“Yeah, well, at least I don’t have to wade out of the rubble of this one, Corporal,” Hill said gruffly, thoughts flicking back to older times, when his power first manifested. “You still got damn fine aim, kid. It’s a pleasure watching you shoot.” He reached into a big pocket of his coat, pulled out a custom cell phone he’d lifted from by the Master Vampire’s chair while mired in those scarlet tentacle things, and handed it over to Hawkeye.

“I had incentives to get better after that,” Hawkeye admitted, accepting the phone and stowing it with a glance and a nod. “I’ve already called for ambulances and support. They’ll have the water and power turned off here shortly, and get the rebuilders in to work on things.” There was a beep at his waist, and he looked at the display on his bracer. “Damn, that girl is efficient. Eight survivors, forty-three ghouls, thirty-nine var-bats, twenty-seven Drinkers, and eleven vampires, with one Master Vampire.”

“What’s the pay if you didn’t kill anything?” Hill asked bluntly.

“My share would have been about two hundred thou,” Hawkeye eyeballed it. “Not that any of that shit would have endured your Weight.”

Hill nodded curtly. “That’s two hundred thousand I owe you then, Corporal. Figure out what you want me to do for it.”

“I’ll think on it,” he agreed, and extended his hand. Hill took it readily, shook it carefully, and spun around to stride away with that tireless, domineering, carefree walk that indicated he was going to walk through anything in his way, and it wasn’t going to stop him.

Hawkeye watched him go. He’d seen eight of those floating Cards with people on them floating at the edge of the block, while all the lights in the neighborhood were on and sleepy people were coming out, wondering just what had happened here.

They were all likely to be angry and overly dramatic. They’d had their sleep interrupted, their safety threatened, and most importantly, they’d missed the whole show! Hawkeye shook his head and started after Hill, then watched as Hill suddenly shot into the air and got himself a big headstart on heading back to his van.

That was definitely a new trick from The Mountain. Hawkeye shook his head and grinned to himself as the first of the police cars pulled up, not seeing the merc jump away at all, and the public relations and liaising part of his job began.

-------

Mr. Hill came down about thirty yards shy of the van, in light gravity mode and partial Reversefoot slowing the impact so he didn’t leave any big indents in the road or sidewalk.

I was off-loading stuff from Card-Disks into the van. Those things included seven different wall-mounted paintings, four sculptures in bronze and marble, ten more paintings rolled up in storage, a wall-safe I’d yanked right out of the wall, multiple Rolexes, and a couple boxes of jewelry for both men and women, among other things.

“Nice.” Mr. Hill looked at the wall-safe, got a grip on it, and expediently tore the lid right off its hinges with a crunching, squealing protest of mangled metal. He looked at the stacked cash, bars of golden metal, and glittering gems inside, along with some papers, and grunted approval.

I reached inside the safe, liberated a ruby, and tossed it up to him. He caught it smoothly and popped it into his mouth, sucking loudly, as I gently moved the stricken safe into the back of the van. “Good haul. Nice things about vamps is we don’t gotta fence the things, either. We can put the artwork up through public auction. Makes a lot more money,” he mentioned with the air of a man who carefully takes note of such things.

“I bow to your expertise in such matters.” My telekinetically-aided looting spree transferred into the van, the Card-Disks vanished, and I closed the doors.

“A good morning’s work, Mr. Hill,” I bowed to him.

“Damn right, girl,” he grinned, heading for the driver’s side. “Let’s blow this highbrow place, and you can mix me something way too expensive to celebrate.”

-----

The excess Lightning oxides were a big hit. Mr. Hill was sitting on his back porch as sparks popped and crackled out his eyeballs and nose, clearly enjoying the sensation.

He came wandering in about an hour after dawn, sat down across the counter from me in his big kitchen, and watched what I was doing.

I was mixing some kind of brown sludge up in a mixing bowl. Lightning was crackling over my hands as I did so, humming thoughtfully.

His dark grey eyes glanced over to the oven. “You making a cake or something?” he asked archly, taking in the gold and silver bars that had been cut up neatly, some containers of metallic beads sitting around, and another mixing bowl of some kind of pasty dough.

“Uh-huh. They should be ready in about fifteen minutes.” I set down the bowl of viscous dark goop, and picked up another bowl full of stuff black as oil, and began stirring it energetically as I added in some mineral oils and odd compounds. It thickened up nicely as I stirred it. The last bowl with bone-white stuff was last, and it had little red flecks in it, further drawing his interest.

I knew he didn’t have much of a sense of smell, so I wasn’t worried about him figuring it all out. I finished whipping the heavy stuff up as the timer on the oven went off, and without using pads or anything, I brought out the three circular cakes baking inside on the racks.

They kind of glompfed when I set them down, not being light in the slightest.

He watched in fascination as I flipped the pale white cake out, and it barely flexed, clearly not made of dough. With great speed, I spread the white frosting all over it, and then sprinkled it with pale blue sapphire chips.

His lips pursed at that, while I gently put the dark orange cake on top of it, veined through with the green of jade. I smeared on the black frosting artfully, before treating that with tiny beads of molybdenum.

The literally golden cake went on top with the chocolate-hued frosting formed the third layer, which I accented with ruby and amethyst flakes.

He was staring at it in fascination. I went over to his refrigerator, and brought out a metal cylinder. I set it on the counter, which creaked at the weight.

