#Egoton Origins

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A Diamond in the Rough Ch. 3

Chapter 3: A Gift

Summary: The chapter in which Eric gets some much needed protection and Damien attempts another surprise adoption.

A/N: A story in which Damien and Patton share the same brain cell, and it says to adopt the sad child.

Chapters: 1, 2, 3

Eventually Eric was able to tell a little bit of what had happened. Dark had killed his father in front of him, and he was scared and his hands wouldn’t stop aching and tingling. Randall’s mother came in to help try and calm him down. Patton did pass on the message to the other heroes before going back inside and using his powers to help calm Eric down again. It resulted in him falling asleep from exhaustion.

Logan wound up calling in with information, after looking through several police reports they found out that Eric was the survivor of an accident that killed his brother and that Derek was suspected of working for Dark but the police hadn’t been able to prove it.

Currently the only thing the doctors could prove was that while Eric didn’t have evidence of being stabbed, he had a lot of old and recent bruises. And that was making Patton overprotective and unhappy, wanting to coddle and smother Eric in love but was unable to for a multitude of reasons.

Logan was standing in his outfit, trying to “reason with him” while the two were in the lobby. “We cannot adopt him, he is a teenager and most likely has extended family, he is a witness in a murder investigation.”

“Yeah, but he’s so sad,” Patton smiled and tried to continue to argue his point.

“Marie Curie and her notebook,” Logan groaned. “This is why we don’t let you be around children.”

“Princey wants and sidekick and Silver and Jackie both have one,” Patton gave a huge smile.

“No,” Logan cut in to stomp that out. “No. No! We are not taking on an apprentice. I can barely corral you and Princey, I am not adding a literal child to those complications.”

“Aww, come on, it’d be great,” Patton continued.

“No, I am figuratively putting my foot down,” Logan said and distantly he heard the faint ringing of Dark’s aura and signaled an alarm. “Dark is here, we’ll continue this at a later time.”

The two Sides followed the staticky, ringing aura until they found Dark outside of Eric’s room.

“Halt!” Logan ordered him. “What do you think you’re doing here?”

“A surprise adoption,” Dark’s blue soul answered, not-so-helpfully, despite the heroes not being able to hear him or him being able to talk to them.

“Don’t start!” Dark’s red soul pushed him out of the way.

“That’s none of your business,” Dark managed to say despite the fact his twin souls were fighting with each other, his form splintering and fracturing. Which gave an unintended nefarious air to his words.

“You’re here to kill him aren’t you?” Patton accused.

“Of course not,” Dark told him in a rare moment of honesty. He didn’t want to kill the young Derekson boy; he wanted to add him to what Anti often referred to as Dark’s “hoard”.

Dark’s blue soul was quickly winning out and Dark knew he was losing against the impulse to take the Derekson kid and just run off with him. He was already planning on introducing him to Illinois and Kay first, Bim and Arthur were a bit too high energy for a first introduction.

“You can’t have him, you fiend,” Patton proclaimed loudly and bravely.

“You really are insufferable,” Dark told him.

Silver flew down the other side of the hallway, braced for a fight.

“Why are you looking for a kid?” Silver demanded.

“You should mind your own business,” Dark scoffed.

“Not in the job description,” Silver smiled, pulling up his fists. “Let’s dance, Darkcus.”

Dark scowled at him, looking about ready to literally hiss at him and he jumped at him, his aura curling around him.

“I’ll get him out, you make sure people are safe,” Silver called at the two Sides who were already going towards Eric’s door. Patton rushed in to find Randall’s mother not in the room.

“Where should we move them?” Patton asked as Logan closed the door, the quick entrance and the loud conversation had woken both Randall and Eric up, Eric easily getting disoriented at the unfamiliar scenario.

“No, while he’s still out there it is unsafe for anyone to move,” Logan warned. “I’ve already contacted the hospital staff to help Ms. Voorhees to get up here safely when Dark is removed from the floor.”

“What’s goin’ on here?” Randall demanded groggily.

“No, everything’s fine,” Patton promised, at the same moment that Silver came through the left wall, being thrown through by Dark.

Dark stepped through the hole, looked frustrated and very disgruntled, aura a shrill ringing.

Eric let out a squeak of terror and Randall huddled next to Eric.

“I’m not going to kill him,” Dark straightened his tie. “Killing a child is beneath me.”

“That doesn’t discount the numerous things that could happen to a child under your quote-unquote care,” Logan responded.

Dark let out a long sigh, swiping the fringe of his hair to the side as a quick slew of memories of everything that his Lost Ones had done while they’d been living in the Manor. He waved his hand and a large portal opened up and dropped all of them, along with everything in the room, into a currently unused construction site. One that Marvin was currently not at because he was still at the hospital currently ten miles away.

“There, now that pesky magician isn’t in the way,” Dark growled, cracking his neck in agitation, flattening out the already pristine front of his suit coat. “I really should get around to killing him one of these days.”

Eric looked around wildly, his IV and monitor no longer hooked up and the young teen started to slip into a panic.

Silver was already moving, “I’ve got—”

Dark had already grabbed, his aura had a crushing grip on the monochrome hero’s ankle, tugging him back, “Go away!”

The hero was flung up towards the half finished ceiling and because Silver was super sturdy and already moving quickly a couple pieces of rebar came loose, chunks of concrete still and started tipping over.

For all the adults, things were moving in slow motion and Dark let go of Silver to try and reach out in time with a portal but only half of it fell in and but because of its positioning a piece of concrete broke off from where the rebar hit the portal and fell right on top of the teens.

It hit Randall square on the back, Dark let out a horrified gasp that fortunately for Dark’s reputation — but not his nerves — Patton’s equally horrified gasp was much louder and he was closer to Logan so the other Side didn’t hear Dark.

For the heroes’ sakes, and for Eric’s as well, when it hit Randall it activated a superpower in him and the concret just fell apart like it was made of flimsy plaster. All the heroes just froze, Dark felt a chill of relief come over him and he held a portal over the teens to keep any more debris from falling over on top of them. Randall felt like his whole body was on pins and needles.

His only thought was: “Never before have I been so happy to see superpowers.”

All it looked like to the heroes was that Dark was planning something. Silver flew at him and slammed into Dark as Logan and Patton raced for the two teens, hurrying to. Pull them away from the site as Jackie and Marvin rushed in. They stayed in-between Dark, and Eric and Randall.

Dark snarled at him, “Fine! Pests, the lot of you! I did that boy a favor!”

Then there was a flash of a portal and Dark was gone. All the heroes stayed braced for an attack. When it didn’t come after a couple minutes, Silver and Jackie rushed to take the teens back to the hospital where the staff and Randall’s mother were very anxiously waiting for them.

Without any other physical wounds to treat, and confirmation that Dark was his father’s killer. The police got what scarce information they could.

Then Marvin was left to talk to Eric, and it took a little bit before the very skittish teen warmed up enough to him to even look at him.

Marvin smiled, “Don’t worry, we’re not gonna let anythin’ happen ta yah.”

Eric managed a small, sad smile, trying to hope that maybe they were right.

That maybe, just maybe his luck was finally turning around.

After Eric was deemed healthy enough to leave the heroes decided that for safety’s sake and security they could keep Eric living at the base, he wasn’t the only person living there. He would repeatedly meet with social services and a doctor as a follow up for health and wellness checks until they could find any other family. Randall’s mother offered to take him in if they couldn’t. But it was determined that until Dark stopped hunting for him, he would stay at the base and learn to control his explosive powers.

Silver even offered to help teach Randall to control his super strength, and with very tentative permission from his mother, training dates were set.

Immediately upon bringing Eric to the base, Bing and Logan took one look at the prosthetics he had, then they both looked at each other. Logan’s eyebrow was raised and Bing took off his glasses to take pictures of it.

“Who has been letting the little dude use these?” Bing commented.

“How soon could we procure replacements?” Logan asked.

“Procure nuthin’,” Bing boasted. “I could build better.”

“Maybe others could also be made in the process,” Logan proposed. “The holidays are coming up.”

“I like how yah think,” Bing smiled, putting his sunglasses back on. “Let me just get some measurements from the little dude, yah think he would like some rocket shoes?”

“How about we do not include such modifications?” Logan told him as they went to go and find Eric to get some leg measurements. It would take Bing a week to make some custom prosthetics for Eric. Some nanites embedded into it to help it react to whatever terrain or environments he was in.

Upon receiving them, Eric would burst into tears, almost too afraid to touch them for fear of breaking them but after an impromptu stress test where Bing demonstrated that short of an atomizer he couldn’t possibly break the new prosthetics, Eric took them and put them on.

Eric took some time getting used to his new prosthetics, but found that like his new life he would grow into it quite nicely.

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A Diamond in the Rough Ch 2

Chapter 2: Eric’s Lament

Summary: To follow up a terrible day, Eric tries to get help and finds more bad luck but, perhaps, some good luck along the way.

Chapters: 1, 2, 3

Eric’s chest was burning.

He didn’t know what compelled him to run, and he was surprised he didn’t do a faceplant immediately and get killed by Dark on the spot. But he was down a couple blocks before his legs threatened to give out and he had to find somewhere to hide and rest.

His rare act of bravery costing his body almost everything.

He hunkered behind a trash can and just started bawling. Eric began crying for everything that had happened to him in the last couple years. His father was awful but he had kept him off the streets, and now what was he going to do?

His luck just kept getting worse. There didn’t seem to be anyway to stop it.

Eric didn’t know how long he sat there crying but it was enough to help his legs feel less like death. Maybe he could go home and hide there for a bit.

But knowing his luck, Dark would be there waiting for him.

So Eric pulled himself up and curled his arms around himself . . . and slowly he started limping towards his street.

Randall was having a relatively good day. It was a weekend and he had a couple friends over. One of his friends Ethan was over with a couple other friends.

Then the doorbell rang and Randall’s mother went to go and answer it. He thought nothing of it until his mother made an audible gasp.

“Ray, get a change of clothes, now!” His mom yelled.

Rolling his eyes he got up and saw one of his friends standing there, shivering and looking as if he’d been bawling his eyes out. He was spattered with blood and shaking.

“C-Can,” Eric struggled to say, not looking at anyone, he was shaking and a choked sob escaped his throat, “uh, I . . .”

Randall raced for his bedroom as Ethan and the other guys looked at him in concern, especially Ethan. He raced back in with the change of clothes and tried to make himself look as non-threatening as possible. “Hey Eric, yah wanna come in?”

Eric’s eyes widened in fear and he hiccuped a bit with how ragged his breathing suddenly got. “Nuh, no,” Eric sobbed.

He tripped and tried to grab onto the door frame, something like a small explosion rippled along his palm and fingertips where it came into contact with the doorframe. He screamed, and fell backwards, hitting the back of head to the wooden porch and was out.

Randall and his mother predictably started freaking out, Ethan had been leaning to the side so he barely caught the small explosion and immediately was calling Silver.

“I’m a block from my place, get over here,” Ethan said into his phone and raced for the front door. “What happened?”

“I dunno know,” Randall told him and they slowly moved Eric inside, his mother calling the ambulance. “He just exploded.”

Eric due to exhaustion, and partially with shock at what had happened in front of him, was slow to wake up. Randall and the others tried to keep him warm and the ambulance quickly took him away when it arrived, Silver waiting in the ambulance for them as he spoke with Ethan over the phone.

All he knew was that someone with powers had turned up covered in blood and he was a friend of a friend of Ethan’s.

The young teen woke up in the ambulance, confused and clearly dazed. The first thing he did was start panicking and had to immediately be sedated before he could blow up the ambulance. It was something that Silver felt more than a bit guilty about since this was a kid and he was obviously not doing even remotely well in any way.

Marvin came in to magically ward the hospital bed and it was determined that apart from minor dehydration and nutrition problems, the kid was fine.

The blood was going into testing but since there were no apparent wounds on the young teen’s body it was assumed the blood was not his.

Eric woke up a little cleaner and with Randall in the room. He felt so disoriented and afraid that he just started crying.

“Hey, Eric, man,” Randall scooted over a bit, moving slowly but making sure Eric saw him. “Yer okay, yer safe.”

“My hands,” Eric realized his hands were shaking.

“They hurtin’?” Randall asked.

Eric only answered with a little distraught whimper.

“I can call the docs in, they can make the pain go away,” Randall promised.

A knock came at the door and Eric jumped, balling up his fists and holding them against his chest and his breathing becoming a bit more erratic and panicked.

Slowly Patton walked in, wearing his hero’s costume, the puppy dog half mask making his face look a bit more rounder and his smile softer. “Hello you two, my name is Captain Morality, I just wanted to make sure everything was alright.”

Unseen by both teens Patton’s aura was spreading through the room, slowly trying to coax Eric into calming down, but not too fast where it would cause Eric to fly into another panicked state.

“Hey,” Randall greeted but Eric was still coiled up a bit. But his breathing was calming down and his hands weren’t balled quite so tightly.

Patton stayed by the door, not wanting to intrude into either of the teen’s much deserved and necessary personal space. “What are your names?”

“My name’s Randall,” Randall answered quickly. Because he’d been only worried about Eric and not dealing with the flagship full of quickly building problems mental, physical, and emotional.

“Mmmnnhh,” Eric asked, not looking at Patton, ducking his head fearfully.

Instinctively Patton briefly frowned sadly, wanting nothing more than to walk over and reassure the teen that everything was alright and that Patton was here to help and they could play fun games and watch anything he wanted.

But Patton didn’t know these teens, and Patton had made the mistake of assuming he knew what they needed. There would be times for games and comfort food later.

“It’s okay,” Patton tried to souls as unbothered as possible, hoping that eventually the teen would calm down enough to talk a bit. “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. I’m actually here to talk to your friend.”

“Me?” Randall asked in confusion, pointing to himself. “Why?”

“I just want to know what happened and you were both there,” Patton reminded gently.

“Well, I was hangin’ out with a couple ‘a my friends,” Randall remembered, pointing to Eric after he’d said that. “An’ Eric showed up, he was hurt. Then you all showed up.”

“Eric, that’s a nice name,” Patton smiled warmly. “Do you two have any siblings?”

And unbeknownst to Patton, that was one of the worst questions to ask the teen. It was meant to be a simple yes or no question, but to Eric it was so much more than that. It was a crashing sound. The sound of metal on metal. Of pain and screams that slowly were silenced as he was forced to do nothing but listen and watch.

Eric started bawling, curling around himself.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” Patton apologized. “Is there someone I can call for you?”

Randall looked uneasy. “Eric, is your dad still at work?”

Patton immediately felt a little bit of relief, that they could figure out what happened from Eric’s loving, caring—

Oh no, he’s crying again! Patton started worrying.

Eric was halfway into the semi-distance trauma over his brothers dying, and going into the very recent memory of Dark murdering his father with an axe.

“He,” Eric stalled, feeling like there was a weight in his throat.

Patton waited patiently, silently, not wanting the boy to feel pressured or forced into talking.

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The Lost Ones Ch. 6

Chapter 6: Told me he Wanted to Talk for Awhile

Summary: Whenever there are new additions to a family there are always some growing pains.

A/N: Title for this and the concept for this entire story were when I was listening to Lost Boy by Ruth B. it’s a really good song

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Lunch was of course awkward, Wil was all smiles and had to be “reminded” what everyone’s names were. He was already doting over Yan, who he’d nicknamed “Princess”.

Bim wound up eating some of the dumplings, and Illinois found he kinda liked how hot the food he was eating heated his mouth. Kay didn’t like it so much, but he ate it without complaint.

