By yearends and Akane
Paula Estévez was not like other Super Goddesses.
Oh, she was every bit as powerful as they were, and for that matter older than all but five of them. There'd been plenty more born since she herself had been, some of them human, some of them from other species, but even so, she was different, and she didn't quite know why.
Unlike the very first Super Goddess, M'wela, or another of her elders, Shizuka, she had no particular desire to rule. Unlike the other three born before her, Irina, Park, and Jennifer, she didn't have an interest in science. And unlike every other Super Goddess in existence, she had no inclination to build up a harem.
It wasn't because she'd seen how much Jennifer's--easily the largest of any Super Goddess--had grown in the trillions of years of their long existence, to the point where she had had to create three new galaxies for comfortable living space. That wasn't the issue--after all, Paula could easily create three billion new galaxies with a thought, just like every other Super Goddess. And it wasn't because she wasn't constantly aroused--no Super Goddess could avoid that. She'd just found happiness in her work and with her few companions.
There was José Gómez, of course. Even trillions of years later she considered her time on the beat in Nueva Caracas when she was in her early two-hundred-and-fifties to be her best years--not that she was any worse, of course, but that was when she felt she was really at the peak of her career, able to spend all her time chasing down criminals and bringing them to her own form of justice. And José had been with her through all of it, and had become far more than just her partner on the beat. He'd lived his life, retiring from active duty to a desk job, retiring from the police altogether, and finally dying in his sleep at a hundred and forty-two, and through it all he was her partner and her lover. Each night, when nobody could see, she restored his youth and they had wild, imaginative sex and Paula would just snap her fingers to give José the benefits of a full night's sleep. He'd chosen when he died--or, rather, didn't, since while the tears the eternally-young Paula cried at his funeral were real, and her eulogy was truly heartfelt, she was mourning only the fact that she would have to keep the truth a secret until everyone had forgotten about José Gómez, the man who won the heart of a Super Goddess. She'd dug the hole for his ornate casket by herself with a gesture, lowered it into the ground with her own hands, and used her amazing telekinesis to cover it back up, and finally caused the dirt to spawn flowers of all sorts, a garden that would last until the universe ended.
And then she'd teleported home where José Gómez sat on their couch, looking as young as he had the day they met, a look he'd retain for the rest of time thanks to Paula's gift of immortality, and watching the holographic projection of his funeral as everyone milled around after Paula's departure.
"Nice service," he said. "I don't think anyone could have asked for more."
"Nobody deserved more," said Paula, and then she collapsed on his lap, bawling into his chest at the fact that they wouldn't be able to be seen together again for thousands, if not millions, billions or even trillions of years.
Even she hadn't expected her second companion, however. After giving Penelope Sánchez breasts far too big for her body when they'd first met, Paula had soon regretted it, just a little, as it went further than most of her other pranks, but rather than shocking Penelope into the instinctive subservience Super Goddesses normally enjoyed from most people they met, it had only made the other woman more open about her feelings regarding Super Goddesses and she quite liberally argued with Paula and traded insults and barbs. Paula shrugged them off, of course, and gave as good as she got--but never more--until the day tragedy hit their police station.
Paula and José were out across town and it happened suddenly enough that Paula still wasn't sure if she could have stopped it without rewinding time. There was no malice, no intent, just a drunk driver out for a joyride when he slammed his car into the wall of the station.
Penelope was directly in the path both of the shards of the wall and the vehicle that followed right behind, and she was already dead by the time Paula had teleported herself and José back to the station and frozen it in time. She created roadblocks out of nothing but her own will and set José the task of keeping passersby away from the station. Then she plunged into the frozen area her powers had created.
It was a simple matter to remove the car from the scene. She tapped one of the studs on her belt and the car shrank down and was sucked inside, locked there along with its driver until she could decide what to do with them. And, thankfully, most of the injuries were superficial, easily healed even by then-modern medicine, never mind Paula's infinite power. The wall, filing cabinets and desks that had been broken were also easily repaired, Paula carefully rewinding time in those places to restore them.
But Penelope Sánchez was another matter.
Still with the area frozen around her, Paula knelt down over the deceased receptionist and put a hand on her forehead. She examined the subatomic structure of Penelope's brain--she'd caught her in time that her brain hadn't shut down due to the lack of resources from its attached body, the only injury to her head having been a few cuts and a mild concussion--had she lived, at least--from when her head hit the floor as she died. She infused it with a bit of her own life force so that she could discuss the situation.
