The portal itself feels a little strange to pass through, kind of… tingly, if nothing else, but you manage to enter the Flaxans' dimension of origin without issue otherwise. Tumbling through the air as the portal closes behind yourself, you quickly reorient your body to land properly, abruptly halting and slamming your feet on the ground.

Behind you, a rocky and dry mountainous region stretches, more or less left completely natural, while a military installation of some sort is before you- the Flaxan soldiers crawling all over the place make that much clear. More interesting, though, is the color scheme.

You already noted, once, that a lot of Flaxan clothing, armor and even architectural design tends to be white over all else, the color kind of their 'official' color as a society or something. You also already knew, from those soldiers you ate during the first invasion, that the sun of the planet you are now on- and indeed the sun of most Flaxan-inhabited planets- is not the color of the sun as you are used to it, but rather a deep red, tinting everything in sight pretty thoroughly.

This makes it so white is the one color that really stands out, now that you look around like this. Yet another cultural mystery solved, you suppose. Now as for why Flaxans tend to live in red planets… Probably just some thing about the laws of physics of this particular dimension, who even gives a fuck.

"Alright, I'm through, time dilation doesn't seem to be a problem," you say, stretching your neck left and right for a moment as you consider what form to take for this. As in, should you stay in your Night Queen form or take another one, if only temporarily? You will admit, you are kind of used to the longer reach of a grown person, at least.

Of course the soldiers who were just standing by, meant to be marching through the portal that was just closed behind yourself, are shouting orders and aiming their weapons at you, but you summarily ignore them for the moment.

You smirk. Really just a moment, though. Gotta start the mass murder somewhere, after all.


Well, no need to get ahead of yourself; you have a plan and everything you need to put it into practice, all that remains is to do just that step by step. First off, though, a little boost to what comes next. "I see past and future!" You exclaim, immediately gaining an understanding of your immediate future, your own actions and their results.

Basically a form of combat precog far as you're concerned, though it also does have some other uses. Incidentally, the Flaxans arrayed before you seem unnerved by the way they perceive your quick chant, as they are able to understand it just like anyone else could.

What with the whole 'being heard in any and every known language' shtick your magic has going on. You suspect this is why they haven't already opened fire, though you can easily predict and see, now, how you could provoke any number of reactions from them.

You promptly do, making a gesture at them that equates to the Flaxan version of a middle finger, though it implies more that its recipient is an honorless piece of livestock than the traditional 'fuck you'. It also consists of you holding your hands to the side of your head as though to hide nonexistent feelers, which has you feel kind of silly.

It works, though. In a society like this one, not reacting to a taunt like this would be nigh unthinkable, and so you have a couple dozen angry soldiers immediately shoot at you and, just for the sake of science, you do not move an inch.

Seeing as you're immune to their lasers anyways and all that. More than that, though, you saw a few Flaxans try to take potshots at you earlier, during the attempted invasion, but you never really took the time to properly verify the effects of your little pendant, still carried on you right this moment, so you just… do that now.

Not a single shot actually hits you. Instead, about half of the ones made accidentally hit other Flaxans, in many cases instantly killing them, due to the shooters suddenly stumbling, accidentally being jostled by others nearby or stuff like this, while a couple others somehow manage to break their rifles so they explode in their hands and a couple are even just squashed flat by one of the Flaxan tanks, meant to be driving through a portal right about now, just rolling over them.

Confusion and mild chaos break out as military discipline is, in mere seconds, shattered to pieces. You, for your part, only nod in satisfaction as you check over the memories you have stolen from your previous Flaxan victims one last time.

But before you go, time for some appropriate music! After all, everything feels more fun when you have the proper background chime going on. Even and especially when it come to planetary cataclysmic devastation. And the best part is, you don't even need to chant, so you just snap your fingers instead and your track starts!

https/watch?v=n7BLGt0wU48

As the music starts blaring, you continue to ignore the Flaxan soldiers and instead cross your arms, looking up at the sky- ah, there you go, getting this stuff started the moment you came was obviously the right decision.

A few spare drops of red, iron-y blood are already coming down as you slowly work your way towards a proper storm of blood to follow you around, steadily increasing the amount and spread of 'rain' slowly, but surely.

More Flaxan confusion ensues, as this planet has very little rain at all outside of a particular season. You, again, ignore this, instead choosing to grow a massive pair of bat wings as you jump upwards, manipulating your own gravitational pull to rise into the sky, then move off rapidly.

Next stop, the nearest population center!


The military installation you just left behind yourself is, for the record, the largest concentration of military might on the planet, meaning that now that the invasion has been called off, they're scrambling to respond to your counter-invasion, trying to stop you from doing whatever the hell you want on their side of the portal they opened.

Sadly for them, you're both fast enough to keep up with fighter jets and you don't really show up on radar, so they can't really do much aside from spreading all over any and all nearby cities and other installations to try and slow you down. Similarly sadly for them, even if they managed to catch up with you any way, shape or form, they don't really have anything that could possibly stop you.

Turns out these guys, for one, don't have any superpowered assets. Their loss, really.

Flaxan cities are built high before they are built wide, gleaming, white edifices to their power as a civilization, large towers and wide pathways full of their people. And now, as you rapidly near the largest of such cities on the planet according to the locals, you shall absolutely smash one of them to pieces.

Not in person, though. That's for later. Right now, you shall leave one of the most loyal parts of yourself here to thoroughly work through these idiots.

See, Flaxans tend to build around a central point, typically a particular, large tower that is connected to neighboring ones as a sort of focal point of their infrastructure. Which is precisely where you now land, a quick visit to the highest terrace amongst confused and frightened civilians being exactly what the doctor ordered.

'Doctor' being yourself and the 'order' being for your Tree to come forth. The huge, semi-wooden Guardian bursts from your mouth in a cloud of fog, slowly materializing from there; a huge, pumping heart comes first, tendril-like roots punching through everything in sight and summarily massacring any and all Flaxans around as they immediately begin to dig down into the floor.

Except you're on the top floor of a passingly monumental structure, so the heart just ends up poking through the ceiling of the layer below you. Which doesn't particularly bother the Tree; it, instead, simply continues to dig down, all the while leaving behind massive holes and reaching around with its roots to empty the entire floor of the central tower.

You stay behind, floating in the air as you make sure the already incoming laser bombardment on the part of locally stationed troops doesn't have the sheer firepower to stop the Tree. It doesn't, for the record; maybe if they had a couple hours to work on it, they would be able to 'kill' it, but they haven't even figured out the distance they need to keep to not immediately die yet.

And, the Tree being the Tree, it is promptly thrusting its roots into select individuals to puppet them around, having gained the ability to do so at some point. Using them, it immediately starts to call for backup from anywhere available on the planet, using your understanding of Flaxan as a language, making sure to misinform said reinforcements about the issue it represents and effectively lure them straight into its reach.

Sprinkling in a few conflicting 'sightings' of yourself for good measure. Yeah, this part is done, you're pretty sure.


While your Tree is making short work of this particular city, you concentrate on your work in making it rain blood, having caused widespread rain all over the area already- you just want to wait a bit as you keep on pushing for your vision of what the weather should be like, get thick sheets of blood to fall from the sky, more or less.

You could pull the things you're planning to do off as is, but you really rather would prefer to do it properly; for the sake of drama if nothing else. But ah well, you may as well start the next phase a little early; focusing a bit, you burst apart into a swarm of bats, hundreds of them, distributing yourself in all directions.

And, in the slowly intensifying, splattering blood coming from the skies, dark red clouds having been gathering overhead for the past little while, you immediately begin to take all the blood you've been working on conjuring literally all over the continent, turning any of it nearby yourself into, you guessed it, more bats.

Your numbers rise slowly, but steadily, each and every drop contributing towards creating another separate part of yourself. Before long, you've doubled your original number of bodies, then you go further- from hundreds to thousands and beyond, an innumerable swarm of bats.

An innumerable swarm of bats that is moving- straight towards the research facility you know to be located in another city nearby the first military installation you saw, knowing that much thanks to plenty of propaganda the Flaxans have been blaring on all channels of their TV equivalent ever since they discovered that they could attack other dimensions.

They really aren't that good with secrecy in some ways. Then again, their entire empire is basically built on what amounts to a cult of military might and authoritarian supremacy- boasting about every little thing they can is how they keep the approval ratings high, you guess.

Anyways, though, by the time you arrive near the next point of your attack, the actual military being misled and distracted by your Tree and its actions, you are less a swarm of bats, screeching and fluttering everywhere, and more a massive cloud, darkening the sky and casting a massive shadow below yourselves.

The Flaxans scream, pointing and the smarter ones already running to evacuate.

It doesn't really matter what they're doing, in the end. There's only one outcome possible, now that you've decided to have a bit of a snack. After all, what else are you going to do when offered a buffet than to eat your fill?

There's a reason all living beings must fear the unknown. Time to impress as much on these little green aliens that failed to let this fear stop them from poking into your general direction.

The surviving ones, anyhow.


When you descend, it is in a hemokinetic storm, a million bats screeching and forcing the delicious red out of the bodies of any living beings present. A veritable tornado of blood rises to meet you, sucked into ever more mouths, arriving by the millions now as the dry planet around you is drowned in blood raining down from the skies.

Some try to fight. Some try to run. Some plead for their lives, some just give up, some can't decide what to do.

They are all turned into more blood for you to drink, skin bursting and organs failing under the constant scream you subject them to, the sound carrying your power with it from all directions so no escape remains. Every inch of every place inside the city is covered in blood, only for the stuff to take a life of its own and be sucked into the maelstrom you are feeding on.

Some may liken this to hell on Earth. To you, it feels like Tuesday, vaguely, even though it's already way later in the week for you. Actually, this scene feels somehow artistic, in an 'abject destruction of all man has built' kind of way. Maybe you should take this as inspiration for a picture or two, once you figure out from which perspective you'd even paint it.

The sirens blare up, then fall quiet. The screams barely managed to be heard through your screech to begin with. And before long, all that remains is a massive swirl of all the blood you are drinking as quickly as you can, the only sound remaining the wet splattering of more and more blood raining down, the stuff you use to spawn more of yourself rather than drink for lack of souls involved.

You leave the destruction of cameras and other recording equipment, much of it recording live and allowing other Flaxans to see what is happening from afar, for last. Let them baste in their fear a little. Or defiance. Or anything else they care to feel. As long as they flavor themselves with it, you care little how.


Unbeknownst to the majority of Flaxans that were somehow able to keep up a connection with the city whose name roughly translates to 'Shining Medal' in their language and whose population is currently being rapidly depleted, like, really rapidly, you also are taking further steps towards sabotaging them, of course.

Specifically, you're using your semblance again, now that your aura mostly recovered from the fighting you've done so far. Hey, you needed it to deflect a few bruises and nasty explosions from your bat swarm self, just because you don't really feel pain normally doesn't have to mean you just ignore it when parts of your body get smashed.

And whom would you ever summon to make an absolute mess of as much of a spacefaring civilization as possible if not Hack over here?

"Whee! Now lookie here, just one password protection on the local main servers? Don't mind if we dooo!"

"Porn, porn, porn, more porn, and some extra freaky alien porn! Did you know Flaxans are big on interracial porn, by the way? They have looot of it. And now it's playing on every news broadcast we could find!"

"Wonder how long they'll take to realize we replace their navigation systems with Starship Troopers?"

Yes, you may or may not have given Hack several bodies to do as much damage to the Flaxan empire, both locally and at large, as possible with the time and aura reserves available. This also may or may not have just caused evacuating ships trying to leave the planet to promptly crash all over the place, incidentally.

… This particular minion of yours may constitute a war crime all by herself. Good work. Also, some ships crashed nearby, so doubly good work- a few extra snacks never go amiss.

Now you just need to go and shift a couple tens of thousands of bats over there. Ugh, being this huge and having this many bodies makes you feel kind of lethargic and slow, even though you're still all kinds of active and moving in a giant swarm of dark little bodies.


The Flaxan language, simply called 'Flaxan' and full of slightly guttural word structures combined with weird grammar, wasn't really all that easy to speak. However, with this massive influx of people, all of which were from an entirely different culture and only spoke it, there was little other choice.

Didn't mean Uyehara had to like being one of the few council members that had already learned it and, therefore, forced to go and help deal with the literal millions of new inhabitants of their own little slice of purgatory.

"This way, this way, keep moving steadily," he instructed, waving along the traffic around the central point for all new entries, the weird magical armory. "Go through and pick up whatever you feel you need to, then exit through the doors opposite of where you entered. Keep calm, any families that got separated wait for someone to come find you once you exit, everyone else move along and await further instructions."

He wasn't sure what was more insulting, the fact he had to waste time playing immigration officer or the fact he was doing grunt work as one. Either way, the only reason things were going this smoothly was the compulsion forcing any newly devoured souls to seek out this place first and foremost; they'd been working on setting up something of a process for getting large numbers of Flaxans settled in once they realized He would likely go wild with them, but this kind of mass consumption was a new height of brutality even for him.

Also, curse Phillip for realizing what had to be done and asking Uyehara for help. Which was the reason he was currently here and trying to reduce the chances of a full-blown panic setting in on the other side of the armory. Sure, nobody could hurt anyone, here, but that did not mean it would make for any less of a mess.

"Everyone, be careful with any children and try to help them find their parents as soon a possible. You will also receive a guidebook on common human languages you may find here so you can identify at least a few common phrases, but please know that nothing bad can happen here. It is too late for all of us in that regard."

And if they didn't like it, it wasn't his problem. Uyehara Yoshiake only had, as He would say, so many fucks to give, and his fuck deposit was mostly claimed by Indigo these days.


Your meal completed for the moment and mild nausea setting in, you go ahead and recorporate yourself into one single form, the experience of really pushing the amount of bodies you can inhabit at once somewhat… disorienting.

It's not too bad, just kind of weird once you go from being one individual, maybe a couple thereof or even a few dozen and being millions of individual copies of yourself, all moving around through the air and in constant need of correcting how you shift around as a whole.

Disorienting, as you already described it. Not even too unpleasant or anything, it just ends up confusing you a lot. Then again, when you go full apocalypse swarm like that, there's very little that can realistically bother you, considering your immunity against the vast majority of bullshit anyone could throw at you, so it's not too bad.

And even if things had gone dicey at any point, it's not like you really need the vast majority of your extra bodies to stay alive. So you're pretty safe unless someone gets the bright idea to thoroughly glass whatever continent you happen to be on at the time.

But still, here you are, putting yourself back together, more or less. Except you aren't shifting yourself back into your normal form, this time; after all, you have a whole world to crush under your heel, it would take forever if you didn't actually take this task seriously.

So, as hundreds upon thousands upon tens of thousands of bats draw towards one single point, the rest simply melting away into a massive wave of blood that paints the landscape around the city you targeted a deep, glistening red, dark, twisted flesh merges itself together, mangy grey fur growing out of a bent and crooked back.

Your long, spindly fingers scratch the ground, tearing open metal and stone as you stretch your lanky limb, your malformed head stretching just as much to let the wicked curved teeth you own now sprout from your jaw, black goo melting from your skin and out of your mouth.

A baleful, red glow establishes itself, your rows of eyes and the insides of your body alight with strength. You turn your head and, if you could, you would be grinning at the many cameras currently broadcasting your form- and its effects on the living, if weakened from the real thing- over as many parts of the Flaxan empire as they can, thanks to Hack.

Not your fault if their eyes rot and their faces die just from looking at you. The failure of lowering their heads before your majesty speaks for itself!

You chitter and snarl, short tail whipping through the air behind yourself. This planet offends you, and so you shall do with it as you do with many such things: Make an example! One so painful, so frightening, none of these upjumped green smurfs ever dare to so much as think about it ever again. Which is why you are here.

Here and now. In this city you just ate. This city filled to the brim with mutilated corpses… Corpses that are nevertheless still perfectly usable. And since none of the original owners are about to stop you from taking them for your own purposes, after what you did to them…

"SssskreeeEEEEEE!" You bellow, a wave of something spreading from you almost like an explosion, except it passes through anything solid nearby. Then, though, it does show its effects- metal rusts, cameras break down, stone withers.

And, everywhere the aura you just unleashed reaches, guttural breathing is heard as ruined corpses, completely emptied of life and blood both, begin to rise. They rise, and gather.

And, more importantly, they begin to morph into something reminiscent of, but rather quite unlike Flaxans. After all… It wouldn't do for your mighty army to be mere shuffling corpses, now would it?

Oh no, you chitter as you get started on gathering them, breaking out of the still slowly withering and decomposing building you were just in, that wouldn't do at all. After all, the Rat King can only abide by the mightiest of abominations serving as his honor guard when your host falls over the rest of the planet!


By the time you leave the now deserted, dead city, its once gleaming white architecture now dilapidated beyond repair thanks to your presence inside of it, your army has been reconfigured some, the groaning corpses of its inhabitants hulking monstrosities that are made up of two to three Flaxan bodies on average.

The kids get extra large rides for double that, of course. Aren't you just so generous towards them?

The faces of any that were fused to another body proudly sticking out, you begin your grand march, just in time to greet a small army coming to greet your glorious conquest! Lines and lines of Flaxan soldiers and tanks, disgorged from what would be a highway on Earth that abruptly stops near the city's actual limits. Seeing how you tore it down already.

Normally, as you are aware, they would have been swarming in on medium-altitude drop ships, which is how the Flaxans usually deploy troops on a planetary scale, but Hack may or may not have done a thing about those before anyone knew what was going on. Causing significant casualties and delaying their response, as is only natural.

Now here you stand, preening atop the roof of a shorter tower. These maggots wish to experience the might of the Rat King, and you shall oblige!

You begin, naturally, by taking a deep breath. A very deep breath. Your chest expands, blowing up to double, maybe triple its original size.

Then, you jump towards the newly arrived dead bodies yet to realize their death, exhaling mightily, blowing a narrow cone of black-ish mist out of your snout. The Flaxans see you, several of them opening fire and a couple tanks swerving towards you… But you ignore them, for their feeble mortal capacities are summarily beneath you!

And their red laser blasts are entirely ineffective, of course.

The same cannot be said about about your mighty breath! Wherever it passes, it looks as though time passes thousands of times quicker, reducing soldiers caught in it to desiccated corpses and any machinery to useless, rusted junk. There are screams, and desperate attempts at moving out of the way, but you stop the advance of their force. Flat out.

Then, before any of them can react, the gloriously bloated monstrosities you created arrive, storming towards the broken highway and heaving themselves upwards, unaffected by the mist you just sprayed all over it. At the same time, the recently deceased also get back up, baring their teeth at their former comrades as they attempted to kill anything in sight.

You croon in enjoyment as you slowly rejoin the fray, having landed down below by this point. A quick jump lets you come in hot, screeching and howling along with the rest of your horde as you run towards the nearest point of resistance, still foolishly upheld against the grandeur that is your noble visage!

As you come closer, many of the Flaxans grasp at their eyes, screaming even harder than they did before. Truly, your shining example of valorous superiority blinds all that are so below yourself! If only they had known to promptly kill themselves before you ever saw them, they could have saved themselves all this pain…

Alas, you are present! And you shall not allow any of them to suffer any longer than is necessary for your amusement. Truly, you are a caring and benevolent ruler. And thusly do you promptly grasp a living Flaxan, tearing the screaming creature apart with one hand buried in its neck, grasping the collarbone, and the other gripping its spine firmly.

It dies in an explosion of gore, its nearby comrades too occupied by the undead now running roughshod all over them. Shrugging, you open your maw wide, jamming first one, then the other half of the deal body inside of it and swallowing without chewing.

Just another couple dozen and you shall have enough for a truly proper champion to lead the charge against the living.


Using the infrastructure of the Flaxans against them, your mightily shambling army proceeds onward, bolstered by the fodder sent against it. After the initial skirmish you ended up feeding on, there was little true resistance on the way, so you march your massive army, some tens of thousands of undead now that you have remodeled them to be more impressive, straight through the advanced transportation systems originally meant for their vehicles and the like.

All of them at once, that is. You just sent the abominations made of tangled limbs and groaning faces resulting from prolonged exposure to your majestic countenance onward to do what they do best- destroy all in their path and wipe out all life in sight.

This planet is filthy! Filled with disgusting creatures that failed to sacrifice half their number to you the moment you arrived! They must suffer for this sorry state of affairs!

There are some countermeasures in place should the planet ever be invaded or a rebellion be started, of course, great metal shutters that bar your path where they still work (as opposed to having been sabotaged by your electronic-self), but you tear through the alloys used with ease, as do your mutilated followers. Dead they may be, but a monster made from a doze Flaxans, entwined limbs turned into weapons of their own as their hulking forms shuffle along at great speed they are still!

And while you were working on creating them, you also kept on calling upon your ratlike followers, spreading your succulent blessing everywhere they go. You sent them with the rest, too, to ensure all corpses created by the tide of undead you just unleashed shall rise as is only proper.

The living shall die! The dead shall rise! Nothing shall continue past you! Kill everything! Wipe it all out! Tear apart all civilization, such that only what has been touched by your own hands is allowed to exist!

When your group of jolly life enders breach the next city, you make it a point to lead the charge, trampling over the defenders already in place and mowing them down by the dozens, each swing of your hands destroying all in your path with ease. By the time you smash holes into the enormous structures the Flaxans inhabit, terrified screams echoing to bring you no small delight, it is far too late to change anything already anyway, and this city, too, falls in short order, except it is torn asunder by the violent corpses now inhabiting it rather than turned into an unabated storm of blood.

Speaking of storms of blood… The rain of blood you created, still intensifying into a massive flood called down from the heavens, continues to come down, dyeing the entire planet an even deeper red than what its sun normally does already. The sky is covered in positively malevolent clouds, thick and dark red enough to make it feel like nighttime already, and you rejoice at the depiction of hell on earth you have created.

Finally, with the iron-y scent of blood so thick in the air you can taste it and the dying screams of a civilization echoing around you, you truly feel at home. This is what it means to be you- The Rat King cannot stand for anything less than this before He feels content! Finally, things are right, and you enjoy every moment as you make it a point to smash through yet another tower, dooming hundreds of thousands to death as their refuge is toppled and opened up for your troops' ravishment.

None shall escape! Escape is an illusion! All that behold your glorious self are aware! As proof, the Flaxans have widely shut down all communications with this planet, ever since you used your electronic-self to broadcast your most noble voice through any and all available channels, promising death and destruction to any that were able to hear it.

All shall fall before the-

Oh. Looks your time is up. Shucks.

Your body transforming back to your base form, bones creaking and snapping as they shrink down rapidly, your flesh un-distorting itself to take on a rather more pale color and your fur grows back into your back as it straightens out, black hair instead growing from your head and your head alone again in its place.

"Uhhm," you groan as you stretch, the Night Queen's body once more the one on the fore. "That was a good meal. Though ow my head feels kind of bloated… Ah well, the undead are still going and interplanetary communications have been cut, so whatever. Even if I'd like to take a nap before we go on…"

Huh, could it be you're the type to get chatty when you're full? You never really noticed.


Having consumed an ample amount of Flaxan scientists, specifically the ones responsible for the scientific background of the construction of the devices you now know to be responsible for the creation of those interdimensional portals, you now know a good bit about how the whole thing works… As well as why they needed a massive amount of space to actually house all the machinery involved.

More importantly for the moment, though, is that you are now also aware of some of the limitations inherent to the technology involved. Specifically, it can only access dimensions that are, to put it crudely, 'adjacent' to the one it starts out in, and even then the actual physical locations one can open portals in are limited by a lot of factors.

Simply put, you need to calibrate these things carefully so you don't accidentally open a portal into the vacuum of space or the depths of an ocean or something, and the place you build it in affects that. Which brings you to the actual important bit: This planet has a much easier time actually accessing the version of Earth you are currently operating on, just in terms of location. It's not impossible to go from elsewhere, it just so happens that crosing dimensions from this point is comparatively easy.

Heh, turns out interdimensional warfare follows real estate rules, location is still everything.

So long story short, you now have another goal, beyond traumatizing the Flaxans as a whole so badly they won't ever, ever try and go to Earth ever again. Simply put, to make this entire planet impossible to settle even if they were to wipe out the things you leave behind through copious amount of orbital bombardment or something.

It's a two-pronged approach to punishment, disincentivise them from trying to invade Earth (by torturing this planet's population to death and playing wild with memetic hazards as a direct response to them doing so) and make it a great hassle to try for a repeat offense. Simple, but hopefully effective.

To this end, you first go around and start to gather up corpses, including ones formerly animated by yourself while you were running around in your more powerful form. While making them overly large isn't necessary, the undead you now plan to make are meant to be durable and capable of extremely good vision, the level of advanced telescopes at least, so you veer on the side of caution and decide to use a little extra biomass just in case.

Now to brush off your knowledge on how eyes work and design a more effective model… Not that that'll be difficult, naturally evolved eyes are just complete crap to begin with.

Let's see… How much magnification do you need for the equivalent of an anti-space spell turret bound to its location (so you don't need to actively maintain the things yourself)?


The trick, as it often is for you, is of course to just cheat as you figure out the course you need to take, here. While, yes, you could easily devise a biological system with vastly superior eyesight when measured against mostly any organism you care to name, simply because natural 'selection' is really just the process of random and often pointless mutations happening repeatedly and no living being really has any reproductive advantages from being able to see into space, which is how natural selection works, but at the end of the day…

Well, it's not like you really need to. In fact, it's much easier to just think of the eyes you plan to create as sort of advanced cameras and discard the idea of optical nerves connecting them to a brain entirely. Which of course saves you a load of time and work, because it limits the amount of issues you have with them.

The advantages, you suppose, of working with magic. It really does help a lot to just screw the way you'd need to do things without it and simply declare that 'these eyes are part of this thing so I can see through them'.

From there, all that remains is to figure out the logistics, and make this thing as foolproof as possible. Which you do with all the appropriate gusto, intending for the things you're putting on this planet to last for a good long while.

A central body made of tough flesh in and around a framework of bones magically enhanced to keep it all in place, suspended inside a small cave of flesh consisting mostly of muscle and sinew. Inside, this octagon hangs, and you add an opening on one of its corners in the form of a mouth.

Each of it teeth being made out of a Flaxan skull, of course. Just for the novelty value thereof.

That done, you get to the meat of the matter. This 'core' inside the protective shell of flesh is capable of regenerating extremely quickly and, more importantly, inside of it are over a dozen eyeballs, not physically connected to it yet counted as part of it by the standards of your magic.

And then you give them the ability to fly. While this undead thing you made can still see through them. And, now that you also gave it the ability to, cast a spell through them, freezing objects full stop.

Did you mention these eyes are also capable of flying out into the atmosphere and scan space around the planet for anything approaching it? Because these babies are. Now all you need to do is make one of these things for each continent on this planet, bind them to each of them and you're golden.

All in a couple hours' work. Also takes, what, somewhere between a hundred to two hundred dead Flaxans, but those aren't exactly in short supply at the moment. Speaking of which, though…

You'd best get back on that as soon as you're done building the rest of these. By the time you are, you'll probably be ready for another round of the good transformations, and you have the perfect one to make this planet as uninhabitable as inhumanly possible.


This planet you ended up invading by your lonesome, by and large simply because doing so was the easiest solution to the problem the Flaxans represent under the circumstances, looks like it never had all too much of an extensive biosphere, going by what you know of it.

Like, there were some plants in the more fertile parts and smaller animals here and there, mostly small mammals and insects and that kind of thing, a little forest here and there where they managed to fit in-between the craggy mountains covering most of the planet, by and large.

Even in those areas you have some mosses and critters evolved to live there, including a couple variations of snakes, or at least snake-like lizards. Of course you're generally only describing these animals broadly, as you're looking at a literally entirely alien biosphere.

Few of the Flaxans you consumed were experts on the matter, but they generally classify living beings in an entirely different system than you're used to. Not that it matters to you personally, though, as you surface in the middle of what used to be one of those little forests once upon a time.

Currently, it's become more of a swamp, of sorts, as you have been moving around underneath it, black scales rubbing over stone and soil as your six heads salivate the purple venom you currently produce.

You'd be worried about getting dirt stuck in your scales, but thanks to the slightly corrosive nature of your venom, the tunnels you dig by turning around yourself, shifting the earth in your way to the sides, it actually acts as a way to polish your scales instead. It also leaves behind a thick trail of venom that then proceeds to seep into the surroundings, slowly creeping into anything and everything around the places you pass through.

And its effects are what has recently turned this entire area into a bog of mud and dying things around you.

Most of what you are using this form for isn't particularly complicated, all told. You are simply moving around and spreading your venom everywhere you can, burrowing deep under the earth and leaving fairly vast tunnels behind in your wake. This is useful, as you have already seen mosses and crawling creatures sprout up in them, the new space rich in venom already serving to allow a wholly new ecosystem to form.

It is much more pleasing to the eye, soft glows and jagged limbs much more prevalent than in the rest of the planet's wildlife. If only all beings were so easily led to improve upon themselves as these simpler life forms…

Alas, little use in dwelling on it. You simply have to work on it a litte more yourself.

Once you're done corrupting most of the continent you started out in, new creature already gestating and evolving in the swampy and bloodied lands you leave behind, a vast change from the overall dry climate from before, you turn toward the nearest ocean, breaking through earth and shooting forth into the water reddened by the sheer amount of blood that has been raining down, the typhoon of red still showing no sign of movement as it keeps on producing more and more blood.

The water is a perfectly nice medium for you to spread your venom in, and any fish or the like that are infected with it either die in short order or adapt rapidly, the mutagenic substance rapidly bleeding into its surroundings like ink.

And each of them, you know, will carry some of it with them, and spread it further. At other times, you would be annoyed about this, about the uncontrollable mutations sure to come and take over entire ecological systems… But you know how this will end, and you welcome it.

Besides, no matter how silly you are about it, you did choose to use a planet you never plan to return to for this for a reason. Even if you dearly do hope its inhabitants never forget the gift you grant them and their children and their children's children…

Great globs of purple trail from your mouths, your heads watching all directions. Before you know it, you have cast everything in your surroundings in a most pleasing shade of venom, to the point you judge it to be sufficient for its natural spread to do the rest.

You wonder; will your venom spread to the other continents? Will the creatures spawning from it visit them one day, maybe? How will they react, to seeing such untainted lands, and what may they think?

