You just went and mashed up all the soul bits you could milk from your current stable of bloodbags to add to your current stores of the stuff- which just so happens to be full, again.
Some of the others have also taken to using fragments extracted from souls, but you can't exactly ask them to act as storage batteries for the stuff, they have their own crap going on. Maybe you should get back to mixing a few of the things to see what you get, that's always been fun enough to do.
Incidentally, you do sometimes exchange soul fragments with other vampires, but mostly just so you can combine those that they themselves can't yet before giving them back. The twins often like to play around with them, so you're lending them a hand and all.
There is, as usual when you have some extra time inside your inner world, an abundance of things to get done as you sink into it, some of which you immediately delegate as is only appropriate. Mainly towards Yoshi and his little gang, who continue to be the ones most scientifically inclined inside the little microcosmos built out of your accumulating victims.
Which leads to many technological developments as you use your little hidden chamber inside the laboratory to evade the patrols of cultists trying to find and worship you, letting you simply not deal with that whole headache and actually concentrate a bit instead. Yes, you know why they're doing this, or you can at least reconstruct a general timeline beginning with that time you ate one Simon Wales and things spiraling out of control from there.
Rapidly so. To the extent you didn't even notice when a part of the souls that make up a part of yourself started considering you some kind of hybrid between god and Satan. Which is no mean feat, as you are literally in a kind of semi-hivemind with all of them subordinate to your greater will.
Ugh, anyways, science is done, progress is achieved. One of the things you finished working on is a little upgrade for your robots, once again making the BAT model important in actual combat situations, or like, more so than usual anyways.
Simply put, you still had that VATS thing lying around, a program plus associated hardware meant to be part of a Vault Boy, all stolen from Earth Fallout. Integrated into your robots, it increases average accuracy by a few percentiles, which is good enough of a reason for you to do just that- and, more importantly, using their already existing real-time combat cooperation via wireless connection, you can let one of them use the VATS based upon the targeting data of other robots that see the target.
It lets them shoot at people without being within sensor range themselves. They also grow more accurate the more of them are seeing the target, which shall allow for some very pleasant increased lethality whenever you get back to Remnant and see if your local robot army can't be upgraded a bit.
That said, you're personally much more excited about the other piece of technology you've managed to bring to a usable state. The one that you are, in fact, testing out right now, using Yoshi has a test subject.
"Three and a half seconds," you nod, ignoring the much more accurate measurement apparatus determining that he has once again landed. "That makes somewhere between two to six seconds of complete weightlessness with every use so far."
"I think I'm gonna throw up," your test subject notes. "Everything is spinning…"
"A bit of nausea is to be expected," you shrug.
The piece of tech you're testing, for the record, is your newly devised gravity negation gauntlet, a fun little device consisting of a bunch of really delicate machinery covered by a shell of hard material for safety and wrapped around the user's elbow joint, lower arm and hand, with the palm serving as a targeting point.
It's pretty simple to use, which is the most important part for this kind of stuff. Just activate, point palm at target and target loses most of its weight for several seconds, as you have just proven.
"Next test," you say, moving around the blank white room meant exactly for this kind of thing, the only noticeable object inside of it aside from yourself and Yoshi being a large metal crate. Which you now position between yourself and Yoshi. "Let's see how it works in practice, such as a firefight. If this works, it very well could be a whole new solution to the age-old issue of 'cover'."
"I protest… against this method of… experimentation…" Being turned almost completely weightless and floating around aimlessly before coming back down to the ground repeatedly seems to have rattled Yoshi more than expected. Which is good, more experimental data!
"Protest noted and summarily ignored," you say, making the carte weightless. "Now let's see…"
You pull out a simple gun, firing it at the crate. the bullet impacts, penetrating the outside layer and losing momentum so it only does so once, rather than coming out the other side. The crate, suddenly subjected to a considerable physical force and not possessing the weight that would normally hold it in place, becomes a large metal battering ram that slams into the person standing behind it.
Or, as Yoshi eloquently puts the physical processes leading up to this moment: "OUFH!"
He doesn't get completely crushed, but is definitely thrown around a good bit.
"I'm alive! I think I broke my arm, though."
"Perfect, that's about what I predicted," you nod, satisfied. "Now to repeat the experiment to ensure it's reliable."
The test subject groans in pain and annoyance both. It seems he really got used to your antics by now, given he doesn't even protest any further.
"Alright Theo, I don't want to overwhelm you with this stuff, but I figured it was about time I introduced you to a couple of the Crypt capes your own age."
It wasn't exactly easy to do it, but you did manage to get Kayden to leave you alone with Theo Anders for a bit. She does trust you, even if it doesn't come easy. Then again, bringing Jesse back to life and letting her know she's actually an aunt now has been keeping that entire household a tad bit busy in general, the mousy brunette is usually more frazzled than annoyed with you these days.
Incidentally, the first thing the woman once known as Iron Rain did upon being notified of her last remaining living relatives was to openly doubt her brother would ever actually get laid. She even got his soul out to physically rub it into his face, it was actually pretty hilarious.
Back to Theo, though. The blonde boy is still pretty chubby, but he's been losing a couple pounds since you last saw him, you're pretty sure, and his complexion is looking a lot better. Not being in the general sphere of influence of his late father seems to have been good for him.
You're taking a little 'walk' through your base, but as you just told him, you're basically on the way to introduce Theo to a few people. It seemed like the sensible thing to do.
"Uhm…" The soft-spoken boy seems hesitant, but you just keep pace as you wait for him to find the words. "No offense, but this isn't some effort to set me up with someone, is it? Because Max used to do that and it was just, very creepy."
"Oh heavens no," you can't help but let a chuckle escape yourself, "nah, you date whoever and whatever you want whenever you want, Theo. This is genuinely just me making sure you at least know a few people your age that are caping with us."
"Okay… Why? Because I'll tell you now, my- Max said I would get powers someday, but-"
"Yeah, I'll stop you right there," you say, literally holding out a hand. "Your biological father may have been a fucknugget, but even he should've known better than to so much as say that."
"Why's that?"
"Ugh, it's actually a load of psychological stuff that people study for a living, but it's related to how triggers work," you explain. "You know what I mean with that, right? Trigger events?"
"The worst day of your life," Theo asks more than he states, but good enough.
"Eh, kinda," you hedge. "Second triggers are when you have that same thing just in worse, but by and large it fits. Triggers are, generally speaking, times when traumatic experiences and extreme stressors overwhelm you enough to knock your power active, provided you've got a corona. It can be a moment of terror, a sudden realization or extreme danger to your life, or it can build up over months or even years. It's often both- happy people don't get powers, is what I'm getting at."
You really run the danger of going on and on when it comes to stuff like this. You blame college, personally, learning it in a scholastic environment just made your tendency to blather on worse.
"And second-generation people don't have it as bad."
"Arguably," you allow Theo's point. "It still requires some genuinely traumatic shit to happen to you, or to go on inside your head, and let nobody tell you otherwise. If the trend holds true with third gen capes anyways, which isn't a sure thing. Here's the rub, though- if you're aware that feeling bad could give you powers, you don't feel as bad about feeling bad, do you?"
"... I'd say I'd still feel pretty bad," the chubby teenager says.
"But there would be something for you to reach out to, something to keep the edge of the despair a trigger usually involves at bay," you counter, before shrugging noncommittally. "That's how it goes with most people, anyways. See the issue with telling someone you want to get powers that they can get powers?"
"Yeah, I definitely do." He shudders, before giving you a careful look. "... So do you expect me to trigger, or…?"
"Buddy," you smile, "you're in the middle of puberty, where everything is incredibly confusing and demotivating and you're stuck in school for half your day. I'm not saying you're guaranteed to trigger, but it's likely enough I think we should make sure you get to know a few capes that aren't nazi assholes you can talk about stuff with just in case, no offense if you actually liked any of those."
"... I see. Makes sense."
"Hey, heads up, it's not like superpowers are all that bad if you luck out and get them. Think of them as a consolation prize for whatever bad crap you experience at that point anyways."
"That doesn't make me feel better about the prospect… sir."
"Oh, don't give me any of that deferring crap, not like anyone around here does," you wave him off. "And hey, you're getting the attitude down already. First step to getting it over with, if you're gonna be like that."
And whether he likes it or not… Theo does smile a little as you go on. A successful attempt at encouraging him a little, you'd say.
Being a Crypster in Brockton Bay wasn't all that hard these days, not even mentioning the people that just wore the colors or the symbol somewhere, the ones that paid lip service only to be part of the whole thing they had going on.
The people that were actually part of the gang itself, that worked for it and got paid by it like it was a normal job or something, were doing a lot of stuff- a lot of them were employed in the drug dens, for example, if they were decent or at least not completely terrible at dealing with people.
Had to make sure customers weren't choking on their clothes while high and stuff like that. It took a bit of patience and things like that that not everyone had, which was being considered when it was time to figure out what any one Crypster would be best off doing for a living.
Many of them ultimately were responsible for simply keeping order, just like the Enforcers used to down at the Boardwalk before it was renamed the Cryptwalk and all. They didn't really patrol the streets, normally, not like they were some kind of militia and the normal police could deal with most crap going on.
They were mostly paid to sit around, smoke weed and be visible. And honestly, it paid a bit better than minimum wage and they were given appropriate clothes for the season plus free weed, so it was objectively better than retail already.
They only really came out to deal with public disturbances, or if someone pissed them off somehow. Sometimes, when a call came in through the police scanners, they also got off their asses to take a look.
Which was what was happening right now, a trio of Crypsters coming to investigate some automated call coming from a supermarket. "The fuck's even going on when the doors're all closed?"
"I dunno, maybe there's something on the roof?"
"Like fuck are we checking there," the third of the team shuddered. "Let's just-"
"Shh, do you hear that?"
The three fell silent, listening out for something in the area. And indeed, there was something to be heard; the rattling of metal, the scuttling of ill-aligned, inflexible wheels, drifted through the air.
Without another word, they hurried towards the parking lot, cursing, sighing and giving off a noise of relief, respectively. It was just a homeless guy trying to steal… a whole bunch of shopping carts, even keeping them in those long lines of them they were stored as.
"Hey, uh, you doing alright there?"
"Hisss!" Apparently, the feral hobo was not happy to have company. "I know you people! You're where they went! But you won't get me, oh no!"
"... Ah crap, one of those," one of the Crypsters mumbled before clearing his throat. "Look buddy, it's probably a bad idea if you take all of those carts, but I'm sure this place won't miss a handful or so, so-"
"YOU'LL NEVER GET ME, AHAHAHA!" The homeless, dressed in a long, oversized jacket and jeans, ran straight forwards, the shopping carts about to crash against the parking lot's fence- except they didn't, as they disappeared into a suddenly opened portal in space no light escaped through. "I'LL SURVIVE YOU ALL LIKE I SURVIVED THE FLOOD! AHAHAHAAHAHAHHA!"
The thing closed up with a quiet pop, leaving three Crypsters standing there still as they exchanged a few awkward looks.
"So, uh… I guess I'll just call up the line?"
"Cape bullshit, man. We sure ain't dealing with it."
Sometimes, the simple things in life are the best. That's a philosophy you very much can get behind, as you believe you've thoroughly proven to date, and it can't be overstated just how many people should just take a moment and actually think about it. Maybe if they did, their lives wouldn't be such horrible voids of going to work, doing nothing of personal import, going back home to still do nothing they actually care about, eat, sleep and repeat.
Modern society, man. Not even once.
This same line of thought is why, once you've got Theo's introductions and all of that squared away, you are whisked off to do some technical work together with Riley and Rey, the two professional Biotinkers inside your base and, in the case of the former, the possessor of what may well be described as that one unique vampire power that lets her play god.
Literally. She can create life with it. Sure, it takes pre-existing life for her to modify, but she can basically kill and completely transform any given living being into something else with some time and preparation.
It's not really directly useful for combat, but you've seen her create giant ocean-spiders with it before. The things were enough to make you stop and think, which is more than literally any other thing except that one Tarrasque you fought once can say for themselves.
It's pretty insane and she can pull a lot of bullshit with it, simply put. Rey, aka Blasto, is along for the ride for his expertise as a Tinker working with genetic material, from what both he and yourself understand of what he actually does, whereas you invited yourself along as you have a lot of experience committing crimes against humanity, sanity and nature itself.
The reason for this illustrious gathering? Okita desires Cuties, as she seems to have gotten bored of playing with the undead you made for her last time. Therefore, something new and, preferably, self-propagating is required to continue keeping her happy and focused on something that is not accidentally finding a way to hack and slash at reality itself.
Nothing in her powerset that you are aware of should allow anything like that, but you know her. You know how Okita ticks. And you are not taking that risk.
Sure, it's frowned on to create horrible monsters that can replicate by themselves, but the PRT can go take a hike about this as well as it does about everything else. You're saving the world over here, arguably.
The black-haired heroine with the giant rack is sitting on a bench off to the side, expectantly looking upon the three of you as you poke at the mass of cloned, technically living meat Rey brought. "Are you sure this stuff is usable?"
"I mean, why wouldn't it be?" The stoner with a Biotinker boner asks you. "It's living, it won't die for a few hours, what more do you want?"
"A brain to modify would be nice," Riley points out, having stuck her arm into the off-green meat-goop up to the elbow. "Now I have to spool it all up manually. I guarantee there will be something wrong with it when we get first designs down."
"Ah well, if it happens, it happens," you say. "Just means we have to keep working at it. I figure with the three of us here, we should be able to diagnose just about anything wrong with the end result."
"Actually, why are you here?" Rey asks. "No offense, but I didn't know you do wet tinkering."
"I… arguably do?" You honestly aren't sure- your whole undead magic stuff isn't tinkering as such, but from the perspective of someone else looking at it, it may as well be the same, really. "Just trust me when I say I'm very used to things that give any sane man nightmares or worse. I did make the very first 'Cuties'."
And none of you want to disappoint Okita. The silent pressure of her expectations is downright palpable all the way to where you're standing over your material, stored in this big vat Riley needs a little ladder to access.
"Anyways, let's get started. So I was thinking we do something with an exoskeleton, but…"
The operation ends up being… interesting, especially once the three of you really get going and having fun with what you're doing (and isn't that the ultimate point of anything you do in life?), because as it turns out, each of you has ideas and approaches to making a biological organism from scratch that has you discuss, combine and prioritize entirely new processes and organs continually.
You need certain specifications to be met here, but the way you do so is left entirely up to you. It could, perhaps, be said that giving a madman, a stoned mad scientist and a girl that literally motivated nightmares all over Earth Bet for years free reign in this way is a bad thing, somehow, but you do not let any such contrived nonsense get in the way of your fun here.
Thick, leathery, gray skin that can absorb most nutrients needed for the creature to survive, as long as it's regularly covered in fresh blood. No eyes, you have way too many better senses to replace those obvious weak points with, and no nose, the respiratory part of its metabolism is handled by these large holes inside of its bulbous torso.
Long, by comparison stick-thin limbs, ending in three very sharp claws made of extended bone, plus a few shorter cutting feelers on what would be the chest on a human- Okita likes those aesthetically and they're decent enough to eviscerate anything that gets close, so you threw those on. Its back, of course, is covered by tentacles and thick spikes, and its tail ends in its exposed spine, most of the fleshy parts for there held within the bones rather than outside of them.
The 'head' holds nothing but a very large mouth filled to the brim with razor-sharp teeth. Not even a brain is in there, you instead moved that into its torso together with the rest of the actually important inner organs, all covered behind a shell of additional secondary bones acting as armor.
Or intended to do so, anyways. There's only so much force you can deflect regardless of how perfectly the stuff is formed for the purpose.
Okita, for one, seems to like it, clapping her flat hands together once.. "Mm. Cute. I approve."
"Great," you smile, having secretly kept in contact with her over telepathy as you worked in order to get anything done at all. And, well… What you came up with does meet what passes for her aesthetic sense, you suppose.
The mostly faceless monster whose paralysis Riley removes with a quick touch makes a sound not unlike that of a chainsaw being revved up, orientating itself towards whatever is nearest to itself. Okita, of course, immediately comes closer to pat it.
The new Cutie, having been made to be authentic, attempts to immediately murder her for some totally unforeseen reason, throwing itself at her with its claws outstretched to dig into and through her eyesockets (you specifically designed them to be perfect for murdering humans, by the way). Being herself, Okita interprets this as a desire to play.
And promptly punts it across the room, your creation impacting the wall. Violently.
Riley clears her throat. "Just remember, if it dies, there's an organ inside of its chest you have to rip out and plant in some meat, you can use its old body as well, and it'll regrow itself! That way even if you break it, it'll be good as new really quickly."
Rey staggers backwards, suddenly realizing what the three of you have done. "Ah crap, this is actually kind of messed up."
"How so?" You ask. "Sure, it's sentient, kind of, but its mind is limited to the exact things it needs to be able to do, so it's not gonna grow a personality all of a sudden."
"We made a literal murder machine that will regrow itself forever!"
"Okita's chewtoys aren't easy to make, you need to meet a certain minimum standard," you shrug, entirely unconcerned. "Let's be honest, you could probably fight this thing and put it down yourself. I don't get why this is any worse than anything you've ever done before."
"Sorry, I'm just coming to terms with the new workplace standards around here. Like, I'm normally just making plant hybrid guard dogs and bruisers, and weed, and here we are with the… semi-immortal murder machine."
Riley hops off her little ladder, picking it up and scooting along to set it down next to Rey. Climbing up onto it again, she pats his back now that it's within reach. "There, there, it'll be second nature once you get used to it. That's just how we work here."
