“That is incredibly impressive, if you don’t mind me saying so,” Callie’s voice carried through the sky. Since she could be heard everywhere around the planet if she desired, not too surprising.

Rings of Raggador thousands of feet in diameter were cutting through the skies, drawing in the radioactive dust and ash thrown into the sky by the Badoon bombardment. They hadn’t been dirty bombs, but it was still dirty stuff, and would contribute to a nuclear winter. A wall of the magic was circling the planet, sucking up all the pollution and stuff in the air, and as a side effect restoring the ozone layer to full in passing.

“Heya, Callie. Whoops, Prima. Is it nice to have a day where all your political critics decide to shut the fuck up?”

Callie glided in next to me, for a moment letting her fatigue show on her face for just a second. “Well, all except the ones that blame us for luring them here, saying we set this all up just so we’d have an excuse to stay in power,” she murmured in her impossibly carrying Voice of Thunder, courtesy of Black Bolt’s power set and a century of practice with kiai-jitsu.

“You can’t win for losing. Go, and you abandon them. Stay, and it’s all your fault. I know the mindset. They want someone to blame, and there’s nobody higher than you that you can blame.” I tilted my head. “Jimbob Jones and Penelope Marionski are Skrulls, however.”

She gave me a look at mention of two popular internet personalities, I lifted an eyebrow, and she put two fingers to her temple. “Slave-driver.”

“RING-driver,” I corrected, pointing at my totally cool herd of Rings as they blazed a trail through the atmosphere.

“How are you doing that?” she had to ask. “It’s not an intrinsic power. You let me copy off you for Sersi and everything...”

“That, my lady Prima, is Voice of Thunder Sublime Chord Casting. A restrained version of it.”

“Oh. OHHHH...” she trailed off, eyeing me warily. “I don’t know tons about Casting, but the simple fact you can pull this off without being Dr. Strange says a lot...”

“He may or may not have noticed. He’s quite busy right now fending off a lot of extraplanar supernatural interest trying to take advantage of a golden opportunity and everything, or I’m sure he’d be here playing the arbiter of all magic role.”

“So you are a full Caster, not just an Alchemist,” she made sure I knew she knew.

“Oh, very much so. However, my power source for magic needn’t be the universal magic field.” I waved my hand around as we both paralleled the Rings of Raggador effortlessly, Air Elemental Command making sure the air wasn’t roiling and loud as we zipped along at twice the speed the planet was turning. “Like I said, it’s Voice of Thunder Casting. It’s like powering a spell with an atomic bomb, instead of, say, a megaphone.”

She took that analogy, blew it out, and looked at the magical Rings shifting slowly through the thaumaspectrum ahead and below us. “Huh. I’ve seen Strange use that spell before. It was much smaller...”

“Yes.”

“You feel secure revealing this here?” she asked carefully.

“You and Primus aren’t going to say anything, Strange can’t reach his counterpart on our world with dire warnings, I’m not sticking around to intimidate all the mystics, and yeah, it really does make things a LOT easier when you can sling around this much power.”

“That way you were clearing off their fighter-craft was because of this.”

“Yeah. The Voice of Thunder took a basic minion-clearing offensive spell and made it into a chain-guided railgun-equivalent anti-aircraft spell with no-miss teeth. As far as magic goes, there’s nothing higher, except for Eternity itself backing a play. A good enough Caster who knew what they were doing could probably collapse the whole universe.”

She was silent as she contemplated that. “Are you that Caster?” she had to ask.

“Not straight off. With a long enough Ritual, I could be.”

Despite herself, she smirked. “And you actually admit it. Strange would have conniptions.”

“Strange could collapse reality, too. It’s not as solid as everyone thinks, if you know where to look and what to do. Why Eternity tolerates so many things that could rip it apart being inside it, I dunno.”

We watched the Rings cutting through the sky, clearing up the dark clouds they ran across, leaving the sky bluer and the clouds whiter where they passed, the rain cleaner and air sweeter.

“Are you going to leave some Duplicates here?” she asked me.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Do you want me to?” I replied calmly. “It’s another dimension, so I can also leave a Clone. She’ll become a Primary once I leave this alternity.”

She didn’t take long to think that over. “Yes. I trust Strange to do his job, but not to give a damn about what anyone else thinks as he does it. I Mimic you, and it’s obvious that doing the job right and best and all those silly moral things is still important to you. It’s plain you’ve been acting with incredible restraint.”

“How have you and Primus been controlling the Infinity Gems, now that we’re talking of restraint?”

Her eyes glittered as she looked at me. “You know about their combined power...”

“Yes.”

“We split them up, and keep them in nihilor cases.” She flicked a small box of E-plumbum out of hammerspace, staring at it in both fascination and real fear. “We aren’t like the Old Man and the Hag. They’re Forsaken, they can turn off their attunement to the Gems at will, and don’t have to worry about using them unconsciously or subconsciously.”

