The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

“Thirteen hundred and sixty-one Clones!” I groused, holding my head. It was a mind-blowing concept, and all stacking on top of the four hundred and more already working in the Alternity Watch.

At the same time, it was incredibly exciting. Aspects of me were going to be living everywhere, even if they were going to keep a low profile.

Morgan reached over to pat my shoulder. “Just imagine what it would have been like if you hadn’t Leveled and could use Valence Eleven so you could make sixty at a time, instead of just one.”

“At least they could help me make the vivaurum for the next batch of us,” I grumbled, snagging one of Freya’s bottles of the High Slopes for a sip. “Dynamos, Dynamos everywhere!”

Nimue just rolled her eyes. “She’s a 24/23/23, opened Valence Twelve, and she’s complaining about being all over the damn multiverse now, living in more worlds than Tatyana has been to!”

“I have earned my right to complain!” I shook the bottle at all of my Dupes and Clones who had gotten here. “I didn’t see you all out there helping re-establish the Underweb!”

“Now you’re just being petty because we don’t have the Voice of Thunder,” scoffed Felicia, holding out her glass. “You know how wild the dimensional walls got as all those alternate entities tried to escape here.”

“You can quit trying to make me feel bad about all the Karma you all earned and passed on,” I sniffed, rolling my eyes as I poured for her. “I seem to have noticed you all have Leveled up marvelously, too!”

Smiles broke out everywhere. One thing traipsing all over the multiverse to worlds that are going to die gets you is confronting all sorts of beings willing to kill however many it takes to survive, and shutting them down via Binding and Sealing. As with Amora, Karnilla, and the others, it was a good way to break Twenty via completing an independent soul, and neutralize dangerous beings, other than by just killing them, at the same time.

The Justice League’s enemy Circe, for example, was actually the heir of their Greek goddess of the moon, Selene. There was no way she was going to be let into the Uni-mind, as she had been planning to take it over from within, so my first emergency Clone for the Justice League’s Earth, Luna, had Bound and Sealed her and removed her as a problem, just like Cleo had eventually been dragged along by Sama and Bound and Sealed Sekhmet after that stunt with the Richards.

I could also have issued three more Duplicates over the past years of effort, but given I’d just dropped over a thousand Clones across multiple dimensions, none of us particularly believed we needed more of us running around... unless they wanted to go to other galaxies or something, which was something I was thinking hard about. After all, the universe was a big place, and if Eon was going to have me jumping around anyways, some devoted explorers of our own universe might be welcome in a lot of places.

---

Our debates about what to do next paused as I held up a hand suddenly, looking away. I broadcast my Cosmic Awareness to all of them.

“Let’s see how good he does,” Morgan mused archly, as we watched Reed Richards-616 start ‘rebuilding the Cosmos.’

I still didn’t know why Dr. Strange-616 had wimped out, but Reed Richards did not. Owen Reece had moved the recipient of his power from Doom to Richards. Doom was not willing or able to do the rebuild, only make a petty realm for himself to be god and ruler there, all others below him. Richards had the empathy, compassion, and selflessness to give it all up and return it to what it was before.

Eternity definitely approved of Reed’s efforts, as we all watched him rebuild the continuum from the Earth-equivalents there that he could, using the destroyed worlds as the foundation stretching up and down the timestream, and...

I whipped my head around, and everyone else followed suit.

“Oh, shit!” we all said together, as suddenly another Terra materialized in orbit around Sol.

He didn’t know the planet here hadn’t been destroyed, so he’d gone and made another one.

Uncle Ben quickly inserted his Will into the effort as Richards tried to rebuild the timeline, diverting it along the hard line that was 1832, with no alternities spinning off of it, and not interfering with Reed Richards-616’s efforts as the power of the other Beyonders was bled away and helped restabilize the multiverse even further.

But the rebuilt Earth he’d made didn’t go away.

We all groaned in unison at the world sitting there in orbit... no, THREE worlds, because Richards had naturally built a Venus and Mercury in their original orbits, too!

There were already gentle alarms ringing out in reality and the Markspace at the sudden existence of planetary masses where none had been, and airwaves were filling up with the electromagnetic junk of an 1832 world very different from our own, because naturally that world had never had a Sama or Briggs, Nulls or Sources, and so all their effect on history was gone.

However, that world ALSO had no counterparts in beings that were born before 1832, meaning that it only had memories of those beings being there; the actual beings were already IN our universe.

Like, all the gods and Eternals and whatnot. The population would remember Thor being there and a hero to them, but actually, their world had been created whole cloth out of nothing, and all that history had never actually happened!

Likewise, nobody who was a Null or a Source would have a counterpart there, meaning they might remember there being a Punisher, but Frank Castle and his family were Nulls here on our world, so he and his family had no counterparts there.

That said, those people were basically totally real otherwise... and Eternity had let it happen.

I moved my awareness around as more alarms came through. Suddenly, there were two million beings living on Mars, too. Abruptly popping up around our mines and the colonies there had startled everyone and set them on edge.

