Mother Earth, Part One (Patreon)

Written by HikerAngel

Commissioned by TRM

Caroline placed two fingers on her temple as she gazed down upon the earth that she had been calling home for most of her life. On days like this, she just wanted nothing to do with it! They called her GaiaGirl, though she much preferred GaiaWoman at this point, much as it didn’t roll off the tongue. Sometimes, she wished she didn’t have to keep up the fake identity. If anything, Gaia suited her perfectly fine. It felt far more formal and bespoke for a woman of her caliber.

She ran a hand through her raven hair, tucking a streak of gray behind her ear. She was getting older, several thousand years of it to be exact, but humanity remained the same as ever. Time had been kind to her in many ways. It blessed her with a body most women would still kill for at her age, or even women hundreds of years younger. Comic book superheroes drawn by horny artists would turn to villainy for a form even half as delectable as hers was.

She pushed a wrist-mounted button on her skin-tight, curve-defining supersuit. A hologram projected itself from the location, an image of her earthen family proudly displaying before her. She looked so happy in the image as she held both her loving husband and daughter up with a single bicep flex. But that photo was fifteen years ago and this was now.

Even with a life as fantastic as hers, she wanted nothing to do with it right now. What had happened? Her own stressed, apathy-ridden face reflected in the light of the photo, overlapping the carefree face present within it. Had the populace grown tired of her? No, she remained quite popular as the only superhero defender of earth aside from her daughter.

What she really needed was a break.

Every day was a similar song and dance. Wake up, stop some random villain of the week, return home, repeat. The sheer monotony was enough for Caroline to nearly rip her perfect hair out. Smoking did nothing for her. Alcohol did nothing either. Meth, cocaine, weed, LSD, ketamine, heroine, fentanyl, quaaludes—all nothing. Her body was simply too powerful for any mind-altering substances to affect her in any way.

There was one out she had. One way to vent her frustrations. Yet it was coming up on quite short supply.

Destroying planets.

She loved it. They were like punching bags made of sugar glass to her. She was quite fortunate that seemingly every planet other than Earth was an inhabitable rock floating through space, since anything that science classified as a ‘planet’ brought a surge of dopamine through her buxom body as her sinuous fists reduced them to rubble with singular strikes. Thirty or fourty brought to ash every few months or so usually kept her sane, and as long as she did it far, far away from what human telescopes could observe, there wouldn’t be any public unrest about what she was doing.

Because if the public found out, then so did Tammy, her daughter. That was a conversation Caroline would simply never be ready for. She was an inspiration for the up-and-coming hero, a force for good and hope that Caroline did not wish to corrupt with her secret desires. Tammy was a good kid. A bit aloof and distant, but that was to be expected from a nineteen-year-old who liked “vibe music” and wore exclusively worn-out t-shirts and the same oversized hoodie for the last five years.

In the time it took to read that paragraph, she had already decimated a galaxy’s worth of dwarf planets. She felt nothing. She couldn’t even settle for gas planets, which a simple inhale of her powerful—albeit appendix-tier useless—lungs could eviscerate from existence with ease. They had to be physical rocks, ones that seemed just similar enough to earth. Perhaps she got a bit of a rush from the naughtiness of it all, how easily earth could be one of the many planets reduced to atoms under her heel.

She wasn’t in the business of psychoanalyzing herself, she could save that for the shrink. All she knew was that she liked destroying planets, simple as that. And simple it would have remained, had she not been rudely interrupted during her latest bout.

With Caroline’s worry already at a new high as her fresh planet count seemed to dwindle, the last thing she needed was to be blindsided by an explosive device nearly ten times as powerful as a human nuke. She wasn’t even hurt, just confused, as one naturally would if they were a few billion lightyears from the nearest known civilization and were suddenly hit with something undeniably man-made.

But as soon as she could raise a sculpted eyebrow at the unexpected opposition, a vaguely humanoid figure flew through the hazy meteorite field and struck her in the chest. At least, it attempted to. If space could allow someone to hear them scream, Caroline certainly would’ve. This alien being had struck her unbreakable abs with an arm-like appendage summoning as much power as they could muster, yet it only appeared to hurt them in turn, their arm contorting at an unnatural angle as they appeared to let off some sort of expression of agony.

Already bored with this interaction, Caroline looked past the green attacking creature to the approximate location they had arrived from, assessing the threat of the situation. Now, her advanced mind was beginning to put everything together. Whoever this was, they clearly hailed from the planet adjacent to the one Caroline had just destroyed, and they probably thought they were next.

