Everyone wants to keep me away from the fighting for all sorts of reasons. Mental health. Thinking up a plan. Signing off on laws. Clearly, my heroic and neutral allies, and those around here on my island, are trying to prep me for being the diplomat of the bunch.
One thing I did to try and work on my skill at diplomacy involved a nice dinner for some of the top Directors, just to help the flow of information both ways. I even cooked for them myself. I could tell these top brass were quite uncomfortable being in my presence at such an event, even more so that I personally saw to the food. I figured I’d break the ice with a little joke as I sat down at the table with the rest of them. I took my seat, raised my hands, and announced, “Truly, I tell y’all, one of you will betray me.”
All conversations and faces fell. Suddenly, one guy on the end jumped up, knocking over his chair. He ran for the door of the building I’d borrowed for the occasion. I grabbed the gravy boat off the table and threw it. Tricky as it is to throw something that’s spilling viscous fluid out of it, it clanged off his head and he fell down. A pair of the security detail stepped in, looked at the groaning man on the floor, then up to me. “Have this one eliminat- no, ya know what? He’s a Director and he might be useful. Throw him in a cell somewhere and find out who he works for.”
I looked around the table to all the other Directors I’d invited. The guys supposedly making laws about all the important things but who had instead gotten into fights subsidizing personal businesses and a funny fight about naming certain roads that has some walking along the intersection of Ug Lee Street and Wong Way. It’d be funny if not for the fact that part of the reason I’m getting so much paperwork from the courts is because they’re doing that instead of reinforcing the courts and writing laws to fill in the gaps.
“Now then, gentlemen, I hope the rest of you stay and enjoy this meal as we have ourselves a productive conversation about the proper place of the judiciary and why I value not having to spend all my time running Ricca.” I smiled around the table, prompting many a fearection from the gathered Directors. “After all, you’ll find I miss the gravy more in this meal than I do any one Director’s company.”
I think it went well, but it was only the first step in what I was doing. See, I’d gotten this idea into my head that perhaps I don’t necessarily need to destroy the Hares. I just had to sit down and have a proper thought about it while drinking some cocktail Max gave me. I dunno, it’s like things became clearer, though it gave me some terrible dry mouth.
So one thing I know is that the portion of them that are aliens have convinced the whole group to hide their supers. Because the aliens are just sitting around waiting to be retrieved, but their government’s liable to just blow the crap out of the whole place if it looks really dangerous instead. No wonder they targeted me. Being dangerous enough to justify orbital nuking is what I do best.
Dame didn’t like being kept under lock and key with that group, and they already kept most members out of the loop about what was going on. As a result, she doesn’t know what prompted them to start doing things now. She hadn’t really been brought in on anything until Master Academy called her up to help me. They left out the virus and the power collars, but the phone call started with “We are calling upon you to serve as one piece of our apparatus.”
That’s the same sort of language they used for Funhouse, who no one’s seen since the multiplier was apparently gassed for not following orders and leading me to a site that let me identify and hunt down the Three Hares.
That hands-off approach is why she was able to hang out with people who can literally read minds without problems. And it’s why, ultimately, I decided to give her to her friends in Master Academy. I even made a little ceremony of it.
I escorted her to the Cape Diem camp. A small crowd gathered around us, curious. Everyone likes a show, especially people working. I held onto her with one hand. She didn’t put up a fight and knew she couldn’t. Merely having the power to control her like a puppet with my fist up her ass didn’t mean I had to exercise it. I could do a lot of philosophizing about the nature of power, but it’s just a simple thing. I’ve spent most my life with a hankering for human life and the ability to kill almost everyone I’ve ever met. And I only tried to kill everyone on Earth the one time.
I slipped a scroll out from between my breasts and flicked it open. “Our lovely nation of Ricca has only grown stronger by the contributions of the best of all cultures on Earth and a few from below it. As an outsider to this island, I know this more than most. Ricca has given me family and a higher purpose. But this goodwill does not extend indefinitely. And so I am formally removing the supervillain known as Dame from the island and evoking my right to Jus Primae Calceus, otherwise known as the Right of the First Boot. Begone, woman!”
I stepped back and kicked Dame’s lovely, if skinny, ass over the border into the camp. She stumbled but caught herself and turned. I shooed her away. “Go. I’m sending you back to the heroes. Let them deal with you. You’re not my problem anymore.”
She was more than happy to run into the arms of nearby Cape Diem personnel who were to escort her through the portal. She might even miss the island. Sure, I was horrible to her, but I’m her enemy. That’s to be expected. She’s going back to people she’s known as friends who now know she was working with the Hares. She thinks she’s heading back to friends.
Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time in her head or because of my bout with temporary sanity, but I almost hope it’s not too bad for her. I sent off an email to Venus letting her know that, just in case they have irreconcilable differences, I might be willing to be the island of last resort for Dame.
Note to self: don’t do this brain and memory thing ever again if I can help it. It makes them way too sympathetic, and I found myself looking out from the wrong body more than once.
With that taken care of, the next thing I had in mind required waiting. It would have been less of a wait, but the Director who ran turned out to be working with the Chinese. Despite that setback, I had a feeling I wouldn’t be waiting long.
Yeah, right. In my dreams.
I was enjoying another night of overpressure and screams. Just being caught in an endless fight, bare hands, no armor, endless enemies and no way out. Dimensional bomb right there, and I understood I activated it. I was running to get away while people swarmed me. Every time I killed them, they’d rise right back up. I could tear off faces and they’d stand back up. Snap necks, up again. Pull out a person’s heart, stand right back up, hole and all. Just me being clawed at by a never-ending mass of undead who would claw or bite chunks out of me. When I finally got to the edge, there she was. The one who betrayed me. She smiled and waved. The shield went up and trapped me in there with the never-ending army and the bomb in the middle.
I just kept fighting, never knowing when it was going to go off or I’d finally be too exhausted to keep fighting. Now, all that was fairly normal up until I looked up and a giant bug stabbed through all of it. Think Tyrannosaurus Mantis. A big, stabby mantis. It carved through all of that, then turned to me and scooped me up in its arms and lifted me up to where a teen boy stood on top of the giant mantis. I was set on the insect’s head and just took a moment to breath and look around, but the guy reached up for me. It felt like we were jumping and things got fuzzy.
I woke up gasping as I tried to breathe, my body being pushed down into the bed. I looked up to see the same boy on top of me, hands around my throat. I went to move my arms, but then something stabbed through the upper pair that were outside the sheets and pinned them to the bed. Looking up further, there was a giant mantis again, though not dino sized. More like basketball-player sized, with me being bounced like a basketball while the little guy choked me.
This one, I didn’t want to give a laser lobotomy to. I opened my mouth and dropped the fangs I’d installed. Handy things. Also handy? Forearms, but less so when bitten by fangs. To my surprise, he kept choking with one hand and used the other to punch me in the nose. Which means no more mister nice bitch. My laser eye lit up and I took both his arms off.
He fell back screaming, and the mantis parked next to me growled. I didn’t know they could do that. It raised its claws brought them down toward my head, but I got all four arms up and grabbed them.
Now, a standard mantis body can’t content with a standard human body even if made bigger. Just wouldn’t work as far as things like breathing and circulation, but there’s also the neat thing about muscle becoming less efficient as the size of the animal increases. Humans have bones and muscles enough to support all their bones and muscles. I had reinforced bones and unnaturally strengthened muscles. And, after a moment of pushing, I also had a pair of torn-off mantis claws for souvenirs. I shoved one through the giant bug’s head, then turned to the screaming, cowering, pantless little assassin trying to crawl away from the foot of my bed.
I jumped off the bed and landed with my knee planted in his back, probably fucking up his bladder. Boo-fucking-hoo. I kept him pinned there as I tore his shirt open and began to carve. “Stop squirming, ya baby. If I make a mistake, I’ll have to cross it out and rewrite it, and you’ve only got so much skin.”
When sending a message written on the back of a living victim, it’s important to be as clear as possible. That’s why I broke out the thesaurus and made sure to use the most precise words possible, no matter how long. I decided to hurry when I noticed more and more flies and roaches gathering in the room. The guy commanded a big bug, so it occurred to me he might have the loyalty of smaller ones. They all scattered their own way when I finished and put the final exclamation mark on the matter by driving the claw through the guy’s skull.
The next day, I had Hu and the Intel people pick him up and prepare to drop him off at the site of the next raid. For all the time I took writing it, it’s a simple message, really. Just seeking to have a chat with folks from the Three Hares and see what we might do to convince them to stop the proliferation of both diseases and power collars.
But, while simple, no message is quite so impactful as the one carved on the body of the assassin sent to kill me.
“Dear crazy conspiracy asshats: I, the Great and Devious Psychopomp Gecko, Empress of Ricca, Destroyer of Worlds, Mistress of Mayhem, cordially invite you to make the necessary arrangements for a diplomatic summit wherein we shall gather and discuss the terms of your surrender, nay your unconditional acquiescence. To that end, I also request that you stop sending assassins. If you do not, I will send one of my own and will not need to send another. Especially not another five. Get the message already. Hugs and blowjobs, Psychopomp Gecko, Empress of Ricca, Destroyer of Worlds, Mistress of Mayhem. P.S., Now I’m just fucking with this guy before I kill him.”
World Domination in Retrospect 
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