I sighed and tried to keep my innate snarkiness under wraps.

  “Okay, ground rules. One, you know I’m wary of you. It’s not personal; it’s a survival instinct when talking to a living piece of history who could stun me with a whisper and whose personal brand is… complicated. Two, apparently, the government considers me some kind of super-super or something, which is clinically insane, but I’m not going to argue with a delusion that’s currently keeping me from getting a sniper round to the cranium. I’ll take my wins where I can get them.”

  “Thirdly,” I held up a third finger for emphasis, “I know at least six people off the top of my head who would happily mimic you convincingly if you offered them the kind of paycheck I’m sure you could afford. Want a picture of you taking a train? I know someone who could make it happen. Hell, I know someone who could literally create a video of you doing that kind of thing just by creating the footage out of whole cloth, no actual train required. The digital age is a wonderful, terrifying thing.”

  She looked a little surprised, but I knew that Abigail, aka Network, could do it with one hand tied behind her back while hacking the Pentagon for funsies. And people from my old rent-a-villain circuit would also do it if enough money and protection from prosecution—or from Angelique herself—were assured. We’re a mercenary bunch. It’s why we never get invited to the hero community picnics.

  I shrugged. “Now, my own story? I am a little confused about it. How about you tell me why they snatched me, why they are calling me a class nine, and why I am in Washington? Maybe together we can figure out what the hell is going on.”

  She sighed, a sound like wind chimes made of crystal, and sat down on the bench next to me, flipping her wings over the edge with practiced ease. “Okay, do you know what a foreseer is?”

  I nodded. “Someone with the ability to extrapolate from current information the most likely, or a series of the most likely events, based upon certain activities. They cannot tell an actual future—the Cassandra paradox—but they tend to be fairly accurate, assuming basic events proceed. Sometimes, they don’t even know where their clues come from; it’s a power thing.”

  “Like Minority Report, because sometimes reacting to the information alters the event, and sometimes that reaction actually causes the event to happen. Like the guy that drops a penny and, through a chain of impossibly unlikely events, causes a nuclear explosion. Or that ridiculous Nick Cage movie.” I’ve done my homework. When your future depends on not being predictable, you learn about the people who try to predict you.

  She nodded, “Well, as you know, all governments tend to prioritize securing the services of predictable foreseers. People who observe possible events, not the ones that cause them. The futurists, the ones that actually cause events, can be neutralized by determining the initial reaction, so they kind of cancel each other out. Every country does that, so it’s sort of a balancing act, and it’s also the reason that no countries have been able to use the kaiju threat as an excuse to wipe out their enemies since the eighties.”

  I nodded. “Makes sense. Too complex for me, but that’s why I try to stay low profile.”

  She smiled a little, “Well, that and individual actors can sometimes throw things out of whack in the predictions, especially high-powered individuals. You know that power levels can have a significant effect on lower-rank perceptions, and that applies to foreseers as well.”

  “So, the foreseers detected a disturbance that you were a part of, that wound up with Earth-shaking consequences. But they couldn’t guess what that disturbance would be… considering the power levels involved, the only thing they could guess was that your power rating had to be at least eight or higher, probably nine at a minimum.”

  I snorted. “Or maybe they were just wrong. Like I said, four at most. I’m barely a blip.”

  She shrugged, the motion making her body move in a way that should be studied by physicists. No touch doesn’t mean no look, even if she was old enough to be my great-grandmother. “Well, that’s why they tried to bring you in unconscious, with a minimum of disturbance. But various assessors have estimated your power strength between six and eleven, so they decided to send me instead of a retrieval squad. Your power has been described as low-yield molecular alteration, but that’s not it, is it?”

  I shrugged uncomfortably. I always kept my possibilities close to my chest, and this is one of the reasons. “Something like that.”

  She nodded slowly, “And could you molecularly manipulate matter into a nuclear device?”

  I nodded, “Supposedly, although I don’t know the specifics. I was always more of a ‘turn guns into confetti’ guy. But people have been able to make nukes for decades. They even made a movie about it back in the eighties.”

