Mother Earth (Full Story)

Written by HikerAngel

Commissioned by TRM

Caroline placed two fingers on her temple as she gazed down upon the earth that she had been calling home for most of her life. On days like this, she just wanted nothing to do with it! They called her GaiaGirl, though she much preferred GaiaWoman at this point, much as it didn’t roll off the tongue. Sometimes, she wished she didn’t have to keep up the fake identity. If anything, Gaia suited her perfectly fine. It felt far more formal and bespoke for a woman of her caliber.

She ran a hand through her raven hair, tucking a streak of gray behind her ear. She was getting older, several thousand years of it to be exact, but humanity remained the same as ever. Time had been kind to her in many ways. It blessed her with a body most women would still kill for at her age, or even women hundreds of years younger. Comic book superheroes drawn by horny artists would turn to villainy for a form even half as delectable as hers was.

She pushed a wrist-mounted button on her skin-tight, curve-defining supersuit. A hologram projected itself from the location, an image of her earthen family proudly displaying before her. She looked so happy in the image as she held both her loving husband and daughter up with a single bicep flex. But that photo was fifteen years ago and this was now.

Even with a life as fantastic as hers, she wanted nothing to do with it right now. What had happened? Her own stressed, apathy-ridden face reflected in the light of the photo, overlapping the carefree face present within it. Had the populace grown tired of her? No, she remained quite popular as the only superhero defender of earth aside from her daughter.

What she really needed was a break.

Every day was a similar song and dance. Wake up, stop some random villain of the week, return home, repeat. The sheer monotony was enough for Caroline to nearly rip her perfect hair out. Smoking did nothing for her. Alcohol did nothing either. Meth, cocaine, weed, LSD, ketamine, heroine, fentanyl, quaaludes—all nothing. Her body was simply too powerful for any mind-altering substances to affect her in any way.

There was one out she had. One way to vent her frustrations. Yet it was coming up on quite short supply.

Destroying planets.

She loved it. They were like punching bags made of sugar glass to her. She was quite fortunate that seemingly every planet other than Earth was an inhabitable rock floating through space, since anything that science classified as a ‘planet’ brought a surge of dopamine through her buxom body as her sinuous fists reduced them to rubble with singular strikes. Thirty or forty brought to ash every few months or so usually kept her sane, and as long as she did it far, far away from what human telescopes could observe, there wouldn’t be any public unrest about what she was doing.

Because if the public found out, then so did Tammy, her daughter. That was a conversation Caroline would simply never be ready for. She was an inspiration for the up-and-coming hero, a force for good and hope that Caroline did not wish to corrupt with her secret desires. Tammy was a good kid. A bit aloof and distant, but that was to be expected from a nineteen-year-old who liked “vibe music” and wore exclusively worn-out t-shirts and the same oversized hoodie for the last five years.

In the time it took to read that paragraph, she had already decimated a galaxy’s worth of dwarf planets. She felt nothing. She couldn’t even settle for gas planets, which a simple inhale of her powerful—albeit appendix-tier useless—lungs could eviscerate from existence with ease. They had to be physical rocks, ones that seemed just similar enough to earth. Perhaps she got a bit of a rush from the naughtiness of it all, how easily earth could be one of the many planets reduced to atoms under her heel.

She wasn’t in the business of psychoanalyzing herself, she could save that for the shrink. All she knew was that she liked destroying planets, simple as that. And simple it would have remained, had she not been rudely interrupted during her latest bout.

With Caroline’s worry already at a new high as her fresh planet count seemed to dwindle, the last thing she needed was to be blindsided by an explosive device nearly ten times as powerful as a human nuke. She wasn’t even hurt, just confused, as one naturally would if they were a few billion lightyears from the nearest known civilization and were suddenly hit with something undeniably man-made.

This planet, Vathiunus, was occupied.

But as soon as she could raise a sculpted eyebrow at the unexpected opposition, a vaguely humanoid figure flew through the hazy meteorite field and struck her in the chest. At least, it attempted to. If space could allow someone to hear them scream, Caroline certainly would’ve. This alien being had struck her unbreakable abs with an arm-like appendage summoning as much power as they could muster, yet it only appeared to hurt them in turn, their arm contorting at an unnatural angle as they appeared to let off some sort of expression of agony.

Already bored with this interaction, Caroline looked past the green attacking creature to the approximate location they had arrived from, assessing the threat of the situation. Now, her advanced mind was beginning to put everything together. Whoever this was, they clearly hailed from the planet adjacent to the one Caroline had just destroyed, and they probably thought they were next.

Eager to quell this misconception, Caroline grabbed the alien attacker by their unbroken limb, dragging them back to the planet they came from. She touched down on the foreign soil, gently letting go of the space fairing alien and allowing them to regain their balance. Immediately, confused, orange-skinned beings began to exit their homes, unsure about who the new face that had arrived on their planet was.

But then, their faces turned sour as they saw who she had dropped at their doorstep. Caroline managed to raise a sculpted eyebrow this time as the orange beings began to pelt her and the green being with rocks, mud and whatever else they could find at their feet. Her advanced mind quickly put two and two together—these were two different societies of the same alien species who were in some sort of rivalry or war with one another.

“So, what exactly did you do to piss off all of these guys, hmm?” the superwoman asked somewhat rhetorically to her green assailant, not expecting them to actually understand her. “Just my fucking luck, I go to blow up some planets for stress relief and to escape the pointless, petty squabbles of humankind, only to find a alien race that’s no different from them at all!”

Enraged, she picked up a rock by her feet and chucked it at a nearby orange alien. Her return fire was far more devastating than anything they had thrown her way, zipping forward like a hundred-caliber bullet which tore through an orange alien’s head and subsequently the entire house behind him. But the devastation didn’t stop there, as the resulting tsunami of a sonic boom ravaged the nearby city blocks as if a bomb had erupted nearby.

