New Me Who Dis? 2

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I think I enjoy my little meetings with the Baron. I’m still shit at chess, but that’s partially because we agreed not to use powers. There would just be so much cheating if we used them. I’m not sure if he’s on my level, what with how mysterious he plays. Still, he seems to be something above the Three Hares, a conspiracy of supers, some immortal, who claimed to be gods. Maybe even some were, just that gods back then were supers. I suppose I would fit that definition, just having surpassed every other super on Earth now, and hitting a tier of existence where I had a trio of god-murderers hunting me down recently.

This time, the Baron and I moved onto cards. We were playing HORSE, which is really five poker games in one that alternate. We chose to alternate every hand to a different game, from Texas Hold’em for the H, Omaha Hold’em for the O, Razz for the R, Seven Card Stud for the S, and Seven Card Stud Hi-Low Eight or Better for the E. It seemed like a good compromise because he wanted to play Seven Card, I wanted to play Hold ‘Em, I offered Razz, and he countered with HORSE. I’m a lot more competitive in it than chess, though I still have problems with a couple of the games.

Samedi knew it, too. That’s why he put the pressure on during Omaha so much, dropping down some lost Spanish gold doubloons we were playing with. Still, I thought I had a chance, and heads-up play allows for a much looser playstyle in Hold’em, so I called with some Deep One coinage, which were more like triangles with holes through the middle.

“What troubles you this time, Lady Unicorn,” the Baron asked. Much like me, he seems fond of nicknames. But then gods collect nicknames like some people collect stamps. Philately aside, I did have something bothering me, but when don’t I? I could probably go a good eight or nine years doing nothing but talking about shit happening to me. “You and the thief Dame have more adventures?”

“Yes, and I can get to that, but right now I’ve also got this thing going on with Blacklight,” I muttered. The dealer, a zombie on loan from someone the Baron knew, flipped over the final card, which might be good for me. I raised. Samedi called.

“Your cards,” the zombie asked in an emotionless voice. I’m not a fan of the idea of turning someone into a monster to attack their own loved ones in the abstract. Enslaving someone with poison or magic is potentially worse once you take away the possibility of a zombie apocalypse. But he made for an unimaginative card dealer without the agility to perform card tricks.

We turned them over, leaving my three of a kind at the mercy of a flush. I tossed my cards in. “Good hand.”

“Now, Razz,” the zombie dealer said. He began to gather up the cards and stuck them in a automatic shuffler

“Now you’re seeing Blacklight? I remember having a libido like that,” Samedi teased.

I shook my head. “That’s not exactly how it was meant to go. I was juggling this Dame stuff, but I also thought, maybe, I would get on Backlight’s good side. Not that kind of good side.”

And so I began to explain that story to him and y’all.

Blacklight, along with everyone else on Earth at one point, had found out the infamous Psychopomp Gecko was also the Unicorn Goddess. It caused a lot of hard feelings in people who couldn’t square that the goddess who fixed pollution and disease, the savior of every genocide in history who created plopped everyone down on another Earth, could be Psycho Gecko. All that good done by a mass murdering serial killer just doesn’t compute. And power like that in the hands of a mass murdering serial killer really freaked people out. That’s part of why I wiped it all clean, so that the only people who remembered were the ones ok with it. Blacklight, obviously, was not ok with it.

But, hey, she’s flying around with her looks restored, fighting crime and all that. Worse, she was fighting to deal with having been legally dead. She was the heir to a major medical conglomerate, Long Life. That meant a lot of money was arrayed against her, and I imagine she had to hide how she returned to life. I think lawyers could make a pretty good case that she isn’t so much back from the dead as a temporarily-displaced time traveler. If she heads back to her original time, she dies and the timeline goes forward as it has been. There would also be plenty of people who see it as their duty to return her to the time of her death, even though that doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t think it ever mattered anyway.

So anyway, I thought I’d spy on her. She was flying around, fighting a giant Nazi robot. They’d built it with a death’s head face, adorned with lighting bolts, swastikas, and Pepe frogs. Out of everything bad about them, which is basically their entire existence, their symbols weren’t as bad as the current generation.

The robot was stomping through this suburb of Empyreal City when Blacklight came out of nowhere and cut one of its arms off with a blast of life. The robot turned to her in time for her to smack into it, but she didn’t push it too far because that caused a little more damage. She tried instead to ease underneath its center of gravity, starting to lift it into the air. The robot tried smacking its metal fist into her but that did nothing, so instead it opened the fingers and fired a palm cannon at the buildings around it. Blacklight responded with more blasts of her black lights that tore holes through its torso that didn’t disable it.

I created a shield at the barrel and blocked the shots, causing the barrel to explode, which I also contained. I flew in on my extraneous wings, horn glimmering in the light of day, and joined Blacklight. I put my hands next to hers and pushed, throwing the Nazi robot high into the sky.