Then again, philosophical questions like these hardly suit you. Instead, how about you muddle the waters a little further, introduce another uncontrolled variable into this equation?

After all, nothing says 'home' like hordes of hellspawn terrorizing the lands. With this, you launch yourself into the water, your entire body undulating to let you swim right along.

Another continent, another atrocity to commit. Though whether or not spitting thousands of demons everywhere counts as an atrocity in itself you are not quite sure. You'll do it anyways.


Demons are, in sufficient numbers, perfectly capable of and willing to overrun just about anything they can see, especially when adding up the less intelligent ones primarily concerned with destroying anything in their path. You have to make a show of eating some of them with the heads not busy being a portal straight to hell, of course, but they do realize what's what in this regard quickly, if nothing else.

The Flaxans still on this part of their world do not last for long once the mass of demonic creatures, arch-imps and Tortured and dozens of similar types, reaches sufficient levels, each and every single one of them dying one way or another. Actually, there could be survivors that manage to hide from the hordes of otherworldly monsters you flood the entire place with, but…

Isn't it fine as well? They will either die going forward or make their own place in this world you are creating. Leaving it up to fate is good enough for you.

Even if they do manage to establish contact with the rest of the Flaxan race, off beyond the stars, they will not be able to escape this planet, after all. The widespread devastation you caused ensures as much. And again, if after all of this they somehow build or repair a spaceship capable of carrying them off, they'll have earned that much, at least.

Utterly unconcerned about the possibility of escapees after all, you spit out more demons as you slither across the continent, figuring you may as well make sure you have enough. Doing so you also go ahead and spread your venom but, well, the demons are largely immune to the fun parts anyways and the life around these parts will need a little boost to contend with them anyways, eh?

One continent filled with venom, the other with low-level demons. You can't see how their interactions will turn out over time, though you suspect the demons will end up just fighting each other out of boredom sooner or later; they just are like that. No scales off your snouts, that, as long as they do their initial duty well enough.

The last Hack body, still holding on for as long as possible to let you know how events are proceeding through the Flaxan satellites in orbit around the planet, lets you know all cities around these parts have fallen, which indicates they did just that, too. Good on them, that way you don't need to go do it yourself.

When casualties do not matter and air support is out, no amount of laser weaponry helps. You do hope any potential survivors learn that lesson if no other, for their own sake.

Else they will just die, of course. All the same to you.

Now, with the largest single landmass on the planet concealing your little surprises in the form of the undead you made filled with venom and the nearest one flooded with demons, you do believe you still have one more continent left, if only thanks to unusually inactive tectonic shifts in this planet's history after it formation.

Now, whatever shall you do with it… Especially considering you are starting to get just a little exhausted, this much activity on this level of strength does drain you a little, after all. Has it been three hours already? Then again, you are not surprised, either, considering how much you got done.

Very well, very well, time for another break.


Well, you think to yourself as you absently wave a hand to crush a couple weak demons trying to come in your direction now that you aren't a giant multi-headed snake anymore, that could have gone worse. Sure, you ended up going to a whole different continent, confirming your suspicions on the potency of certain mutagenic substances you can produce on the one you started out in and realized that you have a few issues with controlling yourself when you take on your most powerful forms.

Well, more of one than you were already aware of, anyways. It's not like you never noticed the changes to the way you think and act before when you used them- though calling it a 'change' is kind of misleading in itself, you think.

It's more like… Different parts of your character that usually aren't front and center express themselves more strongly, you'd say. You always have a little bit of megalomaniac self-aggrandizement going in the back of your head, it's just that you usually temper it with a little sarcasm and the ability to take a joke at your own expense at any time, something that is just completely absent when you're using your most powerful rat-adjacent transformation, for example.

The interesting part, though, is that you don't really feel any different in the moment, despite being clearly different in the way you think, reason, solve problems, even. You're still yourself, after all, just kind of through a different lens.

Anyways, with this landmass taken care of for the most part (you just really don't feel motivated to go and comb through it for potential survivors, not now and not later), you just shrug and decide to move right on- or back, rather, to the continent you came in on.

It takes you a little longer to travel than when you're transformed, actually, as you can't just swim at speeds significantly faster than any submarine anyone cares to name (note to self, make a super-fast submarine one of these days, might come in handy), but you can make do, especially as you still have your massive rain on blood going on, meaning you can effectively move yourself through hemokinesis as you fly along.

Nothing beats doing a combination of flight and swimming in a tub of blood propelled by your mind. You are traveling with some prime vampire flair and anyone that says otherwise is just objectively wrong.

But yeah, once you're there, you first confirm that you did, in fact, manage to trash the Flaxan's portal facility cum invasion headquarters (how's that for some fucking class, people randomly used Latin to make themselves sound cooler all the time a century ago) thoroughly enough none managed to, say, escape to Earth, but no, the military personnel present when you set off to destroy this planet tried to stand their ground and fight, to pretty obvious results.

Like, they did get a lot more of the undead abominations you sent than you were expecting, but in the end all of them went on to be butchered down to the last man and consequently reanimated by the undead rats you sent along to scurry around.

You know, rat-you is kind of an idiot, but at least he's also very judicious in the application of force and force multipliers. It's something, at least.

Anyways, the main reason you went back here, across the bloodied swamps of flooding blood forming all over the place while these weird pods and the tentacles of strange organisms jut out of them, is to gather a few materials. Specifically, a couple dead Flaxans, again, it's the one resource you have plentiful of on this planet.

You need them to make a few custom undead, as well as to turn into cursed objects of very specific use- add a little extra 'fuck you' to the planet's ambiance, see? Transforming dead semi-mollusks (it's close enough to how the Flaxans classify things, which is hilarious, by the way) into the kinds of biomatter you want takes a bit, but you end up just repeating an older design of yours, merely making a few minor adjustments now that you work on it again.

They worked against humanity in Thule, they can work against living beings at large now. Especially once you imbue them with your spell to create festering miasma over entire areas and let them loose in the last continental landmass 'merely' hit by the aftershocks of your other actions thus far.

You're still all kinds of screwing the last likely survivors over, they're getting blood rain, venom-infested waters and completely hacked systems that have been replaced with loads of interracial Flaxan porn, but all of that aside, you're still about to take a trip there and devastate everything in sight just on principle by this point.

As for the Flaxan bodies you impale on stakes of metal, well, they are now cursing anyone that comes anywhere near them with sickness, pain, hallucinations and more. Just to round out this whole thing you've got going now.

They'll need to be placed around the ruins of the cities the Flaxans put up all over the place, though at least they have a pronounced tendency to ball up in large urban centers built vertically over horizontally. Less work for yourself.


When you next move along, you're somewhat naked, as it seems your current transformation has opinions about clothes and their place on yourself. That being 'nonexistent'. Still, while you wouldn't mind prancing around naked, you're still kind of humanoid with the addition of wings and having your dick dangle all over the place while you wipe out everything that's left of this planet's 'original' population would be kind of awkward.

So you grab some cloth out of a spacious, but now abandoned home, a bit weathered and tattered by the massive spread of your miasma while you were still on the whole 'undead' track but otherwise still good, and wrap it around your waist. Works just fine with a bit of elbow grease.

Weirdly enough, you don't really feel any different from the usual this time. No idea whether that's because you are paying attention to this stuff now or what. Heck, maybe it's due to how close your body is to your usual one, just in pale and with a couple extra bones in your rib cage.

Oh, and extra long finger nails. Short ones on your toes, though. And sure, your face has kind of grown into an almost solid plate of bone while your hair shortened a good bit and grew white to match your skin color, though you grew some exceedingly fluffy feathers around your neck and down your shoulders in exchange.

… Well, technically it's more that you grew wings out of there, but your fluff is spread out in a way to remind you of some ostentatious cloak's fur lining when worn. It's a really nice color, too, that shade of blue-ish black that you like. Your plumage also does contain some dark orange in the feathers around your wings' edges, which you feel is a nice touch.

Overall, yeah, you like it. This body suits you pretty nicely.

"Test, test," you say, trying to form words without a mouth. It is surprisingly doable, despite your jaws being more or less fixed in place. You twitch your wings. "Well, that went better than expected," you shrug, moving out of the room you used as a workspace earlier.

Leaning forward, you soar into the sky, first under the power of your legs, then your wings, summarily ignoring the heavy bloody rainfall. You considered stopping it for a little while now, but… You kind of like this planet better this way, even as the red liquid you're milking from the heavens is seriously pooling up everywhere, the lower levels of these Flaxan towers are basically flooded entirely by now.

Like, you knew that whenever you enter the room, bitches get wet, but this is a new level of moisture even for you. You kind of want to see where it's going, though you doubt it'll be anything big, at least in the time you have left here.

You've done a lot of shit in a short period, but there's only so long massacring and violating every alien on the planet can entertain you. Especially at the rate you are going through them. May as well mop up the rest, set up your little warning signs on sticks and get back to what you were doing. Screwing with people, in essence.


It feels almost banal, the way you fly over the last remaining landmass, deep red clouds at your back, but you don't really go out of your way to pull this lovely weather you've been drumming up with you- it does what it's meant to, but you don't exactly need it for what's coming next.

There's only, what, two actual cities left, according to the memories you've plundered up to this point, you can take care of those on the fly. It wouldn't be quite so easy if you were talking about more spread-out places, like humans build them, but then it's just a matter of more time put into the same task.

Turns out building high makes it easier to shoot you down. Not all that hard to comprehend.

At the speeds you are moving now, you don't have to wait all that long to see your first target for the moment. You suddenly realize, as you do, that you didn't actually bother keeping track of the days you've spent on this little side project, the local sun barely visible at all through your blood storm so far.

Like, you could probably try to count the seconds you remember living through, then compare that to the local day/night cycles, but that feels like it would be almost aggressively tedious at this point. So, honestly, screw it, you don't need to know exactly how long you've been at this.

City number one, on the other had, promises to be a pleasantly swift and simple affair. You quickly land on the central tower's highest peak, a deserted place on first sight; you can see where the inhabitants of this place are anyways, huddling up inside their homes.

Maybe they're just silently hoping and wishing for this nightmare to be over. If so, you… probably can help them, even. It somewhat depends on what happens next, your curiosity slowly rising as you feel a rumble in your chest.

Normally, you would be blowing your horn. But in this form, well… You do not need it right now. Though your throat might just get a tad sore in exchange.


Your voice is not a voice, no simple vibration traveling through the air as a sound would, but rather a physical portent of change, swelling from the hole in your face and pushing through everything around you, all the way through the air and the metal and the stone and the city and the creatures therein.

As it does, matter twists, turning from one thing into another. Alloys and stone are replaced with sinew and muscle, tower turned into a perversely jutting monument of your presence here. The flesh does not pulse, is not alive, but at least for a time it will remain standing despite the change in materials you imposed upon it.

The plants found within this city, however, become glass and ceramics, their leaves and roots and stems frozen in place for the most part. Those that are not tip over thanks to their newly gained weight, some shattering if they hit upon something hard enough in turn.

The inhabitants themselves? They become metal statues clothed in everything from plant fiber to tightly wound sinew. Alloys, pure metal, all is fair game- you spy one made of copper, one of lead, some others here and there, their eyes the only thing constant, made of some darker metal that makes them look like entirely black globes contained within their skulls.

The effect reaches out all over the city, reverberating widely. You have to hold the 'tone' for awfully long, but finally you let up, the pressure in your chest receding slowly.

Whelp, that went well. A bit gross to just leave all this meat standing here, but hey, whatever, you've made the point you were meaning to make.


With little other use to be made of the now weirdly inverted city, you promptly leave it behind as you fly off once again. There is only one more place to hit before you're done with this planet entirely, so you may as well get to it and mop things up a little.

You could take several approaches for this last one, too. There would be magic, offering a plethora of ways to massacre entire cities with a little time; repeatedly calling down ice meteor strikes would do the trick, it's just a matter of keeping at it for long enough, or a horde of living shadows rising up and swarming the place to wipe out any living beings in sight, to name just two examples.

Then again, you could also just do this the more direct way. Simply start to destroy everything in sight, ram yourself through buildings, rend the very earth through mighty swings of your claws… Or make use of your natural advantages in this form, for that matter.

A well-placed beam of utter annihilation or two would probably work just fine to take a Flaxan city apart in its entirety. They are compact enough it would barely even be tedious, as the resulting demolition would probably be enough to take care of most survivors in one go.

You'll just have to see what mood strikes you when you arrive. And, speaking of, you're there before you know it, your huge wings easily keeping you aloft and on course while you were continually accelerating yourself by meddling a little bit with how gravity works.

Always nice when physics can be counted on to talk things out. Saves you a lot of time.

What doesn't necessarily save you that same amount of time, though, is what you find when you home in on the highest level of the highest tower in this last bit of Flaxan civilization left on this particular ball of rock.

Instead of finding it empty and the entire population hiding away, like it was in the last place, there is someone hurriedly waving their arms, shouting something at you in Flaxan. "Please do not kill us! If you can understand me, please do not destroy us all!"

Flaxan females, interestingly enough, do look noticeably different from the males, and share several distinctions with human females in general as well. Their body build is obviously female, with slightly wider hips and slimmer shoulders, they have feminine facial features and longer legs to go with a pronounced butt- pretty much like you'd imagine space babes to look like, in short.

Of course they still do have some entirely alien features as well; the green skin, for one, is the same thing with them as it is in male specimen of their species, though theirs tends to be smoother, softer and generally more pleasant to the touch. The perhaps most notable bit of sexual dimorphism in them is that those feelers you repeatedly noted before are significantly longer in the females, growing out of their heads almost like hair.

In fact, they often braid or otherwise rearrange them to change the way they look, which is the very definition of how women treat their hair sometimes. It counts as far as you're concerned.

The reason you're considering all of these things is that you are, for once, actually bothering to look at a female Flaxan, her wide open eyes, black with an orange-ish iris, staring at you as you slow down.

"Now why would I ever do that?" You ask her in perfect, unaccented Flaxan, speaking it better than most Flaxans themselves do.

It comes with being spread out over several planets, you're pretty sure, dialects form naturally in different parts of the same country often enough, it has to be even worse when you have populations spanning an interplanetary empire.

Ignoring the woman's apparent shock at you actually responding to her at all, you tilt your head. "I have to make a point, after all, and leaving survivors is not part of it."

You're fairly sure you've figured out the scent of Flaxan fear by this point, or at least you have a good idea of how they smell when afraid. This one does smell of fear as well, yet the fact she isn't actually dead yet, your continued motionless hovering above her as she kneels on the highest walkway of the city, usually reserved for the higher classes entirely, seems to be encouraging her to try talking, at least.

Well, from her perspective, she's just gonna be dead if she doesn't manage to negotiate with you anyways, so there's little harm in trying, you guess?

"Please, we will do anything you demand, just stop killing us!"

"Mhm…" You make, the light coming from the slit in your face fluctuating a little- technically, you are converting your light into sound and vice versa, in this form, but eh, details. "I am aware enough of Flaxan culture that senseless violence is usually how one goes about exerting authority, so I am not sure whether not killing off the rest would work to make the impression I aim to make," you inform her.

She recoils as if struck, but gathers her courage once more. "Please, we, we know there was an invasion into another dimension, but no sensible Flaxan will ever dare to try it again, I assure you! There is nothing we would not do to make this clear to the rest of our kind, be the messengers of this message, if only you let us live!"

Huh. Cultural norms would normally demand that this woman oppose you to her last breath, as Flaxans consider it a sign of ultimate weakness to accede to any form of request, demand or anything of the like from a non-Flaxan being, but you suppose you did make an impression with your shenanigans so far. She likely has no idea whether you actually are the same being that demolished the rest of the planet thus far, but…

A quick look at her face and into her deepest fears confirms that she did, in fact, have access to camera footage from the last city you visited, which is how she knew to await you at the highest point of this particular tower. Right now, she's terrified of you doing the same thing here that you did there, a sort of primal understanding of the danger you pose overriding anything else.

Now what to do with that…


You do, for the record, end up fucking her in the ass. Repeatedly. After all, you're going out of your way to not kill everyone she knows and slash or loves, the least you can do is to get the most for your money, as it were.

Also, she may scream and writhe when you do it, but she also squirts like a damn firehose when you batter her asshole for the first time, so it's a win-win, really. Doesn't hurt that she does have a very fuckable ass indeed.

But, well, all the fuckable alien ass aside, you figure you may as well honor the agreement you made- even if you, very carefully, never actually promised that you would stay your hand. However, even with that, you feel somewhat like you should reward this one somehow.

After, y'know, the sheer level of mojo she just demonstrated. After all, instead of quietly caving in to the monster that's literally murdering her very civilization on this whole planet, she went out, alone, to confront it and ended up fucking the problem away.

Just saying, but you can respect that move, okay? Game recognizes game. It's the exact same thing you would do if you were still alive and confronted with a smoking hot big bad looking to commit some genocide.

So you make a quick, small incision in the skin of your corded arm, picking out a single dollop of blood with one of your extended claws before it heals up again right away, in spite of your best efforts. Flicking it over at the Flaxan, lying insensate and long since bereft of all higher conscious thought, you watch as it disappears into her half-open mouth.

There you go, she's thralled just like that. Once she manages to swallow next, anyways. Maybe she'll do well for herself, make something of the immortality and supernatural powers you just handed her, or maybe she'll die in a week or two in the environment you created. It's all up to her from this point.

But as for you… You'll just go ahead and make your last preparations before you leave. This joint has been well and truly demolished outside of the one place you deliberately spared, after all.


With the majority of your goals for this particular planet successfully completed, you return to the location of that first facility you saw, the site of the portal they tried to use to invade Earth. While you don't explicitly need to use this particular location for your last step, you figure it's fitting well enough, so you may as well.

And yes, you actually did have several objectives to accomplish during your rampage here. For one, you did get to test out a few of your powers, particularly the ones exclusive to your most powerful shapeshifted forms, and it's a good idea you did choose to use a planet you wouldn't exactly miss for this.

Just look at, uh, whatever is going on around that first continent you chose to deal with, and the glowing stalks of some kind of plants growing straight upwards on the blood-flooded fields resulting from your massive intervention in the local weather patterns. Just saying, but like, half the stuff you pulled here was so pervasively destructive and transformative to your environment you wouldn't be surprised if you were classified as an Endbringer at this point.

If anyone that actually mattered saw, anyways. Which was the point here.

Well, you also did want to glut yourself on fresh Flaxan blood and souls, something you wasted no time doing, that was what the storm of blood was originally for after all- confirming you can become a massive swarm of millions of individual beings when you stretch yourself was also a part of your current experiment, incidentally. Beyond that, though, you've absorbed…

A lot of souls. You usually make it a point to account for each and every one you consume, but the numbers would be so dizzyingly staggering at this point you just accept that you ate a metric fuckton and move right on. No need to dwell on the specifics here, for once.

That aside, you also grabbed yourself a whole bunch of those nifty little soul shards while you were at it, not like there was any real lack of them in the areas you summarily massacred. You do have to take a few quick detours on the way, yes, but it's well worth it to stock up on the stuff for future projects.

Summoning all those demons really helped to give you some variety in their types, too. Say about those low-level ones what you want, but they do have a lot of subtypes and characters among them despite their generally low intelligence. Even if the Tortured, for example, are very much one-dimensional in what they do.

Soul Fragment Inventory Before Flaxans:

Fragment of the Deeply Unified x2

Shard of the Wrathful x3

Shard of the Lustful x1

Shard of the Resentful x1

Shard of the Tortured x3

Shard of the Terrified x1

Shard of the Burned x1

Shard of the Apathetic x3

Shard of the Deeply Wrathful x2

Shard of the Deeply Tortured x3

Shard of the Deeply Lustful x1

Shard of the Deeply Betrayed x1

Shard of the Deeply Burned x2

Shard of the Deeply Terrified x2

Soul Shard x4

Deep Soul Shard x1

After Flaxans:

Shard of the Deeply Unified x1

Soul of the Wrathful x4

Soul of the Lustful x2

Soul of the Proud x1

Soul of the Resentful x3

Soul of the Tortured x7

Soul of the Terrified x4

Soul of the Burned x3

Soul of the Apathetic x2

Soul of the Betrayed x1

Soul of the Drowned x1

Soul of the Diseased x1

Soul of the Raped x1

Soul Shard x10


Your last act before you go isn't anything grand, just a quick little finishing touch on your masterpiece of cataclysmic destruction. To be precise, you are going to the place the Flaxans erected their portal to specifically leave behind a message to make it as clear as feasibly possible what happened here and why, as well as what the consequences of certain actions would be.

You lift a green, iridescent pearl out of your own shadow, holding it aloft as you focus for a moment. This curious little object originally fished out of the ocean back on Earth Fallout possesses a few very interesting properties, but chief amongst them right now is its ability to, in some ways, refract and redouble on certain kinds of magic, your own included.

Using this fascinating little tidbit, you are able to make certain illusions last for much longer than they should… Even when they are meant to last for a very decent while already by default. If you left the pearl itself behind, you could make it last in theoretical perpetuity, too, and keep on renewing itself over and over again, but the thing's a little too valuable to you to do that.

Taylor did give it to you, after all. Even if you didn't have other, more important uses for it in mind, the sentimental value alone would be enough to have you keep it forever.

So instead you just use it to boost the spell a little, an illusion of a few glowing Flaxan letters, arrayed to be readable from any angle- to an observer, the symbols would look like they are following them to ensure they are able to view them at any angle.

They're also big enough to be seen from space, assuming some decent optics like you honestly presume any spaceworthy vessel would have available. Which is the main point here, if you're to be honest.

The message is fairly simple and straightforward, the jagged script reading out only a couple lines. 'This was a taste of what is to come. Open the portal again and it will continue.'

There. Nothing too complicated, anyone would get it, but it still has that dramatic pizzazz you wanted on top. Plus, making it blare in bright orange does help, you think.

This should be all, then. If and when the Flaxans ever return to this planet, as you are sure they might, they'll read this before they ever set down and, hopefully, get the message. If they still decide to try invading Earth again after all of this, well, they can't say you didn't literally warn them, can they?

Now to get back to this version of Earth. And, naturally, you didn't just get over here and never bothered to build another portal generator device without your own way out, that would be stupid. No, you simply focus for a moment, concentrating on the secret lair you built up for yourself in the sewers of that city on that planet, the feeling of retreat to your warded location of safety and defensive measures-

And from one moment to the next, you are gone, seamlessly reintegrating back into a wholly different time stream.


… Yeah, even after briefly retreating into your inner world, you just can't quite seem to get into the creative groove you usually enter when you want to get down to being, well, creative.

Sure, you have the skill to just, put what you think about onto canvas, that's hardly the issue; the issue is that you can't quite seem to drum up the exact shade of emotion you want to express along with the picture.

A foreboding red storm casting dark shadows, a swampy ground surrounding the focus of the perspective offered, a massive edifice of flesh, once solid construction replaced with flexible flesh tensed in a perpetually mindless state, hints of humanoid figures hidden along it… All of the elements are here, and they work as they are, but you just can't manage to properly connect them.

As it is, it's more a disjointed vision of unpleasant things, rather than an expression of the pure desolation you wrought. Seeing no way to actually make this work out better at this point, though, you just shrug exasperatedly and call it a day.

Things are just like that sometimes. Not even you can get yourself to work perfectly a hundred percent of the time.

Twisted Landscape: A painting of a Flaxan planet, combining several elements as observed during your first visit to one. A city whose organic inhabitants were turned to metal while its construction was turned into flesh, surrounded by a bloody rain and the flooding results thereof. When summoned, reduces willpower rolls in all living beings in a medium area of effect by 20, may induce anxiety in viewers. (Painting)


The Flaxan Empire, First And Only Of Its Name, Supreme And Only Accepted Governing Body Of The Stars And Beyond, was not used to facing obstacles it could not overcome.

There had been other races that opposed the reign of the Flaxans, but none stood the test of their mighty legions, such that all of them had to accept their rightful place as slaves under their true masters. There had been slave 'rebellions', but as any Flaxan child knew, they were swiftly and thoroughly cast down as they deserved, for the Flaxans were the true rulers of the galaxy.

There was no challenge, no obstacle, too difficult to be overcome with their superior intellect and utter discipline, whether in the field of science or that of battle. Their engineering was the best amongst the stars, untainted by lesser designs incapable of even traveling space in most cases, and any new horizons and borders were merely more ground to be covered, more territory to be rightfully claimed by the rulers of the world.

It was to this end that the Empire celebrated the opening of one more such border, the advances of its scientists allowing them to access entirely new dimensions only waiting to be conquered. Of course, the first sortie met considerable resistance, but ultimately was only defeated due to a difference in physics between, as some were already calling it, the Flaxan Dimension and this as of yet uncivilized one.

Such things were known to happen, not even the Flaxans would succeed at the first try in all cases. However, when at first you don't succeed, prepare and do it again, and again, and again, however many times it may take to reach your goals. This classical Flaxan saying was included in elementary school education for a reason.

(Or the equivalent of elementary school anyways, these things did not translate well and going into depth on the Standard Imperial School System would would be a dissertation of itself.)

As such, it did not take long for the glorious elite soldiers of the Flaxan Empire and their well-oiled logistical support to improve upon their training and equipment, readying themselves for the next attempt. What was a decade or two in the face of guaranteed victory, attained with their life's work if it had to be?

Only one thing was eternal. Glory To The Flaxans!

However, as particularly patriotic households activated their vision-receivers and prepared to celebrate, things went… awry. Not many would talk about this day, few of those that lived through it directly ready to think back on it.

At first, reports of fighting were made known by the news-casters covering this event, as one may expect. Then, however, confusion set in, followed by panic as information was passed along. Something had come through the portal, invading Flaxan dominion, except it was not, as the most pessimistic of predictions had suggested, a possible counter-invasion.

As communications with the troops advancing into this other dimension cut off, footage of a single creature was shown. It was short, the size of a child perhaps, with long, dark scalp extensions and strangely colored skin, proportions somehow oddly off in a way thousands of slave races were not and alien clothing covering it.

It was also floating in the air with no discernible technological devices to do so. One may be excused for believing they were somehow hidden, miniaturized to an extreme degree, but following events belied this interpretation.

Mass death, destruction on an unprecedented scale, the very atmosphere darkening with clouds that should not form on this planet at all as an alien organism manifested itself in the wake of this creature, its wooden limbs seeking out all Flaxans around it as it fed off their life-fluids. These images were horrible enough as they were, many younglings hurriedly ushered away- yet the next developments were so stunning, so terrifying, few had the wits to put this task into motion.

Massive swarms of even more alien beings manifesting from a rain of what had the color of blood and eating entire Living Domes alive could have this effect on some. The reporters in place, unable to find any way to spin these events in a positive way, were consumed before an audience from all over the Empire, the horrid screams followed by wetly splashing silence the perhaps most oppressive thing even a slave could have felt.

By this point at the very latest, all channels had switched to emergency broadcasts and offworld studios. As the News-Casters attempted to calm the public, as was their duty to the Empire, however, control of the glorious Central Flaxan Data Stream was contended by unknown means.

First, many of them showed… Disgusting filth, superior Flaxans copulating with inferior slave species, which caused any younglings still present to have their eyes covered by quickly swung hands. However, before long, this blasphemous programming was replaced by… it.

This is where records become diffuse, as few testimonies could be given, and fewer yet were trustworthy. Any that saw it directly saw their eyes scarred by swelling, hardened tissue, their faces weathering years and decades in moments, their minds growing feeble and incapable of proper Flaxan discipline in thought. Medical examinations also showed the same symptoms in ear-holes, something often compared to proto-necrosis by the professionals attempting to heal the aftereffects in the years that would follow.

Overall, The Incident cost the Flaxan Empire decades of manpower and time both, cracking the determination of the Flaxan people. Far from all of their superior species had been affected directly, but few indeed had not lost a family member or a friend to the ravages of this effect, their newly gained conditions requiring intensive care and entirely new and as of yet undiscovered medical technology and techniques to treat.

Mental healthcare, to date a barely researched field, was also put into the foreground, the traumatizing effects of The Incident not to be underestimated. Additionally, while the exact fate of the planet meant to become a new stronghold and slave distribution center upon successful conquest was classified such that only the highest rungs of military and political leadership were allowed to find out about it, any and all Flaxans present at the time were declared dead, having Perished In The Line Of Duty despite this distinction normally being reserved for military personnel.

Millions dead, a colonized planet lost, the rest of the Empire struck in ways both large and small. It was little wonder the Empire struck the name of said planet from the Registry of Civilized Stars, burying the details in the annals of time. Nevertheless, the entire sector of space would be declared a non-Flaxan zone, a place so hazardous and potentially deadly no Flaxan was meant to waste their time with it until and unless High Command declared the issue resolved.

It was a dark day in the history of the Empire. But the Flaxans would prevail, as they always did! They may merely… do so with less zest for some time.

And never again were experiments with trans-dimensional technology allowed to be performed on inhabited planets.

-History of the Flaxan People, Volume 5, Chapter 3


"When the High Priestess awoke after her anointment, she was far from the person she would yet, in time, become, her role yet to be found and fulfilled. However, even in this early time in her life, she would take the steps that would eventually lead her to becoming thus, despite the hurdles in her way.

A highborn, yet otherwise unremarkable individual to any bystander's eyes, she had been the only one to meet Him atop the highest of towers, the only one ready to receive the revelation of His presence. The Undoer of Worlds, He Who Remakes What is, in turn granted her audience as she pleaded for the existence of her people.

Having bared her heart and her body, she had been ready for any judgement to be laid upon her, only for His words to reach her ears like a glove of velvet. Her dedication and her honest plea had convinced Him of the righteousness of her cause, and so He bid her to submit to His pleasures.

Long and hard did she do so, her cries echoing through the halls. When the end of the world stopped, Him departing for parts unknown, she was left adrift, her people stranded in a new and strange world, yet the High Priestess knew what she had to do, blessed as she was.

With the strength of five men and command over life itself, she led the Untouched, those who were yet to be granted His grace, to the bottom of the Last City, whereupon He had brought the seas. Unknowing of the world, yet made to find it all the same, they set out to discover His presence, lingering.

Amidst the red and the dark, He had left guidance for them, great masses of fish and crawlers that would feed them after the end of the world. As they ate, they changed, the Untouched slowly becoming the Touched. Under the High Priestess' guidance, they rebuilt, becoming one with the land that was changing as well.

