James Williams sighed in relief when he made it to his desk with just a few minutes to spare. It wasn't that anything too terrible was going to happen to him if he happened to be late but it was better not to take chances, since he actually liked his job despite its….peculiarities.
The job itself was nothing fancy, just another desk job in a cubicle the same as many others, but the pay was better than most other jobs offer at the same level and his immediate superiors didn't ride his ass all the time.
There was a reason for that.
It was because the CEO of the company hated everyone that worked for her equally. Everyone from the IT guys down in the basement to the executives up in the top floors knew that the boss hated them. She made sure they knew it when they were interviewed.
You'd think that would create a very tense work environment, but it strangely didn't. Since everyone knew that she'd be pissed at them if any complaints reached her, the department heads knew better than to screw around and provoke her. Everyone knew that there were no such things as 'favorites'or 'getting away with it'. As long as you did your job and avoided irritating her, you could rest easy. If you did otherwise, you got tossed out the front door by security no matter who you were, as one overly self important would-be executive found out the hard way recently and that was just if you happened to think too much of yourself. People that tried to swindle her had the unfortunate tendency to suffer bankruptcy.
Basically, everyone was afraid of making her angry(which was more or less normal anywhere), but at least you knew she'd hate you fairly. Well, that's how it was for most of the people working for her at least. Anyone that had to deal with her directly had it worse. Things had stabilized a bit by now, but from what he'd heard, the guys in management had gotten replaced regularly the first few years.
There was no dress code, nobody had to wear suits or ties and you didn't catch any flak if you had gravy stains on your shirt as long as you did your job.
It never ceased to amuse him when he thought of the fact that being employed by Poison Ivy was the best job he'd ever had, even if she hadn't gone by that title in over a decade.
Pamela Isley leaned back in her chair and sighed in relief over the fact that she didn't have anymore paperwork to approve or reject, for today at least.
Sometimes, she wondered just what the hell she'd been thinking when Naruto had helped her hammer out this plan and execute it. Then again it really was the most effective way of going about her goal to preserve nature, so she couldn't complain too much.
She'd only had a bare bones idea of it when she'd asked Naruto to help, but over the couple of weeks that they'd spent ironing out the details the whole thing had grown very much out of proportion, making her realise that her previous modus operandi was simply too small scale to accomplish anything significant.
With that in mind, Naruto had gone about and used some creative mind control, bribery and threats to have all of Lex Luthor's former assets transferred to her, along with the ownership of his corporate tower and everything else he could track down. It was so nice when you had a god of questionable morals helping you out, it certainly smoothed things out.
After that had been done, he'd given her a nice tattoo that took up her whole arm that was actually one of those wondrous seals of his and it would create random gemstones or precious metals on command if she ever found herself running out of money, though she did have to be careful to make sure that she didn't collapse the market by accident. That would be bad.
Once that was done she had finally been able to turn the economical might of those assets towards her goals.
The biggest and most obvious culprit in the systematic destruction of nature were the energy companies. Old and clinging to their power with a deathgrip, they tried their absolute hardest to keep humanity reliant on fossil fuels so that they could keep getting richer by exploiting those resources.
Since Naruto had so kindly provided her with infinite wealth she had used it to bludgeon those companies out of business. It had taken years since they'd been so entrenched, but unlike her, their resources weren't infinite. And the best part was that they couldn't even say she was doing anything illegal, because there was no law against being able to create wealth on command.
In the meanwhile, the company she had usurped had turned its attention towards researching clean energy sources and sinking obscene amounts of money into their development. Turns out that it was easy to steal scientists from their previous posts if you offered them an unlimited budget and state of the art equipment. Some of them hadn't even asked what she intended to do with their research.
Additionally, she'd recently started up another program to researching ways of achieving workable faster than light speed. The damn technology existed already even, but it was mostly restricted to the Justice League and their little shuttles. What she wanted was for it to become widespread.
The end goal? To get as many people as possible off her damned planet. Killing humanity off might have been a bit of an extreme idea and probably unworkable since humanity tended to be like a cockroach when threatened, but giving them a way to voluntarily leave was possible.
She was well aware that allowing a people with a completely fractured government into space was more than likely a bad idea that was going to cause a great deal of war eventually, but she didn't care about that. What she cared about were her plants. Who knows, it might actually get them to unite into a singular world government. Anything was possible, even if it wasn't very likely.
