I stood on the observation deck, reveling in watching as the Twist Drive relaxed its hold on the quantum foam domains. The regions behind the ship shrinking back almost to their normal tiny size, while the ones in front grew back from near non-existence to just shy of normality.

It was sad that more people weren't here to witness this miracle, but the deck was mostly used only for sightseeing stops. I really couldn't blame them. What was amazing to my kinetic senses, to my eyes, though, was the same as they would see, merely an undifferentiated gray fog.

With no sensation of movement at all, we slid from a pseudo-velocity of many times the speed of light, to almost stationary in merely an instant, the slight Twist remaining, maneuvering us at the merest fraction of light speed. The transparent dome showing the sights, the ferocious yellow sun was huge as it illuminated the hot gas giant. Our target rivaling the gas giant in relative size was the gas giants moon, Sirrisi. (#1)  A barely perceptible shudder ran through the deck as the ship docked with the Sirrisi Orbital's boom, set far enough away that the Twist wouldn't tear apart the station. The drives shut down, and we entered the orbit of Sirrisi, home of a dozen of the most infamous villains. The boom smoothly retracting, pulling us into a docking dimple on the station's hull.

Docking at the Orbital began my first trial. I had spent all last night scanning the fine layout of the atoms that made up the visa approval stamp on my neighbor's ID chip. I couldn't understand what it said, of course, but using my TK to push the atoms into place on my ID chip to duplicate it was painstaking, but not that hard. (#2)  Grabbing my two well-worn valises in my climbing arms, I joined the lines at my assigned station portal.

Stepping across the demarcation line marking where ship's territory ended and station began, I felt the brief affirmation as my implants synched to the local public networks, downloading language updates and received current news.

As always the customs line was barely moving, and the crowds kept triggering a near state of panic that made me want to climb the nearest object and hide until the threat was gone. Hiding is what my people had done best, using the kinetic sense to detect and avoid predators. The Federation machines could see the foam and manipulate it, my version of it was vastly more detailed. I no longer had to even think about it, all the security cameras within a 37-meter sphere, had a light fuzz blurring my features just enough to prevent identification, but not so much that the AI's would flag an anomaly. It was unlikely any camera further away would even notice me. Barely a meter tall in a universe of beings ever so much larger.

"By Grr!k. They must train them in how to move slower! This line has yet to reach full stasis." I heard the clicking and grinding, like rocks in a tumbler, of the being's voice, as it joked, overlaid with a nuanced translation. Any ambiguous wordings displaying a branching tree of meanings in my overlay. Looking up at the towering Hruk behind me, the assisted reality overlay gave me name and species, everything else was marked private unless I sent a request that was accepted. I briefly checked my display, seeing I was still secure in the purchased ID I had adopted almost fifty standard years ago.

"Maybe they should hire some Tlan, they take minutes just saying 'hello.'" I chittered back up at him. His rumble in reply was translated as merely a laugh.

As my climbing arms placed the valises on the scanner plates, my manipulator arms pressed the back of my left true hand against the ID scanner. My luggage always raised suspicion, not because of what I carried, but because there was so little of it. Just dietary supplements, my reader loaded with physiology texts and a block of the wood that was the last remaining piece of the Tree.

The bored customs screener was rambling on about what I could and could not bring onto their world when the ID scanner gave out a beep. I hated this part...

The screener shot to his feet and bowed to me, "Honored Doctor Anais! Sirrisi welcomes you! Your visa is only good for twenty days, and then you must find a sponsor or apply to Immigration!" Motioning me through the security gate.

The Hruk laughed again, "Honored Doctor, hmm? Can you even reach to treat your patients?"

"That is why I would hire you; to lift and hold me as needed!" Walking away to the Hruk's laughter behind me.

The title 'Honored' was reserved for those certified to treat at least thirty different species. I had spent fifty years in school and was certified in all one hundred and twenty-one of the republics member species. The only reason I was using it was that it expedited my path through the bureaucracies. As to the patients, who needed to 'see' the patient when I could sense what was wrong and fix it from across the room.

It took a moment's concentration as I paused briefly in front of an automated bank teller and I picked up the stack of bills and rolled coins waiting for me there. Four more tellers, and a quick walk to the planetary shuttles; I was set for my days on Sirrisi. (#7)

=-=-=-=-

The Wayfarers Guild hostels were nothing fancy, no scheduled cleanings, no laundry service, and most importantly no questions. As I settled into the small room and began searching the local resources.

It was almost five days later before I saw the first action.