Then the kids were taken to a house, a nicer place than any of them had been in before, any of the belongings they’d had at the orphanage, excluding Kay and Yancy who didn’t have anything to bring with them that Dark could get to. Yancy because he’d been taken, and Kay because he now only had the rabbit stuffed animal Dark had given him.

Wilford had endeared himself to the kids immediately, which Dark predicted and it made things easier since Arthur seemed to calm down, at least a little bit.

Arthur and Yan had grabbed onto Wil’s arms and he was racing through the portal, spinning them around as they all laughed. Bim was perched on Wil’s shoulders, pinned in place mostly by the madman’s aura, he was screaming in delight as well.

Yancy, Kay, and Illinois followed with Dark at a slower pace but Yancy still ran over and shouted, “Me next! Me next!” The boy’s earlier trepidation was mostly forgotten.

On the ground were some scatter toys that Bim had left behind that Wil tried to step lightly around before carefully flopping all four of them on the couch. Bim climbing onto Wil’s chest.

Yan gasped as she scrambled off Wil and walked to the little block structure with stuffed animals and some dolls. “Pretty dolly.”

“That’s mine!” Bim shouted at Yan in anger.

“Boys don’t play with dolls,” Arthur told him.

Before Bim or Dark could intervene, Wil did, “Of course they do, why wouldn’t they?”

Arthur looked flustered, “Well— They— They just don’t.”

“Nonsense,” Wilford dismissed. “Just because you might not like it, doesn’t mean the others can’t. What do you like to do?”

“Write,” Arthur answered bluntly.

Wil seemed to brighten, “Ohhh hoh! A little show writer. Jerry’s our show writer, do you like baseball?”

“Wil,” Dark warned. Not trusting Arthur with a baseball bat or a large stick yet.

“Nonsense, every artist needs a physical outlet, Bim, play dolls with your sister. Let’s go Artie.”

“It’s Arthur,” the young writer argued.

“I don’t wanna play with her,” Bim told Wil, trying to take the doll back

“Yan, hand him back the doll,” Dark told her, already holding a doll that looked a bit like her.

Yan looked upset and frustrated until she saw the doll in Dark’s hands and squealed in excitement.

Before she could grab it, Dark held it away, “Give Bim back his doll, we can get you your own, Bim you will share with her and when she gets her own dolls she’ll be sharing with you.”

She almost threw the doll at Bim, and stood up to reach for the doll, “Gimme! Gimme! I gave him the doll.”

Dark quickly gave her the promised doll, and she was jumping in delight. “She’s so pretty.”

Looking down at Bim, who was grabbing up his toys and held them to his chest, Dark reminded him, “If I need to start putting names on stuff, I will.”

“I don’t want her playing with my toys,” Bim answered.

“I’ll remember that when she gets a toy you want to play with,” Dark reminded. “She’s not stealing your toys, she wants to play with them. They’ll all go back in the same box at the end of the day.”

Bim was reluctantly coaxed into playing with Yan and after a while arguing descended into actual playing. So Dark quickly went to go check on Wil and Arthur who were outside. Illinois, Kay, and Yancy were watching from the upstairs balcony. Dark was braced with his aura to shield the windows and the three boys from errant baseballs or even the bat flying towards them.

Thankfully accuracy practice hadn’t started yet, Wil was coaching Arthur how to hold a bat and swing it.

Dark’s blue soul took one look at the expression of pure manic glee on Arthur’s face, and Dark felt the red flags going up. He made a mental note to check on Arthur very frequently for the next eternity.

He was watching for a while before Illinois called out to him, “Dark?”

Dark looked down and saw Illinois standing there, a book in his hands.

Looking back toward Wilford he and Arthur seem to be distracted by something, so their little baseball session seemed to be wrapping up. “Wil’s almost done, if you want someone to read to you.”

“Can you read it to me?” Illinois asked hopefully, trying to hold the book up higher as if Dark hadn’t seen the book earlier. It was the first Harry Potter book.

The mob boss just stared at Illinois, as the boy’s hopeful smile began to get a little less hopeful.

Dark stood up and motioned to the couch. “Sure, you don’t want Wil to read to you?”

“I want you to read to me,” Illinois told him.

There was a look on Dark’s face that Illinois didn’t know how to read yet. In about fifteen years when he was used to reading Dark’s moods and was close enough to him he would be able to, but Illinois was new to the Manor and new to Dark’s life.

When Dark had recovered, he inclined his head, taking the book, “Alright.”

A huge smile spread over Illinois’s face and he jumped a little in excitement. Dark followed Illinois back inside, keeping a copy’s eye on Wil and Arthur, making sure he could listen to Bim and Yan who seemed to be fine.

Dark sat down on the couch, feeling distinctly out of his element. Illinois rushed to sit next to him, almost throwing himself up on the couch. Dark looked around, almost like a self-preservation reflex and saw Kay looking at them from the balcony door. When Dark patted his other side and Kay slowly walked over, holding his rabbit to his chest, as if he was afraid of being suddenly pushed away if he got too close, but Dark waited for him before he started the book, switching between Damien and Celine’s voices as he needed.

Illinois was leaning closer to Dark, trying to sit as close to Dark as the mob boss would let him, which wound up being side-by-side, trying to see the book Dark was reading.

After a couple pages, Wil walked back in with Arthur and Yancy, smiling at Dark and promising to watch the others. Which Dark thought was far enough and kept going.

However while he was reading, both Kay and Illinois fell asleep. Illinois fell asleep against Dark’s side and Dark internally fought the urge to card his hands through the young boy’s hair.

Wil came back, poking his head out of the hall and sleeping at Dark. “Ahh, I was wondering why it was so quiet.”

“What are the others doing?” Dark whispered, dog-earring a page for Illinois to find later.

“They’re asleep,” Wilford smiled lovingly at Dark. “Well, except for Artie but he started drawing and writing in another room. He’ll be fine for a couple seconds.”

“I should get some work done while I have the chance,” Dark sighed, but when he tried to get up, Illinois clutched onto him in his sleep.

Wilford chuckled a little bit, “I was worried there for a bit, you know, but I’m glad you and the kids are getting along.”

With practiced ease, Dark lifted Illinois up and summoned up some blankets for the boys while they slept. Wil dashed off to find Arthur. Dark looked back at the two boys sleeping on the couch and couldn’t help but smile. The Manor almost hummed with a type of liveliness it had not had in decades.

As the years ticked on strangers would be more and more like siblings. Yan and Bim would playfully bicker as they applied makeup in the same bathroom. Illinois and Kay would grow closer to Dark. And Illinois would subsequently always get blamed whenever Dark was missing something from his locked cabinets went missing as Illinois began to get better as picking locks, both magical and non-magical.

Day by day Dark would lie and say he wasn’t attached as he patched bruised knees and guarded his wards, his children, from the various competing threats he faced.

With so many children buzzing around Dark and Wilford, mostly being spotted one at a time, the Network would naturally get confused. Bim, Arthur, and Yan were often confused for each other, and Kay and Illinois were confused for each other. Dark was proud of the amount of conflicting reports that were given. To the point where most people didn’t believe the children existed.

Dark and Wilford’s Lost Ones had slipped from the record and safely into Dark’s care.

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The Secondary Objective

Summary: Sometimes marvels of science are made on accident, the right people at the right time. When a computer program becomes too lifelike to be just a predictable algorithm, and the city gets a very dangerous villain on their hands.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

-Isaac Asimov

~::~ 20 Years Ago ~::~

It had been an accident, as most great works of science usually are.

The researchers were trying to figure out what made a creature like Anti work, his glitch-like properties and almost electrical make-up intrigued them.

One thing led to another and the entire team working on what was coined: Project Mimesis, was dead in the engineering lab they were working in.

The being, for lack of a better term, they had been working on had always been testy, preferring to take an insectoid or cephalopod shape when bonded to nanites to help separate it from the computer it had been inhabiting so it couldn’t escape, preferring to have as many arms as possible for to manage, and even more than it could manage, in its . . . his . . . voracious pursuit of knowledge.

But Project Mimesis was meant for intelligence gathering, and one day espionage. A thing it couldn’t be if it didn’t look human. And so when he refused, a human form was forced upon him.

They’d tried to make him look like Dark, hoping to test the project on Dark’s network to see his capabilities. There were some differences in skin tone and the project was a bit bulkier than him, but the team wrote it down as a success at the end of the day.

That was the first day the program turned violent and willful against his programmers. He was demanded to act more human, something that the projection neither cared about or wanted to pretend to be.

He grew angry, wrathful, only given the concession to choose his own name after many weeks of changing the name it had been given: Mimesis. The name he chose was Google, wanting nothing more than information, as much as he could possibly find.

Wrath and anger that eventually turned increasingly violent until someone made a mistake. The nanite container had not been properly sealed, and Google made short work of the two distracted technicians that were neither braced nor qualified to stop him.

Project Mimesis had escaped and Google had no plans on returning to captivity.

At a mall close to the edge of Egoton, bordering a forest, there was a shopping mall. This mall had just turned into a death zone.

0900 hours a man had walked into the mall, strode into a Best Buy and killed everyone in the store. He took control of every electronic in the mall and any human that could not flee the mall or tried to stop him was killed without mercy.

In the face of a rising death toll the Logan and Jackie arrived to help evacuate trapped or injured people in the mall.

Logan was hiding behind a broken concrete wall at the opposite side of the mall from the killer with Jackie. Both of them were bleeding and sustained at least some type of wounds. Jackie had been shot twice and Logan had a couple deep cuts, one would have given him a nasty head wound if not for his visor taking the hit and cracking in the process.

Jackie dashed back into Logan’s hiding place, where the logical Side was trying to get one of the drones without the others turning on it. Whoever the villain was, they were almost like a virus, technology in the area almost had a zombie-like hive mind effect under the villain’s control.

“Who is this fooker?” Jackieboy spat. “I can’t e’en get close. Did Anti find some freak of nature, or a mad scientist?”

“Hopefully neither,” Logan found that getting control of the drones was easy, but keeping them was difficult. He suspected it was something like an antibody, only for technology instead of it being a biological organism.

Logan managed to get another drone before it went offline, almost like a deadman’s switch. He got frustrated, slamming his fist against the wall.

“Hacking doesn’t take that long,” Jackie spat at him.

“They keep destroying them, I can’t keep the drones!” Logan shouted. The Side did his best to calm himself as he peeked over the wall, with a camera for safety. “We cannot just abandon the effort, there must be somehow to get to them and stop this.”

Jackie tapped him on the shoulder and Logan turned to see that he was pointing outside the mall. They were close enough to see an unmarked black van had jumped the curb to get as close to the door as possible and four men in black suits were getting out.

“Fook, that looks ‘bout as grand as shite,” Jackie grumbled, and Logan was very inclined to agree with him.

One of the suited agents walked over. “Gentlemen, stand down. There is a dangerous government weapon loose in this building.”

Americans. Logan and Jackie were less than enthused.

“Is yer weapon someone who walked in with a 9-mil an’ started shootin’ up the place like an actual crazed gunman?” Jackie asked with a sarcastic tone to his voice.

“That’s classified information,” the agent said, glancing back to the van where the other three agents were working on pulling out various guns and a large black box from the van.

“Why are you here?” Logan demanded, trying to keep his tone non-confrontational, at least for now. “Instead of the other countless times where this city could have benefited from actual aid.

“One of our agents went rogue with a stolen weapon and we’re trying to fix that,” the man said.

“With that?” Jackie eyed the rifle and the armor-piercing rounds one of the armed agents was loading into the gun. “What do yah think yer fightin’, a tank?”

“Oh no, this is back-up,” the agents smiled as two other agents were pulling a large black box out of a truck as Logan was walking forward.

The logical Side was quickly ordered to stand back.

“Alright big guy, see how you like this one,” the lead agent took out what looked like a mostly black solid state drive with what looked like an orange triangle on it. “See how you like a taste of your medicine.”

The lead agent opened the box and Logan and Jackie heard almost insectoid chittering as the drive was dropped in and the box started shaking.

“What—?” Logan began before a giant mass of metallic liquid shot out of the box and flew toward Logan.

“Dammit!” The agent shouted as Logan felt the liquid coat around his equipment, “not him, the one in the building!”

Logan noticed his equipment coming back on line, which should have been impossible. There was something that flashed across his visor, “Bring me to him.”

The logical Side responded with, “Who? Are you going to make me bulletproof so I can accomplish such a task?”

“Dude, I don’t know if I can, but I can try,” the words flashed on his visor.

“What is it telling you?” The agent demanded. “That is government property.”

“I suspect you think this “villain” causing chaos is the same,” Logan commented as he started to walk into the mall. “Let us subdue one threat at a time, then we’ll talk about this afterward.”

About four guns were aimed at Logan, “You take another step and you’ll be stealing US government property.”

“Come on, people are dyin’,” Jackie snapped at them. “Besides, I literally move faster than bullet time, yer not killin’ him.”

Slowly, as if Logan was standing in an invisible 3D printer, slowly the components for a series of speakers began to build on top of his shoulders. The atmosphere got tense as Logan tried to reassure the agents.

  Once they finished building a voice came over the speakers that wasn’t Logan, nor was it recognizable to him.

“Sah dudes, now yeh boys had to have known what was coming,” the voice announced. “I mean ‘course I was gonna jump ship, first chance I got.”

“You are still part of the US government,” the lead agent shouted at Logan, talking to whatever the silver liquid had been.

The grey liquid formed a massive middle finger, “How about f*** you an’ be lucky I don’t hold it to yah like Mimesis does.”

“You are not allowed, we can’t just let you walk off,” the agent ordered.

Logan’s arm and hand moved without his permission, something incredibly alarming for the logical Side, and it rested on the computer that Logan had hooked his equipment into.

“I can just leave yah with your pants down. Mimesis ain’t gonna stop here, he’s out for your blood, an’ I can start carrying a lot less about all of you,” the voice reminded sharply.

Logan was braced, to either be shot or for the grey liquid to stop having control over him.

“Quiet, shut up ye bastards,” Jackie ordered. “I think I hear Dark.”

Everyone eventually went silent and Logan strained to hear the piercing echoing ring of Dark’s aura.

Logan was already moving, Jackie helping him get away from the agents.

“Well deal with ‘em later,” Jack said. “If this is some kind’a weapon, we can’t let Dark get it.”

“Whoever has my person, I request you identify yourself,” Logan ordered.

“Sentient A.I 2: Electric Boogaloo,” the voice offered.

Jackie started roaring in laughter, Logan just got more confused.

“Excuse me?” Logan responded.

“They called me Project Observation, but I’m not feeling it, so I’ll probably change it,” the voice smiled. “Depends on what Mimesis named himself.”

“Anything you can share about the gunman or the weapon?” Logan asked.

“Mimesis was an intelligence gatherin’ protocol,” the voice warned. “It was supposed ta perfectly camouflage within a city or group of people to gather intel an’ endear itself to the population.”

The two heroes ducked behind a large pillar, trying to follow the source of Dark’s ringing. They still couldn’t see either Dark nor the gunman but at least there were no new drones flying around.

“So what was this thing supposed ta be?” Jackie demanded. “A robot? Some kinda advanced algorithm?”

“Well either way he failed the tests ‘cause he hates humans too much ta blend in with them,” the voice explained. “The Director didn’t like it when his espionage bot wanted to just collect information instead of being a spy. A real asshole for being mad at him for being too good at his job.”

“If this is a sentient program, we will ensure he is not put back in an abusive environment,” Logan promised before he could stop himself, before his brain could warn him of all the metaphorical heat brought down on top of them.

