"What did you think you'd achieve, hmm? A few centuries of reprieve for an insignificant backwater universe that doesn't even know how to manage its own petty affairs, let alone its place in the scheme of the multiversal cosmos? A pat on the back from the grateful dullards in the Liberty Squad once they remembered you even existed? Please enlighten me, because from where I'm sitting, you sacrificed yourself for nothing. And that's a shame for a woman of your potential."

Azure could feel a subtle, insistent pressure on her mind accompanying each question, not quite a headache but more like that strain just before the headache finally arrived, but she kept pushing it away. A part of her felt obscurely proud of herself; she'd never really thought of herself as much of a psychic powerhouse, but she was discovering that the standards of her long-vanished universe might not be the same as the ones she was frequenting these days because she was doing a pretty damn good job of holding the telepathic intrusion of one of the most powerful mind controllers in existence at bay. A fact that seemed to greatly frustrate Professor Psycho, judging by the snappish tone in the Greek woman's voice.

"We are going to get everything out of you eventually, Azure," she snarled, trying unsuccessfully to hide the petulance in her sultry tones. "I've networked a thousand of the multiverse's most skilled mental adepts into a limitless battery of psychic power, more than enough to wear down your defenses and bend your will to my own. You can spare yourself a vast amount of suffering if you surrender to us willingly and allow yourself to set the terms of your own subjugation. We are harsh but fair, my dear girl, and you may yet find a role for yourself in our universe if you accept a place at my side instead of beneath my boot."

It might have intimidated anyone else into surrendering, but Azure had studied telepathy the same way most children studied cursive handwriting. Networking psychics was a neat trick and it could accomplish a lot, but there was still a hard limit to how much power could flow through a single brain at any given time without simply frying it like an old worn-out fuse. She'd have far more luck operating in tandem with others, but if Azure understood one thing about this terrible and debased version of the reality she was familiar with it was that they weren't big on cooperation. It was a dog-eat-dog world here, and Professor Psycho was used to getting her meals on time.

Which was just about the only advantage Azure had. Even if her tactile telekinesis could break the shackles made of dwarf star metal, and even if she could somehow elude the hundreds of supervillains who ran this world, there simply wasn't a resistance to hook up with to help her find her way back home. The Punishment Details were ruthlessly efficient, ferreting out defiance with telepaths and precognitives and the most advanced surveillance the planet's super-scientists could devise, and all the heroes of this reality were long dead or subverted by Professor Psycho to the new order. Azure was, quite literally, all alone.

But that didn't mean she was going to give this bitch the satisfaction. "Who do you think you're protecting?" Professor Psycho shouted, almost losing enough of her self-control to slap Azure before remembering that direct skin-to-skin contact with a tactile telekinetic would be the worst--and last--mistake she could make. They should have used psychic dampeners, but Azure had a suspicion that wasn't a high priority for research in a world where one of the ruling triumvirate relied on her mental abilities to keep her grip on power.

Instead, she changed tactics. "Look," she wheedled, "we all saw what you did to the Supremacy back in your universe. And she's one of the Triumvirate, a queen of queens and really my only rival here. I can play that idiot Imperil like a fiddle, but Helena's every bit as good at playing the political game as I am. If you were on my side, it would tip the balance of power immeasurably. We could rule together, and I promise... I could make it worth your while." Another telepathic intrusion accompanied the words, this one sneaking in beneath Azure's mental barriers to caress her at the level of pure instinct with raw pleasure. It was harder to defend against an assault like that. The brain simply couldn't recognize it as a threat in the same way as a brute-force attack.

Professor Psycho must have felt it succeed, because suddenly Azure felt arousal pooling in her heavy breasts and slick, needy cunt in a way that nothing short of telepathic manipulation could explain. Not that Azure wasn't as kinky and pansexual as the next person in her long-vanished native reality, but this wasn't exactly the kind of bondage she enjoyed. "What you're experiencing right now, darling... it's only a shade of the ecstasy you could have if only you opened your mind and let me in. I can't say you'd be my equal, that's not how the world works and we both know it, but you'd never be sorry you submitted to me. That much I can promise."

That sounded suspiciously like one of those ambiguous offers that always ended up in the death of the gullible henchperson who believed it, but it was a little harder to make that distinction when Azure's clit throbbed a little bit harder every time Professor Psycho put special emphasis on a key phrase in her speech. Still she kept silent, knowing that the professor was trying to play a game of social dominance and the most powerful thing Azure could say was nothing at all. Opacity was a virtue. A brick wall never wound up saying yes.

"I still don't understand what you're trying to achieve," Professor Psycho said again, this time in a tone of mock sympathy accompanied by wave after wave of saccharine bliss that Azure's mental defenses couldn't shut out no matter how hard she tried. "You know there's no hope of resisting this kind of mental intrusion--billions of years of evolution have made you crave pleasure, even more certainly than they've made you avoid pain. You can resist torture, but can you resist the sweet, subtle insinuation of ecstasy? Not for very much longer, dear. Because deep down you don't want to."

She chuckled. "And even if you could hold out forever... what would be the use? To be another victim of the march of progress, another corpse under the foundations of the Empire? There's no medal waiting for you, no reward for your resistance at the end of all this. The pathetic fools you fought alongside have almost certainly forgotten you, if they ever cared about you at all. You're just another orphan desperately searching for a family to accept you, a foundling looking for a home. Why not let it be here with me? Why not let me heal your scars and fill that void inside you with my control?" The pleasure flashed into a near-orgasmic burst of sensual bliss, then faded just as suddenly as Professor Psycho looked expectantly at her for an answer. Azure felt a sudden craving to speak, simply to feel that pleasure again.

