Alchemy works through tools. So, having proper tools on hand was a must. Masspacks + Compressing (Sha/Pym) Particles meant I could carry around a lot of stuff.
This Portal was being attuned to both vivify necromantic energies and pour them down an existing pathway into another dimension. There was just weaving a little space magic around the whole so the detonation went down the funnel instead of omnidirectionally, which was simply a matter of making all directions just one direction.
The pieces of the Portal hummed, silvery strands of magic rose out and encompassed the oversized sphere of Dead Go Boom, and I Sang softly as I played the Portal and Wove the Chords necessary to make this happen.
Wasn’t all that hard.
The Red Eyes turned around and looked behind me.
I politely raised my hand and the Fastcast Wall of Force got in the way as the Smasher understudy slammed into it with his superstrong fists. He appeared a bit startled at his failure, which got worse when Vier yanked off his glasses, disrupting the Ward that had been hiding him from genescans. The Baneskull atop of Function floating there turned around and focused its burning eyes on him, lighting him up in hostile green flames both physically and in the mindscape.
The next second, he didn’t have a head any more, as Gladiator came across and removed it directly.
His body was warping and bulging inside his uniform as he fell, swelling into the bulbous, hairless form of a Dire Wraith.
With an understated roar and pop, the necrosphere blew, and promptly ignited into sun-bright vivus as it did so. Instead of expanding in an uncontrolled fashion and giving everyone a case of white blindness, the sum of the energy was dumped instantly down the waiting Portal, and I had to hide a hiccup as it intersected the pathway to the Underweb we used and dumped itself into the Pocket.
A big roiling explosion of vivus. Couldn’t see any way that would be useful in the future, nuh uh...
The light went away, leaving a nice hollow in the metal flooring. The Portal powered down, disassembled itself, and shrank down as the pieces dumped themselves into my Masspack.
I grabbed the floating eyeglasses, which weren’t eyeglasses at all, but some form of extremely advanced and powerful technorganic creature called Exospecs, capable of granting their wearer all sorts of abilities, and held them out to the Praetor calmly.
They had been part of the fake Smasher’s disguise, meaning they were compromised, and I had them sheathed in a minor Ward against Evil to stop incidental contact.
He took them wordlessly. As one of the most powerful weapons of the Shi’ar, or whatever planet the Smashers came from, naturally they weren’t going to leave the things in my possession.
“Your presence here saved many lives,” he noted calmly.
“Eh. If I hadn’t warned you, far fewer of the Guard would have been here and in danger. How about you and Mentor figure up a way to claim all the credit and quietly leave me out of the official report.” I dusted off my hands. The two men, and most of the Imperial Guards there, looked at one another in surprise. “To assuage any feelings of honor, just write me up a performance-based mercenary contract after the fact, toss some credits at it, and claim I was worth what I was paid without needing to go into any specifics. Nobody should question it, right?”
“That... seems like a smooth enough way to handle events,” Mentor agreed cautiously, looking to the Praetor for his approval.
“The only ones who need to know are the ones you tell yourselves.” In other words, I didn’t give them permission to write me up, so it wasn’t going to happen regardless. “Happy to be of service. Now how about I get out of your way so your forensic teams can really get to work?”
------
“That didn’t take too awful long,” Red MJ said, sipping at a formerly-full glass of milk as I sat down with a plate of Combicha Two and my own glass. “Not even going to show off?” she asked me archly.
“Meh. Two has a longer onset time, I can go slow enough to enjoy it more.” Which didn’t mean eat slow, just slower. “Nice show, yourself!”
“Thanks. Twits waving around energy weapons...” she muttered, shaking her flaming-red locks. “Should have stuck to guns. I miss anything important?”
“Dire Wraith infiltration about ten miles away. Had a stand-off necronuke ready to take out the capital, too. Problem solved,” I related around spearing my tortilla pieces. Mmmpff, mmmpff!
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“That sounds pretty serious,” Peter murmured to me, glancing around.
“Oh, it is. They even got someone into the Subguardians. The whole planet’s going to be locked down and everyone on it gene-scanned now,” I said cheerfully. “Which means we are going to have to test our entire crew before we break station.” My eyes flickered. “The odds one of the SHIELD techs didn’t get replaced is slim to none at this point.”
Peter winced. “You say that so casually...”
“Well, the Dire Wraiths are going to learn that sucking up the mind and soul of your victims can be used against you,” I said calmly. “I already texted everyone to wear their headgear at all times and why. I can’t do anything if they don’t follow directions and want to get laid by an alien.”
Peter found other places to look, while MJ just glanced at him and smiled, having heard all about his prior accomplishments from Gwen and Cindy, and was completely inured to such things through her preincarnation. “You look a little edgy, Peter. Lady Syalitha and her companions trying to corral you again?” MJ asked him.
