The group walked into the doors and Cottie released the trigger.
Alexa threw open her bag, shaking out a whole cadre of cleaning droids from its innards. The droids dispensed through the cathedral, collecting dust. They weren’t very smart about it and kept bumping into each other.
“Forgot the broom, eh?” Alexa looked at Ember. “Not a very diligent sweeper, you are. Would not hire as my cleaning-drone maid.”
Ember sighed.
Alexa bent into the bag pulling out a pair of cleaning shoes. She took off her jump-sneakers and put on the swiffer-shoes, opened the door and slid into the cathedral, collecting dust as she went.
The others followed.
[Alexa. What the fuck was that thing... Wizard Revolution?] Martin asked. [What she said about everything... was that the truth?]
[Hell if I know,] Alexa shrugged. [Some signs point to yes.]
[What is she?] He demanded,
Alexa skidded to a stop. She looked at the hologram of her dad. “Off” The hologram winked out.
Martin blinked. “Wait.” [You control the hologram? Has all of this been another elaborate theater?]
[I control the hologram,] Alexa nodded. [From what I gathered together my father learned too much and he was obliterated by Agent Three out of existence. However, some of his... work remained behind, eventually producing... me, an agent capable of dismantling the Superstate. I was created to kill Nonpareil.]
"Kill Nonpareil?" Ember sputtered.
"He deserves it," Alexa said.
"Nonpareil is the greatest hero of all," Ember insisted. "He saved the planet from supervillains and apocalyptic disaster countless times!"
"Nonpareil isn't what he seems," Alexa said simply.
Ember squinted at her.
"I'll show you," Alexa said. "We have twenty three hours to find him. You can ask him yourself about exactly what kind of hero he is."
"Maybe I will," Ember crossed her arms.
[Alexa,] Martin pressed on. [What is Wizard Revolution?]
Alexa deflated. [There are things out there in the Universe. Things far more awful than the worst supers. Revolution is the third one you know of, Martin.]
[The third?!] Martin blanched.
[The man made of lasers was one. Revolution is another. Can you guess who else doesn’t belong?] Her silver-blue eyes struck the boy, making him blush.
Martin looked at Alexa for a minute. Then his mind clicked.
[You. You don’t belong,] Martin reached a sudden, dawning realization. [You can do impossible things. I can’t sense your hexagram via the spidernet. I can't read your mind properly. You aren’t a super.]
"Bingo," Alexa nodded.
"What?" Ember asked, staring at Alexa and Martin.
[I’m sorry. I died a long time ago,] Alexa spread her arms.
"You... died?" Ember tilted her head, trying to comprehend what Alexa was talking about.
[I died four hundred years in the future and what had come back wasn't a girl nor a skinwalker wearing human flesh. What had come back in me was one of those damned things,] Alexa's head fell and she started to sniff.
Martin felt despair pouring from the girl. He walked over to Alexa and hugged her fiercely. “You don’t look dead to me.”
“Yeah. A lot of things don’t look like monsters, Martin. I am one, though, I assure you. I don't have a soul. I don't have a super's hexagram. I carry the echo of a dead god inside of me instead, an infinite abomination capable of warping reality. I'm something that has no right to exist.”
"Don’t trust her, Martin. She’s probably full of lies," Ember muttered.
[What do you mean?] Martin glanced at his sister and turned back to Alexa. [How are you an abomination?]
[It’s no different from an educational experience in middle school,] Alexa said mentally.
[Hm?] Martin raised an eyebrow.
[I noted that in physics class this Friday, Mrs. Lester taught us that and I quote - “Momentum is Mass times Velocity.”]
[Okay?]
[It’s an incredibly vast oversimplification. Momentum is also conserved in special relativity in electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and general relativity. It is an expression of one of the fundamental symmetries of space and time: translational symmetry.]
[I understood some of that, I think.] Martin sighed.
[Exactly. Just when you understand, there is more to discover,] Alexa replied. [All supers have a very special spark, a hexagram inside them.]
Alexa lifted her arm and a holographic spark looking like a multilimbed fractal started to spin in her hand, becoming bigger projected by some machine within the cathedral.
