"Yes. Our love became the talk of the kingdom—which finally pushed the jealous court magician, Vyndktvx, over the edge."
"He set out on his revenge without restraint. He stole the kingdom's sacred artifacts—the Imaginator, the Nothingcoat, and the Multispear." Mrs. Nyxly's eyes blazed with fury, her hands curling into claws as if she wanted to reach through the air and strangle the court magician.
"He put on the Nothingcoat, slipped into the palace, and tried to kill Mxyzptlk. Fate had other ideas. He saw the bowler hat Mxyzptlk always wore and drove the Multispear down into it."
"He had no idea His Majesty was wearing that hat that day. Even the king, powerful as he was, couldn't withstand the Multispear's strike. But the recoil shattered the weapon, destroyed the Nothingcoat, and tore off one of Vyndktvx's arms."
"Instead of killing his rival, he'd committed regicide. Vyndktvx was about to lose everything. To save himself, he pinned the crime on Mxyzptlk."
"The whole world was howling in grief over the king's death. Mxyzptlk told me to run. He stayed behind to fight the pursuers alone."
"I fled. I tore open the dimensional barrier and came here. In this place of exile, I lost my power and became mortal. I've been waiting quietly for my life to end."
Thea arranged her features into an expression of sympathy—as though deeply moved by the lovers' tragic fate. She didn't interrogate the biases in the story. She didn't press for details on what ultimately became of the others.
Fate's business was fate's. The Fifth Dimension's business was the Fifth Dimension's. All she wanted was high-level knowledge to broaden her own perspective.
To a Fifth-Dimensional being, time was something that hovered between existing and not existing. The Superman-Mxyzptlk story hadn't happened yet for Superman or for Thea—but from the Fifth-Dimensional perspective, it was already years in the past.
Thea touched a finger to Mrs. Nyxly's forehead and began reading her memories. Language couldn't convey the truth; memory didn't lie. What Fifth-Dimensional beings used as second nature—as easy as breathing or drinking water—was something Thea could actually learn from.
A massive, chaotic flood of imagination poured into her mind. No rationality, no logic—absurd babbling that formed picture after picture. This was a completely alien mode of thought, utterly foreign to reality as she knew it.
The full intake took ten minutes. This Fifth-Dimensional princess had lived a simple life—simple as a royal in the Fifth Dimension, even simpler as an earthling. In terms of sheer breadth of experience, she was nothing compared to someone like the ancient Guardian Horuba, who had lived for billions of years. But the tier of her memory was hundreds of times higher than any Guardian's.
Thea felt like she was using an Earth supercomputer to read data off an alien photonic computer. You couldn't call it slow—but the mismatch was obvious.
Fortunately, her cultivation realm was high enough. She read it all, then checked it again. Nothing was missed. She said her goodbyes to Mrs. Nyxly and left to think it over carefully.
She didn't go to the White House or the Underworld. She went to the residence of the Endless. With Big Brother Destiny at the front, it was the safest place in this world right now.
The DC universe was ten-dimensional, after all. Fifth-Dimensional beings sounded impressive, but they were nothing next to Destiny.
Mxyzptlk featured most prominently in Mrs. Nyxly's memories, so Thea started there.
The findings were reasonable. Mxyzptlk wasn't much stronger than she'd expected. None of the stuff from those ancient comics—turning the Spectre into a trading card with a wave, snapping his fingers and deleting the Anti-Monitor—showed up. None of that.
By Thea's estimation, if Mxyzptlk entered the multiverse, his power level would be comparable to Trigon's.
Which meant he was stronger than Thea and stronger than Darkseid—but not in the realm of the incomprehensible.
She sealed away all the Mxyzptlk material. She could read it like a storybook later when she had time.
What she cared about was Mrs. Nyxly's description of the Fifth Dimension itself.
Thea was long past the stage of parroting other people's claims. She had her own judgment, and she wasn't about to accept everything as gospel. These days, even supreme beings could be wrong. And this Fifth-Dimensional princess—now reduced to hanging laundry on a rooftop and drinking cheap beer, having landed herself in this sorry state—was clearly a long way from being omniscient and omnipotent.
The old woman's theory was a reference point, not a textbook.
Even the Goddess of Death had her pride.
Mrs. Nyxly had called the Fifth Dimension "the fifth dimension" and reality "the third dimension." Thea didn't buy that.
The real world was three-dimensional space packaged inside the four-dimensional box of time. It was a hybrid space—you couldn't reduce it to just "three-dimensional."
Mxyzptlk was a pauper in the Fifth Dimension, but once he dropped to the Fourth, by their own standards he was a god. By the same token, Thea ascending to the Fourth Dimension made her a god of time. The native Fourth-Dimensional beings would be maxed-out locals while she'd be a newcomer from below—her raw power lower than theirs, but her tier was the same.
Some said the Fifth Dimension was thought. That touched on it. To Thea, "imagination" was a more accurate label.
Take Martian Manhunter—his power was driven by sheer will. He willed it to work, so it worked; if it didn't work, he made it work anyway. Many mages and metahumans could also make the nonexistent real. Where did that ability come from? Why did it just appear from nowhere?
Thea suspected these abilities drew—at least partially—on the Fifth Dimension. The Fifth Dimension was very close to ordinary people. Mrs. Nyxly had said it was "far away, yet right before your eyes," and she was right. It couldn't be seen. It couldn't be touched. But it was there. It had always been there.
Everyone had time. Everyone had thought. Some few could draw power from thought.
So reality was one-dimensional points and lines, two-dimensional planes, three-dimensional space, four-dimensional time, five-dimensional imagination, then six, seven, all the way up to ten—layers of invisible, unknowable dimensions stacking like nested boxes.
An individual who climbed to the Tenth Dimension reached the peak of this world. Thea wasn't going to walk that road. Different paths, same destination. Power's essence was the same either way. The only variable was how you acquired it.
Sifting carefully through Mrs. Nyxly's memories, Thea realized that—just as not every person in reality was a scientist—the Fifth Dimension had its share of slackers too. This princess had clearly been one of them: living off name recognition, always mooning over pretty boys, not bothering to study.
A lot of Mrs. Nyxly's views, when Thea tried to translate them through her own conceptual framework, turned out to be wrong.
By now, Thea was a multiversal-tier entity herself. The veil over the world had lifted a corner for her. Theories that contradicted her foundational understanding had a ninety-nine percent chance of being flawed.
But she couldn't dismiss them entirely either. She had to decode them bit by bit, cross-referencing as she went. The correct pieces she filed away to study carefully. The ambiguous ones went into the "check later" pile.