"What happened? Where are we?" said Penelope, who, Paula knew, thought she was in a formless white void.
"Nowhere, really," said Paula, giving herself an apparently physical form in that void. "I just wanted to talk about where we should go from here."
"What d'you mean?"
"You're dead, Penelope."
That, it quickly became apparent, had not been the best thing to say, as Penelope broke down sobbing for a good fifteen minutes while Paula didn't want to risk compromising her fragile mind and having to rebuild it out of her own memory--and thus necessarily altering it from its original pattern, as Paula hadn't completely mastered the technique of making an exact replica of another person's mind and so would only have been able to instill memories and most personality traits, but the new Penelope would never have been quite the same, even if only Paula would ever notice the difference. But with Penelope's brain not quite dead even though her body had been smashed to a pulp, Paula knew she could restore Penelope as she had been.
"So what now, then?" asked Penelope after she drew a deep, shuddering breath but held in a sob. "Did you just bring me here to taunt me or torment me or torture me or whatever?"
"No," said Paula. "I came here to offer you a second chance."
"And why should I trust you?"
"What did I ever--" Paula cut herself off, but it was clear that Penelope had grasped the thrust of her retort.
"You gave me these!" she said, hefting her outlandish breasts. "I'd done nothing to you!"
"It was a joke!" Paula shot back. "If you really didn't want them, you could have just said so."
Penelope only huffed and turned around, and then Paula noticed something she hadn't realized before, something that made Penelope's actions click into place.
Penelope Sánchez was hopelessly torn between her upbringing that taught her that Super Goddesses were to be feared and reviled and her first impression on seeing Paula--helpless love, far beyond what mortals normally felt on seeing a Super Goddess.
And it manifested itself somehow as pride and stubbornness and anger and a determination to prove that whatever Paula did to her, Penelope could adjust. When Paula had given her breasts too large for her body, Paula had taken up weightlifting to build the muscles she needed to carry them anyway. When Paula brought up some obscure fact of history, Penelope would spend her entire night researching it. When Paula listed a few facts about whatever notorious criminal they were discussing in a meeting, Penelope would spend the rest of her day, as she could, compiling an exhaustive dossier.
"Why are you so afraid of me?" asked Paula. "What have I done to deserve your fear?"
"What you've done? What about your earrings? Don't think--"
"I hardly keep that a secret," said Paula. "And you know that they all deserved it fully. It's not a crime to hate a Super Goddess, or loathe a Super Goddess, or even to attempt to kill a Super Goddess. You could have pulled out a gun and shot me point-blank the day we met and I still wouldn't have done any worse to you than give you those. There's probably no safer place for you to be than where I am."
Paula reached out her hand. Penelope took it.
After that, a genuine friendship grew between the two women, with Paula helping Penelope at the gym, showing her how best to optimize her routine for her goals and spotting for her, a relationship which soon grew beyond gym workouts. They didn't try to keep it a secret from everyone else at the station--not that they could have if they wanted to, since José regularly came in with a smile just a bit too wide to suggest he'd only had a Super Goddess in bed the previous night.
About a millennium later, Paula had become the head of the Unified Latin American Armed Police, and Penelope, whom she had long since given immortality and eternal beauty, was her personal secretary. Every night they'd go home and tell José about all the boring paperwork they had to do and wish they could go back to the days of researching criminals and being on the beat. José noted that it came with having a bunch of all-powerful women running around--crime tended become much smaller under those circumstances. Paula involuntarily reached halfway to her ear before stopping herself.
Paula was so busy with paperwork, in fact, that she didn't realize until it was on her desk that there was a serious sex trafficking ring--the sort of thing that she thought she'd stamped out hundreds of years prior--operating essentially right under her nose in Buenos Aires. She immediately called in her senior subordinates for a meeting, and they popped into her office at PAULA HQ, as her old police station in Nueva Caracas had become, as it expanded into a meeting room, using teleport technology that was effectively a tap into Paula's own teleportation powers.
A rapid discussion ensued, and eventually they decided that--unless Paula was just going to snap her fingers and put an end to the whole thing--they needed someone on the inside.
