Her Vaccine beeped, and then it beeped again in two tones she would never mistake for anything else. Dealer hauled the phone out of her Vest and looked at it.

Diamonds were winking around the display words. She grimaced despite herself.

Time to be the dutiful inhabitant of Terra and do my duty taking care of something... No, no, this isn’t tied to Dynamo and Richards bringing in some aliens, no, no...

Reality Warper in Alexandria. Take care of it.

Shit!

-What’s going on in Alexandria?- she promptly /asked her Simulacra and everyone else, as they tracked more information than any one of them could. Benefits of multiple eyes and heads, woo!

-The Avengers uncovered a cell of Skrull sleeper agents, it erupted into a shoot-out across half the Eastern Seaboard. SHIELD addressed the ones around Alexandria, but there’s something going on out there that almost blew a helicarrier out of the sky...- Dynamo’s Number Fourteen, who worked in the Associated Press bureau, /replied promptly.

A Reality Warper...

Well, a job for a Caster, which is why it had been sent to her. She calmly blew the V, and Teleported away.

-------

She came up near Arlington, on a lived-line she had stretched this way, and promptly shot into the air, assessing the situation.

Smoke off to the west in several places. There was a helicarrier over there, moving south under full power, and a big roiling ball of flame north of it.

A ball of flame... that looked like someone screaming.

She Linejumped over there, just in time to meet the blast of it in her face.

It was pretty hot, but also quite rigidly defined, air changed to plasma and not radiating like it should. Telltale marks of a Reality Warper. Her skin went red and then cooled off almost instantly.

Most importantly, it had a Caster Level in the range of Twelve.

She let the flames blow past her harmlessly, Eagle Eyes up and looking around, and she met the eyes of someone who looked like he was going out of his mind below her, standing in the middle of a massive crater/sinkhole blown out of a neighborhood. He was staring at her, his eyes bulging, and he didn’t look friendly at all.

The way space was bending all around them, and the ground rippling like it was fluid, certainly didn’t help.

“You! WHO ARE YOU!” his voice filled the whole space like thunder, filled with desperation and pain. Veins were throbbing on his head, and power crashed down on her with obliterating force.

The Interdiction went off without her saying a word or moving. Ah, rep counts on Still and Silent Spell, a boon to Casting thou art...

With a voop, the expanding area of magic reached out to reality, soothed it, locked it down, and his wild and crazy thrashings at it... did a whole lot of nothing.

Sure, he had humungous amounts of power to do what he was doing... but his quality level didn’t match up.

Still, if it was Flux... Dealer was sure Lady Sersi Cast at Twenty. That made a ten percent chance or so this guy could win a check, maybe more if his emotional state got worse, and that would probably mean her instant death... or as dead as you could make an Eternal like Sersi.

Whereas Dealer could automatically win that Caster Level check, or simply enter with an Interdiction already up and shut him down before he realized she was there, if she was at all sneaky.

Her effective Caster Level for checks like this was in the +46-50 range. This fellow in the bloody shirt below didn’t have a prayer. With Steady Focus, this guy below had no chance whatsoever of doing whatever he was trying to do... or not trying to do, and was doing anyway, as it were.

That was important, because he was still ‘trying’. His power was running rampant, uncontrolled and responding to whatever trauma was currently afflicting him. He looked older than a normal mutant, which meant that whatever his trigger condition had been was high enough that puberty hadn’t cleared it.

She floated down from the air as he clutched at his head, doubtless feeling like the air around him was suddenly made out of iron, the Veil refusing to bend to him, and his power was pounding at it like he was crashing against walls of steel.

“You!” he screamed at her as she came down, running towards her, trying to clutch at her and his head at the same time. “What did you do!? Get out of my head! Go away! Leave me alone! Take it away!”

He was trying to grab her, and she Repulsed his fingers and they kept sliding off her awkwardly. She could feel the ripples on him. If his power was working, he literally would have torn her apart as if she wasn’t there.

Assay, one Matthew Malloy. It was the only thing she could read about him.

