"So, I hear you're at war with Viltrum," Nolan said.

"I am, yes," I said, nodding.

Two weeks had passed since that time I tried to kill him. This was the first time I'd visited him outside of his hospital room, and it was entirely because Debbie said he'd asked to talk to me.

"Why?" I continued. "Are you going to ask me to kill an old rival for you?"

"No," Nolan said, shaking his head. "I'm just... wondering, is all. What's going to happen to the Viltrumites?"

"That's... tricky," I admitted. "I'd like it if the Coalition of Planets didn't hate my guts, so at the end of the war, they're probably gonna demand I turn over any and all Viltrumite prisoners to face the courts. Which... uh... Well, as it so happens, the government I represent outlawed capital punishment in its constitution, and also forbids extradition to jurisdictions where capital punishment is legal and at genuine risk of happening to the prisoner in question."

"If anyone was gonna be executed, it'd be the Viltrumites," Nolan said.

"Yeah, so..." I rubbed the back of my neck. "Those negotiations are gonna be a little tense. On the plus side, I don't strictly need the cooperation of the Coalition to prosecute this war, so I can survive failure on that front."

"And if the Coalition is so upset after negotiations that they decide to declare war on you?"

"I'm kicking the Empire's ass. I'm not scared of the Coalition."

Nolan nodded, and that thread of conversation reached its conclusion.

"Speaking of therapy," I continued, "how're you holding up?"

Nolan sighed, heavily.

"Not great?"

"I don't deserve to be doing great," Nolan said. "After what I've done..."

"See, this is what the therapist is here to address," I said. "That kinda sentiment isn't healthy, Nolan. Suffering isn't productive."

"I know that, I just..." He sighed. "I'm alive and well, while the people I killed aren't."

"Yeah, that's gonna suck," I said. "I'm... not really sure there's anything you can do about that, to be honest. You may well carry that pain with you for the rest of your life. All I can really say is... I hope you don't."

"...Thank you, Rose," Nolan said.

----------------------------------------

"So, what now?" Eve asked.

It was three weeks after I tried to kill Nolan, and I'd been here for about three months.

"Not much, really," I said. "Karasuba and I are stuck here for the next nine months, so... we keep doing this until our year is up, and then we leave. We've got a war going on up in space, but, uh. Well, I'm not exactly enthusiastic about letting a seventeen year old whose health and safety I'm responsible for go and fight in a war."

"Fair enough," Eve conceded.

"Anyhow," I continued, "you've got the next nine months to decide how much you like living with me and Karasuba, and if you like it enough..." I shrugged. "Well, you wouldn't be the first person I took with me on this dimension-hopping bullshit."

"That'd be Karasuba, right?"

"Eyup. We weren't married at first, mind- she just wanted to run away from herself, and since I was leaving the universe..." I shrugged. "But, well, we can bore you with the details of how we met later. Right now, I think we should discuss the question of your education."

"I really don't want to go back to high school," Eve said.

"Duly noted," I said. "Given that you're seventeen, I'm willing to shrug and say you're probably old enough to just straight up go to college, if you want."

"If I want?" Eve repeated.

"See, I do think that education is genuinely important, buuuuut, being Jewish and also someone with ADHD who has had a poor experience with the actual experience of education, I have a... complicated, shall we say, opinion about education's realities."

"Mhm..."

"Fortunately," I continued, "the Warehouse- that's what I call the pocket dimension where I keep my stuff and also an entire galaxy full of life and culture- has some bullshit magic going on that can vastly accelerate and ease the process of actually learning, thus leaving you free to do the other fun college shit, like drugs and parties and unprotected sex. Or whatever it is people actually do at college. I went to a community college and I try not to be bitter about missing out on that formative cultural keystone by reminding myself that I have never been a drugs and parties and unprotected sex kind of gal."

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Eve snorted in amusement. "Well, fair enough. I... honestly, don't think I'm much of one either? But, well... I'll consider it."

"Cool deal," I said, nodding. "Fair warning, the state of the art there is conveying a bachelor's degree worth of education and training in the span of two hours, so, uh... Don't expect to walk out of there with just one specialty."

"Oh no, I'll be good at too many things. The horror."

"Even with immortality and time dilation, there's only so much time in the day. Don't come whining to me when you can't decide between writing for your next book, or sculpting a new statuette, or prototyping a video game."

"...You're not just making up examples, are you?"

"Those are all things I've tried my hand at and enjoyed, yes. Although it's writing that I actually stuck with, and which I did with the most frequency back before I started leading a far more exciting life. Now, I know you aren't my own flesh and blood, but we are still kindred spirits, so..." I shrugged. "I will be proud, but not exactly surprised, if you end up developing similar interests to me."

"So, between us, teenage rebellion is going to look like me getting into sports?"

"Yes, precisely. Please don't test me on that, though, because as much as I love you, I will not pretend to like basketball for the sake of your ego."