What once was a wasteland, bereft of life, was blooming under His touch, great forests and winding pits spreading year after year. His Blessed Land was gentle, and the Touched soon spread amongst it, finding their new name under the vigor endowing them now.

They were once, as the old scriptures tell us, the Flaxans. Now, though, they had become the Flaxxxans, generation after generation changing step by step under the High Priestess' guidance.

This is how we came to be, our men broad in shoulders and great in endowment, our women generously chested and widely hipped, once viciously green skin turning softer and paler while our eyes turned from soulless dark to gain the light of our people.

And the greatest among us, the High Priestess, does to this day lead our people, to venerate and search for our God. We truly are-"

"Haah… What did I tell you about telling these old stories of yours?"

"Ah! Your highness! My apologies, I was merely-"

"Explaining how you misspelled our name that one time and changed how we call ourselves now? Don't believe a word he says, kids, it's been three generations since it all happened thanks to how long we live now."

"Now who was meant to build this wall to keep the Greatmoose out?"

"I believe the men are transfixed by your behind, your highness, and your shining tentacles-"

"I know! Literally all everyone thinks of these days is sex, but there's still work to be done!"

"If I may, why is it then that you never took any mates to your chambers, your highness?"

"I am not like that and that is all I will say about this!"

"You are blushing, your highness. Is it true that, day after day, you look upon the sunset thinking of Him and what-"

"Oh look at the time I'd better go byemakesurenottolietothekids!"

"… And that, dear younglings, is our ancient and everlasting ruler, the High Priestess of His Will. Remember, she is the oldest among all of us, despite her eternal youth, hm?"


Reappearing inside your base, safely ensconced in several layers of protection and surrounded by the Thinker's work, you quickly take a moment to catch her up with what's happened so far, quickly rushing along now that you've confirmed the time dilation worked as you were hoping it would.

Under a minute has passed in this dimension while you were busy doing your thing, giving you the perfect opportunity to seamlessly return to what you were doing before you jump through that portal to the local buffet. Of course you have to get a couple things really quick, transforming back to your female mini-Gabe form as a matter of course.

Also, a new Mister Teddy is created once more. Can't just go out without one.

Long story short, you swipe some stuff and soon arrive back at the site of the second Flaxan invasion, blithely stepping past a few chunked civilians that were summarily blown up when the aliens came in. Sure sucks to be at the wrong place at the wrong time in this dimension.

You make sure to actually lick on the ice cream you acquired on the way as you quietly walk along, closer towards where Robot, Atom Eve, Rex Splode and Dupli-Kate are currently talking, the team leader's literally robotic voice audible over the buzz of police and special units bustling and coming in to deal with this scene. "With Night Queen gone, we will have to redouble our vigilance just in case the Flaxans return yet another time. Hopefully, she will find a way to return before this happens."

"Forget them, how the hell is the brat gonna get back? And, no offense, but we're all kinds of screwed if she's not around and this shit happens again," Rex says, babbling like always.

Dupli-Kate clears her throat. "There's not much we can do about that for the time being anyways, is there?"

"Unless our fearless leader can figure out a way to open a portal himself, you mean?" Eve asks, raising an eyebrow. And good lord, it's still weird to you how these people don't even cover their faces, completely different cape culture or no. No secret about those secret identities, no sir.

"There is little chance of any such thing happening. However, with the data acquired today, I should be able to adjust the warning system I built and potentially-"

"Potentially what?" Rex asks as you join them. "Let us know how screwed we are?"

"Detect whether it is Night Queen or the Flaxans entering this dimension. I believe there is a high chance she will be able to prevail on her own."

"Look, I get that you think she's strong, Robot, but she's still just a kid," Eve objects. "We can't expect her to be okay on her own for… However long this will be from her perspective. Time runs faster there, right?"

"It does, yeah," you say.

"See? We shouldn't assume she'll just be fine and find a way back on her own."

"Gee, babe, pretty sure the murderball knows how to handle itself."

"I get you don't like kids, Rex, but don't be a dick about it."

"You saw what she did to my dick! Against my consent!"

"Either way," Robot interrupts them, "I believe the question is moot. There is nothing more any of us can do about it."

"Why's that?" Kate asks.

You idly lick your ice cream and wonder whether you may finish it before anyone except Robot figures out you're even here.


You continue to idly consume your frozen treat as the four heroes are talking.

"As I was saying, Night Queen needs neither extraction nor support at this time."

"Robot, I just explained why it's a bad idea to leave a kid alone in another dimension!"

"No, wait, I'm with Robot on this one! The murderball can look for her own way out, we ain't got no business with this shit."

"If you would just listen to me…" Robot, apparently quite fed up with his teammates' antics, seems to just be waiting until he can point out you're here. You, meanwhile, decide to make a few small hops, jumping up to everyone else's eye level before dropping down again.

All the while balancing your cone of ice cream in one hand, of course, and taking a few more licks from it. Just to see if any of them manage to catch a glimpse of you. They don't.

"…" Finally, the Teen Team's leader just disregards the other three for a moment. "Night Queen," he addresses you. "You are back."

"I am," you agree, shutting the others up.

"Have you done what you were aiming to do in the Flaxans' dimension?"

"Yup, ate a lot," you say, still taking another bite of ice cream.

"Wait, since when were you here?!" Rex shouts, retreating behind Eve on the spot, careful to stay out of kicking range. A futile effort, but you won't let him know. Yet. "You just left! I thought I was safe!"

"Rex, stop making an ass of yourself," his involuntary human shield sighs, rolling her eyes. "Time runs faster in that dimension, remember?"

"The Night Queen has no time for your petty squabbling! Dessert is more important." Your announcement, perfectly sensible in light of recent events, is accompanied by more ice cream consumption. You're nearly done with it, too.

"The heck, what'd you even eat? How much time passed while you were there?"

"I ate Flaxans. Duh."

This is where Robot chimes in again. "As you may remember, Night Queen is a vampire and, consequently, drinks blood. As we saw in prior battles against the Flaxans. Thus, it is no surprise she would continue to do so while sabotaging their capacity to return again."

While the three devolve into another stupid argument, Dupli-Kate moves around them to approach you more directly. "You good?"

"Yup! Could use more ice cream, though."

"Give me five minutes." With that, she proceeds to use her power, splitting off a copy of herself that she throws a handful of coins to as she takes off.

Finally someone is being useful.


While you have to wait a little for the arrival of your extra ice cream ("Is strawberry alright?" "Yes, please."), it doesn't take too long for Kate's duplicate to arrive the number '2' proudly shown on her chest where the original has a '1'.

In response, you pretend to stick a hand under your dress, pretending to look for something under it. Then you pull out one of the props you prepared for the sake of your current cape identity out of the shadow you're casting under your clothes, making use of this particular quirk to make it look like what you're taking out was somehow stored there.

Specifically, it's a gold coin, one you had your manufactories cast using the replicated materials you had left over after the important stuff was done being built. You even went the extra mile and added a few other elements to make it look like it was made using primitive technology, including the radiological age of the materials involved.

It also bears your face on one side and a full moon on the other. They are, after all, Night Coins.

"Well done, peon!" You declare once you have your strawberry ice cream. No idea where she found it, but you're happy to have it either way. "In recognition of your valiant efforts, you shall be rewarded with a shiny! Use it well."

"Uh… Thanks?" Dupli-Kate asks, her two bodies exchanging a glance before they both just kind of step into each other, merging into one again.

You nod, depicting the proud kid that just handed a friend some chewing gum perfectly before you turn towards your ice cream. Then you stop again, because the Thinker just reminded you of something.

… And yeah, sure, she can go ahead and have a turn at screwing with people.

Before long you are 'suddenly' picked up by a black, robotic arm, held under it by the blonde body you created for the Thinker to use in this context.

"Oh great, now the next weirdo is coming along to steal the first one," Rex gripes, throwing his arms up in the air. "Will this ever end or are we bound to get swamped with them at this rate?"

"Rex, you are not being helpful," Robot helpfully informs him. "Also, greetings. Who might you be?"

"… I am the Sword of the Night. That is all you need to know." Wow, you weren't sure the Thinker would actually use the voice modulation you built into this one, but she did just fine.

Looks a lot like an actual person that just happened to have a lot of robotic prosthetics, too, moving smoothly and all, even her facial features emoting on a very subtle level while appearing motionless otherwise.

"We will be off, now. Night Queen requires her naptime, since someone let her overeat." Not looking at anyone in particular, the Thinker seems like she's accusing everyone present at once. You approve.

"Please wait. The Global Defense Agency would likely want to have a word regarding the events that took place beyond the Flaxan portal," Robot says, as though anyone gave a fuck what the GDA wants. "It would be exceedingly helpful if Night Queen could make a statement."

"I already did," you complain, contorting a little to keep your strawberry ice cream from toppling into any particular direction. "I ate them. End of story. Also, I dun' wanna nap!"

"If it is this important to you, you may convey a telephone number under which the GDA may be contacted. Later. After said nap." The Thinker's icy glare would enough to have anyone that wasn't a literal robotic drone shrivel up a bit on the spot. "Now, if you would. Night Queen is a handful at the best of times."

With that, she stomps onto a nearby manhole cover, making it flip and jump up so she can kick it aside. Looks like someone better have some paper to hand quick.


It is now night, the perfect time to nap… Except you're a vampire! Raaa!

But anyways, you also have a number to call from Robot, so you should be able to get things moving with the GDA soon-ish, too. Before that, though, you're taking a hot second to inform Alicia about the success of your anti-Flaxan measures. Just to keep her updated on this stuff, what with her personal investment and all.


Okay, so with immediate concerns dealt with for the moment you can, finally, return to your underground lair, getting back to your other pursuits for a brief time, at least.

Mostly you just don't want to seem too eager to contact the GDA, really. Let them chew on you doing the work of the Guardians all by yourself while making it look like literal child's play for a bit, only get around to granting them audience when you feel like it later on, that kind on thing. And no, you aren't letting your Night Queen persona leak through here, for the record.

Your power directly translates into status, you just don't bother to exercise the former to make the world acknowledge the latter. Doesn't stop you from behaving like an absolute little shit whenever it suits you, in the physical form of one or otherwise.

But yeah, you mostly occupy yourself with some magical craftsmanship- you did harvest massive amounts of soul fragments off of the Flaxans, and you are determined to brush up on some very particular objects. Specifically, Last Embrace and that Hamsa you made are getting a bit of an upgrade.

Whether it will become particularly relevant going forward or not you have no idea, doubly so as you only have a pretty general idea of what you're doing, but… shoving enough soul-matter to make up an actual soul into a few pieces of equipment hasn't steered you wrong so far.

Sure, that's mostly because you've never done it before, but hey, what's the worst that could happen? Your gauntlets suddenly developing sapience and communicating with-

Actually, bad example. What's the worst that could happen, your weapons rebelling against you? None of your creations (that you gave an actual sense of self) have ever done that. You remain optimistic you shall be able to deal with any results that arise from this.

Next on your list, training. Not the usual kind of training you do, where you mess about with your powers or your magic or some such shit, but actual, physical, strength training. An incredible innovation, yes, yes, you know, hold the applause.

Generally speaking, while you use your musculature to move your body like a living person would, most of the actual strength you exert is generated supernaturally; you decide that you are stronger than you should be able to and so you are, thanks to the way you are actively animating your own body at all times. The entire thing is actually fascinating and says a lot about the way your vampirism works, but that's beside the point right now.

Even if it's really interesting to figure out what funky shit your own soul is getting up to. You're relatively convinced that is what's causing it, anyways, you could be wrong, as always.

Thing is, things have changed a little now that you have the modified version of a Viltrumite's bullshit DNA in you. You could, in theory, actually work out and get a real improvement from it, as you understand it. Theoretically.

This as yet unproven, but hopefully accurate theory is why you're currently working out a bunch of more advanced equipment meant to let you actually work out without cratering city blocks on the regular. Superdense material, gravity manipulation devices, inertia canceling, you don't spare any of the good stuff, even if it does deplete your stocks of materials a good bit.

You just need to wait for more, not like you're all that pressed about this stuff now that the Thinker worked up to a skeleton crew of Hammers already. With those taking care of expansion and building your lair, you have a bit of a lull in the construction department otherwise, they're mostly still just carving out the space you require.

Space that wasn't there before you, or rather the Thinker, put eldritch cores everywhere, but hey, you aren't about to complain. Now back to shock-absorbent materials and how much of them you need on the treadmills…


While you are busy building any superhuman gymbro's wet dream, however, you also do some other stuff on the side. Primarily, you feed a few random Flaxan souls to your lawyer to have her investigate one Damien Darkblood, demon P.I. extraordinaire.

You don't exactly expect a full profile or anything, just some general information on what his deal even is. Why's a demon running around on this particular Earth solving crimes, basically- a pretty good question, considering demons aren't really the type in general.

The answer you receive, after a few hours of waiting and the other half of the payment in Flaxans? Simply put, Darkblood is the kind of demon that is both intelligent and personable enough to prefer not to simply destroy things whenever he can, instead preferring to stay outside of hell and avoid that entire dimensional clusterfuck.

To do so, he may or may not have struck several deals with certain entities, you don't actually have any way to find out unless you get him to talk, but as long as he acts in pursuit of truth and justice, he has an indefinite visa card for Earth. That's why he goes out of his way to solve crimes- it both keeps him out of hell and gives him something to do he can get behind.

Not that he's some bleeding heart or anything, he's still a demon and all, but he also has an actual sense of justice, amusingly. From what few testimonies your lawyer could dig up in 'the archives' (she does not offer further elaboration and you do not ask for it for now), he actually genuinely is in this whole thing to expose the truth whenever someone tries to hide it and get criminals to face justice, one way or another.

Really quirky for a demon, yes. Then again, not everyone can go and be part of some infernal bureaucracy for all of eternity.

In terms of known abilities of his, well, he can detect and, to an extent, disrupt magic, though you doubt he could do much of anything against any of yours that actually packs a decent punch. He can appear and disappear whenever he is not observed, though his presence has some signs that anyone can pick up on if they pay attention- you saw that one through Cecil Steadman' eyes, too. And he does actually have magical abilities to investigate stuff, including a demonic version of your own magical psychometry.

Basically, he's a meddler, and he may get in your way… If you actually did anything that bad, that is. Sure, you did run around, use magic to spy on people and stole those samples from the bodies of the Guardians, but you were't the one to actually kill them.

As such, you should be able to just manipulate him into helping your own agenda along. And if he makes trouble, well, he may be near invincible as long as he does his job, staying on this plane of existence rather than being sent back to hell when subjected to sufficient physical trauma, but you do have your own ways to deal with demons, one way or another.

All in all, a potential problem, but not that difficult to deal with. You also know, thanks to your lawyer's information, how you could summon him yourself, having received all the details and instructions on summoning him in particular you could want. Food for thought, you suppose.


Your off time, after some preliminary testing of your new workout equipment (you end up having to redesign and replace a few part here and there when it turns out you straining your body against them causes them to break despite the measures meant to prevent just that- immense amounts of force applied on a relatively small surface teds to cause issues) and doing some recreational alchemical experimentation (it's like trying to make new and inventive drugs, just better because of the sheer width of possible ingredients you get to play with) is, after some thought inside your inner world, spent going some introspection.

Not on the topic of yourself and your own actions, of course. You're way past the point of giving a rat's ass about that kind of thing. No, you consider the cool new stuff you gained by murdering (almost) an entire planet and remaking it in your image, because the benefits to you are just so immense it takes a while to categorize them all still.

One could even call it a fortunate encounter, an opportunity that allows you to advance your rise to the top in immense ways that most others on your level of power could only dream of. Almost like divine providence, the heavens smiling upon you on your quest to reach them.

Except you actually earned this, what with proactively going out there and murdering that planet's worth of people. Sure, green and alien people, but hey, you don't discriminate.

Anyways, that entire little tangent aside, you still have to consciously work through the technological base of these Flaxans and how you can best abuse it for your own purposes. After all, it's not every day that you get access to some of the brightest minds of a wholly alien civilization and the knowledge they hold!

Normally, it's just a slightly shifted version of humanity you get to exploit like this. Sure, lots of cool stuff still, as all the secondhand Academy City science you ended up incorporating in your own tech can confirm, but it doesn't usually give you this much of a comprehensive overview of, like, all the fields at once.

So. Flaxan technology. Being as prominent in your interactions with them as it is, you already analyzed the interdimensional portals they used to invade Earth repeatedly, and though they are limited in scope- only accessing parallel dimensions and requiring sizable installations to do so- they do have the potential to be useful down the line.

Hey, having a pocket Earth up your sleeve can never hurt, if nothing else.

But that's far from the only thing you can take from them. So, like, the laser stuff isn't anything special by your standards as such, you already have better versions of the same… except the Flaxan energy weapons don't actually fire lasers.

No, they do fire shaped energy in itself, which is… interesting. Insofar as you do the same for your own disintegration weapons, combining chemical disintegration with charged energy more or less. However, the methods by which some of the Flaxan weaponry you are aware of operate do offer some interesting possibilities.

Sure, they needed to build big in order to allow the required amount of energy to be a given for those energy bombs their tanks shot, but heck, even their spacecraft equipped for combat used basically upsized versions of the exact same thing. It's interesting and the drawbacks less important for you given your proclivity to break physics by building your favored Eldritch Cores.

The possibilities are endless, and you are already considering if and how you should add the capability for energy grenades to Last Embrace. Sure, you'd have to work some things around, reorganize the inflated space you're using inside your gauntlets to actually house all the machinery required for their functioning, but…

Well, a project for later. Otherwise, you also have a bunch of designs for spacecraft, as you may have mentioned already, though they aren't actually all that advanced- no faster than light travel, for one, and they do require some specialized infrastructure to actually get off a given planet. That said, once you get into how the Flaxans' metallurgy and material sciences works out and how the differences between dimensions and subtly modified physics can be adjusted for, you quickly figure out how to produce a variety of advanced alloys for use in various scenarios, which is nice.

You can infinitely replicate anything you care to using your machines, but that just means having more recipes for stuff to replicate makes them that much better in practice.

Then there's some minor improvements to IFF protocols based on the Flaxans' automated weapons and gadgets, some of which were apparently meant to disable certain high-difficulty heroes such as Atom Eve and some of which were used in their turrets firing off those continuous energy beams, for example.

Quickly drying, super-sticky faux-concrete? Check. You could use this stuff yourself, maybe add it to some weapons- it's basically containment foam, this funky expanding, self-hardening and non-airproof foam the Thinker tells you Dragon has been working on, except less easy to breathe through. EMP shells? Eh, honestly nothing new and you never really lack in ways to shut down machines, to be honest.

Now one of the big ones… Dimensional shielding tech. Technically, the stuff doesn't really interact with dimensions all that much, it just takes particular physics- that is, the passage of time- and maintains it. The Flaxans actually used it in these bracelets they all wore during their second invasion, not that it really helped them much when up against yourself.

Normally? Nothing supremely massive for yourself. You don't age and that's really all they tried to do anything about. But, on the other hand…

You do acutely remember the existence of Gray Boy, one of the many little horror shows of the Slaughterhouse Nine. You also recall that there are, to this day, victims of his caught inside localized time loops, inflicting the same suffering to them over and over again while they remain fully conscious of their state and the predicament they are stuck in.

If someone were to, say, wear one of these bracelets, tuned to the local passage of time, they would, in theory, be able to simply slip into this time loop, put another bracelet onto the victims involved and remove them from said time loop, if it works as you are led to believe. Purely theoretically, of course.

More importantly, it may even protect against certain other kinds of parahuman powers that manipulate time as such, Clockblocker from the Wards ENE coming to mind immediately… If it works. And if that's how said powers actually work that way. It's a lot of 'if's in there, naturally.

Still, lots of science to comb through, interesting stuff to go over, the works. Though Flaxan architecture is absolutely horrendous and it shows in many of the things they build and design, just for the record.


Come morning, you are already working on your next step, as you are wont to do- you didn't get this far by not focusing on your immediate priorities whenever those were something you could do something about. Specifically, you're hashing stuff out with Alicia, who, for the record, has gone back to her insanity-inspiring morning routine in the meantime.

She isn't an expert on the GDA and its operations, but hey, she's the best you have. You also make a point to include her in the planning just out of principle alone, what with your current arrangement and all that.

While at it, you also feed her some more potions you asked the Thinker to brew up, more for the sake of intellectual curiosity than anything else, with flavoring of lime and chocolate this time. The point of this particular exercise is basically to see how far she can go with a variety of small, but cumulative enhancements before you go and juice her up even more than that, just because you can.

She's actually already exhibiting slightly increased fitness overall, mostly shown in increased vigor and bodily activity all throughout the day- she doesn't do her morning exercise because her body needs it to get going and more for the fitness benefits by this point.

You've also taken to massaging her shoulders, promoting circulation and preventing her poor posture throughout the day as she sits crouched in front of a laptop or computer from causing her back pain. Or her breasts, for that matter.

She may or may not have decided that this is part of your official job description at this point. You aren't sure, but it's not like you mind kneading the flesh of a cute girl on the regular, either.

Some strategizing and trawling Alicia's memory for known and suspected GDA technology (you still have some professional interest in their teleporter, even if you suspect it will have it own limitations and issues, as these things are wont to do) is all you can get in before other matters require your attention, though. 'Other matters' being, in this case, lots of demons.

Look, you have some pride in being the greatest monster around at any given time and you aren't gonna say the GDA having Damien Darkblood help investigate stuff makes you feel threatened, but out of sheer principle alone if they have a demon, you have to have a hundred just to make a point.


… Well, you end up just summoning masses of weak ones that you beat the crap out of, turn into handy little essences that you slap together and use to create a bunch of demonically enhanced guns the Thinker is nice enough to fabricate for you while you're busy, but hey, that's not all you end up doing with them, to be fair.

Any specimen that look like they stick out to you among the imps and arch-imps you summon in the, what, hundreds? Low thousands? Well, you simply beat them around a bit and, instead of extracting their essences like with the rest, force a quick 'mutual' contract upon them.

The terms are simple, they have to come whenever you call for them and do whatever you tell them to, then fuck off back to hell when you don't have any use for them anymore. Simple, to the point and very much the kind of relationship that nobody would mistake for ever being equal.

With a steady backbone of very, very many weak-ass fodder demons at your beck and call, you decide to add on a few additional demonic reinforcements just a call away at all times on top, what with your capacity to summon them in with extreme ease at these levels of power.

You still do know a certain Greater Barghest from a while back, the one from which you got the essence that you empowered Last Embrace with, and upon contacting him once more you fairly easily bribe him with a bunch of Flaxan souls to give you access to not one, but two packs of hellhounds of several dozen each, ready to hunt down and tear apart just about anything you point them at.

Which is pretty nifty, to say the least. Sure, you can do just about anything the demons you are ready to summon at the moment can do for you, but hey, the more you can offload your work the more time you have to apply your own strength where it really matters.

Which is why you then also go ahead and summon up the backbone of your fledging little demon army, several dozen physically capable demons capable of both taking some extreme punishment and tearing through any opposition the fodder can't just overwhelm with numbers.

You still smack them down as you summon them, thanks to your own power and ability in combat, but it actually does get a little more difficult to do so when you just summon as many as ten Demon Brutes, as they're coloquially called, at a time and make a point of fighting them all down at once.

Things get just the slightest bit chaotic, is all you're saying. Especially when the fuckers start to fire off those heat beams of theirs all over the place. That said, it does bode well for their usefulness if they can momentarily annoy you, if nothing else.

Come to think of it, this is how most demon armies and hordes would start building up, you'd imagine. A powerful being capable of accessing hell, or a demon itself, not like they're any different in that regard, subdues a solid chunk of physically strong demons, then uses them to do its bidding while working towards more powerful ones, whether through force or by exchanging souls or other valuables with them.

And a couple months later you see them snowballing into massive hordes darkening the skies until some madlad of a hero comes in to murder whoever is at the core of things. Or they lose control of their demons and are replaced by the next strongest being that can enforce a semblance of order of the forces of evil or whatever.

Well, anyways, you have your little pocket army and you'll look into pulling it out whenever you have the opportunity. Can't really ask for more with this price tag, can you? Like, you got most of them for free!


Demons on open contracts (may be summoned to perform given tasks at any time):

Several hundred imps headed by several dozen Arch-Imps (fast, feral demons, stronger than anything their size should be with natural weapons)

Two packs of Hellhounds at around thirty members each (great hunters and trackers, can breathe fire and cast minor magic, good at cooperating)

Dozens of Demon Brutes (Huge, heavily armored, strong enough to tear through most fortifications and more, can generate beams of concentrated heat when brute force is insufficient)


Once you have appropriately addressed the immediate lack of a literal horde of demons up your sleeves (by getting one, that was the whole point, yes), you quickly ready everything you may need for what you plan to do now.

Well, you already have most of everything you need, granted. The phone number Robot gave you, some snacks and a change of clothes. All that follows is you quietly floating up the side of a random building downtown with a live view of things going on transmitted to Alicia over your bond with her, what with her being a thrall.

So that's exactly what you do, naturally. Once you've found yourself an appropriate roof to dramatically grow a throne made of ice upon, you swiftly take a seat and pull out a random burner phone, the kind of which you know Kate used to use before she settled down with you.

Kind of a criminal favorite, these things. You swiped this particular one from a random phone shop on the way, which is how you pretty much source all your supplies you don't just go and have the manufactories produce these days. But hey, so long as it's not traceable and the Thinker takes care of the technical side of things, it works just fine for you!

Dialing in the number in question, you lean back, casually letting the wind play over your dress as you lounge. For the record, it's kinda cold this high up, not that it particularly bothers you, and you go through the effort to manipulate the weight of your dress purely with your mind to make sure you don't accidentally flash anyone, considering you once again didn't bother with underwear.

Look, you can't be arsed to do so in male form and girl underwear is if anything worse. Sure, you could get away with childish panties and nothing else while you're in this body, but still, why go to all that trouble when you don't need to?

The phone call doesn't take long to connect, as unsurprisingly the GDA has people on making sure these things run as smoothly as possible. Of course you then immediately proceed to do your thing, in part because both yourself and Alicia think this inordinately funny.

"I want a large pepperoni and ten packs of chocolate chip cookies."

"No, I'm sure I got the right number. This is a random faceless mook from the Global Defense Agency, right? Yes, I am The Night Queen, and yes, I want those cookies."

"I don't care. You want to hear what I have to say, you look into spontaneously becoming a gosh-darn delivery service, got it?"

"Doesn't matter where I am, your boss will come to me. You just, like, track the call, you're not wholly incompetent. Look, that one Cecil guy has his pet demon detective disrupt me looking through his eyes, he can face me himself instead!"

"Yes, I will wait. Not like I can't entertain myself. How many casualties will it take for you to hurry up with that teleporter?"

Turns out Cecil does run a tight ship, just like you were thinking he was. It doesn't take long at all for a flash of light, almost like miniature lightning, to appear right in front of you.

And lo and behold, it is none other than Cecil Stedman himself, a pizza box under his arm. "We were all out of cookies, so let's hope your majesty can make do with this."

Dang, he's good. Smells like a good pizza, too.


Naturally, the very first thing you do is to throw your hands up in the air. "Pizza time!" You declare happily, opening your mouth wide to expel a swathe of silver smoke that quickly coalesces into… Well, a table and a chair for Cecil, positioned not to make you move from your throne.

Next you secrete a bit of aura, letting the swirls of color turn into a pair of your ever-trusty slime maids, one of which grabs the pizza from Cecil while the other one pulls the chair back for him.

"Well, I've never been one to let a good pizza go to waste, but would you mind spilling the beans while you eat?" The scarred old man asks, taking a seat without so much as raising an eyebrow.

You get the distinct feeling he's trying to evaluate you, figure you out. About what you would have expected- it would've been even funnier if he just completely fell for the Night Queen persona, but hey, you gotta work with what you have.

Gesturing for the slime maids you summoned up, you let one of them transform her hand into a razor-sharp pizza cutter, taking the food apart into manageable slices one of which you immediately grab. With both hands, for your hands are weirdly small and dainty in this form.

"Ate the Flaxans, if they come back they know they volunteered for buffet duty. But that's not what you want to know," you tell Cecil, opening your mouth wide (without your gameface teeth, of course) to take a biiig bite out of one piece. He, for his part, is currently looking at the pizza, as if to judge whether it's safe to eat after being slime-cut or not.

A thought has the opposite maid from the one that did this morph one hand into a thin plate she shoves under the currently openly lying pizza, lifting another piece off to offer it to him. "Please go ahead, Mister Stedman. While it is still hot," the gentle-mannered, polite creature says, bowing with a smile while completely nailing down the whole uncanny valley part of her being made of a sapient semi-gelatinous mass.

"Well, in for a penny, in for a pound." Credit where it's due, once he decides to go ahead, he does just that, though Cecil is much more graceful about eating his slice than you are. Not, like, unnecessarily graceful, but he just doesn't stuff his cheeks the way you do.

He's efficient about it, is what he is.

"So, you said you had something to say. Out with it, I don't have all day and neither do you, 'your majesty'." Wow, you barely hear those quotation marks out of his speech.

"You're in deep shit because your pet heroes got themselves butchered and you have no idea who did it." You only swallow once you're done talking, throwing the rest of your slice and the crispy crust that comes with it into your mouth afterwards. "And you suspect someone used magic to watch. The same magic I used on you."

"So Darkblood was right. And you even came forward with it." If you aren't lying, his narrowed eyes tell you without any need for words. "Look, anything you can tell us-"

"Nolan did it," you cut to the chase, going for the next piece of pizza. This stuff is actually really good, okay? They got the cheese just right. You aren't some pizza snob, but you can recognize good food when you eat it. "Or Omni-Man or however he calls himself at the time."

Cecil all but shuts down his face, a carefully blank mask constructed in a heartbeat. Literally, as you can match this stuff up thanks to your powers. "Omni-Man is a longstanding hero and has worked with the Guardians for a long time."

"He's also the only survivor and his wounds were caused by them. He called all of them to their headquarters in order to ambush them." You make a point of showing how you're bored by the conversation you're having, holding out a finger you swirl in the air. Partially because rehashing things you already know is boring, partially to convey how little of a fuck you give. "Something something conquer Earth for the Viltrumite Empire. He didn't think about it too much when I was in his head."