Upon witnessing the damage a mere passive toss of a stone no bigger than her balled fist could invoke, Caroline cupped her hands over her mouth in horror. She didn’t desire to deliver destruction upon these people! Worse—she found herself quietly loving it.

These bigoted animals will never change their minds. She found her brain already attempting to rationalize what she had done. Hell, they’ll probably find earth one day and attempt to conquer it. You’re doing the human race a favor by preemptively dealing with a future threat.

“Ugh! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” she shouted aloud to her eager thoughts, stomping her foot on the ground several times for emphasis. Of course, failing to regulate her strength in this instance only served to further exacerbate her destruction as spiderwebbing cracks tore through the concrete around her. Magma from the mantle of the planet was pushed further up into the crust from the sheer power behind her tiny tantrum, nearby dormant volcanoes erupting and coating several unprotected houses in boiling lava.

Long ago, the Orange aliens had a choice. They could invest in lava-proofing, or spend their resources towards the endless war against the Greens in hope of getting an edge on the competition. It was pretty obvious as to which choice they made. In hindsight, had they known that an unstoppable, jaded mother would’ve touched down upon the surface of their planet and unleash hellfire then maybe they would’ve thought differently about which direction was a priority, but now they simply had to live with their choices as she forced her unconscious will upon them.

With a break in the action—at least for Caroline—the superpowered mother paused to focus her brain. She couldn’t understand a lick of what these beings were saying, but thanks to her advanced mind, she’d figure it out in no time. She recalled several of the existing alien shouts and utterances, quickly piecing them together in her head and seeing which ones matched with familiar phrases of English, working backwards like a sort algorithm—only faster. By the time it took for a missile to have been fired from a tank barrel halfway towards her, she had already figured out every aspect of their language, how it worked, where it originated from and the difference in dialects between the Oranges and the Greens.

On top of all that, she still had enough time to raise her hand and idly swat a missile off of her like it was a fly, sending it spiraling off where it promptly turned a housing block into a crater.

~

Betarex ran down a long corridor as fast as his spindly legs could carry him. He wasn’t much of a runner, that much was evident, but when the High Command spoke of the Green menace, Daicro, touching down on orange soil with a completely unfamiliar associate who proceeded to unleash destructive mayhem upon the populace. Information on specifics was limited, but the message was clear—this was now an all-out war.

As the most qualified defense engineer for the job, Betarex understood the stakes. He was already out the door the second a mention of Daicro crossed his communication waves, there was simply no time to explain anything to his concerned family or even acknowledge that he was leaving for work at such an unusual hour.

While chaos and panic erupted on the streets, the table of elected leaders and appointed representatives sat in total silence. The High Commander was one such leader, his gruff expression remaining as it always had even amidst this strange, newfound crisis, which only made his eight feet of height and broad shoulders that were half that metric all the more imposing.

“You’re late.” That was all the head of the High Command had to say in response to Betarex’s wheezing as he floundered into the round table room.

“Yeah, sorry… the warp device… was down. It’s a good thing… I live close,” he replied between heavy gulps of air.

“Each breath you take is another house totaled by that fiend. Get to your station immediately,” the High Commander once again responded coldly.

“Y-yes sir,” he replied, huffing off to where he was told. Of course, getting there was no easy trek as it was behind more security clearance checkpoints than could be counted on two Orange hands—and they had eight fingers a piece!

“Are you in position?” The High Commander radioed within seconds of Betarex falling face-first into the room from exhaustion. The space was cramped—it had to be. There were more weapons-related buttons in this single location than anywhere else in Orange-claimed territory, maybe even on the whole planet of Vathiunus.

“Y-yes sir,” he managed to respond through dry heaves. “Here and ready to execute justice and such…”

“Good. I will leave the first strike up to your Discretion, Betarex.”

For a moment, The High Commander seemed confident in his subordinate’s abilities. That was quite the unusual response, but the last thing Betarex wanted was to disappoint the man now! He triple-cleaned the fog from his glasses that had built up from his relentless breathing, activating computers and programs alike to prepare a response to the newfound threat.

If they were calling upon his expertise, he figured that negotiations simply were not an option. No, if they needed Betarex, then this was a threat far beyond even Daicro the Green. The advanced maps quickly triangulated the source of the conflict. A supersoldier—only one unlike anything Betarex had ever seen. Her skin was not Green nor Orange, but a strange tanned peach. Then again, it was a color almost too close to Orange for comfort.

Betarex’s reticles were aimed and ready, a beam of concentrated microwaves that could incinerate any solid object it touched was available at his fingertips. Yet he hesitated still. His people still lacked a supersoldier to rival the Green’s Daicro. If he could perhaps only weaken the attacker, well…

“Betarex! What the name of our goddess Vathiunia is the holdup down there!?” The High Commander screamed from the radio, his voice peaking the device’s range with his fury.

“Ack! N-nothing, sir! S-sorry, sir! Just contemplating the usefulness of this ray. It’s never been tried before!” That wasn’t technically a lie, but it also was low on the bespectacled alien’s priority list.

“This being’s decimation isn’t slowing down and it’s standing still in the air! You can’t miss it!” This was true. With the weapon’s long arming time, this specific situation was perfect for a sitting duck target. Not one to dismiss a direct order from the boss, he swallowed his indecision and unleashed one of the more powerful beams of his repertoire.

Unfortunately, Betarex’s hesitation would cost him. Within the second of him pushing the button, Daicro recovered from his Caroline-inflicted injuries and attempted once more to attack his human assailant, only to fly directly into the path of Betarex’s beam. Not even the Green supersoldier’s healing factor could save him from a concentrated heatwave that rivaled a red hypergiant.

With the invisible nature of the ray, Caroline was left briefly confused as she looked over her shoulder at the man charging at her screaming, only for him to explode into harmless ash. She simply shrugged, continuing her onslaught against the fledgling Orange armada that dared to call themselves the protectors of this quadrant.

“Betarex? What the hell happened? Did you destroy the target?”

