Reroll

As we step into the Holographic Amusement Center, Dad raises his eyebrows, “How did you get our….”

Mom stops him, “It's not our living room.  Look at the pictures.”

Dad pauses, “I see.”

I nod, “Right. Our living room went boom.  This is the result of me describing it to the ship and asking her to simulate it.  I wanted everyone in as familiar an environment as I could for this.”

“So it's a big bomb, then,” Sarah knows me well enough.

“Yeah.  A couple of them.  First off… I take a breath, not that it helps, “the same event that gave me the power to do all this changed my body in some pretty extreme ways.  What you're seeing now is how I think of myself, but it's no longer physical reality.  It's an illusion produced by power originating from the same event.”

“Wait, so you've been lying to us?” Ah, Sam, no need to raise your voice…

“Not really,” Mom steps in, “this is him inside, still, and he's actively taking the time to tell us, explain, and ease himself into what he needs to say.  It goes with the theme of the room, really.  Let him.”

“But…” Sam starts to object.

“You heard her,” Dad learned a command tone in the military…

“Yes Dad,” …and we all know what it means to ignore that tone, so none of us do, including the elder of my two younger sisters. He's kept in shape: He can AND WILL still bend us over his knee… well, maybe not me anymore.

I'm still not going to risk it, though.

“Thank you.  So yeah, hold a minute while I drop the facade…” I use Selective Illusions to let them see me as my body as it is:

The most striking aspect is that my skin is black. Not dark brown, black: I look like I'm coated in coal dust.  I'm a little on the short side… maybe five foot three?  All my family members are taller than I am.  My jugs… huh, same as Sam's… a little on the large size, but not bad.  I have a thin waist, but not so much that it looks inhuman. My muscles are quite toned, large but normal range hips, and a jiggly rear.

There are the annoying things, of course: The first is my tail.  It's big, furry, and black, going up to my head… and it's drooping a bit right now… yeah, definitely a dog tail. I'm also a leaky faucet from my lower lips, but my armor handles that.  My hair goes all the way down to my knees… ugh. Still, I'm incorporeal, so it doesn't tangle or get dirty.

I continue, “So this is my current base physical form….”

“I have another daughter!” Mom's enthused.

“I have another daughter?” Dad's confused.

“You don't look very physical,” Sarah's picking up on my partial transparency, clearly.

“Current?” Sam squints.

I consider, “I still think of myself as your son and brother, and… yeah. Every time I get killed, I have the opportunity to rebuild myself, and then I revive… with a different shape.  I don't get to directly control my base form, but I have some limited workarounds. I never get to be physically male, but I can control my appearance within certain limits…” I switch to my social form, and play with my skin tone for a while, then drop back to my default form, “and can use illusions,” I go ahead and put on the guise of my original self.

As my folks and siblings sit there in shock, I continue, “One of my more popular shapes…” I switch my illusion to my “Alice” appearance, “is this one.  I'm the person who's been all over the news and social media of late.”

Dad considers, “So you're the healer who stopped just shy of declaring World War III?”

I switch back to my default appearance as I consider that, “I suppose. But… well, people very much like me, but less fortunate, have been very systematically abused, and I need to stop it.”

Mom looks around, “Why not just… run away, set up a colony on Mars or something.”

I sigh, “I literally can’t just run away…” my voice cuts out for the next thing I try to say, stupid contract, so I pick up with “...and I literally can’t say why.  I MUST keep moving forward.  I can take breaks, but…” I shake my head, “I tried running already.”

Dad thinks for a minute, “So… does that mean we're sitting on a manufacturing plant for nuclear bombs?”

“Technically they're missiles, but yes.”

“How many do you have?” Sam is very wide eyed right now.

I chuckle, “Two on this ship, as that's how many fit in the silo. But if I fire them, automated systems build replacements for them in about ten minutes, so I have a supply of them limited only by time.  The main ship has the same setup, and I think my friends are similarly equipped… but I'm not 100% sure.”

“This ship? Main ship?” Dad asks.

I nod, “Yes.  This one is owned entirely by me.  The friends of mine that got caught up in the same mess each have their own, and we also have a joint ship.”

“And you're actually going to…” Sarah can't seem to complete the sentence.

I roll my eyes, “Yes, I'm going to blow up a small patch of empty ocean. Honestly, it's a weird nuke: The blast radius is going to end up slightly smaller than that which the US dropped on Hiroshima, but it'll wreck things more inside that blast radius, have a much more even distribution of the destruction, and the radiation will be gone in a matter of minutes.  They're very clean and precise compared to other nuclear ordinance.”

“... can I watch?” Sarah's eyes are very bright.

I shrug, “Sure.”  I turn slightly, “Ship, how long until the launch?” I've lost track of time with the individual briefings.

The ship's voice comes from seemingly nowhere: “Two minutes.  There's activity near the target area: We have observers.”

I nod, “Great… put the target area on the TV, please.”

The TV mounted over the fireplace flares to life, showing… an empty stretch of ocean from highbabove, and a few little gray lines that might be ships scattered about.

“I don't suppose we can zoom in?” Dad asks.

I shake my head, “No… the sensors are designed for space.  They work very well in that environment, but they can't see well at all in an atmosphere. We'd need to actually head down, and there isn't really any place to land.”  Also, the game designers wanted viable reasons to keep players visiting all these alien worlds they dreamed up, and that's a lot harder when they can see the ambush from orbit and do a mineral survey from the same.

Mom considers, “What about news feeds?”

I shrug, “Ship?”

“Switching channels.”

The TV cuts to a view from the deck of a carrier, where… huh, Joyce Jones of J5 news gets around… there's a bit of commentary already in progress, “...now, keep in mind, Alice did NOT specify an exact time.  So we're stuck, simply waiting.  In the meanwhile, here's General May Hem of the French navy, with us aboard the…” I hit the mute button on the remote.  Yes, it's a holographic remote, but the TV is equally fake, and the ship is smart enough to figure out the intent. She does turn on closed captions when I do that, though.

“So now we wait…” Dad is just staring at the TV.

I nod, “Yep.”

“Ah… why are they on top of the ship, rather than, I don't know… in bunkers?” Mom's being practical.

I shrug, and Dad rolls his eyes as he answers, “Basically? They don't believe anything is going to happen.  They're out there because they're told to be, but nobody really believes that someone could develop nuclear weapons without it coming to anyone's attention.  Really, they're expecting to be there to witness your humiliation… son?” Yeah, he's old.  But he's trying.

I chuckle, “Well… then they're going to be disappointed… oh, there it is…”

We watch in silence as the camera zooms in on a dark gray missile heading straight down from the sky on a column of fire, re-entry flames around the warhead, then… the feed cuts to a test signal.

I consider, “Ship, mind getting us the orbital view of that back?”

The TV switches to the pre-news view, and we watch a circle of fire on the ocean for a moment, then a big white cloud.

“News is live again,” the ship announces.

“Put it on,” I order, and the ship complies.

We have a nice view of a white mushroom cloud, with a bunch of people on the ground, and the camera very obviously is too.  We watch as a massive wave approaches the ship… and then just stops, the ocean seemingly calming itself.

“What?!” I get from all four of my family members simultaneously.

I chuckle, “My tech doesn't follow the normal rules.  It is very precise about the strangest things… so yes, the destruction stops exactly two thousand, five hundred feet from the epicenter.  It follows a different set of laws of physics.  No, it does not make any sense at all.”  I pause, “But it works.  So… who's up for dinner?”