Sama clapped her face as she looked at the ten new normal-sized Duplicates, who didn’t have variations on my face, nope, and had dyed their hairs all sorts of colors, with a preference for mohawk cuts.

“You rescued ten Strontians?” she demanded of me, looking at the ten women and the genetic archive they were hovering protectively around.

“Yep,” I said, without an ounce of remorse. “If I could have, I would have saved a thousand of them, but I couldn’t fit more than this into a Uni-merge without starting a causality event.”

“Lady Dynamo, who is this?” one of my new Dupes asked a bit stiffly. Memory dumps of my purpose and reason for doing all this meant they trusted me unconditionally, but they didn’t know Sama.

“Hallusa, this is Sama Rantha, the Golden Hag, all around total badass and my boss, which means she’s your boss. Bow to Da Boss, ladies.” I slapped hand into palm and bowed to Sama, and only a little reluctantly, all my near-doubles did the same.

Sama rolled her eyes, but returned the gesture respectfully, regardless. “Ladies, I mean no disrespect to you. Your little progenitor, however...” She stepped up and shamelessly rapped me on my head.

Crunchcrunchcrunch, she hammered my feet down into the ground. “You make everything so damn easy and difficult at the same time, Dynamo!”

“OWOWOWOWOW! Good people deserve good things to happen to them!” I rubbed my head ruefully, four bumps already breaking out. Damn Power Stone! “And nobody deserved what happened to them!” I went on, as all ten of the ex-Strontians frowned, but very carefully decided not to antagonize Sama as I stepped out of the knee-deep depression in the stone.

“Let’s hear the spiel,” she said tiredly, stepping back and folding her arms across her NTS chest to stare at me.

“They have motivation, discipline, knowledge, and they are not Strontians,” I replied calmly. “They can power up through their Ultra Cores, and will at least rival their old selves once they have done so. In addition, they’re going to be learning magic from me, because lack of alternatives to brute strength is just one of the things that got their people killed.”

The ten of them astutely said nothing in complaint. After all, they weren’t Strontians anymore, so the strictures on their people didn’t apply, right?

“The biggest problem with the Strontians is how damn powerful each and every one of them is, and how threatening other powers saw them as. Just that level of power bends timelines, since they affect the destiny of all around them. How are you planning to deal with that?” Sama continued, still staring at me in irritation.

It didn’t matter where we built them back up, we couldn’t obfuscate them on their own. Stronger forces would notice the distortion and begin to turn attention their way. Any force that didn’t ignore magic or looked at timelines would soon see the changes manifesting, and go looking to verify what was going on.

“Um!” I smiled, tapping my fingers together.

Sama rolled her eyes again, and the ten women grinned despite themselves. “What did you do now?” Sama asked with the air of the long-suffering.

“I might have added all the Strontian souls parallel to the Nova Force. Along with the Zen-Whoberis and Galadorans... for the last few, oh, millennia.”

All ten of my Stronto-Duplicates suddenly looked down and put their hands to their Cores at the same moment, shocked as something profound didn’t so much wake up as make itself abruptly known to them.

“If they learn some magic,” I hinted not emphatically at all, nuh-uh, glaring around at them, “they’ll be able to speak with their ancestors and get some guidance and things from them. Most importantly, the Pulsar Force of the Strontians can be easily channeled to suppress the extremes of Strontian power until they are mature enough to handle such things.”

Sama tapped her fingers on her crossed arms, considering that. “That... will definitely lighten the causality load considerably. A mature Strontian would effectively be no different from someone being given an Ultra Core at that point, the rest of the race effectively powering their champions...” She blinked, and rolled her eyes again as she realized something. “You actually want to raise them on Venus, don’t you...”

I gave her a big, proper shit-eating grin. “Briggs is the absolute best smokescreen for fucking with time-sighters, and you know it!”

“Fine, fine. Xandarans, Corbinites, Zen-Whoberis, Strontians, and even some Galadorans, all on the same world. I’m sure that won’t attract any attention.” She threw up her hands in resignation.

“Woo-hoo!” I lifted my arms, and the Pulsar-Cored women all smiled in relief. “The Xandarans are absolute masters of cloning tech, ladies, so this should go extremely smoothly. We might not be able to download the dead like the Nova Force can, due to lack of relative maturity, but starting a new generation should be simplicity!”

“All the other races will help foster a new generation of Strontians, too. You’re going to have to put up with being influenced by the cultures of some of the noblest peoples in the galaxy, I am afraid,” Sama stated, waiting to see how they took that.

“We can live with that, Boss Sama!” Hallusa spoke up firmly for all of them, glancing at the others once, who nodded agreement. “It is obvious that our isolation from others is one of the things that led to the annihilation of our people...” I had totally downloaded to them all the events leading up to their destruction, just like I had Kallark, so they understood everything.

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“There’s a great amount to be said for a warrior culture, until you’re on the other side of it and it’s coming for you,” Sama nodded grimly. “As for you ten, you’ve all got inactive Ten Cores, courtesy of this reprobate, right?” she asked them.

They all snickered at me for just a second, while I just looked wounded. “We do!” they all nodded crisply in unison.