[Some people call it a soul. A villain named Nefaria set out to prove the existence of souls. One day he caught a 12 year old girl who had too much gold and not enough minions for his experiments called 'soul fights'. What he proved instead, was the existence of something far more insidious and impossible. He found a god,] Alexa revealed.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
[What... kind of a god?] Martin stared at Alexa.
“Daddums. Play darknet video 8952-832-11.04.mp5” Alexa spoke and a holographic 3-d movie blossomed into existence.
----------------------------------------
A silver haired girl hung on the cross in the back along with hundreds of other crucified people all around. It was Alexa, but much younger. Beneath the girl, was an amphitheater filled with people. Villains, Martin instantly realized. They all had masks and costumes on. Not nice ones. Most of them looked pompous or menacing or freakish and wielded guns or blades or saws.
A man in a black suit adorned with gold in a mask of black and gold waltzed across the stage. “Welcome to soul fights! I, the great Nefaria, will prove to you tonight the existence of souls! Some of you have already been to my show and others are new! Welcome one and all!"
"How can I prove that souls exist, you might ask? With science! You see, I have created a machine that can catch, extract, highlight, define a person’s energy pattern upon their death!” Nefaria pointed to an enormous sphere made of hollow hexagons that loomed over the crucified people. Complex machinery moved within the sphere, hexagons shifting in repeating patterns.
Nefaria pulled out a gold-plated gun and shot a man on a cross. The machine overhead buzzed and something flashed from it, drawing a round, colorful spark out of the man. The audience gasped.
“Behold! The soul of a man, expressed as a mathematical pattern of defined energy! A signature of life itself beneath the flesh!” Nefaria laughed. “So! Go ahead and execute your favorite victim and let the soul games begin! Tonight you shall witness which of these souls is strongest! From basic observation you cannot tell, but there are two very special people hidden amongst the others. In fact, those of you watching this on darknet, have already made bets on which of these victims are more special via your crypto-accounts!”
The crowd complied. They began their festival of murder, executing one cross-bound human after the other with a variety of devices. Blood sprayed all around. The villains cheered. The machine hummed, harvesting what looked like to be souls. Two of the men bound to the crosses were special indeed. Their souls didn’t come out as mere dots. They looked like complex, fractal patterns that spun about. Once out of their bodies, the patterns started to move, shaping themselves into angler fish-like things. They started to attack the shimmering stars pulled out from others, slapping and nipping at them relentlessly.
“Behold! These two are different because they are the souls of supers! These two were low end techie heroes we’ve kidnapped!” Nefaria laughed. “Truly this proves that we supers truly are superior beings! That we are the chosen ones, destined to inherit the earth!”
The crowd of villains cheered with wild abandon.
"Yes! And now for our own, very special guest! A daughter of a villain, whose daddy has refused to come here, refused to defend his precious pookims." Nefaria walked up a metal ladder, reaching the top of Alexa's tall cross that loomed above the others.
"Don't worry, my pretty. I won't kill you like the rest of the chaff here. I will merely bring you near to death so that we can all see your beautiful soul of a supervillain. We've already seen the souls of heroes! Now let's see what one of us looks like!"
"Get fucked. You're all going to hell," Alexa growled.
Nefaria stabbed a needle into Alexa's neck.
She passed out, after some clearly incredibly painful thrashing. The machine hummed. Its radiant energy caught something, pulled something out of her. What it had produced wasn’t a star or a fractal. What came out of Alexa was a dot of pulsating darkness.
“Well… this is new.” Nefaria looked at the dot. “How truly quirky! This is the first one of its kind! I do wonder what it will do when the souls of the supers attack!”
One of the angler-fish shaped fractals moved towards the dark dot. The dot hung in place pulsating harmlessly.
“Truly extraordinary!” Nefaria said, grinning with a set of yellowing teeth. He did not expect what had come next. Lines of darkness struck out from the pulsating dot. They pierced the fractals of the souls of heroes, drew them into itself. Other dark rays reached for the rest of the stars. The pulsating dot drew the souls into itself, devoured them whole.
“What…” Nefaria spoke, his voice shaking. “But… souls can't eat souls.”
