“Good afternoon! Kitty Pryde of 814?” I asked her, extending my hand.

Her young face and old body language looked up at me, blinking once. “Oh, hello! Yes, you must be Dynamo.” She took my hand and shook it once. “I’ve delivered my warning, for all the good it may do, and am ready to return home. I was told you might be able to accompany me and help us out...”

“Yes.” I sat down across from her at the table in the conference room she was in. She’d been reading about the Wacky Weekend DiDi had once had with Peter, I saw. It had happened not long after she’d taken over for me. “I should be capable of dealing with your problems without too much difficulty, I imagine. I have a plan of battle and the resources I need lined up to assist in this. One question: Do you have a Cerebro on that world, and is it readily available?”

She seemed a little startled I knew about it. “It... was located in the mansion, and disassembled while they tried to make use of the technology. It won’t work without a mutant telepath, not that they stop trying...”

“We already have technology to detect mutant powers, especially Awakenings, but some that has already been specifically attuned to your world would be helpful and save some time,” I nodded once, and saw her expression. “The main use of it here is to detect Awakenings by those who cannot handle their powers, and get a proper team to their location quickly to help them control such things. While it can also be used to track any mutants, particularly those actively wielding their powers, there are ways to disguise mutant signatures, which most mutant criminals naturally avail themselves of. We don’t use it to round them up in concentration camps or something here, Miss Pryde.”

She took a deep breath. “You know, the biggest reason I’m trusting you is because we’re in the Baxter Building.”

I just smiled. “That is indeed a good reason to trust someone. We only employ the best here, and that includes hearts as well as brains.”

“I’ll help you if I can, but...” she hesitated, “I was told I wouldn’t remember if I succeeded or not, because of the temporal disturbance.”

“If you like, I can store your memories of this time period since you arrived and return them to you when I get there.”

She blinked in astonishment. “You’re a telepath?”

“Not a mutant one, but yes,” I confirmed. I put my thumbs on my temples and waved my fingers around. “I employ cosmic energy instead of psionic, but the effects are identical in most respects.”

“I was told that you were a... Paramount of incredible power. Someone who could compete with Thor,” she asked cautiously.

“I am, although I’d prefer not to be hit by that Hammer,” I confirmed. “I’m also very fast, and can put out a lot of energy.” I tapped my skull for emphasis. “I also have Cosmic Awareness. I will be able to sense every single Sentinel unit and its network on the planet and beyond. A machine intelligence will not be able to hide from me.”

She took a deep breath, a spark of hope igniting in her eyes. “I’m going to hold you to that! How are you going to rescue the prisoners?” she asked eagerly.

“I will teleport them aboard a Galactus Sanctuary ship after identifying their mutant signatures. From there, they will be allowed the choice of evacuating to the Blue Area of the Earth’s moon, or a more distant location entirely.”

Kitty hesitated. “All mutants?” she asked carefully. I nodded. “There are some who will not take your benevolence kindly...”

“They are welcome to remain behind. Even if they hide, their odds of survival are low.”

Kitty blinked. “You’re hinting at something? You said you would destroy the Sentinel network!”

“They are machines, Miss Pryde. They can be rebuilt!” I reminded her coolly, and she winced. “And while they are sufficient to crack down on a mild and unprepared internal threat like the majority of mutants, they are completely worthless in the face of the Badoon invasion which is assembling to hit the planet.” I tilted my head as she gaped. “Please, did you forget you were not alone in the universe? The Celestials have departed your world, their job done. The Sentinels slaughtered the people who have been defending it from alien invasion, or who had a chance of devising a way to fend them off. They’ve been in space for over ten thousand years, with an unassailable technological edge over you.

“The Badoon, or the Skrulls, will clean off those Sentinels and any android troops with their pretend powers in no time at all, and then they’ll purge the planet of the elderly, the educated, the leaders, and the military before they seize slaves and breeders and haul them away to die laboring for their empire.

“Your idiot government and fanatical fear just screwed over the entire human race on your homeworld. The place is going to be a shithouse for at least five hundred years, if the temporal records of other alternities are any indication, and longer if they repopulate and the Badoon come back for another harvest.”

Kitty Pryde swallowed slowly. “Those utter fools...,” she snarled, slamming her fist down on the table.

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” I said sympathetically. “Now, how many memories do you want to leave behind for your host there? I’ll give her everything you give me for you to recall in the future, as a matter of course.”

“Oh! Ohhhh...” She had a strange expression on her face. “I think... I think I wouldn’t mind giving her more... and so you, too...”

“That’s fine. This isn’t your timeline, and so any foreknowledge is minor at best... Huh.” I looked away sharply. “Well, isn’t that unsurprising...”

Her eyes went wide as she looked at the clock. “There was an attempt on Senator Kelly?”

