Lyn had been walking in a daze for at least a dozen or so blocks, her body on autopilot. She didn’t even notice herself pushing aside the secret entrance’s disguise or resetting it after stepping through. The sensation of the teleport pad was what finally yanked her free from the pool of thoughts her mind was submerged in.

  That was… even though she’d regained a more cognizant state of mind, she was still assaulted by the events of the past hour. Her train of thought was no longer a slurry of everything but even so, she still struggled to comprehend Emma’s true form or some of the things they’d talked about afterwards. She hadn’t even begun to guess that the woman she’d been hanging out with was an A-rank hero. Hell, was she even A-rank or did they have special categories for people on her level?1

  “Hm? Starweaver?” Val passed in the hallway by with an armful of extremely unhealthy looking snacks. “Did you step out?”

  Oh, right, she hadn’t bothered to transform. Shit, she’d need to find a way to “sneak in” as Terrorantula.

  “Yeah, I had to go somewhere…” she muttered. Muffled voices further inside caught her attention and forced her to ask, “Is everything okay?”

  The speedster shrugged, “Kind of? I get the feeling those two are just like this.”

  Val continued down the hall with Lyn following behind towards the sounds of the argument. As they exited into the larger space of the hideout, the chill of the air conditioning washed over her in tandem with the now audible voices.

  “The problem is it’s a directional weapon!” she heard her boyfriend’s voice exclaim.

  “So we get a damn swivel for the base!” her roommate howled back.

  Val shot a glance back at her as the two of them finally rounded the final corner of computers to reveal the two tech villains shouting at each other as they gesticulated wildly, sometimes in the direction of the giant block of wires and metal behind them.

  “So what? We’re threatening a city block with this?! Again, we’d need to mount it on something mobile for it to be anywhere near useful!” Alex gestured wildly at the half finished superweapon.

  “I take it you didn’t like the surprises?” Lyn asked, somewhat disappointed.

  “Oh, hi Weaver,” he nodded her way, voice instantly dropping back to the volume of a normal conversation. She couldn’t help but feel upset with how disinterested he looked. Maybe the secret identity was a bad idea after all. “No, overall I’m actually blown away to be honest. The gauntlets are great.”

  “Thank you!” Celeste exclaimed, and beamed with pride, seemingly forgetting all of the argument in an instant the moment she got an ounce of praise.

  “It’s just a disagreement over our next steps,” Alex finished, turning back to the diminutive lab rat and his face returning to a scowl.

  On cue, Celeste’s face immediately matched his and she took over shouting again, “A giant robot is impractical! AND IT TAKES AWAY FROM THE DEATH RAY!”

  “HOW ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO FIRE THE DAMN THING!”

  “Oh, I don’t know?” Celeste’s voice was dripping with sarcasm and mockery. “It’s not like we’ve got an aerospace museum in town with plenty of working exhibits!”

  “I’m not putting a death ray on a fucking blimp!”

  “Have they been like this the whole time?” Lyn turned away from the two and asked.

  Val checked the time as she sat down in a nearby chair, laying her food around her in a small semicircle as she scooped up a handheld game console, “Think they only got to shouting about an hour ago. I think they brought up the blimp once or twice already.”

  Lyn looked back at the two of them, reminded of some of the fights Wither Wasp and Beetle Blaster would start in the common room of the Evil Eight’s hideout. She was fairly sure that just like those two former teammates, this was probably less a serious disagreement and more a twisted form of entertainment mixed with a dash of negotiation. Still, she needed to pull Alex away from it to finish up their talk from this morning. She needed to know they were on the same page before… Well before a lot of things in the immediate future from the looks of it.

  “I’m headed out again,” she said aloud, not sure who she was speaking to since neither of those two would hear her like this. Somehow she felt like she got some form of acknowledgment back even as she failed to see either of them react.

  She slipped away to her room to transform, taking a moment afterwards to indulge in the quiet and calm. Thoughts about Emma’s revelation began to creep back in her head.

