Prison break.

I opened a portal to the quarantine area where the Travelers were being held, to start the final stage of the plan.

The contingencies.

I had more than enough on my part but you can never be too careful when trying to kill an alien god whale.

"Noelle, Oliver. Get ready. Plan beguns in T minus 10 minutes. Computer set a timer.

Star, stay her and help them get rea-" I said, as Noelle burped and a rat skittered out from inside her mass of tentacles.

Odd.

I thought I killed all the rats in last night's experiment.

I recalled the test last night.

I wanted to do a final test of Noelle's powers to see if she could replicate everything in the bodies she cloned.

After all, my plan was to use her to reveal the truth of Cauldron to the world like in canon.

A bit unoriginal some might say, but eh, if it ain't broke, why fix it?

But before that I needed to know something.

I had placed nanobots in the brains of the cauldron capes the day I invaded their base.

If I was to clone them and use those evil clones as a final proof of their crimes, I needed to know that I could kill those clones too with the nanobots in their brain.

And for that I needed to check if her clones were replicated complete with any alterations I had made, like the nanobots.

So, I put some nanobots into the brain of a rat and had her create rat clones last night to see if it would work.

Thankfully, it did. The cloned rats all had nanobots in their brains. And I could even control them, which meant they weren't rogue nanobots.

So her power didn't consider my nanobots to be a property of sentience but rather biology.

Nice to know!

Another thing I found out was that Noelle's power can't make clones of dead creatures, as it stopped producing rats when I used technokinesis to kill the original rat inside Noelle.

After that was done, I clearly remember killing all the rats meticulously. And I am damn sure none got away, because this area was a quarantine zone for a reason. I had laser fields isolating the whole room.

So where did this rat come from?

Unless....Noelle can make clones of clones?

I shook my head.

I don't have the time to check for that.

I used my nano swarm to puree the rat and checked Noelle's body again.

No rats.

Well then.

For the final part.

To create a distraction for the heroes and make a final defence against Scion. I needed some minions.

The kind that can stand up to Scion.

I took a look around for any more surprise rats before opening a portal.

To the Birdcage.

And I jumped in.

Right into a prison riot.

I guess no getting any food for over a week will drive them to this after all.

"Ahehem!" I cleared my throat, as all eyes turned to me.

"Get him!" Someone cried, lunging at me.

I sighed, and slung off the pink gun, blowing the man and his crew to smithereens.

"Now, anyone else wants to try something or do you want to get out of the damn Birdcage? Huh?" I shouted, glaring down the rest of the prison population.

"You're the man with the portal gun!" Lung said, his mouth full of....Bakuda?

Wow. So they had gotten to cannibalizing each other too?

Well, they were the worst of the worst anyways. What could you expect from them.

"Lung?" I said, smirking, "Now that's one way to eat a girl out!"

"Give me the portal g-" He said, transforming into his draconic form as he made to charge me.

Only, I didn't tolerate it, blowing off his lower half.

"Listen, I don't have time for your bullshit.

I'm here to bring out a handful of people. Anyone else that tries anything get's blown, and not in the good way. Capische?" I shouted, to nods and murmured agreements.

"Good. Now, I'll call out the names of the people I'm taking out first. So step up, when I call your name.

Glaistig Uaine." I called out as a teenaged girl with blonde hair and green eyes stepped out from the parting crowd.

Glaistig Uaine or as she liked to call herself, the Faerie Queen, was a ridiculously strong parahuman with the ability to steal people's powers by ripping out their souls and eating them. Of course, in this world the stronger the power the more buttfuck insane the wielders were.

In her case, she believed that the parahuman powers were 'faerie magic' and that people without powers were just props on the grand stage of life.

She had that whole Shakespearan theme going for her.

"What fore doth thou desire of this queen?" She asked in a chorus of a dozen voices, straight out of a horror movie.

I had to deal with her on her terms if I wanted to make any headway here.

"A contract. If I release you from your bounds, I desire your help in defeating a great foe. I hear the fae keep their word, to their deaths. I presume their queen, one such as you, would surely hodl some menaing to that? That you would keep your word ever stronger so. Or do I presume wrongly?" I replied.

"You do not. The Fae keep their word. I shall agree to aid thee in thy quest, mortal, just this once. But remember, if you get to the wrong side of my temper, you shan't live to see the sun rise evermore!" She huffed.