“U-um… I got one of them?” he replied sheepishly into the radio, foolishly hoping that the faintest of silver linings would spare him from the inevitable verbal thrashing he was about to receive.

~

“Now just what the hell is going on over there? What happened to our hero?” High King Jahrr of Greens spoke, leaning closer and closer to the projected screen until his rear was no longer on the gilded throne he had been sitting upon most of the day.

“Daicro the Invincible has either been disconnected from our reads on his vitals or he did not survive the assault against this invader. Either way, our greatest asset in the war has been compromised,” his majesty's most trusted informant responded, famous for remaining calm and stoic during moments of great apprehension in Green society.

“No! No, no, no! Get General Odozer to drop everything he’s fucking doing and search for Daicro!” the High King demanded, his volume raising an octave with every other word.

“B-but my liege! Odozer’s mission to secure the battle plans is currently underway!” the informant sputtered, breaking his calm at the sound of such an absurd demand. “It could compromise his mission if he were to be diverted!”

“The potential of the Oranges knowing Daicro’s sole weakness won’t matter if he’s not even alive for it to be exploited!” another less-trusted informant added, in agreement with the king’s position.

“I care not for the reasons you offer, I want Odozer’s men on the scene now! They have instant GPS and transcriptions for documentation purposes, and I want those elements focused on this new threat immediately!”

“Y-yes, my liege!” both informants spoke in tandem, rushing to the command center to bark orders at those beneath them, so that those Greens may bark orders at the already-stressed General Odozer who was already on the most stressful stealth mission of his life.

“General, the High King has ordered that you shift your focus to the current battle unfolding in the leftmost quadrant of Saomas,” came a staticky voice from Odozer’s satchel radio.

“What!? Are you insane? It’s anarchy out there! There’s fucking volcanoes exploding and shit!” he shouted back into the radio, his mouth so close to the receiver he looked like he was ready to swallow it.

“This is an order directly from the High King,” the informant reminded the general. “Obey or you and your men will be branded traitors and exiled from Green society should you ttempt to return.”

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Odozer knew he had no choice but to walk directly into hell. His squad took some stern convincing, but pretty soon he was leading ten of the most specialized men into a conflict that not even a superhero could win. Rubble and Orange bodies littered the decimated city-turned-battlefield, with powerful handprints and shoeprints that were embedded hyper-firmly into destroyed tanks and troop carriers as if they were little more than wet concrete left to dry without supervision to stop miscreants.

“What kind of horrifying beast could bring such powerful destruction to devices like these?” one of Odozer’s men pondered, horrified. If only he could’ve known that this same horrifying beast loved baking cookies on the weekends for her local firefighter station and cried at soap opera drama.

The supposedly fearless men cowered behind whatever cover they could find as Caroline zipped by, picking off whatever sparse Orange infantry still existed within the current wave. More were on the horizon, but a brief glimpse would be all Odozer and his men would get as twin beams of heat tore through the first row of approaching tanks. A chain of explosions erupting like fireworks bathed three square kilometers in a haunting orange.

“Men, assume semicircle formation!” Odozer commanded, somehow breaking himself out of shock long enough to voice an order. “Surround her, search the area for Daicro and fire on my signal when I order it.” Within a few minutes, each member of the Green specialized invasion forces was in position, but Odozer didn't give the signal to attack. Amidst the chaos, he saw opportunity.

“General, what the hell are you doing?” radioed in one of his higher ups, unsure why they hadn’t detected his order for troops and why his GPS coordinates were off-position.

“Something that could shift the tides of the Green-Orange war in our favor forever!” was all Odozer responded with, continuing to ascend the lofty rubble until he finally reached an optimal vantage point.

“Hey! Hey you!” The general shouted aloud to the woman flying around in the air, laying waste to the surrounding area. Her supersonic hearing would’ve detected him at any altitude, but his boldness in calling to her from a high-up vantage point intrigued her enough to draw in her attention, whether intentionally or not. She cautiously approached the man with a slow float, shrugging off mortar shell after mortar shell that struck her invincible form. Sure, she was making herself an easier target by not remaining mobile. But a target could be as easy as it wanted to be if a tactical nuke could hit a bullseye on it without leaving as much as a bullet hole.

“General, is it? Is it customary for people of your culture to get the attention of your superheroes in such strange ways? You do understand you’re in a warzone, correct?”

Odozer was amazed that she remained steady in her questioning while being peppered with bullets. “U-um, well, I-I was just wondering, u-um…”

“Surely you can talk faster than that,” she then paused for a brief moment to jut her hand out and catch a warhead that would’ve struck Odozer dead on. She tossed it over her shoulder, casually returning the explosive device to its sender. “As you can see, active combat is still occurring all around you and yet you’ve still failed to meaningfully convey your point.”

“V-very well, I’ll keep it brief! It seems we have a common enemy here in the Orange ones. Perhaps, with our combined forces, We’ll be able to secure an end to this pointless war. B-because that’s what this aggression is all about, right? You see this conflict as pointless! And that makes you angry!” Ideally, General Odozer would’ve taken a more roundabout path to say the same thing, but subtlety couldn’t last when the unstoppable force of nature before him demanded swiftness in his speech.

“Ah, so that’s your angle here?”

“Y-yes it is!”

“Your only angle?” She questioned, raising a single, unconvinced eyebrow.

Odozer nearly soiled himself with fear. “Y-yes!”

“Then tell me, why do your men aim their guns at me from vantage points they think I cannot detect?”

She found a smile come to her lips as she detected his heart rate increase tenfold. A part of Caroline felt bad for putting this man through easily the most stressful day of his whole career, but there was something so insanely satisfying about withholding knowledge that absolutely mortified her opponents when she revealed it. She recalled a minor villain back on Earth that straight-up had a heart attack and died once she revealed that the weakness to osmium he was so convinced she had—and had been lying about having for several years before that—turned out to have no effect on her. Sure, it had been a cruel bit of deception on her part, but… well, that guy totally deserved it! He was evil! And all these aliens of this planet, they’re clearly just as if not more evil!

