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A/N; I am entirely reader-supported. Here are my special thanks to those of you who enjoy my writing enough to support me with your hard earned money on my pa-atreon page. Not just them though, special thanks to everyone who even just reads this story, reviews it, favourites or follows it. You're the reason I keep going. Thank you. Welcome to this new story, feel free to check out my other work if this is your first.

"There's only one option then. The way you speak about the Nova Empire, they sound like really scary and powerful people." Ovette was the one who began speaking. Fully stepping into the role she was beginning to assume as general spokesperson for her people, Her voice, soft but clear, rang across the silence in the room that had built up over time, crashing through it and not being found wanting. The voice of a Queen? Not yet. But maybe with time.

"And you're strong. We know you're strong, but not strong enough to take down dozens of planets by yourself, are you?" The question was meant to be rhetorical but something about the look on my face must have given her the answer.

"Really? Surely you gest" She said to a shake of my head. I could probably take out the entire Nova Empire if given the time and if I decided not to do anything else with my time. Sure, it would take years. Maybe even decades of effort if I wasn't smart about it and if they had the forewarning and time to implement the absolute best tactics. The bit of Zod in me had already run the simulations.

"I'd win. I'd win eventually. It would take a lot of time, and most of you wouldn't survive to tell the tale, but if it was us v the Nova Empire, we'd win" I said, assuring her and the rest of them. She was the only one who looked shocked, the rest of them didn't quite grasp what exactly I was speaking of. She'd spent just as much time with me on the Dark Aster with Kamaria as she had outside of it helping her people prepare for the shift, so she was the only one who truly understood the scale of the Nova Empire and the kind of shit they could do with the proper motivation.

"Alright then. We'll make that plan Z." I stifled the chuckle that nearly built in me at that phrase. I'd said it once as a joke and now she used it every time she could. Most often in the wrong context, but maybe not so much this time.

"But this Collector. He's a single man, is he not?"

"I would hesitate to call him a man, but yes."

"Then we just beat him up and take all his stuff" Drax declared from beside her, reminding me that while Ovette was the genius of the family, that didn't mean Drax couldn't have his moments where they both thought on the same wavelength.

"It will have consequences. The Collector is old. Older than most things in the universe. In that time, he's made a lot of friends in high places. "

"Then we beat them up and take their stuff too" Ovette replied, hand on her husband's. The smile that built on my face was unstoppable as I looked at them and then turned to the rest of the council who were nodding along with them.

"To Knowhere we go then" I declared.

"Where?" Drax asked.

"Knowhere" I replied.

"But shouldn't we really be going somewhere?" He asked, looking at me as if I'd grown a second head.

"We are" I said, seeing where this was going but having all the fun in the world.

"Then where?"
"Knowhere" I said. Now, Ovette was doubled over laughing as the confusion on Drax's face got worse and worse.

The other councillors were just staring between us. Some of them had already begun whispering to each other about how I was surely mad.

"I told you he was insane. Just look at the ship he intends to fit us all into. That thing can't even take two thousand and he wants millions of us in there? He's a mad man and he's doomed us all with him." One of them whispered to another, making my smile grow even more. I could just imagine the looks on their faces when they finally entered the ship. The space warping tech was just the kind of shit that would shut up all my detractors in one swoop and have them all hanging onto every single word I said and taking it as gospel truth.

"Knowhere is a place, Drax. It's the head of the dead celestial Kal-El was speaking about" She said, letting him understand and taking the confusion off his face only to replace it with embarrassment as he realised that I'd been having fun with his confusion.

XXXXXXXXX

"It's time to begin boarding the ship" I told the gathered crowd of Kylosians as they were about to begin moving their things in and claiming rooms in the ship that would be their home for the next few weeks as we travelled from one end of the galaxy to the other. The ship had already plotted the course to Knowhere and estimates were that it would take anything from one to two weeks to get there. They weren't precise as even I didn't know the effects that the repulsor tech would have in space travel. Right now, estimates were made using the very best traditional thrusters.

But I was practically certain that repulsor tech would blow those numbers out of the water. I was with Kamaria as she walked in, and the look on the girl's face was perfect. Her mouth dropped as the ship she'd been entering for weeks was suddenly very different on the inside. We walked down the very expanded hallway. And began passing the doors. The doors were practically crammed next to each other to conserve space and limit the amount of expansion I'd had to do on the ship itself. The rooms, however, were practically houses.

One for every member of the species had proven impractical so instead we had one for every community of which there were at least a couple hundred with several of the villages being made of multiple communities in truth. When we finally got to the one that belonged to Kamaria's family, we entered and were met with another hallway. I watched carefully as the girl passed through the doorway. Moving from the spatially expanded doorway to the dedicated pocket dimension that contained each family's homes. I'd tested all the doors myself and had run over a thousand simulations and was 99% sure no one would feel any ill effects beyond a shift in the air from moving between the two spaces. But still, I worried.

