Roxy Was Here

Thalia Whisperwind sat, motionless, noiseless, in the pilot’s seat of her ship, the Twin Star Longbow. She stared at the little pair of glasses that sat among her collection of useless trinkets on her console. 

Usually there would be somebody talking. Usually, Bym would be rattling Thalia’s ear off about some potential upgrades he read about in some engineering magazine. Telling her about something weird the engine did the day before that kept him up all Astral night as he problem solved it. Reminding her about how low they were running on spare parts.

But now the cockpit was silent, except for the distant hum of the engines. Not even Big Cat dared make a sound as he lay, licking his wounds, curled up around her seat.

Meanwhile, Nova V’ger sat, motionless, noiseless, in the engine room of the Twin Star Longbow.

She stared at the arcane machinery that was now her sole responsibility to keep running. She had a pile of notebooks in her lap, all scrawled in a pidgin mix of Infernal and Common that she could only barely decipher. She had been so excited to learn how to maintain an astral engine, and now she could barely summon the energy to read. She had found a kindred spirit, another arcane technologist who she could work with and speak with on equal footing. That had only lasted, what, a day, maybe two. Keeping track of time was getting hard now that the brainfog that accompanied Nova’s most depressive episodes had set in. 

Since Nova had stepped aboard the ship, the engine room had been alight with discussion and excitement as Bym had started walking her through each system and subsystem and how they connected and synergised and interfered with one another, the whole time promising so often to eventually explain every system that interacted with everything. Occasionally Nova managed to surprise Bym by offering an insight from her time maintaining the Storm Chaser’s engines, teaching him something even as he taught her so much. The sound of the engines had mixed with their lively back and forth, filling the air with frenetic energy and inspiring Nova to learn more and more. 

But now the hum of the engines felt oppressive, intruding. Goading her to come solve a mystery that she was in no way capable to handle yet.

Everybody else on the ship, occupying some space between Thalia and Nova simply by virtue of those two occupying the extreme ends of the ship, could feel the shroud of grief that stretched between them. 

Kyrie sat in her turret, her face buried in some manga in the hope it would provide an escape. Aila sat in the other turret, gazing out at the wall of the Styx, wondering why this life felt so natural to her. Lucius and Qillek talked quietly about home, sitting across from each other at the table in the lounge, both in the back of their minds wondering what they could have done to change things. Sentry, being no stranger to losing allies in battle, focused on providing her friends some comfort food.

A small light indicating some alarm went off on Thalia’s dashboard. Something with the engine, no doubt some damage from the fight that had only just finally caught up to it. She instinctively turned to Bym’s little booster seat and opened her mouth to tell him to get his ass to the engine room, before reality slapped her in the face. Thalia intercommed the engine room. “Nerva, dear, do you have this under control?” Her call was met with silence. “Nerv- Nova?” She turned to look through the ship to see if she could spot where Nova was from the cockpit. “Nova? Where is that girl...” Thalia double checked that she had engaged the autopilot and marched through the ship to find Nova. Her long legs carried her swiftly through the lounge, and the gangway, and as she entered the engine room, she found Nova sitting against the wall, her head in her hands, crying and hyperventilating.

Thalia wasn’t very good with people. She was a criminal, with a curse that drove people away and an alcohol addiction. People didn’t like her, and she didn’t like them back. Kyrie had been able to see past that for long enough to see the potential for making money working with her. 

But Bym, Bym was an imp. A little devil, though a mild one, but one nonetheless. Life of crime? “Love it.” Curses? “I know tons of perfectly nice people with curses.” Alcoholism? “What’s a little vice between friends, eh?” 

Bym was... Well, if Thalia ever had a friend, it was Bym.

All of this was a long-winded way of saying that Thalia had absolutely no idea how to deal with somebody having a panic attack. Bym never had any, and Kyrie’s method of calming herself down was to run to her turret and listen to some Shansara.

Qill barged past Thalia, or at least as much as a 90-pound ball of feathers could. Sentry following closely after managed it much better. 

“Excuse us, captain,” the hulking bio-magitechnical golem politely said as she pushed Thalia out of her way. 

“What’s up?” Qill asked softly, kneeling in front of Nova. “Can you tell me what’s got you stressed out?”

“H- h- he was supposed to be here teaching me... I don’t know what I’m doing I don’t know how to fix this I’m not smart enough..."

"Nova, you are literally, literally, the smartest person I know."

"I screw up so much, though..."

"Who was it that got us all off of Aegis V alive?"

"By making a deal with the ILS. Who I took home and then detonated like a bomb on the Storm Chaser."

"I'm pretty sure it was Aila who did that last bit, but..." Qill checked over his shoulder to make sure Aila hadn't heard him pinning the blame for that on her. "Okay, who was it that fixed the Maiden's forge and revived Sentry?" Qill assumed that was what happened. He was somewhere else at the time.

"After getting her killed because I was too weak to protect myself."

"Oh, for H'esper's sake..." Qill muttered.

“Nova,” Sentry said, kneeling next to Qill, “You are such an important part of this team. We wouldn’t have gotten half as far without you, and we won’t get halfway to the end if you give up now.”

Lucius entered the engine room and joined the other three. “Nova, you get so much excitement from working with this stuff, and your enjoyment of learning about magic is infectious and makes me and Qill excited about magic too.”

Unknown to Thalia, Tiangong joined in, as best they could, sending thoughts of safety and comfort through their bond. 

"Really?" Nova responded, starting to calm down. "It does?"

"It does," Qill confirmed.

Thalia watched the scene in front of her. They really love that girl, don't they, she thought to herself. 

Once Nova had calmed to the point of taking in the rest of her surroundings, she saw Thalia standing in the doorway, seperate from the crowd gathered to triage her episode. "Sorry, captain."

"No, no, it's quite alright..." Thalia responded. "I... I miss him too." She pondered a brief moment. "It's funny, he and Kyrie only ever interacted when the turret malfunctioned, and you'd only been here a day, so I thought I was sitting up there mourning him all on my own." Thalia pushed her way through the throng of Nova's friends, and sat down next to her. "I'd quite enjoy talking with you, about him, if you would like." 

Nova's friends went back to their previous activities. As Thalia started telling Nova the sordid story of how she and Bym had first met, Big Cat came and laid down at their feet. Thalia quickly lost track of the time, telling Nova story after story of Bym’s escapades, and Nova telling Thalia of her own misadventures as a member of the ragtag group officially unofficially known as the Storm Chasers. Thalia even caught herself smiling a few times. 

She realized she had a feeling of warmth in her chest, sitting here with the girl she had so brazenly flirted with multiple times. Thalia realized she still had at least one friend. But as she listened to Nova’s voice regale her with tales of titans and demigods and flying cities, as even her hair snakes began to become enraptured by Nova’s surprising charisma, Thalia pondered the warmth in her chest. She wondered, if, maybe, they could be closer than just friends. Maybe. 

A young woman confidently strode into a small village at the base of a mountain range, wearing a golden breastplate with a shield, cape, and sword hanging on her back. A cool sea breeze was blowing in from the east, driving off the heat of the summer sun.

She smiled cheerfully as she walked past a farmhouse, with the shepherd sitting in front of it. His wife and daughter were crouching behind the windowsill, watching her suspiciously. That motif repeated several times as the woman neared the village’s central square.

When she reached the square, she found a squadron of red-armored soldiers, all standing easily a full head taller than the villagers. They were relaxing under an awning, where the villagers were giving them a wide berth.

The woman approached them. "You look to be in charge here," she remarked, drawing herself up to match them in height. "What is this place called?"

"Who are you to be asking us such questions?"

“You can call me Diana. Now, I won't ask again.”

"Don't you know who we are?"

"I'm quite proud to say no, if only because it appears to be irritating you."

The tallest of the 5 soldiers reached up and removed his helm, revealing a bald head and a single large eye perched above his nose. “The name is Brontes. I answer directly to Zeus.”

“Directly to Zeus? What’re you doing out here in the middle of nowhere, then?”

“You’re pretty thick for a human. What do you think that mountain right there is?”

Diana turned and examined the mountain, and saw its peak shrouded by clouds. “Hmmm. I take it that this mountain is special or something?”

“That’s Olympos, you idiot.”

“Oh! That sounds like where I need to go!”

“Go ahead, but I’ll warn you, if you just walk up to the gates they’ll kill you on sight.”

“That’s rude. Why?”

“You’re not from around here, are you? They gotta be careful. The gods are at war.”

“Why wasn’t I invited, then? I swear, they never tell us anything.”

“You aren’t no god.”

"You wouldn't know a real God if they stabbed you through the kidney." Diana then immediately began walking towards the mountain.

“Hey! Stop!”

“Stop me yourself.”

Brontes crouched down and leapt, landing in front of Diana. He clenched his fist, and a rod of crackling lightning grew from his palm. “I said stop!”

Diana continued walking, not even changing her trajectory to make to go around him. As she approached him, Brontes reeled back the thunderbolt and flung it at her. 

Diana ducked to the side, and the thunderbolt flew past her. She then reached to the sword on her back and drew it, and lunged forward at Brontes, ramming the sword through his lower torso.

“Do you know me yet?” Diana asked. She carefully pulled the sword out of him, and the blade sizzled as it dried itself of blood. Diana held out her hand, which started glowing, and projecting light upon Brontes’ doubled-over form. The hole ventilating his kidney quickly healed over. “Stay out of my way,” she warned.

Brontes slumped to the ground, holding his side still even though the pain had passed. He remained there as he watched Diana continue onwards to the peak of Mount Olympos, even as the other soldiers checked him for wounds. 

“What are we going to do about her?” one of them asked.

“Let her go. She’s the Olympians’ problem now.”

Diana kept walking until she reached the base of the cloud layer shrouding the mountain’s peak. She lifted the sword above her head, and whispered to it: “Shine."

The sword slowly began to glow, increasing in intensity steadily, until it began to burn the air around it and shot a beacon straight in-line with the blade, cutting through the mist and revealing the blue sky above.

It also revealed the massive palace that crowned the mountain, constructed out of marble and gold and designed in a hybrid of the Hellenic style and the even older Minoan and Mycenaean styles.  

Standing in front of the only door through the wall surrounding the palace was a tall man wearing only a helmet and a red cloth around his waist, wielding a spear. He looked quite startled to suddenly be confronted by a stranger with a glowing sword who had destroyed the magical veil concealing his home. 

“Stop! Explain yourself!” He yelled, running towards Diana with his spear held forward. “No mortal is allowed to step foot in Olympos.”

“If you’re not a mortal, you must be Ares, then.” Diana hypothesised. “Take me to Zeus. I demand an audience.”

“You will get no such thing. Leave, mortal!”

“You’re quite presumptuous. How do I prove my godhood to you?”

Ares responded by lunging at Diana and ramming his spear into her neck.

Diana was nonplussed. She slowly reached up and pulled the spear out, and the wound was healed almost as soon as she did. “Anything else? Or does that suffice?”

Ares, confused, stood down. “I... suppose so.”

Ares led Diana through the door and into the palace, most of which was open to the air, except for the rotunda which sat upon the exact peak of the mountain. At no point did Diana see another person inhabiting the massive compound, until Ares led her into the rotunda. 

Despite the rotunda being relatively small and covered by a roof, the inside was massive, lined with columns, and open to the sky above, though it was a different sky than the one outside. It was glittering with stars even in the daylight, from horizon to horizon.

It reminded Diana of home, giving her a rare pang of nostalgia for a place long lost to her.

In the center of the rotunda was a circle of thrones, twelve in all, all but two of which were occupied. The council of gods was bickering about something to do with countering discontent in the ranks of their mortal soldiers, but they all fell silent as they saw Ares approach. 

Zeus, with short hair and beard of a bright white, carrying a scepter passively crackling with lightning. Sitting in order clockwise from him were:

Poseidon, with long silver hair and beard, wielding a trident.

Athena, a comely woman dark of hair, with an owl perched upon her shoulder.

Hephaestus, stout and homely compared to the ethereal figures surrounding him, but the most obviously muscled of the group. A wheelchair sat next to his throne.

Aphrodite, the infamous beauty, the oldest of the council of gods but the most youthful.

Demeter, with earthen brown hair and lusch green eyes.

Hermes, with tanned skin and short-cropped hair, wearing his winged sandals.

The two empty thrones, one engraved with a familiar sun symbol and the other with a crescent moon. 

Dionysus, dressed in a toga dyed dark violet to help hide the wine stains. 

Hestia, with bright green eyes and vibrant orange hair.

And finally, at Zeus's right hand, his queen Hera, wearing a stern frown but with gentle eyes and wavy hair, both a light brown.

“Ho!” said Poseidon, the first to spot Diana behind Ares..

“Rude,” Diana replied.

“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” asked Zeus.

Diana stepped into the center of the circle. “I am a god from far away. I have traveled to this land seeking knowledge.”

“You could not have chosen a less opportune time, stranger,” said Athena. “We are occupied by discussions of war.”

“War with whom?”

“My father, and his siblings,” Zeus explained. “The Titans. Their reign over the earth must come to an end.”

“This... doesn’t quite line up with the story I know,” Diana noted.

“What do you mean?” Hera demanded.

“I have met with prophets who have told me... prophecies of the fate of this land, and while the general facts are accurate the details of the sequence of events are very different. Now I doubt the prophecies were accurate at all.”

Athena gave Diana a look, and then exchanged other looks with Hestia and Hephaestus. She whispered something in her owl Noctua’s ear, and he flew off, flying through the door Ares had led Diana in through.

“I think it would be best if we discussed this less pressing issue after the war council,” Athena announced. “Ares, take her to my chambers.”

Ares led Diana through the compound to one of the more secluded buildings, one with an observatory of almost industrial design upon its roof.

Ares left Diana in a spacious greenhouse with proper glass windows and an abundance of perches for Noctua, who was nowhere to be seen. The wall joining the greenhouse to the rest of the house was just a line of pillars.

A shape of smoke lurched out of the shadow between the columns, coalescing into a helmet of black metal and then a dark-skinned man in black robes. "You seek the truth, interloper?"

"I am Truth. I seek completeness."

"Then let me lead you to the place you truly belong." The stranger held out his hand, and Diana took it. When she did, a shadow wound around her arm and pulled her into a place of darkness, the same shape as the place she had been before but stripped of all light except a dull, ambient orange glow in the air. “Hold on tight. If you let go we’ll be discovered.”

“What is this place?” Diana asked.

“It is the Darkness. We can’t be seen here by anything, and it can only be reached with this,” he said, tapping the side of his helm.

“The Helm of Darkness...” Diana recognised the item. “You’re Hades.” 

"For a stranger to these lands, you know quite a lot about us."

"I know many things."

“And yet there is more for you to learn.” Hades led her down into the depths of the palace of Olympos, remaining in the Darkness the whole time, until they reached a glowing door, the only thing Diana had seen in the Darkness that produced any light.

“Welcome to my domain,” Hades said as he pressed his hand against the door, which ignited with light and inverted the Darkness, causing it to become light all around them. When the light faded, they were on the top of a hill with a lone doorframe, looking out over a sunny but barren desert 

“It’s dreary, I know, but it’s home,” Hades apologized. 

“It reminds me of my own home.” 

Hades led Diana through the desert to an oasis, passing hordes of wandering listless shades on the way. Next to the oasis was a two-story house, with a tan-skinned woman tending her garden. 

Persephone waved as she saw her husband approaching. “A guest? If I had known I would have cleaned up.”

“Athena called a meeting of the Astron Society. Prepare for the others.”

Persephone straightened her back and dropped her trowel, and rushed inside the house.

“Isn’t it summer?” Diana inquired. “I thought she lived here over the winters.”

“Yet another of the details of our lives that mismatch what you were told,” Hades answered. “We are an outlier of the average story, this I can confirm with you.”

“You know of the metanarrative?”

“Our native prophets have espoused many of the main points of it, yes. Leto knows the finer details, she will be able to tell you more.”

“Where can I find her?”

Hades looked out at the desert surrounding his house, and pointed out at a figure approaching over the sand. “She is coming to us.”

Diana saw the figure, draped in a shawl to protect her from the sun, slowly treading across the sand. She was one of the most beautiful women Diana had yet met.

Diana then saw 5 others also approaching. From the direction Hades and Diana had come from came Athena and Hestia wheeling Hephaestus in his wheelchair, and from another came two strangers Diana couldn’t easily identify, wearing quite ornate armor. Each of them was wearing a glowing crown, which created a halo around their head.

“Helios and Theia, the other discontents among the Titans’ ranks,” Hades explained.

As the Olympians approached the house, Athena marched directly towards Diana. “Stranger, let me see your shield.”

Diana reached back to the shield hanging off her back, and handed it to Athena. 

Athena examined the convex disc of black, silver, and gold with awe, and whispered: “ ‘And among them went bright-eyed Athena, holding the precious Aegis which is ageless and immortal.’ Where did you get this shield?”

“I have been carrying it for millenia, passed on to me from one of my allies who carried it far longer.”

Athena handed Diana her shield, and then held her hand out, beckoning something from far off. After a few short seconds a golden shape zipped over the horizon and flew onto Athena’s arm, slamming into place with her arm through the handholds. 

Athena held her shield out in front of her, and Diana saw that it was exactly, perfectly, identical to her own. 

“Aegis... how did you...” Diana was quite rarely ever confused, so the feeling she felt now unsettled her.

“My Aegis was bequeathed to me by the smith who trained Hephaestus.” 

“Were they a short woman, with white hair and brilliant green eyes?”

“In fact they were. Our fates our bound together, stranger. What is your name?”

“My creator left me with the name Diana Kadmon.”

“Did you just say Diana?” Leto interrupted.

“You know the name?”

“We should have this discussion inside,” Hestia told the gathering of gods, wheeling Hephaestus through the front door of Hades and Persephone’s abode.

The group followed them inside, where Diana was surprised to find that the interior was much more spacious than the exterior implied. It was also much more extravagantly decorated than the house's plain exterior would have indicated. The entryway opened up to a ballroom-sized atrium, with a large marble table in the center of it. Hestia wheeled Hephaestus up to the table, and took her seat next to him. Persephone and Hades took their seats next to her, and Athena sat on the other side of Hephaestus. Leto, Theia, and Helios left an empty seat next to Hades and Persephone, and 4 empty seats between Athena and Leto.

Diana could suddenly feel the presence of a Void-Beast intruding upon local reality. On raw instinct, she drew her sword, and lunged in the direction the abomination would appear from, and as a humanoid figure appeared in front of her, she had her sword at its throat.

The figure was that of a handsome young man, with pale skin, white hair, and black robes, and a sword on his hip. Stretching behind him was a pair of wings which seemed to absorb all light that fell upon them.

“Diana!” Hades yelled. “Stop!”

Diana held her attack, but kept the sword in position.

“That is Thanatos. He serves me.”

Diana did not stand down. “Can you not smell the stench of death and chaos coming off of him? He is not a creature meant to exist in the same space as life or light.”

“He is death. That is his purpose. He collects the dead and brings them to this realm.”

“He is one of the protogenoi, yes,” Persephone explained. “The child of Night and Darkness. He may not be... the most pleasant. But he is bound to Hades and the underworld. He cannot betray them.”

Contrary to what you might think, Hell is a veritable Paradise for an Angel. Especially those Angels who take pride in and derive enjoyment from their ability to slay Demons.

Roxanne is one such Angel. And she had one Hell all to herself, after the associated Earth and Heaven attached to it had disappeared from the face of the Multiverse, leaving only the Demons and their prison behind. However, she’d been an Angel for so long that she had started growing bored with her personal, as it were, Hell.

Lucky for her, she wasn't limited to one Hell. She had infinite Hells to pacify.

Roxanne stood on a cliffside in her private Earth, barren of humanity, which she had christened Altar. She unsheathed her magic sword, Dawnherald, and pointed it out over the cliff, which faced a pristine blue ocean.

She spoke to the sword. “I think it’s time we took a vacation, eh? You pick this time. Try to surprise me.” She released the hilt, leaving the blade floating in the air. Dawnherald then minutely vibrated, in an increasing frequency and tightening amplitude, until it’s subatomically sharpened point snagged on a subatomic wormhole and then ripped an orange-red swath through the blue sky.

Roxy peered through the portal and examined the universe Dawnherald had chosen. “I’m intrigued... tell me more.”

Dawnherald continued ripping open the wormhole until it completely enveloped Roxy, bringing her into the world Dawnherald was proposing. She saw an endless plain of sulfur, interrupted only by towers of sulfur spitting clouds of sulfur like smokestacks.

The air smelled of sulfur, and napalm, and melting flesh, and burning plastic.

She saw movement, in small patches, on the edges of the horizon: Imps, scrambling towards the holy presence of Roxy and her semi-animate gear, enraged at her consecrating effects on their infernal home.

Roxy pointed at Dawnherald and traced a curve from where it was now to it's sheath on her back, which Dawnherald followed until it clicked snuggly into its home. Roxy took a calm, deep breath, and then rocketed towards the squadrons of imps so fast she left a vacuum which sonic-boomed in her wake.  

She stopped among a group of imps as fast as she had gotten going, knocking to the ground all but the one she had stopped in front of and held still by wrapping her ethereal wings around it. Her hand was outstretched towards it, her pointer and index pressed gently against its forehead, and her middle finger was pinned towards her palm by her thumb. When she released the coiled-up flick, the minor Demon's head exploded backwards in a jet of steam, literally vaporized by the energy Roxy's smallest possible attack had imparted.

“Come on, put up a fight. Make me earn my vacation.”

The Demons snarled and indulged her, all attempting to pounce on her at once. She grabbed one, palming its face, and used it as a club to bludgeon the rest. Its neck failed after only three Demons, the body detaching from the head and flying off into the near distance. She then pitched the head at a tight cluster of imps, splattering the head through all 6 of them.

These imps were no challenge for Roxy at all. As soon as she realized she had already exhausted her enjoyment from this particular encounter, she reached back to Dawnherald, pressing the button to release it from its sheath and help dispatch the imps.

As soon as the last imps splattered across the ground, Roxy heard a steady, rhythmic pounding. She smiled. “There we go...” She zipped in the direction of the sound, and as she grew closer she tracked it as coming from beneath the ground.

She set down on the sulfuric stone, and punched down at it, shattering the relatively thin floor she had been standing upon, revealing the chamber below.

It was massive.

It was several hundred feet across, and the bottom of the chamber was so far down that it was obscured by the glowing smog of sulfur dioxide that filled the low-lying regions of this world. She could see flickering sources of light, and shifting shadows, but no details.

The walls of the chamber were smoothed and shaped sulfides, with a whole wall of pure carved native Sulfur. The Sulfur wall had a door 50 feet tall, and behind that door was the source of the pounding.

Roxy wedged her fingers between the crack of the doors, and ripped a hole through it, the soft stone crumbling in her grip. As soon as she did the great fist of some Greater Demon punched through the door, grabbed her, and pulled her into the pitch darkness. It drew her close to its face, and opened its eyes, revealing six charcoal flames, and then opened its mouth and snarled, revealing a bright furnace burning white-hot.

It exhaled rocket exhaust at her, and her semi-mortal flesh melted away, stripping her down to little more than a golden skeleton wearing golden armor, which the demon released to watch clatter to the ground.

The skeleton dropped down to the floor, and then instead of collapsing jumped back up and head-butted the Demon. Roxy pulled her disk shield, Aegis, off her back and held it up, where it surrounded her with an impenetrable sphere of light.

As Roxy’s flesh reconstituted behind the barrier, she slowly paced around the Demon, examining it in the new light. It was 30 feet tall, with skin like bubbling tar, the face of a gorilla and the horns of a ram, cloven hooves, and fingers like foot-thick obsidian blades.

“You couldn’t have picked a more typical form,” she enunciated as soon as her lungs, throat, and mouth had grown in. “Got a name?”

“Ba’al-Beirut,” it growled in response.

“I’m Roxanne. Tell your friends.” With that said, Roxy took Dawnherald and smashed it against Aegis. The two rang out with a thundering clang, and the sphere of light exploded, sending Ba’al-Beirut flying through the ruins of the door and down into the chamber below.

Roxy’s human form had completed repairing. She walked up to the edge of the chamber, just in time to see Ba’al-Beirut scamper off whimpering before the sulfur dioxide smoke filled the Ba’al-Beirut-shaped hole that had been punched through it. She dropped down into the darkness. She landed in a gentle kneel among the smog, surrounded by hundreds of pairs of embers.

“Hello, boys. It’s time to fucking party.” She reach back towards Dawnherald in its sheath, and without even touching the catch pressed it and then flicked her wrist upwards, an action Dawnherald mimicked, launching into the air. “Shine.”

Dawnherald ignited with the light of a sun, blinding every single one of the five or so hundred Demons in the chamber with Roxy. Roxy could still see perfectly, however. While they were all still stunned, Roxy zipped around obliterating the Demons in approximate order of ascending power. By the time she had eviscerated the imps, the other Demons had recovered.

They all competed to be the one to kill her, accidentally attacking each other in their frenzy. Roxy took advantage of the confusion by hovering in places that would lead to more collateral damage when they missed her. She managed to kill almost a quarter without laying a finger on them.

It wasn't much of a challenge, but it wasn't effortless either. Once Roxy had almost completely cleared the room, the surviving greater Demons turned tail and ran.

“You fucking cowards,” Roxy yelled at their backs. “You call yourselves Demons? Get back here!”

She took her time tracking them through the endless system of sprawling tunnels under the surface of this Hell. She slowly, patiently, paced every foot of the 100,000 miles that quest required, killing a million other Demons along the way. But after 10 years, more or less, she found them all, and killed all but one.

She had left Ba’al-Beirut alive, out of some fleeting whimsy to see what his driving fear of her would lead him to do.

She saw him journey across Hell for 20 years after she had finished killing the other Demons she had first come across. He consulted with hundreds of Demon fortune teller and magisters, seeking what it would take to get this implacable Heaven-Spawn off his trail.

Every place Ba’al-Beirut passed through would be shortly thereafter wiped from the infernal map, so the longer his quest drew on the more resistance he found from other Demons not wishing to be marked for certain annihilation at the hands of a bored rogue Archangel.

But eventually his quest led him to the answer he thought would work best.

After utterly destroying the demonic temple that had given him his final solution, Roxy caught up with him as he was adding the final touches on an enormous magic circle.

It was a massive pentagram made of crushed up cinnabar, with lettering in greek, arabic, and norse runic along the edges, and surrounded by more geometric shapes extending out almost a hundred feet from the center. Ba’al-Beirut had spent a day tracing it, making sure that each line and curve were perfectly drawn, to minimize the chance of failure. Thousands of other Demons had gathered to watch.

Roxy recognized this ritual: she'd seen it attempted six dozen times across the Omniverse before; it was the ultimate ritual of local Multicosmic Demonism. Never once had she failed to stop it.

But this Hell was a sandbox. She wanted someone else to play with.

Roxy sat in the air above the circle, legs crossed patiently. When Ba’al-Beirut stopped to run and cower, she zipped into his path, still sitting lotus.

“Finish the ritual,” she commanded of him. Not only did Roxy not interfere with the process, she actively aided it: when Ba’al-Beirut reached the final step, and went to kill a random imp for blood sacrifice, Roxy stopped him.

“He’s more likely to answer if it’s somebody he knows,” she advised. She stood in the center of the pentagram and used Dawnherald to slit her own throat so deeply her head technically wasn't connected to the rest of her body. Her blood pooled within the pentagram, not spreading past its 5 sides. It poured out of her until her heart ran dry. “Call to him,” Roxy ordered.