A minute tensing in his shoulders and hands, pizza held somewhere between the table and his mouth, arrested in place. You're pretty sure that if you weren't here (and looking like a literal little girl), he'd be punching the table, but as it is Cecil holds his temper. Right, he was personally invested into the Guardians. wasn't he? Or are you reading too much into what you peeked on while putting yourself into his shoes?

You eat some more while you watch his thoughts race through him, his eyes betraying that much to you just fine. However, you aren't here to let him think, you're here to fuck around.

"That's why I sneaked in and stole some blood samples afterwards," you therefore tell him, moving right along. "Figure stuff out."

"Yeah? Used some vampire mumbo jumbo?" Cecil asks, obviously still wondering whether you can be trusted or not. You roll your eyes.

"Night Queen mumbo jumbo, please and thank you," you snootily correct him. "Also, how'd you like them back?"

He stares at you. You stare back at him, still munching on the pizza. You're nearly through a quarter of it already.

"Tell me more."

And there you fucking go.


Of course things are never simple nor easy in life, which is why you make it a point to detail exactly what you can and can't do to Cecil before you do anything else.

"The Immortal is technically not dead dead," is how you begin. "Kinda wishy-washy of him. But if someone goes and puts his body back together well enough chances are he'll just start moving again, so that's a good place to start. The rest are more complicated."

"Still better than a total loss," the white-haired old guy you are planning to browbeat mutters. "So you're saying you can, what, bring the dead back to life?"

"With caveats. Imagine I said something something things man is not meant to know," you wave him off, "but yeah. I grab their souls, fix up or make completely new bodies for them and Bob's yer uncle! Predicated on their souls being up for grabs."

"Good thing none of them ever made any deals with demons that I'm aware of then. So, oh your Nightly Majesty, I don't suppose you'll be assisting the GDA from the goodness of your heart. Will a lifetime supply of chocolate cookies suffice?"

You laugh aloud, happy and with the full knowledge that you have him now. He knows it, too. "Naaah, I like cookies, but not that much. I know that you know that I know that you know I can demand pretty much anything from you in exchange for what I offer."

"Well, depends. If it's inherently going against the interests of humanity, I would totally screw you over instead of actually giving you whatever you want," he points out, actually completely honest about it. You know, you were kind of expecting him to be a lying scumbag, rather than a genuine one like this.

"Pft, as if you'd risk me just destroying a random continent to make a point," you shrug in mild warning and rebuke. "Know that The Night Queen shall never be denied! But before any of that, a couple of the Guardians will be a pain to bring back. Darkwing, Red Rush and Green Ghost are easy. Martian Man I have no idea how he works, so no promises. Aquarius and War Woman are in some stupid afterlife I dunno crap about, so none for them either."

"Look, I'm thankful for any of them we could get back at this point, nevermind half the team. What would you need to do your Night Queen magic thing?"

"Their bodies and some space to work with. Contact their souls first, then make arrangements. Maybe just clone new bodies for them to throw them into, but I can work with less."

"… Actually, I have an idea. It's probably a terrible one."


The Mauler Twins. Two clones of an insane scientist, continually cloning themselves and copying their memories and personalities onto a new body whenever one of them is killed. Mad geniuses in this dimension being what they are, they also genetically re-engineered themselves to be between two and half and three meters tall and extremely muscular, their skin being blue and entirely hairless.

They're also just about bulletproof, unless someone shoots them in the eye or something, and their literally superhuman strength shouldn't be underestimated. More importantly, they are very engaged scientists, their entire supervillain career centered around acquiring the supplies and money they need to perform further experiments.

They're specialized in biology as a whole, having gone into genetics and cloning, as you already mentioned, but they're also brilliant doctors and even engineers, among other things, as they are known to set up their own labs and workshops within less than 48 hours, even with only a single surviving clone.

Mostly so that one can clone himself again and all, but the point stands, doesn't it?

The issue with them, despite how easily they can be bribed to do things as long as one knows how, is their deep-seated arrogance and short-sightedness, going by the dossier you were provided upon being flown into the secret prison complex you are currently kicking your legs in.

As in, you're sitting on a chair inside a visiting room turned execution chamber and kicking your legs. Because you are here to deal with those issues, in a rather terminal manner.

See, when you told Cecil that someone would have to put the bodies of the Guardians back together so they would at least kind of support life, he immediately thought of the Mauler Twins. However, he was also well aware that they couldn't be trusted to do anything of this sort without trying to implant some way to overcome the Guardians of the Globe later on and essentially make themselves the perfect opportunity to, like, take over the world or some shit, just because they'd see a way to.

Hence why you subsequently suggested a way to make use of them that wouldn't allow them to do so. So now they're being herded towards you by a group of heavily armed and armored prison guards, unaware they're about to die horribly.

But then, dem's the breaks.

"What the heck is this now, since when was babysitting random brats our job?" A gravely voice asks the moment the two bald and blue giants enter the room.

"Oh, careful there brother, I'm sure the ankle-biter could take off a toe or two at least if you piss her off."

Case in point, they're perfectly intelligent and all, they're just also massive idiots sometimes. Incidentally, you make a point to observe their souls before you do anything else, or soul, rather, singular, as it turns out they have some weird thing going on as well.

Basically, what you can only suspect to be the original Mauler's soul is just kind of present in both of them, partially split up like some fucked up siamese twin kind of deal just on a spiritual level. Pretty cool, actually, and your collector's spirit immediately demands you grab it just to have it.

Good thing that's exactly what you came here for. "Listen up Smurfettes, your skills are needed to do a thing," you explain to them. "But as you're huge blue buttmunchers, nobody trusts you not to screw around on the job, so your cooperation is gonna be ensured the hard way."

"Heh. Cute. And how're you gonna do that, little girl?"

As one of the twins does you the favor of skipping over the formalities, you just hop off your chair. "You're about to find out. Thanks for the meal, by the way."

With that, you launch yourself upwards, right at his throat. The Maulers made themselves strong and tough, but he's neither strong enough to throw you off himself nor does his skin manage to resist your claws when they start to tear through it- not much, anyways, not enough to matter.

You messily eat him in short order, the other one- already trying to flee while you're busy with the first one- following him shortly thereafter.

That's just how it goes when you're a supervillain in a world where acceptable sacrifices are acceptable. Cecil called them a down payment and you, for one, are perfectly fine with treating them as such.


"Say, do you guys ever get chicken pot pie in here? Because hey, I'm not complaining, but back in prison…"

Uyehara Yoshiake sighed, once again utterly tempted to quit. If he could, that was.

"Hey, just asking," the other Mauler shrugged, leaning against the ungodly hell machine that passed for a standard lab computer around here. "Can't go wrong with the stuff."

Luckily, Indigo stepped in before he just lost his temper. Or flopped onto the ground in fetal position trying not to think about how much easier this afterlife would be if he was as nuts as Wales. "Sadly, we don't really influence the menu, but there's some of it every now and then. We also don't get hungry anymore, however."

"Don't matter, food is food," one of the two blue brutes declared as though it was some profound wisdom.

Alright. Enough having issues, Uyehara really should at least try to help keep this mess under control. "Just wait until Julianne comes back, she usually does the food runs around here. Also, please get off me Nolac."

"… No," the raven-haired creature of indeterminate gender pouted. "You never respond when I get grabby, I refuse to lose you to the blue mutant doubleteam."

"Hah! Hear that, she thinks we're gonna steal her boytoy."

"Good thing we installed the libido switch years ago."

"Exactly!" Nolac pointed at them accusingly. "How can anyone trust a guy that can get it up on command?!"

… Honestly, Uyehara just laid a hand onto his face and gave up. Again. Let Indigo deal with trying to keep things sane. Just… He just wasn't going to touch any of this, screw it.

Perhaps sensing this, Indigo changed topics. "You know, you two are dealing very well with your deaths."

"Eh, you're in the business long enough, you either realize you'll bite it one day or you're an idiot."

"'Sides, not like this is the worst that could happen. We know hell exists now, for example. I'll take endless research and occasional errands any day."

Clearly, the world was even more mad than usual today. He needed a coffee. And a crowbar, to get Nolac to stop clinging to him.


With the Mauler Twins secure inside your belly ('just think of it as an infinite prison'), you are quickly carted off to the next facility, now that you have what you need- you summon them once to confirm that yes, it does work the way you told Cecil it does, but they complained about just having found chicken pot pie and wanting to finish it so you suck them back in again real quick.

Sure, you could make them shut up with a thought, but why bother? You sure aren't about to unnecessarily let them take up space on your transport jet in the meantime. May as well let them eat, not everyone deals this well with having just been eaten.

Also, you know for a fact Yoshi is, like, supremely annoyed by them. Acquiring their soul(s) is already paying off. And yeah, they technically count as a single soul for summoning purposes when you work with them, which is a nice little bonus.

But to get back to what you were doing- in the next secure facility, obviously having been specifically emptied out for what will be happening next, you note that they're using some weird lighting, though you have a hard time describing how it's different from normal.

Meh. They probably put it in to subconsciously influence their employees or something? It's not like you particularly care, you can see just fine either way.

So, first things first. Addressing Cecil as you go, the two of you going in together, you can't help but whine, simply because it fits with your current character. "Really? You have a teleporter. I know you have a teleporter. This is fifteen minutes of my unlife I'll never get back."

"No offense, but I'm not trusting you with our teleporter unless absolutely necessary. I'd prefer to have this song and dance through sometime last week, but that's that." Well, that fits, Cecil hasn't made the impression of someone easily pushed into hasty mistakes on you.

Quietly pouting the rest of the way, you soon arrive in a wide-open room, an occupied operation table at its center. There, you see the decapitated body of none other than the Immortal, his disembodied head set on a table next to it.

Makes sense to go with what you claimed to be the 'easiest' part of this operation, of course. With Cecil standing back (and no doubt having someone ready to teleport him the hell out in case things go pear-shaped), you go ahead and summon the Mauler Twins first off.

"Feh, look who went and got us killed, brother."

"You've always been an idiot, Cecil, but how didn't you figure the Immortal just needed to be sewn together again like an old plush toy?"

"Pleasure to see you nutters, too," the director of the GDA replies, looking like he would dearly love to drink some coffee right now. It's an expression you're surprisingly familiar with seeing. "Now would you do me a favor and make them shut up, Queen? I get nauseous every time I have to hear them talk."

"Night Queen," you make a point of complaining before you snap your fingers. "Also, yes. You want more sewing, get out the handicrafts. Do you have what you need here?"

One twin grabs what you know (from reading their minds) to be a wound-sealing miniature laser while the other salutes sloppily. "Aye, aye, boss lady."

Just to make this clear, you aren't making them call you that, even though you are perfectly aware they know that you're usually a guy. They're just playing along purely because they support anything that screws with the rest of the world.

The 'surgery' that follows doesn't take long, maybe twenty minutes or so. The twins are good at what they do, neatly reconnecting the contents of the Immortal's neck and throat right where they're meant to go, though you end up asking after another pizza in the meantime.

Sadly, Cecil turns out to be a poo-poo-head (or you call him that, anyways) as he refuses to bring edibles into what amounts to a surgery room. You end up just occasionally bickering with him until everything is done.

Which, perhaps, makes it extra awkward when the Mauler Twins just stop at that point. "Huh. Why's he not getting up?"

"I mean, what did you expect?"

"I expected him to come back to life, that's his whole thing."

Rolling your eyes, you sigh and gesture towards them. "His heart's still stopped, dummies. Get it pumping again before you complain."

"… Huh. You know what, that's a good point."

"I'll grab the defibrillator."

You look at Cecil, who's just been standing by impassively so far. "This is the quality of the help I have to deal with."

"Give them credit where it's due, they were good enough to be worth the detour. You said you'd have been able to do this without them?"

"Duh." Stupid question. "I'd have just cheated with magic. Would've been fiddly, but an extra arm or leg never hurt anyone."

"… Yeah, that's what I figured."

In the end, your patient needs a couple electric shocks to the chest, but whatever magical properties fuel him let him ignore death just as you were predicting; his limbs are twitching, closed eyes fluttering, and with one last use of the medical equipment you're having your soul minions use he rears up from where he's lying-

"WHERE'S OMNI-MAN?!"

… Right. He's probably not in the best of moods right now.


Of course having this guy run around and try to kill Omni-Man in a rage is… well, kind of the opposite of what you want to happen right now, considering your preliminary plan calls for at least a modicum of subtlety and secrecy rather than whatever you'd call that particular shitfest.

Hence, you have to calm the Immortal down as quickly as possible, make sure he doesn't screw your entire operation twelve ways from Sunday by complete accident. Honestly, why's he being like this? If you were suddenly and unexpectedly raised from the dead, you'd at least take a quick breather before you went on to eat someone.

You would know, you remember how it all went down for you. Sure, you were also in kind of a haze and unable to think particularly well until that first meal, but still.

Anyways, the Immortal, kind of an issue right now. The Mauler Twins are already stepping back from him in wise forethought, so you focus on the guy himself for the moment. Wordlessly using some of your magic, you manipulate his sensations real quick.

Your basic spell for these kinds of occasions has to be finagled a bit to cause full-body sensation, but you're pretty good at this branch of magic, and so everything the superhero you have to deal with now is temporarily replaced with an uncertain warmth, like that of an embryo in the womb or someone submerging their body inside a hot spring.

Hopefully, this weirdly relaxing cue to his hindbrain will help a little. At the same time, though, you also open your mouth, letting off two very distinct sounds.

One of radio static, loud enough to drown out the shouting of the man you just reassembled and focused entirely around that part of the room, whereas the other one is your normal voice directed at Cecil. "You know him, you calm him down."

Indeed, this is operation 'Make Cecil Do It' now. You like the name and may use it again sometime.

"I'd make a joke about making the old man work, but you're right," is all he has to say for himself, which you shall take as consent to run all your errands for you from now on.

With that, Cecil goes on to approach the Immortal, causing you to slowly reduce the volume of your interruptive sound. The broad-shouldered, bearded man on the operating table has sat up by this point, apparently done randomly screaming for now.

"Immortal," the director of the GDA calls out to him. "Can you hear me?"

"Ce… Cecil," the newly re-alived hero gasps, one hand on his forehead. He does look like you'd imagine someone newly and abruptly brought back from the dead would feel, the worst hangover imaginable. "Omni-Man- he, he killed everyone!"

"Yeah, we know," mister obviously not having fully trusted you until now replies. "'Cept it turns out you didn't die all the way, so he failed in part, at least. You feeling how you look, or…?"

"Probably worse," the guy grimaces, his dark hair standing off his head here and there. That said, at least his state has caught up to him now, so you think he won't fly of the handle for the time being. Progress! "What are the Mauler Twins doing here and who is that child in the corner?"

Taking your cue, you breathe them right back in, just because they're blue and huge and take up a lot of space. "I am Night Queen, and Cecil fed them to me to make them help bring you back."

"… We'll talk about this later," Immortal quickly decides with a look at Cecil, clearing his throat and firming up his posture. "What happened since… Since Omni-Man did what he did?"

And now you're talking. Yay.


While the Immortal is being brought up to speed by Cecil, you go ahead and have the bodies of the other Guardians brought in by what appears to be an automated gurney repositioning system driven by hydraulic limbs. Neat, but you seriously have to wonder how much of a budget the GDA has to waste if they use it for this.

The man of the hour tenses his jaw and fists as he sees them brought in, but doesn't otherwise react in the moment. Good on him, you suppose.

"… He just recently woke up, but his story is that he was called to your base, the lights went out and 'someone' attacked him that he couldn't see. I was pretty sure he was either lying out of his ass or his memories had gotten messed with somehow, but you know better than me in that regard."

"And I was watching through his eyes while he killed you, because I'm awesome and can just do that."

"Magic is rarely as straightforward as that," Immortal throws in.

"I also don't gotta explain shit, as it's magic. Take it or leave it, I don't care."

"I'd just go along with it," Cecil suggests to the guy he apparently is surprisingly close to. "She's been 'helping' to keep the place in order while you were dead, dealt with a repeated alien invasion."

"I see," he nods, not commenting one way or another. "And what may be-"

Holding one open hand with your palm downward over the mangled body of Darkwing, you intone your spell. Having their actual corpses right there does make this whole thing much, much easier to get right. "I call upon thee, Darkwing, to dwell in this place for a while, so come and arrive!"

No thunder and lighting happen, of course, even though it would be thematic. Your magic, while perfectly capable of being dramatic and all when it wants to, doesn't generally work like that. Instead, the light in the room dims by an infinitesimal degree that nevertheless can't be overlooked by anyone present, a strange, subtle tension or strain in the air that only intensifies as an indistinct figure appears next to the body, feet just an inch or two above the ground.

It quickly clears up, as if a person inside a cloud of mist was coming closer except the air is clear and they aren't moving. And just like that, the soul of the hero that was edgy enough to call himself 'Darkwing' is materialized from the ether.

"You two talk to him, I'll knock everyone else awake that I can." With these words, you turn to repeat the same spell on the next body, working your way through them really quick. It's a regular corpse party in here already anyways.


As you were already expecting after your initial tests, the souls of Darkwing, Red Rush and Green Ghost are easy enough to call in, which in addition to the Immortal makes four out of seven. Pretty good already, but you really should see about upping that score a little while you're at it already.

Which brings you to the… less clear-cut cases, really. When you go to try and pull at the soul of Aquarius, not only do you feel actual resistance, it seems to actually react to and reinforce itself in response to your pulling and prodding.

And you know what? Fuck that shit. It confirms what you were expecting, more or less, and wherever his soul is you doubt you'll get it without a fight.

A fight you don't really feel like fighting against an unknown enemy and with less preparation than you'd like, so you suppose the hydrokinetic fish guy stays dead.

War Woman, on the other hand, is… similar, but different. While there is some initial resistance same as with Aquarius, you quickly feel it give way, allowing you to sort of… interact with it.

It's hard to really describe, but you basically just feel a pull on yourself instead of a push back. No idea what that's about, but after a while you get a sort of slingshot to the face in the form of War Woman's soul.

"I heard someone wanted a word? … Oh. This is new."

You just point a thumb over your shoulder. "Go get the explanation from the others, I've been acting too serious for hours now and I can't be arsed."

"Very well, strangely rude child."

That leaves only one last body, though it's hard to recognize as such on first glance. Martian Man's remains look more like a large piece of cloth than anything even vaguely humanoid, and as you poke them they wobble a little, but otherwise don't react.

Still, you may as well give it a try, you suppose. Reciting your spell's chant once again, you try to call upon 'Martian Man', but…

As you thought, it's hard to really get a clear shot at this one. You just can't really seem to home in on the right soul here, despite the corpse you're using a sort of catalyst slash sorting filter.

Then again… Not many Martians apparently come to Earth, so you try again using a different approach, adding the requirement of 'being close to a human being' to your fourth attempt at making this idiot's soul appear.

And hey, it works. Yay.

"You alright there Queenie?"

"Shaddup Cecil."


The scene of Cecil and the Immortal standing there and briefing the rest of the Guardians of the Globe on their deaths and recent events in general while the Mauler Twins are just standing off to the side, summarily ignored right now in favor of getting the resurrection business on with already.

Aside from the explanation of said resurrection business and what they're here for, as well as how their cooperation has been 'assured', according to Cecil. He is, very obviously, leaving out the part where he fed them to you first, something only the Immortal is aware of for now. And giving him a few looks over already.

But hey, their working relationship is their problem, not yours. They'll deal with it on their own time. What is your issue, though, is that of course not everyone is immediately on board with being brought back to life, because someone always has to be contrary.

And no, you won't cut Alana, aka Green Ghost, any slack just because Alicia is already metaphorically slapping her forehead right now, telepathically wishing she could lecture her elder cousin.

"I see… With the amulet broken, you… probably shouldn't bother bringing me back. I'd just be a drag on-"

"Ghost, I will stop you right there," War Woman states imposingly, her summoned spirit holding out a hand. "Whether or not you still have your powers, you have been a valuable member of our team and, I believe I am not alone when I say this, a dear friend to many of us. Not to bring you back when it is possible to do so would be an insult to our bonds as well as an insult to our shared ideals."

Cecil, having already taken a step back, leans over to whisper at you from the corner of his mouth. "Green Ghost has always had confidence issues, so the others push her like this when she starts to get down. Figure dying didn't help with that."

Huh, that's news to Alicia, who always pictured Alana as a confident model of what she wanted to be like. You guess she had an easier time hiding her problems in her private life, or maybe she made a point of never letting her family know? Not that it's about to stop you from doing your job here.

Staying just as quiet as Cecil, you blow a raspberry, using your powers to translate you doing so into words for him to hear. "How long is this gonna take, I'm tired and I want to get this done already."

"… should never again doubt our conviction, nor the lengths any of us would go to in order to…"

"When War Woman gets going like this? We'll be lucky if she stops in half an hour."

Yeah, no. You aren't about to waste your valuable time like this. Sure, you could stand around doing nothing, it's not like boredom affects you the same way it would a living person, but it still sucks and you don't even have anyone to cuddle with to kill time.

As such, you simply interrupt them, by way of popping up in the literal middle of the conversation. "Don't! Care! I'm being paid good cookies to make you all live again and so you'll all live again! I'll start with Greenie."

"Uh, sorry to interrupt you boss, but we're still remaking her brain."

"Omni-Man really punched her face in good."

"I don't care!" You shout, turning towards the Maulers and raising a hand. "Change, twist, morph and mutate!"

Some may call using your magic to reconstruct the rough shape of a human brain instead of waiting for them to do it a waste of your unimaginable cosmic powers. That entire mindset is reductive and toxic and you won't have any of it.

"Now check it over and don't scrimp on the others either!" You grumble a bit, crossing your arms as you await the completion of the preparations. If you want it done right, even you still have to do it yourself sometimes.


In the end, you manage to safely bring back almost all of the Guardians of the Globe, their bodies fixed up into more or less perfect condition. Not quite mint in box, but better than anyone could ask for under the circumstances.

"Excuse me? I still feel some discomfort around my back. Is this just phantom pain or-"

"It's phantom pain from being broken like a cheap toy," you cut Darkwing off with a wave of your hand.

"Your bodies are on factory reset," Mauler Twin number one explains, his counterpart finishing for him. "Any differences you feel are all in your heads. Just move around and get used to them and you'll be fine."

"Now go be alive somewhere else! If I could have a headache, I would have one right now!" With that, you succinctly leave the room, totally not giving a fuck about what the Guardians do now.

Then you duck back in, just poking your head through the doorway real quick to suck the Maulers back in, again.

"And next time I have to bring you back, I'll consider you dying consent to modify your bodies to be less crap!"

Ugh. People. More importantly, people you don't have literally under your thrall. Not to say you can't deal with this, you just make a point of method acting your current persona and Night Queen simply lacks the patience to deal with anyone she doesn't either completely disregard the existence of after a single interaction or murders anyways.

Which is why you then repeat the head-stick-through-door thing before finally leaving. "I'll make Cecil pay for this later, by the way, I still have the number from earlier. I need some blood now."

Who'd have thought this whole ordeal would turn into such a huge production? Well, you did, admittedly, but still, this ended up taking a lot longer than you were thinking at first.

Well, at least you got some decent pizza out of it. Gotta see the bright side of things, too.


The Guardians of the Globe were, by and far, the premier team of superheroes on the planet. This was not a boast, nor a marketing strategy, it was simply a matter of facts. When great threats to humanity arose, it was this team that warded off the worst, protected civilians and reduced casualties to nothing more often than not, despite supervillain attacks, natural disasters, aliens, space monsters, ancient deities and more falling under their purview.

They had earned the name they called themselves, many times over.

They were also, as they stood around Aquarius' mangled body, silently mourning the loss of one of their own now that recent events had had time to sink in. It was to be expected- very few would be used to dying and coming back on the regular.

The Immortal supposed he was somewhat of an exception to this. Then again, all of them were exceptional in their own ways. It was what set them apart, made them capable of keeping up with their group.

What made them the heroes they were. Without their extraordinary powers and abilities, they simply would not be able to do what they did. And speaking of…

"He will be missed," the Immortal summarized the sentiment each of them was feeling at the moment.

"Yeah." Red Rush, for once not in a literal rush, stood with his head lowered. "And to think…"

"No need to say it. It's more than a miracle everyone else made it back." War Woman was wearing a simple hospital gown, as were all of them to provide modesty, a far cry from the regalia of her usual armor and mace, yet even so she emanated a grace and composure most could only dream of. "But we shouldn't dwell on it. If he could, I am sure he would tell us to look on the bright side and keep moving forward."

"He always was like that," the Immortal nodded. "And you are right. More importantly, we should focus on what comes next."

"Omni-Man," Green Ghost said softly, her face fallen into a sad grimace. Usually she was almost entirely faceless in 'costume' so seeing her expression like this felt incongruous.

"Yeah. Him." Red Rush's accent was a little harder than usual, his discomposure almost palpable. "He killed us."

Darkwing, having stayed silent until now, nodded. "We always had our differences. But still…"

"I know what you mean," the team's leader agreed. "Trusting him the way we did turned out badly, despite the years of good work we all did together."

"Forget good work, I thought we were friends!" Red Rush, Jozef, broke out. "We saved the world together! Several times!"

"I am sure he did what he did for reasons he believes justified," War Woman said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Not that murdering us the way he did ever could be."

"Ugh… I just can't wait to tell Olga. We were going to get married, then I went and died and… This is all messed up, I just want to say it."

"No need to. This is a hard blow to all of us, and we've only been brought back to life an hour ago." If War Woman hadn't, the Immortal would be giving his friend a few pats on the shoulder himself right now. "Still. Omni-Man has proven himself to be an enemy."

"Question is, how will we defeat him?" Darkwing followed up, his mind making the jump to analyzing the threat as soon as possible like it always did. "We were ambushed, yes, but even so, he defeated all of us by himself."

That was when the door opened, allowing Cecil inside after he had seen to Night Queen's departure- yet another new factor they would have to look into later, but they had to focus on one issue at the time right now. "That's why we'll have to figure things out pronto now. When he hit you, he still took a decent beating himself, right now he has no idea you're back. Better make it count."

"We're down two members," Green Ghost noted, determined resignation in her eyes. "No, I mean it. Without my powers, I'm a liability, and Aquarius is… Yeah. So everyone else will have to pull some double duty in our stead."

"We will have to prepare," the Immortal declared, having come to a decision as team leader. Everyone recognized it and knew that they could speak up now or agree, as they usually did these things. "Fighting Omni-Man was never something we prepared for, and this… Was our mistake. We had best not repeat it. We will train, we will ready ourselves and find ways around his strengths and toward his weaknesses, and only then can we win rather than repeat our defeat. First, everyone rests until tomorrow. Then… Then we will make what happened right."

Nobody disagreed.


"How long do you think until Alana tells us she's alive?"

Alicia, being as expressionless as ever, is slowly patting your head as you sit on her lap, her fingers sliding through your hair. You're still in your Night Queen form, letting her have her fun after she watched as a mostly silent spectator as you went around and did your thing all over the place.

"Well, they'll be trying to keep Omni-Man in the dark, so I'm not sure. You think he knows her civilian identity?" You ask, tilting your head just enough to make it easier for her to scratch the base of your skull.

"Probably not. She was always big on keeping her identities separate." Alicia tilts her head. "She did try, at least. It's not like it was hard to figure out."

"Secret identities are a pain to keep secret from people you're close to," you shrug noncommittally.

"Mhm."

Silently nabbing a cookie from a whole plate of them laid out in front of you, a splotch of color in an otherwise bare and white room. You also had them made after your own recipes, the manufactories down in the basement perfectly capable of performing every step of baking cookies if given the ingredients, so they're pretty great, too, if you say so yourself.

Granted, they don't have that… personal touch of baked goods you make yourself, but they're perfectly capable. Just moist enough to retain a little bit of crunch, with chocolate chips to make them even sweeter than all the sugar dumped into the dough as a matter of course. Alicia has been eating a couple of them with her free hand, too.

Girl doesn't really eat many sweets in general, so you have to be doing something right.

"You're really cute like this, by the way."

"What, you mean I'm not cute normally?" You pout, crossing your arms and glancing upwards, head moved backward a little. Hey, you're pretty good at this whole acting like a kid thing, mostly because you can play just about anyone if you put your mind to it.

"… Your butt is cute when you're a man?" Alicia tries, she really does. Too bad for her, you've turned on the pout-o-matic 9000!

"So you're just in it for my body?" You sniff, wiping your nose with the back of your hand. "I knew it. They always are."

"There, there?" The chocolate-skinned teen pat your shoulder. "You have a very interesting personality, too. I like watching you work."

"Well, can't argue with that," you agree without a second thought, taking another cookie and abandoning all pretenses of sadness.

"Your Night Queen persona is very quirky."

"Is it? Or am I just letting my quirkiness out to play?"

"Is there a practical difference?"

"See, you already know what acting is all about."

Alicia is fun to play around with. And having her support you like this is doubly nice. Maybe you really should ensure she'll remain a permanent little helper of yours…

Eh, you'll think about it. For now, cookies!


Sadly, cookies do not make up the entirety of your interaction with people tonight, even though that would be hilarious. However, a topic does end up coming up and long story short, you end up seriously considering doing something about it.

Simply put, Green Ghost not having powers. Which is an issue, considering you kind of want to leave the whole 'routinely saving the world' business to the Guardians. Of course the exact reasoning behind that line of thinking didn't quite go like that…

"She's such an idiot. Alana should look to come back to life first, then deal with losing her amulet."

"Anything special about that amulet, actually?" You're kinda curious about it, considering it looks a lot like the thing was some kind of magical artefact. If those are at least semi-common in this world, you may even want to bag a couple for yourself, take a few souvenirs and all.

"It was a family heirloom. No idea where it came from, just that it ended up with her because my mother didn't want it." Alicia shrugs, not particularly concerned. "It was just a weird piece of jewelry at the time. No idea how she made it work, but she always kept it on her."

"Huh." That's… kind of interesting, and indicates that someone on the family tree must've known about its effects at some point. "Wonder how it worked."

"… Come to think of it…" Oh no, you know that tone. It's how a woman speaks when she just realized there's a kink she hasn't tried yet, but would totally try out with you. Or things in that direction, anyways.