Watching her enter with no change at all did a lot to alleviate those fears. Drax and Ovette's home was the first door in the new side hallway and we entered it immediately to find ourselves in what was essentially a penthouse apartment from earth. Their room was quite a bit nicer than the others, but still none of the rooms were bad. I'd made billions of nanobots in my foundry and set them on harvesting the greater part of Kylos' neighbouring asteroids and moons for raw materials that ended up being used in the making of these rooms and the ship's changes. Some was stored for the future but it would really be good if whatever planet we got from the Collector had the necessary resources for our use.

She had her mouth wide open in shock as she beheld the high tech facilities. "Welcome, Kamaria" The Virtual Assistant I'd included in every apartment spoke out when she walked even deeper into it. The VA was my solution to the Kylosians being unable to adapt to their suddenly futuristic and technologically advanced surroundings. The goal? To get them as used to tech as I could before we got to the new planet so they'd be capable of living on their own. I had no idea what they'd do with their time in an environment that would essentially be post-scarcity because of how good my tech was, but I couldn't wait to find out. Art, Science, Engineering, there were no limits to what people could achieve with the right education and I knew the Kylosains weren't stupid. Just that with the exception of Ovette, they were all just incredibly blunt. It was a quirk of their personalities that I'd grown to love.

"Woahhhhh" Kamaria screamed as a virtual screen appeared on the wall and began cycling through different kids games for her to play. She was the first one in what would be millions. I had no hope for the present generation of Kylosians. But Kamaria's generation and the one after them? They would be something special. She ran forwards to play the games, not even realising that they were all educational in nature and would have her learning one thing or the other.

This kind of manipulation wouldn't have sat right with me in my old life, but with the knowledge, training and experience of both Jor-El and Zod himself, I could easily divorce my emotions from my logic. This was for the greater good at the end of the day.

Besides, whatever negative feelings I had about the whole thing washed away when I saw her playing with the virtual building blocks. She had a smile so bright on her face that it practically drowned the one she'd had when we'd been hunting together. This was where children belonged. Doing things like this.

Speaking of children, I backed out of the room and returned to my control centre where I continued working on the syllabus for the school I'd eventually be building for the Kylosian children when the time came.

"What are you doing?" A voice asked from behind me. Ovette. I'd heard her enter the ship a few minutes ago and split up from her husband as he went to take the rest of their things into their room while she came to perform her duties as the Kylosian spokesperson.

"I'm making a curriculum for a school."
"A what for a what?" She instantly asked, with a shake of her head. Of course she wouldn't know what those words meant. The universal translator I used must have translated them into something else if it couldn't find the word for it in their native language.

"A curriculum. It's like the list of topics that are taught in a school and how they are taught, subtopics and all that. A school is something from my old planet. It was a place children went to learn." I said, in explanation.

"Children? What happened to their parents?" She asked, looking at me like the very notion of children being sent somewhere else to learn was a preposterous idea. #

"Well, ideally, their parents would send them there to get the best kind of education so they'd be even smarter than them." I said, watching her churn through the idea in her head. Ovette wasn't just a genius when compared to her fellow Kylosians. She was quite a bit smarter than a lot of humans I'd met.

"But who teaches them? How do the parents trust others to teach their children the right things and in the right way?" She asked, eager to learn but still not sold on the idea. Something about the mother in her probably reeled at the thought of leaving her daughter's education in someone else's hands.

"Teachers. They go to school to train and learn how to teach the children, so because they've learned how to do it, the parents just have to trust in them to teach their children the right things in the right way. Besides, not all of the children's education is left for the teachers. Things like the difference between right and wrong, morality, and all that are generally left for the parents. Instead, teachers focus on more technical skills like reading, writing, mathematics and all that." I said, explaining to her and watching her tilt her head.

"We don't have any teachers" She finally said after considering the idea and being satisfied with my explanation. Or at least being unable to find any flaws or questions in it.

"That's a problem, isn't it?" I said first of all. "Or at least, it would be if not for a nifty little thing known as Artificial Intelligence."
"Artificial…Intelligence?" She asked, stumbling over the words clumsily as she tried to put the words into the context.

"Yup. Think about it like a human or Kylosian if you will, just a hundred times smarter and stuck in a machine." Her eyes glossed over as my explanation failed to give her the needed understanding. I sighed, resisting the urge to put palm to face and tried to explain it again.

"Remember what I told you about computers, yeah?" I asked, getting a quick nod before proceeding.

