As far as he was concerned, he had just transported himself to a radiation blighted city, for as long as he could hold his breath. They’d raided a secret government installation to steal confidential files and stumbled onto a private army helmed by cyborg capes. When he ran out of air, he’d have to decide if he wanted to breathe in radioactive dust or pop back into an approximate location in that compound. He had little doubt he’d be surrounded when he did pop in, if there were that many people there.

⊙

He no longer breathed.

The desolate wasteland, however, was his world. It was the place he kept returning to now. A ruined Earth Bet.

His power detonated around him, and he ceased to be. But his senses extended out, and he was aware of who was where. He could move among them. He was largely without emotion.

He was surrounded, he noted, by the machines. Big, small, utility, weapon. The biggest were house-sized, mounted on treads like those of a tank, each containing a different weapon that they revealed when they unfolded.

The roles had switched. The power was in control now, dressed in black metal and spiraling energy. Objectively, he was beautiful. In a moment of weakness, when he thought he faced the decision of breathing in radioactive death or dying at the hands of the machines, the power had reached out to him to offer a deal, much like it had offered him new uses of his power, new varieties, and ways to visit new worlds, or bring out slivers of those new worlds into his world, though the differences between one and the other were often negligible. Gaping holes through reality with sparks and intense heat, or gaping holes through reality that fucked with nearby machines and included radioactive dust in the mix.

The deal was simple. He got to live, after a fashion, it got the driver’s seat, the body.

Now he was the one parceling out the rewards to encourage certain behavior and help out. Remember this? This is relevant. That time my team and I stumbled onto a cyborg lab. I got out alive.

The machines wanted him. He could almost understand how they thought. There was a whole city beyond the ruined portal, but when he reappeared, and he would, the machines would turn right around and prioritize him.

Every second he was gone, the machines marched closer to the portal.

His opponent floated above. A woman with wings and a helmet.

Valkyrie, he supplied, to better inform the power. With the word, he transmitted the idea. The degree of power, and the danger she posed.

I always liked the maxims, he thought. The thoughts were more like lines of code running on a computer than they were words in his head. Rules, courses of action, steps to take.