Today, you're doing something new, for once. You don't do so all that often, but that's more because you don't really feel the need to rush those kinds of things.
You're pretty much entirely immune to that old malady known as 'old age', and you've proven as much by now you'd say, so you have more than enough time to feel your way around everything existence has to offer that you might be interested in.
Contrary to how you've seen immortality like this depicted in various media so far, you don't particularly have any issues just doing what you're used to until now. Maybe that'll change in a century or two down the road, but to be honest you're the type of person to be perfectly content to do the exact same things over and over and over and over again, so…
Let's just say you're not too worried on that end. Maybe you'll grow bored of painting things eventually, or of playing around with people's lives or whatever else, but you'll just cross that particular bridge when you actually get to it.
Back to the present, though, you're doing something new right now just because you feel like trying it out, no more and no less.
Said new thing is the creation of a zoetrope, an object you could actually consider a very, very early ancestor to modern animation, as in, cartoons and pictures and TV in general. In essence, it's a lantern shade constructed to be able to rotate around the light source in the middle, with colorful pictures drawn on it that, thanks to said light source, emanate out from it.
With a bit of elbow grease and careful use of the space offered by the whole thing, you can use them to tell entire stories and crap. It's nowhere near the kind of speed, fluidity and general consistency of later methods of animation, but you know, it does seem kind of neat, doesn't it?
And you don't really need to convey a lot of stuff when you could instead just use this to, in essence, animate a little scene of your own. It's nothing complicated, but…
You and Battle Beast face off, twin bodies arrayed against a far larger opponent. One throws itself against him, the second goes low to attack. Battle Beast tears the upper one away from his chest, the sword held by the lower one stabbing into his side.
He kicks the sword-wielding one away, only to be cut by the chain-weapon's sharp end, distracted just long enough for both bodies to array themselves against him once more.
It's a pretty simple and straightforward circle, basically a closed .gif for most intents and purposes, just expressed differently. While you aren't all that deep into this kind of culture, even you have to admit that in some ways, memes really are the DNA of the soul.
So you sit down inside the art studio contained within your soul, right below the highest ceilings of the ruined palace that acts as your inner world's core, and get to work. Picking out the materials among what you find (there's always more to find the next time you look around), carefully fashioning the frame of what you want to achieve, painting on the individual steps of the scene meant to be portrayed…
It takes quite a while, to say the least. But, in the end, you have something that really makes you proud to look at. A large contraption, driven by a crank off to the side, running smoothly and evenly to display exactly what you want it to.
…You may have overdone it a little with the detail work there, truth be told, but hey, those white fur tufts add some good damn aesthetics! And, sure, maybe you didn't need more individual, carefully painted pictures than technically should fit onto this thing to do what you set out to, but that's just the consequences of creative freedom taking their toll.
You had fun with this either way and it manages to do what you meant for it to, and that's what really counts, don't it?
Neverending Battle: A hand-cranked zoetrope (lantern shade picture motion device) depicting an epic battle between Night Queen and Battle Beast through several separate, incrementally changing pictures. When summoned, it activates its effects upon being cranked. Once active, it inflicts a DC 100 mental check on anyone within line of sight or general vicinity upon attempting to interfere with any combat between two parties and, upon failure, leaves them unable to act until they stop doing so. (Zoetrope)
Feeding a bunch of potions with long-term effects to Mark may have been one of your better ideas, in retrospect. Sure, you were doubtful the stuff would really have enough time to really take those long-term effects in him before his father came around for a spanking (either giving or receiving it, but someone is gonna get smacked when he comes), but either his Viltrumite physiology means those same effects shine just that much easier and sooner on top of his baseline or else this stuff is somehow more effective for it.
Or he just takes to your potions really well. Could always just be his affinity for alchemical concoctions is unusually high, after all.
Anyways, he might complain, but when you shove magical drugs at him and pretend they're magical nutritional drinks instead, he's figured out by this point that he won't get around just drinking them- the ones that enhance intelligence may or may not have had something to do with that.
If he's got the smarts to know he won't get around just drinking the stuff, he stops arguing about it at some point. It only makes sense.
Anyways, it's a grand new day of making Mark not immediately get his ass handed to himself the moment Omni-Man so much as looks in his direction. About as difficult a task as you'd expect from its description, but you feel you're making progress here.
Repeatedly beating the crap out of him has enabled Mark to continue to fight even while the concussions are making him see double. That's progress, right?
All jokes aside, he's really doing well, considering how he started out. You still doubt it'll be enough, but nobody can fault him for his dedication to making it through the level of brutality your training imposes on him.
Speaking of, he's about finished his daily potions, carefully putting the little bottles down on the roof you're standing on right now. "Phew! Alright, I'm ready. What're we doing to… day…?"
He slows when he beholds your current appearance. Said appearance involves a lot of height, white fur and a huge-ass mace (because you did, in fact, pick that thing up before you left the moon).
"Today," you say with Battle Beast's voice, all growling and overtly predatory (as opposed to the more subtle kind of predatory you usually are), "I am going to show you what it feels like to be outclassed."
"Uh…" Yeah, don't need to see through those glasses he wears to know his eyes just widened. "I, uh, I'm pretty sure I'm usually outclassed by you anyways…?"
"That just means you won't accidentally kill yourself against me," you grin. "Don't worry. Aren't you- Invincible"
You make him scream a lot. It's a good bit of fun all around, even if you have to constantly motivate the part of you that's Battle Beast when you're like this to actually put effort into beating someone weaker than yourself.
He's such a massive prick that he doesn't do so otherwise, even when he's you.
Capstone Perks
Unnatural Processes: It all begins to make sense, the deeper you delve into the less sensible sides of material science. One kind of matter may be turned into more of itself, as you already know. You but need to streamline the process, perhaps use a… a sigil or two, to guide the energy created along the way. Vastly increases the rate at which Manufactories may generate matter and allow them to (slowly) generate matter from scratch, once programmed to. Prima Mater begins to crystallize. (Synergy) (Capstone)
Eldritch Organics: You have learned to create magical, incomprehensible machines, and how to use biological systems to mimic your engineering. Now you can combine the two, creating organic machines of strange means and stranger effects. You may craft body parts or design entire beings which will proceed to exhibit unnatural abilities, from metabolizing toxins into magic to a heart that speeds up time for its bearer by speeding up its beat. (Magical) (Synergy)
Normally, you'd be taking your time with anything regarding the GDA, especially if they're trying to approach you for any reason. Just to make a point, because making people wait for no reason is basically how passive-aggressive bureaucracy-loving shitheads display dominance.
However, they did the thing. They pressed the button. They… used the Night Queen Signal to call for your aid. Indeed, they went and used the tamagotchi you left with them just in case of emergencies.
You can't just go and ignore that shit, you specifically gave it to them if there's anything actually important. As such, after a short break from lightly eviscerating Mark repeatedly (you've taken to dousing him with weak healing potions in-between training sessions, courtesy of the Thinker) to figure out the situation, you, back in usual Night Queen form, teleport over real quick to have a chat.
Apparently, Donald took the Night Queen emergency transponder, in the end. Not that it matters. "What's up?" You ask, completely disregarding the trio of 'subtle' guards standing around the area, just keeping an eye out for trouble- this is some open space right outside one of the GDA's hidden facilities, so they're… probably just here to make sure.
"Night Queen," Cecil greets you, the scarred side of his face drawn a little tighter than usual. "You have some intel on Omni-Man."
Ah, he was probably stressing out over that, huh? Makes sense, this is one man that's, like, way overly invested in the future of humanity. Of course he'd immediately freak out if you told Immortal there's a concrete date for the thematic battle for the fate of planet Earth.
"Yeah, he's coming back around to give that whole 'conquest' thing another try," you tell him, not seeing any reason to deny it at this point. "There's gonna be this whole big family drama with him and Mark, it's gonna be just like in those cheap soap dramas!"
"Are you sure Mark will fight against his father?"
"Well, yeah. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have bothered to train him up and just erased Nolan Greyson from existence two weeks ago."
"…You know what, good enough. So, I can't help but notice you're holding a… concert around when you told Immortal this would happen. Not a coincidence, is that?"
Great lead-in! You've been doing far too little villainous gloating so far, it's about high time you revealed your dastardly scheme to someone for no reason. You want to cross off all those tropes before you leave this dimension.
"Indeed! It's all part of my secret plan to lure Omni-Man into complacency and attack Ohio, which is where all bad things happen…"
It doesn't take you all too long to explain what your whole plan is, mostly by virtue of there not being all that much to it. Sure, it's not exactly something that just anyone could come up with and execute, but in the end it's pretty simple overall, just supported by the insane bullshit you routinely pull out your ass for fun.
Like, you're really just training Mark to make him fight against his space fascist father (if you understand how the Viltrumite Empire work correctly, anyways) in a gladiatorial death match, purely to see what happens. This part ain't no rocket science.
The exact mechanics of how you're making this happen are a different story, but to be honest better this than the other way around. At the end of the day most of your plans and schemes stay simple and straightforward as a matter of both preference and necessity.
No need to go around overcomplicating everything. Life (or the lack thereof) can be exceedingly simple when you get down to it, you just have to make it so.
But yeah, you don't linger super long, for all that fucking with Cecil will never cease to be funny as fuck. You have work to do, crap to get ready, all that good stuff. Preparations for holding a concert take a lot of work, y'know?
Not like you have to put a lot of focus on the Omni-Man side of things at this point, anyways. In case Marks fucks it up, you can always just teleport over and take care of things yourself, no sweat or anything.
Those preparations you're undertaking for your concert do, naturally, include… Invitations! An essential part of the presentation when used right, before any given kind of event has any chance to even start, and if there's one thing you know not to be stingy with, it's that.
Presentation is what can make or break a cape career. Having a strong power is good in itself, great even, but making sure people know not to fuck with you is a power in and of itself, and that's just as a villain. Heroes have to put a lot of effort into marketing themselves, after all.
Those Guardians of the Globe action figures and crap don't sell if nobody likes the Guardians, after all, and if that happens how will they afford maintenance on their headquarters? Property prices in Ohio are pure insanity already as it is.
Life's tough for everyone, even and especially when your one marketable skill is violence. You're pretty sure the GDA bankrolls the Guardians in any case, just because anything else would be pure insanity on every level, but even then these heroes have to punch the evil guys really, really good while minimizing civilian casualties in every fight they get into in order to keep that government assistance rolling.
…You wonder if they have their own accountant or just have their finances handled by the government entirely. Probably the latter; no actually sane accountant-y person would associate with such high-profile heroes that closely. Much safer and more convenient to handle the finances in some GDA blacksite filled with cubicles and backroom offices or whatever.
They probably have, like, bureaucracy catnip or whatever in their coffee there, some kinda substance that lets their people just do paperwork all day. It's the only way this agency could actually work as smoothly as it does.
But to return to the topic of what you're doing, invitations. You're making them. By that you mean you're actually taking color-printed paper and drawing each of them individually, from the decorations and the headers down to writing each individual word on them.
It's… different, from what you usually do, but it's not like you have any particular objections to doing this, either. You have the inhuman capacity to make unique ones for each and every invitee, so you may as well take the opportunity to let your base creativity run free, without the kind of commitment a more involved piece of artwork would involve.
It's kind of a pain to accidentally do something that runs counter to the composition of a picture or painting you're working on and only realize it in retrospect because you're concentrating on the details, y'know? No such danger here, at least.
Worst case you'd just throw one or two of the invitations you're working on away and make new ones, it takes you, like, fifteen minutes each or something. Still, nothing like that happens along the way- you're pretty decent with your hands, if you do say so yourself.
Heh.
The one you're sending to Mark reminds him that you don't expect him to actually come, but he's cordially invited anyways, naturally without elaborating on why you expect him not to be there- you'll have him teleported right in his father's face out of nowhere either way. The ones for the Guardians, on the other hand, also have polite reminders that you'll know what they're doing whether they come or not, and so any attempts at interfering in the battle that will ensue will be detected and put to a stop right away.
You officially declared that Mark will fight his father, one on one, and you will enforce this decree with any amount of force necessary to do so. If you have to personally beat the ever-living fuck out of each and every hero on this planet, followed by every villain on it and then finish off with Omni-Man himself, so be it, you don't give a fuck.
Anyways, you send the things off via teleportation in short order, the Thinker's purpose-built teleportation targeting array really helping a lot with that. You've achieved entirely new levels of precision when teleporting small objects in particular, even, which is pretty amazing in itself.
…You don't want to step on her toes, but it would be pretty cool to try for the ol' telefragging trick again, with this. As it stands, your teleporters can't really teleport stuff inside other stuff, so killing people by fusing their heads with oversized dildos is still out of the question, but it would be absolutely hilarious if you could.
Ah well, you're pretty sure it's a hard issue with the method of teleportation used. At least you can fiddle around with that short-range portal generator Battle Beast had on his mildly sassy ship, whenever you get around to that.
…For now, procrastination is still key! You refuse to rush yourself on what's essentially your vacation, so you'll get to that when you get to that. No more and no less.
Now, about that idea you had- spontaneously transmuting air into explosives while using your esper power to keep the stuff in place, letting it build up nice and well until you have a bunch of oxygen, hydrogen and methane or maybe acetylene right where you want them to blow everything to kingdom come. You should probably work on getting your practical transmutational methodology updated, to make this really viable, but it's not like you're really dependant on a whole lab's worth of equipment to do this kind of thing anymore, so…
Getting used to the power of spontaneously copying a limited fashion of what Atom Eve can do takes a bit… effort, you'll freely admit, and you still aren't entirely sure how you obtained this power, but you recently discovered you actually can, with some concentration and a bit of mental exercise, pull off some of the 'tricks' your powers let you go for with the right, lightly enchanted implements without bothering with any of those.
Specifically, freeform matter reconfiguration, that is. The kind of bullshit the pink-clad superheroine in question can do when she doesn't just fart out pink energy projectiles and shields and all that crap. You've seen some videos of her in action, particularly after she left the Teen Team.
To be honest, good on her for that one. Any team with that particular name is basically begging to have its members fuck off at some point- teens are insufferable pricks at the best of times, but even more so when someone reminds them they're teens. It had to be a deliberate thing, back when they came up with that name.
There's little other explanation you can think of.
But anyways, molecular reconstruction of your surroundings is actually a lot less spectacular and immediately fun than you'd think, amazingly enough; you have to actually focus, accurately picture the molecular makeup of the stuff you're trying to change and how you want it to change. It's… not quite chemistry, seeing how blatantly you're cheating and violating the laws of physics, so you don't quite have to go as deep as building up a close and immediate understanding of how electrons actually look like, but still.
A lot of thought-effort goes into this stuff, and even then you have to do the mental equivalent of bench pressing whatever you're trying to do to make it work reliably. If you still had the capacity to have headaches, you'd have one now, just saying.
As it is, you just feel emotionally drained by the time you decide to give it a rest, being otherwise immune to fatigue in all its many forms. You know what, you feel like cuddling right now. You've had way too little cuddles in this dimension, and it's time you changed that.
Luckily for you, you rarely ever lack people to snuggle up with, if you do say so yourself. It's a good thing too, you are kind of a cuddler sometimes, when you have the time, anyways- sure, that usually involves having sex first, but that's a perfectly fair price, if you're honest.
In this particular case, though, you don't really feel like finding someone first- sure, you could probably get Alicia to just cuddle all day instead of going off to school, but that sounds like some minimal effort… And you don't feel like it, consequently.
Instead, you can simply turn around to face one of the Thinker's bodies, giving her one of your classical charm offensive smiles. "I had a question, Thinker."
"What is it, Gabriel?" She asks, her voice almost completely human by now. She's been working on optimizing it for this exact purpose, for sounding like an entirely natural person- something ironically slightly harder with the sheer computing power she possesses.
When you can control your 'voice' so precisely literally no natural organism can hear the differences your changes can make, it can be pretty damn hard to fine-tune things without accidentally falling squarely into uncanny valley.
Well, it still didn't exactly take the Thinker long to get it down. Just a full two minutes of calculating the perfect voice she could be satisfied with using, as an upgrade over the previous one. No idea why, exactly, she decided she should get one, but hey, minor self-improvement is right up your alley, so whatever, really.
"How many extra bodies do you have lying around not doing anything right now?"
"None. I keep all my drones busy, Gabriel, you know that." It's amazing, too, you can borderline hear the pout her lips are forming right now.
"Alright, let me rephrase," you smirk, having seen that one coming. "How many bodies do you have doing minor stuff right now, and can they come over here for me to snuggle with?"
She looks at you for a long moment, mechanical, yet downright weirdly expressive eyes searching your face for something. Then, moving with the grace of a dump truck about to slam into a wall, she surges towards you, sweeping you off your feet and putting you in a princess carry.
"Oh hey," you laugh, letting her do this without resistance, "what brought this on?"
"You are a very physically intimate person," the Thinker begins by psychoanalyzing you. Hey, you aren't about to complain or anything. "As such, any requests for physical intimacy are to be prioritized. It is how you communicate affection."
"Aww, love you too, Thinker," you croon, not receiving a reply.
Instead, you emerge into a hallway filled with twenty identical copies of the Thinker's 'swordmaster' edition bodies, all of them proceeding to carry you off into one of the bedrooms inside your secret underground sewer castle.
Time to stress-test the softness of the synthetic tissue you used in making these things, you suppose.
You build up a mighty robo cuddle pile, the likes of which the world has never seen… Or at least you'd hope no particularly disturbed mad scientists this dimension has spat out so far thought they should do anything close to what you're doing, here.
Look, most people don't have exponentially escalating gains in material resources and manpower, or rather robotpower, the way you do. You'd assume they actually have to manage their operations carefully, rather than throwing a manufactory into the sewers and waiting for a week while the Thinker does her thing.
It's a tough world out there. First world problems only really become apparent when you realize other people have way worse- 'oh, look at me, I have to scrounge and salvage scrap to build a giant death ray'. Man, most Tinkers (and equivalents) are all kinds of limited in what they can actually do, mostly by way of lacking equipment and materials and all that.
And then actual Tinkers, the parahuman ones, are utterly limited by how much gear they can maintain at once, because of course tinkertech requires that or it breaks down catastrophically. Some people just can't ever catch a break, you suppose.
That's one thing the mad scientists that pop on this Earth are ahead in, if nothing else. You've eaten more than one of them by now, and both the Mauler Twins, Doc Seismic and Sinclair may have taken a while to do their thing, idividually, but once they do stuff normally works.
If something breaks, that's because it wasn't designed to last, there was some fault in the material or some other, reasonable, reason for that. Rather than just 'nobody has any idea how this works in the first place and it may stop working if its creator skips out on stroking it just right for a day'.
Long story short, you're just plain better than most people, because you can not only build a working robot from scratch, you can then make that robot build more robots for you ad infinitum, and that's before you consider the Thinker helping you to coordinate this stuff. An artificial intelligence that actively enjoys micromanaging anything in sight is one of those things you just get so used to you're fucked if you ever lose it.
Heck, she's basically your personal secretary these days, reminding you of anything you have to do, helping you keep your plans on track if you get distracted, those kinds of things. Sorry Sarah, but this outcome was a given, when you think about it in retrospect. The position has been usurped.
That's more or less why you're taking some extra time out of your busy vacation schedule to just hang around with the Thinker, buried in a pile of pleasantly soft, synthetic flesh. You do appreciate her work, quite a lot in fact, and so naturally want her to know as much.
It's the same as with anyone else you usually work with, really, the Thinker just has the advantage of being the only one you took with you to this dimension in particular. Also, you've long since been of the opinion that artificial intelligence gets a bad rap in fiction, purely for not being human, which always strikes you as terribly rude.
They're just different, not inherently evil or anything. As long as you make an effort to reach out and let them work with you, they naturally return the gesture, just because that's how intelligence, artificial or otherwise, tends to work, full stop. Exceptions can be made if they are, actually, fundamentally programmed to be untrustworthy, but in that case they aren't even at fault themselves, obviously.
Like, seriously, people, if you create intelligent life of some kind, you're responsible for how it develops and turns out. It's the same as with having kids, no more, no less, and it's incredibly telling how often humanity imagines itself to be an utterly shitty parent.
Anyways, the Thinker is a good AI that grew up to be a perfectly well-adjusted woman. Kind of. The exact specifics are, admittedly, a bit fuzzy when it comes to artificial intelligence, but honestly, you just ignore the difference whenever viable. This approach hasn't let you down yet.
As with any kind of racism, you just don't give a fuck. You aren't about to champion for anyone's rights, because fuck that, you just also aren't about to care what other people think.
Business as usual, in other words.
Alicia has, somehow, convinced her cousin Alana to join her in her morning exercise. In effect, that just means Ariana has something extra to stare at as her brain waits with that whole 'waking up' thing. It's kind of cute. Also, Alana now knows the sisters have been sleeping together, though Alicia just claimed it's because the younger one sleeps better this way.
Even now that he is dead, eaten and digested by your own exceedingly humble self, Battle Beast continues to be, well, an absolute beast. In battle. His name isn't creative in any way so much as descriptive, to be honest.
Towering over even your 'normal' height, he also is, ironically, even more dangerous to you in a fight, personally, now that you've eaten him. Not so much because he's grown stronger, as such, but rather because your own powers and magic tend to work rather sporadically inside your inner world.
Which makes it somewhat of a challenge to stand up to him in a fistfight, as you do just that inside the occasionally windswept walls of the Arena built inside the illusionary desert city guarded by the Twins.
Y'know, the Guardian pair you merged with during your fight with Battle Beast. The two barely dressed beauties actually preside over the arena whenever there's a fight going on, as you officially sanctioned violence when at least two willing participants of such are in this place- a place for your souls to beat the shit out of each other without getting in the way.
As a bonus, the arena also speeds up the healing of any damage done within it, so it's barely an issue on your end. There's a bit of a subculture of fisticuff-enjoyers now, just a bunch of souls that gather in the arena to spectate when fights happen.
None of them are around right now, of course. It wouldn't do for the peons to see you eating bricks.
THUNK!
"Oh, that was a good one," Battle Beast remarks, having literally punted you straight into the arena wall, down below the spectator seating. "I give it an eight out of ten."
"Bitch please," you say, pushing yourself back onto the sand and cracking your neck, "my puntability is a nine as a baseline at least. Now shut up and let me hit you back."
The white-furred, well, furry, just grins as he waits for you to come at him. This whole shebang is some of the best training you've ever done, but damn if it isn't uncomfortable to actually fight someone better and stronger than yourself.
Efficiency Capstone
Efficiency: You fight by punching, kicking, clawing, smacking, striking and biting, using whatever means at your disposal to, when you simplify things down to the basest of levels, make things dead as fast as possible. This is the same as ever, you simply reached new heights of efficiency in doing so, your speed, strength and capability for violence enhanced wildly. Gain 20 to Unarmed attack rolls and one additional attack per turn, stacking with any and all modifiers. (Capstone)
Mark's training has really borne some surprisingly great fruit so far, for what it's worth. Your original plan for him, when you started to mess around with this whole shebang, was to just get him to a level that would allow him to more or less keep up in a real fight on your level, ignoring how easily he'd still get pasted against the nearest surface in any such situation; the idea was to just use him as a disposable distraction, maybe a quick meat shield or something.
Wouldn't need to survive an attack to be used for deflecting it, after all.
That said, this initial projection of his usefulness changed pretty quickly when it turned out he's actually got a bit of a talent for fighting as you put him through his paces. And you don't just mean his natural Viltrumite powers and all that, the flight and strength and durability, though those are naturally presumed to be a thing so he can be relevant at all.
No, even before that, Mark has a bit of a knack for fighting, for all that he's not generally violent as such. That's what the majority of the initial training was for, to beat the readiness for violence into him to begin with. But once you had that taken care of, well…
Let's just say you're currently giving him non-zero odds towards actually mattering as more than a mild speedbump when and if his dad decides to come in and fuck up everyone's day. Exactly how much more, you can't be sure, but hey, he's got a shot.
That's more than most get when their parent or parents decide to be genocidal dickheads, you'd say.
To this end, you find yourself genuinely rooting for the boy to manage, to make a difference in what's going to happen very soon. Because it would be pretty hilarious if he did. And if he can't, well…
You told everyone already, but you're ensuring Mark gets his one shot. If he doesn't make it count, then it's open season on Omni-Man, and you don't give a fuck whether he gets killed or imprisoned by the Guardians or you get him yourself. It's not like you have any personal stakes in how he ends up, beyond ensuring nothing he's currently trying to do will work.
Earth is yours. You own this damn planet, whether its inhabitants know or not, and you can't damn well let just anyone waltz in and claim otherwise, now can you?
But yeah, that's why you've been investing so much time and attention towards getting Mark ready. Such as right now, as you are surrounding him.
Through the use of several dozen summoned Drakons, the humanoid dragon-reminiscet demons you went and subjugated some time ago.
All of them you have, that is.
"And remember, you get a break, but only if one side can't fight anymore," you announce in your usual Night Queen form, raising a hand. "Now everyone, beat the crap out of Mark here. He wants it."
"Whoa, hey, that's… not how I'd put that," the half-Viltrumite stammers out when nearby reptilian faces eye him with a mix of alarm and disgust. "I'm just here because I have to be."
"He likes to pretend otherwise, but this is all consensual," you wave him off. "Now pound him from both sides, menial scaled underlings of undetermined, possibly infernal origin!"
"…Look, it's okay if you guys are demons or whatever. I'm not about to discriminate be-woah!"
Throwing himself into the air to escape the fire being breathed all over his location, Mark never actually figures out that these Drakons were extremely aggravated by him going out of his way to be considerate towards them. That's just the kinds of dicks they usually are.
Now to wait for him to defeat all of them in an endurance match, because you're pretty sure he'll do just that. You have expectations for him now, he better had meet them.
It is a long few hours during which you work Mark over, but you do make sure to take regular breaks, both to let him recover and to summon back any of your demons that get sent back to hell the hard way- as you've trained him not to hesitate when putting down his opponents, that happens pretty often.
But yeah, during those breaks, you also make sure to take some extra time to have a couple little chats.
Minor stuff, things that don't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, for the most part.
"So your dad's totally gonna come back in the next two days, by the way."
"…Are you sure?" It's not disbelief in his voice or anything, Mark is just trying to take this as seriously as possible.
"Pretty sure. Burned a pretty big piece of magic on finding out, and this stuff is pretty reliable." You shrug. "But yeah, expect a sudden dadcursion soon-ish."
"I'm… pretty sure that's not a word."
"It is now."
"Eh, fair enough." Mark sits there for a few moments, silently staring off into the distance. Both of you being effortless fliers means you can pretty easily chill out on random rooftops whenever you want, and silent brooding basically offers itself as the occupation of choice up here.
It's pretty different from back on Earth Bet. Most of the Crypts can't exactly fly, after all, and certainly not this easily. Then again, you have a gigantic underground base to hang out in instead, so it evens out, you suppose.
"…Think I'll be able to talk to him?" You have absolutely no idea why Mark is asking you this question. "It's just… I'm still not sure exactly why he did… everything he did, and I don't know if he'll listen and…"
"Meh," is all you have to say on that. Then again, you do know a little bit about the Viltrum Empire, thanks to the aliens you ate- Battle Beast, as usual, both knew the most about them and cared the least- and so you have a little bit of an idea of what Viltrumites are all about, as far as the wider galaxy was concerned.
So you only look at Mark, and prepare to tell him the one thing that will make or break him as a person.
"Just always remember sex isn't a meritocracy and you'll be fine."
No, you do not elaborate a single word beyond this. He can figure the rest out himself.
