A few hours later, aided by the power of cleaning drones, 8 hands and a pair of swiffer shoes the cathedral interiors became much more bearable.
Some foodstuffs and furniture were relocated from the treehouse into the stone church, giving it a more homely feeling. Alexa released a bunch of levitating Chinese lanterns, which snapped themselves to the ceiling, producing a very wholesome, warm atmosphere.
The dead scientist on the floor was relocated onto a swivel chair and given a thorough dusting as well. Alexa labelled him as Steve the intern who worked himself to death which made the skeleton marginally less creepy in Martin's eyes. She also grabbed the folded sticky note off the floor and stuck it onto Steve's forehead.
"Why are we cleaning up this place and making it look nice?" Ember asked as she eyed the floating lanterns. "Aren't you getting kicked off planet by Wizard Revolution in 23 hours, or something?"
"I need time to wind down, secure a safer base of local operations and to think things over," Alexa replied simply. "This is me winding down before my next big, potentially death-defying heist. Go get your power armor before someone steals it from the bushes, Dimmy. Cottes - open the church door for our ex-hero plz!"
While Ember retrieved her Resonance armor from the bushes with Cottie, Alexa and Martin dragged an ancient, large, gothic pew out of a corner of the cathedral and draped it with blankets harvested from the tree fort.
Alexa somehow managed to convince Cottie to take off her armor.
Pretending to be a god probably had something to do with it.
Making comments like: "My blessed face full of voidness requires the sacrifice of your lap without your power armor in the way," were what had done the Equalizer in.
Cottie's shell of being a lonesome weapon of death for the Equalizer Order had been quite thoroughly cracked and stripped off.
Beneath the carbon-fiber steel plated Cottie wore a tight fitting gray long sleeve unitard that accentuated her curves. Martin's eyebrows shot up when he read her surface thoughts and realized that this was a design similar to the Iva suits used by Titanomachy space engineers that recycled absolutely everything for its users from sweat to dead skin cells.
This was the epitome of SCA tech and the Equalizers had managed to match it with financial backing of many mundane human nations.
They all sat together and watched Demolition man, projected by the holographic arrays, while Alexa used Cottie as a pillow as per usual.
Katherine Lizbeth was at peace. She had found a god that walked among humans, the one she could trust with everything, the only person in the universe who could tell her what to do, wield her for what was right.
No argument made by anyone would dissuade her of this. She had seen Alexa sacrifice herself, step into the heart of Tartarus and emerge from within unchanged. She had seen Alexa destroy Tartarus and even shatter Nonpareil, the one hero that the entire Equalizer Order had no way to stop. She saw Alexa bring the Superstate to its knees with financial prowess and stand up to a data god. In her opinion, these were absolute miracles, deeds of someone not only truly cared for humanity, but also did something about the imbalance of power between the heroes and mundanes.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Ember felt slightly awkward at first, but soon enough she lost herself in the mental link that they all shared, listening along at Alexa's ridiculous comments about the old movie, inexplicably becoming part of the group.
For the first time in her life Ember saw her brother not as a gullible child, but as an equal. She felt like he was someone she could now respect. She suddenly saw Alexa not as a supervillain but as a girl who had ambitions that had rivaled her own. She saw Cottie not as a cultist but as a girl who had lost everything and found a new family in Alexa and Martin.
Ember smiled and for the first time in her life she suddenly realized that she could be herself, didn't have to pretend or to lie to these three people just to outdo, trick or use them. Without her avatars constantly learning, doing things for her, dying for her, without her mad ambition constantly driving her forward she finally had a chance to be human.
With dawning comprehension Ember realized that Alexa was someone that she had always needed, wanted to find but never met until recently - a true rival! Alexa was just like her, a truly determined genius that had matched, outwitted, outplayed, defeated Ember in her own dangerous game against the Superstate.
[Bingo, Dr. Moriarty! Now you're getting it! I'm your Sherlock!] Alexa winked and Ember started to giggle and for the first time in years her laughter was genuine, honest and true to herself.
----------------------------------------
Vladislav Magnetron woke up from a blare of his job notice alarm, letting him know that there was a new, big contract on the market. He blearily opened his eyes, looking at the rusty, metal wall of his base located inside an abandoned Soviet fishing factory ship. Gray light shone from dirty porthole windows, tanker and container ships making noises of arrival and departure from the port of Vladivostok. He rolled out of his dingy, dusty mattress and walked over to his computer station.
Magnetron poked his mouse and hundreds of screens came to life, showing him the changes in the global market. They had all been quite catastrophic. His mouth dropped open and he started to swear in Russian. S-credits were practically worthless all of a sudden as was gold. It was a good thing he kept his currencies spread all over various other crypto investments or he would become destitute. A new cryptocurrency called A-credits was seemingly on the rise, skyrocketing ahead of the others. Magnetron gritted his teeth and invested a few of his plummeting currencies that were tied into gold into A-credits. If only he had woken up a bit earlier. Damn it!
He turned his head towards the screens showing jobs. There was a lot of darknet chatter and a whole slew of offers, all demanding the same thing - the murder of a supervillain named Cassiopea Terror Nova.
Magnetron looked over news pages and laughed. Cassiopeia had exposed corruption within Tartarus sim and somehow hacked the emergency broadcast, plummeting the price of S-credits. Just when tons of supers invested all of their money into gold skyrocketing the price, some dastardly supervillain using a bunch of human corporations sold off, dumped around 500 million ounces of gold into the market. It was utter madness and pandemonium after, but a few people understood that Cassiopeia was to blame. They chose to take their hatred out on her, placing massive contracts on her head.
Vladislav reviewed what was known about Cassiopeia. It wasn’t good. According to darknet vids she could teleport around and had a terrifying power of some sort that straight up harvested hexagrams out of villains.
Notices were made against her by minion unions as she made five talented mercenaries vanish. Still, he needed money now and these contracts were truly tasty. There was a lot of stuff being offered for her execution from both villains and heroes, not S-credits obviously, but other stuff that was still stable.
He accepted all of the head-hunter contracts and dialed up the rest of his team. He told them that they were going to a little Acadian town called Saint Mary to end the life of one very dangerous little girl.