Another crash echoes as Okita continues lightly playing with her new friend. A total success, that's all you have to say about it.
Having once again added a notch to your list of crimes against nature with the creation of the 'Neo-Cutie', as you shall be provisionally calling it (until Okita manages to actually break this one just like she did the undead you made for her, it can regrow but it's only a matter of time until its internals don't make it through her playtime), you proceed to just spend the rest of your night hanging out with a couple people.
What? Ever since you regained the ability to ignore sunlight for the most part, night or day make little to no difference to you. Sure, the sun's horrible, horrible cancer rays still make you uncomfortable, especially when they shine in your eyes, and that does sometimes give you what to a living person would be a mild headache sometimes, but really, you've had worse.
Much, much worse. Like, back when you were younger (and not in control of your erection like you are now) you had to seek out treatment for your permanent boner, and no matter what you always ended up talking to female doctors and apothecaries about it.
Having to get a small cut made to remove the blood from your dick so it calms the fuck down, after the usual of letting them play with your body of course, sucked big time, but it just really wasn't easy to find the right mix of anaphrodisiacs back then. And you had to get treatment, an actual boner just lasting for too long can be hazardous to your health.
As in, it WILL rot from the inside out eventually. The human body just isn't designed to be in sexytimes mode 24/7, for some reason.
Anyways, you just feel like hanging out for a while, so that's just what you do. Some of your night is spent commiserating about the absurdity of Tinkers with Isabel and Lea (Laser Mortars should not and never should have been a thing that exists, but here you are), though it seems Isabel is too shy to talk bad about other people's superpowers and Lea is more concerned with the Tinkers she's managing and their continued ability to neglect their bodily needs.
For the record, that's not even a Tinker thing. That's just Alice and Sherrel being themselves, most Tinkers can take care of themselves just fine; they're just the type to ignore their needs because they feel what they're doing is more important at the time. You do, as a matter of fact, make sure to tell Lea as much just in case she wasn't aware.
She's not surprised, by the way. She knows her girls well enough to be aware.
That aside, you also take a few hours out of your busy night to go ahead and help the Thinker out inside the alchemy vaults, or however else you can even call it. It's basically a series of interconnected rooms inside of which she is producing mass quantities of potions using the power you gave her when you thralled her, using the semi-biological nature of her makeup to your advantage.
You have to say, that actually was one of your better decisions, looking back. Not only is the Thinker a massive help in everything you do, she's also actually funny and fun to hang out with, thinking about it.
It also helps that she can always just split off a sub-process to do so, thanks to the immense computing capabilities you threw together in her upgraded 'bodies'. Means she's always there to chat or joke around with.
Anyways, you help her many bodies in making potions, specifically the annoyingly volatile stuff you're planning on needing in the near future. As you do, Aisha and Circus, who get along about as well as you'd expect (like a nazi's house that is, by definition, on fire) join you for some reason, probably mostly just to pester you for fun.
Too bad for them, you've got an army of sexy cyborg Thinker bodies on your side. Sure, the entire thing ends with you doing some more seeding of those, as the Thinker desires to procreate with them, but you're making the clown and the gremlin watch without letting them join in as punishment, so that's just how it goes.
All in all, it could be worse as far as weekday nights are concerned. You certainly had worse.
You're sitting down, your current location as isolated as you could make it under your circumstances and the ambient light reduced to nearly nothing. In the dark, you pick up your pen, playing with it and staring at the blank pages sitting before you.
You don't remember actually writing to be this hard the last time you decided to spontaneously write a whole-ass book, though then again the experience you've gained in this field since then is likely the deciding factor here. Simply put, you want to write a sequel, which is a lot easier because you have a bunch of characters and established dynamics set up already… Just also harder, because you can't just repeat what happened in the first book.
Or, well, you could, and you probably could get away with it, too, by dressing it all up a bit, but you don't want to. If you're doing this, you're doing this right, and that means you need a coherent plot that add to what happened previously without being stale about it.
Then you also need to balance the issues of reintroducing characters from the first book in a way that makes sense to new readers without basically repeating their introductions in a way that would bore anyone that read the first book. Man, just writing some schlock on the internet in a webserial or something wouldn't have any of these issues…
But hey, in for a penny, in for a pound, as an island reprobate would say. So, time to do this, because like hell are you stopping now.
The ending of your previous work left off as the main character was kept prisoner by the vampire and the werewolf chicks that both were into him, just being used for sex even as they fawned over him at their leisure. While you could start off with a wholly separate character now, introduce them in a way that has them collide with what's going on there, you feel you can get some more mileage out of what you have as is.
The start of the second volume shall, as such, deal with your intrepid main character regaining some measure of control over his life, you think. You can see it already- the prologue details his life in captivity as he keeps his thoughts hidden, living through the 'love' the two crazy bitches that got their eyes on him express in ways most people would be distinctly uncomfortable with here and there.
And the very last sentence of the very first bit, then, is about how he plans to get out. 'And that evening, Jake swore, he would be out'. Or something along those lines, you'll leave the details for when you get to them.
Chapter one would be him fleeing from his pursuers, leaving his old life behind as he does everything he can to escape using the knowledge and experience he's gained to navigate the woods, then nearby civilization as he avoids them. Then he makes use of what little knowledge of the supernatural he has, all the while his friends and family are still looking for him at home…
Intermixed, of course, with a few different perspectives, both of the girls after him and other people entirely looking in on this impromptu chase across the countryside.
Yeah, this has potential, and plenty of opportunities to introduce a few twists, new friends and foes both, maybe some kind of third pursuer at odds with the other two that wants him all for herself after meeting him by coincidence…
Some kind of spirit, maybe? Or maybe the spirit actually, selflessly helps him out, but there's some gang of biker were-hyenas to fill that role instead? You'll add it to your list of ideas for this.
For now, you're inspired to get to writing, so you shall do just that. 'Jake was looking up at the ceiling, counting the floorboards. Again. It was what he had taken to doing, unaware of just how long he'd been chained to this bed inside this room he hadn't recognized at first. Had it been weeks? Months? Days, even, and his psyche was just breaking down already?
Impossible to say without any windows leaking sunlight inside. He'd tried to keep track of the days by Bella and Chloe's 'visits' before, but everything was just becoming… kind of a blur way too quickly.
No, he was…'
Never let it be said that you do not follow good advice when you receive it. One of those things that annoy you the most is when people are told actually important or helpful things or are given suggestions they really, objectively, should follow or at least consider, but then disregard out of hand just because they didn't come up with them themselves.
Or purely to piss off whoever said it first. One or the other, maybe even both at once.
That's just really stupid, toxic and really the opposite of what any reasonable person would do, dammit. The ability to take others' words at face value sometimes to calmly reflect and consider them is the one thing that anyone should be actually fucking capable of if they've managed to make it through high school.
The fact there's just a lot of jackasses that don't is irrefutable proof that the American education system, to put it mildly, sucks major donkey balls.
But enough about the ways in which you measure the success and viability of civilizations in your off time, Sherrel suggested you actually make use of that private beach over in LA you bought after making good experiences renting it last time, so here you are, complete with lovers, wives and daughters.
"You're thinking about something stressful again," Sarah says, half-lying on you as she traces circles across your chest with immaculately manicured fingers, wearing a micro-bikini only. "Stop that. Just think about me."
"Hey, no hogging our man-meat," Kate grins, having heard her while marching along nearby. Your beach chairs creaks precariously as she joins your sister in lounging on your body- not that you're about to complain.
Both your lovers are wearing sunglasses, by the way, despite it being night right now. They're just part of the attire required for going to the beach, apparently, so you went and got a pair yourself, in fact. Vampiric sight means that you can see just fine regardless of relative light levels, so it really doesn't hurt.
Not to mention you absolutely rock the sunglasses look. You blame it on being an LA native, it's entirely out of your control.
"Lucky you there's enough of me to go around," you smile, grabbing a handful of sweet booty from each of them. Together, you watch as your daughters play in the water while Sherrel is busy setting up the barbecue with some help from Nora, the passively emanating mom energy (momergy?) rising by the moment.
Incidentally, the 'playing in the water' bit is Serana floating along on the surface of the waves, Lilian experimenting with the concept of splashing water as a weapon and the twins trying to devise a method to sing underwater. It's pretty cute, all in all.
Sometimes, you just have to relax like this. And if the beach chair that came with the beach breaks down a couple minutes later, that's not at all because of the weight of your lovely girls, as you will swear until the end of times.
Oh, and two homeless guys stumbled along thinking it being night meant there would be nobody to object to their presence. You fed them to the girls while the Thinker got to work on building a teleportation installation hidden under the sand, with some additional storage space for more beach equipment you plan on bringing here.
She's such a sweetheart, isn't she?
Having successfully done your part to reduce the homeless population (heh) and just relaxed for a good long bit, playing around and keeping yourself from freezing the sea for miles in all directions when you all spontaneously decide to have a snowball fight for no particular reason.
What? Your girls want to throw snowballs at each other, you're going out and creating all the snow they may need. Of course, with nobody present being in any way really susceptible to the cold, the course of the battle becomes a little… extreme… but hey, no harm, no foul.
And no, using your gravity powers to dump quarter tons of snow and ice on everyone else to the point your whole family unites to bring down its tyrant is totally within the spirit of the rules. You weren't even the first one to start using Telekinesis for this!
You were just the last. You made sure of it.
But yes, victoriously standing atop your snowheap, you were eventually defeated by means of everyone else stripping down once they dug themselves out, the following orgy drawing you in like an alcoholic to the bottle. What can you do, you have clear strengths and weaknesses, and both mandate you jump right into that.
The ice and snow you created, in the meantime, are left to thaw off on their own; it's May in LA, it won't last long. Oh, sure, the shifting ocean temperatures may trigger a minor ecological disaster underwater somewhere, but honestly, who gives a fuck?
Fishes ain't ever done anything for you, why would you care if they bite it? The sea has taken a lot of way more significant temperature shifts than this, it does so on a yearly fucking basis, as long as you don't actually make a habit of this stuff it won't matter. 'Nuff said.
Next off, having fulfilled your fun quota for the night, you head on down into the bowels of alchemy once you're teleported back to base, continuing to create more potions on a large scale. Every little bit helps when you just want to get a sufficient amount made, after all, and even if you overproduce you can just store this stuff for later.
Like, theoretically, some of the exceedingly clear, almost completely invisible potions you're brewing up here using a slew of ingredients, from bleach to white chocolate all the way to finely-ground sand sourced from the bottom of the sea should, you think, undo the Simurggh's influence… potentially. If so, they'd be damn near priceless to most people.
Like, the exact mechanics are unclear to you as of yet, but if it works against having your brain scrambled by Vasil into loving him (or feeling any other particular emotion) and cut off any conditioning applied by the ue of such powers without affecting your personality as such particularly much, you'd say there's a chance, at least.
Luckily your magic seems capable of predicting the Endbringers to an extent, so you should be able to find out easily enough, even if you have to pop one of your more restricted spells related to fishing information out of thin air. Being a Thinker on the same level of bullshit as all the other stuff you've got going on is actually pretty nice, come to think of it.
Ah well, one way or another, you'll still need a boatload of the Cleansing Potions you've devised, and they're a huge pain to actually brew up…
Your current project, or projects rather, considering what you plan to use at least some of your leftover potions on already, are keeping you fairly busy, mostly on account of all the planning involved. It is how it is, whether you're planning to commit a crime more involved than pickpocketing, running a stage show or designing a building, there's always a load of work going into the background that people aren't actually meant to see.
Backstage is a horrible place full of rushed effort and barely met deadlines, if you're lucky. Always has been, always will be.
Right now, you're working on figuring out what women Heartbreaker may have turned to his side, but not actually kept by it. Government employees, any law enforcement officers he may have compromised, basically anyone that has been monitoring any efforts to actually catch him and warning him ahead of time; there's plenty of people Nikos Vasil would stand to profit off of should he use his power intelligently.
Now you aren't necessarily accusing him of any particular intelligence, of course, but it would take a literal moron not to have taken some precaution at least. And Cherie's opinions of her father notwithstanding, he's at least smart enough not to make himself easy sniper fodder, the man barely leaves whatever place he's taken over at any one time for a reason.
If he didn't, the issue he represents would've been resolved long ago.
So yeah, as for figuring out who's compromised… If you were on your own, you'd be shit out of luck on this one. Luckily, you very much aren't, and so Sarah, Dinah and the Thinker are helping you reconstruct Nikos' path as far back as you can, with Taylor actually helping out as well using her own magic.
Sadly, your divination-y stuff isn't particularly well-suited to this kind of thing. Like, if you had any of his personal possessions you totally could pull something, but as is, your methods of gaining accurate information on someone you've never been in contact with are kind of limited.
Luckily, not only does the Thinker enjoy cyberstalking people, she is also capable of using her predictive capabilities to in essence work backwards easily enough, in contrast to most people with powers that aren't anywhere near as flexible. The more information you all dig up, the more accurately she can say what happened in turn, letting you get a pretty decent idea of what you have to work with here.
Which, for the record, is a lot of people. Nikos Vasil came in contact with many, many human beings ever since he triggered, which means you have to consider the likelihood of them having been compromised by him. Every now and then, his moles are caught when they aren't the type to be subtle about their emotions, but according to what your team of Thinkers can say, you'll have your work cut out for you indeed.
It's not in the thousands, but you do have hundreds of all but guaranteed cases of Heartbroken women running around here and there. Following up on the assassination will be kind of a pain… Though you could probably tap Dragon to make this easier, come to think of it.
Mhm… This could work. Then again, you could just leave it alone- It's just Canada, not like anyone would really give all that much of a crap.
And for the record, yeah, you're aware a good few subjects probably are as of yet unknown to you, purely due to insufficient data on every little thing Heartbreaker did for the last few years. You'll deal with that once you have his soul and everything it actually remembers, but the more victims you can identify ahead of time, the less of a chance there is things will be too hectic at the last minute.
Simply put, being prepared ahead of time with names, faces and addresses known and only adding a few more once shit goes down is a big fat difference to you just having to spontaneously deliver hundreds of doses of Cleansing Potion to hundreds of people at once.
Backstage work, ladies and gents. It begins long ahead of the actually event itself and consists of a lot more stuff than most people ever realize.
"Oh Dragooon, I happen to have need of some help in a questionably legal, but morally clear matter of utmost secrecy!"
Dragon sighs, her video avatar closing its eyes despite her awareness being in no way connected to them. "Cain."
"Oh my, if only there was a great, big, powerful and most of all influential hero that could help me avoid untold amounts of destruction and suffering among the common populace!"
"You can stop now. In fact, please stop. I am listening, but I make no promises I will do anything you ask of me."
"That's all I want, really." You lean back, body language shifting back to normal. "How about this, I plan to murder Heartbreaker and I want you to isolate the victims he's hidden all over Canada, maybe even get a cure for his power into them."
"No 'cure' for Heartbreaker's power is known to man, unless you mean to apply another power that shifts their mental state sufficiently his loses effect," Dragon states, looking at you suspiciously. "I would appreciate more information, but I will not help you-"
"No, no, it's a whole new thing, power-related, but it doesn't screw with your head unless it's been screwed with before," you interrupt her in the middle of clarifying she won't let you brainwash blah blah blah, holding up a clear bottle of Cleansing Potion… Which in itself is almost wholly clear, but you just swirl it around a little to get it moving and easier to see. "A fun little fluid. When consumed, it undoes mostly any external mental changes, with a weird definition of 'external'."
"... What definition exactly?" She knows what you are doing, but she also knows she has to ask to get anywhere.
"I'm glad you ask!" You tilt your head, the shadow you wear as a face shifting unnaturally. "It seems to grant objective perspective on lived experiences and particularly clears the consumer's head, having shown pronounced effects in the case of a small slew of emotion-affecting powers, PTSD, past gaslighting, stage fright, memory manipulation using parapowers again and any and all mundane manipulation that leaves people permanently scarred afterwards. It also helps with anxiety, removes normal toxin buildup and acts as an effective weight loss aid."
"... You mean to tell me," Dragon gravely states, "that you have invented a cure for Human Master powers, as they are colloquially known?"
"Among other things, yes," you nod. "Sadly it's a pain to mass-produce, but we've been working on this for a bit."
"Assuming this works… Niko Vasil does not have a Kill Order."
"He doesn't," you agree. "Doesn't mean he should be alive any longer than absolutely necessary, though, does it?"
"... I believe the scientific phrase for what I want to say in response to that is 'fuck yes, I am in'," Dragon says with no inflexion whatsoever. "Presuming, of course, your so-called cure holds water."
"And I will expect you to be circumspect about this whole thing, just to avoid alarming old heartman," you shrug. "Would you like a couple samples of the stuff along with the likely incomplete list of identified victims we've got so far?"
"Yes actually, if you would."
Both of you are aware Dragon will be doing her damndest to analyze any potion you send her. What she does not yet know is that it will make absolutely no sense to her- even less so than normal tinkertech stuff, anyways.
"If you're good and use one of those gynoids, I may just give you the details on how it works," you smirk, making sure the state of your lips is audible in your voice.
Dragon turns the transmission right off in response, but you have a feeling you kind of flustered her a bit there. Mission success.
Next off, your other big project at the moment. Hey, after you did the whole Machine Army thing, you've found you can't help but enjoy cleaning Earth Bet off of particularly dangerous hazards, which is partially why you're going out of your way to deal with Heartbreaker- that and the likelihood of him holding a grudge over you stealing his kids, as though he had any inherent right to 'own' them or anything- but really, the man hardly counts, right?