Well enough. “Mr. Malloy,” she greeted him cordially in an accent that could soothe almost anything, as if he wasn’t raving like a lunatic.

“HOW DO YOU KNOW MY NAME!?” he wailed at her, still trying to clutch at her and failing.

“If you continue to grope me, sir, I am going to slap you,” she warned him calmly.

“TAKE THIS PRESSURE AWAY! TAKE IT! YOU BROUGHT IT WITH YOU! I SAW IT!”

Whap!

He stumbled as she smacked him solidly, shocked despite himself. Dealer tidied up her finely stitched vest primly, straightened up her blouse, and stared at him as he touched his cheek. “Are you always so rude, Mr. Malloy? Do you always grope women before introducing yourself, at the very least?” she asked him archly.

“You, you already know my name!” he spluttered in protest, wobbling back and forth.

“And do you think that constitutes an introduction?” She lifted an eyebrow in perfect lofty counterpoint.

“I, ah, ahhhhhh...” he was trying to think, and his power was trying to get out, and his brain was in the way of both. He stumbled back, and the Veil was bashed repeatedly.

She pulled out a magical Harmonica made of gold and diamonds, Change Instrument’d it to a Violin with a flicker of thought, and began to play.

Gold and diamonds because the value of the instrument it could turn into was reflected in its own value. She could turn the damn thing into a pipe organ if she needed to!

There were three modes of Perform she had off Minstrel Ranks: song, dance, and the violin. Dynamo should probably have taken the piano, or even stage magic to help her out, but she knew the Rule of Cool was to go with what you loved, and both of them and Ace wanted to be able to play the violin. They didn’t have the skill points for all the rest, only a Feat to make them proficient...

Of course, Singing a very sad opera in Italian using the Sublime Chord while she Played only went well all together.

It wasn’t a truly magical effect per se, and his Reality Warping couldn’t latch on to anything to stop. It was just sound, and music.

Transcendentally pure sound and music, at somewhere in the +30 area.

A 40 was enough to play in Odin’s hall and be acknowledged as a master.

The Heartsong flowed into his grief and let it rise, swamping his power, and making him focus on the song instead of his lack of control. The pounding and tearing at reality eased, or at least became more rhythmical, which meant the power flowed away and both hurt him and stressed the Veil less.

She began to move as she Sang and Played, a triple Heartsong effect he couldn’t tear his eyes from. He was only able to hear the longing and the sadness behind what she was doing, and all the emotions in his shattered heart poured out with them. He slumped there and sat as he stared, watching her Sing Dido’s Lament, Play it, Dance out the remorse in every word, and he just cried.

She totally could have killed him straight off, and there wasn’t much he could have done about it. She was probably totally within rights to do so, given there was a crater a quarter-mile across in a populated neighborhood here.

She sighed as she pulled at a piece of steel rebar sticking out of the remains of a house nearby, and had it floating in front of her using Telekinesis. She swapped Playing with TK on the violin, grabbing the rebar and re-Casting an Interdiction on it. Then she slid over his way, and calmly bent it into a torc around his neck.

He kind of thumbed it absently, then ignored that it was there. Still Singing, Dancing, and Playing, she also pulled out the Crystal Vaccine and snapped a picture of him.

‘Subject Matthew Malloy has suffered some extreme level of psychological trauma. Am currently in an Interdiction Zone locking down his Reality Warping powers. If you wish it to be made Permanent, will require ten pounds of gold to burn. Subject needs severe telepathic counseling, disciplining, and might not ever be able to cope with his powers. Assuming you have a better non-lethal solution?’

The reply was about a minute in forthcoming. ‘Interesting resolution. Yes. Proceed here. Will be waiting.’

A map of the area popped up, indicating direction and where to go. It looked like a small wooded area close by.

Dealer put the Vaccine away, resumed playing by hand, and picked up Mr. Malloy with Telekinesis. He kind of went with the flow as she was playing, drifting in the wind, and maybe the wonder and joy of flying for the first time helped him deal with things as she Serenaded him, and they left the area.

