“Nope!”

Multi-tool

Perry pulled out a cutting tool out of the ether and started slicing through the solid steel wall.

SLAM!

Perry’s body had the wind driven out of him as the two sides of the hall slammed together, stopping just shy of crushing Perry entirely.

Either play my game or die where you stand, Paradox. You’re in my lair, and in my lair, I am god. I see everything. I know everything. I CONTROL EVERYTHING. You thought you escaped, but your brain simply hasn’t accepted its death yet.

***Chemestro***

“Either play my game or die where you stand, Paradox. You’re in my lair, and in my lair, I am God. I see everything. I know everything. I CONTROL EVERYTHING. You thought you escaped, but your brain simply hasn’t accepted its death yet!”

Chemestro slid invisibly past Father, whose attention was completely dominated by the wall of monitors showing Paradox from nearly every angle, as well as the route Father was planning on forcing him down.

Is this irony? Chemestro thought, sliding the thumb drive out of his bracer and plugging it in, Father completely unaware of what was happening three feet behind him. Because this feels like irony.

Directly behind Father’s narcissistic grandstanding, the Thinker’s computer began pouring all his secrets out for Nexus to peruse.

Now all I have to do is wait, Chemestro thought, crossing his arms and leaning back to watch the show on the wall of monitors above Father’s jar.

Maybe I’ll even get to see Paradox die, Chemestro thought, prodding his tender ribs. He hadn’t had anything in particular against the lackadaisical legacy super at first, but after he’d fought him several times, Chemestro knew this for a fact: they would never get along.

***Paradox***

“Listen and listen well! The road before you is beset with many perils! Every turn you make will bring you closer to the cold, indifferent hands of fate! The lair has witnessed your sins, and she seeks vengeance! The lair will punish the wicked, The lair will reward the righteous! You must escape from her grasp! You must earn your freedom!”

“HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO LIVE!?”

The floor of the circular room began to open from the center, revealing a bubbling vat of acid. Perry assumed it was acid because of the smell.

Acid vat. I guess Neuron likes the classics.

If this wasn’t life and death, I’d be laughing, Perry thought, glancing up at the two obvious exits, each hall indistinguishable from the other.

The way he’d come had sealed off behind him.

“Did you seriously make a torture maze just in case you had someone to use it on?” Perry asked, scanning the ceiling and walls for a hidden maintenance exit. Couldn’t hurt to check. Greater plans had been thwarted by less.

Perry glanced into the vat of acid. There was a possibility that it was fake acid, and the maintenance hatch was inside, but the chances were slim.

Perry tore a scrap of fabric off his purloined coat and dropped it into the bubbling vat.

The fabric crumbled and darkened instantly.

Yep. So…left or right?

I’m partial to left.

Perry leapt across the gap and darted through the hallway, the door slamming shut behind him once again.

Up high on the wall was a single blue LED, indicating this was a Blue Zone.

Some Blue Zones are beneficial, creating alloys that don’t exist in reality, speeding up growth, giving glimpses into the future several minutes in advance. That sort of thing. Others can turn life into a nightmare.

There’s one that adjusts the relative size of all living things, causing you to explode from all the bacteria pouring out of your body.

Which one do you think you’ve found yourself in, Paradox?

One way to find out.

Perry took a step forward, and felt vague pressure around his head, a bit like a clogged sinus, a moment before a sudden surge of weight on his neck dragged his head to the side.

He reached up and patted his skull. Perry’s skin went cold when he felt the massive lump on the side of his head.

Okay, don’t panic. If this were the bacteria thing, I would’ve been dead already. What are the rules?

Perry took a careful step backwards, and the pressure on his neck lessened, albeit not completely. There was still a little bit of distended flesh hanging off the side of his head.

“Let’s see how long you can last before you become nothing more than a twitching mass of tumors, Paradox. Maybe if you stand in one place, you can avoid the worst of it, but that doesn’t seem like a long-term solution, does it?”

Neuron burst into maniacal laughter, which Perry ignored.

Perry slowly, carefully, extended his right hand through where his head had passed.

The hand grew tumors at an alarming rate.

Perry drew his hand back, recreating his path as exactly as he could. The tumors faded away to almost nothing, but the skin of his hand was a little rougher than it had been before. It was impossible to recreate his path perfectly.

