"Are you out of your ever-loving mind?!" Carrie demanded as water dripped from her hair onto the floor of the locker room I was dressing in. "Promoting Bunny and Sarah is fine, promoting Qin and putting him in charge is fine, but this idea?! It's fucking insane, Rickshaw!"

"I've had some time to think," I said much calmer than she was as I finished dressing. "This is what I came up with."

"Leaving the current galaxy to fly to another and kickstart the process with no back-up, no resources, and no supply chain? You have gone nuts, haven't you?!" she said.

"We'll have back-up and resources," I said. "The supply chain will come later but we'll have that too, eventually."

"Eventually won't help if we're dead!" she yelled at me. "We're not done talking about this either! Once I've got my clothes on, I'm tearing you a new hole to eat from!"

With that promise to me, she turned and left the men's locker room for the women's and I noticed that she had been wrapped in a towel this whole time. I guess she really felt strongly about any problems that could crop up if we went through with this plan. And if things went the way I wanted them to go, then we were going through with it.

"Go big or go home," I muttered to myself as I stepped into the hallway and began to walk to my office. "Words to live by; words to die by. Let's hope we all live."

I looked up as the door to my office opened with a slight whoosh and Bunny walked in with Sarah and Carrie following her.

"Ladies," I greeted them. "I was hoping to talk with all of you."

"Carrie mentioned that," Sarah said cautiously. I guess Carrie's foul mood at my idea was affecting everyone else.

"Did she tell you anything about it?" I asked.

"Only that you've apparently gone whacko," Bunny said.

"I wanted them to hear it from you so that when they agree with me, you can't say I convinced them without you there," Carrie said as she sat heavily onto the small couch I sometimes napped on.

"So what's up?" Sarah asked as she and Bunny sat in the chairs in front of my desk. "What's this all about? I haven't seen Care this pissed since I thought I was pregnant."

"Carrie has told me about the nickname that the lower-rank Nephilim call me," I told them. "I hadn't been told about it or heard any mention of it before then, and once she'd told me about it, I realized something."

"Why do you think I formed the Nephilim?" I asked them. "Carrie, I think I've told you that, so please don't answer that question."

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"To fight the Scourge," Bunny said. "Everyone who goes through the Academies has to take Nephilim History as a mandatory course. That's what they teach us in it."

"It wasn't that," I said. "I had nothing to do with any of the education courses like that, but I did have a hand in the general ideas for the combat and survival courses. I wanted my Nephilim to be capable of taking care of themselves in all situations. Sarah?"

"You did it to protect the people of Earth?" she asked hesitantly. "That's what I've always thought."

"Better," I allowed, "but still wrong. Carrie want to tell them?"

"Something about making history," she muttered unhappily.

"I guess you forgot exactly what I said," I told her. I took another look at the three women and made sure I had all of their attention.

"I put forth the idea of the Nephilim Army to the Wardens of Life so that I could give Humanity the tools we needed to carve our name and legacy into the stars themselves," I said. "Sounds a little poetic that way, but I meant one thing. If all life is impermanent, then I wanted humanity to be remembered for all time. I wanted races of aliens to find our ruined buildings and our floating ships; I wanted them to study them and ask 'What were they?' or maybe 'Who were they? What did they do to make such fantastic creations? Why do they have such far-reaching constructions?' and 'What does it mean for us if they're not here but we are?'"

"I wanted to leave a legacy for Humanity that would let the whole of the race, from Human to Nephilim to Aasimar and whatever comes after, write in the fabric of the cosmos and the stars themselves our story. The story of a race from a floating rock that defied all odds of the Universe and left something great behind. Something that won't fade and crumble away, something that is written into more than just one or two histories. Something that makes sure anything that comes after us knows about us."

"That's why I wanted to make the Nephilim Army," I said. "Not to fight Scourge. To protect everyone that needs it. Whether they sought us out or they only hear about us from everyone else."

"To fight the Scourge, I needed to remake humans," I continued. "That's why the Nephilim are, by technicality, not Humans. We're a sub-race that is better in every way we can be as long as it helps us fight the Scourge. All Nephilim, civilian or soldier, know how to fight and they took the oath to protect all races from the Scourge. I will hold them to that oath of protection, but I never said it had to be Scourge they fight."

"In making the Nephilim Army and later overseeing the formation of the Deva Collective, I never thought about what my actions would cause," I said. "I was making the tools needed for others to make legends and become stories to inspire everyone else. I was preparing the pens and ink that would take down names and give others new names they'd all be known by. I never expected that I would be one of those names that would be written down. To me, I am, and always will be, Rickshaw James. Doesn't matter how many titles and nicknames they tack on to that; I'm not the First Demigod, the Chief Protector of the Collective, the Man Who Saved Earth, the Solar Exile, or Death's Cheat. I'm just Rickshaw James and all that is just fluff I don't care about."

"To that end," I said, "I need your help. All three of you. You're my personal squad and whenever I go into combat, you're going to be there. I'll need your help to make this idea I've had a reality, which means that you're all going to have to take care of different things you may not have experience with, mostly paperwork, unfortunately."

"We're going to return to the Milky Way, gather up new starships, colonists, supplies, Nephilim, and anything else we might need and we're going to jump ahead to the next galaxy on the list. Once there we're going to start clearing the Scourge away and then we're going to do it all again after we've got a big enough foothold that we can leave without losing everything."

"Like I said," Carrie spoke up in the silence that stretched after I'd finished speaking, "he's gone crazy. And he's trying to drag us there with him."