“Thanks,” Blacklight said with a thin, grim smile on her face. “But what comes up is going to come down. Help me finish it off?” She nodded up toward it.

I nodded along and smiled. “Sure.”

We flew up, me holding back to stay with her, swooping around her. We made good time, with the robot barely reaching its apex when we hit it. Blacklight encased herself in an aura of her light and gathered speed, smacking into the upper chest of the robot and tearing it off from the collar up. I stopped and fired a beam of plasma from my horn that engulfed the rest of it and melted it down.

Blacklight came down with that topmost bit of the robot in hand, carrying that part pretty easily. “Thanks. You’re that goddess, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said. “You’re Blacklight.”

“Nice to meet you. I bet these guys aren’t,” Blacklight said, indicating the robot.

“That reminds me, one moment,” I said. I turned back to the neighborhood and snapped my fingers. The buildings came together, and the dead returned to life without a craving for human flesh. I couldn’t say the same about all the pets I returned to life, but some of those just come with a natural craving for humans. So many of them, in fact. It’s a good thing I brought the people back first.

“That’s handy. A giant undo button. I could use something like that,” Blacklight commented.

“You have something you’d like to fix?” I asked.

“So many things,” she shook her head. “Let me dump this off with someone.” She swooped down and dropped off the robot head with a uniformed cop with a squad car, then came up to join me.

“You’re going to leave that with… him?” I asked pointing to the inadequate publicly-owned security guard.

“Gotta look good while I’m fighting for my life in court. I have a new name, new costume, new fucking anger issues. One of them, I swear to God, um…”

I waved it off. “I am that I am.” I snapped my fingers again, dropping us off at a food truck serving gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, Gouda Vibrations. I floated us a big variety tray.

Blacklight grabbed a half of a sandwich and inhaled it pretty much. “Fine. One of these slimy little bastards tried to put in a motion arguing I’m an evil twin. Someone opened a portal to another dimension where the heroes are villains and villains are heroes, so now they’re trying to say that’s who I am. It’s fucking deranged.”

“I’d leave out the deranged language, but go on. What do you want?” I leaned forward, to halves of a sandwich flying toward my mouth like a butterfly. I plucked one out of the air and nibbled on it. Smoked cheddar with mozzarella. “Delicious.”

“Yeah, it’s good… no, but see, I don’t know what I want, I guess,” Blacklight continued. “You could make it all go away, couldn’t you? If you wanted, you could change their minds, or make everyone thing I hadn’t died.”

I nodded. “Yes, but do you really want me to? There’s all that moral stuff.”

“You’re supposed to be a goddess, right?” Blacklight pointed out.

“Yeah, but I’ll freely admit I’m not a source of morality. I can do all kinds of things that aren’t really moral. I can make them give up and judge in your favor. I can make them never have had an issue with it. I could them love you. I could make you love me.”

Blacklight chewed on her sandwich, leaning forward. I caught a grin through the mask of hers. It was all black, with the openings looking like burns, made to resemble some of the damages that originally killed her. “I’m straight, but I can think of a worse exchange. You said that for a reason.

I raised an eyebrow, busying myself with another sandwich. “You want to offer yourself as, what, my girlfriend? And in return, you want to be legally declared alive and in charge of your company. But what if I know you’d have hated me?”

“How bad could you be?” Blacklight asked. “I know what you’ve done. Heard about what you might have done.” She bent down over the tray to have herself another half of a sandwich. “You should see what I’d do to have my dad back. Or take me up on this and see.” She winked at me.

“Uuuuuh,” I said.

“Don’t beat around the bush. You have the power to stop this. If you have better offer to do this for me, let me hear it,” Blacklight said.

“What did you do?” Baron Samedi asked, gesturing for me to take my earnings from the latest hand.

“I left. Teleported out. I didn’t take her up on it, but I wanted to.”

“Why not then? She offered a deal that appeals to you,” the Baron said. He accepted the new cards dealt to him.

“I’m uncomfortable with her selling herself to me, basically,” I responded.

“I think you are uncomfortable with who you are and what you want. Dame wanted something, Blacklight wanted something. Morgan, Venus, Medusa, all want something. You let them do the things they do because you want the fantasy and companionship, but you fear the judgment of others and yourself. You should figure out who you are, embrace it. Or don’t, and stay a puny guard.”

I was quiet for awhile after that, up until we reached the end of the E again. “I think I’ll just go on my merry way. Nice playing with you, Baron.” I reached for a bottle of rum I made appear, pouring both of us a shot and leaving him the bottle.

“We should do this again, but bringing others we know won’t cheat.” Baron said, puffing on his cigar and snatching up the glass. I nodded and threw back a shot of rum before leaving.

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