"Think of Artificial Intelligence like a computer, except instead of a computer, it can actually learn, create, and adapt on its own. Just like a human in the machine. It's a powerful tool that's going to let us do more than any computer ever could on its own. AI runs this entire ship in one way or another. The navigations, the weapons targeting systems, the maintenance, all of it runs on this little guy here." I said, tapping the mainframe as I stood up to stretch my legs. A human action I was yet to get rid off. The projectors on the mainframe whirled to life and a holographic head that definitely looked nothing like Emma Watson floated in place above it. "Hello Ovette. I am AIKO- Artificially Intelligent Kylos Organiser. She said, rattling off the name that had come to me out of nowhere.

To Ovette's credit, she barely even reacted to the newcomer beyond quirking an eyebrow and turning back to me with a smile on her face. "Well, that's the AI that will be in charge of teaching the little ones, capable of assimilating information faster than the fastest computers back on earth and knowledgeable on over a thousand years of Kylosian history and culture. She's to teach a variety of subjects, ranging from mathematics to languages, to history and government and politics." I said grandly.

XXXXXX- ONE WEEK LATER- MIDDLE OF SPACE

One of the best ways fro discovering the problem with any invention or tool was to use it. Stress tests were a thing for a reason, but nothing actually beat real world use for discovering and ironing out bugs that would inevitably pop up. One of those bugs was that I didn't account for boredom. Not mine. Never mine. I had terabytes of information scraped from the Kree web that I was doing my best to assimilate with every free minute but those minutes were getting rarer and rarer because of the bug I failed to iron out.

Kylosian boredom. We'd already had over a dozen fights today for no actual reason, and there were hundreds of Kylosians in search of entertainment at this very second that AIKO flagged as likely to cause trouble that would require my intervention in the next few hours.

Designing games for the kids had been a good touch, but the adults were quick to grow bored of them and turn their minds to som e other tool for entertaining themselves. The only problem with that was the fact that said tools were few and far between. Those with spouses were having lots of sex to pass the time, but the rest of them were just potential disasters waiting to happen. We'd already had one idiot who decided to try breaking the glass at one of the few stations with outside views to see what would happen. Of course, it hadn't worked, and one of AIKO's drones had been quick to tase him before he gave the breach protocols a stress test they really didn't need or worse, got more members of his species into the madness with him.

Some had taken up boredom eating and those were the least problematic of the lot, if I was being honest. With the expanded space, we had more than enough space for farming and lab grown fauna. Thinking of the fauna gave me another idea though.

Most Kylosians were either hunters or farmers. What if the secret to getting rid of the boredom was to bring in and implement more of that on the ship. The only problem was that letting them all have free reign to cook their food and start fires all over the place was one way to guarantee I wouldn't have much of a ship left by the time we got to the giant floating celestial head.

We were only about a day or two away, but I was beginning to fear that we wouldn't even make it there. The doors behind me swung open, and I didn't need to turn around to see that it was Ovette who entered with Kamaria sitting on her shoulders . I'd seen them begin the journey from the moment the little girl got bored with her game and went to search out her parents. Of course, she'd ended up interrupting them mid-coitus and Ovette had decided that bringing her to me for the time being was one of the best ways to get rid of the little distraction.

"Hello Kal-El" She said, "Uncle Kal" her daughter screamed along as she spoke. I just smiled at both of them when I finally turned around.

"Welcome, here to drop off the terrorist?" I asked jokingly, and the woman just nodded before unceremoniously tossing the child right at me. It was quite literally child's play to catch Kamaria and keep her safe while the child whooped in delight at the thrill.

"Yes I am. And to talk about the problem"
"What problem?" I asked, leaning back into my seat.

"Don't pretend. You see it too. The people are bored. They need something to do." She said, narrowing her eyes at me as her hand pointed at the multitude of screens showing various Kylosians engaged in all sorts of activities.

"You have a point. So what do you suggest?" I relented.

"A festival, of course. You have the space in the main hall. Just get everyone involved in setting it up and you'll keep them busy for the next few weeks." She said with a smile that I quickly mirrored. In a few days, we'd get to Knowhere and I'd wondered how I could keep them busy while I handled business, but it turns out Ovette had the perfect answer all along.

"Thank you".

A/N;Did I do a good job of showing the Kylosians without showing them? So sorry I disappeared for the past two weeks. Had to complete my graduate school applications. Thankfully, that mess is mostly behind me so we're back and ready to go. We've got the next three chapters of this story, along with the first Eleven chapters of another fic that I uploaded at the exact same time as this one (an insert is into an OC firebender in ATLA) all available on pa-atreon, and you can read all of that right now just by heading to the link on my profile or searching for my username up there. Feel free to have a look.