Look, letting a chick's boyfriend watch just isn't what you consider a good time, okay? It's just kinda creepy in the end.

"You can make magical stuff too, can't you? I've caught you thinking something about a… Hamza?"

"Hamsa, thank you very much," you sniff, pulling the talisman you created out of your pocket to show her, the object glinting colorfully in Alicia's blank room. "But yeah, with the right stuff and a bit of time."

"Couldn't you make something so Alana can use it? Just to feel less pathetic over herself." Ouch. Someone sure doesn't mince words here, huh? "Nothing big. Just something to give her the feeling she can do something worthwhile, even if it isn't with the Guardians."

"I mean, doesn't that run the risk of her trying to do more than she can and getting herself killed? Again, I mean."

"… Good point. Maybe this isn't a good idea, after all."

You hum aloud, considering the girl you ended up co-opting for your stay in this dimension. "You really care about her, don't you?"

"… A little." Aww, now she's blushing a little and looking away, her arms folded under her chest. She's adorable.


Okay, so it took a bit of doing and fiddling, but you have something that should, in theory, work out to replace and even improve upon what Green Ghost used to be able to do.

You think. Probably. It's definitely more practical and less liable to end with a punch to the face while tangible ending her life then and there. Like, you don't want to criticise anyone unduly here, but c'mon, she was literally as squishy as any other human when her powers weren't active!

To be honest, she should've just noped right out of there the moment everyone saw Omni-Man was trying to kill everyone. Not like she really had any way to meaningfully contribute to the fight, but making sure the rest of the world would be warned would've made a difference of some kind, at least.

You imagine Cecil would've been callous enough to just, like, drown Omi-Man in hydrochloric acid while he was comatose or something. Make sure the threat was removed first thing, as opposed to medical treatment for him.

Ah well, what's done is done, can't undo what happened already. Besides, like this you'll at least get to watch the fireworks from the side while you do your own thing in this dimension.

That aside, where were you? Right, yeah, Green Ghost, better shit you're designing. Seeing as you have no idea how that amulet she used to manifest her powers before worked and acquiring what's left of it would be of questionable value at best (old enough objects become hard to read precisely even with your magic and this one's been broken on top, just saying), you ended up just making something entirely new and separate from scratch, simply because doing so was easier than trying to imitate what she had before.

Hence you are looking at a full-body suit right now, mostly skintight and painted the same shade of green Green Ghost's transformation used to make her look. Have to maintain her current PR and marketing after all, would be a waste to do anything else.

Of course it's not made out of any old latex, that would be entirely too easy and simple. Not to mention unimpressive. No, you made out of woven mythril threads, having put the samples of Thulian metals you keep on yourself to good use- you'd have gone with adamantite, but that stuff isn't really light nor flexible enough to make for decent threads no matter how you try to work it.

Granted, you're not using only mythril, you also have a good bit of alchemically modified steel in there. Technically that makes it a magical metal in itself, as you gave it the ability to actively resist impacts and force applied to it in general while also turning it soft as silk or velvet, simply to serve as a decent inner layer for the suit.

Hey, if it works, it works. If it also feels insanely pleasurable to the touch, all the better.

Then, of course, you also have the thin layers of bones that make the suit not quite skintight all the way, woven into it as a sort of supportive hydraulic system around the shoulders, arms, hips and legs- where you'd need it to support the wearer the most, basically.

The bone you used comes from your stock of miscellaneous biomatter, by the way. No idea where you originally sourced it from, you can't even be arsed to think back on it, but it's a thing.

Now, in practice, you do of course turn the bones into an undead, using your spell reserved for skeletal corpses and similar instead of the one you're more used to casting, meant for rather more fleshy abominations against nature. But hey, it still works just fine for your purposes!

You gave it the ability to rapidly grow out and throughout the metallic cloth when needed, plus a few little additions to the suit's functionality. Sadly, you couldn't figure out a way to have it make both itself, the suit it is part of and the wearer themselves intangible, which kind of defeats the purpose of doing so, which i why you just went with plan B when replicating some of Green Ghost's old powers didn't pan out.

That is to say, let the user fly, for one, which is way less complicated the way you see it, make them stronger, faster, that kind of thing. Oh, and the bones can regenerate, a property they can sort of extend by extending themselves towards and into other parts of the suit and its user both.

All in all, anyone that were to wear this thing would be protected a good bit, generally superhuman enough to bench press a truck, if nothing else, and they'd get a couple cool additional powers to support that, all at the price of looking like a green latex fetishist. Honestly not bad.

That said, you totally can add a little extra on top of this…


Having applied the additional spells and curses as appropriate, all that's left is to test the suit out a bit. Of course you sized it for someone of approximately Alana's dimensions, so doing so is a little… complicated.

Or, well, not complicated at all. You just dislike having to size your breasts down like this is all. You're not about to obsess over your size, you never really did that with your dick and it would be silly to start with your chest now, but still, it feels like you're deliberately crippling yourself in a way.

Meh. You'll survive. This is far from the worst you suffered through; that one time your parents basically rented you out when you were, what was it, eight? For a whole week to that one kinky lady was arguably worse- having such a persistent boner it constitutes a medical condition does not combine well with cock rings, to say the least.

She still got her money's worth, of course, you're nothing if not a dedicated entertainer when you're put into the position to do so, but you needed a while to recover from that one. And it's not like you didn't get to take the damn things off all the time, she just needed a bit of convincing to realize you wouldn't ever not be hard for her whenever she wanted.

You know, your childhood involved a lot of work. You figure it's basically like your parents making you go out mow lawns or deliver newspapers and taking the money you earn, just more intense than most of those types of summer jobs. But hey, it did prepare to know exactly how you would earn what money you'd need later on in life?

Though Sarah did recently find out about all of that and made you promise not to prostitute yourself anymore. Not that you were planning to, this kind of business takes up a lot of time and your time is way more valuable than what rates you would take. Even if you totally would rake in some big cash these days…

Anyways, the green suit. It's about as skintight as you would expect, you need to adjust your proportions a bit more- you happen to be generally voluptuous as a woman, it is how it is. More importantly, your range of movement is what it should be, the hydraulic bone lattice enhances each movement enough to be noticeable if you were, y'know, not massively stronger than it is already anyways, and though you don't test for that, you know the material would protect a living person's vitals well enough.

Look, you're somewhat of an engineer, you can tell. This isn't the first time you went and fiddled around with the concept of armor. Power armor technically, what with the system enhancing the wearer's strength, you suppose.

Now, about the toggleable effects of the curses you tried to place on it… Well, you about expected as much, but this part of the supernatural mechanism here is a tad bit fiddly.

You wanted to try and make it so this thing could drain strength from enemies while using that same strength to reinforce the wearer's allies, but malomantic magic (this is a real word and you'll fight anyone that says otherwise) doesn't really play well with that last part. If there is an effect, neither you, the Thinker nor any of the rats you spontaneouly pressed into participating in your experimental testing could tell a difference.

On the empowering side, anyways. Making opposing beings weaker works just fine, so long as they're living beings. Similarly, though this part isn't as pronounced as directly applied curses, shouting for enemies to stumble does on occasion spontaneously arrange for them to do just that as long as something stumble-able is lying around, and other environmntal factors like that can be used as well with the correct commands.

And some luck.

To be honest, you do think the effects are kind of weak compared to your best work and having to speak out loud to make either of them work at all sucks, but the former is probably a part of the toggle and the latter definitely is. If anything, just knowing this stuff works at all is a great step forward.

All of that stuff aside, though, you also get to make a certain someone help you decide on the design a little. Aside from the Thinker, anyways, that just kind of happens no matter what with her inside your head all the time anyways.

"Alicia, dear, does this suit make my butt look too big?" You stretch your back a little, pushing your behind towards the girl and looking at her over your shoulder the moment she opens the door to her room.

"… I'm not into girls that way."

You give her a knowing smile as you turn around halfway, letting her see your side. "Not what I asked. Does this look good or should I make Alana's new suit a little… tighter?"

As you say the word, you hug your chest with one arm, smooshing your breasts towards yourself (and makin it clear that no, there's no room for a bra under this number).

Alicia swallows. "I think it's alright like this."

"Thank goodness. Now I can take it off and get my natural size back," you sigh, reaching for the semi-automatic zipper (you made it so the skeletal parts can open it up and let the wearer control whether they do so or not, which works out just fine so far). "I made my curves smaller, but I hate not letting my girls breathe."

Is it just you or is Alicia's skin starting to darken a whole lot? Oh, she's blushing really hard and stopped breathing. You should probably do something about that.

Just as soon as you're out of this thing…


Darkwing wasn't exactly a sociable person. He knew it, the others knew it, PR knew it. It wasn't a secret he didn't like to make small talk, was no fan of socializing on the job and the less was said about his opinion of any of the people he ended up fighting on the job, the better.

That didn't mean he was an outright asshole by any stretch of the word, nor was he actually antisocial. He just liked to think he was goal-oriented, to the exclusion to many other things.

And if certain insufferable alien superhumans got under his skin sometimes with their smug way of casually doing better than he did despite him putting his entire life and more into this lifestyle, he wasn't above admitting that, either. Nolan was kind of a dick.

Even so… He'd never have expected the man to actually murder them all, especially abusing their trust in granting him access to their systems and headquarters the way he did.

If he didn't know better, he'd have said they let their guard down in not preparing a way to nullify him should worst come to worst right when he first came to Earth. Of course that was merely a fanciful fantasy at this point; Omni-Man was simply too strong for any countermeasures he could have come up with to have stuck.

But, well, here they were. Seeing Red Rush's borderline breakdown as he attempted to go about reassembling his life with his fiancée, War Woman launching into a series of phone calls while she methodically caught up to what happened while she was dead and her position as CEO unfilled, Martian Man just standing there aimlessly, trying to wrestle with what happened and worrying about that human friend of his…

It had really driven home what happened. They had died. Nolan had murdered them, and no amount of casual heroic bravado was going to undo that even if they had come back in the end.

He himself… Darkwing wasn't affected as aversely as the others. This life in costume was all there was to him, his entire identity built up around it. But he did not have the Immortal's patience and calm when it came to these things, nor could he help the others in that moment.

When it came to having a handy gadget on hand to cleverly solve a problem, he was the right guy. When you needed some muscle, a little dirty fighting or a criminal interrogated, he could do it without breaking a sweat. But this? His friends had had their lives upended in a deep, enduring way, some of them permanently.

So he'd been the first one to leave, asking War Woman to keep an eye on Green Gh- on Alana. She was much better at that, and it wouldn't seem condescending from her, either.

Instead of staying with his teammates when his presence would have been counterproductive, if anything, he'd moved right back to his… Well, his home, for all intents and purposes. The Wingcave, as some of them jokingly called it sometimes.

A secret facility that came complete with an extensive gym, room to store his various gadgets and inventions and all the support infrastructure he needed on a daily basis. He lived here- he all but had to, to keep up with the team, always training, always working on something and testing it and filling out any gaps left by their teamwork wherever he could.

He didn't have the Immortal's flight and strength, nor War Woman's superhuman physiology. Aquarius could conjure and command water with a thought, Green Ghost used to have magical abilities, Red Rush was, well, Red Rush, the name said it all. Darkwing was the only one among them that had nothing like that, just his body, his mind and every scrap of determination he could find.

Saving the world could be hard. Doing so without looking useless next to the others? A tad bit harder. And now…

Counting down to his hundredth rep, he sighed, switching from pushups to sit ups again. With Aquarius staying dead according to their mysterious benefactor with almost assuredly sinister motives, never mind the childish appearance, and Alana out of the game, it fell to himself and Martian Man to pick up the slack on racial diversity among the Guardians of the Globe, he supposed. If any among them cared for any such thing, at any rate.

Racial equality was an important topic, to be sure, but their business was a bit out of scope for any of them to spend too much time on it. War Woman usually was the only one to do so on any scale in her civilian identity.

For a short while, Darkwing just stopped thinking, fully dedicating himself to the extensive workout that he'd begun the moment he arrived. His body was already starting to feel more like it was his own.

Coming back to life had been a jarring experience, to say the least. He was still feeling some fleeting phantom sensations here and there, but moving did indeed help, so he just kept it up.

Fighting Omni-Man would be… difficult. They all knew it. They knew it intimately well, each of them, given his success against them. No amount of physical conditioning he could perform would help him fight Nolan.

But it would help with other things- primarily his self-invented gadgets and their use. And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to let the others get in more than a glancing blow or two, or even hurt him seriously if he found a way to hurt a Viltrumite somehow.

And wiping that smug smirk off the asshole's face after he killed all of them? Well, Darkwing tried not to let these things become personal, but he may have a dream, now.

Time for the treadmills next, he had a workout to finish. He always had the best ideas in that adrenaline rush right afterwards.


Your next meeting with Cecil is taking place on another rooftop entirely, once again chosen more or less at random by virtue of you going somewhere around the city you managed to find employment within and playing 'eenie meenie miney mo' with the buildings you could see and one phone call in.

The director of the GDA shows up with the customary flash of what looks like electricity, except this time he isn't carrying a pizza box under his arm. Instead, he's got a literal cookie jar on him, as in, a jar of cookies with chocolate chip cookies printed on its outside for good measure.

"Hey there. Figured I still owed you some of these from last time," he announces, handing the thing to you. Naturally, you grab it, not about to say no to some cookies.

"I'll take them, but you aren't getting out of paying up for services rendered," you declare, making a show of twisting the jar open with a lot more effort than it really should take you. Once the lid pops off, you give the offering received a sniff, confirming there's no obvious poison or anything in there.

Even if there was it wouldn't bother you in the slightest, you not having any actual metabolism or anything anymore and all, but you'd be very cross with Cecil on principle. Especially if whatever they tried to use altered the taste of these cookies.

But no, they smell like perfectly normal, fresh chocolate chippers, so you simply nod and take one out before you close the jar up again. "Mrgble," you make, stuffing the sample into your mouth where you confirm that it is both soft and aromatic, yet still retains a certain level of crunchy goodness that synergizes with the sweet taste of the chocolate.

You relax your cheeks as you lowly chew, enjoying it perhaps a bit more visibly than you usually would. But hey, you're a kid right now, you can just do this and nobody's allowed to complain. If they do, you just scream at them so loud their ear drums literally burst, you're perfectly capable of that.

"Glad to hear that," Cecil says as if you just said something completely intelligible. "Speaking of services rendered, though, you mentioned you wanted something from the GDA for bringing the Guardians back. Figure I may as well ask while your mouth is full."

Swallowing the cookie you just scarfed down, you clear your throat, adjusting your sitting position on your little ice chair that looks like a throne if you squint a bit. "Naturally, as I am doing work, I need to be paid. A lot. Also, someone needs to bribe me into not ruining the world's economy by alchemically creating enough valuable metals to completely turn it on its head."

Seriously, the economy is remarkably easy to turn upside down with your capabilities. You figure you deserve a treat for not doing so.

"You know what, fair enough. If it keeps you pacified and nominally on the side of the good guys, nobody can really complain about budget cuts over it. Something tells me you aren't after money, though."

"Pft." You roll your eyes. "Every time civilization has a hiccup, people introduce a new currency, who cares about that stuff? Everyone should just work off the Night Queen standard, at least it lasts. But you're right, if I wanted cash money I'd just demand it from whoever prints it these days."

Now, how to put your actual demands into terms that are as offensive as possible…? Or that just get the idea across, you aren't gonna be too picky here.


"I want your stuff," you declare after a moment of thought.

"I got a package of cigarettes and a lighter. Not sure you'd be interested," Cecil replies, showing you what he's got in his pockets. Unsurprisingly, the lighter is black and nondescript despite not being some cheap plastic thing that stops working a week into regular use, kind of like his suit.

"Smoking is bad for you," you point out almost instinctually. Hey, you made damn sure Sarah and Reggie wouldn't pick up any drug habits, and that included traumatizing them by making them watch documentaries about smoker lungs and health complications from inhaling literally toxic smoke. "Especially at your age."

"Eh. I sleep four hours a night and the coffee hasn't killed me yet, smoking isn't gonna make a difference." Sliding a thumb onto his pack of cigarettes, Cecil looks like he's considering whether to have a smoke or not, but your imperious disapproval (cheeks blown up with a mouthful of air) has him decide against it right quick.

"Still not what I'm after. I want cool toys and you people have them. You know, technology. New robots."

"So you're interested in advanced technology?" Cecil asks, one eyebrow raised a little as he tries to understand what you're saying. Too bad for him you are very much not understandable by design.

Looking at him completely and entirely seriously, you raise your nose a little and cross your arms, looking the part of a kid that demands to be taken seriously. "I may legitimately be the smortest person you have ever met and you just don't know."

Then, still fixing him with the gaze of utter seriousness, you pull the lid off the cookie jar again, filling your mouth with a bite of the next victim of your unceasing hunger.

"You know, I have been trying to figure out what your deal is ever since you first showed up," Cecil says, scarred skin drawn tight across the side of his face. "You wouldn't happen to just want to tell me, would you?"

"I'm obviously a vampire that does what she wants," you summarize the impression you mean to give. "It's not that complicated."

"… Plenty complicated for everyone that has to deal with it." Exactly, Cecil. That's exactly the point.

"Not my problem," you shrug. "Anyways, gimme the schematics to your teleporters. And all the other cool stuff your agency's been hoarding. I wanna steal as many innovations as I can get."

"You do know we keep most of this stuff secret for good reasons. Just saying, but please don't upend the world because you felt everyone should have laser guns to shoot at each other with."

"Puh-lease," you roll your eyes, pulling a laser gun of your own design from under your dress, shooting it off into the air and downing one of the three little camera drones that Cecil thought you didn't know about. "Lasers are so last decade. I don't want this stuff to share it, it's gonna be mine after all."

Brow creased as the earphone he's sporting comes to live, too quiet to hear if you weren't so much better than human at everything, the director of the Global Defense Agency closes his eyes, letting out a quiet breath. "Whatever, fine. Better you than the alternative. Just, please promise not to take over the world or destroy it or whatever because you got bored?"

"If I ever take over the world," you say with utmost sincerity, "it'll be because it really needed taking over. I wouldn't wanna bother with all the paperwork."

"Ain't that the truth," he chuckles. "You'd be amazed how many supervillain types never think beyond that first step."

Amen. And hey, you know what you're talking about here, you literally did it once just to see if you could.


The GDA doesn't exactly have a handy catalogue of advanced technology sorted by whether it was taken from alien civilizations, invented by mad scientists or obtained through temporal anomalies warping future tech into the present or anything, but now that you've got your demands to Cecil made you expect you'll get what you asked for sooner rather than later.

How exactly he ends up organizing it is his problem, not yours. And, as soon as he comes through with his part of the deal, you'll have a bunch of tasty tech to analyze and incorporate into your own standard as appropriate. Can't really ask for more.

To be honest, you were worried for a while you might have to actually go around this dimension and steal all the good shit for yourself, but hey, some locals have been gathering all of it up for decades already, may as well make use of available resources and spare yourself the bother. It's just, nice to be able to skip over the process and simply arrive at the part where you do some science and make shit happen.

It's not always a chore to do all of that work, but it is more often than not when you have such a target-rich environment, so the shortcut is definitely appreciated.

Now then, time to run a few tests on these cookies and see if you can't adapt their recipes to your own collection of Unlimited Baking Works (Gabriel Edition)…


Writing a book is hard work, you consider as you once again sit down to continue your current little project around where you left off. There are a lot of things to take into account as you sketch out the events you want to describe in the right words meant to bring them across correctly while also keeping the overarching plot and themes of the whole work in mind, all the while never going into too much nor too little detail to hit that sweet spot that makes it easy to picture what's going on but doesn't become annoying and overbearing in doing so.

Sure, it would be easy to just spew words onto the pages and make it work, more or less, but you don't really feel like that would actually help the reader understand and live through the plot as presented. Word count is, simply put, far from the most relevant thing when you're writing an actual story.

It's not like you have to carefully weigh each and every word you use, you'd never really get anywhere like that, but it does help to actually have an outline of what you want to write and regularly cutting off any chaff that manages to get into your flow of writing on the way. Having quirky character thoughts and observations of their surroundings in there is just fine, it fits your style anyways, letting those things block out the actual red line of plot progression you're trying to follow here is not.

No matter how much you instinctively feel the need to comment on the exact rate of fuckability of every new character you introduce. Yes, it feels relevant to you in the moment, but your main character is kind of preoccupied with other concerns.

Speaking of, things are going pretty well on that front, story progression, that is. Once you are done going over the parts of your second book you've already written and adjusting and rewording a few sentences and paragraphs here and there with the benefit of hindsight, you get right into writing more, having poor Jake continue on his treck across the countryside to try and throw off Bella and Chloe in case they try to follow him.

He doesn't exactly have any money on himself, but at least he's free- and some soap is easy enough to get anyways in the nearest public restroom. While he can't completely cover his own scent and knows Chloe, as a werewolf, can track it all across town if she wants to, he can at least muddle it up some before he goes to find a place to sleep.

Being in a new town after having hitched a train ride this far, he isn't exactly swimming in options, however, not knowing the people nor the places he comes across. That said, being for all intent and purposes a hobo, as he jokingly thinks to himself, the abandoned-looking mansion he eventually stumbles along looks perfectly inviting to him; it's a roof and more or less stable walls, what more can he ask for?

Still better than being chained up and kept as a pet inside that room. A sex pet, to be more precise, but- semantics. Jake shook his head as he eyed the rusty fence still surrounding the place he was looking to sleep in, the evening sun dyeing the sky red.

Bella was nocturnal and barely needed to rest at all, vampire and all, but at least Chloe still needed to rest… And they would work together to track him, he was sure, so they would hopefully need to slow down on occasion, at least.

Either way, he sure needed sleep, so the choice was either to risk staying in one place for the night or else just be too tired to go on and get caught exhausted anyways. This was his one shot at freedom, he refused to screw it up like that.

There, a hole in the fence, a bit of a tight fit but he'd manage. Now to just get inside somehow, find a nice spot and have a nap that was more likely than not to see him sleep through the night.

What could possibly go wrong?

You almost have to snort as you write that last line. What could go wrong indeed.

Now to continue on with the next scene, of a ghostly apparition showing up while Jake's asleep and thoroughly molesting him. Maybe getting a proper 'taste' of how it felt to be alive, even.

Ghost blowjobs, when you can see your dick inside their throats. That has to be some form of fetish, even if for the (un)life of you you can't think of how it would be called.


You remember Donald Ferguson from your short time spent inside of Cecil's head, though he didn't really spend much thought on him. Not in a bad way, though, the director of the GDA simply considered the man's presence so natural that he didn't consciously consider it all that much beyond confirming it.

White, of around average height, wearing mirrored glasses that conceal a good part of his face and blonde hair cropped shorter than this well-maintained moustache, Cecil's assistant is unassuming by design, his very voice and mannerisms trained to give no impression at all without seeming unnatural in any way.

That's just kind of his job, be around and do minor crap for Cecil without giving away anything important nor potentially souring any opinions anyone may hold. You figure he might make for a great mascot if he had a thing for the spotlight- but that's very much not the case, of course.

Else he wouldn't be doing his current job, after all.

He also does, however, know a lot about the GDA's operations as a natural result of his position within it, and so Cecil, who despite appearances has an actual job to do beyond appeasing The Night Queen, currently has him show you around as part of the agreement you made with this agency.

It feels somehow wrong how genuinely enthusiastic he can be about this task while constantly gauging your mood and reactions at the same time, no doubt both to keep your 'childish temper' in check if he has to and to report everything right to Cecil the moment you're done here. He's actually really, really good at his job, in other words.

"And here we see one of our rapid response teams setting out," he narrates as you watch some advanced aircraft pushing off the air, several jets tilting simultaneously indicating it is moving by virtue of the good old rocket priciple… though your senses for gravity and its effects tell a different story. Apparently these things somehow make themselves lighter to be easier to move, which is pretty interesting, to say the least.

"Yeah, I'll want the schematics for whatever makes those things weigh less," you say, pointing. "And the rest too, for good measure. Where's the armory?"

"We'll get to it in a moment," Donald seamlessly deflects. "Some cookies while we walk?"

… Damn Cecil, did he seriously issue government cookies to keep you distracted and mollified while in his backyard? You have to applaud the audacity, if nothing else. "I'll take 'em, but don't think I'm forgetting why I'm here."

"Of course not. These are just some courtesy sweets, nothing more."

You repeat, he's really good at his job. You have no idea whether he's being entirely serious or only 'humoring' you right now, as he holds up a box of cookies for you.

At least this level of competence does extend to actually showing you the schematics and blueprints for all the stuff you point at. Including, for that matter, the teleporter the GDA is using, a handy little device that unfortunately does require specialized devices and at least one satellite to bring things where they are meant to go. Then again, it doesn't need the kind of radio signal you've been relying on so far for your own models, so…

Advantages and drawbacks, you suppose. Still, there's a lot more stuff to find here, so let's see what these people have lying around in their wealth of hoarded technology.


Global Defense Agency (Invincible) Tech: Various kinds of technology collected by the Global Defense Agency over the years, kept from the common man in light of the danger or upheaval it would cause. includes Many miscellaneous technologies, from improved body armor and simple laser weaponry to various devices meant for civilian use. Anecdotally, microwaves were dispensed by the GDA in the dimension it hails from.

Notable technology in this category includes, but is not limited to:

Advanced single person invisibility devices

Medical technology and devices capable of stabilizing and curing most things short of death

Functional orbital laser satellites

Chemicals that block out the human brain's ability to perceive certain colors

Etc.


You knew it! You knew it all along! The chemicals in the water actually were a government conspiracy!

Sure, it's not actually to make people gay but rather to make them incapable of perceiving certain wavelengths of light, therefore functionally making Americans incapable of seeing places illuminated by it; this incidentally includes any actually delicate highly important GDA facilities, including the one you're in right now.

Their own employees can operate normally while anyone that's so much as drunk a coffee or two prepared anywhere in the US is pretty much blind to what's going on. It's pretty neat, though it does cost a pretty penny to dispense the stuff everywhere as far as you can tell.

More importantly, the GDA actually does go out of its way to spread certain conspiracy theories to ensure nobody of actual importance looks into this stuff too deeply… And they do keep documentation of this strategy here, too, right where you can see it.

In your identity as Night Queen.

Pointing at the piece of paper that describes how conspiracy theorist websites and communities are to be regularly fed with bullshit about how 'the chemicals in the water turn the frogs gay, as well as people, wake up sheeple etc. etc.' (they included a few of the usual phrase to be thrown in by the agents in charge of this task in when in doubt), you look up at your guide.

"Hey Donald, what's 'gay' mean?"

"… I suddenly feel like I am not prepared for this," he comments, subtly shifting his head. You know he's got an earpiece on and all, it's not like you expected the GDA to not keep a close eye (and ear) on you while you're here.

"Hey, hey, tell me what 'gay' is, Donald. Are you gay?"

You should be a kid more often, the cramps he has to hold back on his face right now are absolutely hilarious.


Nikki didn't really like getting her food from the community centers around town, but it was that or doing the stuff Big M didn't like her doing, dumpster diving or just stealing something edible somewhere. It was just that people were, like, either super judgemental or they pitied her, and she hated that.

Pulling her awesome pink hoodie's hood higher over her head, she glanced around, but nobody was about to bother her. She knew there was at least one woman that was gonna try to talk to her if she saw her around this place, but it didn't look like that one was around, at least.

She snorted, thinking of the last time she'd seen her. No fucking shit she was homeless, having no parents or nothin' kinda caused that. She sure wasn't gonna be shuffled around orphanages until she was eighteen, so fuck that shit and anyone that disagreed could fuck off.

… Man, Nikki kinda missed Big M. Screw that, she missed him a lot. He hadn't been around for, like, a week, and she was gettin' kinda worried. Normally when he did that Gordians stuff he at least showed up a while later, y'know?

Wasn't that they hung around nonstop, but he was kinda a goof that had no idea about how human people did stuff. Without her he was kinda boned in anything other than hero crap, what if he suddenly had to, like, deal with the fuzz or figure out a safe place to sleep?

Picking away at her food, she glumly poked a finger through one of the holes in her shirt. She was prolly gonna have to find a new one soon. She usually waited until they started falling apart, but she may as well next time she found something that would work.

Just as long as it didn't clash with her hoodie. Her awesome, fantasticular-tastic pink hoodie. She was never gonna give this thing up, full stop.

Sighing, she gave up on her food for right now. They had rules about eating the stuff here so she wasn't really allowed to take it with her anywhere outta the room, and it wasn't worth risking being found out. If anyone stole it while she was gone, that was that, but she was just gonna go to the shitter and stare blankly at thin air for a couple minutes. That usually helped her clear her head.

'Cept, as she walked along through a door, knowing where to go already, she heard something from above. "Nikki. Here."

She looked up, blinking at the voice. That was- "Big M!" She cried out, eyes going wide as she saw his goof head poke out of a ventilation shaft.

"A little quieter," he asked her, looking around. Shit, was he really in the shit with the fuzz after all? "I should not be here, but I wanted you to know I am fine."

"What the heck's going on, Big M? You don't do subtle normally," she whispered, pretending to lean against the wall under him.

"There was… a problem. Someone tried to ambush all of us after we last spoke, the signal was a trap."

"Told'ya you should'a taken me with ya, I'd'a totally have seen it coming," she complained, but she wasn't super torn up about it. He never let her come and apply her common dang sense so crap went okay with his other friends.

"It would have been too dangerous. One of the others is dead. Staying dead, rather."

"Ah, shit," she cursed reflexively. "You okay, Big'M? They didn't get you, did they? You missing everything below your head or somethin'?"

"I… was hurt," he said, her heart stopping for a hot second. Shitfuckcrapinabox. "But I am fine, as I said. Mostly. We are pretending to be dead, as I understand it, until we can hit back at the one who attacked us. So I cannot stay with you for a while. I am sorry."

"Nah, nah, s'fine, we good. You jus' take care of yourself, yeah?" Nikki adjusted her hoodie, testing how her shoes were doing. She hated having to find new ones, they never fit right. "You stay safe and don't get yourself killed, you hear? If I hear otherwise, I'm… Not talking to you for a month! A year!"

