Consensus, Day 3-5: More.

One, two, three. There were three cars left that needed to leave. All easily visible within the range of Mabel’s cameras. Good. She didn’t have to waste time double-checking to make sure every person had left the parking lot before she could leave. Not like anything was waiting for her at home other than the same crossword puzzle, however.

Mable allowed a sigh to pass through her perfectly plush lips. Effortlessly beautiful and the ability to bend reality to her whims—and yet she couldn’t care less. The powers of boundless creativity bestowed upon the most stalwart mind, left to rot within the cobwebbed carafe of a woman who had already confined herself to a life of malaise.

The vibrations of a car petered out as it came to a stop before her booth. She didn’t even look up from her paper as reality altered itself to register the ticket as stamped, much to the confusion of the person in the car. Three.

Fifteen minutes passed with only the ambiance of a near-empty car park to accompany her. Just the way she liked it. While she had saved every crossword puzzle she had ever attempted—and usually did not complete—since she was in her twenties, Mabel found herself nearly running out of her archive stack as her mind filled in trivia question after trivia question with ease. Not only was her mind becoming sharper, but reality was now rewriting several of the questions to better fit her knowledge pool.

The second car left without a hitch. Two.

The final car however, did not leave without fanfare. The office worker, upon catching a glimpse of the shapely young brunette, replaced every other thought in his head with a dedicated singular desire.

“Oh please! Toll booth lady! I don’t know your name but I’ve been helplessly enamored with you since two days ago!” He spoke, rolling down the window before realizing that was not enough and exiting the car entirely. “Please, let me offer you a night you won’t forget! I wish to make you my—”

The man attempted to will the end of his proposition as effortlessly as it had taken the prior 40 years of his life to string a sentence together—and yet he could not. Mabel was annoyed by the words exiting his mouth, so she simply made it so nothing could ever exit his mouth again. Of course, she forgot to account for air, but the consequences of doing so phased her even less.

The man scrambled for anything that could save him, even though he was definitely hopeless. His hands banged on her window, which she wanted nothing to do with as the noise annoyed her.

Now, the man found his hands frozen in place, unable to move as if bound by invisible chains in all directions. Stuck in suspended motion and slowly suffocating to death, the man had no choice but to pray that whatever afterlife he may be sent to was just and fair. Unbeknownst to the man, a nascent thought verbalized itself through Mabel’s perfectly plush lips; “anyone rude enough to annoy a toll booth woman on duty with something as stupid as that is going straight to hell, that’s for sure!”

A soul fit for Mabel’s god-fearing idea of what hell could be was created, a facsimile of the man’s consciousness replicated perfectly. This “soul” was then sent down to the recently-invented hell, where he would then suffer for all eternity, as per what Mabel believed.

His body was still within her peripheral vision, but that was quickly remedied when she no longer desired him to be. His car was soon to follow when she noticed its garish gold color reflecting in the toll booth window. The memory of him then annoyed her, so he was no longer in anyone’s memory. Not his mother’s. Not his wife’s. Not his child’s. There was no trace of the man left on earth anywhere.

One.

With no one left in the parking lot, Mabel’s job was finally done. She yawned, more out of habitual obligation than actual fatigue. Another day, another migraine.

But as she left the booth, there was an unexpected presence in the car park. One that made itself known. One that was quite familiar.

“Well, well, well. I’d say I’m surprised that you’re still working a minimum wage job with the body of a goddess, but I think we both know how stubborn you are, Mabel.”

“Oh, if it isn’t the little girl I beat the devil out of two days ago. Back for more, I assume?” Mabel turned around, eager for a fight even if it did not reflect in her face.

“That was a fluke, as you will soon find out. Truthfully, I underestimated you and that is a mistake I will not repeat going forward.” Her voice was now cold and calculated. Christina did not appreciate being reminded of her failures.

“Missy, your mistake is thinking you could whup me at all. All this power and influence and for what? I’m not joining your group of black magic users!”

“You may not be, but your powers most certainly will,” Christina replied ominously. “You’ll have wished you took up my opportunity for teamwork when I offered it.”

