"Oh, Luz," the devil said, "how can I not be welcome at an event I arranged?"
Luz narrowed her eyes. "No."
"No?" Mephisto asked in an amused tone.
"I'm sick and tired of manipulative old dudes acting like everything is just according to keikaku." Luz insisted. "What, are you about to claim that you spent the last 400 years pulling Belos's strings? Did you set Cipher loose on me? Are you why Odalia was obsessed with putting me and Amity on the throne?"
"Eh, one out of three," Mephisto shrugged. "Bill did exactly what I wanted him to do while thinking he was rebelling, but Philip was a useful stooge that would have done all of this anyway, and Odalia would have gotten obsessive over her daughter being 'the Consort of the Queen in Black' even if I'd never egged her on."
"Uh-huh, and you're a known liar and manipulator, so I'm going to ignore all of that," Luz quipped.
"Ah, but can you ignore this?" Mephisto said, and suddenly the Collector screamed.
Turning, Luz saw that the Collector was trapped in a cage of fire.
"Let him go!" King shouted.
"No, I don't think I will," Mephisto replied smugly. "Not after all the effort I went to to get an Avatar of the Anti-Life imbued with Titan Magic in position to hug him just long enough that her power would negate his long enough—"
The cage shrank rapidly, and in a flash, a shrunken Collector was trapped in a... Luz flashed back to what the Titan had said about the origins of the Archivists.
"—to become the final ingredient in my Pandeonium Cube," Mephisto finished as the glowing red cube, the Collector trapped inside and banging on the walls, settled into his hands.
King climbed up on Luz's shoulders and growled, and Luz glared at the devil. "I'm going to do violence to you now."
"You're welcome to try," Mephisto said arrogantly, "but... I can't affect you with my cube directly, but I can still make things very hard for you."
And with that, a flash of bright red enveloped everything.
TLOA
"...What just happened?" Camila asked.
After meeting back up with Eda and catching each other up on the last few months, Eda said she knew where the puppets were stored. The three rebel leader puppets were restored, and, after a brief debate, so were the rest of the Coven Heads.
After Willow beat the sweet merciful tar out of the one named Terra Snapdragon to assert dominance, the former witch leaders were press-ganged into being extra hands for the rescue operation.
This was going well, plenty of witches were rescued, and then there was a dash of red: The coven heads and rescued witches were gone, but there were suddenly a rather large number of people present.
"I was about to ask the same thing meself," came a voice with a thick Scottish accent. Camila turned and was shocked by what she saw.
"You're a duck."
"Aye," the dapperly dressed waterfowl replied, "and you're some kind of hairless ape. What's it matter?"
Camila wasn't sure how to respond to that.
"Ach, here's someone who'll know what's what," the duck said and that walked away, hailing someone Camillia recognized quickly, "Stephen Strange, as I live in breathe."
"Ah, Scrooge, I figured you'd be here," Doctor Strange noted. "It's nice to see you, shame it wasn't under better circumstances. How've you been?"
"Never been better," the Duck, Scrooge, noted. "Della turned up alive and mostly well, and it turns out I've got daughters I didn't know about. One of them was right under me nose, too. Got that all sorted out now and everything's going great. Or it was, until just now. What in blazes is going on?"
"Look around us," Strange said, and it was then that Camila really took in what was happening. The sky was a white void, and the ground seemed to be a patchwork of different bits of terrain, from trees to sand to flooring tiles, all thrown together haphazardly. "It seems," the Doctor continued, "that reality is collapsing in upon itself, with multiple parallel dimensions merging. Most likely due to the actions of a single individual."
"Please don't be talking about me," a young blonde woman who was near the sorcerer mumbled.
"No, no. If it were you, there'd be considerably more people here," Strange replied. "No, I've had a suspicion that a certain someone was up to something for a few months now, and it seems that anyone across the local multiverse who could possibly be a threat to their plans is here."
"Then why isn't Luz here?" Camila asked.
"Oh, Camila, I didn't notice you there," Strange greeted. "And as for Luz... Well... I don't have an answer for that."
"Knowing Luz, she's either already beating up whoever's responsible or she's made friends with them and they'll be over for tea once they clean up this mess," Hunter dedpanned.