  She sighed, “So… assuming you had enough energy and the knowledge, how long would it take you to build a plutonium explosive device? I am already aware that the Kellar Academy has determined that you have a nine-foot radius and you have the ability to ignite it without requiring a detonator, based on your power history. You have also been increasing your radius rapidly, somehow. So to create that sphere, 214 metric tons. Do you know what would happen if you ignited it in a nuclear reaction?”

  I sighed, the weight of the math settling on me. “You wouldn’t need to ignite it.”

  “Huh?”

  I shook my head, “Plutonium goes supercritical with only ten kilos in a bare sphere. Simply creating that much plutonium-239 would cause it to detonate instantly. Uhh…” I did the math in my head, a cold feeling spreading through my gut. “That would instantly blow off the atmosphere, fuse the continent it was on into a sheet of glass, destroy every form of life, and turn the entire planet into a chain of supervolcanoes? Give or take. I’m a bit hazy on the post-apocalyptic geology.”

  She nodded, her face grim. “You could turn a bank vault door into fluorine gas. You could turn a crowd of innocent people into gold statues. Heck, you could make every person inside of a 9-foot radius develop spontaneous aortic leaks, and you probably have some sort of quick movement?”

  I nodded, “But the plutonium, gold statues, and bank vaults are impossible. I do have mass limits.” Thank god for small mercies. And by small mercies, I mean the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that I constantly strain against.

  She shrugged, “And how much VX nerve agent would it take to kill every non-meta on the planet? Ten grams? How about this… You walk into an arcology and fill it with poison? Collapse it? You… probably have the most dangerous power on the planet, by a factor of a hundred. How much more growth would you need to annihilate the planet completely? 15 feet? At 18 feet, you become the Death Star. At 20 feet, you could be as dangerous as a supernova.”

  She sighed. “Right now, I am getting yelled at for saying that, but the psychics have said that there is less than a .03% chance of you doing something like that, and only if a series of events come to pass that would drive almost anyone nuts. The reason you don’t have a bullet in your head right now is that they predicted that you have a 99.815 percent chance of surviving it, even if a class six instantly blew your entire body to atoms. And you would be angry.”

  “Oh,” I said brilliantly. My entire worldview had just been kicked in the teeth. I wasn’t a failed hero or a rent-a-villain. I was a walking, talking extinction-level event.

  She nodded, “Oh. Exactly. You could instantly destroy the planet and probably survive it. The only reason you aren’t the ultimate superhero or supervillain right now is because you are male.”

  “What does that matter?”

  She smiled slightly, “Your personality profile. You are not randomly destructive. At this moment you could easily produce enough material to make you the richest individual on earth in only a few minutes. You are ambitious, but your ambitions are not worldwide control or domination.”

  “You like to be in control of your own situation, and can run a team effectively, but have no interest in world domination or hoarding power for power’s sake. You mostly have very… pedestrian interests, and while you are well into genius-level intellect, you have a weird sort of humility that requires approval. Not uncommon.”

  “Most importantly, as a male, you do not have a secondary power. If you had a perception-type secondary, you could run the planet easily with an iron fist. But your aspirations are small-scale.”

  I sighed, “So the reason I was dragged here was so the president could ask me to patriotically become the ultimate nuke for Team America?”

  She shrugged, “That was kinda their first instinct, but then… something happened while you were sleeping, something that made the psychics freak out and was the reason they chose now to uhh… reach out.”

  I shrugged, “I hit level two.”

  “Huh?”

  I chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. “You asked me to trust your story, now I am asking you to trust mine. The q-bombs? They ripped a hole to someplace bad. Someplace where, even as dangerous as you think I may be, I am like a newborn. Remember to thank your local physicists. Just the leak from that place is causing animals to mutate into Kaiju. Earth is not filled with enough energy to interest a level three yet, but it will be.”

  “And everyone who tosses around fireballs, flies, and even talks to other people psychically is dragging more of that energy here. Things are starting to wake up now that there is enough energy to feed them.”

  Angelique was looking at me skeptically, those stunningly blue eyes cutting me like a knife. Well, she was looking for faith. I would ask the same thing.