At least he was okay. She really had been worried when he just up and disappeared. But he hadn't just abandoned her, left her when he could get ahead in life an' shit. He was just…

Doing hero stuff again. It was fine. And even when he disappeared back into that ventilation shaft, she felt a lot better.

And her food was even still there when she came back. Today was just lookin' up like a mothercucker, wasn't it?


"Hey. Hey Donald." You considered shortening his name at some point, just call him 'Donnie', but you prefer using his full first name after all. You wouldn't want him to think you liked him or anything, after all. Also, addressing him in this way specifically seems to have trained him to anticipate the worst by this point, you've been at it for a couple hours now. "Is Cecil busy?"

"Director Stedman has been occupied with organizing the Guardians' response to the latest situation," Donald replies with what you're pretty sure is a phrase he repeats pretty often in the course of his normal duties. That said, he still is well aware you want an actual answer. "I could have a message relayed?"

"I have a magical suit made of evil magic that can let Green Ghost, y'know, do stuff." You gesture vaguely with one hand as you use the other to scroll over a touchscreen, moving dozens of blueprints for complicated devices over it just long enough to see and memorize them forever. "Because I am kind and magnanimous and had parts lying around. Ask him if he wants it or not."

"I can hardly imagine the opposite. You said it was made of 'evil magic'?"

"Oh, it's totally cursed," you tell him truthfully. "It won't come off unless the wearer knows how to make it. It's also technically undead. I made it, so it's better than anything else you'll ever find in a million years."

Holding two fingers against his earpiece, Donald waits a few seconds. "The Director will see you at your earliest convenience. I assume Green Ghost should be there, too?"

"Duh, hard to put it on her otherwise. It's made to murder anyone other than the intended wearer so I got to set her as that first," you mutter as you keep scrolling. "Gimme five minutes."


When you come into the room, it is to the sight of Cecil Stedman itching to have a smoke while he's on the phone with someone while Green Ghost, or just Alana as you know her, is awkwardly sitting off to the side, just letting him do his thing while she waits.

"…ean you didn't know he was gone? Martian Man isn't exactly known for being subtle! Dammit people, he left a goddamn note behind, how does nobody pay attention anymore?!"

Donald clears his throat at this point. "Sir?"

"We'll continue this later," Cecil promises whoever is on the other end of that call before he terminates it and turns towards you. "Okay, Night Queen, you said you had something to replace Green Ghost's amulet?"

"Kinda," you shrug, entirely unconcerned. "It's gonna give her some powers and let her do some stuff. Not the same stuff she used to be able to do, but it's better than nothing. I also gave it first aid powers."

"Good enough. Ghost, what do you think?"

Alana, until now staying fairly quiet, clears her throat. "I was already making my peace about being out of the team for good now, so… It depends on how well it works, but if I can help make the world a better place, I'm still in."

Huh, Alicia was right, she really seems a lot more confident all of a sudden, most likely due to being 'out of costume' as far as her headspace goes right now. Funny how she's low-confidence in costume and high confidence otherwise when you'd normally expect the opposite, but hey, people are complicated.

Cecil nods, somehow making this whole thing a lot more dramatic than he needs to as he turns toward yourself. "Very well. Night Queen, I do not want to impose, but I humbly ask that you grant us succor in this darkest of hours."

"Finally some recognition," you sniff, knowing full well you're being humored and perfectly content to go along with it. "On the condition that I receive some sip later, I shall bequeath this royal gown unto that woman."

Posing dramatically (it's okay if you do it, for the record), you grab something from under your little gothic lolita dress, pulling it out in one smooth motion. The currently inactive green bodysuit you made shivers fractionally as you hold it out.

"I made it to look just like she used to!"

Alana slowly raises a hand, gently laying it across her own face. "… Thank you. You really, really didn't need to, though."

"If her old powers won't interfere anymore, maybe we can issue her a cloak?" Donald suggests as you (and Alicia) realize what is going on. Turns out running around in what amounts to a completely skintight costume isn't actually something Green Ghost was into when she started out, huh?

She still looks pretty good in it when she gets herself settled in.

"… The cloak just makes it worse somehow," she comments when she (finally) wears your creation, having had to excuse herself for a moment to undress completely. You didn't really consider underwear when you tailored this thing.

"I think it suits you. You definitely should use it like that." You nod decisively. "It gives you flair and my fashion advice is a royal decree, no getting out of it."

Mostly because Alicia's thoughts have kind of flatlined into an even 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' at the sight relayed to her. Like hell will you waste this opportunity now.


With your business at the GDA done for the moment (note to self, make Cecil feed you people or at least point out criminals he wouldn't mind seeing eaten later), you retire back to your domicile for the time being, by which you mean you just teleport back, the same way you got back from the Flaxan dimension, purely to flex with your ability to disappear like that.

Now, while Alicia is pretty damn thankful for what you did, she is also… Well, realizing her own preferences and all that- seeing her cousin inside a skintight costume from up close and all- and kind of in a daze right now. So you just leave her be for the moment, instead turning towards a couple other pursuits of yours.

Specifically, you have a theory. Okay, yeah, you have a lot of theories about many things, but this one pertains to something you can actually do something about.

See, you've been working on your alchemical capacities, for lack of a better description; quite a lot in fact. And, in so doing, you have managed to find what you believe to be somewhat of a pattern in how some types of ingredients interact when subjected to this particular branch of your powers.

In the line of potions that improve physical performance and just straight out strength, you often end up using some kind of plants, with the more powerful recipes requiring more and more complicated mixtures and preparations for the stuff, but that's far from everything you put into the stuff, though at least you don't usually need specifically cut stones with a set number of edges a catalysts for these types. Small mercies when other potions do, but that's neither here nor there.

Simply put, after consulting the Thinker to do perhaps a bit much math that may or may not make sense outside the context of outright reality warping, you do believe you have identified possible reagents for a whole new level of enhancing potions. And yes, you do in fact dope if that's what it takes to get results, potion sickness is the worst side effect you know and while it sucks, you very much will subject yourself to it if you have to.

You're a big bad boy that's inflicted immense amounts of suffering on many, many people. It's not like you want to subject yourself to some of it yourself or anything, but, well… If it comes down to it, you're fine with some headaches, vomiting and possibly dissolving a few internal organs that you can regrow anyways in really extreme cases.

Once again, actually testing this stuff back on Earth Rapture was a great idea. Just about nothing beats unlimited human test subjects when you really want to do some science.

So, you'll need very specific flowers that only grow in cold areas that receive a certain maximum brightness of sunlight, some moss that has never known light at all, naturally-grown corals of specific colors, a couple of other things…

Honestly, the part where some of these ingredients have to be left in a full moon's light specifically for a certain amount of time may just be the most annoying prerequisite for actually working on your theoretical potion. Alchemy is kind of a pain in some ways.


Your current exercise, such as it is, is quickly starting to bear fruit in the form of a bunch of low-level demons that are, as a matter of fact, not entirely feral, capable of properly using tools and even understand the intricacies of language.

Said exercise being, of course, mass-summoning imps using a simple ritual circle drawn down in your sewer fortress with a couple of objects thrown around it to add additional 'direction' for the ritual you're repeatedly hammering through reality. A butler's uniform (you did get it when you started working as Alicia's assistant, after all), a few random simple tools from a screwdriver and hammer to a bottle of degreasing cleaning agent.

What you're looking for this time, after all, isn't fodder to throw into combat, though you reserve the choice to do so should you be unsatisfied by the performance of these particular demons, but rather something else entirely. You want utility, easily used servants that can't complain and are capable of enhancing their work through magic while being easily accessible and summoned whenever you want them around.

Most imps are feral, animalistic things, some more so than others, but with an infinite number of possibilities open to you to fish from, it's really just a matter of time to find some that prove the exception to the rule, especially when you just disregard the very bottom of the barrel and draw upon arch-imps instead. While weak compared to other demons, they're still perfectly capable of doing their jobs, and a couple of slightly stronger butler and maid-like demons round your collection out nicely.

Many of them don't even need to be convinced to do everything you want by force to boot, it's enough for them to see your setup and the bodily fluids of miscellaneous demons already sent back to hell to just accept that you're the (relative) top dog now. You aren't sure whether to welcome this as it speeds the process of everything up quite a bit or be annoyed at the relative lack of casual violence.

Look, you like beating the shit out of things that are weaker than yourself.

Still, lots of demonic servants are definitely nice to have on hand, particularly when you don't have an army of robots lying around to do just about anything you could come up with wanting to get done. Speaking of which, the Thinker has, by this point…

…two, three, four, five hundred…

A good couple robots down in your subterranean lair. Yeah. You also have a massive underground cavern by now within which your giant gothic castle stands. Surrounded by waterways and all that actually connect to the sewer system a couple caves further. It's, uh, it's a thing.

What eventually calls you out of said insane underground castle created by an artificial intelligence that may or may not have taken a cue or two from you too many doesn't have anything to do with any of that, however. It's a lot more… mundane issue.

Gabriel, Alicia thinks at you, my sister is here. I might need help.

… Right, she had an actual family outside of her cousin. Y'know, you'd say you completely forgot about that if you still had the capacity to forget anything.


Ariana, the younger sister of Alicia, does, for the record, very much fit the naming scheme this family seems to be applying for some reason. She also is very much unlike her elder sister in that she wastes just about no time to lunge at her, her arms circling around her back like a constricting snake out or its next meal.

"Alicia! Alicia Alicia Alicia Alicia Alicia!"

Sighing, the older girl pats her little sister's back, letting her bury her head in her generous chest. "Hello Ariana."

The long-suffering look she gives you as you quietly (but not too quietly) enter the room very much implies this isn't out of the usual as far as her sister's greetings go.

"You haven't been to school in a week," Ariana complains to her, looking up. In terms of looks, they're pretty obviously related, what with both of them having the same shade of delicious chocolate-colored skin. That said, she's obviously younger than Alicia, and doesn't exactly have her curves or anything. Also, her hair is very much black, as opposed to your 'employer's' pure white. "Something's wrong."

"… No. Nothing of the sort." Patting her sister's back, the older girl just allows the overly clingy effort to hold on to her to continue, only for Ariana to let go, violently pushing herself to her feet.

"No! I can smell it!" Demonstratively sniffing the air for a few moments, she turns around, accusingly pointing at you. "There's a man!"

"Hello, I am a man," you politely introduce yourself.

"AAAHHH!" She screams, caught completely off guard at your confession. "I knew it! You're here to trick my sister, turn her into a delinquent and play with her big boobs!"

"…" You look down at her, considering how to answer that with all the delicacy and tact this situation demands. "Let's be honest here, I wouldn't need to do any of that if I just wanted to play with her boobs, I'd just need to ask."

"He would," Alicia agrees, blushing a little despite maintaining her emotionless poker face otherwise.

"Uaaaah… How can this be, this perversion is not how my beautiful perfect hottie older sister is! You corrupted her! You… bad influence!"

"I mean, everyone's preferences are kind of perverted when seen from a sufficiently removed perspective, aren't they?" You ask, immediately feeling motivated to get philosophical about this. "Can't really argue about being a bad influence, though. That one's probably true."

"No," Alicia denies, shaking her head. "Gabriel, you have been helping me. A lot. I've been taking time off school, but only because there were more important things in my life."

Holding out her hand, she looks at you expectantly, so you take it into your own regardless of how mushy this is becoming all of a sudden. "Really now, I guess I've failed the bad influence part too, then. Don't worry, I'll live."

Before either of you can do anything more, though, the two of you gazing at each other's eyes, Ariana interrupts your ongoing moment being had by jumping between you, her arms flailing to push your hands apart. "Uuurgh! No! You can't be this lovey-dovey! It's not allowed!"

You're openly chuckling now, still talking to Alicia. "You know, I'm pretty sure I'm seeing a trend here, what with you having the hots for Alana and Ariana for you."

"Heresy!" Ariana complains, the younger sister tryin to look as tall and imposing as possible. A tall order, considering she is… neither. "My pure yuri-yuri love for my sister is no such filthy thing as 'having the hots'!"

You gesture if to say 'see what I mean?' Alicia, for her part, just continues blushing a little as she facepalms, her other hand occupied squeezing down on her sister's face as she tries to throw herself at her again in order to 'demonstrate her love' with a kiss.

"Letting her watch anime was the single greatest mistake of my life," she informs you.


Well, never let it be said that you don't understand how to take your cues when given such an obvious one.

It takes a little effort to pry Ariana off of Alicia, the younger, though still totally of legal age, girl struggling the moment you pull on her shoulder, but you do have your ways to get girls like her to see things your way. "Look, you can either cling to her or we can go watch anime together until she feels like joining us."

"Who'd want to watch anime with some stupidly handsome guy like you! I bet you're just-"

"I made brownies~," you smile at her, grabbing the plate of said baked goods you left in Alicia's room the last time you were here (she complained about getting fat, but she's really, really not, that's only her tits she's thinking of) and holding it under her nose. "And you can have as many of them as you want."

"Grrr…" Ariana growls at you, showing you her teeth, yet she can't help but smell the scent of your baking. Snapping up one of the little delicacies piled up on the plate with nothing but her mouth, she grumbles a little to herself while she chews, unable to stop herself. "Augh! Fine, but I'll leave as soon as you run out!"

In silent smugness, you tilt your head, leading her along by moving the brownie plate as you go. "You do realize I can make more faster than you can eat, yes?"

"What are you, that one character that shows up and provides the food porn for the whole series?"

"Not only the food kind," you growl in the back of your throat, making both Ariana and Alicia shudder. "But yes, I'm decent in the kitchen, too. I suspect it's one reason your sister keeps me around."


While you don't know all that much about the local anime scene, what with being relatively new to this version of Earth after all's said and done, you're still able to recognize a few titles thanks to the souls you've eaten up to this point, as it seems some things are, while not necessarily the same across dimensions, at least bear similarities here and there.

In other words, you can at least figure out which ones were around in other dimensions you or any of the souls you consumed visited. Which is more or less why you're ultimately watching 'Inuyasha' in one of the living room-esque places around the mansion Alicia is living in, an anime some of your inmates claim is an absolute classic and a must-watch.

The ones that know it, anyway. There may or may not be some serious dispute inside of yourself caused by this whole topic, as many of your souls argue that it simply came out a long-ass time ago and was merely one of the earlier really good ones that made their way to a western audience.

You just leave them be, it's not like their squabbling affects you in any way. Though it is amusing to see, and mildly weirds out the ones that came from different cultures than those with access to specifically Japanese animation as a form of entertainment, in turn fueling no few sessions of anime binging as those that did watch the stuff catch some of their friends up.

Needless to say, the Flaxans are the ones that have the hardest time to really get used to that, but hey, many of them are actually intrigued by the concept of this type of stuff that doesn't involve heaps of imperial Flaxan propaganda. A couple of them even get into it.

Anime. Truly one of the few things capable of bridging all gaps. Almost as good as sex, though then again sex is the one thing that always does that. You do know what all of your souls get up to, after all, and so you are perfectly aware of how many of those same Flaxans are banging humans already thanks to the accelerated rate of time passing inside of you letting the flirting and all that go by faster from your perspective.

All that aside, though, you do have some actual relaxing to do while you're managing Ariana, who is still munching on your brownies as the two of you are sitting on a nice, wide couch, watching the anime on a flatscreen TV that's taking up a good amount of one of the room's walls.

… The only reason it isn't bigger yet is probably that it would just be inconvenient at that point, you suspect. Nobody likes having to crane their neck all the time to see everything that's going on.

Ariana is still glaring up at you intermittently as you sit next to her, returning any looks she give you with an easy smile. Whenever you do, she huffs and looks away, but at this point you'd like to think she's at least kind of comfortable with you.

Else she wouldn't silently stretch the Brownie Plate at you the moment it's empty, her head turned the other way so she isn't looking straight at you. Only for you to equally silently replace it with a fresh plate of cookies, instead, which she is inordinately happy about as she proceeds to inhale them, now glaring at you as if to dare you to tell her to slow down.

You don't. Instead you just pull out the next batch of cookies and smug at her as you eat them, using your position to hide how you pulled them from your shadow. She is quietly jealous and speeds up her eating in order to demand your cookies as well.

Fun. Kind of like you'd imagine a mini-Sarah that isn't your little sister. She really does remind you of her, just a little bit. Also, the anime is pretty decent as well- the animation could be better, but it's art, there's no point in criticising it on a technical level when the technicalities do what they're meant to.

Fun time all around. Ariana is totally overeating, though.


"Uuorgh… I'm so full…"

"You know, I'd have told you to slow down. If I cared." You shrug, quietly gloating as you eat yet another cookie. Actually, maybe you should switch back to brownies? You didn't make all that many different kinds of sweets, but you made a lot of each to make sure you wouldn't run out. "Guess you'll just know for next time."

"As if I'll ever learn…"

"At least you're self-aware enough to know."

You're done with the first season of this Earth's version of Inuyasha for now, taking the opportunity to take a quick break and let the younger girl regret her life choices a bit. Which she does by holding her belly swollen with sweet treats you handed her and in essence told her to do whatever she wanted with.

Literally, she's just got both hands on her belly as she's moaning in discomfort and wriggling around a little. That is, until she slides sideways along the backrest of the couch, her head bumping into your leg as she makes it all the way down.

The moment it does, she shoots back up, shuffling her butt towards the opposite end of the couch. "Aahh! I knew it, you're an evil rapist man!"

"… I mean, kind of rude to say it like that, but I suppose if you stretch the definitions of each of those words…" Even if you don't stretch them they would still describe you, but you don't exactly have to admit that. "Besides, you were touching me just now. If anything, I'm the one being molested."

"Gununununu…" Ariana gnaws her teeth, glaring at you a bit more. It's really what she's using her face for, like, half the time around you. "I can't stay mad and full at the same time. You won this round, but don't think that means I'm giving up my lovely sister!"

"I think you should work on your multitasking," you smirk by way of answer.


"Eeep!" It wasn't every day that Ariana was at a loss for words, but finding out her beloved sister had bought herself a man, finding said man to be stupidly handsome and sexy and cool enough to sit down to watch anime with her and, finally, finding herself curtly relocated to sit on his lap, all in one day, was maybe a bit much.

Just saying.

But now here she was, pulled in by big, strong arms that were totally not from going to a gym- they were muscled, but not as… bulky, as gym bros usually had them- to lean against an insanely wide, strong chest. She didn't usually come into contact with adult men, it would be weird if she did, but, hey, this Gabriel guy felt kind of nice.

To the touch. He was still an evil man that was trying to steal her-

"Ah!" She made, looking down dumbly. At her sides, just below her armpits, a pair of wide, strong hands was holding onto her, squeezing just enough to make her react. "What're you doing?!"

"I'm testing something," the man's weirdly sexy voice rumbled from behind her, her heart pumping quickly as she felt it reverberating through her back. "Specifically, how ticklish you are."

"… Wait, what do you-" Just then, he squeezed, tickling her at just the right level of force to make it completely unbearable. "Ah! Ahahahaah! Stop! Stahp! Staahp!"

"I dunno, I'm not hearing the magic word," he drawled. Drawled! As if he was in some pornographic novel that Ariana totally wasn't hiding under her bed!

"Puh, pleaaaase!" Her feet were flying in the air as she kicked out forward, but she couldn't help it! It was too ticklish! "Make it stohahahaop!"

"Fine, fine." Ariana couldn't see it, but she heard the smile in his voice. It was an absurdly nice voice, okay?

Freed from the odious feeling of being tickled, she was still caught in his arms, though, sitting squarely on his lap just like before. The realization of the exact situation she was in made her blush- she knew exactly what was just sitting there right down below her butt, and before she knew it she was trying to see if she couldn't feel it-

"Now why're you wiggling your butt like that?" She cursed silently in the privacy of her head. That was right, Gabriel was still, well, there. She might have to lie her way out of this. "And what's that wet spot I'm feeling?"

She froze. Shit. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she lied, badly.

"Really?" Something poked her, then, from below, a jolt running through her spine when she realized what it was. Hard, yet not too hard, and through the cloth of his pants and her skirt. "Guess we'll just have to find out what it might be then."

"You wouldn't dare," she told him, a mix of utter mortification and some strange, longing sense of anticipation pooling in her belly.

He, in response, leaned forward, his mouth close enough to her ear she could hear the taste of his lips. "Try me."

With that, one of his warm hands disappeared up her skirt, a single finger running over her slit. She could feel it, sliding over her skin, coming away wet.

"What a naughty girl," he whispered, except loudly, the tip of his finger flicking over her bean, her legs drawing themselves inwards at the feeling… But only so her feet were pulling against his shins, remaining open otherwise.

"So what if I am?" She sniffed, crossing her arms (so they rubbed over her nipples a little).

"So what indeed," he joked, only to play with her slit a little more, one finger pressing against her, wiggling- it went inside her, both her hands snapping towards her mouth to keep the sound she was about to make in. "Someone really likes this, huh?"

"Well excuse me for being a young girl that you shouldn't be touching like this!" She griped, but she really really liked it, just as he said. She also had to cautiously raise at least one hand again just in case- he was starting to finger her, actually making her feel really good, and she didn't want to risk being heard by anyone else.

Or heard by him. He was too cocky already.

"Really? Guess I shouldn't do anything else, then," he drawled again, free hand wandering down below her; Ariana was confused for but a moment before she heard the sound of a zipper being opened. "None of this for you if you shouldn't be touched."

Something hard, yet soft, and burning hot, slapped up against her, over her skirt and onto her belly. At any other time, she would've complained about the smack against something she'd filled up with sweets earlier, but…

But. This was a penis. A dick. A cock. An impregnation straw. And right there and then, there was nothing she was more focused on than it, grabbing its length with both hands to feel its heat, the soft echoes of a heartbeat pulsing through it, the sensation against her skin unlike anything she'd felt before.

"What do you think, Alicia?" Like a broken robot, Ariana looked up, seeing none other than her beloved onee-san standing next to the couch, watching her deplorable conduct. "What should we do with this naughty little girl?"

"… I think if she wants it so bad, she should get it," her sister said, large chest shifting as she pointed at Gabriel's huge meat rod still standing between her legs. "Until she stops being a nuisance."

"Did you hear?" He whispered into her ear. "I have permission to keep going until you have hearts in your eyes."

Somehow, Ariana thought, that was really, really tempting even if the words made her heart plummet in the direction she was sitting on. His cock, in other words.


When it slowly pushed inside her, Ariana groaned, her thighs held up so she could be lowered onto it. When it filled her out, she moaned, the slight pain overshadowed by what she was feeling. And when it bottomed out, she was panting, her hands on his knees while her feet found the ground again.

The thing she was thinking about was, of course, dick. A very huge, porn star worthy dick, currently buried deep inside her snatch and filling her out like nothing ever had before and nothing ever would henceforth.

Or nothing else, anyways, assuming she could get a repeat performance. Because she wanted to. She wanted to ride this bad boy all day, then all night and then some more the next day. This thing felt gooood.

With her legs shivering too much to keep going by themselves, she heaved herself along the thick rod stuck inside of her, watching over her shoulder as her sister leaned over to kiss its owner, the two making out while she felt her wetness dripping to the floor, her spread folds unable to hold it back as she took in the cock she was spread around. It was… unexpectedly hot to watch, everything that was going on then and there.

She heard them say something, but her blood was rushing through her ears so loud she she had no idea what. All she could think about was the motions she was going through, up and down, forward and back, rubbing and fucking in a slow, steady-

A pair of hands was on her hips, another on her shoulders. Dumbly looking up, Ariana could see her beautiful, stacked, brilliant, perfect sister look at her, but while her face as as impassive as ever, her eyes… her eyes were filled with something deep, heavy, heady as they looked at each other.

Then her rhythm was gone. Instead, she was shoved onto The Cock, breath and higher thought both escaping her, and a hoarse cry was coming from somewhere as she started to really get fucked, her mind needing a few thrusts from behind to start up again and realize it was coming from her.

Alicia was using her like a toy to teach her how to fuck Gabriel. And as she understood that, the tip of the huge-ass cock inside of her hitting her as deep as anything could ever go, her head blanked out, going as white as her sister's hair, her mouth wide open, tongue slipping out, the entirety of who she was reduced to a melting, bubbling, blinding flashbang of pleasure.

In short, she came. Like she'd never come before. Her fingers and her toys just didn't compare to… this, not even the dildo she'd used to get rid of her virginity just in case.

She didn't really get any 'better' from there, only babbling wordlessly a bit as she continued to have sex like this, holding onto her sister for support. Before she knew it, she was kissing her, a proper kiss with tongue and the taste of chocolate and the love she'd been trying to show her all along.

It was glorious. It was scary. It was, everything she could have wanted and more, the trembling, boiling, repeated thrusting into her core turning her into a wanton slut in all but name with the ease of walking or breathing.

His hands stroking over her back, patting her butt and stroking her sister's skin, her sister's hands mirroring the motions from her front, Ariana came again and again, literally melting down and welcoming the kind of cock bards would write ballads about in times of antiquity. She was being seriously messed up, in a very good way.

Finally, when she felt him slow down his thrusting from behind, drawing his entire length into and through her again and again, she knew she'd gotten back at him at least, confirming what she thought with the thick, hot load shot into her like a physical, solid thing, making her scream aloud one last time. Then, settling down, she looked back, grinning at the man that she'd had her first time with, her sister already returning to sit on the couch next to him (probably to rest her knees a bit and all).

She didn't say anything. She just grinned, wanting him to know she liked what he'd done and unable to keep the blush that she'd been wearing ever since her sister kissed her off her face.

She also squeezed with her pussy, only to find out that he could totally keep going.


The look in Ariana's eyes, Alicia thought, was both very enthusiastically consenting (which was the only reason she was going along with this, no matter how weirdly hot it was) and mildly worrying, in an abstract kind of way.

Normally, her little sister was… rambunctious, if she wanted to say it nicely, or a pain in her ass if not, but she was always happy to see her, like an excited puppy recognizing its owner and running up to them. Now, though, Alicia could truly understand the saying about eyes being the window to one's soul- Ariana's were blazing with light, with an intensity that reminded her more of a piece of amber held against the light than human organs.

Thankfully, she wasn't the one that had to deal with it, for a change. Securely held by Gabriel's arms, the younger girl was quickly and thoroughly brought to orgasm, repeatedly, fucked long and hard enough the scene belonged into a porn flick of some description, not into one of the media rooms set up around the mansion. It was still kind of weirdly hot, and not just because she was kind of jealous about the 'attention' of that fat dick.

Ugh, why did Gabriel have to be so distracting? And not just because he was a phenomenal cosmic hunk with a wide back and a huge penis, either.

Not that size was everything that counted, but as long as he could actually make it fit and feel good, it didn't exactly hurt to be nice to look at either. And making it fit was sure to be one of his specialties, considering he'd managed to fit himself inside Ariana.

She blamed magic, Alicia spontaneously decided. Magic and horniness that mixed into a huge wrecking ball of absurdity that had managed to hit her in the life.

But one way or another, she didn't have to wax poetic about the unholy glee reflected in her sister's eyes for long, not when said eyes soon rolled back as she just hung there over Gabriel's lap, mouth wide open and tongue stretched out. It… looked kind of silly, actually.

"Oh look, she's done already," was all Gabriel said, slowly and carefully getting up to deposit Ariana on the couch where he was just sitting. Cleaning it was going to be… an experience for the staff, to say the least. "All tuckered out. Want me to bring her to your room or…?"

"Likely for the best," she nodded, keeping stride with the conversation in order to direct it. "Does this happen often?"

"Almost always these days. It used to be people I slept with only fainted sometimes, but I guess working on your technique for too long just ends up with a lot of unconscious girls sometimes."

…This was dangerous. And worse, she was still up for riding this particular tiger to completion. Until she came her brains out, was what she meant.

Instead of inquiring further, she just nodded again. "Cool."

Oh god, that wasn't at all how she normally talked. Whether because of the horny apprehension or the aftereffects of seeing… what just happened, she really needed to go take a break, clear her head before she completely embarrassed herself.


It's a weird thing, to move and strain your body with the expectation of getting returns from it. Normally, you wouldn't, of course- ever since you died, your flesh and bones have been animated by nothing but your own will, the force a product of your weird ability to just tell reality to fuck off and declare that you can 'move like this with this much strength'.

You never really questioned it all that much, but you don't exactly have a metabolism anymore. You don't breathe to provide oxygen to your body, you don't digest food or water to provide the stuff a living being would need to function, it's all just you being yourself and somehow that's enough, most of the time.

Hence why working out doesn't really have any effect on you normally; your muscles just regenerate to the state you want them to be in no matter what, they can't increase in size with use the the way a living human's would. And even if they did, it simply wouldn't make a difference, as your strength doesn't come from them anymore.

It's a question of where the force is produced. Muscles normally do so, but for you as well as all the vampires you turned (and in some part for your thralls too, for that matter) the force is just decreed to exist, the skeletal and muscular structure inside your body merely serving as the vessel for it.

Of course, something changed. That something being the Viltrumite tonic you created and injected yourself with.

The Thinker has been running a few numbers in the background, being rather proficient in the use of ADAM and estimating it effects in a fidelity of detail hard to imagine when you aren't a literal artificial intelligence that has been doing this pretty much since its inception. According to her, the stuff should have spread throughout your body by now, as this tonic in particular was designed to.

In theory, you should be able to exhibit some Viltrumite-lite powers with enough use, as the exact nature of… however they gave themselves their powers and ADAM interact oddly and you can't just instantly copy them. Which would have been nice, but hey, you'll take what you can get. So no Vitrumite flight or anything, but you may find yourself not needing leverage when doing things and just, being physically stronger in general.

But to make that work, you have to work the tonic inside your body, make it really do what it was meant to. This is a process that just takes up some time- but you can, in theory, accelerate it a little by working out, letting the stuff now laced throughout your body strut its stuff, so to speak.

So you're currently lifting a literal ton of weight, pulling a set of weights made of adamantite up and down the shaft you had drilled into the ground for this. If Sarah was here, she'd totally be trying to sit on your biceps while you're doing this.

"I may not be your sister, but I shall stand in for her as means allow," the Thinker tells you, her blonde robot body standing straight as her soles massage the muscles you're currently using. Giving her fully articulated feet was useful for more than just simulating a proper human body's fighting style, after all.