Mabel then sensed a whole lot more than just Christina’s presence, and all around her no less. The older woman’s head jerked left and right quickly, only catching glimpses of a small fraction of Christina’s new army. While Mabel had been filling out crossword puzzles, her rival had ben busy.

Hundreds if not thousands of people surrounded Mabel, all under Christina’s control through a clever combination of her three current power sets. Her own telekinesis reached all of the people, delivering orders by Carrie’s commanding and persuasive voice, boosted to an absurd degree of effectiveness via Tessa’s power reserves. These people were not just willing to die for their leader, but their leader had imparted fractions of her own absurd amount of power onto them. These were all super assassin level threats, able to dismantle a world government overnight.

And all their sights were set on Mabel. She was surrounded.

Like a pack of ravenous zombies, the army swarmed. But Mabel would not be swayed so easily. She stomped her foot upon the ground beneath her, sending seismic waves outward in a way that more resembled massive exaggerated water ripples than how actual concrete would react to being struck upon. Of course, that was a mere distraction on Christina’s part, as she used Mabel’s shifted focus to brute force a small amount of suggestibility into her cerebral cortex. A very specific line of demands using her telekinesis and mind manipulation to give her an edge in this upcoming fight.

Christina had done her homework. She saw the security footage of Mabel evaporating people into nothingness and summoning clones of Howard Grove, which would presumably function after his passing too. Even if Mabel only had one ability opposed to Christina’s three, it was a damn powerful one that needed to be handled with care and sophistication.

With the “army” effortlessly disposed of, Mabel turned all her focus back to her real opponent.

“What’s wrong, too afraid to fight me one on one? A little girl on girl?”

She clearly said that with the intention that Christina would be as disgusted with the implication as Mabel seemed to be. All it did was give Christina an intrusive thought she immediately wanted to throw out.

“Face it, you’re just a little, tiny, microscopic woman in a tiny little microscopic little bubble!”

Mabel called, reality answered.

Christina began to shrink exponentially with every adjective describing her stature, which she managed to offset long enough with Tessa’s growth ability to shout the word “UNDO!”

The suggestibility within Mabel’s mind activated upon recognizing the passcode word, using a complex program Christina had written herself to recall Mabel’s last command and implement the inverse of it into Christina’s embedded mind control. All of the sudden, Mabel found herself compelled to shout “face it, you’re just a big, large, macroscopic woman in a big large macroscopic big bubble!”

While it didn’t make much sense as an insult, reality did as it was told. Christina grew back to her original size and then some, standing tall at an impressive seven feet of height.

Mabel was understandably startled by the sudden turn of events. “What… what was that? How the hell did you just make me say that!?”

“The future is now, grandma,” Christina replied with a smirk. “While you’re struggling to use a laptop, I’ve created my own programming languages in other people’s brains with my telekinesis.”

Mabel then heard Christina’s taunting voice in her own head. Ohoho, I’m going to make such good use of that reality manipulation of yours.

Christina may have sold fear pretty well to the layman and even other supergirls, but Mabel was a different breed. Now, she was just more pissed off.

Reaching her hand in front of her hand, her lithe fingers wrapped around what appeared to be some sort of invisible string. She then executed a tugging motion and Christina experienced a sharp pain in her frontal lobe, then pain everywhere else as she slammed into the concrete below at cartoonishly fast speeds. The brunette had gripped the blonde’s very own projected thoughts and weaponized them against her.

Christina attempted to shout “UNDO!” but it came out more as “MMMPHMMPH” as she obtained a mouthful of rebar. Her anger manifested through formerly Tessa’s powers, her perfect teeth superheating the metal as they dug into the hardened steel with ease. Her lengthy tongue ran over the softening iron, creating a makeshift forge in her mouth for roughly five musketballs.

Her body erupted out from the concrete with a vengeance, using a combination of her telekinesis and form manipulation to turn her mouth into a makeshift machine gun barrel, firing off the still-molten bullets at Mabel in quick succession. Time seemed to slow, though perhaps both women’s perceptions of speed were simply much more advanced than the average. With a steeling of her gaze, all of the bullets turned into little metal boomerangs which promptly turned back around towards Christina.