--------

A small clearing in a copse of woods between neighborhoods, a nowhere place that meant nothing, except it was in Alexandria and near the Pentagon. Dealer swooped down from the sky, and Sama was waiting there, a Disk out, watching her as she and Mr. Malloy came in.

Dealer had cleaned Mr. Malloy up, given him a fresh t-shirt that read ‘I’m A Survivor’ in big black letters, and if he looked mostly out of it, well, that’s what listening to a Heartsong at 40 does to the average person.

Sama didn’t look much different than Antarctica: ageless scarred beauty, Nothing To See Here, jeans, slippers, a shirt with the symbol of the Champions on it, crossed leather belts, a Di-Vest of what really looked like dragon wing leather. She was toned and slender and somehow managing not to radiate any sense of threat at all as she stood there, eying the stricken man with depthless calm in her gaze.

Her heavens-blue eyes noted the incoming Interdiction sharply, but she said nothing as Dealer landed and slowly wound down her Playing and Song, Mr. Malloy floating in the air beside her in a sad and sobbing trance.

Sama held out a chain necklace of greyish-black metal with a dangling laen pendant hanging from it in one hand, and a small bar of gold in the other.

Adamantium! In a necklace! Dealer wanted to make a crazy face at working the stuff into links that small and fine. It didn’t look all that much different from a fancy golden necklace, except given its price, it was worth way more than gold!

“Re-Cast the Interdiction, radius of one foot from wearer. Center it on the pendant.” Sama wagged the bar of gold in her off hand. “Permanency.”

Dealer nodded obediently, flicking her Violin back into Harmonica form and stashing it in a pocket, which bulged slightly in the Interdiction as it wouldn’t re-Compress.

Mr. Malloy just hovered there in mid-air, kind of hugging himself, and muttering “Jules, Jules, Jules...” under his breath.

Dealer re-Cast the Interdiction calmly, tightly restricting the radius down to six inches of whoever it was worn on. Gold burned as she worked the Permanency into the spell deftly, extra magical power tying off the duration to infinity and basically locking down his Reality Warping permanently, unless he could get out of it.

There were many ways to do so, of course, with shapechanging being the most obvious, but that was on him... Ho, no, Dealer noticed there was a vein of tulstang running through this thing, which would render his body immutable to transformations. Not so easy...

Once she was done, Sama took the necklace back, walked over, and somehow managed to get two solid, fine adamantium links to pass through one another and link up, putting it around Mr. Malloy’s neck as he hovered there and barely acknowledged her as she unbent the rebar and tossed it aside.

With an aura like a protective mother bear, she calmly plucked him up in a bridal carry, effortlessly hoisting him and breaking the TK effect. “Bring that down,” she told Dealer, glancing at the rebar, and with a wave of her hand, Dealer cancelled the Interdiction rising off of it.

Sama’s foot lashed out, not disturbing her balance at all, ripping open a ten-foot gash in the air. The tight Interdiction on Mr. Malloy didn’t interfere as she strode through, humming a gentle Song of her own as she did, the wooded and mountainous area beyond looking like a slice of pastoral paradise before it closed behind her.

Idaho, maybe...

------

Dealer considered what was going to happen as sheTeleported back home.

Sama would Open his Core... a Core that was rated at over eight hundred, by what Dealer had felt. If he could even Open it.

That would bring out his Mind Blade, and allow him to train it and some psionic powers, while all the Reality Warping stuff would stay locked.

That necklace of his would stay on, probably until he could cut it off himself. That... would take a lot of time and discipline to attain.

If he didn’t have the willpower the one time he could, he’d never be able to Open his Psionic Core. His Mutant Core was just too big, and would seal itself behind his first attempt. Dealer couldn’t picture anyone without a level of focus that would rival her own getting it open afterwards.

That would leave one of the potentially most powerful beings on the planet imprisoned in the cage of reality like everyone else, only he’d be able to sense it when his power pushed at it and nothing happened.

Dealer’s Interdiction should work all the way up to him getting a +34 Caster Level check, which, with no opportunity to actually Warp Reality, should be impossible, like trying to increase your agility while being unable to move.

If he could do so, he’d be a huge asset to the planet. It just remained to be seen...