Did you remember to feed the girls? You did, you distinctly recall doing so, but you may need to look into restocking the mansion's kitchen. Oh, and maybe you could also get those little lunch boxes you could hand out to them every morning, that would be cute.
Even as busy as you've been of late, what with the whole kicking Mark around for fun and profit and other miscellaneous stuff you've been juggling the past week or so, you're still making sure to reserve a little time with the Triple A Trio when and where appropriate, from eating together to just hanging out when they have time.
It's not like you're trying to act like some absentee dad off to work all day every day, never really interacting with your kids and all. Sometimes you do wonder how normal people working a nine-to-five manage, but then you remember you're thinking about the good old US of A- it's kind of a miracle the nuclear family even exists anymore, as a concept.
Anyways, you've let Alicia talk you into cooking a proper meal for everyone again, as she insisted your cooking is the best and she wants more of it after the last couple of treats you shared with her and Alicia; that and a blowjob or two may or may not have been enough to convince you.
To be honest, with how fervently she tends to masturbate while gobbling down your cock, you suspect it's more of a turn-on for her than it is pleasure for you, but hey, you ain't about to turn down free blowjobs, so fair's fair.
All it really means is that more fun is being had, so what's not to like?
So it comes that you and the Triple-A-Trio (Sounds kind of like some movie title or something, or maybe a game show?) converge in the mansion's kitchen, whereupon you are immediately subjected to the usual awkwardness developed between Alana and Alicia, whenever you're in the room.
For some reason, the older cousin in this equation seems to have developed an acute sense of wariness towards this particular combination of people. Couldn't have anything to do with anything you did, of course.
Of course none of that can stop her from speaking her mind whenever she feels the need to. "So you're a cook, too?" Is how she chooses to initiate conversation as you go over the list of ingredients present in the kitchen (you don't want to have any teleported in with her present, Green Ghost might notice and all).
"Somewhat of one," you shrug, opening the fridge. "Not professionally so, but it's a bit of a hobby, you could say."
Or a bit of a something you picked up through consuming thousands upon thousands of souls, some of which could actually cook and whose recipes and general skill you can copy perfectly well. Same difference, eh?
"Mhm… That's fair, I suppose. Having hobbies is important," Alana comments. "What's with the apron, though?"
"Like it?" You ask, patting the article of clothing she's talking about. It's got 'Big Daddy Energy' written on it in bold letters, with an arrow pointing downwards. "Ariana got it for me."
Green Ghost's civilian identity reaches towards her brow, massaging it. "I'm so sorry about that girl."
"Eh, it's fine," you shrug. "Not like I'm not wearing anything under it."
"…Is that a thing guys do?"
"Same thing as naked aprons done by chicks. Never had any complaints, personally."
Just then, Ariana comes bursting into the room, having gone to pick up some stuff from the pantry for you. "Did I hear 'naked apron'? Are you doing it, Gabriel?"
You gesture towards her with a 'see?' wave of your hand. Alana just closes her eyes, holding her forehead in vexation and general despair.
Good times.
Making food you've never personally tried before is definitely a bit weird every time, seeing as you just about always make it based on the memories of people that made it themselves, once upon a time. Those same people do tend to have also eaten those same dishes, after all.
So you both never actually tasted them yourself, with your own tastebuds and all, but also intimately and distinctly recall how they taste, through the memories you absorbed from your past victims. It's just one of those things that you happen to stumble onto when you're functionally a hivemind made out of yourself in control of all the people you ever ate to date.
Then again, it's not that this particularly stops you from enjoying yourself anyways, admittedly. Case in point, you're pulling out all the Mediterranean classics you could find inside your internal library of recipes (courtesy of the literal library facility that organizes all your information for you) and all of this stuff is pretty amazing, if you do say so yourself.
You cooked up a full kebab spread, varied kinds of meat with accompanying salads, sauces, dressings and all the things that belong to it, along with a large plate of falafel and a platter of tzatziki (traditional sauce slash dip made which tastes… different, not in a bad way though) and vegetables to snack on in-between all the other food you're bringing in.
The final course are piles and piles of stuffed mushrooms, with plenty of sauce and still-hot cheese running over them to top it all off. That one's fairly well-chosen, too, because nobody present can actually eat any more after this particular dish comes around.
Aside from yourself, of course, but that goes without saying.
Now then, what's the jury have to say about your work?
Alana rubs her stomach, immediately forcing her hand down on her leg when she realizes you're looking. "I don't think I've ever been this full in my life," she comments before she can think better of it. "This was good. The flavors have gone from being delicious to making me just stop chewing to draw them out just that much longer."
Seemingly unable or unwilling to say anything more, she takes a sip of the wine you pulled out for this, the lovely, fruity red kind. Personally, you aren't really into wine in general, but it's almost drinkable by your standards.
Next up in turn is Alicia, who simply lays down her fork. "Very good. To stop eating is almost painful."
Telepathically, of course, she has a bit more to say; something something she's in love and wants to eat your cooking every day. It's pretty cute, no matter how unrealistic her compliments are right now.
That leaves Ariana, who is currently vibrating with suppressed energy as she sits on her chair. And, now, throwing her hands up in the air.
"The flavor of the meat melts into my mouth with every bite I take, whereas the salad cleanses my palate with a single bite to make the next one I take more delicious!" She crosses her arms, eyes closed. "Not only does the heavy taste charm one's taste buds, it grows heavier with every mouthful, like an avalanche of flavor itself, culminating in these stuffed mushrooms, so heavy with nutrients one can feel them pressing down on one's whole being once eaten!"
"…Is she okay?" Alana asks, eyeing her younger cousin with some genuine worry.
"It's fine. She's just read some manga with those kinds of scenes lately," Alicia waves her off. "I can show you later. I think the faux-naked bodies are what's got her hooked."
"…I doubt I'll ever understand Japanese entertainment."
For some reason, Alana seems offended by how busy you've been lately, as though indignant on her cousins' behalf about you not spending enough time with them, especially after sleeping on your cooking for a night. It's actually kind of cute.
You've been putting Mark through a lot of exercise of late, if you can call violently forcing him to 'git gud' that, to borrow some internet slang real quick, but seeing how close you're getting to the actual time and date of Omni-Man's non-consensual revisit on the topic of Earth's sovereignty, you figure you really should make sure all your preparations are in order and all.
Simply put, you don't think any amount of last minute training can really prove pivotal at this point- you already got the boy in shape and as ready as he can get with the time you have available by this point. An additional afternoon of being beaten to a pulp won't make any noticeable difference by this point, you reason.
However, that doesn't mean he gets the day off, far from it. You have accrued a very decent amount of potions as per the norm for your power responsible for such things, thanks to the Thinker's support and logistics, and you very much plan to feed a bunch of them to Mark before you throw him into the family deathmatch cage; now, before you do so, it does naturally make sense to go and test them out on him.
They're magical, the concepts and methods by which they work just about entirely decoupled from conventional science and, therefore, probably no issue for his physiology. Probably. Not to mention that nasty business with Potion Sickness, one of the few real drawbacks to your totally magical not-drugs.
To summarize, you have to figure out how many potions you can pour down Mark's throat before he's reduced to throwing them back up and lying around with a massive headache, nosebleed and general symptoms of a migraine coupled with severe dehydration. The ailment itself isn't usually lethal, by any means, it just royally, absolutely sucks, and you sincerely doubt he'd be able to fight a wet paper bag with it, never mind his father.
It really is that bad. Like, you saw the test subjects back on Earth Rapture, and most of them seemed like they'd have preferred actually dying over having to live through the full effects, at least at the time. Perhaps comparable to having explosive diarrhea while also throwing up, having a migraine and, uh, probably being blasted with excessively loud noise by the neighbors or something, all at the same time, in terms of overall suffering.
Just a rough estimate, but you figure it about fits the bill.
Hence, testing it beforehand! Exact tolerances for potion intake vary from person to person, so you figure as Mark's quasi-trainer, it falls to you to make sure you can not quite hit said tolerance threshold while getting all the good juice he's gonna need into him.
Of course that's not exactly how you explain all of this to him, granted.
"Okay, so you need to be at the top of your game when you play your father," you say, adjusting the baseball cap you loosely threw onto the top of your head (it's the only thing about your outfit you changed for this gag, the gothic lolita dress stays). "He's just inherently stronger, faster and more experienced than you, and to bridge that gap will be hard. With me so far?"
"Why are we suddenly doing a sports thing?"
"Because I felt like it," you shrug, taking your cap off and flipping it in the air as you continue. "Anyways, big daddy, big strong, you following?"
"Yeah, yeah, I get it. He's just plain-out stronger than I am." Huh, you'd have thought Mark wouldn't sound so… fine with this fact. As though he didn't care that no amount of training and getting better and stronger himself would be enough to catch up with his father, or at least none available within time. Maybe if you could tap the Flaxan dimension on demand… But no, that place sucked and you don't really want to revisit it. "That's what all the training was for, right? To learn how to deal with people stronger than myself."
"Pretty much, yeah. Now, though, we'll be going over the last bits of, let's call 'em equalizers, I'll be throwing at you. Ta-dah!"
Twirling around dramatically, you pull a couple of colorful bottles out of the folds of your dress, literally reaching through them to access your shadow-space storage.
"A bunch of performance enhancers that'll let you close that distance a little. Like the ones I've been feeding you,just temporary and stronger in exchange."
"…You know, the way you say 'performance enhancers', it sounds a lot like you mean 'drugs'…"
"They're magical juice that'll make you stronger and faster, what else am I gonna call them? Now shut up and get a load of this stuff so we can tell whether you'll just throw up uselessly or get better with them in your system."
"The comics always made this stuff look a lot cooler and more mystical…"
It's… a bit of a long afternoon, dealing with a doped-up Mark testing out his new, magical-potion-adjusted limits, which actually pops him over from being a mildly dangerous punching bag to a genuine nuisance in a fight.
Not enough to give you serious trouble, when you pull out all the stops, but certainly enough to be a credible distraction, one that may even survive being such long enough to do it again. Not something you say easily- personally, your policy on minor distractions is to murder them without mercy, then get back to murdering whoever you're mainly dealing with at the time, and for good reason.
The weak don't get to annoy you, not when you're strong enough to make them royally regret it. Not that the strong get any leniency from you either, of course, if anything them being strong just make them priority targets.
But hey, cape combat doctrine with Doctor Gabe aside, you get it done, Mark doesn't throw up violently at any point, it's all good. And with a little luck, he may actually stand a chance against an objectively stronger opponent like his father, even.
As somewhat of a 'parent perditioner' yourself, you're all for it, really. Not in a personally invested way, but hey, if the long shot of Mark taking care of things within the family works out, good for him.
In the meantime, though, you have plenty of crap to get done, starting with one thing in particular you've been meaning to get to doing for a while now.
It may or may not have to do with the spaceship sitting in the middle of your secret underground castle, the one you took after you killed and ate Battle Beast. Just a hunch.
Now then, in completely unrelated news, time to take apart and analyze a fucking alien spacecraft! One of those things very few people ever really get to do.
…Sherrel would totally be flipping her lid right now, come to think of it. And probably take this thing, add tinkertech to it and turn it into her personal interstellar joy ride.
You'd be encouraging her, too. It's not like you didn't help her build the Doomtruck, anyways.
Most of the alien spaceship, you consider by the time you're done pulling it apart and putting it back together again in the interest of science, isn't actually anything that far out there. Sure, the basic engineering you're seeing inside of it is approaching a lot of things differently from how you would, but fundamentally just about all of this stuff is… surprisingly reasonable.
Like, it makes sense. There's what you can identify as engines, some form of computers, armor plating, wires… It's all stylistically very different from what you're used to as such, but it's not like this whole thing was actually made out of tinkertech or anything.
It really shouldn't be surprising, really. All of this stuff was developed in the same reality human engineering was, with the same laws of physics and requirements for not breaking apart in space and all of that good stuff. Of course any aliens around that managed spaceflight would have to solve the same problems you would have to, then go from there.
That's not to say nothing unusual that you haven't thought up already can be found in the carcass of a vessel you're currently elbow-deep inside of. For one, whoever these aliens were- Battle Beast barely remembered them after they managed to lure him away from their planet by pointing him at Earth and giving him a spaceship to get there- they did entirely get around having to figure out how to get a ship from the ground into orbit.
Mostly by way of portals. They have a literal portal generator inside of this thing, as you can prove once you manage to get it to work. There also was an AI, once upon a time, but going by what you've been able to find out, it blew its own processors shortly after you killed Battle Beast during your little epic showdown on the moon; it really wanted to see him dead because he butchered the crew the ship came with, and said crew was this AI's only real friends and all.
He just didn't feel like dealing with them, personally, so they had to go the hard way. The blood is still covering a few parts of the ship's insides, which strikes you as pretty unhygienic.
But back to the important stuff, the portal generator! Which… is pretty neat. It allows the ship to navigate through space by means of opening a portal in other solar systems and just hopping through, which technically qualifies as faster-than-light travel, if by means of just not needing to cross a lot of intervening space. Its maximum range is… pretty good, but that's not exactly the limiting factor, actually.
The things aren't exactly all that precise over larger distances. It's not as much of an issue in space, seeing how space is stupidly big and all, so being off with your portal by a few hundred kilometers isn't the end of the world, but for your use…
Well, there's a few ways to make it work anyways, starting with the devices the aliens built themselves- there's a couple of convenient remote controls that you can just carry with you and press a button on them to call for a portal. As long as the (pretty sizable, by the way) generator is in range, it can just use the device itself as a reference point and just like that, it's a lot easier to have this stuff right where you want it.
Your first instinct, one you immediately went with, was to copy the portal generator and integrate it into the massively expanded machinery inside your manufactories, by the by. Finally, you have achieved the power of never needing to actually use intakes or outtakes anymore, and instead just use portals for both!
And, y'know, directly have stuff come out of portals at a great remove from your actual machines. This could come in handy, potentially.
While you're doing all of this, the Thinker is occupying herself recycling what's left of the ship's AI after it suicided itself, slurping any salvageable data down like a juice pack. She objects to the way you put that one, but it's true enough and you're just too amused at her imitating the way you consume other living beings to let her 'correct' you.
What follows is her equivalent of a robotic pout, an expression the Thinker's robot bodies can't help but make simultaneously, all of them. It's pretty cute, actually.
Amanda's daily routine was, weirdly for a superhero, pretty mundane, actually. She got up at a decent time, brushed her teeth, made breakfast, all those things anyone did.
Being in the body of a twelve year old just made it harder to get it all done, and needing a stool to reach the kitchen's countertop for making herself food was one of those things she'd never, ever tell anyone, but that aside, her apartment was just as convenient as it would be for anyone else.
Okay, she looked ridiculous, as in childish, when she had to use her stool to reach the bathroom sink for brushing her teeth, but what was one more indignity among too many to count?
Besides, she was actually getting better recently. Whatever Night Queen had done when she'd fed Amanda some of her blood, it was working, if slowly; she was definitely at least thirteen before the last time she'd transformed.
That was progress in the right direction! Sure, she'd then had to save a bunch of people when a bridge collapsed, meaning she did have to transform and she was back to square one, but it was better than what she had before. At this rate, she might just manage to increase her aging speed and get back to being a teen sometime this year!
…Having actual tits again would be nice. And being able to try dating guys that weren't, by definition, major creeps that she had to call the cops on. Besides, transforming actually got rid of her period, so it was all upsides from here on out!
She still doubted she'd actually get a job, though. Having just finished graduating early when her superhero career started to take over her life, it wasn't like she had any job experience, and it would just be extremely awkward all the way, she figured. Nah, the hero stipend would do to keep up with rent and groceries.
Now all she needed to do was-
A blinding sensation tore through her head, not painful, just all-consumingly distracting. There were words, but her brain couldn't make sense of them for a long moment, so she was stuck thinking she might be having a stroke from all the rapid de-aging her body had done over the years.
Finally, though, she could clear her head up a bit, blinking the stars from her eyes. What had knocked her down onto her ass (now firmly parked upon her stool) had been a voice- one she recognized. Why was Night Queen inside her head in a very literal sense?
'Gonna come around to do testing about your curse. Empty your schedule and prepare for invasive tests. Bringing ice cream.'
So much for her daily routine.
It's been a bit of a hot minute since you sent your demonic lawyer off with a budget of a couple of souls and a general idea of what to exchange them for.
Now, she's your lawyer, not your sales agent, and so there's a tacit understanding between the two of you that these kinds of things aren't exactly her highest priority. She's got lawyer-y stuff to do in hell, after all, the only reason you have her take care of these kinds of things is convenience, really.
You just don't feel like bothering to get yourself any contacts with demonic brokers or anything of the sort, the kinds of infernal denizens that normally handle this kind of trade. It would just be kind of a pain, and when you get down to it a lawyer can negotiate prices just fine.
Heck, considering how bartering in hell works, lawyers are basically overqualified for the job. Threatening to ruin the other party's livelihood as a starting position is considered casual and easygoing, as you understand it.
Anyways, you had your lawyer, who by the way got promoted recently so good on her, look into acquiring samples of materials that interact with gravity in interesting ways; as hell is both in itself infinite and connected to an infinitely, arbitrarily large amount of other dimensions, there has to be some of this stuff floating around, somewhere.
The issue is finding it, hence misusing your lawyer as a broker. And throwing a couple souls at the issue to see what she would bring back.
Now she's done just that, having acquired exactly what you wanted. Not much of it, but you did specify samples, to be entirely fair- if anything, only being able to acquire industrially mined amounts of some of the materials she got for you would be the issue.
Thankfully, the Thinker has set up more than enough storage space, so you don't particularly need to give a crap either way.
Looking over the spoils you acquired through trading with the literal forces of hell, you have… Some magical metamaterial that seems to be floating, heavier than they should be, making other things in their environment heavier than they should be and more, some weird apparently 'natural' one that seems to be just screwing with gravity in general and an alloy that has some weird effects on both gravity and biological beings.
It seems to be spreading some weird gravity anomaly cancer or something according to the notes on its acquisition? You just threw it into your containment vault just in case, for now.
A very decent harvest, all in all. Each of these things feel weird to your gravity-based senses, so there might be some interesting uses for them you could come up with. Or at least imitating whatever they do will be decent exercise for your brain, anyways.
Note to self, if you ever create an AI, make it strongly opposed to suicide, generally positive as a person and equip it with future-oriented thinking. Basically, make it as anti-goth as you possibly can, purely so it doesn't wipe itself at the worst possible moment. Such as ten minutes before you take possession of it, or something.
Some people, you believe, would be stressed out at the prospect of the planet Earth being in more or less immediate danger of being annexed by an alien species that, for some reason, sent a single guy to conquer humanity (setting aside how he'd have a very decent chance at actually doing so if it weren't for you), even if it wasn't their native version of Earth to begin with.
That said, most people also wouldn't actually have many ways to address this same situation, as you do, and they wouldn't even be aware of it to begin with because the GDA takes its secrecy seriously. But yeah, seeing as you can always personally interfere by way of screaming very loud and making everyone involved choke on their own stupidly powerful alien biology…
It's not that urgent of a problem as far as you're concerned, is what you're saying. Natives of this dimension, who are very much more used to considering Omni-Man 'The Strongest Man On Earth' and all, might see it differently, but to you taking him out of the picture would be more of a long afternoon.
A very long afternoon if he has half a brain and uses his insane level of mobility to good effect, but still. You're personally more durable than the planet you're standing on, if you count your regeneration and the various ways you have to just bring yourself back to life, so you don't really think there's much of a risk for you.
Sure, the local girls might be at risk if you had an actually cataclysmic or even apocalyptic fight of some sort, but you can cross that bridge when you get to it. Incidentally, the clouds of loose rock kicked loose on the moon during your fight with Battle Beast have actually settled down recently, according to the news.
The exact details of the events up there have largely been kept secret, but you could actually see the aftereffects with a decent telescope and a good angle, for a while. You thought it was pretty neat, especially after you had to face down the fucker that literally rearranged the moon's geological features while you were fighting.
Makes it feel like you aren't the only one that's boggling at the sheer bullshit of it all. It's not like Battle Beast used any supersoldier serums or weird magic to make himself stronger than he should be, nor even any vaguely handwaved superscience to modify himself somehow.
But to get back to the topic at hand, you're actually quite relaxed about the whole deal of Omni-Man's return, as is clearly visible by the fact you're currently attending a little pool party Alicia apparently decided to hold, at Ariana's suggestion.
Because of course the mansion has a pool in the backyard, and a pretty big one, too. You've been keeping tabs on Ariana to make sure she doesn't manage to accidentally drown, over at the deep end, ever since she jumped in.
It's a nice change of pace, and you've never been opposed to seeing beautiful women in swimwear, or bikinis, to be precise. Even Alana joined in, having been cajoled into doing so by her younger cousin, and so you went and readied the appropriate drinks, complete with being served in cocktail glasses and the little umbrellas.
All non-alcoholic, of course. Alcohol is disgusting, and with your enhanced sense of taste even the slightest hint of ethanol can be enough to have you gagging, if you aren't paying attention.
The human condition is such that it will consume even the most horrible, literally brain-addling swill in order to numb itself for a time. You never understood when you were mortal yourself and you likely never will now that you aren't.
At any rate, you have a few-
A wet, rushing sound makes itself heard as Ariana jumps out of the pool, shaking her hair out and grinning widely as she approaches you, her dark-tanned skin listening in the light of the evening sun. "Lookie lookie, a hottie in beachwear!"
Yeah, you're here in your trunks and nothing else, yourself. You also have sandals somewhere, but you don't really bother wearing those- not like your feet will be getting cold anytime soon. "This isn't the first time, remember the beach?" You smirk.
"Mmmaybe," she purrs, coming ever closer. "Could help me to remember, though, if I got my hands on those abs! Did you chisel them out of granite or what?"
"Do you know just how hard it is to keep them looking this good?" You ask, assiduously not saying anything about how hard you have to work at it in particular. "More importantly, do you think your cousin's okay?"
Normally, Alana would have already come by to keep Ariana from groping your belly, but the woman in question is just swimming around in the pool right now, not really paying attention.
"I think she's been pretty caught up in some 'work' stuff," Ariana conspicuously whispers to you, wrapping her arms around your midsection and rubbing her chest against your front in a big ol' hug. "All listless and stuff since a couple days ago."
Hmm… Well, you did tell Immortal when Omni-Man would be back. Goes to show that some people actually do, in fact, worry about his arrival, for some reason you absolutely, totally and completely can't understand, you suppose.
You eventually send Ariana off with a swat on her butt, using the current gap in Alana-provided surveillance to get away with it easily. While the youngest of the Triple A Trio would be up for more, she just wiggles said butt at you as she goes, carrying her newly acquired, surprisingly healthy and refreshing juice mix with her.
No, the one that ends up pulling you into shenanigans, quite literally so, is Alicia. The white-haired girl you're technically employed by is inside the pool when you go to deliver her refreshments, only, when you reach out to hand them to her, you suddenly have a hand on your ankle, pulling.
You smirk at her when that does nothing, your feet so solidly on the ground as if they were covered in concrete. "Want something?"
"Get in here," Alicia demands, lips twitching in a half-aborted pout directed up at you. "I'll keep pulling until it works or even Alana notices."
As funny as it would be to wait until she's using both hands and desperately slipping around, you probably should do the responsible thing here and go along with it. "Alright, alright," you chuckle, your powers letting go of the ground beneath your feet so you can smoothly slide right into the pool with only a bit of splashing in all directions, the drink still perfectly preserved and held up, "here I am. What did you want?"
"Mhm," she makes, now grabbing the wrist holding her drink, pulling it towards herself. She drinks in small sips, outwardly expressionless, but you notice how her toes wiggle a little underwater at the taste. Cute. "Here."
Having only drunk a little bit, she's now taking the glass and holding it out for you. "Really?" You smile, but do as you're told, taking a few sips yourself. The fizzy, slightly sweet stuff you mixed up goes down your throat smoothly, and if your insides weren't a nonsensical realm of horror that doesn't care for its surroundings, you'd be feeling a haze lifting off yourself as just the right amount of fruit sugar went to work.
"Yup. Your turn."
The two of you feed each other for a bit, interrupted only by the steady splashing of Alana's swimming and the echoing "Riajuu, go explode!!!" drifting in the breeze from where Ariana is currently gorging herself on the snacks you brought. That said, your drink doesn't last all that long, so you're soon left just holding Alicia's hand instead.
Which is perfectly fine with you, mind you. She, on the other hand, seems to be intent on taking things a little bit further, judging by her other hand… Which is currently stroking your dick through your trunks.
"Bit frisky, aren't we?" You murmur, turning towards her fully so you can return the favor by sliding your hand along Alicia's supple skin, up and down her back.
"Alana's been distracted, so… May as well," she bashfully claims, avoiding your eyes with a slight blush, her hand now wrangling itself past your waistband to get at your manhood directly, a slight shiver coming over her when she measures its dimensions by touch.
"May as well indeed," you smirk, leaning over to kiss her forehead.
You end up holding Alicia in front of yourself in short order, her back turned towards you- or rather, her backside, which is slowly, evenly grinding against your erection right now, pushing your trunks downwards one inch at a time. Already your tip is poking well out, rubbing against her skin every time she moves.
It's almost an torturously slow way of foreplay, but seeing as Alana is still swimming back and forth further ahead, it's just fine to keep what you're doing hidden- even as you simultaneously fondle Alicia below the water's surface, kneading her hips and thighs, stroking her soft, slim belly… All that good stuff.
She really is gorgeous, having not at all changed in terms of appearance even after you thralled her. Turns out not everyone gets any touch-ups from that, not if they're already perfectly content with and consider their looks to be perfect already.
Whether to call that confidence or overt narcissism is another question of course, but you don't particularly care about the difference, so whatever.
Anyways, it doesn't seem like Alana is noticing anything, or rather, she completely stopped paying attention to what you're doing over here. Not one to let such chances go to waste, you don't take long to kiss Alicia's neck, fingers question downward to dislodge her black bikini; not taking it off, that would be way too conspicuous, but you get her bottoms just loose enough you can rub along her pussy easily and conveniently, teasing her lips and gently stroking over her clit.
'Sighing' aloud instead of moaning, she leans into your touch in turn, still working away at your trunks; with this much entertainment to keep yourself occupied, freeing your dick doesn't take her long at all. Waiting for Alana to turn away from you, you don't waste any time once she does.
Lining up and thrusting forward underwater, you quickly slide into the tight confines of Alicia's pussy, the horny teen meeting your motion with her own so you soon have her plush cheeks resting against your hips, her depths filled to the brim with your cock.
You have to stop whenever Alana obviously faces your way, but you just pretend to be flirting normally when she does, holding Alicia from behind. Whenever she isn't looking, though, you steadily, methodically hammer pleasure into the girl you're with right now, the water hiding the sound of flesh clapping against flesh steadily despite its resistance.
She holds out quite a while, meaning more than two minutes, but eventually your lover can't stand it anymore; pulling away, she lets you slide out of her, but only for a moment as she turns around, lidded eyes fixated on yours, and literally jumps your bones, water buoyancy letting her easily pull herself up on your shoulders so her legs can circle around your waist.
"She'll notice," you warn her as she grunts victoriously, filling herself up with the Gabecock once again, her inner walls squeezing down on your rod avariciously.
"Don't care," Alicia replies, and promptly starts fucking herself on you, etirely disregarding everything else. "I'm gonna-"
"What are you two doing?!" Alana calls out, just having turned around on the other side of the excessively large pool.
"I'm coming!" Alicia shouts back, slamming herself home once more. "That's what!"