Eager to quell this misconception, Caroline grabbed the alien attacker by their unbroken limb, dragging them back to the planet they came from. She touched down on the foreign soil, gently letting go of the space fairing alien and allowing them to regain their balance. Immediately, confused, orange-skinned beings began to exit their homes, unsure about who the new face that had arrived on their planet was.

But then, their faces turned sour as they saw who she had dropped at their doorstep. Caroline managed to raise a sculpted eyebrow this time as the orange beings began to pelt her and the green being with rocks, mud and whatever else they could find at their feet. Her advanced mind quickly put two and two together—these were two different societies of the same alien species who were in some sort of rivalry or war with one another.

“So, what exactly did you do to piss off all of these guys, hmm?” the superwoman asked somewhat rhetorically to her green assailant, not expecting them to actually understand her. “Just my fucking luck, I go to blow up some planets for stress relief and to escape the pointless, petty squabbles of humankind, only to find a alien race that’s no different from them at all!”

Enraged, she picked up a nearby rock and chucked it at a nearby orange alien. Her return fire was far more devastating than anything they had thrown her way, zipping forward like a hundred-caliber bullet which tore through an orange alien’s head and subsequently the entire house behind him. But the devastation didn’t stop there, as the resulting tsunami of a sonic boom ravaged the nearby city blocks as if a bomb had erupted nearby.

Upon witnessing the damage a mere passive toss of a stone no bigger than her balled fist could invoke, Caroline cupped her hands over her mouth in horror. She didn’t desire to deliver destruction upon these people! Worse—she found herself quietly loving it.

These bigoted animals will never change their minds. She found her brain already attempting to rationalize what she had done. Hell, they’ll probably find earth one day and attempt to conquer it. You’re doing the human race a favor by preemptively dealing with a future threat.

“Ugh! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” she shouted aloud to her eager thoughts, stomping her foot on the ground several times for emphasis. Of course, failing to regulate her strength in this instance only served to further exacerbate her destruction as spiderwebbing cracks tore through the concrete around her. Magma from the mantle of the planet was pushed further up into the crust from the sheer power behind her tiny tantrum, nearby dormant volcanoes erupting and coating several unprotected houses in boiling lava.

Long ago, the Orange aliens had a choice. They could invest in lava-proofing, or spend their resources towards the endless war against the Greens in hope of getting an edge on the competition. It was pretty obvious as to which choice they made. In hindsight, had they known that an unstoppable, jaded mother would’ve touched down upon the surface of their planet and unleash hellfire then maybe they would’ve thought differently about which direction was a priority, but now they simply had to live with their choices as she forced her unconscious will upon them.

With a break in the action—at least for Caroline—the superpowered mother paused to focus her mind. She couldn’t understand a lick of what these beings were saying, but thanks to her advanced mind, she’d figure it out in no time. She recalled several of the existing alien shouts and utterances, quickly piecing them together in her head and seeing which ones matched with familiar phrases of English, working backwards like a sort algorithm—only faster. By the time it took for a missile to have been fired from a tank barrel halfway towards her, she had already figured out every aspect of their language, how it worked, where it originated from and the difference in dialects between the Oranges and the Greens.

On top of all that, she still had enough time to raise her hand and idly swat the missile off of her like it was a fly, sending it spiraling off where it promptly turned a housing block into a crater.

~

Betarex ran down a long corridor as fast as his spindly legs could carry him. He wasn’t much of a runner, that much was evident, but when the High Command spoke of the Green menace, Etlue, touching down on orange soil with a completely unfamiliar associate who proceeded to unleash destructive mayhem upon the populace. Information on specifics was limited, but the message was clear—this was now an all-out war.

As the most qualified defense engineer for the job, Betarex understood the stakes. He was already out the door the second a mention of Etlue crossed his communication waves, there was simply no time to explain anything to his concerned family or even acknowledge that he was leaving for work at such an unusual hour.

While chaos and panic erupted on the streets, the table of elected leaders and appointed representatives sat in total silence. The High Commander was one such leader, his gruff expression remaining as it always had even amidst this strange, newfound crisis, which only made his eight feet of height and broad shoulders that were half that metric all the more imposing.

“You’re late.” That was all the head of the High Command had to say in response to Betarex’s wheezing as he floundered into the round table room.

“Yeah, sorry… the warp device… was down. It’s a good thing… I live close,” he replied between heavy gulps of air.

