Several minutes later, the rather attractive redhead rose to her feet.

Her unsightly, towering bare skull was gone, and so was her overly slender build. She looked like a normal healthy woman in her twenties, clutching a short green Mindsword in her hand as she stared at her arms, and then at me.

“Earn your freedom,” I told her calmly.

“Yes! Yes, I will!” she almost cried, and rather surprised me when she gave me a tearful embrace. “Thank you! Thank you so much!”

------

“It really doesn’t look like you’re going to need us here,” Primus smiled slightly. The Guardians had rolled over everything pretty easily.

“Simon Williams is still alive here, he’ll give them some needed muscle when we go grab him. But don’t leave yet, there’s a trip we have to take to the moon.”

“Oh?” He and Callie both regarded me with interest, since I turned to look at her. “What’s up there?”

“All this era’s enslaved Inhumans. The slavemaster is Loki.” Both of their eyes sharpened instantly at mention of the Norse god. “He’s been playing lord and master to them for centuries, staying away from Asgard... and Odin has let him. He also has a very interesting and mindlessly loyal underling.”

Callie arched a very elegant eyebrow, knowing this was for her.

“He has all the powers of Attilan’s Royal Family in our era.”

Her blue eyes glittered, and she turned to look at Primus.

“That does indeed sound interesting,” he acknowledged, smiling slightly. “I take it we’re going to go free some Inhumans.”

“And I think I shall earn Courtier of Death in another universe...”

----------

“You, you cannot kill me!” he spluttered in terror, staring up at me. Sitting there without his four limbs, his minions unconscious and scattered around him, and the space Sealed tight so he could not escape, he relied on his last trump card. “I am the adopted son of Odin himself! If you kill me, there will be vengeance from the All-Father of Asgard!”

Function flicked down into my hand, extended to full length, and the Eldritch Glaive snapped out on it, sizzling with constrained lightning.

His eyes nearly popped out when he saw the yawning Skull at the base of the Blade, jaws wide as if disgorging it.

“Odin is old. He has waited for Thor to grow up and take his throne, and instead the God of Thunder is yet lost in remorse for the mortal heroes who died a thousand years ago. Odin has ignored your own wicked acts, too tired to do anything about you, and you wove yourself a comfortable cage here as you hid from his eyes, when in fact it merely confined your wicked deeds to the minimum number of mortals affected by them, and ones tainted by the alien touch of the Kree, at that.

“But I, I am not tired, Loki Odinson, son of Lauffey.” I held Function out, right to the end of his nose. “I am not your brother caught up in his grief, either. What I am, and have always striven to be, is a proper servant of Heaven, and even you know that one aspect of Heaven is bringing Justice for those who have been wronged, and being god or mortal makes no difference to Justice when it is time.

“Here, then, is Truth.”

“AHG!” he spluttered, a god of lies and deception unable to tolerate the Word.

“Slaver. Murderer. Traitor. Tyrant. Liar. Deceiver. Manipulator. Thief. The Sins you have wrought and committed far outweigh the good you have done in your life, and that good was only done grudgingly and by force. There was no Good in it at all.

“I expect no Valor from you.” More rich crimson jetted from his mouth and nose at the mere Idea of valiant bravery and courage. I raised Function up, and power began to pulse around it. He trembled in ever more terror as a great and hollow eye swung around in the universe, and looked down upon him, sensing a moment of great interest. “And this, this is the end of your Hope.”

He wanted to scream as despair filled him, black and empty, but there was no time. Function came down, and it was the End of his Eternity.

Vivic flames consumed him as the trifold lightning of Cosmic, Divine, and Primal power tore him apart on every level, and True Death, powered by a Dreadskull against Immortals, shattered his divine soul and dispersed it back across Creation.

In the dark voids where the souls of dead gods dwelled, perhaps another soul of a god would be formed, but it would not be the soul of Loki, and if Ragnarok came and the world restarted, Loki would not be reborn.

And if Odin, Son of Bor, noticed the passing of Loki, well, it was not Ragnarok, and so something would be different this time around.

I was from another timeline, but this one and mine were not very different on the macro scale. If I was an interloper, Function alone proved I was not opposed to the cause of Death... and a Warlock of the Widow was by definition a tool of Her in any realm the Underweb existed in.

Death rippled past as a touch of oblivion ended Loki forever, and something changed in this universe.

-----------

Composite’s power was absolute among the Inhumans, and thus by genetic conditioning and right he was their king. He was also completely mind-shaped by Loki, and his loyalty to the trickster god was quite literally the core of his personality. Without Loki there as the central focus in his life, his mind was literally breaking apart under the stress of not knowing what to do, anger against his master’s killer, and broken love/dependency/obsession and everything.