“Yeah, it’s the same way they can keep Cosmic Cubes around and not unconsciously manipulate the world. Makes them great caretakers, easily able to restrain themselves.”

“They had the gems when they stopped going out into space, at the turn of the century,” she said, shaking her head. “Obviously they knew about the things ahead of time, and acted to forestall anyone else from getting them. Piotr says the Old Man has had them as long as he’s known him, and the Hag, too.”

“You have the Might Stone, and Piotr has the rest, yes?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Just like the Old Man.”

“Without the Might Stone’s infinite power, there’s a limit to what can be done with the other Stones that give control, but not power. Primus has a lot of power, but not infinite amounts of it. Likewise, you’ve a lot of ways you can wield power, but not infinite control of what you can do. Even Mimicking the powers of everyone is not the same.”

“I don’t think I could handle that,” she said softly, stowing the Stone away swiftly.

“You probably couldn’t,” I agreed, watching as we cut through a thunderstorm. The Rings wiped the dirty ash and stuff out of it as we passed through, turning the water clean and pure as it came down, sucking up the irradiated stuff that had dropped in below. “Briggs backs his with both his own will and the full power of humanity’s Destiny Force, which he is basically in charge of. It is very powerful, naturally, and with infinite control of Time, Space, Reality, the Mind, and the Soul, unbelievably dangerous, but it is not infinite.”

“He helped Piotr work on his invulnerability and physical resistance. Those rumors of them having sometimes violent disagreements were just Piotr doing resistance training.”

“Getting knocked out of the solar system is a nice way to send some very mixed messages,” I agreed. “Plus not seeing one another in public.”

“Let them think there’s a rift. Piotr admires the Old Man more than anyone else alive,” she sniffed. “He hasn’t wavered from his beliefs of uplifting humanity for over a century. Russia is what it is back home because of him.” She clenched her fist, and smiled coolly. “It felt so good to save this world from the fate of Lenin and his butchers...”

“So,” I rolled my eyes slightly at her, “it was kind of hard not to notice that you have all daughters...” The shining figures of the fourteen daughters of the Primes were, like, impossible to miss in my Cosmic Awareness.

“Yes,” she sighed, despite herself. “It is true for all his other children, too. He seems incapable of having sons.”

“And do you know the probable reason?”

It was her turn to glance at me. “Your tone indicates I am missing something?”

“Well, you’d probably realize it if you shapechanged and went around seducing women. You’d also only have daughters.”

She blinked. “What? You spent that Wish to lock in my form to reality, freeing up a Mimic Slot. Is it related to that?”

“No. Women who shapechange into men don’t have testes. They have modified ovaries.”

She blinked, and her eyes grew wide. “What?” she gasped, the word echoing out like thunder as her kiai-jitsu faltered for a second.

“The odds are Primus was born a woman, and her powers changed her into a male to better survive in those days. It was probably so long ago and he was so young that he doesn’t even remember it. There’s a medical condition for late male development in children, very rare, where the testes and phallus don’t drop until later. If there’s any records, they’d probably show that.

“It’s long been known Primus can regenerate from massive injury. Getting his balls blown off in the past wouldn’t have any effect on anything, which is probably what you and he have been thinking.”

It took her a minute of clamping her jaw shut and seriously considering what I was saying before she spoke. “This changes nothing between him and I, but... that is unnervingly logical,” she admitted.

I just nodded. “If you want a son, you’d have to either change one of the ova-sperm, or do a gender change to the child, preferably right in the womb.”

Her hands went to her taut abs, which did not look at all like she’d had fourteen children, Widow-Super Soldier build and all. “And you could give us a son that way...”

I just nodded. “Yes.”

Her blue eyes flashed. “We may be here twenty years longer than we expected...”

“Your daughters are likely staying here regardless, given most of them have husbands and families of their own.” It could be said they formed a strata of the elite on this world all their own, plus having tons of super-powered grandkids running around... including demi-gods. “Plus, you’re into local space and the planet needs them. I assume you’ve your exit strategy in place, and the kids and your successors have been quietly handling things for years now?”

“They have all been long-informed of where we are from and what our intentions are and were here. They are aware that the danger from space and other times and dimensions isn’t going to go away just because they are here. We are fully capable of doing a true vacation, and it should not surprise you that if we don’t want to be discovered, we aren’t going to be.” She was very confident of that.

Primus had perfect physiological control, and could easily move around his skin and muscles, change his skin, eye, and hair color, and so forth, if not shift his skeleton. Callie could shapechange into anything humanoid with her Skrull liver. Disguising themselves wasn’t an issue.

“I don’t plan to stay long, and I certainly don’t plan to upset any planetary politics,” I noted to her. “You want me to just make up a one-use touch-wand?”

She considered that, her eyes saying she was talking with her man. “Twins?” she smiled cheerfully after a moment, and I could only roll my eyes.