But before that could happen, they needed to stop using something as idiotic as oil for a power source. She might actually learn to stop hating them all if they could stop poisoning the world or cutting down trees by the thousands.
Of course, her goal was predictably unpopular to a great many people that liked things the way they were, so she'd been subjected to various attempts at stopping her, both subtle and not so subtle.
She'd have long since been assassinated by some fat old man that didn't like what she was doing if Naruto hadn't predicted it and made countermeasures. Most of her back was now taken up by another complex seal that had taken Naruto nearly a week and a half to put together, which was a very long time for him from what she understood, but it had proved its worth many times.
The seal could almost be called an artificial intelligence because of its sheer complexity. It ceaselessly monitored a huge area around her for anything dangerous directed at her and reacted at the speed of light to bring up an impenetrable barrier to protect her if anything at all unexpected happened. No less than thirty four snipers and twelve bombings had been foiled by it, not to mention other, more creative methods. It even prevented fall damage! Naruto had boasted that she would survive even a nuclear missile to the face with that seal…the initial explosion at least, the radiation might be slightly more problematic, but nobody had resorted to nukes in their attempts at removing her yet. Though it was a rather twitchy thing, as it had also activated when Harley had organized a surprise birthday party that one time.
They'd have probably tried poison too, but she was conveniently immune to that method.
It had been well over ten years and she hated dealing with all this corporate bullshit just as much as when she'd started, but it really was the best way to get what she wanted. She wasn't even good at any of it, she just had infinite money, which seemed to be a great way of compensating for anything.
At the very least, things had started becoming easier in the past couple of years. She'd built up enough credibility that her criminal past didn't get in the way anymore and she was gaining an ever increasing amount of support as her projects gained traction. She hadn't even needed to resort to creating extra wealth to keep things going in nearly three years now. The Earth had finally seen reason and shifted to a cleaner energy source, which meant that she was now on top of the pile. But more importantly, the slow destruction of the planet had been slowed to a crawl. In another five years, she hoped to start reversing the damage.
Ridiculously enough, she even got the occasional mention in some magazines as someone who was 'paving the way to the future for humanity'. Idiots. She just wanted to save her plants.
"Waxing nostalgic again Pammy?" An amused voice asked from the window.
"Actually I was just contemplating if I should have one of my executives murdered." Pamela answered blandly, turning to greet her visitor. "Supergirl." She made sure to put extra emphasis on the girl part.
The blonde argoan sighed. "I really should have put more thought into that name. Almost thirty years old and I still have a superhero name meant for a teenager." She made no comment on Pamela's plans for murdering her subordinates, knowing that she wasn't serious. Probably.
"You'll always be that perverted teenager that peeped on our orgy to me." Pamela retorted with a smirk.
Kara sighed again. "You're just never going to let that go are you?"
"Nope."
Kara had gone through some changes over the years. She'd long since gotten rid of the short red cloak, finding that it got in the way more than anything and gave enemies a convenient handhold. Over time her outfit had shiften from blue to red until she'd settled on her current black with red highlights. She'd kept her hair long though, it was the one bit of sentimentality she couldn't quite bring herself to sacrifice for the sake of practicality. The sword that Naruto had created for her hung sheathed at her waist. She never left home without it(unless she had to be inconspicuous).
The top half of her outfit had a neckline of considerable depth and it had been the last thing that Naruto had made for her. He'd claimed that any female superhero or supervillain inevitably developed 'super boobs' and that she should have something that would flatter her 'super figure'.
Kara had scoffed at him at the time, thinking that he was just being his usual ridiculous self, but the annoying bastard had been right. She had eventually developed a figure that was almost as chesty as Wonder Woman. How the hell Naruto managed to always be right with his idiotic sounding theories on the appearance of superheroes and villains never ceased to irritate her. He still managed to mess with her even though he'd been gone for years.
She really missed the big perverted lummox.
"Your fellow League members irritate you again?" Pamela asked wryly.
"When do they not irritate me these days?" Kara said back with an eye roll.
"So what was it this time?"
"You know that new guy? With the mutated arm that could shoot that weird magic purple lightning?" The guy in question was in fact so new that he hadn't even gotten a villain title yet.