“Each breath you take is another house totaled by that fiend. Get to your station immediately,” the High Commander once again responded coldly.

“Y-yes sir,” he replied, huffing off to where he was told. Of course, getting there was no easy trek as it was behind more security clearance checkpoints than could be counted on two Orange hands—and they had eight fingers a piece! 

“Are you in position?” The High Commander radioed within seconds of Betarex falling face-first into the room from exhaustion. The space was cramped—it had to be. There were more weapons-related buttons in this single location than anywhere else in Orange-claimed territory.

“Y-yes sir,” he managed to respond through dry heaves. “Here and ready to execute justice and such…”

“Good. I will leave the first strike up to your Discretion, Betarex.”

For a moment, The High Commander seemed confident in his subordinate’s abilities. That was quite the unusual response, but the last thing Betarex wanted was to disappoint the man now! He triple-cleaned the fog from his glasses that had built up from his relentless breathing, activating computers and programs alike to prepare a response to the newfound threat.

If they were calling upon his expertise, he figured that negotiations simply were not an option. No, if they needed Betarex, then this was a threat far beyond even Daicro the Green. The advanced maps quickly triangulated the source of the conflict. A supersoldier—only one unlike anything Betarex had ever seen. Her skin was not Green nor Orange, but a strange tanned peach. Then again, it was a color almost too close to Orange for comfort.

Betarex’s reticles were aimed and ready, a beam of concentrated microwaves that could incinerate any solid object it touched was available at his fingertips. Yet he hesitated still. His people still lacked a supersoldier to rival the Green’s Daicro. If he could perhaps only weaken the attacker, well…

“Betarex! What the hell is the holdup down there!?” The High Commander screamed from the radio, his voice peaking the device’s range with his fury.

“Ack! N-nothing, sir! S-sorry, sir! Just contemplating the usefulness of this ray. It’s never been tried before!” That wasn’t technically a lie, but it also was low on the bespectacled alien’s priority list.

“This being’s decimation isn’t slowing down and it’s standing still in the air! You can’t miss it!” This was true. With the weapon’s long arming time, this specific situation was perfect for a sitting duck target. Not one to dismiss a direct order from the boss, he swallowed his indecision and unleashed one of the more powerful beams of his repertoire.

Unfortunately, Betarex’s hesitation would cost him. Within the second of him pushing the button, Daicro recovered from his Caroline-inflicted injuries and attempted once more to attack his human assailant, only to fly directly into the path of Betarex’s beam. Not even the Green supersoldier’s healing factor could save him from a concentrated heatwave that rivaled a red hypergiant.

With the invisible nature of the ray, Caroline was left briefly confused as she looked over her shoulder at the man charging at her screaming, only for him to explode into harmless ash. She simply shrugged, continuing her onslaught against the fledgling Orange armada that dared to call themselves the protectors of this quadrant.

“Betarex? What the hell happened? Did you destroy the target?”

“U-um… I got one of them?” he replied sheepishly into the radio, foolishly hoping that the faintest of silver linings would spare him from the inevitable verbal thrashing he was about to receive.

~

“Now just what the hell is going on over there? What happened to our hero?” High King Jahrr of Greens spoke, leaning closer and closer to the projected screen until his rear was no longer on the gilded throne he had been sitting upon most of the day.

“Daicro the Invincible has either been disconnected from our reads on his vitals or he did not survive the assault against this invader. Either way, our greatest asset in the war has been compromised,” his majesty's most trusted informant responded, famous for remaining calm and stoic during moments of great apprehension in Green society.

“No! No, no, no! Get General Odozer to drop everything he’s fucking doing and search for Daicro!” the High King demanded, his volume raising an octave with every other word.

“B-but my liege! Odozer’s mission to secure the battle plans is currently underway!” the informant sputtered, breaking his calm at the sound of such an absurd demand. “It could compromise his mission if he were to be diverted!”

“The potential of the Oranges knowing Daicro’s sole weakness won’t matter if he’s not even alive for it to be exploited!” another less-trusted informant added, in agreement with the king’s position.

“I care not for the reasons you offer, I want Odozer’s men on the scene now! They have instant GPS and transcriptions for documentation purposes, and I want those elements focused on this new threat immediately!”

“Y-yes, my liege!” both informants spoke in tandem, rushing to the command center to bark orders at those beneath them, so that those Greens may bark orders at the already-stressed General Odozer who was already on the most stressful stealth mission of his life.