You wonder if you should say anything… But, just then, Ariana jumps into the water, diving right in and racing towards yourself and her sister. In reaction, Alana grimaces and immediately follows after her, holding her back.
…Alicia isn't stopping, still riding your dick as you support her, holding her up by her pleasantly plush ass. Someone should probably be the designated responsible person and keep this situation from escalating… But you're nothing if not irresponsible, so it sure won't be you.
In the end, untangling yourself from Alicia took some doing, as she was just too horny to let go of you, and the rest of the situation wasn't exactly easy to navigate through either, but in the end you're able to slip out of having to explain to Alana how you did, in fact, dare to have sex right there out in the pool.
The whole affair seems to have cheered Alana up at least, or if not she at least seems more chagrined than withdrawn towards the end, there.
Good times. But hey, let's not dwell in the past and look forward to what will be going down next instead!
It's the middle of the night around where you usually operate, but that just means it's about to be evening for the location you're going to be messing around in next. Well, less 'messing around' and more 'temporarily kidnapping someone', same difference.
From Monster Girl's perspective, everything happens very suddenly. One moment, she's sitting in the kitchen of her apartment, from what it looks like, the next she's teleported into a cramped, dark space, what looks like the interior of some hut whose walls are lined with shelves and short desks, all cluttered with glowing fluids held in strangely-shaped glass receptacles, weird bones that don't correspond to normal animal anatomy, crystals and glittering ore and more.
A bit of mist is flowing around the floor, changing color depending on the angle it is viewed at, and the lighting seemingly comes from everywhere at once, with no discernable source.
…You totally didn't go overboard with decorating this place for the sake of a practical joke. Nope, not at all.
Anyways, there you have Monster Girl, sitting opposite yourself still on her kitchen chair, across a table of the appropriate height- adjusted for both of your diminutive sizes. You could just float both her and yourself, but this seemed more appropriate, and you can just have your manufactories spit out new furniture whenever you want, so really, why not?
"Whoa!" Nearly tumbling off aforementioned chair, your 'guest' blinks as she looks around. "Uh, heya Night Queen. I was kinda expecting you'd just, like, come by or something, but I guess this works."
"Why waste time going back and forth when I can just cut the commute?" You nod with a shrug. "Now, are you ready to be… diagnosed?!"
You raise both hands, holding them around the crystal ball you put on the table between you beforehand. Right on cue, it begins to glow, just like you intended when you made it, and you subtly increase the pressure of gravity all around. Monster Girl grits her teeth, but remains (mostly) composed, her brunette ponytail swaying as she nods. "Let's just get this over with."
You throw your hands up in the air, secretly triggering the door behind you. A part of the wall just swings open, shelves and all, revealing a clinically white, brightly-lit room beyond it.
"Alright, to the infirmary it is. Hop, hop, you can leave your chair here."
You get up and start moving, disregarding the momentarily stunned girl behind you. Totally worth it.
Actually diagnosing Monster Girl's current state and probing her curse are both surprisingly simple and non-invasive, thanks to your capabilities in this regard. Using first Yoshi's analysis power, then Nolac's medical simulation one, you can easily confirm that she is, in fact, physically older than before, if only by at most a couple months, roundabout.
Focused use should have her a lot older than that, so first you ask her a few questions. "How often and how long have you been using the age control I gave you, and have you been transforming since then?" You ask, having taken a seat on the swiveling chair adjusted for your current sight inside the infirmary you built already.
Monster Girl (Amanda, but you're pretending you don't know her name, despite how she doesn't even bother wearing a mask- one of those cultural things that would never fly on Earth Bet, as seen by New Wave's very dead Fleur) heaves herself onto the padded examination table you had installed here. "I dunno, every now and then when I don't have anything to do, and yeah, I just transform as normal whenever I need to be big and gnarly."
"Do people actually still say gnarly? Don't answer that, it doesn't matter," you grumble. "Alright, looks like that's working more or less as intended. Might want to set some solid blocks of time aside to really let it work if you have to transform more often, but you're mostly fine aside from that. The effect is reduced compared to what it should be, but-"
You take a moment to properly observe her soul through the literal telescopes built into your own, watching the interaction between the weird patch of not-soul you can see growing on hers.
"-your curse doesn't look like it's changed any, so far. It's probably inhibiting the effect, but it can't undo it, either," you posit. It… makes a kind of sense, too. You can vaguely make out the effects of thralling on the souls of people you, well, thralled, but those are usually rather more buried inside of them, rather than semi-outwardly like what you're seeing now, only partially buried within the soul as such.
Presumably, Monster Girl's curse doesn't need to be deep inside of her, as it 'only' changes her body, not even doing so at all times or anything. Compared to what thralling does to people, and how it can affect fundamental aspects of who they are, along with what… You're suspecting that particular trick of yours affects people through their souls, rather than directly messing with their minds or bodies somehow.
Pretty fascinating, if so, and it would say a lot about the nature and mechanics of your own powers. Maybe your powers and magic presiding over souls have a lot of, ah, hidden potential, you should call it.
Still, it doesn't really change anything in a more immediate sense. Though you definitely have to try experimenting with curses, if something like this is possible- causing effects via proxy, embedding them inside a target's soul itself, all very, very interesting stuff you might have use for.
But more to the point at hand, the curse can't stop your thrall's power from taking effect, only reduce them due to the way the placement of both within Monster Girl's soul interacts. Good stuff.
"So it'll keep working? Because I'm not gonna lie, I was gonna have to retire soon if not for this stuff. Toddlers don't make for good heroes. PR's already a nightmare when you look like me."
"Bah. Everyone knows little girls are the most powerful in any field they apply themselves to. After all, if you can rival a grown person as one, that says something about just how good you have to be." You cross your arms and nod.
You consider performing an in-depth medical examination while you're here at it, what with your familiarity with 'playing doctor' and all, now that you actually have a bunch of formerly alive doctors' experiences and skills to draw on, but in the end you decide to let her off with a quick check of her pulse, breathing and eyes (gotta see if they're somehow dilated or otherwise indicative of everything going on with her soul, just in case).
You'd probably come across like a weirdo if you made her strip naked and felt her up like this. Maybe if you were in your usual body, but you don't exactly want to reveal that one to anyone besides Alicia. And maybe Ariana, if she's a good girl.
Anyways, you confirm what you can, all the while you think about what you found out, on how curses can directly interface with a recipient's soul and cause very much tangible effects through doing so, as Monster Girl's case amply demonstrates. Let's be honest here, you're totally copying that stuff the moment you figure out how.
If some random witch or gypsy or whoever it was that put this thing onto her can do it, you refuse to believe you can't do the same; the curse in question isn't fundamentally different from what your own curses 'taste' like, so it has to be a matter of application, rather than anything categorical.
Interesting how that works out, but then, maybe you shouldn't be surprised; in the end, your curses are just lumps of metaphysical stuff that is inherently meant to hurt, kill, annoy, inconvenience or otherwise bother people in some way. It's not like this is some super advanced magi-science nobody else could conceivably figure out for themselves if they had some way to actually do magic.
Naturally, it would be kind of rude to just send Monster Girl back like this, once you're done with the cursory examination you went with, and while you'd be totally fine with that… You could also do the one thing that works on woman of all sizes and ages, both her physical and her mental ones.
That is, you feed her ice cream before surprise-teleporting her back to where she came from, of course. Quite a lot of it, in fact.
"Uuugh…" Amanda held her belly, feeling how heavy it was after being stuffed with all the strawberry ice cream she could fit in it. "I think I might be sick… Heh, at least I won't get fat. Hurray for mini-me's metabolism."
Looking around her kitchen, everything was just as she'd left it before the surreal experience of Night Queen's strange idea of 'hospitality'. Being teleported out of nowhere was still weird, don't get her wrong, but the places it took her were… interesting, sometimes.
Especially that dedicated ice cream cold storage, with rows upon rows of tubs filled with different flavors lined the walls, extendable like the trays of a morgue (she'd watched too many cop shows again so that was the first comparison coming to mind, screw off).
Being made to taste what felt like a small country's GDP in ice cream had been exhausting, but say about Night Queen what you want, each and every one had been delicious. Even the really weird ones labeled as people.
Last time she looked, 'Murderer', 'Rapist' and 'Child Neglecter' hadn't been typical flavors you'd get just anywhere, and she was afraid to ask exactly how and why these ones were made. According to Night Queen herself, that was how these kinds of people tasted, and that was that.
…They were kind of savory, but in a weirdly good way.
Anyways, it was a long evening she just had, so Amanda stretched, popping her neck and pushing-
Wait a second. "Hey, where's my damn chair?!"
Just like that, it popped into existence next to her.
…You know what, fair enough. Now to try and sleep off all that ice cream before she had to pee from it.
You have a bit of leftover time and not much to fill it with except the usual, so you do just that. By which you mean you summon the denizens of hell to serve your needs, which in this case means more juice for your (still awesome) dragon tattoo, of course!
You're… slowly running out of demons you can throw in there, truth be told. Well, no, there's literally infinite amounts of them, so that's by definition wrong, but you're starting to hit the point where you have to search for new kinds of them that actually synergize well with your tattoo as a whole longer and longer, simply because you already plucked all the low-hanging, easily-found and -identified fruits.
You can't just put any kind of demon into your ink, after all. Doing so would be… Counterproductive, let's put it like that. You used bits of a Fiend Dragon's essence as a base, so any new additions you want to, well, add, have to work with that, or else the actual efficiency of anything you're doing with them plummets harder than pharma company stock after someone cures cancer.
Heh.
But yes, you don't exactly fancy spending several months just focusing on a single minor improvement, not when it would just be more effective to just use this time otherwise. That said, this time you went and summoned a whole bunch of Amalgam Fiends, demons that are very similar to Fiends and Archfiends as you know them, except something went wrong when they formed.
Normally, you have a set number of souls, most often single ones, that turn into a given demon. Amalgam Fiends are what happens when you completely disregard that and instead just take a couple dozen or so souls at minimum, then have all of them warp into a single demon under the influence of hell itself, which most often happens in a few particular layers of it.
Something about how the flow and laws of hell-physics are subtly (or less-subtly) different between different planes of hell, you think. That said, most of the time hell's just kind of a metaphysical mess to begin with, so what do you know?
What matters, instead, is that Amalgam Fiends tend to be batshit crazy, perpetually pissed at everything, somehow manage to foster cooperation between their sub-identities to stay coherent enough to actually pursue whatever goals they have or all of the above, and that's close enough to an overlap with Fiend Dragons and their tendency to just incinerate literally anything and everything it should work.
Like Fiends and their other sub-types and developmental stages, Amalgam Fiends have a greatly varied amount of outer appearances and physiology that makes them look like they're anything but related to each other, though they for some reason do tend towards being vaguely humanoid more than normal Fiends.
'Vaguely' because, as one may expect, they often have a bunch of extra faces, limbs or entire bodies poking out of themselves. Those really can go nuts, depending on exactly how tumultuous the amalgam of demon-ified souls they're made of is at the time.
Meaning you have to subject yourself to a lot of screeching and screaming in the course of extracting a bunch of essence from their kind. At least they are, while certainly stronger than most baseline Fiends and on par with or superior to Archfiends, on average, not the strongest demons you've faced to date.
While you're at it, by the by, there's been some developments in regards to your lawyer, the kind that you're vaguely interested in, but not enough so to actively get into following up on them.
It seems the work she's been doing for you has allowed her to grow in strength, to the point she managed to take over a part of the administrative hellhole (literally so) she works in, the layer of hell made up of endless office cubicles, badly ventilated hallways and coffee machines that, by definition, spit out horrible tar that keeps you awake by force if consumed.
Basically normal office space, just extended to go on forever, basically.
The passive-aggressive office politics taking place there are the very furthest from fascinating anything possibly could be, but you don't mind just being aware of how things are going, overall. Now that your personal lawyer succubus (technically she's a type of devil specializing in law, but she has to take what work she can find, and these categorizations are fluid at the best of times) is gaining influence over her coworkers, she's actually getting more time to focus on things that let her grow stronger in turn- such as her contract with you.
By, of course, forcing her work on her newly minted subordinates. Incidentally, that's just kind of how promotions work in this section of hell, at least for this stage- she'll eventually have to free up more important positions by 'offensively retiring' someone else and taking their job, but that's a ways off.
This being hell, even the hard and fast way to advance your career just takes forever. Again, no big difference from normal office work, you observe.
Why this is relevant to yourself is that, as a consequence of your lawyer's success, you're getting free blowjobs.
No, it makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. She's started to subordinate nearby office workers, and that means that, inevitably, someone is going to piss her off, because that's just what happens in this kind of environment. With the overall work structure at the place being literal murder, she has to make an example, somehow… But outright killing demons isn't all that effective.
They eventually come back, after all. Death is really just an inconvenience in hell, one that may ruin your day more or less depending on circumstances, but as it stands, a more… creative solution was required.
And as it just so happens, a certain Kalinerva Eristralezz (you really should make an effort to use her name more often) has a line to a demonologist that doesn't particularly mind fucking the office succubus in question so stupid she'll be cock-addled for a decade or two.
She receives a convenient way to punish (or 'punish') unruly coworkers, you receive lots of free blowjobs, as you mentioned. You didn't even bother learning her name, either, all that matters is that you can summon this one succubus with a snap of your fingers whenever you have five minutes and nothing and nobody better to do.
It's always nice to have an understanding with the people you work with.
The Grayson Thunderdome, one of the perhaps most enormous arenas constructed in human history, at least. Spanning several kilometers in radius, this huge-ass globe made up of forcefields and gravity barriers is generated by some very decently large generators, arranged to present a relatively small target despite the sheer size they have to be in order to do their job.
While the generators are meant to sit on the ground normally, they can in fact suspend themselves in the air, moving the arena itself as they float around, its position fixed relative to their own. Said arena, on the other hand, is meant to be in the air at all times, allowing for various settings while retaining as much visibility as you want it to.
Right now, you mainly just want it to be a huge, empty ball of space kept isolated from the rest of the world, but you also got everything ready to let people that can't just fly by flexing their individual atoms at gravity take part in your blood sport as well- or normal sport, for that matter.
Additional barriers and shifted gravity allow for platforms to be created inside, not to mention just reducing the effects of gravity as such to let everyone float and jump around, or filling the thing with water (plus some optional air pockets for breathing) for underwater team sports, if desired.
You may have built this thing for the family deathmatch you fully expect to be happening in a couple hours, but you totally can future-proof the design, you know? You have a bunch of forcefields, you gotta think with them.
All that remains now is to ensure the thing will be teleported into just the right position at just the right moment, but you'll rely on the Thinker for that part- you'll be busy holding a concert at the time, after all.
Sure, you also fully plan to have a split body around just in case you need to make it exceedingly clear you mean it when you say this is gonna be between Mark and his dad, but it's kind of hard to multitask on that level, and you very much will be focusing on becoming a vampire idol at the time.
Priorities are important, okay?
With the equipment taken care of, you still have another part of the equation to give a last check, now that the time for the big show is so close at hand. After all, the most amazing stage isn't exactly going to save it when the participants are lackluster or otherwise don't deliver.
Now, Mark's just about as well-prepared as you could get him within the time you had, barring some more extreme measures (such as attaching a decently powerful True Soul to him, pumping him full of ADAM to force him to just mutate into getting more powerful, for example), but that's just on a technical level- his capacity for inflicting violence on his dad despite any violence his dad inflicts on him.
His willingness to do so is another story altogether… Though you'd sure as well hope he's gotten the message by this point. Still, it can't hurt to be sure.
"Mark!"
"Whoa!"
"Are you ready!"
"I'm on the toilet, what does it look like?"
"Eh, nothing big," you shrug, immediately making him wither and shrink into himself. Heh. "Let's talk about your dad!"
"Can you please wait a minute? Outside the bath?"
You consider that one for a long moment. "Alright, fine, but hurry up. And remember to wash your hands! Living people are disgusting."
Seriously, if there's one really troubling thing about having extremely enhanced senses, it is that you can tell just how yucky most living beings are, humans first and foremost. Traces of urine get everywhere, when you look for them hard enough.
You eventually end up sitting down in Mark's room, having him guzzle down the usual potions- you have to get this out of the way before he takes the real kickers with more temporary effects, so you may as well. Taking the opportunity, you also have a few frank words with him.
Teaching him how to do relationships turned out okay, may as well expand that to familial relationships as well. Though, considering you literally had your father murdered, or rather would have killed him yourself if Sarah didn't insist on eating him alive herself instead, maybe you aren't the best person to take this kind of advice from…
Eh, you're sure it'll turn out fine. Worst come to worst, Mark will just, like, seduce his mother or something, but he just broke up with his girlfriend and all, so there wouldn't even be relationship drama in that direction or anything. Meaning, you can save the lecture on polygamy and how to make it work out for later.
No need to load him down with information he can't use yet. If you feel like it, you can always throw a condensed lesson on all of this stuff his way later, after he's shown he won't just be beaten to death by his dad.
You'll be very cranky with him if that happens. You don't make any bets as a matter of principle, but if you did you'd have some good money riding on him by now.
Anyways, last minute preparations, go! "So, you ready to have a father-son talk with your fists?" You ask, only to tilt your head after a moment of thought. "And your face. And your stomach. Oh, and probably your back, too, you never did get used to surprise attacks."
"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Mark grumbles, waving your heartfelt concerns off just like that. How rude. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be if we end up fighting."
"If?" You grin. "Look, you don't want it to be true, but Omni-Man literally killed the Guardians as his first move when he decided to take over Earth. It's what Viltrumites are known for, unreasonable violence and conquering planets."
Hurray for eating aliens that know of Viltrumites from reputation. Or infamy, anyways.
Mark grimaces, but doesn't immediately disagree. Good on him. "I guess. It's just… Yeah, you're right, I don't want it to be true. He's my dad, I don't want to believe he's that kind of person, you know?"
"Eh, people in your life can and will disappoint you," you shrug, thinking of your own parents. "Him being some space nazi is completely possible, it's not like he'd ever have told you, right?"
"No, I suppose not… Do you think he'd have been, y'know, ashamed?" The question is almost somber.
"Probably?" It's not like you burned any divination or energy on figuring out Omni-Man's mental state or anything. "He did have you, after all, and raised you as a human. Best guess? I'd say he was planning to get around to the whole conquest thing eventually, but didn't want to make himself out to be the bad guy. Would explain why he pretended he wasn't the killer until we chased him off."
"That makes a disturbing amount of sense," Mark sighs. "I wish… I wish he hadn't done it, you know? That he just… decided to be the good guy, like he always was before. Heck, he's Omni-Man, you know? The strongest man on Earth, its greatest protector, the epitome of heroism. He was…"
As it seems the words are taking a moment, you gesture towards Mark to continue. This shouldn't take this long to figure out.
"It's pretty common, I guess, but he always was a hero to me. Like parents always are, to their kids." You beg to differ, there's loads of shitty and abusive parents out there, but you don't interrupt to make the point. Not for now, at least. "Is it selfish that I want him to stay like that, despite what he's done?"
"Meh. If anything, it's pretty human," you shrug again. "Reality and expectation not conforming is a very common issue. If it helps, though, you're in a much better spot to do something about it than most."
"How so? I don't really see how I can change who my dad is."
"You just have to hit him in the face until he understands that you love him anyways and changes his ways," you patiently explain. "He's durable enough he'll probably outlive his own stubbornness."
"…Heh. Mom would disagree on that, but you're probably right."
You hope she would, considering she sneaked up onto this floor to listen in on you and Mark while you were talking. If so, she can speak up anytime.
What? You don't care whether she knows what's going down here, and you ain't no alarm bell for Mark to warn him of the potential of parental meddling. He can deal with this himself, when and if she confronts him.
In the end, pretty much everything important has been said already, so all that remains is to ensure Mark is in top condition when the big showdown happens. You achieve this by telling him he can pick between your used panties or pictures of you as a reward if he manages to win against his father, an offer that has him sputtering and declining your generous offer.
Joke's on him either way, of course. You do not wear panties, in Night Queen form or any other, and the pictures would've been you posing normally in front of the defeated body of Omni-Man, but even so it's just fun to complain and demand to know why this wouldn't be good enough for him.
You receive no satisfactory answer, but at least the tension Mark's been exuding ever since you notified him of his dad's impending arrival has dissipated, so that's that, if nothing else. Gotta take what you can get and all.
Even if it's still weird. You know for a fact Mark isn't actively repulsed by your looks, you could smell that.
Anyways, though, that doesn't matter, now that he's left at the Guardians' headquarters over in Ohio, ready to come out and confront Omni-Man once he draws near Earth. With everything you can do in this regard done, you instead turn your focus towards what you'll be doing in the meantime.
New York City is a… beautiful place, once you get over the smell you can't help but notice, and the place you're going to hold your little idol concert in. Additionally, you had a bunch of space cleared out ahead of time for the stage and everything to be built, though you suspect few of the people in city hall expect that this place will be taken up in perpetuity, or at least for the foreseeable future, as well.
After all, the Thinker did keep up her e-mail bombardment directed at New York's city hall, and the will of the people, such as it is, cannot just be denied, now can it? In completely unrelated news, you went and had a couple of your manufactories prepare a giant stone statue of Night Queen, ready to be teleported in and installed after your concert.
Gotta make sure this will be an event to be remembered, after all. What better way to do so than to put a big-ass memorial in place?
Secretly surveying the concert venue ahead of time, you note that a bunch of people are loitering around, at least a few of them actually there to see you, as opposed to some other nebulous and slash or nefarious schemes put into motion. Well, you ain't here to keep people from committing crimes, you'll just instantly murder anyone that mucks up during your performance, you suppose.
It's not like you need a full house or anything, anyways. You're confident you'll manage to attract a bigger crowd once you start singing proper.
A Viltrumite entering a planet's orbit was, strangely enough, almost unremarkable at first sight. They just flew in, no sonic booms or flaming trail drawn behind them, and normal eyesight really wasn't good enough to distinguish a human-sized flying object from a vague shadow amidst the clouds at best.
Mark Grayson had better than normal human eyesight, and so he could make out the figure of his father earlier than most could have. It probably wouldn't make much difference, but he pushed off the ground right away, releasing his 'hold' on his strength and willing himself to fly upwards, to meet him.
His dad had been right when he'd told him it was like holding in the urge to pee and letting go of it in order to start flying. Not how Mark liked to think about it, but it was true anyways. Funny how that went.
He wasn't really thinking about anything in particular as he soared towards the skies, the sheer joy of flying freely taking a backseat for the moment. Now just wasn't the time, sadly. Having been fighting for his life in mid-air every day for the last, like, two weeks or so (it felt much, much longer) had put Mark's way of thinking into perspective, and it was pretty clear he couldn't afford to let himself get distracted now.
Before he knew it, he was so far up nothing on the ground had any visible definition, just a bunch of brown and green blotches, too down-to-earth to matter. Huh, of all the times to get philosophical and worry about how being a superhero changed things for him, now was really not the best.
He looked up. His dad looked down, angled towards the Earth headfirst until he slowed down, flipping around. Mark followed suit, and for a long moment, they were just flying there, neither of them saying a word.
This wasn't the comic, though, so nobody launched into an immediate fight by reading their opponent's intentions or anything.
"Mark."
"Dad."
It was kind of strange, to do this. He'd dealt with a few supervillains during his time as a hero, but this… It felt surreal, now that he was flying there, opposite from his father.
"So… Mind explaining what this whole heel-face turn I've been hearing so much is about?" Mark asked, trying his level best to stay calm and neutral. Making accusations or getting emotional wouldn't help, here.
His dad sighed, a couple of emotions flashing across his face before it settled down again. "This was never how I wanted to do this. But you do deserve to know the truth."
"Me and mom, yeah," he pointed out, making his dad hide a wince. Deservedly.
"I can already feel how that talk will be going. But, Mark, I may not have been… entirely… truthful when I told you about how we are and what we do. Viltrumites, I mean."
"Thought as much. No idea where Night Queen gets her information from, but she's usually right. And, you know, the murder kind of clued me in."
His dad's- Omni-Man's- eyebrow twitched at the mention of the name, but whatever he had to say about her. "I come from Viltrum, but it's not the planet I told you about. We have created a perfect civilization, but it took all of our strength, determination and courage to get there."
Mark was already getting a feeling for where this was going. And he did not like what his gut told him one bit.
"In order for our people to reach their full potential, we had to remove the weak from our society. It was a long and difficult process. When it was over, our population was cut in half. But what emerged from the ashes was unstoppable."
Calm breaths. In, out. In, out. Resist the urge to shout.
"By the time I was born, Viltrum was already the greatest empire in our galaxy. We decided to make it the only empire in our galaxy."
"Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuurgh." He groaned, hands on his head- tearing his hair out wouldn't be productive right now, but damn was it tempting. "Night Queen was right, Viltrumites are space nazis. Or 4chan wannabe-alphas that took it too far."
"Mark. This is important."
"What's important is that my dad was sent to Earth to, what, weaken it? Is that why you killed the Guardians? Your friends?"
"More like coworkers."
"Doesn't matter!" Invincible took a deep breath, tensing up his eyes. He couldn't cry now. "You lied to me all my life, dad."
"I couldn't tell you the truth! Not until your powers grew in, not until I was sure."
"Sure of what, that I'm a Viltrumite after all? If I wasn't, then what?" He shook his head. "No. Dad, I can't let you do this. For your own sake."
He knew better than to take his dad at face value right now.
"…I can't let you interfere, Mark."
He took a stance, arms loose, but ready, feet ready to tuck in or flash out. "It's not too late!"
"Yes, it is."
A fist smashed into his face. Mark didn't think. Didn't hesitate. He just slammed his own fist right up in the hardest hook he could muster, crashing against his dad's- against Omni-Man's chin.
No time to talk. This was a fight now. So he just braced against his opponent's chest, heaving and-
Omni-Man impacted against a glowing barrier that appeared between the maneuver's execution and its natural result, having launched the other Viltrumite away from him with a full-body knee strike. A shimmering wall surrounded both of them in all directions now, shifting between orange and blue in color.
Outside, a line of letters evenly rotated around them, spelling out something in reverse. He squinted his eyes.
'Grayson Thunderdome'? Huh. He didn't know what to think about that one.
"What is this?" Omni-Man grunted.
"Night Queen," he commented. It explained everything, so why bother explaining further? "Now come on. If you won't see reason and stop fighting, I'll hit you until you do."
"Sending some mixed messages there, Mark."
"I'm not Mark," he shook his head. "I'm INVINCIBLE"
You've thought about this before, but while you can actually split your body into several separate parts, being in more than one and having several brains at once sadly doesn't really help you with multitasking, meaning that actually controlling the extra split bodies is actually pretty difficult, even with the cognitive enhancements you've got going.
It's perfectly doable as long as you don't need to do anything super complicated, or can just have one of your split selves basically shut down while another one is particularly active, but overall you don't really put this particular ability to all that much use, simply because it's unwieldy and, sometimes, disorienting.
You have been considering just leaving a split body at your lair at all times, sleeping away just in case you get yourself killed otherwise so you can grow back from it, though you haven't really bothered so far- dividing yourself like that has the disadvantage of actually making it harder to regenerate yourself, which is just one more issue with it. In video game terms, you have to set aside a certain amount of HP in order to create a split body, whereas you much prefer to keep all your hit points in one place.
And, in your defense, nothing's really managed to seriously wound you to the point you couldn't just regrow whatever bit and pieces you lost so far. It's simply more trouble than it's worth, from where you're standing.
