Automotive Justice

Caprifexia circled over the ruined remains of Windhold below, peering down at the twisted remains of where the tear into the void had been and making sure there wasn't any movement below.

For the first time since Einar had had his little tantrum about her heroic slaying of the proto-drake in elven form, she was alone. Before she'd left Einar had whinged at her for ages, making her promise to 'not punch people unless they really deserved it,' 'not free anymore liches,' and 'definitely not set any part of Sorbet Melon's house on fire.' As if she was some kind of irresponsible hatchling!

Although it would be ridiculous for a heroic dragon of her amazing calibre to feel nervous at not having her friends around, she wouldn't have been violently opposed to having at least one of them trail after her. Not that she was scared to venture out alone. Again, that would have been ridiculous. She was a dragon. Dragons were independent and self-reliant and… it still would have been nice to have Einar along.

After they'd been driven off Nirn by the admittedly disquietingly powerful winged villain Mirael, and her mortal friends had calmed down from their hysterical overreaction, they'd put some distance between themselves and the peak, walking half a day over a plane that seemed to be nothing but an endless sea of waist high blue grass and indigo sky.

Then when they'd returned to Nirn she'd been forced to put her life in the inept furry paws of J'zargo once again, who had somehow managed to not botch the teleport back to Winterhold College. Her friends had gotten to stay there, where there were nice soft pillows to sleep on and fresh fish, but she, of course, as ever, had been forced to pick up the heroic slack and implement the most important part of the plan which she'd, obviously, devised.

Step one: find Sorbet Melon, the frozen fruit loving vampire of Innitstrad. Step two: see if he knew any powerful Planeswalkers. Step three: locate said powerful Planeswalkers and convince them with her charisma and charm to help save Nirn.

Her going by herself was in part, allegedly, due to the time constraints. Because the terrible wizards of Winterhold college were terrible at magic and relied on lodestones to open portals, and Windhelm's had been destroyed, it would have taken some pathetic mortal biped another whole week to make it down to the ruined city. Of course, since Caprifexia was so amazing, she had flown there in a few hours.

Satisfied there weren't any nasty surprises lurking in the ruins, she descended in the general area she thought they had arrived after leaving Sorbet Melon's home plane of Innitgrad. The stonework of the pathetically constructed mortal buildings had been twisted and morphed, so it was difficult to be sure, but after a little searching she was pretty sure she found the alleyway she and the had emerged from the Void those weeks ago.

She transformed into her mortal form as she landed. Then reality bent and twisted under her strength, and a moment later she stepped through into the Void, her boots squelching over the eyeballs and tendrils and other voidborne horrors she studiously tried to ignore. She took out Einar's poorly drawn map and peered at it.

"'Up the bridge that twists in on itself,' then right at the plane with the fossilised palm trees…'" she muttered as she read Einar's notations, looking around at the madly sprawling maze of bridges and platforms. "'Twists in on itself?' They all do that! Damn mortal fool…"

She harrumphed and put the map away, resolving that she'd just have to navigate using her superior draconic sense of direction and flawless memory.

***

Caprifexia stepped through into a busy looking plaza and snarled, wrenching Einar's map from her bag and glaring at the impudent paper. Several of the local mortals shouted in alarm at her sudden appearance, but she ignored them. Mortals were always getting scared, it was what they did. That, and die. She had more important things to worry about, like the fact that her so-called friend had gotten her lost!

She knew she shouldn't have trusted and relied on her friend's handiwork. She'd followed his terrible instructions to the letter, but had that led her to Innitgrad? No! Instead she'd found herself in an entirely new part of the Void with floating islands she'd never seen, and had been forced to set down when an Old God had caught up with her. This was all clearly Einar's fault.

"Stupid map!" screamed Caprifexia, dredging up dragon-fire from her chest and unleashing it upon the impudent and wrong piece of paper.

It burst into flames, and there were even more screams from the assembled mortals, but Caprifexia felt a bit better, and that was what was really important. Satisfied, she dusted the ash from her hands and looked around at the place she had arrived.

She had emerged in a large plaza, above which rose angular towers painted in bright pastel covers, and capped in brassy metal domes. It was pleasantly hot, and the mortals all wore long, loose clothing in similarly bright colours to their buildings.

That, however, wasn't what really caught her interest. Overhead mechanical golems, wrought from similar metal as the dome, and glowing blue with arcane magic zipped through the air, riding on what seemed to be unusually powerful currents of magic that crisscrossed the sky. Blackrock spire had been built atop both a massive convergence of Leylines, and a tear into the Elemental Plane of Fire, but even the ambient magic of her first home hadn't been anywhere near as potent as this place.

Higher up there were even more mildly-impressively skyships, which wafted gently through the bright blue sky, moving between even larger sky-spanning shimmering threads of raw magic. She had always been interested in enchanting, and although she had a mission to fulfil, after she had defeated Mirael she would like to come back to this place and get a closer look at how they worked.

She was distracted from her musings as she realised that the previously startled mortals were still screaming. Screaming, and pointing at her.

"Pyromancer!"

"Call the Enforcers!"

"Run! Before she burns you!"