  “See, the secret to the fortune teller set is not listening to their opinions. Most of them get tons of predictions, and while they can tell you what NOT to do, they never actually fix anything; they mostly just give you warnings based on what they THINK could be the worst possible case. So you have to make sure to ask the questions that get them thinking about the best possible case, or a worst case that you already know is likely if you don’t alter the facts.” I muttered.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She arched a perfect eyebrow, “Okay, I am listening.”

  I smiled a little evilly, “Ask them what the chances are they will be alive five years from now if I just leave. Didn’t do anything. Took my team, a spaceship, or something like that, or even just got bored and decided Earth had a good run, and I didn’t mind dying and taking my team with me when the end comes.”

  She paused for a few moments and then paled. It was a fascinating process with someone so perfect.

  “Now that you have their attention, ask them what would happen if you, personally, or a few other class five and six heroes went on a date with me, or even just made friends and got into our inner circle and were willing to listen when I and the rest of my team… or even just my teammates, if they were a male, a lesbian, or thought that weird guy was too untrustworthy to listen to, helped them change their power.”

  She sighed deeply, and looked vacantly for…. Wow. Minutes. Psychics were fast; she must have had a lot of information to go through. After a while, her gaze sharpened, and she looked thoughtful. “I shut them down. This is complicated.”

  I leaned back on the bench. Okay, this was getting tiresome, and honestly, I was sort of starving. "Alright, let's say I believe you now that you aren’t hosting a mediums of America convention in your head. Let's say I buy the whole tragic backstory and the government's heartfelt apology delivered by a living monument. Those clowns back there... the 'Triton' fan club. Who were they really?"

  Angelique sighed and looked honestly kind of exasperated, like a kindergarten teacher dealing with children who think cleaning up after craft time means putting the open paste barrel in the fish tank. "Officially? They are part of the revised Continuity Security Agency. Somebody in the Pentagon thought reviving the old naming conventions would instill... institutional pride. Reclaim a dark part of our history for a new purpose."

  I snorted, "Institutional pride? They tried to gas me and strap me to a table. Their institutional pride smells an awful lot like benzodiazepines.”

  "The agency's mandate is monitoring and, when necessary, securing high-potential assets in the national interest. Their methods are supposed to be... subtler. What you experienced was a cell of overzealous strategists who've read too many of their own classified memos and maybe seen too many spy movies. They believed invoking the Triton name would immediately establish dominance and fear. That you'd hear it and fall in line out of sheer historical dread."

  "Instead, I fell out of my terratrium collar and through the floor. Their psychological profiling needs work." I shook my head. “Their next assessment should probably just read: ‘Does not respond well to being kidnapped and gassed.’”

  Angelique almost smiled. "Believe me, that particular tactical assessment is being... vigorously revisited. They dramatically overstepped their authority. The 'conscription' they attempted hasn't been on the books since the original Triton was disbanded. They were bluffing, using a ghost of a law, hoping you wouldn't know the difference."

  I thought about that for a moment,"So this wasn't the official, official welcome wagon. This was the zealot wing of the official welcome wagon going off-script."

  "Precisely. My presence here is the actual official response. Contain the situation. Apologize. And assure you that while the government is deeply interested in your well-being and your capabilities, we are not, in fact, in the business of kidnapping college students. At least, not this week."

  She held out her hand, “Let’s go eat. You are ready to burn an entire cow and eat it, hooves and all.”

  I grinned, “I thought you didn’t want me falling in love with you?” I took the hand. It was surprisingly warm. And didn’t vaporize me. A good start.

  “See, this is why I get all ticked off at the people in DC. Do you have any idea how much the farmer families charge Empire City people for beef? I get that it’s hard to keep cows alive and unmutated out on the fringe, but they are perfectly happy in archology spaces… but everyone makes the same excuse. “That space could be used to grow a hundred times as much soybean mass, and pigs are more forgiving eaters!”

  I sighed, taking another big bite of the glorious, real-meat pounder steerburger. Juice dripped down my chin, and I didn’t even care. “I know it isn’t the healthiest, but man, I miss hamburgers occasionally. This is ambrosia. This is what the gods eat when they’re having a good day.”