“And Senator Bartholomew. Avalanche, Pyro, Jetwash, and Unus on the one side, and Black Racer, the Road, Asp, and Outlaw on the other. Both Senators are swing voters on the issue of Powered and especially mutant rights, and both teams of attackers are mutants who hire out for mercenary work.

“DiDi is taking out the first group, and the Red and Blue Shields are dealing with the second, much to their disbelief.”

“Uh, the Shields? Jetwash? The Road?” Kitty asked helplessly.

“There’s a lot of Powered around in our world who weren’t in yours. The Shields are part of the Erskine Super-Soldier Project, run through Russia and the Great Bear. I believe you would know Captain America? He was the first.”

“Oh!” She blinked in disbelief. “There’s... more than one of him?” she asked, astounded.

“There are hundreds of them.” She blinked again. “Most of the nations on the planet have at least one, and many have multiple Shields. Captain France, Fleur de Lis, Madame Rose, le Cavalier, and the Grenadier are all Shields of France, for example.”

Kitty was silent, thinking about how a world with hundreds of super-soldiers would look very different from one where mutants outnumbered all other super-beings.

“They tend to lead up the national and regional super-teams, if their countries have one. Jetwash is a minor aerokinetic, able to fly and hurl winds. The Road is a geokinetic with an affinity for shaping stone. Gets hired out for a lot of construction, tearing up construction, putting up foundations and tearing them down. As long as it pays, he doesn’t care what he does, he’s kind of an action junkie, or he’d just sit back and make money driving tunnels through mountains.

“Bit of an arse, in other words.”

“I... sort of wish I lived here, instead of there,” Kitty murmured. “It sounds like you’re doing a lot of the right things.”

“Well, we’re definitely trying, but there are a lot of very determined people with the foresight of gerbils trying to bring it all down, even while we’re fighting to keep them alive, too. Arsehats, the lot of them.”

Kitty smiled, despite herself. “So, you’ll be following my mind and spirit back to my time and world?”

“Yes. The dual connection will lock it in as a parallel reality at that point, some thirty years in our future or whatever. I’ll take care of the immediate Sentinel threat, remove the mutants we can track down, and let them deal with their problems.”

Kitty sighed. “I want to feel sympathy for them, but I just can’t...”

“Not surprising. We can do this whenever, I’m ready to go.”

-----

Kitty Pryde fell down unconscious as her elder alternate departed, but I had a lock on her spirit and could follow her easily. Susan Richards, Acting Den Mother of the Baxter Building’s crazy occupants, nodded as she caught the younger woman, seeing me off, and I flicked up a Portal through Time and Reality, zipping along after the older Kitty Pryde of Futures Past.

It didn’t take long, as I had a lot of power backing me now, and a straight locator.

---

The Portal opened in midair, and I emerged in the middle of a fight.

Let’s see. That was Kitty phasing through a plasma blast; Rachel Summers forming a TK shield desperately to hold off the Sentinel fire; Master Logan, Colossus, and Storm rather ineffectively putting up a fight against giant robots designed and programmed to counter them, and Master Lensherr, hovering in a metal wheelchair, apparently messing with the electronics of some of the robots and giving them some sort of a chance to defend themselves.

Karnak-sight, when applied to higher levels of awareness, reveals all sorts of weaknesses. I flicked a hand and downloaded a virus into the nearest Sentinel’s neural net, which they promptly shared through their coms.

It didn’t matter what their faces were, they were just robots and programming, and the level of such they had was ‘Modern’ human-level. Trying to match up to Xandaran or Eternal-level computers was just a pipe dream.

That Sentinel froze in mid-motion as its programming suddenly made the logic leap that Sentinels and the Sentinel program were the greatest existing threat to humanity. A second later, it turned its plasma beams upon itself, and blew its own torso off.

The fighting against the surviving mutants became a farce, as the Sentinels there all promptly turned their weapons upon themselves and destroyed themselves violently.

“Who, what...?” Rachel gasped, seeing me floating there as a much older Kitty Pryde blinked and woke up, and I returned her memories of the past to her with a handwave.

The shocked mutants stared around them at the tumbled remains of the formerly-looming robots, while my Cosmic Awareness swept out, even as I raised a golden Rod and activated it with cosmic energy.

The virus was sliding along the Sentinel neural net, powered along by magic and cosmic energy; there was no way for the Sentinels to stop it. It dispersed through every one of the automatons, into their production facilities, and into their Nimrod and Master Mold designs, which simply were not sophisticated enough to stop it.

Explosions began to dot North America as the Sentinels destroyed themselves and their production facilities, the central programming centers self-destructed massively, and the hidden Nimrods first eliminated the key humans essential to building more of their kind, then destroyed themselves.

It would take less than an hour for the entire Sentinel network, its LMD infiltrators, and all of its war-making capacity to die. I could look down the timeline and see it, no mega-Source here to stop me.

“Who in the flaming hell are you?” the Master Logan I was not familiar with snarled at me, long talons of adamantium jutting out from the tops of his hands.