“What, how...” the outworld Bruce Banner spluttered, looking around in shock, and at his own hands, his eyes bulging. “You reverted me back! How did you do that!?” he shrieked in fear and disbelief.
“Dr. Banner, you can fool yourself all you want to, but you cannot fool reality. Being big and green is not your true form, and never will be. It’s just a sack of meat and force over the real you inside. A transformer relying on an external power source is not a threat to me in the slightest,” Sama waved airily, looking down at him. “I can keep the Hulk of our world completely under control, which both he and my people appreciate. Of course, I can also cut him into wafers and feed him to the Land forever, as your predecessors found out when they decided not to believe me and made a move.” She turned to look at me. “Any color change?”
“No, he’s still the same, although he’s having a bit of existential crisis as he realizes that he really isn’t big and green naturally, and how easily he can die,” I told her calmly.
“That Strange’s old Cloak? You some sort of cheap Substitute Sorceress Supreme?” Banner smirked as he got warily to his feet. His eyes were already starting to turn green again. “I can feel you disrupted my power, but it’s still there. It’ll come back!”
“And you seem to think I’ll just roll my eyes and walk away because you’re helpless now before me, so you can get your full power back and come up with some clever scheme to take revenge I won’t be prepared for. Yes, yes, I’m totally aware of the trope. Your predecessors didn’t think I’d splash them across the sands, either.” Sama’s face only grew more bored.
“An extraplanar, trans-temporal invader makes the biggest snacks for the Land,” I reminded her, and Banner’s face changed as Sama’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
“You think you have the right to judge me after what I’ve seen and been through?” he snorted in defensive contempt. Well, arrogance would get him further than false humility here...
“After judging us, he thinks we don’t have the right to do so in return?” I rolled my eyes in reply. “How many billions of sapients are you directly responsible for killing, Dr. Banner? Did Death Herself take notice of you for the slaughters you’ve done? Please, preach to us. Have you killed hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? No? Mmm, not even responsible for a megadeath, and you can harp morals to us?
“Oh, I know, it was because you killed a bunch of your friends. My, what moral high grounds you preach from.”
He was flinching. He literally didn’t know what to make of us, only that we were indeed truly powerful.
“Your higher empathic capabilities are impaired after the stresses of your life, yes, yes, I understand, Dr. Banner. For that reason, you’re not staying here. So, you’ve a choice. Die, or head off to your own planet, which you get to hold against a merciless alien space empire, which just might decide to glass the planet to get rid of you, and so help you relive the horror of your apocalypse all over again.”
He finally smiled again, although there was a flicker of fear in his eyes. “Well, it’s nice of you to make it so simple. I’ll take the planet, of course.”
“Dyna,” Sama waved. I pursed my lips and blew a Note. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he nearly fainted as the manasphere echoed in a thousand ways over his soul, and the Portal opened up behind him.
“Enjoy.” I gave him a slight TK nudge, and with a ‘Whoop!’, he was sent on through, at which time the Portal promptly closed behind him.
Sama stared at the point in the air for a moment, fingers tapping on her biceps. I drifted down next to her. “Wondering if you did the right thing?” I asked her.
“He was right on track to being wafered until you showed up,” Sama admitted. “I could smell the blood on his soul. My Curse was feeding on his malice.”
I glanced out in That Direction. “Hey, it’s not like it’s hard to find him. Twofold intercessor, stands out like a lightbulb. Reality is not his friend here.”
“Maybe with him here, no others will pop in. I don’t mind splashing them; the Land feeds well, it’s just irritating.” She wrinkled her nose. “Substitute Sorceress Supreme?” she egged me.
“Surreal Secret Stealthily Studious Substitute Sorceress Supreme Sorority Sisterhood Society Sect. Cheaper by the dozen,” I replied calmly, and earned a smile for that one.
“Did you just Voice of Thunder kiai-jitsu Sublime Chord a Portal to another planet with one Note?” she asked me archly.
“Yes. Us Subs gotta represent, y’know?” I held out my hand, and Levy slapped it and gave me a tassels-up.
“Well, check on him every now and then, let me know how he’s doing. If he comes back to Terra here, wipe him,” she told me.
One-way trip to the sun, readied! “He’ll likely try to get back to his own little empire first, but since he has no idea how to get there... We’ll see if he just decides to empire-build on his own little planet and wallow in his depravity. After all, the only threats there to him are the ones he chooses to present himself to.”
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A week later, I received a delivery of a dozen T-shirts, numbered, with a custom image and Seal, Sigil, and Sign for Sama’s Smashing Super-Secret Sublimely Surreal Stealthily Studious Soulfully Singing Smiley Substitute Scarlet Sorceress Supreme Seraphim Scholars Sorority Sisterhood Society Sect Simulacra.
Mine was No. 1, of course. No succubi references, thankfully.
The Dupes and Clones pestered Sama until they all got one. There were more than a dozen of us all, after all, which then set off a rivalry to design a Diagram for Dynamo’s and Dealer’s Dozens...