Doctor Strange got an odd expression on his face as he contemplated that.
"Well, I'll be looking for my family then," the duck named Scrooge said before wandering off.
"...So I have a question," Masha said as they gestured to the leaving duck.
"No, he's from an entirely separate reality from he one Howard came from," Strange replied.
"Question retracted."
Amity was staring at the blonde; however, gears seemed to turn in her head. "Doctor Strange said that the reason he couldn't help us was... You, you're the one who—"
"Yes!" The blonde shouted. "I'm the 'vapid princess,'" she took a moment to glare at Doctor Strange, "who destroyed a dimension of magic. And yeah, I've had it beaten over my head enough times that I screwedup, it was impulsive, that I was blaming a tool for what the people using it did, that I didn't think of what would happen to the beings dependent on magic until it was too late. But I was facing down genocide machines whose only weakness was that they were dependent on he same magic as everyone else. I made the call, and the biggest authority of magic I know, who was one of the ones who died because of the destruction of the realm of magic, said I made the right choice on his way out! And he's back now! And he's ticked. Apparently, he liked being dead. All because some cosmic entity decided that fixing the realm of magic would be a good lesson for another cosmic entity without considering that the consequences might be worse than leaving it alone, and I have to call in this guy to help me put out the burning houses." the girl was breathing heavily now, "and I think he knows who did it and he won't tell me! I've spent the last... Half a decade, I think, dealing with the fallout of what I did and working on myself. Whatever criticisms you have, keep them to yourself, I've probably already heard 'em."
Amity, who had shrunk back halfway into the rant, could only say "Sorry."
"Thank you," the blonde woman said, "now, I'm gonna go off and see if anyone I know is here since I'm not getting anything productive done anyway," and then she did so, mumbling about how she should have pawned this all off on someone else and gone to couple's therapy with someone named Marco like she'd planned.
"...So I feel like I'm only just now getting some important context," Doctor Strange said. "Anyway, if the cause of all of this is what I think it is, there's going to be more to this than just herding people here. You should all brace yourselves, just in case—"
And suddenly, a bunch of rifts opened up in the sky around the crowd of people. And on the other side were torrents of fire, and many monstrous figures began crawling out and falling to the ground.
"That happens." Strange began levitating with arcane symbols glowing around his hands. "This both confirms who I think is responsible... And has me worried. This could get ugly, so if you have aces you were holding onto, now's the time to play them."
Then he flew off.
Willow began rummaging through her bag. "I grabbed these when we got the portal open again. It completely slipped my mind that they'd be ready." She withdrew a golden apple. "Luz was scared of outliving everyone after that scan, and I've always been a little fascinated by the idea of immortality fruits, so when I got a chance to get my hands on one," she handed the apple to Hunter and pulled out another. "I think I've got... I'm one short."
"I don't need one," Amity said.
"Oh, right," Willow noted, "then I have just enough." An apple was handed to Gus. Then Vee.
"I've always wondered what these taste like," Masha said as they took theirs.
"...You know, this is the longest I've gone without talking in my life," Eda said, which startled Camila as she'd legitimately forgotten that Luz's other mother was with them in all he chaos. The pale witch accepted an apple. "So you eat this and it makes you live forever?"
"Kinda," Willow said. Behind her, a red ogre-like creature managed to appear almost out of thin air, only to be immediately crushed by vines erupting out of the ground. "But we should probably hurry."
And an apple was placed in Camila's hands, and she contemplated it for a moment. If she understood it properly, eating one of these put centuries onto someone's life, maybe even millennia, among other things. If she ate this, she was making a pretty big commitment. She wouldn't be the hero's supportive, but normal mother anymore; she'd be a major part of the story. This was a threshold that, once crossed, couldn't be returned from.
Off in the distance, she heard a teenage boy shout, "To me, my herald!" nd above them all, an absolutely massive and rather... Infamous gentleman in a distinctive hat and matching purple armor appeared before using his vast cosmic powers to begin dispatching monsters en masse. It barely stymied the tide.
"¡Al diablo con todo! ¿Qué tengo que perder? Manny, te veré pronto o nunca." with that declaration, Camila took a bite.