“So, let me propose a new offer, one that will actually put an end to this pointless war for good,” Caroline began, her eyes igniting with fiery infernos as the temperature of her irises rose into the quadruple digits. “I destroy every self-serving general who thinks they’re going to be the one to end it in victory.”

All of the men ready to fire on Odozer’s command no longer waited for a cue, understanding that their General’s life could be compromised. The expert marksmen all aimed perfectly and would’ve hit a dead-on headshot, however the speed of sound was simply too slow for Caroline. She could’ve simply stood there and took every shot to the face without worry, but instead she pivoted ever-so-slightly backwards and up. Using her advanced knowledge of mathematical theories—she took her job as a substitute teacher very seriously whenever the PTA needed one during her daughter’s tenure in school—she angled her breasts in such a way through the perfect amount of air inflating her lungs that each bullet struck her mighty bosom, only for the supple flesh to ricochet every piece of propelled lead back to whence they came. In an instant, ten of the most highly-trained specialist units were reduced to one, Caroline’s super-hearing detecting that one of the bullets had missed a lethal entry point, judging by the sounds of agonizing pain instead of no sound at all.

“Hmm, my math must’ve been slightly off,” Caroline admitted, leaving Odozer behind as she quickly zipped over to inspect the anomaly.

 The man was attempting to crawl away, no matter how futile the attempt ultimately was. Caroline casually landed where he once stood, casually traipsing alongside the red line of blood that streaked along the rubble.

“Huh, wow. That’s pretty interesting,” she remarked, using her x-ray vision to peer into the man’s body. “You’ve got an extra buildup of a cartilage-like substance in your neck, which just saved your life. More accurately, it’s postponing your inevitable death. Maybe that’s what you deserve, alien scum. You fight these endless wars, for what?”

At a certain level, she knew her justifications were flimsy at best, but that was all they needed to be. She knew her powers bestowed upon her a great responsibility, at that it was her responsibility to deliver justice onto those who warred endlessly. Why couldn’t she also have a little fun learning about how the internal workings of these clearly inferior, warmongering beings operated?

She bent down, ready to dissect the man like a frog in a middle school classroom.

“Oh, mom, there you are,” broke a vocal-fried girly voice through the chaos as if it were simply layered atop reality itself. “Dad’s been trying to get a hold of you for, like, an hour or so.”

Caroline’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. She’d recognize that boredom-ridden tone anywhere, the muffled sounds of late 2000’s pop hits accompanying its own carelessness and general annoyance.

Tammy was here.

The superpowered mother pivoted and froze in place like a thief in a spotlight, her range of motion limited to her eyes as they followed her daughter’s descent down to the planet’s surface. The Orange alien who was still bleeding out noticed how terrified the terrorizing tyrant of a so-called superhero appeared and smiled weakly, believing that vengeance would now be upon her.

If anyone could stop this rampaging mother, it would be her own daughter. Tammy was quite the protégée, already meeting her mother’s seemingly endless strength and prowess by the meager age of eighteen. Her father’s human genes hadn’t slowed her down one bit, though it gave her a potential edge that Caroline feared. While the all-powerful mother was able to disconnect herself from the atrocities she committed—even if she wasn’t consciously aware that she had been engaging in the behavior—she figured that her daughter would not share in such mental doublethink.

Surely, the humanity that Tammy’s father imbued upon her at an early age would leave her appalled by what she was witnessing. That her own mother would be so callous as to massacre those no different and no less deserving of life than her father, her human friends or even her boyfriend.

“Tam! Um, it’s… not what it looks like!” Caroline confessed unconvincingly, her body soaked in alien viscera from head to toe.

“What isn’t? Look mom, I get it. Really, I do. This place is pissing you off. Hell, this place is pissing me off! There’s, like, no wifi or 5G out here! How the hell am I supposed to listen to Spotify here? This place totally sucks!” To emphasize her anger, she picked up a nearby tank and tossed it into orbit, leaving the Orange soldiers within the tank to freeze to death if burning up when leaving the atmosphere didn’t somehow do them in. But Tammy was quick to calm herself after that. “Oh well, at least I have a few tracks downloaded on the app itself. I might just go crazy otherwise!”

Or, she could somehow manage to surpass her own mother in moral bankruptcy.

Tammy continued to scroll through her phone as strikes from the powerful machines bounced harmlessly off her head. While they were optimized enough to recognize and aim for the brain, they were devastatingly unoptimized to recognize the impervious layer of everything that surrounded the supergirl’s brain. Hundreds of difficult-to-craft seeker missiles, all wasted on a girl whose Kevlar-lined headphones blasted Green Day atop of the horrifying noises of an all-out war.

“Tam, come here, check out the cool anatomy of these beings!” Caroline beamed with excitement, lodging her hand into the poor Orange alien before her—instantly killing the man—as she inspected the makeup of his corpse. Trying to relate to her daughter could be tough, but she always made the effort whenever possible.

“Ugh, whatever. Just hurry up and do your business on this planet so I can get back home! Brad is totally cheating on me with my best friend and the longer I have no signal the longer I, like, can’t tell him that he’s a fucking dead man when I get back to earth.”

“Now, dear, you’re not actually going to kill him, are you?” Caroline asked with her usual motherly worry as she ripped a supermassive statue out of the ground and tossed it at a nearby platoon of now-retreating tanks and troop carriers.

“No! I’m not gonna kill him. God, mom, not everything I say is so literal!” Her eyes heated up with inflamed passion—which was not a metaphor. Whatever the skyscraper-sized statue somehow missed, a barrage of laser vision from Tammy quickly cleaned up. Anyone foolish enough to fight or retreat had been annihilated from the battlefield in an instant—though somehow General Odozer was among the one percent of one percent that survived the onslaught.

“Oh, fuck this, fuck this, fuck this!” Odozer shouted as he squirmed his way out of pounds of falling rubble. At any moment, he was certain he would be flattened by the various institutions he had sworn to destroy. It was a miracle that amongst the chaos, he was somehow able to not only survive relatively unscathed, but he was able to remain on track and not get turned around.

