More years pass, grand deeds and crazy events happen with too much regularity, and life in a supersverse goes on...

“Maelstrom, you’re a total nitwit now, which means you always have been. Did you inherit cosmic-level dissociative awareness, or something?”

The twat throwing planet-killing bolts at me snarled, the shadow of Oblivion looming behind him and filling him with reality-destroying energy.

Behind me, Infinity’s golden form swirled power into the Quantum Eye-Lantern hovering above my shoulder and pouring out endless streams of golden energy, giving me access to literally infinite power to counter what he was doing.

“I am unique! There is no one like me! I will be the master of space itself, and all will bow down to me!” the bastard screeched, our different energies clashing with one another.

I just laughed at him. “Idiot. Still a slave, and you don’t even know it.” I smirked at him as we filled the void with enough energy to smash suns. This was purely a mental exercise for me at this point, and the only thing keeping him in the game was Oblivion’s direct backing. “Look at the timeline, you numbskull. There are no deviations in our universe’s causality. Why is that, you might ask?”

He blinked despite himself, unable to stop himself from Looking, and he realized I was absolutely correct!

“There are no variants of us, because we are bound to this singular timeline. Our past cannot be changed, and our future isn’t written until it gets here! We are ALL UNIQUE!... and you didn’t even freaking realize it.”

“No! No! Who could Seal... that is not possible!...” he gasped, finally realizing that he was locked in by an outside force, something he could not escape, and just who that outside force actually was.

“Just DIE.”

A Voice of Thunder at this level wasn’t anything much, but as it tripped the Notes of the Sublime Chord, I pulled at the Underweb, and the underpinnings of reality rose up and grabbed him.

“No! NOOOOO!” he screamed, as Oblivion hastily let go of him and quickly vanished into the darkness of the Void. Webs woven of the threads between realities wrapped around Maelstrom, and long, spidery claws pulled Him down, down, down as the energies Oblivion had given him were drained away, dispersed across multiple infinities, perhaps starting up a new dimension or alternity somewhere else.

He stared up at me as the Weavers dragged him down, and I saw the horror of his realization that they’d be sucking the power out of him, draining him down out of his enlightened cosmic state slowly and surely, until he would die nothing more than another mortal.

Function came up, and there was a flicker as another face rose high above and behind the golden mask of Infinity. Death looked down with Her gleaming skull, and Maelstrom could only close his eyes and accept his fate, as I wasn’t going to let Oblivion take him as a servant, nihilist twat ready to destroy the universe that he was.

True Death came down on him, and vivus exploded to devour the energies of Oblivion and the soul that was tied to them, consuming him completely.

The legs of the Weavers paused only a moment in their clutching, finding the difficult part of the process was all done, and starlight webs caught the transformed energies in a flicker of motion, dragging them back into the Underweb as the Weavers receded, uncaring of losing their prey as long as their task was done.

Golden light swirled past me in satisfaction, and the representation of Infinity was gone, too, while Mistress Death receded back to wherever She liked to go when She wasn’t watching immortals and cosmic things die over my shoulder.

Which left me in the ass-end of nowhere out on a higher plane where cosmic avatars conferred and threw punches at one another. I sighed despite myself, threading up the Portal to take me Down to my home universe, and thence back to Terra.

Crazy-arse nihilist. Oblivion was the manifestation of the force which literally wanted to destroy EVERYTHING else, eliminate the universe and leave only itself behind. It was a whiny petulant thing that the multiverse had been birthed from, and all it wanted was to be alone once more.

Of course, it was a total hypocrite with tons of Void-born avatars trying to carry out its schemes, but such was the nature of the self-destructive; they couldn’t even remain true to themselves.

------

I translated Down into lower space and immediately was drowned in /tells wondering who the Duck had been messing with Fodge and making Reality quiver all around like that.

-Maelstrom made his bid for cosmic status, took the Vassal of Oblivion road, and went all the way down. Once he realized Briggs and Sama were the ones locking down the timelines to make us unique, he kind of lost it, and I fed him to the Weavers. He’s gone,- I /summarized for everyone. If they wanted to go into the memories about it, I stashed them in the Akasha for them to look over.

-One more piece of trash to not have to worry about any longer,- Sama /sniffed dismissively. -How’s the new Lantern there working out?-

-Would you believe Infinity Herself popped up and was letting me channel Her power directly through it?- I /shook my head as I formed the Portal back to Sol space. -Eon wasn’t kidding when He said the Quantum Field is Infinity’s power.

-But I think he’s just using it as an excuse to send me all over the damn place putting out fires, if the last month is any indication.- I had been to FOURTEEN different galaxies that couldn’t even see the Milky Way. Eesh!

-Infinity is a rare one to speak to. You must be getting quite the reputation among the Cosmic Powers,- Briggs /noted. -I’ve only met Her twice.-

-Admonishing you for collapsing dimensions, or praising you for it?- I /shot back.

-Yes,- he /confirmed, and I just shook my head as the second Portal came up. I slipped on through, ending up a light-minute outside Terra and LaGrange. The Pentad had been trying to get me to move my digs to Galador or Venus, but I always politely refused.

I could bounce all around the universe if needed, and I was /talking with people in literally all the places all the time. I didn’t need to physically be in those places, although being seen there by people outside the Alliance was the key point.

