I stepped through the portal onto a street that looked as though it had been deserted in a hurry.  Yep, this was definitely downtown Long Beach.  I could smell the salt air flowing in off the bay.  Long Beach was just across the county line from Orange County.  It was technically part of Los Angeles county, but it was close enough to Orange County that it was treated by a lot of us as our own little downtown.  When you get into downtown, it looks a lot like a big city like New York, with lots of taller buildings, businesses lining the streets, and few of the trappings of suburban life, despite being within walking distance of the suburbs.

I turned back toward the portal I had just exited.  Fenrir’s talent for portals was something even Astveig hadn’t been able to match.  I nodded to Fenrir to give him the okay.  Fenrir nodded back, and then the portal closed, cutting us off from each other.

By my estimate, I was about two or three blocks from the “boardwalk.”  It wasn’t really much of a boardwalk any more, now mostly being replaced with sturdier accommodations made of concrete and steel, but it still functioned more or less the same.  I could already see the red giant my mother was “piloting” stomping through the shallows just off shore, it’s headless shoulders peeking up over the low apartment buildings I had arrived outside of.  Time to get to work.

I conjured my dragon construct and hopped onto its back.  I needed to end my mother’s rampage.  From my brief check of the television back at home, I could already see the news was starting a body count.  Dad had stopped me and told me he wanted to come, that he felt partly responsible for this.  It was all I could do to let him know that Mom was beyond reason now.  He wouldn’t be able to get through to her any more than I could, and he was mortal besides.  If Mom decided she wanted to kill him too, he wouldn’t last a second.

MAB wasn’t equipped to deal with a threat of this magnitude.  The military could come in and try with some heavy artillery, but they lack the expertise in matters of magic, and who’s to say if explosive rounds could even affect a psychic construct, anyway?  No, the best chance we have of stopping this before things get much worse is me.  My “diplomatic immunity” protects me from retaliation by law enforcement, at least for the time being.  If not me, it would have to be one of the Asgard, and I don’t know if any of them care aside from Billie, who has only been granted authority to “advise” me - an authority he has already stretched multiple times.

Reaching the boardwalk, I could see the swells were coming in hard and fast.  You wouldn’t get good surf off these waves; you’d get smashed against a concrete barrier and turned into tenderized meat.  Looming over it all was Mom’s giant… whatever it was, waist deep in the salty brine of the Pacific.  Despite my flying low to avoid her sight, out here I was exposed.  There was no way she was going to miss a glowing, translucent, green dragon in the dark.

Time to make my move.

“I’m giving you one last chance, Mom,” I bellowed as loud as my poor, exhausted and smoke-singed lungs would allow in order to be heard over the crashing, sloshing waves.  “Stop this now or I will stop you.”

Predictably, mom cackled like the loon she seems to have finally become.  “You can stop nothing, little girl.  I have seen the infinite, the vast truths of the cosmos!  I will remake this world to my whims, and you will no longer be a part of it!”

Jesus, Mom, you’ve been taking lessons on villainy from Skeletor.

Proving I really don’t have time for wit even in my own head, the giant immediately stomped right on top of me.  My concentration broken, the dragon I was flying on vanished with a POP as the air around it rushed in to fill the void.  The featureless stump of the giant’s foot pinned me against the asphalt just above the concrete tide wall.

At this point, my ribcage was pretty much holding together by sheer force of will.  I struggled to break myself free, before realizing I already had the solution.  I conjured another dragon, flying directly into the back of the giant’s knee.  The knee buckles, granting me enough room to escape my awful pin.

I gasped in a lungful of air as soon as I could and rolled to my feet, dashing along the boardwalk, salty rain falling all around.  I leapt as the giant’s foot crashed into the boardwalk ahead of me, sailing clear over it as chunks of concrete and asphalt sprayed into the air, narrowly avoiding impalement on exposed rebar by grasping it and vaulting into the air over it.  My mother was determined to crush me even if it meant tearing apart the entirety of the harbor.

“WHY.  WON’T.  YOU.  JUST.  DIE!!!”  Mom’s screech echoed through the night, each word punctuated with another crash as one or more of the giant’s limbs destroyed another portion of the boardwalk.  I ducked and dodged the best I could, leapt over the digitless “hand” of the giant as concrete, asphalt and rebar sprayed into the air around me.  A small, jagged block of cement the size of a large block of cement flew at my head, and instinct kicked in, allowing me to simply knock it aside, cracking it with my own fist, but I didn’t stick the landing.  I crashed to the concrete on the opposite side of the destruction, tumbling head over heels into the glass storefront of a Sunglass Hut.

Bruised, bleeding from a thousand cuts, almost certainly a cracked rib or two and probably about to die from a lethal dose of blunt force trauma to the face, I leaned my back against the rear wall of the store, seeing that I had crashed in so hard that I had actually broken the entire store counter in two.  One big, glowing nub of an arm, pointed directly at me, thrust at me, and I braced for the world to break.