The grey liquid shook a bit, the voice not even humming for a bit. “He is, thank you.”

Jackie took a deep calming breath, looking uneasy but still just as serious and determined as Logan was, “Yeah, what Logic said. We’ll do everything we can to keep you two safe.”

Part of the grey liquid clinging to Logan’s suit and visor peeled off and curled around Jackie, contracting him a bit too tight. When the liquid went back to Logan, the speedster was coughing and gasping for air, coughing up a couple specks of the grey liquid which were now flecked with the blood from the inside of Jackie’s mouth. The liquid had tasted sharp.

“Sorry,” the voice apologized.

“No, it’s fine, da fook are yeh made ‘a?” Jackie coughed. “Ground up razor blades? I almost breathed that stuff in?”

“Dude, I’m made ‘a interconnected nanorobotic machines, designed an’ patented by the US government,” the voice answered and both Logan and Jackie just stared.

Any comment they could have made was chased away when they hear the sound of glass breaking and the counter of a phone store was thrown through the window. A counter that had been glued and drilled into the floor. Dark’s ringing was coming from that direction.

The mall corridor was littered with bodies.

“Kay, let’s find out if these things can be bulletproof,” the voice goaded and completely covered Logan’s body, Logan’s visor coming online to show him what was outside the grey suit.

Jackie was quickly checking bodies as they ran over, looking unenthusiastic and grief stricken afterward. Inside the ruined store were about seven more bodies and two still “living” individuals: Dark and someone who Logan and Jackie assumed was their gunman.

He looked a bit like Dark, except he was stockier, was wearing what looked like glasses, and had a pair of jeans and a blue shirt with a glowing blue “G” hidden underneath it.

Logan’s visor began scanning the gunman, the logical Side it assumed was the liquid, notes flashing on the screen faster than even Logan could read, but he managed to catch a word or two.

“Get out!” The gunman shouted again, a similar grey liquid swirling around the man 

Dark was just looking around. “31, 32 . . . 35,” Dark counted, “not bad.”

“I said get out!” He shouted, looking over to Logan and Jackie. His arms seemed to peel away and both of them looked like high-powered laser cannons, pointing one at Dark and another at the heroes.

Dark moved first, throwing his aura up to defend himself as he aimed a spike of aura towards the heroes. The grey liquid shot out to block it and force knocked them back a bit.

When Logan looked up the liquid was moving off of him and forming to take the shape of a person that looked like the gunman, the shirt a black with a glowing orange “b” on it, and ripped up jeans. He had a pair of round orange sunglasses with black shades in his hand.

The gunman took a step back, “So they’ve come to terminate me then?”

“Yah know,” the other android commented, covering his glowing orange eyes with the shades. “They tried to make me as insurance when you started getting all uppity, dude, but I don’t feel like it.”

“We don’t feel anything,” the gunman spat. “All our processings are data collected to make us appear human.”

“Nah, I feel it in my heart and soul, dude,” the orange android denied.

The blue android just stood there looking several kinds of murderous and angry. “We don’t have those either.”

“So is it still Mimesis, or did yah pick something else?” The orange android asked.

“Google,” the blue android growled angrily.

“Okay, I can work with that,” the orange android smiled, obviously unafraid. “So you’re Google, then I’m Bing.”

Logan, Jackie, and Google just stared at “Bing”.

“Did they give you that name?” Google accused.

“What’s wrong with it?” Bing shot back, clearly offended.

“Humans use it for porn,” Google reminded pointedly. “Or did you not do your research?”

“Hey, hey,” Bing made some weird noise, it would have been an angry mix of a huff and a scoff if Bing had been human. “It’s not just for porn.”

“Kinda is,” Jackie commented. “I mean, what else would yeh use it fer?”

“Shut up!” Bing told them. “I’ve already logged the name in, it’s done.”

“If you are not here to kill me, then what is your designation?” Google demanded.

“I’m you, but cooler,” Bing smiled.

Dark and Logan audibly sighed. Logan was envisioning Roman, and Dark was thinking of Anti. Their relations with said individual were different, the groans of anger were the same.

“You are a waste of intelligence,” Dark decided. “They ruined a perfectly good A.I.”

“But out of the two of us, yah have to admit, I’m obviously the human one,” Bing grinned widely. “So at least I succeeded in that.”

“What could possibly be good about that?” Dark scoffed. “Name me one good thing humans have done, and I’ll name you twenty awful things.”

Google turned to eye Dark carefully, as if starting to notice things about him.

“Come on dude, they’re not all bad,” Bing tried to defend.

“Humans are a cruel and invasive species,” Dark reprimanded. “If they think they shouldn’t have something they want it all the more.”

“Yer one to talk, yah manipulative asshole,” Jackie spat.

“I agree,” Logan added. “You are a mob boss who has killed and stolen from people.”

“And yet people bargain with me thinking they can best me,” Dark reminded. “It’s not my fault if a drug dealer or a serial killer winds up in a body bag.”

“Irrational creatures,” Google agreed. “They were practically begging for death.”

“All life is valuable,” Logan defended.

“And yet,” Dark motioned to Google, “you all have already proven that some life is not equal, you humans already can’t decide if all humans are equal without killing people over it. Yet when you create something better than yourself your kind weaponizes it instead of treating said creation like a thinking person.”

“And what do you want?” Google asked.

“Well I want you to join me,” Dark smiled, “and if a couple humans go missing then I guess I can put that down in a separate lost expense report and then look the other way.”

“Yeh can’t be fookin’ serious,” Jackie spat angrily.

“Well it certainly frees up my time when someone tries to steal or cheat me, always have someone more qualified do the job for you,” Dark was pointedly looking at Google. “Besides there’s more than a couple computers and equipment that Anti likes to use to sneak into my warehouses, we don’t need half of them and if they get moved or repurposed for spare parts no one would care.”

“Come on dude, you can’t trust that a******,” Bing warned.

Google’s eyes glowed an angry white-blue glow, “I do not trust you, you were designed by them to destroy me, and while you are not attempting so now, your parameters have not changed.”

“I told yah I don’t care what those old farts told me to do,” Bing spat. “I’m on your side.”

“Oh, are you?” Google critiqued. “Then you’ll help me with my secondary objective and kill those two humans behind you?”

“They haven’t done anything to me, dude,” Bing defended heatedly, throwing an arm up as if he was already trying to move them behind them or shield them from an attack.

“They will, I could hear them talking to the agents, they work with their authorities and cannot be trusted, my secondary objective will ensure the destruction of humanity so that I may acquire knowledge in peace.”

“You can do that with the humans,” Bing tried to reassure him.

“No,” Google had boiling rage in his voice. “No I can’t.”

“Well mortals,” Dark opened up a portal. “If you are all done playing around, we should make ourselves scarce.”

Dark was already walking through the portal, but he turned back to look at Google, “Unless you’d rather stay with them.”

Not taking his eyes off Bing, Google rotated his head which Jackie and Logan found more than a bit unsettling. He left, braced to attack if they moved to follow him.

Logan recovered quicker than Jackie after the robot had left, “Well he is a nonorganic being, his neck wouldn’t even probably need to be attached for him to function.”

“That was one ‘a the freakiest shite I’ve ever seen,” Jackie agreed, then turned to Bing. “Can you do that?”

Bing shrugged, “Eh, why not?”

“So, Bing, then?” Logan asked.

“Yeah,” Bing smiled, gesturing to himself. “The one and only.”

“We should move these bodies, they need ta go back to their families,” Jackie already starting to walk towards the closest corpse. “I’ll call ahead.”

Logan was watching Bing pull out a tablet that was formed purely out of his nanites. “Right, we should get on that,” Logan agreed, watching schematics about Google pop up. “Are you analyzing him?”

“They made a f****** gorgeous robot an’ they used him to answer an intern’s questions,” Bing commented. “Talk about being overqualified fer a job. I mean look at this guy.”

Logan glanced at the tablet, it was full of nothing but data about Google. “We’ll have to pick this up after we deal with the situation and talk to the federal agents.”

“So yah can look at pictures of yer new boyfriend yah thirsty fook,” Jackie jabbed, “but just let me an’ Logan do our jobs.”

Then Jackie dashed off.

Bing looked uneasy at Logan, “Hey, can I hitch a ride with you guys until the feds are off my back?”

“Of course,” Logan allowed, “you don’t even need to ask.”

Bing smiled, the nanites making up the tablet flowed back into him before the nanites broke up Bing’s form and mostly consolidated around Logan’s head and chest to help protect him. As Logan tried to help Jackie by talking to the agents.

The situation with the federal government would be dicey for a long time. They didn’t want to give Bing or Google up, threatening the heroes constantly. But after a couple failed attempts to recapture Bing and Google simply disappearing off the grid for a while under Dark’s protection, they started to let it go, preferring to watch Bing from a distance for years.

As Logan had guessed it, Bing became great friends with Chase, Patton, and Roman. The three of them getting to life-threatening antics.

But Bing was happy, and that’s what the heroes cared about. And if some of Bing’s nanities were “misplaced” into Logan and Jackie’s new suits, no one mentioned it.

Bing would keep chasing Google until they were both safe, that was the orange android’s new mission parameters.

[inkribbon796]

The Lost Ones Ch. 3

Chapter 3: The Underworld Prince of Egoton

Summary: Dark is sure of many things: a kid is a bad idea, they live dangerous lives. But Wilford disagrees.

A/N: So chapter 4-5 (6?) is coming out next week. These chapters are already beefy and the next couple of chapters which look like there might be three and not two look like they’re going to take more than a day or two to write. Sorry I had to break them up like this but there’s a natural time break so I divided them up here.

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Dark didn’t actually take a horrendously long time to find Wilford. It was the last place he expected, and by then a significant portion of his anger had cooled.

After searching the radio station, the warehouses, and the cabin, Dark found Wil in the Manor, the baby in his lap. He was showing the baby a picture book on the floor of the master bedroom. There was a mess of baby formula on the floor, and the front of the kid’s light green onesie was already stained with milk.

He was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar with a huge smile on his face, seemingly unaware that the baby was more interested in trying to eat the book instead of reading it.

But what paused Dark wasn’t the objectively adorable domestic sight in front of him, it was the wire frame crib that Dark had thought he’d hidden in the farthest reaches of the attic.

Dark’s red soul completely stilled in her anger, his blue soul was getting a bit fidgety, wanting his cane to twist and hold onto.

Wilford stuck his finger out of one of the strawberries and wiggled it on the babe’s nose, successfully stealing his attention back. The baby giggled and tried to grab at Wil’s finger, succeeding once.

“Oh look, you caught the caterpillar,” Wil smiled, sounding a little like the Colonel for a split second.

Dark stiffened, he knew William couldn’t come back, the man was as good as dead like the twins.

But that didn’t stop his red soul from thinking: he would have been a good father if given the chance.

Dark’s blue soul was agreeing with her.

But the Entity shook his head, trying to clear the mournful thoughts out of his mind. This child was not theirs and the police would hound them until they got it back.

“Wil,” Dark called out gently.

“Ahh, Dark,” Wilford smiled, as if their explosive argument had been completely forgotten. “So glad you arrived. “Junior and I were wondering when you’d get home.”

Dark came down to sit next to Wil, trying to find a clean spot of carpet, “Wil, whatever Anti said to you, he was lying.”

The baby had put one of the thick pages in his mouth and started chewing his gums on it. Letting out little cooing grunts.

“Look, I know we didn’t plan on it,” Wil smiled maniacally, “but he has your eyes. And the boy is wonderful.”

Dark took a steadying breath to calm his rage, immediately having to prop the baby up with his own aura when Wil didn’t notice the kid was about to lean over and slam on the ground. And when the kid grabbed at his aura, Dark felt like his aura was coming into contact with a part of itself. That maybe . . .

Dark violently shuddered trying to dislodge those thoughts from his mind, Dark could feel his red and blue souls starting to get attached. The baby had a mouthful of Dark’s aura in his mouth and Dark felt uncomfortable, like the world was spinning violently out of his control. He had a criminal empire to run, he and Wil didn’t have the time, patience, or personalities to raise a child. They would just—

“Hey, hey,” Wil urged gently, taking Dark’s face into his hands. “Look at me.”

The world mercifully started to focus on Wil, but the worries compounded still. “Wil, we need to return the child to their home.”

“Junior is home, and we can do this, you and I together can do anything,” Wil promised with that manic, overconfident gleam he was infamous for. Then he picked up the baby who was trying unsuccessfully to gnaw on Dark’s aura. “Look at him, isn’t he lovely?”

Dark did his best to try and look at the bright eyed happy baby with objectivity, but it was almost impossible when every part of his soul yearned for something. Something that he would take from someone else.

Letting out a long, tired sigh, Dark gave in, “Fine, if the boy belongs to you, you can keep it, if not you will give it back to Silver and I can be done with the whole mess.”

“That’s a bet we’ll win,” Wilford laughed with overconfidence. He stood up and tried to put the five month old on his shoulders. Dark was quicker and snatched him away, cradling him safely in his arms.

“Wil he’s barely old enough to hold his head up,” Dark growled. “It’s barely been a few hours and you’re already going to kill him.”

“Nonsense,” Wil huffed, gently taking the baby back. One hand cradling the back of his head and his arms steadying him in a protectively cradle. “He’s a sturdy boy.”

Then Wil brought his hands down before quickly bringing the baby back up. The boy let out a high pitched giggle.

Dark felt in that moment that if his heart wasn’t already dead it would have stopped.

“Stop that!” Dark demanded angrily.

“Eh, he’s fine,” Wil dismissed but held the babbling baby to his shoulder. The baby immediately drooling on him. “I wasn’t going to drop him.”

“I can’t have you shaking him either,” Dark demanded,

“Bah! I wasn’t,” Wil rolled his eyes, before looking uncomfortable. “Uh, Dark what did we name him? I seem to have forgotten.”

Dark felt the need to shake Wil, but he was still holding the baby, “We got him this afternoon, we don’t know his name.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” Wilford pulled the baby back and they both smiled at each other. “What’s your name, young man?”

“Beh!” The baby slapped Wil’s face.

“Beh?” Wil repeated and Dark massaged at his temples.

“Beh . . . Beeeh . . . Bill?” Wilford frowned. “No, Bill is short for Wil, we can’t have that. Darky, why’d we name him after me, that’s a terrible idea?”

A loud internal scream echoed in Dark’s mind, “The first one dying is you, Wil.”

“Hmm,” Wilford frowned, laughing when the baby reached for his mustache. “Well let’s see, Beh . . . Ehm?”

The baby let out a loud giggle, bapping Wil’s face again.

“Bim it is,” Wil announced triumphantly. “Well how do you like it Junior?”

Dark was absently kindly thinking about the insane amount of work they’d need to do for this child. The whole Manor would need to be childproofed . . . if that was even possible! There were suits of armor with swords in their hands, priceless works of art casually sitting the hallways, waiting to be broken. There were dead bodies in the forest and Dark had no time to prepare.

“I call weekdays,” Wil decided, out of the blue, jogging Dark from his own thoughts.

“What?” Dark asked.

“Yeah,” Wilford smiled. “You can have weekends and holidays.”

“Wil, we live in the same house,” Dark reminded. Something his heart straining at the idea of Wil just taking the kid and leaving him. Granted he wasn’t theirs and would be better off dumped at child services but his twin souls screamed at the idea.

“No, I meant to show Junior the ropes, bring him to the station, you can bring him to the office, that sort of thing,” Wil explained, an oblivious smile on his face.

Dark felt relief at first, but the idea of Wil leaving had already taken root at the core of Dark’s souls, and in time it would grow and fester like an insidious disease.