  A goddess hit on me when we first met… If I didn’t have Alex right now, I’d be kicking myself over fumbling that one, she leaned on humor to dull the monumental amount of panic threatening to burst down her mood as she pointedly ignored the fact that she’d gotten way too close to a hero far above her grade.

  Or should I be grateful? she wondered, thoughts beginning to turn towards the idea of leveraging this revelation somehow. She shut those down quickly, remembering the sight of what was almost certainly a goddess having an emotional breakdown right before she’d dragged her off the streets.

  The conversation after Emma had shown off her true form had been… strange. Enlightening in a lot of ways but still strange. Lyn had held back on asking so many burning questions, figuring she must’ve got them all the time, instead focusing on a lot of the how’s and why’s surrounding her being here. Most her story matched a lot of the things she’d told Lyn previously, about Marcus’s death at the hands of a mysterious villain and about having raced over here with no other friends to back her up, but a few more details fell into place over that conversation. Hell, this explained that whole incident about ten years ago where the news reported the Stormdaughter basically deleting a portion of the abandoned warehouses in Orion in order to capture Marquis Blood.

  Lyn couldn’t help but get the feeling throughout the entire conversation that Emma was leaving something major out, especially when she’d painfully recounted seeing the mystery villain and her fiance as a hostage in their shared apartment. However, given how much she herself was dancing around the topic of being Terrorantula, she was willing to let whatever Emma was withholding stay a secret.

  Not to mention that in the moment, the oddities of the conversation had basically fried her brain, leaving these things to pop out more vividly in hindsight rather than in the moment. The woman had spoken so differently Lyn struggled to not to just think that Emma had swapped places with the goddess. Lyn had even said as much only for Thana to deny it furiously.

  Still despite her claims that they were the same people, Lyn was struggling to rationalize it. Only scant hints of body language seemed to connect the two women, and even then it was momentary flashes where she noticed how the goddess would wrinkle her brows in just the same way that she had in her other body, or a particular angle that she leaned at. But the way she walked, stood, or even moved her hands when she spoke had Lyn’s brain screaming this was someone else. She felt doubts creeping in about the time she’d spent around her, wondering how much of Emma was an invention and how much actually was her true self peeking through.

  A familiar presence drew her attention to her mirror. She didn’t see the red eyes, just her own face, that of the spider woman who had worn a mask over her forehead full of eyes for almost a decade, staring back at her.

  Shut up… she told the universe with its horrid sense of humor.

  Did not speak, mistress? came a hesitant reply.

  She sighed, “Not you. Just… something else I’m dealing with. Don’t read my mind unless I allow it.”

  Yes, mistress.

  Another sigh, deeper this time. I really need to find out what that is.

  A thought struck her, remembering the little ounce of greed this had tried to sneak into her head once.

  “Did you know about her? Who she was?”

  Of course, a cheerful answer affirmed. Suitable consort. Perfect to tame.

  Lyn didn’t know how many sighs she had left in her and was beginning to feel the start of a headache.

  “Let me talk to my new boyfriend before you get any ideas about that shit,” she growled. “I am not fucking up this on the first day because you want me to ‘tame’ someone else. Do you understand me?!”

  Yes! the presence snapped back. Will await command of the mistress and her betrothed.

  “Boyfriend,” she blew air through her teeth. “We’re not engaged.”

  Consort?

  “Boy. Friend.”

  Consort.

  “What are you not understanding?” she asked exasperated.

  Mistress desires more than “friendship” with Consort who wishes to rule this world. Satisfactory goals for consort of mistress. Deserves recognition. Believed “friend” to insult chosen consort of mistress. Shame upon her to speak of chosen consort in such way. Cannot shame mistress by intent. Rude.

  “Okay, fine, whatever,” Lyn threw up her hands, not willing to deal with more archaic Avalonian today. She already spent too much time looking like an elf as she talked to a woman dressed like a vikor. She was done feeling like she was in a fantasy novel for one day and wanted to end this conversation so she could go cuddle and make sure Alex and her were on the same page. “I need to go back out there. Can you make yourself useful?”

  Always seek to be useful to the mistress, the answer faded into an echo and she felt the presence disappear. A part of her felt she should’ve been more specific but she didn’t feel like trying to summon whatever that thing was back.