  “You have had them frequently?” Angelique asked me, picking delicately at her fried fish. She said something about red meat messing with her aura’s resonance frequency or some other superhero nonsense, but most sea life didn’t have a developed enough nervous system to cause the same problems.

  I kind of pitied her for having a power that forced her to miss out on the good things in life. She had explained how her powers worked, and… suffice to say, I actually believed her when she said she couldn’t be intimate with anyone.

  Even as a regenerator, I wouldn’t be willing to put up with what would happen to anyone who tried to get physically intimate with the gorgeous angel, although I bet Graviton would be able to deal with it. That man could probably wrestle a black hole into submission and ask for seconds.

  She sighed deeply as I finished off my third pounder. Yeah, if this were another era, I probably could have won eating competitions, but nowadays? Graviton could probably power-eat me under the table. The man’s metabolism is a terror to behold.

  “Nope. My city doesn’t get much beef, although it looks like the poultry canal probably keeps us in far more chicken than they are used to here, and then of course, there’s Near-Steer.”

  She gagged a little, and I couldn’t blame her. Ironically, she could eat Near-Steer just fine, but I was pretty sure the genetically cloned meat mass hadn’t been related to a cow in a couple of dozen years.

  It likely had NEVER been close to a real cow, grown from beef T-cells, and while hamburgers made from it with artificial animal fat blended in were… tolerable, no one would ever confuse it for real meat. It was the food equivalent of a polyester suit: it did the job, but everyone knew it was cheap and fake.

  Then again, the Taco Dale had never used anything BUT Near-Steer and was still incredibly popular, so I guess with enough hot sauce anything was edible. Or at least, forgettable.

  “The conjunction has decided,” she stated blandly, pushing her plate away.

  “Decided what, and who?” I asked around a mouthful of heaven.

  She sighed. “The conjunction. The conclave of those with foresight and weird powers that resemble mentalism. They have decided to leave you alone to finish your education. Mostly because in all the potentials they have seen, interruption leads to the great silence, where none of them can see what will happen, which they assume is something bad.”

  I shrugged. I could imagine a number of different scenarios in which their powers stopped working. It didn’t surprise me too much that the government had a stable of fortune tellers; if anything, I was surprised it took them this long to lock in on me. I must be slipping.

  The safest scenario was that there was some kind of conjunction that this version of their power couldn’t speculate past. A whole bunch of people moving past their reliance on sucking energy out of the chaos butthole could be way too powerful for their abilities to have any ability to determine in advance.

  Or in the worst case, Earth blows up, turns into a chaos playground, or is destroyed by something like the outsiders to keep it from becoming too dangerous to the universe. I had no idea. Frankly, I was too full of burger to care.

  “Can you explain what you mean by level two?”

  I sighed. “It is stupidly complicated, requires a lot of faith, and maybe a grounding in mythology or badly translated webfictions.”

  She shrugged, “Try me.”

  I shook my head. It was distracting when someone who was widely considered the most beautiful woman on earth said ‘try me’. “It is highly metaphysical, or metaphorical, or something like that. I am not sure I completely understand myself, but...consider your wings. Can a bullet penetrate them even though you aren’t, strictly speaking, a physical alpha?”

  She smirked a little. “Not since the seventies. But that’s sort of public knowledge.”

  “Well, as energy infests things, they become more… real. It is hard to explain without getting into fantasy tropes or Chinese mythology, but it is very much part of everyday life. It’s another one of those weird things about alphas that science doesn’t understand.”

  “Okay,” she took another bite of her salad and listened actively.

  “Well, when you hit certain ranks, or levels, or something like that, it gets to the point where certain things are more… real than others. Your wings are not affected by most damage because they are more real than the things that damage them.”

  “Part of it is perception; everyone knows your wings. Part of that is the Mandela effect, but that’s a discussion I am not getting into, and part of that is just the impact it has on reality, time, and something weirdly metaphysical that I just don’t understand… call it experience points.”