“Then I need you powering up as rapidly as possible, and I need you learning either magic or psi to support that power. I can see she’s Marked you all, so education should be effortless, and you’ve all got the discipline. Follow me, and we’ll get you started on the M’Kraan power-ups. You,” she pointed at me, “are going to get the same. Prep with Atom and Comet. You’re going to be running a full sunbathing AND a full M’Kraan conduit dump.”

“Ugh!” I didn’t hide my grimace. “Slave-driving hag!” I mumbled not under my breath. She was going to make me maintain a Portal and feed me with super-heavy neutron star energy while I had a wide-open flux conduit to the Pocket. It was going to feel like I had a firehose stuck in my mouth!

“Damn right, show your little Duplicates how it’s done!” The ten all looked at me in interest as I rolled my eyes.

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As for other things we'd like to see done...

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“This is what your training instructors liked to call an educational experience.” All of them pursed their lips at my comment.

There was a hiss as Sama cut with her hand, space protested and opened to a place in front of her not on LaGrange here. I waved them all after her as she stepped through, and followed after them.

Nimue was standing off to the side, and just nodded at my glance as I walked by. She’d get the archive off to Venus, already making arrangements with the Xandarans to start producing even more cloning cylinders... although these would only be making babies, so they wouldn’t need to be anywhere near as complex. We were not going to be force-growing Vatted souls.

Negotiations for fostering the Strontian children were already happening. The Xandarans were the first to agree, so matter-of-fact about it that it was plain that not volunteering didn’t really even occur to them. The Zen-Whoberis and Galadorans also chimed in, the former with total sympathy for another race who had been destroyed by the casual hands of empires at play, and the Galadorans eager to spread their noble ideals to the scions of another warrior race. The Corbinites were probably a stretch as far as appearances went, but they had no issues with the idea.

Beta Ray Bill was happy to volunteer to foster one, too.

With their powers suppressed, the Strontian children should also mature much faster than they did on their homeworld, which would help matters a lot. Extended childhoods could be both good and bad...

------

Meanwhile, in some place quite different...

“Um...” Kubark muttered.

Even for a Strontian, he had a radical mohawk, cut carefully in three parts and dyed bright red, made to draw attention to his awesomeness.

Still, his swagger was totally gone, because as soon as the son of Kallark had entered the Sol System through that Portal, he’d lost all his natural powers.

He’d almost stumbled and fallen down immediately, so used to having his ability to fly support him that walking felt unnatural and clumsy.

He... couldn’t crush steel in his hands. He couldn’t fly. He couldn’t breathe super-hard. He couldn’t move super-fast. His reflexes were slow, it almost felt like he was a turtle.

“What have you done to me?!” he demanded for the tenth time of the woman in front of him, but his words were totally silent. He had attempted to stand his ground to yell at her, but he had simply been telekinetically lifted off the ground, turned on his head, and dragged after her.

He had tried kicking and screaming, but was never able to make contact with anything, and his words were all utterly silent.

And she was Looking at him.

She was Right There in his thoughts, staring right at him. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever felt, like a sword waiting to slice into his mind, held back only by crystalline focus and discipline, and he finally realized that shutting up might be the wiser thing to do.

She had only said, “Be silent and follow me,” after he arrived, with none of the pomp and circumstance that befit the son of the Praetor. Like he was nothing important at all.

He realized that he was being silent and following her, whether he liked to or not.

Swallowing hard, looking about the university they were calling Cynosure, Kubark clamped his mouth shut and just looked around.

Supposedly this place only had the native Terran species around, a soft and weak bunch of aliens who would fall apart if he blinked in their general direction. However, he found that fact hard to believe after seeing just how many different types of beings were present, and how many abilities they were manifesting.

It was more diverse than the school for Guardian training, although only the native humans seemed to have multiples. There were peoples with different kinds of fur and heads and limbs, insectile and reptilian and fishy and amphibian and avian and mammalian of all kinds, different kinds of wings, different hair colors, tails and paws and claws and ears, manipulating all sorts of different energies while made of stones or metal or fire or whatnot. He saw the swirling display of psionic energies, his wider range of visual spectrum still holding, as well as the patterns of magic, and the very frequent brandishing from anyone and everyone of humming mindblades of various colors, styles, sizes, and intensity.

The woman greeting him, Mistress Kwannon, was greeted very politely by everyone as she passed, her manner calm and friendly as she did. Despite her own relative youth, it was plain she was very respected here, and just comparing the way she moved to many of these other students, it was plain that she was a very well-trained combatant, and most of the students were merely civilians, not a warrior like him.

As she walked along, spoke occasionally with others, and smiled and waved, those crystalline intent mental eyes on him never wavered, letting him know she was watching him, and there was no lapse in her attention at all.

He didn’t really realize when he turned right side up, some time after he stopped kicking and struggling. Nor did he realize when he was set down, and just followed after her, nearly falling down as his jerky stride kept failing to lift him off the ground and smooth out his gait, resulting in him stumbling every few steps.

His face began to flush at the example he was setting and how ridiculous he looked. He tried to even out his gait, but every time his attention wandered at something new to look at, he would almost fall over again.

“Why can’t I fly?” he demanded to know, except nothing came out but silence. He could blather all he wanted to, but nothing was said.

But the eyes on him didn’t waver, they just radiated focus and poise. Saying anything felt like rebelling against a shining gemstone, doing nothing to her focus. Finally, he just clamped up, tried not to look like an awkward fool, and followed her in silence.