It ain't easy, to be a hero. Not that you should be one to talk, considering you very decisively went and became a villain pretty early on, but being a real hero means you have to put your all into protecting civilians any time a villain comes around and starts a fight- or you start a fight with them, anyways.
That sounds simple in theory, but it's a lot more difficult than you may think in practice. Conveying this drastically increased challenge, you reason, should be part of the training you inflict on Mark.
Alternatively, you just enjoy the thought of making him fly around while clutching a teddy bear close to his chest. Because who else would play the role of the innocent, helpless civilian child if not trusty Mister Teddy, in his smaller form?
…The bigger form is reserved for later, in case Mark is too good at protecting him.
"Muahahahaha! Cower before the dread might of the Night Queen!" You exclaim, diving after Invincible with outstretched arms. "I thirst for the blood of the innocent!"
"You, uh, you'll never- oouf!" You slam into his side with the force of a thousand fitful children, both your feet impacting soft tissue.
That said, he doesn't just let go of the 'hostage', which is something to work with, at least. "Gotta think faster! Pithy one-liners are a learned skill!"
"Are they, are they really that important?!" Mark wheezes, free hand holding his side. He'll survive, of course- you didn't hit him that hard. "I kind of figured saving the day was priority number one, and you literally beat not talking when I'm fighting into me."
Heh. Making him bite his tongue with a quick uppercut whenever he open his mouth will never get old. That said, he did just ask a legitimate question.
"It is, but if you wanna be a hero, it's not enough to just win," you lecture him, crossing your arms. "You have to inspire confidence doing it, too. So you wait for the right moment, make it look like child's play, then you keep on fighting."
"I… guess that makes sense?"
Just in that moment, you sense something coming closer, your blood-radar pinging you for another flying humanoid nearing your position. Twisting in the air to look towards them, you see…
A lot of pink. Huh. Inside the back of your head, Doc Seismic grumbles about sexism and stuff, but you are a deliberately politically incorrect abomination against all that exists, so you pay him no mind as Atom Eve ascends into the sky to join you and Mark.
"Hey there!" She calls out brightly. "What're you two doing?"
Sensing an opportunity to both make a point and fuck with Mark, you immediately let your eyes tear up as you point at him, your voice quivering. "He took Mister Teddy!"
Eve crosses her arms, then quirks an eyebrow as she gives him an unimpressed look.
"Hey, no, wait, it isn't like tha… Ah." Still holding onto the simulated hostage, Mark sighs. "This is… technically… training? Night Queen's been helping me get better, so…"
Ah, this must be the good ol' inability to speak words good teenage boys suffer from in the presence of teenage girls. You never had any of that yourself, but hey, you observed it in plenty of other boys back when you were in school.
Viltrumite Tonic Effects: 24 to all physical rolls-26 to all physical rolls
Healing Capstone
The Healing Blood (Capstone): You may imbue your own blood with miraculous healing properties, allowing it to cure all disease, wounds, and more instead of whatever other effects it would have, if you so desire. Additionally, chosen Blood Vessels of your own may be anointed with it, granting them a weaker version of the same effects. (Synergy Perk)
Precision Powers (Capstone): Using your supernatural powers, from claws with a finer cutting edge than any normal scalpel over the advantages in diagnostics of your advanced inhuman senses, storing a small amount of medical supplies inside your shadow or the healing properties of becoming your thrall all the way to disgustingly precise gravitational manipulation, you are never bereft of just about most tools you could need for any kind of surgery, healthcare or other medical procedure.
Ariana, the youngest of the three young women you've recently been dealing with as part of your 'civilian' identity's activities, has been catching on to the fact that you have an alternate identity, you believe- or, if nothing else, Alicia pointed it out to you after she, apparently, tried to get some info out of her big sis.
Who promptly decided she wasn't going to be the one responsible for this crap and kicked it up the ladder right at yourself, in a move you have to begrudgingly respect. She wasn't sure how much you were fine with letting Ariana know, so instead of asking you real quick via telepathy she just sent you a message through the same means and told you to please deal with it before her sister gets herself into trouble.
Which, well, hey, fair enough. At least she did make sure to ask you rather than just refuse to say anything, then ignore the issue until it inevitably blows up like in literally every movie or comic book written (for the sake of drama and crap).
Honestly, that's a pretty stupid trope and you kind of hate it, personally. Call it you being overly sensitive about it, but when you have important things to tell to your loved ones or something, fucking do so. Hiding things is only really worth it in very specific circumstances, and you've always been all up for telling the truth when and where it works out.
That's not to say you should always be completely honest in all cases, of course. There's a reason you consider it so fucking funny to trick, screw over or otherwise defeat people by simply telling the truth.
It never gets old, man.
But case in point, you don't really feel like giving Ariana the full story, or at least not quite yet. After all, surprisingly perceptive and smart she may be, the girl's still kind of a gremlin- and you feel like letting her in on the secret, while fine with yourself as Gabriel, kind of goes against how Night Queen would handle this.
And seeing as this is her business, you decide to handle it according to this particular persona's MO. Meaning that when you grab Ariana for a quick talk, you don't actually tell her everything just yet.
"Hey, I just wanted to let you know. Hypothetically. If I had any superpowers."
"Oh yeah. Hypothetically," the girl nods, looking up at you expectantly.
"I totally wouldn't tell you."
"What? Why not?!" Immediately pouting, Ariana reaches up to tug at your arm. "I'm totes trustworthy and stuff!"
"I don't know," you drawl with a small grin, "you kind of look like a blabbermouth."
"I ain't never told of Alana even though she was, like, super obvious when we were all living together!" Yeah, somehow you aren't all that surprised to hear that.
"Sure, but that's her problem. If I was a nefarious supervillain with Alicia's help, I wouldn't tell anyone, and certainly not you."
"Moouuu!" The pouting intensifies, and you can see the way she's trying to figure out what exactly your deal is. Are you actually a villain like you indicated? Are you a hero instead, and just trying to lead her into the wrong direction?
Maybe you're neither, and you just completely independently knew who Green Ghost was already… Or you're just a really good actor, maybe you just didn't give a fuck during the incident that incited this entire situation to begin with.
That's all for her to figure out now. You, for your part, just proceed to pat her head a little, until she remembers she's currently miffed at you despite how much she enjoys this treatment and runs off in a huff.
'And though the unbelievers were many and their conviction strong, the Lord cared not for their will, for they had failed to recognize His name. And so though they were many, they were made few; and though their conviction was strong, it was turned into nothing.
Yet when the believers know Truth in their hearts, they may be many or they may be few; their wills may be strong or weak; for the Lord will reach out to them and allow them His Grace.
So may the bodies of the sinful be many, and uncountable in number, may they bay and scream for the blood of the faithful, the Lord safeguards their flesh and their souls, that they may find Grace in his hand.
Such the Lord decreed, and His angels followed, one by one declaring their virtue.
Though shall darkness close in on thyself, bleakness swallowing up all that is and salvation seem far at hand, skip forward twenty-eight pages where thou shall find the prayers and rites to the Sword of the Lord, whom judges all equally in the eyes of the innumerably weak. Go ahead. Theology has its time and place, and though thou shalt read this entire book to understand and know all rites and incantations, sometimes thou shalt prioritize.'
-The Book of Mercy, First Edition, 'On The Miracles of the True Faith'
Being quite undead, and having been for a while, you can say that the issues that come with being alive (as a baseline human, anyway) are, honestly, just not worth it. Your body continually breaks down, you suffer from dozens of small little issues that add up day after day, from stuff as innocuous as sitting slightly wrong and your spine becoming a non-euclidian nightmare down to pustules growing under your skin and giving you blood poisoning without you even knowing about it, necessarily.
Then you have all the diseases, having to actually eat normal people food, and actually the right kinds of it on top to keep yourself fed adequately, need to get sufficient amounts of sleep, keep yourself from various hazards that are extremely trifling to you but already dangerous for a living, average human…
Seriously, they fucking die in car accidents, all the time. Heck, basic kitchen devices can and will burn humans if they're careless.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you barely even notice most things once you use your exoskeletal armor, and even without extending it out of your skin it actually protects you pretty well just by staying in a state of 'maybe-existence', entirely passively.
And that's not even getting started on psychological aspects of living, and how they suck, too. It's not like you really lost any capacities for emotion you had before you went undead, you just kind of… reprioritized them a lot. You can still feel pain, it just processes differently in your excuse for a fleshy blob of brain matter.
You also still retain the ability to feel pleasure, arguably much more so given your enhanced senses and how much more you can feel using them. Honestly, full-on undead conversion with all the advantages and no disadvantages? Yes, please.
All that said, there still are a scant few things that can actually annoy or bother you. Boredom, while similar to pain in that you do experience it in a very different way than when you were alive, still is a thing for you and it does remain fairly unpleasant, it just takes a lot more than some monotony here and there to cause it.
Which is why, when you decided to go and personally ready some potions mostly as a change of pace rather than anything else, you also went ahead and tried spicing the whole arduous brewing process up a bit.
Hence why you are, to put it mildly, jazzing out. While brewing potions that let you (or anyone else that drinks them, for that matter) regenerate any damage inflicted upon them.
It's pretty nice. Even the Thinker has fun with it in her subtle way, moving camera angles, adjusting the normal walking motion of her bodies and stuff like that to kind of go in time with the beat of the music, but in a way you'd have to be specifically observing for in order to notice.
It's pretty cute in its own way, really.
Making deals with demonic forces of pure evil is kind of your default state sometimes, you ponder to yourself as you pleasantly chat with the extension of some enormous, amorphous horror currently materialized in the form of an oversized, ridged and segmented green tentacle. It's actually a rather great conversationalist, which only adds to the transaction you're currently making.
It's nothing extremely big, as far as these things go, you're just trading a good couple of your surplus Flaxan souls- specifically those marked for being particularly uppity and unwilling to just stay inside the world inside your figurative stomach- for a couple of research papers and samples relating to a particular little side project of yours.
Or, no, it's not even really something you'd describe as a 'project' as such. It's just that you have, for quite some time now, since long before you ever came to this dimension in fact, been looking into collecting more and more means of empowerment.
Capes are powerful. Having a bunch of superhuman abilities on hand has made the Lord Street Crypts, including their dimensional permutations you also set up over time, the most powerful organization around wherever your gang exists. No small part of that is that you have been basically adding extra capes left and right, both by recruiting any that you were fine with not eating and literally creating them by giving out powers.
Just your ability to thrall and turn people into vampires to grant them a semblance of your own powers is already pretty powerful in itself, but that never did stop you from pursuing additional avenues of power granting on top. Like, hey, you've been hopping dimensions all this time and a big part of your efforts was to basically do this one thing!
See Remnant, and the advantages of Aura. Which still is pretty neat.
But case in point, the reason you're exchanging pleasantries with a giant tentacle after receiving a bunch of stuff and information from it is that you have now obtained some extensive research on the topic of a super soldier serum, designed on some alternate Earth to create enhanced combatants acting on the edge of the limits of human capability.
It wouldn't work on yourself, of course- your body completely ignores chemicals and radiation both, both of which are the main components of this stuff- but it certainly would work on your more or less human minions just fine, you reckon. Naturally you'll need to test it on some disposable test subjects first, just to make sure it works as advertised, but hey, that's what test subjects are for.
You just have to remember to properly dispose of them. But really, that's standard procedure for you by this point, so what could possibly go wrong?
You haven't had blood for… around a day now, and you are noticing that you're actually getting just a little hungry again. Whatever is going on that makes you immune to hunger, it has to have not been happening in this span of time.
What could it possibly be, though?
Getting access to the sealed archives the GDA keeps on its own operations is, perhaps, one of the harder things someone could manage to do in regard to this shadowy government organization. They actually do take their security seriously, and none of these records you are after are kept digitally.
The easiest way to ensure you don't get hacked is to just keep the data in question out of any hackable systems. Simple, but annoyingly effective against the Thinker's usual methods- which turns it into a problem you have to solve yourself.
Luckily, all it took to make Cecil agree to let you dig into the GDA's past as Night Queen (because you 'wanna know what happened in the last century or so) was some puppy dog eyes, increasingly insistent demands over the course of around half an hour and some minor telekinesis used in boredom while he bought time by claiming to have someone search for the documents you wanted to access.
You're pretty sure that, in the end, he just decided it would be easier to simply give you what you want, then keep a lookout on anything related going forward. Cecil is, maybe unsurprisingly, pretty decent at handling superpowered temper tantrums without getting anyone killed.
Or, you suspect, while getting a lot of people killed if and when he decides to. The old man very much is utterly fine with some murder if that's what it takes to keep this shitshow of a planet running.
Too bad he also has some actual principles, otherwise you'd totally be trying to recruit him.
But yeah, about what you were actually trying to do: Looking into what the fuck exactly happened to produce espers like Atom Eve, or Rex Splode. After all, the mere fact they can use their powers without spontaneously melting or exploding into goo is actually pretty impressive in its own way, considering what you can tell about how they got them.
But, well, long story short, Eve's mother, her biological one that is, actually produced espers every time she had a kid. That was kind of significant back in her day, so much so that one of Cecil's… predecessors slash fellow candidates for DA directorship had her restrained and used for mass-production in hopes of recreating Atom Eve, who had been smuggled out of the whole esper creation project by her biological father by that time.
Long story short, she actually used to have a bunch of siblings- it's just that all of them actually were as unstable as you know she should have been, and would have if not for what amounts to a genetic fluke. As it is, things happened, she actually found out way back when, years after her mother presumably went completely braindead due to the circumstances she was kept in, and she ended up killing the potential rival for Cecil's position. After he killed her mother. And all her siblings basically imploded.
It was apparently quite the party. It was also how Donald came to work for Cecil, you think, though the details aren't actually noted down in the information you can access here. You suppose the GDA's HR standards also involve extensive secrecy, among other practices common to it.
Anyways, Eve's mother has been dead, cremated and the ashes disposed of a long, long time ago, so you likely won't get access to the source of this phenomenon; according to what you're reading, Cecil apparently made sure nobody would keep on trying to clone anything based off of the woman. Not in as many words, but you do know he's charmingly idealistic at times, so he likely actually would have objected to this whole series of events from their inception.
Or it could be Donald actually took some initiative there, considering his involvement. Could have gone either way.
What matters for you is that, sadly, you likely won't be able to really make use of this stuff, or not easily, at the very least. Rex, for his part, had some latent psychic potential that was later enhanced through some basic knowledge on espers the GDA had from this whole fiasco, as well as some kind of implant, but he's basically one giant weird edge case to begin with.
Sadly, the information about Academy City's own programs you have, somewhat fragmentary as it may be, surpasses what the GDA has, by and large. Not too big of a problem, far as you're concerned; you mostly just wanted to find out more, at this point.
You did that, you suppose. Annoyingly, mentioning any of this to Atom Eve is liable to have her either just lashing out or simply run away, so you suppose you'll keep what you found out about her to yourself, unless you find a reason not to.
You have a couple of new targets to follow up on, pointed out to you by your magic, ones that promise to be both worthwhile and convenient to go after in the near future.
That's not to say that you actually know when and where that will be, however, nor much who they are, beyond the brief impressions left inside your mind after you pulled on the Cosmic Guidance that got you even this much information.
Naturally, you need to rectify this.
Hence why you are currently taking refuge inside the Glorious Night Castle's scrying room, a dedicated space set aside for the use of particular magic of yours that shares some similarities with Cosmic Guidance, insofar as you consider it to be part of the same branch of reality manipulation as it.
Specifically, your scrying room is largely featureless, aside from the material its walls, ceiling and even floor are made of. All of them are mirrors, that is, and you only set foot inside once you're completely devoid of any dirt or dust that might cling to you by way of momentarily transforming into a shadow and back.
The one big thing inside of it is a huge-ass ball made of carefully crafted crystal, perfectly round and floating in the middle of the air. Your literal crystal ball, more or less, to be used on this occasion.
All so that you can make maximum use of that one spell. You decided to call it 'Glimpse', by the way.
Using it, you can conjure images of the past and the future of things you envision in the right kinds of surfaces- reflective ones, that is, which is what you need the specialized room for- with relative reliability. The crystal ball is where you start, pulling up a few bits and pieces here and there, refining your approach as you go and shifting particular visions over onto the mirror surfaces around the room to view them in full-sized glory.
It's a bit of a process, but hey, it also does grant you a lot of information. It's less precise than some of your other methods, sometimes giving you also positives or possibilities rather than comparative certainties, which is why you try not to rely on it too much, but in cases like this one, it does come in handy.
Battle Beast, who you have now confirmed is a damn furry just as you'd feared (you seriously should reconsider just officially nominating this dimension as Earth Furry or something) is, apparently, on a space ship of some kind, or will be in the next while, anyways. Considering he's a giant leonine, white-furred alien covered in blood in more than half the visions you have of him, this does not surprise you too much.
Dinosaurus, once you actually get some magical eyes on the right guy rather than any of the apparently dozens of dinosaur- or reptile-themed capes in this dimension, doesn't seem to be doing much of anything; you're pretty sure this is your guy, at least, considering he's not actually running around as a three meter humanoid T-Rex for the moment.
He did at some point in the past though. You're pretty sure he did, at least. You had the Thinker confirm the identity of the person you ended up Glimpsing, then used your Find spell to confirm that one David Anders is indeed the right guy.
That or someone in his general location, it's a 50/50 chance, you reckon, and you're fine with taking it. Worst case you just accidentally chew down an otherwise random civilian and know better afterwards, which isn't much of a risk far as you're concerned.
Lastly, Octoboss. A giant, reddish, roughly humanoid creature with loads of tentacles in the place of parts of its face, hands and feet, somehow in command of a large force of 'squidmen', apparently.
Using the visions you can get of this admittedly relatively unique individual (you only accidentally target other things a handful of times while you spy on his past and future), you can more or less nail down where he currently is- or will soon-ish be- lurking, that being a section of the Atlantic Ocean the Thinker reasons out by means of her magical techno-wizardry used to predict the future herself.
…That or she basically took all the clear data you could get through your magical visions and did some hardcore computing to figure out where what patterns of water currents can be found, or some shit. You don't really ask for all that much detail, to be honest, and instead simply trust her to know what she's doing.
That's the whole point of teamwork, after all. If you had to counter-check everything everyone else was doing, you'd never get any real delegation done.
Throughout your work writing the sequel to your surprisingly popular (in Remnant, anyway, you didn't give it much time after publishing on Bet) book, you've been keeping the story and action pretty close to the main protagonist, overall, focused on the events surrounding his escape from captivity seeing as that's the main theme and focus of the whole work.
However, as you consider everything you have so far, and go over a few of your older brainstorming sessions, you realize you may need to thicken the eventual novel itself a bit more than you already are. There's enough space for a subplot or two!
Now, Jake, your intrepid protagonist, doesn't have any siblings, but he did have his fair share of friends, most of them in high school and all as you'd expect. Most of them didn't really realize he was absent, as a short interlude you already wrote early on, thanks to Bella actively going out of her way to keep everyone at school, as well as his parents, unaware of the whole thing using the mental influence powers you gave vampires in this work of fiction.
She just needs to lock eyes with someone to influence them, pretty much. Both kind of important to the plot at several points and a bit of deliberate misleading vampire propaganda, seeing as while you can do funky stuff by looking into people's eyes, you absolutely aren't reliant on doing so in order to mindfuck them.
But back to those friends, who, now that Bella is absent for a while, are starting to remember, and asking questions. A couple of them look into what, exactly, happened to Jake and just like that, you have a couple of scenes you can insert as the plot progresses along.
Speaking of the plot, it's actually coming along itself. You've got Jake and ghost girl working together as they plan their route halfway across the country, almost getting mugged along the way only for ghost girl to fuck with the would-be-muggers' heads so much Jake can reverse-mug them and secure some traveling funds from the money they took from other victims already.
Unbeknownst to them, however, Chloe has picked up on the scent of ectoplasm lingering with Jake's, in the meantime, so another confrontation grows more and more imminent…
Today, you decided, you're having a nice and slow day, taking your time with everything you're doing; it does help that, while you're going to be putting Mark through his paces (methodically beating a teenager while in the body of a little girl is surprisingly therapeutic, for the record) and then negotiating a very particular deal through your literally hellish lawyer, none of those activities have any strict schedules they have to follow, so…
Really, you figured 'why not' and, not finding any answers, proceeded to act accordingly.
So you didn't abscond from the mansion first thing in the morning, instead staying around to make some breakfast, first. Naturally, cooking something actually nice is going to take you a bit, but, well, it's not like you had to get up especially early or anything when you don't ever sleep in the first place.
So, what do you make? Well, there's the obvious choices, of course, but… You kind of want to really do something nice for the girls, both because you kind of do enjoy cooking and making people eat what you make and because it's bound to, somehow, annoy Alana.
Just, y'know, she's still on about you and Ariana, so demonstrating your kitchen prowess to have her fawn over you will have obvious consequences.
What you go with, after thorough introspection of your goals in this situation, is a whole bunch of pancakes, the batter for which you prepare ahead of time, lots of buttered toast and stuff like that, but the real point of this particular breakfast, the day's magnum opus that will make everything that comes after it feel pointless and like an afterthought to the real point, is the cake.
The chocolate cake, to be precise. That you are baking right now. Layers of chocolate cream, chocolate dough and non-chocolate dough, topped with a thick covering of more chocolate and strawberries (because you like strawberries and they work well for this stuff), lovingly hand-crafted and soon to be cooled down to the perfect temperature for being eaten, once you're done making it.
You can't wait to see the girls' reactions when you pull this bad boy out of the fridge!
"Thish ish too good."
"M-hm, sho mush goodneff."
Alana eyes her sister and cousin, both of them having stuffed their cheeks with cake so they are now holding their cheeks with both palms, unable to overcome the juicy, chocolate-y goodness, the exact level of sweet that everyone present can enjoy, topped with the strawberries you carefully picked out and cut apart to add to it.
"At least keep your mouths closed while chewing," she commands, delicately doing just that as she consumes her next bite of cake. Under the table, she balls her free hand into a fist of victory, keeping her reaction to the taste entirely hidden, more or less, behind her poker face.
"But it'sh too good!" Ariana complains, as if nobody had heard her the first time she said it. Alana, by comparison, calms down rapidly after being admonished by her level-headed cousin, Green Ghost's civilian identity at least trying to pretend she has any dignity to speak of.
"Your sister is right, Ariana," she says once she's done chewing and swallowing. "Do mind your manners."
Meanwhile, Alicia has cleared her plate, holding it out for you. "Another slice, please."
The other two females present stare in shock, heads moving as though on unoiled hinges and in complete unison as they process the implications of those words. Then, when you casually, but precisely cut out a fresh new slice of cake, they swallow, realizing that there is a limited quantity of cake available.
You can damn well see Game Theory flash through their minds as they get right back to eating more, torn between savoring every bite and getting as many of them into their mouths as they can in the hopes of securing more overall cake.
What they don't know is that you actually made two and are leaving the second one for dinner. You do look forward to how they'll handle that…
Breakfast shenanigans ended up taking you a while to wrap up, which is just fine for you- there's no big hurry for anything today, which was why you decided on taking it slow to begin with- so when you pop out behind a corner, already floating in the air, and deliver a good roundhouse kick straight to Mark Greyson's face, you do so later than when you'd normally pick him up for training.
"ARGH! MY EYE!"
It's a deliberate ploy on your part, of course. This'll teach him to let down his guard, especially if he expected to meet someone that keeps on hitting him, but didn't for some reason.
"Miss me? 'Cause I sure didn't miss," you grin as you give the Thinker the go-ahead, causing both of you to be teleported up into the sky, all the while Mark is still rolling on the ground holding onto his face.
"Whoah!" Realizing he's falling all of a sudden, he uses his powers to push himself upright, blocking your next kick that's about to hit his balls with painful velocity more on instinct than anything else after all the cheap shots you've landed on him so far. "N-Night Queen?!"
"It's-a-me!" You cry out, seamlessly launching into a full-contact aerial assault he hurriedly dodges, only to receive a glancing strike from your leg as you lash out along the way. "Hope you're ready for today's training, 'cause I know you're not."
"What's that even mean?"
"It means icicle to the face!" This time, when you launch yourself at him, you do so in unison with a chantlessly conjured ice lance, one of the earliest spells you ever learned to use… And, now, one you truly can abuse, seeing as you ca just will it into existence.
Of course, you're careful to show it off ahead of time, giving Mark more than long enough to actually realize what's going on. Not that that makes it any easier to avoid both attacks at once, and in short order you have him pushed back on the defensive, one giant sharpened icicle after the next coming down on his ass even as you keep him engaged in hand to hand.
"C'mon! What'd I teach you about fighting, huh?"
Mark clicks his tongue, desperate enough to just eat your punch and let it push him away to avoid your spell. Instead, he reaches out for it as it passes him by, whirling around himself to throw it right back at you! "Can't win without fighting back!"
"Well, progress," you shrug, stretching one hand out. You don't actually have any control over conjured ice like this, your magic is all in magic it appear with a given amount of kinetic energy already applied to it, but you still have some cryokinesis even outside of your individual spells.
So you just make the icicle split apart around you harmlessly, ignoring it. Instead, your next one is bigger, almost the size of a person, and stays in place for just a moment.
"Good! Now try to survive the non-kiddy ones!"
Mark swallows, hard. "D-do I really have to?"
"You can die instead, if you want," you say with a big grin, your teeth fully extended into the saw-toothed maw you employ for actually eating. "Your choice."
And really, how else is Mark going to learn how to deal with enemies that have even slightly more diverse powers that 'punches good'?