“You, you actually know their names?” Peter gasped in dismay.
“Well, they were inquiring after you when we arrived. They seemed very disappointed you were coming in the company of the famous Dynamo and your two fellow female Spider Totems... and there might have been inferences that we had a relationship and I wasn’t too happy with your previous display of drugged amatory prowess.” She lifted her eyebrows at him with a smile.
“Say thank you,” I advised him casually as I finished up, and he swallowed.
“Uh, thank you?” he said in a small voice. MJ beamed and patted his hand like an older sister.
My bracer beeped as I was going through The Burn, and I sighed and swept up my milk as I looked at it.
“Ebersol, you idiot...”
I put the milk down, and a crackling line of voltage followed me as I was out of there.
---------
He was screaming and trying to bat away the spiked tip stabbing for his head. The formerly attractive, silkily-furred, tailed, and curvaceous alien woman he’d been enjoying himself with was turning into something that looked more like a purple turd pile with claws and eyeballs, and that tongue-spike was something he recognized!
“ShitshitshitSHIIIIT!” he screamed, and there was a crackle of voltage, a shockwave of breaking air, and belatedly an explosion of doorways shredded moving past as something came through them and stopped hard.
Dynamo was right in front of him.
Norbert Ebersol was never so happy to see anyone in his whole life. The fact she had one hand grabbing the brain-leeching spike and the other was buried in the head of the Dire Wraith helped, too.
There was a hum and really harsh crackle of voltage, and the Dire Wraith blew apart from within, superheated gore spraying over the ceiling and wall away from him, and somehow leaving Dynamo perfectly clean.
“Ebersol, you are a total fucking idiot, and I mean that directly,” she told him calmly, looking him up and down once as he stood there naked.
“Uh, hi, Dynamo?” he could only offer weakly, looking up at her and sort of waving. She was really impressive when she had the Wrecker Buffs up...
“You might want to get dressed. The rest of them are coming.”
“Oh. Shit!” He dove for the wrist bracer the dire wraith had slipped off him in the midst of their fun, clapped it on urgently, and punched his armor recall.
Paramagnetic relays brought his armor tumbling towards him, the pieces lining up as they clapped to him and their systems interlinked, the mesh undernetting serving as hasty underwear that bound everything together as he suited up.
His techpack was barely in place when something big, bulky, and purple came crashing through the wall. Coolly he brought up two rotating adamantium saw blades, cut off the extended tongues, and, his fists crackling with power, he screamed as he launched himself at the rather surprised dire wraiths there while the rest of some of his nasty weapon systems started to come online.
---
“So... how’d ya know?” Norbert asked me, looking over the mess of dead aliens scattered about, trying to control his breathing. Thankfully his armor’s filters were dealing with most of the smell.
“The reason I told you I had a tracker on you in case you got into trouble was so you would look for it and disarm it. The real tracker is magical, and activated when your armor was removed.” I was taking pictures of all of this, and uploading them to the Praetor’s personal email, which I had, uh, acquired recently. “That means if you were really dumb and got yourself killed while in your armor, it would also go off. I won’t even ask where you got an LMD to fool Jenkins while you snuck off.”
“Oh.” He looked around the really messed-up brothel, all shot, burned, and exploded to Hell and gone, with bits and pieces of dire wraiths who used to be all sorts of attractive aliens strewn everywhere. “This is not how I pictured my hentai fantasy ending up, I’ll have you know.”
“But you have plenty of pictures.”
“Uh, I do...” he admitted.
“Imagine how many hits you’re going to get when you upload them. HENTAI TRIP GONE WRONG, BUT ALL FIXED NOW.” I framed it for him, and he went beet red.
But he was still going to post them, I could tell. Just adding to the rep of The Fixer...
There was a crackle outside, and a few breaths later Smasher and his wavy purple hair came pounding through the doorway I’d blown apart getting in here, leading in a squad of Shi’ar infantry with weapons hot. They all came to a halt when they entered the main room and saw the gory mess, and the two of us standing there.
Norbert was wearing a lot more Eau de Wraith than I was. Repulse fields were so useful at times.
“Heya, Smasher! Didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Let me introduce you to my associate the Fixer, who let his love of sex videos with non-Terran humanoid and other species get the best of him. Fix, why don’t you show them your videos.”
Ebersol laughed kind of weakly as the eyes of the authorities fell on him, never liking dealing with government types.
Served him and his pecker right. He was keeping the ‘Terrans are barbaric hicks’ meme alive and well for our planet, that was certain.
I was also going to recommend that ‘Dynamo not appearing in these vids’ was not an accident and I didn’t need to get any credit for this, either.
Funnily enough, the Fixer was probably going to earn a fairly substantial reward for doing all this...