"...and that's when I left him in a cave in the Rockies and came to get a second opinion," I finished my explanation and sat back on the abnormally comfortable, retro-futuristic revolving seat. "The physical stuff I get and tech I can muddle along, but this empowerment business is very odd."

"You could say that again," Mandy said as she took a sip of a radiant orange liquid in a metallic black cup. Said cup looked way too dull and solid for having a temperature of over four thousand Kelvin, according to my senses. "The information we have on the Red Dragon is largely contradictory. We don't even know how his powers work, let alone how he made his disciples."

"Should I prepare for a field-trip, then?" Jerry asked lightly and he and Mandy exchanged a look. In the few seconds that followed I saw them going through an entire silent conversation, micro-expressions shifting dozens of times in response to each other with not a single word uttered out loud. They'd either invented some form of telepathy magic, or they were so head over heels for each other their brains were just different states of the same quantum superposed whole.

With Anne and the other kids asleep for the night - the orbital superhero school had a strict curfew - the three of us had retreated to the bridge to have a discussion on the new information from Miami. Said bridge was reminiscent of those 70's science fiction shows with less science than the average medieval fairy tale, complete with color-coded stations that had magically comfortable chairs and boards of buttons and screens that pretended to be computers. The buttons were near-identical, mostly unlabeled and not actually connected to any electronics.

According to Jerry's eager explanations, as long as you believed you knew what you were doing and had permission to do so, you could use all of a station's functions regardless of what combination of buttons you pressed. Anyone sitting in the tactical officer's or Captain's stations could, in theory, correctly fire the grazer lances or launch the protonium missiles via random button sequences. The only exception was the big red button labelled 'self-destruct'. Pressing that always teleported you to the brig, naked, with your head in the toilet seat. That was nerd humor for you.

"I'll get my new staff," Mandy said and vanished in a flash of fire after draining the last of her drink.

"I haven't seen her excited for a field mission for some time," Jerry mused as he got off the Captain's chair and walked towards the nearest wall, a door already forming on it as he did so. "All our outings lately devolve to chasing down The Wizard before he can use another ancient temple for a mass sacrifice, or summon a fiend to devour some remote village in exchange for power."

"That guy still bothering you?" I said as I swung round and round in the science officer's seat. "How come you haven't dropped a protonium missile or that giant death robot of yours on his head yet?"

"He's not stupid, he keeps hitting inhabited areas." The wall was unfolding before Jerry now, what looked like a soup of liquid gold with dark brown sprinkles forming around him into a stoutly built suit of thick overlapping plates as his powers rearranged the material at the molecular level. I was pretty sure the armor was not gold but a copper-beryllium-scandium alloy over a graphene filament matrix. The composite's physical resilience was ridiculous even before magical reinforcement from Jerry's powers but it was far more vulnerable to heat... but that was only a problem for engineers who hadn't hooked up with the best fire sorceress on the planet. "Dropping the Titan on him would cause too many casualties. A protonium missile would end up like your latest party in Canada."

"Hey! Devon Island was uninhabited and I needed to stop those kaiju." While the exterior looked about done, the internals of Jerry's suit kept shifting as more material came out of the wall. Solid-state power systems, free electron beam weapons, piezoelectric artificial musculature, even a miniaturized Thorium reactor; whole cubic meters of components shoehorned into a suit less than twelve feet tall. I guess he'd discovered a new way to improve his devices besides directly boosting their base capabilities. "Maybe drop a message the next time you're against The Wizard? He thinks he's figured out another escape strategy then wham! Mountain-busting fist to the face faster than he can cast."

"I'll tell Amanda but I don't think she'll agree. She's taken The Wizard's repeated escapes personally," Jerry said in a loud mechanical voice after his helmet finished forming. A golden dome with an angular, mouthless, noseless face-plate and triangular glowing eyes looked back; quite intimidating and oddly familiar. As in, I was sure I'd seen a similar helmet before.

"I'll go see what's taking her so long, she only had a staff to pick up." He took a loudly clanging step into the newly formed corridor then stopped and looked back at me. "Don't touch anything you shouldn't. Spaceships are more fragile than Canadian islands." And with that parting remark I was alone in the bridge - or nearly so. Just me and the rainbow-hued chicken.

...why was there a rainbow-hued chicken on the space battleship's bridge? How was there a rainbow-hued chicken on the space battleship's bridge? Not having an answer for those fundamental questions beyond 'a wizard did it', I searched for something to do while I waited. Taking a few spins in every station's revolving chair, I decided that the Security Officer's chair spun both the longest and fastest for a given amount of force, but the Executive Officer's was by far the most comfortable. The Captain's Chair had the oddest gimmicks, such as built-in vibration and heating, ion-drive based locomotion, a personal magical shield, deployable Virtual Reality headgear, an automated restraint system and micro-missiles that were loaded with various condiments and drinks? Engineers were weird, all right.

