Chapter 11

The Zee Quarry sat outside of town. When Century City had been founded, in the heyday of the 19^th century, when railroads and treaties were creeping their way across the United States and this place had been called Century Mining Concerns, the quarry was basically the entire reason to come here. Well, that and the fact that Century Mining Concerns had three of the best gunfighters in the west – Magnet Lass, who had used a magnet hidden underneath an old Spanish cuirass to pull guns off target, Two Bone Kid, who had bone handled revolvers and was really good at shooting, and Lionlass, who had worn a frilly outfit and, also, had been really good at shooting. With two revolvers.

“That was it?” Nova asked Starflight as the two of them walked towards the Quarry.

“People had lower standards as to what constituted a costumed adventurer in the wild west, okay?” Starfleet said, sighing as she rubbed her hand through her mechanical hair. “No one had even broken the DT back then, the closest they got was General Sherman and that guy who built the giant mechanical spider.”

“Wasn’t Sherman also a werewolf?” Nova asked.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t have anything to do with superpowers, lycanthropy is a disease, it’s just a serious life altering disease, they didn’t have lycotropixate back then, back then, the solution to having lycanthropy was secrets, silver chains, and silver bullets if that didn’t work. Or, uh, being adopted by a wolf pack,” Starfleet said, stopping for a bit, looking faintly bemused. “Yeah, did you know all the violent tendencies in un-treated lycanthropes is mostly from the human side?”

“ ... really?” Nova asked.

“Yeah,” Starfleet said. “Hominids man. They’re fucked up.”

Nova sighed, then put his hands on his hips and examined the quarry.

“So,” he said. “I’m going to die!”

This had been a running theme over the past two hectic, jam packed days. Normally, when one had fucked their mother and sisters, one would expect such a momentously criminal and perverse act to be the center of one’s thoughts. But for the past forty eight hours, Nova had had nothing to do but cram every bit of training into his schedule that he could, while the entire planet went onto full alert. He hadn’t had so much time as to even smile at Mom in fleeting passing between his various rushing from site to site as every hero that had ever fought Darkthornn gave him tips and scientific laboratories worked overtime to study his powers, to determine exactly what he could do when the Mad God himself arrived on Earth to start throwing down.

Again.

“You are not gonna die,” Starfleet said, blithely. “Yes, the cosmic embodiment of all that is evil, birthed in the anti-bang that created the Dark Universe, is coming to Earth. Yes, his ancient tomb-world of Cenetaph is once more filled with malign life that exists only to suffer and labor under his omnipotent will. Yes! His battlefleets are assembling in the Zone of Terror, and are between two months to two weeks away from attacking the outer edge of the solar system. Yes! We’re ... currently looking down the double barreled shotgun of an actual factual real world Event for the first time in two fucking decades!” She clapped her metal hands together, fingers interlocking, her voice having gotten more and more hysterical with every sentence.

“ ... but?” Nova asked.

“You. Are. Not. Going. To. Die.”

Nova stepped over and hugged his sister. She closed her eyes and leaned into him.

“I promise I won’t,” he whispered.

Then, drawing back, he put his hands on her shoulders. “Now, uh, what were you going to show me here?”

“Right, uh, okay,” Starfleet said, shaking her head. “Today, we’re gonna see if you can chuck antimatter at people.”

Nova smiled. “It should be easy,” he said, stepping away from her, then looking around the quarry. He frowned and started to pick out the various bits of rubble that were a safe distance away from him. The whole place looked abandoned and, also, pock marked with signs of old battles. A lots of dimensional invasions came here, it was part of why people had stopped coming here to mine. Well. That and it turns out all you needed to really fix a lot of scarcity issues were, like, twelve people who could transmute matter at will – and that was before he had shown up. He held up his hand, fingers touching together as he focused to try and turn a very tiny amount of air into antimatter.

He snapped his fingers and the resulting crack of displaced air and flash of an explosion was more like a spark. One of the rocks shifted a bit, a black discoloration appearing on it.

