#it was also €3 which i feel like is bordering on highway robbery but i did get it from a hotel vending machine so i think that's on me

[girltakovic]

yall weren't kidding european chocolate really is better

[roxywashere]

New Light

Rey takes her date where no date has gone before

Rey waited outside of Baby’s Diner for her date to finish her shift. It was 4 in the morning. Not an exceptionally late night for her, but she was tired. She cycled some plasma in and out of her veins, to see if that would help her keep energized. She then did a lap around the state park the diner bordered, which did very little to help.

She pulled out her phone and looked up something she thought she remembered. She chuckled when she found it, and then opened up the group chat.

                                          Hey, Shay

What

                                           You’re not going to believe who                                            has tasteful, professionally photographed nudes                                            from back in the 40s

Who

                                           Aradia Johanna Christa Scomparsa-Prince-Furst

You send me those nudes right goddamned now I’m going to give her so much shit for this

                                           Elle make sure she doesn’t hurt herself

Rey shook her head and put her phone away, just as her date, Felicia Kyle, pushed out of the front door of the diner

“So, how was the fight?” Felicia asked.

“Stopped a bank robbery, burned down someone’s garden, broke a rib. Ya know, your standard save the world stuff.”

“Wait, you broke a rib? And then ran here?”

“I got better. Superheroes are pretty tough, you know.”

“Why don’t you tell me more while I drop my car off at my place.” It was a short 15 minute drive to her place, in a trailer park in the nearby township of White Deer.

“This place is…” Rey started to say as she climbed out of the car.

“Let me guess, ‘Rustic’?”

“I mean, in not so condescending a tone. But… yeah.”

“It’s cheaper than living in the city, I bet.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I’m gonna go get changed out of my uniform. You wanna come inside or wait out here?”

“I’m good out here. I’ve still got to psych myself up.”

After Felicia went inside, Rey massaged her rib. She lifted up her shirt and took a look at it: Aradia’s magic had fixed the physical break, but the flesh around it was still bruised, dark violet and a sickly yellow. Rey’s superhuman physiology would heal it quick, but it definitely wouldn’t be painless by the end of the night.

When Felicia came back out, she had almost completely transformed. She almost looked like she belonged in Rey’s group of friends: Torn jeans, black leather jacket, black crop-top.

“Lookin’ good,” Rey said.

“I know how to fix myself up all cosmopolitan-like. I wasn’t always a trailer park gal, you know.”

“Oh yeah? Where you from?”

“Austin, Texas.”

“Can’t get much more cosmopolitan than Austin.”

“So, how’s this going to work? Are you going to… carry me? For 700 miles?”

“You’d be surprised.” Rey activated her power and had Felicia in a bridal carry before she could blink. “You want to go straight to Danesville? Or do you want to sightsee first?”

“Depends where you take me. What sights are there to see?”

“Ever been to the top of the FursTech tower in New York?”

“Isn’t the top third completely closed off to the public?”

“I’m not the public anymore, am I? Me and Rad, we’re basically besties now.”

“Alright, then, my hot young steed, lead the way.”

Rey bolted from the trailer park and and down the road, and onto the highway, east towards New York City. It was 3 minutes later when Rey stopped in front of the FursTech tower, and put Felicia down to let her catch her breath.

“Holy shit, Rey.”

“That’s how it is for me all the time.”

“Pick me back up, this almost better than sex.”

“You’re gonna eat those words later on.” Rey scooped Felicia back up, and stared up at the tower. “Brace yourself.”

Rey ran straight up the side of the tower, slower than she usually would but fast enough that Felicia wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. They were at the top in less than a second. Rey set Felicia back down so she could enjoy the view.

“Jesus, this is unbelievable…”

They sat at the top of the tower silently for ten minutes, watching the lights of the cities and highways.

“So, where next?” Felicia asked.

“Ever been to the west coast?”

“I visited LA for vacation once.”

