Part 1
Part 2
Happily Ever After, Part 3
WARNING: More crack than a "My Little Simurgh: Friendship is Space Whale Bullshit" marathon
"I don't get it," Zimmy said. "Why did Ack-eye … Ock-ee … that lady get in trouble?"
"I'll explain it when you're older," Taylia replied. Libecca managed to convey a smirk without perceptibly moving in any way, as she knew what part of the story was coming next.
Lisa awoke the next morning with a vague sense of dread and an awful hangover. After her morning ritual of cursing her alarm clock, the sun, her body, the existence of other parahumans, the existence of other humans, and existence itself, she stumbled into the kitchen and dining area for a pot of coffee. Maybe some food too, if the stomach gods were feeling merciful.
Zach was at the stove, frying something green that smelled an awful lot like bacon. Missy and Theo were sharing a bench seat and, Lisa noted with disgust, a single plate of food and set of silverware. Clarice had joined Taylor, Amelia, and Emma for a strategy meeting at the end of the table. What to do with Akaihana, her power informed her, filling in the gaps. Though I could've seen that one coming from a mile away, even without my powers. Now that just leaves the problem of … oh, shit.
"Ahem," she cleared her throat loudly to catch her teammates' attention. "I don't suppose anyone has checked on pedo Sleeping Beauty this morning, have they? Or our lovely wedding crashers, Aisha and Alec?"
"Good morning to you too, Miss Sunshine," Taylor responded testily. "And that joke about Aisha and Alec is in poor taste, even for you. They're dead-"
Taylor was suddenly interrupted by Akaihana's voice, speaking in a strange yet all-too-familiar cadence. "More like dead sexy, amirite? Eh, eh?" The body was Akaihana's all right, but those mannerisms, that makeup, that outfit could only belong to one person.
"Aisha?! What are you … what's …?" Taylor spluttered as her brain fought valiantly to make sense of what was happening, and failed. "What." The sentiment was shared by the rest of the team, who had stopped what they were doing and just stared at the scantily-clad woman in front of them. The room slowly began to fill with a smell much like burning bacon.
"Bravo, Aisha!" Lisa said sarcastically, starting a slow, mocking clap for emphasis. "You've actually managed to out-skank that body's previous owner, and her cape name was a euphemism for labia. Now will you please put it back where you found it? You don't know where it's been." But I do, she thought with a shudder. And there goes any chance of food this morning.
"Oh my dah-ling Lisa, I could never do that," Aisha said, grinning from ear to ear. "I'm seeing things so differently now, so clearly. For instance I never realized you had such beautiful eyes…" She swayed her hips as she stepped toward Lisa, who retreated with a strangled cry, scrambling to put the table in between them. "Nah," Aisha said, cracking up, "I'm just fuckin' with ya."
Lisa collected her composure and shot back, "Well you can go fu-" Aisha-in-Akaihana's grin grew even wider. She did, last night, Lisa's power none-too-helpfully informed her, as she trailed off. And again this morning. Twice. She rubbed her temples in a futile attempt to ward off what was shaping up to be another killer migraine. Sometimes I hate my power so, SO much.
As if on cue, Regent's voice rang out, making everyone jump. "And I helped!" He had been sitting on the other end of the bench seat the entire time, with Aisha's real body cuddling on his lap. "Hi everybody." He mouthed the words, but it was Aisha's body that spoke and waved, ventriloquist dummy style.
"Isn't she just the cutest?" Aisha cooed as she sauntered over to them, kissing first Alec and then her old body with gusto—and tongue. "I call her Impty." AggravationDesireEmbarrassment flooded from Amelia to Taylor, who amplified the Aggravation and sent it back mixed with a hefty dose of Sympathy. Aisha tends to have that effect on people.
Whether it was the girl-on-girl action, the supremely bad pun, or the combination of the two, Zach began spluttering, then choking, and then collapsed into dust. "I'm fine!" he shouted upon respawning. Emma was not amused.
"Fucking Strangers," Missy grumbled as she hurriedly hopped out of her seat and fled the kitchen, dragging Theo and Clarice with her. She wasn't going to take a chance that any of the stupid in that room might rub off on her and hers.
What Taylia actually
said was, "That night, Aisha snuck into Clarice's lab and used the mind-switching machine to take over Akaihana's body." She winced at the thought of trying to explain that farcical kitchen scene to the children.
