Some time passes...

“There’s an attempted coup going on in DC!”

I looked up sharply. “There’s a whose what now?” I demanded of Peter, who had burst in with the news.

He flicked up the news on the screen, and we all gathered up to watch what looked to be hordes of oddly uniformed men occupying the big government buildings in the capital down there. There looked to have been some signs of fighting, but all the government forces there were very much not in evidence.

“Well, someone put rather too much thought and effort into something that was doomed from the get-go,” I judged. “I bet all eight Shields are on the way there right now, and those idiots are going to have a nasty time. Who are these yahoos?” My tone was utterly disparaging.

“Given the singular focus of the ethnicity represented among their troops, if they are not associated with the Crux, they are belly-up at the bar with them,” Hank sniffed as well.

He defaulted to blue now, and since he needed to be blue to be smart, that was how we saw him all the time. He was pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff.

-Secret Empire move in DC!- I /crowed to Dealer.

-The Moonstone is in play? Ha ha! I’m so on it!- Teleportation magic rippled, and suddenly there was going to be someone in DC that they definitely didn’t want to be there.

“Wait, aren’t Scott and Jean and the others down there on a class trip?” Gwen suddenly blurted out.

We all kind of looked at one another.

Oh, those poor jokers didn’t have any chances of doing anything...

------------

Three hours!

Lloyd Bloch was fuming as he retreated through the underways of the capital, taking care to stay out of sight.

All that time, effort, and manpower, and they hadn’t been able to keep control for even three hours!

The Shields had bypassed all chains of command and moved out the local military forces in no time at all, with General Rogers hauling desk-pushing brass out of the Pentagon in droves and Director Carter taking over command of the local police with the ease of two people who had once done that here in this town for years.

All their carefully planted aides and allies had been isolated, identified, and hauled away so quickly it had made their heads spin. It was like the Shields only had to look at the list of names to realize who had to be responsible for the dithering going on...

His own ‘reveal’ as a new hero had been cut short almost as soon as they tried to set it up, with that bunch of mutant kids ripping through the Secret Empire’s troops like they were chaff and forcing him to flee or get his face blasted off.

He wasn’t sure if that was a phoenix that girl had been using. Wasn’t the Phoenix dead? Why was she here, ruining his big chance?

He fumed, caught between revenge and much more sensible self-preservation. These idiots had obviously proven even more incompetent than he could believe-

“Hurk?” he gasped, as something came out of the darkness and rammed a glowing crimson Card into his chest.

A wave of revulsion spread out from the point of impact, and his entire body convulsed with the sheer, ferocious nausea of having to get rid of anything foreign to it right now. The stone that had embedded in his chest was forced out and away from him in sheer, vile horror and disgust for what it was, and he staggered and fell abruptly, gasping as he puked like he had never puked in his life.

That was where Jean Grey, who had been tracking the idiot who didn’t even have pshielding in his helmet, found him, covered in his own vomit and effluvia, shrunken and wasted, his shiny would-be hero’s costume covered with filth.

Of the rock he’d been so certain his powers came from, there was no sign, however.

--------

“For you!”

Getting to 17 Ranks in Spellcraft so I could Cast a Duplicate spell (Raised Clone+1 variant!) was supposed to be a key moment of greater understanding into the wonders of Valence IX’s, sparking greater insight into the mysteries of the cosmos.

While it did that, it also informed me that I could make one Duplicate per Spellcraft Rank over sixteen. Effectively I had to reapportion and instill duplicates of living portions of my mind into them so they could be truly autonomous and grow and change without me, which meant they would effectively have different personalities than I did, yet could all merge back into me because they all came from me.

There was a reason I hadn’t gone preincarnation-diving through le Fey’s past, hah!

Just like my Clone, however, my Dupes couldn’t make Dupes, and since they were reflections of me, they didn’t have my active Totem Pact... and since it could conflict with mine if they were dispersed and rejoined me, they couldn’t get Pacts of their own.

Rotter!

“You want me to be the user of the Sunstone?” My twin tossed up the crystal in her hand thoughtfully.

“I was thinking you would probably want to do a Psychic Reformation of Class Levels and experience, too.” I had one of those spells memorized as well. Unlike Madrox’s overpowered ability might do, prepared spells weren’t duplicated by Cloning or Duping, although Sorcery Slots were still available, and of course the very loose and free magical style used all around was also there.

Dealer was a magical Clone with no ability to grow, a true snapshot double of me that stayed current by respending a VIII Slot and synching back up if I got better at something. A total Reformation wasn’t an option for her, nor for me, since all of her Casting ability came from me. The useless Warlock Masteries, now, they could go...

Since I was the electrical generator, too, I had to stick with being Dynamo, which wasn’t so hard. It was funny how some Levels in Alchemist were playing into working on awesome crazy stuff now.

Ace Dupe had my memories up to the point of Duping, so she was fully aware of all of that.

