The room warped and shifted as its dimensional nature was restored. There was now an open doorway there, and a number of brightly colored and armored women filling it, looking astonished when we suddenly appeared in front of them.

Much to his surprise, I beat the Captain in ramming into them, and with light charges of my Fists, blew through the clustered women and sent them flying in thundering, crackling discharges of electricity. They slammed into the sides of the corridor’s walls, bones breaking and falling wildly all around me in a tumbled heap.

He was obviously superhumanly strong the way he scattered them as well, with Meggan following and cleaning up anyone who still moved.

“Sat-r-nyn’s personal troops,” he muttered under his breath. I glanced at him, then at Meggan, the fey blonde suddenly looking both angry and uncertain.

Ah, women problems? Well, whatever. “Which way?”

I let him lead the way flying, skating along behind him easily enough, while Meggan matched my pace while flying.

I noticed her looking at me curiously as we took the corridors and rooms to wherever the Portal was, and if there happened to be some people who looked like Nazis in carapace armor along the way, well, they didn’t last long.

“Yes?” I asked her directly.

“I can’t sense anything from you,” she said, as we batted aside some goons. “It’s almost like you aren’t there to me.”

“Ah, you’re used to functioning awareness on a mental or magical scale?” I replied, bouncing between three men and sending them flying and broken. Nazis are not something you have to be nice to, and we weren’t.

“I...yes. Visual appearances often are at conflict with the heart...”

“Oh, is that not the truth. You’ll be happy to know both you and the Captain are just as heroic as you appear.” Detect Evil at IX, Know the Heart of Evil. Permanent. Applied to all Alignments. She looked like a fairy angel in the spell, while the Captain looked like a valiant knight.

If anything, she promptly looked even more heroic in that moment, beaming. “Really?” she asked, sounding quite pleased at the compliment.

“Yes, indeed.”

“Is there a reason you shield yourself?”

“I’ve been around telepaths who have bad habits of getting into other people’s heads and doing stuff to them, and diviners who like to scry on others and find out stuff about them. Particularly when undressing or showering.”

She blinked, and then her face contorted. The next Nazi went down rather more brutally than the one before. “Ugh!” she managed to say, face a picture of heavenly wrath.

The Captain was watching and listening, not saying much, and apparently wasn’t disappointed with my combat prowess. “We’re here.” He opened the door to the room with the Portal in it, and the Nazis with a few murderbots all raised their guns at him.

There was an explosion of violence, clearly outlining a large bowl-shaped forcefield directly in front of the Nazis, reflecting it all back at them. With screams they went flying, some through the Portal, most against the walls of the room.

I closed my fist, and Megan’s force blasts blew through the robots, while the Captain zipped forward and his Scepter smashed its head into the biggest one’s torso in a spray of exploding metal.

The scene on the other side was probably not supposed to look like a hellhole of burning woods, buildings, dark clouds, warped land and sky, and stumbling things that might have been humans and now looked like demons stumbling over it. Some of them looked to have the remnants of red, blue, and white uniforms on, too.

“Avalon?” he stared, shocked, and I prodded him forwards, momentarily considering if it was important that I was going to the ‘core realm’ of alternate universes, where I’d be meeting up with people from alternate realities.

Those realities probably did NOT have a Sama or Briggs, and so had ended up very different from our own. Indeed, I was surprised there was a Captain Britain here. Then again, he probably wasn’t Brian Braddock... but who knew?

“Into the breach,” I said, shoving heartily, and he got moving. Meggan looked absolutely horrified as we breached the Portal, and her empathic senses got the full taste of the land and sky.

Yeah, someone had done a number on this place. I eyed the magic and lay of the magic and reality, and coolly brought out a deck of cards, pre-enchanted and the seal broken. As a bunch of things that used to be human and were now Possessed by the dark things swirling in from a vortex over that way in the air came at us, I flicked up the first of the Cards and surrounded it with some voltage before flicking it out at them like a throwing star.

It struck the lead creature, slavering jaws and warped limbs still clad in a parody of the Union Jack, and detonated in silver fire, which billowed out even as it forked to the ones behind it.

There was a blast of silver fire that ate into everything around us, and with a metaphorical popping, everything nearby was turned back to proper reality.

Green grass. Flowering trees. Humans in colorful uniforms, gaping at us. Dark shadows in the air, looking dazed at being forced out of their hosts.

Both the Captain and Megan stared in shock, particularly at the white fire that was burning along everything, rather intense at the edges of the warped areas, eating them away and suddenly reverting them back to reality.