  Lyn emerged back into the lab only to be surprised at the quiet. For some reason, the silence worried her more than hearing the argument escalate. She cautiously used her powers to creep up the free standing servers, quickly making her way to the half-constructed death ray. There she found Celeste and Alex hunched over one of her roommate’s many notebooks.

  “And you’re sure teleporting it is safe?” her boyfriend asked. “I know you’re not supposed to portal certain tech.”2

  “Eh, ninety percent sure,” Celeste shrugged without looking over at him. “It’ll probably be fine.”

  Fuck. Lyn knew what that answer meant. The gremlin only ever used “ninety percent” when she was winging things without doing the math first. “Ninety-five” was when you could reasonably trust her and even then you’d want her to actually say the words “Ninety-nine” if there was any chance things could go wrong.

  “I do hope you’re planning a test run of whatever you’re planning before making any schemes,” she spoke up, descending down to meet them.

  Celeste shot her a dirty look and went back to the notebook, clearly starting to jot down some notes for a future experiment. Meanwhile Alex’s genuine smile at her appearance almost made her giggle. Fucking teenager prom night bullshit… She hated how much she loved this feeling.

  “You’re back!” he said, much more excited than she’d been expecting, almost making her feel guilty. “Your friend okay?”

  She froze, unsure of what to say to that. Celeste and Alex exchanged looks, clearly reading something from her reaction. Lyn struggled with what to say.

  Pretty much any detail felt like it gave away too much. Did she even need to keep most of it a secret? Emma hadn’t told her to and the way that she’d been speaking made it sound like that was a very final goodbye with the air of “when next we meet…” to it. And yet, her mind flashed back to the woman she’d seen vulnerable and alone twice now more than she remembered a vikor war queen wreathed in ribbons of lightning.

  A part of her desperately wanted to tell Celeste and even Alex about everything that had just happened. And yet the gravitas of the whole moment screamed that this was the kind of secret she had to be more careful with than any of her own. This was the kind of shit that got you trussed up and hung over a vat of acid if the wrong person learned about it, and Lyn had spent her whole life avoiding being damseled or having to deal with saving someone like that.

  Maybe this was just a short chapter in the life of the god, the kind of innocent little meeting where Lyn’s life had overlapped with hers for just a moment, but it also could be the type of thing where the private moments she mentioned were the kinds of things that people like Marquis Blood and his apparently ambitious minion preyed on.

  Despite how much she wanted to jump into her new relationship with a running leap, the rational part of her reminded her just how much she and Alex still needed to actually sit down and get to know one another for real. She might be twirling her hair and getting all giddy but they weren’t destined soulmates with some invisible bond, just two people who had hit it off really well and were figuring out things from there. She wanted to trust him but… it was still so new.

  As for Celeste, Lyn did trust her. Hell, she’d already told her about Emma’s moment at the arcade by now. But despite how blase they might act around one another, the woman was still a mad scientist with ambitions and more flexible morality. Not to mention a history of being kidnapped. Was it really wise to let her know too much about the Stormdaughter, especially with the League in town? Especially since they were planning on bringing a fight to them? Or would that just put her in danger or give her ideas that were too dangerous? Fuck, if she was being honest with herself, could she say that Celly wouldn’t immediately jump on the same thoughts she’d pushed away earlier, trying to use whatever embers of the friendship they had in order to aim the Stormdaughter at the League and pull the trigger?

  “She… was dealing with a lot,” Lyn said, carefully picking her words, a pang of guilt running through her as she did so. Secret identities might not be for her after all.

  Lyn chewed over her next couple words to which Celeste slipped her a raised eyebrow, catching onto her evasiveness. There was something unspoken in that gaze that looked accusatory.

  This moment of friction blooming between the two was cut short when Alex spoke up, “I know this is weird to hear from a villain, but is there anything we can do to help?”