Everyone looked at Paula anyway. She didn't mind--she'd been looking forward to getting her hands dirty again--and having a roll or two in the sack with some new partners--since she first saw the file.
With a thought, Paula's perfectly tailored uniform--still the same one she'd been issued when she first joined the Nueva Caracas police--vanished, replaced by cheap, tattered clothes, and her immaculate appearance gained some smudges, bruises, burns, and scars, while her hair became rougher and drier. She was still gorgeous, of course, and she knew she looked exactly like someone any pimp would want to whore out to his clients, especially after he cleaned her up.
She enjoyed a deep kiss with each of her commanders and a much longer one with Penelope before teleporting to Buenos Aires' red light district.
She almost didn't have to use her powers to find the ring and persuade them that she was a desperate young woman who just needed a comfortable bed to sleep in and some decent food and she didn't much care what it took to get it. Even in the age of plenty and prosperity she and the other Super Goddesses had created, some people fell between the cracks.
The rules were pretty simple. She saw and fucked clients when her bosses ordered it and did what the client wanted. If they tried to go to the police, well, the head of the whole operation had a friend or two in the government (Paula ripped those names out of his mind and saved them for later), and if he even thought the name PAULA was going to cross their lips he'd kill them faster than Paula could get there. They were allowed to have lesbian sex to an extent--enough to get them hot and horny for the clients, but not so much that they tired themselves out. Lesbian sex was, essentially, intended as foreplay, to get them hot and bothered but not to bring them any real pleasure.
It wasn't hard, of course, for Paula to monitor all her fellow captives to make sure nothing truly awful happened to them, and in between going out to some new man to fuck him (since she was always hot and bothered) and getting "inspected" by her pimps, she struck up a friendship with another of the captive girls, a young woman named Alondra. Alondra really had fallen through the cracks, born to parents who refused to get her any sort of identification--even a birth certificate--or an education, or anything, and when they had unexpectedly died when she was almost eighteen (or so she thought; they hadn't celebrated birthdays, either) she had been forced to make her own way in a world utterly foreign to her. All she knew was what she'd needed to know to do chores on their small farm, which was how they kept themselves off the "grid". She had no idea what a city was, or what a Super Goddess was, or even how to read. What she did discover pretty after a month or two was that if she let a guy put his--she didn't know what it was at the time, but it didn't take her too long to learn far too many terms for it--in her mouth and she teased it until a liquid squirted out of it, he'd give her some metal circles that she could exchange at various places for food. After a few months of being a street prostitute, she was roped into the sex slavery ring Paula had destroyed.
Paula could, of course, just have accosted the leaders of the ring and gotten them convicted in court on her word, but if she'd done that, she knew she wouldn't have developed the close friendships she had with her fellow "workers," nor would she have been able to have so much sex on the job.
Most of the women had families or close friends they could go back to, but Alondra had nobody, so Paula took her to her home.
Of course, Alondra was a wreck, traumatized first by being suddenly thrust into a world of which she knew nothing and then by being raped every day for years.
"José?" called Paula, walking through a door into an alternate dimension where José lived while they waited for the world to forget about him. Alondra followed.
José, long since restored to his prime (and then some--Paula wasn't going to pass up giving him a few improvements, and José certainly wasn't complaining), got up from the chair where he sat and turned to give Paula a hug, only for his arms to fall to his sides as a confused expression flitted across his face at Alondra's scream of terror and despair.
Paula spun around instantly, creating a chair underneath her as she folded into a sitting position herself, cradling Alondra against her and rocking her gently.
"It's OK, it's OK. It's just my boyfriend, José. Trust me, he's the sweetest, kindest person you'll ever meet. Just... trust me. Please?"
Paula telepathically filled José in on Alondra's life story.
"Maybe she'd feel better if I was a woman for a while," suggested José, knowing his thought would be picked up by Paula.
"Are you sure?" replied the omnipotent cop--she might be essentially a bureaucrat now, but mentally she'd always be the fresh young police officer who was just excited to be partnered with José. "I mean, I know you find that stuff fun in bed, but are you sure you want it full-time until she's ready?"
"Want it? No. But unless you're prepared to be here full-time--or give up Penelope--I'm the only choice, and it's pretty clear she'll feel more comfortable with another woman. Just..."
