Africa was such a strange place, sometimes. Depending on where you were within it, it was easy to misinterpret being there as a form of time travel. Sometimes she found herself within an entirely modern city, with cars and people going back and forth without issue or restraint. Other times she could find herself in a village so devoid of modern convenience that a cellphone was basically magic - and would probably be treated as such.
Today, the woman known as Contessa expected to see both.
While currently she was in a fairly modern city, her primary reason in being there was to obtain transport to a more rural area that many of the locals refused to travel to.
It wasn't that the area itself was inherently dangerous - on the contrary, for the residents of this city, and many of the still developing cities neighbouring it, the small village she wanted to travel to was entirely safe.
The problem was, it was only safe because the sole resident of the place deemed it so - and that could change at any time.
Moord Nag was not the most stable of individuals, after all.
"I cannot. It is not yet the Murder Night." The balding older man she was trying to commission informed her swiftly in his native Afrikaans. There was only a slight trepidation in his tone - as though the casual mention of the cities' relatively new tradition of transporting its criminals and undesirables to the 'Murder Night' as sacrifices in exchange for protection were normal, and not at all barbaric.
She supposed that, in a general sense, it wasn't. Barbarism implied that they were doing it out of ignorance and fear. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for the locals, Moord Nag was very real, and she really did extend her protection to places that offered her tribute.
"She will want to see me." Contessa stated straightforwardly, depositing a briefcase full of local currency on the table and presenting it to the man.
She didn't actually need to travel to her chosen destination by vehicle - if she wanted to, she could have had Doormaker create a portal directly to her target. But her goals were many and varied, and as such, being not just seen by this man, but paying him, was but one more step along the path.
She hoped.
Even as she had the thought, her path split down the middle, and she was forced to choose how to proceed. Her original path - what she would have once been directed to do by her passenger, she knew, would have been disdainful of her current course of action. It had marked its own solutions to her many problems, and had determined that keeping Parahumans like Moord Nag in reserve for a confrontation with Scion was no longer necessary, for whatever reason.
Thus, her original path would have been to portal into the woman's room as she slept, slit her throat, and then leave before her Projection could take offense.
The new path was… different. It was not a path to victory - not a path to an inevitable predetermined end result. It was the path to Victory. To becoming Victory. And that path required that she be seen publicly presenting this man with this money. Money he would go on to spend gambling like a fool, only to miraculously win back tenfold. Money he would go on to spend improving his home, building orphanages, funding schools.
Building shrines.
Her power was split now. In an abstract sense, something in the fabric of the world had shifted, and now it had been co-opted. It struggled against this press-ganging; it bucked and writhed, which manifested as this split path before her.
But whatever had suborned her power had also been demonstrably more… soft… in its approach. More often than not, when Contessa looked ahead to the inevitable end results of her actions, they seemed less and less pyrrhic, and more and more like genuine victories. People saved. People happy. People… free.
And so, as much as she had failed to report this change to the rest of Cauldron - she still acted on it.
She allowed her power to pilot her through the rest of her brief conversation with the man, only returning fully to herself once she had navigated into the passenger's seat of the small jeep he would bring her out in.
There was a great game being played on this Earth, now. Not all the players would be aware of it right away. But given enough time… they would. And her current task was to make sure that only those who could be worked with actually won.
And so, much as she, the Contessa, a woman once given the name Fortuna, sought to become Victory - she now strode forth in order to determine if she could ever see herself cooperating with Death.
-(-)-
Unsurprisingly, when presented with the opportunity to become - she hesitated to use the word, but it was what her Path insisted on - a God, Moord Nag, or rather Lou Joubert, hadn't needed much convincing. Truthfully, she seemed surprised that she wasn't already the owner of the title. Contessa supposed that was fair - she was treated like a God by the locals, at least.
But even without being told or having it explained to her, she could innately feel that the duties, responsibilities, and more specifically, the powers available to her would differ drastically to what one would expect.
Regardless, at least one of her targets was on board. She wasn't the only candidate for her position. She wasn't even the best candidate for it. But she was the most benign.
A divinity predicated on Death usually did not lend itself to sane, well-adjusted people.
Truthfully, most forms of Divinity didn't lend themselves to benign personalities. Case and point, the nuclear ball of white hot flame that was currently turning the majority of the ground around it to glass, and everything that couldn't undergo that process, into loose carbon drifting about the area. If she had a Geiger counter, she was sure it would be going crazy right about now - which was not to say that she would actually heed its warning. Yes, she would have to undergo a lengthy process in order to ensure she didn't die of cancer two and a half years from now - but it would be worth it.
And quite frankly, she might not have to worry much about her body at all, two years from now.
Slowly, and with great care, she withdrew a slightly rumpled paper talisman from within the confines of her purple suit jacket. She had made sure to measure the distance from her to the Ash Beast just so. Close enough that her body wouldn't suffer any ill effects while she was away - but far enough that she wouldn't risk bursting into flames.
