“Hah! Hah...” He was looking straight ahead, but his thoughts were elsewhere. “That’s good. That’s real good. Is there a trick or a catch?”

“Heavyfoot is just like lightfoot. Takes time, patience, practice, talent, and really good timing to do it right. Once you have it down, you just go on to the next step.”

“Next step?!” he repeated, his bristling eyebrows actually going up.

“Caroming. You ride the recoil as you come down, either adding force, losing it, or redirecting it.” I made bouncing movements in the air that increased as they went.

“I’ll be damned.” He saw my expression. “There’s more?”

“Once you can Carom, you learn how to Avalanche Run. You use your Heavyfoot to suck in all the recoil force with each step, repelling you from the ground, and you start running with some really big, long strides... which sounds damn impressive, but doesn’t actually do anything to the ground.”

“Huh...” His dark eyes were agleam. “And I could learn to do all that?”

“All heavyfoot starts with Rooting, anchoring yourself against being moved so you can exert your strength. You’ve probably got the strongest Root on the planet.

“More to the point, you’ve got that Weight of a Mountain move that brings down the gravity, and you just told me you’ve got command of your own gravity. Come down at 5 g’s, bounce up at 1/5 g’s... that’s like mixing heavyfoot and lightfoot together. Your only problem is going to be moving your legs fast enough to keep up.”

“Huuuuu,” he sucked in a long burning bit of the cigar, bright in the darkness of the very early morning light. “So, how fast do you think I could go?” he drawled slowly, picturing the scene.

“I don’t know how strong your heavyfoot is versus your Might. But picture yourself hauling back a big spring with one foot... that spring is your Root. Then you let it go.

“You can’t shoot yourself via jumping, but you can prime a catapult and release, right?”

“I can indeed. Hur hur hur!” His chest shook as he laughed to himself. “You busy tomorrow? Well, today.” He squinted east.

“You don’t sleep either, do you?”

“I only sleep when some mutt lays a big enough wallop on my head to knock me cold,” he confirmed. “Haven’t fallen asleep for years.”

“I notice the neighborhood delivers a lot of books to you, and I’m pretty sure most of them end up at the local library.”

“Yeah. I ain’t never gonna call myself bright, but I don’t like wasting books. Sure, it’s not as good as real experience, but most folks, if they take the time to put something down on paper, there’s gotta be something behind them doing it.

“Of course, some people put shit down because they can, but good readin’ gets a man to thinkin’, and there’s nothing wrong with a little thinkin’ when you’re not beating some sense into an ironhead or two.” Ironheads being slang for people in power armor of one sort or another.

“Yeah, just gotta sift the gold from the gravel,” I agreed. “You know, the fifth move of Heavyfoot isn’t a foot move at all.”

“Is that so?” His eyes gleamed again.

“It’s called Heavy Hand. You let the Heavy Release go completely through you and into your hand.”

His cigar was getting stubby, but it flared a couple times as he breathed in and out slowly, thinking that over.

“I imagine your hand would be moving pretty fast if you did that,” he grunted softly.

“Yeah. One-half mass, times velocity squared.”

His cigar was almost down to his lips before he said anything more, and he spit it out the open window. “Girl, you show me how to do that stuff, and I will owe you big time.”

“You’re gonna owe me more when I figure out some decent recipes for you to fix for yourself.”

He glanced over at me, and grinned slightly, his face not really capable of moving that far. But extended belly laughs were escaping him as we headed back to the lair.

------

Chopsaw sent a man over with the cufflinks before noon. Mr. Hill popped one into his mouth without hesitation and began sucking on it in obvious enjoyment.

I told him to save the other for a while, as he might want it for a topper.

He was startled when I wanted to buy platinum, and indeed, I blew pretty much my whole haul on it.

When I told him I was buying it to Burn away to make magic items, he gave me a look somewhere between total craziness, the disgust of feeding wagyu beef to your cat, and plain curiosity that I could make magic Toys.

Most gloriously, platinum was five times as valuable as gold for making stuff like this, but only cost twice as much. I couldn’t imagine why Sama and Briggs hadn’t let that particular bit of news get out there and move world precious metal prices, but then, one controlled the world’s superpower, and the other was the world’s wealthiest and most dangerous woman. Money was not an issue for the stuff they wanted to do.

He made the buys for me, as him doing so was totally normal.

Then we went out into the desert.

-------------

The people who tooled around out here did so in dune buggies, with maybe some devoted hikers. The local Tribes tended to watch over the landscape, and if you started messing with stuff, it was entirely possible you’d wake up in the morning with your house full of sand and a tarantula in front of your nose to show their displeasure.

The Tribal Nations were one of the very big differences between this North America and the history of the one I was familiar with. I assumed that Sama was behind it all, as her fingerprints and companies were all over in them.