"Just what?" replied Paula, having a pretty shrewd notion of what he was going to say without needing to dig into his mind.
"Just make me sexy, all right?" The mental comment was accompanied by a blush as Paula sensed his memories of waking up after a lesbian threesome or one where he and Paula--and sometimes Penelope--had swapped genders entirely. For all that he was the bravest man Paula had ever met, he never got up after one of those sessions to examine his body, contenting himself with feeling himself up and, if he felt the urge, masturbating a little before asking Paula to change him back.
"When have I ever not made you that?" Paula's mental voice carried a definite chuckle, and she reached a hand over her shoulder to wave it at José. Instantly his body rippled for a few seconds, changing into a shape Paula knew very well, for it was the only one she'd ever given José when he became a woman.
Alondra had stopped crying and peeked her head over Paula's shoulder when she felt only one hand comforting her. Her eyes went wide where she saw an incredibly beautiful woman where she'd expected a man to be.
"What?" asked Alondra.
"Hi," said the woman, her mental processes having been altered by Paula so that she would think like a woman in addition to looking like one. "I'm Josefa."
"Where's José?" Alondra continued, unable to figure out what was going on.
"Josefa is José," said Paula. "I'm a Super Goddess, Alondra. I can do whatever I want, and right now what I want is to rehabilitate you, and given your experiences, I think the best way to do that is for Josefa to help you, so I changed José into a woman."
"Why don't you just do it yourself? Just snap your fingers and make the past few years go away?"
"Changing history is fraught with problems," said Paula as Alondra clambered off her lap. "And I've got other responsibilities, so I could never give you the attention you need. But Josefa... well, I'll let her fill you in on the details if you want."
"So is she going to take me out... there?" Alondra shuddered at the thought of going back into the world, a world of which her only experience was that of being used and abused for the pleasure of men for years.
"No, no," Paula assured her. "Josefa can't leave here, for now, anyway, and I have a machine that can exactly simulate reality. You can get yourself adjusted in there, and Josefa will be there to help you every step of the way. If there are problems, you can just reset the simulation to whatever point you like." Paula gave Alondra immortality so that she wouldn't have to worry about aging and dying before she acclimatised.
Josefa extended a hand to Alondra. "Well, shall we go?"
Alondra took the hand and let Josefa lead her through another door. Paula sighed as the pair stepped into the simulation, leaving her alone in José's quarters. At least Penelope was up for anything in bed.
Of course, all that was trillions of years ago, and far more had changed since. In particular--
Paula's trip through her long, perfect memory was interrupted as Penelope stepped through her office door as if it weren't there.
"I will never get tired of that," said Penelope.
"Give it another few million years, the shine will start to wear off."
Penelope sighed. Paula could do anything she wanted, and she regularly told Penelope that it just wasn't as exciting as it had been when she was younger. Maybe it was the difference between being born with power and suddenly gaining it.
"So, what is it?" Paula asked her omnipotent personal secretary.
"Some old friends are here to see you," Penelope replied.
Paula cast her thoughts into the foyer of the office wing of her mansion but found only holes where her visitors should have been, as if they were blocking her from knowing who they were. Of course, Paula was hardly afraid of some unknown visitors, never mind anything else, so she just said, "Send them in, then."
Penelope nodded and walked back through the office door, triggering another of Paula's memories.
As her reputation had grown and Earth had unified closer to a single government, Paula had become the head of a police force with jurisdiction everywhere on the planet. Penelope was, of course, her personal secretary, while José and Alondra were her most trusted subordinates, her boyfriend finally able to emerge from hiding as everyone had forgotten that Paula had ever had a boyfriend, while Alondra had, though it took Josefa thousands of years and almost countless resets of the fake reality, adjusted to her new circumstances and become, next to Paula, the best cop the world had ever seen. She had a bit of a dark side to her, taking a vengeful glee in tracking down whatever criminals still dared operate in a world where the effective dominance of omnipotent beings had become a simple fact of life, but Paula didn't mind vengeance. After all, Alondra had earned it, and Paula didn't really have a leg to stand on regarding vengeance, anyway.
More Super Goddesses had been born on Earth, of course, but it wasn't until Paula was around a million years old that she felt the birth of the first non-human Super Goddess, from a species on a planet trillions of light-years away from Earth. Within seconds, Paula, like every other Super Goddess, was sitting in a room removed from reality, a place where only Super Goddesses could go, where they only ever met in the most dire circumstances.