“General, the High King has ordered that you shift your focus to the current battle unfolding in the leftmost quadrant of Saomas,” came a staticky voice from Odozer’s satchel radio.

“What!? Are you insane? It’s anarchy out there! There’s fucking volcanoes exploding and shit!” he shouted back into the radio, his mouth so close to the receiver he looked like he was ready to swallow it.

“This is an order directly from the High King,” the informant reminded the general. “Obey or you and your men will be branded traitors and exiled from Green society should you attempt to return.”

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Odozer knew he had no choice but to walk directly into hell. His squad took some stern convincing, but pretty soon he was leading ten of the most specialized men into a conflict that not even a superhero could win. Rubble and Orange bodies littered the decimated city-turned-battlefield, with powerful handprints and shoeprints that were embedded hyper-firmly into destroyed tanks and troop carriers as if they were little more than wet concrete left to dry without supervision to stop miscreants.

“What kind of horrifying beast could bring such powerful destruction to devices like these?” one of Odozer’s men pondered, horrified. If only he could’ve known that this same horrifying beast loved baking cookies on the weekends for her local firefighter station and cried at soap opera drama.

The supposedly fearless men cowered behind whatever cover they could find as Caroline zipped by, picking off whatever sparse Orange infantry still existed within the current wave. More were on the horizon, but a brief glimpse would be all Odozer and his men would get as twin beams of heat tore through the first row of approaching tanks. A chain of explosions erupting like fireworks bathed three square kilometers in a haunting orange.

“Men, assume semicircle formation!” Odozer commanded, somehow breaking himself out of shock long enough to voice an order. “Surround her, search the area for Daicro and fire on my signal when I order it.” Within a few minutes, each member of the Green specialized invasion forces was in position, but Odozer didn't give the signal to attack. Amidst the chaos, he saw opportunity.

“General, what the hell are you doing?” radioed in one of his higher ups, unsure why they hadn’t detected his order for troops and why his GPS coordinates were off-position.

“Something that could shift the tides of the Green-Orange war in our favor forever!” was all Odozer responded with, continuing to ascend the lofty rubble until he finally reached an optimal vantage point.

“Hey! Hey you!” The general shouted aloud to the woman flying around in the air, laying waste to the surrounding area. Her supersonic hearing would’ve detected him at any altitude, but his boldness in calling to her from a high-up vantage point intrigued her enough to draw in her attention, whether intentionally or not. She cautiously approached the man with a slow float, shrugging off mortar shell after mortar shell that struck her invincible form. Sure, she was making herself an easier target by not remaining mobile. But a target could be as easy as it wanted to be if a tactical nuke could hit a bullseye on it without leaving as much as a bullet hole.

“General, is it? Is it customary for people of your culture to get the attention of your superheroes in such strange ways? You do understand you’re in a warzone, correct?”

Odozer was amazed that she remained steady in her questioning while being peppered with bullets. “U-um, well, I-I was just wondering, u-um…”

“Surely you can talk faster than that,” she then paused for a brief moment to jut her hand out and catch a warhead that would’ve struck Odozer dead on. She tossed it over her shoulder, casually returning the explosive device to its sender. “As you can see, active combat is still occurring all around you and yet you’ve still failed to meaningfully convey your point.”

“V-very well, I’ll keep it brief! It seems we have a common enemy here in the Orange ones. Perhaps, with our combined forces, We’ll be able to secure an end to this pointless war. B-because that’s what this aggression is all about, right? You see this conflict as pointless! And that makes you angry!” Ideally, General Odozer would’ve taken a more roundabout path to say the same thing, but subtlety couldn’t last when the unstoppable force of nature before him demanded swiftness in his speech.

“Ah, so that’s your angle here?”

“Y-yes it is!”

“Your only angle?” She questioned, raising a single, unconvinced eyebrow.

Odozer nearly soiled himself with fear. “Y-yes!”

“Then tell me, why do your men aim their guns at me from vantage points they think I cannot detect?”

She found a smile come to her lips as she detected his heart rate increase tenfold. A part of Caroline felt bad for putting this man through easily the most stressful day of his whole career, but there was something so insanely satisfying about withholding knowledge that absolutely mortified her opponents when she revealed it. She recalled a minor villain back on Earth that straight-up had a heart attack and died once she revealed that the weakness to osmium he was so convinced she had—and had been lying about having for several years before that—turned out to have no effect on her. Sure, it had been a cruel bit of deception on her part, but… well, that guy totally deserved it! He was evil! And all these aliens of this planet, they’re clearly just as if not more evil!

