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I Imbued something magical every day, of course. It took up my Sustained downtime, but that was how things went, slogging forwards one day at a time. My others did the same thing, knowing that Gear and Artifice were the Tools that built uberness, and I had the gold, and could get as much more gold, as was needed.

Which was good, because when you start burning 250 lbs. of gold for each Wish/Miracle for Stats, a thousand tons of it starts being chewed through pretty quick. Almost four tons for a full thirty-stack of Inherents, after all...

When I wasn’t doing that, I was Energizing various materials, and Matter-Manipulating the heck out of stuff.

Having both Kismet’s and Sersi’s Matter-Manipulating powers to work with made me the equal of either of them in power, and I was actually superior in some ways, especially when dealing with inorganics.

I learned that making stable Isotopes was very difficult with Matter Manipulation, as Energizing stuff was a whole different skillset. Ben Parker could do it once he transcended the matter/energy divide, but that was a hitch up to the Cosmic tier of power.

I did learn how to make Earth Iron with M-M, aka durasteel. I still needed the raw materials to work with, which meant my next portable Portal was soon being set up by areas that needed tunnels built or passes carved that would not happen otherwise. Massive amounts of stone were sent into LaGrange’s quantum storage chambers for transmutation and building out new sections of the station, or I was down in the Blue Area clearing out new spaces and expanding the habitable areas while generating valuable amounts of hull-viable raw materials.

What I could also do was generate the raw elements for Energizing Isotopes, although such things were magically inert and useless for making magical items or being Burned in them, unless they were Energized first.

I Sunbathed for at least six hours a day if I could. I was collecting Thunder, Lightning, and Solar energy, among other things, as well as gravitational fluctuations on space/time, dumping them all in the Pocket so my Dupes could pull them out and fill up their Cores.

Felicia was totally set on making up a Chaos Magic Core. That I couldn’t help her with, so she was limited to Reserve uses and her own magic to power it up. I was sure it was going to be very interesting when she got it up there. Her ability with Hexes, Cursing, Illusions, and Enchantments would rival Wanda’s.

I wasn’t growing a thousand miles tall, but I was constantly using Kismet’s quantum energy gathering and Comet’s Flare when I was outside the station, in addition to the constant incoming M’Kraan surge. My Reserves were actually a minor contribution at this point, so I vented them as Chaos Magic for Felicia to use, for the most part.

When not adding to the work being done on the station, which was growing by leaps and bounds with effectively five Matter-Manipulators around, and one (me) who was a very advanced Weird Scientist, I was lived-lining the Solar System.

Out in space, lived-lines were very different than on a planet, with all its gravity and magnetism and mass. Out here, wherever you passed was a lived-line, you didn’t need to be anchored to an Element, or travel via one. Ranges were greatly extended in different modes, too. Riding the Light, for instance, could easily shoot you multiple light-seconds away, depending on what Valence you used it from, up to hours away.

Spend nine Valences, and I could jump right out to the Kuiper Belt, if I could fix on something... and with Specs’ forward magnification approaching that of a Kryptonian, combined with Cosmic Awareness giving me targets to focus on, that was never a problem.

Lived-lining gave me teleport fixes to the destination points, and teleportation fixes were easy Portal points or Teleport points, allowing me to bring others with me. One of the first things I introduced to the station was an outgoing Portal with range out to the Kuiper Belt that could be charged up to deliver us to any trouble, without necessarily needing me there to do stuff, avoiding the whole having to go to FTL to get to someplace in quick responses.

That Portal couldn’t take any incoming dimensional jumps from off-planet, which was simply too massive a security threat without absolute overrides and source filters.

This also helped with dispatching a new sensor grid to cover the system, built with Xandaran technology, and improved on with Weird Science, much to their amazement. Add in some Shadow Elements to the cloaking system, and the things became almost impossible to sense in passive mode, meaning they couldn’t be sniped and eliminated by invaders.

I wasn’t too worried about such things, although incursions and scouting runs happened all the time... and now we were catching more of them, since I had Cosmic Awareness and routinely covered the entire solar system to sense any real changes.

Ben Parker did the same, of course, but his job was to be a very, very light hand. If outside forces knew we had a truly Cosmic entity protecting us, they’d start planning to take him out somehow, or bring other Cosmic forces in to contest him and likely take the planet out as collateral damage.

He put his time and effort in where there were few witnesses, or things could be explained away as accidents. A random chunk of Jupiter’s rings wiping out a Kree observation post there, or a Badoon ship wandering into a spatial friction ‘hotspot’ at the leading edge of the sun’s magnetosphere out in the Kuiper Belt, or an uncharted comet slamming into a Skrull ship as they came out of hyperspace... these were all things he could do after some consultation with Primus or Flux, the latter having a real talent for inventive ways to dispose of hostiles and making it seem like ill luck.

The Sol System quickly gained a reputation for being bad luck and haunted among certain segments of aliens. I thought it was tremendously amusing.

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Dealer went through with the delivery of Franklin Richards pretty easily, bypassing all the tedious and painful birthing process with a Polymorph to just open up and let the baby boy be lifted out. The Richards wanted to give her naming privileges, but she just laughed it off and bowed to their first choice. He would, however, have to call her Auntie Dealer forever.