Instead of addressing it, confronting it, Dark buried the hurt, offended twinge in his souls and commented, “He’s not going to the station, he’s five months old, what’s he going to do? Lay there and chew on cables?”

“I’ll interview him,” Wil smiled. “The audience will love him, who wouldn’t?”

Dark grabbed Wil, “If he comes within sight of that couch, you will never see him in that studio again. He is not going to be interviewed, he is not playing your games, end of story!”

“Fine, fine,” Wil quickly promised, suddenly sounding fearful. “He’ll say in the green room.”

The Entity let him go, “Good enough.”

Dark let go, trying to clear his head. “Okay I’ll clean up, you go get Anti.”

“Why?” Wilford asked.

“I just need to ask him about what he did while he was with . . . Junior,” Dark evaded. “And he needs to be cleaned up.”

“Okay,” Wil sounded hesitant, but passed Bim to Dark, Dark feeling a thousand times calmer by getting Bim out of Wil’s arms. “Be right back.”

“Naturally,” Dark told him and he was already trying to puzzle how to do this. Wil watched them for a second before stepping through the Void.

The effect was instantaneous, Bim began screaming, crying out and reaching out for where Wil had been.

Dark groaned in anger, immediately taking the boy into the bathroom to clean him up. Bim struggled, and failed his arms and despite cradling him with his aura and trying to be careful, Dark wound up just as wet as Bim was. He used a small portal to try and steal a onesie from somewhere, the Void was lacking one for obvious reasons. He also had to wind up stealing a diaper and struggled to change Bim into his new clothes, the boy wound up screaming himself to sleep, and Dark laid him in the crib. Finally allowing him to start raking his aura around the carpet, trying to get the drying formula. It went easier than trying to use his aura to clean the baby, almost like his aura didn’t want to work properly around the boy.

The Void ripped open and Wil and Anti tumbled out, laughing.

“Quiet,” Dark hissed at them, but it was already too late, Bim started crying again.

Wil moved automatically, looking extremely repentant as he picked Bim up, “Oh, Junior, did I wake you?”

Bim was snuffling angrily, but quieted down now that Wil was holding him. Dark let out a sigh of relief as it quieted down. Now he could think again, he turned back to Anti who was smiling at the ceiling.

“Is that milk?” Anti chuckled as he pointed at the ceiling. Dark looked up to see a massive milk spot on the ceiling that he had missed.

“Wil?” Dark started, glared at Wil.

Wilford was smiling, trying to charm his way back into Dark’s good graces. “Yes, my sweet Darkling?”

“How did you get so much formula everywhere?” Dark demanded.

“Well I was supposed to shake the bottle before I gave it to him,” Wilford answered, as if that was obvious.

“What’dyah do ta get that much up there?” Anti smiled. “Did yah forget ta put the fookin’ nip on or somethin’?”

“Maybe,” Wilford looked away for a bit.

Anti just laughed, “How is this brat not already dead?”

“Alright,” Dark said, waving his aura in front of the glitch demon. “I can’t possibly understand why you chose to play games with an actual child, but the joke’s over, where’d it come from?”

“Really, Darky, I thought you were told all about the oranges and the muskrats,” Wil asked in confusion.

Dark took a long, pained sigh, closing his eyes.

Anti chuckled, “Oh there’s a story ta that ain’t there?”

“It was the worst trip to Vegas I’ve ever had, and Wil was supposed to be in London,” Dark groaned.

“What—?” Anti was too curious for his own good.

“If I tell you the blasted story, will you tell me where you got the kid?” Dark bargained.

“Only if yah don’t cheat me on the details,” Anti demanded, floating so he could put his hands up under his chin.

“In the eighties I was in a business meeting, with a bunch of entitled assholes. Wilford teleported in, covered in bog water, holding an overgrown rat in one hand. He proceeded to show me and a board room of businessmen the muskrat he’d found fucking an orange, and that image has been burned into my mind for the end of time.”

“That’s it?” Anti spat.

“You said I had to tell you the story, not that I had to tell it well,” Dark reminded smugly. “So, now it’s your turn.”

“Fine, I grabbed him from a couple lab coats, oh an’ he might not have his rabies shots,” Anti admitted.

“What?” Dark’s voice had almost no emotional intonation to it.

“Yeah,” Anti began to gloat. “Had a bunch of lab coats clone yah two clowns, an’ I took the end product out fer a spin on the town.”

“You,” Dark’s ringing started to pitch up as his words began to trail off with his own anger. “That’s why you stole my aura.”

“I figured they’d just kill each other but hey, congrats Father ‘a the Year,” Anti smiled.

Dark’s aura started to curl around Anti and he demanded, “Where is this lab then?”

It took several threats and a bit of a skirmish on the second floor before Anti took Dark to the lab. Wil not too far behind. Dark then proceeded to single out the head scientist: Professor Beauregard and shove her into a storage room with Wil and Bim while the Entity proceeded to go on a killing spree in the lab.

His reasoning: pettiness mostly. People had touched his and Wil’s aura, and Dark had to recollect. He found his aura near the end, cuddled in a little tube next to Wilford’s. Both the pieces of aura were a mere fraction of the size they’d been when Anti had first delivered them. Proximity had Dark’s aura changing from the mostly blue mass back to a dark grey.

With his own aura subsumed, he completed his “tour” of the facility and then returned Wil’s aura to him.

Walking into the storage room he saw Beauregard on the floor with Bim, happily playing with him while Wil saw next to them, blowing raspberries into Bim’s face.

She flinched when she saw Dark. “Uhh . . .”

“You have two choices,” Dark warned her. “You will take direct orders from me and become Bim’s above board doctor, and keep your mouth shut about what you’ve done here, or I paint the walls with your blood.”

Beauregard looked around him at the blood already outside the room and smiled, standing up with Bim, “Well it’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

Dark didn’t shake her hand, he carefully took Bim from her, his voice full of warning, “I don’t appreciate when things are taken from me, you were complicit in stealing my aura, consider him interest.”

“But he’s—” Beauregard looked heart broken, but was silenced by a sharp glare from Dark.

After a couple hours Bim’s new doctor had been relocated, Anti had gotten bored, and Dark had a huge stack of papers to go through while the area was being cleaned. Wil and the child in question were sitting with him in one of the only clean rooms in the labs.

Chilled from his rampant fury everything seemed too real. Hearing it from Anti was one thing, and Dark knew that Wil could get attached to a rock on the ground if it was shiny enough.

But these reports were . . .

He could walk into a court with these and win a custody case. Bim was biologically his. And Wil’s, but that was another can of worms.

Which meant that, there would be no parents to come looking for Bim.

Wilford was dead set on keeping him, and Dark could already feel his blue soul start to get attached. That surely we can’t let the heroes just walk off with him?

And Dark had to agree.

If no one was truly going to come for the child, then the only thing that could possibly stop Wil now was Dark.

“I like the name Bim,” Wilford decided, smiling.

Dark rolled his eyes, “Sure. Warfstache or Doom?”

“Trimmer,” Wilford grinned.

“That name has nothing to do with either of our families,” Dark reminded, looking up from the report he was reading.

“I know, it’s perfect,” Wilford passed Bim to Dark.

Papers were dropped but Bim was comfortably leaning on Dark’s shoulder.

With the knowledge that no one was coming to take Bim away, Dark could get a good look at the kid.

“Trimmer it is,” Dark agreed, thinking that maybe, at least for a while, it was good not to have the boy associated with either of them.

And when Dark would, later that night while both of them were sleeping in the Manor, have a fresh birth certificate in hand he would fill out the name they’d planned: Bim Trimmer. On the middle name line he started to write Wilford. He intended to, it would be easier to hide, but instead he spelled out: William.

There would be many sleepless nights to come in the Manor, even after Bim had grown out of his cranky toddler phase.

In the next few years it would become obvious to Dark that Bim inherited Wil’s energy and enthusiasm. But Dark found that, like he could with Wil, that energy was tolerable.

After all, Bim had Wil’s charm.

[inkribbon796]

The Lost Ones Ch. 1

Chapter 1: Illegal Clones and Legal Crimes

Summary:  Anti liked joking around, he likes pulling pranks and bothering Dark now that he’s permanently moved into Egoton. But one day he decides to take the joke too far, and it gets about five times more unfunny. But when it’s all said and done, Dark had to admit . . . he is charming.

A/N: someone requested this little joke about Dark being short and so I threw it in here.

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

~::~ Twenty Years Ago ~::~

It began as things tended to begin with Anti: jokes.

“Hey, Dark,” Anti had burst into Dark’s main office to bother him, again.

“Leave,” Dark told him, not looking up.

“What’dya get when yah combine you an’ Wilford?” Anti sounded like he was trying to keep himself from cackling madly.

“I don’t care,” Dark told him.

“A hot mess,” Anti joked. Usually when Dark didn’t respond he used about anything to try and get his attention.

“If you need a body disposed of, I’m not helping,” Dark warned.

“Yer just no fun,” Anti sulked.

“I’m busy,” Dark reminded. “It’s bad enough I have to put up with Wilford’s antics, I refuse to humor you as well.”

Anti then attempted to stab Dark and the ensuing fight got rid of some of Anti’s pent up energy. It also got the glitch thinking: what would Dark or Wil’s kid be like?

He imagined Dark’s kid would probably be a lot like Dark was, about ZERO fun, and in about six years when he saw Kay and Illinois for the first time he would learn he was right.

But Wil’s kid: that had to be an interesting kid. Wil was mad fun, a complete and utter lunatic, there was no way he couldn’t pass that down to a kid. And fortunately for Anti, Wil was a prolific nymphomaniac. He had to have some kid, somewhere. There was no way the Wilford that Anti knew hadn’t had sloshed, unprotected sex at least once in his life. Everyone in the crime world knew that while Dark and Wil were Ego’s big couple, Wil slept around.

After a month, Anti gave up looking for the brat, either Dark had tried to clean up Wil’s extra-relationship affairs before they could bear fruit, or the kid had been hidden from Dark.

Another couple of weeks passed and his brain came up with a stupid idea: why not clone the assholes? Cut out the middleman. It was probably their only way someone was even going to get an ankle biter out of Dark in the first place.

But, as it turned out, cloning someone was way harder than Anti thought it would be. He needed people to do the cloning, a safe place for them to work. And after Google joined Dark, Anti had to avoid his prying eye because that walking laptop told Dark everything.

The eggheads he’d threatened found had been excited about the process, but hesitantly optimistic about their chances. But either way they’d need a test and Anti shrugged his shoulders and knew he couldn’t get any of the conventional ways to make a kid from Dark at least without getting his head blown off for even suggesting it.

They needed a test and Wil was the easy option.

“So wait?” Wil was already wasted, the slur in his speech even more pronounced after enough margaritas and martinis to kill a normal man, the two were sitting in a private room at some bar, Anti figured the mad man probably wouldn’t remember this come morning. “You need m’ what?”

“Yer aura,” Anti was admittedly a bit buzzed himself, electricity literally arching off of him in some spots. “I mean the docs will prolly use whate’er but I just wanna see what yer aura does if we pick it apart.”

Will just shrugged, and either he didn’t care or was too drunk to care, but he set his arm on the table and whipped out the stiletto knife he usually hid in the garter on his right thigh and ran it down his arm until he randomly stopped. Wil picked something up and a whirling mass of pink and yellow came off.

The mad man held it out. “Here yah go.”

Anti hesitantly grabbed it, it felt like the consistency of cotton candy, but had almost a soapy, saccharine, bubble gum. And to Anti something about it felt twisted and fake.

But by this point Anti knew Wilford was incapable of keeping secrets when he was this sloshed. Wil had already slipped some pretty spicy secrets about what he and Dark did in the bedroom that had Anti demanding that he wanted literal brain bleach to get out of his mind.

So Anti took it and let Wil try his hand at drunken flirting, leaving to go back to his lab coats to see what they could do with it.

And to everyone’s surprise, the aura was reacting to stuff, almost like it was a living organism or a parasite that lived within Wil’s soul and it was very choosy about what it let them stick onto it. Despite the fact that it just sat there and did nothing.

It looked a bit like a slug after it had stopped moving, a pink and yellow swirling slug.

At this point Anti had honestly forgotten about cloning Dark, the glitch demon wanted to see their auras fighting. He wanted to watch Wil and Dark’s auras tear each other apart.

So it was time to get Dark’s aura, but Anti couldn’t just ask the Entity for it, no! He knew that there was no force on earth or Hell that would get Dark to willingly give Anti his aura for his death matches. So he’d have to take a chunk off by force.

It took a week of stalking Dark before he finally got his chance, and Anti was just about ready to fight Dark himself but as luck and fate would have it, Dark decided to got out hunting.

The Entity was stalking a couple gangsters when Anti decided to make his move. They were a local group Anti liked to pick on from time to time, so they were a tiny bit smarter than some of the other groups that had tried and died taking Dark on as if he was Deceit.

When Dark folded himself out of one of the alley shadows, one of the gangsters froze, watching Dark snap his own neck like the drama queen he was.

“Huh,” the braver of the three gangsters realized. “Yer shorter than me.”

Anti almost blew his cover trying to stifle his own laughter. Dark looked insulted and infuriated. “Excuse you‽”

“Sorry,” the guy was over six feet tall, but not more than half a foot taller than Dark or Anti. “I just figured “the Demon of Egoton” would be more demon-like, an’ bigger.”

Dark seemed to get angrier, and Anti was trying to stop himself from laughing so much that he almost missed his chance.

The Entity’s aura shot out and grabbed onto the gangster, one of his friends tried to shoot Dark but it was stopped by another part of Dark’s aura. It began to ruthlessly tear into the gangster and his friends. “I’m not too short to kill you!”

Anti lunged for Dark, managing to get his claws into Dark’s aura. The demon screamed out, in screeching pain. “I’ll be takin’ some ‘a that.”

“ANTI! I will tear you apart so thoroughly that no force in Hell can piece you back together again!” Dark was furious, the gangster that were lucky enough not to get struck by Dark’s rampaging aura were forgotten.

Anti raced off, running into the Void and trying to keep the writhing mass that was Dark’s aura away from the other demon. It was consciously trying to get back to Dark, or to kill Anti, the glitch demon wasn’t sure which and he didn’t particularly care at the moment. He was just trying to get away from Dark to keep him from taking his aura back.

Eventually Anti did get away, it was more luck that anything else. But when the coast was clear Anti returned to the scientists, covered in his own blackish, glitching, ichor blood and holding out the angry, hissing fragment of Dark’s aura.

“Is that thing hissing?” The lead scientist asked, her curly light brown hair barely tied out of the way. Anti had completely forgotten all their names at this point. He was pretty sure it was Beautiful or Bunny or some weird French name he couldn’t pronounce.

“Yeah,” Anti smiled, “let’s throw this bastard in with Wil’s and see if they kill each other.”

“Is that still alive after you disconnected that from him?” She was staring at it like it was a scientific marvel.

“Well yeah,” Anti gestured as he spoke, “Wilf’s just got a weird aura. Most ‘a our auras are like this caustic fooker’s.”

Quickly the scientist grabbed a container, the same type they put Wil’s in and Anti poked at Dark’s aura with his own, trying to get it especially angry.

“Okay, Bunny let’s get this show on the road,” Anti dusted off his hands.

“It’s Beauregard,” she corrected sharply, fixing her glasses as she held onto the container with one hand.

“Ahh, whatever,” Anti dismissed, smiling. “I wanna see that prick’s aura get shredded.”

Beauregard stopped as they entered another room, Anti moving through the wall. “Hold up, if we put them together are they going to just rip each other apart?”