I had set up a social media alerts with filters for all of Sirrisi's hero and villain activity. Just after the first meal, with the day shift just heading to work, the boards lit up with reports. The Hydra team was assaulting the Helgan-Soon Research and Development facility.

Running out the door, I dropped to my belly on my grav-board, normally just a child's toy, holding on with my true hands as I went to a four-limbed propelled ride, legs and load arms spinning nearly in full circles. Darting into traffic, I grabbed onto passing vehicles, rocketing across intersections every time the vehicle I was leeching a ride from slowed or turned. Using my kinetic sense, I moved through traffic with an ease that put to shame the clumsy blocks of metal and plastic. The People may not have known how to fight, but the same adrenaline could be used to move towards trouble as was used to flee it.

Arriving at the police barricades, I found the closest light pole and lashing my tail around the pole, converted my horizontal momentum to vertical. I was almost to the top of the pole when I saw the other arboreal species already gathered there.

"What's going on? Is it Hydra?" I gasped out, still short of breath from my crosstown dash.

"Oh yeah! Hydra and Dominator, up against Red Guard. Turn to channels SuperViz or Nightscape for the official coverage, my favorite is PirateHome, they give the real stories."

I had already been following SV and NS but had never heard of PirateHome. I tried logging in and got a message, 'Invite Code Needed.'

"Says I need an Invite?"

"New on the planet? Try..." I echoed the code and my AR ocular implants filled with all the details, bio's I was already well familiar with, but the best part was the updates of the current faceoff. The action was occurring a full kilometer away, as my eyes focused on any particular participant my implant overlay kicked in, and they zoomed to full size. Only seeing others in the view if they attacked or were attacked by the primary focus.

Now was the time. I narrowed my kinetic sense from a globe and sent it out as a narrow beam. I could no longer sense things around me, but that beam could reach out as far as two kilometers. Latching on first to the villain Pyretic as he fired a bolt of flames. My sense flooded his body, finding Pyretic's upper heart, I reached out with the ability my people would use to shake distant limbs to distract predators, only capable of a few grams of force, and stroked the nerves leading into the heart, sending it into wild palpitations. Then finding his lower heart, I sent it into palpitations slightly out of phase with the upper heart. His blood pressure plummeted, and he collapsed unconscious.

Dominator, was easier as she had no real physical prowess, relying instead on hordes of mind-controlled minions. It was too hard to control her minions, as I stroked the nerves that sent her bowels into spasms and triggered her gag reflex until she vomited and shat uncontrollably. The minions turned on her most cruelly.

Swarm took effort. First I had to sort out which of the five robotic bodies was the original, and which the entangled duplicates. Turns out it was easier than I thought, the brain sponge of entangled platinum group metals was far less complex in the duplicates. Then finding no organic content to interfere with, I found instead a tiny spinning ring of exotic matter holding open the throat of a wormhole leading into the fusing heart of a distant sun. Raw energy streaming out of that pinhole in reality, was captured and tamed in a complex array of force fields that in turn powered the mechanical and electronic systems. I had never tried this before, but the possibility had occurred to me. Reaching down into the quantum foam, I pumped energy into the domains on one side of the throat, pushing the wormhole off alignment just a nanometer, but for the attometer aperture it might as well have been on the opposite side of the galaxy. The stream of energy flooded the interior for almost seven hundred picoseconds. While the disruption of the energy flow was critical, the real damage came as the energy stream nicked the spinning ring of exotic matter and sent it tumbling. Briefly, opening the aperture to flood sun-hot plasma into Swarm's body. The explosion was sudden and took out Swarm and its duplicates. Shadow was caught in the flash before she could teleport and was also believed vaporized. AR implants briefly darkening to opaque to protect our eyes from the flash. Unfortunately, Glitter, one of the heroes, was grappling Shadow at the time and also vanished.

The last villain, Rage, was just a big dumb Tank and was quickly captured by the remaining heroes.

"Wow! Was that a whole new set of powers?"

"Did Swarm just self-destruct?"

"Wait! Where's Glitter? I liked Glitter. I got her autograph last year."

These and a hundred other questions and comments flowed around me as I clung there, looking at the devastation. Did I really do that? I mean, I know not directly, but did I really do that? My people had no fight or flight response as most of the other species did. We were all flight or hide, there was no fight in us. Yet, I had just committed an act of violence, to the best of my knowledge, the first in the entire history of the People.

=-=-=-=-

I was hiding in the top of a tree, in a park not far from the scene of yesterday's battle. Was this really what I was supposed to be doing? Was this the life I wanted?