"Yeah, what about him?" Pamela had heard of that one yes. She'd been contemplating putting an assassination contract out on him. Morons like that tended to get in the way of her goals just by being their usual moronic selves.
The now greatly expanded Justice League kept most of them busy, but the occasional lunatic was quietly removed by one of her contracted killers. Powers or not, most people tend not to survive a high caliber sniper round to the head.
"Well he was being surprisingly tough to take down and nobody had any idea how to counter that arm of his….so I cut it off. Most of the League seems to think I was being excessively brutal…again."
Pamela snorted. "Wimps. Why don't you just quit the League anyway? I'm grateful that you vouched for me when I was just starting out, but I don't need it anymore. You could go your own way and not have to deal with the Justice League anymore."
And she really was grateful. Supergirl's support had made things a lot easier when she'd just been starting out. Naruto might have used some more less-than-ethical mind control to get her pardoned for past crimes but she'd still have been facing an uphill battle if not for Kara's help. Not that the battle hadn't been uphill either way, but at least the hill had been less steep.
"I was thinking about it." Kara admitted. "Maybe check out the rest of the galaxy for a bit."
"Really?" Pamela asked in surprise. "I didn't think you'd actually do it, not when you were so eager to join up in the first place."
"You know how it is…..things just haven't been quite the same ever since Naruto happened."
"You don't say?" Pamela retorted sarcastically. She certainly had never imagined she'd end up owning a mega corporation before Naruto crashed through her life.
Kara gave her friend a slight grin as she thought about how things had gone after Naruto had 'released' her.
Flashback
"So you're saying that the only thing that happened during your kidnapping was Uzu….." Batman was saying(suspiciously), only to be interrupted.
"I told you already, his name is Naruto." Kara interrupted irritably. At the very least, it was just Batman, Barbara and Clark. This might have been a lot more annoying if the entire Justice League had been present.
"Right, Naruto." Batman said neutrally, inwardly wondering who the hell names their kid 'fishcake'. It seemed a horribly bad name for such a powerful individual.
"So nothing happened to you except for Naruto teaching you some martial arts and how to use a sword?"
"Well I did also become friends with Pamela, Harley and Priscilla." Kara said with a shrug.
"You mean Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn and Cheetah?" Barbara asked in surprise and curiousity.
"I'm pretty sure that Naruto has convinced them to give up on crime."
"How did he manage that?" Batman asked, sending a glance at Batgirl that basically told her to let him handle this. Personally he very much doubted that the three women would really give up crime, though it would be great if they did so. Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn were one of his more dangerous opponents, the former more so than the latter.
"Well, Priscilla just wanted to be normal again so all he needed to do for her was reverse her transformation. Pamela was taking care of Harley after Naruto killed the Joker and she's just not interested in crime anymore now that he's not around to manipulate her." Kara explained.
"And Poison Ivy?"
That caused Kara to smirk as she answered. "Sex. Lots and lots of sex." It wasn't exactly true, but there did seem to be a lot of sex involved.
Barbara colored rapidly at the blunt response and couldn't hold in her incredulous question. "He reformed her by sleeping with her?"
Kara grinned at seeing her friend so embarrassed. After spending so much time around Naruto and his outrageous behavior, something like that didn't even register on her embarrassment meter. She couldn't help herself from making it worse.
"Yep, he fucked the crime right out of her."
Barbara blushed even more and looked vaguely scandalized.
Superman was if possible even more scandalized as he exclaimed. "Kara!" He'd never imagined that his cousin would be so crass or curse like that.
"What?" She asked blankly, not seeing what the problem was. It was just a curse word.
"Mind your language."
Kara blinked at her cousin slowly, wondering if he'd always treated her like a child and she just hadn't noticed or if this was a recent thing. Naruto had always treated her like an adult and she was just now realising how much she had appreciated that. Either way she felt herself getting quite annoyed by it and responded in the way that she had often responded to Naruto.
Waspishly.
"You know what else? He fucked them all, first he fucked them seperately, then he fucked them all at once. Fuck fuck fuckitty fuck fuck."
A week ago she'd have never entertained the idea of talking like that, but prolonged Naruto exposure was guaranteed to either drive you crazy or have you discover that some foul language and talk about sex was really not that big of a deal.
Barbara went as red as her hair, though she also looked like she was having trouble holding back laughter.