If the king killed him for fleeing his post and returning home, so be it. As far as he was concerned, his mission was complete. Sure, Daicro was dead, a tragic loss to be sure, but there wasn’t even a central Orange city for the Greens to attack anymore. Their rivals were now fledgling, and a full-frontal assault once the supergirls left Vathiunus would secure his people’s victory once and for all. 

Perhaps… Yes, perhaps… there was still a light at the end of the tunnel for him.

~

“Eheheheh, uh, I-I guess I could’ve aimed that better…”

To say Betarex was sheepish was an understatement—he might as well have been a whole flock. He couldn’t see the High Commander’s face over the communications channel, but he could feel his eyes burning into Betarex’s very soul.

“Now there are two superbeings wreaking havoc and our most powerful ranged weapon is recharging energy. Your punishment will be severe after this conflict is over. For now, ensure that our two adversaries are dissuaded from attacking these lands, annihilate them if you have to!”

“Y-yes sir!”

Betarex’s mind was in a flurry as his eyes darted this way and that among the array of buttons and levers. A battlefield as cluttered and complex as this one belied the use of such an alternative concentrated beam of energy. Too many obstacles complicated everything.

Then again, he could release it.

He shuddered at the thought. It had taken the might of his ancestors to contain it, and if it was unleashed he might not be able to reseal it should it succeed in defeating the Orange’s latest and greatest oppositional force. Betarex didn’t have much of a choice. Sure, it would probably unleash more property damage through its sheer rage at being contained for such a lengthy time, but at this point there wasn’t much property left to damage.

With the deliberation mulled over in his mind, he unlocked a specialized box with a key dangling from his neck and pulled the lever behind it.

~

A rumbling was heard at the city limits, attracting the attention of the two supergirls. If there were any survivors left to bear witness to the planet's surface concaving and swallowing everything around it whole, they would run towards the invading women and beg for refuge. From the great depression arose a beast most foul, one whose thunderous roars wilted plants and browned the air like an unstoppable plague.

Grödikrovken.

Forged from the sun gods, it was designed to be Vathiunus’ reckoning. Its form writhed with hydrogenic heat, plasmic in nature as it left singing footprints in its wake. Gazing upon it was much like starting directly into the sun itself, only no tinted glass could spare the inevitable fate of one’s eyes. The gods had warned that endless warfare between the Greens and the Oranges would result in them sending a messenger of destruction, but the ancestors of the Orange warlords managed to trap it within a deep-freeze containment chamber miles below the surface, viewing it instead as a gift from the gods to unleash upon the Greens when the time was right.

Grödikrovken stood taller than most. Much, much taller. If there were still skyscrapers to compare to its massiveness, the beast would surpass even those. Caroline and Tammy weren’t the targets of Grödikrovken’s wrath and went largely ignored as it began to act out divine vengeance, but Tammy certainly didn’t see it that way.

“Great, now there’s some big, ugly beast trying to one-up your destruction, mom! That’s not fair!” Tammy lamented. “That’s like, not fair to your venting process and all that.”

“Well, dear, would it make you feel better if we defeated it together, as a family?”

“Meh, not really. I think we should just leave.”

And so, the two superbeings began to ascend, ready to leave the Oranges to their self-inflicted fate. But just as they were approaching the stratosphere, Grödikrovken unleashed a torrent of lightning and hellfire from the skies. That would prove to be a larger blunder on its part than getting captured for thousands of years.

“Mooooooom!” Tammy whined like a petulant child. “This asshole ruined my favorite pair of sandals!'' Sure enough, while the beastly opponent had failed to actually hurt the bored daughter, a stray, city-leveling firestorm had singed a mere millimeter of her big toe sandal strap, the fabric still connected by a thread.

Carol’s face furrowed into a scowl. “No piece-of-shit monster hurts my daughter.”

Grödikrovken suddenly found a great deal of tension placed upon its torso as Caroline practically teleported before the beast, wailing on it with devastating punch after devastating punch. The shockwaves alone proved more devastating than the being’s entire apocalyptic output so far, ruining all that remained of the once-sprawling Orange city. To the world-ending beast’s credit, it was able to take several of Caroline’s punches without its particles immediately being scattered across the galaxy. Plasma was something the superheroine had little experience fighting against as it wasn’t something she could simply strike out of existence. She could offer some resistance to it, but the gaseous nature of its form would not budge in any way that mattered.

Witnessing her mother struggling on her behalf, Tammy flew down to join her. She also began wailing on Grödikrovken with kicks, believing Caroline’s method of attack was flawed due to the particular limb in use. The beast began to swipe at the supergirls, but like a human swatting at a fly with just their hands, it wasn’t particularly effective.

As Caroline continued her rather ineffectual onslaught, her mind began to feel clouded with a strange fog. She wasn’t sure what was bringing about such a potent cloud, but she was beginning to worry that her proximity to this beast of unfathomable origin was psychologically harming her in some sort of way. She looked around for Tammy and spotted her by Grödikrovken’s head, looking down at her hands with a nervous, borderline horrified expression.

“Moooooooom! My hands are shaking! W-why are they shaking!?”

“I don’t… ugh… know. My head feels so… strange.”

Grödikrovken then, rather unexpectedly, began to laugh. It was a deep, guttural laugh that shook the earth and frightened the heavens. “Fools. You may possess unimaginable power, but no amount of mortal enhancements can stop me. I am this planet’s doom, not you! The gods crafted me from the combined energy of every star in this galaxy to ensure that this conflict would finally see its conclusion as deserved, buried under ash.”

At that moment, it all clicked for Caroline. “Ah, so that’s why my head is feeling clouded!”

“Yes indeed, it is because your meager form cannot comprehend my unwavering power,” the beast responded.

“Nope. It’s because my powers come from the sun and you’re composed of about 200 sextillion of them!”