Like, you fucked over the Slaughterhouse Nine, who were way more physically dangerous. Sure, Heartbreaker is a massive issue if you can be affected by his power, which is true for, like, ninety-nine percent of all capes, but to you he poses very minimal real danger.
Like, unless he literally gets his hands on whatever military personnel he'd need for firing intercity missiles or something, and even then you'd probably survive it just fine.
No, you have your sights set higher. And hey, if Nilbog didn't want to land on your dinner menu, he shouldn't have made himself as big of a target as he did.
But that's for after you're done with your simpler snack. For now, you have some more basic preparations to make just in case, which is why you're massaging Taylor's shoulders as she's sitting on your lap right now, both of you naked as is only natural inside the nudist zone that is your place.
And Annette is sitting nearby herself, in turn being fed grapes by Jesse. It's a nice little family moment, you think, but right now you have a little bit of convincing to do first of all.
"You really should try it, with everything we've all got going you can hardly be bad at singing. And it'll be a great opportunity, too!"
"Do you have any idea how many people watch those videos?" For her part, Taylor is not at all willing to agree to take part in the stream you've been planning. "And billions of people rewatch them later on. I can't."
Turns out stopping to give a fuck and viewing all of humanity as sacks of deplorable filth fully deserving of the pain they experience at your hands may help with stagefright, but they don't remove it outright, it seems.
"Don't say that, you have a beautiful voice if you really use it," you assure her, tracing a few kisses along her neck.
"... Even if I use my swarm voice?"
"Especially when you do," you smile. "Won't you give it a try, at least?"
"I don't know… I'll just ruin your performance…"
"You absolutely won't," you say, kneading the muscle tissue above her shoulder blades a bit more. Can't ever massage that area enough. "Besides, I'm sure your mom would love to hear you sing, wouldn't she?"
"Ng, don't bring me into this!" Nearly choking on one of those grapes, Annette pushes herself upright. Then, at Taylor's look, she immediately relents, quietly clearing her throat a little before she continues. "Sweetie, I'm sure you would do great if you decided to, but please don't feel pressured into this, okay? If you do it, do it because you want to."
"Okay. I will."
And that is that, you suppose. Progress. Oh, and now you have to keep on massaging one of the most infamous mass murderer around the East Coast according to the latest internet polls on the matter, likely followed by her mother and said mother's girlfriend after the stunt you just pulled, huh?
How terrible. However shall you survive such a fate?
Once you're done dispensing the naturally required quota of massages necessary for a man in your position, which for the record is a LOT, you of course get back to work, seeing as the list of uses you have for certain potion keeps on growing faster than your production capacities allow, the magical nature of alchemy somehow making it hard to really scale up production in any meaningful way.
Not impossible, the Thinker proves that much all the time, but still kind of a pain- which is why every little bit helps, hence your personal attention on the whole potion production thing.
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's down the mine you go,
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, brewing the whole day through~!
'Down on your luck? Can't find anyone that'll give you the time of day? Criminal convictions fucking you up?
The Crypts got your back! We take anyone that's willing to work, previous experience preferred but not required. Everything from warehouse work to applied gardening, individual strengths taken into account.
Join our team today! Write us at…'
Job ad for the Lord Street Crypts, posted on PHO
For once you aren't going out of your way to make any big announcements as you get moving, instead just smoothly cruising along under the radar. To be honest, it feels oddly comforting- this level of activity has been your mainstay for a long time, so getting back to it is nice.
You didn't drop a message on PHO when you hunted down the core members of the Merchants back then, and you sure a hell were keeping quiet about your part in the E88 civil war you literally unleashed on the nazis from the outside, to name just what happened in this dimension. Big, melodramatic gestures are a nice touch when you want to get your supervillainy on, but they don't need to accompany literally everything you do.
Just saying, you started out sneaking around to ambush lone targets and you're still fond of your standard operating procedure back then.
It just works the best, you know? Hitting enemies from ambush, dropping them before they can react… It takes a lot of the pressure out of what you do when you can dictate that you win before anyone can have any other say in it.
And, y'know, they sure don't have the time to argue about it afterwards.
For now, you are in full stealthing mode, in other words. Having tracked the current location of Nikos Vasil and his entire household down thanks to everyone helping out, you're currently assuming the form of a raven all the way in Vancouver, along the north-western coast of Canada.
The sun has gone down, and the streets are illuminated by street lamps, their shine throwing an eerie light over passerby that walk along them. The sky is dark and if you were some sort of poet you'd probably call it foreboding or something, but luckily you aren't one of those proto-emos, so fuck that.
You've been slowly circling and observing the detached house in question, making it a point to use your excellent senses combined with the entirely supernatural ones to ensure you identify the right target to keep an eye on. And indeed, it's not hard to pick out the one grown man inside thanks to the overall body shapes you can make out, letting you differentiate the right one from his victims and kids.
Not much of a difference between those categories, when you think about it. Your environment makes you or breaks you and all that.
You've just kind of been keeping an eye on him since then, making sure to get actual visuals as well- sure, Heartbreaker makes it a point to avoid showing himself more than he has to, but he's also not exactly, y'know, nailing the windows shut, at most keeping the curtains drawn to avoid making himself too obvious. You do catch a look or two on him before long, in other words.
Good enough for you to confirm you've got the right guy, at least. With that, all that's left is a bit of a waiting game as you keep an eye on him, intending to catch him, y'know, off guard and preferably alone.
More company than intended wouldn't necessarily be terrible or anything, but you very much would like to do this whole thing quickly, quietly and cleanly. Having to keep the women he keeps around quiet would be more trouble than it would be worth.
Really, you're just mildly concerned about his thralls finding out about this, so you're being particularly circumspect, is all. It really just would be a massive pain in your ass.
On and on you wait, absently noting the other occupants of the building going about their day. It's not all that late, but some are already turning in, not that it matters for you; you only have eyes for one particular fucker right now.
Nikos Vasil is many things. A slippery son of bitch, a huge annoyance, kind of a cock. What he is also, though, is human, the many usual weaknesses and openings living being present to you very much present in him. And so it comes that, as you knew it would sooner or later, that he is getting into one of several bathrooms around the house.
Alone. Turns out he isn't into making his slaves watch him piss, which is good, really, and saves you a bit of work in here.
The moment he closes the door behind himself, you've turned into a shadow creeping in through the window. As he turns around, you shift and dance across the walls, always keeping just out of sight. In the time it takes him to open the toilet, you're shoving yourself upwards, onto the ceiling of the otherwise nondescript bathroom.
Lots of female hygiene products, but then you could've told yourself that much beforehand, there's a bunch of girls and women in this household so it's no big surprise.
Looking at him like this, Nikos Vasil is… not all that out of the usual. Relatively tall, just a bit shorter than yourself really, bit lanky, long dark hair- you can see where his kids are getting it from, really, including the trend towards being above average in terms of looks. He's going shirtless, looks to be somewhere around his thirties and, if you were to quint and hit your head a little, he even has a fraction of your usual swank.
Really only a fraction, though. He probably thinks he's hot shit and all.
Inside one of his pockets, you can see what seems to be some sort of ornament; a bunch of rings strung up on a piece of long, thick string, like a simple necklace someone would make out of beads. Looking closer, you think it might be wedding rings, some of them have names engraved on them and they fit the look.
Classy, that. Real classy.
Ah well, not like you care personally. As he fumbles with his pants, you grow out of the ceiling itself upside down, a shadow turning back into something more substantial, and just like that you have him.
A quick grab around his face keeps him from screaming as you lift him up by the spine with your claws piercing his flesh, his legs dangling in a panicked reaction, but you're already burying your teeth inside his neck, careful to keep him away from anything that might make noise.
You still got it, by the way. He dies quickly, his blood drained down your gullet, and you carelessly shove him aside once you're done, no longer bothered by the prospect of anyone coming to investigate. They don't, and so you're left to enjoy the rush of a fresh meal tasting of savory dumplings with chicken and beans, for some reason.
You've long since stopped questioning why people taste like they do beyond the vaguest of inferences based on how naughty or nice they were. His soul's tasty enough, that's all that counts.
Assimilating the metaphysical core of who and what Nikas Vasil is into the greater whole that is you, you quickly take stock of his memories, making sure to compare them to what you know of his past victims, to compare the lists, pretty much. That task is made a lot easier thanks to the sense of organization your inner world applies to these things when you access it for this purpose, of course.
The library has a complete list of everyone he ever used his power on for you in short order, so you just go ahead and send that information to everyone else via telepathy. Within moments, adjustments are made to the plan and the Thinker informs Dragon of the additional people she will have to take care of .
You, on the other hand, have a bit of additional work to do… Because there's a bunch of people in the area you don't want to have running around being so suicidally devoted to a dead man they'll collectively blow themselves up or something.
So you transform yourself, your body morphing in one smooth motion as your features are replaced, your hair grows out, your proportions change as a whole.
You bend down to retrieve something out of your shadow, a whole crate's worth of Cleansing Potion quickly lifted up and put down atop the toilet lid once you close it really quickly. Then you look down at Nikos' corpse, or more specifically, his pants.
"Ugh, the lengths I go to sometimes…"
Two minutes later, everything sits correctly, so you slam the door open, the crate carried under your arm.
"Hey everyone, you really should drink some of this mysterious fluid I found on the toilet, trust me!"
You don't particularly bother actually imitating Heartbreaker beyond copying his body, even though you could easily do it; using and abusing his power as you are right away, you can easily get everyone in the house to drink one of the potions, so there's no need to, really.
Undoing all the conditioning and active effects of the recently deceased cape's power does cause some chaos, of course, as the women he's been collecting (and actually keeping around) have several panic attacks, one of them tries to stab you in the eye with a nearby pen and you have to keep a couple from screaming at you, but hey, you're still in the shape of Nikos Vasil, you kind of expected as much.
Incidentally, you are, if anything, pretty happy with how well those potions are working. Each and every time, the affected women go from drinking the clear fluid to being confused or silent for a few moments before immediately rethinking everything they've experienced with a newly cleared-up head.
Of course how they react is more up to them, but the magical curative you prepared does its job splendidly.
That still leaves Heartbreaker's now bereaved kids, of course, some of whom possess parahuman powers that have let them sense that something has been going on for a while now, so you've just been corralling them into the living room where they've been gathering.
Coming inside of there right now, you swiftly decide this may or may not have been a good idea, surveying the chaos of nearly a dozen kids trying and failing not to direct your attention towards themselves while still picking on each other.
You know, because kids are so easy to deal with at the best of times. Ah well, here goes nothing. "Alright kids, I have good news and I have bad news, which do you want to hear first?"
"... You're not our father, are you? You don't feel like him," one of them says. Samuel, according to what you know, blonde curls, surprisingly normal as a person even in this family environment.
"I sure ain't," you shrug, entirely unconcerned at being found out immediately. "This may come as a surprise to you, but it is commonly accepted your father was kind of a dick. Until I killed him twenty minutes ago."
Immediately, several of the kids launch into action. That is, they try to use their powers; Chastity, younger girl wearing a miniskirt and a bra only, grabs at you with her hands wreathed in some dark blue energy, which you know would cause most people to collapse on the spot as their minds would be overcome with what has been described as 'distilled defeat' depending on how powerful or confident they believe her to be, for one.
Then there's Aroa, who's, like, nine, and currently firing some sort of near instantaneous blast of power at you that, according to Heartbreaker himself, is meant to cause the victim to enjoy pain to potentially unhealthy degrees, Florence reaching out to subject you to hallucinations overwhelming your senses with whatever you love most and Roman trying to simply punch you as his rage-inducing power is summarily ignored.
Incidentally, most of the kids aren't much older than twelve or something, at the most, heck Roman is eight, so this scene is all kinds of hilarious to live through. Oh, sure, for a living human being without your whole deal it would also be horrible, but hey, you don't exactly give a shit.
So instead you just shrug off the powers, let them touch you and easily absorb the punch strong enough to seriously bowl over a grown man, smirking. Throughout it all, those among the siblings that have been keeping their cool either frown, grimace or look at you blankly in varying states of caring about what's going on.
"Alright," you say, your voice just loud enough to make everyone stand down and listen, "now that we have that bit out of the way, I want each of you to drink one of these little bottles here and then we can see about what to do with you."
"What's in them?" Juliette, young, relatively straight hair, can make people stop moving as long as she does too, asks without any emotion in her face nor voice.
"You can think of them as tinkertech that clears up your head," you explain. "Just in case your dear old dad managed to mess anything up inside your brains too badly."
"What if we don't want to?"
"Then I make you drink them anyways." You let Nikos' appearance slide off yourself like oil as you grow several inches, making the point that you're a cape they don't know abundantly clear. "Now get to chugging already, I don't have all night."
"Oh," Chastity breathes, staring at your abs and now revealed face, blushing. You think you may have made a fan already.
Cherie wasn't really thinking of anything as she returned home to take a quick break from what a lesser mind would've called 'work', the constant monitoring of all emotions in anyone inside the Raveyard less a soul-crushing grind that made you fall apart until all you felt was despair and more her in her natural element.
She often chose a handful of songs to listen to when she spent all night in the VIP lounge, the half-hidden nook up above the dance floor. It was basically heaven, especially since Gabriel had given her the permission to make use of the surveillance room to truly keep an eye on everything that happened.
She'd seen a lot of shit, but the kinds of depravity going on inside this place had even her eyes glued to the screens sometimes. And her hand to her pussy, but that was just how it went.
It wasn't like she had all that much to do- nudge a few couples to join an orgy here, make assholes that wanted to shoot up the place commit suicide in the alley behind it there, no problems at all.
She even got to eat the latter kind of 'customer' every now and then, though those kinds of people were getting rarer all the time. It sucked to suck, she supposed.
Anyways, she was just coming around to remind Jean-Paul that she was better than him and to grab some of the gaming consoles she had replicated the day before to try and install them inside the monitoring room when, suddenly, she felt something she hadn't thought she ever would again.
Slowing to a halt, she thought, fighting herself. Should she go take a look or should she just keep away and hope it went away on its own? After about half a minute of that, she decided it probably didn't help to pretend the problem didn't exist, so off she went.
Around a bend, down a hallway and she was there already, something weird going on with space as he walked through… whatever the bunker had become. Cherie was pretty sure it was related to the newest renovation somehow, but she wasn't there to ask about that so she didn't.
There was an ajar door, the familiar sounds of the songs of her siblings blaring on the other side. She was there.
"Welcome, children. My name is Curie and I will be your caretaker until further notice. Let us get along well and nobody will have to experience worse than their power could ever do, agreed?"
A cold sweat running down her back, Cherie backed away from the door and went right on her way. She had seen Gabriel, Skitter and Bonesaw in person, but for all that each of them was a vampire as well, their songs quiet to her mind, if she had to name one person among the Crypts she was genuinely scared of, it would be the redhead wearing lab coats.
That was some real horror right there. She wasn't even malicious- she just wanted to see if any given thing would make you scream and why. To use your body and your mind to experiment, then record the results and repeat it again and again to verify results.
"Sorry brats, you're on your own." She whistled a jaunty tune as she got right back to what she was doing.
Actually delivering most of the Cleansing Potions where they're supposed to go is mostly up to Dragon, as you seriously can't be arsed with organizing something like this; Heartbreaker spent most of his time in or around Montreal, sure, but he also did range out from there on occasion, like he did before you snatched him up, and that's still quite a lot of people he mindraped on the regular still.
Sure, you could've gone and put something together with the Thinker's help, but honestly? Fuck it, let the Guild handle this crap. All over Canada, identified victims are securely packed up and potions administered before any news of the man's death can spread exactly as planned.
Keeps them from trying to kill themselves in despair. Or from trying to burn the world down. A couple, you hear, manage to realize what's going on and blow their brains out before they're in custody, but by and large it's a fairly decently performed maneuver.
The biggest headache, according to what the Thinker relays to you, are the ones Nikos 'disposed' of. Thralls he didn't have any use of anymore and wanted to get rid of, but also didn't feel like having kill themselves, leading to him getting… creative with his power.
Several of them are permanently terrified of other human beings, forced to live in the Canadian wilderness as hermits as they completely flip out and HAVE to run like mad the moment they so much as think any other humans are in the area.
And contrary to common belief, wild Canadians do not make friends with wild moose and ride off into the sunset as a cultural thing. Nah, a bunch of them just died in that same wilderness, though Dragon is going the extra mile to track them down using unmanned drones to confirm as much and offer them your potions if they're still around.
It remains to be seen whether any of them will be able to return to the pack as resocialized, full Canadians, but in case they will not, at least they will be very polite crazies, you suppose.
Anyways, seeing as it's unlikely there'll be any large-scale chaos following Heartbreaker's death, you suppose your job here is done for the moment, so you can leave the land of the maple syrup behind to return home again.
This whole gig went easier than you expect, to be honest. You shall blame it on yourself being just that good.
Being yourself is pretty awesome, you have to admit. Not everyone can say they're anywhere near your level of sheer power, whether as a cape, a matter of connections and social clout or sheer wealth, each of which are interconnected and leveraged into immense effect on the world around you.
What can you say; you have a knack for this whole thing.
In that sense, you taking some time for yourself and just sitting back to relax to the pulsing beat of the Raveyard's music selection while you post news of your latest big exploit on the internet is perhaps one of the least concerning way you could spend your time from the authorities' point of view, not that anyone cares.