“Good enough for me.” Rey picked Felicia up once again. “Oh, there’s one more thing I have to show you. I only just learned this since you texted me the first time.” Rey braced to run, and bolted straight off the edge of the building, coming to a stop about a hundred feet from the edge, before starting to fall. Felicia screamed and covered her eyes.

Rey slowly activated her power to slow her fall, until she was going horizontally. After sufficiently long time not having hit the ground, Felicia cracked her eyes open again, and looked around, astonished. “You can fly?”

“You betcha.”

“How fast can you fly?”

“You wanna find out with me?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Rey ramped up her power, to the point where she could feel her plasma reserves empty, and needed to draw from the Heart on her back. She kept going, pushing herself even further. She felt the Heart draining. She’d never burned through this much plasma so fast ever, she may not have even used up this much plasma in the entire rest of her life. She didn’t know how fast she was going, but she was beyond words like “fast”.

“Hey, you seeing that?” Felicia asked. Rey was pretty sure she was. It looked like she was seeing her plasma trail in front of her. She raced past streak after streak, until they merged together, and the streaks became a solid tunnel of plasma.

“What the fuck is happening…” Rey muttered.

“Are you gonna stop speeding up?”

“I think I did…”

Rey and Felicia suddenly hit a wall of light, and were spat out of the plasma tunnel above a bright sunny desert, and very quickly slowed to a stop.

“Where the hell are we?” Rey asked.

Felicia, looking around, pointed behind Rey. “I think I see some buildings over there.”

Rey turned and flew in that direction. When they reached it, they found a vast slumped skeleton of a massive skyscraper, draped across the desert, less than two miles from the sea. Much smaller towers poked out of the desert around it.

“Rey… I think this is Dubai. That’s the Burj on its side right there.”

“What the fuck happened? It looks like the city’s been abandoned for a thousand years…” Rey gave Felicia a disturbed look.

“Did we just fucking time travel? Did you go so fast you punched through time?”

“Hey, this is new for me, too.”

“Identify yourself!” ordered a voice from behind Rey. Rey turned to face the source, and found a familiar face floating a few dozen feet from her.

It was the Archangel, the mysterious benefactor of Astra’s League, wearing what looked to be a suit of sleek golden power armor, helmetless, with a long flowing sky blue cape.

“Rey?” the Archangel asked, apparently just as perplexed as Rey was. “How did you get here? We detected an interversal incursion… Was that you?”

“Fuck if I know.” Rey answered.

The Archangel sighed. “You speed-forced it, didn’t you. You went so fast you broke the barrier between worlds. You weren’t this powerful when we fought Therion.”

Rey spun around, showing the Archangel the Heart that Aradia had given her. “Rad spotted me an upgrade. She said you made it.”

“I did. I am happy to see him being put to good use. Who is this with you?”

“This is my date, Felicia.”

“That’ll explain it. I remember when I used to be that much a show-off…”

“Where are we?”

The Archangel hesitated for a moment. “…Let me show you.” She turned and started flying northwest, quickly picking up speed. Rey had no trouble keeping pace. They crossed the middle east in only a minute, eastern europe and scandinavia in another two, and the north atlantic in another five. As they shot past a winterset europe, Rey thought she saw spots of gold glimmering in the snow, but from miles up it was hard to tell. It was a similar story across Canada, but when they neared the midwest, it was a solid blanket of gold with small islands of snow instead of the other way around.

A massive metroplex stretched from northern Minnesota, around the coastal edges of Wisconsin and north Michigan, down through Illinois, and across southern Michigan and into the southernmost reaches of Canada. The sun was just rising here, and every building that could see the sun was glittering golden in the light of dawn.

The Archangel flew down towards the center of the city, where Danesville would have been if this were the Earth that Rey knew. She landed swiftly in a park in front of a massive palace, and the power armor unfolded and she stepped out of it. She was wearing a skintight bodysuit, upon which were mounted a series of decorative golden plates. The cape that had been threaded out the back of the armor was revealed to be a light cloak, held around her shoulders by a small pin with a image of a sun on it, radiating 16 points of light.

