Chương 67: Book 1 Epilogue

I was lying on my back, long hair fanning out from my head forming a golden halo nearly three feet in radius. Proximakinesis lifted some of the tresses, bringing them up for visual inspection. Other than a reddish tint from both the dust on the ground and background illumination they were glossier and healthier looking than at any other time in memory, with no sign of recent events. No tangles, no split ends and while they felt pretty normal for hair to my touch to a normal person they might as well be metal wires.

They were also getting too long.

"Hair is just dead cells, right?" I asked, forcing my voice to sound normal when it came out both too faint and like a strangled goose.

"Why does regeneration work on it?" Honestly, I'd never thought about it before - mostly because there had been more important things to focus on at the time but also because superpowers seemed work better than any shampoo or conditioner. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

"YOU WOULD HAVE MORE PROBLEMS THAN JUST WITH YOUR LOOKS IF YOUR HEALING ONLY WORKED ON CELLS," the voice boomed, every word a thunderclap.

"IT IS A RETURN TO YOUR IDEAL SELF, NOT SOMETHING TO DO WITH BIOLOGY."

"Can you not speak in all caps? It's annoying." Also potentially lethal to normal people; the boulder to our left had gained a few extra cracks.

"And why is my ideal self trying for Rapunzel-style hair?"

"IT'S AWESOME AND YOU KNOW IT," Verity shot back, because of course she did.

"AS FOR THE HAIR, YOU HAD BEEN GROWING IT OUT YOUR WHOLE LIFE, WORKING AGAINST MUNDANE WEAR AND TEAR. SUCH THINGS ARE MUCH LESS OF AN ISSUE FOR SOMEONE OF YOUR POWER BUT YOUR SELF-IMAGE HAS YET TO ADAPT. YOU SHOULD HELP IT DO SO... UNLESS YOU AIM TO FOLLOW IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF A CERTAIN DISNEY PRINCESS."

"Great, more problems." I fanned my arms and legs, carving a rough angel shape into the dust. Maybe it would be a good change, a simple problem that didn't involve monsters or fighting... though from Verity's tone it might prove harder than expected. I reached out with my powers, carving the depression of booted feet at the bottom of the angel shape, drawing out the wings to be more bird-like. It felt good, to use superpowers for something so mundane. Relaxing, even.

But before relaxation, there was still the metaphorical elephant in the room to deal with... and I'd never been one to procrastinate.

"You told me I'd die," I stated, my body freezing, every muscle ready to explode with tension.

"That if I did what I did it would kill me." I held back from punching or kicking out in frustration. The mountaintop might shatter and then where would we sit? The reddish, start-strewn, too-clear sky above mocked me; so many little lights, twinkling merrily. But as always, appearances were deceiving... as were words.

"YOU DID DIE. FOR MORE THAN THREE HOURS YOUR HEART DID NOT BEAT," Verity said after allowing a minute or two for my urge to punch things to fade away.

"FOR TWO OF THOSE HOURS YOU DID NOT HAVE A HEART AT ALL."

"Then how am I here and still alive?" My own words did not sound like thunderbolts but the ground still shook in time with them. All the fear, all the doubt and rage I'd felt those last few minutes of the battle, those same emotions simmering under the surface for the past few weeks, all that I hurled at the mountaintop with a blast of my power. Rock split, thin soil scattered, and a boulder the size of a small house flew away as if kicked by a giant.

It kept going faster and faster, not disappearing over the horizon but rising off into the troposphere and beyond. Judging from the trajectory, it would probably drop into the sun in a couple of days. The exhaustion of what I had done in my outburst hit me like a ton of bricks... but a ton of bricks was no longer that much of an issue. Potential consequences on the other hand were.

I'd just expended an hour's worth of stamina in a fit of rage, setting up what amounted to an ever-accelerating missile and casting it across the solar system in a fit, blindly. I raised my hands before my eyes, looked at them in a new light. It had been... not easy, but no extreme effort either. A far cry from nearly killing myself to get a giant bullet around the world.

"YOU JUST NOTICED THE FIRST HALF OF THE ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION. CONTRIBUTING MORE THAN ANY OTHER TO MOT'S END HAD CONSEQUENCES. SOME OF THEM BENEFICIAL, OTHERS FAR LESS SO." She paused, letting me digest the information that, in retrospect, should have been obvious. Whether a villain empowered by violence and destruction, or a hero defending the helpless and bringing down evils, helping blow up that ridiculous, oversized, banal incarnation of evil would have given a boost to my powers.

