The White House, early morning. Thea shuffled out of her room mid-yawn to find her mother Moira already deep in a stack of paperwork.
"Thea, take a look at this." Moira handed her a thick file.
Thea flipped through it at speed. "The DuPont family and their associates think they don't have enough people under their control? Easy fix—I was just thinking the Earth's population was getting a bit crowded."
She kept reading, shaking her head. These old families, even drunk on greed, had somehow reached twice their usual capacity on the promise of vast reward. Through a web of alliances and deal-making, they had conquered five of the seven known planets beyond the solar system. The native civilizations had been devastated. Intelligent species were being enslaved and slaughtered, much like the Indigenous peoples of the Americas centuries ago.
The momentum was intoxicating. Not just the young—even the old guard had been swept up in the drumbeat of victory after victory. Every direction they looked, they saw money.
But even the best hunters have blind spots. The enslaved species weren't helpless. They fought back. However advanced your weapons were, you could still die from a knife in the back while you slept.
The major families hauled a shipload of spoils back to Earth and opened negotiations with governments: they needed weapons, they needed energy, and above all, they needed people.
As if on cue, the answer walked right in. The overflowing prisons had been a headache for years. Thea didn't bother involving the governments directly—she directed Knell to grease the necessary wheels. Money changed hands, and the criminals who couldn't be rehabilitated were quietly shipped off-world and sold to the pioneering families. The price was laughably low—practically spare change.
The cycle of crime that democracy had failed to break couldn't follow these men to a foreign planet. The families, now fully settled into the mindset of frontier lords, needed workers for the land. Whips and iron rods were persuasive enough. As for escape—the ships were all under family control. Surrounded by hostility on all sides, even hardened criminals found it in their interest to stay close to the people who could keep them alive.
Blackgate Penitentiary, Belle Reve, and others—Knell swept through them systematically, loading thousands onto transport ships at a time.
No one raised an objection. Prison staff had always found the work exhausting and dangerous—stabbings with improvised shivs were a regular occurrence. Now someone was paying them to look the other way. From the warden down to the janitor, not a word was said.
With these changes and the flow of capital, social order reached an unprecedented calm. Crime rates plummeted overnight. People were too exhausted from real work and too well-paid to bother robbing a fast-food restaurant. It simply wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Thea kept her eye on the big picture and didn't sweat the details. Social transitions always had growing pains. Like Jenny—no policy could deliver for everyone, and she knew it. She genuinely believed she'd minimized the collateral damage. She felt no guilt.
Her days settled into a comfortable rhythm: refining the power absorbed from the ancient Wizard Shazam, studying the mechanics of the Soul domain, and spending weekends sparring with Diana—a deeply satisfying workout for both body and spirit.
She returned to the Soul Sea once more and cleared out everything connected to Darkseid's power. The Siren had flagged that humans had been extracting trace amounts from the water, and Thea had sensed the discrepancy herself. She couldn't trace the culprit—humanity's black-market technology was too varied and too well-hidden—but the material was gone now.
Diana's twin swords had been infused with the most fundamental form of the Omega Effect. Darkseid's divine blood carried a concentrated portion of it as well. Thea had spent two days trying to make sense of both. She got nowhere. This was something that existed beyond her current understanding—which probably explained how Darkseid had always managed to hold his ground against Highfather.
She returned the swords to Diana, sealed the divine blood away for safekeeping, and decided to revisit the problem once her cultivation had advanced further.
...
"You've landed? How's the weather in Cambodia? Humid and overcast? Ha..."
Diana had set out alone with a travel pack to wander the world and deepen her understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Thea was buried in work, so she settled for a daily phone call to check in.
On the other side of the world, Diana smiled warmly and hung up. A teenage girl beside her nudged her with an elbow. "Boyfriend?"
The warrior goddess answered without hesitation. "Girlfriend."
The group let out an appreciative chorus of "Ooh~"—whether sincere or not.
She'd run into this crew in Phnom Penh: two guys, two girls, self-described university students on a holiday trip. Their destination was Angkor Wat. Diana had her doubts about their story, but she didn't especially care—she herself was traveling under a concealment charm, so she was hardly in a position to judge.
"Diana, keep up!" The girl called Cassie waved her over. Cassie and a good-looking young man named Dacey were a couple; the other two were the Lawrence siblings, friends to both of them.
Their reasons for traveling together seemed murky, but Diana didn't press it. When they'd asked her name, she'd given them "Diana" without thinking—common enough in any language to be completely anonymous.
Despite their best efforts to hide it, Diana had caught them huddled over a map around the campfire one night, whispering intently.
A treasure map? She almost smiled. Kids who watched too many movies.
She'd nearly slipped away on her own, but Cassie kept attaching herself to Diana, firing off questions about everything she saw. Diana sensed the girl wasn't a bad person, and they clicked in a way she hadn't expected—any topic she named, Cassie would happily discuss for an hour.
Not as encyclopedic as Thea, of course—but Diana was still a goddess. Her depth of knowledge and breadth of experience earned Cassie's genuine respect.
In Cassie's mind, Diana was clearly some kind of scholar.
The five of them took two vehicles and drove for six hours. With a local guide leading the way, they entered the Angkor Wat temple complex.
Built in the twelfth century, Angkor Wat was a marvel of architectural ambition and sculptural precision, renowned the world over for the grandeur of its construction and the exquisite detail of its bas-reliefs.
It was an era when Hinduism dominated the entire Indochinese Peninsula. In the local language, Angkor Wat meant the "City of Temples"—and it was dedicated to Vishnu, one of the three great gods of Hinduism. Brahma governed creation; Shiva governed destruction; Vishnu governed preservation, manifesting in countless forms to protect the world. In spirit, his doctrine was closer to Diana's creed of guardianship than any other tradition she'd encountered.
Unlike the others, who moved through the complex at a tourist's pace, Diana moved slowly and with intention. As a goddess, she could sense the residue of divine presence here. Vishnu had descended to this place—likely to deliver some form of teaching or blessing.
Many of the stone slabs and bricks inside the structure bore inscriptions: the reflections of people long gone. Few modern visitors could read Sanskrit, and so the ancient wisdom had been set aside in favor of admiring the architecture.
Diana wasn't here for architecture. She moved swiftly through the complex, examining every inscription she could find. The ones that aligned with her own path, she absorbed and internalized. The ones that didn't, she noted for future reference.