"So, wait, can I use the book again?"
"Sure, why not? It's safer to wait a bit, 'cause people's neurons are easily bruised and crap, but it should be fine already."
"Huh. You know, normally you'd expect these kinds of magical relics to only work once per person, or something, wouldn't you?"
"Yeah nah, I don't give a crap. That would be a stupid limitation. I can go grab it right now, if you want."
"Actually, that would be a great help. I wanted to… look into something? Uh… You know what I mean."
Negotiating with demons, for all that you usually make light of it, actually is kind of a chore, and a difficult one at that, when you don't have the details hashed out already ahead of time because the demon in question is the type to make the kinds of trades you want to habitually.
Or, y'know, you can't just beat them into submission the easy way. The way you usually do these kinds of things.
Unfortunately for you, you actually are dealing with the kind of being that you can't exactly trifle with, and even just actually pulling it all the way into reality to try and bully it into submission would promise to be highly hazardous to say the least, so that's not exactly an option. Hence the old-fashioned and, frankly, bothersome approach.
"Look, you have something I want and I have a couple of things to make it worth your while. Are we gonna make an exchange or not? I can take my business elsewhere."
A tremble runs through your summoning chamber, the fierce, indistinct presence inside the room focused on you. It's little more than some active attention, but it is the active attention of a rather powerful demon, one that is in the possession of a piece of essence.
The essence in question stemming from a rather powerful demon in turn; a Fiend Dragon, one of those kinds of things that you're generally better off just leaving in hell and not poking in any way. That said, this particular specimen has been rendered inactive for a while now, and so you have an opportunity here, once you get this other demon, which is a Fiend Dragon in its own right, to cough it up.
To exactly nobody's surprise, the immensely powerful demonic dragon is extremely greedy, extremely ill-tempered and doesn't want to let go of its treasures- even when you offer something that's worth more, at least in terms of trade. True souls are pretty valuable, after all, and they'll do very fine indeed in any draconic hoard.
This fucker knows as much, too, it's just reticent about giving you any of its stuff in exchange. Rolling your eyes, you watch impassively as another assault of black light presses into, then slowly breaks against the massive interlocking ritual circles you prepared for this whole song and dance, drawn in your own cursed blood and supported by the additional sacrifices of gold and other filthy lucre you mass-produced and placed to distract this thing's split attention.
"Some of these are collector's edition souls. Heck, my Mengele comes as a True Soul himself, even! You want what I offer, give me what I want and we're in business. I'm not exactly giving you any alternatives here."
Another rumble, this time even stronger- if you didn't have complete control over your facial expression, you'd be giving the thing the stink-eye right now. You're pretty sure this'll register as an earthquake aboveground.
"I have all day to stare at you, just so you know. I don't age and even if I were to croak it, you wouldn't be getting any of my collection. But hey, if that's what you want, a staring contest it is." You cross your arms again- you've been doing that half the time ever since you managed to summon a fraction of this Fiend Dragon's being, anyways.
It's a long couple of hours until you get anywhere. You aren't sure whether it's your constant talking softening it up or it just can't stand the sound of you playing an endless loop of horrible Justin Barber songs on repeat out of pure spite against it, but eventually you manage to receive the essence you were after, while staying within your planned range of expenses.
Who knew it could be this bothersome to trade the souls of other people for what you want in life?
Souls traded:
Soul #2660
Soul #2726
Soul #3480
Soul #3581
Soul #3670: Jozef Mengele
Soul #3703: Ronald Reagan
Soul #3716: Mao Zedong
Obtained: Fiend Dragon Essence x1
The essence of a great, fiendish dragon, a remnant of its once great might in remarkably good condition. Known for their bad tempers and ability to ravage entire countrysides on a whim, Fiend Dragons are considered some of the most powerful draconic demons in existence, embodying the ideal of a dragon mixed with the vagaries of being a demon.
Large enough to rival buildings, strong enough to mow those same buildings down like wheat and fast enough to be difficult to track with the bare eye when in motion, they also are well-armored enough to ignore tank shells. deflecting attacks from their tough, scaled hide. They also sport a breath weapon, typically in the form of hellfire they spew with surprising precision and effectiveness. Combined with their extremely fast flight, a single specimen may destroy entire nations or even subjugate continets if unleashed fully, depending on the nature of the civilization in question.
It's kind of cool, to be working on yourself now that you managed to grab the raw materials you needed to get to work on the experimental procedure you've been considering performing for a while now.
Turning the demonic essence you bought at no small cost to yourself into the kind of ink that you want, the sort that will set inside of skin and be passed along as cells are replaced, becoming 'permanent' inside of this particular environment, is easy enough- tattoo ink, in essence, and you can try your process out with a few disposable essences and test subjects easily enough.
However, actually using the good stuff, the essence of the Fiend Dragon you got, as ink is a lot different, just because it's so valuable. And, well, powerful. Even reduced to a non-conscious, semi-amorphous state like this, it still tries to fight you, contorting itself out of place and biting at anything that touches it.
You have to use a tattoo needle made of adamantite, in the end, when stainless steel keeps on melting and bending. You didn't really feel like trying through other options you have, may as well go all the way.
The pain isn't much to write home about, though probably quite agonizing compared to getting a normal tattoo (which in itself can be pretty painful from what you've heard). That said, once you've got the ink inside of your skin, your numerous protective measures forcefully and manually taken down at your own hands for the moment, it can't really do much of anything anymore, at least not actively.
Of course tattooing yourself is actually quite difficult and awkward, but although you have the Thinker supporting you in that she controls the modern tattoo needle you're using to ensure you can work with supreme precision even by your own standards, you mostly insist on doing this (to) yourself.
Granted, maybe you could've chosen an easier place than the circumference of your left arm all the way to the back of your shoulder, but hey, you can just grow additional hands and eyes to make this easier. You aren't a shapeshifter for nothing, here.
The motif you chose was the good old 'Asian Dragon winding around limb' thing, both because you kind of liked the idea more the longer you played around with actual designs and because you just know Kate will absolutely love it. And indeed, it did come out pretty well in the end, if you do say so yourself.
"A little sore, but no bleeding or anything," you smirk to yourself as you bend and stretch your arm a little, testing it out after what you did to it. "Regeneration is the gift that keeps on giving, I guess. Now how about…"
With a flex of your will, the entire tattoo disappears, only to reappear a moment later. So far, so good- you managed to imbue a bit of magic to make its actual visibility entirely optional. This kind of tattoo works by directly engraving itself onto the user's soul, so it being there inside their skin, while sensible, isn't strictly necessary once the process of putting it there is completed.
Meaning you can accessorize easier, and you aren't forced to keep it there when you shapeshift into something or someone completely different.
As for the meat of the matter, the real reason you'd go out of your way to get yourself something like this, engraving a demonic tattoo like this into yourself has actually made you stronger, given you more power to yourself.
Normally, your body doesn't really pump blood or anything, your heart having stopped for a liiittle while now, but even so you can feel a steady heat build up inside your veins now that you're done putting your new tattoo in place. You can't wait to try out-
A quick dash has you bust a dent into the wall of your very own personal tattoo parlor, the construction stability only as strong as you normally make them. Pushing yourself out of it again, you grumble to yourself in annoyance even as you can telepathically sense how the Thinker deploys drones to fix this up.
"Guess it made me stronger than I thought. Gonna have to take baselines all over again…"
A bit of a thorough workout and some experimentation on yourself to figure out what changes, exactly, your awesome new tattoo caused in yourself later, you're slightly smokey thanks to the amounts of heat you subjected yourself to while testing for your new bare-skinned tolerances. Which, due to the slight scent of burnt meat, only serves to make you hungry again.
And, well, you've had more than enough time to ascetically fast while trying to narrow down possible causes of the whole 'no hunger' situation. You also want to get ahead on the targets you picked out using your magic for convenience, while you're at it, so your next steps almost walk themselves.
After thorough consideration (thinking about it for two seconds), you decide to go after Dinosaurus first, or David Anders, as his real name is. Thanks to the Thinker cyber-staking him extensively on a regular basis ever since you found out about his existence, you can easily figure out where he is and what he's doing; apparently, he's unable to work a regular nine to five due to the nature of his powers, so he's just been playing the stock market for money instead.
To be honest, becoming a giant dinosaur dude any time you're sufficiently bored kind of is a good reason to avoid being stuck inside an office all day, you'd imagine. The sheer amount of furniture they'd need to replace each and every day would add up pretty quickly.
You'd know. You can barely sit down and do paperwork for five full minutes before the sheer boredom of the act drives you crazy enough to go get up and tell Sarah you love her, purely to make the torture end. Also because it's true, but that's beside the point.
Point being, screw it, this guy's about to die horribly. The only question is how you'll make it happen.
…You kind of just want to smash through his door, walk up to him, break his back and get right to business with his carotid artery, if you're honest.
Much to your mild, yet thorough disappointment, it does seem as though this 'David' Anders you're dealing with is not, in fact, a neo-nazi, nor in any real way affiliated with any. Kind of a bummer, considering the last time you tangled with anyone bearing that particular last name.
Except for the girlfriend Taylor's mother brought with her from the afterlife, anyways, but she hardly counts. Being killed and spending so long a time dead as she has kind of absolves her of most things she did while alive she has since disavowed, at least as far as you're concerned.
Not that you care either way, personally, you're just being thorough here. As such, lack of fascist motivations aside, you happily intrude upon the man's domicile, an apartment in the middle of this city's downtown area, in the form of a mere shadow sliding in under the door.
This place isn't terribly large, though still a very decently sized affair, all things told. Finding your target shouldn't be too hard, you specifically chose to come here at a time you know he will be at home, and so all that remains, now that you're inside this decently well cared for environment, is to search-
"I know you're there, come out," you hear coming from what appears to be the living room. Immediately melting into the darkest spot nearly, you slowly climb up the wall and onto the ceiling, ready for anything as your stretched form pulls itself along. "Nothing, huh."
You stay there a moment as you consider what the heck this might've been about. Then you get moving again, and if you had any distinct eyes in this form you'd be rolling them.
This fucker's just regularly calling out for anyone that might be trying to sneak up on him. Well, if it helps him prevent boredom and save his apartment floor from getting scuffed by way of dinosaur claws, more power to him.
You'll just murder him for the trouble. Well, you were going to already, now it's just mildly personal.
When you come upon David, he's sitting down typing away at his computer, writing something for whatever reason. You're hardly one to speak, but it's the middle of the night here and now, so his sleep schedule has to be particularly… interesting.
Looking at him, he's a lanky guy, his caramel-brunette hair readily matching that awful chin-beard on his face. Chin pubes, really, but hey, you aren't here to judge his fashion sense; it's not like having less questionable facial hair would have saved him from what's coming next.
You know for a fact that he can't even transform on demand, only when sufficiently bored out of his mind. As such, you aren't even dealing with a typical Changer or anything, but rather, functionally speaking, a completely normal human baseline guy.
Just one with a bit of an unfortunate affliction that made him a tempting target for yourself.
You appear behind him in a single, smooth flash of movement, too quick for him to react even if he did have any way to actually stop you at this point. Your clawed fingers dig into his shoulders, both to immobilize his arms and to pull him off his chair, placing his neck within reach of your fangs.
You don't waste any time gloating, nor do you throw out any snarky one-liners or anything of the sort. You simply proceed to bite into his jugular, teeth digging through soft, vulnerable flesh as you guzzle down all the blood inside of him.
A good, regular meal is, in the end, what it takes to make you a happy vampire.
The borderline split personality your new 'friend' Anders kind of developed tasted kind of weird, but you've come to the conclusion that he was, in fact, the same person in either form. He did, however, hold wildly different views and ended up acting very differently between them.
Mildly spicy-savoury in taste either way. You kind of liked it, even though the flavor wasn't all that strong.
You're gearing up for the final confrontation, now. Things have been coming to a head for, like, two chapters now, you can feel it in your bones; the plot is approaching its climax, as sure as you can tell when someone you're fucking is doing the same.
With barely half an idea of what he's doing, Jake is still stumbling along, trying to figure out what to do, what he can do, to shake his pursuers. In the meantime, all he's come up with is the same mantra he's been repeating to himself throughout his journey so far: Keep Moving.
It's the only thing he's experienced actually granting him some semblance of safety, and so that's what he's literally running with. He found himself some support, in the form of the ghostly follower he picked up along the way and the truck driver that helped him escape when things went sideways (and gave him some good advice besides), but in the end he's still not done actually internalizing all of this.
Jake, when you get to the bottom of things, is still just running away. Because he doesn't see any better options. Because he just wants to get away from his time in captivity. Because, somewhere inside of him, he can't actually conceptualize any way to deal with his situation than to keep running.
Doesn't matter that intellectually he knows that this is not sustainable, not when they've caught up to him once already. Jake is just completely terrified thanks to the trauma he lived through, at the end of the day.
And overcoming this kind of thing? Yeah, that ain't easy. He can't just do it on a dime himself, either. So things are looking to shape up… interestingly.
He's the main character, after all. This whole book is all about his very own character arc, and you'd be remiss if you didn't put the appropriate amount of effort into leading it to its penultimate, hopefully satisfying, conclusion.
It's one thing to have the technical skill to put nice words on a page, and you'd say you do have a good bit of practice with that side of things, but actually coordinating deeper plot like this, the string that holds the various characters together and makes them part of a gripping story? That's its own kind of challenge, and one you are less confident about from the onset.
You'd like to think you did a decent job here, but in the end, that'll be up to whoever ends up reading your work. You could just keep on writing for nothing but your own pleasure, nothing wrong with that, but you actually kind of do want to see people's opinions and reactions at this point.
So you set the stage, and you place the pieces; everyone gets a brief point of view as everything, finally, comes to a head in the midst of a sleepy, rural town, completely unremarkable except for the confrontation brewing to be unleashed within it.
Honestly, you kind of cherish the opportunity. Your writing is usually fairly character-driven, so taking that and putting it all into so many ways you can make characters interact, contrast, clash and mesh with each other…
You definitely have to put some thought into how you structure thi-
Crap, you just realized you're out of time already! Ugh, human experiments for alchemy research are fun, but they do eat up a lot of the time you save up to do things in here with, now that you're thinking about it.
You'll just… figure out a couple of things and get back to this next time, you suppose.
Your considerably increased strength is immediately put to some good use at your hands, and feet, and elbows and knees, when you next 'train' Mark, as you're still in the process of getting a good feel for your enhanced abilities. May as well make use of the opportunity, really.
Fast forward to you going at it with gusto, hitting, kicking and generally mashing your body parts at Mark in midair while he tries to defend himself, blocking and deflecting as many blows as he can. This, as you told him, is the part of his training where he learns how to not be literally bitch slapped into submission the moment his father sees him.
"Guh!" Not that he manages to actually avoid getting your (currently horribly child-sized) fist shoved into his gut on the regular, but while you've inflicted a perhaps mildly unhealthy amount of bruises on his body so far, you haven't yet actually beaten him so badly he'd be out of commission for the next day's violent intervention against his unhealthy lifestyle choice of not being ready to defeat his dad the moment he shows his face on this planet.
Really, without you here Mark would just walk around, live his normal life with a little bit of casual superheroics strewn in until he either gets murdered by Omni-Man or joins him in subjugating humanity. A good long-term planner, he is not.
Then again, he's a literal teenager. You doubt this fact surprises literally anyone.
"C'mon c'mon c'mon!" Fun fact, bullshit Viltrumite flight can be partially countered by applying enough force, such that you can push Mark back through the air by way of hitting him really hard. "Try and defend yourself! Muahahahaha!"
You may or may not also have turned your hair kind of red-ish today, to denote your increased strength. And to pretend you entered some kind of super saiyan mode (thank you, Yoshi, for being such a weeb that actually watched Dragon Balls in your second life, before you were summoned as a hero) or something.
Mostly, you're banking on the GDA spying on you and having to try and figure out what the heck this means. That's right, it's your old default for killing time, screwing with people in power for no reason whatsoever!
Also, you managed to kind of intimidate Mark, which is a pure bonus.
"Gah!" All that said, you do have to say the half-Viltrumite mutt you're working with here is actually showing some marked improvement, to the point you can't even call him an idiot over it, despite how much your Night Queen persona wants to.
Still, none of this is particularly out of the usual as far as your training sessions with him go- save for when Atom Eve comes by and, well…
"Actually… Would you mind me helping out too?" She asks, her pink costume drifting a little in the stiff breeze you're all subjected to- the wind really does get a lot stronger the moment you leave the ground, not to even mention the kind of heights you usually move at here.
"Good idea. Go ahead and pound him."
"Ugh, phrasing," Mark grunts in response. "Please?"
"Right. Go ahead, Eve," you say, "nail him with lots of your thick pink power blasts until he moans for you to-"
"Alright, hit me, please just make her stop talking!"
Chuckling, Eve waves her hand, conjuring a couple bolts of translucent pink energy. "Alright loverboy, here goes."
Of course while you're here already, you also do go ahead and hand Mark the little secret weapon you prepared for him, once Eve is gone again- after repeatedly nailing him in the backside with her power, as you'd requested.
The object in question is one of the prototype sonic weapons you made, technically no different from a finished product beyond the fact it hasn't yet been used in an actual fight of any kind, so far. That said, you did test these things extensively, so there really shouldn't be much of a problem.
"Here, take this before you go," is how you announce the perhaps most important moment in Mark's life so far. Not everyone can claim the Night Queen was magnanimous enough to gift them an actual weapon leagues above and beyond anything they could ever find or make on their own.
"This is… a gun?" The teenaged disaster of a boy asks as he carefully does as he's told, grabbing the sonic gun in the rough shape of a pistol from your own hand with some confusion at its appearance.
It's sleek and elegant, the magical metals used in its creation gleaming pleasantly in the light. Seeing as this one is destined to (hopefully) find use in the hands of Mark, you had its outer shell constructed out of adamantite, the dark material being the most durable stuff you had that was suited to its construction.
There's a pair of dials at the back of the shaft, where you'd normally have the gun's mechanism igniting ammunition on the pull of the trigger, but those aside the whole weapon is largely self-contained, the energy it requires all generated by a very small Eldritch Core. Its size does mean that it needs a little downtime to recharge occasionally, but that shouldn't be much of an issue overall, what with how many shots at normal power it can produce at rest.
The muzzle looks a little weird when compared to traditional firearms, being a little bulbous and all, but still, this is one beauty of a weapon, and anyone that says otherwise obviously has no idea what they're talking about.
"It's a sonic gun, and it's magic," you explain, your palms thrust against your waist. "Right now it's tuned to produce a special sound that hurts Viltrumites, anyone else will just get ringing ears if you shoot it at them. Don't shoot yourself with it."
"Wha- I'm not gonna shoot myself, Jesus!"
"You sure?" You ask, leaning forward to look at him inquisitively. "I mean, you're a teenager and you kinda suck, don't most of your kind try to kill themselves at some point?"
"Look, suicide rates among teens have been going down for a few years now, but they aren't that bad and I'm not suicidal," Mark insists, still carefully holding his new gun out to the side so it doesn't point at anyone.
"Huh, coulda fooled me," you shrug. "I bet everyone at school thinks you're a loser or something."
"They don't!" Mark tells you, only to take a moment to consider that statement. "Well, some do, to be fair, but not everyone! I have a girlfriend and all!"
"Bet you she's fed up with you and only staying with you to make a point and hurt you by breaking up with you eventually." You may or may not have looked into Mark's civilian life and that of people close to him through the Thinker.
Just saying, but his 'girlfriend' is totally being way passive-aggressive with him. Speaking from experience, she's just not great girlfriend material- regularly fucking her into a coma, yes, going steady, no.
"We- no! That's totally not what's happening!" And, like any teenager, Mark is just completely immune to recognizing he may need to change something. "Me and Amber have been going through a bit of a rough phase, but we'll be going to this awesome university over the weekend, it'll be a whole trip and-"
"Bet you she'll dump you within the week." You cross your arms. "If you have to plan for stuff to do together so you don't break up, you've already broken up, doofus."
"…Nobody says 'doofus' anymore," Mark softly complains as you slowly drift away. Only to tense when you turn around and face him again.
"Shaddup. Also, being on a trip is no excuse to stop training, so expect to be dropkicked into the air if you fail to attend."
"C'mon, you could cut me a little slack!"
You snort, looking him in the eyes. "No."
You'll keep using your punching bag, and that's final.
Viltrumite Tonic Effects: 26 to all physical rolls-28 to all physical rolls
"Movie Night!"
Ariana's spontaneous exclamation does, if nothing else, throw Alana for a loop as the youngest of the three dark-skinned beauties you're pretty much living with throws her hands up in the air right after everyone finished eating dinner.
You don't really insist on it, but one way or another you've basically settled into somewhat of a schedule, as far as these things go; schedules allowing, you all come together to eat at the same table around dinner time, which serves as a handy way to keep a thumb on the pulse of things here in the mansion in case you're too busy to keep up yourself.
"Right, it's that time of the week again already, isn't it?"
Movie night, of course, is kind of similar, if also very different. Simply put, as long as the girls can justify staying up late, you usually take a couple hours to have everyone sit down in the media room you usually use in this place to watch a motley mixture of whatever movies, recorded TV series, anime or similar one of you figures would be fun to watch, with everyone taking turns recommending something.
"I got the list from last time saved."
Ah, yes, the list. As it turns out, there's more stuff being suggested you watch than there is time for the three of you watch things, so you just kind of made a list of everything you haven't gotten to yet so you can work your way through it.
"We are having movie nights?"
And, indeed, despite Alana's confusion as her cousins immediately set out to get everything ready, she, too, is pulled into the mire of entertainment and eventual sleepiness that is movie night.
So it comes that all four of you end up sitting on the same couch, a couple blankets covering everyone as the big home cinema screen taking up a wall lights up, the room's lights dimming and the speakers buzzing to life with sound.
You're watching a nature documentary of all things, mostly because Alicia decided that dolphins are evil monsters and everyone should know it- her reasoning was almost distressingly cute on this one, so much so you had to hold yourself back from just pulling her on your lap and patting her head for a bit.
Ariana's elder sister may appreciate that kind of thing, but she also gets really embarrassed about it, so you try to cuddle her in moderation.
As the movie rolls in and the popcorn, comfortably placed in several bowls so everyone can have their share, starts to be eaten, you, too, settle in and enjoy the documentary's opening. You really do enjoy just relaxing together with others like this.
That isn't to say you enjoy getting a little frisky any less, of course. So when Alicia slowly inches closer to you so she doesn't arouse Alana's suspicion, her older cousin naturally distracted by the screen and what's running on it, you just lightly bump your shoulder against hers, and when Ariana, the youngest of all three, wraps both hands around your lower arm, you just smile and pat her thigh.
There is absolutely no way this can go wrong, after all. Even when Alicia undoes the button of your pants, slowly and carefully unzipping them when the documentary gets a little loud for a moment to mask the sound. Slender fingers wrap around your dick in a matter of moments, and she slowly begins to jack you off, no frantic urges nor overwhelming lust, just casually sharing your bodies with each other because you want to in the moment.
Something similar happens on your other side with Ariana, the little minx pulling your arm in close, but then not towards her chest or between her legs.
Instead, you find your hand cradling her butt as she sits on it, giving you a quick grin before she turns forward again as she grinds her butt against your palm.
Naturally, your reaction is to fondle said butt, soon wiggling your fingers inside her clothes on that side while your other hand gets busy feeling up Alicia, exploring her soft, pliant skin and playing with any sensitive areas you just so happen to find.
Her breasts need lots of love, just saying. Someone has to provide it.
Back to Ariana, she's still rubbing her behind against your hand- you probably should try to find some way to make her stop moving, before Alana realizes what's up. And, as it so happens, you can think of one.
Curling your fingers a little, you pull and reposition yourself a little, the tip of your middle finger sliding between the very squeezable cheeks you've been playing with so far.
And indeed, Ariana does stop moving when you poke her asshole, sensitive flesh suddenly being confronted with an intruder- only for it to open up, allowing the tip of your finger to intrude.
She's giving you lascivious looks now, still moving her waist, just that she's now slowly teasing her own butthole. Meanwhile, Alicia is leaning against you, breathing your scent in deep as her soft hand plays with your balls in-between stroking your cock.
And Alana, meanwhile, is none the wiser. Good.
You remain like that for some time, just holding the two close as you mutually pleasure each other. You do have to take a little care to make sure Alana doesn't notice, of course, but you do manage, all in all, so that's not too much of an issue.
You keep Ariana in place by continually teasing and playing with her asshole, the girl in question repeatedly licking her lips and fidgeting with her legs as you do so. By contrast, Alicia remains fairly calm and composed outwardly, even when you start to vigorously finger her- and have to slow down due to how wet she becomes pretty quickly.
Note to self, her thighs are very comfortable and squishy, something you confirm again on this occasion. Also, she smells of peaches today, her scent drifting into your nose almost to the exclusion of all else as the two of you cuddle closely together.
It's a nice time all in all, is all you're saying. You even do manage to squeeze an orgasm or two out of both girls you're manually working over, casually wiggling your finger deeper into Ariana's behind until she has to hold a hand over her mouth to keep the noises she's making inside.
Alicia blushes, but in the darkness of the home cinema room, nobody can see. Nobody other than the one guy that can see in the dark and sense the distribution of blood inside her cheeks, that is.
If you weren't buried knuckle-deep inside her snatch and her sister's ass, you'd be stroking her cheeks with a thumb. But even so, softly kissing the top of her head gets what you want to say across just fine, you hope.