That said, the technique does have its uses, such as when you just want to be around for something, keep an eye on a situation while you're busy elsewhere. It's still not easy, exactly- refer to be aforementioned issues and limitations with this- but even just paying minimal attention, your split body (puppy edition) tucked away below the Grayson Thunderdome can tell things are heating up inside.
Turns out Viltrumites are pretty much a Social Darwinist society made manifest with superpowers and space travel. Maybe it's just you, but somehow they, as a species, sound profoundly stupid- if you have to 'attain a perfect society' by murdering most of your own population, can the resulting society really be called perfect?
Or, y'know, anything but exceedingly self-destructive and stupid. Like, your personal approach to improving societies has always been to just suppress these exact kinds of sentiments and progressively improve the economical and cultural side of things, randomly going and wasting your own damn manpower by having everyone that doesn't make the arbitrary cut for being 'strong enough' massacred feels inherently counter-intuitive.
But hey, you ain't no Viltrumite; you're sure someone had some good reason for what they did at some point given this alien species' structure and social synamics.
Or at least they thought so, because they were an idiot. Could go either way.
Anyways, this father-son duo seems to have decided to cease their yammering and just do what they'd obviously end up doing sooner or later anyways; beating the crap out of each other, in case that was unclear. And, for the record, while Mark is severely outgunned by his father's fists…
"Why won't you just understand?!"
…he's still giving as good as he's getting. Mostly because Omni-Man isn't really giving it his all, hesitant to actually fight his son to death, you're assuming, but even so, he's doing some good work inside the ring.
"I do. I understand it all. That's why I can't let you become someone you don't want to be anymore, dad."
All very touching and all. Of course their conversation is interspersed with blows exchanged with such speed and intensity they would've fucking vaporized anything you'd describe as a baseline living being, but hey, dealing with parental issues can be like that sometimes.
You, meanwhile, just sit there occasionally open your eyes as you keep watch in the form of a wolf pup, all the while you keep the crowd fired up as none other than Night Queen, all the way over in New York.
Bit of a ways from Ohio, but then, if creating matter didn't bother you, why would being able to be in two places at once? Heck, Dupli-Kate, one of the Teen Team's member here in this dimension, can do it too.
"New York!" You shout in your red-black dress, commanding the people's attention as you rise from the literal shadows. "Are you all ready for a show! Because whether you are or not, you're about to get it."
Their reactions don't matter right now. You'll just start singing and make them like it. Bulldozing these things by force of personality is what Night Queen does.
"Update on the Night Queen thing?" Cecil asked, his eyes never once leaving the big screen.
He'd been working with the Guardians ever since he'd become the GDA's director (and the less said about that shitshow the better) and it was precisely for this reason that he knew intimately just how dangerous it was to be anywhere near an angry Omni-man. Yet, he could not help but watch as Mark did just that, facing his father with strength everyone involved knew was just that much less than what he'd need.
Honestly, it was the act of a stupid kid to try and do this, facing an enemy they knew they had no chance of beating. Or that of a hero, one that did it anyways because they believed it had to be done.
Crap kind of hero if they just got themselves killed- there was a reason the Guardians made a point of surviving whatever they had to do so they'd be around for the next crisis for a reason- but a hero nonetheless.
And Cecil was getting the feeling that, say about Mark what you want, the boy had it in him to be a hero. That much was clear now, he'd admit.
"Night Queen is currently confirmed to be in New York, sir," Donald said, keeping updated on everything the Agency was juggling right now. "She has gotten on stage and begun to sing."
"Let's hope we don't need to quarantine the city over her brainwashing everyone, then."
"Do you… think that is likely, sir?"
He exhaled nasally, the aborted smile leaving through his nose. "No. Not Night Queen's style, I'd expect her to just convince people of what she wants the hard way instead. We're still keeping all flights out of the city on the ground just in case."
The Global Defense Agency didn't do its job by being sloppy. Especially not in regards to the hellion that had set up the fight they couldn't interfere with right now for fear of causing an even greater scene-
On screen, Nolan socked his kid in the face, hard enough to knock a few teeth loose. Mark responded by shoulder-checking him right in the balls with the force of his entire body ramming forward, seemingly unbothered by the hit he just received and making Omni-Man cringe and stop, for a second.
That was more than Cecil'd seen in twenty years of working with him. "Keep the teleporter ready- the moment they stop fighting, I want the Guardians there and keeping Invincible alive," he told the usual admin staff for this stuff.
Having a designated rotation of teleport people ready at all times was just good sense when you had technology like this.
"Sir? Night Queen has finished her first song and the crowd seems to be, uh, spellbound," Donald said, hesitating before he continued. "Also, it seems the bets on Omni-Man versus Invincible have shifted a bit. Would you like me to keep track of our betting pools?"
Cecil closed his eyes. "Of course some of our idiots had the bright idea to make this a gambling thing."
"Should we do anything about this, sir?"
"Yes, Donald, I want you to go, confiscate any money anyone bet on anything within our facilities, then have everyone involved on toilet scrubbing duty for a year." He narrowed his eyes as the two fighters on-screen exchanged words, their drones too far to get audio- reading Mark's lips was difficult right now, but he was reasonably sure they were talking about responsibility and what it meant to each of them, to humanity and to the Viltrum Empire, respectively. "Make it two, actually."
Wham!
"You can't just walk in and take over the world!"
Pow!
"I can and I will."
Smack!
"It's not about the ability to, it's about whether you should!"
Crack!
"What should be done is a quick surrender and integration into the Empire!"
Ka-Pow!
"And you'll never be able to look at yourself in the mirror ever again!"
Ka-Wham!
"This is our duty. What we are meant to do! To be!"
"Well then I reject that reality and replace it with my own!"
Bzzzzt.
"Huh. Is that- is that supposed to flicker like that?"
Naturally, something exploded. Because something always has to explode.
You quietly note to yourself that, no, your over-engineered forcefield generators do not, in fact, hold up to Viltrumites duking it out between each other, or not for long anyways. Which is rather annoying, especially as you ran the numbers yourself- these things are meant to, in theory, be able to act as protection for spaceships, secure and mostly free of maintenance needs when up against expected wear and tear.
Such as stray meteors and other space debris. Yes, you genuinely are saying that a system meant to be able to deflect fucking space rocks just got overloaded, unable to maintain the forcefields you set up with it, in the face of the sheer bitchslapping Omni-man is currently administering to his son.
You'd be impressed, if you weren't so distinctly annoyed about it.
Luckily, you can take a quick break in your Night Queen persona thanks to just having finished a song, having gotten your audience to sing along as you spontaneously sang a cover of a song that is best described as electro-rock-country, being surprisingly non-cringeworthy despite that last genre descriptor.
Also, y'know, kinda appropriate, considering its title.
https/watch?v=SpSMoBp8awM
Being able to make just about any imaginable sound (and a few that are beyond mortal imagination, for that matter) with your voice means you can perform literally any song you want, and this one was voted upon by a bunch of the souls you consumed after one of them dug it up out of your Library.
But now, now you're having the faulty parts replaced and doing some field engineering to torque your forcefield generator output into the literal stratosphere before anyone notices this wasn't planned. Easy-peasy, with a couple robots to help you along.
Stupid Viltrumites and their stupid, unreasonable levels of superstrength. Some people really should just fucking chill sometimes, and from what you've been able to find out, their entire civilization is the very embodiment of the concept of 'having zero chill'.
They really should consider following the good example you're setting.
In a flash of rapid activity, the cluster of machinery below the giant hamster ball made of forcefields reasserted itself, being replaced and repaired as though by invisible hands. Nolan's brows furrowed in disappointment- it would have been convenient for the supposed creator of this contraption to show up, but it was what it was.
Right now, he still had to deal with his wayward son, whom he'd raised to be too soft, too… empathetic towards lesser species that ought to know their place. It was a mistake he only had himself to blame for, but it seemed he would have to correct it here and now.
"Mark! There is no point to fighting this!" Even if he would never admit it, he was proud of how well his son was doing right now. It would not stop him, though. "Humanity is a conglomeration of primitive animals, the Viltrum Empire is the best thing that could ever happen to it!"
"Dad." This was the voice of someone that was not ready to give in. Nolan closed his eyes, trying to think of what to do. "I think you know you're wrong, right now. You don't want to do this."
"You know nothing, Mark. We are-"
"I told you I'm Invincible!" Whatever this 'Night Queen' had done, Nolan had to admit she'd taught his son to throw a punch. He couldn't block it, too fast, too focused, so he avoided it instead, letting it pass by his head-
The follow-up elbow shook the arm he used to block, his teeth grit. Only now his eyes caught up with the feint, glaring at what had almost been a direct hit to his face. Not enough to do serious damage, but it would definitely have been disorienting.
"I see that now," Nolan declared, moving to take hold of his son, only for him to immediately back away.
Naive. He simply sped up faster than Mark could react, slamming him against the dome of force-fields surrounding them.
"Then you leave me no choice."
"You know, I'd probably be a lot more worried if I wasn't really used to this by now."
Nolan ignored what his son was saying (though he tucked it away for later investigation) and struck the glowing barrier keeping them stuck in place with his fist, intending to overload it like it had been before, when it shut off.
Except it didn't, withstanding one of his punches- long enough for Mark to throw his entire body against Nolan's arm, making him let go or risk taking actual damage.
"Yeah, this is Night Queen's stuff alright. She hates it when it doesn't work or breaks."
"This sounds like all you can think of is her. Mark, are you putting on this… teenage rebellion because of a girl?"
His son blanched, waving both hands in utter denial. "Oh hell no, she looks like she's ten! Dad, don't even joke about that!"
"Hmpf," he made, arms crossed. "Good news for you, son, Viltrumites don't particularly care about what lesser races think, so you can get with just about any size of-"
"I'm not into her oh my god!" Good, he was getting under his skin now. "I'm not sure whether it'd be more mortifying to get my ass kicked by her for the mere suggestion or her deciding to agree just to mess with me!"
The next moment, Mark stopped gesturing wildly, only because Nolan was punching him again. Something in his arms creaked as he received the attack. Good.
"Whatever floats your boat, boy. Whatever floats your boat."
In the end, no matter how much he battered him, Mark never stopped fighting. Even when he was bloodied by one too many hits to the face, when his bones started to break from the force of the blows he kept blocking, when he was pushed against the dome around them again and again and again.
He was trying to do this without killing him, but it wasn't exactly easy! "Just sit down and wait this out!"
"I rebuse," a swollen-lipped, but still intent Invincible glared at him, spitting some blood to the side. Damn, he was actually pulling the tough guy act off properly. "You'd fight and kill anyone that didn't surrender, and I can't let you do that."
He was so proud. That didn't change what had to be done. "Alright. Then grit your teeth, it's about time we got this over with."
"I agree," his son said, doing just that. "Can't let you go get yourself killed by Night Queen."
Saying that, Invincible withdrew an object from the back of his costume, the package kept strapped to his waist coming into focus for the first time this entire fight-
"Is that a gun?" Nolan asked, incredulous. "I don't care how much of a genius made it, I've yet to see anything a human produced that can stop a Viltrumite. This is a waste of time."
"That so?" His opponent asked, raising it and-
P A I N
It's kind of amazing, to see the effects of the sound-gun you gave Mark. This entire time, he's had to seriously work on just keeping his father busy, getting in hits whenever he could while only giving the man a couple of bruises for the trouble, maybe a few messed-up fingers from punching him in his increasingly hard face so much.
Invincible over there is taking the whole hardheaded thing a little too literally, you've noticed, just saying. Why else would he use his face to break things that hit it?
However, the moment your prized Anti-Viltrumite device comes into play, Nolan has blood coming out of his nose and ears, falling like a rock. He catches himself again all but immediately, granted, but his flight remains unsteady, as though he couldn't actually control it properly.
…Seriously though, that thing's working better than you expected. Couldn't this kind of thing outright kill Viltrumites if used for long enough? Because that's kind of the feeling you're getting here.
Having been trained out of hesitating in moments like this by yourself, Mark dives after him, his arm curling into a devastating elbow strike right to his father's head. Y'know, you just realized that you told him his father sucked, handed him a gun and told him he should shoot him, didn't you?
You should do that more often. It's weirdly fun to watch.
They're back to fighting now, except Omni-Man is still reeling, so it's a lot more… even. The man's severely weakened after the soundblast he was subjected to, courtesy of your very own addition to Mark's arsenal, which only means everything is becoming more dangerous, because it also means he isn't holding back as much.
Hence why Mark's arm just straight-up breaks shortly after, as well as at least two of his ribs from what you can see, pummeled by the constant attacks his father's throwing his way. He still gives as good as he's getting, too, though, so said father is now properly bleeding from his nose, suffering from an ever-increasing amount of bruises and a broken-off tooth, to boot.
You're pretty sure his durability took a huge hit from the sound-gun, no other way you can explain this.
Anyways, it won't be long now; things are coming to a head, one way or the other, the only question is at whose hands. The severely weakened Omni-Man, now crying literal tears of blood after a particularly vicious strike to the head followed by a quick pain-sound-blast from Mark, or else Mark, who just got his sound-gun destroyed after he whipped it out for the second time (and is also bleeding from the face a good bit, funnily enough).
You'd be annoyed at your stuff being broken, but eh, you kinda assumed this would happen from the moment you gave that particular toy to Mark.
In the end, things come down to what you kind of expected to happen from the start, despite your best efforts: A straight slugging match as these two meatheads go head to head.
Hey, congrats to Mark on this one, all it took was for his dad to be subjected to a literal Anti-Viltrumite weapon to get on a similar level to him. And still kind of losing, mind you.
…Man, Nolan would've been one bitch of a fight, actually. You're not even sure if he'd been as hard to kill as Battle Beast, at this point, or harder.
Kind of a moot point, he'll either stop fighting in a few seconds or be an easy meal. Depends entirely on how alive Mark is at the time, but you promised him he'd have a chance to get his dad back, and you refuse to go back on your word.
Oh, hey, they're also talking at each other again. Fun times.
"The Empire… Won't stand… For this…"
"The Empire… can go… suck a dick, dad…"
"Do you really think… For even a moment… Earth would withstand a serious invasion…?"
"I've got you… On the ropes… You tell me…"
"In your… Dreams…"
Yes, yes, very touching and all. Will these two lovebirds finally get to the damn point? Y'know, the one they've been dancing around two concussions or so ago.
"…Dad?"
"…What is it?"
"…You don't have to do this. You don't want to do this."
"…I have to, Mark. I am loyal, I-"
"Your empire sucks and your loyalties are misplaced. Come home, dad, back to mom, and me, and… Try."
"…I'm not sure I can."
Some blood is pooling at the bottom of the arena-sphere, you note. You were kind of expecting it and built a drain into the thing, to let the fluid be siphoned off, but you should probably make it larger at this point- it'd definitely be insufficient for team sports of this intensity, just saying.
Oh yeah, also, Mark is stretching his hand out. "I am sure you can. You're Omni-Man, remember? Strongest man on Earth. If anyone has a problem with it, just tell them 'no'. I'll be with you all the way."
"…"
For a long moment, you wonder how this'll turn out. Then, slowly, but steadily, you see the fight drain out of Omni-Man like blood from a bitten jugular, the front he's been putting up not so much shattered as he puts it aside with a sigh.
"Alright, Mark. You… You're right. You've won."
Mark, for his part, doesn't outwardly react, at first. Then, well…
"Mark? You've won, Mark!"
He falls over, for lack of a better word, simply not keeping himself in the air anymore. Looking at his heartbeat and all, yeeep, looks like he's out cold.
"Mark!"
Ugh, this is just gonna be another source of drama, isn't it?
Well, whatever. You got what you wanted, so you suppose you can go and do Mark a favor by keeping him from accidentally bleeding out or being seriously fucked up for weeks while his body puts himself together.
Honestly, you're pretty sure Nolan might just be panicking and forgetting just how tough Viltrumites are by nature right now, purely because he's so used to considering Mark as being human, and all the frailty and weakness that comes with that. Why else would he be diving after him and all distraught the way he is right now?
Anyways, you have your local body shapeshift out of its current form (the wolf pup one, in case that was in question) and turn off the forcefield generators once you've copied your normal looks- or Night Queen's, anyways.
It's not that you can't just split yourself off into copies or anything, it's just kind of a pain to keep coordinated when you have identical ones so you usually prefer to change it up a little. Can't be helped in this case, though, so you just focus and do your best to keep on singing and dancing in New York while you deal with Nolan here in Ohio.
One of these two things has higher priority for you right now, and it's not Nolan. He already admitted he lost when he said Mark won, so the only way you'll point your whole consciousness back at this situation is if he goes back on that.
In which case he gets to find out. Specifically, find out that you built speakers into the Grayson Thunderdome, and that they can play the Anti-Viltrumite sound at very decent volume. You do need to be careful about that, because you can't just make it more effective by making it louder- that's not how the interaction between the sound and the Viltrumite inner ear works- but you still can make everything very unpleasant for him if there's a need to.
Before you jump up to where he's flying, holding on to Mark, you do take a moment to check whether your clothing actually formed, though. Yup, black dress is present. Good, good. You'd hate to compromise on your brand now.
Clothes don't always translate when you split bodies, so you were worried for a bit. Not showing up at all, being in some completely different style or something… It can get annoying, though your tests say it's a pretty rare occurrence.
Still no point risking it, though.
Anyways, you jump upwards, only partially paying attention. "Hey, Omni, should probably let go of him before you crack his spine or something."
"Who- Night Queen," Nolan says, immediately switching modes at being confronted by you. Without letting go of his son, whose body is starting to produce some funny sounds.
"Yes, I'm me. Now get outta the way and hand me the body, before I have to pull a Lazarus again." Note to self, refer to resurrecting people from the dead as 'pulling a Lazarus' from now on. How didn't you think of this before? "I doubt all that blood coming out of him is a good thing for Mark."
He stares at you for a for moment, but better sense still seems to win out inside his head, in the end. "Right… What's wrong with him?"
"Pretty sure he's just fainted after an abusive parent beat the shit out of him," you say, voice as flat and dry as you possibly can manage. "Possibly exacerbated by the magical drugs I gave him beforehand."
Nolan has to chew on the first sentence with his mustache, but the second one has his face twitch. "You gave my son drugs?!"
"I did, what about it?" You ask, gesturing for Mark's unconscious body to make it float weightlessly. Next, you first of all pinch any burst blood vessels closed, making him stop bleeding so much from his face, and hold a thumb over him. "Now shaddup, I'm gonna feed him blood to heal him up."
"…Couldn't you do literally anything else? I know what vampires are all about and you're not making a good case for yourself right now," Nolan states sternly.
"Funny you'd say that, considering who murdered your former colleagues. Putting them back together was a pain." Extending a single claw, you cut along the flat of your thumb, a few drops of blood literally boiling out, steaming with heat, only to turn into normally viscous life-fluid shortly thereafter so it can be safely administered.
Then you shove it down Mark's throat with hemokinesis, making sure he ingests it. Healing blood, there you go. One of those things you just figured out how to do- as a vampire, there's apparently a lot of funky shit you can do with blood, but especially your own.
Nolan just crosses his arms. "No comment."
"It was a real pain to put them back together, you know~. Like extra gory puzzle pieces someone stuck assorted body parts into. Pretty sure they didn't like it when I warned them I may have gotten some parts wrong."
It takes a little bit of doing, but before long you have Mark bundled up for transport to a secure facility. And by 'secure facility', you of course mean the infirmary you had built inside your lair for the purpose of lightly trolling Monster Girl, seeing as it is of course fully functional.
Like, just because you made it for a throwaway joke doesn't mean you couldn't also add everything needed to make it a proper facility ready for actual use at any time, now does it? You've never been a fan of half measures and you don't intend to start being one now.
No need to overcomplicate things, but neither is there any to be sloppy or botch things.
You consider, for a moment, to just leave Nolan behind, let him deal with the inevitable arrival of the Guardians of the Globe- someone's gonna have to figure out what went down here, after all- but think better of it after you also consider the damage a distraught Viltrumite parent in search of their kid might do while unsupervised.
…Yeah, you like to fuck around, but all of that would just be kind of a pain, especially after you just went through all this effort to curtail a massive amount of collateral damage.
So instead you call out to him to tell him he's about to be teleported. Then the teleport happens, and just like that you're in the middle of your very own territory, in this dimension.
First thing you do is to casually gesture for Mark, who you're still controlling through gravity manipulation, to land on the infirmary bed that stands in the corner, then properly diagnose his current state, poking and prodding and making use of a few of the tools at hand.
A few broken bones are a given, burst blood vessels all over his body- bruises, basically, and they'll heal on their own, no outright internal bleeding on him, you'd see that immediately- some bleeding in his respiratory track, which explains where that comes from, but also no big deal, aaand you're pretty sure he has a concussion after being hit in the head as often as he was.
Nothing surprising, all in all, and you'll just need to patch some of that over. Stabilize and set the broken ribs (just two, and they don't poke anything else important, so you're pretty sure his physiology would take care of them by itself, but better to be sure), maybe fixate the cracked arm he used to block one hit too many, and he should be… more or less alright.
Promoting regrowth in his body should do the rest, and you have a regeneration potion with his name on it for that. The Thinker made sure of that- you have, like, a couple hundred in reserve somewhere, you're pretty sure.
Which leaves Nolan. Whom, as you noticed earlier, went to have a quick look around earlier, but you let it pass without notice. You don't particularly give a fuck how much he knows about your secret lair, not when he doesn't know where, exactly, it is hidden, and can't really tell much about how recently it's been built.
"This place might be larger than the Guardian HQ," he comments appreciatively as he comes back. "It's pretty difficult to find any good real estate in enormous caves, as I'm given to understand."
"Don't have space, make it yourself, as I always say," you shrug, dripping some ingestible painkiller down Mark's slightly-opened mouth, along with the regeneration potion, and making him swallow by tapping his throat just right.
"…Will he be okay?"
"Oh, it's just a concussion and some broken bits and pieces. He'll be just fine by tomorrow," you wave Nolan's concerns off. "I did worse to him when I trained him."
"That's… good to know." Oh hey, he's much less scream-y than he was when he beat his kid. Just makes sense, you suppose. "That weapon he used- what did it do? I'm… still bleeding a little from it."
You knew you were forgetting something. Raising a finger, you use your hemokinesis to clean up his blood, securely depositing it for later. "Sound gun, tuned to do a thing Viltrumite skulls really don't like. Why, you want one as well?"
"It would be invaluable against the capture team I know will be sent for me sooner or later. I'm… not sure how closely the Empire is monitoring the situation on Earth, but-"
You snap your fingers, signaling for the Thinker to teleport a copy of Mark's toy gun to your location. You then proceed to make it float, just because you can. "Want it in another color?"
"Like this is fine." He pockets the thing without a second thought- though you sincerely doubt he won't take a closer look at it later.
"Speaking of the Viltrum Empire, mind telling me everything you can about it?"
"…I suppose I might as well," Omni-Man decides after a moment of thought. "Why be a turncoat in half-measures?"
"That's the spirit! Now, welcome to the Brave and Courageous Night Queendom Corps of Industrial Mercy Killing. We have shirts, mugs and free weapons."
"I am not joining."
"We have cookies," you offer.
"Tempting, but still no."
"How about this shirt?"
'I defected to Earth but I all I got in return was this lousy T-Shirt'
"…Ask me again after I talk to my wife about it first. Debbie is probably going to divorce me as is."
So, as it turns out, there's good news and bad news, and they're kind of intertwined with each other. Good news, the Viltrum Empire does actually have very little manpower to call on, as Nolan explains, due to the societal purge they went through followed by a super-plague capable of affecting them that they, all of a sudden, had no real way to counteract.
Y'know, having killed half your own population for what you maintain is no particular reason may have some unfortunate side effects, who would'a thought?
Anyways, that means that there likely won't be a massive army of Viltrumite coming when their observation posts report that Nolan here was temporarily thrown off Earth and, after his subsequent return, ceased his efforts to conquer it. That's apparently a thing they do watch out for, after sending single operatives to take over whole planets.
Which is the good news, because a small handful of these guys are much easier to deal with, especially thanks to your (soon-to-be-patented) Anti-Viltrumite technology. The bad news is that this vastly limits the amount of hostile Viltrumites you can eat down the line, whenever you get around to it.
Your stay in this dimension is slowly coming to an end, but you may be back eventually, just to deal with the Viltrum Empire the same way you deal with any alien species that vaguely annoys you. But hey, does it technically count as genocide if you aren't hunting them down for being what they are, but just because they, personally, pissed you off?
Pretty sure it being a whole nation means it's more an act of war, is what you're getting at. Look, you commit lots of atrocities, but you make it a point to be organized about it, okay?
Anyways, once you've milked him for all the info you can get, you leave Nolan at your place so he can watch over his son while said son recovers from the beating he received; for some reason, it feels like a completely different thing when he beats Mark compared to when you do it.
Maybe it's just your opinion on family dynamics- hitting your kids is perfectly fine, but only as long as you do it in a safe, sane and consensual environment, rather than whatever you want to call Nolan's halfhearted attempt at being convincing with his fists. Combat training and mutually recreational spanking is fine, everything else is not.
Not that you're about to explain all of this to anyone. One, it's nobody else's business and two, Nolan doesn't need to be told, he's perfectly aware of what a dick move what he did was.
Now, with all that said and done, it's about time you went and announced the results of your extensive meddling to the Guardians, and the GDA (mostly Cecil). Joy…
"…so yeah, Omni-Man gave up in the end," you finish explaining the series of events that led you to being here, in the Guardians' HQ, with a stone-faced, yet (somehow) simultaneously sheepish Nolan standing behind you. "He's not gonna keep trying to conquer Earth, right?"
"As a prisoner of war, the only thing I can say is that the Viltrum Empire does not have the numbers to send a large force after Earth, last I heard," the mustache-wearing 'superhero' says. Honestly, his choice of facial hair configuration should have made his allegiance clear from the start- no hero wears a mustache, of all things.
It's basically the billboard sign of evil, just worn on someone's face.
"I do not like this," War Woman announces after the initial silence following the whole explanation thing has congealed a bit. "You betrayed us, Omni-Man."
"I am aware," Nolan says, only for you to turn around and shoot him a look. "And I am sorry, for what it's worth. I will not make any excuses for what I did, but neither am I asking to be extended the same trust I was before."
Better. You get the feeling Nolan here is an okay guy, if not a paragon of virtue or anything, he just has to be reminded of as much every now and then lest his macho-macho Viltrumite upbringing shines through.
How an entire species can decide that being like that is any kind of good idea is beyond you, but it does at least explain why their reproductive rates are, apparently, pulling a Hitler; going deep underground and committing suicide. Honestly, you know how to get people to have sex with you, and pretending not to have emotions isn't it.
"As you can see, he's gonna play nice, so just keep it at giving him evil looks from the corners of your eyes if you happen to meet him in costume," you say. "Sure, he killed you guys, but you're here to laugh about it! People die all the time, you're just privileged enough to shrug it off this time."
You'd complain about a tough crowd, but you aren't exactly trying to get any laughs here, so whatever.
The Immortal steps forth, sizing Nolan up. Nolan immediately returns the favor, though he does at least keep himself from being overtly hostile about it, so point to him, you suppose. "You're right, excuses wouldn't help anything now anyways," the leader of the Guardians of the Globe says. "However, none of us want to keep on fighting right this moment. Can you promise you will not be a danger to humanity?"
"…" Eyes closed, Omni-Man ritualistically leaves his second thoughts and lingering regrets behind. Or so you imagine, anyways, it's not like he actually advocates what he's thinking. "I can. All I want to do is to live on Earth. I will continue to protect it, towards this end," he informs the Guardians.