In an ageless and multiversally spread infernal tongue, Ba’al-Beirut cried: “<Therion, I summon thee.>”

There was a flash of light from the center of the pentagram, and a crack of thunder, and the cinnabar dust started glowing.

The blood started roiling and churning, as if it wasn’t only mere centimeters deep. A shape slowly rose out of the liquid, looking like it was composed of the blood itself. It was vaguely human-shaped, though many things often were, but as it rose higher it’s features became sharper. The face of a man became distinct, already smiling wickedly, and before it had risen completely its eyes snapped open.

Therion leapt forward at Roxy, not yet fully formed. His arm shot forward like a tentacle, which materialized into a hand around Roxy’s neck. She still had Dawnherald in her hand, so she swung it to cleave the gripping fist.

She zipped backwards, out of his reach. “I thought She forbade you from entering any Hell?” she interrogated.

“She let me back in as a reward for my good behaviour,” still half-blood Demon answered disingenuously. “I thought She forbade you from using your wings under foreign suns?” he then asked in return.

“She gave me new wings.”

“Well, I guess that all our questions have been answered.” He examined his surroundings, and himself, still partially solidifying out of Roxy’s blood. He saw the figure of Ba’al-Beirut towering over the much more minute Angel. “Though it was her blood that drew me here, the voice that summoned me was not hers. I presume that was you?”

Ba’al-Beirut was in a state of obvious confusion. “I summoned the Demon King, God of Evil, the Immortal Dragon. What is this buffoonery?”

Roxy and Therion shared a rare smile over their mutual amusement at the situation.

Ba’al-Beirut gestured at the random assortment of Demons that had surrounded to watch the ritual. “Kill this imposter!”

Roxy gave him some space, flying straight up to not be in the way, and Therion spread his arms and cackled as hundreds of imps and middling Demons converged upon him and ripped his finally completely solid body to shreds.

Roxy landed upon a hill a fair distance away. Ba’al-Beirut turned his back on the frenzy and walked for a long minute to confront her. “Why did the spell fail? You said he would answer.”

“And answer he did, you stupid impish emberling. Look again, and see for yourself.”

In the minute that Ba’al-Beirut had spent stomping over to Roxy, the scene behind him had changed dramatically. No longer was there a legion of imps tearing at the flesh of some random human, but there was instead an enormous form standing above the imps, stretching up into the sulfurous smog until it could only be seen as a shadow against the ambient glow of this Hell’s atmosphere.

Everything had gone silent. The enormous shadowy figure had never made a sound as it had come into being, and the imps had ceased their squawking out of awe.

A shadow leaned down out of the smog, revealing a colossal draconic head beset upon a long thick snake-like neck. The head was itself beset by a crown of four curved horns. Six other nearly identical heads then leaned down around the first head, their only difference being having a single pointed horn instead of four.

The central head spoke, with a deep, but genial voice. “Therion, The Beast from the Pit, The Seven-Headed Dragon, the King of Demons, at your infernal service. I see you have already met my opposite.”

Ba’al-Beirut fell to his knee and genuflected. “Forgive me for my disbelief-”

“Up! Stand up! We don’t have time to be formal, we’ve got a Legion to organize! No time to waste! Go, rally as many as you can!”

As Ba’al-Beirut scampered off to obey his command, Therion leaned even further down to Roxy. “You think yourself so clever, driving a Demon to insanity to draw me into a far-flung realm and imprison me...”

“You’re the one calling me clever, here,” she responded. “I only wanted to see what would happen if you were summoned to where you were forbidden. I thought maybe the process would finally destroy you.”

“If only.”

Roxy sighed in commiseration. “If only indeed.” Roxy cracked her neck and fingers, her joints popping as loud as firecrackers. “Let’s get to business, shall we?”

Rey waited outside of Baby’s Diner for her date to finish her shift. It was 4 in the morning. Not an exceptionally late night for her, but she was tired. She cycled some plasma in and out of her veins, to see if that would help her keep energized. She then did a lap around the state park the diner bordered, which did very little to help.

She pulled out her phone and looked up something she thought she remembered. She chuckled when she found it, and then opened up the group chat.

                                          Hey, Shay

What

                                           You’re not going to believe who                                            has tasteful, professionally photographed nudes                                            from back in the 40s

Who

                                           Aradia Johanna Christa Scomparsa-Prince-Furst

You send me those nudes right goddamned now I’m going to give her so much shit for this

                                           Elle make sure she doesn’t hurt herself

Rey shook her head and put her phone away, just as her date, Felicia Kyle, pushed out of the front door of the diner

“So, how was the fight?” Felicia asked.

“Stopped a bank robbery, burned down someone’s garden, broke a rib. Ya know, your standard save the world stuff.”

“Wait, you broke a rib? And then ran here?”

“I got better. Superheroes are pretty tough, you know.”

“Why don’t you tell me more while I drop my car off at my place.” It was a short 15 minute drive to her place, in a trailer park in the nearby township of White Deer.

“This place is…” Rey started to say as she climbed out of the car.

“Let me guess, ‘Rustic’?”

“I mean, in not so condescending a tone. But… yeah.”

“It’s cheaper than living in the city, I bet.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I’m gonna go get changed out of my uniform. You wanna come inside or wait out here?”

“I’m good out here. I’ve still got to psych myself up.”

After Felicia went inside, Rey massaged her rib. She lifted up her shirt and took a look at it: Aradia’s magic had fixed the physical break, but the flesh around it was still bruised, dark violet and a sickly yellow. Rey’s superhuman physiology would heal it quick, but it definitely wouldn’t be painless by the end of the night.

When Felicia came back out, she had almost completely transformed. She almost looked like she belonged in Rey’s group of friends: Torn jeans, black leather jacket, black crop-top.

“Lookin’ good,” Rey said.

“I know how to fix myself up all cosmopolitan-like. I wasn’t always a trailer park gal, you know.”

“Oh yeah? Where you from?”

“Austin, Texas.”

“Can’t get much more cosmopolitan than Austin.”

“So, how’s this going to work? Are you going to… carry me? For 700 miles?”

“You’d be surprised.” Rey activated her power and had Felicia in a bridal carry before she could blink. “You want to go straight to Danesville? Or do you want to sightsee first?”

“Depends where you take me. What sights are there to see?”

“Ever been to the top of the FursTech tower in New York?”

“Isn’t the top third completely closed off to the public?”

“I’m not the public anymore, am I? Me and Rad, we’re basically besties now.”

“Alright, then, my hot young steed, lead the way.”

Rey bolted from the trailer park and and down the road, and onto the highway, east towards New York City. It was 3 minutes later when Rey stopped in front of the FursTech tower, and put Felicia down to let her catch her breath.

“Holy shit, Rey.”

“That’s how it is for me all the time.”

“Pick me back up, this almost better than sex.”

“You’re gonna eat those words later on.” Rey scooped Felicia back up, and stared up at the tower. “Brace yourself.”

Rey ran straight up the side of the tower, slower than she usually would but fast enough that Felicia wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. They were at the top in less than a second. Rey set Felicia back down so she could enjoy the view.

“Jesus, this is unbelievable…”

They sat at the top of the tower silently for ten minutes, watching the lights of the cities and highways.

“So, where next?” Felicia asked.

“Ever been to the west coast?”

“I visited LA for vacation once.”

“Good enough for me.” Rey picked Felicia up once again. “Oh, there’s one more thing I have to show you. I only just learned this since you texted me the first time.” Rey braced to run, and bolted straight off the edge of the building, coming to a stop about a hundred feet from the edge, before starting to fall. Felicia screamed and covered her eyes.

Rey slowly activated her power to slow her fall, until she was going horizontally. After sufficiently long time not having hit the ground, Felicia cracked her eyes open again, and looked around, astonished. “You can fly?”

“You betcha.”

“How fast can you fly?”

“You wanna find out with me?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Rey ramped up her power, to the point where she could feel her plasma reserves empty, and needed to draw from the Heart on her back. She kept going, pushing herself even further. She felt the Heart draining. She’d never burned through this much plasma so fast ever, she may not have even used up this much plasma in the entire rest of her life. She didn’t know how fast she was going, but she was beyond words like “fast”.

“Hey, you seeing that?” Felicia asked. Rey was pretty sure she was. It looked like she was seeing her plasma trail in front of her. She raced past streak after streak, until they merged together, and the streaks became a solid tunnel of plasma.

“What the fuck is happening…” Rey muttered.

“Are you gonna stop speeding up?”

“I think I did…”

Rey and Felicia suddenly hit a wall of light, and were spat out of the plasma tunnel above a bright sunny desert, and very quickly slowed to a stop.

“Where the hell are we?” Rey asked.

Felicia, looking around, pointed behind Rey. “I think I see some buildings over there.”

Rey turned and flew in that direction. When they reached it, they found a vast slumped skeleton of a massive skyscraper, draped across the desert, less than two miles from the sea. Much smaller towers poked out of the desert around it.

“Rey… I think this is Dubai. That’s the Burj on its side right there.”

“What the fuck happened? It looks like the city’s been abandoned for a thousand years…” Rey gave Felicia a disturbed look.

“Did we just fucking time travel? Did you go so fast you punched through time?”

“Hey, this is new for me, too.”

“Identify yourself!” ordered a voice from behind Rey. Rey turned to face the source, and found a familiar face floating a few dozen feet from her.

It was the Archangel, the mysterious benefactor of Astra’s League, wearing what looked to be a suit of sleek golden power armor, helmetless, with a long flowing sky blue cape.

“Rey?” the Archangel asked, apparently just as perplexed as Rey was. “How did you get here? We detected an interversal incursion… Was that you?”

“Fuck if I know.” Rey answered.

The Archangel sighed. “You speed-forced it, didn’t you. You went so fast you broke the barrier between worlds. You weren’t this powerful when we fought Therion.”

Rey spun around, showing the Archangel the Heart that Aradia had given her. “Rad spotted me an upgrade. She said you made it.”

“I did. I am happy to see him being put to good use. Who is this with you?”

“This is my date, Felicia.”

“That’ll explain it. I remember when I used to be that much a show-off…”

“Where are we?”

The Archangel hesitated for a moment. “…Let me show you.” She turned and started flying northwest, quickly picking up speed. Rey had no trouble keeping pace. They crossed the middle east in only a minute, eastern europe and scandinavia in another two, and the north atlantic in another five. As they shot past a winterset europe, Rey thought she saw spots of gold glimmering in the snow, but from miles up it was hard to tell. It was a similar story across Canada, but when they neared the midwest, it was a solid blanket of gold with small islands of snow instead of the other way around.

A massive metroplex stretched from northern Minnesota, around the coastal edges of Wisconsin and north Michigan, down through Illinois, and across southern Michigan and into the southernmost reaches of Canada. The sun was just rising here, and every building that could see the sun was glittering golden in the light of dawn.

The Archangel flew down towards the center of the city, where Danesville would have been if this were the Earth that Rey knew. She landed swiftly in a park in front of a massive palace, and the power armor unfolded and she stepped out of it. She was wearing a skintight bodysuit, upon which were mounted a series of decorative golden plates. The cape that had been threaded out the back of the armor was revealed to be a light cloak, held around her shoulders by a small pin with a image of a sun on it, radiating 16 points of light.

Rey landed a bit rougher, and put Felicia down.

Despite evidently being the dead of winter, the air was comfortably warm and the grass was a vibrant green. There were dozens of people milling around the very large park, playing in the snow or walking through it. The were also many animals walking around: elephants, rats, wolves and dogs, otters, cats, pigs and boars, and even some dolphins and octopi floating through the air or in small blobs of floating water, and then countless birds: crows and ravens, and parrots and pigeons, and some hawks and eagles. The animals were dressed in the same style as the humans: an interchangeable assortment of bodysuits, robes, and decorative armor.

“This… is New Jerusalem,” The Archangel said, “my homeworld.”

“It looks like Earth,” Rey said.

The Archangel led them towards the palace, and up the marble steps that rose nearly 100 feet above the park. “We did once call it that, and some still do. Years ago this world was just like any other Earth. I was seventeen when the Revelation occured, and changed all life on this world forever. It’s a very long story, but the short of it, is every living human on Earth was gifted powers by the Goddess of this ‘verse, and we used our powers to build Utopia on Earth. No-one here wants for anything, all is provided free of scarcity.”

The doors of the palace were 200 feet tall, and made of marble and gold. The Archangel gently pressed her palm against them and they silently opened, frictionlessly floating on their hinges until they just as gently stopped.

Even though the sun was still rising behind them, the enormous chamber behind the doors looked like it was lit through the skylights above it, and when Rey examined it closely she realized the skylights were actually an impossibly complex series of mirrors. The roof was held up by 10-foot thick pillars of gold and marble, and on each pillar was a lamp that looked like someone had taken a Heart, much like the one Aradia had given Rey, and carefully peeled it open to reveal the miniature sun within.

“Jesus Christ…” Felicia muttered.

As they neared the end of the hall, they stopped in front of a 20-foot-tall lifelike statue of a young girl, with brown hair and golden eyes, holding up a hand towards the sky, above which was levitating a golden orb, peacefully spinning according to some unknowable pattern. Her eyes were crying a fountain that ran down her face and over her clothes until it reached the pool at the bottom.

Rey found the girl familiar, but couldn’t place why.

On the other side of the fountain was another door, half the size of the first, and through it was another skylight-mirror lit room. At the end of it was a Throne, one designed for a human twice the normal size, beneath enormous tapestries hanging from the ceiling detailing events Rey could only barely comprehend, battles between angels and demons and gods and aliens and other unknowable things. Sitting in the throne was a giantess, ten feet tall, wearing white and gold robes and an elegantly ornate golden crown with a glowing white jem on the brow.

“Good morning, Roxy,” the giantess said. “I see you have brought some guests, they look not to be from around here. I trust you remember the policies for introducing the unready to our world, and the punishments.” The giantess subtly reached for the two giant weapons on either side of her throne: a hammer with a head the size of an oil drum on her left, and a sword as tall as she was on her right.

“Calm down, Romana.” the Archangel insisted. “Rey traveled between worlds under her own power. If that’s not proof of her readiness then there is no such thing. And arriving here on accident, the metanarrative guided her. This was meant to be, for whatever reason yet to be revealed.”

“We’ll see.” Romana leaned back and relaxed.

A large raven flew in from the entrance of the throne room, and perched on the end of the handle of Romana’s hammer. “What do we have here? Are you bringing us another child of yours from another unspeakable escapade?”

“For once this one isn’t mine, I’m pretty sure.”

“I’m sorry, can we go back a step,” Felicia pleaded. “That bird can talk.”

“Humans weren’t the only ones given gifts by our Goddess,” the Archangel explained. “All the most intelligent creatures of Earth were uplifted. This is Muninn, Prince of the Corvans.”

“At your service,” Muninn said, bowing.

“We’re headed for my workshop, would you like to accompany us?” the Archangel asked Muninn.

“I would be honored.” Muninn hopped down from the hammer and glided to the Archangel’s shoulder.

The Archangel led Rey and Felicia deeper into the palace, walking down seemingly endless halls and past lush gardens. Eventually they reached a 20-foot tall door made of a black metal banded by gold. The Archangel pushed through it, and as soon as the door cracked open the sound of hammering suddenly washed over them.

Behind the door was a enormous chamber lit by a dozen furnaces lining the walls, and a dozen holograms that sat throughout the room, lines of light tracing patterns both arcane and technological.

On the back wall was a ring a foot deep made of gold, silver, and black metal, forty feet in diameter, behind which was a blank wall. About twenty feet in front of the ring was a small dias covered in glowing sigils and runes.

At one of the furnaces were two ten-foot-tall humanoid constructs, glowing from within by a white light, hammering away at a large piece of white-hot metal. In front of one of the holograms was a woman, wearing a silver bodysuit and armor and a pair of spectacles, drawing at the hologram, modifying the design it displayed. Next to her was a tall bearded indian man, wearing a close-fitted black robe and an eye patch, with scars poking out from beneath them.

The Archangel glided quickly to their sides and whispered something in their ears, which Rey had no chance of hearing over the sound of hammering, though Felicia did tilt her head as if she were attempting to.

“These are my friends, Eitri and Jayadev,” the Archangel introduced once she was done conspiring with them. “E, J, this is Rey and Felicia, from Astra’s Earth. Rey is friends with Aradia.”

Eitri and Jayadev turned to face their guests and bowed. Rey suddenly realized that she recognized them.

Eitri seemed to notice the look of familiarity on her face. “You did attend the Astra Academy, correct? You must have met our counterparts Ethel Adams and Jake Newark, then.”

“Yeah, I did. I was in their classes.”

Eitri walked around to another hologram, and started typing at a panel of glyphs next to it. “Just to fill you in,” she started, “The Astraverse, as we call it, is a heavily metanarrative reflection of our world, which is why, as you have discovered, it tends to produce individuals identical to individuals in ours, to the point where with only a scant single exception, every single person born on your world has or had a counterpart here.”

“Who is the exception?” Rey asked.

“Astra herself, which is the reason hers is the name we use to identify your world.”

“Wait,” Felicia interrupted. “You said Newark. Isn’t that the last name of Babalon? Are you related?”

Jayadev visibly winced at the mention of the supervillainess. “In both your world and ours, my sister succumbed to the enticing call of wickedness. She is powerful, a scourge that I deeply regret I hadn’t eradicated before it took root.”

The Archangel rested a hand on Jayadev’s shoulder. “That was as much my failure as yours, J. I’m the one who drove her to it.”

“I just fought her in my world,” Rey said. “I don’t blame you at all for not being able to stop her.” Rey lifted up her shirt to expose her deeply bruised ribs. “She’s a caliber all on her own, fast as Hell and hits like a truck.”

“If you fought her and lived you must be quite powerful. What are your powers, if I may ask,” Jayadev said to change the subject.

Rey held out her hand and drew some plasma out of the Heart, forming it into a ball in her palm, before absorbing it into her veins, briefly allowing it to overcharge her, causing her to visibly vibrate, and then she dashed to the other side of the room and back, leaving behind her plasma trail to indicate that she had moved at all.

“Very impressive,” Jayadev said. “Speedsters of your caliber are few and far between. And how about you?” He asked Felicia.

“Oh, I’m not-” Felicia responded. “I’m just a normal human.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Since it’s only fair,” Eitri said. “I have an expanded intellect and enhanced stamina.”

“I,” Muninn said, “have an uplifted mental capacity, and reflexes, and a boost to flying speed, and can mildly telekinese to compensate for my evolutionarily unforgivable lack of fingers.”

“For me,” Jayadev said, “It’s best to show you.” He ripped off his robe, revealing a black bodysuit underneath it, and stretched, cracking his joints. In less than a second, he dramatically transformed, his limbs becoming longer and leaner, his face sharper and elongated, dark black fur spreading across his skin, until he was a large man-shaped wolf, and then continued until he was completely a wolf with all human traits removed. His clothes had all dissolved into his skin, excepting only his eyepatch, which remained covering a still heavily scarred eye. Even as a wolf on all fours, he was still taller than the Archangel.

The Archangel reached over and gave him a scritch around the ears, which he leaned into enthusiastically. “Don’t be afraid of him, he’s really just a big puppy.”

“I can’t wait to talk to Aradia about all of this,” Rey said. “She’s been here too? You said they knew her.”

“That’s the thing…” The Archangel started. “I have brought her here secretly, but because she's not yet technically earned the readiness that our law requires to introduce her to our world, I cannot show her everything I wish I could.”

Rey realized something. “She had a counterpart here, you were close with her. That statue outside the throne room, that was Rad, I recognized her.”

The Archangel nodded. “She was my niece. She died before she was given a chance to flourish as she has in your world. I’m so proud of what she’s accomplished, all of her progress to make your world more like ours. But we miss her dearly here.”

“Making our world like yours… I’ve never seen anything like this place, it seems so perfect. Peaceful.”

“Just wait until you see the gladiatorial combat,” Eitri dryly noted.

“Our world is peaceful because we have no need to fight for resources and manpower. People work if they desire work to do, but if they don’t they live free of cost. Everyone is free to spend day and night doing whatever they wish. All soldiers are volunteers, signing up to protect their world because they are capable of defending it, and are willing to pass on if they were to give their lives in the process. But our world didn’t just come into being fully formed. Countless people bled and died to each take a turn to swing the hammer to help forge it. When Therion, the Demon King, made his first attempt to conquer our world he did so by first slaughtering 99% of humanity with his army of 100,000 fellow Demons.”

“The Demon King sounds like more and more of a nightmare the more and more I hear about him,” Felicia said.

“Therion makes the Joker look like a youtube prankster, and Thanos look like a schoolyard bully. I helped create Astra’s League in your world to give your world even the slightest chance to survive encountering him, and it was only barely enough.”

“Therion was borne to cause strife and suffering, fundamentally: it’s coded into the very structure of his soul,” Eitri said. “So we took the mantle of stopping him and his ilk from plunging all of the omniverse into chaos.”

“Above you used to be Astra’s League, the guardians of your world,” The Archangel said. “Now that you are a member of Astra’s League, above you now is us, Yggdrasil, the guardians of the multiverse. As for what’s above us, well, maybe one day we’ll all find out.” The Archangel walked over to the dias in the back of the room. “You should head home.”

She punched in a series of glyphs into the panel on the dias, and then a portal opened within the ring on the wall, showing the peak of FursTech Tower in Danesville on Rey’s Earth.

Aradia was meditating in her workshop, and when she suddenly heard the hammering in the Archangel’s workshop she was shocked out of her meditation. She ran to the balcony near the portal. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

Rey sheepishly peered around the edge of the portal. “Hey, Rad… Guess what I learned I can do…”

“Oh, fuck me,” Aradia muttered, cradling her face in her hands. “You speed-forced it, didn’t you.”

“That was the exact same thing she said!” Felicia pointed out.

“Rey, you and I need to have a very long talk about your responsibilities and expectations as a member of the League. Thanks for getting her back home, Roxy.”

“You keep a close eye on her, Rad,” The Archangel told Rad. “She’s got even more potential than we first thought.” She turned to Rey and Felicia. “Now, git. I’ve got work to do.”

Rey picked Felicia up and floated through the Portal and landed on Aradia’s balcony. The Archangel pressed the big central button on the dias, and the portal snapped shut

“What were the results of the soul scans,” She demanded as soon as it did.

“Well,” Eitri answered, “for one, Felicia lied about not having powers.”

“I could tell.”

“As for Rey, there’s no doubt about it: she’s a native New Jerusalemite. How does she not know?”

Rey Walker, better known as the superhero Neon, had very suddenly become a celebrity after being inducted into Astra’s League, the world's most prestigious superhero organization. She sat in the League's headquarters, FursTech Tower in Danesville, Wisconsin, at 3 in the morning January 1st 2101, watching as 24-hour news stations scrambled to uncover everything they could about this random punk-rocker who had just been thrust onto the world's stage. Her best friends and long-time crime-fighting partners Hilda Furst, Elle Ectric, and Shailene Octavia stood around watching the same holographic screens where they were also being analysed for the same reasons.

“This is so weird,” Rey commented as she watched the TMZ office argue about the team’s power levels while all still wearing party hats from their New Years party just hours before.

“You’ll get used to it,” Aradia Furst told her. 

“I’m literally being interviewed by like 17 people every single minute and I hate it,” Hilda said. She was apparently Aradia’s second cousin three times removed (Hilda’s great-great-great-great-grandparents were Aradia’s great-grandparents), which Hilda had only learned when she saw it on MSNBC’s coverage of her. “I’ve never killed myself in public before but I’m this fucking close to doing it just to have one less body for everybody to interrogate.” She’d never been this stressed out by her power before, at least that she’d let her best friends know.

“This is exactly why I don’t like going out in public,” Elle said.

“Well, I guess you’re going to be travelling exclusively by lightning bolt forever now because your ass is famous worldwide.”

“I wish my ass was famous,” Shailene mumbled.

“Don’t go getting any ideas, now,” Aradia chastised. “We’re public figures, we have to keep a clean facade.”

“I mean, do we have to? Or is that just how things have been done? What if it’s tasteful? With, like, a real photographer?”

“If you want to draw Astra’s ire, go ahead. But I’ll be looking down my nose at you the whole time.”

“All I heard was ‘go ahead’.”

“Do you pay us?” Hilda asked. “Or would we have to do brand deals and shit.”

“You each get a monthly stipend which will support a quite comfortable housing arrangement,” Aradia answered. “Anything else you wish to earn on top of that is up to you. I would suggest that you wait to get comfortable with your new income before you start trying to supplement it.”

“Is that on top of, or replacing, your basic income program?”

Aradia was at a loss for words. “No League members have ever been on the program before. I never even considered that it was a possibility.”

Rey’s phone dinged with a new message. She was actually kind of surprised that it wasn’t just constantly going off since the press conference. The text, and the ones that immediately followed it, read:

Hey, this is Felicia The waitress From the diner You gave me your number Are you busy right now? You’re probably busy You can ignore me if you’re busy

With a brief burst of her superspeed Rey texted back:

                                          I'm not busy don’t worry                                           Just watching the news                                           hyd?

What is this, the 20s? ‘hyd’?

                                          I’m old fashioned

I get enough old fashioned at this fucking diner

                                          Is your shift over?

Almost. Another hour

                                          You work third shift often?

Only tonight I drew the short straw to work the new year shift

                                          You busy after?

I was planning on sleeping

                                          That’s probably a good idea

I could wait until after getting an early breakfast tho

                                          Wanna come to Danesville?                                           I know a couple places

Danesville is a 10 hour drive from here

                                          I can carry you                                           Btw, whats the actual address of the diner                                           I kinda just stumbled upon you last time

1 Mile Run Rd Allenwood PA We’re right next to Little Mountain State Park off I-80

Suddenly Hilda jumped out of her seat, yelling “FUCK!”

“What is it?” Aradia asked.

“The Harlequin just showed up at one of my bank security guard jobs. Midwest Federal.”

A plasma trail traced from the chair Rey had been sitting in to the workshop’s balcony, where Rey already was, leaning over it to look out over the city. “Alright Aradia, time to hold up your end of the bargain.”

“I suppose it is.” Aradia got to work casting a portal, but instead of waiting Rey jumped over the railing and ran down the side of the building. Running down a building was always much harder than running up one, but it was so much more exhilarating. On her way down, she sent one last text to Felicia:

Gotta go. Duty calls. See you in an hour hopefully If I never text back then that means I’m dead 👉😎👉

She made it to the bottom with no problems, and flowed through the city until she stopped in front of the bank. Five of Hilda in bank security guard uniforms were standing with their handguns pointed at the door. All the lights inside were dark, and the front door looked like it had been smashed in. A second later the portal Aradia had been casting finally opened, behind Hilda and Rey.

“Wait,” Shay said, double-taking at the balcony of the workshop behind her. “How did you...”

“I’ve been here for like five minutes, guys,” Rey taunted.

An ATM came flying out of the bank’s front doors, followed by a shrill roar. Rey stepped out of the way, pulling one of Hilda who was also in the way along with her.

“What the fuck was that? I thought you said the Harlequin was in there?”

“I swear to god I saw her mask for an instant before she killed me,” Hilda said.

“Is she working with somebody new?”

“Let’s not wait to see...” Aradia said. “HARLEQUIN!” I know you’re in there. You’ve slipped under my radar for far too long.”