Direction-based mass-warping. It seems to work just as well in reverse as it does forward. That implies there are spots that could dwindle my hand down to a stub. It’s not just tumor.

Perry spent the next few minutes plotting out the hall, his hand growing rougher and more misshapen as he slowly navigated his way through the invisible eddies of warped reality.

As he went, the familiar sensation grew stronger, warning him in advance sometimes before he even touched a specific spot.

Perry focused on it. It felt like…Attunement overload. I wonder if… It was a dangerous gamble, but something told him it would work.

Sliding Stats.

Attunement 35 -> 39

Stability 19 -> 15

Perry closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let his tenuous grasp on sanity slip. everything outside of himself faded away. Gradually, the blue light, the steel hall, Neuron’s incessant ranting ceased to exist in Perry’s mind.

Perry stood in the void of space, empty safe for himself. Nothing else existed beyond him.

Wait, that’s not quite right.

Perry’s opened his eyes.

He was still standing in the void of space, but it was familiar. There was the milky way. There was the big dipper, Cancer, Gemini.

Perry’s point of view was still on Earth, and if his suspicions were correct, still at the exact same spot it’d been when he allowed the world to fade away. he just couldn’t see anything around him.

Except that.

In front of Perry was a mass of distortion. Not visible, per se, but he was perceiving it somehow. Perhaps in the same way he was not perceiving the rest of the world.

The masses were gnarled tendrils as wide as a man, and thicker at one end of the hall than the other, like the branches of a monstrous tree…except they breathed. Energy seemed to pulse back and forth through the branches in slow motion, like the deep breaths of someone sleeping.

Frowning, Perry’s gaze followed the distorted branches back to their source.

There, in the center of a halo of gnarled reality that seemed to stretch in every direction, sat an oval-shaped void in Perry’s perception of the stars.

Like someone had taken a giant ostrich egg and painted it with Vantablack.

His gaze followed the tendrils back out into the distance. Everywhere they went, Neuron was sure to have penned them in with steel and blue lights. He glanced further afield, back the way he’d come.

Perry couldn’t see Neuron’s mechanisms and hallways and deathtraps, but he knew they were there.

Did Neuron have a comprehensive map of these reality-warping tendrils, or could Perry find some way to take advantage of them?

He identified a set of tendrils that extended hundreds of feet upwards, towards the surface. It stands to reason that if there exists a hole in Neuron’s security, it would have to accompany these tendrils. The closer I get to them, the less control Neuron has. I can then follow them up and to the surface.

Idea firmly lodged in place, Perry began to carefully climb through the tendrils. Sometimes he stepped over, under or around them and other times, he timed his speed to match the flow of energy, reversing the effect on himself as the breath flowed in the opposite direction.

“What are you doing? How are you-?”

Perry used his fingertips to locate the cold steel wall, following it until he found a spot against the wall where the reality-warping roots formed a tiny, inaccessible nook. Perry forced himself halfway through the warping effect, then allowed the return breath to fix his body, slipping halfway out, then repeating the process until he was completely through, with only minor deformations.

***Chemestro***

“What are you doing?” Neuron demanded, still facing the wall of monitors.

“How are you-“

On the screen, Paradox’s body briefly warped before returning to normal as he methodically stepped through the uncharted Blue Zone, following some unseen pathway. A moment later he knelt down and began to cut his way through the wall using a tool that simply appeared in his hand.

“I warned you!” Father shouted, and Chemestro watched as the walls slammed in around Paradox, shrinking as they passed through the blue zone, creating a half-sphere that sheltered the young tinker.

“No!” Father withdrew the walls and lasers fired from hidden ports, warping around Paradox’s body to burn holes in the wall around him.

Same with the ballistic guns, death rays, and even the poison gas.

Paradox walked out the side of the wall into the outside maintenance area of the Blue zone, sealing the exit behind himself with foam.

Before he ducked completely out of the room, Paradox extended his right fist, which grew massively, bigger than a man’s head. Paradox pointed it straight at the camera, then extended his sausage-sized middle finger.

Chemestro wasn’t sure what the meaning was, but it seemed to anger Father beyond reason, as the brain in a jar who’d raised him threw a…what could only be described as a tantrum.

“Mechanaut, you piece of shit! You think you’re better than me!?” Father shouted, his mechanical tentacles beating dents into the command console.