"Will you tell them what actually happened when they're older?" Libecca silently snarked from across the room. Her mouth was twitching up into a smile at one corner, the equivalent of side-splitting laughter.
"If I never have to explain—or think about—the details of Aisha's and Alec's love life again, it'll be too soon," Taylia signaled back.
"Besides," she added,
"I don't remember you being nearly so amused at the time."
Libecca's fingers tapped out her reply.
"One of the benefits of hindsight, I suppose. After all, if you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?" Taylia began to respond, but Libecca cut her off with a minute gesture.
"Uber and Leet don't count."
Taylia continued her story. "After that we had a long talk about what to do with Aisha, or Akaishana as Zach
insisted on calling her. We decided that since she was a troublemaker by nature, we'd have her make trouble for our enemies. She'd already developed a strong power interaction with Alec—the ability to prevent the targets of his body-snatching from noticing while he attuned to them—plus they both possessed a certain … ethical flexibility … that I had to admit was tactically useful."
"I think the word you're looking for is 'sociopathy'," signaled Libecca.
"Potato, potahto," responded Taylia.
"The interaction got even stronger after Aisha … borrowed Akaihana's body. Using their powers together she could puppet someone without them even realizing it, which also let her control more people at once. And she could become a nearly perfect infiltration specialist if her armor was loaded with the right selection of powers, for example: her original power for stealth, Strider for movement, Vicky for defense, Lisa and Rapture for intelligence-gathering and psychological warfare planning, and Alec for manipulation."
Plus a discreetly-installed crystal that would resonate in response to a special signal from Pantheon armors, letting us know if Aisha was within 50 feet.
"A good thing too," Libecca signaled.
"I don't want to know what she would've used those goats for if we hadn't caught her."
"We worked with Dinah to devise the perfect plan, one that would turn the two greatest threats to our world against each other." She continued, carefully avoiding any mention of the code name Zach had given the operation. "Phase 1 was straightforward: Aisha, Alec, and Impty snuck into the CUI-occupied territories and began creating as much chaos as possible. Which is to say: a lot.
"It started with weapons manufacturing and storage facilities being sabotaged, surveillance records lost or corrupted, government slush funds drained, and state secrets leaked. The trails of evidence always led back to powerful hard-line party officials, who without exception claimed to be completely loyal and have no knowledge of what had happened. Which didn't save them from taking the blame."
The kind of blame that involved a bullet if they were lucky, or rubber hoses and electrodes followed, much later, by a bullet if they weren't.
"The CUI aristocrats were so accustomed to backstabbing and power plays that it took them months to even realize they were under Master/Stranger attack, and after they figured out that something was happening they still didn't know what. They kept it quiet to avoid appearing weak, which proved to be a mistake.
"Next came a string of incidents where formerly-loyal party officials denounced the royal family and called for liberalization during TV interviews and press conferences, all of which leaked to the international media with a little help from Dragon. And then there was a 24-hour period where every website under the CUI's 'Great Forcefield' of censorship automatically redirected to an itemized list of the regime's human rights violations—except PHO."
And, at Alec's insistence, all the porn sites. "Because withholding porn from half a billion Chinese is a human rights violation in itself," he had said. "Give us your turgid, your perverted, your horny masses yearning to beat freely…" Et cetera.
"The disruptions kept getting worse, more frequent, and stranger, and before long it was obvious that it was only a matter of time until the CUI crumbled completely. The last straw came when the remaining members of the royal family performed a can-can on live television while holding up a banner reading "We Suck!" in seventeen different languages.
"The people took to the streets in revolt, and 90% of the regular army defected to join them. Somewhere in a bunker deep underground, a general gave the 20 Yangban battalions their final orders: to massacre their rebelling countrymen, then embark on suicide missions against neighboring countries' infrastructure and population centers. In short, World War III.
"All of which was, as Dinah was growing increasingly fond of saying, 'Just. As. Planned.' As the Yangban members took to the skies, their bodies began to shift and change, sprouting fur and whiskers, soon turning into an army of fuzzy kittens."
"No way!" Zimmy shouted, her eyes wide. That's sooo cute … but is it really what happened, gramma Taylia? Or is this one of those times when you don't tell us the real story because you think we're too young to understand?"
"That's exactly how it happened, sweetie." Taylia reassured her. "I'd given Aisha a vial of my power in order to begin Phase 2 of our plan. She gradually infected all the Yangban with a parasite that would let her later affect them remotely, and when they attacked she activated them all at once." Which was the truth, if perhaps not the whole truth…
"Are you sure this will work?", Taylor asked. "We're going to need a lot of kittens."