"As I see it," said M'wela Mutegaraba, beginning the meeting abruptly, not bothering to recite facts everyone present already knew, "we really only have three options. We could sit back and hope this new Super Goddess doesn't have imperial aspirations, we could go right now and subjugate her planet before she comes into her full power, or we could expand humanity into space and hope we're too tough a nut for her to crack, however militaristic."
"Why not," suggested the soft-spoken artist Jennifer Martinette, "extend the hand of friendship? I mean, I don't want to see humanity conquered either, but why are you just assuming that this new Super Goddess will be hostile? And besides, there's far more of us, so just one hostile Super Goddess doesn't pose a threat."
"Unless," pointed out Irina Volkoba, "she goes farther than just enhancing everyone as we've been doing and turns her whole species into omnipotent beings."
"But I tried that," said Shizuka Hirose. "Can't be done even to one person, never mind a whole species."
Nobody else spoke, not Ha-neul Park, not Paula or Elza Sabini, and certainly not any of the younger ones. Nobody had to: Jennifer's soft-spoken but impassioned plea had carried the day.
Paula never spoke on the rare occasions when all the Super Goddesses had met. As far as she was concerned, there were only five whose views carried any particular weight with her, and that was because she was grateful to what they'd done for her in her childhood.
Even when she was in her mother's womb, Paula knew she was unusual, because, somehow, she had developed a degree of telepathy and knew everything about the world into which she was to be born. She saw how Jennifer had tried to have a normal childhood even though everyone knew she was a Super Goddess, and how even then it was clear the teenager was already planning on turning her entire high school into the core of a harem. Paula, for some reason she still didn't really understand, recoiled at that. She didn't want a harem. She just wanted to live her life and, though she knew she couldn't get away with it forever, go as long as she could without revealing to the world at large that she was a Super Goddess.
So she arranged with the five born before her that they would announce that a Super Goddess named Paula Estévez had been born in Venezuela, but they would take turns impersonating her, looking like a normal young Latin American girl while Paula hid herself as best she could. She changed her hair to blonde while still in the womb--it wasn't unheard-of for Hispanics, after all, and who would think that a blonde girl, however much of an oddity that might be, would be the new Super Goddess when there was a young girl showing off supernatural feats and looking far more like a typical Venezuelan girl? After all, none of the other Super Goddesses had looked markedly different from their surrounding populations, at least until they matured and became far more beautiful than their ordinary peers. And it definitely helped that not long after she was born, Elza Sabini was born in Italy, distracting everyone from Paula since Elza didn't bother to try to hide herself.
And while she was changing herself, she removed any lingering desire she might have had for a harem.
Which, she had realized upon reflection, might only have shifted her desires, because none of her fellow Super Goddesses--all of whom had harems--had any apparent interest in any real cruelty or any desire to inflict vengeance.
Paula did, and she desperately wished she didn't.
Paula took full advantage of a deal that the Super Goddesses had made, not long after it became clear that the world would eventually be fully ruled by them, with the mortal authorities: the word of a Super Goddess would be sufficient to convict anyone in any court of any crime, and that Super Goddess would be allowed to dictate the punishment, but in exchange it would be impossible to commit a crime against a Super Goddess. After all, how could you murder someone who couldn't die, or steal from someone who could create anything she wanted with a thought?
So Paula had become a cop, mostly because she loved it, but because it also happened to give her the perfect excuse to catch criminals and bring them to her own form of justice. She'd gotten a feel for the work running private security jobs, generally for other Super Goddesses, until she'd entered the Nueva Caracas police academy and passed with flying colours. (In fact, when she graduated, she turned herself into a rainbow so that she quite literally was flying colours.) She was issued her uniform and immediately set to work making a few changes.
First, she made sure it would never need cleaning or pressing--she was proud to be a cop, and she determined that unless there was a truly pressing reason (as there had been when she rescued Alondra) she would either wear it or be naked. (She hadn't realized that by wearing it constantly, it would become so filled with her pheromones that eventually she would have to shift it into a small alternate reality to get naked--not having it on her body would cause the pheromones to overwhelm anyone nearby who wasn't as powerful as she was and drive them to uncontrollable arousal for the rest of their lives--which, for humans after a few billion years, meant eternity.) Second, she turned the studs on her belt into holding chambers for contraband and suspects. And finally, since she (like every other new officer, not that she needed permission) was allowed a few personal adornments, she wore earrings which were actually her own prisons.
