“You may as well come up to the surface. You didn’t dampen the earth vibrations enough, even the Richter scales caught you,” I Said as I floated above the waves. “No, no, ignore me, that’s fine. I’ll just dismantle that toy there before you get to use it, and you’ll wonder what all is happening as you ignore the voice in your ear that cannot possibly be there, nope, nope.”

There was a pause in the movement of the waves below, and then they began to billow and slide out of the way at enhanced speed.

The emerging warbot was huge, easily a thousand meters tall, made to kill fortified Deviant cities protected with advanced technology. How she’d found it where it had been buried in the mantle was an interesting question, but I suppose abandoned Eternal cities had all sorts of fun things in there we should have secured on this world. She’d gotten them working, pulled this one out, and was coming in an arse-kicking rage for Krakoa to obliterate it and all that lived there.

Except I was visiting, and as the warbot rose to the surface on its anti-grav, power systems surging with cosmic energies, the splashing waters all coursed down and missed me as I floated right in front of the bald woman standing on its head.

She was a little bit startled to see me there, to say the truth, but instantly reacted with a telepathic attack so powerful the air lit up with pale blue mental waves.

The attack slammed into my fourfold shields and Will, and there was an instant Negapsi Backlash. She managed to open her eyes in shock as the blast of Negapsi Reprisal + Reserve + Wrath slammed into her, she barely got some shields up in time, and she screamed as she was sent skidding across its central body, charred and smoking.

“You might not want to try telepathy on me again,” I advised her, gliding along with her and keeping the same distance without effort.

“Target her and destroy her!” she shrieked at me, gasping as she stared at herself, and her body that was not healing and coming back together like it should have.

Several guns in the immediate area began to converge on my general direction. Unfortunately, the construct couldn’t see me to aim those battalion-wiping armaments, and I waved my hands all about, turning them and their power systems into water which poured down in short gushing waterfalls, sending the confused super-mutant sliding back and forth before she could levitate above them.

“Arrgh! Just die!” she swore at me, wrenching off a good chunk of the warbot’s durasteel armor and hurling it my way. Then she screamed again as I broke the telekinetic effect with Argent Savancy, blood spurting out of the orifices on her head and all over her skin as her force shields and TK burst on top of her.

Stillflight went off, and I landed on the shoulder of the warbot as it paused, trying to figure out what to do about me. It raised a couple limbs to strike at me, and those dropped off, clean cuts through them transmuted into more water, leaving it unable to reach us, only shift position a bit as it stood there on top of the water.

“You might not want to use force effects on me, either,” I informed her, the water washing about her stained pink with her blood. “Also, you can’t heal psychically from those injuries, so if you try something else, you’re probably going to die, and your mind and soul are going to Feed the Land. Go ahead if you want to die forever.”

I wove up a fantastically complex Seal and Rune diagram in all sorts of rainbow hues, and sent it in towards the command core of the Eternal warbot, popping and arcing with cosmic energies. She watched it hit the side of the construct, and promptly circuits and arcs all over the thing locked up and sizzled.

“Aieeee!” she screamed, clutching at her head as I cut off her command of the warbot with the proper ideogrammic commands and perfectly attuned Celestial-style cosmic energy, not her psionic fill-in.

“This is a device designed for massacre. Were you intending to use this on the mutants of Krakoa, Cassandra Nova?”

She glared at me, trying to fly, and unable to get off the ground. Soaked, bloody, and wavering, she rose unsteadily to her feet, glaring at me as I stood there without a problem.

“You... are Dynamo, from the other world! What are you doing interfering with my business?” she demanded, snarling the words as she took a defiant tack.

There was a burst and pop, her muscles convulsed and sent her flying up and backwards out of control, plopping to the deck again.

“You might not want to make me repeat myself,” I continued advising her, waiting calmly as she groaned and turned over. I could sense her trying to restore her body, but the Blooding on Function made sure that wasn’t going to happen. She was as vulnerable to injuries as any other human being right now.

“Yes, I was going to attack them and kill them!” she finally spat at me. “We are born to be enemies! It is my right and destiny to do so!”

“No, it’s not,” I refuted her. “Your timeline began just a few months ago. You don’t have a past or a destiny, but it does look like you were recreated with some problems inherent in you. Not a surprise, as your brother is a mess, too.”

She stiffened at the mention of Charles Xavier, even as she rolled over and slowly forced herself back to her feet. She glared at me, the resemblance to him unmistakable, as was the arrogance in her eyes. “Do you think you can stop me, just because you took back control of this machine?” she sneered.

“I forgive you for not realizing how the High Guard operate. A mutant of your potential with an Aura as Purple as yours will simply be killed out of hand, mind and soul subjected to vivus for permanent dispersal. Do you think you’ll be fleeing to the mindscape or something?” I asked her archly. “You’re like the fourth mind-controlling twat in the planetary threat range we’ve had to deal with this month. Do you honestly think you are a threat to me, Miss Nova?” I asked her calmly.

