Authourity

"I can bring you back to life," I said. "It's not a problem. It's why I took your blood so the nanites could adapt to Jotun physiology."

"I still don't see why you need me here," Loki said. "If this enemy was able to almost kill you, he'll blend my insides with my outsides, and that sounds unpleasant."

"It'll be fine," I assured him. "I'm immune to that attack now."

"I'm not!" he said. "I'm barely more resilient than a human!"

He was quite a bit more resilient than a human, but he was exaggerating because he didn't want people to shove a hand in his chest.

I suppose that not getting more resilient every time you were attacked and not having almost instant fast healing would make being attacked a lot less pleasant.

"Anyway, you're coming because I don't think Canary is ready for a half Jotun child."

"Aren't there ways for mortals to deal with such things?" he asked. "Considering how…loose they tend to be I assumed they had something."

"I'm fifteen," I said. "And my Mom has been dead for a while. I don't know if you need a prescription for birth control, or if you can buy it at the pharmacy or what."

"You've got all that tinker knowledge," he said. "Why don't you make some?"

I stared at him, and then sighed.

"We can ask Blasto when we get done," I said. I scowled. "If he doesn't have anything, you're using condoms."

He scowled, and I shook my finger at him.

"Your world is barbaric," he said. "There are better ways in Asgard."

"Everything's better in Asgard," I said. "I know the drill."

I'd read his mind, and the minds of the others in the community to see if he'd caused them any trouble.

To my surprise, he'd entertained the children with illusions, and he'd used his enhanced strength to help with tasks the villagers were struggling with.

He was good at fooling people, and even better at fooling himself.

His thoughts said that he'd just been good to seduce Canary; getting her approval by getting the approval of her peers.

But empathy told me something else.

The children admired him; they actually looked forward to his visits. He was the fun uncle that they'd never had, and they were ridiculously easy to entertain.

He told himself that it didn't matter; that they were stupid, ephemeral mortals. Their approval and affection didn't mean a thing, and the look in their eyes was just the foolishness of the ignorant.

Yet there was a warmth when he thought of the children, and he'd kept entertaining them even when Canary had been called away.

The older villagers irritated him.

They didn't treat him with the respect he deserved as a Prince of Asgard. Instead, they treated him as a friend, a comrade.

He'd actually given them some good advice, and they respected him for that instead of his position.

The thought that they would all reject him if they knew who he really was bothered him more than he was willing to admit.

"How was the village?" I asked.

"Fine," he said. "They're working on making their hovels a little less like holes. Even the Norse lived better, though.

"Well, do you want to go hunting for Cannibals then?" I asked. "I figured I'd clear them out for a couple of hours before I went back."

"That sounds good," he said. "Humans who you are free to slaughter."

"We're not slaughtering them," I said. "We're sending them to Australia, where they can slaughter each other…or not if they get their act together. If they try to get back, we can release the mecha-kangaroos."

He stared at me strangely.

"You have mecha-Kangaroos?"

"No…but I think it's almost inevitable that we'll find them eventually, right? And if we don't, well, I can probably make some."

"Wouldn't it be kinder to just kill them?"

"Then what would I do with my mecha-kangaroos?" I asked.

"That's…a good point," he said frowning. "I can't see that they'd be useful for anything other than engines of war. They don't have hands."

"Well, in times of peace I could modify them into mecha-riding kangaroos."

"So, this is what you'll be doing when you've killed them Endbringers and Scion and brought your father back to life?"

"I could program them to do housework, maybe," I said. "But the tail would have to be removeable or retractable."

"I don't think even the humans would be foolish enough to buy something like that."

I frowned.

The market outside Australia might be small, although I could provide them to the Australian military for a fair price.

"Maybe electric grandmothers?" I asked.

"What?"

"Robot grandmothers who will never age or die," I said. "And they can share everything they've learned with each other so that they'll become better and better."

"So, like the Borg," he said dryly.

"No," I said. "Maybe they'll only upload after a lifetime with one child."

"Maybe you could focus on not getting us killed by an insane jogger."

"Speedster," I said absently as I checked my screen again.

We blinked into the shuttlecraft, and a check of the scanner showed that there were only 9500 people left on the planet. Somehow, 500 more people had died since the last time I'd checked.

They were scattered out across the continent ad the world in small groups. Large groups were too hard to feed.

We worked our way in concentric rings around the village. My first purpose in all of this was to make the village safer from attack. It wasn't strictly a humanitarian thing.

Appearing in front of the first group, we saw that there were six of them; a large group which suggested that they were probably cannibals. They looked well fed by the standards of this world, although it would be gaunt at home.

They were gnawing at what looked like the remains of a woman's arm.

Glancing at Loki, I moved.

I purposefully broke legs and arms, and I listened to them scream.