  Lyn did a double take. From the look on Celeste’s face, she wasn’t alone at being surprised at this. She thought she heard a cough from somewhere in the room but obviously that was impossible.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Hey, I’m not suggesting we strap white capes to our backs and pick up litter or help out at animal shelters,” he rolled his eyes. “I just figure if she’s your friend then well…”

  Lyn couldn’t help but smile at that. That at least reaffirmed her impression that he was the same type of villain as her: the type to care about his own. Not everyone with a sense of justice and the need to wear a mask joins the hero side after all. She wondered if this was part of why he wanted to rule the world.

  Feeling the spontaneous urge, she leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek, and almost laughed as she spotted a slight blush, even as she ignored the grunt from Celeste.

  “Thanks, but it turned out to be something I was uniquely qualified to help her out with,” she said, figuring this one detail was innocuous enough to share. “It turns out that one person connected to her problems was Ned and she needed some help screwing him over.”

  She was rewarded with a snort and a guffaw from that.

  To her dismay, Celeste’s expression drew serious and her roommate fully turned from her notebook, “I have to ask, did you tell her about your new…?”

  She gestured at Alex, clearly not sure what words to use. That accusatory look briefly flickered back on her face and Lyn suddenly understood what Celeste was thinking and what she’d apparently been assuming was the reason for her trying to keep a secret identity.

  “No! I mean, yes, it came up that we’re finally dating, but the other- Look I didn’t go over there for that!” she shouted, feeling her face beginning to break out in a blush.

  Celeste’s eyes narrowed, clearly still suspicious. Lyn felt her body beginning to tense with anger over the veiled accusation. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alex’s concerned face at this sudden flare up.

  Lyn screwed her eyes shut before turning to face him, “This friend of mine… we- uh, when we met she um… asked- I told her I was looking to find you after you asked me out… and she… uh-”

  Lyn’s face and neck were on fire and she looked over at Celeste again. The short woman had her arms crossed and was staring at her, a note of judgment in her eyes. Tell him, she seemed to be saying without words.

  She wanted to snap back that it didn’t matter since she didn’t plan to act on any of that, but with Alex clearly concerned and apparently Celly thinking that she was trying to double dip in her dating life the very first day she and Alex got together, she felt like the air needed to be cleared.

  She ground her teeth together and pushed through, furious that Celeste had put her in this position but somehow not mad enough to overcome the awkwardness, “She joked- No, she was serious but I didn’t- She wanted to float the offer for- If we got together then she, you, and I- uh-”

  “Oh.” Alex interrupted. “Um… okay. I think I’ve got it.”

  Lyn’s mind froze as she studied the man. He brought a finger to his teeth as he clearly was processing all of that. Her heart stopped beating and she began to curse Celeste for doing this to her when the man finally spoke.

  “Kind of weird since she hadn’t met me, but I can understand why she’d try to shoot her shot with you,” he laughed with a tinge of worry. “...Is this something you want?”

  Lyn rubbed her taloned hands together, keenly aware that if they had pores she’d be sweating up a storm, “I… kind of want to figure things out with you first before anything else. I mean, I want to date you and don’t want anyone else to come between us!”

  “But she’s really fucking hot, isn’t she” Alex’s laugh this time was a little more geniune, but it still made a rock fall in the pit of Lyn’s stomach and she failed to form any coherent response to that. “Look, believe it or not, you wouldn’t be the first woman I dated with that fantasy.”

  “Bull. Shit.” Celeste interrupted.

  Alex glared at her, “Nothing happened there, just someone who liked the idea of chasing unicorns after a couple drinks. Honestly not the weirdest thing someone I’ve dated has been into. My first girlfriend ever was kind of a freak.”

  He glared at Celeste, daring her to challenge that. When she didn’t, he looked back over at Lyn and put a hand on her arm, “Anyways, you want to talk in private for a bit?”

  Lyn nodded while her thumbs fiddled together, slightly relieved but still feeling like she was standing on a cliff’s edge. He led her away from Celeste who returned to her notepad while some videogame soundtrack played in the background that Lyn couldn’t place the source of.

  When they were far enough away, Alex spoke up while continuing to maneuver them in the direction of one of the meeting rooms he’d been to, “Is she always this prickly or does she just not like me dating you?”