Batman remained stone faced. It would take a lot more than that to make a crack in his expression.
Superman was opening and closing his mouth as if he had no idea how to respond to the stream of vulgarity, but he was looking quite poleaxed. After a few seconds of this amusing sight, he seemed to muster some self control and started looking concerned again.
"He didn't….touch you, did he?" He asked carefully, as if he was approaching a particularly skittish deer.
Kara shot her cousin another irritated look. Seriously, she'd given him a hug already and assured him that she was fine and hadn't been mistreated in the slightest. And yet, at the first sign that she was acting a bit different, he instantly forgets about that. She was starting to see why Clark got on Naruto's nerves so much.
"Well, he did tell me to sit in his lap and call him big brother, it was amazing." Granted, those two things had nothing to do with each other, but she was just about irritated enough to neglect mentioning that.
She managed to keep up her innocent face for a few seconds before his horrified and sickened face made her feel guilty.
"Oh calm down already. We were both dressed and he only needed me to sit in his lap so that he could make my sword." She said with a huff.
"I'm confiscating the sword for testing by the way. You can have it back if I find that there's nothing wrong with it." Batman interjected.
He suspected that the sword might be the cause of Kara's changed behavior. A sword that could influence people wouldn't be the strangest thing he'd ever encountered, not by a long shot. The way they'd been played with and the fact that even he had been fooled by Xanna despite how careful he'd been was not doing his paranoia any favors.
"Good idea Bruce." Clark agreed, catching on to what Bruce was thinking and hoping that Kara would be back to her old self once the sword was away from her.
"What?!" Kara hissed angrily, shocked that the two of them just up and decided that by themselves without so much as asking her. "This sword was a gift and I'm not letting you take it!"
"Please be reasonable Kara, we have no idea what that sword can do. It could be influencing your emotions." Clark tried to reason.
"It's a sword, it cuts things. That's what swords usually do." She retorted sarcastically.
"Better safe than sorry." Superman said insistently and tried to take the sword from it's place on the table where Kara had put it.
He frowned in confusion when he couldn't budge it. The table definitely wasn't sturdy enough to support any object heavy enough that he couldn't lift it and yet, the blade seemed to be heavier than a mountain range.
He strained even harder to lift it, only to have his feet sink into the ground.
Meanwhile, Kara had been glaring angrily at her cousin for his attempts and the blade shivered in its sheath in response to her anger, which prompted Superman to let go of it warily. A moment later, it shot at Kara hilt first and smacked firmly into her palm.
The event shocked Kara just as much as it shocked Superman, Batman and Batgirl, but it also reminded her of a few things that Naruto had told her about it.
I bound this blade to your spirit and it will obey only you.
Strike with your spirit and the sword will follow.
"It's MY sword and it stays with me." She said firmly and walked out with an irritated huff.
End Flashback
Things had continued to be annoying after that. The caped idiots(as she had started calling them soon after that), had apparently become convinced that her sword was some kind of diabolical mind control device and kept trying to get her to surrender it for testing. Eventually they had annoyed her to the point that she had conceded just to shut them up. It had taken having Zatanna Zatara take a look at it and determine that while it was indeed an item of great power, it was most certainly not any kind of mind control device. She had stopped calling them the caped idiots when they finally grumbled that she'd been right, though Batman had looked like he'd drank a barrel of lemon juice while doing it.
Clark had continued trying to convince her to just leave it at home, much to her irritation. Then again, he'd also tried to convince her to stay in Kansas until she was deemed old enough to join the Justice League.
Both had been something that she had absolutely no intention of doing.
The brief glimpse of insight into Naruto that she had been given during the creation of her sword had been quite enlightening. Naruto had certainly never quietly listened when someone told him what he should do. He had sought out knowledge and experienced the world for himself. He might joke about lacking wisdom, but he had his own strange brand of it.
Either way, it had given her a desire to travel and see the world. There was so much more to it than the tiny corner that her cousin had wanted her to stay in. That was what she'd done in the end, despite vehement protests from Clark.
A couple of years later, she'd come back and joined the Justice League. Her cousin had chilled out in her absence and things had been going well at first. Right up until the point where she had resorted to using a bit more force than the others were comfortable with.