I slowly retreated from the crime against interior design, decency and common sense and brought up Focused Invulnerability while checking Immutable Force was on. Lately, I'd been keeping that power in my standard load-out on account of resisting mind-control or spells that could turn me into a duck but it was always best to double-check and if in doubt, double-check that you'd double-checked. Moderately confident in my own invulnerability, I pressed the big red button labelled 'self-destruct'. For a split-second I was surrounded by a bluish light and felt little pins and needles all over my body but when the lightshow was over I still stood on the bridge, fully clothed.

"Convoluted security measures are no match for good, old, overwhelming power!" I stated.

The rainbow-hued chicken belched a three-foot-long burst of flame. The flame was black with bright pink spots.

"Meh. Everyone is a critic."

xxxx

Mandy, Jerry and I were in the station's airlock when I felt one of my forcefields wink out. I reached out with that part of my powers that kept me vaguely aware of every twisting of of physics I was either actively holding on to or had permanently created. Most of them were back on Mars, a couple were on the Moon, but the majority of the more recent ones were on Earth. Those in the last category were under a hundred, if you counted the defenses on my house and a couple other secure locations as a single field each, but focusing on each one took significantly longer and it involved more than a little blind fumbling compared to checking anything with my senses. Unfortunately, said senses simply weren't good enough after the first few dozen miles so the slow way it was. I was about halfway down the list when the second force-field winked out. Acting on an educated guess (totally not a random whim) I checked a certain cave in the Rockies and...

"Guys, we have a problem," I told my two best friends. "Two of the bindings on the prisoner just went kaput." I scowled harder on the next bit of feedback. "Three, now."

"How many did you put on him?" Mandy said and started pulling a massive amount of power. Her new staff, a single rod of reddish violet crystal of beryllium, magnesium, aluminum and oxygen, glowed brighter and brighter.

"Forty-one, for redundancy." Plus it was a prime number one less than forty-two. It felt appropriate. "But at this rate they'll be all gone before we land."

"...are they winking out for no reason?" she asked, her glowing amber eyes looking at something I could not see. "As in, the prisoner is not doing anything?"

"Yes, another just vanished." It was very odd. Then again, I couldn't exactly get detailed information from orbit and halfway around the world to boot. "How did you know?"

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

"No time to explain." She touched me with the magic stick and an odd film of alien power spread all over my costume, skin and hair. It was somewhat similar to Anne's constructs, in that my senses could not tell me what it did. Whatever it was, it did its job without interacting with physics at all. "How good are you at stealth?"

"I snuck through your defenses the last time I flew by, didn't I?" I reminded her somewhat impatiently, mindful of another binding vanishing.

"Good enough," she decided with a firm nod. "I'm about to transport us. It will be flashy and loud and as long as you hide the moment we arrive, magical detection should not be able to tell you'll be there at all."

I wanted to ask why that was important but there was no time to waste. Crackles of magic flew out of Mandy's staff like bad CGI, like lightning but red and not made out of electrons or any other particle I could name. Not made out of particles at all. Then the sensation of being exposed to more heat than the heart of a nuclear explosion came without the accompanying flesh-melting pain... except all three of us did melt and turn into the same crackle of energy.

We speared through the airlock and the more intangible defenses of the station as if they weren't there, leaping through the great distance between the station and the planet below as if taking a single step. No, not leaping; being pulled back by a sucking, howling force so hard that the whole world turned on its head. It lasted an instant and a day and all the spans of time between, until a crackling bolt of crimson struck somewhere in the Rocky Mountains an infinitesimal fraction of a second before our departure.

Crackling energy reformed into bodies and I forced myself to act through dizziness and disorientation, fading from the physical world before the flash of magic fully subsided. The moment I entered the void of intangibility the world righted itself, my thoughts and senses unscrambling. We'd arrived earlier than we'd departed?! No, no, I was going to leave that can of worms to be dealt with later. For now we had a goal and Mandy had instructed me to go full stealth for a reason.

I had no idea what that reason was, but then the more supernatural aspects of magic were still alien to me. Mandy was the expert here and whatever she'd realized about the situation from what little I could say about my disappearing force-fields, I trusted her to have a plan. It was more than I did and in situations you knew little you always followed the expert; anything else would be stupid.

Snow and gravel crunched under Jerry's metal greaves and hissed and boiled under Mandy's bare feet as they advanced up the steep incline. We were somewhere in Montana, on a pretty average-height peak for the three-thousand-mile long mountain range. I'd picked the general area pretty much at random when transporting the prisoner, chosen the particular peak because it was in the middle of a mostly uninhabited region and did not stand out in any particular way. I didn't even know its name, though if I looked into the nearby towns with super-senses I'd probably find a few signs with it. How had Mandy even known to bring us here? Precognition? Detecting traces of my own powers? Probably not mind-reading, given my defenses.

The wind howled as we marched on, though I only sensed it at one remove while intangible. At a height of a good eight thousand feet at night, the weather was already going for what promised to be a nice snowstorm. It didn't physically impede any of us but it did make searching our surroundings for the reason the prisoner's bindings were failing a bit more complicated. Mandy marched ahead confidently, needing no directions to step right to the almost invisible crack in the mountainside that marked a cave's entrance. A boulder jutted out right in front of it, making it nearly impossible to see from a distance for anyone without super-senses or that did not already know where it was. The cave itself snaked through rock, wide enough for even Jerry's armor for about a hundred feet before narrowing too much for anyone larger than a child to go further.

