Most interestingly, all the crazy plotlines dealing with difficulties with Susan’s pregnancy were now history. If I recalled correctly, that meant their first encounter with Annihilus, looking for the Cosmic Control Rod, was not going to happen.

Huh. That was totally going to bollox up a LOT of stuff. Especially being prepared for Annihilus when the immortal bug-lord of the Negative Zone actually popped up.

Word had already come down from Sama Rantha that the Negative Zone was NOT to be intruded upon again from our side, and even Reed wasn’t brave enough to go against that pronouncement. Doom, however?...

However, that hardly meant they couldn’t come back against us, if they had managed to retain our dimensional coordinates. That meant we had to be constantly on the alert against incursions like that, and come down like a brick on anyone stupid enough to replicate Reed’s experiment.

Plenty of stupid geniuses around...

All the plotlines about stealing or using the power of the Silver Surfer while he was trapped here on Terra were done and gone, too. Oh, such odes to originality. If I remembered correctly, the first connection with the Microverse had come that way...

Psycho-man? It had been too long since I read all the crazy plotlines... be hilarious if the Micronauts showed up locally...

I pulled out my Crystal Vaccine and typed in a text to Sama to give me a call when she had some time. Update call, nothing more.

About ten minutes later, as I was kicking back, relaxing with gen-yoo-ine caffeinated Hillbilly Piss™, the Vaccine rang me back and I picked up with Specs. “What’s up?” Sama asked neutrally.

“Brought the Richards out of Asgard, completed their Elemental Circle. Suspicions of Ororo proved true. She tried to absorb the Richards and ambush us with the help of both Loki and Karnilla. Also, she was the Chosen of Sekhmet.” I let that hang a minute. “In addition, Karnilla is now off the board for the expected future. How open season is Loki?”

“Loki is unfortunately the whetstone needed to make Thor grow up.”

“Why does childhood for storm gods last so damn long? I know Tricksters never grow up, but really?”

“That damn timelessness,” she replied, taking me literally as she was drinking something. “Sekhmet, eh?”

“She was planning on using Franklin Richards to incarnate here ‘legally’.”

“Yeah, like that would have flown,” she growled. “How is he?”

“Percolating inside Dealer right now.”

I heard the splutter on the other end. “Damn Powered,” she muttered without force. “Do I even want to know?”

“Ororo took an Asgardian Racial Level. Dealer Bound and Sealed her, inherited the boy. We managed to Reverse-Godmerge/Duplicate the Richards out, but the baby stayed behind since we took him from her on the Sealing.”

“Well.” She took a swig on the other end. “That... rather nicely tidies up some potential possibilities,” she admitted.

“Cosmic Control Rod?” I asked knowingly.

“Isn’t the Negative Zone involved in some of those predictions of yours?” she returned in confirmation.

“Bugface features prominently in them.”

“I’ll arrange for some scouting of the place so we have a better idea of what we are dealing with.” I could hear her growling as she said it. She was making no allusions to the fact she couldn’t just go in and eliminate him, which meant her Celestial-slaying, starship-hewing stuff was likely restricted a bit there. “Briggs is already monitoring for incursions from it. We knew it wasn’t something that could be avoided, and it was better to know when and where someone found it than it happen randomly and disastrously.”

“I gather you ran across that in other alternities.”

“Yes. The Negative Zone is basically full of techno-barbarians, drones, and savages given advanced tech by intelligent warlords wielding super-science. Things hit an unprepared Earth, sometimes even nukes couldn’t save them.”

“And they could just come back somewhere else, again and again, since they outnumbered us, too.”

“Making Terra a springboard to galactic invasion, which also stirred up other forces.”

“Well, make sure you send me any language files you get,” I told her, also taking a drink. Ah, teeth-destroying goodness, so much better with alchemy. “Also, did the Godmerge/Dupe thing on Ororo, Burned her Divine body, leaving her mind and soul Bound, and sent a Dupe back to Wakanda as her.”

I timed it pretty good, as I was sure something went spraying. “Are you serious?!” Sama demanded of me, adding a few other terms in six languages afterwards.

“Yeah. First priority was to inform T’Challa, so don’t worry about false circumstances. Storm already verified that the incident with the Sphinx was meant to kill T’Challa and allow Ororo to both kill the Sphinx and take over Wakanda. I guess Sekhmet has some sort of grudge against Osebo...”

“She considers the Totems lesser beings, and as Ra’s Avenger, she’s got a chip on her shoulder. Likes to blame people for the failings of others, too. How did Karnilla figure in?”

“She knows Sekhmet. Secret Society of Goddess Sorcerers with Spells to Grind, or something,” I said reasonably. “Karnilla mentioned it to Loki, and he happily jumped in to mess with Dealer and I.”

“What’d he do, try to cheat at a poker match and get caught?”

“Three different times. He’s intimately familiar with Mr. Hill’s knuckle patterns now. Then there was that time I ran into him in Greenland where he was trying to stir up the frost giants...”