"Thank you. You have my sincerest gratitude." I said, turning to the next person on the list.

"String Theory!" I called out.

A petite woman in exaggerated glasses, squeaked, as she pushed her way out of the crowd, stumbling in.

"Here!" She said, raising a hand.

"Same deal for you. Help me deal with a guy and you get to go free after." I said.

"And why should I work for you? You look like a tinker. You should be the one looking to work for me! I am the greatest tinker the world has ever seen! I don't lower myself to your level! In fact, if you work for me, together we can take over the world! And you could be my second in command!" She said, hands on her hips before cackling like a megalomaniac.

String Theory was unfortunately correct. If I hadn't arrived in this world, she'd have been one of the strongest tinkers ever.

Her power was to create devices that worked on countdown timers. That's it. That's the only limitation she had. She had the ability to build anything and everything she could imagine so long as it had a countdown timer to self destruction.

And her speciality? Doomsday devices.

This along with her odd personality, made her an archetypical mad scientist straight from saturday morning cartoons. And I mean that literally. She once tried to blow the moon out of orbit if she wasn't paid a ransom of a billion dollars. That's some Austin Powers, Dr. Evil shit right there.

And she'd have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those heroes and pesky little Dragon.

"I blew up Pluto last week." I said smirking, showing her a holographic display of the scene as her eyes went wide with awe.

"Marry me!" She squealed, jumping at me only to smash against my forcefield.

"I'll consider it. If you help me kill Scion. How about it?" I asked.

"A man with ambition! Me likey!" She giggled, giving me a thumbs up "I'm in!"

"Alright. Gavel!" I called out.

A hulking behemoth of a man with shoulders that could put Kingpin to shame walked out from the crowd, munching on a human arm.

Gavel's power was another broken one. His power capped the amount of damage that could be dealt to him at one time.

This meant that shooting him with a dozen bullets would only do as much damage as shooting him with a couple of them.

He literally can't be hurt more than a set amount. The best part though is that it meant he couldn't be critical hit or one hit KO-ed by anyone. Not even Scion.

The author once said in an interview that Gavel was one character that couldn't be killed no matter how hard you tried.

He spat out the bone, scratched his bushy beard, before picking out bits of skin from his teeth as he spoke.

"Killing Scion? How much you paying?"

"The payment is your escape from the Birdcage." I replied, frowning.

"Nah. Keep it. I'll stay." He said, waving me off.

"Tch fine. I don't have time to waste negotiating. Five million dollars. And your escape from the Birdcage. All you need to do is hold him in place while I deal the death blow. Won't take nore than a couple of seconds. That's generous pay for less than a minutes' worth of work." I said.

"Deal." He smiled, nodding.

"Finally, Marquis." I called and a man emerged from a cage of bones, rising up above the crowd.

"If you think I can fight off Scion, you overestimate my power." He said, frankly.

"Oh, I don't need you to fight Scion. For you, I have another job. Saving your daughter from her abusive family." I replied.

His brows furrowed and he eyed me skeptically.

"And what do you get from that?" He asked.

"I get to deprive the heroes of their strongest healer. That's more than enough." I answered, "Are you in?"

"Yes." He replied, and walked over to me.

"Oh, and one last thing!" I said, scanning the room, "Teacher!"

A fat balding man walked out, from an organized row of people, the crowd stepping away in reverence.

"I don't suppose I need to fight Scion too? If so, I'm afra-"

Boom!

I blew him up, as chunks of him rained down on his followers.

Teacher had the power to give minor powers to people and then assimilate them to be used for his own ends via a form of brainwashing.

Used correctly, he could have formed a tinker hivemind with his followers and eventually reconstructed my portal tech, something I cannot allow.

Hence he needed to die here.

The same reason I shut down and wiped all of Dragon's blueprints from her drive.

The same reason I killed Micah and Molly in Heroes.

No one can have my portal tech.

And I will not take any chances with it.

"No. I just need you to die." I laughed, opening a portal to the quarantine zone on the ship.

"Come on you four. Clock's ticking. We have a long day before us."

Returning to the ship, I found Noelle, Oliver and Star waiting for me, ready to go.

"Alright. Next stop, Brockton Bay!"