Movie night. Always a delight, one way or another.
Siege Beasts, as a type of demon, are fascinating creatures, exhibiting fairly rare properties for their level of overall power; being both very large and physically powerful, yet simultaneously focused on the prospect of ranged combat, to be precise.
Normally, you have big brutes that just try to get in close and fight things or else higher-leveled demons that just ravage anything in sight at any range due to being flexible in that regard. It's just an overall tendency, of course, and the infinite nature of hell means that there's really no shortage of this archetype, but Siege Beasts generally embody it, by and large, despite its relative rarity in the circles they can usually be found in.
There's a reason they earned their name as a 'species' of demon. They're large, well-armored, generally (but not necessarily) humanoid creatures, with a variety of ways to take large projectiles of some sort and launch them at things they're meant to destroy slash kill slash blow the hell up.
Some varieties or 'subspecies' of the things directly spit out rocks, others do the same except their rocks are glowing hot for that little bit of extra 'fuck you'. Some others in turn grow natural catapult or ballista-like mechanisms on their backs, use their natural magic to hose enemies down with napalm-like substances, those kinds of things.
In short, Siege Beasts are basically living siege weapons, is what you're saying. That's what they're typically used for and that's what they typically do when left to their own devices, they instinctively seek out fortified locations, difficult terrain or anything of the sort they can find and flatten it until not a single stone stays standing, then move on and repeat.
Their intelligence is, all in all, just as varied as their natural methods of attack, running the gamut from 'basically a halfway organic piece of rock for a head' to being able to hold actual conversations, even though their instinctual behavior is still imprinted on them regardless of how smart they are.
When attacked, they usually try to just trample over their attackers or else reposition to properly hit them with their usual methods of indiscriminate destruction. As most of them have thick hides, literally grow natural armoring and their huge bodies are driven by thick layers of muscle that basically act as more armor in themselves, unless they're just straight-up going with an exoskeleton, they usually just plough through the average counter-attack and keep going with what they were doing.
They're very stubborn, is what you're saying.
The reason all of this is important here and now, beyond the fact you pressed a good couple of them into service for your personal little demon army, is that you're kind of committing a minor, semi-localized genocide of the things, repeatedly summoning them from hell only to brutalize them and extract their essence, repeatedly.
Hey, it can't really be helped, you kind of need a bunch of the stuff for a… project, let's call it that, and this is the most convenient way of getting the stuff. It's not like their level of physical resistance can save them from you- every now and then you need more than a punch or two to smash them down, but the time you take on this all serves a good purpose.
…Cleaning up your summoning room every time one of them manages to live long enough to make a giant mess is really the most annoying part of the whole affair. Glowing hot rock isn't any more effective against you than any other rock, your tattoo actually protects you from quite a bit of heat, but it gets everywhere.
Speaking of, though, once you're done massacring, or rather extracting all the essence you require from, the Siege Beasts you summon one after the other, you fuse all of the stuff into one big 'glob' of essence, as per your big plan here.
Then you turn it all into extra ink and just kinda add it on top of your awesome dragon tattoo, mostly to give it some extra definition here and there, round it out a little, that kind of thing.
Sure, you could've done something entirely new with this whole thing, maybe made a handheld siege weapon or something you could magically enhance with this essence, but hey, you figure some extra juice on the stuff you've already got going can't hurt.
Now to figure out what, if anything, it does…
Some days, you don't really have all that much to do, thanks to the girls in the mansion being busy- school does take up time, usually, and while Ariana is occupied with that for most of her day every now and then, Alicia apparently took up some secret hobby or something that keeps her occupied on occasion as well.
She makes sure not to share any thoughts about it, and so while you could press her on the topic, you figure she wants to keep it secret from you for some reason. You also trust her not to do anything completely idiotic or self-harming, too, so you just leave it at that, with her.
Oh, and as for Alana, she's kind of busy trying to get her life back on track, seeing as she was declared dead a while back. When she was dead and all.
Turns out being a professional photographer involves working with a lot of people, so she has a lot of stuff to catch up on, has to show her non-unalive'd face, that kind of thing.
Honestly, it's not like all of this is any big problem or anything as far as you're concerned. When in doubt, you always can just go and make your own fun, which is exactly what you do in this case as well.
It might come as a surprise to some, but you kind of are into engineering. It's basically your hobby at this point, taking machines and what they can do, combining technology you plundered from elsewhere or even any that you develop yourself, thanks to the insanity-inducing amounts of information, experimentation and more you can access and perform at all times inside your inner world, and doing something new with it all.
You kind of felt like the first man that ever built a functioning steam engine back when you actually built devices that could, in a very limited manner, mimic your own understanding and manipulation of gravity. Heck, you could say the same about back when you first designed and actually built the first prototypes and forebears of your by now insanely over-engineered automated manufactories.
Those were the days, when taking overly developed robotics from Earth Fallout and turning them into an unwieldy box of automated screwdrivers made your fucking week.
That same joy, the pride you take in creating something new, something special, is what you're indulging in now that you have some time to kill. Though it's nothing all that out there, truth be told; implementing some of the less physics-obeying tricks you figured out by now, you just modify a particular subset of your robots you haven't really used in a while.
The mining bots haven't been needed ever since you basically decided to just replicate any material you have need of using your manufactories, but their design deserved some love as well, you decided. Just to keep them updated in case you actually do need to spontaneously get some large-scale mining operations underway.
Not everything you can find underground is easily replicated metal and rock… And even then, manufactories still have a limited output at any given time. It may well just be more efficient to use the thing to build robots that then mine out other stuff you need at a much faster pace.
Or, y'know, if you happen to decide to mine asteroids or something, in case you get really, really bored someday. Normally, purely terrestrial resources and operations are quite enough for your purposes, but you never know if you may decide otherwise one day.
And, while you're at it, you also update those auto-docs you also originally stole, or rather, whose designs you appropriated, from Earth Fallout. They do their jobs just fine as they are, but…
An eldritch core in the right position and a few bits and bobs you copied from your manufactories later, your new, upgraded version can also create and implant small amounts of biomass. Not, like, completely new biomods or anything, but grafting on additional tissue to deal with cases of it being lost, replace skin, glue broken bones together using more bone, those things are quite doable for them now.
This also does expand the range of possible cosmetic surgeries they can perform, though you for one sure aren't about to program all of that into the onboard software. That's one task best left to a literal AI, thank you very much.
And for the record, for all that your morning is spent peacefully and casually working away inside your underground castle, what happens when you go to deliver Mark's daily dose of punishment is… All kinds of interesting, to say the least.
When you teleported into the airspace above the general area you know Mark to be in right now, you were expecting to see a number of things. Him playing at being a normal civilian, not unlike how most heroes and villains work, even back home on Bet. Or maybe he would be in costume already, awaiting your sucker punch to the back of his head.
Alternatively, you'd even take him hiding or something to try and avoid you for at least a day or two. It wouldn't work, of course, but you'd give him props for the balls that would take before busting said balls black and blue.
But no, instead you find him on an open plaza, in costume, fighting some bizarro-BDSM-cyborg reject looking motherfucker. At least you're pretty sure they wouldn't let this guy into any halfway good club.
He's fast and tenacious, though Mark easily holds his ground; using his ability to fly to full effect, your… student? Disciple? Hobby project, yeah, that one. Anyways, Mark is giving as good as he gets, though things are at a standstill for the moment.
The half-Viltrumite is tough enough to withstand anything the other guy throws at him, fighting through any hits that actually land on him, but on the other hand said other guy just ignores the counter-attacks coming his way- even when they ragdoll his rusty ass halfway across what you just realized was a university campus.
From the looks of things, Mark is holding back, though. Which is good- he's at the level where he actually can consciously make the decision to do so and judge the way the fight is going correctly. His opponent is accruing damage, all he needs to do is to keep going and the robot-wannabe stripper will just fail to move at some point, once the joints break down.
Maybe he's even trying to take the recklessly charging, obviously braindead sucker alive. Y'know, seeing how he's trying to be a hero and all.
At least he knows he's not actually Invincible
Yeah, while this fight is is more or less decent enough of a sideshow to make it onto TV, just as background noise or something you tune in to when you're doing something, but also want some sound going on besides, you don't really have the patience to wait for two single-minded fist-slinging amateurs to finish up.
If you can even call the cyborg one that much. Bull-rushing and wildly flailing at someone to hurt them may have their place in a fight, but if that's all you're doing you kind of are wasting your potential. Just look at him, his sheer strength is making him legitimately dangerous to Mark, but all he's managed to do so far is to give him a bloody nose.
And Viltrumites heal pretty damn fast, for the record. Not combat-worthy regeneration the way you're capable of yourself, where any damage someone manages to deal to you just gets healed off at visible speeds, but a good night's rest does let Mark keep going through everything you've been doing to him so far.
Anyways, screw this. "Boooring!" You shout as you literally drop from the heavens, turning yourself into the closest thing to a ballistic missile you could want. Landing right on your target, the failed BDSM guy, you ignore Mark's surprised shout as you, instead, immediately start to fiddle with the one-eyed head piece that you now see is literally welded onto his skull.
Bit of a patch job, that. Then again, not everyone can have your standards for creating unholy abominations against all that is good and right.
It doesn't get better from there; deftly avoiding the arms trying to pull you off this guy's back (you have to cling to it to get a proper look at what's going on with the back of his head), you turn on your fingers' claw mode, scratching and catching onto one of the seams here the wholly mechanical right shoulder is stuck to the rest of the body.
A bit of force, a good push and a pull later, you've torn the casing right off, your ungodly amount of illogical, physical strength once more coming in handy. Just like that, you jam a clawed thumb into a bit of machinery and, bada-bing, bada-boom, that arm is immobile now.
This is some pretty advanced technology compared to humanity's normal level of mechanical engineering, prosthetics and direct body interfaces, but it's also nothing super far out there. It's enough to be distinctly and notably superhuman in performance, though, which is the only reason Mark didn't just win immediately.
Having thus locked down one arm, and quickly tearing through the robotic lower arm on the other side, you can now properly inspect the piece of metal holding what looks a lot like a brain implant in place. Carefully pushing a single, bladed finger under it, you hold the spastically twitching victim of probably some crime (fashion crimes, if nothing else) still while you seek to disassemble the stuff shoved into him.
"Oh god that's a lot of blood. Is that his brain?" Mark, of course, comes closer only to stare, wide-eyed under those goggles he has as part of his costume, at what you're unearthing.
"If you have time to babble, you have time to grabble. Try to keep him still while I see if his brain is still in there."
"Uh… Got it."
And just like that, you have obtained an assistant, an Igor to your Doctor Frankenstein. Progress!
As it so happens, you do, in fact, manage to salvage a brain, even after Mark panics when a couple of people come by and you have to spontaneously relocate your spontaneous brain surgery up onto a nearby roof.
Apparently, these are his 'friends' or something. At least one of them is a super bitchy (black, not that it matters in terms of bitchiness) chick, so you'll assume she's the girlfriend your punching bag claimed to have.
Now, while you will admit you were half-unconvinced she even existed in the first place, she's still totally a giant cunt. Literally everything you told Mark is absolutely true and you're honestly kind of amazed at how accurate your own predictions were when you gave him that 'pep talk'.
Still, you let him have this, with the understanding that he'll be around later to get at least some proper training in as usual. If he wants to get dumped real quick beforehand, that's all up to him.
Back to actually important stuff, such as the babbling cyborg in front of you, considerably less borged out now that you've removed the device that was replacing around a third of his brain. "Look, you can't speak right now 'cause the parts of your brain that do speech were removed. Can you understand me?"
Shutting up, the skinless man still clad in metal flops his head around in the general approximation of a nod. Well, it's good enough for you.
"Good, then shut up. I've already called someone to come pick you up, if you're lucky you'll recover somehow. Also, remember to praise The Night Queen once you can enunciate my rightful title again!"
You like to think you are very good at giving pep talks, and you don't have anything else to do while taking apart the blood-covered piece of junk someone rammed into his skull. May as well and all that.
Getting the guy (whose name you don't know, and neither do you bother finding out) taken in by a small goon squad of GDA agents, you take a moment to consider what to do next. You'll be beating Mark black and blue as always, but after that?
Once you've got your daily dose of punching done, you probably should look into whoever took some random guy and turned him into a brainwashed cyborg made to fight above any human baseline level. Then again, maybe you should just wait and see about this stuff; you're sure someone else will be taking care of whatever dastardly plot, villainous scheme and slash or mad science is going on here eventually, one way or another.
That's just how it works around here. If there's nothing else, you can always rely on some busybody do-gooder jumping in to try and prevent whatever a given villain is doing at the moment.
That's not to say they'll succeed, necessarily, there's a bunch of successful villains around for a reason, but still, you figure it's a more or less safe bet.
Come to think of it, it's pretty late already. Did you really spend all day immersed in engineering stuff?
Hellhounds. The topic of tonight's essence gathering operation and one of the many types of demons that tend to be almost entirely animalistic, with enough intelligence to understand a lot more than actual, non-infernal animals would, such as interpreting language to an extent, but no capacity for speech themselves.
Or, indeed, interest in doing so. These bad boys really just think and behave like dogs or wolves, seeing as they're pretty much sized-up versions of those in the first place.
It's no coincidence that, statistically speaking (from what you've been able to figure out), the majority of canine souls that end up in hell one way or another tend to turn into Hellhounds, unless they were particularly exceptional in some way in life.
In which case they might make the cut to become any of dozen of other possibilities. Demons, amirite?
But yes, that aside, Hellhounds themselves are essentially larger, smarter wolfhounds with overall dark fur coloration, a lack of fur and skin entirely, glowing eyes and the musculature to take down creatures thrice their own size, or at least the average specimen of their kind are.
They also do possess the ability to spew swathes of fire from their mouths, some of them can teleport over short distances and they tend to hunt (because what else would they do with their time when they don't age, given they're demons) in packs ranging from half a dozen to over a hundred in numbers.
It all depends on what areas they live in and what they're trying to hunt, really. Which would make for a fascinating ecological study, if hell was properly defined and constant instead of an ever-shifting psychedelic mess of conceptual resonance and crap, outside the realms of influence the various demon lords maintain down there.
Anyways, extracting all of these dozens upon dozens of essences is some hard work, but at least you can just continually reuse the same ritual setup involving five bags of dog food, a squeaky dog toy and a couple of dead squirrels. Makes this whole affair go a lot faster.
Unless, of course, one of them manage to damage these ritual components by spitting fire before you can subjugate it through the usual bit of ultraviolence. Thankfully, your ritual circle itself is quite immune to such trifles, seeing as you used your own blood to fill out the grooves you have for just this purpose inside your ritual room.
Your blood that actually constantly boils at the temperature of lava, these days. One of the advantages of your tattoo, you suppose, along with the fact you yourself are entirely unimpressed at the fire they try to use against you.
Now, to add these puppers to that same tattoo…
Your brief excursion into the realm of demonology aside, as well as the fact you'll be getting back to it again later, you did make sure to keep an eye on the situation on this university campus on the side- no active scouting or anything, you kind of are occupied over here, but hey, an eye is being kept, what more could anyone want?
Mainly, you just have the Thinker survey the area using one of her, uh… One, two, three, four… Four hundred eighty one extra bodies, all copies of her blademaster pattern close combat model, and one of your improved Stealth Boys, as the invisibility devices whose insides you plundered for knowledge once upon a time are so affectionately nicknamed.
Hence you are aware when, during some kind of college party that in your own humble opinion involves far too little sex everywhere that Mark is attending, something is going on with one of his little friends, as the Thinker also does make it a point to listen in on any communications going on in the area.
Mark may not understand any part of the phone call he receives when his blonde buddy asks him for help in utter panic, as he is currently underground in the sewers and being hunted by more BDSM cyborgs, according to the on-site scans currently being taken.
Kind of a pickle, there. Something, something, his boyfriend was abducted by an evil scientist dude and he's begging his best friend to come help him, because of course he knows Mark is Invincible. Sometimes you wonder if anyone actually cares to keep their secret identity secure or if it's really just you.
That has to be kind of a pickle, huh? The Thinker is keeping you updated as Mark makes his way away from the party (and his bitchy girlfriend, who is looking bitchier by the second) to try and call his friend back.
You could intervene here, help him out, maybe prevent the death, mutilation, non-consensual bodily modification, butchering or similar 'mishaps' from happening to this guy. On the other hand, it's not like you particularly care about him in particular…
It comes down, ultimately, to which of two options you prefer. Let Mark deal with this on his lonesome, see if he's really learned anything from the 'lessons' you've been giving him and how he'll do in practical application thereof, or you can go and eat the mad scientist guy (you're assuming that's the cause of this crap, the level of mechanical engineering on display in the first subject you took apart indicates they're working with literal scraps, but still outperforming a military-industrial complex in terms of quality) responsible for this whole thing.
Decisions, decisions… It's not like you couldn't just come in at the last second and eat him either way, but then again you have only so much time to waste…
Ah well, may as well, you suppose. Nothing else you were planning on doing tonight was really all that urgent, you're pretty sure.
Teleporting back into the area this operation will take place in, you quickly pick out where Mark is hurriedly putting on his costume right now, scrambling to figure out what is going on and possibly save his friend. Which brings you right to the point where you shall make your dramatic entry!
"Ohohoho," you laugh, the little hero you've been using as a stress ball freezing in place at the sound of your voice. "Is that an emergency I see? How predictable of you!"
Turning around, Mark relaxes when you don't immediately launch into violence, taking a deep breath. Or maybe it's a sigh, hard to really tell. "Night Queen, could you not, right now? I really have to hurry and-"
"And go fly into the sewers looking for that place with lots of blood underground, I presume," you cut him off. He all but twitches, confirming that you are, indeed, correct, and that he's not currently rushing off to seek out a hooker after realizing his girlfriend won't ever put out. "Told you it was a stupid idea to come here."
You cross your arms, making it a point to look as smug as possible. Seeing as that's basically Night Queen' default expression, it's not hard.
"Fine, sure, you were right, I was wrong, now can you tell me more about that place you mentioned? There's a life at stake here!"
You harumpf, which you just decided is a technical term for one of the sounds you often make in this form. "I'll do you one better, for I am greatly magnanimous and also refuse to waste all night on this."
"I'm suddenly getting a really bad feeling here."
Turns out Mark isn't entirely stupid, after all. He can do basic pattern recognition.
Not that this stops you from forcefully grabbing him by the neck of his costume, making the nearest manhole cover fall upwards and out of your way and pulling him along as you start flash stepping straight into the sewers.
Mark's scream echoes through the night, reminiscent of a traveler lost in life discovering they just stepped into an inescapable pitfall.
…You're getting a little peckish, you think. That does make you wax weird philosophy like this sometimes.
Your journey through the sewers is brief, thanks to both the speed at which you travel and the easily understood paths you need to take. Sewers aren't exactly the simplest thing in the world, seeing how you need to manage more than a few practical issues if you want them to work, but they also aren't built to be intentionally labyrinthine in any way.
Generally speaking, as long as you know what direction you're trying to go, you can usually find your way towards it by just picking the right tunnels. As you can literally see that place through walls thanks to your ability to perceive blood independently of any of your other senses, that's really not much of a problem.
You're currently cruising along by way of your esper power, your flight achieved by creating a small, continually moving gravity anomaly that pulls you with it as you shove it through space using the power of your mind. It's a practical application of the abilities you gained after you basically copied the Gravity Well plasmid using only your own power over gravity.
While you're doing so, you're also continually manipulating the gravitational effects on the waste water you're passing by, making it flow all around yourself along the edge of the pipes instead of risking getting any on yourself. Sure, you can and will ignore this (literal) shit if need be, but seeing as you may as well…
"Slow down! Slow down!"
You're tempted to make it all hit Mark, whom you're still dragging alongside yourself, but while it would be hilarious, you also don't want to have to smell his sewer stink for hours going forward.
"Do you want to be late or do you want to save your friend? Because he's strapped down while some dude's jerking himself all over him."
"What?"
"Think about it. Mad scientist. Mindless cyborgs. He had to get the warm bodies somewhere," you tell Mark, the rushing of the wind minimized thanks to your power exertion as well.
It is admittedly kind of complicated and a little distracting to do all of these things at once, seeing as you have to continually adjust each of the ongoing processes you're running all around yourself, not to mention bluntly working on air is a little more difficult for you than your usual tricks (seeing how it weighs relatively little, so you have to be just that much more precise when messing with its weight to get it done), but hey, you manage. More or less.
"Ah crap. Can we at least-" You interrupt Mark's rambles by abruptly stopping just as you emerge into an outlet chamber, an open space where water from several pipes converges to be drained elsewhere. An important part of any sewers' construction, and it offers a bunch of ways to go from this point.
Not that that's the reason you hold up here for a moment. No, there's a much more immediately relevant issue that has you abruptly let go of Mark's costume, your claws unlatching from it and having him fly forwards headfirst- until he takes control of his own positioning, somersaulting to reorient himself and turn around towards you.
All that training actually was worth something, after all. Good for him.
"Why'd we stop? Didn't we have to hurry?"
You roll your eyes at him and his inability to settle on one side of an argument. "Make up your mind already. First you want to stop, now you want to go- are you just being contrary or what?"
"No, I- You just said we don't have any time to waste!"
"Yeah, but I didn't mention the guards in the way."
"Guards?" Mark perks up, looking around the moment he realizes that this is an active combat zone, or about to be one anyways. "What guar-"
Another one of those half-naked cyborgs shoots out of the water coming out of one of the drainage pipes, slamming into him. You gesture towards the immediately escalating fight, your erstwhile student throwing himself against every attempt by his enemy to get a clean grip on him until he returns the favor by slamming himself against the nearest wall.
"Those guards, got it," he shouts at you before he fully concentrates on fighting. Honestly, that could have happened first, talking can usually wait until you're done murdering any opponents in sight.
"There's two more coming, try not to break them," you yell at him before you proceed onwards, straight towards the area you were aiming to go to from the start. One of the cyborgs (that you've been tracking this whole time, seeing as they're still organic and, y'know, have blood) tries to lunge at you from another pipe, only to be immediately thrown off course and into the opposite direction the moment it can't get any leverage in midair.
Funny how that works, huh?
"Got it, I'll hold them- ugh!" Being punched in the face, like so often, does seem to be the essence of what it means to be Mark Greyson. Ah well, you'll leave him to it, you suppose- you've trained him enough he won't die against things of this caliber.
If he does, well, more power to him. Such an embarrassing showing would mean you'd literally bring him back from the dead just to chew him out over it, then kill him yourself. Then maybe, if he was pitiful enough, you'd bring him back to life again so he could regain his honor by not being quite so pathetically weak.
You like to think these kinds of things are understood implicitly between you, without a need for words. Though maybe drawing up a brochure that explicitly explains it would be worthwhile as well, in case you ever do end up taking another disciple or something…
Regardless, you place a gravitational 'fuck you' that should buy Mark enough time to deal with his new opponents without any of them bothering you as you skip right along. Now with nothing between you and the object of your 'affection' but a straight path, it really doesn't take long to get you right where you want to.
The room you emerge into is filled with the stench of butchered bodies, dozens of them suspended from the ceiling by thick chains. There's a couple tools lying around too, everything from scalpels to an industrial water cutter someone managed to install down here.
Said someone is, in all likelihood, the man standing in front of the guy currently bound to an operating table over to one side of the room. The former is also currently menacing the latter with a modern bone saw, poised to start cutting into his skull.
You immediately launch into trash talk about what really bothers you about this situation. "Seriously, not even bothering to sedate him? Look at the guy, he's wiggling and all." You gesture into the direction of this whole… thing. "How do you get any precision work done?"
The mad scientist in question turns around, raising an eyebrow at you. You note he's wearing a suit for some reason- you don't even want to know- and his features, while not necessarily ugly, are quite distinct, with a somewhat large nose, small ears that look like they're jutting out due to how he wears his black hair (a more painfully white hairdo is rarely seen, in your experience) and the pronounced cheekbones, eyebrows and chin give him a rather angular look overall.
"Who is this sassy lost child?"
"The one and only Night Queen. I'd tell you to remember, but it won't matter to you pretty soon anyways," you casually introduce yourself. The captive, of course, grins when he hears your name.
"Hah! It's her! You're f- done for, Sinclair!"
"Nobody asked for your input. And as for you… How did you get in here?"
"Jeez, read the news sometime, man!" For a hostage slash raw material for another cyborg, this blonde guy is pretty upbeat right now. Eh, probably just dealing with the stress by lashing out verbally. "This is Night Queen! She's, like, Guardians of the Globe levels of strong!"
"That and I left Invincible to deal with the guard dogs." You eye the dude that's apparently named Sinclair- probably no relation to Augustus over on Earth Rapture, but would be one amazing coincidence if there was. "He'll deal with them, or else get his ass beat for half an hour or so like he always does. More than enough time for a snack either way."
You don't give this guy any time to respond, nor to do anything at all, really. Accelerating abruptly, you rush straight towards him, your very speed increased far beyond what the human eye can capture cleanly.
The interesting thing about this state, the moment when you engage in your Flash Step as it has been forcefully called in the past (you never could say no to your daughters) is that you don't just move fast, your perception and ability to think is correspondingly sped up along with your body.
Not quite as much, perhaps- you still have to be careful about using it- but you can still literally see how this Sinclair person's face slowly warps in realization that he is, in fact, in some deep shit.
It doesn't exactly save him. You reach him before his brain has the time to do anything more, though you don't exactly stop going.