  Lyn shook her head, “It’s… I should’ve been more honest before just leaving you there.”

  He paused before opening the door for her, “We both have… secrets. That’s the kind of life this is.”

  “I want-” she started to say then thought better of it. “I wish I could share more, but it’s dangerous to be an open book, isn’t it?”

  “Especially since we haven’t even gone over the basic stuff,” he nodded. “Like: you want kids?”

  She laughed, “Pass. I uh… don’t know if that’s in the cards with this body.”

  Even before getting zapped into a spider, she hadn’t really felt the need for little brats running around.

  “Aw… but I’m about to adopt some minions…” Alex playfully whined.

  She smiled, “Okay fine, but only if they’re well behaved.”

  The two slipped into the meeting room together, both fidgeting as they prepared to bare their souls to one another.

  ---------------------------------

  “GODSDAMMIT!” Over Seer flung the divination materials away from her desk. They clattered to the floor but none produced the satisfying sounds of shattering. Her annoyance rose as she heard one of her assistants bumble after the assorted objects to scoop them up for later use.

  She longed to destroy either the fool who dared to see value in such a bunch of useless failures or the library around her belonging to a sycophantic mage who had offered it as a temporary headquarters for her. Or perhaps she wanted to rend the fucking chunk of compound material locked in stasis above her ornate table out of existence. The stone slab it floated above was decorated in hundreds of runes and spell circles and had been painstakingly transported through the twisting channels of Unreal Space to arrive here in this penthouse with no one noticing. AND IT WAS STILL FUCKING USELESS!

  “I take it things aren’t going well,” Arex noted as he opened the door. Her guards rounded on him but didn’t dare to draw their weapons, earning a chuckle from the shapeshifter as he nudged past them.

  Over Seer fought the urge to unleash every offensive magic at her disposal at the fool, but wrangled her anger down with the limitless self control she’d developed over the years. She turned to face him and almost let that control slip.

  “Did you seriously kill someone the second day you were here?” she snarled, gesturing at the massive amount of bloodstains over his clothing.

  “Nope,” he dismissed her concerns with a wave, “half of this is mine. And some of it is Prime Ape’s. He’ll live.”

  She fumed. That meant he still got into a fight. Like Stormdaughter, Over Seer was using subtle magicks most would never even notice to suppress too much information about the League’s presence in Victory. Oh yes, Over Seer had noticed that little trick. It was almost clever for someone who clearly had never bothered with actual formal arcane training.

  Still, like the bumbling godling’s pathetic use of runes and archaic sorcery, these magics depended on not making any actions that would draw attention to themselves while they were here. While Thana might be able to lean on the Fates to get people looking for the wrong lightning hero from Orion, the advanced spellcraft that Over Seer was employing was more careful and precise. It would work better than that god's clumsy magecraft but only so long as the person most fucking famous for turning into dinosaurs didn’t get into high profile fights!

  “What witnesses do I need to take care of?” she hissed.

  “Didn’t catch their names. Looked like a husband and wife pair who really liked purple,” the man shrugged.

  A copy of herself immediately appeared and began consulting the records as she returned her attention to the damn carbide chunk, not bothering to ask any more from the giant idiot.

  “So… What’s wrong?” he asked in a sing-song voice as he flung himself down on an antique couch. Centuries old springs whined at his careless force.

  Over Seer felt a blood vessel threatening to pop in her forehead, “My spells aren’t taking hold. It is as though someone has scrubbed the Akashic properties from this.”

  “What is that anyways?” Arex’s hand wandered absently above, seeking a nearby bookcase full of tomes.

  “Something Fencer tried to hide,” she seethed at the thought. There was no way someone like him wouldn’t have noticed it if he’d actually seen the scene of destruction. There would be a reckoning later. “It was by the broken glass from the Blood exhibit.”

  Arex’s hand stopped as he was pulling a book from the shelf, “Wasn’t it a replica? That might be why you’re getting nothing.”