------------
Brazil...
“I am certain Hoggoth would have taken me!” Isabella sniffed haughtily.
“He’s old, not cold and snow,” I replied, looking around with a grimace, and she considered that viewpoint of the word Hoary, then shrugged the matter off. “This is some bad grey magic here.” I ran some Revelation through Specs, and my vision started going through all the spectra here. “Yeah, mixed white, black, and grey magic dealing with souls. What exactly were these bastards trying to start up here?”
“Ex-Nazis. Old, bitter men and women,” she pointed out, kicking the nearest gaping corpse, freezing the body and then shattering it to cold dust, which began to burn hungrily with vivus. There were nearly two hundred of them here...
“Crux.” Some of the iconography was impossible to miss. “These people were at least journeymen in the mystic arts, Bella, but they kept it under wraps for forty damn years. That is not a good sign.”
“And so I called you. My people are already saying this place is cursed, and if it is not, I care not to correct them.”
“I don’t like Rituals I know nothing about, Bella.”
“Yes, we are missing too much information. Think you we shall see more of this?”
“Yes.”
------
Days later, Pont-Rouge, Quebec...
“Think this is in reaction to you, Medea?” I asked, looking at a familiar circle of older Caucasians of both genders, but predominately men, dead and grimly composed.
She considered the question in her own way. “I should say that I hope so, because that means I am being effective.” Her hounding of both the Crux and Askari organizations had put her in the unique position of being judged a terrible danger by both sides, which disturbed her not at all. Just her annihilation of their reserves, stores, armories, and bases had cost both sides a great deal of time and money, and that was before she got to the people.
Of course, it also increased some pressure on her sisters in their various places, which they also found exciting. Twenties get their excitement from odd places, and occasional racist fanatics trying to assassinate them was one of those places.
Of course, the groups didn’t know how much of their bad fortunes were her fault and how much was others, as she was totally capable of making her efforts subtle as heck and supplying others with the appropriate information. Euroforce had been cracking open a lot of Crux establishments recently...
“On the other hide, this is certainly building toward something. There might be a few ex-Nazis, but chances are these are merely arch-conservative Christians. France, Italy, and Spain are full of them, as is Quebec.”
And not full of white-haired Africans at all, but that was a given. There had been four other sites found in Europe so far, and there were probably others I’d not been able to get sussed out, because the Obfuscation on this matter was only going up.
“Absolutely at least a thousand dead involved in this so far,” I related to her, “and it could easily be twice that, or higher. The same Ritual, different places, different souls, common cause. The fact that they don’t need to be simultaneous means they are probably feeding power into a common source, but it doesn’t need to be all at once.”
“So... they are building something, instead of empowering something that has already been built. Growing it as they can get the people together.” Medea stroked her chin thoughtfully. “New Israel has a great deal of information on powerful people among the Nazis, and the Nacht Hund sorcerers were among the first to flee when the Great Bear came down on Germany. Vilherstein and the Blood Phantom were never caught, among others, and have been training up apprentices of the Crux for years.”
Ah, there was only hope that the deaths of the Red Skull, Hitler, Arnim Zola, and Baron Strucker would stop the craziness from persisting. Wishful thinking all around, yes, yes. “To think he’d spread the skills and teaching this far out, to this many people.” I studied the familiar symbols, only a couple altered, probably having to do with the geography, if my comparisons to the other sites was true. “Who do you think is the backer?”
“I doubt there’s any single one of them. The Crux bandies what magical power they have from any source who’ll give them some for relatively no cost, be it Blessings or Curses... although there are definitely signs of ancestral magic being used here, if not from a single ethnic group.”
“Well, if they went Aryan they’d be including those horrible, filthy, very-tanned barbaric savage relatives of theirs down in India and Pakistan,” Medea smirked. “So, they probably went right with skin color. Lots of pure prejudice just working on that, and would even suck in some of Briggs’ people, if they dared to recruit there.”
Bone-deep racism was something that had to be taught, while surface racism was basically something about belonging to a group with common beliefs. Briggs had plenty of ways to get people out of those thought modes, and was puh-lenty aware of the spread of those kind of organizations in his territory. He generally gave them enough rope to hang themselves, and they inevitably did.
“So, Fey and Ancestral Spirits, maybe even undead of some kind.” Undead were, of course, equal opportunity Karma for anyone who stumbled on them, and had been suffering around the world lately, even more than normal. Poor vampire clans.
“That would be the best guess.”
“How much do you think they have to do?” Medea asked.
“Trick question. The answer is, ‘How powerful do they want this to become?’”
We both looked up at the sky, and the measure that floated up there, looking over the world.
“Pretty strong?”
“They’d have to have a better picture of just how strong he is. I doubt they do. They have no idea of the training he goes through, or that he’s over a hundred years older than they think. So, they’re trying to build something more powerful than the Primus they think is there...”