I woke up in a piss poor mood. Margot came home from work upset and a little freaked out. The director of the DPAA had tried to turn the heat on and pressure my wife into spying on me. I was relieved to hear that she’d said no and was just a little ashamed to find that despite all my, earnest and sincere, attestations of trusting her with my life and more, I’d kind of expected her to betray me

In my defense, most of my relationships, romance or otherwise, had tended to end badly. With the other party either leaving me, dying, or turning out to be an enemy. After more than four years of happiness with Margot, I’d kind of felt like my number was up and I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. The point where things usually turned to shit had long ago arrived. I can’t be only one out there who’s ever started to feel anxious because life was going a little too well.

I was happier than I’d ever been and it was kind of scary because in a laughably short four years she’d managed to bring me to a point where if anything happened to her, or she ended up adding to number of knives that were already embedded in my ancient back, I’d probably never recover. Or at least my recovery would take a few thousand universal heat deaths before I recovered.

It became a whole thing….I’m not talking about my thoughts of doubt. I might not be old enough to have outgrown the insecurities I’d gained from barely surviving eons of having life repeatedly kick my heart in the ass. But, I was old enough to know that you didn’t need to share absolutely everything that went through your stupid brain.

One’s emotions and notions didn’t always need validation. Sometimes silence really was golden. Sometimes the dumb shit we thought of was just that...dumb shit...And the best thing we could do with those thoughts and feelings was to let them float away rather than inflicting them on the people we love. It was only when they started effecting our actions that we needed to say something and it’d take much more than a few stray thoughts, and the meddling of an old government spook, to make me ruin what I had with Margot.

Then again, maybe I was just being cagey, anxious, and neurotic. Rationalizing my high-level of mental and emotional guardedness against those I loved most. Whichever the case was, I was careful to give Margot no hint that I’d ever doubted her. So yeah, the brouhaha for that particular evening had nothing to do with that.

Instead, I spent most of that night talking Margot down from a rushed plan to move overseas. She wanted to leave the country because she was worried that the DPAA was going to act against us. I had to gently remind her that we were both nuke proof and Mentally and physically, my wife was an immortal through and through, but she was new, it’d take a while for her to get used to it. Which was why Director Dillan had felt she could take a shot at seeing if she could pressure her.

Margot was still in the mindset that she was a “person”, a citizen, a tiny existence that had to pay serious attention to the laws of man. An immortal that was used to being an immortal would have either ignored the probe, laughed in her face, or subtly reminded her that the only reason building was standing and she still had flesh on her bones was because of our employment contract.

Most immortals were overbearing and arrogant creatures, even good-natured, humble ones, like yours truly. It was probably something to do with being powerful enough to change the shape of a landscape at will. Flattening mountains, draining oceans, leveling cities...etcetera...that sort of thing.

I managed to calm Margot down...Somehow calming Margot down turned into the two of us fooling around. A little this and that happened, which was fun in the moment, very fun in the moment,...but that meant making sure that my girl didn’t get hurt because she’d decided to fall in love with a literal sex monster. Which in turn meant dealing with the ever worsening backlash that came every time the two of us were intimate.

Fast forward to the present, where I lying in bed feeling like death warmed...warmed over… I was lying there face down in a pillow. Kind of wishing that I a) actually needed to breathe, b)was lying face up and c)someone was pressing that pillow onto my face to put me out of my misery. Then all of a sudden I got that itch again. I could feel the tendrils and machinations of fate reaching out for me and trying to ensnare me.

“Alright...Okay, now I’m mad…” I said. Casting a cleansing spell on myself, insta-equipping some clothes and teleporting out of bed.

I’ve never met anyone badass enough to be able to shrug off “actual” fate, but the artificial fates created by those who plucked at the strings of the cosmos could never touch me if I didn’t want them to. Probability manipulation was something fundamental to my very being, it was a big part of my core peculiarity. I was frankly offended at having some rank amatuer think they could jerk me around.

*************************************************************************************************************

“Almost...Almost there...Have we got him!” said a man. Tall and athletically built. His short-shorn, silken, silver, hair standing on end under influence of the immense energies that flowed through the room.

“No, Master Seth...He….He has escaped my weave...I can’t bind him. His fate has exceeded my grasp!” said a woman. She wept tears of blood while bending over what seemed to be a giant machine. A colossal cross between a steam engine, an industrial loom, and a quantum computer.

“Dammit!... It’s, it’s, okay...You’ve tried your best...I guess we’ll just have to try something else. We’ll settle this matter one way or the other…” said the man. Striking the wall and then running his hands through his hair after his outburst. Fuming as he glared at the numbers displayed on the holographic screen in front of him.

“Yes ...I imagine we shall..” I said as I arrived behind the man.

“What?!”

I didn’t give the man or his immortal companion any time to respond. My aura exploded dominating the entirety of the laboratory I’d found myself in. I took control of the natural laws within the lab, sealing the room from outside intervention. Then I immediately destroyed the artificial fateweaver that dominated most of the room. Firing a wave of telekinetic force that crushed the machine into scrap and then using my alchemical powers to reduce said scrap to iron-sand.

“No! My loom!” cried the woman.

My next step was to take out the woman, she didn’t feel particularly dangerous but she was an immortal, that was like saying a particular weapon of mass destruction looks unimpressive. Even if the bomb isn't a nation killer that doesn’t mean, that some city won’t end up disappearing.

