Briggs thought about that a moment before replying to my question. “Not like you think. Mostly I wait for them, while Sama goes looking for them. As a Source, I have no fixed future. So, if things want to change the future, they basically have to come meet me in my ‘present’. When I choose to cross that with them, I pull the motherless wretches into causality, and then I make sure they never leave. I can sense ‘em coming from a long way off, messing up potential timelines, but none of it means anything until I get there. I just choose when to ‘get there’ for the bastards.” His broad white smile was very, very cold and grim.

I made an appropriate face. “Huh. That would be just horrible. Here they are, riding the timestream back to kill something before it’s born, and something reaches out, pulls them out of the water, and makes them dead.” I tilted my head slightly. “Not restricted to Terra, either?”

“No. It’s a big universe, lots of nasty stuff in a lot of places that can all ripple this way. I’m an equal opportunity Mythos vivisizer,” he replied in casual deadpan.

Damn, he could just play time games on unsuspecting Fifth+ Dimensionals and make awesome, steady Karma! “And Sama... she locks Reality in, so she’d feel them coming from behind, trying to rewrite the past?”

“And she goes and kills them once the causality waves meet, her Null lock against their rewrite. She just rides the rebound, goes right to them, and puts Time back on track,” Briggs nodded. “Nobody realizes it, because she’s never gone for more than a second of our time. She fits the trips in while walking around corners and such.”

“Just like you.”

“Just like me,” he agreed, finishing off the beer. I slid two more across, just as Dr. Strange, his Cloak accenting a very nice tux, sat down next to the much bigger Ancient. Briggs just nodded a greeting as Strange took up the other beer.

“Looking sharp, Doc,” I told him with a wink. “Is Clea supposed to show?”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting her...” a Rift opened in midair, and a ravishing platinum blonde in a maroon dress stepped through right behind him, “to?” he finished, turning around and looking up just in time to meet her searching and delighted eyes in astonishment.

“I’ll save your beer. Go dance.” I liberated his drink as he surged to his feet, offered his arm to the new ruler of the Dark Dimension with a smile, and headed for the dance floor.

“Nice,” Briggs complimented me on my timing. “How many of you are here?” he had to ask.

I glanced around. “A dozen?” I admitted. “Some are working security. Some are here with others.” Isabella, all in white, was with Iceman over there, naturally enough, with a circle of X-folks chuckling wildly at her completely deadpan stories of the Brazilian criminal world. Kwannon had come with Cassandra Rantha, who had lived in the Baxter Building teaching the Phoenix for a time, Kwannon’s daughter actually helping babysit Franklin Richards right now. Barb had accompanied Wrench and the Atom down here from LaGrange, while Maria was actually heading up the live band and showing all her musical range. Fedora was on backup security, Curie was here as part of the Baxter Foundation, and Storm had come with T’Challa, the famous and very photogenic King and Queen of Wakanda present.

Briggs just shook his head. “Powered. So, you are all having fun in different ways?”

“That’s the general idea,” I agreed with a small smile. “Of course, I’m still working, I just look like I’m enjoying some time off.”

“Ah, yes.” He could see me answering /questions in the Strategos Room, too. Cosmic Awareness, leveraged to the max. A wedding reception was no reason not to stop awareness of imminent threats to the planet and proactive dissuasion of the same.

Primus and Callie were here, but he was carefully avoiding Briggs, as the two didn’t mingle in public at all. People noticed and turned it into a rift between them, which made the public feel more secure that Briggs wasn’t in control of the most powerful man on Terra.

Totally untrue, of course. They celebrated Yuletide together, but the public wasn’t invited to that, and nobody else talked about it. Briggs was Primus’ foster father, as it were, and rumors of their estrangement were just that, manipulated deliberately for effect.

“He’s got like sixteen more grandkids for you,” I said softly. “You get to meet them yet?”

“That alternity wasn’t fixed to ours yet, so I was able to take a trip over there and meet them a couple months ago,” he rumbled in satisfaction. “He did good work, except for not letting me be a proper grandfather and spoil his kids rotten,” he sniffed.

I laughed despite myself. “Well, at least they can come visit now, then.”

“This is true. I won’t mind spending a holiday on that Earth,” he nodded. “I’ll bring along their aunts and uncles for the next Yuletide, let them think about that!”

“Does Dmitri holding down the stuff here help with the future-fixing?” I had to ask. The White Bear was famous in Russia for taking over as the defender against the Old Gods and other stuff plaguing them.

“Explicitly so. That is a tiresome job. Just ask Sama. Our daughters do the same in the Tribal Lands. Sometimes, however, you just have to go in and gank the bastards in person,” he noted, glancing north.

“Oh, good. No more Sasquatch?”

“No more Sasquatch,” he confirmed evenly. “Most of the spirits the girls have to worry about are either by-blows, hopped-up Fey, or old things asleep and waking up to a new and interesting world full of snacks.”

“They’ve stayed below the radar, and I’ve never met them,” I pointed out. They were Nulls, of course, so Cosmic Awareness couldn’t fix on them unless they specifically allowed it, and that was disregarding any magical protections they certainly had.

“Mmm. Most of what they do gets credited to their mother. Their names are Snow Eagle and Ravendark. Snow Eagle handles most of the open fighting, Ravendark deals with the tricky bastards who like the night. Also, Raven loves her and has an Avatar around her basically all the time.”

“The Snow Saint? Logan’s wife?” I had to ask.

