"Yes, I know, but that doesn't mean that I can actually feel it happening. Or that I can feel matter that I'm not transmuting."
"Right, but-."
God, could you imagine how mind-bending a power to sense all matter around you would be? Not simply 'solid objects I can see' but every last molecule, even in the
air. Nope, nope,
nope. Informational overload.
But I'm clearly reaching the end of her temper. I attach an orange rope to her sword and send it to subspace before replacing it with one of mine.
She looks nonplussed for a moment, but I just smile at her. "Our little secret."
A pity she can't read molecular structures not directly affected by her power. Studying that blade might prove
interesting.
She still looks confused, but she transmutes herself a white scabbard with pink decoration and belt and sheathes the sword.
"Have you found any of those spy drones yet?"
And at least a basic sword like that doesn't need much more skill than 'swing sharp-edge first'. Although she might want to be careful about backswings.
I nod. "Several, but they're deployed in clusters near each of the various Invincibles. And I'm not all that good at sneaking up on things. Ideally, I'd wait until several got destroyed and then ambush the last one left. But I'm starting to wonder why Angstrom Levy is behaving in the way that he is."
He's a complete psycho lunatic, basically. Clear case of hyper-cognitive psychosis.
"Because he wants everyone to associate Mark with what all the other Marks are doing. According to him, other Invincibles murdered his family in their dimensions, and now he can't remember which version of him his memories come from."
"Right, but logically, he-."
She sigh/gasps in frustration. "Did you see his giant mutant brain? He's not being logical."
Eh,
he kind of started it by pulling his plan to combine all the scientific prowess of all his
alternates into himself, apparently?
"Okay. Based on the G.D.A.'s files on the first time he attacked your Invincible, he could use a portal to send him anywhere. He could kill him by sending him to a dead Earth and leaving him there. Or a reality where the Earth never formed. Or any other reality, because his friends and family wouldn't be there. He didn't. He sent him to places where he'd probably get a bit roughed up, and then brought him back. Each time, except the last one where he was in a coma and couldn't."
Possibly one of the most busted power,
if you can think how to break it utterly...
"So..?"
"So he doesn't want to kill your Invincible. And he doesn't want to specifically kill anyone else, because it wouldn't be that hard for him to get hold of a weapon, portal himself into range, fire and then leave.
...Oh look, Lantern can work out just one way to break it.
What he wants to do is inflict as much physical and psychological harm on your Invincible as possible. And keep doing it. So he finds a bunch of arsehole Invincibles because they'll know the best way to hurt him, and their costumes and faces are similar enough that people will associate them with him." She gives me a small nod. "But he blames them as well. Right?"
And yes, I suspect Levy picked ones that conquered their Earths as payback of a sorts. It certainly fits with his cracked state of mind that he'd enjoy using his family's murderers as weapons.
She nods, mildly perturbed. "He wants them all to die. He doesn't want Mark to die, but he didn't bring… Different versions of me who hate their Invincibles, because he wants them to die and he barely knows me. They.. probably all did something to him or his family when they took over their Earths."
I see Eve had the same thought.
I nod. "There's no reason for him to reappear at this point. Not until the Invincibles stop attacking or their numbers drop below the point where they can't cause the sort of havoc that he wants."
"Why are they helping him?"
Sadly, with this lot, trying to get them to stop doing this would be near-impossible. Especially the ones that find it
fun.
"He offered them things. Technology that will let them access parallel universes so they can conquer other Earths. One of them wanted to steal your Invincible's mother to replace his own. A couple just wanted to fight strong opponents."
"What about your Invincible?"
The 'steal my alternate's mom' one sounds a bit cracked himself.
"I don't know." I shrug. "I just got my marching orders, and went."
"What, that's it? I thought you two were friends?"
...For a given value of 'friend',
sure.
I regard her levelly for a moment. "I didn't know him before Invincible and Omni-Man conquered the Earth. I obey and make myself as useful as possible because as far as I can see that's the best way to make things less terrible. Have you ever seen, um..? The video of the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Not the.. bit where one man stops a tank division while armed with a plastic bag. I mean, the bit where they mowed protestors down with machine guns and then shot the ambulances that went to try and help them. Repeatedly."