Hand thrust forward, you run straight through him, lifting your arm as you go along to use your, momentarily fairly insane, momentum to literally tear the man asunder. Using both hands now that you've basically pierced through his whole body, you move behind where he stood just now, leaving the body behind.
Or rather, leaving the two halves of the body behind, as you successfully ripped him in half in the blink of an eye. Well, despite his creations, he wasn't exactly any more threatening, physically speaking, than any other slightly-out-shape guy his age, so that much was pretty obvious.
Before your brief period of superspeed ends, you quickly take control of the blood already exploding all over the place now that you tore its former container into literal pieces, forcing it to converge in your direction. Several streams gather in the air, all of them jointly flowing around yourself and into your mouth.
By the time you experience time normally again, the dead meat is falling to the ground with not a single drop of blood left, the head still stuck to the right side, most of the spine on the left. The viscera splattering all over the place is a little messy still, but you figure that's pretty okay given just how dirty human bodies are once you take them apart normally.
The insides get everywhere, especially all those floppy inner organs. Doesn't help you literally pried the ribcage apart, either.
You're still chewing a little on the last of the blood when you finally turn around to deal with the bound hostage, finding yourself missing the texture of raw meat a little. It's not that you absolutely need it to enjoy a meal or anything, it's just something you came to be really used to before you knew it.
Hemokinesis still makes for really convenient and easy eating, of course, and you'll continue to use it anyways, you may or may not also just eat 'manually' when appropriate. Or, seeing as drawing in the blood upon biting is an instinctual act, maybe it would be more accurate to describe using hemokinesis as the manual option instead?
Either way, you're done eating this one, the new soul settling into your stomach. Now, as for the guy-
"That. Was. Awesome! I'd feel bad, but this cornhole abducted my boyfriend and was about to cut me open, so screw him. So, uh, hey Queen, can I call you Queen? Night Queen, could you please get these stupid things off me?"
You aren't sure whether he's afraid of you after you just murdered a guy right in front of him or whether there's a just bunch of residual adrenaline pumping through him after he was forcefully abducted to a mad scientist's lair to become another fresh test subject, but you do smell a lot of adrenaline from him right now.
Still, it would be poor form to eat him as well now, he is Mark's friend and all; pointless cruelty in moments like these is what gets boots up comic book villains' asses down the line for a reason.
Still, you could just leave him there so he can't hurt himself until 'official' rescue arrives…
"Rick! Rick, I'm here, it's fine, you'll be fine!"
Curiously enough, Mark is pretty sheepish when you have him carry the three thoroughly disabled males that have been worked over by, as you now know, one D. A. Sinclair, who was enough of a dick you just suppressed his personality while you accessed his memories and abilities to get an idea of what, exactly, he's been doing and how.
As well as why, but to be honest his reasons are a classical example of a guy that's technically really smart behaving like an utter idiot, because intelligence isn't something so straightforward you can say a smart person will always do the smart thing.
Intelligent people do dumb shit all the time, including this guy who very much can be considered a super-genius kind of guy- except he decided to mutilate people he considered 'lesser' than himself for not being as 'smart' as he was in order to figure out how to best improve on a human's physical capabilities.
The fact that he's kind of doing all sorts of crime in the process, fucking up his own chances at making any kind of constructive use of this specialty in mechanical engineering and crap and all went completely over his head.
Or rather, he knew it would happen, he just didn't care. As far as Sinclair was concerned, any amount of horrible shit he was doing was worth the scientific advances he would make. Not exactly something you'd agree with for the simple logistical issue of heroes existing and being ready to kick his shit in over something like this.
Exhibit A: Invincible, who you're currently forcing to help you undo some of the damage Sinclair did on his still living victims after he begged you to do so. Something something he had to make up for ignoring his blonde friend, William (you did not ask for his name but you received it anyways) when he was worried earlier today.
Look, you don't care, you're just in this for the opportunity to fuck with the soul you just ate and ensure you take on the role of the benevolent, all-powerful and greatly skilled mentor that isn't ever put into a position to fight their student for any contrived reasons.
This entire dimension kind of seems to run on comic book logic, so you're covering your bases. No more, no less.
You only have so much to work with for a start, as you're doing some spontaneous surgery in Sinclair's own improvised workshop (which is still filled with dead bodies, by the way), but that's hardly really any issue when you can just, say, teleport in an auto-doc and go from there.
Most of the modifications involved amputating body parts, then reintegrating them into the augmentations Sinclair replaced them with, as a sort of 'ultimate combination of flesh and machine'. It's effective, to a point, though you could just get the same result with purely synthetic materials, so the big question is really one of material availability.
Say what you will, but this madman did achieve pretty respectable results with a very much minimal budget. It reminds you of how Tinkers use a bit of junk to create completely insane shit even more acutely than even Doc Seismic's case.
What you do, with your automated treatment system and the resources at hand, is less undoing the changes, because it would take way too long to completely regrow the missing and modified limbs, inner organs and all that stuff, and more… Going all the way on them, really.
They're basically prosthetics, after all. You can improve on them, make them better… Less disfiguring, in this case.
Add some artificial skin and bits and pieces of flesh that you properly integrate into the new body parts you're throwing onto these victims, courtesy of the auto-doc's recent upgrades, and you're good to go!
…Once you're done unscrewing the brain modifications and replacing them with something that doesn't screw over normal brain functions. You also may or may not have to replace a few frontal lobes- messy business all around.
Mark actually has to vomit just from watching you work and excuses himself to go call the GDA people in to help clean up. William does so several times, though refuses to leave the one guy he calls Rick, who apparently is his boyfriend.
Very heartwarming and all, even if quite unnecessary. You do know what you're doing here, even if all the blood and viscera covering the ground (and your arms) may indicate otherwise.
"Will he be okay? Please tell me he'll be okay," William asks you when his boyfriend fails to awaken in response to his feverish assurances.
"He'll wake up feeling like a bald newborn with all the drugs I put in his system, just let him work through it all," you wave him off. "Try touching his arms, does the new skin feel right?"
"…" He does so, following your instructions in equal amounts of respect and fear. William here acts out a lot in order to hide how perceptive he really is, is the feeling you get. "Doesn't feel different from normal. How…?"
"Synthetic muscle fiber, adjusted to be part of a biological system. I basically just built human-equivalent parts, just in better. I even kept dietary requirements more or less normal," you idly boast as you carefully screw a new set of bones to replace an arm into place. This is fiddly business, especially under these circumstances, though at least sedating these guys was as simple as knowing how Sinclair controlled them to begin with.
"Wait, does that mean he… all of them will have superpowers now?"
"Dunno, do you count cyborgs as supers?"
"That's… awesome! Or, uh, at least better than a lot of the alternatives. Man, I can't wait to tell Rick once he's up again!"
However he prefers to work through his trauma, really, you don't particularly care.
Dealing with this whole mess Sinclair made ends up taking you most of the night, completely crashing your plans for what you wanted to do. It's not a super big issue, nothing time-sensitive or anything, but while you are very, very good at doing surgery on people (you credit all the doctors and scientists you ate that can advise you, whether they want to or not), even you can't just rush perfection.
These modifications are meant to keep for the rest of these young mens' lives, or at least require minimal maintenance that could be performed in a nursing home, by staff without any idea what they're even doing at the best of times. You have to keep things simple while also perfectly imitating parts of human bodies that interface with what human pieces are left.
This crap is complicated to get right, and adding it just takes time, even with your Auto-Doc helping you along and automating a lot of the successive surgeries you have to implement here.
Spontaneous experimental bodily replacement is not a field of medicine that is often discussed in reputable journals, for some reason. You should write an open letter to the scientific community to point out that they should be pushing boundaries if they ever want to figure out how to do proper first aid in real emergency situation, such as whole-body-failure.
That's probably not how a real doctor would describe it, but that's hardly your problem. If the human body gets fucked, the point and use of medicine is to handle the situation until you can undo said fuckery.
Death shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than the flu in that regard, merely one that's harder to overcome. But hey, what do you know, you're just an overly nosy vampire that keeps on eating people. If they want to just accept it when people die, that's on them.
Even if that makes them lousy health professionals.
The GDA sends some more goons around, so you direct them to handle the cleanup and get the patients out of your sight once you're done with each of them in sequence. Their bodies will need a bit to recover from the stress they were put through, something you yourself didn't exactly help with, but the real thing keeping them down for the longest will be their minds.
Like, if they aren't massively traumatized after everything they went through, you'd be amazed. And classifying them as clinically insane. Just saying.
Ah well, all in a night's work. Now to go see about Alicia and her absurdly early morning gymnastics-
Oh, what's up with Mark now? The Thinker is sending you an alert and all.
Mark is sitting around on the roof of the university dorms, the place being locked up tight after a season of repeated suicides got the administration pissed enough about the bad publicity they had to do something about the situation.
What this means for you, mainly, is that it's a convenient place nobody will randomly stumble upon, which you suppose may well be why Mark is here as well. Because, from the look of him, he is currently engaging in the one teenage activity that transcends all boundaries, from nationality to culture to even species.
Moping. Mark is moping like a motherfucker right now, so very 'despondent' he doesn't even react when you float up to join him on there.
"So what's the big deal this time?" You ask, utterly unwilling to sit around and let him mope at you until he gets over whatever his problem is. "Someone got cancer? Your girlfriend dump you?"
Reminder to self, you could take some free time later to really enjoy doing the whole cancer cure thing. Again. It was hilarious on Bet and it would be hilarious here, too.
Mark, however, refuses to meet your eyes. "…"
"Well I know it's not cancer, I think. So…" You look at him meaningfully.
"…You said she'd break up with me," Mark mumbles. Almost admitting that you were absolutely right and he might as well have saved everyone the trouble.
Hey, it's progress. Of a sort. You don't want to demand too much from a teen.
"I'm not gonna laugh at you. There's low-hanging fruit and then there's too easy," you announce, taking a seat a little ways down the roof. "So, what'cha thinking now?"
"I don't know, I… I guess I'm just sad it had to end this way?"
"Meh, least you're not growing up to become a wife beater or anything," you shrug. At his appalled look, you shrug again. "What? It is how it is. Now you've managed to get yourself dumped and the world hasn't ended."
"Still feels real shitty," he complains.
"Welcome to life, it sucks and it only gets worse from here!" You spread your arms as though you were doing some big presentation. "Want me to look through my vaults for any drugs that could work on you?"
"No. Also, please don't do drugs. The idea of you going on a bender is terrifying."
"Pfh, as if they'd work on me. That would be too easy."
Your timetable being as disrupted as it is, the plans you had to interrupt when Mark decided to get his friends abducted and then dumped by his bitchy girlfriend (instead of the traditional kind of teenage rebellion of getting drunk and arrested for public indecency or some shit) not exactly something you want to just throw into the wind and forget about, you end up not having all that much time the day after all of… That… happened.
Not that you're rushed for it either, you just have to fit some extra crap into your by now more or less usual schedule. Which somewhat upsets said schedule, to say the least, but hey, what can you do.
Cutting the appreciation time you usually reserve for Alicia's morning exercise short a little (hey, she wants you to stare at her and you very much like what you see, plus the occasional quick massage usually goes rather quite appreciated by her as well), you hurry onward to get as many essences summoned, beaten and extracted as you can within the frame of time you allocate for doing so.
Today's main focus are the demons commonly just called Greater Fiends, which may or may not be a direct evolution of Fiends and other, lesser types of demons. The issue in clarifying whether this is the case or not lies in the vague documentation you have access to in regards to how different 'species' of demons work, especially the Fiends.
Simply put, Fiends (and Greater Fiends, naturally) are somewhat of a collection of wildly disparate features, even more so than most kinds of demons. Which, granted, the classifications are only loosely defined in the first place, but when you have the general type simply be 'assholes with around this much power and smarts above a base animal, but less than a normal baseline human', things can get… perhaps overly vague, is all you're saying.
Most Greater Fiends are basically lesser demons that have accrued enough power, largely through constant violence, theft and similar. They can be humanoid, have six or eight or twenty limbs, though they generally do trend towards the first couple of options there, some have natural abilities that supplement their reliance on brute force, some don't, wings are common, though not too common either…
The one thing all Greater Fiends you end up summoning do seem to have in common, at the end of things, is weaponry. Many of them sport natural weapons of some kind, from the ever-popular claws at the end of whatever digits they possess to horns, stingers and even detachable quills that can be shot out, in one case.
Even more interesting, many Greater Fiends also possess other, non-grown weapons they use, from oversized swords that have to be the size they are to fit their builds to a couple that wore actual, forged armor. As it turns out, it actually is possible to get some equipment even down in hell, and even these not-particularly-bright guys can manage to do so, on occasion.
If their brains suffice to figure out where to point the pointy end, anyways.
Sadly, it takes you a while to actually overwhelm several of the ones you end up summoning with a bloody mace and a couple of rusted coins as ritual materials thrown around your usual summoning circle, and the combined essence isn't quite enough to achieve the consistency you'd prefer for the purposes of creating proper tattoo ink.
Call yourself demanding if you have to, but you refuse to work with substandard materials. Especially on yourself. Sure, there's something to be said about creating art with whatever simple resources you have on hand, and limited means certainly can bring out surprisingly creative solutions, but not with your own body (and soul, technically, which is what the essence-ink really bonds to) as canvass.
No thanks. You'll just look into gathering more of this stuff later.
In other news, proper analysis and incorporation of Sinclair's work, much to his writhing dissatisfaction inside your stomach, you should note, has resulted in some very nice improvements in your own array of technology applicable to mechanical engineering… Such as notably enhanced parts to be used in your robots, for example.
The guy himself may have been pretty focused on enhancing human bodies for the purpose of creating advanced soldiers for a low cost, but you can make much more use of his unusually focused mental facilities than he ever could. He knows you think so, too, as you go out of your way to let him know.
Hey, he's kind of a dick. You don't foresee pissing him off for fun to be as funny as doing the same with Yoshi, but you may as well get into it while it's still new and fresh.
Mostly, you just go ahead and design new versions of things you already have, just with a dozen small, but notably accumulating improvements here and there. If it comes out to a total increase in performance of more than five percent, which it handily does, it's already pretty decent.
Five percent better than your most effective artificial muscle tissue, black strands of carefully grown material that isn't actually biological in any way, means that the Thinker's new generation of bodies will be just that much more devastating, not to mention require even less frequent maintenance. And by the way, it's all entirely non-biological, just to make that clear.
It's just that you have to grow the stuff by mixing the correct materials together, so the final process looks more like machines are 'growing' the tissue than any kind of traditional construction.
A good time all around, you'd say. You can even make use of this stuff in regular robotics, rather than the good stuff you reserve for the Thinker only (specifically because she's actively intelligent and can work around issues that VIs would stumble over way too much for your liking). The Bobs, your construction-focused robots originally based off the Mister Handy model you stole from Earth Fallout like most of your initial robot stuff, will appreciate it.
You made… a lot of modifications to the Mister Handy. Heck, by now a bunch of them have more space inside of themselves for tool- and material storage than they should, and while that's nothing new by your standards as such, you have no idea when or how that even happened.
Which is mildly concerning, you'll be honest. You literally can't forget shit, so…
Ugh. Anyways, you'll either figure it out or pretend the situation is entirely under control, as always. That approach hasn't failed you yet.
"Alright, quit yer dallyin' and sette down, class is in session!" Adjusting the glasses you made specifically for this skit, you gesture towards the (currently weightless) blackboard you're keeping in the air behind yourself.
"Uhm…" Looking eminently uncomfortable, Mark is pretending he was sitting in school right now, using his powers to essentially fly in a way that makes it look like he's sitting down. You didn't make him do that, he just followed along when you started to build up the impression of a classroom with nothing but some acting of your own. "What… exactly… is going on right now?"
"I'm giving you a break from physical training and making you bulk up your brain instead," you point out. Literally, with one of those extendable pointers. This one also doubles as a baton, naturally, seeing as you had it made out of adamantite covered in black lacquer to make it look less metallic. "So we'll be doing a review of your performance during the ReAnimen incident."
It's a stupid name, by the way, but Sinclair called his creations that in his notes, which the GDA already confiscated and used to try and make sense of what happened, so it's stuck now.
"Oh boy." Mark sighs, ruffling his hair. It looks pretty funny to see him behave like an actual schoolboy in his costume and all. "This'll be painful, I'm already seeing it."
"Good, means I don't need to explain it so your dum-dum head can understand," you nod, with all the seriousness the statement requires. "Let's start with the obviously biggest topic we'll cover: What You Did Wrong."
Using a piece of chalk you shake out of your dress, you write 'Failings' on the blackboard in bold letters, circling the word once.
"Should I just, list everything alphabetically or chronologically? Because I know I fu- I screwed up royally there, I mean."
"Chronologically please, that'll make it easier to add everything you inevitably didn't think of. But you go ahead first, then I'll complete the list, then we'll go over how you'll do better next time. Including how to keep a girlfriend, because your showing there was horrible too, just so you know."
Mark sighs again, both hands covering his face in despair. But there is no escape from the despair that is… The Night Queen! Mwahahahahahahah!
The back of the blackboard was, naturally, already prepared ahead of time, and so when the time comes to get into this part of the lesson plan, you only have to turn it around once and there you go.
Because why would you ever not use a double-sided blackboard that doesn't really work as well without your powers to prop it up instead of any actual screws or shit to keep it on a wall? It's not like you're planning to donate this thing to Baltimore's abysmal public schools or something.
On one side, you have the important relationship advice. More bold letters, as you find they generally get the point across nicely, promote 'Communication' as well as 'Respect: Your Partner And Yourself', among other things.
It's basically all the stuff you need to not just be a limpet stuck to whoever you're going out with. Or a toxic partner that should be dumped at top speed, for that matter.
On the other side of the board you have a few anatomical drawings of the cross-section of a penis and a vagina, with a few additional topics covered via bullet lists of important points you'll be going over. 'Consent: When To Ignore', 'How To Pleasure A Woman: Overview', 'Receiving And Administering Oral Sex', 'An Expert's Guide To Finding The Clitoris', 'How To Anal Sex' and, finally, 'Important: Contraception'.
You nearly forgot that last one, just because it's of absolutely no concern for yourself as a vampire and it pretty much never came up ever since you died. Still, you should make sure Mark doesn't accidentally create an inadvertent Viltrumite baby wave the moment you teach him how to get laid.
"Alright bud, time to learn how to be a pussy magnet," you announce the moment you turn the blackboard around, letting him see what awaits him.
Your student, for his part, blushes a bright red, covering his eyes with his hand. "This feels so utterly wrong on so many levels…"
"Hey, you wanna learn the practical skills you need to get and keep a girlfriend, this is the time and place," you say, crossing your arms over your (currently flat) chest.
"I mean… Not to doubt your great skill and experience-" He totally doubts your great skill and experience. "-but I really don't need any of… that. We already had sex ed classes and they were mortifying enough."
Mark waves at the anatomical drawings and accompanying (tightly spaced, for reasons of space economy) text.
"Too bad, I don't trust the US educational system not to have fucked this up, so we'll go over each topic in sequence. Especially anal sex, you don't need to rupture someone's asshole the first time you decide to get creative in bed. Or in the open air, a public park, whatever floats your boat."
"Can we please not discuss sex?"
"No. We will talk about it, and we will do it thoroughly." You fix him with a merciless gaze, the teenage boy gulping uncomfortably when he recognizes the look you always throw him when you're about to deliver a gut punch. "Your girlfriend was shit, but so were you as a boyfriend. So let's start with this here mutual respect, point one: Don't be a cunt, but also don't be a limp dick. You owe yourself that much, with or without someone else in the equation yet."
You take this 'educating Mark' crap seriously, okay? You'll have him drowning in pussy the moment you give him any real free time to himself.
Getting a hold of Cecil has, of late, become pretty difficult. Maybe it's him exhibiting appropriate levels of paranoia after you repeatedly managed to track him down over the last couple of weeks, maybe it's him actually being pretty busy and having to catch up on a load of work, considering how he had to focus on the whole 'The Guardian of the Globe got chunked and Omni-Man is a genocidal dick' situation.
In fairness, that was kind of an existential threat that he actually should be focusing on. If anything, you're surprised he managed to leave the rest of his workload to his subordinates for so long without some part of the world going up in flames.
Or just ceasing to exist or something. This dimension is crazy enough it could happen at any time and nobody would see it coming, you're absolutely convinced of it.
Still, you're slowly getting the impression that he might be avoiding you. Which would be mightily rude of him, now wouldn't it?
Luckily, you do have your ways to track him down, and if you have to use magic- as it turns out, Cecil still hasn't gotten any magical protections against being scried, so it's simple enough to at least roughly figure out his current location at any one time.
However, that feels like it would go against the spirit of your little game with him, even if there's barely any rules whatsoever and the goals are nebulous at best.
So you instead ask the Thinker to try and find out more about his moves lately, looking to find another way to annoy him until he has no other choice than to confront you so you get what you want. Some people might say you are taking your Night Queen persona too seriously right now, but some people also can shut the heck up, you're busy doing your little shadowy information war right now.
Except, as it turns out, it's not hard to figure out what he might've been doing lately. As it just so happens, the Guardians of the Globe are looking to expand their roster, introduce a couple of heroes as a sort of probationary junior program with the possibility of joining the team proper in time.
Knowing what you do, it's obviously an attempt to ensure that, should the Guardians be summarily ganked again, there's at least someone around to keep the Earth safe in their absence. Or to take over for them, in case you won't or can't bring them back again.
Yes, you can almost feel it, Cecil's paranoid little thought process being what it is. For all that he's extremely good at what he does and you can't imagine him ever stopping doing it, until and unless someone finally kills him, he's not all that hard to figure out, all in all.
Knowing that you weren't able to bring back Aquarius for one reason or another, the GDA's director is currently back to setting up contingencies. What if you turn hostile? What if you decide resurrecting the Guardians again would be too boring, or too annoying, any of a number of childish reasons? What if you just straight up won't be able to?
In those cases, if Omni-Man comes back to try and finish the job (as has to look pretty damn likely from his perspective), if some other new threat comes around, if Invincible is hiding his true colors and just waiting to flip on Earth together with his father, he needs someone that can hold down the fort while someone figures out a solution.
As such, Junior Guardians, or whatever they'll end up calling it. An open invitation for heroes of all stripes to try and join up is going around, all but officially confirming it's gonna be a thing.
And of course Cecil's been busy with that, without a single word to you.
Naturally, The Night Queen is somewhat… miffed about this. Miffed enough to go ahead and cause a little chaos just out of principle, and in a way nobody can really complain about without looking like a huge dick.
That's right, it's time for Plan C-B. Short for Cancer Begone, by the by.
Time for another go at kicking the pharmaceutical industry at large in the fucking balls.
"Uh, sir? Sorry about the hour, but you should see this."
'Hero Night Queen resolves Major Health Crisis, Claims Cancer Cure'
'Cure To Cancer Announced On Internet, Night Queen Trending'
'Revolutionary Medical Breakthrough, Cancer Thing Of The Past'
Cecil Stedman did not sleep much. It came with the job, there was always too much to do and too little time, so his routine involved two hours of bedrest followed by the kind of coffee that could be used as industrial paint cleaner in a pinch.
This was not ideal, but it was the best his aging bones could do. A decade ago he still could keep his head above water with one hour, hour and a half in times of luxury, but old age waited for no man.
He was surprised he hadn't died by now, truth be told, some villain managing to get an opportune bullet in him, betrayal, one of his subordinates getting fed up with his methods… It wasn't like he'd been close to his predecessor by any means, himself.
Still, two hours were too much in a job that really required a man to stay on his feet 24/7. It wasn't that he didn't have any people in place that could act and react in his absence, either, but Cecil was an adherent of the old saying about doing things right.
So when he woke up to find… this… going on, he didn't know whether to curse or just grab another coffee, his liver be damned.
'Cancer Cure Works, Most Costly Disease On Planet Gone'
'Stock Market Crash, Pharmaceutical Top 3 In Trouble?'
'Rumors About Night Queen And Invincible: A Secret Relationship?'
"At least the damn gossip rags are having a field day already," Cecil groaned as much as he noted it, his gaze sweeping across the screen before it returned to the third article on this page, the presentation of known data updated as promptly as ever. "Have someone censor this one, Mark's a good kid and Night Queen… at least looks like she does."
"Will do, Sir," Donald nodded, sending instructions off to the tech department. "It has been approximately fifteen minutes since this situation began. The monitoring team assumed it was a hoax at first, until the stocks started to go down."
Pulling up a summary of the stock market and pharma companies in particular, Cecil had to hold back a snort, the scars on the left side of his face aching a little. "More like they entered freefall out of a moving plane. Analysis?"
"It definitely was Night Queen, or an extremely good fake. The same MO as hers whenever she does anything digital, the entire thing forcefully spread all over the internet. There was no way to contain it by the time it became known."
He read the message Night Queen apparently sent, "This stuff hazardous? Please tell me we can just call it a dangerous, experimental thing and put something in the water."
"No, sir. Lab analysis is ongoing, but it genuinely seems to be a form of broadband medical treatment for cancer. In other news, the lab in question has requisitioned any lab rats with cancer in them after the first tests proved effective."
"This is going to be such a pain in the ass… Why would she do this? Any thoughts on the motive?"
"Sir, it's Night Queen. It could be any of a million reasons. She may well have done this purely to annoy you."
"…I hate it when you're right, Donald."
If only Darkblood would hurry the hell up with his 'independent' investigation already…
You amuse yourself to no end simply by, when you get down to it, trolling people on the internet, repeatedly causing certain stock prices to fluctuate wildly and weird rumors to spring up like mushrooms on a pile of the most bullest of shit.