  “If it was, even with all the anti-scrying fields Fencer puts up, I’d still be getting something,” she pointed out, “even if it was the intent to copy the original. It would be harder but I could use that to trace through to something more concrete. We likely wouldn’t find the original this way but it might let me have a better trail to follow. No, this is like someone ripped the history out of this. Or… it never recorded it.”

  She bit her lip. That would require a lot of preparation and paranoia. You’d need to expose the object to either warding or selective destruction magic continuously in order to mess with the Akashic properties to this degree.

  She supposed “Roger Stevens” might have had some motivation, assuming that somehow this fragment of a supposed replica did belong to him. Her thoughts were interrupted as the clone of light researching Arex’s loose ends dissipated abruptly and its findings flowed into her mind. She clawed a hand to command one of her assistants to bring her a record of the heroes of this city.

  The idiot needed a telepathic command to understand her desire and she fought the urge to incinerate him on the spot. He rushed over and quickly fled after handing over the binder. Hmm… decent survival instincts after all. Perhaps more useful elsewhere.

  She flipped through the book and found the first set of likely suspects and flipped it over to Arex, “These two?”

  “No, the guy had longer hair and the lady wore a domino mask,” he huffed.

  Her phantom memories pinged off that bit of extra information, and she knew exactly which two those were. She quickly tossed aside pages to point once more at a different duo.

  “Yep, them.”

  She flung the binder aside, one of her guards grabbing it from midair as she quickly wove four spells into existence with the aid of transparent arms that manifested themselves from nowhere. The aetheric effect took hold quicker than she’d expected it would as she began to leech details regarding Arex from their minds.

  “You might’ve mentioned your flunkies beat them black and blue,” she muttered and returned her attention to the mysterious artifact. With their mental defenses weakened, the pair of heroes would struggle with a few details. That would let her previous magicks work their course.

  “It’s why I wasn’t worried,” he told her as he threw his legs to the floor and strode over for a better look. “So this is a dead end?”

  “No,” she hissed. “Just one that needs a little more… complicated techniques.”

  She snapped her fingers and her assistants and guards fled the room. Arex glanced down at her and she held back a snarl. Fine, let him stay.

  She peeled off her blindfold and the sigil floating around her head burst into motes of light. That caused her sight to plummet into pure darkness for a moment before she fought to push her eyelids open, months of disuse hampering her process. She won out and a world of absolute chaos, the true world, pressed itself into her vision as her thrice cursed, five times inscribed, and twice augmented eyes glowed in freedom once more.

  It was hard to resist the urge to peel apart reality’s horrible secrets in a stupor that would last years, but her willpower let her focus on the hovering carbide and ignore the howling voices from the creature standing beside her.

  With this new sight, she saw the few fragments of the past that clung to the object, barely flickering into existence. Carefully, she wove her spells, pushing past the need to stare into the stream of magical energy she was directing to see the source of magic buried in the microcosm of its existence. With a surgeon’s precision, she peeled these fragmented memories off with knives of pure intent, trapping them in fields of her own power and forging shells around them with three flicks of her fingers.

  When the last scrap of the past was safely secured, she reached for where she’d placed her blindfold only to find it missing. A moment of panic threatened to cascade over her before she saw it being offered to her by the mass of monsters in human form next to her. The thing’s face smiled and millions of teeth ran down its form, million-year memories stuck in the gums. She snatched the strip of enhanced and enchanted cloth back from Arex’s horrid claw and wrapped it around her head, letting her witch sight end and a more mundane view of the world reassert itself.

  “This it?” the council member asked hungrily.

  Over Seer took a moment to let the world fully come back into focus before looking at the gathered bits of aether suspended in glowing spheres. There was far less there than she’d hoped for.

  “Maybe…” she muttered, gingerly picking one up and letting her magecraft sown into the orb gently wash into her mind so it could peruse the contents. It was almost nothing at all, the memory damaged somehow. She saw a spiral of wire that a larger block of carbide sat within. The machine was completely unfamiliar to her, but the fragmentation of the memory fascinated her as it threatened to fall apart even as her spells did their best to hold it together.

  “I need to know what did this…” she muttered, a speck of drool threatening to wet her lips. “This could be very useful for us.”