Rey landed a bit rougher, and put Felicia down.

Despite evidently being the dead of winter, the air was comfortably warm and the grass was a vibrant green. There were dozens of people milling around the very large park, playing in the snow or walking through it. The were also many animals walking around: elephants, rats, wolves and dogs, otters, cats, pigs and boars, and even some dolphins and octopi floating through the air or in small blobs of floating water, and then countless birds: crows and ravens, and parrots and pigeons, and some hawks and eagles. The animals were dressed in the same style as the humans: an interchangeable assortment of bodysuits, robes, and decorative armor.

���This… is New Jerusalem,” The Archangel said, “my homeworld.”

“It looks like Earth,” Rey said.

The Archangel led them towards the palace, and up the marble steps that rose nearly 100 feet above the park. “We did once call it that, and some still do. Years ago this world was just like any other Earth. I was seventeen when the Revelation occured, and changed all life on this world forever. It’s a very long story, but the short of it, is every living human on Earth was gifted powers by the Goddess of this ‘verse, and we used our powers to build Utopia on Earth. No-one here wants for anything, all is provided free of scarcity.”

The doors of the palace were 200 feet tall, and made of marble and gold. The Archangel gently pressed her palm against them and they silently opened, frictionlessly floating on their hinges until they just as gently stopped.

Even though the sun was still rising behind them, the enormous chamber behind the doors looked like it was lit through the skylights above it, and when Rey examined it closely she realized the skylights were actually an impossibly complex series of mirrors. The roof was held up by 10-foot thick pillars of gold and marble, and on each pillar was a lamp that looked like someone had taken a Heart, much like the one Aradia had given Rey, and carefully peeled it open to reveal the miniature sun within.

“Jesus Christ…” Felicia muttered.

As they neared the end of the hall, they stopped in front of a 20-foot-tall lifelike statue of a young girl, with brown hair and golden eyes, holding up a hand towards the sky, above which was levitating a golden orb, peacefully spinning according to some unknowable pattern. Her eyes were crying a fountain that ran down her face and over her clothes until it reached the pool at the bottom.

Rey found the girl familiar, but couldn’t place why.

On the other side of the fountain was another door, half the size of the first, and through it was another skylight-mirror lit room. At the end of it was a Throne, one designed for a human twice the normal size, beneath enormous tapestries hanging from the ceiling detailing events Rey could only barely comprehend, battles between angels and demons and gods and aliens and other unknowable things. Sitting in the throne was a giantess, ten feet tall, wearing white and gold robes and an elegantly ornate golden crown with a glowing white jem on the brow.

“Good morning, Roxy,” the giantess said. “I see you have brought some guests, they look not to be from around here. I trust you remember the policies for introducing the unready to our world, and the punishments.” The giantess subtly reached for the two giant weapons on either side of her throne: a hammer with a head the size of an oil drum on her left, and a sword as tall as she was on her right.

“Calm down, Romana.” the Archangel insisted. “Rey traveled between worlds under her own power. If that’s not proof of her readiness then there is no such thing. And arriving here on accident, the metanarrative guided her. This was meant to be, for whatever reason yet to be revealed.”

“We’ll see.” Romana leaned back and relaxed.

A large raven flew in from the entrance of the throne room, and perched on the end of the handle of Romana’s hammer. “What do we have here? Are you bringing us another child of yours from another unspeakable escapade?”

“For once this one isn’t mine, I’m pretty sure.”

“I’m sorry, can we go back a step,” Felicia pleaded. “That bird can talk.”

“Humans weren’t the only ones given gifts by our Goddess,” the Archangel explained. “All the most intelligent creatures of Earth were uplifted. This is Muninn, Prince of the Corvans.”

“At your service,” Muninn said, bowing.

“We’re headed for my workshop, would you like to accompany us?” the Archangel asked Muninn.

“I would be honored.” Muninn hopped down from the hammer and glided to the Archangel’s shoulder.