Which is a thing. It's an expression. One you just invented, but that doesn't make it any less legitimate.
With some help from the Thinker you can even do it all over several social media sites at once, giving you even more coverage. Pushing people all over the world (or the parts of it that have internet access at least, which really are the only parts that matter anyways) into conversations all about that awesome new cancer cure is great fun.
Especially when you also made sure to add in exact price estimations for mass-production, including material costs, labor and ancillary equipment involved in it. Like, here you are, giving this crap out for free, and like hell are you going to just let some price gouging dickbags profit off of your cure against cancer.
This isn't some damn repeat of the old story where a guy sells the recipe for a dollar to help the world only for a bunch of dicks to jack up the prices and proceed to make bank off of the US. Anyone that tries any of that shit with your stuff gets to find out just how thoroughly The Night Queen can take a corporation apart for fun and profit.
There's no escape when you have your technical support track everyone and everything at once. Murder and mayhem never have been more convenient than with the Thinker at your side.
…Note to self, cobble together some Augmented Reality Goggles or something, purely so she can overlay things onto them. You don't particularly need anything of the like thanks to your telepathy, but you're mostly after the coolness factor anyways.
Sure, you could just make some kind of sci-fi VR environment with much the same feeling, but it just wouldn't be the same. Though the idea is good in case you ever decide to program a whole-ass VR game for the corresponding tech.
It's really convenient that you already have the console and all ready to go, complete with a decent physics engine. Mostly thanks to the Thinker, again, who is just amazing, for the record.
You tell her as much on the regular, too.
But, well, all the internet trolling (and ruining entire financial markets for fun) aside, you also have a bit of a date to get to. Though from the outside it kind of looks more like a family outing you'd say, amusingly enough.
Simply put, you're taking the girls you're living with out to be wined and dined, including Alana of course; you didn't want to push her to come, but you thought you'd offer at least, and she was pretty insistent about it when you mentioned you were bringing both Alicia and Ariana (who totally is above eighteen, in case this was not abundantly clear by this point, you numbnuts, even if she's short, lithe and looks very childlike at first glance) along.
For once, the type of food you're eating is not you paraphrasing what kind of people you're murdering for a snack. You almost forgot people can eat Chinese without actually eating someone Chinese.
The place you're going to, after all, is a whole Chinese buffet, like, that's the restaurant's whole main attraction. They've got everything from fries to fried noodles to whole dishes you can just take however much you want from, all kept warm in these big pans and metal basins that are regularly refilled whenever they're emptying too much.
The buffet is set along this long hall, with the tables all set next to it. The walls on that side are made up of a series of large windows, giving a pretty nice view of the city skyline stretching across the horizon from this point, currently lit by a slowly sinking sun.
The cost of admission to the buffet isn't exactly cheap, though it isn't terribly expensive either. Kind of middle of the road as far as these things go. The reason you chose this locale was mostly down to its good reviews written by non-bots, which is something the Thinker always keeps an eye on.
And really, the food is absolutely worth it. The sweet fried salmon they do here is fantastic, one among several ideas and dishes you absolutely intend to steal and replicate yourself later on. Not like the internet doesn't have a bunch of recipes you can follow to get more or less this same result, you just have to figure out which ones you like and tweak them until they're perfect.
In related news, you also really like the variety of ice cream they have in the dessert section here. Sampling will definitely have to happen later, you haven't had any mango in far too long.
Strawberry is and always will be your favorite favor, of course, but variety is the spice of (un)life and all that.
So yeah, your plate fills up pretty fast once you get going, as does Alicia's; the white-haired girl is actually hurrying up a little right now, having specifically asked Ariana to buy some time by distracting Alana for a bit.
The younger of the sisters did so as well, after only a bit of convincing and promises of a shared shower later in the evening. You might even join in, not like the mansion's showers are too small for three or anything.
This leads to you and Alicia being back at your table a good bit earlier than the other two, giving you a bit of time to work with.
Time that, at her silent, telepathic insistence, is best spent getting a little bit freaky in public. Well, who are you to argue when she looks up at you, her ever-present poker face in place, and her hand starts to stroke your thigh?
Literally the only reasonable response at that point is to return the gesture, just quietly feel her up in turn. And, for the record, Alicia's thighs are deliciously soft and pliable as always.
Not that they're the only part of her anatomy you could say as much about. Her mouth doesn't have the only pair of lips that are getting wet with appetite already, to say the least.
Keeping things subtle enough to escape notice requires a little nudging and arranging yourself properly, on both your parts, but by the time Alana and Ariana are coming back, your cock is being pumped by a delicate, steady hand, even as you make it difficult for Alicia to sit still by pumping two of your fingers into her, forefinger and thumb tweaking her clit every now and then.
Gently, of course. Always gotta be careful with that.
Alana throws both of you a suspicious look, but you casually ignore that while you grab your fork. "Glad you two could join us. I didn't want to start without you."
"Mhm," Alicia nods, already having, like you, taken off her shoes. Important for the next step, that.
"Alright, fair enough. Let's just…"
Alana trails off, feeling something off. You immediately realize what, too. Glancing over at Alana sitting next to you, you note that you just kind of followed her lead on this one, except that for some reason, instead of playing footsie with Ariana, your foot is currently molesting Alana's knee.
You really should be paying more attention.
"Anything wrong?" You ask politely, fork poised to spear up a piece of that salmon (you really want to eat it, for the record), giving her your best charming smile.
Narrowing her eyes, Alana shakes her head, even though neither you nor Alicia stop. "It's nothing," she quickly declares, apparently deciding to pretend nothing unusual is going on.
Good on her. She's working hard playing the hero and doing a full-time job every day, she may as well enjoy herself a little when the opportunity arrives, right?
You continue to go out of your way to make small talk as you eat, drawing everyone present at the table in as appropriate. Of course neither you nor Alicia relent in your toe-based assault tactics in the meantime, tagging in and out as you focus on eating a bit in short shifts.
Alana notices, of course, and throws both of you the occasional glare, though that's pretty much all she does. Whether it's because she's opening up to being casually molested this way or because she doesn't want to let Ariana know what's happening, she eventually relaxes and stops keeping her legs pressed together to prevent access of her inner thighs.
Something you make use of without a second thought, softly pressing your foot into her crotch when she stop expecting either of you to go beyond her thighs. Startled, she looks you squarely in the eyes, wordlessly trying to ward you off…
Only for your calm, equally wordless reply to bring her up short. Just lean back and let it happen, your eyes say, your complete surety seemingly perplexing to the woman that runs around under the guise of Green Ghost so very often.
You're pretty good at fine manipulation even when only using your feet rather than your hands, if you do say so yourself, another little advantage that your brand of vampirism allows you, so you can tease and prod her just fine even like this; working your way along her inner thighs, you don't rush things, working her over step by step until you arrive right where her legs meet her waist.
Alana grows visibly uncomfortable when you start to just precisely target her weak points, cheating in finding them using your enhanced senses and direct blood-sight to easily find out how she reacts to what kinds of things.
Before long you manage to produce a bit of a blush on her face, grinding the pad of your foot against her crotch, her legs back to squeezing, just around your probing digit this time. She's biting her lips, hardly even making any progress on emptying her plate.
Until Alicia nudges you, letting you know to swap places. Chuckling, you withdraw your foot, Alana instinctively trying to squeeze down on it for a moment before she finds her senses again and lets go, the blush not standing out that much on her dark skin.
Ariana has totally noticed, by the way, throwing you a knowing look. It's not like she's completely blind or anything.
Then Alicia takes your place again, aggressively grinding into Alana- you have to actually warn her to take it a little slower. Looks like getting herself killed did land Green Ghost over here in some deeper shit with her cousin than you thought, considering she's begrudging the whole affair like this.
Ah well. She made her bed, she can lie in it. In the meantime, though…
Man, the salmon really is great. Reminder to self, design some autonomous salmon farm or something, more of this stuff should exist.
You spend the rest of your night, once everyone has eaten their fill and Alana has been made to squirm sufficiently, down inside your secret underground lair, both because you have lots to do and to ensure she can't actually confront you over what happened at the restaurant.
It's just fun to mess with her like that, really.
Anyways, you summon lots of demons, even keeping a few of the Greater Fiends you're still gathering up for ink as parts of your little personal demon horde- a few of them are pretty powerful in their own right, even giving you a little trouble thanks to their really varied natural magic and ability to wreck face up close.
Meaning, they survive for longer than a few seconds when you go about subjugating them after summoning, which is pretty impressive. Greater Fiends, man- they're basically heavy infantry as far as hell is concerned, but the standards of assorted infernal legions are pretty outthere compared to what baseline humanity get up to.
Some of them even combine natural weaponry with industrially forged equipment. It's apparently somewhat common once you go beyond baser Fiends, but still, you see a lot of cool stuff during your little session.
But yeah, that aside, you also just throw a couple hours into working your alchemy lab on the side, figuring you may as well. You need a couple of potions for a particular plan of yours, so you may as well make a bunch and chuck 'em inside your shadow, like you usually do.
The thing is getting just a tad little bit full, but you don't really need it to store a lot of stuff anymore these days, so really, who cares? You mostly use it to keep whatever useful crap you like to have on hand these days, anything heavier or more bothersome you can just teleport in thanks to your outrageously good tech support.
Finally, now, it happens.
The final confrontation takes place outside of anyone's real plans. Jake is just trying to keep going, to keep on drawing out the inevitable as long as possible, simply because he can't bear to deal with it head-on. Until he has to. His ghostly companion, for her part, just goes along with what he wants, having little idea what else they should be doing herself.
Bella and Chloe, having dealt with the 'incident' they caused when they nearly caught up to him, are trying to pick up the trail again and working through any nearby cities he could have reached by this point in time, relying on the blonde werewolf's sense of smell to catch his scent and go from there.
The two pairs (for all that one of them doesn't much look like a pair, given ghost girl's invisibility) bump into each other out on the open street, right in the middle of a sleepy, rural town's late evening- there aren't many passerby to go around, leaving them largely free of bystanders that could interfere from the outside of this whole relationship drama.
Jake is tense. The twin reminders of his months in captivity as what may well be described as a slave bound to whatever these two wanted from him are thrust right in front of him, after weeks of avoiding even thinking about them the best he could.
Bella and Chloe are perplexed. They didn't exactly expect to find the object of their desire this suddenly, nor easily- but then, exchanging a glance, they both shrug and chalk it up to good luck.
Bella is the first to speak up, the confident vampire chick taking a step forward. "There you are, Jake. It's about time you stopped running."
"Yeah, yeah," Chloe agrees, pretending to be aloof and unaffected for all that she doesn't take her eyes off him for even a single moment. "You're just making this more difficult for yourself."
Struck with indecision, Jake just stood there for a long moment, like a rabbit in front of a predator. Then, he feels a cool palm pressing against his back, silently supporting him- someone literally has his back.
And sometimes, that's all it takes.
"No."
"No?" A perfectly proportioned eyebrow is raised, the vampire that had taken great amounts of time to wring him dry over and over again, day after day, asks.
"Hah! Someone thinks they have the right to refuse." Chloe chuckles, the werewolf that went out of her way to find new and 'interesting' ways to play with his body crossing her arms, but it's a dark, almost malevolent sound. "How cute."
"I mean it. I-" Jake takes a deep breath, putting his thoughts in order without backing down. "I won't go back into that room."
"Poor baby," Bella croons, deep red lips forming into a smirk. "If all you wanted was walkies, you should've just said so."
"I'm not your pet!"
"Eh, jury's still out on that one," Chloe throws into the conversation. "You definitely need a leash so you stop running off."
How had things even gotten like this? Jake still remembered when these two were… Well, not exactly normal, but they weren't batshit insane, at least. "Why are you doing this? All of it. Putting me in that room, chasing me down…"
"Because we love you, dummy." "'Cuz I wanna jump yer bones, duh."
The two would argue about it, but they'd done so to exhaustion already. Their agreement had been what caused things to turn out the way they did.
"Well I don't want anything to do with that if it involves tying me up for the rest of my life! I'm-"
Jake had to jump aside when, suddenly, a car swerves right onto the sidewalk between the two opposing groups. Its back door opened, one of Jake's old friends, the ones he thought he'd had to leave behind when he made his escape, waving him in. "Hey man, no idea what's going on but come with me if you want to live!"
He had a lot more characterization in the first book, but you do like bringing him back out of the limbo of interludes showing this little group's progress.
Things are coming together. Finally.
At the end of things, Jake has to make a decision. He has to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He can just give up, let himself be captured again, that was always an option… Except it was killing him inside, and no matter what else he does, he already decided against that.
The question now is, what does he do instead? To him, it was looking like he had no way out all this time, like the best he could do was delay and try not to deal with things until they went away on their own.
That didn't exactly work out for him, of course, but lucky him, he did buy enough time to realize something. Enough to figure out that there are people out there who can help him.
His friends, old and new. The group that followed him through this cross-county trip looking out for signs of Bella and Chloe's passing. Ghost girl, the unnamed, flighty and yet consistently helpful and loyal companion that had helped him even when she had no idea what was going on. The truck driver that had dispensed wisdom and helped him escape what could have been his journey being cut short ahead of time.
All of them reached out to him at one point or another, and Jake was finally reaching back. And yes, you may or may not be basing all of this on the dynamics of a toxic relationship, abuse or similar, but your point is that sometimes, bad things happen to you and you can't deal with them on your own.
And that's okay. Oftentimes, you don't need to. And when you see someone in a situation like that, reaching out to them yourself can make all the difference to them.
Hey, you're writing a whole-ass book about this crap, you may as well give it a bit of a message.
Long story short, Jake makes his escape again, hurriedly informing his friends of the situation and quickly formulating an actual plan, with them. Fast forward a bit and he loudly proclaims that Bella was the better lay between her and Chloe and that he would prefer to stay with her, predictably pissing Chloe off enough to start a fight.
It wouldn't have worked the other way around, Bella being a much calmer head and all, but, well… Chloe is somewhat temperamental, as Jake knows all too well, so he takes advantage of that.
Shenanigans continue to happen, ghost girl channeling her righteous anger at her friend's tormentors by continuing to fuck with them while the gang works out the rest of the plan, and it all ends with the vampire and the werewolf dumped into a nearby lake, severely affected by their specific weaknesses (Bella has a bit of a garlic allergy, just because) and having to fight to survive the giant squid that is attracted by their presence, considering them intruders in its territory thanks to their own magical natures.
The epilogue features the long drive home, complete with soft, emotional music drizzling from the radio and Jake feeling a lot better over himself, finally. Just getting out of his situation didn't let him deal with it, after all- doing that took a whole lot of more effort in the aftermath, and telling the story of his great escape actually helps a lot, his friends staying supportive of him throughout as he demolishes a bunch of candy bars.
His body's having its own issues, considering his at best limited diet during the straining events of the past two weeks. Now that he's finally letting go of the constant tension eating away at him for good, it's demanding its toll, is all.
They briefly encounter the woman that helped him along the way, the trucker exchanging a daring grin with him an giving him a thumbs up before her course leads her elsewhere. And, finally…
Two sopping wet girls are standing by the side of the road, neither of them in the mood to just run all the way to the nearest bit of civilization. And Jake, being incorrigibly nice at the weirdest of times- a quality that led him into the hole of shit he was in to begin with, having touched their heartstrings and initiating the series of events that these books describe- asks the others to stop for them.
The rest of the trip home is a bit cramped, but… Now that he can face them properly, neither of them actually attack him, to their own surprise. Instead, they all just share this kind of awkward teenage silence as everyone tries not to talk about the elephant in the room.
Or car, as it were.
And there you go. That's the story, the end. The conflict has been resolved, character has been developed and everyone involved has grown more mature over the course of the story, one way or another.
Jake hasn't forgotten what happened, nor has he forgiven it completely- but he also knows that, one way or another, he can't undo it, nobody can. And neither can he just banish these supernatural women out of his life completely. So instead…
Instead he endeavors to deal with them, head-on, instead of just kind of going with the flow and pretending he had no idea as he did before his captivity.
The closing words are the mention that the car is, technically, stolen from someone's parents, and that explaining everything was going to 'a bitch and a half'. Chloe takes offense and someone has to chuckle at the absurdity of the entire situation.
It's the good kind of chuckle. The one that spreads.
Original Manuscript of Night: Free By Dawn: Original manuscript of a book written entirely within the soul palace, the continuation of Dawn: Chained By The Night. In this sequel, Jake must escape the situation the ending of the first installation of the series left him in, engaging in all sorts of (among other things, sexy) hijinks along the way. On summoning, cast Freedom of Movement on any creatures in the general area, freeing them from anything that would inhibit their freedom, from destroying physical bonds, dispelling magical ones and temporarily undoing psychological pressures that explicitly ensure they will not act to free themselves from a given situation. (Manuscript)
After all the fun you've been having, it's about time to return to Mark's usual schedule again, so you get ready for the whole thing- changing shape, changing clothes, the whole shebang you've turned into a quick, efficient routine.
Not that any of it is particularly complicated, so you go ahead and ask the Thinker where he is right now, so you may follow tradition and drop on him with a literal dropkick out of nowhere. Y'know, to set the proper tone for the training you're putting him through.
Only, there are some slight… complications, this time. Nothing particularly big or anything, but, well…
The Prior Evening
Honestly, Mark wasn't sure what to feel about the whole lecture Night Queen had dropped on him out of figuratively nowhere. Sure, she just did whatever she wanted and nobody could really stop her- that much he'd learned by now, just about anyone that had met her for longer than a minute would- but still, having a little girl drop comprehensive relationship advice and… Even more comprehensive sex ed on you wasn't something anyone just expected to happen.
He shuddered. Everything about it just felt wrong on so many levels it bore repeating.
Still, though, here he was, thoroughly single and with nothing to lose. And hey, if nothing else, Night Queen had been weirdly persuasive when she'd gone over how to 'get a girl to have sex even if you're a loser'.
It wasn't that Mark was out to have sex and nothing else, but honestly, right now he just felt kind of numb. Why not go and give it a try, worst he'd get was to get laughed in the face.
Yet another lesson Night Queen had taught him. There were worse things than a little embarrassment.
And hey, he was still at this university where so much had happened in the course of, what, a couple hours, so…
Sighing, he stretched his neck and cleared his throat. "Alright Mark, remember, just be confident, do what feels right and have a good time. Everything else comes from there."
What was the worst that could happen?
Back To The Present Day
You stare through the window into the university dorm's insides, where a certain half-Viltrumite went and got hooked with three uni chicks at once, sleeping amongst them like a baby. Among them you spot a busty blonde, a brunette a la leggy librarian (complete with a skewed pair of glasses balanced on the tip of her nose) and a short redhead.
All of them are naked, naturally, and a couple of used condoms are lying around- it doesn't take a genius to figure out someone had a wild night.
Good on him, really. Your student obviously applied your lessons well. Not that this stops you from dragging him out of there to beat him up just because, naturally, but you reckon he's earned himself, like, twenty minutes of extra sleep.
Afterwards, you're going in there and getting started. If he isn't dressed by then, that's his problem.
The earth shakes with each sluggish, echoing step, a mildly foul smell spreading far and wide. Shuddering flesh twitches with every move, slowly advancing to fulfill its foul agenda.
There is panic. The people scream and flee at its sight, its great, hulking silhouette wading into the city. A laugh bubbles up deep inside its belly- this is what it should be like.
They scorned it. They feared it. They hated it. They paid for it. All the same, they died to it… Until they stopped. Until everything changed.
It let the laugh out, its lumpy growths brushing over, then tearing through electrical lines, the barely noticeable burns healing over as quickly as they appeared. "HUOOOOHOHOHOHO! RUN, FEEBLE FLESHLINGS! FLEE FROM MY MIGHT!"
Leaning into a nearby building, it tore right through it, poor building standards and its great bulk coming together into improvised demolition work. This body was new to it, yet its continuous metastasis ensured that it remained unharmed regardless of what happened to it.
Indeed, it was the perfect lifeform… Far superior to those that would scorn its sickening blessings for a chance at prolonging already fading lives.
"I! AM! CANC-R-US! ALL OF YOU BELIEVED YOU WON AGAINST THE GREAT CELL DIVIDER, YET I SHALL DEMONSTRATE HOW WRONG YOU ARE!"
These foolish mortals dared to strike at the major age selection factor of all biological life, and their reckoning was at hand-
"Shit like this is why nobody can have nice things," a most deplorable, young voice echoed over the rooftops of the city. "Look, I cure cancer, the next hecking day we get a giant cancer man showing up looking for a buttkicking!"
"NOBOY! CURES! CANCEEEEER!"
"Seriously, can you believe this, Vincible?"
"Uh, my name's Invincible."
"You haven't earned that first syllable yet. Keep trying, maybe you'll make it in a century or two."
The literally cancerous creature rampaging before your very eyes roars as it changes course towards you and Mark, its folded tissue quivering massively with every step.
The thing you're looking at is, according to Yoshi's analytic powers (you overlaid him real quick, his constant annoyance at you replaced with trepidation and even greater annoyance towards the slowly growing religious groups within your inner world) basically just a giant ball of literal cancer, grown out of any and all proportion and controlled by some sort of central intelligence.
If you had to guess, there's some poor fucker in there whose brain cancer went out of control or something, right before your Universal Cancer Cure (trademark pending as always) could solve the issue the easy way.
Or something. You swear there has to be something in the water in this dimension, more than the chemicals the GDA throw in there anyways, because this kind of shit doesn't happen anywhere else you've been.
Ugh. You suppose someone should do something about this. The… Giant Cancer Man (you try to come up with a decent name involving cancer and clinical something something you could abbreviate into CUCK, but nothing really comes to mind for the 'K') doesn't actually have many markers for normal biological life- this thing doesn't move by tensing musculature nor does it have any bones, for instance.
Instead, it moves by rapidly multiplying its undifferentiated cancer cells in a given area, all to give the impression it was moving its arms and legs as it proceeds to come towards you. There's some kind of eye constructs on the lumpy piece of flesh you could mistake for a head, if one on a proportionally morbidly obese person, but most of it really is just a big bag of cancer cells.
"Uh, shouldn't we do something about this guy? He's kind of wrecking the city." Mark winces as another building just topples, the bulk of the self-ascribed Canc-R-Us forcing itself against it until its construction crumbles sufficiently it can't take it anymore. "Crap. I hope the people evacuated in time."
You know what, you have found the perfect opponent for Mark's training, on second thought. "Right. Go do something about it."
"Uh, me? Like, I can, but I'm not sure I'll be able to limit collateral damage here. My powers are good for punching things, not for any of the stuff that comes with that." Ugh, did the potion you try feeding him to help him get perspective and escape the intellect-draining properties of teenager-hood quicker work a little too well or is Mark just surprisingly aware of his own strengths and weaknesses?
Not like it matters. "It's part of your training now. Go beat up the Giant Cancer Man, everything else is up to you."
You'd go and take care of it yourself, but this thing doesn't exactly have blood flowing you could drain- and without a soul to consume for your own use, why the heck would you bother?
"…Actually, are we sure it's a man? I mean, it's not like this thing has any genitals or anything, it could just as well be a Giant Cancer Wo-"
"Mark," you growl, crossing your arms and making him flinch. You point a finger at the subject of your discussion, like a spear or arrow out to find its mark. "Fight. Now."
"Right, got it, be right back." He sighs, flying towards the giant enemy that showed up out of the blue. "Really should've gotten some breakfast today, I hate it when I don't have the time…"
Tough luck, buck-o. Now, time to see how he does against something like this.
It really is kind of a shame, but there goes another residential building. One disadvantage of these big apartment buildings is that when you pack people in tightly like that, a whole bunch of them lose their homes at once whenever some random disaster happens, you suppose- a much more immediately relevant problem in a place like this, naturally.
You're tempted to seriously just call this dimension Earth Fuckup at this point, considering the sheer amount of fuckery going on all the time. Having villains run around doing crime all the time is one thing, but this is Earth Bet levels of senseless destruction you're looking at here.
Like, Blasto used his power to make what amounts to an enormous scarecrow once to project power back during the Boston Games, if you remember correctly, and before you took him out Lung going on a rampage produced collateral damage not unlike what you're witnessing here. There's a reason Brockton Bay was kind of falling apart before you took over, and the deep, genuine care with which capes treat architecture was not it.
Right now, Mark is trying to use the force he can bring to bear to beat back and immobilize Canc-R-Us, throwing all the acceleration he can put together into slamming through its limbs. Results are… mixed, so far.
He's managing to blow holes into the arms and shoulders of the thing, busting through its body by ramming himself through it, which indeed manages to immobilize the body part in question more often than not. Issue is, any damage he manages to do just heals up too quickly for him to capitalize on it, the regenerative properties of his cancerous foe working too quickly for him to really make much of it.
On the other hand, he's actually way too fast and precise about his spacing to be hit in return, even when Canc-R-Us actually grows an additional pair of arms in an effort to swat him down.
Turns out he actually did learn something from all that training, particularly how to not get hit in the face by managing positioning and reacting to everything his opponent does, and now he's applying it in a practical way in an entirely different situation, with an enemy that has much greater reach than he has rather than the other way around.
You're almost proud of his progress. The Mark of a week ago would be… Well, not beaten, necessarily, but definitely bloody, too slow to react to being smacked out of the sky repeatedly so his body would impact surrounding buildings like a cannonball.