Another roar rang out. And then a slow stomping, slowly growing closer. And eventually some creature stepped out of the shadows, with red-and-white checkered scales, wearing the Harlequin’s mask: a plain featureless oval, half red and half white. Except the mask had been split across its width, a third of the way up, by a thick crack which was now its mouth.

“What the fuck is that thing?” Elle asked.

It spoke, in a low, rasping tone. “Hello, Aradia. Recognise me?”

“Why should I, fiend?” Aradia demanded.

“Twofold, witch. Your father was a thorn in my side for decades, one. And you and I spoke face to face only 7 days and a few hours ago, two.”

The Harlequin had been a consistent foe of her father in his early days before joining Astra’s League, this Aradia was familiar with. But, seven days and a few hours ago, Aradia had been at Johanna Kerr’s christmas ball, before it had been blown up by what evidence suggested was the Harlequin, or at least her goons. Aradia would have remembered encountering this beast there.

“What happened to you, Harlequin. This is something new, even for you.”

“I’ll spare you the details of my weakness, if you please. I’ll only have you know that it was and remains to be very painful.”

Something clicked in Aradia’s mind. Could it have something to do with the massive explosion the Harlequin had triggered after Aradia had left the christmas ball? If she had been at the ball to trigger the bomb, she likely would also have been caught in it. That would be more than enough energy to disrupt the impenetrability of her superhuman skin and possibly cause this strange alteration. It was a chemistry gauntlet to work through some other time, however, and especially not as a mere thought experiment.

“Then allow me to relieve your pain,” Aradia announced, straightening her back, and drawing herself up into the standard casting stance, one hand held in front of the other, fingers ready to trace magic circles into the air. “Girls, do what you do.”

The very first thing the Harlequin did was wrench a piece of the door frame out of the wall, and attempt to use it as a javelin to spear Aradia. As before, Rey leapt in to pull Aradia out of the way of the projectile, which embedded into a concrete wall across the street.

“Don’t worry about me getting hit,” Aradia told Rey. “I’m more robust than I look. Focus on taking this thing out.” She then quickly summoned a simple but strong magical barrier, and used it to give herself cover while maneuvered herself next to Hilda.

Meanwhile, Elle and Shay put their powers to work together, performing one of their favorite tag-team moves. Shay reached out and liberated the bronze fixtures from the destroyed door, which she psychically compacted into two rods and Elle then pumped a voltage differential into. Shay launched them at the Harlequin, which hit and elicited a scream as the voltages equalized through her.

Once Aradia had sidled up to Hilda, she asked of her “I’m going to need you to duplicate something for me, quickly.”

“What is it?”

Aradia knelt down and anchored her barrier to the street. She then plucked a dimly glowing white jewel off one of her necklaces and handed it to Hilda. “Its magic and that's all you'll understand even if I explained it. Took me a few years to understand myself.”

Hilda took the jewel and quickly duplicated herself to five, before passing the now 5 jewels to the middle-most her and re-condensing herself back to one. She repeated the duplication once more, before handing them to Aradia. Piled together in a hoard of 25, their combined glow was now about as bright as an average light bulb.

“That’ll do quite nicely,” Aradia said. She dumped all but one into her sleeve, cradling the last one in her palm. She pumped her light through her skin into the jem.

Aradia stood up, clenching her other fist and dissipating the shield she had summoned. She tossed the jewel towards the Harlequin, and yelled “Rey! Blast this with me!”

While Aradia cast a spell to focus her light, Rey zipped in and examined the jem. In the compressed time that her power afforded her, she grabbed it out of the air, and made a deliberate pondering pose for a long enough fraction of a second that she would be visible doing it. She then walked up to the Harlequin, and held it out in front of the Harlequin’s mask. While the Harlequin did a double-take at the audacity of the act, Rey asked “This a good spot?”

“Perfect.” Aradia illuminated the jem with a brilliant white laser projected from her fingertip. Rey, for her own part, channeled her power to siphon some of the plasma that was fueling her into it as well. It was less than a second before Rey felt a crack, and took that has her cue to let go and back away very casually.

Rey watched from a roof across the street as the jewel exploded, throwing the Harlequin through the wall of the bank. 

She only recently had been able to go this fast, after Aradia had given her an upgrade: The Heart. The Heart was a backpack fusion reactor that produced functionally infinite plasma for her to fuel her power with. She use to be able to consistently hit speeds of about fifteen miles a minute, but she’d only be able to sustain that for a handful of minutes. With the Heart, however, she’d been clocking a mile a second, and she had been able to sustain that for at least fifteen minutes, long enough to run from New York City to Danesville, without a sweat.

She pulled her phone out and checked to see Felicia’s response:

If that becomes the last text you ever send anybody i’m donating this phone to the smithsonian for their astras league exhibit

Rey smiled, and put her phone away. She went to step off the roof, but stopped when she noticed a strange flower growing out of the gravel spread across the roof. She summoned some plasma to her palm to shine a light on the flower, which closed its petals against the intense beam of sun-simulacrum.

She heard a crunch against the gravel behind her, and as quickly as she could she turned to face the sound, delivering her neck quite nicely into the grasp of a viney tentacle.

“Well, well, well,” world-infamous supervillainess Babalon said, as she lifted Rey off the ground.

She was dark-skinned, indian-american if Rey remembered the various tv specials about her correctly. Her hair was a long braided tangle, interwoven with branches and interspersed with flowers. She was wearing a bodysuit that was either made of leaves or designed to look like it was made of leaves. Holding her up off the ground were a dozen or so ten-foot-long, inch-thick vines that sprouted from her back and waist, one of which was stretched out and holding Rey. Each vine ended in a bundle of two-foot-long “fingers” each of which could move individually but tended to be used in groups. The fingers were what was wrapped around Rey's neck, preventing her from making her retreat.

Babalon drew herself closer to Rey. “It seems the self-pompous priestess of light has found herself a new disciple. Wanna know what I did to the last one?”

“I'm good, actually. Hey, why'd you name yourself Babalon?” Rey responded, grabbing the vine around her neck with both hands and channeling some of her plasma into it. Babalon recoiled as two feet of that vine was instantly incinerated.

“She gave you the Light too?! HOW?!” Babalon screamed as she swung another of her vines at Rey, faster even than most other superspeedsters Rey had ever met. No wonder she was on the top tier, worthy of being one of the few that drew Astra herself out to fight.

Rey needed to actually focus. Her new upgrade gave her an edge, but only barely.

She boosted herself backwards, remembering just a little too late that the edge of the roof had been behind her. She tripped over the parapet and fell back over the edge, and slowed time down to give her some space for thought. She was about 5 stories up. It would take about 4 seconds to reach the ground. That was plenty of time. She brought her hand to her chin and pondered.

She had only had three hours to adjust to her new power level, but she was fairly confident in her ability. She had developed one specific new skill, something almost unnoticeable that she had nonetheless noticed running up and down buildings all night. She just needed to figure out how to do it on purpose.

She felt the writing mass of plasma on her back, the Heart, given to her by Aradia. She felt its warmth, its light. “The Light”, Babalon had called it. Astra, local goddess she was, had never revealed what it was that fueled her cosmic might, but she did do a lot of glowing while she used it. Was this the same Light? Rey had no idea, but it was a fun little supposition to make. And it did somewhat explain the aforementioned new skill.

“Are you... posing?” Babalon asked, apparently appalled by the gall Rey was exhibiting.

Rey had been focusing on both her inner monologue and maintaining the hand to the chin, and hadn’t noticed that time had resumed normal speed and she hadn’t continued falling.

“What the fuck?!” Shay yelled. “I’m not doing that!

Rey looked at herself. She appeared to be just standing at a 90 degree angle from vertical, 45 feet above the street. “Huh. Didn’t know I could do that.” As she moved, the plasma trail that indicated she was using her power traced her every gesture.

Babalon lunged over the edge, and Rey cut out her power to drop herself out of reach. Shay reached out and grabbed Rey before she hit the ground, following the unprecedented failure of Rey to reactivate the hovering part with the rest of her powers.

“That was weird,” Rey told the others as she righted herself. “Anyway, what’s up with this bitch, Rad?”

Aradia gave Rey a look of annoyance for using her nickname. “That’s Jane Newark. She’s...” Aradia sighed. “A pseudodemon, and a Whore.”

“Wow, strong words. But, I get the idea. Let’s kick her ass.”

A brick whizzed past Rey's head. “Forgetting something?” the Harlequin growled.

“Elle, help me out with Babalon, the rest of you keep dealing with dollface.”

Elle zapped up to the roof with Babalon, with Rey following.

“The witch’s new toys are out to play, I see...” Babalon said as she circled the two. “I’ve killed 5 of Astra’s League, you two small fries don’t stand a chance.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Rey said winding up a punch, Elle standing behind her. “Elle, now!”

Elle jumped forwards, converting herself into pure electrical energy, electrical plasma. She wrapped herself around Rey’s arm, and Rey absorbed her and used her energy to launch herself forward, fist first. Elle released herself the instant Rey’s fist hit Babalon’s chest, exploding out of Rey’s hand, shooting forwards and launching Babalon into the sky.

Elle continued to the clouds, dragging Babalon along with her. She rematerialized periodically, taking opportunities to give Babalon a kick or two before returning to plasma to dodge Babalon’s flailing vines. On the ground, Rey flowed through the streets, following Elle’s flashes of lightning.

Elle eventually let Babalon go in the middle of a cloud over a field outside the city. She struck down to the ground, and started waiting for Babalon to fall down to her. Rey caught up only a few seconds later. They acknowledged each other with a fistbump that crackled with static and neon.

“So what was with that flying thing back there?” Elle asked.

“I don’t really know. This nuclear backpack Rad gave me has some fucking magic in it or something.”

“Can you do it again?”

“I mean, probably. I don’t know how though. How do you do it?”

‘“It’s just an instinctual extension of my power. But it’s not really the same as, like, how Astra flies.”

“I mean, obviously. But I gotta start somewhere.”

“What if you just try running up?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“When you run with your power, it’s like pushing yourself in the direction you want to go, right? Just do that, but up.”

“I don’t know...” Rey was silent as she looked up to inspect Babalon's progress towards the ground. “Wait, shit, I just got it.”

“Got what?”

“It’s the Garden of Babalon, because she controls plants.”

Elle sighed. “That does make sense, yeah. You wanna give it a go, with me giving you a boost?”

“Give what a go?”

“Running up.”

“I mean, sure. But you gotta promise to catch me if it don't work.” Rey reached out her hand towards Elle

“Deal.” Elle took Rey’s hand. “3, 2, 1...” Elle converted to lightning and crackled over Rey’s skin as Rey absorbed her, before Rey knelt down and then jumped into the air, Elle releasing herself to give Rey a little extra height.

Rey tried doing what Elle suggested, activating her power to try to force herself higher. As Elle jumped out of her, Rey tried to siphon some of the extra energy Elle had given her, and add it to her reservoir.

She didn’t expect that she would be rocketed into the sky at the same speed she could run. She passed Babalon, still on her own journey down, before she knew what was happening, and hit the clouds in a single second.

Elle, still nearly on the ground, for a second thought her friend had exploded or somehow vaporized herself, until she backed away and saw Rey’s plasma trail tracing a thick, bright line straight up. “Holy shit, Rey.”

Rey, now whizzing past the clouds, considered what to do next. She calmly pulled some plasma from the Heart, though not nearly as much as she used to get into this position, and then tried activating her power downwards to slow her still very rapid ascent through the atmosphere. She managed to stop herself before she got to the point where the air would be too thin to breath, and then let herself start to drop back down to Earth. She periodically slowed herself down, until she was continuously doing it, and was floating like she had done accidentally before. She experimented with the hypothetical throttle of her power, gently increasing and decreasing to raise higher and lower, and then tried to change the angle at which the was directing her power, and managed to achieve something quite analogous to how she assumed someone like Astra could fly.

She glanced down, and noticed Elle zapping around a very angry looking dot, and dropped down to join her.

“Nice of you to join us,” Elle said as Rey gently fell to a stop a few dozen feet above the grass.

“Hey, turns out, I can totally fly.”

“Join the club.”

“We just did, like 5 hours ago.”

“Shut and help me, Rey.”

Rey dropped down to the ground, where Babalon was swinging her vines wildly to try and and reach the two heroes floating just out of her reach.

“You getting tired yet?” Rey asked her. “If you want I could go get Astra, somebody you can actually get some good swings in with.”

“Don’t act like you’re too powerful for me. You haven’t laid a finger on me either, you stupid punk.”

“Tell that to your singed vine.”

Babalon lunged at Rey, growling with frustration. Rey zipped past her vines, and grabbed the vine harness that anchored her plant limbs to her human body. Rey pumped plasma directly from the Heart onto the vines, incinerating them and burning away the leaf-like costume Babalon was wearing.

Babalon swung one of her human arms, hitting Rey and sending her flying.

Rey crashed into the grass, rolling and yelling in pain. “FUCK! I think my rib is broken...”

Babalon, now robbed of her major advantage and seething with rage, stomped towards the now vulnerable hero. “That’s why it takes Astra to handle me, you petulant child. She can take a hit.”

Elle zapped over to Rey, to put herself between Rey and Babalon. “You get back, you bitch.” Elle unwound the chains she kept wrapped around her arms, and started swinging them, striking sparks between them. “We aren’t done here, yet.”

“I’ll just kill you both, then.”

Elle ran at Babalon, and then zapped around her, leaving her chains corporeal enough to wrap around Babalon’s arms. Elle materialized behind her and twisted the chains to bind Babalon’s arms behind her. “Do anything stupid and your heart’s a piece of burnt toast.”

“Bold of you to assume I have one.”

“Well, if you say so.” Elle pumped 10,000 volts across her hands, sending the current across Babalon’s shoulders, setting her skin on fire most evidently. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Elle atomized the chains and rematerialized them back on her own arms, and then kicked Babalon to the ground, where she screamed in apparent agony. “Rey, do you think you can walk?”

Rey slowly got to her feet, grunting occasionally whenever she agitated the broken rib. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Can you send up a flare?”

“Yeah.” Rey raised her palm up to the sky, and launched a plasma ball into the air, arcing slightly towards the city.

A portal appeared a dozen seconds later, out of which Aradia, Shay, and Hilda stepped. Rey saw, through the portal, the Harlequin, restrained tightly by a few dozen feet of chain wrapped around her, being loaded into a police van.

“Good work, girls,” Aradia congratulated. “You are certainly working hard to earn your place on this team.” Aradia strode towards the writhing Babalon, and pulled all of the adamantium from the jewelry she was wearing and sent it to lift Babalon and hogtie her. “Wait until Astra hears how the youngest members of the League took you down on their own.”

“Your threats of humiliation mean nothing, witch,” Babalon spat.

Aradia muzzled Babalon with the remaining adamantium she had. “Shut the fuck up, Whore.”

Rey limped over. “Hey, I don’t suppose you got any healing magic, do you?”

“Depends how severe your injury.”

“Broken rib?”

“Just one? No trouble at all.” Aradia quickly danced out a spell, which sent a warmth up through Rey’s ribcage. “Now, I would suggest you rest for a while before...”

Six armored figures marched down the hallways of a grand castle, pushing another figure along with them: A human woman with short silver hair and silver eyes wearing a silver skin-tight fabric with plates of golden armor on top of it. Her mouth was muzzled and she was strapped to a cart with her arms bound together in front of her chest and her wrists linked to a collar around her neck.The armored figures pushed through a grand doorway, revealing a vast chamber, with a throne sitting in front of a enormous window showing empty black space, and in the middle of the black space was a shining accretion disc of ionized stardust spinning around a sphere of void. They led her to the foot of the throne and stopped the cart, before stepping back.

On the throne was a man. Not a human, but a man, a massive one with pale blue skin and a chest-length mane of tentacled hair. The figures stopped short of the throne, and kneeled in deference, and presented their prisoner.

“The Mighty Luna, Guardian of Terra, at last,” the man on the throne said. “Such a faithful guardian that no one knows where this Terra that you protect is or even if it’s real... Or that is how things used to be.” The man stood up from his throne, revealing his true height of almost 14 feet, and stepped towards her. Once you heard that someone claimed to discover its location, you needed to know if what they claimed was true, so you would know if you needed to destroy them. You hunted them... But you cannot expect to out-hunt The Great Hunt.” He dismissed the others, leaving the throne room empty, and then reached down and removed the muzzle from her face.

“I knew all Hunters were Aster...” She said immediately, “But no one ever told me the Khan was Aster Gargantuan.”

“And you were naive enough to truly believe all the Gargantuans dead? Our home is gone, this is true, but we persist.” The Khan then turned back to the window, to face the Black Hole for which his race had been named. “And the same will be said for your race, when the Great Hunt reaches Terra.”

“If you truly know where it is,” Luna spat. “Prove it.”

“Prove it so that then you will be forced to kill me, and destroy my empire in the hopes that the knowledge will be lost forever? That doesn’t sound so wise to me.”

“I’m gonna kill you anyway. You might as well spill the beans.”

“ ‘Spill the beans’. What an interesting Terran expression.”

“It means-”

“I know what it means. We’ve been studying Terra’s radio transmissions.”

“That’s not proof enough for me.”

“If you want your proof, you’re going to need to torture it out of me. And I don’t see how that’s going to happen.”

“You don’t, do you?” Luna grabbed the collar around her neck and wrenched it, slowly but steadily ripping it away.

The Khan only responded by sitting back down on his throne. “Are you attempting to intimidate me?”

Luna strained as she snapped the silver shackles binding her arms together. “I’m just getting comfortable. Me killing you comes later.”

“Does it.” He leaned forward expectantly.

Luna finished by ripping out of the restraints strapping her to the cart she was rolled in on. She stumbled out of the cart, stomping onto the polished stone tile of the throne room, cracking it.

“Was that necessary?”

“Oh, it’s going to get a lot worse. Especially since your lackies tore my cape.”

The Khan snapped his fingers and a swath of blue fabric materialized draped across his giant hand. “My apologise. I hope this fabric is up to your costuming standards.” He levitated the cloth to her, where it carefully interwove itself with the remains of her old cape.

“Oh... Thank you, I guess.”

“I have my moments.”

“I’m still going to have to kill you.”

“Of course.” With that said, he bolted up and reeled back his arm.

Luna knelt down and then jumped up, her own fists forward as well. Her fist met his, and there was an explosion of energy, one which echoed across the Khan’s castle-ship, and causing a thin crack to appear in the window looking out over the void.

The two combatants had not fared identically, however. The Khan had remained stalwart in stance. But Luna had been blown across the room, slammed into the door to the Throne room, shaking it and nearly cracking it.

“You should quit while I’m still giving you a chance to surrender...” The Khan taunted, marching towards her.

“You were never going to let me live,” Luna countered.

“On the contrary. You’ll live forever as a monument to your species’ existence, after all is said and done. Whether it is as a free being, or chained to a wall in my castle, that is your choice to make. Make it now.”

“Freedom or eternal imprisonment. You might as well have asked me if I’d prefer a slice of cake over dying.”

“So which is it? Cake or Death?”

Luna smiled as the Khan walked into her punchline. “I’ll have the chicken, then, please.” She kicked off the door, launching herself at the Khan. He leapt over her and swiped her in the direction he had come from, sending her flying into the window, cracking it much more.

As he marched back towards her, the Khan quickly traced a pentagram inside a circle inside a pentagram in the air in front of him. He held up his palm, and a thick, bright white laser shot out and hit Luna and the window. The window shattered and all of the air rushed out of the room, before a force-field grew over the window to lock the air in again. This sent Luna rocketing towards the black hole, tumbling head-over-toes into the void.

She only tumbled for a second, but by the time she righted herself and slowed to a stop she was about 1000 feet out. Her cape billowed in the air that she had been pulled out of the throne room by. She leaned forwards and floated back towards the Khan’s castle-ship. She stopped still 100 feet out and stared the Khan down.

The Khan ambled to his throne and prodded the hidden control screen on the arm. Moments later, Luna felt the castle-ship’s atmosphere stretch out from the broken window and encompass her.

He then flipped open a panel on his throne and pulled something glowing with a dull blue light out of it.

“You know of the Cosmic Seeds, of course,” he began monologuing, as he revealed the 2-inch-long fragment of crystal. “They grow in places of great power, places where the cosmic energies flow strongly. They’re almost impossible to find, having long ago been mined and drained across the whole of the universe. This is a Space Seed, used to rapidly travel across the universe, one I’ve been using for a few years. It’s almost run dry... But it has just enough energy for one last trip anywhere within a few million light years.”

“What’s the point of this?”

“The point is, if Terra was capable of producing someone of your caliber, it should also be capable of producing Cosmic Seeds. And if nobody has ever heard of Terra and it’s never appeared on anybody’s radar, then that means one of two things: There are no Cosmic Seeds there, and you were a fluke, a pure product of chance. Or: Your homeworld is yet fledgling, and is only on the cusp of discovering it’s trove and entering the universe’ stage. If I get there soon enough, I can take Terra’s bounty for myself.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“Well, here’s the thing...” He then slid the Space Seed into a bezel on a simple metal band molded to his left wrist, and then used its power to pull him and Luna towards each other, until his fist reached out and grasped her neck. “You don't.”

Luna tried to pry the Khan’s hand off of her neck, but his grasp was too strong for her to get more than a finger pulled away. He spun around and launched Luna back at the castle-ship. She bounced off the floor, and into the door, this time going through it.

The Khan floated through the window and landed gently.

Luna scrambled to her feet, and limped down the hallway away from him.

“Where to you think you’re going?” the Khan demanded. He activated the Space Seed, and a gravity beam started pulling Luna towards him. She tried flying away, and the gravity increased, to the point the gravitation started spilling out of the beam, ripping tiles out of the floor and bits of stone out of the walls, sucking them into a singularity that the Space Seed had formed to increase its gravitational power. The air howled as all of the atmosphere of the castle-ship was being pulled towards and into the singularity, and the metal structure of the castle-ship groaned. All the while the Khan was still advancing towards her. Eventually, Luna reached the point that even flying at maximum strength she was still moving backwards.

Once the Khan was only a few feet from her, he detonated the singularity, using the Space Seed to invert the gravitational field and release the energy that it had collected.

For a brief instant, that hallway of the castle-ship was illuminated by the light of a full-sized star. An instant later, the walls of the hallway were superheated to a few million degrees, converting everything in the hallway except Luna and the Khan into a plasma. In the nano-moment after, that plasma spread through the castle-ship, quickly dissipating as it got further from that hallway. The pressure of the brief solar experience blasted away everything that remained for a few hundred feet.

Nearly a tenth of the castle-ship had been completely obliterated. The only thing that had survived completely unharmed was the Khan. Luna had only survived at all thanks to the light of the detonation briefly supercharging her, before she was bombarded by the rest of the energy, knocked out, and launched into the void of space.

As she regained consciousness, she was being pulled back to the Khan, this time by a much more gentle gravitational beam. He held her in place as she weakly struggled.

“Will you submit?” the Khan asked.

“Never,” Luna spat back.

“Very well...” He searched the local space for the remains of the chains that previously held Luna, and pulled them back to him, and bound them back around her limbs. “I’ll spare you for now, but...” He pulled the Space Seed out of its socket on his wristband. “Fly home and tell your people this:”

He took the Space Seed and crushed it in his palm, creating a puff of bright blue cinders, which he then used to trace a magic circle with. He then leaned in close and whispered something in Luna’s ear.

He thrust his palm through the magic circle, impacting with Luna’s chest, which sent her rocketing out into space at beyond the speed of light, surrounded by the blue aura warping space to allow her velocity, carrying her so close to the Event Horizon of Gargantua that were it not for the magic isolating her from normal space she would have been drawn in.

Luna had no control over her path, but she could turn to face forward, towards where the Khan was sending her. She saw countless millions of stars rush past her, but one small dim point of light remained steady directly in front of her. As she screamed through the universe, the point of light slowly grew larger and brighter until she could see smaller, much dimmer embers split off from it. A pale brown one and a yellow one most prominently, but also an icy blue one and a much darker blue one, and then a rust-colored one, then a molten yellow-colored one, and then...

A pale blue dot.

“No...” Luna gasped, fully understanding now that the Khan’s claims were not just hollow threats. As the pale blue dot grew closer, continents became distinct. Her magic transportation began to slow, and she saw it start to turn under her. Her home, which she had left 2000 years ago and never let herself return to lest she lead someone to it.

As she crossed back to traveling slower than light and the relativistic effects suddenly set in, the Khan’s last words to her echoed through her mind:

Retired United States General of the Army Karen Reis teleported back to her home, deep in the Rocky Mountains. She teleported into her training room, and unbuckled her sword belt and shoulder holsters, and set them on their equipment dummy.

She teleported to her washing machine, and took her clothes off and threw them in.

She teleported into the shower, and turned the hot water on all the way. She stood in the stream and scrubbed most of her skin raw, and then let her skin heal before washing her hair.

She turned the water off, and teleported to the nearest towel.

She dried herself off, and teleported to the washing machine again to throw the towel in.

She teleported to her closet, and picked a new wardrobe. Jeans, T-shirt, and a short leather jacket.

She teleported back to her training room, and buckled her shoulder holsters back on.

She teleported to her kitchen and pulled a bottle of water out of her fridge.

She teleported to her bedroom, and grabbed her sunhat and sunglasses from her bed stand.

She teleported to Venice Beach.

It was early morning there. She sat in her usual spot, a bench at the southern edge of the beach. She watched the waves roll in and out, sipping her water, while she waited for her contact to arrive.

“You’re early,” the contact said when he sat down five minutes after Karen arrived.

“I wanted to enjoy the view,” Karen answered.

“That’s your prerogative, I guess.” He handed her a file in a manila envelope. “Usual payment. Delivered upon confirmation of kill.”

“It’ll get done,” Karen said before standing up and teleported back home.

She opened the envelope, and saw the contract. Some Saudi businessman. She didn’t recognise him, so he must have only been a bit player in the Caliphate cold war. Nobody anyone would miss.

She teleported to her bedroom and left her briefly worn clothes in a folded stack at the foot of her bed. She teleported to her training room, and geared up. Lycra catsuit, body armor, and ballistic face mask. She strapped her sword belt on, and then teleported to Dubai.

She appeared on the beach, facing the city. It was late evening. The contract said that the target lived in the Burj Khalifa, 150th floor.

She teleported up to the 150th floor. The room she teleported into had 3 armed guards, who scrambled to take out the intruder. She drew her swords and quickly dispatched them, and then pulled a couple of bullets out of herself, putting them in her pocket when she had retrieved them. She noticed that she had bled on the floor, and dragged one of the guardsman's bleeding corpses through her droplets to obscure them. A door burst open, and another 3 guards opened fire.

Karen teleported behind them and took them out. There were even more guards rushing into the room Karen had teleported into. They all raised their guns and took aim, stupidly waiting for Karen to make the first move.

She rolled her eyes, and swiftly drew her dual modified Berettas. Ten targets, 30 rounds. Too easy. They all hit the ground within half a second of one another. She slid the pistols back into their holsters, and then retrieved her bullets from her targets, and put them in her pocket.

She examined the penthouse, now that the guards had been taken care of. Fairly expansive, taking up a slice of two floors of the tower. No sign of the target, but evidence suggested that he had been home very recently. She closely examined the walls...

“Bingo.” She spotted the seam of a secret door, cleverly hidden by some carved paneling. She searched the area for the requisite hidden switch, and found it, hidden in the very same paneling. She pressed it and it revealed the safe room behind it. There was a biometric lock on the thick steel door.