UNDO.

Christina didn’t even need to say it. As long as her mind was focused, she could weaponize the vibrations in the air to vibrate the word past Mabel’s ear. Sure enough, the lodged program read the instructions loud and clear and the bullets returned to normal, only this time the bullets were still in the trajectory towards Mabel.

She was struck head-on, while four of them bounced rather harmlessly off of her skin, one of the bullets hit her in the eye. She gripped it in pain, convulsing as she called upon reality to fix it. Christina saw this as an opportunity for another opening, this time movie phase two of the plan into effect, dubbed: Complete and Total Control of One Mabel Mifflin.

But Christina was getting predictable with her mind-based approaches.

“I don’t want your goddamned suggestions!” Mabel shouted, using her forehead to strike the thought by Christina so hard it was headbutted right back into Christina’s brain, affecting her instead. Now it was the blonde businesswoman’s turn to grip her head in pain, suffering the migraine of all migraines as her mind struggled to find out why its own command was suddenly attacking itself.

Mabel didn’t care what the hell was causing it, an opportunity was an opportunity. She closed the distance between the two of them, literally folding it in on itself briefly like a picturebook so that she was mere feet away from Christina for a proper beatdown.

Her fisticuffs style laid into Christina with blow after blow. Christina would have been fine normally, but because she was suffering an internal injury it simply was not as easy of a recovery. Now Mabel had Christina exactly where she wanted her, backing the businesswoman into a corner as her defenses were slowly whittled away at.

Now was time to improvise. Now was time for the ultimate Hail Mary.

Christina leaned forward and kissed Mabel mouth-to-mouth.

Mabel shuddered as Christina’s tongue slipped between her lips. Her eyes went wide, a universe of possibilities suddenly opening up to her in that very moment as she realized just how good it felt. Everything about that moment was perfect. Christina’s nimble tongue, heavenly lips, hot breath—the way her fingers ran over Mabel’s hips down to the steely obliques that lined her narrow waist, creating an erotically ticklish sensation that the older woman instantly became addicted to. This wasn’t enough, she wanted more. She needed more.

A life of being denied her desires in a world that hated her had made Mabel bitter and lonely. But now… maybe life could be better.

But Christina was quick to capitalize on Mabel finally discovering true happiness, stabbing the brunette in the side with her device. Immediately, the older woman tried to dispel the device, making it disappear like a figment of her imagination, but she could not. Reality would not let her. It was no longer obeying her whims. It was now being injected directly into her rival’s veins.

Christina’s head rolled back as she finished the injection, every elegant muscle in her magnificently feminine body erupting into absurdly defined striations. Her perfect physique quivered as her mind glimpsed into the endless possibilities of reality, her form shifting appearances like rapidly clicking through TV channels as if realism was merely an animation style to experiment with.

The freedom lapped at Christina’s brain, begging to be used and abused. Endless potential dripping from every atom of her body. It was almost too much to control… too much… too much…

No.

It was exactly enough.

Christina was the master of her own fate. She had everything she could ever need. Science was hers. The minds of others were hers. Strength was hers. Reality was hers.

Mabel’s weak lips could barely muster a representation of the pain that had suddenly exploded throughout her whole body. Her bones were brittle from both re-aging and losing what little extra power was still there within them. Christina didn’t even need the satisfaction of killing Mabel, as the elderly woman was on the verge of a heart attack any second. A perfect bout of irony for a woman who was, just a few seconds ago, actively aging backwards.

The blonde’s smile stretched long and wide, sadistic eyes glued upon the quivering crippled woman that lay before her. “Whupped you.” she spoke in a purposefully demonic voice, reveling in her overwhelming power as she floated tall over those who opposed her. She channeled a mix of mind control and reality manipulation, commanding Mabel’s body to hurry up and reduce itself to dust in the wind, which it promptly obeyed, dissolving into the ashen remains of a human skeleton as if Mabel had spontaneously been aged 100 more years in mere seconds.

That mailwoman wouldn’t stand a fucking chance now.

End of Day 3.