A loud crash draws you to actually pay attention to the fight again, where you can see that Invincible has just decided to actually get into a straight-out slugging match now, punching back any time the Giant Cancer Man tries to hit him. They're more or less evenly matched at first, but he's slowly pushing his opponent, steadily battering it back into the general area he's been maneuvering the fight into.
That is, the already thoroughly destroyed area, where nobody can really cause all that much more collateral damage than has already happened. All the while he's pretty much just buying some time so either someone can help him with a powerset better suited to this enemy or he can set up a decisive blow that bypasses the regeneration, somehow.
He's coming along, you have to say. Even if he's currently covered head to toe in dead cancer meat, the stuff blasting off in all directions each time his fist clashes with the bulbous arms attempting to hurt him.
Honestly, you could see Mark outlasting this thing through sheer stubbornness, but you don't have all day and neither does he- you want to run him through a performance review now that he's dipped his toes into bigger opponents, literally so after a couple of those kicks he rammed into all that walking cancer.
So you decide to help along a little. Not directly, you wouldn't want to discourage your (tentative) student by just taking the fight away from him, but rather somewhat indirectly… Such as by, among other things, giving him some advice.
By shouting really loud and distracting everyone. Hey, you don't want to interfere, what would you do if you had to blow everyone up for getting cancer slime on your dress?
"Push harder, you can rip half that arm off!"
Just because he's doing better than you'd have expected doesn't mean he can't do better yet, after all.
"Stop getting distracted, that's how you get dead!"
Of course while you're doing that, you're also nudging what civilians are still in the area out of danger here and there, making sure he can focus on the fight at hand. You're welcome, Mark.
Also, while all of that is going on, you went ahead and phoned up Robot using one of the nigh-untraceable burner phones you had made using a few idle manufactory hours. The thousands of them, you mean. You were pretty thorough.
Sadly, Robot is busy with something right now, something something supervillains blah blah. He does, however, give the number of Atom Eve, who does have some free time and is flying around North America right now.
You apparently have to add that qualifier after she decided to extend her heroic roaming ranges worldwide, having officially split off from the Teen Team a while ago. Honestly, good on her, kicking droughts in the balls and shit is nice and actively helps people, rather than 'just' protecting them from supervillains.
You kind of do need both when violent madmen intent on blowing civilization up appear on the regular, really.
Eventually, once Mark has proven he has the situation under control twice over, the heroine clad in pink appears from beyond the horizon, her flight speeds absolutely, stupidly insane considering she's using what amounts to a freak success of an esper power to do it.
You could match hers, but that's only because your power is really, really good and you can perform a couple tricks to let yourself manage the g-forces involved.
"You know, I'd make a pithy comment about breast cancer," she says once she's close enough to be heard, "but honestly, let's just end this."
A wave of pink light blasts out from her, harmlessly brushing past the debris of the battle until it permeates 'Canc-R-Us'.
And all of a sudden, on the next exchange of blows with Mark, the barely-sentient ball of cancer stops regrowing the chunk of flesh now splattering all over the place.
"I've stopped its cell growth, it won't regenerate anymore!" Eve shouts for Invincible's benefit. "Hit it hard!"
"Pretty sure he was doing that already," you note.
"I know, but a pretty girl cheering him on will do wonders for his morale."
"I'd say the three college chicks he spent the night with have that covered."
"Oh, really? Way to go, Invincible!"
Mark turns his head, still wrangling with the (now even more violently struggling) Giant Cancer Man. "Could you please stop talking about that and help me a little over here?" He asks, but the blush he can't fend off is unmistakable.
"Nah, you got this. If you need help, you get an extra asskicking for lunch," you inform him, lazily drifting off in the breeze.
There's just something oddly peaceful about floating around up in the air. You reckon just putting yourself into orbit around a planet would be about as close to complete serenity as you could get, come to think of it…
Among the many demons that make up typical infernal hordes, one of the both classically handy and yet situational ones, at least in your opinion, are Nightriders.
They're nothing extremely far out there, mind you; in essence, they're basically just demonic centaurs as per Greek mythology, the upper body of a human on the neck of a horse. Of course them being demons, they aren't quite like that, there's a couple of… differences from that description.
For one, the horse body isn't quite that of a horse, more like what you get when you mix a horse, a lizard and some miscellaneous bits together. It also possesses a long, tapered tail that can act as a weapon of its own, which is neat, you think.
Also, they don't have skin. At all. Skin is just not a thing they do. Instead, Nightriders possess stupidly tough muscles combined with bony plates that cover their lower arms, backs and parts of their lower bodies, providing both natural protection and weapons in one thanks to the claws their fingers end in.
Also, they have curly horns, a bunch of spikes all over their bodies and a mean streak a mile wide. Their attitude combined with their general preference for even ground is the reason you don't personally field any in your own demonic army so far, though the latter is really more of a preference than anything else- they only vaguely resemble horses and can easily jump and climb much better than even mundane goats can.
They don't typically use weapons, and the scars they collect are basically medals of honor to them- living in small, tribal communities, they basically spend all their time fighting rival Nightriders and any other demons that enter their territory, until such a time they manage to evolve- or perish and recorporate, in which case they start over.
Apparently, both the souls of horses with some 'kick' to them and those of other assorted mortals that tend to think in highly tribalistic ways often end up as Nightriders. One of the kinds of demons whose 'evolution' (it's more a metamorphosis, technically, but apparently various video game franchises have warped hell's general vocabulary) is more well-documented than that of most, it is well-known that Nightrider Chiefs look… very, very different compared to their 'normal' counterparts.
Something to look into once you can summon them more easily, you suppose. For now, you just go ahead and smack a bunch of normal Nightriders into paste to extract their essence, then make use of it by stuffing it into your tattoo.
You do wonder if it'll eventually run out of space for more, or if its nature as a technically soul-based construct means that things like 'space' are completely irrelevant to this thing…
You didn't have time for many shenanigans today, but yeah, no hunger again. Maybe you should make it a habit to properly categorize every little thing you do all day just so you can finally be clear about why your unending thirst for blood has been holding steady instead of constantly increasing lately.
Hmm… Does fingering Ariana to sleep count as sex or people-oriented activity? You suppose you'll have to properly define catgeries one of these days so you can do this right.
Now then, absence of the unending thirst for blood that drives you to attack the living for the sake of your own sustenance notwithstanding, you do want to get some eating done, purely because you always need more souls and it's not like their current owners really do all that much with them anyways.
And sure, maybe you don't need need them anymore these days, what with the plethora of other ways in which you can feed yourself without killing anyone, but really-
If you have the choice between being some kind of vegetarian vampire that feeds off of blood packages (cooled blood has the equivalent taste of warm lemonade, being the opposite temperature of what it should be) and animal blood (bland rations that never quite feel like they fill you up even when they do) compared to casually committing violent murder for the sake of getting some proper meals, you know what you'd go with.
Considering that's literally what you do. Not that you don't live off of bloodbags if the circumstances dictate as much, mind you, but it's the principle of the matter.
Also, keeping people as literally permanently immobilized slaves whose only purpose is to produce blood for you in what has to be one hellish existence that won't ever end is, if anything, more cruel than just consuming their souls and keeping them safe inside your belly instead. Not that you're factoring cruelty into this, just principles and how you want to be the best abomination against all that is good and right you can be.
Yup, eating people is just the best. Well, the best option in this regard, at least. You also very much do like your vampire wives, your daughters, the Lord Street Crypts and all the funky shenanigans you all get into and so on and so forth, naturally.
So yeah, long story short, it's dinner time, and some dude's on the menu. 'Some dude', in this case, meaning none other than Octoboss, the amazingly humanoid jackass made of rubbery tentacles imitating limbs.
He's currently somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, fucking around intercepting radio signals in this weird underwater base manned by these weird little squid-people. They'd almost be cute, if they weren't wearing those blue stormtrooper uniforms that make them look like squid-headed little fascists.
You know all of this from the times you spied on Octoboss using your magic, naturally, because like hell are you going to head into a situation like this without first confirming as much intel about your target as possible.
It's not every day you pull your whole infiltration and consumption shtick on a secret underwater base, after all. You don't need to breathe and no amount of water pressure is really going to stop you, as you've already proven on Earth Rapture, but the drastic change in environment does mean you'll have to actually adjust your approach a little here.
All of these considerations rush through your mind as you circle above the ocean, your black wings holding steady as you ride the updraft currently keeping you far from the water's surface. All you need to do, really, is to get down there and eat Octoboss, you don't exactly expect much trouble along the way.
Except from your target himself, who is a huge-ass octopus-man that you expect to be physically strong and potentially resistant to being eaten as easily as a baseline human. Simplicity itself awaits you, in other words.
Well, no point in dawdling around overlong; the ocean awaits, its deep, cold, pressurized depths holding the loot you wish to obtain.
In this case mostly being the soul of Octoboss, really, but that just means you don't have to bother with preserving any other, more tangible gains that might be pulverized as collateral damage. You doubt there'll be any particularly amazing technology you couldn't just make yourself down there, and if so, you're likely to get access to at least some of it through the soul you're here to 'acquire'.
So you dive, your feathered body warping and twisting as your wings lie closely against your sides, merging with them before they stretch out of yourself again, becoming rigid and decidedly devoid of feathers.
You grow out and out, your beak becoming a large, almost square snout, your now massive maw sprouting a row of teeth sharp enough to rip right through flesh and bone on a massive scale. More and more spiky fins grow out of you, your now blue, rubbery amphibious skin stretched over plates of bone and enormous strands of muscle.
Blank eyes shift into place at the sides of your head, adapted not to see light but rather perceive something other than light entirely, somehow, letting you 'watch' the flow and currents of the water you threw yourself into.
That's right, you're overlaying the soul of that one Sea King you ate in Thule that one time. Wiggling a little, you adjust your orientation, preparing for a deep dive by shifting the water all around you, the natural, magical hydrokinesis of this creature settling in.
Time for a swim then, as it were. You could probably make some whale noises while you're at it, just to fuck with anyone or anything listening to what's going on, actually- and using your current power to manipulate water, you also could make yourself look like a whale on most modern monitoring devices.
You don't bother with that second part, though, instead using it to let yourself swim faster by literally having the water pull you along, plunging into the depths like a cavitating spear. This is how Sea Kings like the one you turned yourself into can reach their massive swimming speeds, a combination of their natural magic and enormous size, plus the actual adaptations in their bodies of course.
Next halt, the secret base Octoboss had built. Time for that snack you're here for!
You make some good time, trucking along straight towards the bottom of the ocean.
The differences in water pressure you subject yourself to would almost certainly be debilitating or even fatal for most, what with living beings and their embarrassing little hangups in regards to their biochemistry and how it works differently in sufficiently changed environments. However, Sea Kings naturally are perfectly adapted to these issues, being able to just dive or come up whenever they want, and even if your current body didn't have that advantage, you're still fundamentally undead, so really, fuck all of that noise.
Long story short, you plunge ever onward, your absurdly large body making it easier to move quickly. That's the thing about living underwater, and the reason the largest living creatures known to man (aside from any weirdness, that is, but even then) tend to exist underwater, rather than on land; the larger you are, the more water you can push aside every time you move, effectively making you faster.
Whales are huge, but they aren't slow. Their size is there for a reason.
Well, right now you're pretty huge yourself, you're pretty sure as a Sea King you're actually bigger than a blue whale, in fact. What you're saying is, you're moving really fast.
Hence why it doesn't actually take all that long to reach the somewhat ramshackle underwater base whose location you already knew of, its outlines standing out against the watery sense that replaced your eyesight when you took this form. Actually, looking at it like this…
Is this thing, like, a repurposed spaceship or something? Because that would explain a lot, both where Octoboss and his merry squidmen come from as well as the overall shape you're kind of sensing here. Then again, you could be wrong, maybe they just prefer an architectural that looks like it might be cobbled together out of a crashlanded spacefaring vessel when you look at it from this angle.
Well, not like it matters all that much. You'll find out in due time. Your blood-sense does work on the inhabitants of this place, after all, and so you know precisely where to find Octoboss himself in there.
Only question now is how to do the eating, but you're confident you can find a way, even as the base scrambles to respond to the giant monster that just showed up right above it. This is kind of your bread and butter, after all.
Sound waves travel very differently underwater, making it pretty difficult to transfer specific sounds between 'above water surface' and below. That said, you do, in fact, have literal magic that lets you project a given sound in ways that partially ignore or invalidate normal physics, so…
As you near the underwater wreck turned into a secret base, a deep, echoing sound rings out, again and again, threatening, menacing- and then the additional instruments come in. The squidmen are visibly confused and alarmed, but there isn't really anything they can do about it.
You come closer. And closer. As the entirety of your bulk becomes apparent, the panic rapidly begins to set in, though trying to flee to the supposed safety of their base doesn't exactly save them when you open your jaws.
You proceed to slam your opened mouth into the repurposed shelter right from above, digging your teeth in as deep as you can by wiggling around once or twice, metal screaming and tearing under the force of your assault.
Then you snap your jaws shut, scooping up a bunch of the squidmen in one swoop- as well as Octoboss, who is now clamped into place between rows of teeth. So far, so good… Aside from the part where he's stretching out his 'arm' and 'legs' made of tentacles slung around each other, forcing your maw to remain open rather than being crushed entirely.
Bit of a pickle, that. The fucker's refusing to be eaten.
It's not exactly easy pickings that you're here for, as it turns out. Your dentures aren't exactly weak to begin with, but in this form, you're literally a giant-ass ocean monster with a mouth that's about as wide as your body is; the very fact Octoboss hasn't just been torn in half by virtue of you snapping your jaws in his general direction is a testament to his strength.
Of course he also does have the advantage of being a very small, very strong creature that's currently using the physics behind how leverage works against you- it becomes exponentially harder to crush him the further away he is from your temporomandibular joint (more commonly known as the jaw joint), and he's about as far away from it as your current mouth configuration allows.
That doesn't mean it's easy for him, either, of course. You can 'see' the water his body is drawing in and expelling at a rapid pace, the exertion clear in the undulating, heavy pumping of his blood, very much unlike what it was like earlier, before you literally bit down on him.
You're trying to crush him between your teeth, while he's trying not to be crushed. For a long, long moment, you're at a stalemate, a few of the squidmen that weren't caught in your initial assault regrouping to try and shoot at you with these underwater guns they have. Not counting the ones currently inside your mouth who are still caught in the chaos of 'suddenly, mouth', anyways.
Octoboss even manages to pry your jaws open a miniscule bit with what you think is a roar of effort (you can't exactly see or hear things going on up at the front of your snout all that well, you blame how big you are). That, though, is when you decide enough is enough, and you really put some effort into it (aka you burn some of the blood you aren't even drinking anymore to push yourself that little bit harder).
As a result, the guy slowly, but surely loses ground again. Until the grip of your teeth on his tentacles hits that sweet spot, until the forces being applied on all sides align just right-
And he does, in fact, get crushed, his blood summarily sucked thouh the seawater you're swallowing and straight down your gullet, in the company of the squidmen that are flailing and trying to free themselves now they're being flushed down that way.
Damn, that felt satisfying.
You don't really need to clean yourself anywhere as much as most people would, a quick transformation into something intangible usually being more than enough to get rid of any dirt or other substance clinging to yourself. That said, you are mightily tempted to take a shower or something at least, after your little recreational swimming session.
The ocean is not, in fact, clean. It's full of all the shit and piss of the animals that live inside of it, any chemicals that are discarded in it, all the trash and other crap humanity just dumps in there- it's a small miracle that water is even capable of bearing life at all, sometimes.
And you basically took a good, long dunk inside of it. Honestly, that shower is more tempting the longer you even think about all of this.
That said, you also have a little something to do right around now, the appointed time to pull the trigger on a side project you had the Thinker cobble together over the past day or two. It's done now, the timing is all you've been waiting to line up- you do it right and it'll be all over the evening news.
So you settle down on a couch in your underground lair, your Night Queen guise swirling some tomato juice in a fancy wine glass. This was the one version of you that felt the most appropriate for this, is all.
You don't really need to do much of anything. The Thinker has the whole operation well in hand. Still, as the TV turns on and the deep fakes are spread all over the internet and mailed straight to every news outlet this side of the globe, you can't help but wonder whether the public will bite.
"Breaking news, this just came in," the newscaster you're looking at right now says (she's the Thinker's choice for this, because she got some nice tits you suspect), "in an incredible turn of events, every pharmaceutical company in the United States of America producing medicine has made a joint declaration in the wake of the Cure to Cancer, announcing that all insulin prices will be capped to at-cost levels for the next five years."
Next to her, several of the images your friendly neighborhood AI doctored up are played, showing the declaration itself, then a couple of executives from different companies shaking hands and smiling, doing the good ol' PR dance. It's all completely fake and, from your perspective, absolutely hilarious.
The Thinker even edited their websites to make all of this look real. The point of this exercise, of course, is to see what happens when you widely, publicly announce something like this, with none of the companies in question having any idea themselves whatsoever.
"'…that in the light of the good deeds committed by Night Queen, concerns over profitability and stockholders are entirely misplaced. We all must do our part to create a better future for humanity and, although this is but a small step, it must be made all the same.'" Yes, yes, quote the fake declaration some more, you had an absolute blast coming up with this tripe. "A moving gesture indeed."
The only reason your tomato juice isn't splattering everywhere as you giggle uncontrollably is your gravity power making it stay inside the glass.
"The stocks are down! The stocks are doooown!"
"We have to sue! Tell me we can sue!"
"We can't, not until they find out who did this!"
"We can't." Thud. "We can't." Thud. "We can't." Thud.
"Sue the news! Make them stop this, now!"
"Why even bother- hic? They already sent it out. 'S too late. Hic."
"Shut it with that defeatist attitude!" Smack! "Damage control! We have to control the damage!"
"How?! The company's entire portfolio is cheap-ass insulin! How are we supposed to salvage this!"
"Can we petition the government for aid? Just write this off as a terrorist attack?"
"…I'll shoot the legal department a note, see what they say."
"Fuck the legals, we don't make this work, we'll be hemorrhaging money. I want you all to phone up whoever you have to, but we need those taxpayer dollars sooner rather than later!"
-Excerpt from a boardroom meeting transcript
The good old Demon Brute. Where the 'humble' fiend acts as what one could liken to infantry in terms of an infernal horde's ranks, the Brutes are the equivalent of heavy infantry. You already noted this when you went out of your way to recruit a bunch of them for your own pocket demon army, but they are somewhat optimized for their role in battle, even more so than most demons are.
Hence they are technically considered relatively 'weak, when compared to other demons- but that's only in terms of total demonic power, the 'depth' of hell they tend to inhabit unless compelled otherwise by someone or something and essence making them up. This matters a lot for the ease (or hardship) with which they may be summoned, as well as what you may do with their essence once you've harvested it.
It does not particularly factor into their ability to chew ass in combat all that much, however. They are heavily armored, their heads less heads and more a portable wall in terms of durability and thickness thanks to the enormous bone plates they sport, their horns simultaneously act as a protective and offensive spear formation in effect and they even can create a beam of intensive heat as an added offensive maneuver, their natural abilities as efficient and effective as possible.
Their coal-like skin even acts as camouflage in the dark to an extent, but the real danger is their all-terrain charge, enabled by the strong, muscle-packed limbs that are required for them to even move with all the weight they have to carry, and once up close (optimally after they've skewered whatever they're fighting with their trio of front-facing horns) their absurdly sharp claws come into play.
Then there's the additional limbs jutting from their chests, the claw-like appendages meant to let them deal with any enemies small enough to try and maneuver below them and also useful for climbing onto things. Things such as fortress walls… Or carrier demon of some kind that are meant to make the Brutes easier to deploy.
That's what they do, in short. They beam things with heat that melts steal at a minimum, they charge things, they murder things and they don't get murdered in exchange, as long as they punch anywhere close to their own 'weight class'.
A bitch to fight, a very useful bitch to send into a fight yourself. And now, well, now you're gathering a bunch of their essence, for all that their hard-headed toughness makes them a pain to kill even for yourself.
Luckily, you can just make them explode from the inside out easily, especially thanks to their great weight, given your esper power, but still- punching these guys into submission by the dozens might've been a legitimate pain.
There's a reason they're a staple in the modern diabolist's arsenal.
"Okay, so uh, I get that we're training like usual," Mark says, having internalized that all the abuse you put him through happens for his sake, somehow (man, living beings are always so gullible), "but why'd we come to the middle of nowhere first? We don't usually bother getting out of the city."
"Obviously because we needed some space," you declare, crossing your arms. "Specifically space that nobody cares about collateral damage in. Can't let loose an army and expect it to not blow everything up."
"Wait. One second, please." Your student holds up an open palm, as though physically asking for a moment was going to make you actually consider his request. "What army?"
"The army of demons I hid around here ahead of time. Duh."
All of a sudden, the forest below you is teeming with activity, dozens and hundreds of misshapen forms crawling out from where they were hiding, a couple of hills to the side literally standing up to face towards you, the Siege Beasts remaining well-fed at the orders of your army's field commander.
The Daughter of Carnage herself stands on a rising platform, richly decorated with bands and ribbons of velvet, and gives you a salute to indicate her forces are ready to go by briefly lifting her banner. Hundreds of fireballs are primed within moments, the formation of newly acquired Demon Brutes right below you heating up, ready to set up an inescapable net of heat rays to limit Mark's movement guided by a mix of their instincts and their leader projecting her precise orders straight into their heads.
"Ah. That army. Uh…" lightly overwhelmed, Mark's head shifts back and forth as he tries to take in the forces he suddenly finds massed against himself.
"Feel free to kill them, they're demons anyways," you point out, stretching your neck left, then right. Then you smile brightly. "Playtime!"
The entire area is subjected to an immediate bombardment of magic, projectiles and jumping demons using themselves as projectiles, followed by you dive-kicking him straight in the face.
Say what you will, but this self-appointed job of making Mark actually competent as a fighter does have its upsides.
Watching the ensuing battle through orbital surveillance, one Cecil Stedman was, while not amused, not particularly surprised either. "Someone add confirmation of the demon thing to NQ's profile. Donald!"
"Yes, sir?"
"Any news from Darkblood yet?" He asked with less volume in his voice, seeing how this wasn't anything the rest of the command and control room needed to know.
"No, sir. As of the last status update he is still investigating the location he suspects Night Queen's lair to be."
Cecil let out a breath of air, not so much sighing as he was exhaling. "The one time we'd need someone to look into hell… Then again his whole deal is that he doesn't want to go back there. We might need to hire again."
"Sir, you told me to, and I quote, deny you any access to coffee if you ever tried to hire any magic specialists again."
"…Good point. I made a good point, Donald. Just have the eggheads draft an emergency protocol in case of any demonic invasions."
"We… already have those, sir."
"With Night Queen in the mix somehow."
"Understood, sir."
The internet was a strange and fascinating space, allowing humanity to connect across boundaries of nations, religions and ethnicities, from social media and various forums allowing news and personal stories to be spread to TheyTube and the video hosting services it offered.
Another thing it allowed, however, was for websites to be set up by just about anyone, and all it took to access them was the correct address. Some of these sites were obscure and known only to their creators, maybe a handful of others that were interested in them- who had ever heard of some nerdy website where people came together to play 'quests', after all?- whereas others were rather more known.
One such site, newly created but a millisecond before it became known to others, was titled Night Queen Statue Petition, a humble, direct name for what it was. The reason it spent so little time in the ether of the internet was that its creator, a certain artificial intelligence, wasted no unnecessary time and immediately began to 'spam' the link on the appropriate social media.
The only reason it took so long was that she went the extra mile to compose the appropriate posts surrounding the link itself, maximizing the chances of luring gullible human beings into following it and adding their names.
She did use a random name generator to add a great number of signatures herself, but it never hurt to have provably emotionally invested meaty people ready to confirm they took part in this petition. Plausible deniability was a very 'human' concept, but one she could understand.
Half a day later, the matter of curing cancer having been enough to attract emotional interests among humanity, she judged the number of signatures to be sufficient, and launched into the next step of the plan.
Simply put, the Night Queen Statue Petition was a public appeal to support the construction of a statue of Night Queen in the city of New York, to honor the hero ('hero') that had slain the nightmare that was cancer. Naturally, now the Thinker proceeded to send it to the office of the city' mayor, considering it to be the appropriate station of authority to pursue this request.
The Thinker had learned many things over the course of her existence. One of these things was the concept of 'trolling'. Therefore, just to be sure this petition would be taken seriously, she did not simply send it once. Nor twice.
Overriding server limits remotely, she sent this petition no less than one thousand and forty two times. Each with hidden code in its title that would prevent them from being considered duplicates and summarily deleted with one click.
Surely, this would be sufficient to find due consideration. And if not, she did not exactly lack alternate addresses to utilize for more of the same however often it would take.
The kaleidoscopic nature of demons and the exact mechanics of their sheer unending capability for repopulation means that even if you were to try your hand at it for an eternity or two, you sincerely doubt you could make any real dent in any given infernal demographic, to say the least.
That really just means you never lack for recruits, at least among the lower ranks of the infinite variations of demonkind hell spits out. One of such variations are the Striders- a bland name for prideful, snake-like creatures with perhaps a few too many arms and entirely too much attitude.
Maybe it's justified, considering just how annoyingly powerful they can be, compared to some other demons. See, they're fast, strong and their spiky, clawed limbs, jutting out of their snake-ish form, can cast a couple of different kinds of magic, mostly destructive in nature. That makes them pretty useful in the context of your army, hence you went ahead and filled up an empty afternoon, the duration of which you sent Mark home to go relax for later for, with summoning them en masse to press them into service, as per the usual.