I altered the gravity in the room and the woman was sent flying towards a wall. I added a little telekinesis to the process to keep her from catching her balance and anchoring herself somehow. She found herself pinned there, trapped beneath a crushing weight that ground at her bones and applied enough pressure to make it clear that any attempt to fight back would result in her becoming a greasy smear against that wall.

Then I suppressed her aura as she tried to fight my influence over the room and sealed her power so that her options would be nill. Using my power to counter any moves she might have made and oppressing her my ageless will.

With the woman out of the way, I could focus on the real troublemaker. The man. I knew who he was. I’d sen his face multiple times in the newspapers and more than a handful of television interviews. His name was Carter Seth. He was one of the head executives of the ubiquitous yet secretive Cat Sith Corporation.

I grabbed the man by the neck and lifted him off of his feet. He tried to struggle. It was pointless. He might have been an A-rank superhuman with fae-blood running through his veins but he was still only a man. A mortal. Not that I was looking down on mortals, I’m pretty sure I was mortal once upon a time and look where I ended up...Mortals can be surprisingly capable.

I was just decidedly more than human these days. I’d gotten far more powerful after Margot’s ascension and the amount of power I could express through my physical body was beyond anything the man could contend with.

Despite this being the case, I still decided to err on the side of caution, because like I said, mortals could surprise you. I sealed the man’s magic by boring into his spirit with tendrils of my ruinous aether. I wanted to make sure he couldn’t move anything on the metaphysical level, so I nulled all the man’s powers by disabling his cultivation. Then I shut down most of his nervous system, both central and peripheral. Leaving just enough of his brain function so he could A) comprehend how badly he’d fucked up by trying to trap me in whatever he was trying to trap me in, and B)continue being alive.

Again, just as a precaution, pressed against the man’s mind with just enough psychic pressure to make it hard to think, let alone plan. Just in case, the man happened to be psychic.

I was a little bemused to find that the world’s will was trying to help the lad escape. I could feel this world’s heavenly will trying to invade the altered-space I’d created with my aura. It seemed that I’d unwittingly run into one of this world’s protagonists.

“Nope...You cut that out or we’re gonna have a real big problem…” I grumbled under my breath. Firming my aura and enhancing my complete domination of the space within the laboratory.

I don’t know why I was surprised. Worlds will do what worlds do, and they did so for the sake of their own evolution and survival. I could imagine this world becoming a little more proactive in its defense after nearly being subjected to the horrors of the ENE.

Which naturally meant having at least a handful of favored sons and daughters of heaven, who were granted a little extra support in playing their role as unconscious facilitators of the Earth’s agenda.

Once I was finished making sure that this young man who seemed to have just a hint of “protagonist’s” aura couldn’t get away and wouldn’t be assisted by anybody. I put him down and with a voice that boomed from every direction despite my not speaking above a whisper I said,

“Now,...Who the hell are you? And why the fuck do you keep bugging me?”

I’ll give the guy some credit. He had spunk. He managed to glare at me despite being at under enough mental pressure to turn most men dull-witted. Despite the fact, he was basically paralyzed from the neck down and was only standing because I’d grown tired of carrying him was using my powers to hold him upright, the dude was trying his best to stare me down.

“So...is the part of where you end it all? Is this the part where you ruin our plans?” growled the man

I just sort of stared at him. I wasn’t clueless. My akashic feed was filling me in on the man’s background. TLDR, I was right. The Cat Sith Company almost certainly wasn’t the benevolent, charitable organization that they’d pretended to be. They’d quietly taken the world over one company at a time, one agency at a time, one government at a time. Sowing their seeds early, during the worst of the post-ENE period and making sure that the world couldn’t really function without them after the rebuilding process.

The little organization of mostly mortals had managed to overcome mortal and immortal foes alike in the pursuit of world domination. And honestly, I didn’t care. I couldn’t care less because one of the hallmarks of a high-level civilization is that eventually someone, somewhere takes over the world. That was just life.

“Kill me if you must ...but our vision won’t end with me. This world will ascend. This world will become more and the Cat Sith will be its rulers!” said the man. Growling at me and spitting out a loogey filled with blood and phlegm, that only managed to dribble down the front of his shirt.

I rolled my eyes at the man’s melodramatics. World’s get conquered all the time. It was actually something of a problem if they didn’t because then the politicians who wanted to be big fish in small ponds tended to ruin things by making it seem like working with and playing nice with their neighbors was a problem. Then if a world was really unlucky they’d be just advanced enough to have invented a bunch of superweapons which would inevitably get used and blow everyone up.

“Okay...Here’s what’s gonna happen...You come after me again...You bother me again...I’m gonna have to kill you. End of story. No second chances...The only reason I’m not killing you right now is that you’re technically one of my bosses, and this is about as far as I can take it without breaching my employment contract...It should go without saying that going after my family and friends and trying to use them against me will land you in even deeper shit...Ten times deep… A hundred times deep… Mariana Trench deep… Do you understand me?” I said. My eyes glowing. Literal flames crawling out of my skull and setting my hair ablaze.

The man’s eyes went wide.

“Wait! Can we talk about this fi-...!?”

The man didn’t finish his sentence. He’d passed out. I glared over the woman on the wall who was glaring back at me like I was holding the love of her life hostage ...Which uh-, actually might have been the case. The man’s protagonist-aura meant likely he’d lived quite the life. Including capturing the hearts of quite a few demons, fae, and goddesses. I let go of the man, pulled back my aura and was gone.

She likely caught him before the man hit the ground but would probably discover that I’d been nice enough to heal the man of any injuries, my rough treatment of his body, spirit, and soul, might have inflicted on him.