She stepped out of a Portal in space well outside of Andromeda. She looked like an extremely well-built and attractive female Skrull, which was the complete truth, just not with that face.

Instead of the default purple shifting uniforms, she had on a more stylized uniform with custom colors, not accidentally patterned after Comet’s sash and style. Same aura of power about her, too.

“Welcome, Princess Veranke,” I greeted her in amusement. “I see things have been proceeding well.”

“Dyna,” she greeted me in turn, equally amused as the Portal came down. “Felicia is indeed a cunning vixen,” she smiled, “and the Skrulls played right into it.” She sighed only a little bit. “I’ve extinguished any remaining will of the Princess, although I’ve still full access to her memories and everything. The revised Warskrull line-up is proceeding.”

“Any problems with the imprints?” I asked her calmly.

“Kolumi’s ‘discovery’ of the last set of remaining imprints after the destruction of the War Skrull facility has not been questioned,” she confirmed calmly. The Raven Guard Black Widow had been in deep cover as an up-and-coming Skrull agent for years, earning a reputation as a ruthless and ambitious operator while doing so. Full internal body cavity organ replacement gave her all the shape-shifting powers of a trueborn Skrull, and more when combined with Warshifter levels. She was actually famous among Skrull operators for her combat morphing! “They’ve been lining up volunteers for the imprints ever since, and given the power of the imprints, have been very satisfied with the results for the fighting to come.”

I exhaled softly and shook my head. “Yourself?”

“I have no problems masquerading as one of them. All the records indicate I undertook the process, and I naturally have them among my power-sets.”

I nodded once. “That is a horrendous mix of powers you have there, right?”

“I have to manage them sharply, but the limit of three active helps with that immensely. Kwannon’s telepathy enables me manage the imprints without any problems.”

“And the Skrulls don’t have a clue...” I shook my head despite myself, and Veranke just smiled cruelly.

“It serves them right, being taken over by those they are attempting to substitute for,” she sniffed. “We have complete control of the Warskrull process, and the limitations on imprints means we can actually make Warskrulls faster, as it is easier to customize and filter applicants for a single process.” Her smile grew harder. “No such notifications through diplomatic channels, I trust?”

“Of course not, Your Highness. That would be telling.”

She gave me a slightly hungry look, then let it slide. “I would love to do a full Unimerge and be Duped out with a Core, but we can’t take the risk it would be sensed. I will have to make do with access to over a hundred imprints and power sets!” she grinned wolfishly.

“In the future,” I agreed shamelessly. “I would apologize for doing this to you, but I did not...”

She just laughed. “I am fully aware that I did it to myself, and what my ambitions were. Slay and replace, it is the Skrull way. They just weren’t planning for it to be used on them!”

“Alright, off with you, and take care of yourself.”

“That I will do. I can’t take over the Skrull Empire without doing so!” she agreed cheerfully.

She waved up a Portal next to herself and flitted on through. It closed behind her, back deep in Andromeda at a hidden world where the Skrulls were desperately making their best and most powerful troops for the fight to come.

The original Warskrull facility had been taken over by Princess Veranke in preparation for both the oncoming war, and what was intended to be an invasion of Terra afterwards. Improvements made in their shapeshifting had rendered those so treated immune to detection by anything short of the direct scan of a Baneskull-boosted Galadoran Analyzer. They were going to infiltrate, capture, imprint, and replace all the super-powered beings on our world, followed up by political and military figures, and then simply invade and take over, breeding humans and experimenting on them to generate more super-powers for themselves to imprint and subsume.

With said super-powers spreading across their people, the resurgence of the Skrulls would be unstoppable! Human destiny, successfully stolen!

Unfortunately, they’d not figured on us infiltrating them. Kolumi had found out about the Warskrulls some time ago, made herself extremely eligible for the process, and in doing so discovered its location and the fact that the ‘exiled’ Veranke not only had taken it over, but had done so with the full support of the other Skrull nobles, who basically had bought into her religious beliefs of a prophecy that a blue world that would save the Skrull race after the destruction of their homeworld (Galactus munchies a few years ago).

Of course, to the Skrulls that meant subsume the inhabitants of said world and take for themselves all that they were, in the proper Skrull fashion.

Veranke was the acting Queen of the Skrulls, although she was never publicly enthroned... mostly because they didn’t want the currently-helpful and extremely dangerous Terrans to find out about her plans.

Enter Felicia, the Raven Guards, and some of the meaner and more dangerous Terran operators out there of all types. I hadn’t been on the raid, but Nimue had, just in case someone got clever.

The facility had been annihilated, along with every Warskrull who had been found, save for a few out on infiltration missions, such as Kolumi. All had been urgently recalled in the face of the catastrophe, Princess Veranke had gone missing along with all the scientists there, with desperate rebuilding efforts to follow.

Kolumi’s two imprints of Comet and Photon were found to be unstable and impossible to replicate accurately, but she had been with the team that had gone into the deep datacores and pulled out a miraculously undamaged reserve core in a safe room that had Veranke’s imprint plans on them.

Those imprints had been for DiDi (imprint acquired via an oblique masquer during a fight against ningoofu oozoid mercenaries), Kwannon (acquired by the services of the Hand and a demonic attack she’d helped fight off), and Carol Danvers (physical template acquired long ago, mental one updated by posing as a member of a Spartoi diplomatic delegation).

That wasn’t actually Veranke’s Imprint set, of course. That particular set had been DiDi, Kwannon, and Cerise, somewhat to Veranke’s surprise.