“Eternity is such a twat at times,” I sighed. This was literally the ONLY universe such a thing could happen to, and probably just to see the effect of it, Eternity had basically let the alternate Earth where no Sama or Briggs had been born become reality by making it manifest here for real, instead of fade away as a fake reality.

There was a chorus of confirmations. The last of the wine was hurriedly downed, and we all cleaned ourselves up as the wheels began to turn.

-Uncle Ben, Aunt May, if you could kindly move the new planets opposite the existing ones in an equilateral orbit between the four of them. I imagine there will be no opposition to terraforming Venus and Mercury again,- Sama /said in a clipped voice in the Markspace. -Someone get to Mars and stop the newcomers there from shooting our miners.-

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“everyone will stop their fighting or I will do more than whisper.”

The air thundered. The ground heaved. Men and women screamed, but nobody heard them. Walls cracked and pavement broke. Thousands of people were jolted into the sky and fell badly from the shockwaves.

A sun came down from the sky, impossible to look at.

I descended on Mars Mining Outpost Seven, the largest of the ones on the red planet, which actually had some Ultraforce Staffers down here on rotation duty. It was considered mild recovery duty for the men and women who’d seen active fighting, and so when the newcomers had popped up all around and been shocked to find the mining sites among them, it had been able to put up defenses against a sudden attack, where the other sites had either holed up or been quickly abandoned after probing attacks by the aggressive newcomers.

The projection of energy blasts against the defensive shields was swiftly curtailed, if only by the fact those launching them were sprawled awkwardly on the ground. That didn’t stop everything, of course, but it did stop the worst of it.

A figure was coming up to meet me, surrounded by a swirl of iron parts, his helm shielding himself against the brightness of the light.

I politely dimmed down as I drew closer, stopping a few hundred feet above the station’s force field as the man closed in on me cautiously, thousands of tons of metal swirling behind him, ready to be used.

I crossed my arms patiently and waited for him to drift closer, ignoring the mass of metal behind him, all of it riding on magnetic waves of terrifying scope.

Waves that still hadn’t been able to pierce the defensive shields of the outpost below. We knew how to build our shields, and Interdiction fields against reality manipulation and Stillflight Zones against suborning of natural laws were part of them. His attempts to control electromagnetism simply didn’t work against them.

Assay said this was an Erik Lensherr, an alternate of our own, a mutant master of magnetism, and very proud possessor of a hard Ruby Aura. I just glanced over all the thousands of beings below, most of them Green-Emerald to Blue-Sapphire, and what looked like an amalgamation of dozens of alien races, humans, and hybrids turned out to be Homo Sapiens Nexal, ‘mutants’.

All of them, as far as I could see.

“You!” he demanded, his anger almost palpable as I waited there in midair, only barely keeping himself from holding back from encapsulating me in metal to establish his power. “Who are you, and how did you dare think to set up your settlements in Arakko?” he demanded of me.

“Interesting. You’ve obviously done no analysis at all of what has been going on, Elder Lensherr,” I replied calmly. “I am Dynamo of the High Guard. Given that your people just appeared out of nowhere less than ten minutes ago, I’d be inclined to ask the same of you and how you arrived here, but given I’ve met Elder Lensherr many times and you don’t seem to recognize me, I’m going to infer you were transferred here from somewhere else without your knowledge.”

“I... what?” he asked, startled out of his anger as he looked at me.

I pointed at his entourage of iron. “Elder Lensherr would never be stupid enough to levitate tons of metal around me, especially when it might fall down and hit some innocents below, for starters. Secondly, if you would kindly extend your magnetic sense down into the ground outside the force field below, you will see miles and miles of mining tunnels worked into the mantle, clearly the product of months of effort at the most conservative of estimates, and more likely years, which is actually the case. Wear and tear on the remnants of the equipment here was clearly done by the atmosphere and terrain of the ground here over considerable amounts of time, and you should be able to tell the age of the infrastructure here that is not your own by its own degradation.

“In short, in spite of the instant terraforming that seems to have accompanied your arrival, it should be plain to you that this mining colony and all the others on this world have been here for quite some period of time, and they were made to deal with the original atmosphere of Mars, not this interesting addition and modification you’ve managed to come up with.”

I lifted an eyebrow at him, clearly non-aggressive and not planning to fight unless he forced the issue, and my acting familiarly with him and clearly not feeling threatened by him was also forcing him to re-think matters.

“If you will allow me to verify your words, I will instruct my people to stand down until they are certain,” he ground out after a moment or ten of more constructive thought.

“Oh, please do. In the meantime, let me be the first to congratulate you on a masterfully woven magnetic field for Mars. Wherever did you get all the iron for the core to do so?” I asked politely.

I was wrongfooting him with my politeness. “One of my fellow Council members is capable of producing vast amounts of metal at will. We imbued the core together, Lady Dynamo.”