Even his anger seemed to be strangely misplaced.

Was I truly afraid of this my entire life? Chemestro thought, arms crossed. He’d been held to such high standards of self-discipline and control, that he’d sort of…assumed Father did the same for himself.

Fath - no, Neuron - certainly implied that he did.

Neuron’s violent swinging turned him to the side far enough to catch a glimpse of Chemestro.

“What are you doing here!?” Neuron demanded, his petulant rage vanishing in an instant, replaced with stern disapproval. It was a bit too late. The cracks in the façade had already been revealed to him.

“I’m disappointed Father,” Chemestro said, sliding the thumb drive back into his bracer. “My training, designed to drive all weakness from me, has given me an acute sense for weakness...Specifically yours. Irony abounds,”

Neuron paused, staring intently at him.

“Who put you up to this, Twelve Forty-Two?” Neuron said, his tinny voice simmering with rage.

“Was I going to be disposed of after Warp took my place?” Chemestro asked rather than answer Neuron’s question. It was a not-so subtle insinuation that Chemestro couldn’t make decisions on his own.

“Of course not!” Neuron cried. “That would be irrational. Why would I waste the the best fighter I have!?”

“Neuron.” Chemestro said Father’s name out loud. Trying it on.

Not Father.

Not Sir.

Neuron.

Neuron twitched, his mechanical tentacles writhing around him as lightning began to cloak his jar.

“I don’t believe you.” Chemestro said, nodding to the ruined command console, covered in dents and broken buttons. Ruined in an irrational outburst.

“You picked a fine time to wise up, Twelve Forty-Two.” Neuron said. “Engage the failsafe.”

Chemestro clasped his hands together and stood at ease as silence stretched between the two of them.

“Why aren’t you dead, twelve forty-Two!?” Neuron demanded, his voice rising with tremulous fury.

“Because. I’m Chemestro,” Chemestro stated, taking a page out of Paradox’s book.

***Paradox***

Ow.

Perry reached up and tapped the massive scab covering the hole in his shoulder.

Ow.

He was healing fast, but not fast enough to be meaningful. At least his bleeding had stopped, leaving him just a little lightheaded.

Okay, now I need to see where I am

Perry closed his eyes and focused on regaining his grasp on reality. Friends, family. Heather. Natalie. Eating dinner, walking together at night. The warmth of a hug.

Sliding Stats.

Attunement 39 -> 31

Stability 15 -> 23

Perry blinked once, twice, and the all-encompassing void faded away, revealing the inside of the wall.

I’ve never controlled it like that before. Never had any reason to.

Perry leaned back against a container of nerve gas and took in his stuffy environs. It was hot and humid, cluttered with machinery and pneumatic tubes, poison gas delivery systems and the guts of automated lasers and guns. There was a tiny walkway for a repair drone or a human technician to get access to the death traps contained within.

Perry was on the other side of the smooth steel façade of Neuron’s lair, and it was candyland.

I could use this stuff to escape, easy.

Perry had all the tools to make it happen, too.

Between the Spendthrift perk, Multi-tool, and Aerosolize, Perry had everything he needed to create some makeshift armor and weapons and get the heck out of here.

Except…

Neuron was beginning to become a serious problem. He was emotional, didn’t pay any heed to the ‘proper’ way to villain. Even Monolith was willing to ransom him.

And he’d come after Perry again even after he’d cost him tens of millions of dollars as a message.

If I escape, he’ll do it again. He’s not motivate by profit, or even the desire to play the game. It’s revenge, pure and simple.

Perry thought of Natalie waking up in that torture chair. She was very small and breakable outside of her armor, and if Perry had to choose what kind of villain he’d like to fight…it would be one who would play the game correctly and ransom her back.

Now that I have a moment to think about it, what evidence does Neuron have that I have no cap on my growth? The only thing he can prove is that I’ve gotten stronger quickly over the last six months. So does every other super mastering their powers.

So if Solaris got a report about me, what would it do? The man’s friends with my mother. He takes a closer look at me, and finds nothing definitive…

I think I’ll take a page from Chemestro’s book and just kill Neuron. I’ll take my chances with his replacement.

Perry reached out his hand and an impact driver with a half-inch socket settled into it. He began unbolting the wall-lasers from their housing.