...Yeah, that actually
happened. And yet it's the tank guy that everyone remembers. Probably for the symbolic resonance.
(And let's not argue over the event itself, shall we? It's outside the Rule 8 cutoff, but better safe than sorry...)
"No, but I know what you mean."
"People tried protesting Omni-Man's take-over too. Now, in theory, two people can't occupy a planet. And they can't in practice either. But they can kill anyone who openly protests about it or tries to fight them. And it's not as if they need to win an election afterwards, so any amount of force… I mean, the more people who die, the fewer they have to bother trying to corral, right?"
And viltrumites... Are
very good at casual mass murder, given their physical capabilities. Seriously, just fly at knee height through a crowd with arms outstretched... It sends a
very clear message.
She nods with obvious reluctance. "I just.. can't believe that Mark would do that."
"My Invincible isn't your Invincible. And… If I had to guess, I'd say that once Director Stedman got his mother killed, he just went along with what Omni-Man said… At least until he got too invested it in to stop. And… Governments and people around the world didn't ever quite seem to accept that they couldn't win, so the… Killing kept happening."
Probably a mix of said mourning depression, and sunk-cost fallacy. He knows that trying to undo it, to free Earth, would bring down the full force of the Viltrumites on both him and the planet, after all.
"But you didn't fight him." I shake my head. "If you could make these swords, why didn't you help when Omni-Man took over the world? You didn't need to work for Cecil to do that. You could just have handed them to someone else."
"I couldn't make them at the time. I learned that afterwards. I didn't bother trying to learn how to use my powers for fighting until after I started working for Invincible, and that was mostly because Viltrumites wouldn't respect someone who couldn't fight. And if they respect me at least a little then I can make the occupation less onerous." Hm. "Can you transmute antimatter?"
Definitely not one of the best situations an Alt!Paul is stuck in. Though some might have had it
worse. Anti-Green, for example.
"I.. don't know."
"It works on Viltrumites, but don't do it on an inhabited planet. Antiprotons and positrons can be contained with magnetic fields, but make sure that they're in a vacuum, because-."
You've mentioned it to her before, but the point bears repeating, I suppose. Better very safe than horribly sorry.
"I know what antimatter is. I'll try finding out if I can make it once this is over." She looks around, then returns her attention to me. "How do we isolate a drone?"
"I'm not… Did you meet Angstrom?" She shakes her head. "But he knows that you exist?"
"Probably."
This is the tricky part. How to catch something you can barely see, much less chase without it spotting you? ...I assume they're under some measure of concealment, anyway.
"Okay. Then my best idea is that we find an Invincible at the lower end of their power range and you engage him with a few other local heroes. I detect the locations of the drones and you 'accidentally' destroy all but one during the fight. Once there's one left, I sneak up on it, or… Engage you to 'help' that Invincible, and covertly take control of it."
...Well, for an off-the-cuff plan, it's about as good as they'll get, I bet.
"You said that he'd come here if we beat all the Invincibles."
I nod. "That's my best guess, but he might just toddle off to get more recruits first. I don't know how many different parallel Earths there are, but I suspect that it's more than twenty."
"How are you going to persuade him?"
Twenty is probably about as many as he could manage to keep directed. Enough to form a couple of squads, but not so large you need lieutenants to command them.
"I'm not sure. Tell him that my Invincible's gone rogue and that I want a portal home? New orders? Tell him that some of the Invincibles are annoyed that they're dying and suspect that he's not planning on holding up his end of the bargain? I'll scan the drone in detail and see if I can open a portal myself?"
And once he has Angstrom in his presence, well... Whether it's Branding or Assimilation, he
will do what he's told...
Scan. Where are the Invincibles?
"If you don't have a better idea, there's a good fight going on in Seoul right-."
Define 'good', mind. An Invincible having a rollicking slaughter with no opposition, or one struggling?
"Hold on." She listens to something on her earpiece, then her eyes widen. "One of them's attacking the Teen Team! We need to-" Pink light bursts from her hands and feet as she turns herself in what I assume is the direction of their headquarters. "-go!"
I dart forwards, grab her and transition us.
One thing she
can't replicate, almost guaranteed...