Speaking of enhancing your own physical strength, which is something you're generally invested in anyways (hey, you have to maintain the ability to deadlift your entire harem at once just in case), seeing as you have compiled a list for potential ingredients required for an alchemical solution to your need for strength you set aside a few hours to try and figure out where to find each of them.

That is, not by running around all over the globe or anything. Look, you may have a bunch of extra time whenever you jump to other dimensions like this one, but you only have so much patience and no plans to spend days of your valuable attention on this crap when you have a much easier solution you can apply without so much as leaving your place.

You speak, of course, of the discipline of Divination, also known as your ability to just find shit out easily by manipulating reality. Nothing beats going 'no u' and simply deciding that you know where stuff is, after all.

So you start casting, using your spell meant to guide your way towards what you are looking for. This, in combination with the Thinker calculating and triangulating locations based on the results your magic gives you as you work your way through your list, the nearest object meeting the requirements defined by your casting pointed out to you in straight lines this time around.

Mostly you're just trying around with different, slightly varying instructions to cover all your bases for the moment.


"What weaknesses do Viltrumites have that can be exploited in combat?"

It never hurts to be specific about these things. You don't want to know how to defeat their civilization as a whole, just how you could fight Nolan Grayson in particular should you need to.

'A frequency of sound exists that can confuse and hurt them when applied directly to their inner ear, in addition to diminished weaknesses of living beings. They can hold their breath for longer, but their eyes and soft tissues remain weaker than the rest of their bodies and some rare diseases can affect them.'

Huh. Go figure. Also, thanks for the info, universe. Y'know, just in case you're somehow sapient in there and all.

'…'

Yeah, that's what you thought. Still, progress! Now all you need is to figure out what frequency of sound your spell meant to inform you of in particular and you have a secret weapon to throw into the ring, should the Guardians of the Globe get their asses handed to themselves. Again.

Actually, considering what you know of Viltrumites based purely off of Omni-Man's recorded feats and battles, and weighing that against the Guardians' last scuffle with him, make that a when as opposed to an if. Like, just saying, maybe they get lucky, but you won't bet on them winning round two is all.

Now, where'd you put your list of miscellaneous contingencies to ready in case you suddenly have to deal with a Viltrumite invasion…


You know, you didn't really expect to really get into writing as more than a way to spite bad literature and get one over its author, but regardless of the Ninjas of Love series, you're just genuinely invested in the story you're writing at this point.

It's not so much that you see anything of your own past in it, but you do of course draw inspiration from things you've seen and experienced yourself here and there. And, of course, you still like working with your own hands and all, so…

Well, it's kind of enjoyable to write the actual text down by hand, the original manuscript being drawn up word by word as you work your way through what you envision happening in-story. It's nowhere as neat as a finished product would be yet, of course, right now it's all loose paper and your kind of 'meh' handwriting, but once you're done and bind it all up, you expect it to become just as potentially powerful as the manuscript of your first book.

Not that that's why you want it, though. For the most part you just have a collector's interest in these pieces of art and similar you manage to create inside your inner world and imbue with some sort of inherent reality manipulation kinds of power.

… Actually, does that count as narcissistic, now that you put it like that? Not that it would stop you or anything, but prizing your own work just kinds of sounds… Ah well, who cares, you just want to have more cool stuff.

Some people collect post stamps, others collect more money than they'll ever be able to spend in a single lifetime, you just happen to collect things that have some real value. To each their own, though it's not that you'd say no to being richer than god or anything.

Looking at Earth Bet. And Earth Rapture. And kind of this Earth too, the Thinker has been working towards manipulating the stock market to generate functionally infinite income already- Night Queen is not limited to merely dominating the world with her sheer presence, market forces, too, are among the many things that must bow to her!

But yes, back to what you were doing, slacking off on your writing time can only be allowed so far. Now then… Jake, having 'met' the spirit that haunts the mansion he spent the night in, is confused and scared, but still spends most of the following day trying to find out what exactly is going on with the whole thing, inadvertently wasting enough time for his pursuers to come just that much closer.

However, after 'accidentally' embarrassing the spirit in question (and having sex with her), she basically decides to up and follow him around, allowing him to slip into the same train Bella and Chloe disembark from as they are tracking. Doubling back like that, he just barely makes it out and proceeds to hitchhike into a random direction, figuring they can't possibly trace him if he just covers enough concrete.

Also, the muscled, nearly amazonian truck driver that ends up picking him up is surprisingly sympathetic, giving him some good advice on life in general and all that. You figure the poor guy needs a mentor figure like that at some point, given recent events in his life- being kept as a sex pet for a couple months isn't something just anyone can deal with easily, no shame in having issues there.


"Sir? I found a message on my phone."

"That's not exactly news, Donald."

"It, uh, it says to ready a list of criminals and other 'tasty' individuals."

"Night Queen?"

"The number is listed as 6444878336, sir. IT says the message was sent from Antarctica. Somehow."

"Forget it, that definitely sounds like her. Have some of the eggheads look into it later."

"Sir."


It was warm and cozy, her body surrounded by softness on all sides. Still caught amidst the embrace of slumber, her consciousness slowly bloomed, going from sleeping to wakefulness at the only pace such things were permissible.

Not very quickly.

Still, perhaps subconsciously seeking out the nearest source of warmth, as well as the divine scent that had infiltrated her brain through her nose, she shifted, unconsciously pushing her face into heavenly bliss waiting mere inches from her-

"Good morning, Ariana."

"…Big sis…"

"…Did you sleep well?"

It was now or never, obviously. Nudging herself further onward, Ariana took a deeeep breath, inhaling as much of her sister as she could- only to be stymied by a most unbecoming garment. "Siiiiis… Why a bra?"

"I was not going to sleep naked with you in my bed," her sister said, heartlessly shooting down her fragile hopes, her poor gay heart (okay, not that gay, let's say it was bi after yesterday) broken with the same ruthless composure she was used to seeing from her. "Even after what happened."

"Right! That happened!" Snapping to wakefulness, the younger girl opened her eyes, looking up from where her head was buried in Alicia's cleavage. Her very soft, warm and overall pleasant cleavage. If there was a place to wake up in, her sister's breasts would be it. "It did, right?"

Sighing, the girl she was clinging to nodded. "It did."

"Score!" This was awesome! "That means I can finally move in with you!"

"… I'm afraid I don't follow."

"Obviously, since you refused and said I should live with mom and dad instead of with you, I can now blackmail you by saying I'll tell mom about what happened unless I can live with you now." This was fairly straightforward and obvious, wasn't it?

Sighing again, Alicia raised a hand to pat her head. Yay! "I really shouldn't. However, I… liked seeing you have sex with him. Did you like it?"

She rubbed her thighs together, scattered memories from the day prior rising in the back of her head. "I didn't not not dislike it," she decided after a brief moment of thought.

"Good enough. Just, Ariana?" Alicia continued to pat her, which was a most auspicious sign indeed.

"Hm?"

"Tell me if you think it's too much, or if you ever don't want to do anything."

"Sure thing!" Now how to get into her sister's pants properly… Her pure yuri-yuri powers were going to grow unmatched! Uooh! She could feel it rising already!

"… You're panting. Get your head out of the gutter and go brush your teeth."

"Ah crap, I don't smell from my mouth do I? And did I say any of that out loud?"

Her sister didn't answer, instead just moving the covers of her pure-white bed (perfect and radiant to match her beauty and intellect like the rest of her room) off of both of them, revealing that she (disappointingly) was indeed wearing panties, too. As expected, but still. "You slept through the whole day yesterday. Get your butt moving before I spank it."


Now then, in the interest of somehow dealing with Omni-Man without putting yourself into the line of fire, because let's face it you don't exactly want to let it come to that (even if you're half-resigned to the possibility already and are taking steps to ensure you'll win any such fight, should it happen), you are currently making sure that Cecil and the merry band of do-gooders he oversees have at least kind of an idea of what to do.

Thanks to your incredible cosmic powers to figure out how to defeat Viltrumites and all, among other things.

Sitting inside what looks like an aggressively forgettable and tediously boring government office two states across from where you usually stay, inside one of the numerous safehouses and minor facilities the GDA maintains, you tilt your head where you are currently holding it up with one arm, its elbow on the desk in front of you.

The chairs were insufficiently tall to bear your mighty person at acceptable height for this, of course, so you are currently sitting on a chunk of ice you conjured on top of one to bolster your seating position to proper levels. Just one of the many ways in which you accommodate those of inferior standing and capability, as you are not making a big deal out of it.

For now. You may change your mind at any time.

"So there's some specific frequency of sound that screws up Viltrumites when their inner ears are subjected to it. No idea if it differs by individual or if it's ubiquitous across all of 'em. Also, poking their eyes out still works, it just needs a stronger poke."

You demonstrate a few pokes with your outstretched index finger, pointing them at Cecil's face as your other hand occupies itself with the cookies he was wise enough to tribute to yourself.

"Well, it's something, at least. Whole lot more than we had to go off of before." The director of the perhaps least overtly incompetent and corrupt government agency you've ever seen looks as 'done-with-all-this-shit' as ever, but otherwise he's less stressed than usual; presumably, the Guardians of the Globe being back from the dead took a load off his shoulders. "I don't suppose that mysterious sound frequency of yours comes with an example?"

"What do I look like, a crystal ball with connected speakers?" You ask, annoyed. "Figure it out yourself. I've done way too much work about this whole thing already, any more and I may as well just do it myself!"

"Yeah, let's not do that," he mutters, opening a drawer on his side of the desk you're sitting at to fish out another box of cookies, getting them ready for the moment you're done with yours. "It's one thing for the Guardians to be out for a week or two without explanation, but having you take care of Omni-Man before they pop up is a bad look for a few reasons, even if the facts are disclosed. Better to have them fight him either case."

And have you come in as a surprise at the last moment, Cecil doesn't say but clearly thinks. As backup for the team you've given him back. You know, if you actually wanted to do any good, you may have been annoyed about that, but as it is you're pretty fine with that stance.

"Whatever. Did you get my message?"

"Ah, yes, I sent Donald to pick up a list. Of people that nobody would be too sad about being gone. No endorsement of any criminal behavior, of course, but nobody can exactly stop you if you do anything about them."

"Yeah, yeah, leave your plausible deniability by the door," you wave him off, grabbing the stack of paper he slides across the desk towards you- a series of dossiers, by the looks of it. "Is the Immortal around, by the way? I wanted to poke him in the soul to see how he ticks."

"I'll give him a call, one moment." Standing up, Cecil promptly leaves the room, obviously already looking not to have any delicate calls in your presence unless he has an idea of how they'll go ahead of time.

Well, hey, you have cookies to spend time with, but once they're empty you give no guarantees about what'll happen while you're unattended beyond that.


Unfortunately, the Immortal isn't available at the moment- that or Cecil just doesn't want your fingers in his soul and is pretending as much while shooing you away. Annoyingly, he's smart enough not to lie to your face, or else he's managed to get his poker face such an ingrained part of his psyche he doesn't even smell of lies when he states things that aren't true.

Like, that's not usually a concern you have, as the chemical changes in the human body in response to deliberately telling a lie are usually a fairly foolproof sign to your sense of smell, if there is one person you've ever seen that is not entirely, batshit insane and yet still able to get away with lying to you, it probably would be Cecil.

Maybe other exceptions exist among people that literally lie as second nature, such as lawyers and politicians, but you won't hold your breath on finding out. Even if you totally could, being undead and all.

At any rate, you still have a hour or so to kill, so you end up making Donald show you footage of GDA operations instead, the kind of stuff that's normally so classified not even the people that lived through it get to so much as read the serial numbers this stuff is sorted by. You being yourself, you simply bully your way into getting access, both because you're bored and because you want to look into a few things.

Hey, they don't give you the Immortal, they should give you some other entertainment, at least.

While a lot of the GDA's work includes supervillains and other powered individuals as a matter of course, what with them being the first response for anything of sufficiently large scale- from evil cults that attempt to summon their gods to alien invaders, they also deal with terrorists, hostage situations caused by such, that kind of thing.

In short, there's no shortage of cool stuff to watch, though some of this footage is partially scrubbed for potential memetic effects. Probably for good reason, or at least you can't prove otherwise.

As a direct consequence, you make it a point to search out as much stuff the GDA has on people they put on your list as possible. Yes, they did put dossiers together for you and all, but nothing beats getting your own eyes on a raid or two interrupted by sudden fireballs and death lasers being thrown around.

Incidentally, you're pretty sure Cecil is assuming you are just going to eat people so he's trying to spin it as you being a semi-heroic individual that 'only' goes after the worst of the worst, as a way to sell it to the public in case he has to when you inevitably get seen murdering the people he's trying to feed to you without direct involvement by his own people.

Fun times, fun times. Also, Donald is extremely uncomfortable with you watching anything that involves involuntary prostitution (that is usually violently stopped by GDA agents) or open drug consumption, but then nobody cares about how uncomfortable he is about things.

Speaking about things you know Donald to be uncomfortable about, though, you do wonder what Darkblood ended up doing. You sure haven't seen him ever since you last watched through Cecil's eyes, but you also don't see him just leaving this whole thing be.


Most of your day, once you're back from the GDA place you visited this time, is spent on more preparations for your current alchemy project, in that you continue to expand the range of possible ingredients you magically determine the locations of as you work your way down your list of potentially required stuff.

You do hope your theories for applied alchemical solutions hold some actual water, by the way. It sure would be embarrassing if you went around gathering crap from all over the world to effectively cook some overly elaborate soup. That would probably taste horrible too, to add insult to injury.

In other news, you're kind of… Not particularly hungry, actually, less so than you were thinking you would be by now. Weird, but you'll just go ahead and keep an eye on that for now. That said, you could go for a bite anyways, and so you shall, purely because you can.

With the range of potential meals this world offers to you, you would normally be perfectly fine just looking into some likely candidates for your dietary purposes, what with how some personality traits influence the taste of a soul and all that, but thanks to the GDA's work, you have what amounts to a self service restaurant's menu to browse already, replacing that step with havin to choose what meal to go for in particular rather than letting yourself be surprised.

Not that that's a bad thing, of course. It does leave you spoiled for choice, if anything, and so choosing becomes the real trial here.

At least Cecil's people were thorough in listing out the things they could prove in addition to 'only' heavily suspected crimes, the lack of hard evidence the only reason most of these guys are still out in the wild instead of unceremoniously bagged and dragged in front of some kind of judge. Turns out even in places straight out of the old comic books like this one there are some things that never change.

So then, what full course meal do you feel like today…?


You decide, after some thought and leafing through the list the GDA compiled for you, to start relatively small, somewhere you don't have to travel all over the place for.

Sure, you could just teleport (you don't have global coverage quite yet mostly because you aren't looking to get the constant radio signal you need to broadcast for that to work properly noticed quite yet but you can get to nearby continents, at least), but you don't really feel like going full globe trotter when you have a perfectly fine meal just waiting for you right around the corner and all that.

Hence the first target you decide to cross out (literally so) is basically right around the corner from your secret base. A local crime lord type of guy commonly called Machine Head that, for some reason, literally had parts of his brain amputated and replaced by a computer, though at least he does decently well for himself as a result from what you can tell so far.

Drug and arms trafficking, insurance fraud and general blue collar crimes are how he mostly finances his own little crime empire, with a good dose of violence thrown in for when his henchmen deal with other criminal groups or wannabe heroes in particular.

Speaking of, he does have henchmen, of course- more than enough mundanes will do whatever you tell them to for the right payment, but Machine Head has the cash and connections to call on a bunch of powered minions as well, minor villains under his employ, mercenaries that don't give a crap about what their employer does beyond paying them, those kinds.

Going by the GDA's files, none of them are anything special except the man's bodyguard himself, a dude named Isotope that can teleport… And, more importantly, teleport others as well. His actual power is pretty limited in a fight, but that's not why he has his job- Machine Head basically just has him teleport the two of them out of any really sticky situation, or teleport in reinforcements as needed.

The others are pretty street level overall, but the softcore AI the organization's leader turned himself into seems to be doing a decent job, as far as these things go. Sure, he's still kind of criminal scum and all, but you can hardly throw any stones there, heh.

Not that you won't anyways. You, for one, are perfectly okay with being a little bit of a hypocrite.

Now, you don't want to spend forever dealing with this guy, a simple, quick and disastrous alpha strike would be for the best, you think. The alternative would be having to deal with a teleporter that never actually has to go anywhere near yourself while throwing meat shields out by the dozens, a situation that while amusing would get real old real fast.

You're in this to grab a bite, not to turn your favorite pastime into a massively tedious chore. So it's time to figure out a bit of a plan.


A bit of investigating, mostly with the help of the Thinker who very much has long since attained access to every scrap of information the internet and the government (or at least the less-secured parts of it without airgapped servers) hold lets you figure just about everything you need.

Well, not everything everything, but everything you need to get started. By the time you arrive on the roof of the place in question, all that remains is to figure out the exact timing of what you know is about to come.

The Popsicle Palace (you like the name, by the way) is a night club, one of several Machine Head more or less controls. More importantly, it is also his establishment of choice to relax in, which you also can sympathize with- the Raveyard certainly is far from the worst place to hang out in, in your own humble opinion.

What this means for you is that, knowing roughly when and where he usually is at certain times of day thanks to the Thinker's research, you can simply wait right near its entrance for him to come by. Normally he just has his pet teleporter move both of them in and out, but he makes a point to do so right outside the door- something something no superpowers inside the club.

Convenient for you. Power usage like that does get noticed, after all, and where Machine Head apparently considers it a way to flex and show off nobody will stop him from just showing up and disappearing with sparkly green teleportation involved, to you it's basically just a neon sign saying 'food here' plastered all over the internet.

People talk, take pictures… It's not that hard to find out about things like this, really. Social media, providing information to predators like you since their very inception.

So here you are, kind of late in the evening, the sun still up but tinted a distinct red as its light illuminates the streets. There's a mild breeze, blowing over the space you would occupy if you were corporeal- because of course you're in shadow form right now, your trusty old transformation power once again serving you perfectly well to sneak around.

Takes you back a little. You were literally lurking in the shadows a lot back when you just rose from your grave and figured out it was a thing you could do, what with your preferred method of operations.

Can't really call something a fight if it consists of you one-sidedly overwhelming and chomping down on your victims. Just like it's meant to be- actual fights are reserved for suckers and things you can't easily ambush like that.

Suffice it to say, examples of such are pretty rare nowadays. And Machine Head really doesn't fit the bill.

There's not too many bystanders moving around outside the Popsicle Palace, which does suit you just fine, and you can easily track your targets by the notable lack of blood flow in Machine Head's head area; quietly staying in place right above the entrance, you watch and wait for the exact moment you want to strike.

It takes maybe half an hour at most of waiting like this (the Thinker notifies you it was twenty-two minutes, fourty-two seconds and some change) before they leave, your currently nonexistent eyes on their blood signatures the whole way.

The moment they are through the doors, you push yourself out of your shadow, crouching on the roof, then throw yourself down, your telekinetic powers, gravity manipulation and more helping you along, moving you faster and with all the force of a low-orbit meteorite-


-you impact Isotope, the man in the dark purple suit and black shirt with a big, stylized Roman 'I', his green hair serving as a handhold for you to grab him by as you crash down on his shoulder, immediately sending him to the ground.

And breaking half his bones, going by the sounds his body makes.

The man himself is too surprised to even scream, and the opportunity to is taken from him forever as you bite into his throat, tearing straight through it before his skull even crunches onto the ground. By the time it does, you're already drawing all the blood out of his body, too quickly for him to even notice he's already dead.

You confirm as much from the soul you just added to your collection.

"Of fuUucking course," a voice sounding like it's autotuned comes from next to you as you slowly rise from the now prone and very much lifeless body of Isotope, blood trailing from your mouth. And your cheeks. And your chin, a little. "Why do I even bother haAaving a life?"

"Your own fault," you shrug, taking control of the red fluid you managed to spill to slurp it up properly as you look up at Machine Head, jumping off of his henchman's corpse. Then you give him a wide smile for good measure, your pick-like teeth shining with the lifeblood of the guy you just ate. "Shouldn't have expected you'd never get ambushed."

"No, but I did paAay off the cops," he points out, just as he points what look like some fancy toy gun at you. "…CaAan I pay you to replace my bodyguard, for that matter?"

You have to hold back a sudden bubble of laughter at that one- this is a first, you're pretty sure.


"I got a better offer for you," you state, your hands thrust onto your hips to provide the adequate level of smug superiority to what you're doing. "I'll kill you and in exchange I'll keep your stuff!"

"That doesn't soOound like a great offer," Machine head comments, muzzle of his weapon still trained on you. "Incidentally, what is your opinion on getting your faAace blasted off by lasers?"

You grin even wider, as if to dare him to try. "Nothing in particular. It's not like it'll work. Also, there's something I wanna know."

"Well whaAat is it, if we're doing a damn twenty questioOons Q already?"

"I wonder if you'll taste all sparky and there's only one way to find out."

With that, you're right on him, your speed too great to allow Machine Head to do much of anything. A rapid swipe from a clawed hand violently disables one arm by the elbow, then you're climbing up his torso and driving your teeth into his shoulder, jaw completely unhinged for just a moment before you're biting down hard enough to break bone and tear muscle tissue with ease.

Looking up at it from this angle, you can see his mechanized head, the metallic neck the reason you didn't bite him there. Only, you can hear the near inaudible buzzing of activity inside of it, too quiet for human senses to possibly make out, even as you drain him of blood at the usual rapid pace.

Just your luck if he has, like, a battery inside of there. Just to be sure, you reach up and jam your slender, clawed hand upwards into Machine Head's machine head, magnifying its own weight to make it skewer itself on your outstretched fingers.

There you go, his soul entering your collection as well; just in time, as you just finished drinking him empty, his back lying on the ground after you jumped and bowled him over earlier.

You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand. "Another juice pack done," you comment, grabbing both of the bodies before you jump up onto the roof again, dragging them off the street.

Gotta make sure you aren't seen before you teleport away. Just in case.


It is now night

The man inside the white suit and with the face made of metal was leaning over the sterile table. "So I'm just saying, someone should overseEe food distribution in this joint. Way I see it, it's a commodity, even if people aren't reliant on it anymore, so-"

"Please, we both know you would try to use any action the council took to gain influence over the masses," Uyehara Yoshiake told the newly consumed supervillain. "Just accept we're all in hell or purgatory or however you wish to call it and give it a rest."

"SoOorry amigo, that's not how I tick! Now can you-" Yoshiaki initiated the file transfer, letting the unfathomable techno-paganism of this place some were calling the Soul Palace (it was some kind of reference, he was sure, just not from where and he did not really want to know either) work its magic. In response, Machine Head's face displays began to glow in neon pink, the man trembling in his seat. "OoOoOoOoh yeah, now that's the stuff. That's, that's what I'm talking about."

He sighed, shaking his head. Yes, he had agreed to upgrade some of this guy's programming, mostly because he had to- the Thing that had landed him in this place being what it was, a single thought was enough to make him do just about anything- but did Machine Head have to sound like he was pumping himself full of drugs?

"Just like that, oOoh yeah…"

Julianne, the fellow scientist hailing from Academy City having been reincarnated just like himself, poked her head through the door (that automatically slid open, as they were in the laboratories). "Hey, I ship it!"

"…See, this is why I can't stand people." Indigo had many good points when they discussed life and philosophy and all such things, but Yoshiake would always insist that, at the end of the day, it just wasn't worth it to personally get involved with most others.


You're in a good mood when you rejoin the others back at the small mansion Alicia apparently got for herself. And, as she has made sure to let you know, her little sister has moved in already- Ariana picked out a room, had her stuff put into it and her school escort arranged by the time you're back from eating the two guys you decided to take care of.

She basically spent part the day to spontaneously move into Alicia's place. Didn't even stop going to school in the meantime, she just called on a couple of people to have her own furniture taken out and reinstalled where she wants to live now.

Actually being rich sure is nice, huh. Like, you can't really talk, considering how you behave now that you can basically do whatever you fuck you want to, but still, before all of that, you were surprisingly normal in retrospect, weren't you?

But that's probably not important right now. Indeed, your current priorities are very much removed from pondering the conditions of your childhood which really shouldn't have been what they were, considering your parents were solidly middle-upper class at the minimum. In terms of income, anyways, they were bottom tier as far a human beings went and all.

"Once again, my name's Ariana and I'll be in your care from now on." Surprisingly enough, Alicia's sister can be downright polite when she wants to be.

Something you aren't shy about pointing out, either. "Huh, no accusations this time? Not even any screaming about me being a guy?"

"Hey, I can be perfectly nice and-"

"She wants the dick," Alicia explains, cutting her off. "And she'll behave for it."

"Good to know," you smirk, holding out a hand for her to take. She does. The slight blush is invisible to human eyes, but your blood-vision does make out the increased blood flow inside her cheeks, as though her body was gearing up to produce a proper red tint at a moment's notice. It's adorable. "Guess we'll have to see if she earns it then, hm?"

"Hey! I can hear you both perfectly fine and I do not appreciate being spoken of in the third person!" Hopping upwards on the balls of her feet, Ariana waves her hands between the two of you.

"Get used to it, that's just how it is when you don't see eye to eye with anyone else in the room," you drawl, casually patting her head. Alicia seems to agree with the sentiment, adding her own hand next to yours.

"Ugununu… This isn't too bad, actually." The younger girl pouts at first, but just grins with loose cheeks within moments, letting both you and her sister pat her head and stroke her hair.

You always did get along with teens, all the way back to when you were one yourself.


Normally, cinemas and similar establishments at least kind of screen who they let in to watch certain movies- that is, nobody cares about the normal kiddie stuff, but when for some reason someone decided that this one example of violence, swearing and slash or sexuality (and if it's just in the form of a busty actress not wrapped in clothes from head to toe) is unsuitable for younger audiences, the people that sell tickets are at least in principle supposed to make sure no kids get in.

You, of course, disagree with this on a fundamental level. Like, not to speak out against protecting kids from things they aren't ready for, but let's be real for a moment here, why do they have to be 'protected' from a movie?

Kids should be able to make their own judgement on this form of entertainment, unless they're unable to distinguish fiction from reality. In which case their stupid parents should get off their asses and teach them to, dammit, or their teachers or whoever sees themselves responsible for that shit.

You shouldn't coddle them like that, in your own humble opinion. Like, sure, if they're too young to understand what's being shown there isn't really much point to letting them watch, you'll happily agree to that, but you have yet to see a twelve year old that doesn't understand gun violence and how it works.

May have to do with certain cultural notions, given you're American and grew up in LA and all, but still, the point stands. And don't get yourself started on trying to keep sex from kids- how or why some people arrived at this notion is entirely beyond you.

Hey, you've been having sex since you were… Shit, you can't even remember how old you were exactly (seeing as you only have perfect recall from the moment of your resurrection and all), but you turned out just fine, for once. The war crimes and eating people bit only started after you died, after all.

You were a model citizen before that, if you say so yourself. Sure, you may have committed what would count as minor misdemeanours by technicality if a lawyer were to comb over your life, but really, who doesn't? By and large, you were perfectly peaceful, pleasant and a great person all in all.

Heck, you may have been in a couple fights when you were younger, but those were always started by someone else. And it's not your fault if some other guy's girlfriend, wife or whatever decides to go and have some fun with you on the side, they shouldn't go after you and instead figure out their own damn relationships first.

Ugh. Some people, seriously…

But yeah, it is with this background that you and Alicia smuggle Ariana into the cinema you ended up deciding to go to, just because she looks a little young and nobody wants to deal with the hassle of having to how off her ID. Alicia gets out too rarely anyways, so her sister was all for the opportunity to make her- apparently, the older girl usually justifies staying at home all day except for school with… having gone to school, more or less, but that kind of fell flat considering she's been ditching school or over a week now.

Not to launch into another mental diatribe on the topic, but you can sympathize. The American education system is shit and everyone should just not go to school, nothing of value would be lost. Though maybe it's different in this dimension?

…Eh, it's still America. This is one of those universal truths, you're pretty sure. So you'll stay true to the sentiment, screw school, only go if you don't have anything more important to do.

And yes, your cute neighborly childhood friend's butt does count as more important, for the record.

So here you are, covertly covering Ariana between yourself and Alicia as all three of you make your way into the cinema hall in which your movie is going to play in a few minutes, the late hour meaning it's one of the ones that 'aren't suited for some audiences'.

You already mentioned what you think about that.

"What was the name of the movie again?" Ariana whispers, a little too paranoid about someone hearing her voice and deducing her age. Right, she couldn't exactly come up to the ticket counter with you when you casually hoodwinked everyone present to get her her ticket.

"Exposed Explosions 3: Extra Exposition," you tell her. "No idea what it's about exactly, but with that title it'll either be hilarious or horrible. Good time either way."

"Oh! I watched the first one a couple years ago, it's a comedy flick. With adult humor and all."

"Mhm. Watched both the first and second," Alicia nods along. "That's why I recommended it."

Good to know you're in good company for this, you suppose.


The movie is… surprisingly, pretty decent. As you were told, it's a comedy, mixed with some action and honestly a lot of sex jokes, but while it is a bit limited in what it aims to do, it does so pretty well.

There's explosions, of course, as advertised in the title, and lots of nudity, but while sex appeal is certainly there it's not the main point; the scene where that blonde chick bursts out of the shower, naked and wet, to fight off a band of terrorists that mistook her home for the White House with random household items is just pretty funny before it is sexy.

Note to self, defenestration by way of exploding microwave and disabling people by shoving a vibrator up their ass shall be added to your favorite home defense maneuvers. Also, if you weren't already well aware anyways, you would now know just how many potential weapons are within reach in any average kitchen.

But yeah, it's some nice stuff- and, appropriate to this dimension's cultural predilections, the good guys win in the end, world war three is prevented by great bravery and two of the protagonists pretending to be gay to sneak into the evil guys' headquarters (off-brand nazis, you're pretty sure) and there's a happy end that involves a cute couple forming based off of breast worship.

There's not even superheroes involved, it's a tasteful, funny piece all in all. Also, the sentence 'It's called empathy, use it once in a while you dumb fuck' will forever be stuck in your memory.

That said, you can't say you were entirely focused on the movie all the way through, what with your very much charming company. As in, Ariana is sitting between you and Alicia, and as the latter mentioned earlier… She does want the dick.