"Help! Help!"

Caprifexia turned to stare at the nearest screaming mortal, an elf, and glared, which only made them scream even louder as they stumbled backward and fell over.

"Stop being so loud!" she commanded, stepping forward and picking the mortal up by the front of his wrappy-shirt-skirt-thing and intending to, heroically, put him back on his feet.

The elf's screams ratcheted up another notch, and he began to flail wildly at her, smacking her in the side of the head. While it didn't hurt, it wasn't pleasant either, and sparks flew from Caprifexia's mouth in irritation. He screamed even louder.

"Help, help! She's going to set me on fire!" he whinged, tears and snot sliding down his grubby little face.

Her first impulse was to do just that, immediately incinerate him for striking her. But Einar had made her promise not to burn anyone who didn't really, really deserve it on her trip to Innitgrad, and while the elf was annoying, he wasn't actually really a threat to her, so she resolved to try another thing that her friend was always going on about: diplomacy.

Diplomacy was the art of tricking people into what you wanted them to do. From what she had been able to gather from Einar's boring lectures, it different from other forms of deception and intimidation solely because it was a hero doing them. Given how good she had been at tricking and intimidating people as a villain, she was could probably add 'greatest diplomat in the multiverse' to her ever-growing list of heroic appellations.

"Cease that infernal racket!" she roared, shaking the elf like a rag doll in an effort to get him to stop screaming. "Cease your screaming! I command it!"

"Help! She's going to kill me!" sobbed the elf, somehow resisting her shrewd diplomacy. "She's going to-"

"Calm down you stupid mortal!" said Caprifexia, slapping him lightly across his face a few times. "I-" Slap. "-said-" Slap. "-calm-" Slap. "-down!" Slap.

The elf slumped in her grip, rendered insensate by her cogent diplomatic arguments, and she dropped him onto the ground where he couldn't hurt himself anymore. A trickle of blood dribbled from his mouth.

Did people usually bleed from the mouth after a good diplomacy-ing? Einar hadn't mentioned anything specifically about that, but he was always leaving out crucial pieces of information when he badgered her. It was probably normal.

Pleased with her success, she looked around the plaza, which had cleared significantly, and was just about to pick a direction to explore while she waited to Planeswalk again when there was some strange warbling sound from behind her.

"Freeze mage!" shouted a blue-skinned man pointing pointing some kind of silly little metal contraption at her. The was perched atop some kind of brassy, horseless cart that had four sphere-like wheels that glowed with inner light. "Get on your knees and put your hands behind your head, criminal scum!"

Stolen novel; please report.

Caprifexia stared at him with incomprehension. "Excuse me?"

Who did this man think he was, accusing her of being a criminal? She was a hero! A hero who had just successfully calmed down that grubby little elf with a stunning display of diplomacy. Hadn't he seen?

"I said-" repeated the clearly blind blue mortal.

"'Criminal!?' Do you have any idea who I am?" said Caprifexia. "I am Caprifexia! The greatest hero in the Multiverse-"

There was a zap, and the strange contraption fired a jet of lightning straight at her. It impacted her chest, but unlike the nasty Arakno's magic which had mildly inconvenienced her, it was incredibly weak. Her innate magic easily overwhelmed the pathetic discharge, and she didn't so much as stumble. But that wasn't the point, if she had been a squishy and weak mortal it probably would have atomised her or something.

"How dare you!?" said Caprifexia, conjuring lightning around her fists. "How dare you!?"

The man riding the flying cart's eyes boggled and he rapidly began to slap buttons of the side of his zappy-stick. But Caprifexia had seen enough, and raised her lightning-wreathed hands. As the multiverses' greatest hero, she had a keen eye for villainy, and this weird blue man had it written all over him. Not only did he not recognise diplomacy when he saw it, but he also assaulted heroic dragons for absolutely no reason.

"Astrap!" she shouted.

The man screamed as he was blasted from the cockpit of his machine, landing hard on the cream-coloured paving stones and spasming as her lightning arced over his body. She moved over and snatched his gizmo out of his hands, looking it over as she put a boot on his chest and pinned him to the ground. She considered finishing him off, but he was incapacitated, and heroes did, as she'd always known, show mercy for lesser beings. Sometimes, anyway.

"Consider this a warning, villain," she said, waggling his zappy stick at him as he twitched and spasmed. "Next time I may not be so lenient!"

The villain's eyes rolled back into his skull, and he began to foam at the mouth. That was probably normal.

Gratified with her heroic dispensing of justice, she turned to look up at interesting looking horse-less cart the villain had arrived it. She did have at least an hour or so to use up before she could safely Planeswalk again, so perhaps she could figure out how it worked before she needed to leave. Besides, as she understood it, by defeating the machine's villainous former owner, it was now, by heroic right, hers.

Her body shifted and rippled as she flapped up into the control seat, one of her claws gripping the control wheel while she searched for whatever made it go. She pressed a few of the dash-board's buttons, one of which shot a beam of energy across the plaza that melted an ugly statue that no one had probably liked anyway, before she found a lever, pushed it down, and the cart whirred into life beneath her.