These things do not appreciate being mass-summoned, they do not appreciate being pressed into service and they especially do not appreciate being violently suppressed until they agree to serve you. A whole bunch of them just kept on fighting even when you started to pull out the more ridiculous tricks you keep up your sleeve, literally dying before they would submit.
That said, you still did recruit a bunch, so you can't really complain… too much, anyways. Incidentally, you may need to renovate your summoning chambers after this whole thing- thanks to all the bullshit demon magic that was thrown around, the mithril walls have a couple of holes now.
You really liked its silvery sheen, too. Ah well, can't really be helped, you suppose. At any rate you now have a bunch of oversized snake dicks (or dick-snakes?) to boss around, seeing as even without counting the full length of their bodies, these guys stand at three to four meters at rest.
They're pretty bulky, too. Some of them took a couple of your direct hits before they learned to avoid the murder-punching. You have some expectations for their performance, to say the least, for all that they're about as subtle as a brick to the face and equally as capable of nuance.
The reason you had Mark keep on standby (as in, you actually told him you'd come get him later, rather than just do it without letting him know you would), by the by, is a certain event happening in a certain place at a certain time.
The time is now, the place is the one you had yourself and Mark teleported into and the whole big deal is…
The Tryouts! Specifically, the tryouts for this new 'Junior Guardians' thing the Guardians of the Globe (and Cecil) are trying to pull off. Personally, you don't particularly see the point- if they want some reinforcements, just enlarge the team normally with whoever's good enough, or set up a secondary team or something instead of this whole 'training the next generation of heroes' shtick, but hey, they do them, you guess.
You're just here to style on them, anyways. Hence why you needed Mark along for the ride, naturally.
You're inside this elevated room, with a large, empty arena below it overlooked through a whole wall made of (tempered) glass. In it, you can see Mark playing test dummy, primarily by doing the one thing he knows to test people's strength through.
That is, he's beating the crap out of this big gorilla-looking guy, making it a point to be gentle about it and apologizing occasionally. Unsurprisingly, it's just getting the other dude pissed.
You consider this a complete win, of course. The blood splatters remaining from previous matches prove as much.
"You're really whipping him into shape, huh?" Cecil, standing next to you as he, too, watches the fight, addresses the illustrious and mightyful Night Queen. "It shows."
"Eh. He's getting there, but something's missing," you complain with a shrug. "Think I'll do a lecture on philosophy or some crap. Teenagers always eat it right up and it lets them do the whole brooding emo thing better."
"…Yeah, about that," he says, "please don't. We've had two incidents about his behavior already and I don't see you making it better."
"Huh?" This is news to you, and you monitor him 24/7, pretty much.
"Apparently it was just some girls throwing fits and fighting each other over him, but when property damage racks up and people get curious…"
"Ah. Isn't that normal? It happens all the time when I turn on my charm," you say, genuinely confused and tilting your head. "If anything I should give him supplementary lessons if it's only been two big catfights."
"…" Why does Cecil look like he really, really wants a smoke right now?
With most of the heroes around focused on what's happening down in what you'd describe as a gladiatorial mosh pit, you have a bit of time to do other stuff, seeing as you don't exactly have to keep your eyes on things directly to know how Mark (or the other Guardians, for that matter) are doing against the aspirants.
Blood perception, especially in combination with your other enhanced and additional senses, is pretty useful to say the least. You often rely on it more than your eyes when it comes down to it- easier to react to things when you can literally observe the blood vessels in an opponent's body moving as they do, squeezing down in accordance with their muscles and the tension in those, all those kinds of things.
It also allows you to just continue to spectate as you make your way through the gathered crowd, not that anyone wants to stand in your way for any length of time; as it turns out, you kind of have a reputation and people downright respect you, despite your current stature. You'd kind of hoped to be able to trash someone in person over them trying to make fun of you or something, but that doesn't look like it'll be happening for the moment.
Maybe personally destroying an alien invasion on your lonesome was a bigger deal than you expected. Oh, and curing cancer probably didn't hurt either in that regard. For some reason it turns out that's one particular trick that never gets old, no matter what developed world you're on.
Heh. Humanity and cancer, name a more iconic duo.
Speaking of your stature, though, you aren't the only person of your approximate height and visible age in the room. No, another girl is also present, a brunette with green eyes and long hair kept in a ponytail. She also isn't wearing much of a costume, but then not all of the other capes around are, either, so whatever, really. More power to her.
Much more importantly, she looks to be about her age, though she decidedly isn't. Thanks to your constant telepathic connection to the Thinker, you can look a lot of these people up on the internet in real time, and this girl very much is best known as Monster Girl, a hero that transforms into this huge, green creature with enhanced physical strength.
The classical Changer/Brute, pretty much. Not much in terms of additional powers, according to the dossier the Thinker puts together for you, just her turning large, strong and in all likelihood being able to heal faster than normal, somehow. Also, she appears to be aging backwards, which is… interesting, to say the least.
There are two reasons you're approaching her now, as she blinks at seeing you come towards her. One, Amanda over here (you do of course know her name) looks like she's around your apparent age, as you already remarked, so any kind of interaction is bound to be hilarious.
The second reason is that you can smell something from her, your enhanced sense of scent alarming you to a new and unknown, yet simultaneously familiar something that seems to be stuck to her, wafting off her when she moves.
It smells like a curse, like the ones you can cast yourself, just a little… different. You obviously didn't put it there, and the sensation is obviously not literal in what it is- you're sensing that she is in some way cursed, or some spell is cast on her at least that heavily reminds you of your own curses.
Naturally, you should investigate.
"Uh… Can I help you?" She asks when you don't say anything, just sniffing at her instead.
"Depends," you reply. "Did you know you're cursed?"
"…Duh, that's my power. I turn big and green, but I age backwards whenever I do."
Well, that clears that up easily enough.
"Makes sense," you nod. "Wanna do something about that so you don't turn into a toddler or something?"
"…Wait, you can do that?"
"I'm Night Queen," you declare, casually floating off the ground to get that little bit of extra height for this monumental reveal. "If there's something I can't do, nobody found it yet. Welcome to the Brat Brigade."
"Okay, nope. I'm out. If it involves calling ourselves that, I'd rather-"
"Too bad, nobody asked about your consent," you say, eyes narrowed.
With that, you stretch out a hand, palm opened towards her, your telekinesis activating- the Plasmid hasn't let you down yet, after all- and simply… pick her up, carrying her with you as you fly up above the rest of the heroes present.
"Hey! Let go of me!"
"Nope!" You don't even have to fake your good cheer at denying her what she wants.
"I said…" Bursting, bulging muscle forms out of her until now thin, literally girlish limbs, Monster Girl proving her moniker's veracity by turning into a huge, green-skinned, bald creature.
It also smells male, interestingly enough. Does she change gender every time she turns?
"Let me go!" A now deep, bellowing voice completes.
"Still nope," you say, simply holding her further up in the air so she can't reach anything or anyone to hold onto. "'Scuse me, coming through, we're having an intervention~!"
Now then, time to deal with this little bundle of issues.
Taking Monster Girl out of the congregation of heroes and wannabes of the same might've raised some eyebrows if you were anyone else, but a pinch of reputation combined with boldly proclaiming that you've got 'magic stuff' to take care of is more than enough to have everyone just kind of ignore you floating outside, the pouting green currently male hero still held in your telekinetic grasp.
It has to look funny as all hell from the outside, but you suppose these people are capes in this completely insane version of Earth already. They've seen weirder shit and continue to do so on a pretty much daily basis, if your own experience with this planet is anything to go by.
In the end, you maneuver the both of you off into the distance, lazily drifting toward the horizon to make sure none of the GDA's bugs or similar can keep track of what you might be saying. Speaking of, you also go ahead and let your gravity powers wash over your skin, crushing and brushing off any bugs that 'got stuck' on you.
Nice try Cecil, but The Night Queen is leagues ahead once again. Well, you doubt he expected this to work anyways, so whatever.
On a related note though, you have to work on your delivery whenever you scream your cape name. It gets the point across, sure, but you figure you're missing a bit of panache, that little something extra that really strikes a chord with people.
Maybe you should use your voice manipulation to make the sound of thunder every time you say it? It's a classic for a reason, after all.
"Hey!" Monster Girl gravels out, just before she decides not to waste her monster state and begins to turn back. Interesting that a transformation under her control like this even still counts as a curse- this definitely has potential, you figure. "Where are we even going?"
"Nowhere in particular," you immediately shrug at the now female Amanda. "I just don't feel like sticking around that stuffy place when we're discussing big girl magic stuff."
"…Riiight. About that. What the heck are you trying to pull here?"
"It's pretty simple," you begin to explain. "I could dispel your curse entirely, but that would leave you without your powers, so we'll call that Plan B for the moment. The biggest issue you're really having with its effects is that de-ages you, so the easiest solution would be to just reverse that. Problem resolved."
You make a little 'boom' motion with the hand that isn't steering your telekinesis right now.
"Wait, are you saying you can make people age?"
"I'm saying I can give you the power to age or de-age yourself. Duh."
"With magic."
"It sure ain't basic algebra. Now shut up and drink my blood."
With that, the deal's pretty much done. Time for another instance of thralling, just as soon as you arrive under the visual distortion that will make it really hard for any, say, orbital surveillance satellites to see exactly what you're doing.
Your compliments go out to the Thinker, who is generating and teleporting in massive amounts of certain gases that are not particularly problematic to have around, yet will serve quite well to blind the GDA's eyes here. It's not like you particularly care whether they know you can give people powers by sharing your blood with them or not, but…
To just give away the game would be unsportsmanlike in the extreme, wouldn't it? No, if they want to know, they have to put in the effort. Or just ask you, not like you wouldn't tell them outright.
You do wonder if Cecil will ever realize that's an option…
The victim of a 'curse' that left her with the ability to transform into a large, green and male monster (hence the name). Every time she transforms, she ages backwards, additionally granting her effective biological immortality as long as she does not overuse her powers.
Sadly, she is a hero on Earth Omni (provisional name), meaning she has to do so a lot. Having found out about this state of affairs, you thralled her to establish a line of communication and an opportunity to mess with her again later… if you decide to.
Powers: Age Control, Unnatural Armor
Thanks to your current appearance, you can easily blend in with a crowd after just a brief change of (appropriately sized) clothes, and so you even get to go out for ice cream with Monster Girl once you reach the nearest city.
It doesn't speed up the whole process that is thralling her, but it absolutely does make it more fun. Ice cream improves literally any situation it is applied to. Really, if there's one thing humanity did right, it was inventing it.
Also, mixing your blood into Amanda's ice cream without cooling it down all the way to melt it just a little bit faster was a hilarious prank and you'll eat anyone who disagrees.
The office was a battlefield. Paperwork was the weapon, both in one's own hands and when used against them, the constant stream of work and e-mails sent back and forth the rhythm of combat, the only shield most had the precious breaks spent smoking what little cigarettes they could get away with.
In fact, even cafeteria food was more akin to rations of old than true food, its taste as nonexistent as the nourishment the body could draw from it.
All this was taken for granted, but of late it was worse than usual. The office was under assault, both in the open and through insidious routes of attack, and it was all they could do to hold back the flood of server-busting messages directed at them like spears poised to strike.
"Assemble the interns!" The secretary exclaimed, obsessively watching the digital clock on her monitor. All assaults had been perfectly timed so far, obviously managed by some program someone had written, but until they found a way to shut everything off without being implicated and having to pay massive sums of money for overburdening the servers, someone had to delete each of the messages every time they were sent against them.
Hence the peasant recruits were to hold the line, as they always did.
The office was a battlefield in its own right, and war… war never chang-
"We're here, ma'am. Also, can we please stop this whole army thing, it's really…"
She narrowed her eyes. "Look here buddy, this is the one time I get to boss everyone around while the mayor is out," she told him. "Just take your orders, do your job and you won't be in front of a court martial for incompetence and cowardice in face of the enemy before the day is out, got it?!"
"Sheesh, fine, fine," the upstart muttered, moving off to join his comrades-in-arms. "Woman's on a damn power trip."
"I dunno, she's kinda hot like this…"
Their antics were summarily ignored. There was a constant war to be waged!
Coming back 'home' after your little excursion that ended up being used to thrall Monster Girl to see what happens (and to put her in your debt, shove a foot into the door with her so hard it won't close anytime soon etcetera etcetera), you quickly take stock of things for a moment. Mark did a good job, from what you saw at least, so that side of things is working out pretty well.
His progress is pretty remarkable, though then again you wouldn't be surprised if Viltrumites are just, like, genetically inclined to fight well. You know fuck all about the species beyond what you could figure out from the DNA you appropriated from both him and his father, but that just means you can speculate to your heart's content and all.
Anyways, you'll just chalk it up to your amazing ability to teach him for now. Anyone would get better after getting a proper crash course from yours truly.
That decided, you turn your attention towards the next item on your docket. Your attention and your eyes, as you can literally see it right now from your location inside the mansion Alicia lives in.
Which just so happens to be who you're looking at, too. Through the ground, that is, as she is currently somewhere inside your secret lair.
The secret lair that you do not recall actually showing her to, mostly just because there was no particular need to and you didn't really want to bother for no reason. Now, though, well…
You aren't exactly alarmed, just a little concerned, at most. You did make sure to thrall Alicia, after all, and none of your thralls have really overtly acted against your interests before- the mild brainwashing side effects are hard to overlook when you've been working with several of your thralls for so long.
That still does leave you questioning exactly why she is down there in that distorted pocket of pace you created smack dab underneath the city. There are only so many reasons you can think of…
Closing your eyes, you just go ahead and ask the one person that's pretty much guaranteed to have an idea, at least. The Thinker, however, just asks if you could ignore this little incident- apparently, there's a surprise for you they're working on?
…The women in your life conspiring to surprise you is one of those scenarios that can end in either amazing things or a catastrophe that ranges from you sleeping on the couch to a planet going poof, and there's no way to know which end of the spectrum it will be beforehand.
Ah well. If it happens, it happens, no need to fret over the possibilities- you sure aren't about to ruin… whatever surprise is going on right now.
If the Thinker asks you not to dig, you won't, simple as that. You figure that much unconditional trust and more is perfectly reasonable to extend to her at this point- it's not like this is some sudden development, you've been trusting her to take care of… quite a lot of stuff, in retrospect.
Robotic legions and the construction thereof. Central administration of Earth Rapture. Construction and renovations of just about any place you stayed at for any extended periods of time. Heck, she even helps you with engineering stuff, planning out your days and scheduling your experiments.
It's important not to take people for granted, and you make a conscious effort not to do so with her, but if you didn't, it'd be almost impossible not to in her case. The Thinker's just too ubiquitous in your life to easily keep in mind she's, y'know, a person.
…Being a personal assistant somehow both makes a lot of sense for an AI and also seems utterly counter-productive, when you think about it. Like, an AI doesn't need a fleshy organic to do and decide stuff when it can just do any of that itself, so why bother with that particular step?
Like, the human (or equivalent) involved is utterly redundant. You know for a fact that the Thinker can think hundreds of thousands of times faster than yourself, if anything you're just slowing her down at this point, now that she's developed an actual sense of self and all.
She kind of had one before you found her down in Rapture, it's just that she only really started to identify as somewhat of a person at some point after you met. Either way, any of the details are little more than semantics as far as this topic goes.
Simply put, the Thinker hardly has to put up with your shit, nor is there any real compelling reason she'd have to listen to any single thing you wanted. You're kind of curious now, so you just go ahead and ask, reaching through your deeply-buried telepathic bond to do so.
The answer? The Thinker works with you because she wants to. She doesn't have any particular needs or wants, beyond some basic self-preservation (and even that is very different from how a human might feel), but she sympathizes with you and wants your desires seen to fruition.
Personally, you figure she might be vicariously experiencing your life through you, which would in part explain why you've been constantly sharing sensations and emotions for months now, you figure. Then again, it's not like you're complaining or anything.
Anyway, mystery resolved, you get back to what you were planning to do, before this whole thing happened. Which is actually something you're quite looking forward to.
You did eat a couple of aliens along with him when you got around to ambushing Octoboss, tearing through their repurposed spaceship and all that. Sadly, none of the prison guards that survived the crash of said ship were engineers nor maintenance personal of any sort, which means you don't have any easily accessible knowledge on their tech base to work with, when it comes to reverse-engineering any of it.
Also, rather annoyingly, relatively little of the ship was salvageable, so you doubt you'll be able to get an idea of however the FTL-tech it had to be using worked. That said, Octoboss himself was, while not exactly an expert, still well-versed in how some of his people's technology works, so…
Time to steal the secrets to how to build up a whole civilization underwater, you suppose. You'll just have to work off of what you have and go from there.
Squidman Technology: Technology reverse-engineered from fragments and remnants of an alien race best described as 'squidmen'. Examples were largely limited to technology for personal use and everyday devices, but include everything one might require to build a civilization underwater from the ground up, from water filtration to stream-tunnels for easier transportation.
Also includes modified technology that allows living beings to breathe underwater using a small device that is worm over the face, covering the nose and its sides only.
You know what, in retrospect those Striders you had to deal with actually weren't all that bad. Sure, they were assholes to the last and the collective tantrums they threw every time you smacked them into obedience and cleaning up after them was a pain, but at least you could get through all of that with somewhat decent speed, at least.
In comparison, you're taking forever to deal with this new type, one that has various names in different cultures and languages, but you decided to just call them 'Dracons'. Their name is… somewhat self-explanatory, but to sum it up, they're somewhat humanoid demons that bear dragon-like characteristics, from scales to wings to horn, all topped with a fiery breath and an attitude that singlehandedly mark them as the biggest asshole around wherever they are.
They occasionally cooperate with Striders in the layers of hell both of their kinds inhabit, but they just as often go after each others' throats, betray each other or generally despise each other's guts.
Turns out a bunch of overly prideful individuals that by definition think nothing about murdering anyone that crosses their path has predictable results. That said, the Striders in this equation usually have to team up to take down a Dracon, which makes it more difficult for them to do so… Until the Dracon in question has pissed them off sufficiently they can set aside their mutual dislike long enough to deal with the dragon-like demon in question.
But yeah, that dragon-like part is the reason you're after them tonight, along with their general strength as demons. Which is pretty respectable, for the record- they're just also the weakest demons you could find that had draconic properties proper, rather than just some lizard bits and pieces.
Seeing as they tend to actually fit into what amounts to civilization in hell, Dracons also have ways to obtain custom-made armor and weapons, though they usually eschew the latter in favor of their claws, or equipment that synergizes with them. The custom-made part is actually quite common, as many demons differ vastly from each other even among the same kinds, so a lot of them kind of have to source it specially made for their own builds.
Or just find a demon that's got roughly the same sizes and proportions, then adjust it, but that has its own issues. Long story short, Dracons are assholes, but assholes that can pay or pressure other demons into providing them with equipment on top of their natural, draconic brute strength.
They also flip their shit anytime you just summon them with a ritual consisting of a few lizard scales, a couple kitchen knives and a portable furnace tastefully draped around the ritual circle you normally use. Something something blood sacrifice or bust.
Your reaction is to immediately hose them down with plasma from Last Embrace. It doesn't actually kill them or anything, but it sets the tone for the following bit of ultraviolence the encounters you have with them consist of.
Taking these guys down actually is difficult, and you have to beat them within an inch of their lives several times before you get their essence. Hence why you have to summon them one by one and all, which only serves to slow things down even more.
…On the other hand, you do get what you want. It's just kind of a pain to get it.
Fighting Night Queen was just as surreal now as it had been the first time she'd shown up and suddenly started kicking him, but Mark figured he was, slowly, getting a handle on it. What had seemed like an impossible task once was more a matter of just reacting, like he was actually getting better at fighting in a quantifiable way.
He still got beaten up a bunch, but he could actually hit back now. That was the big difference.
It was the goal of the whole thing, he figured, to make fighting while in the air and with nothing but his powers second nature to him. Not that Mark could say much about Night Queen's methods, he had no idea how you'd train a superhero or anything, but as far as fighting things went, he was pretty sure he was getting there.
…How much that would help against his dad was another story. But hey, maybe they'd just talk it out, have a heart-to-heart and not have to make this a family drama thing-
"You daydreaming?" The words were more warning than Mark usually got. Twisting in the air, he ducked under the human rocket that was Night Queen, immediately turning around his own axis to-
His outstretched leg was stopped by her hands, catching the return strike smoothly. Mark was pretty sure if he'd hit a building just now, it would have a hole in it at the very least, but all it did to the girl training him was to push her away a little.
Sure, it took her a moment to come back, but he was pretty sure her flight didn't work anything like Viltrumite flight. It was just the mechanic in play, she had to bleed off the momentum, fight against it and all, where he could just push it aside, for lack of a better explanation, and get right back to it.
"Good," she said, and that was enough to make his mind blank for a moment.
"Uh… Excuse me, what?" Mark asked. "You never call anything I do good."
"Hmpf." Night Queen crossed her arms. "You've graduated up from being a toddler. Congratulations Mark, you're not a complete waste of space anymore."
"Thanks? I'm pretty sure you're just going to call me something else insulting now, though…"
"Exactly! You've graduated into being a wimp instead!" She grinned, her sharp, nightmarish teeth on full display. It just looked cute on her though, not that Mark was about to say anything about that. "And with that comes harder training to push you into being a proper delinquent next!"
"Wait," he begged, holding up a hand. "What's the sequence here exactly? Just so we're all on the same page."
"Toddler, wimp, delinquent, goon, mook, minion, trusted lieutenant, sudden but inevitable betrayal," Night Queen counted off one finger at a time. "Don't worry, it's pretty intuitive when you get to each part."
"I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the implications of those job titles," Mark noted for posterity.
"Too bad, now get ready for t he wim p train ing."
Night Queen's voice distorted, growing deeper and unnatural, like it was something that wasn't supposed to be there. Now while Mark wasn't the most experienced hero, that sounded a lot like bad, bad news to him. "Hey, are you o…kay…"
His mouth felt dry when he saw Night Queen's skin turn ash gray, her arms stretching out with the dry, nauseating sounds of bones breaking again and again, her face melting away into a blank mask and the back of her head bulging out, these huge… horns growing out of it.
In several places, her new skin broke open, other growths pushing themselves out instead, and a large pair of bat-like wings flapped out behind… her? Body.
"Uh… Night Queen? That still you?"
The form of what Mark had to assume was her (he couldn't be sure) tilted its head.
Then, the sky was spinning and he was flying off into space, until it started to spin in the other direction instead, and he realized he was shooting back down to Earth. Also, what was that taste in his mouth?
…Ah. Blood. He knew he knew it from somewhere.
This was gonna be… tough.
You know, divination is all kinds of unfair, when you take a moment to think about it like a Thinker (heh). Knowing when someone will do what, being able to easily plan ahead for your enemies' future actions with all the active thought of popping a superpower or a spell makes countering and minimizing the impact of said actions basically child's play.
As long as you aren't completely and entirely outclassed on every level, prescience is enough to, in essence, guarantee your success as long as it's accurate enough. Knowing ahead of time what will go down and preparing your counters, being able to hit where you have to in order to actually win… Those things are, in a word, overpowered.
Lucky you, you're the one asshole that gets to do it all the time, specifically to Omni-Man to be precise. You're pretty much consistently scrying for his current location using your whole scrying compass setup, the Thinker's monitoring of the thing allowing you to keep track of how far he is from Earth, but you could do with a bit more of a complete picture of what to expect once he comes by.
When exactly will be arrive, and where, for example? Considering your plans for him, you have to know where to deploy Mark at the right moment to ensure they fight each other and all. Luckily, you can answer those questions!
That's right, Cosmic Guidance is back in action, and you don't waste any time in cheating with it. After all, if you have a question, it's best to just ask it, assuming someone who can answer is around.
With this, you know exactly where to send Mark. Three days before you will be forced to vacate this dimension (for now), Omni-Man will be entering Earth's atmosphere again, somewhere above Ohio- probably to literally kick in the doors to the Guardians' headquarters again, you assume.
The exact reasons why weren't contained in the answer you received, so whatever. All that matters is that you have coordinates and a Mark to chuck at them.
Speaking of, actually… You see Invincible stirring where he was lying inside the crater you created.
By punching him really hard, that is. It's not the first one of its kind you produced today.
"Uh… How long was I out this time?"
"'Bout twenty minutes. You're getting faster," you comment, hopping off his prone form so he can get up.
"Joy… Doesn't that just mean I spend more time getting beaten up?"
You shrug, completely ignoring the way the blood trickles from his nose. Not your fault his face, and inner organs for that matter, are so squishy. "It's progress. Now get ready, I want you up in nineteen minutes this time!"
Mark raises his arms, guarding his front as he takes off, flying close to the ground and strafing to your side. "…Looking forward to it."
He hasn't lost motivation nor tried to run away so far. You have no idea whether this stubbornness is owed to his determination or just him being a teenager, but hey, good on him.
You could make a habit of using living punching bags, you think.
It felt kind of good to stretch your literal wings again, you really should play around with your big transformations more. It doesn't hurt, of course, that you have a convenient punching bag to work with. Mark actually made it through the beating you delivered unto him pretty well, all things told.
He still needed the GDA goons to come pick him up and bring him to their secret hospital complex to receive some first aid, but he'll be right as rain by tomorrow. You made sure to hold back.
It's about time, you reason, to go and deal with Battle Beast.
You've been leaving doing so for later for a while now, in part because you were kind of busy and wanted to get other stuff done first, in part because you wanted to take some time to figure out why, exactly, your Cosmic Guidance mentioned the guy.