And she just can't seem to help herself when it comes to getting some.

So you're not particularly surprised when you feel a tug on your pants, her soft hands slowly and quietly undoing your zipper so nobody can hear it in the middle of an action-packed scene (involving a half-naked guy not looking at an explosion as it goes off behind him, only to be confused by what just happened) only to have your half-hard cock spring out of it already.

Quickly taking it in her hand, Ariana starts to slowly jack you off, licking her lips when she sees you growing hard in the dark movie theater illuminated only by the movie playing on the big screen up front, her skin feeling over every inch of your dick, fingers wrapped around you tightly as she stimulates it from base to tip. And even plays with your head, teasing it until a thin layer of precum covers her palm.

Did you mention you have a bit of space between yourselves and everyone else here to watch this? Because you do.

It doesn't take long for the slender hand working your shaft to be withdrawn, however; Ariana raises it to her face, giving it a quick sniff as she glances up at you.

The she gives her palm a lick, followed by a second one, as though it was covered by delectable honey or molten chocolate.

She seems to like the taste, as she wordlessly proceeds to lean over the armrest of her seat, holding a finger over her lips to signal you to stay quiet. Only, she does so while looking downwards, unable to tear her attention away from your gently throbbing cock, and just like that she moves her finger to the side to open her mouth, stretching her tongue out in clear invitation, copious amounts of saliva showing how much she's looking forward to this.

Not one to say no to such things, you grab her by the back of her head, pulling it towards your lap- she eagerly goes along with the motion, wet tongue sliding over the tip of your cock ahead of her lips, the girl you're gently manhandling treating it like a lollypop to suck on.

And suck she does, bent over with her butt pointing towards Alicia as she is, her hands on your lap to support herself; her mouth is hot and wet, tongue wriggling and sliding over your length, quiet wet sounds produced when you start to probe the back of her throat.

Only for her to hold her breath and push herself further along your shaft, slurping happily as she does her best to take you to the base despite the visible bulge in her throat, eyes almost rolled back a little so she can still glance up at you.

In short, she's being a very good little cocksucker. Something you make sure to let her know by way of pulling her back up, then down again, chortling gurgles signaling she very much does want this.

Sometimes it's almost scary how hard they fall for your cock, but then, that's just the way the world turns, huh?

Either way you continue to make use of Ariana's mouth and throat, the soft circle of her lips wrapped around your shaft. A tight throat swallowing around your cock again and again is just what you needed to really enjoy the movie.

Meanwhile, Ariana has already slid a hand down her own pants, slowly and casually pleasuring herself as she watches what you're doing. She's just playing with her pussy, fingering herself once she gets nice and wet, while her other hand is currently patting her sister's butt through her pants.

Something that only contributes to how eagerly she's swallowing your cock, you're sure.

It doesn't take long with such a talented and engaged cocksucker working you over before you feel yourself coming close, maybe ten minutes in total, but you suppose you should let her breathe for longer than a couple seconds at a time at some point so you don't hold yourself back. Still firmly holding onto her neck and head, you pull her all the way down again, filling out as much of her throat as you can.

Keeping her there this time, you stroke her soft pink-ish hair as you start to come, pumping glob after glob of cum straight down her hatch. She twitches and almost moans in open pleasure around your cock, but holds herself back to better gobble up every last bit of what you're giving her.

By the time you pull her off your cock, all that remains on it is a thick layer of her saliva, glistening in the light of the next explosion going off in the movie. Ariana, once she's rearranged to sit back down inside her seat, breathing deep and slow as she swallows a few more times on sheer instinct, patting her belly, is promptly provided with a handful of girlcum to the face courtesy of Alicia, who refuses to look at her now that she's stopped masturbating.

Instead, the little sister just starts to lick her hand clean, suckling on the fingers that were just inside a hot and bothered snatch with wild abandon. You, meanwhile, let her rest a bit, knowing full well this movie lasts for two full hours.

You have time for a few more turns one way or another, no need to rush.


All good things have to come to an end eventually, and the same goes for the movie you're watching while both you and Alicia have your way with Ariana. You have to support her while walking out, not to mention you're still covering for her presence in general given her apparent age and the late time of day, that being 'night', but you manage just fine.

You've been doing this kind of thing for a long while, you aren't about to be bothered by some random idiot trying to inflict whatever excuse for a moral framework they got on your general vicinity before being shut up.

You wouldn't even just kill them or punch them out- Sarah learned how to make boys run away in tears in second grade, and she learned how to do that from you. But as you already noted, you don't even bother with any of that when you can just move right out and get on the way back to the girls' mansion.

"…This was nice," Alicia informs you as you split up, your arms occupied carrying a happily dozing little sister (someone has to get her to her bed, though you doubt she's up for anything else tonight). "I liked it."

"Glad to know," you whisper back, hefting Ariana. "You gonna be fine for tonight?"

"Mhm," she nods. "Just going to take it slow, sleep a few hours."

You return a nod of your own together with a shrug. She can suit herself, you're not the boss of her. Not unless you decide Night Queen needs handmaidens or something, anyways.

Now then, once you've put this particular gremlin to bed (as opposed to any of the other ones you happen to know), you have a bit of a long night ahead of you.


Gathering the ingredients you theorized should somehow interact in a more permanent manner than you are used to potions you alchemize up doing is… Well, kind of a mixed bag, so far.

Some of the acquisitions you're after are easy to make, just a matter of teleporting along and making whatever further distance remains to be traveled from the edges of your range (you considered expanding it, but you're a bit paranoid about some random super-genius picking up on the radio waves and following them back to your base somehow), grabbing the items in question to stuff them into your shadow, then leaving again the way you came.

Of course the details can be a little more… complicated, but you're pretty good at ignoring or getting around those kinds of complications on the fly. The plants you need that only grow at the bottom of the ocean are harvested once you turn into a giant snake to swim all the way, for example; turns out you can swim surprisingly fast in that form, in fact.

Sure, you are bothered by a few animals on the way and you're kinda sure you spy what looks a lot like whatever Aquarius was before Omni-Man turned half his body into chunky salsa off in the distance, but you don't exactly feel like dealing with any of that as you just speed along. You have a lot to do and only so much time to waste as of right now.

Also, the depths of the ocean are as pleasant as always. You kind of like the pressure evenly spreading all over your body, the lack of bright lights and the different way you have to move with all the water resistance in all directions.

There's a reason you added a few deep sea simulation chambers back when you built the Titan. And why your serious water park design isn't rated for living human beings.

That aside, you mostly fly around while accelerating your flying speed through your various powers as appropriate and use your teleportation through shadows in order to get around, picking up the little tidbits you're after.

… It's still a massive pain to actually get all the way to the North Pole to grab some ice that has been frozen for a minimum of a century or two, but at least you don't need much, just a few crumbs in theory if you're correct. Meaning you take as much of the stuff you dig into the ice to get to the deeper, older layers as you can put into your shadow for transport, but that's just you covering your bases.

You also do use a few potions the Thinker prepared for your use to speed yourself up along the way, which really does help. You have to use every advantage you can get.

By the end, you have… Maybe two thirds of the materials you were looking into gathering, including everything that you think needs to be processed somehow before it's usable- you kind of prioritized that as a matter of course, may as well get that done in the background ahead of time. You're also not exactly sure about a lot of the things you're going to be throwing together, but the part where you do magical science comes later.

For now, better to just stock up on materials and hope for the best. You're kind of good at that second part.


Of course there is a reason as to why you don't just keep at gathering stuff right away, that mostly being you figured you should take a break to break up the monotony of 'go there, take that, repeat' a bit.

You're not in one of those horrible games that have been repeating the same old fetch quest formula for decades, after all. You can just decide that you feel like doing something else whenever you want. Which, as it happens, brings you back to your current underground lair.

You have, after all, been fiddling with the idea of a proper horde of demons you could summon to your side on demand, but so far it's been more of a wild mob than anything else. Not really an issue considering you haven't been in need of them so far, but having a way to actually organize the hellspawn you're trying to wrangle into something useful (not to be mistaken with Hellspawn, as in a type of demon that is a thing) would be nice for when the time comes.

What you need, you figure, is something or someone that can do that for you. Some kind of demon that can act as a competent field commander, to keep things on track and maybe even actually contribute and free your own attention up a bit- you can't always rely on just summoning endless amounts of completely unbound demons like you did against the Flaxans, after all.

Or, well, you could, but that kind of precludes you using them anywhere close to anything you want to keep. You already have a few nuclear options like that and most of them are more destructive already anyways, no need to add to them.

Looking at you, Lung. The soul currently 'casually' chatting with one of the crazy ones that started praying to you to rile the whole anthill of believers up a bit with some rumors, some of which he invented himself, is one of your big 'fuck you's left up your sleeve for a rainy day for a reason.

But back to making better use of the demons you subjugated- thankfully, there's a type of demon down in hell that fits the bill, a happenstance likely owed to the infinite nature of said place. Or 'collection of not-quite-physical dimensions', whatever, all that matters is that you can get a name and a summoning ritual easily enough.

So then you go on to conduct said ritual, involving a flagpole with a burning flag on it, a slightly wilted rose and a short piece of chain, among other things. The chanting goes off without a hitch and so before long-

The sound of a battlefield echoes inside your summoning chamber, roars and screams, weapons, teeth and claws and more clashing against each other over the distinct, dull throb of large bodies trampling all in their way. The scents of blood and fire, mixed into what would be nauseating if it didn't just make you hungry, spreads around, cauterized and incinerated flesh fighting for dominance against copiously shed blood.

Embers flare out of nowhere, and out of the same place comes the creature you decided to summon. Stepping straight from what sure sounds like all-out war (and likely is just what happens on a daily basis in the place in question), a female humanoid with large, notable horns moves into your chamber, the things growing out of her forehead looking like they grow out pointy protrusions specifically to have them point at each other along their lengths.

Only a little of her white hair is covered by the front-facing iron diadem she wears, the prongs at its sides sweeping along all the way towards her cheeks where a few pieces of the material hang on seemingly nothing at all. She doesn't wear much clothing, just a few bands of cloth loosely covering her breasts coming from around her iron choker and a few more tied around her waist to do the same for her groin. And, of course, some armor for her limbs, her right arm bearing a long flagpole, strange demonic writing on the flag strung upon it.

That last part is pretty unsurprising, as she is a Flagbearer, a maiden of war that lives and breathes for the sake of uninhibited carnage above all.

There also are chains on her, probably symbolizing something, with a lock on her choker to keep them in place as they wind from it to more iron bands on her arms as well as between said arms behind her back, with enough give they don't inhibit her movement too much. Similarly, her flag is literally chained to its pole, which is again probably a matter of symbolism, but this one chain is made of gold, interestingly.

She also has several very notable tattoos, which is likely why she wears so little, from the eye right between and beneath her breasts over the mark right above her crotch all the way to the flowers etched into her arms, only for their blooms to literally grow out of her skin in the form of thick thorns, cracks in both her skin and the thorns themselves actually making them look like closed flowers. You appreciate the artistry that goes into this part, actually.

Someone is making a point to look nice, in an abjectly inhuman sort of way, and you think you like it.

Heterochromatic eyes return your gaze after you are done taking in each other, summoner to summoned. She is the first to speak, voice oddly melodious for something that was literally born in the middle of unending war. "You have called upon a Daughter of Carnage."

"I did," you agree easily. "I wanted someone to lead my very own little army and I wanted someone to do it right."

"One thing you got right, then," she smirks, that little blush not going away. "Of course I will demand-"


Flagbearer Demon

More of a commander than a fighter in its own right, a Flagbearer should not be underestimated by itself, but shows its true value when in command of other demons. Magically capable of viewing fields of battle from different angles, they can share their vision with their superior or summoner, conveying their orders when they do not take charge of the army they lead themselves. They also can empower those demons at least technically weaker than themselves, which combined with their keen mind for warfare makes them a potent force multiplier.


"YES! YES! FUCK ME HARDER, YOU ANIMAL!"

You look down on the demon in your arms, completely lost in what you're doing to her. "So do we have a deal?"

"WHATEVER, JUST KEEP GOING! HARDER!"

Always nice to work with people that can appreciate your talents, you suppose. Especially if they agree to work for you for free like this.


Notes on the Bio-Camera Mk.II

Improved integration with advanced sensors (particularly latest eneral improvements, Flaxan spaceflight tech, Machine Head's mobile solutions to some issues, among others)

Internal construction rehauled- was about time

Added grown components beyond base model, now has a proper bio-engineered eye inside

Light receptors are basic shit, how does nature keep screwing them up so badly?

Added detector mode for handheld version, though it's crappy on anything nonliving

Included a few mods on the basic bot model based on some of these changes, though they're minor

Also, kept the old-timey aesthetic and ability to immediately print out pictures, including different picture modes. The 'naked' one took a bit of work, but I refuse to design a system that scans a living body and can't show you how that body looks.


You spent most of the following day following up on what you were trying to accomplish earlier, working your way down your bucket list of experimental potion ingredients. You'd think that, being somewhat of a hobby artist yourself, alchemy being as much an art as a science wouldn't be an issue for you, but, uh…

It kind of is. You have to guess at what exactly you're doing every step of the way with little to no ways of telling if what you try worked, which is conducive to neither art nor science. That said, you can at least just perform mass experiments, supported by the Thinker to keep them all organized and catalogue the results, to try and make sense of what happens.

The topic at hand being what it is said sense is mostly nonexistent, but your intuition tells you you're on the right track here and there, which is good enough for you. Playing things by ear and improvising is, like, ninety percent of what you do anyways.

With the girls (as in, Alicia and Ariana) off to school now that the younger one prodded her elder sister into properly going again, you certainly have the time, if nothing else, and this time you're actually getting invested enough to spend most of the day on this. Until, that is, you realize you're doing so and spontaneously decide you shouldn't spend your vacation cooped up with work.

The things you really came to this dimension for are already taken care of, meaning the rest of the time you have? All vacation time. You're just fucking around and grabbing anything else nice you can find beyond that, when you don't just fuck around or use the extra time for your idle vanity projects.

Meaning that, well, you really should fuck around a bit. Which is how and why none other than Night Queen walks into the Teen Team's secret bridge base twenty minutes after you decide you're working too much, holding an old-timey camera, the type that can directly print out pictures, that may or may not be able to closely analyze all sorts of things about a living being's body.

Faced with the speechless handful of heroes that just met up to have a team planning session earlier, you smile triumphantly. "There is this newfangled thingy called 'artistic photography'. We are going to do it."

Rex Splode winces, leaning towards the rest of the group to whisper to nobody in particular. "Ah crap on a spiky spit."

You appreciate the sentiment. At least he knows he's worth shit.


"Shalt a stone be cast at all, always be the first and last to cast it."

"Love thy neighbor, unless he is undeserving of compassion. In such cases, thou shalt be the pettiest neighbor thou can be. Salt the ashes of their front yard at thy discretion."

"Cast out not the unbeliever, for they know not their falseness. Instead, thou shalt educate them on the truth, that they may be unbelievers no more.

Cast out instead the false prophet, for he leads man astray from the word of the Lord. His crooked staff shall be cut in twain before his words shall find fruitful soil."

"Thou shalt not commiteth that which the wisemen call a dick move, for it shall be known in the beyond and forever rubbed in thy face."

"For though thou fucketh around, thou shalt find out mightily indeed, for the Lord hath a sense of humor."

-Quotes attributed to the Book of Mercy


"And the world lay dying, its last breath quiet and even until such time it ceased to be. But from the corpse of the world, a new world was born, a new firmament of possibilities. So, too, doth the Lord die, and so too doth the Lord rise.

The true meaning of death is not an end. Such the Lord teaches, for He is merciful and holds the eternity of His faithful in His chest."

"And though the Lord wears many faces, all faces are the Lord, and the Lord is all of them. Some may be kind and forgiving, others vengeful without limit, all serving the purpose of Lord of Mercy.

For what are we, if not seeking His compassion? It may not be deserved, yet Mercy cares not, for it is not a deserved thing, but rather one gifted of one's own volition.

For what are we, if not deserving extinction? Mercy is not an act of infinite compassion.

Mercy is to forgive and grant new life, such as it is to end life and allow a new beginning. Manyfold are the Lord's faces, for manyfold is what must be done."

"And the sun was cast from the Heavens Beyond, brought to an end by sharpness unending. Such was its spite that it beheld the Lord. 'May you yet be beyond me,' it proclaimed, 'may my curse forever divide you from Life and Light, that as I am cast above thou shalt be cast into shade.'

And though the Lord answered not, such it was, for He allowed it. Such is as He teaches us: Though we may not agree with another, we can allow their spite, for to answer is beneath us. And in time, bonds broken may yet be reforged, spite may yet be undone, and truth may yet emerge to wash away indignity.

Such the sun shines to this day, impotent rays burning what they may, for the Lord made them grow Life in turn that division from it may not keep him; and Light was cast in many forms, that it may bathe his countenance unperturbed.

No weapon shall prosper against the Lord, and no sticks nor bones nor words shall impede him. Such shall his faithful not be impeded, for in his teachings do we find Truth."

-Later quotes attribute to the Book of Mercy


"Mhm," you make, looking over the data you successfully surreptitiously obtained from the Teen Team, having gotten them to pose and work with you while you pretended to only kind of know what you were doing (you made sure to take some actually good pictures of them, you're pretty sure at least a couple of them will end up pinned somewhere inside their base).

You, naturally, kept the analytics your little camera, based off of the research cameras meant to help Rapture's inhabitants figure out who spliced themselves up how, provided you with, as opposed to the printed pictures themselves- you added the function to just print and keep the rest backed up inside the device itself for later review for a reason.

Well, technically you did that just because you figured it might come in handy two generations of iterative improvements to these things back, but you were right, it's coming in handy now with the most modern version you could come up with, Despite the retro look you kept and all.

For now, you nod to yourself now that you're back inside your lair, fiddling with a couple of charts and biometric scans you had the camera you used print out. "Interesting. Very interesting, in fact."

The purpose of this little exercise earlier was to see if you can't figure out where the Teen team's heroes got their powers from, to cut straight to the short of it. You've seen some interesting results from analyzing the Guardians of the Globe already, and the TT is basically right next door so you decided to corner them and see what you could get.

You didn't necessarily expect to see the results, but you do recognize some of them.

"Interesting how?" One of the Mauler Twins asks, them being one of the souls you summoned to help you in your lab for this. "They're completely normal for the most part, weirdest bit I see is some of the nutritional challenges a couple of bodies are operating under. Brain chemistry looks a bit borked in Eve and Splode, but that's it."

"See, that's how we know you're the inferior clone," his counterpart gravels, their identical, deep voices adding something to their whole shtick, you feel. "If the boss says something's up, that brain imbalance is obviously more than what it looks like."

"Worse," Yoshi croaks, bringing up the rear. Hey, you're analyzing stuff, the anal(yzer) hero's presence is pretty obvious, isn't it? "The signs are faint here, but… I recognize them, too. They were turned into Espers, at an earlier age than what we usually did."

"The process likely wasn't as well-refined, too," you point out with a shrug. "But yeah, I'm pretty sure both Atom Eve and Rex Splode are espers, they got their powers just like how I got my gravity stuff. Or in a similar way, whatever."

"What about this Kate girl? Nothing notable in her profile, beyond some old malnutrition," Mauler twin number two throws in.

"Probably something magical," you shrug. "If we can't see any explanations for a power, it's a safe enough bet we can proceed with it. I did sense something funky with her soul when I was in the same room, but that perception isn't exactly all that precise in that way."

And you have nothing on Robot at all, which was to be expected considering he usually isn't around in person. Drones and secondary robotic bodies all the way with that one.

"What joy. One less thing to worry about." Yoshi is already massaging his brow, lookin like he's about to have a headache. Despite his inability to do so, which is in itself kind of impressive. "So someone has been creating Espers in this dimension, most likely completely independently of Academy City's knowledge and programs?"

"That's what it looks like," you agree. "Why and how is the next question, but I honestly have no idea. They're also not doing it all over the place, else we'd have a lot more heroes and villains with those kinds of powers. Though Eve's abilities are pretty insane."

"Molecular and sub-molecular manipulation of matter is far from unknown, she simply seems to be fairly advanced for an Esper," your unwilling informant says. "Level 3 to Level 4, I estimate. Hard to be certain without the kinds of precise measurements we used to take, but the efficacy, scope and ease of usage indicates as much."

"Right, good thing we have an expert in the field of experimenting on kids," you smirk, feeling the indignation on Yoshi's part… Even as he doesn't really have any retorts to make.

Man, how he ever thought he was one of the good guys back in the first life he remembers you'll never know.


Sadly, while some of your scientific endeavors are proceeding apace as it is, some others have somewhat stalled out; you asked Cecil if his people have made any progress on the sound frequency against Viltrumites thing, but he claimed there haven't been any opportunities for any tests so far.

Apparently subjecting, say, Mark, Omni-Man's son, to a bunch of sounds that are extremely unusual and weird to see how he reacts is kind of a dead giveaway that the GDA is up to something, which you can't help but agree with. The last thing everyone wants is to let Nolan know everyone's aware of what he's done.

In general, this very specific sound that seems to screw them up is going to be extremely rare in nature as well as mechanical capabilities to produce sound- if it wasn't, everyone would be aware of it by now by sheer dint of the odds of Omni-Man coming across it at some point in the last, like, twenty years of moving all over Earth.

Which complicates things somewhat, suffice it to say.

To be fair, it would indeed be hella suspicious to spontaneously arrange for a bunch of 'concerts' in areas the two known Viltrumites on Earth (well, one Viltrumite and one half-Viltrumite, more or less the same difference). And to do just one or two and somehow stumble upon the precise sound needed, without making literally everyone else in the area bleed from their nose and eyes and ears in the process?

Because just saying, you'd probably need to blast that sound really loud to actually have any observable effect. Heck, if a little bit was enough, Viltrumites themselves would probably wear ear protection all year round just in case.

It's what you'd do, really. If you have one major Achilles' Heel, of course you're gonna defend it, right?

In other news, Cecil is still trying to keep you from doing anything regrettable to Immortal by way of poking him into his soul bits. Entirely unwarranted concern, but he's just pretending he doesn't know where the guy is while he's preparing to take on his old buddy Omni-Man for round two.


Weirdly enough, you're still not feeling any hungrier than earlier. Which is slowly becoming concerning, as you distinctly remember that you used to get a pang of mild hunger around this time, when the sun goes down, usually.

Well, you aren't experiencing increasing hunger, at least, which would be more concerning. As it stands, you'll just have to keep an eye on things and, hopefully, figure out exactly what is going on.


You sit there staring at the alchemical reactions now finally taking place as intended, frothy, burning red liquid slowly swelling inside of the closed container of reinforced glass you've taken to using for some sorts of experiments.

Most of it is semi-homogenous, with only a few pockets of other fluids floating around as they somehow refuse to mix in with the rest just yet, waiting to do so until later despite this behavior making absolutely no sense if you discount all the magical reality manipulation going on inside of there right now. Seeing as that is very much the point, you just shake your head, grumbling to yourself.

"Okay, so for the record, I was right in assuming blood would be a catalyst," you say, knowing the Thinker is with you as always. "Why exactly it had to be a virgin's blood in particular is beyond me, but okay, it's magic. Might be an issue, though. Virginity is the one thing that doesn't tend to last around me even if I try to preserve it."

You suppose you'll just have to figure out a reliable source you won't accidentally turn non-virginal at some point. Now if only hospitals labeled blood bags by 'does fuck' and 'does not fuck', this would be a lot easier and more convenient to do, but, well, it's not like there's any discernable difference to non-unholy magical bullshit, despite what some idiots may think on the matter.


Like any other dimension you've visited so far, the one you are currently fumbling around inside of has its own little idiosyncrasies and cultural differences when comparing them to others. Even in what seem like 'merely' vastly divergent parallel versions of Earth, such as here and now and Earth Bet, notable shifts can be observed just about everywhere.

This isn't really surprising- yeah, sure, you have superheroes and villains in both, but they do behave and present themselves to the public in very different ways. There's just… a different sort of cape culture, more or less, and pop culture always is heavily influenced by that.

Then you have all the aliens, supernatural shit that's semi-acknowledged to be a thing in some circles, overabundant natural disasters… Well, suffice it to say that the things you're looking at right now, mostly popular entertainment in the form of movies and other TV series and stuff, video games, music, art, all those kinds of things that you can find on the internet so the Thinker can add it to your collection of interdimensional copyright violations.

It's actually kind of informative- and confirms that, in this dimension at least, superpowers and shit have been around since ancient times and probably before then, too. Greek mythology, for one, at least seems to be a tad bit more literal here, seeing as they have the skeleton of the actual minotaur in some museum over there.

Whether it's actually real or not you have no idea, but they did push the exhibition on their internet site, so there's that.

Of course then you also have the more modern examples you started out looking into. Some heroes and even a select few villains have merch that isn't necessarily unpopular, and you even find a couple cartoons about the Guardians of the Globe.

There's nothing wrong, of course, about taking a bit of time and perusing a couple of interesting titles and hand-drawn comics while you're already analyzing the data the Thinker siphoned off the local internet so far. May as well, who's gonna stop you?

… Well, Ariana does when she realizes what you're up to, that being binge-watching a bunch of stuff she also likes, but she only slows you down until she's sitting on your lap and supplied with the popcorn you made to consume on this occasion. You can deal with that just fine.


Next off, well, in the end, when you want something done right you just have to do it yourself. That being said you make sure Ariana is securely tucked away in bed for the moment before you do just that- getting what you want yourself instead of annoying Cecil until he takes care of it for you.

Your previous strategy was passingly amusing, but you only have so much patience to expend on it; if what you wanted actually required a delicate touch or, indeed, any real level of subtlety, you would keep on writing a message to Cecil every two hours (on the exact second, in fact), but seeing as the opposite is true…

You find the Immortal a tad bit out of the way, that is, all the way in what you suppose is meant to be a secret facility in Florida. Of course he's notified the moment you show up and start to climb onto its roof, as the building doesn't actually have any street-level access- it's meant for fliers to get in and out easily, not for easy pizza delivery, it seems.

You take a bit to actually get up, as you're deliberately pretending not to have… quite a lot of your abilities; the entire exercise is more just you having fun while looking like you're having difficulty scaling a bit of a wall, limbs flailing as appropriate along the way.

In the end, though, you get to be right where you want to be, sitting opposite from the burly man known as the Immortal, leader of the Guardians of the Globe and probably bearer of some other titles you just don't really care about. The place you're meeting in is fairly bare and uninteresting as well, just a mostly featureless room the GDA probably put together as its standard 'nebulous government conspiracy' package when they readied the building for secretive use.

You mostly just want to figure out what exactly is going on with the Immortal's soul, and how and why his supernatural abilities work the way they do. Who knows, maybe one day you'll be able to replicate the effects in others, or at least get another version of the same going- fuck knows you've invested a lot into being able to empower your minions all this time.

It just helps a lot to be able to throw a dozen capes or two at a given problem with the certainty that said problem will cease to exist. Delegation is not only your secret weapon against paperwork of all times, it is also generally a great tool to have and make use of in all situations life puts you in. Or unlife, as it were.

That isn't to say the man you demanded come sit down for half an hour so you can stare at him doesn't have his own thoughts on how to spend this time. "I never did have the opportunity to thank you, did I?"

You glance up at the huge guy nearing two meters in height, currently looking almost comical as his wide-shouldered build is just too big for the normal-sized chair he's sitting on. "Huh?" You ask, tilting your head. You can figure what he means, but you don't even want to bother answering with any more than that.

"For helping to bring me back to life," he explains. "As well as my teammates. We… We worked together for a long time, and I would call all of them my friends, so… thank you."

He lowers his head, eyes closed. In response, all you really do is shrug with a little 'meh' sound. "I don't really care, but alright, nice to know. Just try not to get all of them killed again, I only got so much time to waste on y'all."

"Duly noted," the guy you're deliberately trying to piss off says. "I just wanted to let you know. That said, I also would like to request that you try not to cause too much destruction, suffering, death and all such things in the meantime."

You give him the finger, still not blinking your eyes as you trace through whatever the hell is going on with his soul. "I'll do what I damn well want. You don't like it, make me stop."

"I was afraid that would be your answer," the Immortal sighs, his hand scratching through his beard for a moment. "Still, while I would prefer you did not need to kill those criminals Cecil set you after, I doubt anyone on the team will truly object over the matter."

Oh, so he does know about that stuff, huh? You would've thought Cecil would be compartmentalizing information and all, do the whole mushroom shtick with the heroes- keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit- but you suppose either the GDA is a lot more honest than you'd expect or else the Immortal is making a point to keep up with what's going on on his own time.

"Nobody asked for the Guardians' opinions, but sure," you allow. "Figure it's the reason you didn't invite me into the club, but 's not like I'd have joined anyways."

"Mhm," Immortal makes. "You're right of course, but what makes you so sure we would have let you join?"

"You offered Omni-Man a spot on your team. If he's good enough, I'm better." And that's just the damn facts. Even pretending to be weaker than you are, anyone with half a brain can see how, in terms of powers and associated abilities at least, very much the kind of person that merits a lot of effort to recruit.

Sure, the Guardians' morals are sabotaging them in that regard, what with you being very much in favor of just murdering whatever is making an issue of itself over taking anyone alive, but the principle of the matter remains the same.

"True enough, I suppose. And, just between you and me…" He leans in towards yourself. "I wouldn't want to add anyone to the team right now regardless. Aquarius is still dead and while we are all professionals, it still would not do to look like we are replacing him with a new member to make up the same numbers again."

You sneer at the hero now. "Yeah right, as if. If anything they're all traumatized over being betrayed by Omni-Man and wouldn't be able to trust anyone else brought in on the fly."

"That, too." The immortal straightens his back. "Honestly, it is nice to talk about these things with someone not directly beholden to anyone. It also helps you are above gossiping about the Guardians."

Meaning he can share shit with you without worrying about where the information ends up, seeing as if you really wanted to you could just get at it through other means anyways. So he won't even bother to keep it secret as long as it's not too personal?

Honestly, you can dig that. He hasn't suddenly become your favorite person in this dimension or anything, but the Immortal is alright, you suppose. You'll still murder him in a heartbeat if expedient, but you'll do so with the understandding that he's decent.