***

Mortals, Caprifexia decided, weren't completely useless. At least some of them. The ones that had made this once-villainous cart, for example, had at least had some idea what they had been doing.

Ahead of her bunch of mortals who had been drinking cups of some kind of liquid, perhaps clothes soup, outside a shop melodramatically screamed and theatrically dove out of the way. They had just gotten clear when she, very lightly, clipped the side of the cafe's patio, which was clearly bigger than it should have been. One, two and then three of the metal tables screamed as they were crushed beneath the whirring wheels before she swerved sharply left, then right, then left again to orient herself back down the main thoroughfare.

Behind her more of the villainous cart-riders shot more blasts of their weak lightning at her. They had, apparently, taken exception to her heroic defence of whatever this city was called. Their shots went wide, however, since the cowards were far too scared to go at the perfectly safe and reasonable speed that was however fast it was when the speed-lever-thingie all the way down.

The cart's wheels screamed as she pulled the control wheel to the right with her clawed paws, and the well made vehicle cleverly oriented itself at forty five degrees to the ground as she went around a corner, repurposing a wall into a temporary road.

An awning that someone had stupidly put above a vegetable shop in the way of the wall-road was smashed to pieces by the left-claw side of her cart, and crate of cabbages was reduced to paste by the right ones, but the horseless-cart was surprisingly sturdy, and no real damage was done.

The surrounding mortals, in what seemed to be a local pass-time, screamed as Caprifexia's cart thudded fully back onto the road as she did two intentional and totally controlled 'S' manoeuvres in a row, knocking over some kind jewellery stand that clearly shouldn't have been there, and crushing something that claimed to be a box for posts, before straightening up and speeding onward.

"Stop in the name of the Consulate!" boomed another blue person in a flying contraption from overhead, unpleasantly loud. "Stop in the name of-"

"Astrap!" she shouted, blasting the annoying thing out of the sky. The contraption twisted violently through the air and smashed into a building and exploding in a ball of azure-fire. Another heroic victory. She was really on a roll today. Einar would be so proud.

Ahead of her several of the villainous cart-riders emerged from a side street, recklessly pulling out in front of her from a side road and screeching to a halt in what presumably was an attempt to stop her heroic investigation into their interesting villainous cart-machines.

They also, presumably, thought she was going to come to a halt.

Unfortunately for them Caprifexia hadn't yet divined how the cart was supposed to stop, so instead of trying to work it out in the few seconds she had before impact she instead simply opened her wings and let her already substantial momentum carry her up and into the air.

There was a massive crash beneath her, followed by a deafening boom as whatever kind of fuel tanks the contraptions used exploded, and she was blown slightly off course as the street below disappeared into a series of blue-tinged fireballs as the others ignited.

That might have been a bit more lethal than she had been going for, but really, it was their fault for recklessly pulling out in front of her. And they were villains, after all, so they deserved whatever Just-fire they got.

"Let that being a lesson to you!" she yelled as she circled the blazing wreckage a few times, using the thermals to rise higher before tilting her wings and alighting on a nearby tower's balcony. A few on the mortals who had been drinking strong smelling alcoholic drinks and watching the righteous destruction below screamed and retreated inward, but Caprifexia ignored them and left them to their hobby.

Her or so hour looking around and waiting for the Old God to leave was up anyway, and although there was surely more heroism that she could perform on this interesting plane, she needed to be moving on. This world would have to, somehow, manage without her.

For the second time that day reality bent and twisted under her Planeswalker's Spark, and she stepped into the Void. She checked carefully to make sure that the Old God had indeed gone, peering between the twisting bridges and platforms made from a mad-mishmash masonry, wood, metal, and natural stone all covered in twisted, fleshy growths. Between the platforms eldritch vapour flashed with a kaliedescope of magical energy, which raced too and fro on unseen winds.

Although she had long ago figured out that she was travelling the Void, not merely some inter-dimensional realm between planets, she still didn't really understand everything she was looking at when she travelled between universes.

Sure, the twinkling stars were clearly the various realities she could hop between, the platforms around them clearly some kind of representation of the Old One's attempts to break in, and the bridges paths between them.

But what were the clouds of energy that streamed too and fro? Was that the power she drew upon when she summoned up Void magic from outside the walls of a reality? Or were they some kind of primordial energy that universes themselves were formed from? Was there a cycle of death and rebirth for universes? Or was the entire multiverse simply a process of decay? An inevitable decline, where one day the last of the seemingly endless realities would slip back into the Void, and this was all there would ever be?

She shook herself. Her curiosity could wait. For now, she had a heroic quest to complete.

She took out her notebook. It was time to make a proper map. One written in plain draconic. None of this poorly labelled and haphazard mortal nonsense.

She drew a small circle, and then, in her jagged mother tongue concisely labelled it 'Explody Horseless-Cart Plane with Weird Blue Villains and Mana in the Sky.' In brackets she created a dragonym for the plane: 'EHPWBVMS.' Perfect, clear and understandable; not like Einar's terrible excuse for a map that had gotten her lost in the first place.

Now, to find that frozen fruit loving vampire's home plane…