“I will definitely do that, but I need to plan it all out. HAH! Do you know how many Masteries I’ll save by not having a Pact?” Ace crowed at me.

“You’re going to need them all to use the Sunstone properly.”

“Oh, right.” She deflated, but rallied instantly. “A good problem to have!”

“That’s the spirit. You settle on a face?” Naturally we didn’t want another twin of me running around, with only topical changes.

“Let’s see if this damn stone actually changes my hair to blonde.” Ace took the glowing jewel, placed it against her chest and concentrated, synching it up. A Reformation couldn’t change a Talent, so Concentration would always be our thing...

There was a swirl of golden particle effects as the Sunstone slid in under her skin and behind her breastbone.

“Well, I damn well know that the first thing I’m gonna do is make it my Arcane Bonded item and my Item Familiar,” Ace murmured, turning her eyes up as she felt quasi-cosmic energies surging through her, replacing to a great degree what the Totem Pact had been giving me, and even giving something more.

“Sound,” I agreed. No need for her to have a Ring if she was going to be bound to one of the Gems of the Tree of Life. I could see little sparkles running along her nerves and blood vessels through her skin, converging towards her hair.

Yep, our hair was energy-sensitive. Like the sun rising from the crown of her forehead, the Sunstone’s energy washed up her long locks and turned them brilliant golden blonde.

I had noticed that frequent spellcasting kept Dealer’s hair jet black, while mine was merely dark brown, and people saw that it tended to go reddish and somewhat white at the ends when I was putting out the voltage. Eh, well, it was what it was.

“Let me take what you started and I’ll come back with my final build,” Ace said, and I nodded agreement. If something happened to her and she ‘died’, she’d still revert back into me, but the Reformation would be unspun, and the raw Karma she’d earned dumped on top of mine. I’d remember being great at what she was, but the skills wouldn’t be there any longer, melted back into the Primary Template of me which they had come from, and which hadn’t changed.

However, and very importantly, I could just Duplicate her out again, and she would come back out exactly as she had been.

Yes, very sick, broken ability. Although treating yourself as a disposable power-leveling tool was... interesting, the fact remained that if I Duped her back, she also came out with the same Karma level I did, if I had gained any. So, a win-win.

Now I just had to work on Spellcraft Ranks Eighteen, Nineteen, and Twenty, and figure out what I wanted my Dupes to do!

I was probably going to have to ask Dr. Strange if I could read the Book of the Vishanti, too. Many of the spells inside it could only be Invoked from that Book, so it wasn’t like I’d be stealing any uber spells, but the foundational knowledge inside was what I was looking for.

He’d probably give me one of Those Looks at even having the temerity to request such a thing.

Hmm. I should offer to write a book for his library, then. It was kind of light on alchemical stuff, and while computers were actually much better at tracking the mindbogglingly complex interactions of E-Elements, having some solid foundational knowledge in there wouldn’t be bad for him and the other Vishanti sorcerers.

He’d definitely preserved a copy of the dimensional ruleset I was working on and was puzzling through it himself, doubtless swearing at how I’d managed to put all that together and from where.

-Confirming Sunstone dump into dark Underweb..,- Ace /relayed to Dealer and I, and we sat back, waiting patiently.

The Sunstone was a very powerful tool, but it was always looked down on because it lifted its user into the medium power level, where they’d easily be beaten up by those stronger, faster, with greater energy projection abilities, and so forth and so on. Karla Sofen regularly got manhandled by Captain Marvel and Iron Man, among others, with almost no recourse, making her a first-ranker on a street level team, and a second-stringer on an elite team.

But like a Pact, instant power was not why it was the Sunstone. It wasn’t a ‘Moonstone’, reflecting or gathering power. No, it was literally an unlimited conduit of direct and continuous energy to a limitless power source. Like a Pact, it was limited in DPS by the skill of the wielder and its own design, but in terms of time... it never ran dry.

So, like a Pact, the best resource was to have a capacitor to hold all that nice happy power that would otherwise be wasted, and draw the Sunstone at maximum power 24/7, shoving all that extra juice into an extradimensional holding space.

Like, oh, an unused portion of the Underweb, an empty pocket dimension.

That was what I was now doing, since I’d worked out the planar mechanics to find one... and I’d had to opportunity to see Comet, this world’s Carol Danvers, who had her Binary/Flare Conduit opening onto a white hole.

I didn’t need a white hole power source (although wouldn’t that be nice?). I needed a big empty space, and well, Creation was big, and there were pockets laying around here and there waiting to be picked up and made relevant by something. I could Cast IX’s now, which allowed me to link up to my own demiplane if I so desired.

I so very did that, and my Dupes and Clone all shared that link.

I was not putting a Sanctum of my own in there, I was filling it up with energy.

We all had Call Major Lightning Storm in a VIII Slot (we didn’t use a IX Slot because we only had three each), and we all had Lightning Reserve. +8d6 being dumped into an effectively boundless capacitor every six seconds each is no small amount of juice!