Chapter 1
Gwen had won the game. She had finished the comic. She was at the top of the world.
Except not literally. Seeing how she had spent the last half of her run stopping her evil future self from taking over the world. Which paradoxically gave her the power to control reality according to her whims, pushing her further along the supervillain arc with every passing day.
The other day, she had brought her favorite heroes to an island to have a death match. On a whim. Nothing to do with the threat of being retconned out of existence and her constant burgeoning existential crisis, no sirree!
“Gwen, have you considered that maybe you’re a little drunk on power?” Cecil asked.
She had gone back in time and retconned a gravity modifier into existence, and now she could lounge about on the ceiling. Gwen hummed, about to roll over to the side one more time, but thought better of it when she noticed how close she had gotten to the fan blades.
“Nope. I think my power-scaling is just normal!” She decided, dropping to the ground, regretfully letting gravity claim her again, “This isn’t enough, though. My awareness isn’t as good as it could be. I need to be… more.”
“For what?” Cecil asked, crossing his arms, “Just for the sake of it? That’s boring and you know it.”
“It’s not about the entertainment value. Not this time.” Gwen replied. Was that sincerity? Gross. Which was the exact kind of energy that made things so hard to stay on track.
Everyone thought she was the jokester of the superhero world. World-ending power, sure, but she would never use it in a way that had long-term consequences. She learnt that lesson the hard way.
There was a future in which she had gone mad with that power. Played everyone like puppets, just like the writers. Until her friends and idols got sick of it.
Until her brother had put his life on the line to trap her in a world where she was normal and safe and couldn’t hurt anyone else.
She understood why Teddy did it. But Gwen couldn’t live like that ever again.
So the ensuing scuffle across space and time may have resulted in his death.
And despite all her power, she couldn’t bring him back. Not if she didn’t know which afterlife he’d gone to. Once that was figured out, she could simply pop in, find him, and drag him back to the living plane. Easy as.
But so far, the search wasn’t going well.
Cecil, being dead, was the only one who could walk into afterlives unnoticed. He was having to scour each place under his own power. Heaven was a bust. So was purgatory. So was a bunch of the end-points reserved for religions Teddy had spared a passing interest in. No dice on anything.
She was starting to think that he was in hell. Which was ridiculous. Her baby brother was the kindest, sweetest, most moral kid ever. Who had lured his own sister into a trap meant to suck all the joy from her. But she didn’t hold it against him.
“Is this about Teddy?” Cecil guessed, “Listen, you gotta be more patient, Gwen. Hell’s a rough place, and I’m easy pickings down there. If I have to respawn there, then I’m truly linked to it. There won’t be any escaping. So I have to be careful, which means it’ll take more time.”
“I could help if I went down there.” She argued, swinging her katana in the air.
“No, you would stick out. Because you look alive.” He shook his head.
“What? Are you all rotting corpses?” She teased.
Cecil coughed, “Not… exactly. Think more warped.”
“Well, it’s the last place left on the list, isn’t it?” She pointed out with a shrug, “So I get in a little trouble, who cares? With me doing the searching, we’ll have Teddy in no time!” An overexcited slash ended up slicing her newly acquired gravity-repellant into two. And before she even got good use out of it.
Cecil didn’t look happy with it, but he agreed.
Gwen stepped into the whitespace, pulled out a panel where the POV switched to show what Cecil was doing, and used that as a reference to get herself into Hell.
“Ta-dah!” She posed for no one in a back alley that smelled like sulfuric garbage.
A slow clap sounded, and a blue anthropomorphic dog stepped out of the shadows, tinted with black accents. Gwen panicked for a second, before tilting her head, “…Cecil?”
“The one and only.” He replied, sweeping a hand – paw? – over his appearance, “I look like this in the afterlife realms for some reason.”
“Because you’re a furry at heart!” She cooed.
“You think you’re so funny.” He growled. Actually growled. That was also adorable.
Electricity sparked around him, and pixel like constructs appeared under his feet, floating him up until he was towering over her, yet still failing to intimidate.
“Cool, you have techy powers here, too. Now let’s get this search mission started!” She threw her hands up as she marched out of the little alley, immediately plunging herself into this strange new world.
The sky was red, was the first thing she noticed.
The roads were wrecked and most of the cars were equally so. Everyone she saw was some kind of monster, with fur and fangs and horns to match what people would expect of Hell, but more than that, they were all miserable.
Either miserable or causing misery, she realized, as she saw a cackling pair of horned demons throw knives at a small cowering hoard of little demons that appeared to be nothing but fluff.
Gwen frowned, reaching for her katana, but Cecil put a hand on her arm to stop her. Physical contact with him was so surprising that she froze, letting him say, “They’ll be fine. This is Hell. They’ll respawn when it’s over.”
“Then that means so will the horned ones, yeah?” Gwen checked, unsheathing both katanas anyway and charging the pair.
Gwen wasn’t the best fighter when it came to pure combat ability. Not even after lessons from an actual vampire hunter, a powerful Captain America villain, and multiple Young Avengers members could she compare to the greatest. But she knew how to work the element of surprise.
In her first hit, she cleaved straight through both demons, one with each blade, leaving the dripping halves of demon to fall onto the ground.
That felt so good. She’d been playing less ‘anti’ and more ‘hero’ in recent times back on Earth, but that didn’t apply here. She could do whatever she wanted. She could kill whoever she wanted.
She could go into the closest business, which was probably getting looted right now, and empty a whole clip into the robbers’ head if she wanted. This was a slaughterfest!
“Phew! First kill of the night sure is a high!” Cecil chuckled beside her, his voice much too tight, “Let’s get away from here, Gwen.”
Too late, someone was approaching them, their shadow stretching over her.
“Hey, bitch, some warning would be appreciated.” A fox/wolf type anthro demon colored bright pink and green scoffed, “Those two were my best money grabbers, too. Now I gotta wait for them to respawn themselves.” They rolled their eyes, “How do you plan to make up for it?”
“Make up for it?” Gwen repeated cluelessly.
“Yeah.” The demon continued, uninterestedly turning their attention towards her. They frowned slightly as they realized how normal Gwen looked, in comparison to the demons all around, “Huh. That’s something you don’t see every day.”
Their eyes widened slightly as the realization struck, “Wait, are you alive-”
They didn’t get to finish their sentence before the world around them both unfurled into pages, the margins and borders between them growing stark and noticeable as Gwen grabbed the hot pink mess of a demon by the throat and threw them into the borders.
They screamed violently as they went down, only to be cut off as the pages snapped back into place, leaving behind an empty spot of street as if nothing had happened.
All the demons in the street sure had noticed, and were staring unsubtly. But they didn’t want to go the way of the hot pink wolf person apparently, because they scuttled off quickly.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” Cecil whispered quickly, his voice almost a tea-kettle whistle from the stress, “Ohmigod, that was an Overlord. You should not have done that.”
“Overlord, Schmoverlord, they’ll be fine.” Gwen assured him with a lazy wave of her hand, “Everyone is.”
“They come out horrifically changed, which I don’t think is fine!” Cecil replied, “Please just get us out of this fucking place before these people stop being freaked out enough to kill us.”
Gwen laughed, giving the assault rifle she had slung over her back a hearty pat, “They’re never going to succeed.”
Everyone flinched at the motion.
Somewhere in the distance, a deer demon with a fondness for radio stood, observing. Smiling.
“Well, isn’t this exciting?” He asked no one in particular.