It's like, hey, you could be off to physically subjugate Africa right now, or to assassinate the Triumvirate to make a point about being the strongest cape in the world. Compared to the realm of possibilities open to you, hunting down particularly high-profile villains and other threats is comparably benign, all told.
Heck, they should be trying to incentivize you to keep going, if anything. Of course any attempt to do so runs the risk of you doing the opposite of what they want just to fuck with them, but still.
For now, you're just chilling and doing your own thing, kind of as a quick break from everything else. It can get tiring to be so perfect, y'know?
"Say what you will about being a villain," you talk to yourself, glancing over the assembled party goers spastically moving and dancing downstairs from your vaunted VIP area, "but no heroes ever own a fucking nightclub with a hidden black market in the basement."
Seriously, you're basically using your power and influence to more or less centralize illicit trade in the city. That's no small matter, no matter which way you turn it, and it's letting you profit off of a lot of the things going on within your territory.
You wonder if the sheer amount of guns and other assorted weaponry Accord is gleefully finding buyers for has reached the point of literal tons of merchandise being moved daily yet. No sane government would want you freely trading the things you are, but hey, here you are, getting rich off of it anyways.
Then there's the drugs, too. People, you have found, love drugs. For some reason, escaping their shitty lives by snorting a couple lines and smoking crack is the favorite activity of, like, half of humanity at this point for whatever reason, and they'll pay a crapton of money to keep doing it.
And there the US are, still thinking outlawing weed was going to get people to stop smoking it. Hilarious.
Nah, let's be serious for a moment here; the world is depressing and most people are aware of it. Just look at yourself, you're a horrible, murderous monster committing atrocities as kind of an afterthought at this point, and you have been an actual, objective improvement to humanity's situation on Earth Bet.
Like, this statement is very weird, when you think about it. It should be the opposite of true, but even so you can't actually help but consider the ludicrous thought that you are, in fact, one of the planet's greatest heroes.
Not in terms of motivation for your actions or anything, but simply due to the net good you're doing here vastly overshadowing the fact you are kind of a monster.
You have no idea whether that's sad or hilarious. Actually, no, it's the latter, you're just forcing yourself not to laugh out loud.
Jeez… Anyways, you're going ahead and using your old PHO handle to throw a quick mention of Heartbreaker's death onto the platform, complete with a selfie of yourself holding up the man's dead body. The internet will take care of the rest itself, especially whenever the Guild up in Canada gets around to making a public statement about why the secretary of Canada's prime minister had to be detained.
Kind of a big oof there, you ain't gonna lie.
PRT Interdepartmental Notice
Confidential: For Archiving Purposes Only
Notice regarding the Nomadic Villainous Parahuman 'Circus'. Subject corresponding to known appearance present in Brockton Bay, possibly relating to LSC (see PRTENE LSC-1).
Subject sighted playing clown-themed japes on passerbys, in all cases involving the use of at least one creampie (no innuendo). Likelihood of correct identification high, but separate designation has been determined in case of a new identity being assumed.
Provisional designation: The Japist
Note, the Japist is known to hand out sweets to children and has been judged of little danger to Wards personnel. Overall threat assessment remains unchanged beyond this addendum.
Do not approach the Japist unnecessarily. Assume loss of personal effects if carried, even under standard issue PRT Agent equipment.
Technically, you can keep on going, jumping from what amounts to one action sequence to the next, but you would be lying if you said you didn't enjoy your little breaks in-between, either.
It's just part of reality that more often than not, big, epic battles, sneaky assassinations and thrilling cape duels aren't things that happen every day. The mundane, the casual normality of your life, sooner or later catches up to you one way or another, and if it's the kind of thing that would have most people declare the opposite of mundane.
Simply put, anything can be normal to you if it's your normal. It's always surprising just how much even a baseline human can get used to, living with only one arm, being colorblind, having to walk five flights of stairs to enter their apartment each and every time they want to go in or out; the possibilities are there, really.
As a vampire and proud ignorer of many laws of physics, nature and man alike, you like to think your tolerances are much, much more pronounced than even this, of course. So your home is an ever-shifting nightmare of spacial consistency that reorients and recombines its compartments in continually changing, yet always convenient ways, so what?
Who cares if you're splitting off parts of your soul to do minor work here and there, or that you have an AI riding along in the back of your head? Not like anyone can say anything about it, nor the fact you have a literal harem that more or less gets along with itself, contrary to what anti-polygamy propaganda disguised as popular media likes to spout.
In this sense, it's not even anything out of the ordinary how you keep on churning out just a few more ever so valuable flasks of the clear potion you've been making such immense use of. It's a chore, no more and no less, and it's not even all that bad of one considering the process of making the stuff is just a little bit entertaining.
It does involve miniature explosions and bright lights, which is basically the reason chemistry is neat- except it works off of completely different principles, of course. Incidentally, those lights are a different color every time you filter the ingredients for some reason, and they always merge into different vaguely present patterns before fading out.
Not a horribly bad chore indeed.
Your usual experiments with potions and the plethora of easily available soul-only materials you can access inside your inner world are taking more time than you were expecting when you started on this fine Friday morning, having seen there was a good bit of time backed up inside of yourself to do so with, though they also are unusually productive at the same time; turns out that's what happens when the potion meant to clear their recipients' heads instead cause them to engage in a full-on orgy, you guess.
Somehow. Like, this should not be increasing your productivity in testing and advancing your known recipes and ideas on them, but it does, through whatever process is involved here.
Personally, you think it might have something to do with another phenomenon you believe to be related, the 'Blowjob Paradox' having been a well-recorded thing for a good long while now, though you never did share your findings with anyone.
Like, Kate did figure it out, but you never discussed it with her in-depth or anything.
Anyways, the Maid turned up to and started molesting you and somehow, you managed to both screw a couple dozen of her bodies and simultaneously get everything you wanted done. Or rather, you managed to do a bunch of stuff before the Latin chanting closed in on your location a couple hours in, so you decided to just book it there and go do something else.
Elsewhere. In another location. That was not there.
This is how and why it came to you wandering through an empty city in what seems to be a desert, an illusionary oasis amidst burning hot sands that seem to be baking in the sun regardless of what the sky itself would indicate. There are no souls hanging around the place, so you think you're pretty safe from the cultists crowding you, at least for the moment.
It is also, you think to yourself after having discovered as much via a quick parking of your ass on your throne, the place two of the Guardians hanging around your inner world are currently staying. And testing two creations of theirs.
You enter the upper ranks of the arena at the center of this place unopposed, the twin guardians currently busy elsewhere but no part of your world inhibiting your progress regardless. There, you see the Dollmaker and the Pit Lord, arguing as always, whereas the sands of the arena itself are bearing the creations you respectively tasked them to complete.
"Bah, ruddy 'tacles 'n slime. Nah creativity 'n nothin', 's jus' a big target I tell ya!"
"Big words coming from someone that just made another thing with four limbs and a head. So gauche. Everything is humanoid these day." The huge form of the Pit Lord, his pale, muscled flesh and frame nearing three meters in height as always looking entirely mismatched with the withered, wizened sight of his 'brother', looms over the balustrade of the high stands, reserved for the ruler and his court when they attend.
You know this because you look these kinds of things up in your spare time. You have a soul arena mirroring some ancient ones that really existed, why wouldn't you g*gle it?"
Looking down at where both of them are focusing, you can easily see what they're talking about. A writhing mass of flesh, tentacles, in fact, is prowling around down there, viciously throwing itself at what appears to be a mech of some sort, the two locked into a bitter struggle for domination over the other as neither can truly die in this place.
One side is using uncountable tentacles, covered in thick, clear-purple slime to launch itself at its opponent, latching onto anything it can to try and grapple it down using momentum and sheer, savage grit. The other, on the other hand, counters this with blades extending from its forearms and -legs, followed by waves of heat and electricity visible as arcs of energy emanating from its chassis.
The mech's weight is distributed with great care, its legs easily letting it weather the storm and push its enemy back. The tentacle monster loses several of its limbs, both to swiftly, almost unnaturally organically aimed cuts and the non-kinetic weapons meant to stop it, only for the former wounds to seal up as its purple blood rapidly turns into new tentacles to replace lost biomass and its otherwise battered flesh regenerates so quickly you can see it regaining its use within moments.
Another exchange, this time using distorted eyes surfacing where the Pit Lord's creation withdraws its tentacles, the very air shimmering and shifting in a way that would have sane people rub their faces to avoid having to watch it directly, the mech answering with a wrist-mounted rocket launcher and its own laser eyes.
"Looks like they're about equal," you comment, casually slipping onto the throne behind the two that made these creatures possible. Both turn around, protests ready on their lips, but they die down as they realize it's you.
Instead, they immediately begin assuring you their respective vision in transforming the souls you threw at them is superior. "Oh, but you have not even seen the sweet, pussing beauty of the constant evolution of the sweetie I fathered in the bowels of the dark-"
"Bah, ain't worth noffin' if'n it ain't be o' use. Look at mah machine, it works! 'S reliable! 'S not keeling over the moment a someone pours chem'cals over it!"
"Your worthless piece of shriveled junk just cannot bring forth the true beauty of the fruit of my loins!"
Yep, these two guys are the same as ever.
You do, as a matter of fact, keep on toiling away through the early morrow, working in your own potion basement to keep your production rates a high as possible. You still are putting out far fewer doses of Cleansing Potion than the Thinker is, and only around twice as much as each of the individual thralls you pay to produce this stuff as you need it, but hey, every little bit still counts.
Seriously, undoing all the 'fun' Heartbreaker had took hundreds upon hundreds of potions, which seriously adds up when you take a couple hours to produce just a few. If it wasn't for the literal AI letting you cheat, the more or less natural production rate given just your natural abilities would have taken several times the preparatory period you did end up requiring here.
It's easy enough to mass-produce simpler, easier synthesized potions, including the base versions of most of them, but as you go further and further beyond what those are meant to do… Well, things get harder, more complicated and not as simple to just make in larger batches.
Each potion becomes more work-intensive, more a matter of craftsmanship than simple magical chemistry. It was easy enough to add a bunch of freshly distilled starch to reasonably clean water and throw in any additives you wanted for look and taste, but for your current task of restocking on massive amounts of Cleansers, you need to individually adjust each step according to how the ingredients are reacting.
Sometimes you need to heat the stuff up, sometimes you need to actively cool it down at that point instead. It takes a great deal of trial and error, truth be told, and you simply can't seem to find a way to predict what exact changes to the recipe will be necessary ahead of time.
It's, like, probably some issue with molecular structures. Or the universe is just fucking with you to pay you back for how hard you fuck it on a regular basis. Whatever.
All that aside, nothing is really pushing you to work any faster than you are, so you just spend a couple hours on this before you realize something. Specifically, these Cleansing Potions, they're kind of a big deal, both for general and mental health in particular.
Now, you don't mean to say that half the Crypts are basically complete nutjobs, but they totally are, and you don't mean to say you're an exception to that or anything. Nobody's 'normal', literally any person in existence has their own screwed up little life story and their own individual damage, including you, probably.
Except maybe your buddy Mister Smith over on Earth Rapture, and even he's so normal you would call him 'abnormally normal' in his own right.
More specifically, though, you're thinking of two of your members in particular when you mention the usage of Cleansing Potions. Both Alec, or Jean-Paul if he ever goes back to his birth name (something you suspect he doesn't purely because it annoys Cherie) and Cherie herself never did consume any of them, contrary to all of their siblings and literally anyone that Heartbreaker ever used his power on.
You bring it up with them, but…
"So you're saying it'll be like he never did anything?"
"Kind of, but not quite. It'll make it so anything he ever made you feel fades away in retrospect, to let you deal with it."
Alec eyes you, then the clear potion inside a clear little shot bottle you're holding up. "Yeah nah, I'm fine."
Huh. "Not a fan of dealing with your emotions?"
"I haven't been feeling much for a long time now, ain't gonna start if I don't have to." There's a sense of tired acceptance in Alec's eyes, if not his words, as he turns back towards the screen opposite of his couch, both his and your hands going back to handling the controllers you're holding. "So screw that noise. No offense."
You do wonder whether he's genuine, and just hasn't noticed that he's been exhibiting subtle signs that correspond to someone emoting pretty closely or if he's just afraid of taking the plunge and finding out he's just naturally like this and can't blame his dad for it.
Well, either way, no need to press him. "You do you. Think Cherie will want some or should I just throw this stuff back with the rest?"
"Eh. She's a bitch, she'll say no just because."
Not really all that informative, but it does prove true enough, when you have a talk with her as well later on. Well, you do get it, it can be pretty scary to confront the things that make you, you.
Especially if you don't like them, but they literally define you, and have done so for most of your life. Not that that's an issue for you, of course, you just don't need any of your potions for that, it goes without saying.
As such, you carefully do not drink any yourself. Just in case.
On a distantly related note, you still did have a question or two on the exact extents of your potions, on exactly how far their effects go. You have already proven the stuff can go and undo mindfuckery fairly reliably, or at least the kinds thereof you've seen to date, but you want to figure out what, if any, boundarie there are to this.
Luckily, you do have access to various ways to pull information and confirmation thereof out of thin air, which is why you end up doing just that in preparation of a little gathering of a couple of your people, the ones that can plan stuff and all.
Not that it's directly related, you just wondered, a bit. And lucky you, there is one particular Master affecting humans on the regular that is often seen as the epitome of this kind of thing, and rightfully deeply feared for it.
All you need to do, then, is to ask the question and make the world answer. "Would Curative Potions as I have been using them undo the Simurgh's mind control?"
Reality, as always, is prompt to answer when you request cosmic guidance, and thorough in doing so ever since you made it, having been mildly appalled by the vague answers you received just after figuring out this was a thing you could do.
'The Simurgh acts in two ways, both through precognition to foresee possible futures and through microscopic telekinesis to force those it affects to act in ways that bring forth the future it means for them to actively announced through soundless song produced purely as an occasional byproduct thereof refined into a terror weapon, in addition to causing knock-on effects and reactions to its own actions and that of others that act in the same way executing simple causality.
Cleansing Potions have the power to undo direct manipulation of the brain, as is incorrectly known to be caused through a psychic song, which prevent and reverses it, whereas indirect manipulation enabled through comprehensive precognition remains effective, should the chains of logic at play not be interrupted through this effect.'
Huh. Neat. So it's not necessarily a complete cure, but it likely would screw up any plans the Endbringer had… assuming it didn't just plan around that, somehow.
This is the Simurgh you're talking about; no amount of paranoia is enough, even if you are reasonably sure your powers trump whatever it exactly is or does. You aren't going to bet you can outwit the thing when so many others have tried and failed.
Now, if you were to, say, confirm that your effects on the usual parahuman precognition and similar stuff also hit it, that would be a different story, but you've been careful about directly doing anything about the winged menace more than anything else. If Endbringers are dangerous as a whole, which is a massive case of understatement if you've ever heard any, the Simurgh is doubly so, and thrice as unpredictable.
You really don't want to poke it in a way that would elicit a reaction, in other words. Best to leave that kind of thing to people whose horrible deaths would be both entertaining and enlightening to you.
But speaking of horrible deaths, it's time to meet the others and talk about Nilbog.
Dinah is sitting on a big, doubly-cushioned chair, a small collection of emptied plates covered in crumbs bearing witness to how much you feed the little brunette. "My powers demand at least twenty-eight percent more ice cream before they will cooperate!"
"I sometimes do sincerely doubt the wisdom of letting you decide things, but alright, what does the council think?" You ask. "Is it time for an ice cream break?"
Sarah hops off her chair, wandering off to gather up a couple napkins. "It's always time for ice cream, Gabe."
Thus it was spoken, thus it shalt be.
In all seriousness though, you do have somewhat of a powerful team of Thinkers, when you take a step back to really consider it. Sarah and Dinah are, by themselves, in the upper percentiles of parahuman Thinkers when taken by actual, concrete use, giving you accurate, useful information and playing off of each other really well, whereas the Thinker as an AI is just capable of accessing and sifting through immense amounts of data at incredible speeds.
Add to this Henley's power, which can give him plans and suggestions even if he's not physically present at the moment and everyone else being connected and capable of chiming in with their own thoughts and perspectives on what's being discussed and you have a bona-fide think tank going on by any metric you care to apply.
So when you plan, discuss and contemplate how to most effectively eradicate Nilbog as a potential source of danger for your own livestock operation (better known as human civilization), you do so with considerable and surprising depth and authority on the matter.
You also base your observations off of everything the PRT has on the man that took over the quaint little town of Ellisburgh, beyond 'just' everything your team of capes can confirm by cross-referencing and checking each other.
There is, all in all, a reason the PRT has been just quarantining the area, is one conclusion you come to. His creations have powers of their own, even if they seem to be based on actual biology rather than just happening from thin air as most actual powers seem to, and they've proven to be a match for actual Protectorate capes in the past.
Some grow bigger and stronger when subjected to high temperatures. Some can fire off venomous spines, coordinate each other, some are literal living, exploding kamikaze bombs and the list goes on and on. Simply put, countering Nilbog isn't as simple as to just find a cape that has the right powers, because he effectively produces entire teams of fighters that can make up for each other's weaknesses and all that.
This is why the initial response to Ellisburgh being depopulated was cut short. The Protectorate and PRT simply weren't expecting this kind of opposition, and truth be told most capes would be fucked against this kind of thing in any case.
By now they could've mounted a more thorough task force specifically designed to deal with Nilbog and his creations, they've had plenty of time and, to name just one possibility, the Triumvirate… exists, but they haven't, for two main reasons.
