Hannah parked her clunker outside of the only bar in town, getting out and checking the parking lot to see Ben's truck was actually parked in the back. When she'd gotten the call, she couldn't believe it. After finding out that the kids had been kidnapped, he immediately left the house like a tornado. She'd assumed he'd mount a rescue, but two days later she received a call from Jack the bar owner that Ben had been mass consuming alcohol the whole two days.

  Wanting to figure out what ploy he was playing, she left it alone, only to get another call from Jack that he was two seconds away from calling the cops if she didn't come pick him up.

  Entering the dive bar to the sound of electric guitars playing country music, she picked out Ben's semi-muscular form laying cross-legged on the bar. If it was a drone or clone or mirage, it was extremely accurate.

  When their eyes met, Ben belched out a greeting, then vomited a transparent green goo onto the bar and barstool beside him. Jack, the burly bartender whose patience had just run out, reached across the bar and grabbed Ben by the shirt, dragging him back behind the bar with a glass getting pulled with him. Ben's drunken protests, the shattering of glass, and a very angry rural barkeep all overlapped with the music and Hannah's pounding feet as she ran over to stop any more violence.

  After failing to yell over everyone as Ben was nearly thrown from the bar, Hannah managed to wrestle her way into the situation and prop Ben up by the shoulder. It was when his rank breath graced her nose that she knew this wasn't a trick, the sour alcohol that popped back up from someone's gut was a near unreplicable stench she knew too well. She continued shouting back and forth with Jack while failing to drag out the man who was twice her scrawny weight, tripping out the door bearing a giggly, unhelpful load on her back.

  She dragged her boss back to the car he'd bought, propping him up in the back seat as he mumbled something about leaving his drink inside.

  "What is this?" she asked once the doors were closed. "Did you already get your super team back? Where are they?"

  "I-I *hic* I can't do -hic- it," Ben hiccuped, his drunkenness still overwhelming his good sense of sharing information.

  Hannah had to stop and consider what he meant, "Like-- not right now?"

  "No, no no... no. Not ever," Ben coughed. "They can't *HGurgh* can't be saved."

  Hannah just sat back, feeling a tingling in her face as if Ben was transmitting his intoxication, "Why not?"

  "Becausssse, it's inconspick-conspicuouous.... Those kids, they can't keep getting away."

  "What do you mean?" Hannah asked, gripping her jacket angrily.

  "They win all the time," Ben slacked, getting the hang of his inebriation, "they-they get attacked by villains and-and come out winning. It's too purrrrrfect. They've got a streak of good luck."

  "I'm not following what you're saying," Hannah said, tingling in her arms as she felt a pair of hand drunkenly grab her and pull her close.

  "You heard Idet," Ben hollowly sang while grabbed his assistant in a weak, sorry fist. "They're being held by a supervillain group in a supervillain fortress. It's in Louisiana, a swamp, it's buried underneath the whole swamp. Even the Hero Association doesn't know about it.... Hannah... Hannah, there are hundreds of them. Two hundred and sixteen."

  "You're telling me you can't fight two hundred and sixteen supervillains to save some children?"

  Ben scoffed at the shot on his manhood, "I can EASILY take out two hundred and sixteen-- anything. But... it's not normal. If I help those kids out, people are gonna know someone's protecting them, and they'll probably guess it's me. So, I can't. They have to do it themselves; I can't just go save them."

  "Bullshit," Hannah pushed Ben away, "you can do anything! Make it look like-- SOMETHING! Are you really going to let Mike die when he's finally started getting out of his shell? You're giving up on Katherine, who's working so hard for her scholarship? You'll let Stanley be killed after all you've done for him? What about Gary and Garrett? Are you going to let them die without finding out they love each other?"

  Ben chuckled, the laughed, then coughed as he realized she was serious, "They're not gay."

  "They certainly act like it," Hannah harumphed. "Talking about their dicks and doing gay stunts."

  "Trust me, there's a brain thing for lust and love. They both have it for Katherine. The gay thing is to lay low around her."

  "Are you really going to get such an interesting love triangle die because you're too chicken shit that someone will find out your-!"

  With no sign of drunken folly, Ben shoved a hand into Hannah's open mouth, curling his fingers at the second knuckle to fill her mouth whole down to his palm. She recoiled, but he followed her, keeping his fist in her mouth until she was pressed against the back seat while drooling over Ben's fist.