She had billions of people locked up in there, and the very worst she trapped within her mind itself. She recalled one criminal, for instance, whom she'd caught attempting to rape a young boy.
She'd teleported the boy to safety before picking up his would-be assailant and spinning her around telekinetically.
Somehow, the woman managed to pull a gun mid-spin and, when she stopped, shoot Paula in the head within instants. Paula slumped to the ground, apparently dead.
"You shouldn't have done that," Paula said, creating a new body for herself behind the woman.
"What the fuck?" said the woman, not realizing who'd caught her.
"I said, you shouldn't have done that," repeated Paula. "You should know that I always catch people like you before you can actually act."
"Oh, you're her. So what are you going to do to me now?"
"Oh, I'm not going to do a thing," said Paula before she blinked out of existence.
"I," said the apparently-dead Paula, getting up and speaking despite most of her head being splattered on the ground, "am going to make sure you end up where you belong."
Paula snapped her fingers and instantly the woman found herself in a tight, painful hogtie. Another snap put them in front of a judge, in one of the courtrooms that was always ready to receive a Super Goddess and her accused.
"Ms. Estévez," the judge sighed, "how many times do I have to remind you that it's a violation of a suspect's rights to bring him before the court bound and gagged?"
"You know I only do that when they're guilty."
"And you only ever bring guilty ones. I know." The judge took in Paula's condition. "And you know that killing you isn't a crime."
"No, but attempting to rape a minor is."
The woman tried to scream against her gag, but it included a complete muffling field that Paula put on all her captives, so nobody other than Paula even knew she was trying to make a sound.
The judge sighed--he did not trust that the Super Goddesses were actually only catching guilty people, and he especially didn't like what he suspected about what Paula did. "All right, guilty. You may pronounce sentence."
Paula's face dropped. She hated this part. It was necessary--in more ways than one--but she hated it. "For the heinous crime of attempted rape, you are sentenced to eternal imprisonment in a realm separate from this reality. Your existence as you have known it is over."
With a sad look that would have elicited pity from those assembled if they didn't have at least an inkling of what those words portended, Paula shot a beam from her eye. It enveloped the woman and drew her closer to the omnipotent cop's pupil. She shrank as she floated into the air until she was a small, struggling figure against the black centre of Paula's eye, and then she vanished, as if she'd been sucked into Paula's brain.
Which was where she was for the rest of time, and the next thing the woman knew, she was shivering in a cold, damp, dark cell, terrified at the thought of what Paula might do to her.
Sometimes, Paula Estévez frightened herself. Sometimes, Paula Estévez disgusted herself.
The meeting with the first non-human Super Goddess had gone better than anyone, even Jennifer, had expected. They agreed that would both carefully lead their worlds into space, expanding outward into empires and monitoring closely to make sure that they left other planets with the potential for intelligent life well enough alone in case a Super Goddess was born there.
It was as the human Super Goddesses were discussing among themselves how best to shift humanity from a single-planet civilization to an intergalactic empire that Paula finally spoke in one such meeting.
"If we're going to have an empire, we're going to need police," she pointed out. "And, no offence to the rest of you, but I am the only person who could head such an organization. But..." She paused, not sure how to broach her thoughts.
"But what?" prompted Jennifer. Jennifer knew Paula better than anyone other than José, Penelope and Alondra--and knew her in ways they never could, as Jennifer had most often played the role of the "false Paula" while she was growing up, pretending to be just a beautiful blonde Latina.
"But I'm going to need help. Super Goddess help, because I don't know when even one of the most powerful humans will snap, though I hope one never does." She looked around. "And I need people I know I can trust. Absolutely and completely. And," she added to quell the nascent protests, "people who are experienced, which none of you are."
"What do you propose?" asked M'wela.
When Paula explained, Shizuka exclaimed, "Impossible!"
"Where's the harm in letting her try?" said Ha-neul Park. "For all we know, that may be more or less how some of us got our powers."
Shizuka spluttered, shot an incensed look at Paula, and teleported away, knowing that Paula was referring primarily to her friends, who were as powerful as it was possible to be without being a Super Goddess.