The People had existed since time immemorial. We knew of tools; we knew of constructed things but had chosen not to use them. Our needs were fulfilled by the world spanning Tree we lived in. The Tree as much a part of the People as any sibling. Pillars of each trunk a hundred meters across at the base, reaching more than a kilometer into the sky. What need had we of tools when the Tree moderated the climate under its interlocked canopy. What need had we of written history when we talked to the Tree, and its internal fibers bent to shapes that recorded our history in holographic forms, if only you knew how to look. The only needs we had were filled by Lore-masters who recorded the great thoughts, Philosophers who thought the great thoughts, and Healers such as I, to repair the occasional broken bone on the People or cancerous gall on the Tree.

When the Federation landed on a rocky slope and built a city there, we watched, content to just hide. The concept of personal property had never occurred to us, so sharing had come naturally.

We had begun initial contact with a group of scientists who called us proto-sentient. We just considered them ill-behaved children. Neither really understanding the other.

Then had come the Six. Beings with powers we had not the slightest clue of. In only ten cycles of the greater moon, the Six had destroyed us, removed our hearts, destroyed our souls. With a gesture, entire swaths of the Tree were cut from its roots and feed to armies of metal beings that reduced our ancient histories, our great thoughts, to planks of dead wood. Seeding the soil with things that ate the roots away and left farmland behind.

The People themselves, the slow eaters, the fast predators, were hunted by fast flyers, living, and metal. Soon all that had lived in the Tree were reduced to pallets of furs to feed off-planet luxuries. In the deepest of our great thoughts, we had never considered such a thing.

The few of us that remained, on a reservation ten kilometers on a side would not last long. The Tree as a whole had stored memories going back countless millennia, now what remained was so blurred as to be incomprehensible.

My mission became clear. As Healer it no longer served a purpose to remain, there would be no more laughter and grooming as we considered the great thoughts. No more courting in the very tops of the Tree under the light of the full moons. No more generations would be born; the People had decided to pass from the world that no longer had a place for them.

In our oldest memories, all that was remembered was that before time, we had once walked the stars. We had given it all up, turned our backs on them. Now it was the time that one of the People returned to them.

I had climbed down from the remaining portion of the Tree and walked to the scientist's camp. It took a year for them to understand the nature of their crime, while my first lesson was names, as the scientists gave me Anais. It had never mattered before. The second was time, as the Federation saw it. But by then the People had stopped eating and had fallen, as we always had, to become food for the Tree. The Tree itself had suffered too great a shock, losing almost its entirety. The Tree's slow thoughts ceased, as the climate under the canopy dried, now subject to cooling and warming, the rot had set in. (#8)

It had seemed natural that I attend the Federation's medical schools, I was still a Healer and had a lot to Heal.

Sometimes to heal, a Healer must cut away healthy tissue to remove the bad. My mission reaffirmed I resumed the hunt.

=-=-=-=-

The PirateHome net proved its worth mere days later as they reported that the last three uncaptured villains had retreated to a fortress on the Polar continent. Locked year around in ice, and swirling winds. Not to make it too easy, the search zone was nearly fifty kilometers across.

I spent my last night of warmth in meditation. Reaching inside I destroyed all the skin and hair pigments, turning my fur into a silvery white. Slipping into a thermal wing-suit, intended for high altitude gliding. Taking only my pack full of high energy rations I set out. Walking out of the winter resort into the dark of a daylong night. The grav-board, now colored white, would serve me here as well as before. Raising one leg and the corresponding arm, holding the wing fabric stiffly, I set about tacking into the katabatic winds. Every so often changing the used limb pair as I swung across the wind.

Two long and tedious days later, as I was nearing the edge of the search area, I swooshed through a buried campsite. No heavy power usage, my thermal image barely above background, the same things I had counted on to hide me from the villains, worked equally well on the heroes. The heroes and police were here, I had to hurry before they spotted me.

Detecting a sensor cluster buried in the snow as I approached a rise to the upper plateau that spawned these winds, I turned to travel parallel to the escarpment, finding a second then a third sensor cluster. Having the three points, I drew a curve and drew three lines perpendicular to the curve. Their careful placement of the sensors serving to point me to exactly where they were.