“Okay, you managed to turn a very teeny tiny little itty bit of it into antimatter,” Starfleet said, clicking her tongue softly. “Enough to roughly equal a small gunshot. Can you try turning more into antimatter.”

“It’s ... harder than it seems,” Nova said, lowering his hand. “Matter resists being shifted to have anti-spin more than I expected – but I think if I use the old standards to make things easier, like extending out the quantum function into a larger lattice along my body, don’t bother trying to keep myself from glowing, throw all my weight in at the beginning and then let it take a bit of time to recharge ... yeah, I can ... hmm...” He did some mental math. “I think I can-”

He snapped his fingers.

The shockwave slammed him and Starfleet backwards almost twenty yards, the two of them skidding and fetching up against a tree stump that had been left near the parking gravel that was used for cars that came here. They both sat there, blinking, their ears ringing, until Nova waved his hand and repaired the damage to her speakers, then to his cochlea. As the ringing faded and he blinked away the last spots, they saw that a huge chunk of the quarry was now a smoking, hissing glass crater. Bubbling droplets of black hit the ground – tinking loudly as it hit the ground. One rolled near Nova’s ankle and he picked it up.

“Metal condensate,” he said, a bit absently. “Ow.”

“Are you okay?” Starfleet asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I put it at the outer limit of my range. Uh. Gonna need to, uh, shift some range ... make it uh, farther away if I do that.”

“Okay!” she said, standing and brushing her gleaming metal rump off. “You can make enough antimatter. Maybe.”

“Is antimatter the only thing that can kill Darkthornn?” Nova asked.

“Mom and Dad gave me the skinny, while you were off getting your magnetflux tested,” Starfleet said. “You know how the official comics have Darkthornn blowing up the moon when he killed Legacy I?”

“Yeah, it’s one of the most famous comic pages to exist,” Nova said, biting his lower lip, his ears drooping.

“Actually, Legacy I went into that fight, knowing that it was gonna be his death,” Starfleet said, quietly. “It was to keep Darkthornn in place so that Razzle Dazzle could get him.”

“Who the fuck is Razzle Dazzle?”

“A street level disco themed hero from the 80s,” Starfleet said, shrugging. “I’d never heard of her either, she made sparkles. Anyway, turns out the sparkles were teeny tiny little itty bits of antimatter. She was probably the most powerful, destructive metahuman on the planet, a full cosmic tier effect, and she just never used herself at full power. Just made tiny little booms to jazz up her musical performances.”

“Huh,” Nova said.

“She blew up the moon, to kill Darkthornn,” Starfleet looked up at the sky. The moon wasn’t overhead right now – but one of the chunks was. It was just barely visible in the blue sky. Starfleet slid her hand to take his in hers, squeezing gently. “Now, she also didn’t have a spacesuit, you will be able to survive in space. So, no dying heroically.”

“No dying heroically,” Nova said.

Starfleet gave a curt little nod.

Then, softly.

“ ... do you wanna fuck?”

Nova felt the sudden, intense urge to forget the future barreling towards him, to forget the danger and the frightening nature of it all. But...

“I, uh. I actually have a scheduled fight with Shadecraft in a bit,” Nova said. “It’s for more practice, since his minions are roughly analogous to Parameks, so, like...” He rubbed the back of his neck. His sister stepped away from him, then floated up into the air. She turned to face him – and then another her dropped out of the sky, and the twin robot-spaceship girls floated beside one another, pouting at him in unison.

“Are you sure you don’t wanna fuck your twin sisters?” one purred.

“Boys love getting it on with twins,” the other said. The two leaned in and kissed one another, their mouths pressing together, their mirrored features only accentuating just how ... supremely wrong this was. No. Wait. Was it wrong? Uh. Nova flushed, shaking his head.

“Y-You’re not twins, we’re ... twins. I. Is this selfcest, what you’re doing?” he asked.

The left Starfleet flitted to his right, while the right flitted to his left. Their arms hooked around his as they whispered into his long, sensitive ears.

“Big brother, we’ll let you do anything to us,” one crooned.

“Anything at all...” Her fingers caressed his chest. “Your little sis needs her big brother’s company right now.”