One, Nilbog hasn't been proactively expanding ever since they just put up a bunch of walls, his creatures unable to effectively break through as long as the more dangerous ones stay towards the center of the man's private little kingdom. Two, various Thinkers have rung alerts, and your own have agreed to their predictions for that matter, that should Nilbog be destroyed, he has rigged a massive deadman's switch using his power.
Should he be killed, a massive amount of destruction would soon follow. The most accurate everyone can guess, according to more Thinker powers, is that it's some huge explosion of spores or viruses that somehow multiply when subjected to heat, such as through, say, anyone rudely trying to sanitize Ellisburgh of everything inside of it the hard way, meant to spread all over North America or, potentially, all over the globe.
And, uh, quite lethal to human life, of course. That's kind of the whole point.
Lucky you you have a couple solutions to all the problems presented by Nilbog's existence… Should you choose to pursue the thought of ending him on general principle rather than just, say, wait until he dies of old age or something.
If he even can. You aren't quite sure how close to human he even is, precise reports on how much he can affect himself are hard to get and your magic for these kinds of questions is currently on the fritz after just having been used.
One way or another, you have an eye now on the man once upon a time known as Jamie Rinke.
Sarah Pelham wasn't thinking much of it as she went about her day, taking the opportunity of an empty house to go out and do a little shopping once again. It was a little weird to say so herself, but running a household took a great amount of constantly replenished supplies, whether it be in the form of food or cleaning agents.
It was a running battle to keep everyone fed, clothed and the house clean, one with no end in sight. In a way, the leader of New Wave likened it to defending the innocent and standing for a better future like her and her family tried to; a struggle against what seemed like truly inexhaustible foes.
… She was aware New Wave hadn't been overly active ever since the current status quo settled into place. That said, they continued to fight the good fight!
Just against any criminals that did not wear the wrong colors. Oh how the mighty had fallen. Not that Brockton Bay's criminal underworld was ever lightly populated nor easy to deal with from the start.
Sarah shook her head. There was no point dwelling on these things, not now and not here. She was acting within her private identity's remit only, and the vagaries of cape life had no place within it.
There was little point in separating these two overly strictly, but stress from one part of her life was better left where it belonged rather than creeping in at all times. That was how people developed anxiety and had nervous breakdowns.
No, she was just going to continue strolling through the supermarket, buy the exact same things as she always did despite having determined she was going to be adventurous about new things this week and go home listening to silly songs about romance and absolutely no news on the radio.
Routine. It was strange to think of it like this, but in many ways familiar things were a good thing. They grounded you, gave your life a frame of reference.
All of this was a long-winded way to say that Sarah enjoyed doing things she had done a million times before, because it implied she would do them another million times afterwards. If her routine was interrupted, it just was, that was how life was, but she was just fine living it as it was.
And just like she remembered it happening the last time it did, it repeated. She was pushing her shopping cart, just as he was, the earnest, handsome boy she'd met before.
His eyes met hers, recognition blooming in both their gazes at once. She was frozen for a few long, precious seconds, the detailed events of their last meeting playing through her head again.
Sarah had thought back on the… encounter they had, second-guessing both him and herself. Strangers and Masters existed, and it was utterly unlike her to… faint like she did, not to mention to let it get as far as it did at all, and waking up inside her car, carefully laid down in the driver's seat in fact, had been the strange end to a strange moment in her life.
However, in retrospect, she just couldn't help it. Gabriel was nice, polite and built like a Greek god, a perfect gentleman right until she didn't want him to be gentle at all. It felt, strangely, like there was chemistry between them, despite how short their acquaintance had been.
All this and more flashed between them in the moment of their second meeting, an unspoken exchange, both of them setting down where they stood… And judging by Gabriel's friendly smile as he came closer, he was entirely ready to either pretend like nothing had happened or to rock her entire world.
Again.
"Hey there," he said, voice like honey on her lips and wholly less chaste body parts making her decision for her before she fully realized she had to make it already, "how have you been, Sarah? You looked a little tired when we met last time."
"Oh, you know how it is," she replied, perfectly aware of what he was really asking. "I got home just fine, so I suppose I shouldn't complain."
They were already walking through the aisles together, their shopping carts pushed along together. She also shouldn't let him get away with any cheek nor naughty business, but…
But.
They got to talking, as people did, and before Sarah knew it she was already on the way to her parking spot carrying heavy shopping bags, though she hardly felt their weight thanks to how fit she was- being a hero may not be something she was putting much personal attention into, but staying fit was important regardless.
Gabriel was with her, of course. The young man (with an emphasis on man, even with the comparison to her husband who easily cracked two meters in height) was as pleasant as ever, even having talked her into letting him help her carry her things this time.
She liked watching the slight tension in his body as he distributed the weight like an athlete adjusting his posture for workout equipment… Sarah was perfectly happy to admit she had a type, and for some reason he was hitting all the right button without even trying.
Maybe it was a bad thing to be so easily taken with what was, on the face of it, a stranger, but Gabriel just had a way of sliding right past those kinds of reasonable wariness. "Here you go, Sarah. By the way, did I mention your car looks great? Lots of space in the trunk."
"You need this kind of space when you regularly go shopping for a whole family," she smiled, but despite the reminder of her children and husband, she wasn't at all any less in danger of forgetting herself. If anything, it just made it worse, a guilty pleasure in the most literal sense.
"I can see that. It takes a lot to keep up." Gabriel's eyes were on her body, smirking as he inspected her from head to toe for a moment and knew exactly that she saw him do so. "I do hope those aren't leather seats in there- it's so hard to clean them up anytime something spills…"
He'd been dropping innuendo for a while now. It should be inappropriate, but he delivered it well. His face being nice enough to lose herself in whenever she wasn't paying attention didn't hurt either, of course.
"Oh, I'd bet you'd love to try spilling on them," she heard herself saying, suppressing the urge to hold a hand over her mouth as soon as she did. The way she was talking, it sounded almost as if-
"Not wrong," he shrugged, giving her an impish wink. "Want to try it out?"
Was he- he was propositioning her for sex, that much was hard to deny at this point. So why was she thinking about it instead of immediately hopping into her car and driving off into the evening…?
"Only if you promise you'll try this time," Sarah teased, opening the passenger door and reaching inside to turn a switch that had its backrest drive lower, bending over and returning a wicked grin at the man that had her behaving like a high school girl high on puberty.
The fact he was staring at her ass through her jeans was encouraging in all the worst ways and she loved it.
"I'll see what I can do," Gabriel chuckled as he climbed in after her, the seats now turned into an almost even space they could use. "Not like I need much encouragement here."
This was exactly what she meant.
The door slammed shut behind him and, without another word, they started to tug and pull at each other's clothes, actually behaving more like naughty kids than grown adults. Less of an indictment in his case, given he was half her age, but Sarah couldn't help it; this situation just made her feel oddly young for some reason.
Maybe it was the sculpted abs she was leaning over to lick in short order, maybe it was him pulling her pants right off and playing with the elastic band of the simple, but frilled things, but this entire… thing, was a lot of fun. And when she finally pulled the organ that kept on occupying a corner of her mind in her idle hours out of his pants in turn, ever more naughty little tingles rose up her spine.
Not that she was going to wait for those to get her anywhere by themselves. Her fingers trailing over it, she looked at him and he looked at her, a shared understanding already fully developed.
Leaning back as her panties joined the pile of clothing off to the side of the car, Sarah licked her lips. "Come on already, big boy."
His answer was to wrap his arms around her back, lips closing in to devour hers. She moaned into his mouth as their tongues danced, a frantic, urgent kiss being exchanged while he positioned himself in front of her, her back leaning against the backrest of the back seats.
He looked like out of some teenagers' magazine, a title cover of a rock star maybe. Sarah had no idea what she would describe herself as, spreading her legs for a younger man with no expectations, no relationship drama, just raw sex and sheer fun she shouldn't be having.
At least she was still looking good, she thought to herself, even though she was still wearing her top. No flab where there shouldn't be any, everything still nice and shapely… Her figure hadn't changed much in the last twenty years, including her breasts.
It was a small miracle she didn't have back problems by now, or even much of any sag. If there was one thing she would never budge on, it was wearing the right bras.
"Like what you see?" She asked, despite her utter conviction Gabriel did. Some things just had to be said aloud.
And indeed, as he was sitting up, his hands on her thighs as her already shamefully wet pussy was displayed to him in full, her legs lying around his waist in preparation for what she wanted, he took the time to nod, looking her in the eyes.
"I am, it'd be hard not to. You're beautiful, Sarah."
His cock, raw and hard like stone, was nearing her entrance now. She could feel herself breathing harder, the forbidden pleasure so close she could taste it already- Sarah's last thought was that she was glad the car's windows were treated to make it hard to look inside, because else she would be giving any passerby a free show now.
And she would be, there was no way to stop, hadn't been for a while. Some things just happened, really, and there was precious little she could do about it but have fun.
Gabriel's cock, huge and throbbing, was pointed right at her, touching her, pushing inside of her; she let out a low hiss of triumph as she felt him enter her, the girth of his shaft and the way she could sense every vein along it taking her breath in the same moment she was finally filled with the pleasure of being filled.
There was something intoxicating to having sex despite her marriage. Some naughty part of her that enjoyed comparing Gabriel to Neil.
She threw her head back as the young man that had charmed her so thrust into her, performing long charges far into her depths, plumbing her pussy and exploring just how wet she was getting. When he hit something, bumping into a place that was a little too sensitive, Sarah's eyes were as wide open as her mouth, the inconceivable sensation telling her what she could scarcely believe.
He was hitting her womb, just as he was bottoming out! Suppressing certain sounds she was making, she tried glaring up at him, but it came out as more of a pout. Gabriel still chuckled and pulled back a smidgen, starting to thrust in earnest now and thoroughly plowing her just how she liked it best.
"Better," the mother of two gasped, her hands feeling over his strong back as he pumped his cock into her, her toes curling just a bit. "Muuuch better."
"A common opinion," he grinned, diving in to kiss and lick at her neck, making her feel things she wasn't sure should be coming from any place that wasn't meant to be hidden under underwear. "Did you know you make a cute face when you come?"
"Wait, what?"
"Let me show you."
And just like that, Sarah Pelham launched into the second one-of-a-kind sex marathon she would be part of. There were no regrets, for the record
You make a point, such as you do, of pounding Lady Photon into her car with all due effort, the vehicle's rhythmic swaying saying everything anyone needs to know about how you're making a point of absolutely destroying her pussy.
With your cock. You do mean that kind of 'destruction', just to make that as clear as you possibly can. Always better to be sure when you're often beig pretty literal about these kinds of things.
Anyways, suffice it to say you leave the heroine with a nice little challenge in the form of the car seats' cushions, which now require a bit of cleaning along with… everything else inside the car's insides before the scent of sex will be gone.
Whoops. In your defense, you claimed you would be rocking her world, not that you'd do it without making a mess. Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs and all that.
But yeah, the other Sarah will be fine like that; she sure did look awfully comfortable when you last saw her, limbs all sprawled out and leaking your cum slowly. You didn't fill her up like you feel you would usually, though, mostly because you had too much fun making her make cute faces.
By way of making her come. Repeatedly. Like, what else were you gonna do in that situation?
Good work all around, at any rate. She seemed genuinely happy to see you, for the record, which you shall take as confirmation she's open to having sex every now and then. Too bad for her husband, but really, if she's ready to cheat on him, that just means he hasn't managed to satisfy her sufficiently, nothing more, nothing less.
As long as it's not like those kinds of relationships. The ones where both him and her are super into you cucking the guy. You'd think that only happens with, like, weird fat old men or super insecure beanpoles, but high school was its own kind of torture for many, many reasons, okay?
When you didn't have jealous boyfriends with no experience nor the stamina to really get any of it after your ass for sleeping with their girlfriends, you had to endure the creepy looks of the ones that were into that kind of thing. It gets so exhausting to deal with some people really quick…
Publishing a book, on the face of things, is usually best left to a publisher, a company that concerns itself solely with printing, promoting and distributing an author's work. The logistics and time investment required would just be prohibitive otherwise, hence why you do agree that it just makes sense to have a publisher do all of this stuff in exchange for a sizable amount of the profit involved.
Like, look, you're generally in favor of creativity and all that jazz, but let's be honest- publishers are a reality because reality dictates their necessity, as opposed to, say, pharma companies that drive up the price of medicines in order to rake in extra profit.
See what happened with you going out of your way to forcefully lower the market price for insulin. Just because you could, really.
Why is all of this important? Well, it's because in a place like Earth Bet, where just that many people exist and industries of all kinds have developed the way they did, it's a little more complicated to publish that book you wrote, whose sequel you've already been working on as well. Not massively so, publishers did exist in Remnant as well, but it does take a tad bit more work.
Mostly work done by Sarah, who has declared herself your manager repeatedly by this point and decided she wants to just do the publishing herself. Hey, if she wants to deal with the annoying bits you frankly can't be arsed to bother with, good on her, really.
Incidentally, Nora is handling most legalese business going on with the Crypts on her own time, including anything involving your upcoming book sales.
Dawn: Chained By The Night (written by a certain G. L.) isn't hitting the bookshelves quite yet, but that's mostly because Sarah wants to fleece as many of the stores she can get her claws into as possible. It's not like the manufactories can't just print as many copies as you want them to, of course, and so there's two warehouses full lying over at the docks already.
While you listening to your sister explain her business strategy for making you a world-renown author already, you also went ahead and secured a couple copies to be sent to the Dallon household ahead of time, plus a few lying around for any of the higher ups in the Crypts that wanted to own a physical copy.
Like, you did put it into telepathic circulation for anyone that wanted to read it so far already, but it's simply a different experience between reading an actual book and downloading the text right into your brain as a series of thoughts. Personally, you kind of prefer the latter, but you do see why some of the others see it the other way around.
Tank top showing off your abs? Check. Tight pants that would be actively uncomfortable given your penis size if you weren't immune to that kind of thing? Check. Shadow face? Also check.
Was there anything else you wanted to get ready before you got this circus started once again? Ah, right. Rummaging through the lower reaches of the desk drawers you keep various props inside of, you grab a spare fake mustache, one of several you keep on hand around the place just in case you happen to need one, and a small piece of paper.
Which you scrawl 'Abel's Extra Silky Stache, do not touch' onto, underlined twice for emphasis, before putting the former onto the latter in plain view of the camera you're about to turn on.
You have a whole gimmick here, you may as well use it. Thinking back, you really have been squandering a lot of comedic potential so far by not using props like this a lot more; you're streaming art stuff and trying to structure it in a way that lets people follow along, yes, but you're also doing entertainment in doing so, you feel.
And that means making some concessions for the amusement of your viewers. Not enough to wash out any of the actually integral part of your show, but enough to add to and season the experience.
… You do hope you aren't getting your wires crossed again. After you ate as many people as you have by now, you sometimes have this little issue where experiences and reflexive action bleed into your own behavior every now and then, for a short time as you 'digest' them properly.
It's never anything all too noticeable, just a hand reaching for a soldier's sword that isn't there or things like that, when you consumed Thulian soldiers en masse in particular. Normally it's all extremely minor and passes fairly quickly, but there was this one guy, a splicer in Rapture whose entire thing was to put everything into cooking metaphors that somehow managed to have you think like that for a couple minutes after eating him.
It was… interesting, but you decidedly do not want to make it a habit.
Anyways, your studio is set, all sweeping tables and artistically scattered art supplies, and so you press the button, gazing at the camera you have on for the introductory part of these things just like you always do. "Welcome to Painting with Cain. I am your host Cain and I hope you are having a nice evening today, if for no other reason than tuning in with everyone right here and now."
Now then, let's see what you should go with here…
Well, no need to get too complicated, for once. Not that you usually go out of your way to do so, of course; this is just a bit of recreational live drawing, painting and sketching, nothing more, nothing less.
You're going out of your way to share your hobbies with random people on the internet, make them accessible. It would kind of defeat the purpose if you were to make it harder to follow, even beyond just not needing to do anything of the sort.
"Let's see, I think we'd best return to doing some of the basics this time around. Don't get me wrong, it's always nice to let the artistic juices pump a bit, but the technical aspects of drawing are important enough I feel we should spend some time on them."
You're sitting there with an array of pens, most of them meant to be showcased during your demonstration. The fact that the picture you will be drawing is a reference to the design of the cover of the book you wrote and will soon be selling is another matter entirely.
"First off, we should get into the gritty details of what we work with. I won't pretend you have to keep any pens you use at any particular level of sharpness of anything like that, but there are a lot of ways to hold and apply them that are pretty interesting in case anyone is open to learning."
You hold up a simple pencil, showing off to the camera how someone would normally grip it to write. Then you go through a few other common ways of doing it- you feel you have a decent enough amount of examples from the souls you've eaten to date, you know how people hold pens in their daily lives.
"Whether you hold it properly like this to keep your wrist intact or just do it casually like this, the average person won't really think about how they use a pen. It's something you learn once and just do by instinct from then on, to be honest. With that established though, how do artists hold pens when they're using them to draw and why?"
Time for a little impromptu lesson. And if you end up demonstrating various ways to add definition to a picture using different techniques for drawing, only some of which you've gone over in these streams before, by drawing a book with a heart on it, both covered in chains and the contrasts making it almost look like the picture is reaching up off the paper at the viewer, all the better.
For the record, it doesn't actually do that. You're actively holding back the wisps of magic that have begun to wave themselves into things you draw (or paint, for that matter) for a while now; while it would be amusing to animate a picture of an inanimate object, it would also defeat the point.