Shedding my thermal suit and grav-board, the wind tore them from my grasp, and they vanished in an instant. I wouldn't last long at this energy expenditure, my TK barely keeping my skin molecules excited enough to hold off the frigid wind. I started a slow, steady creep along the rock face. Finding a hidden hatchway, I had my way in. Not through the alarmed and sealed hatch, but molecule by molecule, atom by atom, I tore open a tunnel alongside the hatch. I dropped into the narrow split and crawled over the powdered stone. Entering a tunnel that was only dimly lit, but that was no inconvenience, more importantly, it was warm. I paused to eat several of the ration packs.

I would be facing Destro, an armored suit user, who was of little threat. Angel, with hir life-siphoning touch, I had to stop from range. Dr. Know, physically normal, but with an intellect beyond comprehension by most, and a disturbingly twisted sense of morals, who was to be my ride out of here, IF I could talk him into it.

Scanning the base, I found dozens of service robots and robotic guards I hadn't been expecting. There was Destro's suit, but he wasn't in it. It was only a moment's work to disable the leads connecting to the batteries and Zero-point module. Repairable, but not quickly.

Angel and Destro, there they were, together. It still amazed me how these many species of the Federation were all crazed with mating. Really what was the attraction across species lines? Still, there the two were, not even under the light of a cleansing moon. Both bodies filled with chemicals amplifying euphoria as they rolled together. Angel, who's touch could bring death, zie ceased as a vessel in hir brain ruptured. Destro raced to kneel at hir side and attempted resuscitation, mere instants before he had his own aneurysm. This violence thing was amazingly easy.

Walking down the hallway, robots were streaming my way. So I began wholesale deactivations. Security cameras shorting out as soon as they came within my sphere. Robotic systems falling before they achieved line of sight.

Eating another ration pack as I walked. I had spent way too much energy today.

Arriving at the Doctor's lab, I called out.

"Doctor? Can we speak?" Feeling him moving towards me I relaxed. He walked out of his lab, A Sirrisi native, bipedal, furless mammalian. A foul reek preceded him as he inhaled the smoke from one of those horrid Ecrivain's the locals favored. (#9)

The stench served its purpose, distracting me just long enough that I didn't sense the gun in his other hand until it fired.

The burning pain in my abdomen was beyond belief.

"I do hope that shot hit nothing too vital. I wasn't able to identify your species, so could only guess at your organ layout." Dr. Know said calmly. Pulling a chair up to seat himself beside me. "After seeing what you did to my compatriots and to my robots, I assumed you must want something. So shall we talk?"

"We haven't the time." I gasped out. "My entry left a thermal plume. The authorities will be arriving soon."

I moaned, drawing the attention of Dr. Know. It took every bit of concentration I had, as the small, but heavy, metal slug worked its way out of me and fell with a ringing noise to the floor. The skin pulling shut as I rebuilt the damaged cells and slowly pulled the intact ones together.

"Amazing! Is that normal for your species? What IS your species?" The Doctor was insisting.

"Doesn't matter. Your Federation wiped out my people. We have to hurry. You do have a way to escape? I am counting on it."

"There is time yet. Besides, I could just shoot you again."

"You will find your ammunition quite inert."

Flicking the ancient revolver to the side, the hammer fell on a primer that was full of separated elements, busy oxidizing, but no longer remotely explosive.

"So much for that theory, it seemed that you controlled electrical systems."

"I control what makes up those systems, electrical or mechanical." As a distant clang echoed through the corridors. "It is time to go."

Dr. Know looked up with a smile, "And you did such a good job of disabling all the defenses. Come now! I assume Angel and Destro won't be accompanying us?"

"They are no longer a factor."

I followed the Doctor to a buried hanger. Seeing a Twist ship on the surface of a planet gave me pause, it simply sitting there was a crime worthy of 'Death of Personality' and not merely prison time.

"Don't worry, I've improved it. Totally safe... as long as you don't push it too hard."

I wasn't all that reassured. The good Doctor was always about the final result, the lives lost along the way merely regrettable.

As the hanger doors swung open, the door leading to the base tore open. The soldiers raising their weapons found their guns disabled.

"Hurry! Supers are closing fast."

"...and we are gone." I watched in awe as the sky turned black and the stars came out. "So? Where are we going?" the Doctor asked.

"We? I had been planning on going alone, but Partil was next."

"Partil it is then. As to the 'we', I find you fascinating and will be studying you for some time to come. With an army of you, I could rule the galaxy."

"I think that was why. Why we gave up the stars, gave up everything, and returned home. The Federation came and showed that it was evil, it was sick, at its core. I have made it my mission to heal your Federation, to remove all of the evil."

Doctor Know just looked at me in amazement, as the screens went to plain gray, and we left light far behind.