It would be risky teleporting in without having an idea what’s on the other side, but she wasn’t seeing any other way.

She teleported into the small room, and was greeted by her target.

“AHHH!” the target yelled.

She grabbed him by the neck, and opened the safe room from the inside. “Hello.”

“What does the US military want with me?!”

A bit presumptuous, Karen thought, him assuming that the only people who would bother to assassinate him were the USA. “Oh, the military doesn’t want anything to do with you. This is a private hit.” She dragged the target out of the safe room, and to a window.

“What are you doing!?”

She shot the window, facing out towards the sea, and the window shattered. “I’m gonna see how big a mess I can make out of you. See if you turn into world news. Now, if you wouldn’t mind screaming on your way down...”

Karen tossed him out the window, and he obliged. A considerable while later, he hit the ground.

“I’ll give him nine out of ten. Bad form, but he really stuck the landing,” Karen commented as she started unbuckling her ballistic mask.

She teleported up to the peak of the tower, and looked out over the Persian Gulf, just barely being able to see the coast of what used to be Iran. Her facade of sociopathy melted away in the cool breeze.

She sighed, and teleported to her prayer spot, a hundred or so miles north of Baghdad. A cave, in the side of a mountain, in a region that she had been told once had previously been named Eden. She sat, on her simple prayer mat, and prayed. Prayed that the Celestial Warrior was real. Prayed to the god that the Celestial Warrior represented, to send her along, and usher in the Revelation and the Second Coming.

Karen was a very religious woman, but that fact was a sacredly kept secret. Only Alice Prince, whom Karen liked to think of as her closest friend, however distant that may be, knew.

She finished her prayer, and stood up again. She left her secret cave, and looked upon the Holy Land. It was a beautiful sight, marred by the corruption of the Caliphate. The Caliphate that had spawned from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and taken the entire Middle East, while she had been forced by the restrictive United States Government to sit by and let it happen while they tried non-superhuman measures. And now, it was far too late. Far too established to do anything about. A poison, corrupting the cradle of civilization, and the Garden of Eden. It disgusted her.

Alice Prince’s ghost of a sister, her Celestial Warrior, she was the solution to the problem of the Caliphate. The solution that would come from Paradise to smite the false prophets that had established the Islamic State and liberate the Holy Lands... Or, on the off chance that the Jihadists had been in the right all along, lay waste to the nonbelievers who had resisted the rise of the Caliphate.

It was a depressing non-zero possibility.

There was a crack of thunder, and a flash of light in the sky, and an object appeared, falling from it.

“What the hell...” Karen muttered. “And of all the possible places, it had to be my special spot.”

She watched as the object fell to the Earth, and then teleported to the crater it made.

It was a man: tall, brown hair, blue eyes, handsome features, wearing a raggy t-shirt and jeans, and smoking slightly. He was still conscious somehow, and glanced upon Karen with a look of... Familiarity. He laughed. “Imagine, of all the places I could have ended up, I get one with you in it.” He bolted upright, with a speedster’s quickness, and grabbed Karen by the neck.

She teleported behind him and drew her blades. “Alright, asshole. You’re gonna have to try harder than that.”

He looked at his now empty hand, and chuckled. “No, you are not the Karen that I know...” He turned and faced Karen. “You have her face and speak with her voice, but you are not her. You are something so very much greater. Forgive my undue aggression.”

“Who the hell are you?”

He smiled. “What a question. Who, the Hell, am I? Who is a person, truly. Who are you? Are you Karen Reis?”

“I am. What does it matter?”

“So brusque, Karen. I might prefer mine after all.”

“Where are you from that there is another me, another Karen Reis?”

“Another world, Karen. Another universe. And if I’m honest, likely a much better, more fun one.”

Alice and Karen had once discussed Multiverse Theory, when they were younger, and closer. The idea that there were other universes where alternate versions of them might live. Alice had ruled out the possibility of travel between them, saying that creating a portal from one to another was impossible by mortal science or magic. So, if this man was speaking the truth, and had come from another universe, then Alice would very much like to speak to him.

“I assume we are on an Earth, of some manner?” he said.

“We are. You didn’t answer my first question.”

“Is there, in this universe, a man by the name of Jeremy Ryan, that you are aware of?”

“Not on my radar.”

“Well, now I am on your radar. Also, may I ask, is there a woman by the name of Roxanne Furst?”

“There was a Roxanne Prince, with a mother last named Furst. But she’s been dead almost...” Karen was reminded how old she was. “Eighty five years, now.” Alice’s dead twin sister. The Celestial Warrior. “A rare, hereditary lung cancer. She was 15.”

“So she did succumb to it, in this world.” Jeremy sighed. “A shame. This world is truly lacking of a Paragon. Where on this Earth are we?”

“The dead center of the Holy Caliphate of Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Arabia. 100 miles north of Baghdad.”

He examined the landscape around them, and the look of familiarity appeared again. “Eden...” Jeremy chuckled. “It was no coincidence that I have landed here, then. Your blink, can you carry others with you when you use it?”

“I can. I assume you want a ride?”

“If you would be so kind.”

“Got a destination in mind?”

“Anywhere.”

Karen held out her hand, and Jeremy took it. They teleported to her home, and she let his hand go so she could teleport to the bedroom and quickly change back into the civilian outfit she had worn earlier. She left her catsuit, mask, and swords on the floor. She teleported back to Jeremy. “Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“I know just where to take you.”

They teleported to New York City, Times Square, right next to Karen’s favourite pizza cart in the world.

“Evening, Tino.”

“You’ve got a date? I thought you were, uh...” Tino started.

“He’s just a friend, Tino. Wanted to get him one of your world famous slices. Sausage and ‘roni, for me, and...” she turned to Jeremy.

“As the buddhist said, ‘make me one with everything’,” Jeremy said, looking away from the massive skyscrapers above him. “How tall is that one?” he asked, pointing to the FurstTech building, the tallest tower he could see.

“2500 meters exactly. One of a set of Quadruplets, in New York, Detroit, Danesville, and San Francisco, all sharing the title of tallest in the world.”

He smiled. “The more things change, the more they stay the same. We’ve got one just like it at home. I helped build it, as did our Roxanne Furst. Your Roxanne died young, so who built this one?”

“Her brother David and her sister Alice built it in her memory. Do they exist in your world?” Tino handed over their slices, and Karen paid.

“They do. I never met her brother in person, but her sister and I have met many times. ”

“From what it sounds like, your version of Roxanne got to grow up. What was she like?”

“She is one of the greatest superhumans my world ever managed to forge from the fires of a bloody Revelation. Boundless strength and tenacity, matched only by myself in those regards, as well as a heart with more than enough room to love every creature on every Earth, and a mind with room to hold all their knowledge.”

“She sounds like a spectacular woman.”

“And you know that more than anybody, in my world. You and her are quite famously an item.”

“Are we? Now I wish I’d gotten to meet ours.”

“I’m sure you would have hit it off.” Jeremy continued watching the tower. “Who runs FurstTech now?” he asked after enjoying his pizza for a while.

“It was passed down to David’s daughter, Aradia, after he died. But, she’s not nearly as much a scientist as she is an occulist.” Karen watched a news ticker while she spoke, and smiled as it reported that a saudi businessman had been thrown from his penthouse less than an hour ago. Job well done.

“Aradia, you say?”

“You have one of her, too?”

“Could I meet her?”

“I suppose, if she isn’t busy.” Karen grabbed his hand again and blinked into the science lab lobby in the 300th floor, but not of the tower they had been examining, instead one if it's twins, in Danesville, WI. “Is Aradia in?” she asked the secretary.

“Miss Furst is in her workshop with her sister,” the secretary replied.

“Sister?” Jeremy wondered. “Ashley?”

“What?” Karen replied, perplexed. “No, Thrud.” She blinked them into the big workshop at the peak of the tower. In the middle of the room were two women, both of them middle aged in appearances. One of them, Aradia, was wearing ornate gold and black robes, holding her hands over the other and muttering incantations. The other, Thrud, was wearing robes, body armour, and a body suit covering her torso. Her limbs were long ago amputated, replaced with black and gold, but organic-looking, metal.

Without looking, Aradia snapped her finger and flicked her wrist, and a dense patchwork of runes was revealed on the floor. “Do you even understand the great evil you have brought into my sanctum?”

“What?” Karen replied. “Jeremy, what is she...” She looked to him for an answer, and she saw him straining against some invisible force. But, slowly, he was advancing.

“This is the greatest evil to have ever appeared in this realm, and you led him straight to me.”

“You are even more skilled in this universe, Aradia, and even more alike to your namesakes,” Jeremy said. “But you are no Sorcerer Supreme. You do not possess the strength to stop me alone.” As he slowly took steps forward, his eyes shimmered to a deep crimson red.

“I may not, but I know of the one who does.”

“You won't be able to summon her and hold me back at the same time.”

“If I slay you, I will have the requisite time.”

“But then you will release me upon the citizens of Danesville. And you're not that foolish.”

“There are risks and costs for every action. You do not know me well enough to balance mine in my stead.”

“What the FUCK are you guys talking about,” Karen interrupted. “What is going on? Aradia, what are you saying?”

“This ‘Man’ you have brought here is the Greatest Demon in this Multiverse. A wretched soul that craves no more than the sowing of Chaos and the suffering of the innocent. I present to you, Therion, The Beast From The Pit, The Seven Headed Dragon, The King of Demons.” Aradia’s voice boomed as she announced the full title of her guest.

“My reputation precedes me,” Jeremy said.

“Thrud, take him out.”

“With pleasure,” Thrud said, her voice heavily synthesized. She dashed forward, drawing a sword from literally nowhere, and holding it out so it would pass through Jeremy’s neck as she flashed past him.

He smiled, and laughed, and then his head slid cleanly to the floor, his body following closely after.

Aradia collapsed to her knees. “Archangel, Paragon of Light! Hear my calling! I am summoning you from beyond the void to return this evil to its proper place. Bless us with your strength, and deliver us from the Beast!”

The room reverberated with the sound of the plea, and a moment later a portal opened in the ceiling. Out of it fell a woman, who landed on one knee and with a fist slammed into the ground. She stood up, quickly, and yelled “Jeremy!” The portal slammed shut barely after Karen had even registered that it was there.

She was wearing a full-body blue super suit with silver streaks of lightning wrapping around it, knee-high black boots, a golden metallic backpack, and huge golden wrist gauntlets, with three meter-long golden spikes sticking out the elbow of each of them, parallel with the forearm. Her face was slender, her chin was pointed, her cheekbones were sharp, and her eyes were bright green. She was short, at 4’9”, and she had paper-white hair, in a short bob. She looked exactly like Alice, but 70 or 80 years younger.

She quickly approached the body of Jeremy, and flicked her wrists. The elbow spikes of the Gauntlets slid forward and became enormous claws, now protruding out the back of the wrist area instead of the elbow, with a loud snikt. She stuck his head with one set of claws, and raised it closer to her face. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, you son of a bitch.” She impaled the torso with the other set of claws, and lifted it up off the ground. “Aradia, take me somewhere far away from people. I can’t risk the fight spilling out to populated areas.”

“I know just the place,” Aradia said.

“He’s already dead!” Karen interrupted. “What is there to fight?!”

Aradia opened a portal to a familiar desert, and the Archangel stepped up to the threshold, the body she carried beginning to writhe. “You don’t want to know.” She stepped through, and the portal closed.

Karen stood there, dumbfounded. Had that truly been Alice’s twin, the Celestial Warrior? She seemed so... Vulgar, human, nothing special. ‘You son of a bitch’? She was certainly no angel. But... Karen couldn’t let her get away. “Where did she go?” She asked Aradia.

“You know very well where,” she answered.

Karen blinked to her home, and hastily buckled her sword belt back on. She had a bad feeling she would need it.

She swallowed, crossed herself, and blinked back to Eden.

She appeared in the middle of the desert, and stumbled from the earth shaking. She slowly spun around, and was met with a terrifying sight.

A massive, red-scaled dragon, 200 meters long from tail to head. And concerning the head, it had seven of them, vaguely feline but lizard at the same time, at the end of seven snake-like necks, all sprouting from its crimson-maned shoulders. Distributed across the heads were ten horns, one on every one but the middle-most, which held the remaining four. It had two enormous wings, large enough to block out the sun, beating down, causing a dust storm with every motion. Its four massive legs, each as thick as a stand of redwoods, stomped on the desert sands, causing earthquakes. It roared with all its mouths, spitting napalm into the air.

Therion. The Beast from the Pit. The Seven Headed Dragon. The King of Demons.

The Celestial Warrior, the Archangel, stood with her back to Karen, bracing herself against the repulsive force of evil exuded by The Beast. “You wanted to know?” She yelled, without taking her eyes off The Beast. “Well, now you know! The greatest evil I have the displeasure of being my immortal enemy. Now get away from here, it isn’t safe for anybody to be within miles of this.”

“I want to help you!” Karen yelled back.

“No! I won't let him get to you again!” the Archangel outburst.

While she did, The Beast surrounded the two of them with it’s heads. “An interversal lover’s quarrel,” it growled, in Jeremy’s voice. “Poor little Karen, oblivious to how she makes the Paragon feel, ignorant to what they are in another world. She doesn’t know what she is to you, or what I did to her.”

“JEREMY! This ends now!” The Archangel leapt into the air and impaled one of the heads with her golden claws, and then slid around the neck and landed on The Beast’s shoulders, and started hacking away at it.

“Karen!” The Beast said, fighting off the Archangel with three of it’s heads, and focusing on Karen with the other four. “Come on, FIGHT ME! Share the glory!”

“Don’t listen to him!” The Archangel rebutted. “You’ll only get yourself killed!”

“I’m not weak!” Karen said in response. “I know how to fight!”

“YES!” The Beast cried. “Prove yourself! Prove that you are an equal of the Paragon! Slay me as she has done hundreds of times!” He wound his four heads focusing on Karen back, and pounced.

As four steam-engine-sized sets of jaws with razor-sharp teeth the size of tower shields rapidly approached her, Karen drew her swords. Right before they hit her, she teleported out of their way, they rammed into each other, and she chopped at The Beast’s necks.

The Beast laughed as the fight began in earnest. He darted his heads back and forth at lightning speed, far faster than a creature that large should be able to move. Karen blinked out of the way with ease, coming to and from the immediate area of the fight to recover when she required brief respite. The Archangel opted to tank the attacks, her suit showing the damage and bloodstains this approach incurred. Fortunately she healed at an incredibly rapid pace, even faster than Karen’s own healing factor.

Karen blinked away from the fight, and watched as The Beast grabbed one of The Archangel’s limbs, and threw her up into the air. She responded by firing a grappling hook, which she had been concealing in her gauntlets, back towards The Beast. It quickly retracted, propelling her claws-first into The Beast’s side.

The Beast recoiled as if he had been hit by a high-power howitzer round when The Archangel slammed into him. The Beast laughed as it stumbled.

Another of Aradia’s portals opened behind Karen. Before she could turn and look, she heard a familiar man’s gruff voice.

“Lo, behold the Angel of the World Tree,” Alice Prince’s father, and Aradia’s grandfather, Robert Prince said.

“And lo, behold her immortal foe,” Aradia said.

“And lo, behold Merlin and the Enchantress...” Karen muttered.

“And lo, behold!” Aradia said, coming to stand by Karen’s side. She was still wearing her gold and black robes.

“The woman who broke my daughter's heart,” Robert said, standing on Karen’s other side. He, too, was wearing ornate robes, his gold, blue, and brown. He was native american, Ho-Chunk specifically. Supposedly his great-grandfather was Welsh, providing the sliver of european ancestry required for his magic to work. He looked no older than Aradia was, but was obviously two full generations her elder. Karen assumed that for mystical folk immortality began whenever they reached peak regality, somewhere around 45.

“It was mutual,” Karen said, quietly, pointedly, and sadly.

“Hmm. Well then, let's put the past behind us.” Robert flicked his wrists and assumed a martial pose, and constrained bolts of multicolored energy condensed in his palms, writhing across his skin. Aradia did similarly, assuming a more dance-like pose than her grandfather. They strode forwards towards the battle in unison, and let loose their spells at The Beast.

“HAHA!” The Beast responded as one of his legs collapsed out from beneath him. “A family reunion!” One of his heads pounced at the duo of magicians, and the head was deflected by a quickly-summoned shield. Robert held the shield up, and Aradia fired an energy bolt at it.

The shield’s natural magic capacitance absorbed the energy, and when the shield was dissipated, the energy was released outwards at The Beast. The energy struck The Beast on one of his necks, and exploded the flesh, causing that head and half of the associated neck to drop away, dead.

The Archangel, covered in not only The Beast’s blood but also her own, landed roughly on her knees behind the magicians. She retracted her claws with a snikt.

She stood and stretched as her ravaged flesh regrew. Her bodysuit was barely there anymore, covering her chest only via a thin ribbon of fabric around one shoulder, the other shoulder having been sliced through and hanging free, revealing some of the flesh of her breast.

“Take a picture,” the Archangel said. “It'll last longer.”

Karen realized she had been staring at the half-revealed breast and her face went flush. “Oh, I... Uh...”

“You really are just like her.” The Archangel wiped some of the copious blood from the area around her mouth. “There’s something about Roxanne Furst that always trips the ‘bumbling’ switch in Karen Reis.”

“Roxanne. So you are Alice’s sister.”

“Technically. And please, call me Roxy. Now, this has been fun, but I think it’s about time I got Jeremy home.” She prodded at her gauntlet, and then spoke to it. “Groom Lake, I’ve got Therion at my location. Open the portal and prepare the Kingslayers, we’re coming in hot. My position Z-minus 1 meter, Radius... let’s say, 500 meters. T-minus 30 seconds. Me and Jay, plus one. Oh, and make it an airdrop.” She dropped her arm back to her side. “Aradia, Robert, you can head off now. I’d suggest looking into strengthening your Demon wards even further.”

Aradia summoned a portal back to FursTech headquarters. While Aradia quickly stepped back through it, Robert instead approached Roxy and gently cupped his daughter's face.

“I’ll talk to you later, Dad,” Roxy promised. “I have to deal with Jay first.”

Robert smirked, chuckled, and released her face, before dropping the shield and stepping through the portal. It closed behind him.

“I’d suggest bracing yourself,” Roxy said as soon as it did.

“What?” Karen asked.

The ground disappeared out from beneath them, revealing an expanse of sky where there should by all rights have been earth. Karen, Roxy, and the Beast dropped into the hole, stretching across the desert a kilometer wide.

The location they were in was alien to Karen, but strangely familiar to her at the same time. Three kilometers below them was a desert, sand and dirt stretching off in every direction. Nearby was a lake, and a fortified military base of some kind, every building ostentatiously build out of pure gold, it appeared. While the design was different from the one she knew, the relative locations of landmarks meant it could only be one place: Groom Lake, Nevada, AKA Area 51. Off in the distance, on the horizon, she saw the glittering of a gold-plated city. Again, based on the relative locations, it would have had to have been Las Vegas.

Roxy grabbed Karen by the collar of her shirt and jacket, and when the portal they had fallen through closed, stopped falling. Karen craned her neck to look up at Roxy, and saw the faint outline of wings emanating from her shoulders, and stretching hundreds of meters in either direction.

She is an angel, after all, Karen thought.

“Meet you at the bottom,” Roxy said, releasing Karen and letting her continue her fall.

Karen teleported towards the distant ground, landing on her feet at the peak of Bald Mountain, just to the north of Groom Lake.

Compared to the one she was familiar with, this Groom Lake region looked like it had been been dug up and redistributed, and hit with a couple million artillery impacts, or something of similar nature. It was a superhuman warzone, Karen realized, having seen many in her life. A battleground where powerful beings often opposed one another.

And now she was watching an instance of such a fight before her very eyes. She looked up and saw Roxy stretching her arms and shoulders, and saw the ethereal wings flutter and flap, and then, suddenly, she disappeared.

No, she hadn’t disappeared. Where she had previously been, there was now a stack of sonic vapor rings, pointing downwards towards the still-falling Beast. Below the rings, descending at a meteoric pace and surrounded by a vapor cone, was Roxy, claws pointed downwards.

Roxy intercepted the Beast in the air, and without slowing drove it into the Earth, creating an additional great crater with the impact.

A group of figures emerged from Groom Lake, flying with jet boots and packs the like Karen had seen many times before. The swarm of them flew around the Beast, with swords and guns of various types drawn.

Karen teleported closer, and watched the soldiers as they surrounded The Beast. Whenever the Beast struck out at one of them, they would strike back at him.

Roxy all the while was hacking away at the Beast, carving him ever smaller. After 15 more minutes, the Beast was lying limp, in thousands of pieces of various sizes, none larger than a car.

The largest piece started shrinking, and slowly reverted to the form of Jeremy, and Roxy quickly snatched it up and flew off towards Groom Lake with it.

Karen blinked after her. She flew into a massive excavated shaft in the center of the base, and down a few miles until they hit the bowels of the facility, a maze of corridors.

Karen had difficulty teleporting fast enough to follow Roxy’s angel wings’ speed, but was able to keep up until she flew into a cell and slammed a set of golden chains onto all of Jeremy's extremities, head and neck included.

Jeremy stirred to life after a moment. “Which number was this? 1305? It has to have been whereabouts of that.”

“Including the Fall of Babel, 1306,” Roxy answered.

“Ah, to think I almost forgot our first time.”

“I’ll never forget.”

“Don’t try to make what I do special by pretending you could do anything but remember every second of your long, miserable existence.”

“I’m not the one spending most of mine in a cage.”

Jeremy looked past Roxy and saw Karen. “Is that one yours, or the other one?”

“You know the difference. You haven’t had a chance to mutilate this one.”

“This one’s tougher than yours. You should trade up.”

Roxy visibly strained not to smack him so hard his neck snapped. “We’re done here.” Roxy flew out of the cell, and Karen followed her. Roxy shut the cell door, and then crushed the lock so the door would be unopenable by anyone else but her. “Let’s get you home,” she told Karen. She led her through the hallways, and into an elevator. The Elevator took them up to the near-surface, and opened into another hallway. That hallway led to a control room, filled with technicians.

When Karen entered the room, they all stopped and stared.

“Open a portal back to the Astraverse,” Roxy commanded. “This one doesn’t belong here.”

The technicians got to work, and a handful of seconds later the far wall of the room was replaced by a view out into the desert of Eden.

“Go on,” Roxy said to Karen.

Karen blinked to the threshold of the portal, and felt the warm desert breeze on her face. She stepped through the portal, and as she did she heard the door to the control room open. She looked back and saw...

Herself, except, not. She had the same short black hair, and the same heterochromatic eyes: grey-blue in the left and grey-green in the right. But aside from that, they couldn’t have been more different. Her left arm was gone, replaced by an advanced magitech prosthesis, as were both of her legs. Her face was covered in small, faded scars, excepting the two on her cheeks, which visibly stretched from the corners of her lips to her ears. On her throat was another large faded scar, across the left jugular vein. Though she was wearing a tight t-shirt, more scars on her chest peeked across the neckline. The arm that was still flesh and blood had scars up and down it, with a tightly packed row of them on the wrist under all the rest.

Karen stared at herself, and the other her stared back, until the portal closed and separated them.

Karen stood in the Iraqi desert for a long moment.

She blinked to her home, the edge of her bed. She stumbled back into it, and slumped onto it. After a while she brought her right arm up to be examined. Her skin was superhumanly flawless, but if she was still capable of scarring, her wrists would be just as crisscrossed as the other hers’ had been.

That was the only evidence that Karen needed to be convinced that the other one really was her. Karen Reis, at her core, was a depressive girl who cut herself when she was low. No amount of degrees of Multiversal separation would change that.

Roxanne, Angel of the World Tree, awoke. She examined her surroundings.

She had awoken on a cobble beach, with gentle waves lapping at her toes. Directly above her was a breathtakingly promenant headland cliff face, made of solid, perfectly smooth granite. Well, perfectly smooth except for a conspicuously Roxy-sized crater about 150 meters up, halfway between where she was now and the apparent clifftop.

She was only wearing the top half of an adamantium cuirass strapped to her chest. Everything not covered by that was bare skin.

Roxy couldn’t remember what had happened to her that left her in this state, and that deeply unsettled her.

She sat up, and undid the buckles holding the last of her armor on, leaving her just wearing the top half of a leotard as a halter top. It was better than nothing, she supposed. She slowly got to her feet to explore this world she found herself in.

She walked up the beach until she finally reached where the headland met the shore, the slope covered in verdant grass. She found a cobble path that lead from the beach up the slope of the headland, and she saw the glitter of a golden shape at the peak.

It was no coincidence that Roxy had landed here, she realized, as she saw what the golden shapes were.

She followed the trail up the headland, toward the peak. At the peak she found an altar, with a simple armor stand sitting on it. On the armor stand was a new golden Adamantium cuirass, sized to fit Roxy’s minute frame, decorated across the chest with the Goddess’s emblem: A sun, with 16 wavy triangles of light radiating from it. On the back was a sheath, with a sword within it, and a shield hanging off it. Golden Adamantium boots sat on the base of the stand, under the cuirass. Compactly folded in front of the armor stand was an exact recreation of Roxy’s supersuit, a light blue fabric with streaks of silver racing across it. She ripped off her tattered leotard and hastily put the new suit on. Included with the the suit was a quite flowy cape, a 4-foot-square bolt of fabric with 4 mounting points that could attach either directly to the suit or to the cuirass, fitting around the sheath and under the shield so as to not interfere with the use of either.

Roxy carefully reached out towards the hilt of the sword, and wrapped her fingers around it. She gave it a firm tug to unsheath it, but the sword and sheath might as well have been a single, solid piece of Adamantium with how little the sword budged. Roxy realized that there was a latch built into the sword so it wouldn’t fly out of the scabbard when the wearer was in action. She pressed the button that had been subtly inset into the center of the crossguard and the sword was released.

As she drew it from the sheath, the sword revealed that the primary material of its blade was glowing, and after drawing it completely the glow intensified to a blinding shine. She held the sword towards the sky, and its light made the local sun’s look like a dull ember in comparison. The light invigorated Roxy, as if it were the same light as that of the Sun she had been born under. As she brought the sword back down, the light subsided and eventually ceased completely.

The sword was only about 60 cm long, the length of Roxy’s arm, and looked to be made of black iron. It had golden Adamantium accents along the cutting edge, which had allowed the blade to be sharpened down a molecular edge, as well as up the fuller, and an Adamantium hilt and crossguard shaped like a pair of wings. Engraved on the crossguard was “Dawnherald”, written in the Proto-Akkadian script of Celestial. Etched into the black iron of the blade was the Celestial for “A Beacon of Hope in the hands of the Worthy.”

She rested the sword on the altar, and picked up the shield to examine it closely. The shield was 60 cm in diameter and at its core a steeley silver, with the goddess’s emblem emblazoned across it in gold, and gold around the edge, both likely also Adamantium. Around the image of the sun was more of the black iron, with the Celestial for “Aegis” accompanied by “A Shield against the Darkness” engraved along the edge.

Roxy lifted the cuirass off the stand, and slid it on on top of the supersuit. With the cuirass removed, it was revealed that a pair of Adamantium bracers had been stored in the armor’s chest cavity. She slipped the bracers and the boots on,  and pinned the cape to the cuirass, and then used her reflection in the shield to examine herself.