I blew Bites through the possessing spirits, the plasma outlined in vivus, and totally enough to pop them like balloons. The Captains below all flinched at the sight despite themselves.

“Who are you?” the nearest one demanded, a woman with an athletic build, trying to reclaim her sanity by taking charge once again.

“Captain Britain, Earth-1832!” our Captain replied instantly.

“Get out of the way,” I added, raising more Cards and skating forwards.

They hastily did just that, bracing as a howling horde of transformed civilians surged at them. Silver fire exploded, and half-naked citizens fell to the ground.

Meggan was on it this time, brilliant bolts of shining light sweeping through the demons to destroy them.

Explosions of silver fire rained down, reverting the landscape and people caught within it back to their normal forms as I moved forwards calmly, going around and between the fallen people with alacrity as I picked my targets.

A flat steel bar had appeared on my left hand, and I had the Deck slapped atop it. My successive shots were sniping bursts from it, the Cards were accelerated along the bar like a railgun, flashing out instantly to explode in silver fire.

“I’ll have you know this is not cheap!” I told them over my shoulder. “Each of these cards is like a pound of gold!”

“The wealth of Avalon can easily recompense you for your expenses!” the woman called back, hurrying after me with the other Captains. “I am Captain Britannia of Earth-740! Who are you?”

“Dynamo. I’m with him!” A slavering horde of demonic creatures along a road of bones and slime dissolved into normal people on a tiled path in a spray of silver fire. “Hey, is the person responsible for all this under that vortex?” I asked, pointing at the spiraling cloud over the castle that had turned into a gravity-defying, stone-twisted nightmare out of someone’s phallic nightmares.

“Yes! It is another Mad Jim Jaspers!” she announced grimly. “I do not know what you are using here, but it will not be able to-“

I fired off a Joker at the vortex ahead.

Railgun-level speeds, Cyclonic so that nothing interfered atmosphere-wise or gravity with the flight. A streak of silver that went faster the further it went reached out like a pinprick into the distance, and there was a spark Over Dere.

The FOOM of the vortex dissolving and silver fire painting the sky was almost instantaneous. So was the backdraft of silver fire plunging down as feedback damage to whatever reality-warping shit in the castle had put it in place.

The scream of pain at the impact rocked the air for miles around instantly. Someone didn’t like their powers feeding back into themselves.

I bounced and took flight, Repulsing off the air while the rockets on my heels deCompressed and I poured some voltage into them. A second later I was shooting towards that source, occasionally dispensing fast-moving Cards burning with silver light down into crowds of people and things below, analyzing the warpage and rending of reality here, destabilizing it as I blew apart the cornerstones of the effect, and a broadening, shearing swathe of the landscape began to revert to normal.

That didn’t necessarily help the people down there, but if they were thrown into the vivic fires, the distortion wreaked upon them was burned away, and the possessing spirits abandoned them quickly, at which point they could be shot down with magic firearms, arrows, spells, or other various devices the Captains plied to do so.

The two miles to the castle took too long to get to, since I wasn’t Linejumping and was emptying myself of Cards on the way, but that was fine.

After all, I’d made more Decks up just for moments like this, and I still had another Joker.

An acid tripper’s dream of reality, complete with stairways and doors to nowhere, dimensions going all over the place, and someone floating in the middle of it, began to materialize ahead of us. Someone rode up what looked like a massive extruded tongue to first look around, then saw all the brightly-colored sorts approaching him, and turned on us to do something.

The Card detonated right in front of him.

The flash blew him out of the sky, and he didn’t even have time to scream this time as the Joker with the Spellflare took him out. The long seconds he took to hit the ground also gave me more time to approach at speed, while I brought out my IntOrb.

“You all are gonna wanna stay close to the ground,” I Told everyone, Voice carrying clearly as I dropped closer to the landscape, which was shifting back and forth between screaming hands reaching up from pools of the Damned and normal people wavering on the streets of a picturesque town. The reality of it was fluctuating badly, and it went with ‘forth’ when I shot off the last few Cards into specific points and collapsed the thing entirely.

Some of the Captains had swung off to save the people below as we came, more did now. Only us three and Britannia were left as we swept towards the psycho behind all this.

He was getting up, his checkered clothes repairing themselves and changing to another suit, then shifting to a different one every couple seconds, while his internal injuries were willed away. He didn’t look happy as we came in.

However, he was smirking and totally confident of himself as he did so. Reality Warper, existence itself his to play with.

I cut out the jets and Repulse, and dropped to the ground as I charged up my IntOrb.