I actually saved his sanity by Feebleminding, Sealing, and Binding him. He was well on the way to going stark raving mad, and when someone with a nuclear bomb for a voice does that, well, it could get ugly quick.

From there it was merely a case of invoking the Golden Child healing cocoon internally, combining it with Greater Restoration, and sending the genegineered Inhuman on a voyage of spiritual self-discovery. Just being able to feel the malicious emotions in the magic that had been guiding his thoughts and purposes since he was basically an infant were going to have a powerful effect on him, and there would be no outside interference this time...

“I can do without the scaled skin, hooves, and horns,” Callie said, her lips not even moving, her body flowing back to its normal form after the successful Mimicry... except for the fact she now had a lot more dark brown hair, billowing up a foot above her head, and extending all the way down to her ankles.

It also moved on its own. Primus reached over to run his fingers through it, and Callie almost jumped in surprise at sensing his touch. The long, almost-waterfall of hair promptly flowed up along his arm and caressed his face as if it was alive. “Oh,” her kiai-jitsu’d voice murmured, echoing with incredible spiritual emphasis as she avoided reducing the mines and Blue Area around us to rubble, “that is going to be so very fun.”

“Four kids minimum. No, six! You should try for eight or ten!” I said promptly as they came together for a long kiss.

They both promptly gave me a hairy eyeball. “I concur!” Sersi promptly contributed, clapping my hands in delight.

They both rolled their eyes as they broke and turned to face me. “I trust we aren’t needed in this era anymore?” Primus smiled.

I gestured, and a fully functional Doom Mark XII Time Travel Machine flowed into existence in the corner. Callie promptly glided over there and waved her hands over it, memorizing every aspect of its construction so she could duplicate it when it was time with her Mimicked powers.

“If all goes well, we should be back shortly. If things go sideways, we’ll call for help. If we don’t come back, something really bad happened,” Callie grinned at me.

“Got it. I’ll get the last of the Inhumans out of here and back to the Earth to be assimilated into the general population.”

“Then we shall take our leave of you.” Primus stepped over to the time machine, adjusted it quickly, and then arm-in-arm with Callie, stepped onto its floor plate.

Chronatrons and tachyons had puppy-kittens, particle effects swept over them, and my Cosmic Awareness followed them as they were swept back along the local timestream.

1900 Ukraine. I smiled slightly as almost promptly there was a crack in the local timestream, and it began to deviate from the influence of the two, no, three, people who had entered the world back then.

Callie could naturally Duplicate/Clone herself in a new dimension, and had done so. That was going to do an excellent job of catering to the home/work disassociation. Going back to the turn of the century gave them time to work with to save the world, yet also the time to raise a family.

Their future was forming as I looked at it from their time source, so unless they communicated with me and let my Awareness leap ahead of them, I couldn’t see anything that happened ahead of them in their new timeline.

That was fine. They’d chosen to make a project out of what they were doing, instead of an escape. In the end, they loved their homeland too much to permit the likes of Lenin and Stalin to do what they had on other worlds to it.

--------

All the Inhumans who wanted out of the hellish memories of their generations of slavery were Portaled out, easily absorbed by the genetically diverse humans of Earth who had been doing genetic engineering for centuries. Living under a blue sky with clouds was going to be a change, but they should have no problems with it.

Some had decided to stay behind, now that they were in charge and could actually have a comfortable lifestyle now after gaining the profits of their own labors. I didn’t have a problem either way, although some lessons on different types of government and the kind of people who should be in charge were definitely due.

Happily, telepathy makes for quick instruction on basic life lessons. I certainly didn’t want another Eugenics Council, and learning what their genetics had programmed into them was the first step in breaking it.

Of course, the screen on the time machine breeped me.

---

They both looked timelessly older. They both had that statesman air about them, people who had shouldered the fate of first a nation, then a people, then the world. Primus had let a few hairs at his temple and jawline come in grey, something I was sure he could reverse on a whim, and his Specs were in the form of scholarly glasses.

I knew Callie could do the same on her white streaks and Specs, too. People just expected them to look older, so a few concessions were fine.

“Oh my gawds and Totems! You look even more like old fogies!” I promptly mocked the two of them before they could even speak.

They both blinked at me, nobody probably having dared to speak to them that way for decades. I just smirked and raised an eyebrow at both of them. “One hundred and four years!” I read off the clock and confirmed with my Cosmic Awareness. I leaned forwards conspiratorially. “It’s been forty-five minutes here,” I reminded the two of them. “How many kids? Six? No... eight. Oh, wow, more than eight? Ten? You old rascal, couldn’t you keep your hands off of her?”