Giving me an Eye-Lantern was more about politics and making alliances and qualifications obvious than anything else. Having one of the floating eyeballs over my shoulder was an indicator across a good ten to fifteen percent of the universe that I was a decent and helpful person, although naturally the Watchful Order had their own foes perfectly happy to spread disinformational propaganda about them.

Recruiting within the Milky Way and the Sanctuary Rings had picked up markedly over the last few years as people disillusioned with the various Empires, from the Rigellians to the Aakon, went looking for a better cause to serve and fight for. The fact the three local galaxies were all hostile to us didn’t hurt at all, and the Pentad Alliance was the big one running the show.

The fighting had never really stopped, and the scramble for resources was more intense than ever. The Shi’ar, Kree, and Skrulls would need to be nearly annihilated before they’d give up the fight, and at least the former two had plenty of aggressive vassals present and former who were equally committed to the task.

But the Milky Way itself was slowly losing its patchwork, frontier reputation. The Pentad Alliance had set itself up as an alliance between five powers, and our power and influence was now very, very firmly established, and known throughout at least the local galactic cluster and everywhere the Annihilation Wave had fought. After all, the Acanti had been and were still traveling through all such places, and Xandaran nomad cities were embedded on many of their elders, carrying them through to farther places than the creators of the Nova Force had ever bothered to go before.

The Xandarans ranged, and the rest of us continued building up the foundation. Mining colonies had been established on most of the planets and major moons of the Sol system. There was a bit of difficulty over starting the mining of Uranus given the Eternal colony there, which had objected to doing that. The handful of Eternals leading the cults there were sent off into reincarnation, and their mortal followers decided not to press their claim that they owned the whole gas giant.

Titan was quite a bit more accommodating, but there wasn’t a lot there to interest us, so it basically just became a stopover point, and its status as the interstellar speaker for the Sol System was lost rather abruptly and completely to Venus.

Our main roadblock on expansion was population. The Xandarans were sidestepping the population problem with their cloning cylinders, but they were spread over multiple galaxies, not here at the core. The Whoberis and Corbinites didn’t have nearly those numbers to fall back on, and the Strontians were in the same boat, plus being barely in their teens now. Galador was expanding its influence and domain slowly, taking care not to overreach. If they really wanted to extend their reach, they could just join some Xandarans.

Terra had billions, of course, but we weren’t recruiting from the entire planet... or at least, their governments didn’t think we were. If entire villages and small towns inextricably vanished, that tended to be covered up by the governments who didn’t want others to know there had been a disaster, rather than wondering where the people had gone.

Of course, there were plenty of radical people going wild with xenophobia, especially when they didn’t qualify to go into space themselves. All that did was render them even more off-limits for recruiting.

Steve Rogers had taken that horrible and much-feared step, finally retiring from his position as head of the Ultra Corps and running for President of the United States. He had won in a landslide, despite it being one of the most contested and attempted voter fraud-laced political campaigns imaginable, complete with multiple assassination attempts on plenty of candidates who came forward once The Patriot ran for office.

Trying to kill people who had the backing of the superheroic community was generally not a good idea. There was a lot of violence funded by disparate parties, trying to swing the elections and blame the others for it all.

A massive slate of supporters came into D.C. to back The Patriot, and his agenda was now in swing. Sweeping through the massive echelons of the government with uncanny clarity was one of his first actions, and the number of basically treasonous individuals removed from their positions was in the thousands. Updates to systems and methodologies that had been put off for decades due to non-viability or little kingdoms established inside the hierarchy began to roll forwards, and technology implementations began to spread out under government money and decrees.

Heck, the changes to the tax structure alone were thought to be totally impossible before he put them into force. He made a lot of wealthy people very angry, but he was expecting it.

Peggy’s writing of the History of the United States was set down as the official history to be taught in classrooms and historical texts for the whole country. While it didn’t mandate any specific state histories, deviation from and rewriting the History of the country by educational boards was a warning sign for inspectors to come in and inquire about what exactly the children were being taught, by whom, and mandated by who?

Steve had a lot of work to do, and he was making lawyers howl... and appointing all the judges needed to take up those cases, and the IRS agents to collect those taxes, too.

His opponents would have been truly terrified to learn how big his Allegiance was getting, and the mystical implications swirling around a Shielder being in a position of high leadership there.

All in all, good times for the planet. There were not a few Shielders who had followed Grand Admiral Rogers into politics, and were doing well for their nations. Maybe they might even bring them to the stars of Greater Terra some day.

“Anything exciting happen?” I asked as I came in through the open hangar, shrunk down to merely Wrecker-form and greeted by Paragon’s grandson. Clark Savage the Fifth was being trained to follow his grandfather, his father taking care of the family’s terrestrial holdings and activities. He had the classic Savage build: hyperfit tall and athletic body, close-cut blond hair, and bronzed skin, just like his father, uncles, brothers, and older relatives.

He also had an Ultra Core, a pair of Specs, and there was an Eye-Lantern hovering over his shoulder. His granddad generally preferred a mech-suit when he moved out, but even Paragon sported a pair of Specs now, as the symbiotes were just too damn convenient.

“Well, Manhattan Island had some wild event where the entire population was transformed into Spider Totem-users,” he informed me blandly.

“Really?!” DiDi hadn’t mentioned it. “Wow, I didn’t hear anything about that!...”

“I think Pete took care of it. His wife wrote up the report. I think she summed it up with ‘Another Tuesday and a bitch-demon angry I married Peter and not her’.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Red.” Damn, that spider-demon had actually come back after the Clones debacle? I had to laugh...