Apparently, the boost had been... considerable. Not for the first time since the battle, I tried to access my character sheet and see what had changed. And just like the other half dozen attempts, this one too did absolutely nothing.

"FURTHERMORE, YOU SHOULD CONSIDER THAT YOUR REGENERATION IS ESCALATING. THE MORE AND FOR LONGER YOU REGENERATE THE GREATER THE OVERALL TEMPORARY BOOST TO ALL YOUR ABILITIES. YOUR CONFRONTATION WITH MOT AND HIS PERSONAL RETINUE HAD LASTED FOR HOURS, HOURS IN WHICH YOU WERE REPEATEDLY PUSHED TO YOUR LIMITS. GIVEN THE POWER DISPARITY FOR THE SECOND HALF OF THE BATTLE YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE NOTICED THE DIFFERENCE BUT I ASSURE YOU, EVERYONE ELSE DID."

Because I did notice the amusement in her tone, I wondered what, exactly, Verity meant by "everyone else". Then I decided that was future-Maya's problem, not vacationing-after-stopping-doomsday-Maya's, so I said nothing. Stolen novel; please report.

"THEN WE COME TO THE CRUX OF THE MATTER. DEATH IS NOT A DOORWAY THROUGH WHICH YOU PASS. IT IS NOT A SWITCH TO BE FLIPPED OR ANYTHING SO DEFINITIVE. IT IS A TRANSITION, A SPECTRUM. THREE HOURS, THREE MINUTES AND THREE SECONDS OF DEATH ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THE SEVENTEEN-HOUR RECORD FOR HUMANS ON YOUR PLANET. FOR THE MIGHTY OF OUR WORLD THEY'RE BUT AN AMUSING JOKE." She did not laugh and neither did I.

"AS YOUR DAMAGED BODY BROKE DOWN YOUR REGENERATION ESCALATED YOUR ABILITIES FURTHER AS DAMAGE KEPT ACCUMULATING. THE TWO-HOUR POINT WAS WHEN YOUR HEALING OUTPACED DAMAGE AND YOUR CONDITION BEGAN TO IMPROVE, STARTING WITH REGROWING CRITICAL ORGANS." Then and there I decided the implications of that were also future-Maya's problem. I sat back down, fixed the angel shape my tantrum had broken and enjoyed the silence and awesome view of the sky.

The reddish hue was a bit too close to the crimson nightmare Mot's powers had made of Florida at the end but it being natural made it OK. More than OK, it fulfilled a very old, perhaps childish dream but I had just helped save the world. I could be childish if I wanted to and if someone said otherwise they could go take a swim in the Sun.

"How did you know?" Because when a heretofore inscrutable alien mastermind offered answers you asked. You asked a lot.

"No, let me rephrase; just how much did you know about everything? And why did you help?"

"I KNEW MORE THAN OTHERS BECAUSE KNOWING IS WHO I AM. PERHAPS THE LEAST IMPORTANT FRAGMENT OF I, YET THE ONE MOST OFTEN USED." Verity walked around my prone form and came to stand on top of the nearby boulder; with the other one hurled into space she now stood on the highest part of the mountain and thus the world. She was much changed from all the other times I'd seen her, more like me than a child or a teen.

More like me than me even, a towering adult woman of impossible, superhuman vitality despite her pale skin and ebony hair and yet that body seemed little more than a thin, fragile envelope around a storm of unseen power. Did she even have organs under her skin? Was she flesh and blood and bones, or just a mask stretching thin over a singularity of magic?

"IT'S BOTH." She said with a smile.

"EVEN I MUST ADHERE TO CERTAIN CONVENTIONS WHEN ENTERING THIS REALM - OR SHOULD." Had she just read my thoughts again? Well, compared to knowing a childhood dream from a decade before...

"AS FOR WHY I HELPED, FOR THE SAME REASON YOU DID. BECAUSE WE CHOSE TO. I, LIKE YOU, COULD HAVE ALWAYS CHOSEN TO FULFILL MY CHILDHOOD DREAMS WITH MY POWERS, BUT THE WORLD WOULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH LESSER FOR IT." I could not argue with that so I chose to look at the dome of stars above. So very different than any I've ever seen yet so much closer too. That's what basically having telescopes for eyes meant. I'd never been much for thinking.