  "You're not going to do that," Ben told her in a steely, flat tone. "It would be a bad time for all involved."

  He glared Hannah down with eyes that were steady, ready, and willing to bury a body tonight. She nodded, biting a little on Ben's fist as he withdrew his mitt from her mandibles.

  "I've literally seen everyone die, remember? Not a single person has escaped my sight in all time and space. Five kids who should have been small-town nobodies isn't going to change anything."

  And then, Hannah pulled out the insult she was saving for a rainy day, "Your museum's shit. It never made me feel any better."

  "Oh? What do you think I need to change?"

  "Change? Nothing, you're origin's just stupid. Nobody cares that you got hurt."

  "Would it be better if the comeback was more interesting?"

  "IT'S ALL BAD!" Hannah yelled, the distress reaching her throat and cackling in her voice. She realized she yelled, but was so unhappy with Ben that she didn't even apologize.

  "I can still change it," Ben said, leaning back as the alcohol worked its way through his system, "it's not like it's one hundred percent honest in the first place."

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Hannah rolled her head with eyes on Ben like a hawk on prey, "It's not true?"

  "It's mostly true. I just left a few million years out."

  Hannah waited, "Don't be a bitch. You know damn well I want to hear more of this!"

  "You know how my power lets me see all time and space? That's not a lie. At full power, I am witness to every minute detail of the universe from the start to finish. I was in a coma for two years because my feeble human mind couldn't process that much information. Did you ever ask yourself what snapped me back to my body, even with all that processing load?"

  Hannah waited with bated breath.

  "It was Ymir. See, he wasn't just the strongest hero that we know today, he had another power that wasn't obvious: Immortality. He was going to live for a very, very long time, and he would be getting stronger the older his immortal ass got. Sure, he was a bastard, but he still acted like a hero. He would go on saving people into humanity's space age and beyond. He would be known as the greatest hero of all time, never giving up the good fight. Epics would be written about his life, statues in every human household, even alien species would come to revere him as a true-blue human god. And when he finally dies, it will be in an act of true heroism, his memory kept alive until life itself struggled to survive. Even his uglier habits eventually go away, and he becomes a real, no-skeletons-in-the-closet hero."

  "But, you said the multiverse was fake?" Hannah confessed in confusion. "How could you kill him if he was going to have a future?"

  "Thanks to a lot of preparation, and a lot of time travel," Ben hiccup-chuckled. "The best way to picture it is like a rubber band stretched between two points: the beginning and the end. NO! A guitar string. It's like a guitar string, stretched between two points. Every single person's free will pulling that string in another direction. No matter how hard anyone will pulls it, there's a rebound, if not by another person's will than the natural ebb and flow of the universe correcting itself."

  "The universe corrects itself?" Hannah plucked the phrase out.

  "Don't interrupt," Ben shushed. "Anyway, Ymir was a large part of the universal guitar string, more than any other immortal and certainly more than any mortal. But all I needed to do was pluck the guitar string in the right direction over and over again, slowly molding the universe into one where Ymir could be killed. Into one where he WOULD be killed. I didn't always get it right, but thanks to a lot of time travel, I had all the time in the universe and then some. Let me tell you, those five years of my life were the longest of anyone ever. There were once five million of me scattered across the cosmos for five seconds. All of my effort bending, pulling, twisting at a universe that wanted him alive. I had artifacts, pockets of pocket dimensions, space and time warped irreparably. Just to kill one guy."

  "All that, just because he hurt you?"

  Ben stiffened, then glanced over at Hannah, "Well, that, and... for justice."

  "... Justice?" she said, the word feeling alien on her tongue. "What justice?"

  "You know Ymir's crimes. But did you know that he never gets punished for killing the people he's killed. He keeps going for a million years, but everyone who finds out lets it go because... he's still saving more people than he hurts. Not a single person calls him out on it. Even when he finally changes his ways, he just keeps his crimes a secret. There's no karma, no cosmic backlash, no judge, no jury, not even a slap on the wrist. Everyone he's ever hurt just disappear into nothing while he is glorified and praised and worshipped. The most horrific crime in all of history goes unpunished, just because of some cosmic balance bullshit. And everyone, everyone who found out about his horrible shit just forgave him. Like it was an acceptable loss."