  Ripping memories out of someone was already a very specialized skillset. Psychics were feared for this potential power and yet in Over Seer’s experience, almost no one had the ability to fully delve through the most hidden recesses of another’s mind. Still, the few freaks of nature had made every Spymaster of the League obsessed with finding ways to keep their agents’ secrets safe.

  More than one government had aided the League’s research into anti-psychic tech and reaped the benefits. But it hadn’t been enough. As had been discovered decades or centuries ago, or perhaps in the far future, chronomancy had its uses for pulling answers from even inanimate objects. Akashic manipulation was an even rarer skillset than A-rank psychics but in turn it was even more difficult to scrub the evidence it found.

  As she mentioned, it usually required years of continuous effort. The two most obvious answers were wards and selectively applied destructive magic aimed carefully at Akashic fields, but there were other, more esoteric answers out there. A thought crept through her mind as she remembered the earlier thought about Alsdottir’s manipulation of Fates.

  Would exposure to the AHM-TA-0423 do this? Per Blood’s notes, it seemed to have no effect on mortals, but was that true when the gas was exposed to the Stormdaughter’s powers? Could the explosion have altered “Roger Stevens” into this… ghost? Or was this something else entirely? More than ever, they needed a sample of that gas to know the truth. If it was to blame then suddenly Over Seer felt the need to find it before any of the rest of Draven’s hired hands could.

  She quickly grabbed the next memory while Arex simply watched in silence. Ignoring him, she let the scene play out. A flash of red lightning that tore into what appeared to be a can that ruptured into white light. The brightness threatened to blind her before the memory was gone. She huffed, unable to make out anything from that one. So far everything centered on the damn rock! Was the range of the memories being distorted by whatever had been done to them?

  Frustrated she grabbed two more and barely saw more than a second from either of them. In one, she thought she saw a figure in a labcoat with a non-standard body, perhaps an animal hybrid. Not a unique sight these days unfortunately. The other was just another scene of the carbide stuck in its enclosure, the rest of the world a white void.

  Arex said nothing as she ripped a hand out and clawed at one more memory. She longed to throw it in his face. Perhaps she would after this-

  “-you Steelstar?” a muffled voice asked from the void around her.

  Over Seer dropped the sphere in her rush to prepare a new divination. She cursed as she realized she’d need help with this and fired a spell off to summon the mages she’d dismissed.

  “I take it we finally have a lead?” Arex almost purred with bloodlust.

  “We have a name,” she smiled. “And I have some ideas for those.”

  She gestured to the discarded orbs as her assistants filtered into the room. Picking one at random, she ordered the woman to retrieve them.

  “I’ll have them delivered to an asset who will follow up on some questions I have. There’s someone in this city who I’m told knows a little bit about what can destroy memories. We’ll have that specialist take a look at these.”

  Arex smiled, “Two leads then. Well, work your magic and I’ll do my job.”

  She didn’t bother to answer that, too intent on the ritual unfolding in front of her, her tongue running over her teeth as she tasted the name she’d pried from the aether.

  Steelstar, huh? Let’s see how a “Roger” becomes someone like that.

  ArexXLaser Badger toxic yaoi, and more.

  1. Heroes are not officially ranked, but rather are evaluated for their capability to handle threats of certain categories, which themselves are ranked. This leads to a misconception about “A-rank” heroes, when this simply refers to a category of threat that they are generally considered to be qualified to handle. Thana Alsdottir has not officially been evaluated for threat readiness but would be considered due to her experience, divine based powers, and demonstrated use of her abilities to be able to handle almost any classified threat level with perhaps some specific situations prompting special consideration (such as villains with high resistance to electricity or in highly conductive areas). Unlike most heroes, she has received a potential threat assessment, as have all remaining gods, but this information is classified.

  2. Dimensional travel of any type tends to become more temperamental the larger the object being moved is, not helped by the tendency for such travel to often saturate areas with energy that tends to affect electronic components. This is why most villains tend to transport superweapons in component parts and assemble them on location rather than simply teleporting in bombs, giant robots, or other superweapons