I tilted my head at Dr. Richards. “Our Reed found Mouraphile VERY helpful in understanding women,” I stage-whispered to him.

“I would be delighted to learn it!” he replied promptly, not blushing even a little.

“And you...” I turned to Hank Pym, “there’s at least four different alien languages that refer to, are better understood by, and help ameliorate unstable mental conditions. They basically form a psycho-linguistical moderating affect for those with extreme mental conditions. I’m going to teach you them. It’ll be like self-medicating while thinking!”

“There are languages that do such things?” he gasped, shocked.

“Actually, our Dr. Pym asked me if there were, and I went looking for them. He designed the whole program. There’s literally tens of thousands of people with schizophrenia and other conditions who can basically switch around their mental state on command using those languages, keeping it completely under control. Electro- and magno-kinetics in particular find them very useful.” Our Max Dillon had literally cried for joy when he’d learned them and been able to mentally control his moods as he desired, not needing to wear a brain modulator anymore.

“Are there languages that help with technology?” Stark immediately asked, sensing potential there.

“Yes, but they are dehumanizing,” I informed him sternly. “They rapidly start restructuring the brain into a logic engine, sidelining all emotion, empathy, and compassion. You don’t have the necessary mental control to restrict and subdivide your thoughts to contain the effect, and I’m not going to turn you into an organic Ultron, Stark, so no, I’m not going to teach you those things. It’d be akin to you replacing your brain with a computer, and I’m sure you have some experience of what it’s like to lose a sense of right or wrong, good and evil.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t know anything like that,” he mumbled into his coffee, keeping his head down while he took another drink.

“So the key is to learn to subdivide your thoughts and balance such extreme ways of looking at things,” Reed pointed out calmly. “Since you know those languages, I assume you’ve done that, Dynamo?”

“I’ve got over two dozen active thoughtstreams, which all think very differently, borrowing all manner of thoughts, words, structures, and concepts from any and all of the languages I know as appropriate. A good number of them wouldn’t be recognizable as anything human to a telepath, and I’ve had some telepaths pointedly inform me of that. It also makes it a damn pain to attack me psychically or read my mind,” I grinned in satisfaction to nobody in particular.

“So, you’re one of the smart ones on your world,” Tony said, trying to picture all that. He had cybered connections, so most of his parallel thinking was done via computers and custom programming.

“Yes. I’m considered the foremost expert on math at all levels, geometry, and Energized material interactions. I’m a polymath in virtually all subjects just because of the breadth of knowledge I hold, but I’ve sisters who outperform me in specific areas by design,” I informed them all.

“How do you compare to us?” Tony promptly asked, definitely not competitive about smarts, nope, nope. “Or our counterparts?” he hedged.

“I am considerably smarter than all of them, but I am not a Creative Genius, so the point is largely moot,” I shrugged at his question. “I’m the one who has to take their creations and do all the proper foundation work so that other people can understand them, then go back and refine and improve on what they’ve done using a greater knowledge base. And I check all their math,” I added as an afterthought.

“Not a ‘Creative Genius’,” Reed repeated before Tony could promptly get into the brain-flexing. “I understand that to mean you don’t experience the leaps of inspiration that happen to us when we are delving into a topic?” he hazarded calmly.

“Very good, Doctor Richards. That is exactly it. My intellect is more akin to Stephen’s here, simply super-charged,” I indicated Dr. Strange, who was listening attentively to all this. “The three of you simply skip so many intervening steps when pursuing scientific advancement, somehow going right to the correct solution without all the experimentation and testing needed to actually justify why such things work, which we call a form of Savancy. Why this angle instead of that one, why this formula, why these materials, why that frequency... you just ignore it, pick the right one, and keep on going.

“You’re all Creative Geniuses, Schmot Guys, who literally make leaps of guesswork that are completely correct, somehow.

“I’m the person who has to come in behind you and figure out WHY the stuff you make works, so that it can be applied to other things in other ways, and actually fit into the greater sphere of knowledge we’ve collected, and then spin off avenues of research along all the tangents you thoughtfully ignored on the way to your perfect solutions to see what unexpected things turn up where they lead.”

I waved at Tony Stark as he mouthed ‘Schmot Guys’ to himself. “Like this guy’s alternate. He drives the Xandaran World-Mind and Pentad Schmot Guys completely crazy with some of his upgrades. They all work, but there’s no math or scientific foundation behind them, and he’s too busy to develop it all and explain it. He farms it off to me, and I have to take what he’s done and take it all the way down to basic math, then build it back up, note all the places and directions he could have gone some other way to see if it ties into some other tech elsewhere in a positive manner, and justify why the frak his way is better, since it obviously is.

“Reed’s the same way, but he doesn’t do as much practical engineering work, and Hank gets these crazy multidisciplinary ideas that are total bullshit and somehow work regardless.” I tossed a thumb at myself. “Guess who gets to figure out the why, not just the what and how.”

“Wouldn’t just being able to bypass all that indicate superior genius?” Tony Stark pounced on that detail aggressively.