The Archangel led Rey and Felicia deeper into the palace, walking down seemingly endless halls and past lush gardens. Eventually they reached a 20-foot tall door made of a black metal banded by gold. The Archangel pushed through it, and as soon as the door cracked open the sound of hammering suddenly washed over them.

Behind the door was a enormous chamber lit by a dozen furnaces lining the walls, and a dozen holograms that sat throughout the room, lines of light tracing patterns both arcane and technological.

On the back wall was a ring a foot deep made of gold, silver, and black metal, forty feet in diameter, behind which was a blank wall. About twenty feet in front of the ring was a small dias covered in glowing sigils and runes.

At one of the furnaces were two ten-foot-tall humanoid constructs, glowing from within by a white light, hammering away at a large piece of white-hot metal. In front of one of the holograms was a woman, wearing a silver bodysuit and armor and a pair of spectacles, drawing at the hologram, modifying the design it displayed. Next to her was a tall bearded indian man, wearing a close-fitted black robe and an eye patch, with scars poking out from beneath them.

The Archangel glided quickly to their sides and whispered something in their ears, which Rey had no chance of hearing over the sound of hammering, though Felicia did tilt her head as if she were attempting to.

“These are my friends, Eitri and Jayadev,” the Archangel introduced once she was done conspiring with them. “E, J, this is Rey and Felicia, from Astra’s Earth. Rey is friends with Aradia.”

Eitri and Jayadev turned to face their guests and bowed. Rey suddenly realized that she recognized them.

Eitri seemed to notice the look of familiarity on her face. “You did attend the Astra Academy, correct? You must have met our counterparts Ethel Adams and Jake Newark, then.”

“Yeah, I did. I was in their classes.”

Eitri walked around to another hologram, and started typing at a panel of glyphs next to it. “Just to fill you in,” she started, “The Astraverse, as we call it, is a heavily metanarrative reflection of our world, which is why, as you have discovered, it tends to produce individuals identical to individuals in ours, to the point where with only a scant single exception, every single person born on your world has or had a counterpart here.”

“Who is the exception?” Rey asked.

“Astra herself, which is the reason hers is the name we use to identify your world.”

“Wait,” Felicia interrupted. “You said Newark. Isn’t that the last name of Babalon? Are you related?”

Jayadev visibly winced at the mention of the supervillainess. “In both your world and ours, my sister succumbed to the enticing call of wickedness. She is powerful, a scourge that I deeply regret I hadn’t eradicated before it took root.”

The Archangel rested a hand on Jayadev’s shoulder. “That was as much my failure as yours, J. I’m the one who drove her to it.”

“I just fought her in my world,” Rey said. “I don’t blame you at all for not being able to stop her.” Rey lifted up her shirt to expose her deeply bruised ribs. “She’s a caliber all on her own, fast as Hell and hits like a truck.”

“If you fought her and lived you must be quite powerful. What are your powers, if I may ask,” Jayadev said to change the subject.

Rey held out her hand and drew some plasma out of the Heart, forming it into a ball in her palm, before absorbing it into her veins, briefly allowing it to overcharge her, causing her to visibly vibrate, and then she dashed to the other side of the room and back, leaving behind her plasma trail to indicate that she had moved at all.

“Very impressive,” Jayadev said. “Speedsters of your caliber are few and far between. And how about you?” He asked Felicia.

“Oh, I’m not-” Felicia responded. “I’m just a normal human.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Since it’s only fair,” Eitri said. “I have an expanded intellect and enhanced stamina.”

“I,” Muninn said, “have an uplifted mental capacity, and reflexes, and a boost to flying speed, and can mildly telekinese to compensate for my evolutionarily unforgivable lack of fingers.”