As you already went over, no need to complicate these things unnecessarily.
You can say about Circus what you want, what with the literal clown shtick she's got going and the general sense of gender confusion that has her intentionally behave and appear androgynous in costume, but she's perfectly capable of putting her personal business aside and do her job when it comes down to it.
It's one thing the Crypts don't have as big of an issue with as most cape groups. Oh, sure, there's plenty that manage just fine, but smaller gangs, independent groups and the like, organizations that aren't well-entrenched and don't have that kind of basic professionalism down are distressingly common.
But yeah, Circus quite likes being paid the generous paycheck you afford her and the kind of security that comes with being part of a major gang, even if she normally lives in her own apartment and doesn't have much contact with the others. If it works for her, it works for her, of course, and you aren't going to be gainsaying her about it.
That said, whenever you call on her, she doesn't need long to come to you, whether she's living her civilian life or out pranking people using the various clown gadgets she asked Lea to make for her (as Circus herself isn't actually well-versed in how exactly these things work and consequently couldn't just program a blueprint into a manufactory). Just like she's currently coming into the room, as you did… just that, really.
You're sitting inside what used to be Coil's office once upon a time, having since been rebuilt and the space it takes up expanded to be divided up into several adjacent rooms. Lounging on a large couch, you smile as you see she's taken the local rules to heart; Circus is technically naked, save for the clown makeup, her white face returning your smile brightly.
Without the chest wraps nor the carefully adjusted clothing, it's hard to overlook she's a woman, her modest, but very much nicely rounded breasts moving with a regular breath that's hiding just how excited she is, or else how much she hurried to come to you, maybe even both. Her build is slim, but it does have a feminine look to it, and her long legs are already in motion before you even open your mouth.
"Anyone call for a clown call girl service?" She asks, eagerly coming closer. Her belly is flat, with barely any fat in sight, instead sporting the kind of muscle that the lifestyle of a cape burglar slash thief requires, moving cutely as she slows to a halt before you.
"As if I'd say no even if I didn't," you grin up at her. "I've been feeling awfully bored for no reason, so I thought I'd look into a professional for these kinds of problems."
"Oh golly, good thing you did! Can't have you sitting around brooding in the dark all the time, you could think unsexy thoughts!" Leaning over you, Circus' eyes roam your body- you're as naked as her, naturally, as you too are not exempt from the nudist regulations of your villainous lair's private areas. "Can't have that, now can we?"
"'Course not," you chuckle, raising your arms to slide your hand over her sides, then quickly shift to grabbing her cute butt as she proceeds to crawl onto your lap, her lithe body pressing against yours, a warm kiss and a small moan your reward.
Butts must be kneaded to stay in shape, after all.
"Alright big boy, you ready for some action?" Sitting on your lap proper now, she coos as she feels your hard cock press against her from below, immediately rubbing her moist pussy against it by arching her back a little. "Ooh, you are, aren't you?"
"I always am for you," you tell her, getting in a little nip at her shoulder. Circus is always fun to play with when you have the time.
Subduction Capstone Perk
Lord of Lust: You have evolved beyond your base nature as a reality-warping nightmare spawn, instead becoming reality-warping wet nightmare spawn. All existing racial effects remain unchanged, but you have gained the ability to sense and interpret lust wherever it exists inside the minds (or un-minds) of its originator(s) in a wide area around yourself. Vampires as a whole gain the ability to gain Sustenance through sex, may enhance the physical attractiveness of living beings simply by being present in their vicinity and apply a measure of 'porn physics' whenever convenient, with milder variants of these effects available to Thralls and true believers once unlocked. (Capstone Perk)
Seductive Hazard: The sheer seductive appeal you emanate has grown beyond what should be physically capable. Merely being in the same area as you may leave the vulnerable weak in the knees, the sound of your voice has men and women alike experience formative events and any and all entities affected by your Seduction may develop infatuations with you. Effects can be consciously suppressed, but not quite negated. (Capstone Perk)
Circus was a girl of many talents, always had been even before the cape thing. She had to be to keep up with her circus thing; reflexes and balance powered up like hers were great to do a lot of things with, but it took a little bit of extra polish to really make them shine.
Not that she'd been using her clown makeup for more than a cheap and easy theme that fit her powers well enough before, but hanging with the Crypts had given her time to really put in some practice, once she had a cushy couple big ones in the bank and nothing but time to occupy.
Even so, the trick she was performing now was a special one. A big, fat sword she was about to swallow right there, rubbing against her 'special mouth' and all that. Gabriel's cock was just like it always was, huge, hard and ready to go.
Exactly how she liked them, in other words. There was a reason she didn't really sleep around, but contrary to many of the other girls in The Man's little harem, it wasn't because she was head over heels for him.
Or, well, she was head over heels for The Dick attached to him, she supposed. When no other guy could hope to keep up with the fuck machine that made you feel things beyond human understanding, you got used to disregarding them real quick.
Look, she wasn't some superficial basic bitch only out for sex, but the difference between Gabriel and, like, any other guy was bigger than night and day. It also helped he was damn handsome and made her feel the fluttery things any girl felt when a nice guy was paying attention to her, okay?
She refocused on what she was doing, feeling his strong hands on her back and her tit, his throbbing cock rubbing against her pussy. She wasn't meaning to make any understatements here, but damn was she ready for this already.
"Wanna take a breather we actually start, or…?" Gabriel smiled up at her, pinching her nipple in a way that, had she any less control of herself, would've had her hiss with what he was making her feel.
"Nah, just enjoying the view," she sniped back, grinding against the hard rod between her legs. "But if you're that impatient…"
Grabbing his broad shoulders, Circus leveraged herself up, lining up the tip of her employer's spear with her wet cunt and wiggling her hips a little, letting it slide right into her despite its girth. She groaned as it stretched her out, the monster of a cock basically made to do just that though it didn't help she was pretty slender.
Just not built super wide, see? It just made it even better, the delicious feeling of her pussy widening to make space, taking in and fitting snugly around a huge cock… There was a reason she'd declared herself this man's clown call girl right after their first meeting.
Sure, said meeting was him nailing her silly, but on the other hand, she'd sampled the wares and decided she liked 'em.
His hands were on her ass now, squeezing it and guiding her down his fuckstick at the same time. She wasn't even thinking about it, just leaning in to mash her lips against his, staring lustily into his eyes as his stared back.
Still felt like it knocked the wind out of her when he bottomed out with one last push, her legs spread wide to the sides to accommodate his personal weapon of pussy destruction. She was pulled taut like a loaded spring, getting used to the sensation, but Gabriel wasn't gonna wait- both hands filled with her ass cheeks, he lifted her up like a toy.
But when she came back down, guided into place by The Cock, she did it under her own power, determined to bounce by the strength of her own arms. And legs, of course. She was grunting, panting, sweating a little already, but she kept it up, speeding up as much as she could before it all got too much.
Say whatever about her, but Circus wanted to do her job, at least. And what kind of clown call girl would she be if she came before he did? Not a great one, that's what, so she wasn't letting that happen.
Of course just as she thought that, Gabriel started to thrust up from underneath, meeting her with every bounce. "Aaah~!"
"What, need a break, after all?" He grinned at her evilly, pulling her closer. "I don't mind if you can't keep up!"
"Nu~uh!" It was embarrassing. It was also the best she could do at the moment, subjected to the shivering waves of pleasure his cock was fucking into her that traveled through her spine and gathered in her noggin' to keep her dazed just right. "Not… first!"
"Oh? Let's meet in the middle and come together, then." Then they were kissing again, his tongue tasting vaguely sweet in that indescribable way she craved, and Circus was being blasted, hot cum exploding inside her belly, pushing against what she was pretty sure might be her womb, and fireworks went off in her eyes and in her brain, both at once.
When she next came to, she was just sitting there, still speared onto Gabriel's cock and held in his arms. It felt nice and warm in ways she wasn't sure she could actually describe no matter how many word she used, and he may have just buried her face in his chest for a bit longer between regaining higher thought and clearing her throat.
"Ah, you with me again?" He drawled, patting her back. "Ready for round two or would you like to recover a bit first?"
"… Gimme five minutes of sucking your dick instead of riding it and I'll be right as rain," she suggested, already knowing she wouldn't be able to walk for a day after this.
And hey, she literally signed up for that. Circus was a greedy girl, and this kind of treatment was what she was hot for.
As always, once you're done thoroughly screwing Circus until all she's seeing are floating circus peanuts, you proceed to consider your next priorities, what with the many things you could be doing opposed to the few things you have time to do.
As well as the few people. It is a sad fact of life that you can't bone down everyone you'd like to at all given times, which really is the most problematic part of this whole 'running a criminal empire' thing.
Even as much as you delegate most of said running already, there's always more to do, more stuff to plan and figure out, more passing whims to disguise as something done for a serious reason… The list is endless, really.
So you have to prioritize. And no matter how much you'd love to just spend every day after day in a massive orgy with the many women and girls in your life, you get the feeling that actually doing important stuff is probably worth spending your time on as well.
Also, you've said it before, you'll say it again, it's nice to just work with your hands every now and then. It can get awfully dull to just do brain-heavy stuff, make it harder to keep a thumb on the pulse of what's going on; you aren't some hedge fund manager or pharma lobbyist making the world a worse place.
No, you're a fuck-mothering vampire making the world a worse place, and very deliberately so. Even if the 'worse' part hasn't really been working out so well recently…
Ah well, not like you're maniacally wringing your hands wanting to 'do evil'. You're just fine doing whatever you want to, after all, whether it benefits society at large or not.
Also, for the record, it was hilarious to cure cancer. And it bought you, like, all the good will you could ever want, even if it's weird to see people praise you for it on the internet.
But for now… For now you are back at the manual labor part of things. Potion don't just produce themselves, you tried to make them and they refused.
Now if only you didn't need so much of this stuff…
You have your work cut out for you, as one may realize when thinking about it, when you really get down to working out the exact details of the sequel to Dawn: Chained By The Night, a title that in retrospect sounds way too long and pretentious for something you wrote even if it was just meant as a way to mock certain other works of fiction.
Simply put, you have a lot to work off of. Yes, the plot is both internally consistent and was kind of brought to a conclusion at the end of the first volume, but you can pick back up on it easily enough, as you already decided when you reviewed the possibility of continuing it. The question now is, where exactly do you take it from there?
You need a plan, is what you're getting at here, a timetable of events as you plan to write them. Having learned from writing your first book, you have a much better estimate of how these things will work out, so you can also consider how well you'll be able to connect things, for lack of a better word; cohesive storytelling is actually surprisingly hard.
You're not, like, some amateur web author writing random crap for free over here. You, for one, have some actual standards and all, not to mention you proofread your stuff and all that. Seriously, you've seen some of the crappy capefics people write on PHO- and then repeatedly considered whether to ask the Thinker to just nuke the site off the internet entirely.
Yes, you use PHO yourself a lot, but some of the crap in the creative writing section is worse than you'd imagine a fictional story about your own life would be to read.
Anyways, time to tease your brain a bit. You have a rough draft of several ideas for various events and plot points, now you just need to put them together into a cohesive whole so you don't need to rewrite half the text by the time you're halfway done.
There is, as always, a lot to do, and ironically it being the weekend doesn't see you taking any breaks. It's a hazard, you suppose, of being your own boss- you are the one that decides when to do what, and you don't exactly have any guaranteed free days.
Not that it's a major issue for you, given you tend to treat every day as a holiday with just a little 'work' mixed in in the first place. It does help that you do have literal twenty-four hours a day to work with, rather than having to labor under the old issues of 'sleep' and 'hygiene'.
No, seriously, being able to just ignore the kinds of things that take up easily twelve hours in a living baseline human's day each day every day opens up a lot of available time, when you really think about it. You blame your tendency to just mess around and still get things done when needed on that.
But alas, you have a lot of work to do, so get on it you shall. That said, you aren't throwing yourself back into the potion mines for a change, at least not for the moment; you have, over the last while, been considering possible improvements to the array of tools required to brew the colorful magical enhancers you simply call 'potions' as a catch-all term, based off of your own experiences and those of the Thinker as well as the thralls you gave the power to work alchemical wonders plus a generous paycheck.
All that practical and personal experience you've been deliberately gathering had to come in handy eventually. There's a reason you actually went and gathered it, after all.
So you go in and work out possible ways to increase your efficiency, as well as that of anyone else that is handling potions on the regular. You do so with the aid of the Thinker, who, while not being as overtly creative as you are given her mental structures, has her own kind of innovative ingenuity expressed more through iterative processes than the way an organic being would think of when told to imagine creativity.
Normally, she would just go and calculate things, essentially 'think really hard' about whatever topic or issue is at hand, in order to arrive at a satisfactory solution, but magic has its ways to just do random thing that are extremely hard to foresee, so good old experimentation is what you go with in the end.
Long story short, you eventually roll out a new generation of enchanted 'lab equipment' that should hopefully be up to the challenges required of it. By which you mean you don't exactly plan to perform any maintenance on this stuff before replacing and recycling it all again whenever you get around to making more changes to the whole overall setup.
The joys of having a massive industrial base that can just shit out whatever you materially want. You could literally replace your entire base once a day and it wouldn't be any particular issue for you at this point. Incidentally, you are mildly worried about just how much space under Brockton Bay has been taken up by said industrial base ever since the Thinker initiated Operation Exponential Growth, but…
Hey, it's probably nothing to worry about. You made sure adamantine pillars ensure the stability you want to maintain to avoid accidentally drowning the entire city in case of a sudden visit by Behemoth, so the bedrock the Thinker ended up carving out has been replaced by something actually even more stable than before.
Not that the tightly-spaced manufactory floors taking up the space freed up like that can't bear considerable amounts of weight by themselves either, it's just a matter of principle. Like, it sure would be a fat load of shit if you fought off Leviathan only to accidentally throw Brockton Bay into the bay yourself.
Next off, you're doing a few last-minute adjustments to a certain game- IronCock is a labor of love, and you really do want the Earth Bet version to be something that properly reflects the changing circumstances under which you plan to publish it.
It's not much- you just have to adjust some dialogue, given the concept of what a 'Grimm' is has to be explained, though you only do it after the term is dropped just because you like the flow of the early parts of the plot, where the player has to defend a small town from a 'horde' of them.
You've seen real Grimm hordes, and a couple dozen beowolves are not that. Though the danger posed by those numbers certainly is immense for smaller villages out in the countryside of Remnant, those places basically survive by way of just not attracting Grimm as much as possible.
Surprisingly enough, while it's kind of a death world, it's not that much of one as long as you avoid larger concentrations of people, for several reasons.
Anyways, there's some small changing and shifting things around, but for the most part you can leave the game as such alone. It's not like the gameplay needed any significant changes, beyond the suggestions on multiplayer content your playtesters gave you.
… Of course implementing even small changes can be surprisingly difficult without certain tools, but thanks to the Thinker, code is basically your clay when it needs to be. It's one reason you even went and translated the game over into Earth Bet formats- without her, you likely would've just shrugged and left it as it was.
Seriously, different programming languages, different system architecture- it's like trying to explain a million words in a language that does not have a word for what is meant. Simultaneously. A lot of work goes into video games, okay? And you sure a hell wouldn't have bothered without someone that can just snap her metaphorical fingers and make the changes you need happen.
Ah well. All's well that ends well, you suppose.
"… What is this?" The question is one of disbelief more than blunt entitlement or anything of the sort, uttered in response to the change of scenery you just inflicted on your date for the day, so you just smile and spread your arms.
"This," you explain, "is a beach. Specifically one that gives us a lovely view of the Mediterranean Sea along the coast of Greece."
Crystal Pelham, Laserdream, gives you an unimpressed look, for all that she's still tempted to goggle at the nice little vacation spot you found yourself on the sly. "Why are we here, how are we here and why is there nobody else around?"
Arms folding under her huge chest (not quite Okita level of huge, you think, but very close), she's raising an eyebrow at you; apparently, being randomly teleported across the globe has her a little testy now. You know what, that's fair enough, actually.
"In order, we're here because I wanted to take you out on a date to the beach and Brockton Bay's local ones are literal trash, by teleporting over here the moment you came close to the meeting point and people aren't here because the place is pretty far from civilization and not well known overall."
"… Gotta say, it looks pretty good for being just a wild bit of nature," Crystal admits, taking another look at the area. Soft sand washed over by even, wide waves that reach pretty far onto the beach itself, the water a clear blue that shines brightly in the light of the evening sun. There's a somewhat rocky area some way to one side, but nothing but wide sandy dunes to the other. "It's amazing."
"That's what she said," you shrug, giving her a cocked grin. "But yeah, I brought beach chairs, cocktails, all the good stuff you need to enjoy a beach."
"How about swimsuits?"
"Who do you take me for, exactly? Of course not."
It takes a bit of cajoling, but Crystal does join you for a swim eventually, taking her clothes off and leaving them behind with the rest of your baggage, neatly folded before she was satisfied with them. Her huge knockers stand out as usual, but she's an absolute bombshell regardless of their size and perfect roundness, as you once again confirm.
A beautiful face, aesthetic proportions with long legs and arms, a butt just ranging into the territory of being bubbly, slim belly and perfectly smooth skin, and that's before you even get to the long, straight blonde hair; you've had the thought before, but either the Pelhams slash Dallons just have borderline supernaturally good genes or Amy must've made her whole family hot for some reason.
'Some reason', heh. She may have had repressed it for the longest time, but she totally was into doing members of her own family for a long-ass time before you ever met her, and not just Vicky either, even if she was mostly fixated on her sister. One thing you don't take credit for is just how horny she's always been.
