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You are the Steel Witch.
And usually, you feel pretty damn good about it too. You have a sweet crib above the clouds, you’re stronger than anything that exists, and, let’s face it, you have a face card that never declines. 80% of the time, you love being you.
That number would probably be higher seeing how sweet your life is, but there’s one thing holding you back.
Humans.
You do come from humans— at least you share a lot of similarities with apes— so it’s slightly hypocritical for you to complain, you suppose. But holy shit, these little, squirming, upright bastards have an insane talent for causing trouble, so you’re constantly stressed trying to get them to stop abusing overpowered weapons you accidentally left on the earth. You have no idea where they’re even finding these things because you could swear your peers put them away in secure places before dying, but every decade some asshole pulls out another one of these goddamn things, and you’re forced to confisticate them like a mother with the world’s stupidest five million children.
Unfortunately, they are even more headstrong than you in trying to die, because try as you might, you can’t out-dumbass all of them. So when they inevitably find the edge of the world, being the good witch you are, you carefully put down a cage so they don’t go jumping off into the void, which they seem to want to do anyway, because these bastards have no sense of self-preservation and somehow blame you for trying to keep them alive.
One of your main headaches are these few assholes who call themselves Elders. You hate them all, but can’t be assed to actually kill them— okay, you don’t hate all of them. You’re actually pretty okay with this one dude in particular, and while he’s scruffy and deranged and constantly seems one bad day away from either commiting genocide or suicide, you can’t deny that he grows really, really good weed.
You kind of remember how you met him— you had just started going on your Elder-punching spree after one of them challenged you and got stomped into the ground. Thinking that you may as well stomp them all now and prevent them from getting any ideas in the future, you had started running around and blowing things up. Eventually, one of them would show up, and you’d kick their ass so bad they’d stop dicking around for a while.
He lived in a pretty isolated area and showed no signs of showing up, so you decided to make the trek yourself. Always aiming to antagonise, you pinpointed where he was, chose a location approximately five meters away from his physical body, and went smashing through layers of wood and stone in all your constellation-y witchy glory.
To your relative surprise, he didn’t immediately attack you.Instead, when the dust cleared, he was standing there, half a dead body in his hands, the other half strewn across a table. Looking mildly surprised and barely outraged at your presence, he spoke after a few seconds.
“You have quite the nerve.”
Standard dialogue. You shrugged, talked back, he talked back, the typical peacocking exchange before a fight, but this time it was interrupted when you turned your head to look cooler and immediately spotted a particular plant growing in a pot a little to your right.
You know what weed is, of course. You’re from the future, and you’ve seen basically every drug under the sun. It’s got a reputation for de-stressing people, but you’re a witch and normal weed unfortunately did not work on you.
However, you didn’t know that this guy apparently also knew about the magic of cannabis.
Ignoring the conversation, you walked over to the plant and crouched down. “Wait, don’t tell me you invented weed.”
There was a moment of silence from him, probably from sheer confusion, before he slowly said, “…weeds have existed since the beginning of cultivation.”
“No, this.” You pointed to the plant and looked at him expectantly. “Got any of the finished product?”
And that was how you got sidetracked from your mission of knocking every elder off their high horse and got high with one instead. You’re not particularly human anymore, but either he was a genius or the depression had unlocked 120% of his plant-growing potential, because that weed actually managed to relieve your constant stress headache from making sure the human race didn’t go beyblading off a cliff.
“Damn,” you said, three hours later, sprawled onto a sofa like a starfish, “that’s the good stuff.”
He did not smoke the weed (which you didn’t mind, more for you), so he had spent the better part of the last hours staring at you in severe bewilderment. He only blinked when you finally talked, working his tongue for a moment before he asked, “I was under the impression you wanted to fight.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Finally remembering your mission, you got up and brushed yourself off, stretching in order to prepare for your mandatory assault charge, all the while thinking of how nice it was to go floating off into the void mentally. Huh. Maybe you should intergrate into the humans if this was how it felt not to think.
So, after you defeated him (because of course he challenged you, he was still an Elder), you offered to tell him some things in exchange for a lifetime supply of that good kush. He, unsurprisingly, agreeed, and asked you some things about time. You’re 90% sure this question had some very uncomfortable perosnal roots (pun intended) judging by the way he stared at you, but you were never one for social anxiety and told him what he’s allowed to know.
He looked pensive for about ten seconds, and then proceeded to hand you at least two kilograms of weed.
To hell with what typical morals dictated, for all you cared at that moment, he was an angel in human form.
That was maybe four hundred years ago. You don’t go to the human world much anymore for a few reasons. First, you only have reason to appear when shit’s going down to destroy stuff, and thankfully there isn’t much stuff to destroy on a good day, because they’ve finally learnt to keep the overpowered shit to themselves. Second, you can’t be assed to deal with humans more than the bare minimum. Knocking the Elders down a peg had worked for a while, but you had forgot to factor in the fact that the apes reproduced. It was a battle you were never going to win in the first place, unfortunately.
The only human you don’t find (too) annoying is your weed supplier, who has only gotten weirder and even more insane after you told him about the timestream, but the weed has gotten better too, so you don’t complain and pretend you don’t see the tree he’s growing to try and break your cage. At this point, you’ve just accepted that Elders will Elder, and if you’re going to let one of them keep defying you, it might as well be the guy who more than makes up for it with the weed.
Also, you’re pretty sure that the tree is where your weed is coming from. When you first realised, you were slightly concerned you that you were smoking the dead bodies of thousands, before realising that you did not actually care.
“You shouldn’t be able to grow zaza this good,” you said once, when you were making your annual weed run.
He was not one for social interaction, as you found out very quickly, but he was open to humouring you, probably out of fear. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Don’t you smoke?” You looked down at the stuff he was currently packaging. “It has to knock you out for at least a month if it does *that* to me.”
“I don’t.” He swept the rest of the weed into the cloth bag and started threading a string through the opening. “So I wouldn’t know.”
“I thought you grew it for yourself.” You were turning into a full-time stoner. You didn’t really care. “Why not?”
Tightening the string, he handed your order to you. “It makes me think about my life.”
“Damn.” Oh, right, you forgot the depression, that was what made the weed so good in the first place. You mentally apologised to him and his fucked up brain before pushing on. “Well, I think it’s great. Actually, it’s… concerningly great.”
He stopped in his motions and actually made eye contact with you for once. “You won’t.”
For a guy that was usually so much of a shut-in, he was decent at picking up cues. “Won’t what?”
“Destroy the World Tree.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not worth it.”
You thought seriously for a moment, before nodding in agreement. “It isn’t.”
The weed was, and still is, just that good.