“So, let me propose a new offer, one that will actually put an end to this pointless war for good,” Caroline began, her eyes igniting with fiery infernos as the temperature of her irises rose into the quadruple digits. “I destroy every self-serving general who thinks they’re going to be the one to end it in victory.”

All of the men ready to fire on Odozer’s command no longer waited for a cue, understanding that their General’s life could be compromised. The expert marksmen all aimed perfectly and would’ve hit a dead-on headshot, however the speed of sound was simply too slow for Caroline. She could’ve simply stood there and took every shot to the face without worry, but instead she pivoted ever-so-slightly backwards and up. Using her advanced knowledge of mathematical theories—she took her job as a substitute teacher very seriously whenever the PTA needed one during her daughter’s tenure in school—she angled her breasts in such a way through the perfect amount of air inflating her lungs that each bullet struck her mighty bosom, only for the supple flesh to ricochet every piece of propelled lead back to whence they came. In an instant, ten of the most highly-trained specialist units were reduced to one, Caroline’s super-hearing detecting that one of the bullets had missed a lethal entry point, judging by the sounds of agonizing pain instead of no sound at all.

“Hmm, my math must’ve been slightly off,” Caroline admitted, leaving Odozer behind as she quickly zipped over to inspect the anomaly.

 The man was attempting to crawl away, no matter how futile the attempt ultimately was. Caroline casually landed where he once stood, casually traipsing alongside the red line of blood that streaked along the rubble.

“Huh, wow. That’s pretty interesting,” she remarked, using her x-ray vision to peer into the man’s body. “You’ve got an extra buildup of a cartilage-like substance in your neck, which just saved your life. More accurately, it’s postponing your inevitable death. Maybe that’s what you deserve, alien scum. You fight these endless wars, for what?”

At a certain level, she knew her justifications were flimsy at best, but that was all they needed to be. She knew her powers bestowed upon her a great responsibility, at that it was her responsibility to deliver justice onto those who warred endlessly. Why couldn’t she also have a little fun learning about how the internal workings of these clearly inferior, warmongering beings operated?

She bent down, ready to dissect the man like a frog in a middle school classroom.

“Oh, mom, there you are,” broke a vocal-fried girly voice through the chaos as if it were simply layered atop reality itself. “Dad’s been trying to get a hold of you for, like, an hour or so.”

Caroline’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. She’d recognize that boredom-ridden tone anywhere, the muffled sounds of late 2000’s pop hits accompanying its own carelessness and general annoyance.

Tammy was here.

The superpowered mother pivoted and froze in place like a thief in a spotlight, her range of motion limited to her eyes as they followed her daughter’s descent down to the planet’s surface. The Orange alien who was still bleeding out noticed how terrified the terrorizing tyrant of a so-called superhero appeared and smiled weakly, believing that vengeance would now be upon her.

If anyone could stop this rampaging mother, it would be her own daughter. Tammy was quite the protégée, already meeting her mother’s seemingly endless strength and prowess by the meager age of eighteen. Her father’s human genes hadn’t slowed her down one bit, though it gave her a potential edge that Caroline feared. While the all-powerful mother was able to disconnect herself from the atrocities she committed—even if she wasn’t consciously aware that she had been engaging in the behavior—she figured that her daughter would not share in such mental doublethink.

Surely, the humanity that Tammy’s father imbued upon her at an early age would leave her appalled by what she was witnessing. That her own mother would be so callous as to massacre those no different and no less deserving of life than her father, her human friends or even her boyfriend.

“Tam! Um, it’s… not what it looks like!” Caroline confessed unconvincingly, her body soaked in alien viscera from head to toe.

“What isn’t? Look mom, I get it. Really, I do. This place is pissing you off. Hell, this place is pissing me off! There’s, like, no wifi or 5G out here! How the hell am I supposed to listen to Spotify here? This place totally sucks!” To emphasize her anger, she picked up a nearby tank and tossed it into orbit, leaving the Orange soldiers within the tank to freeze to death if burning up when leaving the atmosphere didn’t somehow do them in. But Tammy was quick to calm herself after that. “Oh well, at least I have a few tracks downloaded on the app itself. I might just go crazy otherwise!”

Or, she could somehow manage to surpass her own mother in moral bankruptcy.

To be continued.