Unfortunately for the Skrulls, Imprinting DiDi and Kwannon together onto themselves was a very, very bad idea, and of course Comet and Cerise were both very well-known to me, and easily assimilated. Veranke’s personality had been overwhelmed almost instantly, subsumed into a minor thoughtstream, and then the gestalt had promptly gone out and used the combination of Imprinting and Dire Wraith Assimilation to kill every single Skrull involved in the Warskrull program, absorb their powers and memories, and then help blow the utter shit out of the place when the black ops team hit them.

So much for Princess Veranke’s invasion plans and religious revival. Taking the place of a returning Warskrull had been simple thereafter, becoming one of the few Skrulls surviving with knowledge of the process and how it actually worked.

That had left her basically in complete control of the hastily-rebuilt and specifically-purposed Warskrull facility, in a new and even more secretive location.

The Skrulls were now imprinting some of their best people with copies of DiDi, Kwannon, and Carol. Said Skrulls were getting their personalities eaten by Kwannon’s powers, and the Skrulls were thus filling their ranks with their own Core-less Duplicates of me... which I admit I found absolutely hilarious.

There were over fifty of them already, and the number was only rising as they fine-tuned the process. My Dupes enthusiastically helped them to do so, leading their research along in the desired direction.

Normal Warskrull production with various power-sets had a success rate of about ten percent, and that was with excessive filtering of volunteers. Almost all failures were terminable, too. It turned out rejecting a psyche, being overwhelmed by a psyche, or your body rejecting super-powers tended to get nasty and violent for all concerned.

Success rate for the new system was over twenty-five percent and rising as the new and improved filters were put in place. Granted, that wasn’t any better in terms of how many volunteer Skrulls could actually accept these particular sets, but the terminal failure rate was much better...

The ‘Princess Imprint Matrix’ was thus fast being perfected in the desired direction. The first set was always Kwannon, since development of telepathy was of monstrous help in battlefield coordination, and both telekinesis and mindblade manifestation with built-in combat skills spoke for themselves. If the Skrull volunteer could take it, the second set was always of DiDi, whose alchemical skills and management ability were of incredible use in logistics and planning operations, and her enhanced physical abilities of great help if needed on a battlefield, hopefully synergizing beautifully with Kwannon.

Carol’s half-Kree physiology was the hardest to Imprint successfully (not really, but that’s how things worked out with us in control) as part of the trio, but immediately turned the recipient into a heavy-hitter, and every damn Skrull who could potentially take that combo wanted it.

There were attempts made to simply Imprint Carol by herself, increasing the number of Warskrulls with extreme power, and they actually worked fairly well. The key was to have the most obedient Skrulls with aspirations of protecting their people, and the conflicting personalities wouldn’t be as much of an issue.

That wasn’t what was actually happening, naturally, as a second line of ‘Queen’ Imprints, just like Veranke’s, was simply assimilating those Skrulls after their successful imprinting and taking their places.

It was cold, hard, ruthless, and it was working very, very well.

The Skrulls had made noises about actually trying to capture and replace Carol, given they had so many copies of her to do so. They’d then found out about the Galadoran Analyzers by dint of some early infiltrators being caught, and scrapped that idea.

We’d also very quickly started upgrading the Analyzers to counteract their improved ability to conceal themselves, much to their dismay, and, uh, sold and proliferated it widely. Making some solid credits off that product line, we were.

There was also the problem of the Warskrulls not being able to use all the powersets at once. The Skrull recipient still had to switch between powersets, and often appearances, in order to be able to use the abilities of a specific Imprint. They could still look Skrullish, but there was seldom a doubt as to who they were a copy of, as they were accessing those powers through the Imprinted psyche, who had default mental views of themselves.

Also, they liked to rub in the fact they had the powers of one or multiple individuals, plus they were a Skrull!

The single-shifting was a known weakness of Warskrulls and so didn’t surprise anyone, even though it wasn’t true in the slightest in this case. The DiDi and Kwannon imprints gestalted almost instantly, and had no problems absorbing either Carol or Cerise’s Imprints, and thus being able to access all their power sets, although they were still limited to triple tranches of Class Levels.

Really, it was more like they were all a custom Dupe of me.

The delighted Skrulls secretly called their powerful, intelligent, and attractive Warskrulls the Comet Corps, and soon had them working in key places all over the Skrull Empire behind the scenes, out of sight of other aliens and spies. Telepathic coordination, logistics mastery, strategic planning, and the muscle power and speed to help hurry things along; the Comet Corps had what was needed for almost any situation, and soon became indispensable at all levels of the Skrull Empire.

That basically meant I was running the Skrull Empire and draining it dry of its secrets, as well as eliminating or replacing those integral to that goal.

The Dire Wraith ability to slay and replace was superior to that of an Imprint, but it didn’t grant super-powers. The Warskrull ability basically sidestepped that limitation, so the Queen Imprint line calmly and ruthlessly took full advantage of it, limited only by the number of Skrulls who could accept the Kwannon and DiDi Imprints. That was about one in ten million individually, and one in three of those could use both. It was also one in three for either, or one in ten for both, to make a set with Comet.

Our biggest improvements were in filtering who could and who couldn’t survive the next Imprint. We didn’t want to kill our own infiltrators, after all!

Naturally a Skrull had no problems acquiring the abilities of a Dire Wraith, who were a subrace of them, so the Cerise Imprint on our Queens was 100% effective. The singles and doubles who couldn’t go further were made Queens.

The Skrull Empire’s direction was going to be very different at some point in the future. The secrets of an alien empire that had been around for literally a million years were now open to us, and we were ruthlessly taking advantage of it.

Last, but not least, a Raven Guard with at least double major organ replacement with Skrull organs could take the Warskrull treatment and receive an Imprint. If they received full body cavity replacement, they could receive TWO.

It meant Raven Guards and Black Widows could get their choice of super-powers...