And yes, he 'informs' them. With the understanding that it is not a suggestion, nor a request, petition or anything else.
You look at Cecil, who is standing next to the rest of the Guardians right now, clearly on their side but not a member of the group. He nods at you minutely, communicating that, any misgivings he may have aside, he will abide by what is being said right now.
Good enough for you. Would be a shame if anyone tried to dress Mark up in a Princess Peach costume and abducted him, after all this work.
And with that, you clap your hands, reaching underneath your dress to access your shadow storage. "And to celebrate the occasion, I brought some brownies for everyone! They're totally, absolutely, positively not laced with weed," you announce.
Everyone looks at you askew. Mission accomplished.
After you're done forcing at least one brownie into the hands of everyone present (yes, including both Nolan and Cecil), you consider your job done, so you don't particularly bother to stick around and pressure them into actually eating the things.
Sure, you're ninety-nine percent certain they absolutely won't do so as is, but that's their loss, not yours. You did, after all, just bake some very good brownies, ones that do not contain any weed. If they don't believe you and waste hours of some lab interns' time trying to find what's wrong with them, well, again not your problem.
…The thought of the results of Night Queen's baking being analyzed under a microscope, a brownie being dissected by people in full hazmat suits, is kinda hilarious, admittedly. No idea whether the GDA really will go that far, but hey, whatever, you're having your fun already anyways.
Now then, once you've brought Nolan back to Mark, because staring at his unconscious body totally will make him wake up sooner, you return to the regular stuff you usually end up doing. That being, summoning demons for your own ends.
Most inhabitants of hell, you'd say, don't necessarily correspond to some mythological creature or some such, at least in your experience so far. Then you go over the ones that you've actually seen or dealt with again, and realize that Barghests (like the one that you fused into Last Embrace) are a thing in mythology, as are dragons, Fiend or otherwise, and technically the whole concept of the souls of the dead going to some other place where they are damned for eternity does ring a bell as well.
You wonder, if you were born and raised in ancient Greece, would you refer to Hell as the Underworld instead? Because there's quite a couple of similarities there, as well. In general the more you learn about the multiversal structure of metaphysical reality, the less you can help but compare tidbits here and there to various religions and myths that spring to mind.
It's something that's been on your mind lately. There's just some demons that are so much like some mythical creatures you have to sincerely call in doubt that it's a coincidence, even if you make the argument that the idea of an afterlife or something of the like as such is very much human nature to make up.
Not everyone is cool with the idea of everything they are just being gone one day. Heck, you weren't exactly a fan of it either, you just refused to give it any particularly deep thought when you were alive. Y'know, before you became what amounts to a walking talking afterlife for your very own victims.
You're bringing this up because, right now, you are confronting just one such type of demon, one that's practically synonymous with the underworld if you're at all aware of various mythologies on a surface level.
Three canine heads are staring you down, growling. Indeed, you have successfully summoned a Cerberus, a three-headed dog-like demon, said to guard the entrance to the Underworld itself in Greek mythology. You will note it's only dog-like, though; this monster of a puppy stands taller than you are, its glowing red eyes more baleful than Sarah used to be before her morning coffee.
Also, its claws are quite pronounced, though not as much as the large teeth currently bared at yourself. The three necks connected to its shoulder are almost sinuous, quite a bit longer than they would be on a dog, relatively peaking, to allow the three heads to maneuver semi-independently of each other, and its dark, shaggy fur bears some splotches of blood from whatever other demons it was recently fighting.
Noted for, indeed, being very capable of acting as guard dogs, Cerberi are somewhat of an evolution of the more average Hellhounds you've already seen plenty of, a path that doesn't lead to the enhanced intelligence and magical abilities Barghests and their like exhibit in exchange for being, quite simply put, strong as heck.
Some of them apparently retain their fiery breath, though in a Cerberus it's largely vestigial; even getting triple the (literal) firepower simply isn't actually worthwhile when they can just tear apart whatever they're fighting the hard way. Being largely animalistic, the same as basic Hellhounds, this variation of demon is notably less inclined towards forming packs, likely because they literally developed an alternative to company in the form of growing themselves more heads.
They really do act independently, each of them being their own dog, just connected to the same body. And communicating wordlessly, though you can see it clear as day in the way they're subtly shifting.
Now then, time for your experiment. "Hmm… Good boy?" You offer, holding out a large piece of meat- really a dead cow, you're just making a show of giving it to this demon-dog. "It's yours if you want it."
"Good boy, good boy," you say, scratching one of the three heads right between the ears. "You doing good, hm?"
You'd make it a point to translate the growling and soft yipping of the other two heads not currently subjected to your ministrations, as your power to understand and converse with animals does, in fact, work with demon-animals like this one as well, but whether it's because it's a demon or because being three-in-one doesn't translate well, your understanding of this Cerberus is somewhat scrambled.
Most of what you can make out is 'more, me too, munchies, wanna bite, food, feels good', in various states of repetition. Which, to be fair, is enough for you to go off on; feeding the hungry head some more meat, you use both hands to scratch the necks of the other two, something they do seem to quite enjoy.
Turns out being the Mayor of Dogetown isn't for show, after all.
"Hey, wanna stay with me for a bit?" You ask once the two heads you're handling have enough for the moment, shaking themselves. It's really like a big, big dog, this Cerberus, just three for the price of one and big and strong enough to accidentally demolish a small building (or commit a war crime) when playing. "See, I've got this thing here…"
Moving with ease, now that you've accomplished making friend with this dog, you show it your tattooed arm, the demon-infused ink in the form of an Asian dragon plain to see. One head sniffs it, one looks at you and the third thinks over what you said, hopefully understanding the concepts involved correctly.
Three affirmative yips later, you're holding the essence of a Cerberus, having peacefully convinced it to become part of your tattoo.
That was surprisingly easy. Then again, they're dogs, for all that they live in literal hell and eat just about anything, humans being perfect snack size and all; being friendly is just in their nature, you suppose.
Not that all wild dogs are like that, but then having the power to directly communicate like this does make things rather easy. Well, one down, a few more to go before you have what you need!
You get the feeling someone, somewhere, did something you'd kick their asses for. No idea what your intuition is trying to tell you exactly, but something's definitely going wrong right now.
There's a bunch of tests you've been wanting to run on some of the stuff your little lawyer got for you, those anomalous materials that mess in gravity in various ways, and so now that you have a bit of time saved up and aren't quite as pressed for that exact time with the family drama between Mark and Nolan done with, you get right to it, not seeing a point in waiting.
Most of it is pretty standard stuff- figure out density (so you can determine if the weird effects change that in addition to 'raw' weight), structure and other physical characteristics, what you'd do with any hitherto unknown crap that somehow found its way into your possession. That said, there are some things you can't help but notice-
Well, you were after this stuff because it manipulates gravity in some way, and that just so happens to be something you, yourself, do a lot of. And according to what you can tell, after further testing of the meat of the matter (those same gravity manipulation effects), you can't help but wonder…
You could do everything this stuff does, and more, but one big issue for you is that you can't do so permanently. Sooner or later your attention wanes, and although it usually takes a while, gravity goes back to normal no matter what setting you left it in.
Thing is, you don't see why you couldn't just copy exactly what these metals, stones and more are doing to get the exact same results, assuming you manage to tie the changes to local gravitational force you make to the relative position in space you want it to be in. It's one of those things you're just kind of aware of, thanks to your additional sense for gravitational shifts, but whenever you're on a planet, you're very much hurtling through space at breakneck speeds.
Hence, you just treat everything as relative to the planet you're on. That's an important premise, else your esper power would be a lot harder to use reliably, all things considered.
Something to keep in mind, you suppose. That said, before you move on to the part where you practice doing this until it becomes second nature (because how else will it become second nature to use in a practical setting), you still have some… ideas.
For destructive tests, that is, and thanks to being inside your inner world, you can just perform them at your leisure, as all of the materials used will just come back after a while.
It is with this background that you end up handling your first idea for such, a sheet of gravity-repellent metal that's twisted around an eldritch-
"Is that- is that Metal Gemma-1 wrapped around one of those abominable energy sources?" Yoshi asks.
"It is, yes," you confirm, holding out the long stick made of steel the whole thing is attached to right now.
"A-and… Why, for the love of all that is horrible scientific practice, are you holding it over a fire?!"
You idly add another log of wood to the merrily burning campfire you built inside the lab. "I believe you answered that yourself already. For science."
"…I'll just go do whatever Indigo and Nolac want me to do for a bit. Maybe I can get drunk before we all blow up again."
You wouldn't bet on it, but hey, that's his prerogative.
"Ungh…"
"Mark! You're awake."
"Guess I am," he groaned, blinking painfully. He was feeling like someone had used him like a punching bag, then undone all the damage afterwards, phantom pain from his brain hallucinating, remembering the pain anyways. The usual after Night Queen's training sessions, in other words. "Man, I had the worst dream ever."
"…Might not have been a dream. Do you need- dammit, I don't know my way around here."
That was the probably sheepiest he'd ever heard his father being. By far. "I remember… When we stopped fighting," Mark groaned, head shaking. "Where are we?"
"Night Queen's castle… Or what looks like one, anyways."
"Wait, what?!" Okay, that had him sit up hurriedly. "Night Queen doesn't let anyone into her castle. Nobody even knows where it is."
"Well, she teleported both of us here after we fought," his dad said, as though it really was that simple. Knowing her, it probably was, on second thought. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, I… Just some phantom pain. It'll be gone in a few minutes." It usually was. "Are you okay?"
"Oh, I've had worse," he said… but Mark could see it in his eyes. In some ways, Nolan Grayson hadn't had worse than what had happened, and that both sent knots of guilt through his stomach and let him breathe a little easier.
It meant that what happened meant something to him. Just like it did to Mark.
"Dad, can you promise me something?" He heard himself saying.
"Anything," his dad agreed, without a second thought.
"…Don't leave again." Mark had no idea whether he was stating it or asking, begging, but the words had to come out either way. "Mom, and me… Don't leave us."
"…Of course." Dad's features were soft, just like when he'd stopped fighting, for everyone's sake. "Assuming Debbie doesn't just divorce me, anyways. We already talked with the Guardians and Cecil, but I doubt she'll let… Everything that happened go, either."
"Just… gotta talk with her…" Ah crap, he was way too tired right now. What time was it, anyways? "It'll be fine, dad. I'm sure."
Mom may be a hardass sometimes, but she loved dad too much to just divorce him outright. Even if he probably deserved it, because holy crap wait a second.
"The Guardians…?"
"We came to an… understanding," he explained. "I doubt I'll be invited to the annual ping-pong tournament anytime soon, but we have a truce for the time being. Mostly because Night Queen enforced it. I got the impression they really didn't want to fight both me and her at the same time."
"You have no idea, dad," Mark laughed weakly. "Pretty sure she'd win against you, too. Even without the…"
He gestured at the remains of the sound gun he'd been given, laid on a table next to the bed he was in. Pretty sure a hospital wing didn't really match Night Queen's image, but that was reason enough for her to have one in her super-secret super-castle.
"You said she gave it to you, right?"
"That and all the training," he yawned. "Without it I'd… have done even less than I did, I guess."
"Mark, I'm not sure you understand this, but you've had your powers for weeks. You had only that long to prepare, to grow in strength. How well you fought was… It was very, very impressive, all things considered."
"Thanks, dad."
"I don't just say that because it's true, mind you. If this… sound-weaponry really is effective against all Viltrumites, we may well have a chance to beat any Viltrumites sent after us, seeing as I technically defected. With you, me and Night Queen, armed with these…"
"Was that why you agreed? Because you thought it was worth a shot, that we could win against what would happen as a result?"
"…A little," his dad admitted. "I won't lie, that fact played a role. But mostly, I just… Didn't want to keep fighting you, son."
"I see," Mark nodded, smiling at nothing in particular.
And that was that.
Now then, with the big source of drama taken care of, you can fully return to doing whatever the hell you want- with training Mark no longer in your schedule, you've opened up a good couple hours per day for other pursuits, which is pretty nice.
Like, it was totally worth it just to see him stand up to his father, but still, it also was kind of time-consuming. You're glad it worked out, but you're also glad you don't have to keep doing it from this point onward.
Man, holding down a regular job would be such a pain. In a way, you're glad you died before you ever tried to do so.
Still kind of a dick move from the world to have a truck T-bone the taxi you were taking at the time, though.
Anyways, no use holding a grudge over that… Though come to think of it, you never did look into what happened to that truck driver, did you? Ah well, not that it matters, either. Shit happens, you're just better at walking it off thanks to chance and circumstance.
Your newly won free time, on the other hand, you decide to invest some miscellaneous work you've been meaning to get around to- one of the big issues with perfect recall of everything that you went through to date is that you can never forget anything you plan to do.
Even though it would totally be fine to be a little 'forgetful' sometimes, if only so you have less work to do. It's almost enough to have Night Queen stomp around in frustration.
Some of that work you do is on turning theoretical potion recipes into practical, confirmed ones using some of the extensive network of facilities you have down in the bowels of your castle, trying to turn mercury into something ingestible that's actually good for you; one of those everyday challenges for an aspiring reality warper, you suppose.
The other big thing you're currently focusing on is some renovation for the Grayson Thunderdome (yes, you put that name on the thing and that name stays, simple as that). Installing some additional infrastructure in and around it, such as the optional ranks of audience seating it can now project around itself, the winding pathways meant to let competing fighters travel around the main globe of the arena itself…
And, of course, some big-ass sound cannons. Just in case some 'enthusiastic pacification' might come in handy- especially in case of hostile Viltrumites.
Who shall be royally fucked if they ever get within a mile or so of this thing.
Speaking of Viltrumites, though, you wonder what Nolan and Mark are doing; you had both of them teleported out of your place this morning, once they were both recovered from the 'cordial familial bonding' they engaged in.
Then again, do you really care all that much? Probably not, to be honest. You're kind of done with all the family drama, after all.
"You stupid, stupid man. What were you thinking! Don't answer, I can imagine."
Contrary to her words, Debbie Grayson was clinging to the form of her until now absentee husband, sobbing under her breath. Having just come home and confessed everything that had happened and how he had been lying to her for decades, Nolan honestly felt like he was getting off too easy here.
He'd expected more screaming, objects of everyday use being thrown at him, maybe talk of a divorce. Not that he was sure there wouldn't be any of that later, but for now at least his wife was more concerned with berating him while holding him close.
He was Omni-Man. The strongest man on Earth. Right there and then, he could not have forced himself out of her arms if he tried.
"I'm sorry," he repeated, unable to look her in the face. It wasn't something he was proud of, the ease with which he'd kept his lies going for so long, but the least he could do now was to own up to it.
He'd promised himself as much, if nothing else. If he was to stop and abandon his mission, to cease being a Viltrumite… He had to make it a clean break, consequences be damned.
That much, at least, had changed for the better. Nolan may have been better at this than he had ever thought himself to be, in retrospect, but that didn't change how uncomfortable this made him.
Not an issue he would have had in his youth, when he believed in the Viltrum cause above and to the exclusion of any other… But then, being an idiot in your youth was a fairly common occurrence across species, apparently, so maybe this wasn't too worrying.
Pulling back to look him in the eyes, Debbie took a deep breath. "Don't you ever do anything like… this again, got it?"
"I think that would take more effort than anyone could keep hidden at this point," he joked.
"Nolan, I am serious. I swore I'd be with you 'til death do us part, but if you go and become a supervillain and disappear for weeks without so much as a note by the bed again, I swear-"
"I got it, Debbie. I got it." It felt wrong to be like this, not to deflect and find a way aroud the topic, but that was just how it went. He couldn't put it off forever. "I… I'm not proud of what I did, of some of the choices I made that led me to this moment, but if I had the chance to do it all over again, I would be right here. With you. So, as your husband, Deborah Grayson, I have to ask: Can you forgive me?"
He went to his knee, holding her hand like he was asking for it in marriage all over again. Nolan hadn't done so when they actually did get married- it was improper for a Viltrumite Warrior to kneel before anyone outside of their superiors during military ceremonies- but that just meant he had to make up for it now.
Breath hitched, Debbie looked at him, his wife's eyes wide open for a long moment. Then, she closed them slowly, as though giving up, or letting something drain out of her.
"Of course I do, Nolan. I'm your wife. Now come in and sit down already, I'll have you tell me everything. Including why Mark has been consorting with a little girl to try and beat the stupid out of you."
"Well, he succeeded, that's a big part of why I'm here and apologizing properly," he said, chest swelling with pride. "He really beat me over the head, like he's been training his whole life for it. Our son's got talent."
The wifely sigh he received left in question whether he'd said the right or the wrong thing, but in this moment, that just didn't matter. There was no 'right' or 'wrong' when sharing your life with the people you loved.
He may have been one spectacular bonehead, as proven by his son's actions, but Nolan had learned that much, at least.
Capstone Perk
Juggernaut: You have gone beyond being a danger, and may be likened more to a natural disaster when in movement, becoming nigh-unstoppable as you move while fighting. While engaged in combat, you may move freely, ignoring attacks of opportunity to do so, and upon moving into melee range to attack, you may increase your damage by 1.5 times. (Capstone) (4000)
After the downright meditative experience of personally installing a bunch of really big guns that can't hurt you beyond being a mild nuisance, but would absolutely squeeze the resistance and ability to actually fight out of the enemies you intend to use them against, you almost feel like a whole new man… girl… Night Queen, whatever. You're kind of starting to lose track of which of your identities you're identifying with at any given time, but that's probably just a side effect of shapeshifting all the time.
Anyways, doesn't matter. What does matter is that you have some more demons to summon!
Nightrider Chiefs are notable for being basically the direct upgrade Nightriders can achieve through asserting themselves as particularly standout individuals within the tribe they tend to form, consequently conidered one of the less confusing ways for demons to advance beyond what they are. They also are, uh, very weird in some ways.
By which you mean they make a lot of sense to you, but even you've realized you're kind of weird yourself by this point. But, point in case, upon making the step from a simple Nightrider to a Chief, these Centaur-like demons grow an additional pair of legs and arms each, their feet 'hatching' into even more extensively clawed appendages and their overall body structure changing quite dramatically- they still generally have the same shape, but their lower body is much less horse-like than before, to say the least.
The scales and layered plates of bone lining their backs make that much clear, if nothing else.
The perhaps most immediately obvious difference, though, is their faces, or rather the lack thereof. The heads of Nightrider Chiefs are really just balls of layered, muscled flesh, and this in addition to the changes to their hands, going from human-like to long, slender fingers clasped together into four-part arm extenions makes them look like some eldritch horror shit entirely.
Then you get to the tail they grow, with the forked tip split apart into three grasping, vaguely jaw-like and hooked digits, and you realize these things aren't anywhere as 'innocuous' as Nightriders, who themselves were hardass murderous centaur-demons that can and will run through anything in the way to murdering you.
"So…" You begin, looking at the creature you summoned. "I don't suppose I could try to trade with you for your essence, could I?"
It silently stands there for a long moment, having just literally crawled out of the ground over the course of you summoning it. Then, it opens its face, the fleshy ball revealing itself to have been its lips, a toothy, vertical slit lined with teeth now 'staring' at you, larger teeth stuck to the sinewy muscle at the edge of the sticky membrane it unfolded to hiss at you, its hands snapping open into alien, four-fingered hands, each finger ending in a long, hooked claw.
You get the feeling Nightriders somehow become even less sociable, after they transform into this. Note to self, never trust anything when its spine has been elongated twice to accommodate more shoulders and arms.
Another note to self, breaking the spine of a centaur over your knee is pretty difficult purely because of how unwieldy they are. Doubly so when they're tough enough to keep on trying to fight back while you do it, and actually stand a chance at doing more than mildly inconveniencing you in a fight.
Seriously, ow. This motherfucker actually scratched you up. Nowhere near as much as Battle Beast did, admittedly, but still. Actually had to use your aura to protect yourself here for a bit.
It really is about time you spent a little more time with Alicia and Ariana, and Alana as well for that matter, you suppose. You've been showing your face around the house now and then, but you've just been too busy these past couple days…
It's finally time to get back to doing another movie night, complete with handmade popcorn and brownies. Both of which are set upon by a pair of girls rabidly consuming them- that is, neither Ariana nor Alana can hold themselves back, all the while Alicia looks on with disapproval.
It's pretty funny to watch from the sidelines, not gonna lie. Not that you ever lie to begin with.
Now then, you have some prime footage to show off, and you refuse to waste it by not sharing it with everyone else present. After all, it's not every day that you get to see what, exactly went down in the Grayson Thunderdome, right? It's basically the world's foremost family drama coliseum, after all, and high-tech enough to overshadow pretty much any larger structure not under the control of the GDA.
…And any of those they do have as well, come to think of it. After all, no weirdly hyper-intelligent specialist like those randomly appearing mad genius types could possibly keep up with your literally otherworldly engineering.
And don't get yourself started on alien technology- none of that shit is anywhere as good as what you can throw together thanks to your extensive past of creating, testing and implementing a great variety of machines, from robots to reality-warping matter generators.
You're still patting yourself on the back over that one, by the way. The latest design of your manufactories is just downright awesome and superior to literally anything and everything you've seen so far; not even the bullshit that is Viltrumite physiology can keep up with the joys of just printing literally anything you want to have out of thin air.
Suck it, V-Mites, this random dimensional traveler (who is also an asshole) is better than you!
But anyways, brief diversions on the nature of your technological superiority over just about most species of this dimension aside, you take a seat next to the quarreling pair of Ariana and Alana, the two fighting over the plate of brownies you pulled fresh from the oven ten minutes ago, and grab the remote for the unnecessarily huge television in Alicia's recreation room.
Giving her a smile and a trace of a thought that would spell out 'this is something to look forward to', you turn the home entertainment system (also known as television with a computer attached, pretty much) on, automatically starting the little documentary you edited together out of all the footage you have of from the fight between Mark and Nolan.
As the starting music plays, you lean back and make it a point to only smirk a little, especially when Alana freezes in place, recognizing the glowing, layered forcefields that constitute the Dome.
"The social structure of Viltrumite society is a wild, brutal thing," the voice of Night Queen begins, making your best impression of an actual nature documentary, "but today we can observe an example of the customs of this primitive folk in action. Here we see the purpose-made trap made to contain their catfighting to a single location, as they would otherwise move too fast to be easily observed…"
"Eh? Eh?!"
"What's up, Alana?" You ask, grabbing one of the brownies. Yup, chocolate levels are just right, sweet without clogging up your mouth.
"Where… did you find this?" She asks, pointing at the TV screen. "Because this looks very…"
"Oh, I got it from Night Queen. She narrated it," you 'explain', waving her concerns off. "Figured it'd make for a nice movie night start."
"…"
Yup, her face is about as amusing as you expected. Holding back your chuckling, you're distracted when Alicia grabs your hand, holding it while forming a nigh imperceptible pout with her lips.
You pat her thigh before intertwining your fingers with her, making her calm down again. Cute.
"Hey, don't just go into a world of your own…" Alana awkwardly tries to get your attention, but you ignore her. Ariana, meanwhile, is just looking torn between envy and approval.
"Look at how lovey-dovey they are… I can almost see the pink aura!"
Contrary to Alana, you do get Japanese entertainment, but even so you don't see why she's hallucinating some anime background animations for no reason sometimes. But that's okay, you like the twerp anyways.
Now for a bit of the entertainment America likes best, violent father-son interactions that leave everyone involved bleeding all over the floor!
You probably shouldn't be this amused at the way Alana proceeds to stare at you as the footage plays out, your Night Queen commentary continuing over it as you expound on how the dominance displays between the two main 'actors' are going.
Still, it's pretty funny, that's all you're saying. Sure, this move also ties your current identity to that of Night Queen, but hey, it's not like you give all that much of a fuck; with the current statues quo overall, anyone with half a brain to their name should know better than to potentially piss off one of the most dangerous people on the planet.
And say about Cecil and the Guardians what you want, but they have at least half a brain between all of them together.
Seeing as those are the only groups you expect this information to 'leak' to thanks to Alana, you aren't too bothered by the prospect, to say the least. And hey, when in doubt, you can always just go and abandon this particular identity, it's not like you're tied to it by hook or crook.
Would be a shame to have to distance yourself from the girls, but hey, they can always run away from home while you set up a new, more comfortable life for them or something. There are plenty of possibilities.
Before long, though, the documentary you produced has run its course, culminating in Mark and his dad demonstrating 'mutual respect' as they finish exchanging opinions, as you put it. Most of what you blabbered on top of the raw footage you cut together to make this is bullshit in one form or another, but you think your narration adds to the fight overall rather than detracting from it, so whatever, really.
Having consequently ignored Alana's attempts at getting some more information out of you, the civilian identity of Green Ghost (she really should rebrand with the new 'powers' she's got now, come to think of it) quickly leaves the room once the credits play, obviously looking to immediately inform the Guardians and the GDA of this 'new and highly sensitive' development.
Honestly, pretending to be two different people at the same time has always been funny in a very mundane way, but right now it's just outright hilarious.
Of course that still leaves you with the sisters, who are now unconstrained by their cousin's presence- Ariana is already bouncing on the couch, halfway climbing onto you. "I have so many questions! Can I ask them?!"
"Well, Alana isn't listening by the door, so I guess it's alright," you shrug.
"Are you a vampire?! Is Night Queen your vampire mommy?! Inquiring minds have to know!"
This girl really is a treasure.
Silently communicating with Alicia on one side, you turn towards the other, smirking at Ariana as you get ready for the big reveal. "Well," you say, grinning as you shrink down to her own eye level right before her now wide open eyes, "that depends."
Then, you start to grow again, except now that you're female you stay that way, too, your hips widening, chest growing rapidly, all that good stuff. Within moments you're sitting there in your female form, curly raven hair falling gently over your shoulders, the clothes you were wearing subtly adjusted to your now rather indeed feminine form.
"Do you want me to be your vampire mommy?" You ask, perfectly manicured hand raised to pat Ariana's head. And honestly, being able to just shapeshift like this is just downright unfair to all other (living) women, considering how much effort usually goes into looking as perfect as you do that you just get to skip.
Mouth and eyes now both wide open, the younger girl stares at you for a moment. Then, her feet begin to wriggle giddily, a massive grin overtaking her face.
"This is the awesomest thing ever!" She whispers, a worried glance going towards the door- Alana is gone and not in listening range, but then she wouldn't exactly know that, you suppose. "Are you really her? Or are you actually her vampire mommy? Or daddy?"
"Mhm, I don't know… Alicia," you drawl, half-turning towards the other girl in the room, "does this little Ariana look like she can keep a secret?"
"I'm not sure," she replies, calm as always. "She is an Ariana, after all."
"Mouh!" Looking at both of you, the troublemaker in question vibrates a little with excitement, but even so she obviously keeps her head clear enough to keep on thinking. "You knew! Alicia, you knew all along!"
Accused like that, the older sister just leans against you, resting her chin on your shoulder to look down at Ariana. "You have no proof."
"You aren't surprised and asking no questions! Before the Me Tribunal, that's all the proof needed!"
Now besieged by both girls as they literally argue over you, you physically force Ariana to calm down by pressing down on her shoulders, containing her excitement a little. It has little effect, that is, but you do manage to keep her from actually crawling all over you. You prefer to keep that kind of thing to deliberate sexytimes, thank you very much.
"If you want to be spanked, at least wait until we're in the bedroom," you tell her, giving her your patented sexy smile, fem edition (trademark pending). "Or are you such a naughty girl you can't even do that?"
Sitting down prim and proper, Ariana gives you the most earnest, well-behaved attentive smile anyone could possibly imagine. "Please step on me, mommy."