"If this works, you can't just do it willy-nilly, you know," pointed out Irina.
"I know. I'll make you all a deal: in exchange for making two Super Goddesses this way, I will never make myself a harem, nor will I Enhance anyone to the point of near-omnipotence. Only what my pheromones might do naturally, just like with all of you."
"No harem," scoffed Elza, looking pointedly at one of Paula's earrings.
"Not like what all of you have. If we help humanity expand into space, given how prolific some of you are at recruitment, and how fecund all the rest of you are, we're probably going to have to create hundreds of galaxies just to house your sex slaves and descendants, and then rebalance all the gravitational interactions."
"Who?" asked Irina, curiously, though she was almost certain of the answer.
"If I can, Penelope Sánchez and Alondra." Nobody was surprised at who she'd chosen, of course.
"You can try," said M'wela, summarizing the sense of the gathering. "Just... be careful."
Paula nodded, and vanished.
Her scheme was actually not very complex. She knew that once someone was conceived, they couldn't be given any more power than Shizuka's closest confidantes had. But she thought that if she tinkered, ever so slightly, with someone as they were being conceived, she could cause them to have as much power as any other Super Goddess. But she also knew that she had to avoid altering history. So she put a lock on their powers, which would only release them after a certain time, when she spoke a certain phrase, and performed a certain action.
Returning to her own time after leaving the meeting, Paula summoned Penelope and Alondra to her office.
"What do you want?" said Alondra, impatient to get back on the street.
Paula snapped her fingers, teleporting all three of them to her bedroom, shifting their clothing into another reality. She reappeared with two massive, throbbing cocks jutting from her crotch, with Penelope and Alondra held aloft above them by her telekinesis.
"Penelope, Alondra... you're Super Goddesses now." Paula released her mental grip and let her friends fall onto her dicks, immediately ejaculating to trigger their latent powers.
But that was ancient history. Humanity had expanded out into an empire, colonizing planets across billions of galaxies, perfectly adapted to every environment by the Super Goddesses. Earth, in fact, had been all but abandoned, with only Paula, José, Penelope, and Alondra still calling it home. It didn't matter where anyone was, of course, since the entire universe was connected by instantaneous teleport links, and almost everyone had moved to an environment they liked better than anything they could find on Earth. But for Paula, and her three friends, there was nothing more suitable than the old PAULA HQ building, however inaccurate the acronym had become.
Paula stood, straightened her uniform unnecessarily, and wondered who didn't want her to know they were there.
But before anyone could cross the threshold, a small gust of wind buffeted her, and she turned to see Alondra, popping into existence where she hadn't been a second before. Paula had tried to teach Alondra how to teleport properly--overlay your particles on the atmosphere, altering quantum probabilities so that they all ended up existing in the empty spaces in between each other, control the forces between them so that you caused no disruptions, then shift the atmospheric particles to where you came from, creating or deleting particles as necessary to match chemical compositions--but Alondra just did the simpler, though more disruptive, method of shifting the particles out of the way so that she teleported into a vacuum. But Alondra wasn't alone, and Paula collapsed back into her chair at the sight.
"Yomi?" said Paula, looking at the woman who was on her hands and knees next to Alondra, gagged and held by a collar linked to a chain around Alondra's wrist. "What happened, Alondra?"
Before Alondra could answer, Penelope came rushing through the door, while José walked more calmly through the antique bookshelves behind Paula's equally old desk, and, seeing his lover's tension, began to massage her shoulders. Paula smiled, took a gentle mental hold on his wrists, and nudged his hands downward so that he could give her the sort of release she always craved.
"This," said Alondra, giving Yomi a vicious kick that was clearly not the first she had suffered, "I caught trying to alter history. It tried to wipe out sex slavery. I mean, I sympathize with it, but you know that's not just not allowed, but, because of me, completely impossible. I caught it because the contradictions it was trying to force alerted me that someone was messing with the past."
"Shizuka," muttered Paula. "This is what happens when you give too many people the power to travel in time and don't check to make sure that all of them will stick to observation."