It's not like you couldn't just, y'know, implant a fetish or two, even before you count in the possibilities your magic grants you in this regard; the human brain is just very eager to form new ways to fetishize whatever it manages to fixate upon, in your experience.
There's a reason so many and extremely varied fetishes exist, as one quick probe of the internet can prove if one knows how to look for them.
For the record, the water is clear enough not to detract from the view at all once you're both in it, Crystal's tits floating in the water as though they were inbuilt life support. She, on the other hand, does keep stealing glances at your body in turn, so you make a point of showing off a little as you move around.
Some pleasant chitchat later, the sun slowly approaching the horizon and bathing the place into a warm light (you still dislike the cancer ball, for the record), both of you return back onto more or less dry land, skin glistening with salty water even after most of it drops off of you.
Neither of you wipe off, naturally. Instead, you end up sitting down on the beach blankets you laid out ahead of time, Crystal just lying down entirely, her whole body almost like a literal gem as the seawater slowly dries on it, her legs spread just a bit so you can see her glistening slit.
It's deliberate, of course. She looks at you, her bright eyes all over your body, and after a long, wordless moment she looks at the setting sun again. "Hey Gabriel?"
"Mhm?"
"This is pretty nice."
"It is."
"… Want to fuck?"
"Who wouldn't?" You smirk, your half-hard cock (kept ready for her viewing pleasure all this time) immediately rising to full attention, the hot blonde college student (that actually would be around your own age if you hadn't spent well over a decade in other dimensions on the side by this point) biting her lip as she watches.
"Good. I was just feeling so great…" Crystal shakes her head and rubs her thighs together, then smiles up at you as you crawl over, spreading them again invitingly. "I just thought it would be nice."
"No need to justify it to me," you chuckle at the mere thought, "but now let's get right down to business."
You have to make sure she blacks out right as the sun goes down, after all. It's your personal goal for the day, as you spontaneously decided earlier.
You exchange wry grins, then deep kisses as you prowl all the way over her body, your cock already pointing right at her juicy honeypot as is; Crystal's almost entirely hairless body feels like it's made just for this and so it doesn't take long for you to push inside her, lip wrapping around a delicious, erect nipple while your one free hand, the one not holding you up, is fondling her other breast.
"Ah, hah, I shouldn't have let Amy make them this sensitive…"
"Say anything?" You mumble just before gently biting into the enlarged nub of sensitive tissue wholly at your mercy, half your manhood already thrusting into her as she moans and groans in equal measure.
"Yeah, c'mon big boy, show me what you got!" She certainly does seem to enjoy herself, her tight walls frantically milking your shaft, her arms pulling you ever closer. "This is, just, ugh, I'm coming!"
Before you've even worked your entire length inside of her Crystal explodes, squirting something wet and sticky down below while her eyes roll into the back of her head for a moment. By the time she's back with you, you're balls deep inside her, but you didn't do much beyond that.
"Maybe you really should talk to Amy if you're this quick," you point out with a teasing hint in your tone, just enjoying the blush now born of both arousal and embarrassment.
"Pretty sure she only messed with my breasts, the rest is all you." She shifts, shuddering pleasantly as you reflexively grind your cock into her with timing you've more or less ingrained into your subconscious. "Fuck… You're really way too good. You sure you aren't a guy hooker?"
"Believe it or not, I used to work as one… Kinda." You think back to your childhood and, later on, how you raised the money for college. Money and sex were far from separate in your life, those are just the times that stick out the most when you consider this. "You better believe I earned myself some tips."
"I do." You're kissing again, Crystal's nails tracing shallow lines over your skin. "Now do me like a dirty college slut, Gabriel."
"Oh, if you insist…"
You do just that, of course. You never planned to do otherwise. Being this close to the ocean makes it look less impressive, but Crystal is a squirter, as you find out through thorough empirical observation, and she comes up a small storm of her own to meet the oncoming tide in its own time before you're done pounding into her.
And you do pound into her. Some good old beach sex is good for the soul, and you fill her with your cum again and again, making sure she's absolutely filled with your baby batter (that you are aware won't be doing anything untoward, at least for the time being) and leaking enough of it to ruin the blankets, if you cared about them at any rate.
She is also covered by it, having requested you come on her face as couple times- turns out Crystal also does enjoy giving blowjobs, so you spent some time just fucking her face as well in the middle of things. Not to pat yourself on the back or anything, but at some point between her hair being glued up by your spunk here and there and all of the spasming orgasms you fuck into her, she's grown somewhat of a bump.
Turns out all your cum just kind of gathered up, particularly when she just tried to blow you off as many times as possible to keep herself otherwise unmolested and conscious a little longer, not wanting the fun to end. You'd, uh, you'd be a little worried she may get sick off of drinking too much sperm- which may or may not have happened because of something you did once or twice, but you have a good feeling about that not being an issue.
Probably a vampire thing. Being you really pays off at the strangest of times.
Your usual minor chores and important tasks don't take all that much doing, as per the usual, whether it be harvesting pieces of souls off of your small, but carefully refined stable of bloodbags or sending the mental recording of the sex you had with Crystal to her cousins, which is almost an automatic thing you do these days.
Hey, if Amy and Vicky have fun with it, you don't see much reason to not give them what they want. If it spices up their nights, all the better for it.
Anyways, you still have some time on your hands, what with nothing particularly pressing going on at the moment, so you end up taking up a little of a certain demonic lawyer's time again, having requested some estimations on various deals you may be interested in.
It's really amazing, you suppose, what kinds of things you can find being sold when you have access to an interdimensional hell dimension filled to the brim with various kinds of supernatural pricks, also known as 'demons', all squabbling with each other in their sphere of activity and around any other dimension they can reach, trying to amass more power and influence, satisfy whatever twisted desires they have or just fuck around obnoxiously.
Or, you suppose, just be what amounts of infernal animals- independently of whether aware and intelligent enough to understand that's what they're doing- as seen in the example of those imp you mass-summoned once upon a time. It takes all kinds, really.
Apparently, there are various kinds of demons that seek to amass knowledge of all kinds as well as specialized ones that prefer particular fields of knowledge and, often, skill. There are some renown ones that simply went and used mechanical engineering to do much as you have done yourself, raising robot armies and fighting among each other in eternal wars that constantly rage across several layers of hell.
Turns out you actually do have a few like-minded colleagues down there. Which is not to say you look forward to joining them for a friendly chat anytime soon, but it is at the very least theoretically viable for you to find whatever kinds of technology you may want to imagine among the infinite expanses of hell.
The only question, of course, being what exactly you would trade for it, as well as what clientele to hit up exactly. Your lawyer, appearing today in the guise of a literally shady figure veiled in darkness, explains it in an oddly human voice that would probably let her hit the uncanny valley point blank (if you were still able to feel it).
"The kinds of collectors most likely to have what you seek can be… eccentric," she says, a hand raised in a 'so-so' gesture. "They will take souls in payment as anyone will, but in general prefer to trade in other goods. Information in exchange for information, for example, whether it be blueprints for a device or an enemy's plans… And many also have interests in cultural areas."
"Huh. Artefacts of ancient civilizations and the like?" You ask, sitting back comfortably in your favorite armchair down in your home. You're communicating with demons, that doesn't mean you can't get comfortable in the meantime.
"For example, yes… Though artwork and texts of sentimental value, rather than intellectual, will find themselves greatly favored as well, depending on the buyer. There is a market for anything and everything. Sadly, the kinds of colleagues in possession of these things have little use for slave work, else souls, living or dead, would be the primary currency in this case as well as any other."
Hm…
The considerations and logistics of making and selling artwork in exchange for (literally) infernal technology, or maybe just stealing the Library of Congress (as in, the whole building) to see if you can't find any buyers, are stuck in your head right now. Honestly, the most problematic part really is that you have no idea what to ask for when the sky is the limit.
"Hello, and welcome! To the world of Professor Abraham and his Assistant Prometheus!"
You always like putting on the big, fluffy white wig and the cartoonish beard and glasses, you think they give your Abraham persona some very nice panache of it own. Of course the lab coat helps, as well- as far as iconic articles of clothing go, these things always work to show off character, whether it be that of a brilliant scientist or a literally mad one.
Which, y'know, is one way in which you are differentiating yourself from Yoshi when you're putting on these performances. He wears a clean and borderline immaculate one, yours is covered in colorful spots around the edges and further down your legs.
"Professor! Please, the artificial intelligences are-"
"Please, Prometheus, I was talking!" You interrupt him indignantly, the tapping of keyboard keys acting as the backdrop of your conversation. He's surprisingly into this whole thing, and never let him tell you otherwise. "So as I was saying, today's episode is about the world of programming. How to string up ones and zeros until they do what you want!"
"String codes are not- Professor, we are being breached!"
One of the Thinker's older voices rings out, your friendly AI assisting you in your acting. She's really helping you out in just about everything you do, it's a small miracle you ever got anything done before just taking her everywhere with you. "Meatbags. Prepare. To. Be. Subjugated."
"Yes, yes, we can take care of the ideological war between supporters and opponents of unleashed artificial intelligence later," you wave them both off, clearing your throat. "So then, dear viewers, first we must consider the nature of digital space, and how it is not a space at all!"
"Professor!"
"I said later, Prometheus! Right now it is time for science, and it waits for no one!"
"… so there you go, a basic program up and running! It is nothing more than a simple game of Snake, as the older generations among you may recognize, but we have successfully got it to run."
"Professor! We have reached a peaceful conclusion and are working on signing an accord between cybernetic and organic intelligences!"
"See Prometheus, I knew you could do it if you only set aside your prejudices and talked it out man to computer."
"Actually, calling artificial intelligences that has been declared racist, sir. Maybe not do that?"
"Well, trust me to put my foot in my mouth! Anyways, here, have a link to a demo of another game we made if you're interested, I'll put it in the description later, too, and thank you all for watching!"
A line of bold letters blinked on the screen to show an internet address, both of Professor Abraham's hands pointing a finger at it each. It was hard to miss in all honesty and, as tens of thousands and soon millions of individuals of all ages found out, led to a download site for a demo of a never-before-seen game, one that had many that tried it out for themselves wondering if and where a full version would be available.
Sure, it was awkward to explain you liked Iron Cock, and more than one parent had to think quickly when their kids asked what exactly those words meant in combination with each other, but the gameplay was both simple, fun and surprisingly deep, the deep satisfaction of making the screen shake slightly as rockets, lasers and more found their targets and wiped out the creatures threatening the land of Remnant by the dozens.
In fact, in just the demo, the lore and worldbuiling were simultaneously plentiful and accessible enough while not being overbearing nor jumping at the player's face, some tidbits that would, in a certain other dimension, be considered historical facts only found by delving into certain data storage modules available to be found in the corners of Atlas, the starting location partially available for the free demonstration of the game.
A note, found easily by anyone that browsed the webpage containing the demo, gave those perusing it the address of the full game, available for the equivalent of five American dollars. Or, alternatively, as it continued to say, 'just pirate it like anyone else, we don't care'.
The plasmid 'Gravity Well' is, a one may expect when realizing it effectively acts like a literal miniature gravity well… interesting. In a very technical sense, though you do of course agree that using it to clear a room is both effective and entertaining in equal measure, especially if you manage to hit a whole bunch of hostiles at once.
You don't really have terribly many test subjects to waste on doing so for the sole purpose of recreation at the moment, but that much has been made clear often enough so far. However, you really are considering the more dry and cut scientific aspects of this particular wonder of bio-engineering.
You hold up a hand, squeezing your fingers into a tight fist, and just by concentrating a little bit, flipping a mental 'switch' of sorts… You create a semi-biological ball of tissue, trembling in your palm and threatening to break loose unless you keep a tight grip on it.
Gravity Well, as a plasmid, shares a few similarities with the polyp types that generate a sort of ball filled with various chemical cocktails meant to be thrown at their targets, as well as with the Insect Swarm plasmid for that matter, but even so it also stands somewhat on its own in the exact execution of its functions beyond the surface level. For one, the pulsing, twitching thing you are holding isn't a biological agent of any kind- truth be told, it's hard to accurately describe the phenomenon contained within.
Simply put, it's weird. Weirder than most plasmids already are, anyways. To your senses, especially the ones based on your esper power to manipulate gravity yourself, it feels…
It kind of feels like a knot, of sorts. Like a bunch of gravitational pull somehow generated from nowhere you can see, without any accompanying mass or anything, just bound up in this unstable little ball, the black mass surrounded and held together by a framework of darker 'veins' made of more dense anorganic matter.
It does feel fairly heavy in your hand. Most of this stuff was fairly obvious so far, but you never really took the time to observe the plasmid in detail while in use like this.
Well, only one more thing to do for now. Shifting your grip, you throw the little black ball trying to rip itself out of your grasp into a corner of the empty training room, causing the pull that specifically excludes yourself to break forth.
You aren't trying to really pull anything in- as the room is empty and all that- you just want to see what you can tell about what's going on here with your gravity-sense and what you can do with that. And indeed, the sudden, intense pull does register, making you reach out instinctively as it keeps going for a bit.
Strangely enough, nothing happens. Right- the plasmid doesn't affect you. Not usually, anyways; you can let yourself be pulled along by it in conjunction with your other powers interacting with it weirdly.
You groan. "I'll need to do some science on this, won't I?"
Replicating what your plasmid does using purely your esper power is… difficult, more so than you expected at first, even, and you went into this with the understanding that it certainly wouldn't be easy, at least.
Still, you think you're starting to figure it out, for all that there's a weird difference between your attempts at replicating its effects 'by hand', as it were. As you use the plasmid version, you increase the 'base' gravity of things, whereas using your power multiplies it, to summarize the interactions going on with the laws of physics here.
That obviously makes your power even more powerful than it already is when you combine the two, turning it from something that can instantly cripple and kill… pretty much most things in existence into a great tool for disposing of even otherwise serious threats on your own level- something that doesn't work when you don't have the plasmid itself in use, even if you copy its effects otherwise.
… You should be able to figure it out with some more practice, hopefully. You can hope, if nothing else; it would be really nice to be able to just do these two things by yourself and completely crush just about anything short of Alexandria herself under its own weight.
Well, your thoughts of near unstoppable power aside, you still have some other stuff to do. In part because you just kind of felt like cooking, you just have fun with it, and in part because you felt like treating everyone to a nice big dinner.
Hence you're in the kitchen with Ethan, having realized that the place hasn't been spared the universal expansionism that seems to have taken over your underground base.
"You know boss, I think we could do a cooking show kind of thing of we really tried to."
"I mean, we probably could," you shrug your shoulders, flipping a few fries before shoving the tray back into the oven. "What brought that on?"
"I've been thinking about anything fun to do on the side, ever since I got, like, all the medical knowledge needed to be a surgeon."
"Guess you need a change of pace from cooking all day?"
"Hell no, I love cooking!" Ethan chuckles as he stirs a pot full of noodles. "I just try to find new ways to have fun with it now."
"Huh, fair enough," you shrug, again. "But imagine adding the pressure of performing for an audience regularly added on to it. Not saying you couldn't make it, but it can get pretty exhausting, especially when you do it regularly."
"Good point. Guess I'll think about it a little more. Though if the audience is anything to go by, we probably could make it work if we did it together."
"No joke, we're both fit, handsome and not wearing shirts," you point out as you straighten your back again, showing off your abs for the jeering Crypsters, Kate's girls for the most part, sitting outside the kitchen and looking in over the long counter between it and the 'official' lunch room.
"Bet they'd love it if we made out," he comments, flexing a little. He looked just fine long before he met you, but being thralled really seems to have improved his physical conditioning.
And his sense of humor. "I'm not making out with you, Ethan, even if it would be hilarious."
"Dang. A guy can try, right?"
Everyone really liked the feast you and Ethan cooked up, though you do have to note Lilian spent most of her time drinking blood rather than eating 'human' food. Your eldest daughter does have her preferences.
Also, creating several dozen sweets fairies and setting them free for dessert was a good decision, in retrospect. It saves you a lot of time on actually serving the food when it's just conjured locally for every individual as they want it to be.
Weirdly enough, you think to yourself, trying to write something like the novel you're working on at the moment is both a great way to really stretch your literary capabilities and also what may be one of the hardest times you've had, when it comes to any more artistic pursuits among those you tried your hands at.
The first book was you just doing whatever and letting it flow, mostly motivated by simple spite towards the author of Ninjas of Love, but this one involves a lot more actual premeditated planning, a whole storyboard and all in fact.
So… Yeah, you're simultaneously just trying to work through the points and ideas you've already had and, at the same time, trying to keep your writing from becoming boring or, even worse, formulaic. All the while bringing in your fresh ideas as they come to you in the process of actually writing, adjusting future parts of the story, trying not to stress yourself out over what you're putting down…
Honestly, how normal authors manage to do this stuff without eidetic memory like vampires have by default is beyond you. Like, obviously they do it, somehow, but you certainly do get why normal people need literal years to write a good book.
Emphasis on 'good', of course. You're not counting those insane webnovels some people write about capes; you don't really pay it much attention, but some of them are definitely about yourself.
You know Sarah writes a capefic about you in her spare time. It is both sweet and disturbing.
Anyways, you're making progress, for all that it sometimes does stall as the words just don't want to flow as naturally as you're used to. Then you get them to go again, your natural writing groove reinstating itself as viciously as it is productive.