In New Jerusalem this would be the peak of fashion, if only for the fact that it was Roxy wearing it. Her short stature aside, she wouldn’t even look too out of place on Asgard or Krypton, which of course had been the inspirations for New Jerusalemite fashion in the first place.

Roxy reached the shield back to the sheath until it clicked into it’s latch which would hold it. She then picked up the sword again and admired it.

Roxy remembered when she used to wield a sword into battle. It had been a few thousand years since the last time, but it still felt like second nature to her. She deftly twirled the sword in her hand, and since there was nobody around to see her acting like a weeb, she did as many dumb/cool-looking moves as she could think to do with a sword. It was so perfectly balanced that sometimes it felt like it flew from her hand of its own…

Roxy held the sword at arms length. She swiped it through the air, taking very careful note of its weight and center of gravity. She held it close to her chest, and then went to throw the sword, and conveniently forgot to let go.

The momentum of the sword carried Roxy almost 30 feet.

Roxy, emulating the immortal words of Taika Waititi, exclaimed: “Oh my god… The sword pulled me off.”

She examined the wings that made up the crossguard closely. Then, she reeled back and actually threw the sword, out towards the ocean. It flew in a perfectly straight line, towards the horizon. She watched it fly, and after a moment she held out her hand, beckoning it back. She saw Dawnherald break the sound barrier as it rushed to return to her, point first.

At the very last second, she ducked out of the way and grabbed it as it flew past her, letting it carry her away. She flew out over the verdant field of grass that stretched across the landmass, and when she gently tilted the swordpoint upwards she rose up into the air. She quickly transitioned to vertical flight. She rose higher and higher, until eventually she breached the atmosphere and let the sword go.

As she arced over this world, she saw the continents trace their familiar terrestrial shapes. It was exactly identical to any other modern Earth, in fact, with one glaring exception: there was no sign of either human civilization or even human life.

She examined the stars and planets she could see. She did some quick mental supercalculation to simulate a model of the constellations and the solar system in her mind. If her model was correct, then that meant the date on this Earth was July 17th, 1459.

She called the sword back to her, and holstered it on her back, and started falling back down to the world. As she fell, she felt the sword gently tugging on her, slowing her down, until she finally reached the ground, when she carefully touched down onto the grass.

“Alright, I think I get how this works,” Roxy told the sword. “Lets try an experiment.” Roxy reoriented herself towards where the Altar was, and started running through the grass. After building up an adequate amount of speed, she leapt into the air, and held her hands forward.

Dawnherald lifted into the air, carrying Roxy with it. Even though Roxy was not under her home sun, and so should not have had her wings, she still felt their aetherial presence on her back, being channeled into existence by Dawnherald.

“The sword rides me on my back…” Roxy noted. “My wings away from home. I think you and I are going to have a beautiful companionship.” They returned to the Altar, and Roxy set her feet down. She grabbed the shield off her back, and examined it once more.

The concave side of the shield had two handles, spaced right and just the right size to fit on Roxy’s arm, with a grip that mated nicely with a fixture on the sheath on her back. It’s center of gravity was perfectly centered, and the Adamantium edge was sharpened, but was dull enough that somebody wouldn’t accidentally cut their fingers off just from handling it. It was slightly smaller than Cap’s own famous disc shield, but it was shaped identically.

She gripped the edge of the shield tightly, and threw it out over the field. It traced a gentle arc across the sky, and eventually the arc led it to return to her, like a boomerang. When she reached out her hand to catch it, the shield rushed to return to her just as Dawnherald had.

“Both of you?” Roxy asked with astonishment. “I’m starting to feel a bit spoiled.” She docked the shield with the sheath. Together on her back, Roxy realized she could feel her power coursing through Dawnherald and Aegis as they attuned to her bottomless energies.

She returned to the Altar, and inspected the walnut fruit. It was the same species as the Tree which she was the guardian of, of that she was sure. She supposed she wouldn’t be a very good guardian if she couldn’t identify its seeds to protect them as well.

Roxy took to the sky again, flying with gusto towards one of her best known locales on any Earth. On this Earth it was just a wide grassy field, but in her birthworld it had been a shopping mall built around a tree older than human civilization, a tree that was conspicuously absent in this world. Where the tree should have been, there was a small patch of grass cleared away, and a smaller hole dug in the center of it.

Roxy carefully peeled away the outer flesh of the fruit, and then cracked the nut itself. She extracted the seed, and deposited it in the pre-dug hole, and then ground up the nut and the fruit peel, and buried the seeds under the resulting paste to fertilize them. With that duty done, Roxy returned again to the Altar, and looked out over the ocean.

This world was empty of humans, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t an adventure to be had exploring it. She stepped up to the edge of the cliff, and then stepped off of it, and dropped down towards the ocean below. Her wings caught her and carried her away, over the waves, to explore this curious world.

Roxy, after spending a very, very, very, long time traveling the tranquil world, decided to return to the tree and begin developing a plan for what to do next. The Tree of Life she had planted had reached maturity, and grown tall and mighty.

It was December 18th, 2000. Roxy’s birthday, that is, the date of her birth, had been exactly two weeks earlier. She had celebrated by going to the precise location she had been born, a place that in another Earth had been a suburban trailer park but in this Earth was pristine Midwest prairie land, within spitting distance of the tree she had planted. She had laid her sword in the dirt, and prayed a blessing upon her distant past self, and any other version of her across the many worlds of the multiverse.

But now she was sat against the trunk of the World Tree she had planted, and closed her eyes to rest in the tranquility it provided, and to formulate her plan to leave this world.

She quickly drifted off to sleep, and like a dream catcher the tree collected the somnic energy of the world and funneled it into her.

She dreamed of Paradise, but it was different than she remembered it. There were no people, no dead who had passed into it and called it home. She walked the barren streets of Utopia, Paradise’s capital, until she reached the Throne of the Goddess at its center.

The Throne sat at the peak of the Mountain of Paradise, upon which Utopia was built, within a palace the size of the largest cities on Earth. In the center of the palace was a vast antechamber, lined with towering fluted columns, and between every pair of columns was a vista of a different field of glittering stars, each star representing a Soul living on Earth.

Or, that was how it should have been, how it had been the last time Roxy had visited the Throne. But now, all the vistas except one were blank, just empty black canvases depicting endless voids. There was only one star left shining, hanging in the air above the doorway Roxy had entered the room by.

She knelt at the foot of the Throne, and genuflected to the one who had created her. The Goddess was sitting what felt like a mile away, up the tall stair of the Throne’s dias. The throne itself was solid gold, beset with jewels of every color, each shining with the light of a sun. Her face was as always obscured by a blinding light, only an ornate crown with hundreds of gems being faintly discernible, but out of respect Roxy refrained from glancing upon it anyway.

“Your Radiance…” Roxy started.

“We can skip the formalities, Roxanne,” the Goddess interrupted. “It’s only us here, now.” Her voice was not as powerful as it had been the other times She had spoken to Roxy, and it lacked a sort of timbre that it had possessed previously. It no longer echoed out across all of Paradise, instead feeling quite weighed down, and restrained.

Roxy looked up, astonished by this unprecedented informality, and saw the Throne and it’s dias for what they truly were: a simple carved-stone bench with no back, on a dias with only two steps that raised a single foot above the ground Roxy was kneeling on. The room full of fluted columns was gone, leaving them out in the open on the peak of the mountain. The entire city of Utopia around them was gone as well. Paradise was barren, and undeveloped. The sky above them, previously as full of glittering stars as the vistas usually were, was dark, occupied yet again by only a single star.

The Goddess, face still obscured but not by as nearly bright a light as before, sat with Her hands clasped in Her lap. She was wearing a plain white toga and Her crown, a simple band with a single yellow gem set upon her brow.

“Now you can see me for what I really am,” The Goddess said. “I’m just an old, weak demiurge.”

“What are you talking about? You’re a capital-G God, you wield the power of a universe worth of stars.”

“It’s all gone, Roxy,” the Goddess said. “The void-beasts cut me off from the Light and carried me away to this barren, far-flung universe, and now I can’t find our home. I used the last of my luck to get you to me, so you could help find it again.”

“You need me to help you? I’m great, don’t get me wrong, you made me well… But I’m still just an angel.”

“The mightiest and most dedicated of angels, one whom I can entrust to remain faithful even after seeing me lain low, as I am now. I wouldn’t be able to trust the Seraph or the Furies with this task. And besides, are you not the Angel of the World Tree, Defender of the Multiverse and Guardian of the Tree of Life? How can you guard the central Tree of Life if you do not even know where it is?”

“It’s not been destroyed, of this I am certain: The seed I planted in this world took root and her branches are strong. No leaves have withered, so the multiverse under her canopy is still intact as well. But even with a World Tree to help me channel the Metanarrative, this far across the omniverse finding New Jerusalem again is going to be like trying to find a specific atom in a fucking black hole, with all the complications that implies.”

“Dawnherald and Aegis will help you in this task. Once you learn to master them, their abilities will become integral to your quest.”

“Thank you for these, by the way,” Roxy said, taking the aforementioned weapons off her back.

“Though I will admit they are imbued with my energies, I did not make those. They already here when I arrived.”

What the Goddess had just said was so obviously not possible that Roxy instinctively activated her lie-detection senses and tried to use them on Her, despite the fact that She was 1) literally God, and 2) communicating to Roxy through a dream. “What?” she finally asked after taking about a full minute to process the statement.

“Someone else made these tools and left them here for us. If I were the superstitious type, I’d go so far as to call this whole situation the result of divine intervention, and for the second time in my entire existence I had nothing to do with it.” She let out a soft chuckle. “It looks like we’ve got our own Guardian Angel looking out for us from somewhere across the infinite omniverse. Now, you should probably wake up before the Howler gets to you.”

Roxy awoke with a start, still trying to process these new revelations, when she heard the familiar screech of the void-beast Howler. She quickly tracked the noise to a black speck screaming across the sky.

Roxy had encountered the Howler before, on one of her many treks across the multiverse. It was little more than a writhing mass of dark matter so dense it had formed a semi-intelligent microsingularity, which hungered for light and energy-dense souls, souls such as Roxy’s and those of other powerful superhumans. The signature howl was a result of it trying to consume the atmosphere, producing the sound of air super-sonically whistling as it was drawn towards the black hole at the heart of the animalistic abomination. Occasionally, shadowy tendrils of dark matter would lash out to grab whatever was nearest, to easier draw it in to be devoured.

Normally, Roxy wasn’t previously capable of actually harming the Howler, but with her new weapons she might actually have a chance.

Dawnherald lifted Roxy to her feet, and into the air. As she flew, Roxy drew the sword and held it forward, pointed directly at the void-beast. She heard the Goddess whisper something into her mind:

“Shine.”

The blade responded to the incantation by igniting with an intense white light, which quickly focused into a laser directed exactly at where Roxy was aiming.

The Howler screamed it’s namesake screech again, this time in as close a semblance of pain as void-beasts experience. It’s trajectory quickly altered, turning towards Roxy.

Dawnherald continued shining until Roxy rammed it into the Howler, and then continued past it, ripping it out and bringing a tangle of dark matter with it. The Howler in return backed away from Roxy and peeled away the shroud of dark matter surrounding it’s core singularity, and started sucking in air fast enough to generate a micro-gamma-ray burst, angled directly at Roxy. Without even consciously thinking, Roxy summoned Aegis to her arm from her back, just in time to intercept the brunt of the blast, which deflected off the convex mirror enough to dissipate it.

Roxy charged into the burst, until she was close enough that the reflected energy was enough to damage the Howler. The Howler’s uncountable tendrils reeled back and attempted to reach around the shield, but when it struck a barrier of pure light blocked the way. The Howler reached further and further out, trying to get around the growing barrier, until the barrier had formed a full sphere around Roxy.

With a little bit of instinct, and a lot of understanding how these kinds of things work, Roxy thought to hit Dawnherald as hard against Aegis as she could manage. When she did so, the shield of light around her instantly intensified into a sun, exploding outward against the void-beast surrounding it. The Howler was thrown down to the Earth below, leaving a crater where it landed. It started sucking in the dirt and stone in an attempt to feed but found the inanimate matter lacking, and released another screech.

Roxy returned Aegis to her back and gripped Dawnherald with both hands. She cried “Shine!” and dropped down upon the Howler. The sword glowed again, and exploded with light when it contacted the void-beast’s dark matter flesh. Roxy re-equiped the shield, and darted under the Howler, and then pushed upwards, carrying the void-beast into the air and eventually into space.

Roxy pushed the Howler away, and then threw the shield and guided it to the other side if the void-beast. She held the sword out, and summoned Aegis back to her arm, pulling the Howler along with it. Dawnherald impaled into the Howler, and when it collided with the shield they exploded with light again.

Despite the considerable damage Roxy felt she was dealing the void-beast, it hadn’t shrunk in size or ferocity. Which actually wasn’t much of an improvement from the last times she had fought the Howler.

She placed Aegis between them again and pushed the Howler all the way to the moon. She left it in a trajectory that would make it hit the moon pretty hard, and attempted to escape it’s sight, touching down in a crater near Luna’s north pole.

Despite knowing full well that it was pointless in the absolute vacuum, Roxy consciously opened her mouth to talk herself through this. “Alright, She said that you guys would be integral tools on my quest to find home again. So… I’m assuming you’ve got more than just a kamehameha in you.”

Dawnherald and Aegis offered no answers, but the Goddess did offer a whisper: “I think you’ll find the hidden power of this knife to be quite subtle…”

Roxy attempted and somehow succeeded in producing a sigh despite the vacuum. “Thanks. All the subtlety of a brick to the face. Alright, Dawnherald is also the fucking teleutaia makhaira. Now all I need is a weird compass and a dumb spyglass and then I too will be able to not figure out how the fuck the multiverse works. Why am I getting hung up on this? Just fucking cut through the universe, already…”

Roxy held the sword out in front of her, and tried to focus on hooking the point of the blade on a virtual micro-wormhole to rip it open and bring into actuality. Until she realized one thing: “Wait, shit. I can’t just leave the Howler in this universe with a World Tree… I gotta get him out before I leave.”

Now that she had a plan, Roxy lept into the space above Luna and revealed herself to the Howler, which was raging across the lunar surface. Now, even though she knew pretty much exactly what she needed to do, she had no definitive knowledge on how to make it happen. So, she figured she would try stabbing it one more time.

“Shine!” Though Roxy’s voice was silenced, the sword still obeyed. She charged, Dawnherald forward, at the Howler, impaling it and driving it into the lunar regolith. She then pinned it with Aegis as well, and then searched for the hidden dimension of spacetime that she would need to cut open with Dawnherald.

Suddenly, she felt the point of the blade catch on something. She hoped it was something otherworldly.

When she ripped the blade out of the Howler, a spatial anomaly traced the path of the blade’s tip. The spacetime tear rapidly widened and swallowed the Howler’s singularity, before snapping shut and severing the tendrils that had been some semblance of desperately trying to pry Roxy off of it. The tendrils dissipated in the light of the local sun, now that the singularity holding the dark matter in such a dense state had been banished.

Roxy stood on the lunar surface for a long moment to catch her breath, figuratively, before noticing that the spatial anomaly hadn’t completely been closed. Looking at it, Roxy realized that it wasn’t at all dissimilar to the secret portals that linked Paradise and her home universe, the ones that the Deceiver and Therion had first used to escape to Earth and begin their preparations for the Revelation.

She carefully prodded at the anomaly with Dawnherald, and successfully managed to reopen the portal, wide enough for her to look through and see where she had banished the void-beast. On the other end of the portal was a lunar surface identical to the one she would be looking at if the anomaly wasn’t there. She slowly panned from side to side, until she saw something of note: Debris, of a distinctly terran make. Broken segments of lightweight structural beams and scraps of heavy-duty airtight fabrics flying up out of the crater that Roxy had earlier recuperated in. A crater she suddenly realized that she had seen before.

As she watched, a light popped into existence above the crater, one so bright that it was easily comparable to the light that always obscured the Goddess’s face in Paradise. It was doing much the same job here; Roxy couldn’t identify the object projecting the light beyond that it was vaguely humanoid. A human figure suddenly appeared above the crater’s rim, and Roxy’s suspicions that she recognised not just this location but this exact event were confirmed.

This was the Moon Incident that had given Astra and the other 8 astronauts their powers, after the Howler had mysteriously appeared on the moon and destroyed their newly established base. She was watching, before her very eyes, what Astra had described to her on many occasions: A being of light imbuing her with fantastical cosmic power by imparting upon her an Adamantium coin.

“Fucking shit… I caused the Moon Incident. I’m the reason the Astraverse is as fucked up as it is. Of course. It always has to come back to me, I’m the girl the entire Anti-Monitor-damned omniverse revolves around, apparently. Man, apparently if I can’t hear myself talk, I just keep on doing it. I’m going to get back to Earth so I can shut the fuck up.”

Roxy touched down in front of the World Tree, having regained her pre-battle composure. She hadn’t had a chance to let loose like that since the last time she had fought Therion almost 100 years ago, and the adrenaline had gotten to her head a bit.

With Aegis and Dawnherald on her back, she knelt in front of the tree to pray, for guidance, for luck, and even for the infinitesimal chance that the next world she stepped to was New Jerusalem.

Once the prayer had been dealt with, she drew Dawnherald, and focused on trying to cut open the fabric of reality once again. When she opened the tear, she found a world that looked, at first glance, very similar to the one she was in. But, the only way to be sure it wasn’t New Jerusalem was to take the step forward and explore.

It had started just like any other day. Most days started like any other day. Noelle rode the train to work, from Kenosha to the heart of the Danesville Metropolis. She walked from the station to the coffee shop she regularly bought breakfast at, reading the overnight news on her phone all the while. She bought a breakfast bagel sandwich and coffee, and ate it while she proceeded to her job at the FursTech building.

She worked on the 255th floor, a kilometer up. The first elevator only went to floor 150, so she transferred to the second elevator, which took her to floor 250, and instead of transferring to another elevator she took the stairs the remaining 5 floors. She scanned her Employee ID at the door out of the stairwell, and entered the FursTech national development lab.

Noelle was a hardware developer for the largest technology company in America. She was currently the lead on a new phone project, the most ambitious device the company has ever made. Her team was one of the most secretive groups in the company, surpassed only by the CEO’s personal projects.

No materials were allowed to leave the floor, and designs were only allowed on permanently installed computer consoles and their associated machining booths. This project was the most top of corporate secrets.

When Noelle arrived, CEO Aradia Furst was standing at the project station, examining the team's progress. Aradia, despite being a world famous technologist and inventor, was also widely known to be both a pagan witch and a christian sorceress. Instead of shunning this conception about her, she embraced it, and always dressed the part. She was rarely seen not dressed in long, flowing dresses or robes, exclusively colored black and gold. The phone Noelle was working on, the Pendant, was an endeavor by Aradia to bring simple, functional magic to the commonperson on the street, so it may be integrated into modern culture and the stigma around its use dispelled.

“How is the Pendant coming along, in your opinion?” Aradia asked as soon as she sensed Noelle arrive.

“It’s coming along very good, I think,” Noelle answered. “I think I’ve finally figured out the best materials to infuse to give the most user friendly experience. I’ve got a list drawn up...” Noelle, as a high-ranking FursTech engineer, had been given personal magic lessons by Aradia herself. She used her moderate amount of training to summon a hologram from the project console, showing the list of materials with an awkward contortion of her hand.

Aradia examined it for half a second before commenting. “With some substitutions, it’ll be unparalleled.” She expertly altered the list, replacing a number of archaic components with purer modern equivalents. “There. One last prototype and test, and I think we’re ready for the production model.”

“Yes, definitely. I can't wait for this to finally get into the hands of the software team. This will give us a big leg up on the Tokyo Workshop.”

“Speaking of...” Aradia dispelled the holograms. “The Workshop has a number of mahou in the city ‘on business’, so be extra cautious of espionage this week. I know for a fact that somebody on this floor leaked preliminary info on the Pendant, and that damned kitsune running the Workshop would literally kill for the designs for so compact a spell base. At the very least, brush up on your defensive and summoning spells before the next time you leave the building. If they ambush you, don’t be afraid to summon me to protect you.”

“Yes, of course.”

Aradia left, and Noelle got to work assembling the prototype with Aradia’s substitutions. She had a fully functional phone in her hand by the time she had eaten lunch.

It of course wouldn't be equipped with any offensive spells by default, but it had a number of defensive and utility spells built-in, with room for software devs to program more. Noelle and another member of the team took turns casting increasingly powerful spells of varying types against it, to test its capabilities.

An average citizen would be able to protect themselves not only against the average witch, but more mundane threats, like a mugger with a knife or gun, and be able to call for help for any more substantial threat. It would change the world, for the better.

After the day had ended, Noelle handed the phone over to the software team to begin developing the final version of the OS and program the full suite of spells. Noelle walked to the train station, careful to stay on well-lit streets, her focus completely on her surroundings. She boarded the train, picking a seat at the very front where she could see every passenger and through every car.

But she never truly expected the japanese coven to be so bold as to attack her in public.

Noelle only barely managed to get a ward up before an arcane bolt struck her, pushing her into the wall behind her and denting the panelling. She was in a daze as the three elegantly dressed mahou approached her, and cast an immobilization spell upon her. The tallest of the three hoisted Noelle over her shoulder, and then they cast a teleportation spell.

They sat Noelle in a chair, in a small dark room. Without any decorum, they immediately started casting painful spells upon her, in an attempt to forcefully pry her mind open to be read.

After a few fruitless minutes of this, they started conversing in japanese, in frustrated tones. While they were briefly distracted by their argument, Noelle hastily and quietly muttered a summoning incantation, only barely finishing it before one of the mahou caught her lips moving silently.

“Stop!” The shortest said, in a thick accent.

Noelle, through the thick mental haze of the pain she had been experiencing, smiled.

The shortest of the mahou approached Noelle, hand out to slap her, but froze suddenly. Aradia stepped out of the darkness, contorting her hands rapidly, effortlessly counterspelling every one of the other two mahou’s panicked spells and counterspells. Aradia, with a flick of her wrist, sent all three mahou collapsing to the floor. Aradia picked Noelle up in her arms, and cast a portal back to FursTech.

She gently set Noelle down on the altar in her private labratory, and cast a slow but powerful healing spell upon her.

Once she was certain Noelle had been stabilized and numbed, she returned to the dark room, and bound the mahou in a magic silk string. She strung them up from the ceiling, like a spider hanging it’s future meals from it’s web for safekeeping.

When she had fully fortified the containment spell, she woke the mahou up, and told them “I’m going to have a word with that damned kitsune.”

Aradia cast a communication spell, summoning a full hologram of the fox-devil before her.

The kitsune was tall, with black hair and ear-fur, and eight night-black tails. Her black yukata was trimmed with gold and silver, and tied with a red silk belt.

“Still working on your ninth tail, I see,” Aradia started.

“<I refuse to converse in your barbarous language,>” the fox-devil replied in Jōdai Nihon-go, an ancient form of Japanese.

“<So be it.>” Aradia returned in the same language. “<Your underlings have gravely wounded my favourite apprentice.>”

“<And what are you going to do about it?>”

“<I demand reparation.>”

“<As if you ply such influence over me.>”

Aradia reached out to grab the hologram by the throat, and the fox-devil jumped back instinctively to avoid it.

“<You say that, yet you still fear the unknown boundaries of my power,>” Aradia observed. “<Send me one of your apprentices and I'll release these three, and not further pursue you for this slight.>”

“<Keep the little one. She has potential but is too irksome to teach. I don't want her anymore.>”

“Sensei!” the short mahou cried, hearing her master’s dismissal of her.

“<As you wish,>” Aradia said. With a snip of her fingers, she cut the silk the other two were hung by, dropping them through trapdoor portals to the Tokyo Workshop. She seized the short mahou’s string, and they dropped together through a portal to her laboratory. Noelle, already awake, greeted them.

“Thank you, Miss Furst,” Noelle said, “I would have been a goner without you.”

“It was nothing. Help me unbind this mahou. That damn kitsune has ‘reparated’ for the attack on you by pawning off one of her disciples.”

“What are we going to do with her?” Noelle asked, cutting through the magic silk around the very young-looking japanese witch.

“We must treat this girl as one of our own, and show her a kindness that the fox-devil likely never did. That will be our true revenge.”

“Does she speak english?”

They both paused and stared at the girl. After a long moment of not being answered, they continued with their conversation.

“She likely doesn’t,” Aradia posited, “but we should remain tight-lipped around her just in case.”

They finished stripping her of the magic silk, and Aradia held out her hand to help the girl up. She cautiously took it.

“<What is your name?>” Aradia asked.

“Sakura Hina,” she answered.

“<Welcome to my laboratory, Hina-san. This is Noelle, and you may call me Furst-sensei, or just Aradia if you feel comfortable abandoning honorifics. How long did you train under the Kitsune?>”

“<Two years.>”

“<Then you must be quite skilled. Niponese Hermetic, primarily, I assume?>”

Hina nodded.

“<Do you know what my school of expertise is?>”

“<Kitsune-Hime told me you were you were dangerously skilled in all of the western arts...>”

Aradia took note of the fact that Hina had just called her former master a princess. “<My expertise is in the fact that I am multidisciplinarian. My grandfather may have been a more powerful sorcerer, and my mother a more powerful witch, but I am powerful enough at both and many other magics to have eclipsed them. I wish to bestow upon you as much of my skill as I can, as I have with Noelle.>”

“<Thank you... Furst-sensei.>”

Rey Walker’s first fight as a member of the most prestigious superhero group in the world had been a hard-fought victory. Though there had been considerable civilian loss of life, the death toll had been a mere fraction of that of the last time the group, much younger and unprepared then, had faced this same villain. Once the Demon King had been hauled off by the Archangel to be imprisoned somewhere beyond the bounds of this world, Astra’s League had immediately transitioned to providing disaster aid to the people of New York.

Rey wasn’t very good at this part. Her plasma-manipulation based superspeed had no real use outside of a fight. Her friends Hilda and Shailene, on the other hand, were very useful. Hilda, who could duplicate herself and anything she holds effectively infinitely, and Shay, who had an almost unparalleled telekinetic strength and skill, were very easily proving their utility to the League, by shifting debris and caring for injured survivors. Even Elle, with her fulgurkinesis, found use stop-gapping broken electrical lines and keeping the power on in the area.

Rey sat on top of a building and watched as the rest of the 42-person Superteam did their work.

One of Hilda sat next to her, futily trying to comfort her friend. “Look, Aradia tells me that her father was never of much use during the clean-ups either, and everybody still loved him anyway.”

“Aradia’s father? Isn’t he the one who mysteriously disappeared and everyone assumes died?”

“Uhhh...” Hilda stalled while one of her other bodies asked Aradia. “Yeah...?”

“Shows how great he was.” Rey sighed. “I’m gonna head home.”

“What, you’re just gonna fucking walk all the way back to Danesville? You’ve never even gone a fifth that in one go before, you’re gonna completely wipe yourself out.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll stop to catch my breath when I need to, maybe grab a drink somewhere.”

“Well, be careful. Call me if you don’t think you can make the whole trip, I’ll ask Aradia to swing by and take you home.”

“You’re not my mom.” Rey activated her plasma-propelled superspeed, and ran down the wall to what remained of Times Square. She looked around, tried to orient herself, and then ran south a couple blocks, and then west until she hit the Lincoln Tunnel. She followed the highway west for fifteen minutes, and by then she was well into Pennsylvania.