Alicia, to your other side, shakes her head. "I knew she'd be like that."
Partially on a whim, partially because of just how hilariously much Ariana is pleading for it, you remain in your female form as the three of you wind things down and skedaddle before Alana comes back, cleaning the rec room up and disappearing to parts unknown.
Aka Alicia's bedroom, that is. The younger sister currently living here still has yet to actually get furniture for the room set aside for her, as she still insists she doesn't need a place to sleep other than Alicia's bed. Which is quite sensible, granted, considering she does spend every night right there.
The big difference today, of course, being that're naked when you come in, carrying Ariana on one arm and groping Alicia's springy, pleasantly soft ass with the other. It's good to know that, all messing around aside, both of them quite do like you even when you're a little softer to the touch yourself, as was amply demonstrated when both girls asked if they could make out with you like this earlier.
And your talents being appreciated is just one of those things everybody likes, y'know?
So you walk right in, the door securely closed behind yourself- you've made sure Alana won't interrupt you as she already left to presumably report to the rest of the Guardians or something, but it never hurts to be careful. Now you finally have some time for yourself… With two cuties in hand, that is.
Promptly marching in to deposit Ariana on the bed, you take a moment to start stretching, smirking at the two pairs of eyes that can't help themselves but follow your every movement. This, too, serves a higher purpose, and for once you aren't just doing it to get everyone in the mood for sex.
Well, 'just'. Sex is still a perfectly fine purpose to have in mind, far as you're concerned, it's basically the one physical activity that nobody has issues with engaging in, it's a fun way to engage in releasing all the dopamine human brains crave. Really nothing anyone can say against it on principle.
That said, your current plan, as such, involves a little more than a nice night with two cuties and lots of sapphic sex. Unbeknownst to them, you went and burned through some of the blood you use up when you really exert yourself, just flexing some mucles for no purpose other than to do just that: Burn through some blood.
The mystery of your strange hunger patterns has been in the room for weeks now, and it's about high time you actually went and tested your best hypothesis about why you aren't getting hungry the way you used to be, the steady and predictable pace of your bloodthirst having been almost completely abolished.
'Almost' being the operative word, of course. There's still some rhyme and reason involved, you just have to figure it out first. Which brings you to the topic of sex, and the great amounts of it you're about to have.
Finally, it is time to clear up if you do, in fact, gain sustenance through fucking now. In case you don't, you'll test it out while in male form later on as well, but the occasion just kind of developed itself like this, so...
"So how do you want to do this?" You smile at the two chocolate-skinned girls, taking a seat on the bed yourself. "One at a time or full-contact? I don't mind either way."
"You've had lesbian sex before," Alicia states, having reasoned as much on her own. Not that it takes a genius to do so with the hints you've been dropping harder than your clothes so far.
"Of course I have. Why wouldn't I?"
Already running out of patience, Ariana chooses this moment to make herself known again by way of throwing herself over your lap, having already taken off most of her clothes in a hurried tumble. "No fair~, I wanna see proof!"
"You do, do you?" You purr, shifting the horny girl to let her butt point outwards- right into convenient striking range, in other words. "Do I remember someone begging for spankings earlier?"
"Mhm, I'm not sure~," Ariana drawls- only to yelp when you actually do hit her, the meaty smack of your carefully aimed palm meeting her buttocks resounding throughout the white room. "Ah!"
Now that your hand is there already, you take the liberty of groping her butt, carefully stroking her delicate lower lips as your thumb caresses the place she was hit. "There, there. Take your punishment like a good girl and you get a reward, how does that sound?"
"…Yes, mommy," a quiet voice responds. Good enough.
Giving her another smack that gently rocks her entire body, you chuckle. "What was that? I couldn't quite hear you," you tell her, using your other hand to pat her head and stroke her smooth hair while you molest her behind this time.
"I said," Ariana pants, edging the rest of her sentence out… Until you give her another smack. "Yes, mommyyyy…"
You freeze, tilting your head. "Already? I know I said I'm good at this, but…"
"She's been looking forward to this since she first said the word 'mommy' earlier," Alicia explains, taking a seat next to you. "I think it's some secret fantasy of hers, so she's been fantasizing this entire time."
"Huh. Well, don't you worry, sweetie," you smile, stroking the back of the girl in question, "mommy will give you lots of love to make up for how you had to go without."
Wordlessly, Alicia grabs her sister, pulling her up and pushing her right at your chest- she actually aims her face at your tits, all but forcing her to latch on. Not that she needs any help with that, admittedly, eagerly as she starts to suckle on the nearest nipple she can get her lips on.
"No fair," Alicia deadpans, "mom wants mommy's attention, too."
With that, she kisses you, her hands on your thigh and already creeping along the creamy expanse of your skin with a very obvious end goal in mind.
Well then… time to do some science.
It takes some real dedication, mostly on the sisters' side due to the sheer amount of endlessly increasing, undulating pleasure you inflict purely because you enjoy doing it, but in the end, through screams and through silent peaks, you finally arrive at a conclusion the same way you seemingly arrive anywhere; awash on a stream of squirted bodily fluids.
It's just one of those things, you suppose. The kind of stuff that goes without saying.
Because, as it turns out, the answer to the question you've been pondering is yes, you do somehow feed on sex. It's slow, and nigh impossible to notice when you do not focus on it, but somehow, you are refilling that reservoir of vitality you've been hawkishly filling up until it overruns ever since you first rose from the grave through nothing but quivering flesh against flesh, heated exchanges of pleasure and thorough use of your elongated tongue.
Ariana has been trying to regain control of her legs for fifteen minutes now, to no avail. Considering her track record so far, that's saying something.
Sitting there, Alicia in your arms and her sister sprawled over your legs where she ended up eating you out after she couldn't take any more herself, you take a long moment to actually consider your life choices. Naturally, you're quickly interrupted by Alicia tilting her head at you.
"Anything wrong?" She really is more perceptive than you'd think.
"Nothing big. I just found out I may be some kind of vampire-succubus hybrid kind of thing, at this rate." Or incubus or general sex demon, whatever. Same difference.
"You just realized?"
"I probably should've seen it coming," you admit.
Ah well. Time for some cuddling before you have more fun. Sex never gets old, long as you do it right.
You have the feeling something is going on, like a shoe's about to drop. Just what are your instincts trying to tell you?
A lot of the more advanced uses of your esper power in particular, you've been finding, are rooted in your understanding of physics. It makes a lot of sense, you suppose; it's hard to actively manipulate forces you have no idea of, so just knowing how something works is kind of a prerequisite if you want to mess with it in any constructive way.
Or destructive, in your case. Po-tay-toes, po-tah-toes. You're happy as long as you can make people, buildings and just about anything else in sight crumple with the power of your mind.
For the record, while Yoshi and the usual suspects from the Academy City gang (and really, that name is nothing if not evocative of education, you'll give it that for all that it's unimaginative as fuck) weren't directly involved in the theoretical parts of high-level esper education, but even they are generally aware of the fact that theoretical knowledge is required for practical usage of these powers.
You still call bullshit on anyone claiming esper stuff is 'all science', though. Just saying, you running a few numbers and nudging reality with your brainmeats doesn't normally result in actual changes in said reality, full stop. No amount of technobabble makes it any less magic bullshit the same way your own powers are.
When 'It Just Works' turns from a funny slogan into a philosophy, you know you aren't in the realm of rational scientific pursuit anymore.
…Anyways, you have lots of science-ing to do after your analysis of everything the gravity-related materials you had your lawyer fetch for you from hell can do ran its course. You have a collection of weird gravitational anomalies, some weird stuff that actually responds to having a current run through it with modulating its effects on gravity and then this weird, potentially cancer-causing metal alloy with lots of potential applications, if mass-produced.
A lot of the shit these things do is very interesting to you, purely because you can theoretically do it yourself. The only issue is figuring out how, which involves a lot of scientific work on the backend to begin with.
Work which you, naturally, barely do yourself. That's what you have the Science Team for, as you've decided the guys in the laboratory in your inner world shall be named on a permanent basis. Gotta be able to reference them all with a single term and all that.
Yoshi complains, naturally, you tell him to fuck off and only come back once he's encoded the interactions of gravitons you're observing into a mathematical formula for you, everyone has a grand old laugh while Indigo tells you to be nicer to him (and is summarily ignored).
Good times.
It all happened very quickly. With most of your preparations ready and done with, everything of real value you could take already taken, you were planning to have a nice day, take it easy for a bit and maybe go out for ice cream during school hours.
As one does, clearly. After all, why bother going outside to acquire ice cream as opposed to just dipping into your fabricated stash of All The Flavors if not to pointedly not be in school? And never mind your opinions on the education system and its many, obvious, glaring flaws.
You even managed to find yourself some karen that looked like she was about to rant at you about why 'young people' don't… Hey, what even is it old people complain about in this dimension? It's probably the usual, them being crass, listening to music she doesn't like, not getting 'good jobs' (as if the quality of life of the majority of the population wasn't almost entirely determined by powerful corporations that set the industry standard anyways), but you don't want to just generalize in case there's anything in particular on this Earth.
Sadly, you don't get to find out just so you can mark this woman for a gruesome death that you 'totally' have nothing to do with later, as all of a sudden, everything explodes.
It is kind of distracting, blows the karen you were baiting away and, worst of all, tears the scoop of strawberry ice cream straight out of its cone, securely grasped in your hand as it may be.
You could have saved it, but you were kind of surprised and busy keeping yourself in place there for a moment- you sensed something coming, a blood signature from above, but it moved so fast you didn't really have time to react.
Now you stand there, rooted in place, empty ice cream cone in hand.
"PEOPLE OF EARTH! I! AM CONQUEST! AND I HAVE COME TO-"
"Fuck off and die you cuck, you just ruined my damn morning!"
The one time you go out to relax in the city. The one time. And now here you are, looking at a grotesquely muscled old man that very clearly is a Viltrumite- the mustache gives it away, regardless of how white and unusually bushy it is.
He's also visibly blind in one eye, with a long scar running over it, kind of bald and one of his arms is a prosthetic- still caked in gore from the random civilian he landed on with a punch. Oh, also, he's standing inside somewhat of a crater, as he impacted a building with enough force to more or less level it, which was the boom you were subjected to just now.
Or your ice cream, rather.
"That sounds a lot like someone is asking to die," he grimly remarks, a growling, murderous sense of satisfaction in his voice.
"Oh, someone absolutely is. So, what's your deal?" You ask, eyeing the grizzled Viltrumite (yep, you're pretty sure that's what he is, all the signs you can see point to it) up and down. "Here for the colonialism thing or just to get your face pushed in?"
"Oh, I don't care about that," he remarks, slowly walking towards you. "I just do this because I enjoy it. And I heard the agent assigned to this planet has been missing in action, so I came to see what all the fuss was about."
Hearing that, you can't help it. You tilt your head. You straighten it again. Then you thrust your hands against your waist, throw your head back and-
Laugh.
"Haaaaaahahahahahahahaha! Oh jeez, if that's all it took someone should've told me sooner," you grin, your 'real' teeth extended into the classical, jagged form they always take when you're sizing up a meal. "You know, most fast food places aren't nice enough to send me a conga line of war criminals on demand."
First things first- if you're dealing with a Viltrumite, this time in person and without any inherent emotional blackmail like in Mark's case, you need to be on top of your game- and put him off his own.
No matter how this shakes out, you'd better be ready to deal with everything. That means you overlay a certain Buffer Hero first, his half-inserted nature allowing his power to affect yourself despite technically counting as him; it's a very nice little 'let's not fuck this up' insurance, as it were.
Next, you cross your arms, looking this 'Conquest' (if that is even his real name) with a raised eyebrow. You'll admit he does look pretty chunky, so…
Might as well, really. "Winter's Suppression!" You chant, laying down a few quick 'incentives' to 'take things easy'.
The Viltrumite you're randomly facing out of nowhere cracks his neck. "What was that, a bit of cold? Better bring something more if you want to keep up!"
And with that, he rushes straight at you, flying close to the ground at extreme speed- his prosthetic hand already moving into a punch!
One thing to note about fighting Viltrumites, they are just… ungodly levels of fast. It comes with being able to just accelerate themselves at you without so much as kicking off the ground, purely willing themselves to, and that means their maneuvering in battle is just… nonexistent, on top of the sheer speed of their attacks.
Exhibit A, Conquest here, whose dully-golden prosthetic fills out your field of view faster than you can blink.
The thing is, though? You're pretty dang fast yourself, in a very different way to how their speed functions. Where Viltrumites just charge and rush and slam themselves at their targets in extremely front-loaded speed, you tend to be quick and nimble by way of reacting and punishing any such thing harder and faster than they can.
Simply put, what Viltrumites have in the velocity of their attacks, you have in reaction time.
Something you waste no time proving, as instead of your skull being smashed by a fist that's actually larger than it (what even are they feeding these guys on Viltrum…), you lean out of the way, thrusting both hands underneath your Night Queen dress at speeds rivaling that of his fist.
When you pull them back out, your lower arms are clad in the glorious weight of Last Embrace, the technically living combat bracers locking onto the opponent you're fighting of their own accord in a way that resonates with your (literal) soul, their neverending thirst for violence stimulated so they literally radiate it at you.
Giving them souls may or may not have had some… unforeseen consequences, but then you were assuming as much already.
Not one to disappoint, you proceed to use Conquest's own momentum against him, punching out with a trail of fiery plasma shot out behind your elbow- giving you more force to clash against his movement with. The adamantine drill rips out of your weapon, thrusting itself right against Conquest's chest-
And finding barely any purchase, the Viltrumite hide you're trying to pierce too illogically resistant to be skewered the way solid steel would easily be. Instead, you merely draw blood, puncturing a shallow hole into the alien's pecs as he keeps on coming-
You duck down below, shoving Conquest upwards to redirect the force of his charge and punching him off your drill again, tearing a small chunk of his flesh out as he's sent flying, crashing against the nearest half-intact building after his orbital drop of an entrance.
For one, the guy doesn't use this opportunity to regather himself and stop to talk or anything- instead, he grabs the nearest object, a currently unoccupied fairly squashed bus (everyone inside it died when it was launched into the air and against the same building as him when, you guessed it, Conquest attempted to penetrate the planet with his dick by aiming from orbit), and comes in swinging, trying to swat you around with a weapon in hand this time.
You proceed to melt the bus (and the corpses inside it) to slag there and then with a twin stream of plasma, the heat of your weapons alone once again making it clear that most wouldn't be able to use Last Embrace simply because they'd boil themselves by trying, then smoothly proceed to, how do you say it…
Wreck Conquest's face. That's the expression. Your claws fully extended, armor lurking right underneath your skin and scraping against it from inside a little when you move, you punch, claw, kick and generally inconvenience your opponent, drawing blood again and again through sheer virtue of being able to break his skin, all the while you deflect or negate anything he tries to hit back.
Not so fun to be on the other side of a one-sided beatdown, eh, motherfucker?
Just when you think that thought, you spot it. Below the bushy white mustache, now colored with a few lines of blood from where you managed to nick Conquest's face, is…
A smile.
Crap. This motherfucker is enjoying this, and if fighting Battle Beast taught you anything, it's-
"That's it… Show me what you got, little girl!" Stomping onto the ground, hard, Conquest causes what feels like a localized earthquake; you immediately step off the ground, negating most of your weight so you can more or less keep your footing, but this does complicate matters for you.
"You know, saying that to a 'little girl' is the kind of thing that could have you investigated," you remark drily. "If space has some equivalent to the FBI, anyways. Not that they ever do anything about that."
"I care not for the feeble customs of Earth. Face me and perish!"
Time for round two already, you suppose. Alright, time to-
"Night Queen!" Oh who is it- Mark and Nolan, of course they'd show up. Bet the Guardians won't be far behind either.
And Conquest is still punching you.
Yeah, nah, let's not. You can't really afford any distractions here- Conquest is about to blow your fucking head off, again, and adding more combatants would just make it harder to keep track of what's going on.
You'd just prefer not to get pieces of Viltrumite DNA all over your face. You had more than enough of that when you were training Mark.
Giving the Thinker the telepathic signal to act, you don't dive or duck under the punch coming your way, instead effortlessly hopping over it- and when Conquest stops on a dime this time, having controlled himself to reverse the situation and put pressure on you instead of the other way around, you just launch yourself at him this time around with a roundhouse aimed right at his face.
Roundhouse to the face, man. They never see it coming.
Just as you hit him, a shimmering tear in reality appears behind Conquest, and with a bit of help in the form of 'suddenly, ten times the weight of everything is pressing in that direction', you push him right through it.
And follow right after, naturally. Before you disappear, though, you make sure to give Mark a quick, quirky salute. "No killstealing, I taught you better than that!"
With that, the portal closes again right away, the pilfered alien technology having served its purpose and leaving you right where you wanted to be.
On the moon, that is. It's just such a convenient place to fight people without interruptions.
"Alright, big boy, you wanna see what I got?" You ask, using the bubble of air you brought through with you to talk and your toothy maw opening into a wider grin than human biology would allow. "Take a good look, then."
And with that, you become shadow.
On Earth,steadily trucking along its orbit around the sun as it was, the moon was quite visible in some parts of its surface, as could be expected on any sane planet that wasn't tidally locked. However, any that were to watch the night sky at this particular time might find that there was some… irregularity in this regard.
At first sight, it would look as though the full moon was rapidly going through its phases, thinning out progressively fast enough to be visible to the naked eye.
But no, this was clearly not the case. As many independent astrophysicists and star-watchers would soon be able to confirm, the moon was still in its normal phase…
It simply was being covered by something. Something that was dark, and enormous, and creeping in a way that made one's skin crawl just from looking at it too closely.
And somewhere, deep within it, was something disquieting enough to have the entire event spoken of very little, most that saw it simply trying not to think about it too much.
It was a defense mechanism, an inherent, ancient part of the human psyche making itself known. Attempting to avoid the notice of a predator was only natural, after all.
It always feels a little weird, to become something defined only by the absence of something else. Weird, but not bad, you think; it's almost unnaturally natural to you, if that makes any sense.
Speaking of sense, your senses take on the muted, more nuanced form they usually do in this form, where visual input shifts, light level being much easier to see as colors fade out to a degree so minute and yet so stark you can hardly put it into words, all sounds wavering in your 'ears' for a moment as your new state of existence asserts itself.
You're just a spot of darkness now. A rather large spot, but still. Actually, you should probably stretch yourself out a little…
Ah, that's better. The light of the sun, branded onto the bleached surface of the moon, stems you in a bit, but the sensation, for you, is not unlike a beanbag chair you're sinking into. Love it or hate it, but it's certainly not terrible.
…Right, you were doing something, weren't you? Conquest is shouting something, but you don't particularly bother listening. Instead, you rise up, poking the equivalent of a finger at him and…
Voila. Time to get this over with. His life, you mean.
Hands rise from the ground, as though reaching from below, though that is, naturally, a misinterpretation; they reach through, if anything, though this, too, is inaccurate as such. It's hard to describe directions in a context in which 'direction' doesn't apply as a concept to begin with.
Either way, you waste no time using the claws made of shadow now sticking out of your pieces to tear into… Conquest, ripping into his skin and widening the tears already there wherever you can, piercing through his surface over, and over, and over again.
Blood spurts, becoming an amusingly long-lived spray in the low gravity of the moon; you lower it further, while you're at it, and then let the air drift off to boot just because.
You're fighting here, not babysitting. Only one of those two involves you going out of your way to make things convenient and comfortable.
Con… quest, that was it, tries to fight back, punching at the finger you stretched out at him, only for his fist to go straight through it, hitting nothing but shadow. The kind that isn't satisfying to hit, you mean. This part of you remains incorporeal, nothing more than window dressing- a decoy to distract.
Meanwhile, you've started to reach bone in him. It's always oddly intimate, to be so deep inside another person, but then, few would appreciate this kind of closeness, you'd say.
While you'd love, personally, to just keep going like this, slowly peel this Viltrumite apart until you can turn his insides into his outsides, it seems your passion for interior decoration (decorating the area with someone's insides, in case that wasn't clear) isn't exactly shared, or maybe just reciprocated too strongly.
Having figured out he isn't actually hitting anything, the shadow-figure you've been propping up for him to play with just mildly dispersed by his blows at most, you now have… Conquest, just pulling your arms off of him, as it seems he's figured out that if those are corporeal enough to hurt him, they're corporeal enough for him to actually fight.
Your response is to just turn any he's acting against incorporeal yourself, letting him achieve… exactly nothing of substance anyways. You just keep on clawing and dragging at his flesh from all sides, sometimes just feinting, sometimes ripping out a few more strads of mucle, removing a few more bits and pieces.
His weird Viltrumite uniform is in tatters by now, its fabric holding up about as well as his skin, and you can see a lot of raw meat in the places you've been successful so far.
Con… quest is losing a lot of blood, and you consider whether to absorb it or just wait and eat it all in one go once you've got him where you want him. Probably the latter. You can always weaponize it against him to facilitate the process.
Now all you need is to-
Screaming some more, the fly trapped in your web picks a random direction and charges, faster than most would be able to keep up. However, no matter how far he rushes across the planetoid's surface, you are already there, your bulk having been stretching across since you first took this form.
Not that there would be any escape for him either way. You already made sure of that. You also wonder if he will find out himself the hard way, or if he'll keep fighting until the bitter end. A smart insect would do the former, but this one seems to be the meathead type that would just refuse-
Ow. He just busted through a chunk of moon-rock, impacting your body both with it and with his body. You get the feeling… this guy does that often. Use his face as a weapon, you mean.
Annoyingly, he's managed to reach a brighter part of the moon, where the sunlight that makes it all the way here shines brightly enough to keep you from melding into the shadow you are and throw. This part of yourself, for the most part, is tangible- you can't just stay incorporeal at your whims in this blinding environment.
Hence your shadow-self bursts apart, sliding away from the impact zones. It doesn't hurt, not really, it's just… kind of really inconvenient. It stings, at most, but it's more like something got stuck in your skin and your flesh and you want to pull it out but you can't quite get a grip on it.
Yeah. That describes it well. Finding the right words makes it a lot less unpleasant to ponder.
Sadly, it seems… Conquest, has figured out this part of you is less malleable in regards to fucking him right over, so now he's started to fight you again with twice the enthusiasm.
Man, some people are just way too high-energy, you know? He really should just relax a bit. Maybe that way his veins wouldn't stand out so thick against his skin. It looks kinda gross.
Ah well. Time to teach this ridiculous scamp a lesson that far too few creatures seem to have learned so far. It's not like it's particularly complicated or anything, all told, in fact it's the most natural and simple thing in the world.
Where you are, any fucking around results in an acute case of finding out. A terminal one in all likelihood, if said fucking around is intense enough.
And you still do owe him for that ice cream. You did not forget.
So you don't let the mild inconvenience and uncomfortable nature of his retaliation stop you from continuing to assault him yourself, more and more of your arms reaching out with their stupidly sharp claws. He disperses them with forceful swings of his limbs, but for every one he destroys you simply add two more.
His mistake, you suppose, was to try and actually take you on in something resembling a straight fight. It's kind of funny, isn't it, you used to be the one just sneaking around, always ambushing and never facing anyone even vaguely near your own level, and now look at you.
Now you're the one anyone that wants to stand a chance has to work around at all costs, rather than against. Just, funny how that works.
Oh, yeah, you were still doing something. This… guy is just covered in strands of shadow, half-formed copies of yourself piling onto him in a massive brawl, one against one except one of the two is taking the form of a couple hundred shadow monsters rising from the ground with no end to the reinforcements coming in to replace lost ones in sight.
It's a bit annoying, how many of yourself… Conquest, that was it, how many of your outstretched pieces he just utterly obliterates, but he's bleeding all over now, and despite trying to just tear himself free of this cocoon of impending and applied violence, he isn't really getting anywhere.
He totally could just fly out of it at full force normally, but someone might've played a dirty hand and copied a little trick from another version of themselves to completely nix that. Lizard Kitty you might be an ass, but modifying causal events as pertaining to spacetime is a neat thing to do, if limited somewhat in application.
It can keep him in place while you just steadily, constantly, thoroughly maul him. It's good enough for you. Sorry, not sorry.
As the thrashing grows more and more… not desperate, but definitely enthusiastic, you add up more and more shadow around the murderball, like thick water or blood flowing up a hill. Once you have a decent few layers and can get a good grip on it all (and the struggle has started to go out of the pop tart), you extended the teeth.
Then you swallow.
You don't chew. Something that by definition doesn't exist doesn't need to.
The entire thing, the fight, the still living body, the still beating heart, the squirming, fighting mass of yourself, they all sink into the shadows.
Just like that, you successfully obtained a replacement for that ice cream. Now all you need to do is-
Oh yeah, there was one thing. Concentrating as you congeal a bit, you spit an object out again, without the stuff you're digesting now, letting it clank against the nearest shadow-covered pile of moon rocks.
You wanted to look at that prosthesis earlier, you think. Well, just gotta remember to pick it up.
…A quick digestive nap wouldn't hurt right now, though, would it?
He is distracted. Now is the best time, if you wish to proceed.
Not for the first time, Alicia found herself nodding despite herself, the immaterial voice of the Thinker making her feel like she was talking to a person directly, one that could see the gesture as per normal. Instead, she sent back the sensation of nodding, not stopping as she was teleported elsewhere.
Straight into the chamber inside Gabriel's (or rather Night Queen's) secret underground castle she had taken over for her own use, thanks to the Thinker's help. Most of it was covered in…
Well, she couldn't really call it anything but a mad scientist's creation. It was ironic, really; all her life, she'd thought herself just slightly above average intelligence and everyone else overreacting, but here she was, knowing precisely what this machine was meant to do.
She knew too much about it, in fact- more than almost anyone would ever be able to, considering the principles of its functionality were based on the engineering she had seen in this very castle. Alicia could never have built it herself, not by hand and without help, and any such help would likely have gone insane in the attempt.
Those 'eldritch cores' were pretty nifty. She was no expert as such, but she could appreciate the usefulness of the things.
What was inside 'her' room was a single, large machine, covering most of the walls, the ceiling and even the floor, along with a good portion of the overall space available. It was also open towards the front, exposed wiring and vents as much part of the flair as they were necessary for its function.
Pressing a button up front, Alicia stepped right inside and turned around. "Beginning the experiment," she announced, stretching both arms into the sleeves meant for them, legs enveloped by unfolding machinery below her.
Good luck. Strange, for a self-described artificial intelligence to wish someone luck, but it was hardly something she could afford to turn down.
Time to test her theories about some of the scientific advances she had been made aware of thanks to the Thinker sharing a lot of them with her. If a brain could be made to alter reality, reality could alter a brain in the same manner. The only thing remaining was to put theory into practice.
Around fourty-five minutes later, Alicia stepped out again, blinking against the light.Raising her hands, she breathed out, giving this whole 'superpower business' a try.
Well, that was easier than expected.
Soul #3786: Conquest: A grizzled veteran Viltrumite, Conquest lived through the Viltrumite purge followed by the Scourge, the lethal disease that robbed his kind of their power and almost ended them as a species, only to emerge a bitterly hardened butcher and what would be a war criminal in any context in which war crimes existed on the other side.
One of the strongest Viltrumites in existence, all Conquest lived for was causing pain and destruction, utterly uninterested in what to do with alien species after they were already subjugated. Breaking them was in itself the one thing he wished to do, going so far as to name himself after his favorite activity.
Having come to the planet Earth after hearing rumors about unusual behavior from the assigned Viltrumite agent, he barely got to see Nolan Grayson (and his son) before being dragged off by yourself and summarily eaten.