I left one for Loki, and I noticed that he was beating the tall man that remained viciously. I noticed that the man had a yellow feather on the bedroll beside him.

"Don't kill him," I told Loki.

He sneered at the man, kicking him and shattering his leg.

"Humans are weak and worthless," he said. "Beasts are below men. These don't even qualify as beasts."

How much of it was the yellow feather, apparently a treasured heirloom of the woman who had been eaten. Did it remind him of Canary?

Blinking, I dropped the men off on a beach by the ocean, blinking Loki first.

I healed them all partially, leaving them in pain as a reminder of what they had done. They'd all be limping for a while.

"Bitch," one of them said.

"You have been judged," I said. I reached down and touched the sand beside me, and I transmuted sand to Ramen noodles in one-pound blocks. I left them ten of them, but I did not give them a pot and I'd left all of their belongings back in America.

"There's water around here…somewhere," I said. "All the people around here are going to be like you…the damned."

"You can't judge us, you bitch," he said. "How many people have you eaten?"

"Not one," I said. I levitated some sand with telekinesis, and then I transmuted it into a cooked steak. "I don't need to."

"This isn't fair," the man with the bad teeth said. The others were all slowly getting to their feet.

I sent a flare up high in the atmosphere.

They all cringed.

"What's that?" another man asked.

"The dinner bell," I said. "This is a place for your kind, and the others have had longer to equip themselves. Also, they're fully healed, and you, not so much. I hope you have the energy left to run, because you're going to need it."

With that, Loki and I blinked away.

"What about the natives?" he asked as we returned to the shuttlecraft.

"Well, only about 1 in 600,000 people have survived," I said. "The Australians did a little better statistically, but there were still only about fifty of them. About one in ten are the cannibals who enjoy it, eight and a half in ten are the cannibals by necessity, and one in twenty have never eaten human flesh."

Those were the statistics so far anyway.

Presumably most people had started out blameless, but they would have either starved or been eaten themselves.

"Let's go," I said, glancing at the next closest group to Blasto's camp.

There were three of them, and they stared at me cautiously as we appeared.

They looked tattered and bedraggled.

"Have you eaten of human flesh?" I asked.

They had, but they'd never killed anyone to do it; they'd only eaten flesh of people who had died, and they were all sick from it.

Loki and I were intimidating figures. We were fully fleshed, lacking the gauntness that had become the norm in this world. To them, that meant that we were highly dangerous people, successful cannibals.

"Don't do that anymore," I said. "Get your stuff together."

"Why?" the father asked.

"I'm taking you someplace a little better than this," I said. When I saw that he might argue, I levitated into the air, and a corona of flame surrounded me, not touching my clothing at all.

They fell to their knees.

I touched down in front of them, and I touched each of them on the shoulders. I healed them of all their diseases, and I said, "Do better. Be the best person you can be, and I will be with you."

A moment later, we were somewhere else.

I'd decided that putting all the people who'd eaten flesh in the same place was cruel and unusual punishment. Those who had only eaten the dead or had been forced to eat by others got better accommodations in France.

Those who had killed would be forced to live in South Africa. The distances involved would keep the communities apart from each other, especially without food sources along the way. They might as well have been on the moon.

There was already a small community here. They'd been building their own houses out of the remnants of dead trees using wattle and daub.

I was impressed with how much they'd accomplished.

They didn't have as many children as the non-cannibals, either someone had eaten them, or it was possible that the non-cannibals had abstained because they'd been more fortunate and had been able to find enough food for their children while these people hadn't.

People were surrounding me.

There was almost a worshipful air about them. Possibly it was my approach; I tended to use the flying thing and fire a lot. It tended to save on the attacks and on damage to my clothes.

There were few women among the Australian contingent; those who had been forced had been placed in the third village. The few women who had deserved to be in Australia I'd placed in New Zealand instead.

The last thing I needed was for the Cannibals to be making and eating babies.

I'd never given these people pizza. That didn't feel fair. I did however blink a pallet covered in cans I'd bought from a Dollar store in Brockton Bay.

I'd given the people in the Blasto's village better canned food simply to give them better variety, but I was making sure they mostly ate fresh foods.

I gestured, and a pallet of canned food bought from a Dollar General in Brockton Bay appeared before them. I could hear the glad cries of the people here.

The people in the third village would get transmuted, dried foods.

It was easier to put them in villages because it made food deliveries a lot easier.

"These people have been judged," I called out. "They are worthy to be among you."

With that, Loki and I levitated into the air. I was holding him up with telekinesis.

"Be better to each other, and you will live a good life."

We blinked back to the shuttlecraft.

"It's barely worth fighting them," Loki said with disgust. "It's like kicking people made out of matchsticks."

"Well, they are almost starved to death," I said. "If you want to beat someone up for fun, let's do Nazis sometimes. Anyway, I've got to feed Chort."

