According to the clocks, it was three a.m. the next morning when Margaret returned.
Fate and Cait turned from the TV Margaret had brought in before she left to greet her. On the television was a man wreathed in a tuxedo of writhing dark flames atop a winding double staircase of stone. The man grinned down at an unforeseen enemy, his arms spread wide.
"Welcome, Grendin! Welcome to my humble abode. Please, take a-" Fate paused the show, to better pay attention to Margaret.
"What's the word?" he asked.
"We're done here," Margaret replied. "All of the Advanced here are dead or in custody. We're landing now, and we should have everyone on this planet onboard by eight a.m.."
"So fast?" Cait asked, somewhat shocked that putting three billion people into a ship would only take five hours.
"We'll be sending ships with deployable large-scale teleportation pads. Half of the time is only for the ships to land where they need to. Each pad can teleport a few hundred thousand at once. The other half is just lines and people waiting for their turn."
"Have you found Ythmun?" Fate inquired. " I doubt his subjects would take orders from you, no offense."
"None taken, and yes, we did. He's lost an arm, and he was bloodied and beaten when we found him, but we reattached the arm and poured some liquid flesh on him to seal the wounds."
"Liquid flesh?"
"It's something we cooked up after raiding an Advanced base a month or two ago. You pour it over exposed flesh or bone, and it settles into a facsimile of flesh and skin. It isn't alive like flesh is, but it's capable of all the essentials like ferrying blood and oxygen throughout the body.
"It's also able to adapt to one's Divine Energy and be influenced by your Manifestation as if it was a normal piece of you… after a few months to give it time to adjust, of course."
"And why didn't you use that on my wrist instead of giving me a band-aid?" Fate asked, looking down at the patch.
"Because it's expensive to make, and we only have one Embodiment with the right Manifest Power to make it, so our stock is limited. It's best saved for emergency cases, like Ythmun, who would've died from blood loss without it."
"Who is it that's capable of making this stuff?" Cait asked.
"Fate knows him," Margaret told her. "It's Frederick Fongnra. He's a Personification that governs a city in Pensinata. He has his hands full half the time patching people up, so he can only make a few gallons of liquid flesh a week."
"How's he doing? I haven't seen him since I dropped that girl off at his house," Fate said. "Symna, I believe her name was."
"He's fine, although I worry he might be overworking himself. As a Personation, he doesn't need to eat, sleep, or breathe, but there have been rare cases of Embodiments at his Level working themselves to death.
"The only reason I haven't stopped him is that Symna is helping him out tremendously. Her Sound Manifestation may not be the best for medical work, but she's a fast learner, and can already handle any situation short of emergency surgery."
"That's good to hear," Fate replied. "Saving lives is far nobler than taking them."
"But both have situations where they're required," Cait said softly.
"The latter more often than the former, it seems," Fate responded, heaving a light sigh. "But that's what happens when you give homicidal maniacs the powers of superheroes. They abuse them."
"That's what we're here for," Margaret told him. "To save the good ones from the bad ones. Although lately everything has seemed to become one big lump of gray as opposed to the black and white I'm used to. Many of the Advanced genuinely believe they're doing good."
"The worst villains always do."
Five hours later, Fate stood on the bridge of the ship, beside Cait and Margaret. Now fully healed thanks to a generous donation of Divine Energy from Cait, Fate and his friend were dressed in the drab brown and green of the Flaming Crows, sporting cargo pants and rough long-sleeved shirts under a light chest plate of hard, laser-resistant material.
He stared out of the massive window at the thinning atmosphere as the ship slowly flew into the sky. Margaret shouted every now and then, barking orders or asking for status updates. A ship this big required several steady hands and a diligent commander.
Soon, they were in the endless expanse of space, which then transformed into thousands of bright lights zipping past as the warp drive was activated. "Where is Ythmun, by the way?" Fate asked when Margaret was free.
"With his subjects in the bottom of the ship. None of them have ever been on a ship, much less one as big and intimidating as this, so he's down there keeping them calm," she told him.
"Sounds like a handful."
"It is, but he's proven to be quite a-"
"Sir! You're gonna want to see this!" shouted a man in front of one of the many computers on the bridge.
"What is it?" She asked, her and the other two moving closer.
"An anomaly detected in our path. Black hole. We're going to hit it."
"Steer away from it, then."
"We've tried, but for some reason, the ship just keeps going straight for it. A scan revealed heavy influence of Divine Energy, from a Manifestation we don't have on records."
"Then stop the warp drive and put all power to front thrusters."
"We can't, sir. The warp drive isn't responding. The engineers are reporting nothing out of the ordinary; we don't know what's happening."
Margaret frowned, eyes trailing to the viewport. "BRACE YOURSELVES!" She yelled.
In the distance, providing a contrast to the glimmering lights around them, was a dark, lightless void, swirling and spiraling as it devoured the light around it. Everyone on the bridge grabbed the closest thing they could for support…
And the world went dark.