She was also, as expected, exhausted. She pulled off to the side of the road, panting. She looked around at nearby signs, illuminating the late night with her rapidly depleting collected plasma, and saw one advertising a quaint roadside dive a few miles down the road. Rey shook off the sluggishness, and slogged the short few seconds it took to get there. It was still open, fortunately, a flickering neon sign advertising this fact.

Rey pushed through the front door of Baby’s Diner and saw a retro-styled red-and-white tiled interior, and for a second wondered if she had stepped 140 years into the past, to the 1950’s. She slumped into a booth, the neon sign hung up in the window next to it, and picked up a menu. She stared at it idly for a minute, before looking around the restaurant, wondering where the staff were. She spotted an old-fashioned plasma screen TV in a far corner, showing a news report of the fight back in New York, and spotted glimpses of herself in the footage they were showing on loop.

She realised something, and then then patted herself down looking for her phone. She pulled it out of one of her pockets, and quickly scrolled through her contacts. When she found the one labelled “Mom”, she double tapped it.

Rey silently cursed when the call went straight to answering machine.

“Hey, this is Trip’s phone, I’m obviously not here right now, but if you wait a while I might pick up before you’re done leaving a message.” Beep.

“Hey, ma. I don’t know if you’ve seen the news yet, but in case you did and saw me I just wanted to make sure you knew I was fine. Um... speaking of news, I’ve got some pretty big to break to you. I was inducted into Astra’s League, about an hour ago, and I’ve already helped save the world. So, that’s pretty cool. And it wasn’t just me. Hilda, Shay, and Elle were inducted too. Aradia Furst called me to her tower, and all of the League was there when I got there. I...”

Rey was interrupted by her mother picking up. Without even saying hello, she immediately asked “The Archangel, did she see you?”

“The- wait, what? How do you even know about her?”

“Did she see your face, Rey?!” Trip demanded.

“Well, I mean, yeah.”

“Goddess be damned...”

“Mom, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”

“Now she knows we’re here, Rey. I risked my neck escaping her wretched clutches and you went and handed yourself to her on a golden platter!”

“Mom, what the fuck are you talking-” Rey was interrupted by her mother hanging up on her. She stared at her phone in confusion and incredulity. “What the hell was that all about?” She put her phone down on the table, frowning. She looked around some more. “Where the hell is the waitress?” She sighed, and glanced towards the neon “Open” sign, which was still flickering. She briefly activated her power, and traced her finger along the tube that was flickering, until it returned to a strong, stable glow, though in doing so she drained herself of the last of her plasma, making her powerless until she could restock. She quietly smiled to herself.

A woman wearing a disheveled uniform walked out from the back of the diner. “Well I am so sorry,” the woman, whose name tag read Debbie, apologized. “We didn't hear your car pull up. How long have you been sitting out here?”

Rey peaked past her into the kitchen and saw another woman with a pocket mirror cleaning up her noticeably smeared lipstick. “Just a couple minutes. Did I interrupt something?”

“Hm?” While Debbie merely feigned ignorance, the woman in the kitchen scowled at Rey. “Would you like something to drink?” Debbie asked, forcing the conversation forward.

“A Sprite’ll be fine.”

Debbie turned to the other woman, and motioned her towards the soda fountain.

The other woman grumbled and stopped fixing her make-up, and then went to pour a glass of Sprite.

“Would ya like anything to eat?” Debbie asked Rey.

“A burger will be fine. Just cheese, I like them plain.”

“Comin’ right up.”

Debbie went back into the kitchen to start making the burger, and the other woman walked up to the booth with Rey’s Sprite. Her nametag read Felicia. “I was gonna get laid tonight,” she whispered. “I hope you’re happy.”

Rey pulled out her wallet and counted out a $10 advance tip in ones. Felicia raised an eyebrow. Rey counted out $10 more. Felicia subtly nodded. Rey handed over the wad of ones and took her Sprite in return. She had also slipped in a scrap of paper with her name and phone number on it, one of many she kept in her wallet so she could hand them out like business cards.

When Felicia double checked how much she had been tipped, she scoffed at the forwardness of the gesture.

“Just, keep it in mind,” Rey explained. Felicia shook her head and walked back into the kitchen. Rey’s phone started ringing, and she answered. 

“Great, you're still alive,” Hilda said.

“Did you expect me to have died walking home?”

“Honestly, I never know with you, Rey. You're always pushing yourself harder and harder and I always gotta be there to carry your unconscious ass home. Anyway, Aradia said she's going to be holding a press conference in Danesville right after the new year ticks over there, which, need I remind you, is in like ten minutes.” 

“Shit, really? I'm definitely not going to make it back by then.”

“Ya don't say. Where are you, Aradia is just gonna cast a portal and pick you up.” 

“I don't know, somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania, just off of Interstate 80, called Baby's Diner.”

“Alright, she's casting the spell, she'll be right there.”

Rey glanced out the window, and saw the glowing sigils indicating an incoming portal appear in the air in the middle of the parking lot. They were shortly followed by the portal itself, a circular rip in space outlined by a dark violet glow. Aradia stepped through it as soon as it opened, and it closed as soon as she did, only having been open for a second total.

She walked up to the diner and silently pushed open the door, and smiled warmly at the old-fashioned stylings of the place. “So,” she said to Rey, “You ran out of plasma, didn’t you?”

“I used the last of it to make the open sign stop flickering,” Rey told her, indicating said sign.

Aradia took her seat in the booth with Rey. “How kind of you. How far does a ‘full charge’, for lack of a better term, get you?”

“I don’t know, actually. I’ve never been able to reach ‘full charge’. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty hard for me to get my hands on large quantities of high-quality ionized plasma. Cheap stuff, sure. I got a supplier that just just ships me tanks of gases that I can pump through electrodes and ionize myself, but it’s real low-quality.”

“Well, that’s where I think I can be of great use to you. Because, in fact, I do have a source of high energy plasma. The Archangel is a divine craftswoman of the highest order, and she has built for me fusion reactors that consume no fuel and are small enough that they can be carried in a backpack. If you were to have such a device, I believe your capacity would become effectively infinite.”

“I want to say such a thing is impossible,” Rey started, “But that’s a dumb thing to say in this day and age, so I’m not gonna. But I will ask: What’s the catch?”

“All that I ask of you is that you keep in close contact with me. Keep me updated with the goings on of the street-level crime, and keep fighting it.”

Rey considered the offer for a moment, and then held out her hand to shake on it. “Alright. Let’s make this happen.”

Aradia shook Rey’s hand, and at the same time Felicia walked out from the back with Rey’s burger.

“Oh, my, god,” Felicia exclaimed. “Deb, get out here, Aradia Furst is in our diner!”

“What?” Debbie replied. She poked her head out of the kitchen and likewise exclaimed “Oh, my god.”

“Would you either of you like a photo?” Aradia asked. “Or an autograph perhaps? Both, even.”

“Yes!” Felicia said. “Could you sign my phone? I know it’s not the latest model, but you make them so reliable I haven’t needed a replacement in like 7 years.”

Aradia, summoning a gold sharpie from seemingly nowhere, replied “Never a finer endorsement than one from somebody who hasn’t needed to buy everything I sell. What's your name?”

“Felicia Kyle.”

Aradia took Felicia’s phone and signed it with one of the most ornate and complicated signatures Rey had ever seen. “Now, don’t worry about it wiping off, this ink is specially formulated to bond perfectly with the material of the phone. The only way it’s coming off is by belt-sanding the entire back of the phone off.”

Debbie then stepped in with her own (non-FursTech manufactured) phone, and took a quick selfie with herself, Felicia, and Aradia, with Rey in the background.

“Now, I believe Rey and I have a press conference to attend,” Aradia said.

While Aradia started casting another portal, Rey dug in her wallet to pay for the burger, pulling out $7 and slapping it down in Debbie’s hand, and then taking the burger from Felicia and slamming the rest of the Sprite.

“You two,” Rey told Debbie and Felicia, “Keep an eye on the news.” Aradia finished casting, and a portal into a dark room appeared. Aradia stepped through it, and beckoned Rey in after her.

Rey stepped through, and the portal shut. Rey heard only a low rumbling, and then Aradia snapped her fingers. Holograms started appearing across dozens of workstations, showing gauges and binary status lights, and then a spotlight illuminated a metallic orb bristling with copper pipes, sitting on a pedestal.

“This,” Aradia explained, “Is a recreation of the first Holy Device the Archangel ever built. She called it The Heart. Unfortunately, I cannot give this to you, because it is too delicate in its ancient state to function. However...”

Aradia turned to a human-sized flat disk of gold embedded in the wall. With her finger she traced upon it a wide circle with a pentagram inside it, and inside the pentagram traced the Kabbalah Tree of Life. The disc on the wall split into seven fragments that irised into the surrounding wall. Within this vault was shelf upon shelf of stacks upon stacks of large golden coins, and in the middle of the room was another pedestal with another orb on it, except this one was a plain sphere glowing from within with a powerful white light.

“This Heart is sturdy enough to be worn, even by a superspeedster.”

Aradia then used her metallokinesis to draw from the golden coins, and constructed a backpack around the Heart, and a coil of flexible metal pipe.

“Go ahead, put it on.”

Rey hesitantly walked into the vault, and up to the backpack, and slowly slid it on. Aradia walked up behind her, and slid the pipe under her collar and down her right sleeve, coming out just below her palm.

“Do you feel the plasma, writhing within its containment?”

Rey shut her eyes, and focused, and felt the dense mass of energy on her back. She tried to draw from it, and she felt it snaking its way through the pipe, until she felt the bare heat of it in her palm. She opened her eyes and saw the bright white sphere of plasma, and then absorbed it into her veins.

She had never felt so energized in her life, and struggled to keep her superspeed from activating on it’s own, her fingers twitching and the rest of her body vibrating slightly. She clenched her fist, and stilled herself, halting the overcharge from overtaking her.

“I think I found my practical full charge level,” Rey confided. “It’s not a hard limit, and I’m sure it will go up as I gain mastery, but I think that’s it for now.”

Aradia summoned a small hologram of a clock, which indicated that it was a handful of seconds from passing midnight in Danesville. When the New Year ticked over, Aradia quietly said “Happy New Year yet again, Neon. Now, we must be getting to that press conference.”

Aradia cast yet another portal, and the pair stepped into the front lobby of one of the four FursTech buildings across America. But Rey noticed that they weren’t in the Danesville FursTech building.

“Why are we in New York again? I thought you said the press conference was in Danesville?” Rey looked back at Aradia, who had silently cast one last portal and stepped through it.

Aradia turned to Rey, and said “I did indeed. I’ll be introducing you in about five minutes. I hope to see you there!” Before Rey could snap out of her bewilderment, Aradia gave a small wave goodbye, and closed the portal.

The holes in the body filled out with a light, but instead of the body re-animating, the light emerged from the body, taking the shape of the dead Scomparsa. She looked at her hands, and saw she was still holding the coin in her now-ethereal palm. She looked at Seren.

“Thank you, Astra,” Clara said. Seren didn’t understand how she had heard it, though: She had seen her lips move, and had heard the words in her ears, but she knew that there was a vacuum between the two of them. She was also perfectly cognizant of which twin was which, suddenly, as if Clara’s speech was able to convey her sense of self. “The others will need your spark. Go, find them quick, their oxygen is running down. I will stay here and comfort my sister.”

As Seren went to go, Clara wrapped her aetheric arms around Ash, who quickly calmed and rested her head on Clara’s shoulder.

Seren flew out of that section of the Hab, and searched for more signs of life. The crew had been gathered in the living quarters, so they could not have been far. There was no sign of them, or the thing that caused all of this in the first place. She set down again near another portion of the Hab and opened the now useless airlock. She flew down the hallways searching for her crew, until she finally found the sign of life she was looking for: The airlocks to the communication module were both shut, when the protocol was to leave at least one open so emergency communications could be made hastily in just such a case as this.

Seren flew up to the door, and looked through the small window inside. She saw the other six members of the crew sitting against the walls, all of them with their head down, having accepted the fact that they would run out of air in a matter of hours. Now that she found her crew she needed to make a plan to save them. If she just opened the airlock, they would lose all their air and die pretty much instantly. If she shut the other airlock door, she would leach their air away slowly, and kill them slowly. If she found the emergency air canisters, she could replenish their air after leaching it away. She quickly flew away to find the storeroom, and get the spare oxygen cans and masks. When she got there, she found that many of them had been damaged, and she was only able to find 5 sets.

She bundled them up in her arms, and carried them back to the communication module. Then she remembered that they had brought two spacesuits for every crew member, and flew off to find those as well. Unfortunately, most of the suits had been torn. There were only five left intact. She brought those into the airlock and then shut it behind her.

She tapped on the window, and Robert Prince looked around, confused. His eyes went wide when he saw Seren’s face on the vacuum-of-space side of the door. He ran up to the window and stared out at Seren and mouthed, plainly, “What the fuck?”

Seren held up a canister of oxygen, and made a show of cranking open the valve, letting it flood into the airlock, until the air pressure had risen to the point where her speaking voice sounded about normal. “Can you hear me?” She asked through the closed airlock.

“Yeah,” he replied, his voice muffled by the inch of polycarbonate between them. “What the hell is going on? You were just breathing vacuum!”

“I don’t know what happening. All I know is that this...” She pressed her coin against the window, “...made me able to survive in space.”

Prince made a show of quickly patting down his pockets and then pulled another coin from one of them. “We got those too. None of us know where they came from, they just literally appeared in our hands when we weren’t paying attention.”

“Can I open the door?”

“I mean... I guess. If you don’t we’re dead in a few hours anyway.”

“Alright. I’m going to break the seal.” Seren cranked the lever to open it and leaned against the door to push against the slightly imbalanced air pressure. There was a small rush as the air balanced out, and then she pushed the door open the rest of the way. She gestured to the air tanks and space suits. “I brought supplies. Air tanks, and spacesuits. Only 5 of each, though. Everything else was destroyed.”

“Where are the Scomparsas?” Isabella asked.

“They... I’m not really sure what happened to them. They were dead, but then I touched their coins and brought them back to life, somehow. They’re back in the sleeping quarters.”

“Is whatever did this still out there?” Adewale asked.

“I don’t think so. At least, I didn’t see it. How long has it been? I got knocked out.”

“About half an hour,” Prince answered.

“Did you get a message down to Earth?”

“The equipment was already destroyed by the time I got here. But, the good news is that with all the debris thrown up by whatever happened, and the fact we haven’t called to say we’re okay, they probably already know that our shit is fucked. They could probably whip up a rocket to send in the immediate next launch window, which would only take...” he looked at his watch, “four fucking days to get to us. And even if we could leave this room, I can see from the window that our return craft was trashed, too.”

Seren did some hard thinking, about what she knew about herself and her new abilities so far. She could survive in the vacuum of space. She could fly under her own power. And she could survive extreme temperatures. Three very important qualities for any rocket or other spaceborne object.

“I can fly you back home. Back to Earth.” Seren held up her coin again. “This thing, whatever it is, it gave me incredible power. That power is the key to getting us out of here.”

“You said after you touched the Scomparsa’s coins they...” Ford didn’t really believe the words he was about to say, so he didn’t say them. “Anyway, what if you do that for us? What if you gave us power, too?” He held out his own coin. The image on it was of a sword overlaid on a shield.

“I can try, but I can’t promise anything. I know just as much about how this works as you do. Maybe it only worked for the twins because they had died?”

“Then there’s no harm in trying,” Thor said. “Worse come to worst, you kill us, then you bring us back.” The other six all gave him looks. “What? Just being realistic.”

“There’s nothing realistic about any of this, Donny,” Prince said.

Ford offered his coin to Seren again. “Just try it.”

Seren hesitantly reached out towards it, and gently grabbed the edge of it. Nothing happened for a second, but then a green light shone out of the coin, and spread across Ford’s skin, until it completely enveloped him. And then it gently faded.

“Well, it did something,” Prince said. “Me next.” He held out his coin, with an image of a triskelion on it, which slightly perplexed the welsh Seren. She touched it, and almost instantly a set of glowing runes appeared in the air around the coin, before they also faded.

Isabella’s coin had a rose on it, and when Seren touched it, it glowed red briefly, and then afterwards the air began to smell more and more like roses as time went on.

Thor’s coin had an image of the traditional Thor’s hammer of Norse mythology, with a stout handle and a wide, curved head. When Seren touched it, it crackled with electricity for a moment, before it faded as well.

Pierre's coin had a subtle embossing of two slightly different textures separated by a lightning-bolt shaped line. When Seren touched it, the two sides glowed red and blue respectively, before fading as well.

Adewale refused to let Seren see the reverse of his coin, but he did let her touch it. Nothing happened that anybody in the room could tell.

“Well, that didn’t do much except confuse us,” Ford said. “What’s the next plan?”

“I guess I just have to try and carry the module back to Earth,” Seren said. “I don’t know how well it’ll hold up to space travel.”

“If you go slow, we should be fine.”

“If she goes slow, we’ll die before we get back,” Adewale pointed out.

Ford stared intently at the shield on his coin, and then at his other, empty hand. He tightly squeezed his fist shut, and tried to focus, and then suddenly his arm was surrounded by a glowing green shield-shaped energy. “Whoa!” He said, jumping back in surprise, dispelling the green energy in doing so. He focused again, and summoned the energy again, this time in a slightly larger disk in front of his fist. He pressed his other hand against it, and found it to be completely solid. He moved his fist, and felt the air resistance, indicating it blocked gases as well as solids. “I think I can help, Seren.” He closed his eyes, and focus one last time, but the rest thought nothing had happened until they glanced out the window and saw that the module was completely surrounded by the green energy. “If you think you can carry us home, I think I can protect us from the stresses and debris impacts of interplanetary travel.”

“Alright, I think that sounds like a good plan. But everyone should wear the spacesuits anyways.”

“We only have five,” Pierre noted. “There are six of us who need them.”

Ford focused again, and completely encased himself in green light. “It should be air-tight enough to last however long it takes us to breach atmo if we decompress,” He said, muffled by the summoned spacesuit.

“Will you be able to focus on it that long?”

“It’ll be just like rock climbing. One slip-up, and I die, but I have the discipline to not slip up.”

Seren approached him, and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for for risking yourself like this.”

“Don’t be so grim about it.”

The other five suited up, and put the helmets on. After they had done so, Seren walked into the airlock, and closed the door. She walked up to the outer door, took a deep breath out of habit, and the cracked the seal. The door tried to explode open, but Seren held it tight enough that it didn’t fly off it’s hinges, until the air was gone and she pushed it open. She didn’t know quite how she was going to lift the module off the ground, but she did carefully manage to snap the cables anchoring it down with her bare hands, so she felt like she was strong enough now to do it.

She carefully lifted up the edge of the module, jostling the people inside, and then Ford summoned the green energy to make sure none of the beams she was lifting it by wouldn’t bend under the weight. She slowly lifted the module, until it was perfectly level, and she placed herself directly under the center of mass, balancing it on her shoulders. She pushed off from the lunar surface, and the module began to rise with her, until they had risen above the rim of the crater. And then, with all her might, Seren started accelerating directly towards the Earth, at a considerable clip. They moved relatively slow at first, but it quickly became clear they were accelerating at a far greater rate than most rockets did, and they left behind the moon in a matter of minutes, compared to the few hours it would have taken in the actual return capsule.

They reached the halfway point in an astonishing 30 minutes, at which point Seren reversed the direction of her acceleration and they started slowing.

Debris from previous missions occasionally splattered against the green force field holding the module together, but otherwise the trip went without a hitch until they entered the atmosphere and the air around Seren started burning.

Her jumpsuit burned with it, leaving her naked as she flew across the sky, still trying to slow the module. She eventually reached a stop in the skies above Texas, with the Johnson Space Center visible below. She had been palming her coin the entire trip, fortunately not being able to trust that her pockets would hold it the entire way home. She rested the module on her shoulder, and looked at the coin now that her options for places to hold it had diminished from  20, the number of pockets she had had, to four: Her hand, her mouth, and two far less comfortable options.

Thankfully, as she stared at it, the coin glowed with the golden light that the being who had given it to her had glowed with, and then a wave rippled across her skin, spreading from the fingers touching the coin. Wherever the wave passed, a skintight fabric suddenly appeared, gold on her hands like gloves, red from her elbows to her shoulders, blue across her torso, red down her legs, and gold on her feet like boots. Across her chest was a golden symbol identical to the one on her coin, and pinned to her shoulders was a 6-foot-by-6-foot square of golden fabric that billowed in the wind dramatically.

Your first appearance should be memorable, but for the right reasons, the voice that had whispered to her when she had first touched the coin said. This is the uniform of a Hero. Go, Astra, meet the cameras, show the world that you are here to protect them, and then show them the truth of those words.

Seren noticed that there was a conveniently sized pocket on the inside of her right glove, and slid the coin into it, where it fit snugly. She started lowering the module to the ground, aiming for the parking lot outside mission control, and she saw dozens of people running out to watch her. She touched down in a remote region of the lot with few cars, and carefully, slowly, lowered the module to the ground. Ford’s green energy holding it stable faded, and the airlock was pushed open from the inside. Five astronauts in space suits walked out, and Ford followed after them. The flashing lights of photographers and the microphones of local news stations surrounded them, and before any of them had had time to breathe started asking them all questions.

All Seren managed to say in answer to anything was “I’m here to protect you.”

They were silenced when an ethereal figure materialised in front of Seren. Clara said, with haste, “Astra, you must go and face the Void-Beast that did this to us. It has followed you here, from Luna. It seeks to devour all life on this world, and to grow fat on our newfound energies.”

“What followed us? What is it?” Seren asked.

“Mission Commander Colonel Seren Evans, Mission Log December Seventeenth, Two Thousand. Two Hundred hours Universal Coordinated Time. Lunar Base Desiderata is now at full operational capacity, after three days of hard work by the mission team. Last night we celebrated by opening the designated celebration MREs, which included... Cake. How they managed to vacuum seal a cake and keep it edible I’ll never know. But it was damned good. So, whoever on the mission planning team arranged that, all nine of us up here owe you a drink. After celebrating, we all as one had a well-deserved sleep in our new, permanent beds. I forgot to create a mission log before sleeping, so here it is now, with me freshly awoken from a comfortable 8 hours sleep. I’m the first up, as far as I know. So, good morning, Houston. End Log.” She saved the video log, and uploaded it to the NASA server.

Seren slowly sat back in her chair, careful not to jostle herself in such a way that she would be thrown out of it due to the low gravity.

The nine man team had settled into their new home quickly. It was comfortably expansive, thanks to Luna’s proximity to the Earth, which had allowed them to send a handful of relatively massive rockets ahead of the crew. The first full day of the mission had just been members of the mission sitting in the rovers transporting components for the habitation modules back and forth between the base site and the forward rocket landing sites.

The base had 6 separate interconnected habitation module groups, consisting of a dormitory, a kitchen, meeting and living place, a greenhouse, a general science lab, a fully functional wide-spectrum observatory, and a recreation module. They also had a mining drill, to be used to extract resources from the Lunar soil, and to slowly expand the base to be sublunarean.

The current crew was also fairly large for a manned extraterrestrial mission, but still being only the first team sent over to set up for an even larger, rotating 25 person crew. It consisted of: former Group Captain and current Colonel Seren Evans, a Welsh fighter pilot for the British Royal Air Force and NATO; Majors Ashley and Clara Scomparsa, twin sisters and cargo pilots for the United States Air Force; Robert Prince, an American Electrical Engineer and Astrophysicist; Doctor Thor Donaldson, a Norwegian surgeon and biologist; Robert Ford, a British geologist and part-time documentary host; Isabella Rosa, a Spanish botanist; Pierre Clairmont, a French physicist and mathematician; and Adewale Maleas, a South African engineer.

Seren sat back and and breathed the canned air, and stared at the hab lining. A thin layer of plastic to hold the air in, a thick layer of insulation to keep the temperature stable, another layer of plastic to hold the insulation, a planned foot of lunar dirt to keep the radiation out long-term, and the vacuum of space. She didn’t let anybody know, but the single thing that scared her more than anything else was the possibility of the hab decompressing and her suffocating. She was getting anxious just thinking about it.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Robert Prince entering the communication section of the living hab. “Good morning, Colonel,” he said. “What are you doing up so early?”

“It’s 9 AM in Houston. I just sent a mission log down to mission control. I should be asking you the same thing.”

“Like you said, it’s 9 AM in the American Central Time Zone. I was going to sit down and talk to the wife.”

“Well, I’ll be here in the corner, being real quiet. Go ahead.” Seren got to work on the small amount of administrative work she would need to do for each week of the mission.

Robert Prince was the same age as Seren, 28, though she would admit much more successful, despite her being a decorated war hero. He met his wife in the senior year of high school, immediately had a son with her, went on to obtain 2 PHD’s while raising him, train to become an astronaut, have a set of twins, and then become one of the first people to live on the moon.

Prince sat down in front of one of the computers, and opened the video chat client. He sent a chat request to his wife’s computer, and waited patiently while she answered. The video chat opened, the grainy video showing a woman holding two two-week-old babies. “Hey, Johanna.” Prince said. “How are our baby girls doing?”

“Roxy has a bit of a cough,” the woman said after the short 3-second delay between the Earth and Moon, speaking with a diluted German accent, “but the doctors tell me that's just a minor complication of her birth difficulties. Alice is as healthy as she could be.”

“And how is David?”

“Little Dave is the coolest kid in school, because his papa is an astronaut.”

“And what about you, meine Lieben?”

“Ich vermisse dich.”

“I miss you, too. I’m only up here for a few months. I’ll be back before the twins’ first birthday.”

Seren ambled behind Prince. “I promise to get him back to you in one piece, Frau Furst. But until then, I need him up here, making sure this place doesn’t fall apart.”

“Alright,” Robert Prince said. “I should probably go make double sure none of the wiring in this place is likely to short and burn us all to death. Ich liebe dich, Jo.” He kissed his hand, and pressed it against the webcam.

“Ich liebe dich, Rob.” Johanna could not return the gesture without dropping one of her daughters, so she merely made a kissy motion towards the screen. The video chat ended.

“I’ll get to work after I have breakfast,” Prince said, after a small sigh.

“Who else is awake?” Seren asked.

“I saw Ford and Isabella up and about, but I’m not sure about anybody else.”

“I’ll wake the other americans. I’ll need to talk to them.” Seren left the communication section of the living hab, and entered the kitchen area. Ford and Isabella were sitting around the dining table, carefully spooning food from an MRE into their mouths. Seren could tell they were still adjusting to the low gravity, because Isabella had managed to launch some food directly onto her forehead by bringing it to her mouth too fast. Thor and Pierre were awake and preparing their meals.

“Is everyone else still sleeping?” Seren asked.

“Just the twin Majors, actually,” Ford said. “We all woke up pretty much right after you did.”

“Lazy fucking Americans...” Seren muttered. The Majors Scomparsa were cargo pilots, recognised for their skill in piloting and landing in contested areas and warzones, but if it weren’t for their obvious skills they would be the worst airmen that Seren had ever met. They were lazy, petulant, hedonistic and know-it-all.

Seren entered the dorm module and found the twins’ quarters. The two tall, blonde, blue-eyed sisters had pushed their cots together and were sleeping draped over each other.

“Like children.” Seren tipped the cots over and the twins flailed awake, launching themselves in the air. “Get up!”

“Fuck you!” one of them said.

“We don’t need to get up yet,” said the other. Seren had a hard enough time telling them apart when they were in uniform with a name patch, but now that they were wearing only shorts and loose-fitting halter tops they were literally identical.