Appearing on the island, I was grabbed from behind.

"Take me home!" he gritted in my ear.

At least he'd stopped calling me names. I'd spent the first few times I'd been back as bitch and slut and whatever other names he could think of to try to hurt my feelings.

"We're not going anywhere until I deprogram you," I said calmly. "You aren't a villain."

"Yes, I am!" he said.

Years of conditioning by Mama Mathers had given him a certain amount of resistance to my mind control. I could still give him general commands, but changing his beliefs was proving to be a lot harder.

I'd told him he was never going to escape, and he'd tried to kill himself. I told him to not try to kill himself, and he'd begun hurting himself.

He hated himself and he hated what he'd become, and yet he didn't see a way out. Even if he somehow became a hero again, he'd never be trusted by anyone else.

"There are other worlds where you can be a hero, you know," I said casually. "Places where you can make a new start, become the person you were once, live like you want."

He froze.

His arms were still around me. I couldn't move them if I tried. I actually appreciate his occasional attacks because it gave me something to test any new strength increases with.

"You are a good person," I said. "And you can be again."

Every time I came, I reinforced that message, and he got a little closer to believing it.

I turned to gaseous form in his arms and spread out along the beach.

A pallet of cans appeared before him. I'd picked some of his favorite foods, even if they were from the Dollar store. I'd even gotten him a few bags of potato chips in the weird redneck flavors he liked and the pork rinds.

Living with the Mathers had permanently damaged his food preferences.

He'd used the wood of the pallets to begin to form a simple shack on the beach.

He'd been good since the last time, and he hadn't tried to hurt himself at all.

I began to transmute the sand beneath me into a hammock, and then a small number of polished tiles.

"For your place," I said as I reformed. "Get you up off the sand."

His face showed no expression, but I could feel the gratitude. He'd suffered Stockholm syndrome with Mama Mathers; he could just as easily feel it with me.

I blinked back to the shuttle, and I blinked us over Central City.

A quick check of the scans and I blinked us both down into the city.

We blinked outside of a junior high school; Loki was making both of us invisible. School had just let out, but the signature I'd found had been around the back of the school.

I could feel the anger and the fear from here. Gesturing to Loki, we moved around the corner.

A chubby boy was shoved up against the side of a brick wall, surrounded by a gang of other boys.

"Chuck the fuck," one of the boys said, and the others laughed. "Give me your lunch money. You could stand to lose a few tons."

A glimpse inside his mind showed me that Chuck had superhuman strength. He'd accidentally killed his dog after the particle accelerator explosion, and he was terrified that he would kill someone else.

Yet a dark part of his mind fantasized about finally letting loose on the boys who had tormented him since elementary school. He could imagine himself punching through their skulls, and he knew exactly what it would look like because of his dog.

I glanced at Loki.

I took the image of their homeroom teacher from the boys' minds, and gave it to Loki. There were too many boys for my own illusion power to work.

"Leave him alone," I said to the lead bully, making it a permanent command.

It meant they'd never be friends, or reconcile. The bully would ignore him for the rest of their time together.

I couldn't protect him for the rest of his life, following him around and deflecting bullies, but I could make this a little better.

I grabbed the arms of the main offenders and said, "Unless you want to be suspended, I'd suggest that you leave him alone."

Hopefully I wouldn't get his teacher in trouble.

The boys reluctantly dispersed.

I waited until they'd all left before I had Loki remove the illusion.

"I'm Taylor Hebert," I said. "And I'm just like you."

He stared at me.

"I copy powers," I said. "And if you let me copy yours, I'll do what I can to help with your bullying problem."

He stared at me, then he nodded.

It only took a moment and it was done.

+5 STRENGTH!

YOU NOW HAVE A STRENGTH OF 88!

I healed him, and he never even knew it was happening.

I'd have helped him even without the power, but I needed to fight the Endbringers, and I couldn't have qualms about beating up a 13-year-old boy.

Besides, he as only two years younger than me anyway.

"We're going to have a talk with your principal and your teachers," I said.

He panicked a little.

"I've got mind control," I said, grinning at him. "Do you know how much trouble I could have saved myself in school if I could do what I'm about to do?"

He frowned.

"Then we're going to have a talk with your parents," I said. "Having powers like yours aren't easy. I'm thinking about creating a support group for people like you…there will probably be adults, but I'll read their minds and make sure that nobody bad gets in."

He looked like he was about to faint.

"Hey, some of them might even have the same powers you've got. I already know one guy who might be willing to help you," I said, even though I had no idea whether he would or not.

"If I can find a psychologist who is like us, he might be able to help," I said. "But that's a crapshoot."

Putting my arm over his shoulder, I switched to my Armani suit.

"Let's go talk to some authority figures," I said.