It was at that point that we found my prisoner, still unconscious and in exactly the same spot that I'd left him. His immobility was enforced by invisible, intangible force-fields of Proximakinesis, shaped like inch-thick ropes tied all over the man's limbs and body on one end, the other stretching a good five miles into the heart of the mountain below. With each force-field able to exert a good hundred million Newtons of force and being anchored deeply in a mass of well over fifty billion tons, even I could not have escaped through main force. As for breaking the bindings, unlike in comic books they were not physical things but areas where a preselected amount and direction of force was applied. If more force than they could counter was used, whatever exerted it would simply pass through as there was nothing physical for it to break. A supernova could sweep away the entire planet and they would remain behind completely undamaged... so how then had they been broken?

"Ah, I see," Mandy muttered mostly at herself, moving her hands over the bindings as if she could touch them. Normally I'd say she couldn't have because they were not set up to exert force against anyone but the prisoner, but she seemed to be interacting with the magic itself rather than its applications. Her hands slipped an inch over the bound man's bare chest and the Chinese logograph thereon, the red raw skin where the symbol had been burned into him momentarily flashing crimson. "This is very clever. Very clever indeed."

"Amanda, love, I've told you before," Jerry's artificially amplified, oddly distorted voice echoed from his golden helmet. "The rest of us mere humans do not see as you do. I can't tell what you find so clever about a letter messily branded into a man's chest because for me it's just some bit of cruelty... and probably neither can anyone else."

"Right," the redhead said distractedly. "This is not really granting the guy powers. It's a complex spell that mimics the abilities of a super, laid over him and put under his control."

"How's that different from actually having powers and why is it important?" he asked exactly what I wanted to, because if it mimicked the abilities of a super and was under the man's control, didn't that make him a super?

"It's like the suits of armor you built for the kids," Mandy explained, fingers splayed over the symbol and wriggling oddly. More flashes came from it, in increasing frequency and intensity. If I didn't know better - and I didn't - I'd say they were either a distress signal or a self-destruct. "It might not have physical components but it has similar benefits; enhanced strength and durability instead of artificial muscles and armor, triggered spells instead of built-in energy weapons, enhanced senses instead of a heads-up display, sensors and v.i. combat assistance, rudimentary telepathy instead of communications." The next flash from the symbol lasted a good three seconds and was blindingly bright. It looked like a warning. "Most of the bigger spells I've cast were about more esoteric effects or had much higher power. This is simplistic, mid-tier magic in comparison, but sturdy and... standardised? Honestly, it feels more like your magitech than a spell."

"Oh, so that's why he can keep casting them on people." Jerry whistled appreciatively. "He's also skipped the issues with both designing and using artificial intelligence for combat by giving it to people just like we do. You're right, it's clever."

"That's not all," Mandy said, then stepped on the man's side for a moment. Her bare foot made his flesh sizzle and burn where she touched the same way she'd been leaving footsteps on the bare rocks. The symbol started glowing and the sizzling stopped almost entirely and the glow did not stop when she removed her foot. The second-degree burn on the man's side started glowing too, slowly getting smaller as we watched. It wasn't nearly as fast as my own regeneration but that it provided healing at all was a big deal. Most supers did not have access to healing powers, let alone those capable of healing others. "I was not sure before examining it while it went active, but this is not just magitech or an an enchanted item, it's an active power."

A glance and a wordless conversation went through my two friends once more, Jerry starting to look quite worried. Since I was neither familiar with enchanted items the way the two of them were nor shared into their couple's telepathy, I prodded Mandy and Jerry in the back with Proximakinesis. Jerry caught on before she did and spoke out loud what had the two of them so worried-looking.

"If it's an active power tied to him, whenever empowered soldiers use it in combat most of the violence will fully feed back into the Red Dragon instead of them, as it would if the powers were theirs, or just making the item stronger as in enchanted items."

Wasn't that just like what I've done at the Miami wall? Maybe I should sue his Scalyness for copyright infringement. The courts would ruin him and we wouldn't need to face him in a big battle. ...wait, no, he lived in China. It would never work, copycats were part of the cultural identity over there. Even if it could have, they'd probably dismiss my claims of his using precognition and/or time-travel to steal my idea as spurious.

Far less worried about copyright infringement and other intellectual property theft, Mandy had returned to making odd gestures over the unconscious man's chest. The brand was flickering madly now and... I blinked, then blinked again. Was it actually moving?

"What are you doing?" Jerry asked, curious about the brand's newfound mobility as well.

"I'm fairly sure the empowerment is supposed to be detachable," the sorceress muttered, her eyes glowing brighter and brighter to match her staff, her hair first partially then fully turning into flames and her shadow starting to move and flutter like a cape in the wind. "If I can find a way to move it myself or even just turn it off, much of the Red Dragon Army's threat will go away without us having to fight a single battle."

Apparently, someone did not like that idea because the mountain shook more than in a hundred earthquakes, as if it had been struck by the fist of a god. With a roar louder than a small nuke the peak shattered and millions of tons of rock buried the cave and all within it...