“Okay, that didn’t go quite as planned.” Tom admitted.

“You THINK!?” Felix demanded as they ran down the venue’s built-in secret tunnel, aiming to get as far away from…whatever the hell that was, as they could.

“But the P-energy…”

“Apparently that’s not all there is to it,” Felix said, grunting as he crouched down to exit the tiny one-man tunnel that exited out into Chicago proper. “Who knew?”

They’d gotten a lot of info about Paradox over the years by scrapping anything he left on the battlefield, and that mummy had been the feather in their cap that had given them the information – and confidence – they’d needed to try and pull off the biggest heist ever: Holding the wedding cake hostage in exchange for Phat Loot.

Holding the cake hostage had been carefully selected to give them the best chance at pulling off the heist without bringing the wrath of the assembled supers down on them but still having a shot at that sweet, sweet ransom money.

The perfect plan really. They had all the counters for Paradox’s security system lifted off that mummy, allowing them to make tech and bio-parts that confused it enough for them to slip in through the building’s secret tunnel.

“You know, after Avery and Maria, I’m kind of wondering if maybe our plans…aren’t that good?” Tom posited.

“What’s the problem, man? We realized we were being unethical, apologized for bringing them into existence, and gave them a golden parachute.” Felix said, stepping out into the street and taking a grateful breath of fresh air as pedestrians cruised by at high speeds on the Tinkered sidewalks.

“Yeah, but it was still a bad plan.” Tom said. “Aren’t we getting…too old for this? We’re twenty four.”

“Well…maybe. But are you still having fun?”

“…Yeah.” Tom admitted, catching his breath against the wall.

“There ya go. I’ll stop running around in power armor when it stops being fun.”

“Hey, there’s Easy Access.” Tom said, waving at the super parked across the street.

“God, I wish we didn’t have to work with him.” Felix muttered.

Easy Access was a Wildcard type super who could reveal secret passages into buildings that had ‘always been there’, retroactively creating them. He charged obscene amounts of money for each job, and mainly specialized in heists…but that wasn’t what bothered Felix.

It was the name, and the suit with the cartoonish tunnel entrance with a big question mark over his crotch.

It had hinges and everything.

Felix shuddered.

Suddenly, Easy Access stopped waving back, and paled for an instant before their getaway car sped away, flickering through disguises as the super fumbled the knob.

“Huh. Wonder what spooked him.” Felix asked.

“I think I might have an idea,” Tom said.

Felix glanced over and spotted a black suit of armor standing between the two of them, arms over their shoulders.

“Ack!” Felix lashed out with a reflexive punch and landed it…on Tom’s blue painted helmet.

Tom lashed out at the armor between them with a jet-assisted kick, and his toe caught Felix in the kidney, the dead-gel inside barely absorbing the shockwave before it reached Felix’s organs.

An instant later, the suit of armor grabbed their heads and spun them around. Felix could hear the crick crack of stressed ceramics inches away from his squishy human skull as his whole body began to spin at outlandish speeds, turning the scenery of Chicago into a hellish tilt-a-whirl.

Felix broke away and staggered to a halt long enough to shoot a micromissile at the black armor, which flickered out of the way, revealing his brother.

“Oh-“

Tom got hit with the micromissile, which sent him tumbling backwards into the nearby Chicago wall.

That’s less than ideal.

“We give up!” Felix said, raising his hands.

“You sure?” Paradox asked from behind him. “Cuz I could keep this up for a while.”

“Pretty sure, yeah,” Felix said, hands still raised.

“Did we surrender?” Tom’s voice came out of the hole in the wall.

“Yep.”

“Cool.”

“I saw Easy Access speeding away from here, so that explains how you got in, what I’d like to know now is how you got the security system to ignore you.”

“Welll…” Felix didn’t want to give away their work of the last several years.

“Or you will officially become my nemeses, and I’ll try to kill you every so often, just like you wanted. Although I think it’ll only happen once. Believe me, you don’t want me to remember who you two are.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“I knew it was nemeses!” Tom’s voice came from the hole.

“When you put it like that…” Felix said.

***Paradox***

“This is ridiculous,” Perry said, staring at the blown up picture of himself with devil horns and a goatee, along with the dart board with another picture of his armor taped to the front, several darts nestled in uncomfortable places.

“Actually ridiculous.”

“Well, you know, we haven’t had a nemesis at our lair before...” Tom said with a nervous shrug. The two of them had filled out since the last time Perry had seen them on the beach…roughly five years ago.

They were threatening to go to fat, but not quite there yet. They were at that finite moment where a youthful body could still counteract a poor lifestyle.

“This looks more like a college dorm than a lair.”

“You’re one to talk, you put a foosball table and a pool in yours.” Felix said.

“In the entertainment area!” Perry said, plucking a banana peel off a laser cutter’s power supply. “And I kept it clean!”

“It would be clean if we had a maid.” Tom said, glancing at Felix.

“Hey, you felt it the same as me, it was just as bad-“

“Shhhhhhh…ut up,” Perry said, hushing the two of them before they began bickering again. “I don’t have time for whatever bullshit backstory you guys have going on. Show me what you used to get through security.”

“Um, okay,” Tom said, hobbling over to the side of the lab, his manacles keeping his arms together and steps short. He motioned to a little black box on the counter. “So this box here produces P-energy to-“

“The hell is P-Energy?” Perry asked, already 99% of the way there. He hoped he was wrong.

“Well, it’s the signature that your superpower gives off.” Felix said. “Everything you make has it.”

Perry nodded, already putting together how they pulled it off. They’d momentarily convinced his Lair Control Center that they were him. By scraping together thousands of tiny examples of his work, they were able to spoof it well enough that a dumb machine couldn’t tell the difference.