“What’s this now!?” spoke the incomprehensible beast about a revelation beyond even its own comprehension.

“Usually, it would take me about three hundred thousand more years of exposing myself to sunlight in order to unlock another power, but it seems you’ve expedited the process!”

With the strange feeling in her head now understood, Caroline had no trouble embracing its new horizons. The fog was not a limitation of her own mind, but instead its attempts to expand outwards into the world around it, manipulating physics to its whims. She now had telekinesis.

Using her hands to guide her awakened mind, she thrust them forward as if commanding a grand orchestra. Grödikrovken found its body solidifying in place, an invisible force greater than its own clamping down on every inch of its brighter-than-bright form. The beast roared uselessly as it attempted to escape to no avail, contained within a hold of its own creation.

“Woah! Hey, no fair! You got telekinesis!? How!? Why didn’t I!?” Tammy lamented like a spoiled child.

“Oh dear, I’m sorry,” Caroline apologized sweetly, though the thought of her rambunctious daughter with even more overwhelming power did frighten her a little. “Telekinesis in our family skips a generation. But don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get your own unique powers from accepting the gifts of the sun’s exposure! Try channeling that feeling within your hands and see if that leads to anything!”

“Hmm, accepting the gifts of…” she began, returning her gaze to her shaking hands, this time with a willingness to feel it out and let her arms guide themselves to their own conclusion. Tammy's hands centered around her chest, her fingers closing as if gripping something pole-like that required a sturdy hold to wield. From a splitting crack of pure light formed a stellar blade, inching from the crack like rising vines as it met Tammy’s hands. With a mighty jerk, she removed the sword from the crack as if it were King Arthur’s own, holding it up to the heavens for all to witness.

“Holy shit! I get a freakin’ sword!” Tammy exclaimed with probably the most amount of excitement she’d ever uttered in her life.

“Yeah, that… also skips a generation in our family,” Caroline deadpanned, not as satisfied with that revelation as her own.

Tammy giggled as she swung the sword around like an excitable child on Christmas. The beast they were fighting was less than enthused, however.

“Release me this instant!” Grödikrovken commanded, its voice appearing less authoritative as it merely made the clouds grow dark and puppies cry. “The Sun Gods will smite you for this! They will send beasts far greater than me for defying them!”

“Well, they’ll have to think of something other than sun beings to send our way, unless they want to make us more powerful,” Caroline remarked with a bit of snark, finding herself very much enjoying herself.

“Oooooh! Fucking owned!” Tammy added, acting as an adorable hypewoman for her mother.

“Alright then, let’s finish this,” Caroline asserted, spreading her outstretched arms further apart as she literally pulled Grödikrovken in two. The beast attempted to reform itself, but its finite plasma  “Ready, Tam-Tam?”

“Ready!” the daughter said, lifting her sword up high, ready to bring down the pain at a moment’s notice.

“Now!” Caroline yelled, giving a particularly powerful tug to both halves of Grödikrovken, exposing a dark, foreboding spherical core within. Before its plasma could reform properly, Tammy unleashed a powerful downward slice with her lightbringer, perfectly slicing the core in two. It erupted into a chaotic miasma of unknown energy, dissipating into the mortal aether. The blinding brights of plasma were extinguished into dull yellows and oranges as Caroline rescinded her telekinesis from the beast.

“Nooooooo! Y-you fools! I… will… return…” Grödikrovken spoke as its body disintegrated into dust. While his declaration was ominous, the supergirls would’ve graciously accepted a reunion with a being who had so considerately granted them powers as these.

The apocalypse had been averted, but there was no one left to celebrate it.

~

“Betarex! If you don’t respond this instant, it’s a mutiny!”

The bespectacled Orange alien shot to attention, the shock of the situation so overwhelming that he had nearly missed the last of three radio-ins that the High Commander issued.

“Ack! S-sorry sir! I’m here! I’m here!” He shouted into the receiver propped up with a trembling hand, unable to take his eyes off of the telescopic view of the two supergirls that remained amongst the terraformed earth.

“You better be! We need an answer to this problem and we need it now!”

“W-well, we’re in luck!” Betarex claimed, quickly activating a few knobs on the control panel before him. “The laser’s recharged, and there isn’t exactly anything in the way of our adversaries anymore.”

“Temper your ambition, Betarex. So far, everything we’ve thrown at them has either done nothing or empowered them further. This will be our last chance to salvage what remains of Orange society.”

“I-I wouldn’t worry, sir! The Cell Breaker v3 is certain to work! It attacks the contents of every individual cell, multiplying them until they burst! It uses a process of—“

“Shut up and aim the damn thing, Betarex,” the High Command put bluntly.

“Um. Y-yes sir.”

~

Tammy looked with a forlorn expression at her new sword once the commotion had calmed. She knew what a new toy like this meant—it had happened before with the phone and the car and the puppy. She wasn’t “responsible enough” to handle her wants, according to her mother. 

Being born with strength rivaled only by her mother led to a life of complexities. She couldn’t play rough with the other kids, there was no chance in hell that her mother would let her keep a weapon like this for any recreational use.

“Dear, if you’re worried that I won’t let you keep the sword, don’t be,” Caroline piped up. Tammy looked over, only to meet the warm, supportive gaze of her mother. “With what you’ve shown me today, you’re more than responsible enough to wield such power without any supervision. You’ve been an adult for almost a whole year, I suppose it’s time I gave you some sort of independence.”

That was mom-code-speak for “don’t tell your father what happened here between the two of us and I’ll let these things slide.” Caroline couldn’t be sure whether or not Tammy picked up on that cue, but her daughter beamed with excitement regardless.

“Aww, thanks mom! You’re the best!” Tammy embraced Caroline, bringing the taller woman into a loving hug. Affection like this was the one time neither super had to hold back on their strength, as their impervious bodies could withstand as much stress as they could dish. The same could not be said for the miles of ground around them, cracking like arid earth from the sonic boom unleashed upon their embrace. The Green kingdom across the ocean suddenly experienced a quake unrivaled in its magnitude, many of their lesser foundations crumbling from the aftershocks that lasted long after the hug concluded.