“Clara!” Seren yelled.

“What!” The second one yelled back.

“Thank you for identifying yourself. Both of you, we need to talk. Theoretically, you two are the second and third in command, but I’m not finding it in myself to trust you two with any orders.”

“Then delegate to someone else!” Ashley said. “We’re just here to do the heavy lifting. If you don’t need us for that, leave us alone.”

“Why are you even on this mission if you don’t want to do anything?”

“Because our daddy is richer than god,” Ashley answered.

Seren made a face at them. “You two disgust me.”

“Then get away from us,” Clara said, pulling the blanket back over her and her twin.

Seren stormed out of the dorms, fuming. How she was going to live with those two for 6 months, she could not comprehend.

The rest of the mission crew had gathered in the dining area, sitting around the table eating quietly.

“This is going to be a real adventure, isn’t it,” Isabella said, with her thick Castillian accent.

“Yeah. I can’t wait to start wading through the footage,” Ford said. “This documentary is going to be pure gold.”

Suddenly, the moon quaked, an alarm went off, and the lights dimmed greatly. “Shit...” Prince said. “That’s not good.” He ran to the observatory module, and Seren and Adewale followed. The black South African had been a member of the design team for the base, and knew it better than anybody else.  

“That alarm is for the reactor,” Adewale said, in his own thick South African accent. “What could have happened?”

“I don’t know...” Prince answered. “Meteorite impact?” He climbed up the cupola in the observatory and looked out over the exterior of the base. “What the hell? Where’s the reactor?”

“What?” Adewale climbed up after him. “It’s right th...” He went silent when the reactor wasn’t where it was supposed to be. He whispered something presumably profane in Afrikaans. “This is not good.”

Seren looked up at the two in the cupola while the moon quaked again. “What are you telling me?”

“We have a problem that we can’t fix without an immediate care package from Earth,” Prince said.

“Sweet mother of God!” Adewale interrupted. “What is that?!”

“What?” Seren asked, worried. The moon quaked again.

“No... no no no no no no...” Prince said, quickly climbing down from the cupola.

“What?!” Seren repeated. The moon quaked yet again.

Adewale followed closely after Prince. “Run!”

Seren, instead of following them, looked up the cupola shaft. One instant, she was staring up through the cupola roof porthole. The next she was staring into space, with the cupola sheared away by some unseen object.

Seren instinctively gasped, and then consciously clamped her hands over her mouth and nose, before she was sucked up the shaft and into space.

Seren’s worst fear was coming true, again. This wasn’t the first time she had been decompressed. In the late years of her career as a fighter pilot, she had been a test pilot for experimental aircraft, primarily flying high-altitude craft. On one of those test flights, her oxygen mask had failed and she had started suffocating in the high-altitude environment. As she was passing out, she pulled a risky move, directing her aircraft straight down and hoping she would regain consciousness before she hit the ground. She obviously survived, but that experience had scarred her. When she was being considered to lead the lunar mission, the fear of empty vacuum was the single reason she did not initially want to, before being convinced that she would be leading humanity into the future.

She was currently floating about 100 ft above the lunar surface. The area around the lunar base had been blasted repeatedly by some manner of impact or explosion. Pieces of the Lunar base were scattered around the polar crater the base was nestled in. As she slowly lost consciousness, she noticed a bright light coming from the “sky”, for lack of a better word. She reached the peak of her ascent, and suddenly was face to face with a humanoid figure, armored neck to toe in golden plate covered in shining multicolored gems. The figure’s head was unarmored, and topped with a crown, but it’s features were obscured by a blinding light.

The figure had its arms crossed across it’s chest, and was floating less than 10 feet in front of Seren. This world is on the precipice of great change, the figure thought, and Seren heard. Demons and aliens and extraversals all ready to converge on a weak, defenseless Earth. You must be ready to protect it. The figure held out a hand, and a golden coin-sized disc floated towards Seren. Seren held out her hand, and as soon as she touched the coin, she was blasted with an energy of some kind, and then the last of the air was explosively forced out of her lungs. Wake up, Astra. She felt a burning deep within her lungs, and then she passed out.

Seren woke up face first in the fine lunar regolith. After sitting up and rubbing her eyes, she collected herself, and when she realized where she was, she went into panic mode and covered her mouth and nose again. She panicked for a few long moments until she realized she wasn’t suffocating anymore. She slowly removed her hand from her mouth. She was perfectly unharmed. She stood up, and took note of where she was. She seemed to be just outside the lunar base. The coin was lying a few feet from her. She cautiously reached out towards it, and picked it up. On one side was a circle with 16 wavy triangular points radiating from it, and on the other was Seren’s face in profile. She slipped it into one of the pockets of her uniform.

She jumped to get a good look, and saw a lunar base that was torn to shreds. And then she realized that Luna’s weak gravity wasn’t pulling her back down.

She was hovering steadily about 50 feet above the bottom of the crater, level with the rim. She felt very unsteady, and after a moment began to feel her weight subtly resting upon a point somewhere in her core, just above where she knew her center of mass was. After more time, she tried to “push” against that point, for lack of a better description, to try and move herself. After some awkward-feeling and ineffectual core muscle contractions, she began moving slowly. She flew over the base, and tried to find where the rest of the mission crew could be.

She found what she believed to be the remains of the dorm hab, and lowered herself towards the ground to investigate. The side of the hab had been torn open from the inside, and blood had been splattered all over the hole and the regolith outside it. Laying in the middle of the mess of bloodstains was a severed hand. The hand had been recently manicured, and the nails were painted; It could only have been one of the Scomparsa twins. The fingers were wrapped tightly around something. Seren carefully knelt down and pried them open, and they gave easily enough that it was evident Rigor Mortis hadn’t set in yet.

She had been holding a coin similar to the one Seren had been given, with the Twins’ shared face on one side, and an elaborate symbol on the other: an egg, with flames surrounding it and a bird stretching its wings within it. A Phoenix.  

Seren placed the coin back in the palm of the hand, closed the fingers back around the coin, and cradled the fist while she mouthed some words of respect for the dead.

When she did so, the hand spasmed to life, and began to heat up. It heated until was glowing-hot, and started burning the oxygen out of the blood. The hand writhed, and out of the stump a char-black bone began to grow, followed by more glowing-hot flesh and skin. The arm that should have been attached to the hand regrew, and then the shoulder, the upper torso, the neck, the core, the other arm, the hips, the skull, the legs, and then finally the flesh of the face filled out. The coin had been flung to the side, and Seren had rescued it.

The Phoenix, skin and hair aglow with her heat, lay face down nude in the regolith in front of Seren. She jolted to consciousness, and grabbed Seren’s arm, instantly melting her jumpsuit into a napalm-like goo that fortunately couldn’t burn in the vacuum of space. Seren recoiled, but realized that the heat hadn’t hurt her at all, and reached her arm back to steady and calm the Phoenix. By the look on her face, Seren could tell that she was trying to scream and cry, but physically was unable to because of the vacuum silencing her and the heat vaporizing her tears.

The ground around her had begun melting, and the oxygen trapped within it was burning away. The glowing regolith was sticking to her skin, binding itself on the protruding areas of her anatomy like molten glass, which it essentially was. By the time she readied to stand, her areas requiring modesty had been adequately coated. She mouthed something desperately, but she was moving her lips far too fast for Seren to have any hope of reading them. She moved to the hole in the Hab, half-running and half-flying, the Hab lining melting when she brushed against it. She looked around desperately inside, and ran off when she found something. Seren followed her inside, and was met with an even more gruesome scene than the one with the severed hand.

The other Scomparsa twin had been eviscerated, and her blood was coating the inside of the hab. Her body was in mostly one piece, but her neck was hanging by a single thick tendon, and chest had been torn open and her lungs and heart devoured.

The Phoenix reached out to cradle her sister’s face, but recoiled when the skin began to burn. She floated in the middle of the Hab, and stared at her cursed hands.

Seren, meanwhile, had caught the glint of another coin in the dead twin’s hand. She carefully excised it and examined it. Like the Phoenix’s coin, it had their face on the one side, but on the other side was a double-ended scythe, blades flush with the rim, and the constellation Cancer.

Aradia Johanna Christa Scomparsa-Prince-Furst was one of the most powerful women in the world, and not just in terms of influence or wealth, though she was very influential and wealthy. She was the confluence of two powerful magic bloodlines: the ancient Scomparsa witch bloodline and the almost as ancient Merlin/Le Fay bloodline.

Aradia was taught witchcraft from her mother Romana from as soon as she could speak, as was the ancient Scomparsa tradition, but when her Merlin-descended grandfather Robert Prince discovered her penchant for sorcery he began teaching her that as well. Her grandfather had learned to cast magic through martial techniques, but Romana forbade Robert teaching Aradia how to fight, so instead Robert taught her to cast through dance.

Aradia took to both disciplines with a skill rarely seen before. She never became as powerful a witch as her mother, or as powerful a sorcerer as her grandfather, but through both combined she surpassed nearly every magician of any kind on Earth. She learned dozens of other varieties of magic after dropping out of school to travel the world and learn from the masters of magic themselves.

Along the way, she picked up more traditional skills, and discovered an additional penchant for electrical engineering. She began experimenting with using minor spells to replicate electric circuits, and with using circuitry to act as hermetic geometry for casting spells. Through these endeavors she invented the field of Magitech.

She returned home at the wizened age of 23. She started a technology company with her father David and aunt Alice to design and sell her Magitech, and made billions in deals with the US government and various superhero organizations. When FursTech started selling to the public, it became a household name almost overnight. Aradia rocketed to the top of the list of wealthiest people in the world.

It was then that Aradia first made contact with Yggdrasil, an organisation of Demigods and Angels tasked with defending the Multiverse, and visited their home universe of New Jerusalem. The leader of Yggdrasil, the Archangel Roxanne, bore the name and face of Aradia’s other aunt, who had died of cancer before Aradia was even born. Roxanne explained the nature of the Multiverse to Aradia, and showed her that all of the fictions in her world were real events in others, and vice versa.

But all of that was well in the past. Aradia now was 82 years old, though thanks to both magical and spiritual training only looked 40, and more importantly only felt 20. She was tall, and wiry, and in the face she was the spitting image of her grandmother, Johanna Furst. She grew her brown hair long, well past her hips, though she often held it up in buns and braids so compact she needed to use magic to hold them together. Her eyes were a shining gold, the only obvious sign of her immeasurable ability.

She dressed almost exclusively in gold and black, primarily ornate dresses and robes, with gold and onyx jewelry, all the better to embrace her public perception as a powerful witch and sorceress.

On the night of the eve of the year 2101, Aradia meditated in her private workshop at the peak of FursTech Tower in Danesville, Wisconsin. She sat, cross-legged, three feet above the floor, with her robe hanging down into the empty space beneath her. She contemplated the events of the last week.

The Harlequin’s Rampage. The Salamanders’ Revenge. The Reappearance of the Demon King. The Approach of the Blackstar. The So-Called Death of Doctor Lazarus. Countless other smaller incidents.

She lamented how she had been at the Mansion of Jo Kerr a mere hour before the Harlequin had detonated a bomb underneath the mansion, killing nearly 300 people. She had aided Xena Noble in imprisoning the Salamanders in Xena’s mind. She had fought the Demon King in the desert of Eden alongside her grandfather, her aunt Alice's ex-wife Karen Reis, and the Archangel Roxanne. She had advised Astra in her ongoing preparations to face the Blackstar. She had bought out Lazarus’s laboratory and discovered the unholy things he had done in the name of achieving immortality.

Aradia had been at the center of a lot of events across 80 years of life. But this last week had set a new high for such events in rapid succession. It consternated her greatly.

She sighed and lowered her feet to the ground. She opened her eyes, and walked towards her workbench. She rapidly signed her spellpass and unlocked her computer, turning on a full room’s worth of holograms and illusions. She searched them for her digitized comic collection, and with a beckon of her hand she pulled that set of lights towards her. She scanned her collection for anything that could help her understand, and frustratingly found too many possible reasons.

Aradia, frustrated, thought about her next vector of approach to this problem. She contemplated going to the highest authority on metanarrative directly... She shook that thought off. She had vowed to never abuse her greatest powers in such a trivial manner. But would it be trivial? If Aradia’s bad feeling actually amounted to something, it would indeed be wise to ask for aid. She had just given that advice to Astra not 5 days ago.

Aradia silently crossed herself, and then muttered her summoning incantation. “Forgive me, Paragon of Light, but I wish to ask for advice.” Despite having whispered the request, Aradia’s summoning voice shook the room, and echoed long after she had silenced.

A handful of seconds later, a portal opened in the room. Through it Aradia saw the Archangel Roxanne, sitting at the foot of a lounger, on a beach, holding a golden remote in her hand. Beside her was her human wife, Karen Furst, a triple amputee holding a glass of ice water in her left hand, the only of her four organic limbs she had left. They were both in revealing bathing suits; Aradia knew that in their religion sunbathing was a popular form of worship to their all-powerful Sun-Goddess. Karen’s skin was covered in deep scars and well-tanned, but Roxanne’s was flawless and pale.

“What is it, Rad?” the Archangel asked, with a tone of familial concern. “What do you want to ask?”

“I... I have this immense feeling of dread. So much has happened this past week, and I don’t have an understanding why. I need help understanding what is happening. I need guidance.”

“Of course.” Roxanne turned to her wife, and told her “I’ll be right back.”

Karen shrugged and sipped her water. “I’ll be fine without you for a few minutes, I guess.”

Roxanne chuckled, and stood up, and walked through the portal. Once she had passed completely through, she pressed a button on the remote and the portal apertured shut. She sighed. “There has been a lot happening, in your world and mine. In New Jerusalem, there have been reported sightings of... me, in places I definitely was not at the times reported.”

“That sounds familiar,” Aradia noted. “It’s like when Alice started seeing you appearing in this world. Are these other yous avoiding interacting with you, like you did with Alice?”

“That’s the thing. One of them is. There’s more than one other me in my world. I met face to face with the other one, and while she did avoid speaking to me to avoid breaking the metanarrative, she did give me meaningful looks and acted like she had seen everything in that instance before. It’s not unreasonable to assume she’s the future me.”

“But what about the other one?”

“That’s where the reports become deeply troubling. The other has been invariably sighted coated in a permanent layer of blood, dried and fresh. Witnesses claim she has the crimson eyes of a Demon. Both of them, they are an order of magnitude more powerful than me at least. They tear through Adamantium with an ease I can’t. They even have the Touch-Telekinesis that I frustratingly never developed.” Aradia knew that that was saying something. She had seen Roxanne rip through a plate of Adamantium like it was a piece of cardboard.

“And how do you know this?” Aradia asked, already knowing the answer.

“Exactly. These two other me’s have been coming to my homeworld to fight. Or, one of them has, and the other is there to drag the first away.”

“Well, my problem seems insignificant now. You’ve got a War of the Gods on your hands. All I’ve got is a spike in supervillain activity in one city.”

“That’s nothing to shake a stick at, though. With your world’s scale of supervillains that still threatens the lives of millions if nothing is done. It warrants bringing together Astra’s League.”

Aradia hesitantly started casting the spell to summon the other League members, bringing up an illusion of a big red button, but stopping just short of pressing it. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not a member, you are. You make the choice.”

“You’re only not a member because your purview falls above ours. Astra deemed our problems smaller than your Doctrine of Multiversal Protection.”

“Even so, I will not make you press the button.”

Aradia thought deeply about her bad feeling. Was this really an omen of upcoming events? Or was it Aradia overthinking a brief rise in activity? The Metanarrative could swing either way, and Aradia knew that.

Aradia closed her eyes, and pressed the holographic button.

Astra’s League had 50 official members, of which 12 were deceased. The rest of them all fit handily in Aradia’s spacious workshop. Aradia, as the one who summoned the rest, stood at the center of the circle of extraordinarily powerful superheroes.

“The last week in this city has seen a spike in superpowered crime that hasn't been measured since the invention of superpowered crime.” Aradia began. “All of it, individually, falls very far below the scope and scale we operate at, yes, but it has come hand in hand with not one, but two appearances of the Demon King in this plane. I told you all that a few days ago Karen Reis unwittingly lead him straight to my workshop, and that with the aid of her, my grandfather, and our friend the Archangel we banished him. But in a seemingly unrelated incident a dozen days ago, our trusted associate Xena Noble tangled with a pair of Pseudodemons connected to a string of arsons and captured them within her mind. Two days ago she suffered a waking nightmare where the Demon King threatened her with subjugation if she did not release them. So, it seems that even the threats we deemed ourselves unprepared to face without divine intervention are embroiling themselves into the street level crime of this city. I will admit barely any of the crimes committed this past week have been so obviously interconnected, but it has given me reason to suspect that they may be at least metanarratively connected, and the Archangel agrees with my assessment.”

Roxanne stepped forward. “Events on my end have not been encouraging, either. Metanarrative players I believe to be from the distant fringes of my personal timeline have started intruding on my temporal locality. If they are in any way relevant to the events Aradia described, then this could possibly inflate to not only my scope and scale but even beyond my and my people's capability to contain. This could even become an multiversal Omega event, like the Infinite Crisis of legend. That is, of course, the very worst case scenario, but something to be kept in mind.”  

Astra, the founder and namesake of the group, stepped forwards. She was in her costume, blue and red with a giant gold cape. “What, then, do you propose to do, Aradia?”

Aradia thought for a moment. “Even though you would never hear any of us admit it, we have neglected our duty to aid the smaller-focused members of the superhero community. It would behoove us, I think, to bring a powerful street-level hero of the city into the fold. Allow them to be the link between our scope and scale and theirs. I know Neon in particular has become frustrated lately with our lack of intervention against the Harlequin and the rash of arsons, and thinks herself more than skilled and powerful enough to join our ranks. I don’t disagree with her assessment: She’s at the same age and level my father was when he joined.”

“Things have changed since your father joined,” Paladin remarked. He was one of the few heroes still in his civilian clothes.

“But he was the greatest of us by the time he died. His sacrifice protected us in ways none of us could truly understand. Neon has that same potential he did. If we nurture her as you nurtured him, instead of stifling her like we are now, she could very well become one of the most powerful of us.”

Aradia’s sister Thrud the Half-Golem stepped forwards. When Thrud was mortally wounded in the crossfire of a battle between Yggdrasil and Demons, Aradia saved her life by grafting her into a magic life support system, built with holy materials provided by the Archangel Roxanne. Thrud, in the process of rehabilitating, revealed that she had her own untapped magical ability, which could be used to power not only the life support but also spell-bound artifacts. Being of the same union between witches and sorcerers as Aradia, she became almost as powerful, if more combat focused than her sister. “I second my sister's proposal. Our ranks have grown stale and stagnant. The last addition to the group was Aranea 30 years ago, and we have lost 3 members in that time. We need to revitalize.”

Astra sighed, switching to a more monotone managerial voice. “The motion moves forward. Would anybody like to nominate any additional non-members to be considered for membership?”

Aranea Arachne, with her striking blue eyes, raven hair, and six arms, stepped forwards. “I know Neon’s team members all have particularly rare powers, which would certainly be a boon to us. Scratch and Elle Ectric were two of the most powerful kinetics I ever taught in my tenure at the Academy. And as for Roadie, there’s just never been anybody else like her.”

“Are you proposing we bring all four of them into the League?” Astra asked.

“Everything Aradia said about Neon applies to them, too. It would seem arbitrarily petty to elevate one and leave the rest.”

“Very well. Any others, while we are at it?”

The room remained silent.

“Then we will vote immediately. All for accepting Neon AKA Rey Walker into the League?”

34 of the 38 said “Aye.”

“Motion passes. All for accepting Scratch AKA Shailene Octavia into the League?”

26 of the 38, the minimum for the 2/3rds majority required.

“Motion passes. All for accepting Elle Ectric AKA Elana Etric into the League?”

33 of the 38.

“Motion passes. Lastly, all for accepting Roadie AKA Hilda Furst into the League?”

36 of the 38.

“Motion passes.” Astra smiled ever so slightly. “Aradia, since you introduced the motion, would you do the honor of summoning our new members?”

“Of course.” Aradia focused and incanted her summoning charm. “Rey Walker, Astra’s League requires your presence. Bring Elle, Hilda, and Shay to my workshop, please.”

It took Neon all of 30 seconds to appear on the balcony to Aradia’s workshop, trailed by her trademark streak of iridescent light.

“I said to bring your friends, Rey,” Aradia told her.

She bolted back down the building, and returned another 60 seconds later with Scratch and Roadie carried under her arms.

“Where’s Elle?”

“She’ll get here,” Neon said.

A crack of lightning later and Elle Ectric was standing beside Neon. Neon put down her other two friends and they all hesitantly waited on the balcony.

“Well, come inside,” Astra beckoned.

Neon switched off her power, absorbing the nearby segments of her plasma trail, and walked into the workshop. Neon was in her “costume”, which was a pair of neon-blue jeans, with a neon-pink leather jacket, and she had her pixie-cut hair dyed white. She bore an almost uncanny resemblance to Roxanne, though much taller, which subtly took the Archangel aback. Scratch followed her, with her deep violet side-cut accentuated by more subdued black leather. After her was Roadie, with her dark blue fauxhawk matched by her dark blue hoodie and old-fashioned denim jeans. Last was Elle, who had sparks jumping through her bright yellow spiky hair, and through the pair of copper chains wrapped around her arms, which grounded to her copper mail blouse.

The four of them looked the epitome of punk in an age when it had long ago fallen out of fashion. But they didn’t care if it was in fashion, because they were punk enough to rock it.

Aradia herded them into the middle of the room, and Astra started speaking. “I would assume you know as much or more about this recent wave of superpowered crime in the city as we do, is that correct?”

“Is that what this is about?” Neon asked. “Because yeah, I would say we know a lot about it.”

“And that is why you’re here. We will admit that we have been negligent in lending aid to help stem this, and for that I personally extend my apologies and would like to make it up to all of you.” Astra turned to Aradia. “Would you forge a set of coins for them, please, to mark their membership?”

Neon stepped back. “Membership? No, you didn’t...”

“Didn’t what?” Roadie asked. “What’s going on?”

Aradia walked up to Roxanne. “My regular supply is in storage in the basement, may I take some directly from the source?”

“Of course.” Roxanne held out her arm, and Aradia twisted her hands around it. Soon, microscopic strands of golden Celestial Adamantium were pulled from the Archangel’s bones, and flowed into four deposits orbiting the arm. Once the deposits were the size of a common challenge coin, Aradia took them and hovered them over to the new members.

“You crazy sons of bitches,” Scratch said, telekinetically reaching out for the coin approaching her.

The four of them each took their respective coin, and at the same time everyone else in the room except for the Archangel held out their own coins.

“You four are now the newest members of Astra’s League,” Astra announced. “Welcome to the team. We hope that now that we have a more tangible connection to the problems of the city we will no longer be so negligent in protecting it from superpowered crime, no matter the scope and scale.”

An alarm on Aradia’s workbench went off. “Oh, it’s about to cross into the new year on the east coast,” she announced. With a quick flick of her wrist, Aradia brought up a holographic screen showing the countdown to the ball-drop in Times Square.

“How apropos,” Astra noted. “May this new year signify a new age of peace in this city and the world, with you four’s help.”

The entirely of Astra’s League gathered around the screen, and Aradia passed around glasses of champagne to toast with. The countdown hit zero, and the ball dropped, and there was much cheering. The League as one drank their champagnes, and the camera in New york panned over the cheering crowd.

And Roxanne saw something that should not have been. In the center of the cheering crowd was a woman, with white hair and red eyes, wearing a crown with a thick crack running through the front of it. She had Roxanne’s face. Besides her was a handsome man, also with red eyes, who was laughing.

“THE DEMON KING!” Roxanne yelled, pointing at the screen. As she watched, the woman drew a large golden knife, and grabbed the Demon King’s hair. She yanked his head back and ran the knife through his neck, cleanly severing his head. Roxanne watched as the woman mouthed: 

“Come and get us, you angelic whore.”

“We gotta get to New York ten seconds ago,” Roxanne said, panickedly punching buttons on her portal remote.

On the screen, the body of the Demon King started it’s unholy transformation. The crowds of people in Times Square started screaming, and running, and the woman laughed. His body grew and grew, and started sprouting wings and a tail and seven snake-like necks.

Roxanne finally finished summoning a portal, which opened up to a rooftop above Times square, where the Demon King’s transformation was even more apparent. He was growing so fast that he was crushing people running away.

Roxanne ran through the portal without hesitation, and Astra and most of the rest of the League followed. Aradia and the four new members were the last ones left to go through.

“I won’t expect you to throw yourselves into the thick of it this suddenly, but your aid would be greatly appreciated,” Aradia explained.

“Well,” Neon replied, “if you’re going to help with our problems, we'll have to help with your problems. I did ask for this, after all.”

“It’s all our problem, now, Rey,” Roadie noted before duplicating herself and sending the four duplicates of her through the portal. Shay hovered through after her, and Elle jumped though with a clap of thunder.

Neon chuckled. “That it is.” She ignited her power again, sending glowing plasma through her veins, and then bolted through the portal with speed, leaving a trail of neon iridescence behind her.

Xena Noble had made her fame in the 2040’s as a supervillainess, the shape-shifting and pyrokinetic Salamander. She never killed, but she did cause billions of dollars in property damage in Danesville, Wisconsin over the ten years she was active. In the latter years she began to become disillusioned with her chaos and sought desperately for escape. She had gotten her chance in the form of Renegade, a superheroine she had fought many times. One time, she had gotten too zealous for her good, and had very nearly killed Xena. Xena had let her think she had. She shapeshifted away from the wreckage of the building the Salamander had died in, and never used that name again. Xena had never been unmasked, and would never be chased after; it was the perfect crime.

She sought normalcy. She applied for a job as a teacher at a superhuman school, the Astra Academy in upstate Wisconsin, so she could put the knowledge that had created the Salamander to good use.

By sheer coincidence, she managed to become close friends with Renegade’s civilian identity, Alice Prince, who was also a teacher at the same school. In the fifty years since, she had come out as a former villain to the rest of the superhuman staff, and had been forgiven and accepted by the vast majority of them. She had found normalcy.

But now there were some jackasses kicking around and causing chaos using her old name.

She had gone to Danesville, her old city of operation, where the new Salamanders had been making a ruckus. She was standing in front of a still smoldering arson site, as snow drifted from sky onto her afro and wind fluttered her coat. Police were still swarming the scene, and she tagged one down, flashing her Astra’s League (associate) badge. “Morning officer. I’m Xena Noble, from the Astra Academy. We have reason to believe that two of our graduates did this. What can you tell me?”

“The owner of the building said he saw...” The officer hesitated. “Well, he described them as Demons. Big, 7-8 feet tall. Pitch black skin, and glowing mouths and eyes. That ring any bells?”

“Unfortunately, yeah.” They hadn’t just stolen her name, they were stealing her look, too.

“Well thank goodness. I hope you don't mind us pawning this off on you, but we’ve been swamped this week with all of the Harlequin activity.”

“Well, today’s your lucky day. I’ll take it from here.”

“I’ll go grab some of the files.”

Xena pulled out her phone, dialed it, and held it front of her. A hologram appeared above it showing Alice Prince's elderly face.

“They definitely know my old MO,” Xena explained. “They even impersonated my old combat form. If they're both half as good as I was, well, you can do the math.”