Definitely getting the AI Tinker perks at level 20…Assuming reality survives level 20.

“By scraping together thousands of samples, we were able to spoof the-“

“Yeah, I got it,” Perry said, waving them off. “From what I see here, you could’ve made the spoof years ago. Why now?”

“Years ago? But-“ Tom elbowed Felix

Perry raised a brow. “You couldn’t have done it years ago? What changed between now and then?”

Tom and Felix avoided eye contact.

Perry rolled his eyes and scanned the room, spotting a secret door invisible to human eyes. In fact, Perry couldn’t see the door so much as he could see the difference in dimensional wavelengths around the wall, forming a door-shape.

He cleverly bypassed the security system by ripping it out of the wall.

It might be a shitty lab, but it was still a lab, and the three of them had an armistice, so Perry set the door down gently where it wouldn’t do any unnecessary damage.

When Perry glanced past the ruined wall, he spotted a table with a partially dissected mummy on it. It was clear that the outside rooms covered in Cup Noodles and various discarded trash were decoy labs, and this was where the braindead duo did their serious work.

“What is that?” Perry demanded, pointing at the pale emaciated figure under a glass box, seemingly preserved for further study.

“Not…entirely sure, to be honest,” Felix said, scratching his head.

“Lots of P-energy though.” Tom said.

“And it’s organs match yours” Felix added.

“Lots of parts do, actually.” Tom nodded. “No lungs though.”

“I wonder why it didn’t have any lungs?” Felix asked.

“Error in the code?” Tom posited.

“Insufficient data?” Felix countered.

“Replica’s machines wanted it to die,” Perry said, stepping closer and peering at the hauntingly familiar corpse. Nothing Replica had ever made was stupid enough to make mistakes that simple. “Raise the glass.”

Tom nodded and flipped a switch to pump the preserving gas out of the tank before raising the glass.

Perry walked around his doppleganger and peered at the Comp-gel brain. Definitely one of Replica’s androids. And the age of the corpse matched that of a mummy drying out in a completely dry, germ-free environment for a good five years.

The people grinder five years ago. When he’d first visited Chicago.

Perry lifted the corpse, flipping it over to reveal the gaping hole in its chest cavity.

“You didn’t do this?” Perry asked, glancing over the organs. The lungs were indeed missing. They hadn’t been ripped or cut, simply not existing in the first place.

“No, that main hole was there when we found it.” Tom said.

There were other surgical cuts made, obviously to take samples and use them to design things that could fool Perry’s security system, both the bio-print and his dimensional signature.

Perry returned to the comp-gel brain.

It was in fairly good condition. He could probably fix it up and get it working again, get that smart AI assistant that totally got him that he’d always wanted.

Sliding Stats

Body 135 -> 120

Attunement 135 -> 150

For a brief moment, Perry’s Attunement became one thousand, five hundred and eight times stronger than his starting amount.

He tapped a finger to the brain and modified its chemical properties with his Spendthrift perk. The brain interacted with the oxygen and ambient temperature, and self-ignited, turning into a puddle of white-hot slag that melted through the table, scorching the floor.

“WHAT WAS THAT FOR?” Felix demanded, taking a step back from the heat.

“The last thing I wanna do is wake up as a digital slave of myself.” Perry murmured, watching the fire spread through the entire corpse, rendering it to primarily carbon and a bit of rare metals.

“Forget what that was for, how the heck did you do it!?” Tom asked, peering down at the ruined table, still bubbling as gas escaped the slurry of molten metals.

Perry reeled his Attunement back in and looked up at the two.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea what you two found, and I don’t like it. Tell me everything you saw at the site. Everything you know about it.”

Perry started rummaging around the lab, making himself at home.

Multi-Tool

A sampler drill appeared in Perry’s hand as he grabbed alcohol and cotton swabs and a nearby gurney, switching on the vent to make sure the gasses from the bubbling hole in the middle of the floor didn’t hurt his test subjects.

“…What are you doing?” Felix asked.

“Less asky, more talky,” Perry said, humming to himself as he grabbed one of their computers and hacked into it in seconds, hauling it across the room to sit next to the table.

Next he went and grabbed a bunch of the testing hardware the brothers had used to study his android’s flesh.

“There’s no…corpse left…what are you…” Felix paled.

“Why don’t you take a seat while you tell me about when you found the mummy?” Perry asked, patting the gurney.

WHIIIIR.

The bone-marrow sampler in Perry’s hand whirred with what felt like a particularly eager drilling sound.

“Look, I need bone marrow samples from both of you. We can do this the easy way, or I can lock you down again. And let me tell you. It will hurt less if you’re not freaking out.”

“Why do you need bone marrow samples!?” The brothers demanded at the same time.

“To make sure you’re you.” Perry said with a shrug.

“What?”

“Up on the gourney.” Paradox said, pointing with the massive drill. “Hop to it.”

***Two excruciating bone marrow samples later***

“Good news!” Perry said after he’d tested the samples. Both brothers were clutching their left arm. It would probably be bruised for weeks.

“You guys are still human…for better or worse. Now, show me on the map where you found the mummy, and don’t leave each other’s sight for the next…eh…six months should do it.”

“Tell me what’s going on!” Felix demanded

Paradox fixed the two of them with a stare, causing the two recreational supers to lean away from him.

“Why? Do you want to be the ones to deal with the problem?” Perry asked.

“Umm…no?” Tom said.

“Then show me where the replicator hideout where you found the mummy is. Afterwards you can go back to your day job as birthday clowns.”