It was an epic battle ... which unfolded inside a spaceship with very delicate dimensional-shifting equipment.
While the heroes could be considered victorious, as they managed to retrieve all the pods with their missing women, the Gorminati were not technically defeated, as they managed to escape in their own ship before jumping into another realm where they could start all over again. They figured the heroes would have their hands full trying to get their loved ones and friends back to normal to give them chase. Quickly, they set the computer to start cloning some of the most powerful and more intelligent women from the latest universe so they could help them in capturing all the valuable females they would find on the other side. Or so was the plan.
Unfortunately for them, the jump systems had been damaged in the battle with the superheroes, and the re-entry into a new universe caused a critical feedback that could not be fully stabilized in time by the faulty quantum dampeners. As it was, the slavers, too preoccupied with creating new clones or escaping the heroes, barely had any time to react before they were vaporized, as any other living thing on the ship, by the massive heat burst that erupted as soon as the ship contacted the new reality. Some of the barely functioning navigation systems could not stand the stress anymore and burnt themselves out along with the more delicate life-support systems.
Now adrift in space, the ship started a slow decaying orbit onto the closest planet, which happened to occupy the same space in this new realm as the one where all the heroes had come from in the previous one. But there were no heroes around this time, or any other superpowered beings for that matter.
Considering their trade, it should be no surprise that the most protected, sturdy, and well constructed machines the Gorminati had were related to their enslaving and cloning activities. Regardless of the scorching heat or the freezing temperatures that followed, not to mention the G's and the shocks, the machines continued to perform the work they were programmed to do, maintaining a constant temperature, pressure, and inertia inside the remaining pods that would deliver in time a group of fully grown women, and would keep them in perfect suspended animation until the time came for someone to wake them up. Which would happen some time after the whole ship crashed in a deserted part of the planet below.
Our protagonist was luckily the only one who found the remains of the ship, with its contents mostly intact despite the circumstances. This happened because he was...
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