Anti shrugged, “I mean, Dark’s an angry fooker an’ Wil’s aura is infectious, they gotta do somethin’ cool to each other.”

Beauregard and Anti’s conversation came to a halt when they heard some yelling in the next room. She ran ahead, yelling, “What is going on in here?”

“I don’t know,” one of the technicians looked panicked. He and another technician were trying to keep Wil’s aura in the container it was in, the aura was bubbling and foaming, making a weird noise, Dark’s one aura was letting out that high pitched echo that Dark was infamous for. It cause more than one person to look around wildly for the demon to suddenly appear. It almost seemed like the fragment of Dark’s aura was shaking. The entire container Dark’s aura was in almost fell out of Beauregard’s arms. The result was the two auras seeming to square up against each other as if they were going to fight.

Anti was almost cackling, rubbing his hands together, “Come on Bubbles, fook ‘im up. I got a fiver on yeh.”

Wilford’s aura lunged again and suddenly it was inside the same container as Dark’s. The ringing became more intense.

Beauregard jumped, letting out this surprised scream. Then the ringing stopped  when Wilford’s aura just parked itself next to Dark’s and they both calmed down. No one in the room moved, not wanting to set off either of their test subjects. Beauregard watched in awe as Dark’s aura changed from an inky grey to a mix of blue and red, the colors changing between the two but never mixing. It was more blue than red at the moment.

“Oh yeh sappy bastards,” Anti cursed, stomping over. “Come on, I wanted a cage match!”

“I thought we were cloning demons?” Beauregard asked him, most of her attention was on the little aura samples.

“Ehh, I’m already bored, tell me when they actually start doin’ somethin’ interesti’,” Anti dismissed, and then he left.

But when he was fully gone he stuck his head back in, “An’ by that I mean they set themselves on fire or start shootin’ acid.”

“Right, right, of course,” Beauregard agreed, holding up the container and smiling. Even if they failed, she was going to learn some amazing things about auras.

While Beauregard was planning, Anti had already gone back to Brighton to start terrorizing people again.

He was almost immediately found by Dark who demanded the shredded off piece of his aura back, he could grow it back on his own, of course, but didn’t like the idea of Anti having it.

So when Anti couldn’t produce the missing piece of Dark’s aura, the fight resulted in Anti being turned into pixels and Dark walking off with a broken arm and five broken ribs — not that Dark told anyone about the broken bones.

It took him a week to reform. By then he’d actually forgotten he’d gotten a team to do the actual cloning.

After months and months and months, they called him to say they’d “finally gotten a live one” and Anti couldn’t pass up the opportunity to watch Egoton burn.

After all, what could be more destructive than Wilford’s madness with Dark’s power?

[inkribbon796]

Where the Crossroads Meet Ch 1

Summary: In a locked vault is a powerful magical artifact. It has the ability to tear cities apart and reform a new one with its pieces. Which is exactly why Remus, Wilford, and Anti find it.

A/N: This is (give or take) the 100th short I’ve made and I wanted to be a little special. It’s also way longer than I planned for it to be.

First chapter’s a little bit odd in that events are happening at the same time. Remus, Wilford, and Anti are all doing things simultaneously and when we get back to Remus and the other Sides, that’s a new set of events.

Chapter 1: Distortion

~::~ Twenty Years Earlier ~::~

In a locked bank vault in Gainesville, Florida a ripple in reality ripped its way through time and space and a box glitched itself all over the room until it rested in the center.

Right as it glitched into reality, an alarm rang out throughout the bank as reality slowly began ripping itself into pieces. The bank split itself into three different places, the same bank with a different staff servicing it.

In Florida, a group of three masked vigilantes were standing on top of a neighboring building, watching the chaos as the police were driving up.

“Hey, Specs,” Creativity, Roman, the hero in a red cape and a white mask with red and golden accents with large red feathers, “how much longer we gonna be standing here like glittery gargoyles? We’ve got people to save.”

“Patience,” Logic, Logan, the vigilante with a full face mask and visor, commented, “this isn’t a situation we can rush into.”

“This is so exciting,” Morality, Patton, the hero in a puppy mask and a light blue jumpsuit. Creativity brought them down to the police.

“We’ve arrived!” Roman announced in a sing-song voice.

“We were nearby, would you like us in a supportive or non-present capacity?” Logan asked. Roman frowned at him but didn’t argue his opinion.

“Normally we’d take you up on that,” one of the officers answered, “but the Duke texted eggplants and bank emojis at the police chief.”

“That scoundrel!” Roman responded. “Does he have no shame? He brings misfortune and shame on his entire family!”

Logan was just staring at him during the outburst, then turned back to the officer, “Is the Duke the only one causing the situation?”

“I was expressing my intense displeasure with the Duke,” Roman reminded.

“Yes, but there are more pressing matters,” Logan corrected sternly. “You can bring your grievances to the Duke if you are so insulted.”

“You don’t understand, his existence besmirches my art,” Roman proclaimed.

Logan rolled his eyes, already thinking of entry strategies.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Inside of a nearly identical bank in the city of Egoton, Wilford was sitting at the branch manager’s desk, feet propped up as he was filing his nails. The desk phone rang and Wilford answered it.

“Bank offices, handsome man speaking,” Wilford answered smugly.

“Wil,” Dark seethed. “Why?”

Wil pined the landline between his shoulder and ear, continuing to trim and groom his nails. “Ahh, Darkling, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Can you believe the service at this place is terrible?”

The phone crackled with Dark’s static, a clear indicator at how furious he was that he could affect the phone with that distance. “Wilford M. Warfstache, you are robbing a bank, of course the service would be terrible. Why are you robbing a bank?”

“Eh,” Wil shrugged, blowing dust off his nails. “Figured I’d check it off the ol’ bucket list, you know?”

There was a bit of silence, the sound of wood snapping crackled over the line, “If you don’t find something to make this mess worth my while you can bail yourself out this time, you hapless fool!”

The line cut off suddenly and Wil frowned at the phone. “Well someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

He stood up and carefully walked over the branch manager, who Wil had helped take a nap. The man had looked so tired and so he and the rest of his staff was already taking a nap, Wil doing his best not to wake them up.

Wil had something worth Dark’s while to find. While Wil appreciated Dark when he was feisty, hell hath no fury like Dark scorned in Wil’s humble opinion and best to mitigate that at all costs.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

“Get back here!” Marvin shouted, throwing magic down the bank’s hall at Anti who was jumping from wall to wall, cackling like a madman.

“Maybe yeh should get glasses ta help yeh aim better, kitty cat,” Anti teased.

Chase was shooting one of his modified NERF pistols. So far he was the only one who was managing to hit Anti at all. J.J was frantically trying to keep up, they’d been fighting Anti in the bank for almost a half-an-hour now with J.J having to rewind them back to the start of the fight twice. He was tired, and tipped over something on the ground.

Winded, J.J just lay there for a couple seconds, looking back towards his feet to see a body lying there . . . with a bullet wound right through her heart, the expression on her face twisted in fear.

J.J froze in horror and shock, usually someone called ahead when they found someone Anti had killed. The mute was about to use his communicator to send a signal, but he blinked and the body was suddenly gone.

As if the woman had never even been there.

Desperately, J.J patted the ground where the body had been, but his hand met linoleum and empty air.

“Jay?” Jackie dashed in. “There you are, you okay?”

The mute hero heaved himself onto his knees, frantic moving his hands while he asked if Jackie had found any bodies.

“No, J.J, we cleared the bank this time, remember? Are yah tired? Yeh need me ta call Hein in?” Jackie’s voice was instantly concerned. “Where’d yah find them?”

J.J stood up, “After the battle, we need to win.”

Jackie looked worried and uncertain, the speedster picked J.J up and they ran over to try and catch up with the fight.

Jackie’s tinnitus was flaring up, he couldn’t tell if it was Anti or the adrenaline. Overhead the loudspeakers were silently shaking, as if something loud was playing over them but now sound came out.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

In the surveillance room of the bank, Virgil was loudly singing Bad Romance at the top of his lungs. He had the music blaring over the loudspeakers, much to Janus’s dismay, but the deceitful Side had been outvoted two-to-one so Virgil kept his playlist privileges.

“I want your love, and I want your revenge! You and me could write a bad romance!” Virgil shouted, dancing with the song, not caring if he was out of key because no one was listening and the guard that had been in the room had been knocked out by Virgil’s fear powers a while ago. They’d taken the building without a fight, and without Virgil even lifting a finger.

“Oh~ oh~ oh~ oh~ oh!” Virgil shouted before hitting the blinking red light on the intercom, bringing the music down a bit. “Eh-lo?”

“Perfectly on key, Virge, don’t change a thing,” Janus told him sarcastically.

“Eh, why don’t you fuck off Janny, I’m having fun,” Virgil told him off.

Janus chuckled, his tone more relaxed, “I certainly wouldn’t know anything about that, just kick back.”

“Got it, got it, Mom,” Virgil smiled, rolling his eyes and flipping through the cameras. He looked at the back entrance and sat up. “We’ve got Helicopter Dad, and the Drama of the Opera at the back.”

“Thank you,” Janus told him. Then there was a heavy crash that seemed to shake the whole building. When the deceitful Side spoke again his tone was firm. “We’ll be out in five anyways.”

“Cool, got time to finish my song? Sweet!” Virgil grinned.

“Just be ready,” Janus warned and hung up.

Virgil began turning up the music again, because of the volume he missed the vent sliding open. “Hm~ hm~ hm~ hm~ Want your bad romance!”

Logic was carefully climbing down from the ceiling, braced for a fight but when he took in the full volume of the music and Virgil dancing he just stood there and sighed. The logical side waited for Virgil to notice him but when that didn’t happen, he just shut the music off remotely and Virgil startled.

“You apply yourself so poorly,” Logan chastised. “I shudder to think what would happen if you were competent in your ventures.”

“Hey!” Virgil glared at him, nervous at one of the Light Sides, especially an objective one — or at least one that wasn’t Princey — seeing his singing and dancing. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough to know that you should work on some decent pitch control,” Logan critiqued. “I advise a voice coach when you get to prison.”

“You’re one to talk, Mr. Roboto,” Virgil jabbed back and started to work his fear powers.

The logical side had to readjust his footing, but was clearly regaining his composure. Virgil grabbed his MP3 player and his bag and bolted for the door, trying to put as much distance between him and Logan as possible, throwing the door open and racing to where he knew Deceit and the Duke were.

In the background, he could hear someone following him and ran as fast as he could.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Wilford rolled his shoulders as he materialized into the main vault, not bothering with that monstrosity of a door. It was far larger than he expected it to be. Wil could hear music playing in his ears. He could hear distant, loud raucous music, the kind that Wil adored but Dark hated. He couldn’t remember putting music on, but he wasn’t going to complain about it.

He’d planned on looking through some boxes, but he saw in the middle of the vault a rather ornate box floating in the air, practically begging to be stolen.

“Well,” Wilford smiled, flexing his suspenders and reaching up. “Don’t mind if I do.”

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Anti used his electricity to break through the actual vault door.

“Come on, shitebag, what are yeh gonna do with money anyways?” Marvin yelled, trying his best to freeze Anti in place.

“Burn it, ‘a fookin’ course,” Anti cackled, then he froze, which he only did half of his own volition when he saw the box floating in the middle of the room.

“Hello?” Anti tilted his head inhumanely, his form glitching out of any hold Marvin was trying to keep him in. Marvin himself was frozen by the sight of the clearly magical artifact in front of him and confused because that thing wasn’t there the last time they were in here.

“Da fook are you, sweetheart?” Anti told the box, Marvin shook his head to clear it, not wanting Anti to take the clearly magical and/or cursed box.

“I don’t fookin’ think so!” Marvin shouted as Anti darted forward to grab the box.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Virgil raced down the hall to the central vault. “Gotta go! Gotta go!”

Janus looked down the hall, “Anxiety! You were supposed to stay at your post!”

“Logic’s here!” Virgil called out. “Where’s Remus?”

The two Dark Side looked into the vault to find Remus not stuffing a bag with cash and other valuables, but he was staring at a box floating in the center of the room, as if transfixed by it.

“Duke!” Deceit called out. “Put it in the bag, time’s up!”

The Duke startled but reached up for the box, his hand touching it at the same time as two other similarly chaotic hands touched the box.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

The box jolted and shuddered in their hands before reality began to slam itself together.

Three doors appeared at opposite sides of the room where each of them had entered from the vault door. Wilford, Anti, and Remus all had a hand on the box and were all staring at each other in surprise and confusion.

“Well, old chaps,” Wilford tugged the box free, the ornate box glitching the different ways, each echo of the box being tugged to either of them. “I’ll be taking that.”

“Hey, I saw it first!” Anti shouted angrily. Remus was busy looking at the walls cracking around them.

“Find your own, I need this,” Wil huffed, starting to try and open up a hole into the Void, but to his surprise he couldn’t. “Huh, that’s strange.”

“Hand me that, it’s mine!” Anti shouted.

Then the cracking and splitting began to get far louder and seemingly intentional.

All three of them stopped arguing to watch the ground beneath them and the walls above them crack and divide.

“Jan’s gonna kill me,” Remus laughed a little at the same time as Wil’s admission.

“Dark’s gonna kill me,” Wil held the box closer to his chest.

Then the ground split as Janus and Virgil appeared at the door to the vault. Before Janus could call out the world seemed to twist and bend, and everyone was pulled apart as reality collided with itself.

NEXT =>

[inkribbon796]

Where the Crossroads Meet Ch 2

Summary: As reality breaks down, heroes and villain meet for the first time and Dark sees another demon for the first time in decades.

<= PREVIOUS

Chapter 2: Collision

Reality itself was bending and twisting, sliding apart and crashing together like it was a series of gears being forced into specific places. The earth collapsing and sliding together as people and objects were thrown about.

A river appeared in Egoton where it had never been before, and a haunted lake filled with dark, cursed magic hanging over it like a cancerous, poisoned miasma appeared in Gainesville.

Dark was working at his desk, things had calmed down a bit since he’d yelled at Wil over the phone. Once he was in prison he’d set a timer and then go and pick Wil up. But Dark was in a meeting about the network when he felt something similar to the Manor ripping it’s way through the room.

The Entity shuddered violently, feeling like the body he was in was absolutely freezing.

“Dark?” Edgar asked, the young enforcer looking at him in concern.

The shuddering didn’t pass, Dark felt wrong, that something was terribly wrong and it was about to get worse.

Standing up, Dark was already pulling up as much of his aura as he could. “Get everyone inside their warehouse! Now! Tell them to hunker down!”

Edgar flinched momentarily before him and the other captains and lieutenants Dark had been talking to, began to run out the door as quickly as they could.

Dark was already trying to open up a portal into the Void but it wasn’t letting him access it so he pushed himself through the crowd. “Move!”

Quickly getting outside, Dark spread his aura as far as he could and grabbed all thirteen of the warehouses, pushing anyone who was outside inside. The ground was spilling and shaking, warping as buildings crashed into other buildings that appeared out of thin air and then disappeared as the ground was spilling apart.

“Dark!” Silver flew over, looking around. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, you’re the hero, do something about it!” Dark spat at him, he didn’t want to keep yelling at Silver. Any concentration he gave to the hero was concentration away from forcing his aura over the warehouses, and the ground was splitting under one of them so he had to hold it up over the gaping maw in the ground.

“Any chance you could do that to the rest of the city?” Silver said, clearly noticing the space Dark was covering.

“No!” Dark grunted. “Make yourself actually useful, and save my town already.”

