Bath angled his wings against the wind to gain altitude, reveling in the pressure pushing up against his body. He pulled on his Center, increasing his density while shooting mass particles out behind him for propulsion. They naturally disintegrated and returned to his Center when he went far enough away, a few miles or so.

He didn’t have a clear destination in mind. No: Now, he was simply surveying the ground beneath him. This domain, all that was his, all that was the humans’.

He had been indecisive about the best course to take for the past few years.

Global Warming had only continued to escalate. Spring was unusually warm, and tropical storms across the world were more severe than they had been in hundreds of years. As Bath flew over the West Coast, he saw scorched ravines and an active forest fire.

Already, the weather was careening out of control. As Bath flew over the Earth, he couldn’t help but feel out of place as he observed how humanity had indelibly altered each area underwing. This was an age of man, no longer an age of beasts.

A paradigm shift in every sense of the word.

He was frustrated. Part of him wanted to destroy humans before they could destroy themselves, if only to punish the species’ arrogance. Another part of him wanted to seize control of the planet and protect humanity, force humans to take the actions necessary for Earth’s imminent salvation.

Bath knew now about the different forms of human government. The one that most appealed to him, as it was the way he had always related himself to the world around him, was monarchy. Not the kind of monarchy beholden to a council or a set of lords making policy, but the kind of monarchy that ruled with dictatorial iron.

Bath didn’t presume to know all the answers. He knew for a fact that his problem-solving ability was sub-par to that of humanity’s brightest, if only because of his inability to think of time on a short-term scale.

What he was certain of was his ability to force humanity to unite. Uniting against a common enemy was a common trope in apocalypse films, after all. Whether that enemy be nature, another group of humans, or aliens, it didn’t seem to matter.

Perhaps some time in the future, Bath sighed as he streaked across the clouds, particles blasting behind him in a vaguely purple burst against the sky’s sapphire. Perhaps I may need to become the enemy that humanity now lacks.

He still wasn’t convinced that "Common Enemy" was the only—or best—strategy to force human cooperation. In his time with humans, with his family, with his schoolmates...with Lisa...he had begun to realize that he would prefer not killing humans if given the choice.

Lisa. He didn’t know what to do with regards to Lisa. He was thankful that she had listened to him, and still decided to stand by him. But she really didn’t know much about him.

She knew everything about the human him—the Bath that lived in a suburb of the United States’ capital, who played basketball, who enjoyed school and was popular enough to get by. She knew him well enough to trust him to fly her into the sky.

What she knew wasn’t false, per se, but a facade. It was better than her thinking he was a normal human, but it wasn’t fully satisfying his increasing desire to be known.

Bath angled himself so that he followed the coastline down South, looping down around a foggy bay that could only be San Francisco.

He tried to understand what held him back from telling Lisa more about his past. He didn’t feel shame for anything that he had done; the emotion was still foreign to him. Apex predators didn’t feel shame; any regret was transient and soon forgotten. They did as their whims drove them.

Bath hesitated as he shot forward. Humans, too, did as their whims drove them. Yet they still felt shame and remorse. Why, if humans could feel these emotions, did they destroy endlessly? Was it ignorance? Did they not know that which they did?

Perhaps it is insanity, Bath calculated darkly.

✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽

Bath remembered how things had been years past. Sometime less than one-thousand years ago, he had staked out a territory covering most of Europe, though primarily situated in the Swiss Alps. The area was relatively remote, though resplendent in its beauty. The alps reminded him of a different set of volcanic mountains from millions of years past.

He hadn’t been very conspicuous during that period of time. Some days, he would stand on the tips of the peaks, his form stretching for a hundred feet or more, his wings arching across the clouds in a rainbow of reflective iridescence. That form was one of his favorites: mammalian with avian additions, such as feathers and hollow bones.

Some days he would be bored, or hungry, and he would venture out to collect the tithe of his territory’s inhabitants. Often, they paid with their lives rather than their livestock. Not that he really wanted their livestock, but prey sitting out in the open like sitting ducks was just begging to be eaten.

Oh, the pitiful humans. They built stone structures, readied catapults, weaved fantastic tales to inspire heroics, all for naught. Back then, Bath hadn’t even realized that they were actually trying to fight him. The concept was so foreign—that a species could be so instinctually barren so as not to realize the futility of resistance against limitless might—that it hadn’t occurred to him.

He thought that they were sending off their most magnificent humans, clad in metal like shiny tinsel, for his sake. They were like toy soldiers marching in organized lines, trotting on their fierce destriers. A worthy tribute.

That they feigned resistance only sweetened their offering. He would first descend from the sky with a shriek that literally cracked the Earth with its magnitude. They would clutch their heads; sometimes blood would pool from their ears, he would smell it. He would hear their hearts pick up, racing faster and faster.

Intoxicating.

He would reach the ground with an earth-shaking smash, sending up a column of dust that only rose high enough to obscure his legs. His neck would arch into the sky like a crescent moon, shining brighter than all their metal armor combined.

He would fix his eyes upon them, would watch them as they realized their time had come to a close. He would smell their cowardice as they realized their role as prey, their shit and piss as they quivered in place.

There would always be a brave a thirty-percent or so who ran straight toward his mouth, charging with halberds extended. He would lower himself down to the ground, his chest nearly brushing against the grass beneath, and would stare them directly in the face, his maw opening as they approached, baring each one of his preternaturally sharp fangs.

Sometimes they would throw fire at him. He would exhale, blowing a funnel of wind in their direction. The flames would envelop the humans instead, expanding out into a blaze as Bath fanned them with his pearlescent wings.

Bath enjoyed their games; the ingenuity on the humans’ side was fresh. With other species, the game never changed. The prey never learned, or at least never fast enough.

These humans, they tried to give him a fight. Perhaps that was the greatest tribute of all.

✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽

Bath returned home and sat on his bed. He ran a hand through his hair as he sighed. He noted that he seemed to be sighing a lot lately, likely in correlation with his indecisive mood.

He needed to choose a course of action. Flying around and playing boy with Lisa was never going to complete his objective.

Bath voiced his primary ask: “What is the biggest man-made obstacle to environmental protection?”

Probably oil lobbyists, Bath concluded.

“How did you stop oil lobbyists?”

Besides killing them all off, Bath stipulated grudgingly. He tilted his head.

“How do you stop a politician?” he intoned slowly, broadening the question. Probably with more politicians. He didn’t know much about politics other than what he read in the news or online.

Think. How do you destroy chains of intent? At their source. Where is the source of political intent? Those who seek to gain. Who seeks to gain? Oil shareholders.

Bath growled in frustration, the sound inhumanly low and menacing, like the rumbling of thunder. This line of reasoning wasn’t helping at all; he had no ability to influence the stock market.

There is another angle. Bath cocked his head in contemplation. What if I just attacked the natural resource itself? An oil deposit.

Bath didn’t like this idea by virtue of its ineffectiveness. He needed to change the mindsets of people who got rich off of oil, not give them reason to increase their security.

What if common people became afraid of using oil? Of using gas? Bath mused. That was one way to cut off demand.

“Hmm. This might be difficult to accomplish, but let’s see what I can do.”