  "Fuck that. If there was no justice in the world, then I was going to get some myself. But when I reawakened, the cosmic apotheosis wore on me, and I wondered if I was wrong. That was my time in the military, I had to see for myself how trustworthy my omniscience is. So I found his island and watched the nuke go off myself, which confirmed that my sight was true. From there, it was just about making Ymir pay. I picked the moment in recent history when he would be weakest, five years from then, and I started to prepare. God artifacts, gods themselves, the position of planets, which phase the moon was in, a pebble on the road positioned just right so it got in a security guard's shoe in such a way that he would step on it a few minutes later and distract himself long enough to miss my explosives laden van driving outside, which he would have noticed as suspicious and alerted security if not for a momentary distraction."

  Ben rolled his sleepy, weary head over to Hannah, "I spent lifetimes constructing the perfect moment. A concentrated pull on a universal guitar string hard enough to punish the only person in existence to never suffer for his crimes."

  Ben faced forward, really wishing he had some whiskey in front of him as Hannah asked, "What did that do to the future?"

  "Dunno," Ben said, massaging his face. "Part of the plan required pulling us both out of time and space, into a place where even someone like me couldn't see into or out of. My omniscience is the best out of all of them, you know? And once Ymir was dead, really and truly dead, I put on this power dampener, and I've never taken it off since."

  Ben showed his special watch to Hannah, who remarked, "Is that what that is?"

  "Yep," Ben said, "restricts my sight in exponential increments. Ever since I left that demi-universe, I've never unleashed my power enough to see more than five seconds into the future. I have no idea what my actions may have wrought, and I don't care. I did what was right, and if the universe doesn't like that, then the universe can suck a turd. They can try to punish me all they want, but I made sure that no power in this universe or outside of it can undo Ymir's death, which was half the battle in the first place. So many people revive him later or travel in time to see the great hero, it's super annoying."

  "What about the backlash? Or the... uh, the rebound? Aren't you worried?"

  "A little," Ben admitted, "but I think it may have worked itself out already. You now Big Man?"

  "The guy who replaced Ymir as the strongest hero? What's he got to do with this?"

  "I had no idea who he was before he was revealed by the Hero Association. Like, he never appeared in the future with Ymir even though he's clearly as strong as him. I can only conclude that Big Man is the universe's answer to Ymir's death. A hero strong enough to replace him, and invisible to me so that I can't kill this one."

  Hannah was reeling from the revelation that the entire timestream continuum was at risk thanks to the drunkard next to her who wouldn't even save some kids.

  "You talk of justice, but what's happening to those kids isn't justice."

  "Then they'll have to find their own justice, the way I found mine."

  The assistant sat back, looking at her boss in astonishment. There was absolutely no logical reasoning she could ever accept for allowing children to die.

  "Of course, there is a way that might work out for all concerned," Ben huffed exasperatedly.

  "Which is?"

  "I can't save them directly, but I could unlock the doors for them, they could find their own way out. Hopefully. It would still be on them to get out."

  "Yes, please, can you do that! Any little thing to help!"

  "Aaaaaaaaaahhhllllllright," Ben agonized. "Go to my truck, the center console has a thing with a big button on it. Hit that button, or give it to me and I'll hit it."

  Hannah excitedly hopped out of her backseat, skipped her way over a poorly salted icy parking lot, and into Ben's lifted truck. She popped open the center console and immediately knew what Ben was talking about. In the middle of a bunch of gizmos and alien gadgets was a bulbous grey box with an ominous red button on top. She picked it out, excited to finally use some of the mysterious tech Ben kept, but accidentally turned some scroll wheels on the back. She knew better than to press the button after accidentally fumbling it, so she brought it back to her car for Ben to fix.

  "Good sense," he congratulated her, much to her immense pleasure. "I set this earlier, but you just moved the beacon over Florida. That would be rough. I'll set it back to the Louisiana destination, and-"

  Ben held the doohickey up and Hannah gladly pressed the button.

  "-that's that! Now we just need to wait for them to invade and the kids should have an easier time getting out."

  Hannah nodded, then picked out the word, "Invade? Them? What?"

  Ben grinned at her with the red glint in his eyes, then his jaw stretched into a yawn.

  "Gosh, drinking really tires me out," Ben finished his yawn. "Let's get some sleep. We'll need it."

  "Ben," Hannah bumped her boss while a sinking feeling filled her gut about the contraption, "what does this button do?"