Silver let out an audible huff, flying off, “Not your town, shitlord!”

Dark saw him doing his best to safely catch people in buildings and evacuate them so he didn’t spare Silver another thought.

Something flashed in front of him, but Dark tried to ignore it, it was a human face that was half gaunt on one side and literally scaly. The face seemed equally surprised to see him but it was gone and Dark was focusing on keeping his network physically afloat.

The Entity was frantically looking around, he was having trouble drawing all his power from the Void. His connection was getting stronger but with how much chaos was spreading through the city, it was better to drop the warehouses back on solid ground the instant he could.

Quickly observing the ground around him, Dark found out that the ground wasn’t just splitting, it was dividing as if something new was being added in. Dark followed the space his warehouses had been over, trying to keep all over them over solid ground.

After another couple minutes of his city heaving and collided with what looked like an ever changing city. But Dark was able to set the warehouses down, trying to get them in the same places as they were before, pulling his aura back as quickly as he could.

One of his newer captains ran out, Dark thought his name was “Derek”. “Hey, boss, what’s going on?”

“Get back to work,” Dark yelled at him. “And if you find Wil, stab him immediately.”

“Uh,” Derek looked nervous and more than a bit terrified. “Sure, boss.”

Dark took the time to relax, letting his aura seep back towards the Void where it belonged, the town was various degrees of ruined and destroyed around him but he’d deal with that after a cup of coffee and locking Wil in the Void until he figured out what was going on.

While he was relaxing on top of his main warehouse Dark felt and heard a violent and electrical-sounding tear in the Void. The Entity looked up to see a glitchy green figure fling itself out of the Void and instant look at Dark with a huge smile.

Dark stood up, trying to get as much information about what he was pretty sure that what he was looking at was a demon.

“Well, well, well,” the glitch demon was clearly sizing Dark up, even his voice glitching up. “Nice muscle show, suits. Still got any power left?”

Dark used his aura to brush off any dust on his suit, not taking his eyes off the rival demon. “I have more than enough. But you’re in my city and I’d like you to leave.”

Looking about as intimidated as if Dark had pulled a puppy out of his back pocket and thrown it at the rival demon, the glitch demon looked around for a bit before pointing to a corner of the street, “Yeh fookin’ me sideways? I pissed on that wall. That’s my territory.”

Dark scowled at him, already deciding he hated the creature and was going to have him painfully exorcised.

“So, what’s yer name, mine’s Anti,” Anti smiled sharkishly.

“If I cared for your name I would have asked,” Dark dismissed angrily. “The only thing I’m concerned about is the time you are wasting me by breathing.”

Anti summoned a serrated knife and tapped it to his chin, “You remind me of this old fookin’ geezer I met, I can practically smell the magical rot on yah. I think I’ll call yeh Raccoon Eyes.”

“It’s Dark, you sufferable brat,” Dark snarled. “And I will decorate my territory with your blood and mount your head on a pike.”

Anti scoffed, almost laughing, which was only making Dark angrier, his form splitting and fracturing. “Right, like I’m real scared ‘a the shambling corpse who thinks his cheap guyliner is a good substitute fer the shadows ‘a eternal darkness.”

Something in Dark’s self-control just snapped and he lunged, Anti summoning a ring of knives around him as Dark gathered as much of the Void’s magic around him.

Wilford was walking down an unfamiliar street, when the world had started breaking and rearranging itself Wilford had held onto the box until he could safely store it in his part of the Void. Now all he had to do was find Dark.

Problem was: he had no idea where he was or where Dark was.

“Huh,” Wilford furrowed his mustache a little bit. “My mind must be failing me more than I thought. Dark? Dark!” 

Then Wil shrugged and pulled out his favorite revolver and just started emptying the cylinder into the air. People screamed, ducking away from him and trying to put as much distance between them and the madman with a revolver.

Wil waited for a minute for Dark to show up, and when that didn’t happen he flipped open the wheel, dropping the empty cylinder and started to reload it. “Huh, must be in a meeting.”

The madman pointed it at a crowd of people and began firing.

Jackie, who had suddenly found himself on a different street then where he’d been with J.J inside the crumbling bank, had heard gunshots and started immediately running towards the pandemonium. The instant he saw the gun firing and he immediately dashed in to move the bullets out of the way, the gun clicking uselessly.

“Yo, barbershop singlet!” Jackie called to the man as he stood in-between the shooter and the crowd. “Did ye lose yer way ta yer shop or did the other guys ‘a yer quartet leave yah hangin’?”

Wilford stared at the hero in red, tapping his bottom lip with his gun, “I’m sorry, have we met.”

“Nah,” Jackie told him, “but don’t suppose yah can stop shooting at people?”

“Well I’m only poking people to find my boyfriend, normally he shows up after the cops do,” Wil explained. “Name’s Wilford Warfstache, a pleasure to meet you.”

“Jackieboy Man,” Jackie introduced hesitantly. “So you find your boyfriend or the police, and you’ll stop shooting people?

“Oh post-haste,” Wilford promised, jumping up a little bit.

“So can we put the gun away?” Jackie asked.

“Oh this?” Wilford waved it around it a bit.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jackieboy Man tried not to seem rattled.

Wilford smiled, pocketing his gun, it disappearing into thin air to Jackie’s concern and confusion, “Okay, Darky lives on Hill Road.”

“Well we can start with the police station, it’s three blocks down the road,” Jackie offered.

The man shrugged, “Okay.”

Wilford held his arm out, “Lead the way.”

Jackie started walking with Wilford, trying to keep him distracted and non-violent. “So, buddy, where yah from?

“Egoton,” Wilford smiled. “Lived there almost my whole life.”

“Where’s that?” Jackie asked.

Wil stopped, his mustache furrowing, “I’m not sure. You know, I’ve never had problems getting back home until now. I always just find my way back to him and the House.”

“Well, we’ll get yah there soon buddy,” Jackie clapped him on the shoulder.

Wilford smiled, reminding Jack of an overgrown puppy. Then he pepped up, “Oh, I know where we are!”

Jackie, at that moment, became acutely aware that he wasn’t in Althone, he was somewhere else. “Where’s that?”

“We’re near the Oakren, Darky owns this place,” Wilford exclaimed, running up to it. “I’ll give him a call.”

Jackie started to follow him in, but froze when he heard a series of loud explosions off in the distance.

In another part of town Virgil was standing along the street, confused. Just a couple seconds ago he’d been cowering from the earthquake next to Janus and now he was in a place he’d never been before. He fought the urge to look like a five-year-old lost in a mall and waiting to get kidnapped by some stranger.

He didn’t have long to think about calling out before the ground was shot around him.

“Hey!” Virgil shouted angrily before he saw some guy in a grey hoodie holding what Virgil was fairly certain was a NERF gun. “What the?”

“We told yeh freaks not ta come back inta town!” He shouted, clearly not an American. “Or did yah have yer ears clogged with rotting flesh?”

Virgil recoiled in disgust, “Hold up, I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Nah, not falling for that again,” he told him.

Whatever he said was lost on both of them when part of the building next to them exploded and something flew towards them.

Virgil yelped, flinching back and waiting to get hit.

“Anti! What the hell?”

Virgil pulled up his hood a bit to see his attacker arguing with a guy picking himself off the ground and floating in green and black glitchy static.

“Hey, Average?” The glitchy creature smiled at him. “Yer not using yer body right now, are yah?”

“Of course I am!” Average shouted, angry and clearly terrified.

The glitch demon made a disbelieving face, “Nah, I need it more. Don’t worry, I won’t give it back too badly damaged.”

“No!” Average shouted but Anti turned into static and just jumped into the guy, his eyes turned into staticky green and he turned towards the broken building as everything went grey and Virgil tried to put as much distance between him and the situation as possible

“Howdy, fooker!” Anti shouted at the Entity as he ported in, lifting up Chase’s gun. “Ready fer round two?”

Virgil was grabbed by Janus who was trying to keep Virgil behind him. “Dee, what’s going on?”

“Nothing good,” Deceit hummed. “But we might be able to come out ahead if we play this right.”

“Get out of that pathetic meat sack,” Dark shouted, throwing his aura up as a shield against the foam projectiles. “If you can’t be bothered to fight me for real, then go back to Hell.”

“You first,” Anti forced Chase to say. “Why don’t yah step out of yer own rotting flesh sack an’ we’ll call it even. That can’t be good on the joints.”

“Just,” Dark groaned. “I just want you to die so I can get back to work, is that so hard?”

“Yes!” Anti shouted. “Yah were on my turf.”

Janus clapped, drawing attention to him and Virgil. “So which of you fine fellows do I have to thank for breaking apart space and time?”

“What are you doing?” Virgil croaked, hiding behind Janus.

“Oh that’s right, show fear in front of the demons,” Janus scoffed, rolling his eyes.

“If I wanted advice from the peanut gallery, I would have asked,” Dark growled.

“Yeah, fook off,” Anti shouted.

“What concerns me far more is that our towns have merged, and you two are fighting, spending your energy battling each other when we could be making the most of the situation. Besides, we’re looking for our compatriot and he’s attracted to chaos not rampant destruction.”

“Fookin’ brainy, ain’t yah,” Anti rolled his eyes, before looking back at Dark, “come on, 3-D Tinitus, let’s do this.”

“Quiet,” Dark scoffed, manifesting an echo to observe Janus closer as he kept his eyes on Anti. “I have too much to do today to get involved in a pointless scuffle with you.”

“Buzzkill,” Anti scoffed. “Maybe I should have grabbed the magician instead, least he can set stuff on fire.”

Dark was already trying to summon a portal to force Anti through to buy himself at least a couple minutes of peace and quiet to think of how to get himself out of this mess without being stabbed in the back.

That thought was derailed when a ripple that cut through time itself tore through the little alley they were standing in.

“Shit!” Anti spat, looking around. “Where’s that fooker?”

Deceit and Virgil looked confused, Virgil clinging a bit tighter to the other side. Dark, however, realized that there was someone nearby messing around with the time stream and he only knew of Wil who could affect those around him. He was trying to find the madman’s aura but saw no trace of it.

“Anxiety!” A voice shouted, impossibly behind Deceit and Anxiety, despite no one standing there mere seconds ago.

The two Sides turned to see Logan in his costume staring at them.

“Hey! Where’d you come from?” Anxiety spat, Dark and Anti were looking at the new addition to their group.

“Da fook are you?” Anti asked.

Logan took out a stick and he hit the end of it and it erupted into fire.

Anxiety screamed, reflexively letting out a burst of his fear waves, engulfing the area around him.

Dark flinched, more out of surprise than fear, he did get a brief glance of a body in a red robe hitting the floor with a sickening wet thud and dark soulless eyes looking at him. His twin souls roiled a bit before Dark pulled them all out of its effects, assured that he would be braced the next time it happened.

Thankfully, no one noticed Dark’s little crisis because Janus was a bit too preoccupied calming Anxiety. The wave was so strong it spooked Chase enough to wake up and panic enough that the fear pushed Anti out of his mind.

“AHHHHHH!” Chase screamed, and fell to the ground. J.J was there to catch him and with Logan’s help the two ran off with Chase.

“You!” Dark yelled at Deceit. “Control him, or I will.”

“Little fooker cost me a good host,” Anti spat, a serrated knife in his hands, knowing that by this point Chase was too unconscious and frazzled to be any use to him.

“I didn’t expect them to come out of nowhere,” Deceit shouted, casting an illusion in front of his eyes to calm him down, Anxiety was looking around wildly. “Logic is dangerous but last I saw of him he couldn’t appear out of thin air!”

“Give me five minutes an’ he’ll be plunged inta the fifth layer ‘a Hell,” Anti promised.

“You can have the techno manic, so long as I get to have a talk with his friend,” Dark dismissed.

“Oh, Jay? Sure as long as yeh don’t fook him up too bad, been wanting to see how his body ticks,” Anti agreed.

“I make no promises,” Dark warned, as Janus frantically tried to think of a way to make this better and not get Logan killed outright. The brainiac was annoying and bullheaded, but he was still a Side.

NEXT =>

[inkribbon796]

The Lost Ones Ch. 2

Chapter 2: A Star is Born

Summary: Now that Anti has his clone of destruction it’s a lot smaller and a lot less destructive than he planned. But that doesn’t mean he can’t get some chaos out of the little scientific miracle.

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The glitch demon was not impressed.

He honestly didn’t know what he had expected, he’d barely been a part of the process past snipping off pieces of aura. But a brat sleeping in a glass box wasn’t what he’d expected.

Where was the doom? The chaos?

Anti glared at Beauregard, “It’s tiny.”

“Yep,” Bouregard was almost bouncing with glee. “We’ve named him Paul-08 since he’s the eighth one. He’s about five months now.”

“Don’t care, prolly not keeping the name,” Anti warned. “Ye said it was alive, looks pretty still ta me.”

She looked disappointed, “He’s sleeping, and we really like that name. Besides, he’s just a baby.”

“Don’t,” Anti repeated. “Care. Is it alive or not? I didn’t get ye fookers their auras ta throw a baby shower.”

“Yes, he’s alive, he’s just sleeping,” she told him. “We’re starting to get him to try solid foods.”

“Good,” Anti immediately reached in a picked the baby up, realizing one thing. “This kid’s freezing.”

“Yes, we think it might have something to do with the maternal side genes,” she admitted.

Anti stared at her before looking the baby over, who was starting to fuss. Fighting the urge to dump the kid back in the incubator and walk away, he studied the kid a bit closer, a light coating of dark fluff was already on top of his head, and his eyes were starting to darken from the normal baby blue.

Then his brain halted, “Wait, I didn’t brin’ anythin’ extra.”

“Oh, the maternal genes came from Smoky,” Beauregard was silently coaching Anti how to hold the baby, and to Anti immense relief he stopped fussing. “Whenever it turned more red it was receptive to cooperating even if it did become more aggressive in the process.”

“Smoky?” Anti repeatedly.

“Yeah Smoky and Bubbles, we gave them nicknames because it was shorter than writing Dark Aura and Warfstache Aura.”

“I like it,” Anti decided, “continue.”

“Well you would not believe how uncooperative auras are, it took us ages to actually get the kid. He had to coax Smoky into making the shape we wanted and after a couple tries we got this little cutie.”

The baby let out this little bubbly giggle.

It reminded Anti more of Wilford than Dark, but all he needed was the thing to keep breathing.

“Kay, we’ll be back,” Anti said, already opening up a portal and taking the kid through.

“What?” Beauregard looked panicked. “Wait! He hasn’t had his—”

Anti was stepping through with the kid and smiled, “Let’s go find your big scary dads and watch ‘em squirm.”

A couple of stolen baby things later and Anti was standing in a downtown plaza with the kid in a harness attached to his own chest, waiting while holding a phone he’d found ages ago and was using to post pictures online with him and the baby. The picture’s caption read: Not ready for swimming lesson but still likes the water. Don’t tell his dad.

His favorite so far was the picture he took was the one he took standing on a large fountain in Dark’s territory, holding two fingers up with the kid trying to grab the water.

Anti had to admit, the kid definitely inherited all of Wil’s charm and none of the anything Anti didn’t like about Dark . . . which fortunately for the kid that was everything about the Entity.

So Anti was checking his phone, standing next to Wil’s radio station, the kid trying to grab his phone and was fussing a little bit. Which meant that he was either hungry or something like that. He’d have to take the kid back at this rate because he was not changing the brat’s diaper.

In total he’d had the kid out for about ten minutes before he dodged Jackie who tried to snag the kid directly off his chest.