“For me,” Jayadev said, “It’s best to show you.” He ripped off his robe, revealing a black bodysuit underneath it, and stretched, cracking his joints. In less than a second, he dramatically transformed, his limbs becoming longer and leaner, his face sharper and elongated, dark black fur spreading across his skin, until he was a large man-shaped wolf, and then continued until he was completely a wolf with all human traits removed. His clothes had all dissolved into his skin, excepting only his eyepatch, which remained covering a still heavily scarred eye. Even as a wolf on all fours, he was still taller than the Archangel.

The Archangel reached over and gave him a scritch around the ears, which he leaned into enthusiastically. “Don’t be afraid of him, he’s really just a big puppy.”

“I can’t wait to talk to Aradia about all of this,” Rey said. “She’s been here too? You said they knew her.”

“That’s the thing…” The Archangel started. “I have brought her here secretly, but because she's not yet technically earned the readiness that our law requires to introduce her to our world, I cannot show her everything I wish I could.”

Rey realized something. “She had a counterpart here, you were close with her. That statue outside the throne room, that was Rad, I recognized her.”

The Archangel nodded. “She was my niece. She died before she was given a chance to flourish as she has in your world. I’m so proud of what she’s accomplished, all of her progress to make your world more like ours. But we miss her dearly here.”

“Making our world like yours… I’ve never seen anything like this place, it seems so perfect. Peaceful.”

“Just wait until you see the gladiatorial combat,” Eitri dryly noted.

“Our world is peaceful because we have no need to fight for resources and manpower. People work if they desire work to do, but if they don’t they live free of cost. Everyone is free to spend day and night doing whatever they wish. All soldiers are volunteers, signing up to protect their world because they are capable of defending it, and are willing to pass on if they were to give their lives in the process. But our world didn’t just come into being fully formed. Countless people bled and died to each take a turn to swing the hammer to help forge it. When Therion, the Demon King, made his first attempt to conquer our world he did so by first slaughtering 99% of humanity with his army of 100,000 fellow Demons.”

“The Demon King sounds like more and more of a nightmare the more and more I hear about him,” Felicia said.

“Therion makes the Joker look like a youtube prankster, and Thanos look like a schoolyard bully. I helped create Astra’s League in your world to give your world even the slightest chance to survive encountering him, and it was only barely enough.”

“Therion was borne to cause strife and suffering, fundamentally: it’s coded into the very structure of his soul,” Eitri said. “So we took the mantle of stopping him and his ilk from plunging all of the omniverse into chaos.”

“Above you used to be Astra’s League, the guardians of your world,” The Archangel said. “Now that you are a member of Astra’s League, above you now is us, Yggdrasil, the guardians of the multiverse. As for what’s above us, well, maybe one day we’ll all find out.” The Archangel walked over to the dias in the back of the room. “You should head home.”

She punched in a series of glyphs into the panel on the dias, and then a portal opened within the ring on the wall, showing the peak of FursTech Tower in Danesville on Rey’s Earth.

Aradia was meditating in her workshop, and when she suddenly heard the hammering in the Archangel’s workshop she was shocked out of her meditation. She ran to the balcony near the portal. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

Rey sheepishly peered around the edge of the portal. “Hey, Rad… Guess what I learned I can do…”

“Oh, fuck me,” Aradia muttered, cradling her face in her hands. “You speed-forced it, didn’t you.”

“That was the exact same thing she said!” Felicia pointed out.

“Rey, you and I need to have a very long talk about your responsibilities and expectations as a member of the League. Thanks for getting her back home, Roxy.”

“You keep a close eye on her, Rad,” The Archangel told Rad. “She’s got even more potential than we first thought.” She turned to Rey and Felicia. “Now, git. I’ve got work to do.”

Rey picked Felicia up and floated through the Portal and landed on Aradia’s balcony. The Archangel pressed the big central button on the dias, and the portal snapped shut

“What were the results of the soul scans,” She demanded as soon as it did.

“Well,” Eitri answered, “for one, Felicia lied about not having powers.”

“I could tell.”

“As for Rey, there’s no doubt about it: she’s a native New Jerusalemite. How does she not know?”

“I’ll be looking into it.”