Petey opened his eyes, happy he’d been allowed to say bye to Leula. She’d been very confused, waving her little legs around and shouting.

Oh wait, he was falling.

This was not his first time falling out of the sky. In fact, he’d been much higher up the last time. The wind whipping through his fur and pulling drool out of his mouth tasted different than the stuff back home.

Shaking his head, he rotated to check on the other people hurtling at the green far below. One of them was a hooman that smelled like being angry, but he didn’t look like he was worried about his predicament. Maybe it was because he was wearing so much armor.

Flipping over, Petey glanced between his back paws, trying not to roll all the way, and saw the nice person who had not yet confirmed that he wasn’t a crab tumbling through the air, screaming. He had a lot of hard bits and sharp bits, but he was the only one who gave Petey pats, so he was Petey’s favorite so far. His face had opened up like a flower so he could scream louder, which seemed like a very helpful ability to have.

Petey swam through the air towards him and grabbed onto his black shell with his teeth, being very careful not to punch through. He was still getting the hang of his own strength, even though he’d had it for a few weeks by now. With a determined thought, he started floating, and their momentum halted abruptly.

The crab-man stopped screaming after a moment, feeling around. “Wha- Petey? How are you doing that!? Flight is really rare!”

Petey beamed from ear to ear. “Thank you! I like flying, but Leula-” He froze as he realized he’d dropped the crab-man in order to talk, and he looked down to see the crab-man screaming once again.

Aiming himself, Petey launched himself downward, grabbed onto the crab-man’s shell on the way down, flipped over, and crashed into the ground with enough force to make a crater. A second later, the crab-man landed on Petey, bounced off his soft fur, and slammed into a tree with a sound that made Petey wince.

Petey started walking towards him, but paused. Was he… was he forgetting something?

He sat down and scratched his ear with a hind paw, frowning as he thought about it. Angry armor man, nice crab man… right! Hooman child who smelled weird. Where’d he go?

Something clamped onto his back, falling with immense speed and rolling off with a startled oof of displaced air. Petey gazed wide-eyed at the smol hooman in front of him, and he slowly sat up with a wince. “Hello, Petey. I seem to have broken a rib. Is there any chance you possess some kind of healing ability?”

Petey gave him a huge lick across the face in reply, and the weirdest smile Petey had ever seen crossed the child’s face. It was like he hated himself for enjoying it. After a second of facial wrestling, the young boy worked the expression off. “Impressive emotional manipulation. How can it be applied to other… hmm.” Standing up, he patted himself down and then looked at Petey, eyes narrowed. “Did you lick me in an attempt to better yourself in my view and happened to heal me as well; or were you trying to heal me, and the burst of happiness was a side effect? Moreover, is it simply the transference of your innate glee to others or is it an artificially induced happiness?” His face darkened, and Petey kind of wanted to give him another lick. “If only that paladin-spawn excuse for a spider hadn’t put limitations on me. I’d love to examine you with more depth.”

The armored person sat up from where he’d landed. He’d hit a tree on his way down, but instead of falling through the branches, he’d gone through the main trunk and pulverized it from top to bottom. Even as Petey watched, the splintered remainder toppled over.

Petey scratched his ear happily. These were such interesting people!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Bain stared up at the brilliant blue sky, breathing hard. He’d been raised under a city, not over it. Heights were not his strong suit.

Not for the last time, he wished Nahma was here to help. His dad definitely wouldn’t have fit in the small room they’d entered in, but the kaiju centipede could beat anything.

He rolled over, glancing at the glowing Golden Retriever furiously licking Argus. Well, anything in their universe. Petey hadn’t even appeared to notice Bain’s weight and managed to keep flying at the same time. He had immense innocent charm, was relaxing just to look at, and had powers even Eddie wasn’t capable of describing.

He’d make a better hero than you.

Bain shook the thought away. He’d dealt with more than his fair share of psychological issues. He’d earned his place among the heroes of his home city fair and square, and he’d defended it more than once. Petey probably had his own problems to deal with, much the same as everyone in existence.

Rolling all of his shoulders, Bain checked himself over and found no chinks or cracks in his carapace. Sure, they’d heal fast enough, but he wanted to be in top condition for the Mission to Save the Multiverse.

At least, that’s what he was calling it in his mind. He couldn’t wait to bring news about it back home. Hallow might have saved the city a few times. Boom Mike could blast himself halfway across the city by the time Bain realized he’d forgotten donuts. Stitches was probably unkillable. But could any of them say that they’d saved an entire multiverse?

Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t totally sure. Hallow had been number one for a pretty long time.

Doom extricated himself from the demolished tree he’d landed in and promptly summoned a gun bigger than Bain’s arm, and the monster frowned. Petey was plenty heroic and Argus reminded Bain of Nahma’s sheddings, but Doom gave Bain strange vibes. He felt like the armored soldier was ready, willing, and eager to kill any and everything at a moment’s notice.