When Shizuka Hirose first became governor of Tokyo, she had enhanced some of her most trusted friends to near-omnipotence, among them Yomi Shirogane. She thought she could trust them with time travel, but, as with all Super Goddesses, had shut off her prescience because knowing the future just made life boring. It was hardly Shizuka's fault that Yomi had ultimately proved to be unable to follow one of the most important rules--do not alter history--but Paula figured she'd have to pay a visit to the Empress anyway. And, of course, Yomi couldn't be trusted with any powers any longer.
"You should have seen Shizuka when I brought it to her," chuckled Alondra. She shifted and became an exact body double of the elder Super Goddess. "Get... this... out of my sight," Alondra said in a perfect mimicry of Shizuka's voice. "And tell Paula... I'm sorry." Alondra shifted back to her own body, grinning triumphantly.
"Now that," said Penelope, "is something I thought I'd never see." Being a Super Goddess, Penelope had every right to attend their extradimensional meetings, as did Alondra, but Shizuka almost always ignored them, was extremely hostile on the rare occasions when she did acknowledge their existence and status, and could always be counted on to oppose any suggestions Paula, Penelope, or Alondra made, and she'd even been taking out her hostility on Jennifer, since the artist had been the Super Goddess, other than Paula, most consistently supportive of Penelope and Alondra being recognized as true equals, despite everyone knowing they only had their powers as a result of Paula's meddling with history.
"So what are you going to do?" asked Paula.
There weren't very many criminals in the universe, given that everyone knew that they would be caught, but some were still brave or foolhardy enough to try. To ensure maximal space for residential, agricultural, industrial, and recreational facilities, everyone had long since agreed that the only prisons they needed were Paula and Alondra's earrings and minds. In theory, if anyone but Alondra caught a criminal, Paula was tasked with imprisoning them; in practice, Alondra spent most of her time chasing down what scant crime remained so that she ended up with the bulk of those who could not live in the same reality as everyone else.
"I think you know what I'm going to do," said Alondra, with a vicious grin that made everyone's blood run cold. There were very few people Paula had ever known who could match Alondra in cruelty--at least on those occasions when Alondra was inclined toward such--and all of them were imprisoned in deep, dark corners of her or Alondra's mind.
"Yomi Shirogane," said Alondra, turning to her prisoner, saying her name, the last time that name would be spoken for the rest of time, "you have been found guilty of attempting to alter history. For this unforgivable crime, your sentence is eternal punishment in a realm apart from that occupied by civilized beings."
The gag disappeared and the screams everyone knew Yomi had been trying to make erupted suddenly from her mouth, screams that intensified as Alondra put her hand to the powerless woman's forehead. Her body dissolved until only her essence remained, an essence that rapidly vanished into Alondra's own body.
Alondra smiled as the screams faded. Not for the first time, Paula regretted that she needed help, but she did, and Alondra was quite simply the best. It was just unfortunate that unlike natural Super Goddesses, all of whom were highly empathetic and wished no real harm on anyone, Alondra had been irrevocably shaped by her experiences early in life and took out her fury and frustration and anger on those she deemed (in fairness, Paula reminded herself, her judgment was always correct) the worst of the worst.
Paula shook herself. She knew Alondra thought she was only copying her mentor, but where Paula tried not to think about the punishment she inflicted even on those who most deserved it, Alondra reveled in it.
"All right, Penelope. Show them in."
Penelope composed herself, turned around, and walked back through Paula's office door again.
"I wonder why I bother keeping that thing," sighed Paula, changing the topic away from the display they'd all just witnessed, and the vicious grin on Alondra's face. "It's not like anyone ever uses it."
"Because we're all too sentimental to get rid of it," said José, who'd stopped fondling her breasts and moved his hands back to her shoulders now that she really was tense. "After all, it wasn't easy to get."
"True," said Paula, though "not easy" was purely relative for an omnipotent being. When Paula became chief of police at her station, she'd decided she wanted to assure the people of Nueva Caracas that she had no intention of abandoning them, and so had dredged up from the sunken ruins of Caracas a door from the original cathedral in that city. She'd kept the chief's office as her own ever since, throughout all the changes in her job and her life, with that door, and her promise not to abandon Nueva Caracas had kept her on Earth when everyone else had left.
Paula pushed José's hands off her shoulders, stood up again, straightened her uniform again, and again wondered who didn't want her to know they were there.
For the noncanonical continuation, see https://omnipotent-girls.net/node/123
For the canonical continuation, see https://omnipotent-girls.net/node/124