“Feel free to call down some help,” Alice pleaded.

“Once I’m actually on their trail, maybe then. Talk to you later.” She hung up. Xena had always been a lone wolf type.

The officer returned with a data card. “This is everything we have on this investigation, and the ones with the same ID’d perps. Drop by the station if there’s anything else you need.”

“Will do.”

Xena walked off, plugging the card into her phone. She read while she walked, and by the time she had gotten to where she was going, she had read all of it. She stopped in front of an old warehouse. It was visually the same as it was before but it obviously wasn’t the same building as the one that she had headquartered in, since Alice and Xena had destroyed it in their last fight. She didn’t even have any reason to suspect that the new Salamanders would be there, she just went there because it’s what she would have done.

The building was abandoned, as it had when she had first taken up residence, because of a downturned economy. The door was chained shut, so she checked that the coast was clear, grabbed the lock, and turned up the heat in her palm, melting the brass away. She forced open the door and kept the heat in her palm going, redirecting it into a flame to light the warehouse. It almost looked too much like it did when she had lived there. If her eidetic memory wasn’t betraying her, it was identical down to the patches of peeling paint on the walls, and the grease stains on the floor.

She ignited her whole body instinctually, and absorbed her clothes and phone into herself to protect them. She turned her skin into diamond-hard black carbon, and turned her eyes and mouth into bright orange embers. This was what she had called the Salamander: A fire elemental with no set form. Her body was a domain which she held full control over, every atom and its energy subject to her will.

Xena cautiously spun on the spot, scanning the now fully illuminated warehouse carefully. As she did so she spotted two shapes crawling from shadow to shadow. She growled at them, her mouth spitting smoke and fire.

They slunk out of the shadows, like serpents, not moving but growing and receding in her direction. They solidified into the forms of two androgynous teenagers, one with pale skin and long black hair, and the other with tan skin and short auburn hair. Xena did recognise them, they had been enrolled at the Academy. They had also taken a suspiciously high percentage of her classes. Xena now realized they had just been been studying her the entire time.

“Look who finally came crawling back to the cradle,” said the auburn.

“What a pathetic excuse for an Elemental,” the brunet taunted.

“What do you want from me?” Xena shouted at them.

“We want you to suffer,” said the brunet, standing where the auburn had been.

“You’ve abandoned your heritage,” said the auburn, standing where the brunet had been.

“You’ve forgotten who you are.”

“You’ve lost your flame.”

“Why should I care what two punk-ass kids think?” Xena taunted in return.

The two were gone, as quick as a blink, though Xena could swear she hadn’t. She spun around, and was met with two Titans, 30-foot tall lumbering masses of fire, soot, and shadow. “What about what we think?” they asked in unison. One of them grabbed her, and the other surrounded her with it’s hands, and she felt their heat. She didn’t just feel it, they were burning her, and she screamed, in pain and anger. Just when she thought their fire would consume her...

She snapped out of the lifelike deception, standing in a warehouse that looked no more like the one she had called home than any other would. Her heart was racing. She looked at her hands: Brown skin, not black carbon. She felt her face, and massaged her temples. “Shit, I do need to call in some help.”

And for deception magic as powerful as that, there was only one person capable of studying it and possibly tracing it: Aradia Furst.

Aradia was Alice's niece, and though most of their family wasn't on speaking terms with itself, Aradia always kept close tabs on her relatives’ allies. When Xena had come out as a former villain, Aradia had briefly kidnapped Xena to interrogate her for her intentions. Xena had passed with flying colors, and as a reparation Aradia offered her services for any magic-related troubles Xena may encounter.

And Xena figured now was definitely the time to cash that favour.

“If I didn’t know any better, Xena,” Aradia explained after hearing Xena’s recounting of the daydream, “I’d say your mysterious and unexplained backstory was catching up with you. You’ve always said you got your powers in a lab accident, but that doesn’t line up with what I’m hearing from you now.”

Aradia was hovering, Lotus-Position, in the center of her workshop. Her black and gold robes hung to the floor, and they glittered and shone with reflections of the glyphs and holograms that covered the walls. Her long brown hair floated freely, and her golden eyes shone with their own light.

“It was lab accident. I was doing my work with Heat-Controlled Cellular Regeneration, a bit of the test culture got on my hand, and then the propane tank fueling my bunsen burner backed up and the lab exploded. That’s all that I remember.”

“Hmm.” Aradia reached her feet to the ground, and walked towards her workbench. “A propane tank spontaneously backfiring at such an opportune time sounds like the work of a Metanarrative Totem.” With a few flicks of her wrist, Aradia summoned a stylized glyph of a spider, and then X’ed it out and drew a stylized salamander in front of it with her finger. “With that kind of force at work it’s a miracle there’s only three of you. Last time a Totemic power got unleashed upon a multiverse a thousand of them went to war, and nobody wants that again.”

Xena just stared at Aradia, unused to seeing this less-than-stoic version of her.

Aradia sighed. “This reference is being wasted on you. Spiderman, Spider Totems, Spider Verse. You’ve never heard of any of that, because Marvel and DC don’t exist in this universe.” Aradia rubbed her face. “I need to get out more.”

Aradia had an apparent revelation with that sentence. “There's an idea, take me to the place it happened. I'll be able to study the magic better if I’m immersed in it. Where was the warehouse?”

“Down by the Pike River outlet.”

Aradia drew a wide circle with her fingers, which then tunneled through the fabric of reality, opening a portal to the Pike River embankment. She stepped through, and beckoned Xena to follow. When she did, Aradia gestured for her to lead the way. Xena led her to the warehouse, and Aradia started casting spells to reveal the magic that had triggered the daydream, summoning illusions and holograms displaying in complicated detail every facet of the space.

“Oh, this is definitely Totemic in nature. It’s got strong traces of Demonic influence, as well, that’s never a good sign. If the Demons are directly involved I may need to summon divine assistance.”

“ ‘Divine assistance’?” Xena asked.

Aradia ignored her question, deeming her not ready for the answer. “A Demon is a worst case scenario, though. Most likely it’s just magic based upon the Deceiver’s own, and not it actually.” She focussed on the glyphs surrounding her as they honed in on the source of the magics. “There we go. Very strong. Ancient. Absolutely Totemic. But, not Demonic, and therefore in my jurisdiction. Would you mind if I called my sister in to aid us?”

“If you think she’ll be able to help.”

Aradia performed an incantation, and after a moment, she created another portal. Out of it stepped a figure.

Thrud Furst was tall, wearing a combination of robes and gold and black metallic body armor. She had long black hair, flowing in the breeze coming from behind her, through the portal. The skin of her face, the only skin of hers exposed, was heavily tanned. Her left eye was replaced with a complicated connector, a port to interface with any other magitech. The skin around it looked violently scarred, and more scars peeked around the edges of the bodysuit hiding her neck. Her arms and legs were not organic, but instead gold and black prostheses, designed to look and act like metallic muscle. She was holding in her hands a very ornate gold and obsidian mask, with a glass slit across the front and a jack inside that matched the one on her eye. After stepping through the portal she placed the mask upon her face, and the glass slit started glowing red.

“The hunt is on, sister,” Thrud said, her voice distorted in an almost robotic manner, summoning a golden sword from the thin air behind her back.

“Indeed it is, sister,” Aradia replied. “Pseudo-Demonic magic, made to mimic the manipulations of New Jerusalem's Deceiver.”

“Nothing we haven’t dealt with before. Where are they?”

Aradia studied her holograms more. “The foundries in the south of the city. How apropos.” She summoned another portal, straight to the foundries along the  border with Chicago at the south end of the city.

“I imagine drawing them out will be as simple as you arriving there,” Aradia said. “At least, assuming they do truly wish you dead.”

Despite their reassurances that the enemy was not Demonic in nature, Aradia and Thrud both crossed themselves before stepping through the portal. Xena stepped through without ceremony.

Aradia and Thrud were standing back-to-back, watching their surroundings carefully. It was strangely quiet. None of the foundries were being worked, all the workers having gone home after a hard day's toil.

Xena assumed her pure carbon form in preparation for whatever may be coming.

Aradia spoke up. “Do you feel that?” She summoned a circular flat hologram, which rippled like a pool of water, shaken by some subaudible vibration. She pointed the hologram in a number of directions around the trio, until the vibrations spiked. “That way.”

She led them to a FursTech Foundry, where the vibrations were audible, a series of loud, steady clangs, the sound of metal being worked. “Well, they certainly have a sense of irony,” Thrud mused.

“They also have a sense of who I’d have gone to for help,” Xena Responded. She pushed through the unlocked door to the foundry, and made her way through the offices to the foundry floor, where the two Titans were at work. One of them was holding its hands over a large glowing-orange sword, heating it to be forged, and the other was hammering it with a massive golden hammer. As Xena silently approached them, they glanced in her direction, nearly rendering Xena paralyzed with fear. They finished their forging, the one who had been heating the sword hoisting it over it’s shoulder.

“Are you ready to join with us, little Salamander?” they both asked in unison, their hulking forms approaching her.

“I...” Xena stammered. Aradia and Thrud stepped out of the shadows behind the Titans. Aradia summoned a circle of seven glyphs in front of her, and each of them fired a laser of a different color at the Sword Titan. Thrud dashed up the Hammer Titan’s leg and back, and planted her golden sword cleanly in the back of it’s neck, before activating an ice spell. She ripped the now frost-coated blade out messily, jumping away, and landing next to Aradia. The Titans both cried out in anger, making a sound like the roar of a jet engine.

“Then you’ve come to die,” they both surmised. “Very well.” Their forms changed rapidly, going from soot and shadow, with burning interiors, to pure flame, surrounding a skeleton of ember bones. Their shape was more obvious in this form, showing that they were humanly proportioned, if a bit stocky, and their skulls were now obviously horned, with two thick bull-horns curving up and slightly forward.

Xena responded by matching their height. She grew her carbon skin thick, and allowed her inner flame to consume the rest of her, becoming an armor shell surrounding a being of fire. She threw the first punch, turning her fingers into long obsidian claws and swiping at the Titans’ skulls.

The Titans both parried with their weapons. Xena then focused on the Hammer Titan, and focused as much heat as she could into the weapon, trying to melt it. Aradia and Thrud, meanwhile tried to divert the attention of the Sword Titan. Thrud zipped around it’s ankles, and Aradia blasted it with various Cold, Light, and Water magics from a distance. After she saw Xena heating the metals glowing hot, Aradia shouted: “It’s Adamantium! Melting it won’t work, you’re just making it more dangerous for us!”

The Sword Titan brought it’s blade down powerfully on Thrud, who held her sword up to block and locked her body mechanically, her armor and limbs seizing into a solid interlocked frame. The swords clashed, and Thrud pushed a crater into the ground instead of being crushed outright. “This is the power of Adamantium,” she proclaimed. She summoned an upwelling of magic strength and pushed back the larger sword. “My body was destroyed by a Demon, but my sister summoned the aid of the angels to gift her the materials to rebuild me. Celestial Adamantium and Uru-mithril make me an unbreakable conduit for magic.”

“Stop talking and start fighting!” Xena roared. She attempted to tear the weapon from the Hammer Titan’s hands, but the Titan would not let go. The two quickly transitioned to wrestling, which threw their tangled forms against the walls of the foundry, and they fell through it to the outside.

The Sword Titan made to follow, but Aradia threw up a barrier preventing it from escaping from the magitech assault. It raged at the barrier, striking it with the sword ineffectually. Thrud climbed the wall nearest to it and leapt to try and stab at the burning skull, but as she did the Titan swung its sword directly at her. Thrud was sent flying through the foundry, crashing into the far wall. Aradia dropped the shield as she tried to cushion Thrud’s impact, allowing the Titan to join its other outside.

Xena had been dealing with the Hammer Titan, throwing it at the surrounding buildings, trying to entangle it in debris so she could try and wrest the Hammer from it. The Sword Titan rushed behind her, and cleaved a wide slash in her back. Xena roared and slashed back, allowing the Hammer Titan to gather itself and lift its hammer.

Aradia, rushing out of the Foundry, hit the Hammer Titan with a frost beam, blasting it’s hands and making it drop the hammer. Xena, turning and seeing the Hammer now free, quickly grabbed it, and tried to smash the Hammer Titan’s skull. The Hammer Titan rolled out of the way, but not fast enough that Xena would completely miss it, smashing it’s collarbone. 

The Hammer Titan howled, crawling towards the other, and the Other met it halfway, grabbing it’s hand. Their bones began to melt together, and they flowed into one another, becoming a blob of flame surrounding a swirling mass of bones. The bones melded together, and the new Titan started taking form, not quite twice as tall at the two had been separately, but lanky and slim in comparison. 

“YOU WILL BURN!” they cried. Almost effortlessly, they bent down and grabbed Xena in both hands, and overpowered her flame with their own. Xena resisted at first, hammering away at them, but quickly the pain became too much, causing her form to start to lose cohesion and be drawn into the Titan. She screamed, refusing to surrender. 

“SUBMIT TO OUR WILL, OR DIE!” 

Far below, Aradia continued blasting with ice and water, and Thrud lept up the sides of the buildings to try and reach weak areas of the Titan. 

Xena seethed for a moment, and then relaxed, allowing herself to be drawn into the Titan peacefully. Once her mind had been completely welcomed by the Titan’s two others, then she started fighting again. 

“I submit to no-one. You submit to me!” 

The Titan’s twin minds, not expecting to be turned against, were quickly restrained by Xena’s will, and fought her as she bottled them into a dark recess of her psyche. As she gained more and more control of her new body, she started dousing the flames, and condensing back to a normal human size. The Titans’ powers, instead of being bottled with the minds, were added to Xena’s own, giving her an immense rush as she accepted the quadruple in strength and control they offered.

The Hammer and Sword fell to the ground as the form grew too small to hold them, causing Aradia and Thrud to back away. They watched as the Titan shrunk to human size, flame swirling around it as it went out, and the form itself solidified. They approached cautiously, spell and sword at the ready, watching Xena wrestle the last bastions of the Titans into the pit in her mind.

Xena, kneeling on the concrete amidst the destroyed foundries, opened her eyes. She looked at her hands, seeing them the shade of brown that she had been born with. Her clothes wrapped snugly around her body, and everything she had had in her pockets was there once again. She noticed that there was suddenly an ice-cold sword pressed against her throat.

“Are you in control?” Thrud demanded from her.

“Why would I tell you if I wasn’t?” Xena answered.

“That sounds like her,” Aradia noted. She finished casting a spell, showing her the landscape of Xena’s mind: The roaring flame of Xena in control, and the two smoldering embers of the Titans wrapped in chains. She motioned to Thrud, and Thrud reluctantly removed the blade from Xena’s throat, sheathing it in the space behind her back.

“How do you feel?” Aradia asked.

Xena introspected for a moment. “Stronger than ever,” she eventually answered. “What was that you were saying about Adamantium earlier?” she asked, having a thought.

“Why?”

“What kind of power would be required to incorporate it into my shifting?”

“Immense.”

“I’ll give it a go then.” Xena stood up, walked over to the still-hot giant Adamantium sword, and pressed her hands against it. She utilized all her newfound power and poured as much heat as she could into the metal, scorching and cracking the ground around her before finally the metal succumbed and started flowing freely from the puddles under her hands. She quickly scooped it up, and absorbed it into her skin. Keeping it heated within herself, she used her shapeshifting to create a mold inside her, directed the Adamantium into the mold, and then sucked the heat from it.

When she was done, she carefully pushed the molded Adamantium out through the skin between her knuckles, in three long blades.

“How original,” Aradia dryly noted.

Xena absorbed another thick glob of Adamantium, and remelted the stock she already had. She moved it throughout her whole body, storing all of it in her bones, having just enough of it to replace her entire skeleton. “I’ll keep working on the possible applications of this metal. But for now, Thank you, Aradia. And thanks to you as well, Thrud. Would you mind dropping me off back at the Academy?”

“It would be no trouble.” She summoned one last portal, opening to Xena’s office at the Astra Academy. “Tell Alice I said hello.”

Xena stepped through the portal, and it shut behind her, leaving Aradia and Thrud standing amoung the rubble of the fight.

“This would have to be at least a half million worth of damage she’s caused here,” Thrud said, adding it to a mental tab of damages caused by her allies in fights.

An old, lone renegade stands atop a building, watching the city. She’s been retired for decades, but recent events have turned her world upside down, and she drove herself to her old life of action, trying to seek comfort in the familiarity.

Alice Prince flicked her wrists, re-familiarising herself with her old repertoire of tools and weapons mounted in her all-in-two bracers. Mounted switchblades, grappling hooks, automatic lockpicks, a mounted gun with dozens of ammunition types, and both a stungun and tazer.

She had built it herself… 85 years ago, when she was 15. By now most of the high-tech stuff was woefully out of date. But she wasn’t planning on doing any actual fighting with it, she just wanted to make sure she was still able-bodied enough to use it.

She fired the grappling hook, and lowered herself to the ground. She dashed through the alleys, climbed up and down walls, and grappled across streets. Even at 100 she was as agile as an active 30-year-old, but as a thirty-year-old she had been in the B-tier of superhumans, the tier that existed just beyond the theoretical bounds of natural human ability. He face was wrinkled, and her hair was aged white, and the fire of youth was dying in her green eyes, but she knew she still had it in her to be the superhuman she once was.

She slowed to a stop on the roof of an apartment complex. She spun around in place watching her surroundings, trying to place the reason she felt like she was being watched. It then occured to her pretty plainly: She was.

Karen Reis, current A-tier superhuman-for-hire and former US Army General, teleported into the moonlight behind  Alice, and sighed. “Alice, what are you doing.” It wasn’t really a question, being more of an expression of exasperation.

“What do you want, Kay?” Alice responded. She was brusque with Karen in part because of annoyance, and in part bitterness that Karen was ten years older than her but her powers enabled her to still look no older than 29. But, then Alice looked into Karen’s mismatched blue and green eyes and remembered why they had once long ago been so close.

“I want to make sure you’re not going out and getting yourself killed. The superhero scene is pretty different from what it was when you were last on it. And your costume’s a bit tacky by contemporary standards.” She indicated Alice’s old colorful blue and green skintight supersuit with matching-colored bracers, and compared it to her own ensemble, which was more drab and militant: Combat boots, black ACU pants, a weapon belt with a pair of swords, shoulder holsters with a pair of pistols, and a black tank top.

“I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

“You missed 40 years in the middle where you thought you were too old to do it safely.”

“What do you want me to do about it!? I’m not getting any younger!” Alice turned her back on Karen and continued running across the rooftops.

Karen teleported into Alice’s path and held out her arm to closeline her. Alice, who had been looking back to try and find Karen, ran right into it. “Sorry about that,” Karen apologised. “But if you had stuck around, I could have told you I may know a way to help you out with that last point.”

“What?” Alice asked, cradling her ass after the clothesline had dropped her onto it. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been working security for Doctor Stephen Lazarus. He’s been making unparalleled strides in every medical field having to do with possible immortality. He had a breakthrough just last month. His prototype treatment could be the thing you’re looking for.” Karen held out her hand for Alice to take.

Alice took it cautiously, pulling herself up. “Why are you telling me this? I can’t imagine that you saying any of that wasn’t a breach of contract.”

“Because some things are worth more than all the money that a superscientist can offer.” Karen, still holding Alice’s hand, teleported to the center of Doctor Lazarus’s laboratory, next to a medical tank filled with a luminescent green liquid, and connected to the ceiling and the lab infrastructure by a dozen tubes of various width and material. “I still love you, Alice. I know that the way we ended 40 years ago isn’t the most amicable to starting up again, but I think we can make it work. Especially knowing what we know now.” Karen quickly teleported to the security room, assassinated the guards squinting at the CCTV screen, and disabled the recording systems.

She teleported back to Alice, who was looking intently at the tank. “What is this stuff?”

Karen prodded the controls on the tank, opening it, but setting off an alarm at the same time. “This is the only prepared treatment Lazarus has. He’s going to be set back years if he loses it, and a single use is enough to contaminate it.”

“You’re really going to go back on such a lucrative contract for me?”

“I’d go to Paradise and fight all of the angels of the Heavenly Host if it would make you love me again. Now, hurry, before the rest of security gets here.” Karen pushed Alice into the tank, and closed it behind her. A timer on the tank started counting down from 25 minutes. As she did so, the bulk of the security force showed up: Doctor Lazarus’s failed experiments. A horde of zombies released from the vaults, to overwhelm anybody who thought themselves capable of stealing from the world-famous mad doctor.

But Karen knew how to deal with Lazarus’s trap. She drew a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, and ducked, dodged, and teleported through the swarm, swinging and firing, sometimes swapping hands, and firing and swinging instead. Karen had been the world’s best mercenary for 40 years, and a soldier for the 50 years before that. Even without her powers, she was a very hard person to kill. Once she had dispatched the zombies, the armed guards decided it was safe enough for them to join the fray. Armed with advanced rifles and body armor, they would require Karen to actually focus. The squadron of guards recognised Karen as the head of security, and hesitated, confused as to the next course of action. More than enough of a distraction for Karen to utilize. She holstered her pistol and sword, and told them “Threat neutralised. Someone broke in to steal Lazarus’s experimental treatment, but I can’t stop the procedure without his authorization.” Technically, every word of that had been true. “Give me your comm,” She asked of the closest lieutenant. “I’ll summon Doctor Lazarus.” She took the radio from the guard, and called the doctor. “Stephen, there’s been a break in. Someone is in the rejuvenation tank. Your handprint is the only thing that can de-activate.” As the doctor notified her he’d be there in 15 minutes, she checked the timer on the tank: 22 minutes.

She ordered her unwitting underlings to clean up the 20+ bodies, which represented merely a full year of failed research. Lazarus was barely human anymore, with the experiments he had done on himself and others pushing over an ethical and biological boundary separating him from almost everybody else on Earth.

By the Time Lazarus arrived, all that was left of the mess Karen had made was the puddles of blood on the floor. Karen quickly teleported away and grabbed a thin plastic card from her home, hiding it in her pocket before returning to the lab

Lazarus was a ghost of a man, rail-thin, pale, tall, and with an almost marionette-like way of movement. As soon as he arrived, he demanded to know what was going on.

“There’s somebody in the tank,” Karen explained again. She saw that the timer was down to 7 minutes. As Lazarus approached the tank, Karen slipped the card from her pocket into his.

“Do you know who?”

“I do. An elderly teacher from the Astra Academy. We used to be friends, back in the 2050’s.”

“Ah. So do you know her intentions to utilize this gift she’s stolen from me?”

“She most likely wants to have a youthful form again.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we. I’ll have to initiate the self sabotage. At the stage she’s at in the treatment, she’s already mostly rejuvenated. The only way to deny her the treatment is to dissolve her into the solution.”

“That’s a bit drastic. Can’t you keep her alive, and study her for how well the treatment worked?”

“I know how the treatment works. The problem isn’t how it fails or succeeds in others. The problem is how it fails and succeeds in me. The solution is already corrupted by her enough, dissolving her into it is simply waste disposal at this point.” Lazarus used the control panel to activate the nanobot dispersal to dissolve Alice, and then got right to the chase. “Are you letting your past feelings interfere with your duty?”

As Karen watched the grey goo of nanobots flow through the tube from the ceiling towards the tank, she fought with herself whether or not to go through with her plan.

She teleported nearer to the tank, and in a single action drew her sword and swung it through the tubing, and then teleported away from the lab, triggering the inverse-proximity explosive card she had slipped into Lazarus’s pocket. She teleported back, and found Doctor Lazarus in two still-functioning pieces, divided in half roughly at waist height. His upper half was crawling on the floor, in a puddle of nanobots, oozing a rainbow of chemicals from his bisected torso. His legs were collapsed in a pile, not bleeding or oozing anything, because they had long ago been converted to a solid chitinous mass by Lazarus’s longevity experiments. At least Karen had proof he wasn’t human anymore.

The rest of the security team, breaking out of their stupor, started firing on Karen as soon as she reappeared. The first few rounds hit her, before she could react, because she had noticed that the tank had been damaged by the explosion, and was leaking the liquid inside it, which had turned red since Alice had gone in. That can’t be good, Karen thought before getting shot.

Karen seethed as she charged the guards with her sword, hacking through their body armor with ease. The ten of them were dead in as many seconds. She returned to Lazarus, and sliced his hand off, spraying more rainbow liquid from the wound. She grabbed it, and pressed it against the control panel, which displayed an Error message and refused to unlock. The timer was down to 6 minutes, but Lazarus had said that the treatment had already been administered. She tried to get a good look at Alice through the tank to see if she was ready to be removed, but the red liquid was too opaque to see more than an inch into.

Lazarus grabbed Karen’s ankle with his other hand, and pulled himself closer to her. “It’s too late for her… the process has been disturbed too much. Even if she comes out physically perfect the imbalanced chemicals will have destroyed her nerves and brain.”

“Her powers specifically cancel out neurological damage.”

“Only if they were active during the process. Are you certain that was the case?”

“Just shut up and die already,” Karen said as she impaled Lazarus through his skull. He would be back, somehow, Karen just knew it. In the meantime, though, Alice was still in limbo in the tank, a Schrodinger’s cat, both dead and alive until Karen opened the tank and reality made itself known. The tank’s timer read 5:30. If she opened it when she was supposed to, any damaged caused by the disrupted chemical equilibrium might become permanent. But if she opened it early, any damage from the explosion might not be healed by the treatment. She teleported to her bedside table, grabbed a quarter, flipped it, sighed, and teleported back to the lab. She jammed her swords into the seam of the tank lid, trying to pry it open that way. While it did break the waterproof seal, the tank still refused to open. The puddle of the luminescent red liquid spread to encompass Doctor Lazarus and the majority of the dead guards. She could almost see Alice, well enough that she could aim for a safe part of the tank wall to break. She straddled the tank, and brought the swords down on the glass, shattering it and spilling the last of the luminescent liquid.

A 25-year-old Alice was laying in the tank, unconscious and unbreathing. Her once dull green eyes shone like emeralds, and her white hair had returned to its youthful dark brown.

Karen swiftly scooped her from the tank and laid her on a segment of floor free of bodies, blood, broken glass, and bright-glowing liquid. She checked Alice’s heartbeat: there, but faint. She quickly transitioned to chest compressions to clear her lungs of the rejuvenation treatment. The liquid cleared quickly, but she still wasn’t breathing.

Karen knew the last step was rescue breathing: The Kiss of Life. She pinched Alice’s nose shut, took a deep breath, locked lips with as tight a seal as she could manage, and exhaled directly into Alice’s lungs. She repeated those steps 3 more times before Alice gasped back to life, mid lip-lock.

Karen backed off, and gave Alice her space to readjust, but Alice grabbed her to keep her from getting too far away. Alice blinked blankly at Karen, her old supersenses returning to her, and closely examined Karen’s face. Her tan olive skin, her jet black hair, her green right eye and blue left eye. And in the reflection on Karen’s corneas, she saw herself. She gently touched her own face, feeling the fresh smoothness and suppleness of her once again youthful skin. And, more importantly, she felt the strength returned to her muscles, the ache of age which had brought her to her low point disappeared.

Alice slowly reached her hand up to Karen, hooked it around the crook of neck, and pulled their faces closer together. Karen didn’t resist. Their lips locked again, this time in a true kiss. After a good long moment of that, Karen broke away, giving Alice a moment of doubt that they had gone too far. But then Karen brought up her hand, and made a display of snapping her fingers, teleporting the couple directly into Karen bed.