You don't really count the words you're putting to paper, you'd just either obsess over the number or else ignore it anyways, but you're making good progress. Pretty good progress, even, a prodigious amount by most standards.
Just par for the course on the Gabetrain.
It has, when you stop to think about it, been a while now that you've spent back in your 'home' dimension, for what it's worth to call any one place that given you kind of spent almost as much time in other dimensions as you have spent on Earth Bet counting all your life and death combined, and so you are aware that it won't be much longer before you're due another try and jumping somewhere else.
It's tempting, as always, to return to a world you've already been to, just because you already know what's up and don't have to be overly fearful of any particularly… unpleasant surprises, to say the least. You do more or less look into possible dangers every time you explore a new planet and figure out how you fit into it, after all.
Still, for all that you have a great lot of fun and work to take care of in just about any dimension known to you already, whether it be by introducing the Thinker to Remnant and seeing how the Grimm and their nebulous leadership like that once your robot armies become virtually unstoppable or continuing that little matter you have yet to take care of in Thule, y'know, that gigantic near-eternal war and the rude interruption thereof at the hands of certain pointy-eared jackasses, some things do also speak for seeking out a wholly new place instead.
Exploring new and yet uncharted dimensions offers opportunities of all kinds, a new perspective, cultures to take a look at, possibly whole new branches of completely insane reality manipulation to be found; after all, you do remember discovering Thulian magic, even if you can't use it yourself without overlaying a sufficiently eaten mage from there, Remnant aura, ADAM on Earth Rapture and even FEV, the basics of your current state of robotics and general automated engineering and whole swathes of prime feeding opportunities on Earth Fallout.
Of course you also could hit just a random parallel dimension of Earth as you know it with few or even no capes at all to be found, just an entirely mundane place with nothing particularly outstanding from your perspective… But even then the sociological data would be of great interest to Curie, if nothing else, and you could just use it as your playground without any issues outright.
But even more than that, it's basically a roll of the dice for whether you find something useful or not, and seeing as you're yourself, you are totally weighing those dice. You can, kind of, vaguely aim yourself when you get going- and with any luck that'll be enough to get yourself to the right kind of dimension.
One with the kind of creatures in them (and easily accessible, you add, thinking of the Passengers that make parahumans happen) that would be notable and powerful even by your standards. Then, with any luck, you'll hopefully be able to steal at least a little bit of their strength for yourself, whether it be in the form of chomping down on their souls for later use or messing around with their DNA in combination with your usual ADAM slash FEV mixes.
Or maybe not. You're willing to gamble on this, as you aren't particularly desperate for more time to prepare yourself for anything you've got going on at the moment, for once after so long you just kind of adopted the mindset of needing to make maximum use of your time-dilating interdimensional abilities.
Stopping a literal Endbringer short kind of should've been a hint for yourself, you think, but you were somewhat preoccupied at the time.
Of course you discuss all of this with everyone else, telepathically, actually taking a few hours out of your day to do so so you can concentrate- just eating some ice cream with your body in the meantime. Naturally, bringing anyone else into uncharted waters that you specifically seek out due to potential danger would be extremely dangerous to them, particularly as you're the most durable out of all vampires except maybe Okita.
Seriously, you kind of stopped counting the ways you can just regenerate yourself from actually dying again a while ago. Not only does anything trying to off you have to blast through ridiculous aura reserves and your unnaturally strong and resistant undead body with all of the armoring it provides and its natural regeneration and ability to just keep on going as long as you're just kind of still existing as a physical entity, you can just come back even if it works.
Just saying, anything powerful enough to actually kill you and keep on killing you is likely going to absolutely ravage whatever planet you happen to be standing on as well long before you're actually, seriously cornered. Your pursuit of strength and nigh invulnerability has produced results and all.
Seeing as it is night over in Europe at the moment, after all your considerations and telepathic discussions are taken care of, you ultimately end up being convinced to spend some extra time with your daughters by Serena's fake tears, seeing as she (along with everyone else) is perfectly aware you aren't going out of your way to spend time without your family.
Quite the opposite in fact. You would absolutely love to make this a vacation with all your wives and kids… But you really do need to prioritize a bit, here. And if you were to ever contemplate bringing anyone along after all, it certainly wouldn't be any of your daughters, not when, say, Taylor or Okita would be far lass vulnerable than any of them.
No matter how much Lilian pouts when you point this out. Your eldest is strong, even for a vampire, but she's simply not quite at the same level of invulnerable killing machinery made flesh.
It's an issue of measuring up to the highest peaks, as it were. Just, y'know, peaks of murder. The metaphor you're thinking of works, dammit!
At any rate, though, time spent with your kids. Germany is having some okay-ish weather right now, and you did get everyone those semi-eldritch motorbikes, so yeah, time to have a go at the local network of highways stretching throughout the entire damn country.
It's not like having highways is anything all that special, but they do have a lot of them, with lots of secondary roads and these elaborate interchanges in regular distances from each other. This stuff costs a crapton in maintenance to keep running smoothly, as you know from your time taking over Earth Rapture, but it does give you a lot of room to just… drive, y'know?
You also make sure to present a nice view for the various speed cameras you end up crossing on your nightly tour, running from north to south through the whole country. The girls are wearing motorcycle helmets to hide their faces, but you're deliberately leaving yours off, letting any pictures they manage to take in time show that none other than Cain is cruising along with a whole team.
There's just something special about riding a proper bike like this. The thrum of the engine, the feeling of the machine as a whole becoming one with your body as you drive around corners… And yes, the excessive weaponry you put into them is also a part of it all.
It's pretty fun. It also helps everyone keep out of the sun, which is half the reason why any halfway decent vampire would literally murder any given amount of people for the ability to just keep on teleporting out of the daylight.
Though Serena and Lilian, egged on by the twins, do end up eating a few passerby that were driving this late at night… Well, there's a reason humans aren't made to operate during the nighttime. You and your kind may be part of that, these days.
Good thing you kept a few of those poor suckers your daughters grabbed alive- you could do with a few extra blood bags, if nothing else. Having infinite human test subjects back on Earth Rapture was really something…
Honestly, if there's one thing certain employees of yours love about being criminals, it is that they can just drink and party all night long and, thanks to thralling-reinforced insides, be just fine and keep a steady aim the next morning without having to think about it.
You would know, as you encourage them to do just that. Kate's girls are the core of the Crypts' manpower, have been for the longest while now, and so you are perfectly aware that they're the kind of people that can and will randomly act out out of boredom unless kept busy enough otherwise.
There's a reason you basically throw them at anything you can think of- you do not need to be busy doing your own thing only to realize that you suddenly have half the city burning and a bunch of your drunk underlings running amok for the hell of it.
And that's exactly what they'd do if left unsupervised and idle for too long. Kate concurs with you on this, of course; she's been babysitting a few of these people and she insists it's basically some unholy mixture of herding cats, toddlers and terrorists that really, really want to blow something up.
Seriously. That is exactly how they are. It's almost eerily on point.
So yeah, hence you prefer them to get drunk and shoot the shit on base. Y'know, where you can have someone keep an eye on them. Otherwise, well, you keep them buy whenever you can, as already noted.
Whether running guns and drugs over in Boston, taking leadership roles in your local pursuits or just staffing the base, as long as they are doing something constructive you aren't exactly complaining.
And, every now and then, you also go ahead and join them, yourself and Kate egging the thralls on for fun. And it really is fun, not to mention reminiscent of those good old times when you lived in refurbished warehouses and basically had ramshackle everything compared to the kinds of amenities you're pulling together now.
Good times are had, Kate is happy about bonding with her subordinates, only a small amount of collateral damage happens as the fairies you summon end up organizing a competition of some sort. You can't tell whether it's a drinking one, an arm wrestling one or just one of general strength somehow, but you're pretty sure that's what's going on there.
Still, it's a blast, you can have the walls and furniture repaired in an hour or so- you can't really complain about what ends up happening. Still, you have to eventually excuse yourself; there's still one important matter for you to take care of before you do anything else, after all, one that has been on the back burner for a while now.
But really, it is long overdue someone gives Missy a damn gun already.
Missy Biron was living under vastly different circumstances that she had a month ago. She would probably have found her living situation downright ridiculous back then, too, the very idea of abandoning her family and the Wards to go live with the Crypts just too far out there for her to even consider it.
But, well, she'd talked to Cai- to Gabriel, considered it and there she was. It did't feel like that big of a deal in hindsight, even though it absolutely was.
Living with the Crypts wasn't bad, of course. She had her own place that was bigger than most apartments, she could eat whatever she wanted and do whatever she wanted, whether that was staying up until midnight to read random PHO threads or 'playing with' the obligatory Crypts membership gift set.
By which she meant the sex toys the other girl (and women) capes had given her. She had half a dozen ones shaped exactly like Gabriel's- she'd checked, and they were accurate down to the last vein on his thing.
Telepathy was useful like that- there were several publicly available memories of getting very up close and personal with it she had reviewed. Yes, she'd gotten personally acquainted with it as well, but she hadn't exactly had the time nor state of mind to memorize its every detail at the time.
Times, really, but just because she got more than Dean now didn't make her an expert. Also, what were the chances Gabriel was also having sex with Vicky, as she now knew? How and why did Glory Girl get into all the best guys' pants?
Well, okay, that was probably more a thing about Gabriel than her. Missy would allow it.
But yeah, it was a pretty sweet gig. Not to mention she also had… well, family. Given she'd been adopted and all. She'd thought it would be weird to be Gabriel's daughter now, what with having sex with him, but it wasn't, not really, and her new sisters were really nice, too.
Even if Lilian kept on treating her like a little kid. Instead of just a kid. Missy did know exactly how old she was, okay?
Her new 'mom', Sarah, was okay as well. She was pretty busy, but she popped in on her every now and then to just spend a few minutes. It felt a little weird to not have people screaming somewhere she could hear them regularly, but she felt she was getting used to it really quickly.
And not complaining. This life was great. Of course then there were the ethical and practical questions born out of living in a literal villainous lair that defied the laws of physics (she could feel space twitching in pain inside the walls sometimes, when she paid attention) and her lifestyle was being financed by literal crime, but…
Hey, sometimes you had to compromise. And Missy would rather accept some nebulous guilt by association than accept any limitations to her new jacuzzi's usage.
She had two dozen shampoos just standing in her bath. They each smelled amazing and didn't sting her eyes at all. And she could eat whatever desserts she wanted whenever she wanted, all she needed was to kidnap one of the fairies from the dining hall. Just saying, this was the life- so what if some other people somewhere else suffered for it?
Screw you, Missy could do what she damn well wanted. If anyone had a problem with that, she could just point at literal Cain and instantly win any and all arguments.
So yeah, she had a fancy new life and a new daddy she didn't mind calling that at all because you could grate cheese on those abs. Literally. She'd seen it happen during that cookout he had with Ethan- cheese was being rubbed on those babies and it came off in flakes.
The lasagna was the perhaps most delicious thing she'd ever eaten, even though she was just saying that because she knew the places that cheese had been before being melted down. That didn't make the statement any less true.
Still, all her rationalisation and realization of how much she could be bribed with if someone knew how aside, Missy was pretty glad she'd come with Cain, before she'd gotten to know him as Gabriel, and cast aside her life up to that point. It was just kind of worth it, even if someone watching from the outside may point out she was being taken advantage of.
Thing was, if it involved having infinite creature comforts, money and attention from a sexy Greek God's edition of a man lavished on her, it was a very, very fair trade. Really, if she was old enough to have powers and be a cape, she was old enough to ride whatever dick she wanted to, any naysayers be damned.
Unfortunately, though, she couldn't exactly shake her fist towards the sky as she thought of all of this, as she was currently talking to none other than Gabriel himself and she didn't want to look like a complete weirdo. A bit of a weirdo, okay, but not a complete one, please.
"So Missy, I realized this comes a little late, but how would you like a custom-designed weapon capable of killing just about anyone without some serious Brute powers?"
"I don't want to kill anyone," she said almost automatically, pointing out her stance on murder in general.
"You don't want to kill anyone right now," Gabriel returned, taking a sip from his coke. Bubbly and sugary, every gulp told you it was killing your teeth. Except Missy had superior tooth paste and regenerating teeth now, muahaha! She was also deliberately distracting herself from the conversation at hand already. "But in the eventuality that you get into a fight, wouldn't it be nice to have a weapon to use in combination with your power?"
"… I always just figure I'd use a laser gun and turn its fire into pinpoint orbital strikes, but I'm listening." More soft drinks made her a happy girl. She'd tried coffee or tea to make herself look more mature, but those were bitter so screw that with a rusty spork.
"I do hope you'll do more than that- I'll need your input, same as when I made everyone else's weapons," he casually mentioned, as though being a Tinker, too, was no big deal. It probably wasn't for him. "Now take a look at my first thoughts on the design and we'll talk, yeah?"
"Alright, first things first, memorize the manual."
"There is a manual for my new weapon?"
"Of course there is. You know how many cool extra functions I threw in there, you can't make proper use of them without knowing how to operate the hidden switches."
"That seems unnecessarily complicated for- whoa!"
"Careful there, the blade is only supposed to be out for lethal combat and the grappling hook. You really, really should read the manual."
"Forget that, why is it on fire?"
"Because sometimes, you just need to kill it with fire. Trust me, you'll know when you see this kind of thing."
Missy will need a good bit of training before she will be able to use her new toy properly, but hey, handing mechashifting weaponry capable of destroying most conventional tanks to kids has never been a bad idea, in your opinion.
And yes, the sniper rifle mode is basically an anti-material rifle designed to punch through any given armor you didn't make and protect with force fields yourself. The blade can be kept inside the thing to turn it into a blunt staff (or mace, if she holds it a little differently) or, as you did tell her, extended as a glaive or the tip of the built-in grappling hook.
Combined with her power, you basically just handed Missy the answer to, like, over ninety percent of any and all problems in life. Not necessarily the best solution in all cases at once, but a reliable one.
Violence is just like that. If you can't make an issue go away with it, you just haven't used enough of it yet. The question is whether the related fallout is worth it, but that doesn't detract from the point at hand.
At any rate, however, you can leave further action in this regard to Missy herself- she's a big girl unlike, say, Dinah, and doesn't need much handholding to get where she wants to be.
You, on the other hand, have some other things to do, and it's honestly a great bit of news that you do, for once. Your demonic lawyer has managed to come through before the time you estimate you will be making your next jump, the moment your metaphysical chains and anchors are ready once again fast approaching, so being able to do this stuff before you have to focus on a whole new dimension is very appreciated.
It just takes some pressure off of these things.
The demons you meet are an eclectic mix, some of them consisting entirely of machinery of one sort or another- one of them is basically best described as a giant clockwork knight, all steampunk-ish with cogwheels over its back and over its joints, dark, soot-covered metal the only visible surface on it, another seems to be more of an obviously demonic cyborg thing, tortured faces cast into its outer shell and screaming or mouthing unspeakable things, but most of them do follow this overall theme, more or less.
You also end up meeting a couple that just wear lab coats and tinker glasses with adjustable lenses, many-armed infernal inventors and scientists, of course. Seeing the literally infinite and multi-faceted nature of hell, it really isn't that surprising that not only literally mechanical demons have an interest in the kinds of trades you're looking to offer.
Communication is not always easy, and you sometimes have to switch to speaking in literal binary codes to ensure you are understood by the creatures you summon at your demonic advocate's counsel, the rituals to do so arduous and annoying in equal measure.
Seriously, even though you do have the names for these guys, it takes a bunch of surprisingly fiddly ritual materials to actually pull them through into your reality. Plus a bunch of really big ritual circles arranged to make sure their influence doesn't somehow spread everywhere like an infectious cognitohazard; you had to completely destroy and remake your old ritual room thrice by the time you were through.
However, you do have what you wanted; the prices demanded were not always something you considered acceptable, which is why you made a point of telling a good half of the demons you summoned to go choke on a warty dick, but you did get a good amount of actually non-insane offers for the technology you wanted to acquire.
Really, how hard can it be to cloak people and larger objects from sight in addition to all other senses and beyond? It's almost like making your enormous flying city undetectable would take a lot of work, which is completely ridiculous when you could invest the same amount of effort into creating a robot army capable of conquering the average planet twice over.
A few hours of work, prototyping and testing of said prototypes inside your inner world's extremely convenient sandbox of an environment later, you have a functional device assembled, based upon the blueprints and technologies you managed to grab in what few trades you ended up making in the end.
"This was a great foray into the realm of mental gymnastics packed away inside circuitry," you declare, being quite satisfied with yourself while Yoshi is being inspected by his little girlfriend, Indigo.
"I was completely faceless for two hours! I couldn't even recognize how I am supposed to look myself!" He complains, quibbling over the smallest details like always. "That is more than mental gymnastics!"
"Don't sweat the small stuff," you shrug. "Besides, we managed to fix it in the end just fine, didn't we? Once we managed to find you again, anyways."
"That! That is the kind of attitude that causes unintended damage when conducting experiments! At least don't use me as a test subject when you do something as dangerous as this!"
"Who else was I gonna use, any random old sucker around the place?" You wave him off. "We need someone that understands what's going on here to test these devices out. Now take your break and be ready for the next test in five."
"We're not done yet?!"
"What makes you think we're ever done, Yoshi?"
Eldritch Stealth Technology: An alternative version of the improved stealth boy fueled and empowered by an Eldritch Core, this device allows the user to make themselves literally unnoticeable by most living beings, their eyes and minds sliding right off them. Has a limited duration before needing to recharge and can be partially overcome by highly perceptive individuals, ineffective against non-organic beings.