Reroll

“Like, thank you all for letting me talk!” I start, using a very vapid voice… ugh, I sound awful, “So, like… the goddess has told me we're taking Antarctica for our homeland. Because we need somewhere to put all the Mythical folks that can't live with ‘baseline humans’, and almost nobody is using the place.  Now, the goddess gets that, like… some people use it a little bit… but I'm sure most of you heard about what's happened to the Mythics by now, and the ones that can't live with baseline humans need a place to go.  And just to be sure nobody messes with us… we got nukes.  And you don't just have to take my word for it!  We're gonna use one of our smallest ones,” they’re all actually the same size, but when they're all the same, any can be said to be the smallest in the group, “to blow up an empty stretch of ocean…” I give the GPS coordinates for a stretch of the Pacific, “...in about twelve hours.  Should be plenty of time for anyone who doesn't, like believe me, to get their observation drones out there.  Tee hee.”  Yes  I actually say “tee hee”.  Ugh. “So yeah, we'll pick this up tomorrow, okay?”

This really, really shouldn't work. But I do get the expected objection via a “right to rebuttal”: from some South American country's rep: “What's to stop us from just shooting you and ending this farce now?”

And that's my queue, “Oh, that'd be my friends!” I flood the room with my shadows, outnumbering the reps two to one instantly, with their armor and guns, all pointed at THAT speaker, “They're sent by the goddess, she can get them anywhere on Earth VERY quickly,” this is actually true, due to how I transport them… provided one considers me to be the “goddess” in question, “even heavily secured areas, obviously, and they are VERY protective of me… not that I haven't been shot before; as you can see, I got better.  So yeah.  We're taking Antarctica, and totally renaming it to Avalon.  The little demo nuke will go off on time.  I’m pretty sure there's nothing in all that icy waste that anyone really considers worth a shooting war, so all y'all boys and girls are going to let me have it.  And if you don't… well, I’m taking it anyway.  I don't actually need permission, and I'm honestly kinda curious what the goddess will do if someone throws an army at me.” It's going to take me a while to put them all back… but I can make them not exist for the viewers instantly, and do.

I drop the act, on schedule, “So setting specifics aside, I'm making a nation for Mythics. I will not tolerate the old solution of just killing us out of hand.  I do understand you cannot allow the less sociable Mythics to murder or convert your other citizens: Send the problem Mythics to me.  Mythics don't infect other Mythics, so we're safe from that aspect, and in a place where everyone has strange powers, it's a simpler matter to handle those who misuse them than in a place where almost nobody has such abilities.”

I take a breath to continue speaking… the only real reason I need to breathe anymore, “If you need help managing Mythics who are causing trouble, I will cheerfully lend low contagion personele who are capable of handling most types of Mythics to collect them.  Details to be announced after the nuclear test.”

And… ugh, I slip back into the vapid voice for the last bit, “That's it; ta ta for now!” and vanish from everyone's sight.

I then begin the long process of putting thousands of soldiers away, listening in as I do.

It's a good ten minutes of silence before anyone speaks above a whisper.  I don't think the people here were expecting the show of power… which was kind of the point.

The first voice condemns me, of course, for bringing arms into the general assembly… ironically, from the same idiot who suggested shooting me right there. The second points out that the army only appeared once ‘some idiot’ (that's not what came through my headset for the official translation, but it is what she said) threatened my life… and that they didn't actually DO anything, leaving as soon as it was clear the threat was past.  Really, they were just bodyguards, doing what bodyguards do.

There's also a lot of noise and bluster - condemning nuclear proliferation, condemning me for saying I'll use force to prevent murder, that kind of thing - very little of which actually goes over well: The idiots are loud, but they're not the majority.

By the time I'm done putting away the troops, the various countries’ reps have moved on to other things.  I head back alone, invisible, this time taking all the time I like to gawk, checking out the visitor center, following an actual tour for a while, and taking pictures (the camera flash from nowhere confuses people… oh well).

I eventually head back to my skycrane, where Puff is… nearly human, and talking to folks who come by about the sky crane.

I recognize the spell: Infuse Self.  It lets the caster take on the form of one of the planetouched races, who are human with some otherworldy ancestry:  Puff went with a Tiefling, presumably because they're the most visually variable, letting Puff keep some of her draconian qualities: She combined it with Disguise Self for illusionary clothing.  Which… works for most people, but thanks to the save boosts from Primarcane, I can see through it trivially. So I'm looking at a naked woman with green scales and vaguely draconic features chatting amicably with tourists and letting them poke around the skycrane… and they don't notice she's naked.

The looking is harmless, by and large: They can't copy the tech, because it doesn't follow the normal laws of physics… which is also part of why I'm okay parking it on a lawn near people: There's basically zero splash from launch.

Which is why I'm here, “Puff, please calmly clear out the tourists; we should be going.”

Puff nods her head and announces to the crowd, “It's time for me to be leaving, which means everyone needs to clear out.”  Most folks shrug and walk away like reasonable people.  

Of course, there's always a troublemaker: A young man, about six foot one, muscled like a linebacker and wearing a jacket with some college team's logo ignores the order, bends down, and opens one of the floor hatches, pulling out the tie down strap underneath.

Puff walks over to him, and says quite clearly, “You need to leave now.”

The idiot stands up, dropping the tie down (whicj automatically retracts), looks down at Puff, puts his hands on his hips, and replies with a leer, “No. What's a little cosplayer like you going to do about it?”

I consider, “You have my permission to be impolite with this idiot, and frighten him a little; I still need you to avoid harming him for now.”

Now, something about Pathfinder's Polymorph spells: They do make big creatures weaker when they shrink down… but a Gargantuan dragon with a strength of thirty seven, under the effects of Infuse Self, still ends up with a Strength score of either twenty five or twenty seven (at the caster's pleasure)... and a medium creature with a humanoid shape and twenty seven strength can lift a thousand pounds over her head.

The idiot clearly doesn't weigh nearly that much.

Puff picks him up over her head with one hand and calmly walks out of the skycrane, speaking quite calmly as she goes, “I don't know what a ‘cosplayer’ is, which probably means I'm not one. Regardless, you need to go now.”

The idiot, for his part, isn't very coherent.  He says things like “What the?!?!” “HOW!?!?” and “PUT ME DOWN!!!” mixed in with a few curse words.

“Certainly,” my dragon is still being mostly polite as she sets him down outside the blast radius, “I just need you to leave, because it's time for me to go, and you're not coming with us.”

The man insults Puff and throws a fist at her face, which connects.

Puff barely reacts as the college linebacker shakes his hand like he just hit a solid wall, merely repeating, “You should leave now.”

“What are you?” Oh, he had to ask….

I chuckle, “Go ahead and dismiss the illusion and transmutation.”

Now, it takes a little time to dismiss most spells, and my dragon does them in the order I specified… so for a matter of seconds, my minion is a fully nude mostly-human female for all to see.

The idiot starts with, “Ooh, daddy like… if you wanted to be rocked by a stud like me, you vould have just…”

He trails off, however, as the painting dismisses the other spell, and reverts to her true form: A forty five foot long metallic green scaled beast with fangs, claws, and wings, “Do you think you're man enough for ME?  I wouldn't even feel that tiny little excuse for a manhood between your legs,” to be fair, in her normal form, she *might* be satisfied by the world record holder's gear; your average mortal's… not so much, “but it doesn't really matter, because you're not nearly big or scaly enough for my tastes, and have no claws or teeth to speak of. You should leave. NOW.”

The idiot clearly does have at least some sense of self-preservation, as he books it at that point.

At which point, Puff walks up the ramp, I give the signal to the ship, and we lift off.