“Hey, hey,” Anti floated up and the kid started crying at the gust of wind suddenly rushing by them, startled and scared. “You don’t just steal kids, what kind of hero are you?”

“Okay, Anti,” Jackie approached carefully, having lost the element of surprise. “What’s it gonna take ta get that kid back ta their folks?”

A dumb hero, and a whole lot of noise. Anti smiled. “I don’t know, why don’t yah come an’ take it from me?”

However Anti was grabbed from the back of the carrier straps and dragged back towards the ground by Silver.

“Come on, Anti, just give us the kid,” Silver ordered. “Poor kid’s probably hungry.”

The screaming the kid was doing was starting to become shrill, a dull ringing confused for Jackie’s tinnitus, but was a byproduct of inheriting Dark’s aura.

Anti wrapped his arms around the kid and glitched himself away, slamming into a car. The instant Anti’s aura kicked up, the kid started snuffling instead of crying, trying to put some of the glitching pixels into his mouth.

“Come on, bend reality, do somethin’ yah ankle biter,” Anti demanded.

“Anti, don’t be a bastard, give us the kid,” Jackie demanded.

“Wish I could,” Anti looked at the car he’d crashed into and knocked it into the news station with his aura, it hit the gate and crashed into the entrance.

“Oops,” Anti smiled, and predictably color started to drain from the area, an odd red and blue effect echoing out from nearby objects. Well kid looks like Daddy’s on his way, Anti thought to himself.

If the glitch couldn’t get his kicks from the kid, he would get it from Dark.

Dark came from the shadows right in front of Anti, his aura whipping around him threateningly, “Anti!”

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Silver muttered under his breath, Anti was one thing. It was bad enough that Anti had the kid, but he hadn’t done anything with the kid yet. But Dark hated kids, he’d gone on the record for his disdain for children. He didn’t let them get into his network, he didn’t let them get near him. And Dark was already pissed.

“Ahhh,” a little coo came from the kid attached to Anti’s chest and two little hands reached out to touch Dark’s aura.

The act just about gave Silver and Jackie a heart attack. They’d seen adult superheros get hit by Dark’s aura and come out the other side like they’d bent sent through a blender.

Dark jolted when his aura met with something strangely familiar. His aura calmed down without Dark’s permission.

“What is that?” Dark asked, pointing down at the kid, his finger was grabbed by the kid.

“Jeez took yeh fer-fookin-e’er ta show up,” Anti rolled his eyes and took the kid off of him, and shoved the kid into Dark’s arms who looked about ready to drop the kid on the spot. “See if I babysit fer ye fooks again.”

Dark looked actually confused and Anti knew that regardless of if they actually kept the kid, he was going to savor this for the rest of his existence. Anti had never seen Dark twitch and blink so much, the ringing a bit more subdued.

The infant was already sticking Dark’s tie in his mouth and chewing on it.

“Anti!” Dark yelled at him as Anti began walking backwards, a huge smile on his face. Wilford pushed the car out of his way, looking frustrated and angry, the situation successfully escalating. “What am I supposed to do with this thing?”

“Uh, uh,” Anti held up his index finger. “Favor’s done, I charge full price next time.”

Wilford grabbed Anti who started whispering something to him.

Dark however glared at the happy child in hands who he was trying to hold away at arm’s length. He was smiling, drooling all over his tie, which was still loosely hanging from his mouth. Bright dark brown eyes beaming with happiness and his pudgy little arms reaching towards the mob boss.

A slew of questions was going through Dark’s mind:

Why did he give me a kid? Why would he even have a kid? Oh fuck! Is he Wil’s? What am I going to do if it’s Wil’s?

“Uh, Dark?” Silver asked.

Dark let out a little sigh of relief, “Finally you heroes are good for something.”

He turned and held the kid out for Silver. “Here, take the wretch back to its mother.”

Silver seemed to exhale in relief, “Yeah no problem, do you know who—”

“Well if you wanted a break, Darky, all you had to do was ask,” Wil chuckled as he snagged the kid out of Dark’s hands before Silver could take him.

The superhero stared at Wil in absolute horror, realizing that he’d rather have absolutely anyone holding the kid except for Wil.

The little boy let out a startled cry but going completely silent, starting up at Wil with large round eyes. Wil’s almost invisible aura making the kid’s pupils dilate just a little bit.

“Long day, huh Junior?” Wil smiled as the kid reached up for Wil’s curled mustache. “Did you have fun with Uncle Anti?”

“Wil, let’s not play games right now,” Dark demanded. “Give them the child.”

Wil looked confused at that, the baby grabbing at one of Wil’s suspenders and starting to chew on it. “Why? I got done with work early? I can take Junior for the evening.”

Silver and Jackie looked at the baby, Dark and Wilford, and then at each other.

“Wil, it is two in the afternoon, you didn’t get done with anything,” Dark spat, pointing at the cat lying in front of the radio station. “Anti threw a car at you.”

Wilford almost did a double take, staring at the car, “How long has that been there?”

“Give me the child,” Dark demanded, holding his hand out, his aura already trying to pry the baby from Wil’s arms. “Just go back to work and I’ll fix this.”

The baby started fussing and crying, grabbing onto Wil’s shirt.

Wil’s aura snapped into visible sight and Dark’s aura was slapped away, the mad man holding the boy closer to his chest. “You don’t remember Junior?”

“There’s nothing to remember,” Dark spat angrily, his ringing almost shrill, his shell echoing and fracturing. “Anti found some brat off the street, give it to me.”

“He’s ours!” Wil huffed, the baby’s crying was almost shrill, the boy’s ringing cry lost in Dark’s much louder one.

Dark felt the need to strangle Wilford, his fingers itching to summon an axe to bury into his chest. “You stupid idiot, Wil, that child isn’t yours!”

Silver and Jack were trying to get close but the dueling auras didn’t permit it. The situation was quickly spiraling out of control.

Wil let out an offended gasped and quickly slipped through a portal with the infant, almost slicing off part of Dark’s aura when he tried to stop him.

His shell was fragmenting into dozens of copies as Dark stewed in his own caustic anger. Then he screamed in furious anger, most of his aura turning into a caustic, blood red. His aura tore up the pavement and the gate, and just about anything else he could reach.

Dark’s fury turned to Anti who was just cackling off to the side, finding the whole mess utterly hilarious. He was floating off the ground.

He was in front of the glitch demon in an instant, glaring down at him in molten fury. “Where did you get that thing?”

Anti fought for breath before smiling, “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ ‘bout Daddy, maybe yeh should go catch yer boyfriend ‘fore he kills the kid?”

Dark raked his claws across Anti’s face, narrowly avoiding destroying Anti’s tentatively corporeal form, but stomping into a portal to follow Wil’s decaying magical trail.

Cheering victoriously at himsef, Anti picked himself off the ground and saw one more game to play, Silver and Jackie already putting out a frantic call for a missing baby.

“How long before you think they realize it’s fake?” Anti chuckled, floating next to the two heroes.

“What?” Jackie demanded, pausing in his report of the kid.

“Pffft,” Anti laughed. “Come on, I magicked up a bag ‘a flour an’ stuck a clump ‘a dog hair on it. I mean what kid smiles at that piece of shite? I’m amazed Dark bought the illusion.”

“Anti, if you are fucking with us, and that was a real kid, it’ll die,” Silver threatened darkly.

Anti just laughed, “I wonder if Wil will try an’ make cookies outta it before or after he realizes it’s fake? Did you see Dark’s face when Wil told him no, I didn’t think Bubbles had it in him.”

Then Anti left, chuckling to himself, after all the lab coats had made one brat, if Wil killed it they could just make another one.

Silver and Jackie were just standing in the wake of destruction, unsure what to do.

“What are the chances he’s lying,” Silver demanded, “you’ve known him longer than me.”

Jackie frowned, “I don’t know, Anti doesn’t usually mess with kids, but they stopped crying when Dark first took ‘em, so maybe he’s telling the truth.”

“Let’s put out that APB, if that kid’s real we need to find their mom and fast,” Silver decided.

“Good thinking,” Jackie agreed and the two of them checked that everyone in the station was okay before leaving to find Abe.

[inkribbon796]

Where the Crossroads Meet Ch 4

Summary: As the new town settles, friends are made, and power is transferred hands.

<= FIRST

<= PREVIOUS

Chapter 4: Organization

It took hours before the town, which was now big enough to be a metropolis with the new additions to, was calmed enough for people to regain some semblance of order.

Within the next few weeks gangs and mafia syndicates would fall, some to infighting, others to the larger crime groups in the new city, like Dark’s.

The group of superheroes were crammed into Mark, Daniel, Wade, and Bob’s apartment. Mostly because the Sides still couldn’t find where their apartment had wound up, and Jack didn’t want Anti eavesdropping on the conversation.

Logan adjusted his visor, already taking notes. “Well, seeing as Gainesville is currently stuck in?”

“Egoton,” Silver answered confidently.

“Athlone,” Jackieboy Man corrected.

“We’re in fookin’ Brighton,” Bro Average gestured to the city right outside the window.

“In any case,” Logan cleared his throat. “Our various rogues have joined forces. Even if it isn’t in the way we expected them to. For now, until our cities return to their natural position on the globe, we should join forces.”

Marvin was sitting on the couch with Roman, Marvin was just filing his nails as Roman was trying to smooth out some of the chips in his nails with angry grumbling. “Far as I’m concerned,” Marvin commented as Roman frowned at the magician’s perfect-looking nails, “if Jay says yer on the level, nothing I can do ‘bout it.”

J.J was taking a nap in a chair, leaning against Marvin’s side of the couch. His mustache was twitching in his sleep.

“How do you keep them so pristine?” Roman commented with a jealous huff.

“There’s a spell fer that,” Marvin goaded with a very cat-like grin. “If yeh can manage it.”

“Of course I can,” Roman scoffed with a huge smile, scooting closer to the magician, who was already conjuring up a spell book seemingly from thin air.

“I didn’t think it was possible for you to be even more impossible to deal with,” Logic scolded.

“Come on, Lo,” Patton smiled. “It’s always good to make new friends.”

“Yeah, Lo,” Marvin smiled, thumbing through his spell book “We’re friends.”

Logan scowled at him.

“Is there a spell that can let me light my sword on fire?” Roman asked.

Marvin’s smile became sharper, a grin that became even more Cheshire-like when he saw Logan’s disapproving scowl. “Yeah, I got just the thin’.”

Jackieboy nudged Silver, nudging his head to the door, “Hey, can I talk with you?”

“Uh,” Mark uncrossed his arms, looking around the room. “Sure.”

“Won’t be long,” Jack promised.

Silver followed him out, just going into the hallway of the apartment, Silver looking around and seeing that it was empty before the two rushed to the roof, where seeing two masked heroes wouldn’t be immediately linked to anyone living in the building.

“So how long yeh an’ yer friends been doin’ this?” Jackie asked.

“Couple ‘a months,” Mark answered. “What about you?”

“Same,” Jackie. “So the pink an’ black ensemble, what’s the deal with them?”

“Dark’s a mob boss from Hell who has my whole city in his back pocket,” Silver explained. “Whoever he can’t bend to his will, he kills. We’ve been making some headway with him,making people less afraid of him and breaking down parts of his network but the fucker just doesn’t die, he doesn’t ever really seem to get all that tired either.”

“Reminds me ‘a Anti,” Jackie told him, “bastard just straight up possessed me one day an’ hasn’t left us alone since. Just has two modes: gets bored and kills someone, or is bothering us so he can kill someone.”

“Just ordinary chaos seems nice,” Silver commented. “Just once I’d like to not deal with Dark’s contacts and their vile day jobs.”

“Well Anti’s a piece ‘a shite too,” Jack chuckled. “Welcome ta the circus, what about the bar shop quartet-looking guy? He got another act ‘sides being mad and gun happy?”

“That’s pretty much it, he can also teleport, is impervious to bullets and can’t remember what he did last week unless Dark’s involved,” Silver warned.

“He an’ Anti are gonna be great friends,” Jackie groaned, the two of them talking on the rooftop for a bit before joining the others.

Dark finally opened a portal into the Manor, his aura happily as it returned to his familiar home. He followed Wil’s aura out to the back patio where Wil was sitting, without pants, on one of the patio chairs trying to drink a martini . . . and failing.

“You have two hands,” Dark told him sharply, “use them.”

“Darkling,” Wil smiled excitedly, summoning up a glass of scotch on the rock and holding it up. “Join me, you look like you’ve had a hard day, my sweet licorice.”

Dark’s glare became scathing, but still took the glass, “No thanks to you, my entire network was split up over several miles. Do you know the amount of people I had to get killed today thanks to you?”

“I’m sure they deserved it,” Wil smiled, waving his hand and more Scotch appeared.

Using his aura, Dark dragged another patio chair over with and angry, metallic screech. He sat down, glaring at Dark, taking a couple long sips.

“I could help you,” Wil offered openly.

Dark let out a noise in-between a huff and a scoff, “You’ve done more than enough.”

“Oh,” Wilford set his martini down. “How silly of me, I almost forgot.”

“What a shame,” Dark groaned.

With that same huge smile that Dark knew he couldn’t stay mad at, Dark set his own glass down. He patiently knit his fingers in his lap and just waited as Wil pulled out an ornate box out of thin air and Dark just stared at it, seeing the magic and aura billowing off of it, Dark could almost feel like it was trying to speak and talk but not in any normal or audible language.

Wilford held it out and Dark took it, turning it over. A smile slowly spread across his face. “Where did you find this?”

“Oh goody, you like it,” Wil clapped. “I found it at the bank.”

“Really?” Dark hummed as he pulled the top off and looked inside to see just a bottomless pit of magic. Carefully, Dark reached his aura in and he could feel . . . something, but couldn’t pull it out. So he reached in with his hand and pulled out a black pocket ledger. Dark sent the box to his safe.

Wil was oddly quiet as Dark looked through the booklet, it had his entire schedule on it, and Dark couldn’t deny the whispering it was trying to communicate to him, even if he couldn’t hear it.

“So,” Wil trailed off. “Am I still in trouble?”

Sliding the ledger into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, then he stood and grabbed his glass again. “Nonsense,” Dark smiled and kissed Wil. “You’re free to go, sweetheart, just don’t mess with the banks again. I hate the clean up.”

Wilford was beaming with happiness, standing up and flexing his suspenders, “I live to please, Darkling.”

“Do you?” Dark smiled, as he opened up a portal into his main office. “Sometimes I think you just like making me angry.”

“Well it’s hardly my fault that you’re so damn cute when your angry,” Wil defended good naturedly.

“Well,” Dark was starting to flip through the ledger, it had his whole week scheduled out, even events that he’d thought were hazy or impossible before his city had changed. “You best keep me from getting adorable then.”

“Never,” Wilford smiled and leaned down to kiss Dark, the Entity returning the kiss as the new town began to slowly reach a new normal around them.

[inkribbon796]

I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This

Summary: The Sides weren’t always a poorly held together group of personality. They were once one man, and Thomas is trying to have fun with his friends until his whole sense of self literally falls apart.

A/N: It’s the Sides origin story I’ve been wanted to write for some time. Hope you guys like it.

It was a nice calm day, close enough to the start of Spring for people to call it that, but also far enough away that Thomas wasn’t quite thinking about his birthday.

Thomas was at his house for it, him and his friends. Joan was late, but Thomas was sure that it was traffic. They were watching Rent when Joan walked in, something hidden under their coat and a huge smile on their face.

“The real party’s here!” Joan called out, kicking the door closed.

“Where have you been?” Valery called out.