It was probably about that moment she had a real bad vibe. She tried to send her mind out, but that got nowhere, as I’d already Sealed her when I’d hit her with the lightning tap. She tried to bend space, but I just Flared that and Fed it into her, and she vomited blood and fell to her knees again from the feedback.

“Might not want to try dimension-bending around me, either,” I added thoughtfully. “Just for future reference.”

She was getting really close to dead, and she finally realized it. “What... what are you planning to do with me?” she finally gasped, staring at me with hatred, but realizing she couldn’t actually do a damn thing to me at this point. “Are you going to kill me?” she coughed around her blood.

“No, because you haven’t actually killed anyone as of this point.” She stared at me in stunned disbelief. “It’s totally true. That whole Genosha mess you arranged? It never actually happened. Your world here was created out of nothing on the day you saw Terra show up in the void.

“You have to be aware of it. Weren’t you wondering why your dimensional and temporal signature coalesced out of nothing right before that moment? You were created out of nothing right at that instant.

“I haven’t bothered to see what you were doing for the past few months, but you’ve no innocent blood on your hands at all. The vileness of your thoughts is a total downer, but all those murders and slaughter and things you’ve done in the past? Those are literally created memories. You’ve never actually done any of that stuff.”

“You... this... how?” she gasped, her eyes flickering back and forth as she reached out to sense what I had said... and the fact she and the whole planet had literally come out of nowhere was totally and completely correct.

“There was a universal reboot in another timeline. Your world was supposed to be reborn, but that proved impossible, so, like so much other stuff, it was shunted over here and popped into being. Congratulations, Miss Nova, you’re less than a year old, with a head full of artificial memories from a timeline which never existed.”

None of which was actually untrue. She gaped at me in disbelief, still bleeding and spitting blood, but not as much. “That... how many people know this?” she gasped, trying to muster her anger and hate and staring at the immensity of everything she believed in literally being created for her out of nothing.

“Not many. I just assumed someone of your intellectual ability and power had deduced the truth and gone a bit crazy at realizing just how small and insignificant you were in the face of such cosmic power, instead of just continuing on with your pointless animosity like a programmed puppet to entertain some cosmic joke.”

Her mouth clamped shut. She had her pride in her power, after all. Still having trouble breathing, she asked bloodily after a moment, “So, what do you intend to do with me, then? I cannot believe you are simply going to let me go...”

“Of course not. I have already notified your counterpart, who is completing her astral scan of you as we speak.” She blinked in astonishment. “I certainly am not going to allow a damaged rogue nuke like you to run around without being certain that your programmed murderous tendencies have been dealt with.” A lilac hole in the air opened to the side of us, and she jerked in reaction to the dangerously powerful and exquisitely controlled psionic energies.

Cassandra Rantha, almost identical to the woman in front of her, except clearly radiating even more power and control, stepped through the Portal, followed by Heather Douglas, Mistress of the Moondragons, and Kwannon, Mistress of the Mindblades of Cynosure.

“She’s fractured like a broken glass. Who guided her mental development?” Heather immediately sniffed, staring at the broken Omega (Epsilon, you rotters!) Mutant calmly.

“Herself and serendipity, of course,” I answered back. “Too late to save, Cassandra?”

“Of course not! If she is a copy of me, her willpower will not allow her to fail and be a slave to this crude fate lined up for her!” Cassandra said haughtily, the wounded one here automatically lifting her head to match as their eyes met. “Come! We will fix this mess that was made of you and your mind, and you will be able to embrace your own destiny, instead of this farce foisted off on you by the cosmos!”

She held out her hand, and despite her suspicion and hate and uncertainty, Cassandra Nova took that hand and was brought away with the three most powerful telepaths of Terra.

---

I watched the Portal close, and turned to look at the Celestial warbot, which was obediently sitting there waiting for instructions.

“Okay, you and your fellows are going to the moon, and now we have to seal and shut down all the Eternal cities on this world,” I sighed, and glanced out into the Pacific. “And the Deviants are still here, too. Of course, of course...”

Well, someone else to open up diplomatic channels with, and maybe have to wipe them all out again. At the very least, we had the genetic treatment to get rid of Deviancy forever, and weren’t going to tolerate their genetic imperatives now that the Eternals were no longer here to forestall them...

So many loose ends on Earth that had to be tied up again. I could only shake my head, add them to the list, and haul this millennia-old hunk of Celestial scrap to the moon...

---------

Some months of gathering up lots of dangerous stuff on Earth later...

A Breach in the Crunch!

My head snapped around as the reverberations cut across space-time, an instant warning to the whole universe if your senses were in that direction.

My outfit pulsed, forming the Gate instantly, and three seconds later I was literally all the way across the universe, and coming in at .99c on the Breach.

I could see and sense it long before I got there, a massive hole in the continuum leading to another alternity. Invasive energies were gripping the edge of the hole, keeping it open... the only reason to do so being a prelude to expansion or invasion by the powers within it!