She hadn't gone traveling with the intent of becoming more like Naruto, she'd just wanted to see the world. The problem with seeing the world was that you tended to also see things that simply don't fit into a clearly defined black and white moral code unless you were incredibly stubborn and a bit delusional. Clark was a good man, but he was shockingly naïve in some aspects.
When she'd returned, her cousin had still been more or less the same, while she'd learned that sometimes, permanent solutions were much better than morally comfortable ones.
Clark was much dismayed to see that his sweet cousin was fully capable of using that sword of hers to main a villain if he was proving to be too problematic. It had been particularly tense when she'd killed her clone Galatea, whom the government had made as a counter to the Justice League.
That had been a very frustrating time for Kara. It wasn't as if she'd just up and decided to kill Galatea for no reason. She'd tried to talk her clone into not being such a psychotic bitch and becoming more like something of a twin sister, but that had proved rather difficult when the cloned woman been vat grown and indoctrinated…..something just hadn't developed right and she'd been obsessed with killing her genetic progenitor. In the end, Kara had no choice but to cut her down, which her sword had proven itself perfectly capable of doing. That mind link thing would probably have ended up being a problem anyway.
The years had gone by and she'd done her best to abide by the rules of the Justice League, but sometimes they were just idiotic and she ended up doing something that the others didn't like.
And now she was at the point where she was seriously considering just quitting and doing her own thing. It wasn't as if there was a shortage of superheroes these days.
"How are Harley and Priscilla doing? I haven't seen them in a while." Kara asked after she'd shaken off her wool gathering.
"Well, Harley looks like she's finally gotten over her party girl phase and seems to be settling down. I've got the guy she's with watched though, just in case he's up to anything funny."
Kara nodded understandingly at that. It wouldn't be the first time that someone had tried to take a shot at the bubbly former villainess that way.
"Priscilla is as usual more interested in tinkering with genetics in a lab than anything else. She's been perfectly content to set up shop in that lab I set her up with, though her son drags her out of it often."
"Well you did give her near unlimited funding." Kara pointed out wryly. "That's something that she's wanted for a long time."
Pamela simply shrugged.
"I hear that your project for Mars is nearly done." Kara commented.
"Yes, the aggressively mutated algae I've created should be able to terraform the planet to a sustainable degree within a decade or two. I hope." Pamela muttered the last part.
"You're not sure?" Kara asked with a raised eyebrow.
"I've never done something like it before." Pamela explained with another shrug. "Who knows what could happen?"
"Right, it's a good thing you don't seem to be aging yet then. You might actually see your projects bearing fruit."
That much was true. Pamela was nearly forty years old by now, but was not showing any signs of age yet. She didn't believe she was immortal for a moment, but her strange physiology might have increased her longevity, which suited her just fine.
"Indeed it is."
"Oh hey, I just remembered that I wanted to ask you why you were trying to buy the Sahara desert." Kara said as she suddenly remembered hearing about that on the news.
"Simple, I intend to turn it into a forest." The redhead answered with a smirk.
She'd refused to answer the question when asked by the country representatives who technically owned the desert right now, as they would have tried to make it more expensive if they knew. It wasn't as if any of them actually had any use for it, they'd just try to milk more money out of the deal or try to convince her to 'rent' the desert. Greedy assholes.
"You think you can do that?" The blonde asked in amazement.
"Bitch please, remember who you're talking to." Pamela shot back arrogantly, gaining a snort from the younger woman.
In a gesture that Kara didn't notice, Pamela lightly fingered a green crystal hanging around her neck. It was a replica of the one that Naruto carried. He'd made it for her and filled it with what he called 'Mokuton chakra', which would supposedly boost her ability to grow plants. It should be exactly what she needed to turn the barren desert into a place of verdant growth.
The crystal would break when she died, but it was still an incredibly generous gift and a great show of trust. Stupid horny bastard making her feel like a crushing schoolgirl with all these gifts.
Pamela sighed once Kara was gone. She didn't enjoy keeping secrets from her friend like that, but she knew that the argoan wouldn't approve of what she'd done. Maybe she'd be able to tell her about it one day…one day when it was long since too late to do anything about it and Kara could see that there was nothing wrong with what she'd done.
Despite her conversation with Xanna, she hadn't been willing to give up the idea of getting herself pregnant with Naruto's baby. It might be selfish of her, but she wanted a child of her own, not an adopted one and no man since Naruto had roused even a passing interest in her.