“Let’s go home, Tam-Tam. I think mommy feels a lot better after unleashing some stress with her daughter. I’m pretty sure your father will be—”

“FIRE NOW!” the High Commander ordered, seizing the opportunity as their two assailants were both in range of a single blast from the cannon.

The powerful beam of experimental magic successfully engulfed the two women, unknown energy coursing through their atoms as they blinked a few times in confusion. The entire round table of High Oranges watched with bated breath, hoping that the cellular explosion would occur. The next five seconds felt like hours as nothing seemed to change within the women. Then, right as all hope seemed to be lost, Caroline and Tammy began screaming wildly—only this was not the sort of screaming that would be conducive to cell eruption. They dropped their embrace and fell to their knees, their bodies convulsing as they were brought to pleasurable orgasm after orgasm.

“O-oh dear, oh my,” Caroline moaned, attempting to contain herself as her daughter was right next to her.

Tammy was not so subtle in her enjoyment. “F-fuck, this is easily better that Tom, Greg and Jerome all put together! I need to get blasted by random death rays more often!”

“Th-that’s inappropriate, honey,” Caroline chastised with a sweetness only a mother could sell as she too was subjected to pleasure far superior to anything her husband could offer her.

“Stellar job, Betarex,” the High Commander spoke, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “You just gave our adversaries the world’s most expensive orgasm.”

But the High Council was about to wish that an orgasm was the only side effect, as once the pleasure began to subside and the two women returned to their feet…

…Caroline and Tammy began to grow.

At first, it was simply a few inches added to their already lengthy legs, upgrading them from supermodel beauty to proper supermodel gorgeousness. The rest of their bodies were quick to catch up, adding luxurious height exponentially as centimeters quickly became meters which became kilometers. The horizon line became a suggestion to them as all remaining members of the Green/Orange conflict bore witness to the uncontested mediators of the formerly endless war. With their heads brushing the stratosphere, the two women looked down upon the truly puny masses with confused, then later devious, smiles.

“BETAREX, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST DO!?” The high commander bellowed, though no matter how frightening he sounded, it was nothing compared to the looming threat of two supermassive supergirls.

“W-well I think I see where the error might’ve been, sir… the device is supposed to expand their cells until they pop, but I think their cells are simply too tough for a surge in size to do much at all except, well, um… give them a surge in size.”

“YOU FUCKING THINK SO!? BETAREX YOU FUCKING IDIOT, YOU JUST DOOMED US ALL—”

Before the high commander could finish his scathing critique, he and every other member of the orange military cabinet were flattened underneath a mile-wide sandal as it leveled the entire other city, unhooked from Tammy’s equally gargantuan foot.

“Since you assholes totally ruined my sandal, you can keep it!” The superpowered college girl shouted, the sheer energy in her voice generating a sonic boom which decimated all aircraft in lower orbit. “Ugh, so frustrating. I can’t even visit a new place without ruining my fit! Talk about a hostile universe!”

“That’s why you need a super suit like mine, dear,” Caroline suggested, flexing her muscular arms and showing how the spandex contorted to the peaks and valleys of her biceps flawlessly. If Vathiunus were to somehow survive the sheer existence of the mother and daughter duo, the weather on it would be irreparably ruined beyond belief as the shockwave from Caroline’s flex cast the cloud layer into chaos. “It’s about as durable as I am. I’ll have to order one for you from the same designer who did mine.”

“Um, like, if we can even see him that is,” Tammy complained, her new size feeling like a burden to her teen sensibilities as she postulated if it was permanent. “How am I supposed to spot a tiny little human with my head bumping satellites?”

Caroline saw this as the perfect opportunity for a lesson, albeit one she never thought she’d propose in such a state. This was a lot for her, but she needed to remain calm for her daughter’s sake. “Well, dear, we have advanced sight, we can pick out anyone from a crowd no matter the size. For example…”

She twirled her skyscraper-sized finger, twinkles of telekinesis glistening around it as her all-encompassing mind zeroed in on an unfortunate soul who could never quite catch a break. Odozer, who had constructed a makeshift raft and was now crossing the great ocean that separated the two kingdoms, refused to look back at the chaos behind him. But he didn’t have to, it would come to him. He suddenly found himself scooped up high into the air, like falling in reverse. The shrinking land that he craved dearly became obscured by several layers of clouds, leaving him with little to look at beyond a supermassive eye that stared back.

“Ah, well, if it isn’t the general who offered me a peace treaty. I suppose that suggestion’s off the table now?” Caroline spoke. Her impenetrable barrier of telekinesis provided the only sanctuary from her destructive voice for Odozer and even then he found his ears ready to bleed.

It took a moment for the puny general to construct a response, as one would when face-to-face with a goddess. Interacting with her the first time was frightening enough, but now there were two of them and they were also both big enough to erase every atom of his with a fast enough blink.

“W-w-w-well, I-I didn’t… I… I or any other member of the Green kingdom have no quarrel with you. You just say the word and we’ll do whatever you ask! W-we’ll become your personal slaves! Whatever you desire!”

An opportunistic smile grew upon Tammy’s face, but Caroline was quick to shoot it down.

“Mmm. Let your people know that GaiaGirl—ugh, why did I let myself pick that name all those years ago,” she interrupted herself, pinching the bridge of her tired eyes with two fingers, a motion that ruined the connection of all satellites in orbit. “Let your people know that we will let them be, so long as they promise to usher in a new age of peace or something like that.”

Caroline didn’t really care that much. She would’ve probably destroyed this whole planet 15 minutes ago if she wasn’t trying to set a good example for her daughter.

“Y-yes! I-I would be happy to relay that information to my king! P-plus, you’re welcome to check in on us whenever you want to ensure that we’re doing what you ask of us!”