The darkness wasn’t done. It hungered for more. Black rays had shot out of it across the crowd, pulling fractals out of living supers, pulling energy from their tech suits and guns. The villains screamed, tried to run, tried to teleport out but the darkness was faster. Nefaria fell, his eyes open, staring out lifelessly onto the world as a dark ray ripped out his hexagram of power along with his life.
The tiny dot stole power from the electromagnetic manacles holding the prisoners to the crosses and they started to fall. Alexa's body slipped down to the metal stairwell when her manacles snapped open. Rays of darkness reached for the lights and the auditorium dimmed. It was barely lit now through tiny porthole-windows in the domed ceiling.
A dark vector shot up into the humming machine. It died with a groan, stilling. The small dot of darkness spun in place and vanished as the machine that had exposed it to the world lost power.
Alexa gasped, opening her eyes. She was alive. She stood up, facing a sea of dead bodies now littering the auditorium in front of her.
The video ended then, the holographic show collapsing into blue hexagon-shaped flickers.
----------------------------------------
“Oh.” Martin said.
[I’m not a real super, Martin. I have no fractal hexagram. This video from the soul fight show was uploaded to the supervillain darknet. Some villains know what I am. They fear interacting with me. I’ve been declared a person non-grata by them, especially after it was confirmed that 5 mercenary minions booked by me vanished from the face of the Earth never to be seen again.]
Martin nodded. He understood why Alexa didn’t just hire more super mercenaries.
[The void weapons created by a brilliant villain techie long ago, used and improved by the Equalizers are similar to what lives in me. The precogs can’t see properly, get bamboozled by me much easier because of it. Just like they can’t predict or understand Three or Revolution. Just like they can’t stop Enforcers from killing heroes.] Alexa sent. [This is why I wanted Cottie to kill me in the end. I don’t deserve to live. Like Cottie’s gun, the thing inside me had leached energy, information, life out of everything it touched, permanently, when Nefaria’s machine gave it form. The only problem is… I don’t know if it can even be killed by a human. I’m not a hero or a villain. I’m the nothingness between the stars wearing human flesh.]
Martin hugged Alexa harder.
[It's the void you saw in my mind. The tool sorter. Nothingness. Infinity Paradox. It takes things and organizes them. It can exist in a simulation too because data for it is as real as the physical world. Like Agent Three it makes no distinction between a virtual world and the real. Everything is numbers to it. It itself is made of numbers. Everything for it is a device with utility. I tried to get Three to hit it, but he mostly missed. I got scared and moved a bit.]
Alexa shuddered.
[I’m sorry. I didn't want to forget you. I… wanted to have friends. I’ve been alone for so long in the darkness.] Alexa cried into Martin’s chest. [I have bits and pieces of various villains crammed into me like a half-torn patchwork of... abilities. I can make quirky tools like the ray gun and do some really complex mathematics... but those aren't my powers, they're remnants of skills... stolen ideas and dreams that belonged to the villains in the crowd present during Nefaria's show.]
“I don’t care what you are.” Martin said. “I don’t see a dead god in you. I see a girl. I see my friend.”
Cottie fell to her knees, crossing her hands in prayer, carbon fiber steel kneecaps clanking against the marble floors of the cathedral. [You exist. The power that guides the hand of Equality. The power that breaks supers. The power that lives within the void weapons. I understand how you can do the things that you do now!]
“Oh please! It’s all fake! Deception!” Ember growled. “She’s playing you two for fools! Always lying, always messing around! She’s full of it! She's obviously a super with some kind of a mental disruption-type power, that's all!”
Alexa looked at Ember. “Everything is a game to me, you are right. It’s hard to be a god.”
“Hey, uh.” Martin said. "You ain't gonna snatch up my hexagram or my soul, right?"
Alexa shook her head. "That only happened once due to that kittening infernal machine that gave the Song of the Void, Infinity Paradox form outside of my body. Techie Nefaria is dead and I burned their kittening auditorium of death to the ground."
“Right." Martin nodded. "Anyways… I thought of a perfect nickname for you while you were away. It’s relevant to Mittens and kittens too.”
“Yeees?” Alexa blinked her silver eyelashes at him.
“Casserole!” Martin declared and Alexa choked with laughter.