Had the situation been different, she would have most definitely tried to steal him away from Xanna, but that would have no doubt counted as assisted suicide with the situation being what it was. She'd even have accepted a position as a second wife, even if it was rather demeaning, but she knew damn well that would never happen.
So she'd asked him to sleep with her again, more than just once even. And she'd saved as much of his sperm as possible, all the while making sure that he didn't know she was doing it. She had no idea how far his perception extended, but she figured that he wouldn't find it if he wasn't looking for it.
Then, before their sudden departure, she'd approached Xanna again and asked the horned woman if she was able to undo whatever it was that Naruto did that prevented his seed from getting women pregnant.
After all, Xanna had said that she didn't care if Naruto got mortal women pregnant as long as he didn't care about the children and they retained no chakra. If he didn't know about the children, then he wouldn't care.
It had been a gamble, but a calculated one. Xanna might have simply dismissed her or even killed her for what she was attempting, but it had paid off. She'd been impressed by Pamela's tenacity and devious approach rather than angered by it and consented to the request. All traces of chakra had been removed from it, leaving it as nothing more than the sperm of a regular man, albeit one with genes superior to anything that Priscilla had ever seen. No diseases, an immune system almost worthy of a shark, a potential lifespan easily above a hundred years, maybe as much as a hundred and fifty and a slew of other things.
Priscilla had wryly commented that if there had ever been a 'master race' of humans that the Nazis had so liked to blather about, they'd found its father and he'd never even set foot in Germany. Not that they knew of anyway.
Priscilla's own son was a product of Pamela's subterfuge, a strong young boy with bright blond hair and even brighter blue eyes. Most would assume that he'd inherited those features from his mother, but only she and Priscilla knew that it was unlikely. Naruto had told her that his original eye color had been a very bright blue, he'd even showed them to her. When Pamela gave birth herself, she fully expected that her child would likely have similar features, as Naruto's powerful genetics would no doubt take precendence over hers, not that it mattered.
They hadn't even told Harley about this, fearing that the bubbly woman would blurt it out by accident. They'd have offered her the same chance to get herself pregnant with Naruto's children, but Harley had only ever treated the entire incident with Naruto as a fun fling. Priscilla and herself had felt that Naruto had set an impossible standard for any other man to match. Pamela was by default negatively disposed to any other man, so it was entirely impossible for them to get her interest(and there had been attempts). Priscilla simply couldn't help comparing them to Naruto and they naturally fell far short. What man could compare to a god after all?
She'd wanted to do this years ago already, but there had been too many enemies out to kill her. There was no Naruto around this time to give her child an impenetrable defense, eventually someone would get to it, no matter how hard she tried to protect it.
So she had waited and kept working at her other goals while the dust settled. But now, she felt that it was almost time. There hadn't been any assassination attempts on her for a long while, the rival companies that had been behind those attempts were long since bankrupt and she was regarded as a respectable member of society, if not exactly a pleasant one.
The only crimp in her plan was Kara's idea of quitting the League and going gallivanting around the galaxy. The quitting the League part not so much, but the gallivanting was definitely an issue. She'd been intending to ask Kara if she'd be the godmother.
It was a mean, dirty tactic to make sure that her children got the best possible protection, but it was also something that she would have considered asking either way. Kara was one of the few people that she felt was a true friend, with Harley and Priscilla being the only others. More to the point, the argoan woman would take good care of her children and protect them viciously if anything happened to Pamela herself. And she knew that Kara wouldn't be able to refuse if there was a cute baby blinking at her with innocent blue eyes.
Still, this plan of Kara's to tour the galaxy meant that she needed to hurry. She wouldn't very well be able to ask if the blonde was going around, picking fights and righting wrongs in some remote corner of space now could she?
With this in mind, she picked up her phone and made a call.
"Priscilla, it's time."
There was a moment of surprised silence on the other end before Priscilla answered.
"I see, when do you want to do this?"
"No time like the present, might as well do it right now." Pamela answered with some humor.
"I'll get the lab ready."
Putting the phone down, Pamela stood up and stretched, groaning as her back thanked her for finally getting off the chair.
"Sorry about this Naruto, but you don't just get to make me fall halfway in love with you and then leave without giving me babies." She muttered to herself.
"Now lets get me pregnant."