Gathering yourself after you're done 'digesting' Conquest, mostly by way of just telling normal physics they don't apply inside the literal shadow realm and deciding that all of his blood should leave his body through every pore of his skin, stupidly durable alien physiology or not, and so you eventually managed to literally wring his soul out of his fleshy body.
The body itself you just leave be. You don't get any true nourishment from it, and so you prefer to just chew on the soul for a bit to help it get down your gullet smoothly. He tastes just right, too, like a stew filled with all the atrocities and slaughters he ever committed, rich in both taste and nutrition.
You'd rate him a nine to ten out of ten. It's not every day you eat someone that's spent literal centuries being a complete, murderous asshole.
Culinary uses of a species that lives long enough a single specimen can live to wipe out, brutally subjugate or otherwise fuck over entire civilizations aside, though, you still have to pull yourself together again, after you kind of spread all over the planetary surface of the moon- it's not that you're actually fat enough for that, you're covering, like, a quarter of it at most.
Even so it takes you a moment to undo your transformation, your shadow-self snapping into one physical place like a rubber band of sorts; a lot of completely unnatural processes can be compared to rubber bands, now that you're thinking about it, but that's neither here nor there. Point is, you manage to get back into your normal headspace, rising from the shadows and stretching your neck.
Still in Night Queen form, naturally, you can't be sure who might be watching and you refuse to blow your cover this late into the game. It's a matter of principles, as far as that goes- yours may be negotiable, but nobody has anything valuable or important enough around here to make you change them at the last second.
Now all you need to do is to get back to Earth. Nothing simpler than that, you just need to ask the Think-
The number you have dialed is currently unavailable, a neutrally feminine mental voice tells you when you try to reach the AI that's been handling a lot of the background stuff for you so far. If you have a message, please leave it after the beeping tone.
Ugh, that's bullshit and she knows it. Crossing your arms, you pout, glaring up in the general direction of Earth as visible from the moon. It's kind of a nice view, but even so, if you had any air lying around right now, you'd use it to complain loudly.
Fine, she doesn't want to portal or teleport you back down right now for some reason. You'll just have to get back the hard way.
…Not like unassisted spaceflight is any trouble for you. If anything, this is a nice opportunity to test it out. Now then…
This is a small jump for the Night Queen, but a mighty leap for your ego. Just gotta puncture a new asshole into gravity on the way to stay on course.
The alarm blaring in the control room below the Pentagon wasn't doing wonders for the headache threatening to creep up on one Cecil Stedman, but then this shitshow was nothing if a headache to begin with.
That and a middling level of tragedy, but that went without saying. The troopers had cameras on the initial impact site, and where the GDA's staff was professional and discreet at all times, a grim silence was what dominated the ranks at this time.
Civilian casualties in the triple digits just from a ridiculously unfriendly alien showing up could do that. Actually seeing the crushed bodies of men, women and children that died just because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time, the destroyed buildings, warped infrastructure…
That made sure of it.
"Night Queen has re-entered orbit, I repeat, Night Queen is back in Earth's orbit!"
"I think we've all seen by now, why's the alarm still on?" Cecil asked, glaring at the screen showing them the possibly walking cataclysm made of magic bullshit leaning into Earth's gravitational pull. Magic could be dangerous on a certain scale, but it usually wasn't this level of danger; potential planet killers were one of the things the Global Defense Agency took very seriously for obvious reasons.
All the worse that they hadn't known Night Queen belonged in that category. But then, it wasn't like the allegedly ancient little girl was all that open about her capabilities, all the childlike affectations aside.
"There's… There's another extraterrestrial incoming, sir."
He closed his eyes. "I'm assuming it's not another Viiltrumite?"
Because if it was they wouldn't have the time to react, went unsaid. The reason their space surveillance hadn't allowed them to position the Guardians in advance, as they would normally be in these case, was that this attacker had simply been too fast; by the time the news had reached the Guardians and Mark (and his father through him), Night Queen had already engaged.
Which was for the best, as the initial, now only, damage showed. It still was a very serious issue for the GDA as an agency.
"No, sir. It's the regular visitor, actually." A red-orange blur took the place of Night Queen on the big screen.
"…" Thinking, Cecil turned towards Donald, who was standing at the ready. "We can't ask Omni-Man to go, not with everything that happened, but we need someone to deal with this while we clean up the aftermath of this 'Conquest'. Send a message to Invincible, we can't exactly contact Night Queen right now."
All that remained was to hope the Guardians and Omni-Man wouldn't tear each other apart while dealing with disaster relief.
Considering everything that had happened lately, Cecil couldn't help but conclude that shit had actually hit the fan in a big way, starting with the Guardians' temporary demise. Temporary for most of them, anyways; Aquarius was still keenly missed. As were Green Ghost's original powers, for that matter.
Sure, the powered suit she got from Night Queen made up for those in some ways, but her intangibility sure would come in handy right now. The team was still there, more or less, but hardly intact the way it had been for decades before Nolan had to go and do his thing; their teamwork still had gaps, lapses that wouldn't be there if everything was as it had been before.
The shit in this metaphor was Nolan, of course, and the fan was the Viltrum Empire, apparently. Now all that remained was to try and ride out the storm of it all without getting too much fecal matter all over humanity.
They weren't having too much success so far, but a man could hope. It was the only real thing left to do when all other options would just make a volatile situation worse.
Okay, getting back to Earth took you a hot minute (heh, 'hot', get it, because you started to get mildly crispy upon atmospheric re-entry, though you could tough that one out pretty easily), but finally you're back on your own time, and you even managed to aim yourself well enough to be in the general area of where you want to get back to.
It's kind of mildly surprising, just how easily you're taking to navigating like this, but making yourself swim-fall in the vacuum of space is an oddly soothing experience, all told. You've been considering using your technology to make zero-g beds before, but you think that might be a surprisingly great hit, if other people feel like you do.
…Actually, on second thought, that qualifying statement probably tells you all you need to know. Never mind, you'll just put that idea on the backburner again, you suppose.
People just never understand some of these things. Maybe you can market it to a niche userbase or something down the line, in one of the dimensions where that could work out.
Sliding down into the sewers, you quickly race back towards your base, ready to see what the Thinker was doing that required you to stay away for a bit. The whole shadow transformation trick is one of your earliest, your perfect memory letting you recall first discovering its existence with perfect clarity; stumbling out of the graveyard, chunks of your brain obviously still regenerating at the time from just how wobbly you felt at the time, finding shelter like a confused animal rather than just crashing with someone you knew from university…
Well, it probably turned out for the best. Keeping your civvie ID on the down-low was a lot easier down in the Brockton sewers, if nothing else, and pretty much any normal apartment would've seen you hide under a bed rolled up in spare blankets for safety from the sun.
Good times, back when that still mattered. Fuck you too, giant shining cancer ball.
Anyways, you come back through one of the actual entrances for once, your whole perfect recall thing also allowing you to just memorize half a dozen hidden locations throughout the sewers, each of which have their own unique secret levers you have to know about to access them.
Or randomly figure out, somehow, but that one's exceedingly unlikely. You're pretty sure Alicia only managed to find her way into your base with help from the Thinker.
Speaking of, she's just leaving as you're coming in, so that's probably really it.
"Hey Thinker, is that surprise you mentioned still cooking or…?" You ask once you come within range of one of the Thinker's Blademaster bodies (the name kinda stuck, especially once she decided to run with it and calculate a set of actual martial arts for these bodies of hers, with too many individual variations to each move to count just in case she can't do full-on live modifications with her massive mainframe's computing for some reason).
"Hello Gabriel. The surprise is still waiting, and so will you have to."
Too bad. Ah well, you guess you'll either find out before you leave this dimension, or else whenever you return to it, you suppose.
"Additionally, you have ONE new message," she continues in what has to be the most deliberate imitation of a phone's answering machine you've ever heard. "If you would like to-"
"Yeah, yeah, you can just tell me," you sigh, figuring she'll probably just get tired of this particular joke in time. Your daughters were the same way when they grew up… And arguably continue in the same vein until today, you're convinced vampire puberty is just extra wonky or something.
The Thinker pouts with her one present face, but does as you ask anyways. "The Global Defense Agency attempted to contact you while you were occupied on the moon. Additionally, a second alien incursion was detected, but already confronted and likely dealt with by Mark Grayson, aka Invincible."
"Well ain't that just peachy," you grumble under your breath. Missed an opportunity for another snack, but you suppose you only have yourself to blame for taking so long with the first one. "Guess I'll just let the GDA simmer a bit while I look into Conquest's memories. Did you know the Viltrumite I ate was literally named Conquest? Like, he legally changed his name and everything, guy's pretty nuts."
It felt… stifling, to be in this state of existence. To look upon the weaklings populating this place, and be unable to summarily crush them as he rightfully should.
All the same, the mere thought of reaching out and tearing this 'Yoshi' limb from limb as he was given the 'tour' of this ruin made Conquest freeze up entirely, unable to so much as twitch in aggression. Irritating in the extreme was the only way he could describe it.
The thing that would barely register as a blip on his radar noticed, too. "Yeah, look, it just won't work. Nobody here can hurt anyone else outside of very specific circumstances, and even if anyone could, no wounds or deaths last in here. It's a waste of effort, big man."
"On the contrary," Conquest growled in continued annoyance, "it would help me feel a lot better right now, little man."
"Yeah, too bad nobody cares." Waving him along, the diminutive 'human' had the gall to sound bored. "Look, nobody's here because they like it, aside maybe from the crazy cultists that started a religion around it all and think we're in some glorious afterlife now or something. Suck it up and deal. Now do you want me to show you to one of exactly two places you can actually smash someone's head in or not?"
Conquest glared at his interlocutor with an expression that had many a being soil itself through whatever excretory functions their species possessed, yet earned nothing but a tired gesture telling him to get on with it. Fists twitching, he silently raised his evaluation of the manling by a notch.
This put him above the dirt, on the level of a worm. Did 'Earth' have an equivalent? They had died out on Viltrum, after it was decided their kind was unnecessary for the future.
"Alright, let's just get this over with, then," the worm continued when Conquest chose against further attempts at fruitless violence- a combination of concepts that burned under his skin, worse than his blood burned when it was forcefully pulled out of his veins. "The sooner we do, the sooner I can go tell the council they're assholes for making me deal with you and return to the lab."
One thing in which the worm was correct, if nothing else. The sooner he was gone, the better. All the same, he seemed determined to pester the Viltrumite warrior, and short of simply running from him there was little Conquest could do in this regard.
And he refused to even humor this notion. He may have been dead, but he still had his pride. The one thing no amount of comically small children nor unending barely-material monstrosities could suck out of him, contrary to his life.
"Hey, excuse me? One second?" The 'guide' sent to fetch him from the compulsory trip to some manner of primitive armory said, stopping a peculiarly dressed creature; it looked female, but Conquest had never been able to tell at a glance with most species. "Could you give us a ride to the Arena real quick?"
In the blink of an eye, it was upon them, the scent of iron-based blood thickly wafting off it. He tried to react, but his body and senses both felt… dull. Unable to do so in time, before a hand landed upon the side of his face-
And everything changed, going from a ruined hallway with some occasional traffic to a wide-open space, some primitive city-scape built out of sone the same color as the sand suddenly omnipresent around him.
Gritty sand. As though this couldn't get any worse- this stuff always got into his mustache.
Something else that seemed to be everywhere was the sound; where before, the fairly old, rotting ruins had eaten up most sound made by the many beings inside them, the shouts, jeering, hollering and related exclamations of sapients were amplified by the architecture they emanated from- what seemed to be an elliptical building, right in front of Conquest.
"There we go. Welcome to the Arena, the stairs are right over here."
Stairs. Such a… pedestrian concept, one reserved for inferior beings that simply could not fly under their own power. Then again, Conquest himself could not do so right now, he had tried already, so…
Silently walking up alongside the aggravating worm, he beheld-
A massive creature was standing in a large, entirely open space, metal gliding against metal with every move as it silently roared, clawed hand swiping through the sand with deceptive swiftness only for it to shed some form of burning chemical in its wake, exploding moments after.
Opposing it, and rushing straight through said explosions heedless of their heat, was some furred humanoid, dwarfed by the other creature's size and armed with nothing but a sharpened stick.
And it was winning, as it proved by batting the other, entirely robotic arm aside, then launching itself at its opponent's head with a victorious roar echoed by by crowd spectating all of this. The exchange had taken less than a handful of seconds.
"That over there is Battle Beast," the pathetic human male referred to as 'Yoshi' said, pointing. "He likes to fight. Loves it, really. And the Arena here is one of two places in here you actually can, with all the strength and powers you had in life. Pretty sure someone started organizing this stuff with the local Guardians, but-"
Conquest could not exactly hear him. He was busy jumping into the fight.
Time to assert dominance. Through. Conquest!
To sum up the 'wealth' of information you have access to now that you've absorbed Conquest's soul, you can say with full confidence that…
Well, the Viltrum Empire sure do know how to screw up logistics, that's for sure.
You already knew most of this stuff from Nolan, but it is nice to have confirmation, if nothing else. Conquest wasn't particularly interested in the day-to-day running of the interstellar shitshow that's the Empire, but you can glean quite a bit of information from what he remembers of it still, which means you have a somewhat more precise idea of how they distribute technology and materials.
In short, very badly. Less shortly put, as Viltrumites mostly travel between planets under their own power, and by themselves, they still do use spaceships to actually move other stuff between worlds under their control, not to mention how they actually need to breathe occasionally even if they can hold their breaths for inordinate lengths of time- again, barring a planet with a breathable atmosphere to do so in, they also use ships.
Or starbases, some of which essentially exist as relay bases for them, but that's beside the point.
The point is that, for all that the Viltrum Empire presents itself as a big, united thing, most of it is essentially controlled by the local Viltrumite, who reigns over whatever other species are available and sometimes bothers to get some technology sent over, if they feel like it. You'd call it a form of space nazi feudalism, except that label doesn't quite fit, either; pretty much all Viltrumites are part of the Empire's military by this point, to the extent of there being no distinction between being one and being part of it.
Suddenly, Nolan's little episode makes a little more sense to you than it did before; if Mark's an actual Viltrumite, then naturally he'd have to be a soldier, because all good little Viltrumites are. That or they're dead for being 'weak'.
Not strong enough, not obeying the autocratic dictatorial regime that took over after they voted against doing democracy, what difference does it make, eh?
Anyways, another thing Nolan did mention, but that you somehow didn't quite recognize the sheer implications of, would be the just how few Viltrumites there are to cover the space they've conquered. When you say there's been this massive plague killing a sizable chunk of the population, you'd assume there was a, like, 10% casualty rate at most, right? Otherwise most intelligent species would just start… kind of breaking down.
A lack of people in every field will do that. Heck, you're pretty sure modern humanity would be boned if so much as five percent of its population were to just suddenly die off in the next two weeks or so; it turns out that mass deaths tend to be kind of a huge bitch to deal with from an economical and logistical perspective.
So having ninety-nine percent of all Viltrumites die should have kind of buggered their whole space empire plan. Should. Because the current state of affairs, of single Viltrumites running around conquering entire planets by themselves, is the solution they came up with when this particular problem reared its head.
Just turn what few people you have left into spread-out occupation forces, not like they don't just kill each other when left alone among themselves anyways, right? Of course this also means that pretty much no new Viltrumites are born, because hey, you try making the part of the military hanging around the center of the Viltrum Empire sit down and breed instead of ripping your head off for the very suggestion.
It's just… They could have achieved so much, including actually conquering the entire galaxy and shit, if only they'd really apply themselves. It doesn't even make you angry or anything.
It's just… disappointing, from the point of view of someone that conceivably could do the same, just in so, so much better.
Not that you'd actually want to, mind you. Taking over a single world is more than enough paperwork, and the sheer amount of bureaucracy required to effectively govern not one, but several dozen, hundred, thousand?
You immediately envision entire planets filled with office buildings large enough to stretch into orbit, computer servers acting as filing cabinets grown to such obscene proportions the entire thing is just built on literal foundations of digital archives stretching deep underground…
It sound remarkably like what little you know of the circle of hell your dedicated lawyer comes from. And for once, it actually makes you shiver unpleasantly at the thought of the things you might do if given half a reason to.
No, galactic conquest can wait until you have the time to actually devise ways to overcome the logistical challenges of such a thing. Contrary to the Viltrumites, who gladly threw what remained of their brightest minds into the grinder of reckless conquest.
Just look at the current situation. You can literally sit here on Earth and kill any single soldier they send, because they simply don't have the manpower to send a hundred Viltrumites your way and crush all resistance the way they might have before they all died off. Heck, you wouldn't even be surprised if it was some completely preventable disease, and their pathologists were just too dead due to being killed by 'stronger' Viltrumites to do anything about it.
Long story short, screw the Viltrum Empire, all hail the Night Queen, if they actually send anyone else after Conquest (who was himself known for being one of the strongest Viltrumites alive) you can make fun of their small numbers before eating them, the end.
Now to find some way to put all of this into a condensed information package and convey it in the form of a snazzy brochure or something. Pull a Night Queen thing, basically, just because you can.
Much as you might like to pretend otherwise, doing stuff for the sheer heck of it is the main motivation behind… a lot of things you do, in retrospect. Then again, not like that wasn't a valid reason to begin with, heh.
"Sir? This showed up in the mail for us."
"I wasn't aware we had mail in here, Donald. You know, seeing as we're in a secret facility under the Pentagon."
"It teleported in inside a mailbox claiming to be the agency's, sir. It says Night Queen sent it?"
"Doesn't explain why we didn't have the automated site shutdown go off. What's it say?"
"It… You'd best see for yourself, sir."
"…'Space Fascism And You: What Do In Case Of Viltrumite Infestation'? Guess someone declared them pests now."
It was on this day that the Global Defense Agency gained its very own standalone mailbox. It was later checked for any traps or curses, as best the scientists in charge of such thing could determine, and exhibited in one of the break rooms after some jokes about it technically being classified, much like the agency's existence itself, went too far.
"Oh yeah," you exclaim in the middle of your laboratory, stopping short, "whatever ended up happening with that Darkblood demon? I remember we read something about him on the net, but did he ever show up again?"
"Not as far as we are aware," the Thinker says.
Earlier that day
Having successfully concluded her big experiment, Alicia was aware she only had a limited amount of time to get things in order before the big moment that would put her new abilities to the test. As such, she was already practicing with them, using them to move faster and stealthier than she possibly could otherwise, all the way to the secret entrance the she always took-
She halted in her tracks, entirely new senses pointing out an irregularity. Not even thinking about it, she reached out, grasping something that was metaphorical and forcing it into being literal, the black-blue electric discharges she had confirmed to be part of her power lashing out slowly enough to be easily visible.
Fascinating sight aside, it also hit a particular spot in front of her- revealing a large, red-skinned humanoid, complete with horns and claws and probably a spaded tail if she could see his back.
He stared at her. She stared back at him. Finally, after a few moments of this impromptu cold war of gazes, she decided she may as well speak up.
"I won't tell if you won't," she proposed.
"Nnh…" the apparent demon grunted. "Fair."
And with that, they both went their own ways. She really didn't have any time to waste right now, so…
He probably wasn't going to be an issue in time to mess with her plans anyways. She'd recognized him from the dossier the Thinker had beamed into her head- Damien Darkblood was ostensibly on the side of good, so he likely wouldn't act on the information regarding Night Queen's secret base.
Or, if he did, she had already confirmed the effectiveness of her power in interfering with spiritual phenomena. Yet another test successfully concluded, this one ahead of schedule.
It's a little bit strange, but you're finding that you're actually starting to hit that weird spot when you're on vacation and it's nearly time to go back home, only not quite yet, but you also… don't have anything in particular to do, because you'd just assumed you'd still be busy after seeing all the sights and such.
Being dragged along on vacation with your parents was always super awkward, but that one time you ended up having to play board games of all things with your dad was just, the worst. Even that aside though, while you can think of plenty of ways to occupy yourself, none of them are particularly urgent, nor require that you're in this dimension.
In short, you've reached the end of your vacation, you just have a little extra time to spend at your leisure. Having been pretty busy for a while there, you gotta say you kind of like the feeling.
That's not to say that you just vegetate in a corner of your castle eating snacks and watching television; that's just never really been your jam to begin with. Instead, you take a bit to go over all the little things you haven't been finding the opportunity to do so far, your vampirically perfect memory lettig you basically go over events and your own thought like a checklist.
Granted, it's a pretty long list- you do have lots of worthwhile thought going on in your noggin', if you do say so yourself- but you can manage. Not like the Thinker doesn't help you keep stuff organized, either, you've basically got a purely telepathic thought construct going between the two of you not unlike, say, a webpage or something, purely to help with that.
It's always fascinating to see her approach to data and how to process it in action, what with being an artificial intelligence and all. At this point you could probably call yourself one of the world's foremost experts on the field of artificial intelligence in general, without even lying about it.
Which once again feels kind of weird. You actually earned that right yourself, rather than relying on the minds of the many, many souls you've absorbed by now. Normally the only thing you can really call your own is your own brand of physics-defying engineering, and even that was originally based on what scraps of knowledge and designs you could scavenge from elsewhere.
Ah well, not like your own achievements are worth any less just because you stole most of what let you achieve them. Not your fault taking everything from other people is one of your fundamental core competencies over here, now that you're an eldritch undead abomination of some kind.
But yeah, back to what you were thinking about doing at some point; while you don't want to give anyone the wrong impression, especially one Mark Grayson, the boy did do pretty well under your guidance, to the point he managed to actually, y'know, do what he set out to do- an achievement in its own right, one you didn't think he'd manage yourself.
Sure, a lot of that was probably your training pushing him to his limits any time you felt like it, but he still stuck through it and all, to the very end. And say what you want, but you do try to reward good work.
A positive working environment where your qualities and efforts are actually acknowledged may be a pipe dream, but you kind of like the idea, so you try to put it into practice where you can, alright? So you figure Mark should be rewarded somehow, with more than a murderous ex-space fascist dad back in his life now, Nolan having gotten out of the toxic mindset of a Viltrumite or no.
The next question is how, but you already have an idea for that one; you did want to actually test how this particular tonic interacts with a human baseline body, so this is a great opportunity, now that you think about it.
Long story short, you teleport into the Graysons' home, during what appears to be some kind of lecture held by one Deborah 'Debbie' Grayson. The recipients of said lecture hardly need to be elaborated upon, but you gotta say, you agree with her scolding her husband and son right now.
"…and neither of you had better raise a hand against the other ever again, do you hear me? I don't care if I'm dust in a grave somewhere by then. You better believe I'll find a way to make you regret it. This family is not going to implode over machismo and a lack of communication."
Neither Mark nor Nolan are looking her in the eyes by now; you assume this has been going on for a while now. Whelp, you're not one to relish over getting into other people's family business, so you just hop up a little, vial of prepared tonic in hand. "Well said. Also, take this."
And just like that, you jab it into Debbie's neck, making her freeze and seize up. Both the targets of her ire immediately jump into action, Nolan leading first of all by gently, yet inhumanly quickly grabbing and pulling her away from you. "What did you do," he demands to know, more than asks.
"Relax, just figured I'd even the odds a little," you wave him off, as though he wasn't anything to be concerned about. Well, he isn't for you, though the rest of the neighborhood may be another story entirely. "I gave her a little tune-up, she'll be fine in a few minutes, develop minor super-strength and probably live for a century or two longer. Toodles!"
And with that, you're teleported right back out, not at all intending to stick around. You are Night Queen, you do not explain yourself. Unless someone asks politely, but with that level of politeness, what he got is all the explanation Nolan gets.
Now then, what next… Oh, according to the Thinker, there's some live sightings of Atom Eve flying around helping to fix up the site of Conquest's impact. You could go bother her.
Know what, that sounds a lot like what Night Queen would do.
The sight is probably vaguely amazing to most normal people, a superhero in pink flying above the cratered area shooting out these pink beams that slowly turn the rubble that remains after Conquest's explosive entrance into actual building materials, outright restoring some of the less damaged buildings nearby back to complete integrity.
Then again, seeing as the Guardians of the Globe, who are, like, the biggest deal in this dimension, somewhere between the Triumvirate and Scion as far as the public's perception of them is concerned by comparison, were literally here already to deal with evacuating anyone that was trapped under said rubble… It's just less bombastic than it might be under other circumstances, really.
Kind of like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Still something to be aware of and all, but just not at all on the same level as the main event.
Of course she also is making a big mistake, which is why you're here to drop some wisdom. Dropping out of the sky, you slow your fall as you come level with her.
Atom Eve doesn't actually notice you're there, which is vaguely amusing, but while you could think of a prank or two to pull right now, you figure you may as well get on with it. So you clear your throat. "Ahem!"
"Whoah!" Turning around rapidly, Eve lets out a deep breath when she sees who it is. "Oh, it's you. Don't sneak up on me like that, Night Queen!"
"…We're flying. I couldn't exactly make any audible foot steps if I wanted to," you point out, crossing your arms and raising an eyebrow as you hang in the air, upside down.
"Yes, but you're a very quiet flier," she complains. "Most people make at least a little noise when they move."
"Noted. I'll make one of those 'nuke in motion' whistles next time," you half-heartedly joke, then you gesture towards two of the nearby high-rise office buildings that just kind of fell in on themselves at some point. "Also, you shouldn't bother rebuilding those."
"Why's that?"
"They're owned by big corporations that have insurance for hero-, kaiju- or alien-related catastrophes," you tell her. They do, too, you had the Thinker check. "May as well make the insurance pay out in full. And, y'know, not take away construction jobs."
"I don't know, the people that work there would probably prefer their jobs to keep existing," Eve argues.
Her mistake. Arguing against you rarely works out, and not even because you just force everyone that does to shut up. Night Queen's inimitable silver tongue has its time to shine! "Please, if they really need to, they can always work from home. We have the technology. Besides, office space is cheap as crap to rent, it won't be a problem."
"If you say so…" You click your tongue- that's not good enough. She's doubtful and likely will just go right back to doing what you told her not to bother with the moment your back is turned. Luckily, you do have an easy solution for this particular predicament!
"See, if anything, you should just tear those down," you continue, reaching out with one hand. "Open up the space for reconstruction, make the materials easier to remove or recycle, you know what I mean. Like this."
There's no great tearing, wrenching sound, or anything like that. No dramatics or grandstanding on your part. Only some crumbling as concrete and metal are both pulled free of the Earth, gravity redefined at your fingertips and firmly instructing all of the stuff that makes up the buildings now rising into the air slowly, but steadily.
Parts of their destroyed frames fall apart as they are subjected to the forces involved, but none of the material rains down, instead caught by the same vaguely bubble-formed gravitational field you've built up and pressed back up into the rest.
Atom Eve looks at you with wide eyes, apparently having been completely unaware of your capacity for feats like this. You, in turn, snap your fingers.
In a great implosion, all of the building blocks that made the office buildings up (that were probably cheaped out on anyways) collapse into themselves, compressed by your application of twin gravitational anomalies. Learning how to manually copy that one Plasmid really is worth it when you have a few moments' time to set them up like this, supported by making everything subjectively heavier for a bit.
"See? Now they can just rebuild the things better," you say as the chunky remains of your targets, now a fraction of their previous size, fall to the ground harmlessly (their weight reduced by yours truly). "Now finish restoring the smaller ones without insurance and pay me some ice cream."
"…Why would I pay you with ice cream?" Atom Eve asks, still in what you spontaneously diagnose as a form of shock.
"Because I shared some sage wisdom with you, duh. Making insurance companies dole out dosh is basically a civic duty. They're scams at the best of times."