“Quicksilver, diamond dust, and metal nuts ice cream.” I flourished a scooper made out of heavy steel, suitable for cupping molten lead, and set out a big plate. I scooped out three big frozen curls of metallic ice creams, sparkling here and there, with chunky nuts of various heavy metals in it, with dark black veins of iridium and deep blue cobalt snaking through it.

His jaw dropped. I flourished a knife of blue-black metal, put my weight on it, and slowly carved down through the cake.

“Water-aspected precious metals can foam. So you put in some hydroxides that expand under heat, and you can make a dough out of them. Changes the taste, too, of course, but they are still metal, so a bit tough to cut.” I cut an eighth of the cake out for him, dropped a certain single sapphire ex-cufflink on top, and put the layered cake on the plate before shoving it towards him on the steel plate.

A fork and a spoon of adamantine, double normal size and with handles big enough to be comfortable for his hands, came down on each side of it.

He just stared at it for a moment in awe. It looked a lot like cake and ice cream, but no cake was ever spun out of gold, silver, and copper like this, and no ice cream looked like quicksilver.

“It’s melting,” I prodded him. Mr. Hill stopped trying to drool, grabbed the fork and spoon, and got to it with careful gusto.

It took him about twenty minutes to eat it all. The adamantine knife, fork, and spoon were something I had made on the sly for him once I got the tungsten to do so, and the way he was licking them made it plain they tasted damn good all by themselves... but he needed them to work the metallic food, so he wasn’t going to eat them.

I heard the sapphire crunch as it joined the last of the cake going down his throat. His eyes were closed as he worked it all around his mouth, and swallowed, bit by bit.

“Gods damn it all,” he breathed when he got done. He opened his eyes to stare at me. “I just ate something nobody else on this planet ever has, and so they have no idea how damn good it tasted.”

I shrugged, having already covered the cake in order to spare the flies who would die sampling it, and the ice cream was already back in the freezer. “Total guesswork, although listing up what stuff tasted like to you helped. Then I just had to get the textures correct. Not having to use a welding torch to heat up the cakes took some finagling.” I.e., I’d had to Heat Metal the batch while it was inside the oven.

He looked at the rest of the cake, groaned, and looked away, the look in his eyes that of the little kid who doesn’t want to steal a cookie while mom is watching.

“Nobody’s gonna steal it on you, and it’ll be just fine if it sits there for a decade, given what it’s made of,” I told him. “No urgency, and you might have noticed there’s about twenty grand of precious metals and stuff in it.”

He got a weird look in his eyes, bright and amused. “I really do eat the most expensive meals in the world. Haw!” He reflexively put the spoon in his mouth to suck on, caught my eye, and hurriedly took it out. “What in tarnation are these made of? They aren’t adamant, but I can suck on them all day!”

“Adamantine. Earth-energized Tungsten. Has the unique property of being able to carve through anything softer than it real easy-like. Which, if you gotta carve up something made out of metal, is very useful.” I nodded at the set. “That’s ten k in metal right there. Do not eat the cutlery I made for you.” I held up a tootsie roll-sized plug of the stuff, and set it on his plate. “Try sucking on this for a few hours as an aperitif.”

He plucked it up, shoved it in between his cheek and gum, and slurped noisily. His heavy eyes opened up a little bit.

“Aww, this is just damn cheating,” he muttered, staring at me. “It’s like every sweet and sour gobstopper I ever ate, all in one!”

“Good to hear,” I smiled. “So, you ready to try out some teleporting in a few hours?”

“You let an old man digest his breakfast and suck on his candy a bit, and sure.” He rose to his feet and headed back to his swing chair on the back porch.

I smiled as I began to clean up, Vier’s TK flitting about and gathering things, while Prestidigitation did the cleaning. The excess frosting went into small bowls, I could maybe use it for Heavy cupcakes or something. Spun Water Platinum would be interesting to work with...

I glanced at the LA Times, and the small pic of Spider-man swinging along on it. The article said he’d been involved in an altercation with another armored-suit wearer, vaguely in the heavy style, calling himself The Beetle.

The parade of animal-named villains with no fashion sense would continue.

So, he hadn’t been sent to Xavier’s yet. Mmm, but there was no way to stop it, it was going to happen. There just weren’t that many places around to teach underaged kids how to handle super-powers.

So, I had best get there before it happened, and Xavier’s subtle racism exacerbated Stater tendencies to distrust the Powered, ending up in what would be a race war for survival, with humanity eventually using technology to make up the edge, and ruthlessness to prosecute it.

Sentinels going out of control would never happen, no, no... I noted that despite there being some truly advanced computers in the world, at the very least Briggs and Sama had not invested in any form of AI...

Pym was here, with Tony Stark. That meant that Ultron was basically inevitable, because those two were too smart to restrain their own intellectual accomplishments.

Well, I honestly didn’t care about the Avengers. The whole ‘Marvel Universe’ had basically revolved around New York City, with other countries being stopover points or simply irrelevant to the whole thing... unless Avengers or Avenger enemies came from them.

Their top-position had already been taken at the high levels. Nobody knew what Russia truly had, but Erik Lensherr was there, Primus was from there, the Black Widows were from there, and all the Shielders were from there. The High Guard was able to face off against alien fleets, random gods, demon lords, and whatnot.

Down here, the Champions were ready to go around the world to help put down things. The fact New York City was going to be its own world didn’t make them important.

Now, when the Norse Pantheon started getting active, that might be a thing, but I had a feeling Sama and Briggs were prepped for Loki pulling some crap...