Despite what Eddie said about him, Bain didn’t believe he could be anything except a villain. His armor was covered in blood and he used guns. Not small ones, either. Even if the gigantic shotgun cradled in Doom’s arms shot tranquilizers, anybody shot by them would overdose instantly. And Bain had a feeling Doom wasn’t using tranquilizers.

He flexed his claws worriedly, getting the pops out of his back.

He was going to have to keep an eye on him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Doom was going to have to keep an eye on Bain.

He had been battling everything that had so much as looked at him sideways for over a decade. The world he’d been shunted to had only provided more targets, and he’d taken great pleasure in gunning those down as well. He’d even found a new rabbit!

But Bain… Bain was a monster. Those tended to attack Doom at some point, and Doom was not in the mood to be attacked. Granted, it’d give him some short-lived therapy as he pounded the shell off him, but he really wanted to get back to his rabbit and the underworld helpfully located nearby. There was ripping and tearing that needed to be done.

Shaking his helmet, Doom examined the map located at the top of his helmet directing him northwest. It hadn’t been there before, but if that self-proclaimed spider had written universes into existence, it stood to reason he could fiddle with Doom’s armor a bit.

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. On one hand, someone was messing with his extremely powerful and incomparably handy power armor. On the other, that same someone was perfectly capable of giving him any gun that had ever existed along with a few Doom had only dreamed of, and was refusing to do so.

Really, he was angry at him either way.

He was satisfied with that conclusion. Doom bore anger towards pretty much everything with a pulse, aside from his beloved rabbit.

Checking to make sure the others weren’t watching him (the creepy child was), he removed the Bazookat from his inventory. It resembled an extended tube with exposed wires sticking out of it at various points, most of them plugged into a gently glowing green power source and the barrel. The end of the gun was shaped like a smiling calico cat, the mouth serving as the barrel and two disconnected paws for the foregrip and trigger handle. It was without a doubt the strangest and most unreliable-looking gun Doom had ever seen, and he’d once used a skull as a flamethrower.

Putting it back in his inventory, he swapped it out for a shotgun and smiled in his helmet. Nothing was quite so comforting as a gun in one’s hands.

His HUD picked up a sound and he raised an eyebrow. Something was coming.

He made a decision quickly. He didn’t know if any of the others had the Perk, and he didn’t want to stick around and find out. If the enemy coming towards them was big - and he didn’t really care whether it was actually an enemy or not - he wanted to get its guts outside of it. A lot of weird stuff had happened in the past ten minutes and he needed to destress.

Leaving the others behind and completely ignoring Bain’s shout for him to wait, Doom sprinted forward. He didn’t bother with trying to go around the trees in his path; it was their fault if they happened to grow in front of him.

The sound coming from ahead grew louder, and he grinned.

This was going to be fun.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Argus was confused on a number of levels. A lot of extremely unusual things were going on and had been going on for the past ten minutes and he still had very little concrete idea as to what was going on.

He definitely missed Thesis and Theory. Their combined attack power would have been invaluable in any situation, but he was a dungeon. He could improvise, adapt, and overcome.

Argus frowned. That thought had seemed… artificial.

Shaking it away, he considered the circumstances. Bain was some sort of beetle/humanoid mutant. He seemed quite powerful, although he possessed no mana Argus could detect. He had ‘morals’, which were really only useful when people wanted to trick other people, so Argus suspected he could handle him.

Next came Doom. Wherever the armored human had gone, he had left them behind. A distinct aura of unequaled bloodlust and wrath followed him wherever he went. It made Argus wish he could enthrall the man, but he had a feeling it wouldn’t work. A remarkable amount of mana came off of him, but it stank of rotting flesh and explosives.

Argus glanced at Petey out of the corner of his eye. The dog was bouncing after Bain as the monster tried to follow Doom, a wide smile on Petey’s oblivious face. To a normal man, he appeared as a normal dog.

Argus saw him for what he really was the moment he used his mana vision. An implacable and unstoppable paragon in the form of a dog, possessing incomparable power. He radiated mana like a star, to the point where Argus could barely even look at him through the intensity. It made tears well up and dried his eyeballs.

Rubbing his eyes, Argus blinked until the dryness went away. Bain was a hopeless optimist believing in the innate goodness of humanity. He was strong but manageable. Doom was… strange. In terms of psychology, he was the second most dangerous in the group, next to Argus himself. Petey was by far the greatest threat to the mission.

Theoretically speaking, an artifact in the style of the one Eddie had lost would be more powerful than any gun concievable, especially if that gun was the one he’d spied Doom handling. It was ridiculous thought that such an absurd weapon could mete out any level of destruction, regardless of what Eddie claimed. Stories of nemeses and pet cats were moot points to the unassailable reality of hard facts.

This group was a walking bomb with a lit fuse.

Argus planned to aim it.