As best you can tell, Battle Beast is somewhat of an intergalactic mercenary, one that doesn't particularly give a fuck about what side he fights for as long as he does fight someone or something, according to what you could pick out of Machine Head's memories. It is from the same source that you take a few smattered records of his strength, which seems to be pretty damn reliable.
For the last couple centuries, that is. Battle Beast has literally been fighting whatever he could for longer than most beings live, and the fact he's still around and kicking tells you something.
Mainly that you don't want to underestimate the son of a bitch. Literally so, as you could get your hands on a picture of him- it's officially confirmed he's a furry, now, for the record. Some kind of humanoid white-furred lion-dude the size of two average men stacked on top of each other, and thrice as broad-shouldered.
…From his account on MercNet.Stars, the next best equivalent to a shared alien Craigslist, basically, you also found out that he's currently open for contracts. That might be why your magic told you it would be covenient to approach him- it'd be as simple as shooting him a message right now.
Which is why you went and did just that. 'Hey I wanna fight, 1v1 at these coordinates', and that was pretty much that.
He responded by posting a time he'd be there. It was pretty easy to arrange, really.
The exact place you called him to was on the moon, by the by, and you'll make it a point to keep things on the side of it not facing Omni-Man, according to your Omni-Tracker (name pending, but it's basically your scrying device). Just in case, there's no point giving him a free shot and all that.
No, you'll make him fight his son to the death before you give the man an opportunity to hit you from behind and after you've exhausted yourself, or however he'd look at that situation. Not that you expect to face an actual challenge as such, you're just making sure.
Now then… Time to see how lion-face the furry-barian does in practice, you suppose.
"You're shorter than I expected." The first word out of the furry's mouth aren't exactly respectful, but then you ever did insist on politeness in dead men walking. You can forgive that much.
"Yeah, well, you've got even more fur than I thought, but who cares?" You ask, arms crossed.
Battle Beast came to join you using a portal of some kind, one you very much will find more out about as soon as you eat him. You, on the other hand, came to the moon by jumping.
Your powers let you do that, you just have to combine them right and all. You even took along a bunch of air while you were at it, keeping it contained around yourself- you don't need it to breathe yourself, but you figured Battle Beast might let down his guard this way.
It also does make the sacred tradition of pre-battle banter easier, as without it the moon's absence of atmosphere might make talking shit a bit harder. Just a little bit. That and you can always just release your hold on the gas, letting it fly off into space whenever you want.
Y'know, in case he's ungrateful about it or anything. Or you want to distract him, because you don't doubt for a single second Battle beast has a backup plan for fresh air. Or he can just hold his breath like a Viltrumite would, who the fuck even knows anymore.
Anyways, none of that matters right this moment, you're here now on the uneven, rocky and pale surface of the moon, bleached a boney white by the light of the sun, standing opposite the huge, muscled furry that looks like he comes straight out of the fantasy of someone whose fantasies aren't widely tolerated even on the internet.
"Fine. Now what was that about a challenge?" Battle Beast growls more than he talks, showcasing his extremely sharp fangs- you can instantly see that, whatever his species is exactly, it's obviously carnivorous.
In response, you grin, Night Queen's childish smile revealing your own exceedingly sharp teeth. "I wanna fight, you wanna fight. That right?"
"Hrn. Close enough," he says, mirroring your expression as he pull out a huge-ass mace made out of some gold-ish alloy. "So you think you stand a chance?"
"You're about to find out," you tell him, swinging your arms into a ready position, Last Embrace sticking to them and brimming with mild anticipation for violence.
It's time for some ultraviolence.
To recap, you are equipped with Last Embrace, your Aura is active and you have cast False Life (30 max HP) and Prescience (35 to combat rolls). Are there any other additional changes or buffs you applied before combat?
Well, Big B over here doesn't look like he's immediately taking the first move, so… You launch yourself at him, more flying than running as you keep close to the ground.
His eyes track you despite the sudden acceleration, his mace rushing to intercept you- except you just flow right past it, Last Embrace merrily whirring as the drills come out.
You nail him right in the left shoulder, his entire body pushed back as the adamantite eats into it, and flip over it to keep him from effectively fighting back. Immediately, Battle Beast jumps forward himself, swinging his weapon over his shoulder himself to make it as hard as possible for you to do anything but dodge, but you don't let that bother you.
Instead, you simply become a shadow, jump along the surface of his body and reemerge to his other side, grinning savagely as you slam a couple claw strikes into his side, going straight for his face when you get the opportunity.
Finally, Battle Beast has enough, grunting as he dislodges you with a forceful elbow strike. You skid along the ground, largely unharmed thanks to your inherent armoring and partial deflection- your abs are smaller in your Night Queen form, but they can flex to ward off attacks just fine.
Battle Beast is growls, then chuckles, then openly laughs, ignoring the trickle of blood running down his arm. "Good! Maybe this won't be a waste of my time after all!"
Instead of wasting words at this point, you run at him again, intent on taking Battle Beast out sooner rather than later. In response, though, he widens his stance, stretching one arm out toward you, his mace-wielding one kept at the ready to smack you down.
You charge onward anyways, trusting in your ability to outmaneuver him. Side-stepping his grab, you note he's faster than before-
But not fast enough to keep up with you. Clawing your way up across Battle Beast's body, you get a proper grip on him this time around, slightly tearing through the fur-braid on one side of his face as you go.
You also try to decapitate him with a quick strike to the side of his head, your clawed hand ramming frontally into it, but both your claws and your drill follow-up have a hard time penetrating his thick fur- the heck is this stuff even made of?
Well, screw this. You hurriedly overlay a particular soul you've been keeping up your sleeve for a rainy day or two, one that hasn't seen much use for a long while.
The Rapier Hero gets a chance to shine- and indeed, when you next claw at your opponent, your sharpened extremities slide into his flesh like a knife through warm butter, making him roar as he tries to shake you off.
You make extra sure to rake your claws over his face, too. Fuck this guy, where's he get off to being this hard to kill?!
His penultimate answer to your actions, of course, is to finally snag you by the back of your dress, pulling you off himself (you can't really hold on, because you just slide through his flesh on the way- at least you do some extra damage) and throwing you at the nearest chunk of rock.
Which is very rude and mildly painful, though your natural armor and aura take the worst of it no problem.
"Hahaha!" Now why is this maniac laughing like an idiot? "Hahahahaha! This! This is what I was looking for! What's your name, you little menace?"
"The fuck's it to you?"
"Whether I kill you or you kill me, it'd be a shame to die without exchanging names between worthy warriors first!"
…Alright, fuck it, why not?
"Eh, sure. Name's Gabriel," you shrug, making sure to pronounce your name softly at the end to make it sound like its female version, 'Gabrielle' (given you're female right now, that only makes sense, you'd say), "but I mostly go by Night Queen."
Ramming his mace into the ground, Battle Beast grunts in satisfaction, the fire in his eyes blazing brighter and brighter. "It's an honor. My name is Thokk, but the rest of this galaxy knows me only as Battle Beast. Now… Try to survive!"
With that, he rips his mace out of the ground again, now encased in a chunk of rock he tears out along with it, swinging right at you as a massively enlarged weapon.
Naturally, you aren't letting that one pass. Walking up at a steady pace to meet his strike, you take a quick moment to… creatively reinterpret the weight of the rock Battle Beast's mace is embedded inside of.
As a result, they now weight ten times as much, except all that weight is 'falling' right at him.
Then you get right back to business, slamming yourself into the oncoming attack and pushing the material straight back at Battle Beast. For a moment, the momentum he already built up has him pushing you, but then, with a big, final step, your claws crumpling solid rock as you keep a rip on it, you tear it off his weapon and launch it all straight at him, roughly with the speed and force of a freight train.
He proceeds to grunt, chuckle and shrug the impact off once it's done pushing him back two steps, and nothing more. He's bleeding from the cuts and gashes you left in him so far, but otherwise still going just fine.
Y'know, if you could get tired, you're pretty sure you'd be breathing harder right now. This asshole is just completely ridiculous.
Well, time to share some of the love around here. You've yet to actually cast any concrete magic in this fight, and you just so happen to have no less than two spells that should cut this guy back down to size.
And thanks to your ever-increasing magical powers, you can use both of them at the same time. Sure, you're also giving Battle Beast a free shot at you in the meantime, but you've decided that this is entirely worth it.
Let him smack you in the face all the wants, as long as he gets to stop being able to do so at all afterwards. So you raise a hand, gesturing at him. "Winter's Suppression!"
The combined spells hits your opponent like a twin punch made of bone-chilling cold and a metaphysical 'fuck you' to anything that dares to be alive in your presence. He, for his part, recoils as though physically struck- except he didn't even react like this when he actually was hit by stuff, slightly insultingly.
"What is this?" Battle Beast asks, balling his hand into a fist once, twice.
"Magic," you emphatically tell him.
Chuckling, he cracks his neck, hefting his mace over his shoulder. "Quaint. Let's see what else you have up your little sleeves."
Rude. Your sleeves aren't 'little'.
Now that you've got Battle Beast on the ropes, all you really need to do is weaken this fucker until you can, finally, drain his soul rom his still twitching body.
Because you totally assume even his dead body will try to keep fighting you, at this point. Dammit Cosmic Guidance, you wanted some easy, convenient kills that would have superpowers, not this kind of ultimate showdown bullshit!
Of course the man of the hour (Furry of the hour? Do furries count as men?) is perfectly fine with that exact approach; as you once again rush at him, intent on tearing him limb from limb if only his limbs weren't so annoyingly resistant to being rent apart, he rushes at you much the same, actively moving into each and every one of your moves.
What started as an attempt to attack him has become a brutal dance of sorts, the two of you taking any opportunity you get to tear into the other whenever you can. Glancing blows are exchanged by both sides, followed by heavier ones as you figure out how to do this, and no matter how much you try, you can't seem to actually break his damn arm.
He just powers through it every time you make an attempt, literally smashing you down into the ground on one occasion- you extract yourself and immediately go back on the offense, but the moon now bears a Night Queen-shaped hole inside of it.
Surely this planetary body's ambience has just been upgraded several times over.
Finally, things come to a head when Battle Beast tries biting you, his massive teeth blocked by nothing but your aura- and it does block them, but it depletes your reserves of the stuff stupidly quickly compared to normal. The force of the attack would normally just push you around and deplete itself, but your whole arm is trapped inside his mouth right now, so your soul-juice is being used up fast.
You could turn your arm to mist to get it out, but really, all that's happening is that you're given leverage and an opening right now as you're held in the air. Turning on Last Embrace's 'fuck you I have a plasma rocket drill' mode on with your other arm, you immediately ram your weapon, currently driven by its plasma exhaust to give it that extra little boost, right into his chest, the Rapier Hero's power ensuring you practically delete his inner organs.
When Battle Beast has to let go, being physically launched away from you, he does so with a surge of blood spewing from his mouth, having actually taken some serious damage this time.
His reaction to this state of affairs is to throw his weapon at you hard enough to produce a fucking sonic boom, not at all concerned about missing a third of his insides.
Naturally, this is not ideal. Immediately slamming your esper power against the thrown weapon, you get into position, attempting to push the oncoming projectile away from yourself-
Except you're too slow, hence the attempting part.
Before your body can catch up with your mind, you're tumbling over the surface of the moon, skipping like a stone over the surface of a still lake- except you're bouncing over solid rock and all.
Kind of putting a damper on your vibe over here, not gonna lie.
Fishing the mace out from where it nearly folded you in half after impacting right into Night Queen's belly, you throw it away with contempt, flipping around to slam your claws into the ground and take control of your trajectory. As you do, your back bulges and distorts, a fully grown wolf's head emerging from it to keep track of Battle Beast as he remains in hot pursuit, bounding after you with outstretched claws of his own.
And while you have that head there already, you have it spew out one of your patented icy beams, firing right on this fucker. The giant mercenary just immediately starts to leap around in a zig-zag pattern, still closing in on you while avoiding some of your fire.
Or ice. Semantics. Point is, it's hard to keep a bead on him like this.
Having shaken off the successive impacts you've had to absorb with your aura, you take a moment to take stock of the situation. Battle Beast has lost a chunk of his insides and is leaving a trail of blood behind himself, not all of which has dropped to the ground yet- the moon's gravity being what it is- he just also doesn't seem to care how badly you're mauling him right now.
You, on the other hand, have lost a very unhealthy amount of your aura, though you're fine otherwise; you've had to use up some of the blood you've been keeping inside your body, burning it up to enhance your performance, but your tank is still mostly full so far. You've also got the Buffer Hero and the Rapier Hero overlaid onto yourself, using their powers to let you actually mess this guy up this badly.
Their personalities and all that jazz is kept well away from your own for the moment, too. You've essentially had them just stop thinking or doing anything beyond what you want at all, just because you have to focus over here.
Now, what's your angle? How are you going to defeat this guy faster than he defeats you? Or do you just give him exactly what he wants, fight like a wild animal and start to drink the copious amounts of blood he's losing to heal up?
Alright, you think to yourself, cracking your neck. Big B wants to play rough, you can do that.
Keeping an eye on the bugger himself, you take a moment to arrange your internal soul-composition, getting ready to overlay something other than your usual fare of harvested souls, or, as their little make-belief council recently decided the 'proper' term was, 'disembodied departed'. You're pretty sure Yoshi is just losing his mind and that's why he refused to settle on anything else, but then it's not like their attempt at governing themselves has any real meaning whatsoever.
The thing you push to the surface of yourself this time is, instead, one of your soul's Guardians, those figments of your self that keep watch over and ensure the smooth running of various parts of your soul. In exchange you pull the Buffer Hero back in, figuring you need to prioritize space right now and he's not as useful as his colleague currently taking up the other slot.
There's a bone-wrenching pulling at your insides, your very flesh and bones splitting apart as you perform what you shall call the Night Queen's Night Mitosis or something. Right down the middle, you fold away, pulling apart from yourself and into two separate copies of your body, your clothes dissolving and twisting into leather, gold and jewels, covering up the least they can while still remaining something resembling to clothing by virtue of keeping your privates hidden.
Clad in jewelry and little more now, you grin a pair of twin smiles, hands sliding through identical hair to throw it out behind yourself, mirrored. Both of your bodies are now armed, a chain tipped with a sharp shard of metal at one end and a sword and shield, respectively, and you are perfectly capable of using both excellently well.
All around you, the barren surface of the moon is replaced as though with a fata morgana, an illusion caused by heat and thirst and madness, and just like that there is a city coming into existence around you, all sandstone and palm trees and brightly shimmering gold. It is entirely empty, not a single sound disturbing the wide bands of cloth strung over its streets; as if someone transplanted some ancient, grand metropolis straight from the desert to the moon, perfectly preserved.
The Twin Guardians of the deserted desert city within yourself are masterful in using any and all arms, to their credit, and so are you, now. Battle Beast hasn't slowed down a single moment during your transformation, merely continuing to throw himself into your direction one bounding leap after another, but now you get right back to that- a collar gleams, a thigh-ring shines, and he has to jump to the side as the ground beneath him gives way, crumbling into a shallow pitfall trap.
And before he can recover his momentum, you're on him, a perfectly coordinated assault raining down on him with absolutely no mercy, your twin selves acting and moving as one.
What ensues is a bloody, violent melee during which your perfectly coordinated bodies are put to the test- Battle Beast is not even slowing down even now, and so you have to put your all into actually beating him back. Your shield is missing several chunks of itself where you had to batter his claws to the side, for one, and your chain actually lost a couple of links when you tried to wrap it around his neck.
Not that you, yourself, take any less punishment. Your opponent has decided to fight more like a wild animal than anything else, roaring and clawing and biting and generally behaving more like you usually do. A few claw swipes to your sides eventually break your aura, which for the record is shared among your bodies, and the scratches you take after you fold your aura away entirely once you hurriedly recover at least a little bit of it accumulate quickly.
He even manages to bite you and draw blood for the trouble, once. You very much object to that one- that's literally your shtick!
Still, you retain the empowerment of your soul turned outward, which is what really matters right now. And it's not like you don't make Battle Beast pay for it, either; you eventually abandon your sword for a bit because it gets stuck in his back, only recovered after you tussle a little and smash a few stones torn from your surroundings against his skull hard enough to pulverize them, stunning him just long enough for your other body to skillfully ensnare the wayward weapon in her chain and rip it back out so you can catch it.
You may or may not get yourself thrown against a wall for your trouble, one of your bodies used as an improvised flail, but hey, you also cut off one of Battle Beast's fingers by leveraging your sword, your esper power and a ten second orbital drop. Not quite the level of dismemberment you envisioned, but it's a start.
It's a long and even arduous battle, but in the end you finally manage to wear Battle Beast down to the point he can't quite fight back, after he's managed to injure one or both of your bodies several times along the way.
However, you heal from your wounds, the Twin Guardians' regeneration constantly working in the background, and when you need a bit more you just consume some of his own blood, letting you ultimately just outlast this insane berserker long enough for the curses in your shed blood and your ripping claws to slow him down.
Just enough for you to catch him, to tear into him, and, finally, go in for the damn kill.
He realizes the moment has come, too. When you rear back to, with both bodies, bite into his neck, all Battle Beast does is give you a toothy grin.
Not that it matters now. You drink his blood. It tastes kind of bitter, which isn't great, but for once… For once the taste is really secondary to what else you're getting.
Soul #3785: Battle Beast, aka Thokk: A mighty, drastically empowered individual of an alien species that, through some freak genetic accident, magical possession or sheer lust for battle, became far stronger than should be possible. Having been obsessed with combat for as long as even he could remember, Battle Beast traveled the galaxy, then crossed over into another galaxy when no opponents that could match him were found.
Maniacally searching for fights that would satisfy his desire for them, he was eventually invited to a deathmatch by you, one he did not survive. No regrets were had.
Now that Battle Beast (or Thokk, but you'll never actually call him that) is part of you, you can access his memories and personality, though you keep your hands well clear of the latter- you don't really need to mess around with it and being wholly consumed by what you can passively feel of him doesn't sound like a good time.
Well, actually it sound like a great time, for yourself only. Everyone else would be shit out of luck, though, and you don't really feel the need to accidentally destroy Earth in order to provoke a response, so yeah, screw that.
The former, however, is a lot more interesting right now anyways. Not only can you 'remember' all the fights he's been in over the… centuries? Yeah, the conversion between alien time units and what you're used to tripped you up a moment, but Battle Beast has literally just been flying around two separate galaxies looking for fights for several times as long as you've been alive.
Absolutely fucking wild. That said, what you're mostly concerned with right now, personally, is that he did, in fact, remember where he parked his personal spacecraft- which also does come with the portal generator he was using installed on it.
That does seem like one of those things you'd go out of your way to steal, doesn't it
"Sir! Night Queen has captured the unknown spacecraft and is plotting a course back to Earth!"
"Are we sure it's her, Donald?"
"She is broadcasting celebratory music on all channels, has been ever since she… kissed herself and disappeared from the Moon."
"That sounds like her. Predicted landing zone?"
"Somewhere over the Atlantic, sir, though analytics says she can change course at any moment from what they saw of the craft she… stole?"
"Not like its previous owner will complain anytime soon." It wasn't usually like Cecil to crack jokes like that, but when faced with the absurd, a man could either learn to deal with it productively or go mad. And him going mad wasn't really something the GDA could afford with the ongoing situation at hand.
Twitching, Donald looked down at his tablet before facing Cecil again. "It disappeared, sir."
"What disappeared, Donald? I need qualifying details here, I thought we went over this."
"Night Queen's new ride, sir. It disappeared as soon as it cleared the three hundred thousand miles above the Earth mark."
"…Whoever gave her a teleporting interstellar vessel, I hope they get their turn in hell. Any update on the city that spontaneously erupted on the Moon?"
"It has started to crumble away, giving way to the terrain it displaced again."
"One good thing, at the very least. I swear, if we had another King in Yellow situation with her, I'd be breaking out the Bad coffee."
Viltrumite Tonic Effects: 32 to all physical rolls-38 to all physical rolls
You just realized that, in retrospect, you're actually kind of putting together a manual for demon types and what they do, or have been ever since you started to really mess around with demonology in general in this dimension.
Personally you shall blame having an abundance of free time for that. Not that you need to assign blame or anything, but hey, may as well. You certainly won't stop what you were doing just because you realized what it was all along.
So, right now, you're working with the summoning and essence extraction of Bone Hulks, amusing little fellas that spend their entire existence slowly, but inexorably stalking after given targets they decided upon, usually for completely arbitrary reasons.
They earn their name thanks to the exact mechanics of what they do once they finally do catch up with their victims. Being these huge humanoid clad in what amounts to power armor made of bone, they essentially overwhelm and slaughter their targets, except what they're after isn't their meat, or their blood nor even their inner organs.
It is, quite literally, in their name. They rip the bones of their quarry out of it, warping an consuming them to add them to their own outer shells to add to their armor, become spikes and weapons and all that good shit.
Interestingly, however, they don't just keep growing the more successful they are. Instead, they somehow 'compress' their precious bones inside themselves, making them stronger, tougher, allowing them to contend with other demons they would otherwise be defenseless against.
Them being slow is a very literal issue for them, as they can't really move faster than a brisk walk at the most- and that's when they push themselves. Their advantage when stalking prey, of course, is that they never stop, needing no rest, no food, no nothing until they catch up. And they do catch up, in most cases, as they have a supernatural understanding of the path or paths taken by their targets.
They also are damn smart, to the point they can and will fuck with your mind before they fuck you up proper if that works out for them, and they even predict where you will be going, at times. That way they can move ahead of time and cut you off when you least expected it.
Lastly, they're very, very stubborn. As long as it's physically possible for them to catch up with you at some point, they'll keep stalking you, for years and decades if that's what it takes. All in all, this is one kind of demon that really can do damn far despite its serious handicaps.
When you always dress for success (and to be armored like a complete motherfucker), success will find you sooner or later, you suppose.
For you, actually subjugating them one at a time takes a little doing, but you're just seriously too fast and strong for them, to the point their own, admittedly impressive, physical strength simply doesn't help them. Some strategically applied drilling, courtesy of Last Embrace, eventually destroys their armor, and the rest is more than easy by your standards.
Then again, maybe having just fought the one asshole in this dimension that could take these guys on head-first is skewing your perspective some.
Also up on your to-do-list, now that you've taken care of the other to-do-list (the one with your meals that had yet to be eaten, in case that wasn't quite clear), is some rudimentary battlefield preparations. After all, you burned a use of your Guidance on just knowing where Omni-Man will be coming when his time is up- it'd be a waste not to make the most of it, wouldn't it?
So you have yourself teleported over to Ohio, where only terrible things happen and only the most insane of people would live of their own free will. Which, actually, would explain why the Guardians put their headquarters there, come to think of it.
You have a bit of work to do, from laying some curses down onto the approximate area to prepping a couple of inertial dampeners you could have teleported over here at a moment's notice, once you're sure you can fit everything into what you could call the Family Deathmatch Lightning Drome.
…You could color the inertial dampening fields, sell some tickets to the whole thing. Eh, then again, you also plan to hold your concert around that time and you wouldn't want to cut into the real show's attendance numbers.
You're already considering just kidnapping people to make them take part if the numbers are unsatisfactory as is, you probably shouldn't make the situation more precarious than it has to be.
Precarious for everyone else, but eh, details.
Of course your brief stint as a landscape appraiser and hobby geologist (in the sense that you're considering whether a couple of hills and everything around them might be summarily cratered during what you know is going to happen) is interrupted when none other than the Immortal flies by your position, clearing his throat as he nears the ground.
"Excuse me, Night Queen, but what might you be doing this close to the Guardians' HQ?"
…Well, hey, at least he's asking very politely. Then again, he'd have to be a literal moron not to have reasoned out the correct approach to someone like yourself.
"Mhm," you make, continuing to look upon the area thoughtfully. Just because you're with engaging with this guy doesn't mean you're about to stop doing what you came here for. "I'm surveying the area. Because of the fight."
"…Might I inquire as to what fight you are referring to?" Immortal asks, looking down at you. You, in turn, continue to refuse to return eye contact or anything.
"The one that'll happen when Omni-Man comes back somewhere around here," you decide to relent, despite the idle realization you could probably draw this out a bit longer, purely to mess with him. You just don't really feel like even bothering right now.
"I… see. Could you tell me more about that, please? News on Omni-Man is something the Guardians are very interested in, as you might imagine."
"Yes, yes, he killed you guys, you had a spat with him over it, I remember," you wave him off. It's not like you actually could forget about it, even less so when it just happened so recently. "He'll be touching down somewhere around here, probably to take care of you people again. That's why I'm planning to ambush him with Mark."
"Ah, is that why you've been training Invincible?" Immortal asks, deliberately pretending he didn't hear you use the boy's actual name. "In any case, knowing ahead of time means the Guardians can-"
"No," you declare, taking any emotion or childish mockery out of your voice. The hero you're talking to goes very, very still. You suppose the leader of the team couldn't have been the designated idiot to begin with. "Mark will fight his father, one against one. If he wins, that's the only way you can resolve the whole thing with the minimum of casualties."
Also, it would be absolutely hilarious, and you enjoy the dramatic irony and all that. That's most of the reason as to why you're pushing for it, to be honest, but you never claimed the opposite either, now did you?
"And if he loses?" Immortal asks, carefully.
"Then do whatever, not like I care." You return to being the usual flippant, uncaring Night Queen with a casual shrug. "But Mark gets his shot first."
You do not ask whether you are clear enough. Neither does Immortal ask for clarification. It's abundantly clear either way.