She didn't. Instead, Azure let her body go limp in her shackles, paying close attention to every ache and pain in her body, wrapping herself up in them like a blanket, embracing them like an old friend. She drew herself inward, savoring the bittersweet memories of friends and family who existed nowhere but in her own mind. It was pain, yes, but it was her pain. Hers and hers alone. And nobody could take it from her.

Eventually, as Azure knew she would, Professor Psycho allowed the artificial euphoria to seep back in. It was all she had to use to pry open a crack in Azure's defenses, after all, and she could only withhold it for so long before Azure stopped needing it. Which meant that really, the power she had wasn't power at all because she couldn't afford to give it up. Azure didn't smile, that would be giving up something of herself to a woman who desperately wanted a vulnerability to use against her. But deep down inside, Azure felt something curl in a crooked little grin.

She'd already lost a whole universe. She'd been broken so badly and for so long that she couldn't even imagine a version of herself that was whole. Her scars defined her now... and next to that, Azure was discovering, holding off some whiny bitch with a glorified vibrator wasn't such a big deal.

And eventually, as Azure knew she would, Professor Psycho inevitably made a mistake. Promises gave way to threats again, then to tantrums, then to wild furious rages as Azure felt her mind battered by storms of orgasmic bliss so intense that her vision whited out under the onslaught of ecstasy. Pain couldn't get through, commands couldn't penetrate, so all Psycho could use against her opponent was sheer delight. And in a world shaped by sadism, that was never going to be enough. The supervillain's self-control finally broke after a dozen hours of interrogation and she finally gave in to the uncontrollable urge to slap the stone-faced apathy off of Azure's expressionless visage.

Azure caught the hand. Then she caught the professor. Then she forced the woman's other hand to reach down and activate the molecular key that dissolved the dwarf metal shackles into liquid. "You should probably know something," she snarled, just before she used her powers to rattle Professor Psycho's brain inside her skull like she was shaking up a can of paint and sending her tumbling to the floor with multiple concussions. "My therapist says I have trust issues."

The same key got Azure out of the detention cell she was in, and she was able to tunnel her way underground as soon as she got to something a little softer than the compressed heart of a dead star, but she still felt precariously short of a real plan. She had no allies, no refuge, and only the vaguest idea of how she might be able to find her way back to the reality that had become at least a loose substitute for home. Azure felt a deep yearning ache for Eris and Venus Ascendant, the only two people who hadn't given up on her yet, and for a moment she seriously considered just breaking into some dive bar in the middle of nowhere and drinking until nothing mattered anymore.

But she still had one faint hope. They'd brought her in for study on a quantum level before they remanded her to Professor Psycho's custody, an analysis of her cosmic vibrations that helped them identify her native reality and place her in their hierarchy. The lab was called Border Control, run by this universe's equivalent of Doc Frontier as a way of maintaining the territorial boundaries of the Pan-Universal Empire against... what, invasion? It seemed impossible, but then again these assholes had taken over something like three dozen actual universes. Who the fuck even knew what 'possible' even meant anymore.

Azure tunneled in the general direction of Nebraska, knowing that she probably had only minutes before the various Professor Psyches slaved to Professor Psycho's telepathic network registered the loss of their commander and sounded some kind of alarm. They wouldn't be able to use the opportunity to free themselves, not when they were trapped in a mutually reinforcing web of intermeshed brainwashing, but at least their subjugated brains wouldn't take the initiative to attack her themselves. The Punishment Detail would have to grab her the old-fashioned way, and she didn't have even the slightest plan. Let a precognitive work that one out.

Azure came bursting up in the middle of a sub-basement, grabbing a random lab technician and lifting him up over her head to snarl, "How can I get a portal out of the Empire?" She knew there had to be a few around here somewhere--not ones that could move an entire invasion force, maybe, but something that would let a single person slip through the space between universes in a slightly more controlled way than the random skittering bounds across the interstitial void she'd been doing. And thankfully, the regular people of this world had gotten depressingly used to following even the most bizarre and capricious orders of superhumans on pain of instant death.

Her new buddy showed her to a room with a wide, spacious arch that could perhaps fit an elephant, and a terminal nearby full of buttons and switches Azure didn't have the slightest idea of how to use. "How do I turn it on?" she asked, and the technician gave her a crash course on how to rip a hole in reality and escape the semi-amalgamated universe cluster that was the Empire. Azure took in about half of it. That was both way too much and not nearly enough, as it turned out.

She flipped a few switches, turned a few knobs, and dialed in what she sincerely hoped was a way back to what she sincerely hoped was home. But she'd barely even opened the connection before the technician screamed, "No, not like that!" And mere instants later, he was obliterated in a silver plume of energy that erupted from the portal and seared everything in its path with cosmic fire. Everything except Azure, naturally. She was getting used to fending off this shit.

But what she wasn't used to was seeing a rippling, shimmering translucent curtain that separated the universe she was standing in from another just like it. Azure looked across the permeable membrane between worlds, her eyes widening in shock and terror and sheer cynical exasperation at what she saw. "Of course it can get worse," she muttered. "Of course it can always get fucking fucking worse."

Professor Psycho--another Professor Psycho, flanked by another Imperil and another Supremacy--smiled in grim determination. "For the glory of the Omni-Cosmic Dominion!" they shouted, launching a series of devices through the portal to widen and stabilize the tear in reality. "Death to the pretenders and eternal glory to the true rulers of the multiverse!" Then they came through, and Azure found herself wondering if maybe she didn't need that drink after all.

THE END(?)