  “Well, once you get a certain level of reality, it is much more difficult for ‘less real’ stuff to affect it. Old Xianxia books sort of touched on it, but they did so with almost no grasp of what it actually meant. Once you hit a certain level of reality, there’s a reaction.”

  “Lightning is one of the easy ones, but basically it’s the universe reacting badly to your level of reality existing in a place that it doesn’t belong, like a dump truck in a sewer. Basically, it tries to destroy you, although from what I understand, it only occasionally succeeds, although it often finds ways of stopping your behavior. It isn’t a thought process, it’s just a natural reaction, and as you gain ranks, local reality rebels more powerfully.”

  She nodded, looking at me closely, “I take it that causes a bad side to the local reality, too?”

  I nodded, “Yeah. Well, that and it takes a huge amount of energy. To get to level 3 here, I would have to figure out a way to just… strip a huge amount of energy. Probably more energy than exists on the planet right now, and either taking the energy or the reactions of the universe to defend itself would have a… bad effect.

  “Bad effect?”

  I nodded, “Level 2 is safe enough. Mostly, it just causes a local reaction that tries to kill you. Level 3? Let’s just say if I ever get close to that level, I can’t come back to Earth unless Earth levels up enough to support me.”

  “That sounds unfortunate.”

  I shrugged, “It will probably suck, but I have reason to believe that there are also lots of worlds out there that are higher-ranked than Earth. Remember the Serenoids?”

  She nodded, “I am old enough to have fought them.”

  “Well, they were from a higher-ranked world. The universe is not empty; it’s full of worlds that are higher-ranked than us, to the point where we can’t perceive them. We are a kid using a microscope to observe a drop of water, not realizing it’s on the back of a whale.”

  “So on the Serenoid world, this little aperture opened up to a realm that was very weak. They have terms for it; it happens occasionally, but it was choked with energy. The chaos-stuff that’s turning humans into metas. So they thought, “Oh, neat! It’s a realm that’s too weak to send normal people to without destroying it, but this is a good chance to send our kids that haven’t advanced yet to level up and maybe collect whatever treasures are making this little reality pocket radiate so much power!”

  “So the serenoid invasion was a… tutorial?”

  I laughed, “Yeah, for them. They basically sent a bunch of groups of youngsters through the rift to get some levels in the newbie dungeon, maybe a few weak monsters for them to defeat, lots of possible treasures, basically a playground. They met weak and friendly level one animals and NPCs, primitive and cute, with kind of amusing guns and stuff.”

  “The Serenoids were like “aww...so cute,” so they brought really basic instruction manuals and stuff with them as trade goods. Maybe some day the cute little fuzzy human dolls could teach themselves to be real boys, because they were attractive despite having too few arms.”

  “And then the first metahumans showed up, and it was like discovering Cthulhu in your Wheaties. Of course, they attacked, chaos monsters showing up is terrifying… and lots of them got killed, and they retreated from this rift, and wrote it off as ‘chaos infested’.”

  She sighed, “So I am a monster?”

  I shrugged, “In their terms? Yes. Superhumans are destroying this planet, or realm, because every single time you do anything that doesn’t obey the… reality of this realm, it pulls in more chaos, plus the chaos rifts are bleeding, and humans aren’t the only ones doing it… mutant monsters are doing it too.”

  I shrugged, “If this world ruptures, becomes a chaos realm, most stuff will be destroyed or corrupted. And metahumans like you? You will become insane chaos beasts if you are tough enough to survive.”

  “What about metahumans like you?”

  I shrugged, “I wasn’t born with the instinctive ability to pull chaos energy directly. Basically, my power plug to the chaos wall socket wasn’t in the box. I had to figure out how to scrape all the excess energy you wall-socket users leave lying around because you can’t even see it.”

  “But, because of that, I am not going to get electrocuted when the lightning hits, either… and there is WAY more excess energy lying around than you guys can use, so I can keep getting bigger while you guys are stuck with your socket.”

  I smiled conspiratorially, finishing off my burger. “Now, the big question is, we have figured out how to disconnect more people from the wall socket, so they naturally help with cleaning up the house. Do you want to break free of your power cord?”

  She looked at me thoughtfully and then shook her head.