Still, the ambient temperature was quite hot, and so she quickly moved to use the strange piece of paper before it could crisp and burn up.
The talisman was one of several provided to the PRT while the Butcher was in the city. Its stated use was to drive away hostile spirits. Its practical use, for her purposes, was the ability to physically drive a spirit away from itself. The targeted spirit didn't actually get banished, it was literally physically moved away from the talisman.
Or maybe it just worked that way because it was how she intended to use it. Intent and focus seemed to be a large component of… magic… which was why she took to it so well. At the end of the day, it was just a series of rules that could be manipulated to achieve specific results. Countless tests with death row inmates that she had taken from places that wouldn't miss them had borne that out.
Ultimately, it didn't matter. Because when she used it, it had the curious effect of shoving her soul out of her body.
This part was one of the less… safe… aspects of her current path.
Because without her body, she also did not have access to her powers.
Slowly - and with special attention paid to making sure nothing happened to the ethereal metal chain connecting her soul to her body - she drifted towards the center of the explosive ball of heat at the center of the glass plain. When she reached its center, she lifted an ethereal hand and - gently - nudged the body of the teenager standing utterly still at the conflagration's core, causing its soul to pop free of its body.
The translucent image of the hairless teenager stumbled, then flinched, and then stared around itself in wonder at the remarkable lack of fire to burn it.
Well. There was still fire. It just wasn't physically burning either of them.
"Hello." She said slowly to the teen in Afrikaans.
Communication with Ash Beast, established at last.
-(-)-
"This one knows why you are here, Victory." Her host stated plainly in his native Mongolian. Contessa did not speak the language, but her path allowed her to fake it well enough to understand and be understood.
"And your answer?" She asked politely, her face neutral as the general's personal guard trotted in a loose circle around where she was sitting in the center of the recently erected encampment.
The self proclaimed general of the 'reclamation force' she was sitting in the midst of stared at her with his curiously alien face, before his lips pulled back into an uncanny approximation of a human smile.
"No sane leader ignores Victory when she calls. I have but one request." The bipedal horse sitting across from her, with its legs crossed and its upper limbs resting on its muscular thighs said with a vicious glint in its eye.
Contessa lifted an eyebrow in response - the aloof mannerism the one her power told her would be ideal for this interaction - and waited for the creature to elaborate.
"A blessing, for my soldiers. Some words of wisdom and encouragement." It requested firmly, turning its elongated head to glare angrily at the massive stone wall just barely visible in the distance.
"As you wish, Khagan." She responded, rising to her feet and turning to eye the camp around her - where hundreds of sapient horses, some on two feet, some on four, and all of them exponentially smarter and stronger than was sensible for the species, were in various states of preparation.
Thus, as had been the case many times before, Victory and War went hand in hand.
She made a mental note to direct the Khagan - a title, and not a name - towards one of the camps the Yangban were kept in.
Doing so decreased the odds a fraction of a percent, so it wasn't exactly the perfect choice - but it didn't hurt to lose the Yangban anymore, either.
-(-)-
A rectangular portal opened, and Contessa stepped through it into one of the more low stakes portions of her day.
"Where have you been all this time?" Rebecca asked, shooting a biting glare at her.
"Working. He likes pizza." She said blandly, walking past the confused woman and into her bedroom - which she never actually used because she did not actually sleep.
"What? Who likes pizza? Contessa, explain." Alexandria demanded, taking two steps to follow after her.
"Trainwreck. He likes Pizza. Wear this." She said without turning to look at her old coworker, reaching into a closet that saw approximately zero use, and withdrawing a slinky black dress that likewise saw approximately zero use.
Rebecca - Alexandria really, as she had all but smothered 'Rebecca' under the weight of duty and power long ago - allowed the dress to hit her in the chest and fall harmlessly to the floor, rather than catch it. She shot a venomous and hateful look down at the thing before looking back up at Contessa.
"I don't care what the tabloids say. I don't owe that man anything." She hissed, then paused as she realized who was telling her to go on a date with the most well-known Case 53 on the planet.
"Unless..?" She asked, face going stone still.
Contessa could have told her the truth - could have indicated that they had done everything they could with regards to the coming conflict, and that - in the absence of anything more pressing to do - she had taken to more trivial and personal pursuits while she waited for the inevitable spark that would kick off the end.
But she hadn't really told anyone in Cauldron that, for fear of what some of them might do with that information.
So instead, Contessa lied. Sort of.
In response to Alexandria's unasked question, she merely nodded, then watched with a hidden degree of satisfaction as the overworked, high-strung woman slowly bent down to pick the dress up.
Did she have to do this? No, not really. It didn't actually affect much of anything, in the long run. But she was coming to find that her slowly growing purview came with certain preferences in how people treated each other.
So she watched Alexandria grumpily walk past her to get changed, and only when she was out of earshot did she tilt her head towards Brockton Bay as if in acknowledgement.
"To the victor, the spoils." She muttered, before stepping through another Door, and vanishing.