Perhaps if I had been I would have made different choices, left the city as soon as I could have then pursued a child's dreams. I could have come here before the confrontation with my father. Before learning the true size of Mot's army or his plans. Before I'd known about my sister, or Mot's stupidly ugly final form. I could have been relaxing for a week now, living the dream. And when I returned - if I ever returned - everyone I'd ever known would be dead or a monster.

A dream or the world, not that I'd known where it would end back then. Not that it would have mattered, had I known. The choices would not change; if anything, hindsight would only reaffirm them so why bother trying to think about it to begin with.

"AND THAT IS WHY I BROUGHT YOU HERE," Verity said, making an all-encompassing motion at the awesome vista of the world around us.

"WITH A BIT OF HELP, COOPERATION AND QUITE A BIT OF CHEATING OF COSMIC TREATIES WE CAN HAVE BOTH DREAMS AND THE WORLD, DON'T YOU THINK?" I laughed, not bothering with powers to make it sound normal. It sounded even better in its too-high pitch.

"Is this a reward then?"

"THE ONLY REWARD FOR A JOB DONE WELL IS MORE WORK," Verity's voice boomed in response, drawing a raised eyebrow? Was she growing taller?

"WHAT I OFFERED HERE WAS A TEMPORARY REPRIEVE." Yep, she was obviously taller now, and ever so slightly translucent. It appeared our conversation was coming to an end.

"LIKE ENERGY, POWER RESISTS BEING DESTROYED AND TENDS TO FILL VACUUMS SWIFTLY. MOT'S DESTRUCTION DISPERSED MOST OF HIS POWER BUT MUCH OF IT WILL BE CLAIMED SOONER OR LATER. MOREOVER, THE LINK HE CREATED BETWEEN HIS REALM AND YOURS LASTED LONG ENOUGH FOR BOTH AMBIENT POWER AND FOCUSED ATTENTION TO BE DIRECTED EARTH'S WAY."

"What are you saying, there will be more invasions?" Now why did she have to ruin my vacation like that?

"More monsters to fight, or demons like Mot?"

"NOT AT FIRST. MY LITTLE LIGHTSHOW WHEN I BARRED THE ENEMY'S ENTRANCE TO YOUR WORLD SHOULD DISSUADE INTERFERENCE FOR SOME TIME. NEW POWERS MANIFESTING WITHIN YOUR WORLD FROM ALL THE POWER UNLEASHED ARE ANOTHER MATTER ENTIRELY. THEN YOU HAVE THE SURVIVORS FROM YOUR CITY AND NEARBY LOCATIONS STRUCK BY MONSTERS. BY NOW, THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WITH SUPERNATURAL ABILITIES EXIST AND MORE WILL GAIN POWER IN THE DAYS TO COME." Great, the world was becoming a comic universe.

Maybe I'd sit here and miss the inevitable power registration and forced recruitment to come. What was the worst that could happen? Don't answer that!

"How much time do I have? Should I start flying back now?" It wasn't exactly a short trip.

"THINGS WILL BE RELATIVELY QUIET IN THE AFTERMATH OF YOUR BATTLE," Verity's towering image said, now a translucent, glowing shade as tall as a tower.

"YOU HAVE ABOUT HALF A YEAR TILL THE FIRST MAJOR DISASTER." Prismatic lightning crackled through her fading form, shining in all the colors of the rainbow and quite a few beyond. At least none of them were octarine.

"BUT NOW I MUST BID YOU FAREWELL. SO LONG MAYA WENNEFER, HERO OF EARTH. WE SHALL MEET AGAIN." There was a blinding kaleidoscope of an explosion, so bright it made the inside of a nuclear fireball seem dull yet both soundless and intangible. By the time my retinas regenerated, I was alone. That suited me just fine, for the time being.

"After ten thousand battles, I'm finally free!" I shouted at the universe. Nobody heard, or perhaps they did. Either way that was future-Maya's problem.

"It is time to explore Mars!" I took a leap off the slightly shortened summit of Olympus Mons and flew out to fool around my new vacation spot.