“Sure, from your standpoint. From everyone else’s? You’re a useless genius. What does it matter what you understand and can do, if nobody else can duplicate or understand it? You just made a living dead-end of technology, with a built-in ceiling of obscurity via lack of foundation.” I waved my coffee around at them as they all winced. “In the end, all you did is wave a flag and say you’re a generation or two ahead of everybody else in their tech, this is what you have to do, now find a way to do it on your own, nyar-nyar.” I slurped as I smiled at their rather off-put faces. “Although I will admit watching Xandarans, Corbinites, and Galadorans tear their hair out as they try to figure out how Tony and Howard did what they do is good melodrama. There’s even a Vid series out about it now. Hilarious stuff. The guy who plays Tony Stark has the two of you down to a T-S.”

“Why do you say you are smarter than us?” Tony promptly interjected, getting around his desire to learn where that video series was. “How do you measure such things?”

I didn’t take it personally that he was being so defensive. “Well, the first way is an Assay, which is a magical way of comparing anything to the standards out there for it. In terms of intellectual ability on a cosmic comparison basis, I sit above a 50, and you three are in the 30’s, with Reed here at a 38, Tony at a 34, and Dr. Pym at a 30. Of course, you’re all gifted in mental ability, so your Talents let you think above your weight, and you’re Creative Savant Schmot Guys, so you can just skip the foundation and go to the solution, which makes you look MUCH smarter than you actually are.

“Given that you three don’t have magic, you’d probably put more faith in a head-to-head test, so there’s the Valerian Aptitude Test, too.”

All four of them widened their eyes with interest. “This sounds interesting,” Dr. Strange spoke up. “Does it test magical aptitude, too?”

“It has an aspect that does that, Doctor,” I confirmed, “and I will let you test it. I’m guessing that the three gentlemen here really want to butt heads with one another.”

Stephen eyed the hungry gazes of friendly competition between them, and could only smile slightly. “I take it they aren’t going to be tested on the same things I am.”

“Oh, no, they’d fail utterly. No knowledge base, and their Talents don’t run that way. Dr. Richards could potentially do it in the future, given the nature of his ability to expand his way of thinking in different directions, but he doesn’t have the foundation right now,” I assured him, the three scientists having interesting looks as they realized they’d be very, very out of their depths in such a competition.

“What does this VAT entail?” Dr. Richards asked smoothly, obviously very interested.

“Oh, it was made up for Valeria Richards. She was fully self-aware at birth, her mental ability literally at the peak of human possibility. She was reading physics textbooks before she was six months old, and she was sooooo certain she was smarter than her dad that we had to go and make up some tests to compare them, just for entertainment value.” I smirked at the memory.

Reed Richards blinked. “Is... my Valeria that smart?” he had to ask.

“Why don’t you invite her in here and see?”

There was a pause as he turned right around and did that on the internal coms. We waited around as the little blonde six-year-old hurried in to join us, excited about being included in something. I was the only person she wasn’t at least familiar with, so naturally she knew I was the reason for this. She was cute as a button and looked around to see what super-science we were expounding upon, and was a little disappointed to see nothing powered up and doing stuff.

I fetched out a simple scepter into my hand, and then replicated five more of them in front of everyone out of nowhere. They naturally reached out to grab ahold of them.

“Everyone to a different area of the lab, facing the wall. Don’t let go of the scepter.” I shooed them off, and they split up curiously, facing areas almost clear, or at least somewhat clear, of distracting stuff. “A hologram will come up in front of you. When it does, the test begins. Solve it, and you’re good to go. The scepter will track and display your mental processes so you don’t have to actually draw anything.

“Go.”

Formulae winked up in front of them. All of them instantly went still and concentrated with all their might.

I just leaned back against the doorjamb as Susan Storm poked her head in, wondering what was going on and surveying everything as I relaxed.

“Susan,” I greeted her as she stared at holographic formulae blazing into existence across the holoscreens in front of all the people. Stephen’s was particularly ornate and colorful, with lots of Seals and geometric formations and various Runes moving into position.

“Dynamo. What’s going on now?” she asked me in a low voice filled with knowing patience.

“They are flexing their brains at one another,” I whispered back. “Bragging rights.”

She rolled her eyes despite herself. “And Valeria is competing with them.”

“Actually, she’s in the lead.” Susan blinked, and stared at her younger child. “Which you should be aware of. Her emotional and social awareness is no better than average, of course, but she’s nearly as smart as your husband in some ways. He just has a greater knowledge base.”

“I... see,” she replied, both worry and pride on her face. “I will keep this in mind.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” I agreed.

“Franklin?” she asked, just to be sure.

“Incredibly powerful both currently and potentially, but not a genius like them,” I answered easily.

“Hmm,” she said, leaning against the other doorjamb. “I want to see this.”

“It should be very entertaining,” I told her with an air of experience, and began quietly pointing out comparisons of graphs and curves and formulae as the scepters tracked how each of them were thinking and what, and how they were actually skipping over derivations and extrapolations to the next stages with incredible precision and complete bullshit logic behind doing so.

If you were into pure brainpower at work, it was indeed pretty interesting...