The sudden attack of some of the FF’s foes with robots galore was very unwelcome, and, well, it wasn’t like the FF were actually at all incapacitated. Those attacking were stomped in literally record time by the whole Baxter crew. Susan was particularly brutal in her dismembering of them.

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Also unwelcome is...

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“THINKER.”

The word rang everywhere, jostling the pudgy fellow in the green uniform out of his internal meanderings. He looked up sharply, and then the ceiling fell in.

The impact bounced him backwards, sprawling against the wall, gasping as the room in front of him exploded with seething amounts of voltage.

“Your attempt to teleport away has been anticipated. This area is under Interdiction,” the grim woman’s voice continued with incredibly clarity. With a hiss, the dust and rubble in front of him fell straight to the ground and everything was very clear.

He was very familiar with the uniform, as the few times he’d bothered to be personally present when they’d met had made an impression. Her invisibility to his robots and remote drones had always been vexing, of course.

That note in her voice as he moved quickly to retreat had not been there, however. The rather serene calm that characterized her was tinged with a knife’s edge of... irritation. With him.

Lightning exploded through the walls, crackling madly, and suddenly the lights went out.

“Your path of flight has been anticipated. The blast doors won’t close. The six traps you’ve installed in the walls and floor have lost all power.” Her steps rang with absolute confidence as she paced after him. “Your attempt to command your guardian bots is running into severe radio static. Your bionic link to your surrogates is down.”

He swallowed at that last. She had figured out how to block the subspace connection to his android minions? That was untenable!

“Yes, push that door open manually. The lever is to your left.” He swallowed, as he couldn’t see her, and he suddenly realized that she was predicting everything.

About him!

“You should have realized what is going on now. Yes, you’re pausing to contemplate an x-factor course of action. Of course, you are realizing it’s all been predicted. Your escape route, the means of travel, the location, the force fields, the second group of robots, the secret door, the dummy, the secondary escape route, the double, the tertiary escape route, the ‘accident’, and the concealed safe room.”

The Thinker swallowed as she counted off his plans with steady, unconcerned pacing, the light of the voltage around her illuminating the corridor behind her as she came around the corner.

The robots in the room did not even register she was present. He could only watch as a single writhing coil of voltage, impossibly strong and impossibly controlled, writhed through the air like a living thing and fried their power systems with deft precision.

“You should be thinking that I don’t know about the drop-chute under your feet about now.” His face twisted again, and his reaching hand stilled as she advanced without hurry. “You also should have analyzed that my speed is far more than enough to reach you before you drop down, and yet I am totally unconcerned about the possibility of losing you by this grandstanding turnabout demonstration of mine.

“Because you are predictable.”

He shuddered, and his hand fell back to his side. He made no further move as he watched her approach unhurriedly, the smoking and useless hulks of his megadroids behind her, the white eyes of her Mask glowing as she looked down at him.

He swallowed, aware that he was inches from death.

Her finger reached out, and tapped his head. He felt a hiss, and his bionic linkage to his minions were abruptly gone completely. She had just removed the bionics from inside his head...

“You... have changed, Dynamo,” he muttered under his breath. She certainly hadn’t been able to put on such a display of power before.

“I was holding back,” she replied to his face. “And then, some idiot genius sent his robots out to attack a pregnant woman and a newborn child, due to his delusions of self-importance and envy of spontaneous creativity.” The white eyes of her Mask narrowed dangerously, and the Thinker had the unique sensation of beads of sweat almost popping out of his forehead.

She was so easy to predict right now, a sensation he’d never had against her. She had always been a living, unpredictable x-factor, her alchemy capable of all manner of odd surprises on the rare occasions he’d been present to direct his robots against her.

“I have a question for you, Lucius Rudolfsky.” He blanched at the mention of the name he had thought completely buried, by all the many means at his disposal, her tones setting off all the alarm bells in his mind. “If you were to die, here, today, would the world be any worse off, or even better off, for you not being here?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it, helplessly calculating the possibilities, his own actions past and future, deeds done and things achieved...

He swallowed as the calculations pointed only in a single direction. “Well,” he managed to say, but he could not finish the sentence. Even he wasn’t one to say the world would be better off if he was no longer in it.

She leaned in closer, the glow of her eyes only inches away. “I think you need an x-factor right now, don’t you?”

Predictably, the Mad Thinker nodded.

She held up a crystalline handphone in front of him. At that moment, it rang with a Ding! Ting! that had all the blood drain from his face as he recognized it. “It’s for you,” she informed him, and he took it with a shaking hand.

He had heard of the Crystal Vaccines, but he had never earned one for himself. He had the feeling, that in this circumstance, it was delivering him from death, but to what?

He hit the receive button, and held it up to his ear. “Mr. Rudolfsky,” said a voice all husky silk over razors on the other end. “It seems we finally have an opportunity to talk.”

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I just walked away. The Mad Thinker was now going to be on Sama’s leash, his logistician’s brain and mastery of computer science going to be put through tests like he never imagined... and completely under her control, or he would end up very dead.

No more Mad Thinker. He would stay sane and useful, or he would be dead.