"I make no promises."

----------------------------------------

Once the Terminus Sphere was in play, there simply wasn't much that the Viltrumites could do to stop me. My fleets had the advantage over theirs; their own fleets were subjugation forces, meant to maintain order in rebellious provinces. My fleets, meanwhile, were designed to destroy other fleets in open battle, and had all the bullshit supertech to back that up; I genuinely didn't know if Star Wars' space fleets would outperform the space fleets of the Invincible setting, given that Invincible was about men in tight clothing punching each other with their bare hands and flying through space under their own power, but I did know that I hadn't been content to simply field Star Destroyers, when I had the ability to retrofit them with whatever bullshit hypertech I wanted.

Compared to my bullshit hypertech, the Viltrumite Empire's own ace in the hole, militarily, was to deploy Viltrumites. Given that these were fleet battles in space, however, it was very easy to deploy the Terminus Sphere and neutralize them in seconds.

We disabled and capture ten Viltrumites, out of the roughly fifty or so Viltrumites left in the whole galaxy, before the tide changed, and all Viltrumites were recalled to Viltrum itself, to stage a climactic final stand.

Unfortunately for their desire for a heroic death, we just fired the Terminus Sphere, took thirty four prisoners, and fired a regular old Circle's End on the surface of Viltrum, cracking the planet like an egg, straight down the middle.

It'd coalesce back together, sometime in the next decade or two, but there would be nothing left intact on the surface.

(I'd briefly considered harvesting genetic samples from the planetary ring of dead Viltrumites (that Viltrum had for some goddamn reason, fuck knows why the Viltrumites did that) so I could map the Viltrumite genome in full, but then I realized that I had the Viltrumite database, and the Viltrumites had already done that. So I just left the dead where they floated, and did not disturb their rest any further than was already inevitable given the whole "crack Viltrum in half with gravitic weaponry" thing.)

Once the Viltrumites themselves were safely neutralized, the Red Hand's role in the war was mostly concluded. The Viltrumite Empire had enough inertia that taking fifty people out of the picture wouldn't immediately destroy it, but breaking the back of the rest of the imperial core, made up of societies that had cooperated the most eagerly with Viltrumite imperialism, was perfectly achievable by the Coalition of Planets, especially once they folded in whatever fleets the rebels in the Empire could contribute.

All that was left now was finding somewhere to put all the Viltrumites. And wouldn't you know it, I had a solution to that.

"You really think there's anything good left in them worth saving?" Clover asked.

"We have to try," Adrianne said.

"I'm not convinced we do, is the thing," Clover said. "I cut my teeth in the Sith Empire, and while we did have access to some pretty strong mind-control powers, we still recognized the simple fact that, sometimes, the most expedient option was to just kill someone and be done with it."

"You're talking about Operation Poppy-Cutter," I said. "Where we killed high-ranking Sith who were in the way of certain political aims. And unfortunately, I have to challenge your understanding of the situation: I didn't have them killed because mind-controlling them was less convenient, I had them killed because mind-controlling them was not possible. I may have been the strongest Force Adept in the galaxy, but that didn't mean nobody could resist my influence. The Viltrumites, meanwhile, are different, because among other things, they don't have the ability to resist the Force anymore. Not as much as they had with their powers, anyway. And..." I sighed. "Then we come to one of the problems of being in a Jumpchain: Invincible is a comic book written by the Walking Dead guy, and whatever he decides to put in the story is what goes in the story. But the world I live in, sometimes, when I feel like it, is only based on those comic books, and I can't reasonably say that the stuff that happened in those books will happen in that world."

"The stuff in question being, 'when the Viltrumites are forced to demilitarize and live amongst normal people, all of them calm down and get better and stop being monstrous in relatively short order,'" Adrianne said. "Literally all of them, with the exception of Thragg, who's too evil, and Conquest, who was too dead."

"Precisely," I said, nodding. "Now, I do know that something like that happened with Nolan, but that's different. Nolan spent twenty years on Earth without ever talking to another Viltrumite, and being immersed in the cultures of Earth- even if most of that immersion happened in Baltimore. He got married and had a kid, and raised that kid in American culture, and the whole Viltrumite side of Mark's heritage just... didn't come up much because Nolan understood very well just how disruptive that would've been to the life he'd made for himself, that he enjoyed living." I shrugged. "That's, like. Textbook 'going native,' and it took him twenty years, and it still wasn't complete. So, for General Kregg to undergo that in a single year after amassing a harem, that's... uh... Less than psychologically realistic, in my mind. So..."

"We can't say for sure that there is that kind of good in them," Adrianne said.

"And yet, you're going to try anyways, because it doesn't cost you anything besides the time and effort of people you've never met and don't have to pay," Clover said.

"Pretty much, yeah," I said. "Tell those therapists I wished 'em luck."