The super mother acted as if she was mulling the thought over in her head, adding unnecessary tension to the situation. She then shrugged her shoulders.

“Yeah, sure. I guess we’ll call it there. Works for me. What say you, Tammy?”

“Whatever gets us off this planet quicker so I can totally show up Brad with my epic sword.”

“I think that’s a yes, then.”

High King Jahrr’s jaw remained ajar as he and every member of his kingdom gazed helplessly at the two giantesses which graced their skylines. Their presence blocked out the setting sun, casting the domain in darkness. He debated whether or not to make a play that would alert their attention, since outside of passing glances, the supermassive women didn’t seem to care about his kingdom all too much. Perhaps they just wished to destroy the Oranges and move on with their day.

But then, the king’s radio burst with a strange static. He expected to hear Odozer’s voice, but instead, High King Jarr heard a voice most unexpected—his own.

“Salutations, Greens of Vathinius-249 and congratulations! You have managed to vanquish your adversaries in remarkable time! That qualifies you as a member of the interdimensional society of Greens! You have access to our firepower and vast fleets, as well as all of the multiverse at your disposal!”

“Wh-huh!?”

Across the pond from where Caroline and Tammy stood erupted a tear in timespace itself, and from it emerged a titanic armada of battleships each rivaling the size of the Green Kingdom. They charged out of the wormhole with organized formations evident of a long and storied collaboration between fellow Greens, ready to unite against what they believed to be a common enemy.

“Don’t worry, fellow king. We’ll take it from here.”

The two super-giantesses watched the swarm of ships with confusion as they unleashed what was supposed to be a devastating assault upon their monolithic forms.

“Ah, so it was just an opportunity to get our guards down so we’d be open for attack then, huh?” Caroline remarked, her plush lips curling into a devious smile. She all but ignored the multiversal assault on her hypersized being, as even the powerful armada’s energy canons designed to destroy gods could not budge her or even her offspring.

The high-powered lasers did little more than stain the clothing of the two women, and the capital ship was immediately destroyed by a curious poke from Tammy, but the damage had been done. A twitch of Caroline’s eyebrow and all the remaining ships telekinetically imploded into themselves, her mind effortlessly able to hone in and detonate crucial subsystems that allowed the futuristic machines to function. The ocean below quickly became a watery grave for any ship foolish enough to attack her. In an instant, an entire multiverse-sa

“N-no! This—this whole thing is completely unrelated! I swear!” Odozer blurted out, desperate to save face by any means necessary. “I-I don’t even know who these assholes a—”

Tammy didn’t wait to hear his excuse, squishing him between two of her fingers like a particularly tiny bug.

“Well mom? I guess they left us no choice then, huh?” the college-aged blonde remarked, looking down at the planet’s surface below with a smile.

“Yes dear, I suppose you’re correct. These poor bastards had a chance at redemption and they didn’t take it. It would make our word mean very little if we don’t stick to it now!”

High King Jarr and the rest of the kingdom found the light returning faintly, though it was not a cause for celebration. An ominous red washed over the entire domain as the two pairs of super giantesses' eyes directed their attention back towards the kingdom and lit up their eyes with heat vision that could terraform a landscape even before the two women had been enhanced to almost six thousand times their original heights.

They unleashed a torrent of supermassive, superheated supervision that made Grödikrovken’s divine hellfire look like a damp lantern. In an instant, the entire Green Kingdom was wiped clean off the map, alongside the entire half of the planet that existed around it.

With Vathiunus reduced to scattered meteorites, the Orange-Green conflict had been resolved once and for all.

~

“So that was it then? You two just wandered around the cosmos for an hour until you felt better?” Caroline’s husband spoke, lovingly brushing his wife’s hair as he often did after a shower. Her hair felt… thicker? More voluminous? In fact, her face in general felt slightly off, as if there was more surface area on it than he remembered.

Caroline silently hoped that he had forgotten her exact height as she had once she figured out how to shrink herself and Tammy back to a height that wouldn’t freak out the people of Earth.

“Yep, that’s the gist of it, dear,” Caroline replied with a soft moan, loving the head-scritches she was receiving that her husband might as well have been famous for.

“I mean, wow. I haven’t seen you this relaxed in, well… ever! It’s like all those worries you had just evaporated away.”

“Mmm, heh, those weren’t the only things that evaporated away,” Caroline murmured drunkenly under her breath.

“What was that, dear?”

“Nothing.”

“Anyways, do you wanna call Tammy over? You’ve got that frequency down that only she can hear. Dinner’s only going to remain hot for so much longer!”

“Maaaybe just a few more minutes of you massaging me and I’ll call her over. I feel like she’s always listening in on us whenever she’s home, regardless if she can help it or not,” she adjusted the towel on her naked body, letting a tantalizing taste of her bountiful bosom slip into view.

“True, this does feel like the one time we’re actually, properly alone,” her husband remarked with an erotically-charged chuckle. He began to scratch and grope lower on her body, prompting equally husky giggles from Caroline as the two prepared to embrace.

“I FUCKING KNEW IT, YOU BASTARD!” suddenly screamed an all-too-familiar voice, echoing from miles away. “I FUCKING KNEW YOU WERE CHEATING ON ME WITH VANESSA! YOU’RE SOOOO FUCKING DEAD!”

In an instant, Caroline had swapped into her superhero garb, ready to zip out the door and confront her daughter. But she wouldn’t have to leave the driveway to establish a sightline, as she witnessed her rapidly-growing daughter ascending well into the cloud layer, wielding the blade of light that was also expanding alongside her.

She raised her sword up high, ready to strike it into the earth. People were panicking, cars were crashing into one another and air raid sirens were blaring. Caroline just seemed unphased.

“THIS IS WHAT YOU GET BRAD, YOU UNGRATEFUL ASSHOLE!” she brought the sword down, instantly erasing every inch of the surrounding tri-state area into seared earth.

Her husband fainted on the spot at the sight of their daughter’s destruction. Caroline just sighed.

Was it too late for another break already?