“Hadn’t heard about that one...”

“Laufey’s son is having a hard time getting respect from the giants when a mere mortal woman can beat the crap out of him. He was trying to get the frosties to start raiding as a distraction to whatever new scheme he had, and that kinda went south.”

“Whatever were you doing in Greenland?”

“Excavating a lode of gold from the volcanic zone there. I got bills to pay, you know.”

“Oh, of course. How much did you pull out?”

“A thousand tons or so?”

Man, my timing was good. Splutters on the other end again. “You are REALLY annoying,” she told me, following up with colorful descriptions in twelve languages I waited patiently through.

“What was that seventh one?” I asked casually.

“Entemen.” En-tem-en. I made a note to download it off the Xandaran universal translator. “Anything else I should lose brandy over?”

“Castle says he’s missing Spears-as-Storms and wants his Wind Dragon Master back.”

“Fine, fine. One measly national invasion and suddenly Tribals aren’t wanted anywhere in the States, even if they are killing the vamps and werewolves made out of your family members. Probably particularly if they are.”

“Yeah, them stakes and silver knives gotta be wielded by proper pious Caucasian Christians, not heathen savages, y’know.” I paused for a moment. “We’re dealing arms to the Dark Dimension.”

No spray of brandy on that one. “Briggs has been helping with that kind of thing for years on the sly. Technically, they are ‘raiding stockpiles of abandoned weapons at opportune times and locations, oh horrors, we lost some more of them, them dirty thieves, them’. Makes it up on the other side with some ‘bribes’ paid during resource exchanges. Mostly fringe tribes and barbarians who have to deal with invading demons and stuff from other realms.”

“In The Great Bear’s Russia, you invade demons and harvest their immortal souls!” I said in exactly the right accent.

“Mithar, Natalya is getting to you, too?” she muttered, but she didn’t deny it. “Anything else?”

“How non grata is Stark to you and the Tribes?”

She was silent a moment before sighing. “He said some things to his father when he left that really hurt. They still aren’t talking, which is pretty sad. I speak to Howard regularly, and he’s a major contributor at Ocampe, even goes off to Svartazk regularly. Anthony considers his father a sell-out, when Howard is actually a true globalist and Terran-first. He and the Savages are the foremost people getting us into space. Tony’s gallivanting around in his suit and attempting to bootstrap the States up and all is nice, but all it’s really doing is making him money.

“In the end, he’s just wasting time and having fun. He’s done some innovations on the power armor side that are interesting, but wearing power armor out in space is almost a death sentence unless the enemy is stupid. All the real tech advances have to go down the cosmic, magical, or psionic energy route, and he’s just using straight tech.

“He’s just lucky there’s no easy EMP tech around on Terra to shut him down against those fighting him here.

“And the thing is, he’s not irreplaceable. Sure, in straight human minds, he’s one of the best on the planet. Briggs has two people who are his equals, and a dozen more in niches. I’ve got access to half a dozen myself in the Tribal Nations, and if we talk the rest of the Tribal Alliance, there’s another dozen scattered everywhere. T’Challa has at least a half-dozen specialists, and his sister is every bit as sharp as Tony.

“And then there’s Briggs and I.” And Doom, although she didn’t say that. Doom had been focused almost entirely on building up Latveria properly the past few years... well, building them up properly, not necessarily acting properly. He was still a supremely arrogant ass in many of his dealings, and the laws of other nations were more hindrances than rules. Sunny ran across him and his machinations all the time. Was really good at popping Doombots, too.

I could only agree as I sighed. Nothing Tony was actually putting major efforts into mattered, because he was outside the real circles of the technology.

And he didn’t know, because those under Mark didn’t talk about that stuff to anyone, and anyone who knew that stuff was under Mark... or inner Wakandan, and if they weren’t Marked, were probably flapping lips to those friendly to the Askari.

“So,” she asked conversationally, “who have you used that Ur capstone power on?”

BLAGH! Just to show my appreciation for her timing, I cursed back at her in sixteen OTHER languages, just to show my appreciation.

“Number fourteen there?” she inquired, just as casually as I had.

“Uskvelachi. Under the Shi’ar.” Wow, I’d had to stretch to find that language. I’d basically learned it for exactly this reason.

“Huh. Any reason to pick it up?”

“So you’d ask what it was.”

I heard her smirking through the phone. “And my question?”

I grumbled softly. “Not many people, actually. Mostly just to figure out how their powers worked so I could figure out a spell or general magic to replicate them. Nothing dramatic.”

“So, those Duplicates you have came from using that ability on Madrox and designing a spell based on it, your Clone+1, as it were?”

I could see where she might be going with this. “Yes,” I confirmed. “I could make a number of Duplicates equal to Spellcraft ranks above 16. So, four of them.”

“And the Duplicates from his ability?” she asked calmly, obviously not distracted by that.

I sighed in exasperation. “There are three of them,” I admitted.