“More like frequent lovers. There is no ceremony or exclusivity between them. Ranthas can’t be owned by one man, it’s totally impossible to tame them. Happily, they don’t claim possession of any or all of their lovers, either. Sama has four other daughters, but it seems I am the only one who can give her sons.”

“And only she can birth other Briggs’, yourself notwithstanding?”

He nodded slowly. “My other children have all been born Primos,” he admitted candidly. “They take much more after their mothers.”

“Eh...” I glanced at the table of gods over there, and a certain white-haired Slavic demigoddess.

“Human children,” he amended without batting an eye. “Goddesses can be VERY persistent about getting what they want, and they love blood ties.”

“Which one?” I asked archly.

He was silent for a moment, and then sighed. “Marzanna,” he admitted, lifting his bottle and studying the reflection of his demigod daughter behind him in it.

I had plenty of purloined memories about her. “I am surprised that you elicited such a reaction in her,” I admitted. “Her husband’s betrayal and the cycle of their vengeance is a known thing.”

“I broke it,” he said flatly, his eyes flaring. “The insanity of being bound to your brother was bad enough, the ritual killing of one another had to stop. So, I beat both of them unconscious on both of their handover dates, and they got to live through the other seasons, thereby discovering that no, it wasn’t their deaths that changed the seasons, especially since I was the one chastising them, so no magical effects rippled out.

“It was one of the things that allowed me to take control of the pantheon, breaking one of the several tragic cycles locking them in stasis. Of course, beating her father and uncle black-and-blue helped immensely, too.”

I snorted, glancing over at Ilya just as she met my eyes. I inclined my head in acknowledgement as I glanced at Briggs, and there was just a whisper of a smile before she looked away and got back to drinking some more of Anning’s concoctions with the other boisterous gods. Even Tchernoborg was present and having a dour good time. I understood him and Hogun got along well...

“I take it Sama was the one to talk some sense into Marzanna.” I couldn’t imagine a betrayed goddess of winter taking the idea of sharing a lover easily.

“They have a nice love/hate relationship going. She’s quite terrified of Sama, especially after Sama seduced her.”

I almost coughed in mid-swallow, he’d timed it perfectly. I just looked at him, then over at Sama, who was now dancing with the rather oblivious just-married Alicia Grimm, and laughed to myself. “Well, that’s certainly better than all the Hera-shit Hercules puts up with!” I had to agree.

“Aye. I did have to keep a date around the vernal equinox clear for a time, but that all stopped around three decades ago when Marzanna stumbled across Dmitri up north. She keeps him company now. Of course, this means he has endless parades of Ice Witches around him all the time...”

“Like father, like son. It’s like all the Iron Maidens out of Svartzak don’t congregate around someone, and half the chi-wielders in Russia don’t have Ice Witch wives, and you don’t have just monstrous numbers of third-generation Powered coming up through the ranks under huge numbers of Forsaken second-generations trying to live up to the legends of their parents.”

“Quit yapping about state secrets, or it’s off to the gulag with you!” he warned me in a heavy accent. I sent him another beer to buy him off, and it worked marvelously.

“Drink fast,” I warned him, seeing Susan Richards coming this way, not about to pass up the chance to dance with the most important man in the world.

“Nyet,” he replied, setting it down mostly full. “One does not treat such a beer that way.” He rose to greet Susan, who smiled at him radiantly.

“I hope I am not interrupting,” she smiled at us both.

“Only if you’re not going to take him dancing,” I replied before he could.

“I most certainly am!” She took a step up off the ground to be at a more equitable height with him. “If the Great Bear would be so willing?”

“It is widely known that beautiful and intelligent women are a critical weakness of the dreaded Great Bear,” he said with deep self-mockery, presenting his elbow for her. “Mrs. Richards, I would be honored!”

I waved at him as he swept off to the dance floor, and within thirty seconds, five other fellows all at least seven feet tall were joining him, so he didn’t look at all out of place.

I narrowed my eyes as a killsat unveiled itself above and began to warm up a discharge that would turn this hall and a square mile of ground to ash.

---

Up on LaGrange, Mimi hit a button, and a long, narrow beam of ravening plasma from the station’s handy Terminus Lance Cannon leapt out across a hundred thousand miles of space and sliced the thing in half before continuing on out into space for at least half a light year.

Two seconds later, Morgan stepped through a Portal above a Skrull starship hiding in the rings of Jupiter. Thirty seconds of solar discharges were drawn out of the Pocket, and for a breath a solar flare was punching down through a ship, an asteroid, and down and out of the solar system.

---

Near the Skrull shipyard of Tentramus Minor, Klorivinus Gruim, Nova Centurion, punched a button, and the banks of railguns on the We Remember leveled out and let fly at their targets. Gravimagnetic funnels contained the antimatter rounds all the way to their targets a light second out as the Nova ship began to dump its inertia.

As it slid to a stop over the shipyard, dozens of sizable explosions begat scores of even bigger explosions. The Nova Corps aboard streamed out at top speed under the cover fire of their ship, and proceeded to wreak a lot of havoc at incredible speeds, taking out the shipyard defenses while the cannons above them mauled the shipyard at precisely the points needed to do the most damage to it.

They would be long gone by the time reinforcements arrived, and the shipyard would take more money to repair than it had cost to set up in the first place, not to mention the loss of almost a hundred freighters and way-vessels currently docked there.

Two could play at the party-crashing game, after all...