Basically, someone had come in and introduced a viable economy and some sort of high-end magic to the Indian nations after the Trail of Tears, and in the space of literally a couple of years, the native tribes in the plains west of the Mississippi had gone from a hunter-gatherer culture to one of the most aggressively-armed, equipped, and trained peoples in the world.

Combined with some massive weather control magic that had inflicted severe droughts on white farmers, the tribes had driven back the spreading settlers aggressively, using more advanced technology and weapons, burning down settlement after settlement, shooting down anyone who resisted, and herding the rest remorselessly back to the great river in their own Trail of Tears.

At the same time, they’d issued a call that any slaves who made it to their territories were free, and on top of that, they began to raid and recruit slaves from across the South, bringing them back across the river and giving them their own homes and lands to work on and fight for.

The American War that had resulted from it was a total slaughter, to the stunned amazement of the white forces coming in. Special ops teams had torn apart their infrastructure, pestilence and drought had destroyed their farm economy, and well-coordinated slave uprisings had swept across the South, burning and pillaging and looting as they made their way west to sanctuary.

The United States had sued for peace when the first air raid of machine-powered aerial vehicles bombed New York City and set the whole place ablaze, skipping over a dozen other cities they certainly could have bombed in the meantime. The warning was taken to heart, especially when the ten wealthiest States citizens alive all perished in the same day to seemingly random accidents, and nobody failed to get the message.

The Mississippi River had literally divided the nation, and the Rio Grande cloven it from Mexico, while most of the white settlers were chased out of Texas, too, unless they were willing to bow to the laws of the Tribal Nations.

This unbelievable move was compounded by the Russian Civil War of 1860, which deposed the czar and the nobility with stunning speed and thoroughness. Briggs, the Great Bear, had risen up over the new Soviet Russia and claimed it with an iron fist that had left the nations of Europe quaking in fear.

Among other moves, he had naturally declared alliance with the Tribal Nations, and ceded Alaska to them, panicked flights of non-Russian white folks following immediately thereafter. With the Tribal Nations rapidly reclaiming dominion over lands in what would have been Canada, this world was indeed much, much different from what had gone before.

The classical expansion of the United States had ended at the Mississippi, crushing the nation’s manifest destiny outright. Although there were two abortive wars to take territory after that, focused on what had been Wisconsin and Texas, the retaliation was both extreme and precise at the same time, wiping out the invading forces with appalling speed and then reaching across the whole of the country to eliminate the warmongers in their homes.

Each time, the Tribal Nations took something in forced payment. Chicago was the cost of the Second American War. Orleans was the cost of the Third.

The States had reeled under the impact of suddenly being inferior in technology, in warfare, and before the unknown powers of the Tribal warriors who had slaughtered the States soldiers. Their spies vanished into the Tribes, never to return, even those threatened with deaths of their families and loved ones, while black and red men flowed continuously across the river, abandoning States lands for places they were treated as equals.

Soon enough, whispers of the Core techniques came to the ears of the east, mostly through contacts in California, who still had a Caucasian population in some numbers after the gold rush, although many had been evicted from lands they themselves had stolen. Definitely superhuman beings were identified as coming from the Tribes. When desperate white men sent the likes of vampires and werewolves to instill terror in response, the Tribes were once again waiting and ready, and even more powerful men died messily.

European influence across the world was attacked on a coordinated and unprecedented scale by disciplined, superhuman warriors who overshadowed them as they had so many other lands. Their armies were withdrawn bloodied and broken in many cases, while the lands they had thought of as their own imperial conquests began to modernize with literally breath-taking speed... and far more equitably than when under the invading white men.

Russia itself had seemed to be in ominous hibernation, only stirring when fools poked it, and it reached out and took them for itself. Where they got the weapons they unleashed, and if the Tribal Nations or Russia were the first to invent them, was unclear, but soon enough it was clear that waking the Great Bear was a death sentence for those involved, and the Winter Guard loomed at all Russian borders in Eurasia, ready to make fools pay.

All that didn’t seem to have stopped the emergence of World War I, as the stress of populations and interconnected treaties and ties between the wealthy erupted into a war for dominance and power in Europe. They and the remnants of their colonies all went at it with a will and a way, striving to become that ultimate power that dominated all of Europe.

Technology had rapidly started to catch up to what the Tribes and Russia had displayed on occasion, but nobody had yet found much of a solution to the superhuman combatants both forces had been able to field.

The United States had intervened in Europe on the side of Britain and its allies and forced the war to a stalemate, thus setting up the situation where a frustrated artist had started a revolutionary movement called National Socialism in Europe, and World War II had beckoned.

The Great Bear had naturally anticipated this, and opened his borders to the Jews from many nations ahead of time. An entire region of the Ukraine was basically set aside for them to settle in, a level of hospitality and acceptance shown for the people being pressured by the Nazis and rising anti-Semitism that was completely unexpected by the rest of the world.