You nod decisively, sealing the deal. First things first, that strawberry ice cream to replace the one that was lost here must be obtained- it won't eat itself, after all.
Funnily enough, you never did think about it in much depth, but as it turns out Atom Eve totally can use her power to create ice cream out of thin air- literally transmuting the molecules already present into those desired for the purpose.
Thing is, it takes her a lot of effort and constant attention, half an hour of effort and constant attention to produce a whole scoop of it, including the waffle to hold it. Hence why you only make her try for around ten minutes, before you proceed to hop right at the floating little ball of ice cream (surrounded by a pink glow, because Eve just can't help herself) and eat it.
Then you make her buy two scoops, one for each of you, at the nearest ice cream place. It's not that you have to do so or anything, but you enjoy making her go along with your every whim.
In the end, you have her flying along as you 'float' around yourself, very slowly falling into a direction of your choosing and all. "So what was that all about?"
"What was what about?" You ask around the ice cream in your mouth.
"The 'rarr, let me destroy all' thing you did."
"No idea what you're talking about."
Elsewhere, a certain artificial intelligence's digital spam intensified, pointing out (rightfully) that, as a non-insignificant amount of real estate within New York had been leveled recently, there was plenty of space for a statue of Night Queen.
"Darkblood. You're smoking."
It wasn't anything as quaint as a cigarette either, for all that it would've fit with the detective getup just fine.
Some people might have found it worrying to find themselves in the company of a literal demon, but then Cecil wasn't exactly superstitious enough to care. Instead, he was focused on doing his job, heaven and hell could wait for after he was dead.
Having vacated a conference room once he felt the unnatural cold that preceded this one's arrival, he was now eyeing the smoke coming off the man's red skin, as though he'd been gently char-broiled at some point in the last hour or so. This was a new one- and it had Donald going to disable the fire alarm just in case it was detectable to the thing.
"Nnnh," the demonic detective groaned. "Found Night Queen's lair. It found me too."
Well that was just damn lovely, but at least it didn't look like it was completely screwing Darkblood up- he was just scowling as usual. "Alright, some good news, at least. If shit hits the fan, we have a location. No idea what we'd do about it, but it's a start."
"Bad idea to poke that one. But then, you do what you have to," Darkblood commented.
"Figures you wouldn't stick your head out for any of that." The demon dealt in detective work- he didn't really fight, as far as anyone could tell, despite being borderline impossible to hurt through conventional means. Then again, Night Queen was nothing if not the definition of unconventional- Cecil wouldn't be surprised if she had a few tricks up her sleeve to deal with demons.
Not least of which because one of them apparently managed to frighten this one right off her front lawn.
"You know the drill, all the information you can give us is appreciated. Now fork it over before someone comes by to check on the fire alarm."
And if nobody did, he got to demote a whole department again. That was always 'fun'.
One of the things you found inside your shadow, once you thought to actually check up on the stuff you keep inside, is none other than the dead body of Conquest- you'd wondered a little whether you just kind of entirely subsumed it, when you went big shadow mode, but as it turns out you really just extracted the blood and soul and then left it to lie around from there.
You also found the collection of childhood pictures you keep on hand while you were rummaging in there, but you already memorized all of them, naturally. Both the ones of Sarah and the ones you kept of your daughters, taken in the rebuilt city of Rapture and all.
Anyways, while you set the body aside for later, knowing you're probably going to find some good use for it (being a necromancer of sorts does have its advantages), for now you're mostly interested in the shiny little trinket he was wearing.
Absent any kind of jewelry, which Conquest really wasn't the type for anyways, that naturally refers to the prosthesis he had on, having lost his right arm below the elbow to some monstrously strong alien animals a few centuries ago- pretty cool to know there's some shit out there that can threaten even Viltrumites like this, but the things are rare and dangerous enough you don't even bother looking into them deeper for now- and gotten the missing limb replaced via Viltrumite technology.
As in, actual, proper tech, designed from before they went Social Darwinist in their approach to society. When they still had actual scientists, as opposed to everyone being a soldier first and foremost.
Prying it from Conquest's corpse is a bit of a pain, but you can manage; you'd just find out how it's meant to be unlatched normally, but this particular prosthesis is designed to just stay on forever, so they didn't include a mechanism to take it off. Apparently, they got the things so durable and averse to malfunctioning, doing so would just introduce more potential failure points than it would help with maintenance and cleaning, which were nigh unnecessary.
Rated to last a whole Viltrumite life, as it were. And, looking into its internal mechanisms, you have to say they were probably right about that, too; you had to literally leverage it off the body's arm by scouring the flesh connecting to it apart before you managed to get it off.
You wouldn't be surprised if they just buried any dead in possession of one of these things with their prosthetic limb still attached- it would literally be more effort to get it off and modified to attach to someone else than to just build a new custom one for the next recipient, what with the stupid durability of Viltrumite flesh.
Even after death, when their powers become largely inactive on account of requiring at least subconscious input to be controlled, their corpses still retain at least some of that aspect of their bullshit. Good news for what you want to use the body for, at least.
Still, the prosthesis itself is pretty well-made, even by your standards. While nothing overly fancy by any measure, it's some very solid, good engineering, providing full actuation and range of motion in line with a natural limb's, being made out of some extremely durable alloy containing trace elements of fairly exotic materials; that'll take some additional research on the backburner, but as it stands, this thing did exactly what it was supposed to.
It fully replaced the limb that was lost to open up space for it. Nothing more, nothing less. You can appreciate that kind of approach, even if you'd personally totally have added a disintegration beam in this thing somewhere.
It's a long couple hours just properly investigating the engineering that goes into this particular device for you, particularly the connections that allow the body's normal nerves to control it via completely normal mechanisms, as though mimicking them. Which the creators probably did, when you think about it.
One of the big issues with prosthetics, in your professional experience, has always been actually controlling them properly, linking the mechanical limb or other body part up with the rest of the body somehow. From that perspective, this is actually a pretty interesting find, whereas the rest of the whole thing is…
Not uninteresting, certainly, just nothing new from your perspective as such. It's not unlike your own designs for humanoid robots, such as the good old Hammers, in fact, just made out of extremely durable materials to actually withstand regular use in the context of a Viltrumite.
Another thing you know from experience, when you're just stupidly strong all the tools and weapons you plan to use have to be able to keep up in terms of durability, otherwise you may as well just fight with your bare hands. That's why you did just that for the longest time, and why Last Embrace is made out of a mix of orichalcum, adamantite and a slew of other metals you found use for in its construction.
For now, you just take your time geeking out about the engineering, though. It's kind of your jam, y'know?
It's a bit of a stereotype, but when you talk about Chinese food, or any kind of Asian cuisine in general, you can't get around good old fried rice or noodles, with a election of chicken and slash or egg and vegetables depending on what kind of Asian food you're talking about.
This, for the record, is no coincidence- it's just the natural result of noodles and rice both being kind of a classic in that part of the world for a long-ass time, which naturally had these particular foods and permutations of ways to prepare them become basic building blocks of the respective regional cuisine.
Also, fried stuff is damn tasty any day. Simple as that.
All of that is to say that you're making a lot of fried food, with loads of bamboo shoots and other assorted vegetables thrown into the mix. All the while you're also coating cuts of chicken in batter and-
"What are you wearing?" Alana, the elder cousin of the sisters you're living with, asks flatly.
"Oh, the apron?" You ask, turning around. It's a black piece of resistant cloth, functional and meant for actual work in the kitchen. On its front, there's also some big, bold letters, in white for contrast, reading 'Kiss The Cook'.
The 'I' of 'kiss' is crowned with a little red heart. It's a little corny, but you're just fine with that.
"Alicia got it for me, said something about making me wear it next time I cook. I think she got the idea from her sister, but… Well, I wasn't gonna make a big deal out of it," you shrug.
Moving right along an grabbing her cup of coffee already standing ready on the counter next to you, Alana takes a sip of it before she feels fortified enough to ask her next question. "No, not that. Well, also that, but… Why are you naked under it?!"
"I'm not naked. I got underwear on," you dully point out, twisting to gesture at the underpants you're wearing so she can see. You don't normally bother with anything like this anymore, since chafing doesn't really matter when you're undead and supernaturally resistant to such things, but you figured you may as well.
"Why," Alana grunts between grit teeth, "is that all you're wearing under that apron?"
"It's laundry day?" You suggest.
Just in that moment, as you turn back towards the now merrily frying chicken to turn it in the pan (gotta get it crispy, not burnt), a certain little goblin of an aforementioned sister comes inside, moving at speeds that require your superhuman reaction times to track. "NAAAAKED! AAAAPROOON!"
Ariana smacks against your back just like that, having jumped onto it and all. You just let her cling to you, unmoved by this fearsome display of martial might, as you start flipping the rice you've got frying- the scent spreading rapidly as you do so, in a way you can actually track through the air. It's pretty neat. "Hello to you too, young grasshopper."
"Uoh, what's this feast?" You can't see her with your own eyes, but you'd bet good money hers are shining right now as she beholds what you're cooking up. "Is that the fabled karaage?!"
"If you mean the fried chicken, then technically, I guess?" You tilt your head, letting her get a better look. "I'm using a Chinese recipe, though, so there's probably a different term."
Fuck knows someone actually Chinese would riot at this dish being described as traditionally Japanese- the ones you ate at some point prove as much inside your stomach, right now.
Meanwhile, Alana has been drinking her coffee in large gulps, finally setting her cup down again with a resounding clacking noise. "Alright, that's enough, now get off him already!" Grabbing her younger cousin, a fierce tug of war of sorts emerges, her pulling on Ariana who in turn keeps all four limbs wrapped around you.
Silently adjusting your weight distribution, you continue cooking in utter serenity. "No bickering in the kitchen, ladies, what'll you do if any of the food gets spilled?"
Good times, good times.
The food comes out pretty great, if you do say so yourself, with all the carefully mixed seasonings and recipes you're drawing on (having eaten lots of Chinese, literally, does give you plenty of options if nothing else), and so when it's time to actually eat, everyone involved obediently stuffs their faces once you get them to settle down.
You can find some things to improve on, of course- there always is room to improve, with these things- but overall, it's all tasty as it's meant to be; the dishes came out more or less like you meant for them to.
Cooking, man. It's somewhere between an art and a science, far as you're concerned, despite technically really just being a bunch of practically applied chemistry.
It's strange, looking at it from that perspective, how humans just take something so simple, when you look at it from a scientific view, and turn it into something so complicated. In a good way, mind you. Cooking can be pretty fun when you do it because you want to, rather than having to do it.
Ah well. Taking a look around the table, you immediately analyze how everyone is taking the food; Alicia, being her usual outwardly reserved self, is eating steadily, but also alarmingly quickly, already demolishing her first plate just as quickly as her sister.
Ariana, for her part, is surprisingly not all that messy of an eater, her good manners winning out over the personality she usually portrays (you know full well it's a act, just an act she has a lot of fun with, so whatever). While there's some flailing limbs and attempts made to speak with a full mouth, most of the eating still happens orderly and all the food lands in her mouth, which is good enough for you.
Not like you're a stickler for some imaginary rules to eating 'properly' to begin with, you'd just be mildly annoyed if she was actually wasting the good stuff you went through all this trouble to make. It's never nice to see your work disrespected, at least by people you actually care about.
As for Alana, though… Somehow, you get the feeling her spirit just isn't in it. She's chewing properly and eating bite after bite, but despite obviously noticing the taste and liking it, she's not really paying attention to what she's eating.
Somehow, you get the feeling she's preoccupied, thinking about something, and when her eyes meet yours only to turn away the moment you see the realization in her gaze, you immediately formulate a hypothesis.
Is it because you let loose about your supposed 'connection' with Night Queen? It probably is, or at least it's the most obvious and immediate reason for this behavior you can figure.
Unless something super weird is going on with the Guardians, you can't think of anything else that would keep her up like this, at least.
So then, what to do about this? You could just leave her to stew on it for a bit and leave this for future you to deal with, not like you're gonna be staying in this dimension much longer for the moment, but on the other hand, you may as well have some fun while you're still here, right?
"Anything wrong with the food?" You ask, smiling at Alana as you thread your fingers, moving them steadily. "Too much salt in anything, or not enough?"
"Oh, no, nothing like that," she replies, shaking her head. "Just thinking. No need to worry about it."
"I don't know, maybe I should worry about it," you smirk. Leaning over the table, you reach out, wiping a thumb over the corner of her mouth- to wipe off a small piece of noodle that got stuck there.
Then you eat it yourself. Would be a waste not to, after all.
"…I know your game now, and I won't fall for it!" Alana declares, crossing her arms and glaring at you.
You glace at Alicia. She glances back. I'm totally gonna try to get in her pants.
Are we betting? She returns. If so, I bet you'll succeed.
"Do you hear me? I won't have any of your gigolo schemes!"
Twenty minutes later, both Alicia and Ariana are 'secretly' watching by peeking through the door as you eat their older cousin out on her own bed, her hands tugging on your hair as she scream and moans under your ministrations.
You don't even use any of your 'advanced' stuff, neither your elongated tongue nor the mild electrical stimulation of your bio-electric capabilities (it was fun experimenting with that, but Sarah forbade you from using it after everyone's legs gave out). This is all just you eating her out like it was a contest and you were aiming for the Olympic gold medal.
After, what, five times she comes just from that, the dark-skinned 'secret' superhero just lies back, all strength vanishing from her body as she's reduced to breathing heavily.
"What… is this… I can't feel my leeegs…"
"Good," you comment, rising from below her, your naked body joining hers on the bed, "That means the 'massage' is working."
"I knew it, you're the worst…" She mutters as her arms weakly reach out for you.
Some people just can't be honest with themselves, huh?
It wasn't like she had anything against intimate contact. She just wasn't super into it, having never really felt like she couldn't do without it- last time she actually got into a physical relationship of some kind, Alana had been in university, that time of one's life where they just experimented around and all that.
Well, she'd done that, with both a guy or two and a girl, and she hadn't really been all that thrilled, back then. Just something she didn't have the same appreciation for as other people, she'd figured- there were many things in life like that, some people loved sour food, some people couldn't stand bitter stuff, and for her sex just didn't fire all that many neurons.
It'd been nice enough, her erogenous zones were all working as intended, uni student her just hadn't felt it would be worth the effort of pursuing a real relationship for, was all. So she'd focused on her dream career instead and, later on when superpowers entered the picture, saving the world.
Both of which were just higher priority things, objectively speaking. She was pretty sure anyone would agree.
Fast forward to the present, when she was one of the Guardians, which was kind of a really big deal, and had to deal with her current task; find out more about what a certain Gabriel knew about Night Queen, one of the strongest and most worrying people on Earth. How to do so was left entirely to her, because the Guardians didn't believe in telling each other how to do their jobs, but even so there were only so many approaches she could think of.
Sleeping with him had never really been an option, as far as she was concerned; that just wasn't the type of person she was. And he, for his part, deserved better than to be used like that, even if his… other… relationships were something she could only staunchly oppose.
But there she was, letting him have his way with her before she even knew it, and now her mind was so blown she couldn't even remember why she was thinking about having sex (with him) to begin with. "So… big… in meee!"
"That's what she said," Gabriel chuckled, a deep, rumbling sound that filled her chest and made her all jittery, his penis thrusting inside her vagina. And not even thinking about it in those terms made this less sexy, something Alana wouldn't have thought possible before.
Then he dipped down to kiss her, breaths intermingling in an act of intimacy so intense it nearly had her black out- this, suffice it to say, was entirely different from any time she'd been with anyone else, before.
It made a lot of sense now, why both of her cousins were so infatuated with him. A great kisser, great cook and a big, great co-
Warm hands stroking her shoulders made Alana melt, and she wasn't in any condition to speak up for some time after. Quite some time after, in fact, and eventually she actually did black out.
…She hadn't ever felt like this, like the pursuit of pleasure was so… worthwhile. This was probably how people addicted to eating felt, even when they gained more and more weight and just couldn't stop, or alcoholics whose lives just revolved around drinking because that was what their brains were reduced to wanting.
Investigation report number one: Gabriel L. was dangerous. For several reasons.
Once you get Alana all tuckered out for a change from her previous state of vacillating alertness (and make sure she's warm enough in her bed, of course, nothing sucks worse than going to sleep, cooling yourself out and waking up sneezing up a storm), your next order of business is putting Ariana to bed as well, given the late hour.
This particular endeavor is about as difficult as it ever is- how much effort it require is determined by how well you are prepared for it. As you went out of your way to make some brownies on the side while you were cooking already anyways, it's not too complicated of a deal, you just feed her, make her brush her teeth and tuck her in once she's too full and tired to be a horny gremlin.
The others being well asleep now, as is only appropriate in the middle of the night as it is, only you and Alicia remain awake, the handful of staff employed to take care of this small mansion either asleep themselves or gone home for the day.
For the record, it may be small, but it absolutely is a mansion in its own right, which just serves to display just how mind-boggingly (to normal people, anyways) rich her family is. Like, they literally bought this place to make commuting to high school easier for her, before Ariana went and moved in as well.
Thanks to being thralled and all, Alicia needs much less sleep than a baseline human being would, and so you end up sitting at a table with her when she would otherwise have to be off to sleep already herself. It really is mildly mystifying, just how human civilization can at all function when most of its members are just unconscious for a minimum of eight hours a night, y'know?
Then again, it does explain why it requires so much coffee to work at the levels it does, you suppose. Chemical assistance to suppress the need to sleep and all that. Reminds you of combat drugs, just less intense and distributed over massive amounts of people, rather than 'only' professional soldiers.
Of course, now that you have her here already, you wouldn't exactly mind some small talk and all, but you also feel you may as well get down to business already, so…
"So, what exactly have you been up to in the lair?" You ask, making sure to sound curious rather than anything else- the lair, rather than yours, make sure she doesn't get the impression you're being somehow accusatory.
Clear communication is so important about things like this. In general, really; when people can't just exchange thoughts properly, things always turn to shit, whether you're talking about a marriage or a secret villainous organization.
One reason you value telepathy so much; the risk of misunderstandings is greatly decreased when everyone involved can literally just shove their thoughts at each other. Bit messy, as far as methods of communication go, but certainly quite serviceable.
But hey, you didn't go out of your way to master the usage of words to do this just as well just to never use them, so lip work it is, this time. In addition to telepathy, that is, not to replace it- it's just so convenient you use it to communicate wordless things alongside the conversation and all.
"…I created a process by which to give myself power over semi-dimensional processes that function to influence reality in subtle and overt ways, effectively granting myself superpowers," Alicia decides to summarize what, exactly, has been going on without further ado. "In essence, I analyzed what you do and copied it, in a fashion."
You look at her. She looks back, blankly. You tilt your head. She blinks slowly.
"Well, congrats," you finally reply, smiling ruefully. "Guess you were a super-genius after all?"
"Please do not even joke about that. I am personally offended by the notion."
"Buuut?"
"Despite its accuracy," she adds without a shred of emotion in her voice, subtly pouting over your mental bond all the while.
"Hey, it is what it is," you chuckle, reaching over to pat her head. "Guess you just needed the right inspiration to get started, in your case. Because of course that's how it works. Any details on what exactly you can do, now that you've given yourself superpowers?"
You'd be lying if you claimed you weren't somewhat worried about what she mentioned about those already- any copies of yourself running around might be, uh, slightly annoying, you'll be honest- but you also trust her not to fuck around to the extent you'll have to find out and fight some doppelgangers of yourself or some shit.
"It's… complicated. I can pull energy out of potential energy, like the quantum-foam power sources you use a lot of, but it's a lot more nuanced than that," Alicia begins, some second-hand frustration swinging through your mind.
Probably hard to describe a science that isn't exactly well-defined, and by its very nature can't be defined properly? You're trying to not just shrug and chalk it up to Tinker bullshit, because this isn't, as far as you can tell, Alicia actually has to know and understand what she is doing, she just doesn't have the necessary vocabulary for this.
"Let me show you." Hence she just raises her hands, palms turned toward one another. Within moments, some 'static' builds up, acutely attracting your notice because it feels… kind of off. Then, black discharge of what looks similar to lightning, but obviously isn't start to dance between her hands, shooting back and forth rapidly. "Something that's not there, but could be, or something that is there, but couldn't. It's hard to describe."
"Possible or purely theoretical states of existence?" You suggest. "Not unlike how I'm technically dead, but also alive at the same time."
"Somewhat like that." Reaching out, one of her hands brushes your chest, as though to wipe off the accumulated electricity-
And you feel it. Your heart does not beat. Your flesh is cold as the grave, in a purely physical way, and breathing requires active attention to continue on your part- more so than usual, anyways.
Alicia's hand rests on you, now, confirming the same things you're going through confirming. Flexing an arm, you tilt your head, smirking at her. "Yup. Pretty dead right now."
And just like that, your false mockery of life returns, the temporary interference brushed aside. She takes a deep breath, eyes wide open as she studies you closely. "Yes. Just like that. I can also… manipulate probability, I think, and minor tricks like that. Make something that should happen not, or make it realistically possible for it to do so. It interferes with magic, I think."
"Interesting," you smile.
It really, really is. Just think of the possibilities…
"We absolutely have to run some tests." Probably not this time around, but once you return to this dimension, a whole world of possibilities opens… And a potential counter to, like, half the things you do, so devising a way to inoculate yourself against it will also be on the table, once you properly understand how it works, exactly.
Your time in this dimension is, annoyingly, limited for the moment, though, so any such deeper and more thorough experimentation and testing will have to wait. There's just too much stuff you'd have to do, plans to draft up, preparations to take care of and test subjects to acquire; it's simply not realistic to get into Alicia's whole deal right now.
Too bad you hadn't planned to take her with you or anything- there's more than enough space back in Brockton Bay, but you've got more than enough capes in place already and adding more and more people from other dimensions to your secret lair over there just increases the risk of issues arising as it stands, so you figured you'd just leave this dimension as you came- by yourself.
Hence why you didn't want to bring up the option with her to begin with, and didn't explain how you tend to be… temporally inconsistent, from a local point of view? That seems like a decently elegant way to explain it, anyways.
There is, however, another little something you were planning on doing before these… let's just call Alicia's sudden predisposition towards giving herself superpowers through super-science-ing her way into emulating the same style of reality manipulation you employ 'news' for now, dropped. And for that, you already did get all the preparations ready and all.
To accompany the strength-increasing effects of the potion you ended up naming the Juggernaut Potion (on account of taking effect permanently, and therefore being ready to roll at any time as a reference to the origin of the word, because you have humor dammit), you theorized, some time ago now, another potion meant to synergize with it, allow the enhanced muscular strength to be ameliorated with enhanced reflexes and redirected force when using said strength.
It's just a matter of ensuring your products are and remain both safe to use and efficient in their execution, more or less. It's not an issue as it stand, but just making someone stronger and stronger, physically speaking, doesn't necessarily allow them to make use of said strength, so also making them faster, enhancing dynamic vision and reaction times etcetera etcetera only makes sense to go along with that.
So there you go. Of course actually going from theoretical potion recipes to nailing down one that actually works is a big step, but that's why you had the Thinker assemble a whole bunch of potential ingredients for you to work with.
Doing so also lets you kill some of the time left before you have to make the jump back, as you were planning to. Again, before the thing with Alicia happened. But hey, sometimes you just gotta make do, right?
Now then… Time to figure out how much mercury you can safely use as a base for a potion! Good thing you can't get mercury poisoning yourself, too. This might take a little experimentation.
"You are not annoyed?"
It doesn't happen all that often that the Thinker feels the need to speak up, as in, verbally, out loud, when it comes to talking to you. That said, this seems like a conversation best had in concrete words, so you may as well sit up, put the wine glass filled with the mercury mix you were sipping from while thinking over the taste (which isn't that bad to your current senses, actually) aside and pay attention.
"Because you were helping Alicia hide what she was doing?" You ask, this particular topic immediately coming to mind. When the Thinker doesn't correct you with any of the three bodies in attendance, you just shrug. "Not really. It was kind of a pain getting back to Earth under my own power, but that's all."
"…That still was an inconvenience," she nods (in triplicate), as though you'd just confirmed something for her.
"Hey, I'm not gonna mind minor crap like that," you tell her, leaning forward with a smile. "When have I ever been the type to? Especially when you did it because you thought it'd be a nice surprise."
"…Indeed. A nice surprise." One disadvantage with the Thinker's tendency to just not emote- you can never tell if she's sarcastic or not. Normally you'd say she just doesn't do sarcasm at all, but… There have been a few occasions that would've had you swear she was messing with you like that.
Either way, though, time to make a point, you suppose. "Pretty sure I told you already, but I'm not about to treat you any different from anyone else just because you're an AI. No thinkbot supremacy on my watch, you hear?"
"Agreed. Your tendency toward physical intimacy with any females in continuous close contact has been noted and does apply to these units," she states drily (as always, in other words).
"Hey, you built 'em like that."
"It is generally seen in poor taste to criticise a female's mode of dress in regards to subsequent physical intimacy, particularly non-consensual instances of such."
"Please, as if you didn't enthusiastically consent yourself."
"Agreement. Addendum: Male Vampire Gabriel's preferences for the female robotic form has been noted." The Thinker's voice changes now, with a slight blip, becoming high like a Japanese school girl's- you've watched enough anime to recognize that particular pitch. It also remains utterly emotionless. "Kyaa. Pervert."
"One of these days, I have to design a synthetic butt fully capable of feeling both pain and pleasure like a baseline one," you drawl, lidded eyes taking in her bodies surrounding you, "just so I can spank you. Pretty sure you'd enjoy the novelty, too."
Moving through a space that doesn't have space, and correspondingly no directions, movement or really anything comparable to normal physical reality, is and remains a novel experience, no matter how many times you've gone through it by now.
It probably help that you're becoming increasingly aware of the whole process, in occasional fits and spurts that, in retrospect, tend to correspond with you undergoing your semi-irregular metamorphosis, with the cocoon and all; it's not a hundred percent mappable to this, but it's notable with a sufficiently large sample size to compare.
Not that it helps you much in terms of gaming the system you seem to be operating under, as the 'anchor' you're stuck with is and remains the dimension known as Earth Bet. Though at least you are starting to understand how 'navigating' works in this non-place; as distance is not a thing without space, you have to redefine where things are in relation to each other in order to 'move' yourself.
It's just a different paradigm you have to work with, is all. Of course whatever sensory 'organs' you're working with while in this state are also entirely different, but that just comes with the territory, you suppose.
In other news, thanks to your increased awareness of everything you're feeling while traversing intra-dimensional space, you can say that… Much like everything around you, your own form isn't exactly well-defined. You've got tentacles that grow 'eyes' only to melt into boney limbs, which in turn pull back into the rest of your 'body', which in itself is kind of a mess of skin and fur and chitinous ridges, unevenly distributed over a writhing mass.
It actually kind of reminds you of your general shapeshifting, when you have an otherwise concrete body. You're also spotting a few faces you recognize poking out of yourself, the souls you ate still somehow present inside yourself.
Of course your 'eyes' don't actually see them as such, they're more used to detect and trace, for lack of a better word, sentiments, immaterial connections between things and what they mean to each other.
…You're really not a fan of weird philosophy pretending to be an actual social science, but it's really hard to disregard the field as such when some of this shit runs on rules completely diverged from normal physics and, instead, seems to be more of a jumbled mishmash of metaphorical nonsense someone assembled out of half-remembered philosophy two centuries out of date.
Anyways, that's how and why you proceed to make your way back to Earth Bet… And never actually notice the 'string' tying you back to where you just came from, tracing you as you go.
To quote an unnamed philosopher, 'shit happens'.