"Trust me," Emma replied. "I've done the math on this. An average 8-week-old kitten—scientifically proven to be the cutest age—weighs 1.5 kg, while the average Yangban member weighs 65 kg. So that works out to 86 and 2/3 kittens per Yangban, and they currently have about 12,500 active members, which will give us over a million kittens. It'll be perfect."
"What will happen to all those fractional kittens?" Zach wondered.
"Playful, cuddly widdle kittipedes!" Clarice said, before her brain caught up to her mouth. "… are something I definitely will not make. Because that would be bad. And wrong."
"I grew a giant tree out of Yggdrasil, reaching over three miles high, with its lowest branches a mile from the ground. Pantheon and our allies rounded up the Yangban kittens and put them in the branches. I'd designed the tree to provide food, water, and shelter, so they were free to play and squabble all day long, as kittens do. The most important thing was that since the kittens were originally parahumans they retained their powers and an instinctive knowledge of how to use them, although only at about 1% of their original strength. Just enough to be extra adorable, really. There was only one step left in our plan: to wait."
The golden man was distracted from his battle against a Bolivian forest fire by a great disturbance in the shards, as if thousands of voices suddenly cried out in terror and suddenly … mewed? He flew halfway around the planet in a flash, arriving at a sight unprecedented in his thousands of years of wandering the stars.
A portion of the host species had been shaped into a different form, their shards not destroyed but instead diffused. He noted with satisfaction that the creatures maintained their drives toward conflict: chasing, wrestling with, and nipping at each other. Some floated gently through the air, while others erected eggshell-fragile barriers of force around themselves and others, batted around levitated twigs and insects, or momentarily shifted into other states of being. He even detected hosts with fragments of the same shard battling each other, such as a group of creatures that hissed and clawed at each other as they flickered backwards through instants of time. This novel form of conflict merited further study.
The golden man became aware of a conundrum as he moved to rescue the first armload of the creatures. Removing his shards' hosts from such a concentrated source of conflict felt wrong on a fundamental level, but if he ignored them he would be failing to fulfill his self-imposed duty. While that duty had seemed pointless at the time the man Norton had suggested it, and his subsequent experiences had done nothing to convince him otherwise, terminating such an investigation prematurely was also anathema to him.
Torn between two competing drives, he floated motionless. A satisfactory solution would no doubt present itself if he studied the situation more closely. He slowly circled around to examine another branch of the gigantic tree. Did that creature just set another's tail on fire with a burst of heat from its eyes? And did the burned creature's companion just summon a tiny cloud of rain to put the fire out? He calculated that there would be no harm in observing for just a few moments more.
… or a few moments after that.
… or a half-turn of the planet.
… or a full turn. It wasn't like he needed light to see.
… or a revolution around its star. Just one, and then he'd return to his duty.
… maybe two.
.
.
.
[D'AWWWW]
"He's been floating up there ever since, and our best thinkers predict that's unlikely to change anytime within at least the next two hundred years. He even started a breeding program. At first he seemed to be testing out different power combinations, but for the past few decades now it's been mainly for effect, like a Persian Longhair with aerokinesis or a black cat with a shadow form. We'll occasionally send up new varieties for him to play with as well, ever since the UN decided that the Cattree was a more human method of dealing with dangerous parahumans than the Birdcage.
"Without the threat of Scion hanging over everything, humanity was free to expand to other dimensions and begin colonizing the solar system. Cauldron stopped acting like a nutter's idea of the Illuminati and started to work on making life better for everyone. The last I checked, the Endbringers were busy terraforming Mars. And none of it would've been possible without the CUI.
"So, that's how the CUI saved the world. And then everyone lived happily ever after," Taylia concluded.
"Even the platypus?" Zimmy asked.
"Yes, even the platypus."
"What happened to the platypus?"
"The platypus and Ingenue got married and had lots of abom-, I mean adorable little children."
"Umm," Bemmy spoke up, "What's a platypus?"
"That's a long story," Taylia replied, "but it will have to wait for another night. For tonight though, who wants cookies?"
"Me!" "Me!" "Me!" cried three young voices in unison.
Taylia lead the way, followed closely by Levi, then Bemmy. Last was Zimmy, who hummed contentedly to herself as they headed into the kitchen. And then they all had Samosas.
THE END