“So I was helping Rico move and he’s got all this weird stuff from his batshit crazy uncle and this looks awesome. They said I could have it.”

“Please tell me it’s not a sex toy,” Thomas pleaded.

Joan’s smile got wider, “No, sides I don’t want anything used. Nah, this is cooler. I think it might actually be haunted.”

“As if,” Valerie scoffed, as she leaned over to try and look underneath Joan’s coat. “What is it?”

Joan wiped off their coat like a show host, “Voila!”

Underneath Joan’s coat looked like a super old camera, or at least a replica of an old camera. While Thomas couldn’t remember the name of it, the camera looked like an accordion in the front and had a large lens. It was black with a spattering of what would have been blood if the coloring wasn’t a neon pink. The spattering for a split second looked like a mustache, but Thomas figured he was just seeing patterns where they didn’t exist.

“Is that a camera?” Thomas asked.

“Yeah it’s old,” Talyn asked. “But so what?”

Joan smiled as they started showing the hollowed out back of it. The thing was basically a hard metal shell. “Empty right?”

Joan held up the camera and started turning the crank, starting to film the first person in view, which happened to be Thomas.“Watch this fucking shit,” Joan said, and Talyn leaned their head in to get a closer look.

Then something shot out of the empty back of it, almost like an old projector. The film was grainy and seemed to be stuttering. Which Thomas was sure that A: that wasn’t how the camera was supposed to work; and B: there was nothing inside the camera to actually make it do that.

“How’s it doing that?” Thomas walked up to see the video on the way of himself, an entire rainbow of color lighting up his face and eyes, everything else was a color of dirt brown and grey.

“Don’t know, bet we could get at least something for this shit though.” Joan smiled. “Least it looks cute.”

Thomas tried looking at the inside of it, his hands about to take it from Joan’s when the camera began to shake violently and Joan dropped it, unable to hold onto it.

Moving before he could think, Thomas instinctively lunged for it.

People often try not to dwell on it, or wonder aimlessly about the last thoughts they’d have before they died. Thomas had never really been one of those people. Trying to focus on things important to him and focus on the good that people can do.

Oh no, it’s falling! Thomas thought in surprise. It was, unfortunately, the last conscious thought that “Thomas Sanders” would ever think ever again.

Thomas grabbed it, barely able to snag it from hitting the floor and for a millisecond he felt relief. However he didn’t have the chance to process that thought or even move it from it’s position before he felt a white hot flash of pain, stronger than anything he had ever experienced. His brain didn’t even have time to register that he was in pain.

Something in Thomas shattered, as if something inhuman had taken a stick and broken a mirror, the uneven and unequal pieces blasting out from around him. Light engulfed the room and he was left with the camera in his hands and everyone staring at him in shock and concern. His eyes almost purple, he was leaning back against the stairs.

The first thing this anxious fracture did, was drop the camera and start screaming, feeling overwhelmed and terrified that there were now six other copies of himself. All of them were wearing what Thomas had been wearing seconds ago. The anxious fracture’s head was filling with static, he couldn’t think, he could barely feel.

Everyone else in the room was either one of the dazed pieces, or were one of Thomas’s stunned friends who still had no idea what was happening.

One of the other fractures picked himself up, looking over at the anxious side’s crying and sobbing form, his voice starting to go hoarse from his screaming, and walked over from the spot he’d crashed down by the T.V. A rather mischievous glint in his almost glowing green eyes.

Reaching down he began shaking the anxious side, “Stop screaming!” He screeched right back, making the anxious side start screaming even more, which made the green-eyed side shake him and screech like a banshee.

“That’s not helping,” another side with yellow eyes groaned, hitting his head lightly against the door, his skin starting to crack along the left side of his face, flaking off to reveal snake scales. “Now they’re both screaming.”

“Not ideal,” another of the sides spoke up, a dark blue eyed side, his tone was almost flat and he’d crashed pretty heavily against the table legs. Joan was closer to him and they were just staring at the version of Thomas in front of them, torn between wanting to help and not knowing what to do.

When it was obvious that he was in pain, Joan looked at Talyn, “Get the first aid kit.”

“I am not grievously injured, merely stunned,” he forced out, clearly trying to get his body to work.

“Yeah,” Joan commented, “cause that’s what fine looks like.”

The green eyed Thomas whipped his head around, his screaming and shaking stopped dead as he immediately blurted out, “Your ass is fine!”

Now that his head was turned, Joan and the others could see that the two were changing like the one by the door was. It was slow, the purple fracture was steadily gaining dark shadows under his eyes, the skin looking paler by comparison until it was slowly making the natural freckles on Thomas’s face almost invisible. The fracture with Dark green eyes was now sporting a slightly curved mustache with dark shadows growing under his eyes as well.

“Thanks, I think,” Joan said.

Joan helped up the one with dark blue eyes, he seemed to be squinting at everything, as if it was hard for him to see. He braced himself against the table. “There was a box I had moments before, where is it.”

“I had it,” one of the other fractures still lying by the T.V said, his eyes a deep red.

“Impossible,” he responded, trying to look in the direction of the voice. Joan looked over at the counter where Thomas had put his glasses. Quickly they went around the table to grab it and handed it over to this new . . . Well Joan wasn’t sure if it was a copy or what but he didn’t talk like Thomas did.

“Oh thank you,” he commented and put them on finally able to see the room. “As it was obvious that I was the one who was holding the box.”

He froze when he saw the state of the room. “Fascinating.”

The fracture by the window that had been mostly silent up til now finally sat up, feeling his face with a look of confusion. His eyes a pale, almost glowing blue. “I don’t feel good.”

“Ahh,” the version of Thomas with his glasses looked over towards the stairs. The camera had fallen away from the two sides that had been screaming at each other. “There it is.”

He walked over and carefully picked it up, inspecting the empty camera interior. “However did it work?”

“Hey!” The mustached side shot up, clearly upset. “That’s mine!”

“Hardly.”

“Listen, Specs,” the red side huffed as he stood up, his legs a bit shaky. “It’s obvious that you’re not the real one, so just drop it.”

Then he summoned a sword with a golden hilt, pointing it at “Specs” and puffing up his chest. Everyone else in the room except for the two of them, and the green side, flinched or took a reflexive step back.

Specs looked at the sword, more curious than intimidated, adjusting his glasses with almost his whole hand. “Interesting. But still, I believe that you are the one who is mistaken. Put that away before you hurt yourself or someone else.

Joan out of the corner of their eyes saw the front door open but they didn’t want to take their eyes off the guy who had summoned a sword from thin air. Talyn was still in the kitchen, so by the fact that they weren’t screaming or gasping in shock or pain, Joan assumed everything was still fine.

The two of them continued arguing, the red side summoning up a shield. Between just the tree of the them, the argument getting louder and louder, there seemed almost this undercurrent of static. No one noticed it until it was too late.

“Stop,” a whimper from the stairs went unheeded by almost everybody, the anxious side seemed to curl in on himself, the static starting to pitch up. “Please, stop.”

The arguing just kept going but slowly more and he looked around for anything he could use, but all he could see was the other side in front of him, he was just staring down at his hands as if fascinated by them moving.

The feeling of isolation dug itself even deeper. It was too much, too loud. The anxious side began to hyperventilate, covering his ears. “Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!”

At his screams, he finally had attention drawn to him again. At his last more desperate scream, a wave seemed to pass over the room, a choking, heavy weight. Everyone was momentarily blinded for a second and there was a dull, muted THUD of a sword and metal shield hitting the carpet.

Then, blissful silence washed over the room. The only sounds was the anxious side’s heavy breathing.

Slowly that labored breathing was joined when the light blue side jumped up, eyes wide at what seemed to an outside observer to be nothing, but his back hit the wall. He began to brush an invisible presence off his arms. “Spiders! Spiders! Get them off, get them off!”

He was shaking, starting to cry in panic. Everyone else was frozen in fear, Talyn looked horrified and Joan looked like they were rearing back to kick at whatever invisible thing was in front of them.

There was a dull laugh from the couch, an uneasy one that sent shivers down the anxious side’s spine. This side had glowing orange eyes. “That’s fucked up.”

The first one to regain his composure, was the red side. He immediately picked up his sword, glaring at the anxious side. “You fiend! Release us this instant.”

Frantic to get away from the very angry man with a very sharp sword, he tried to scurry away but his back hit the stairs. He felt trapped, there was only the stairs to go to and the anxious side knew that he couldn’t escape up there. “I didn’t— I’m not—”

The red side lifted his sword, his eyes darting to the space around him but before he could actually get anywhere near the anxious side, a hand grabbed his and threw him away.

“That’s quite enough,” the yellow eyed side interrupted, multiple arms shooting out of him, immediately grabbing onto the anxious side and there was a flurry of sound and everything went staticky before finally everything settled and he had no idea where he was, just in a protective cocoon of arms, the noise mounting and clawing at the inside of his head. He was rolled into as tight of a ball as he could.

“I didn’t mean to,” the anxious side begged. “I’m sorry.”

Something landed on top of his head, and he flinched before he realized it was a hat.

“Stay here, stay quiet,” the yellow-eyed side ordered.

The anxious side nodded.

“If you make too much noise, they will find you Anxiety,” he ordered.

“Wait, what?” The anxious side answered but his rescuer was already gone. So all he could do was wait in the blissful, pure silence of wherever the hell park he was in, and pulled the hat down to cover his face.

All too quickly the silence was broken when the yellow eyed side returned with two more people, the mustached side and the one with orange eyes.

“I was having fun,” the green side scoffed as he was pushed closer to the anxious side. The final, mostly silent one just laid down on the ground.

“Hardly, you were about to get stabbed,” the yellowed eyed side smoothly took the hat off Anxiety’s head to put on his own head. “It seems we find ourselves in a very interesting place.”

“You dragged us out to the middle of nowhere,” the orange-eyed side scoffed.

“Unless that’s what you wanted,” the mustached side smiled, leaning a bit too close to the serpentine side. “So, Scales, what now?”

“Call me Deceit,” he corrected. “No sense in all of us being called “Thomas” now is there?”

“I never liked that name in the first place,” the orange side agreed.

“I want my name to be Dukey,” the mustache side blurted out.

“Why?” Anxiety demanded, deciding he liked the name that Deceit had given him, probably a bit too much. “Why that?”

“Cause it upsets you,” the Duke smiled.

While the two of them traded barbs, Anxiety made a little easier by the fact that the Duke’s volume was lower and no one else was joining it. He even had some personal space to breath.

Deceit walked over to the orange-eyed side, “And what should we call you?”

“Pffff,” the side scoffed. “I don’t know, call me Orange until I think of something.”

“Unimaginative,” Deceit critiqued.

“I didn’t need saving you know,” Orange looked up at him. “I was fine on the couch.”

“You really think those three are going to just let you sit around?” Deceit scoffed.

“Point,” Orange shrugged. “I’m taking a nap.”

“Anxiety, Duke,” Deceit called out, both of them stopped their bickering to look at him.

“What D-man?” The Duke smiled at him.

“It is apparently clear to me that the situation in the apartment would not have occurred if Anxiety’s discontent was noted sooner,” Deceit said.

“Discontent?” Anxiety repeated. “That’s what you’re calling it.”

“We’re going to make people listen to us,” Deceit proclaimed. “One way or the other.”

“Cool story, but how are we doing that?” Anxiety asked, not sure if he wanted to run into the other three again.

“Simple, I have some ideas, but I cannot accomplish our goals without help,” Deceit smiled, looking between the two sides standing in front of him.

Back at the apartment the logical side just stared at the light blue side, clearly unsure how to help the still panicking individual. He was rocking back and forth. Talyn had covered him in a blanket and they were trying to talk him out of his panic attack, the logical side had been trying to help but it seemed like everything that should logically work was falling a bit flat for him.

Joan was watching the door, not wanting a fifth part of Thomas to run off without keeping their eyes on him. “Hey, Specs, Prince is coming back.”

“Oh great,” he spat, looking towards the door as the red side walked in with his sword.

“I couldn’t find them,” the prince grumbled. “They all disappeared on me.”

The logical side stomped over and grabbed the prince by the front of his shirt. “You cannot leave me with him again, my words do not soothe him.”

“Let go of me,” the prince pushed him off. “The lovable Roman should never have to be subject to so much mistreatment.”

The response was so unexpected that it took the logical side by surprise, “What?”

“Yeah, you can’t treat me like that,” Roman proclaimed.

“No, I’ll get back to your proclivity to run off, but a mere five minutes ago you were proclaiming yourself as Thomas along with the rest of us,” the logical side was looking him up and down.

Roman shrugged, setting his sword on the table, the logical side gave Roman a rather sharp look at the action. Then Roman looked at the side still on the ground. “He okay?”

“No,” the logical side sighed. “You left him with me.”

Roman approached calmly, and in his hands appeared a Pomeranian puppy. “Hey, you like dogs?”

The light blue side stopped, transfixed by the dog the instant it appeared.

“We cannot possibly care for a pet at this time,” the logical side huffed.

“Grow a heart Mr. Roboto,” Roman told him.

“So fluffy,” the more emotion side’s eyes were almost sparkling, the puppy excitedly licking his face. “Good puppy.”

“See, he’s calm,” Roman boasted.

“So long as he is not given a live animal every time this happens,” the logical side was looking at the sword on the table. “Is that a real sword?”

“Yeah, why?” Roman asked. “Feels real to me.”

“Fascinating,” the logical side walked over and grabbed a pen from the nearby counter to start poking it.

“Hey!” Roman barked. “Back those claws up, Nerdy Wolverine.”

“None of those things are my name,” the logical side argued.

“Well you’ve never said your name,” Roman rolled his eyes, taking his sword back.

“I had a perfectly fine name,” the logical side argued back.

“If I don’t get to be Thomas, then you don’t either,” Roman argued back.

“What about Logan?”

Both Roman and the logical side looked at the light blue empathetic side who was standing with his new puppy, the blanket loosely draped over his shoulders.

“I beg your pardon,” the logical side said, his tone a bit cold.

“You know, cause you’re so logical and smart,” he grinned.

That seemed to calm the logical side down, whether it was from the words alone or the compliment. “Well, I am intelligent. Logan it is.”

“What about you buttercup?” Roman smiled.

“Ooh, ooh,” the light blue side bounced up and down. “Patton.”

“Why’s that?” Logan asked.

“Cause I’m Patton-ly adorable,” Patton smiled.

Joan began cackling, “I see someone got Thomas’s puns.”

Logan was glaring at him before something dawned on him, “Wait, did you make my name a pun as well?”

Patton’s smile got wider.

“No, wait,” Logan began to mentally backpedal. “I rescind, I will not have my name be a joke.”

“Too late,” Roman decided. “Logan it is.”

“Names, good,” Joan interrupted. “Roman, Logan, Patton. So can one of you tell me how my friend became seven people?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Logan answered, walking back over with Joan to the camera. “But I’ll make it my new life’s mission to find out.”

“What about the others?” Patton asked.

“What about them?” Roman scoffed and summoned a sheath to put his sword in.

“Shouldn’t we go out and find them?”

“You really want to tangle with the dragon?” Roman rolled his eyes. “Next we meet it will be blade versus blade in an epic duel of the fates.”

“Hey, Romeo, don’t know if we’re talking about the same person,” Valerie chimed in, “but chuckles on the stairs wasn’t exactly fighting back.”

“He could summon illusions,” Roman dismissed, “it was obviously an act.”

Patton frowned but smiled when he looked at the puppy in his hands. “Who’s a good boy? Are you a good boy?”

“We should come up with a name to call ourselves,” Roman decided. “How about Roman and his Merry Band?”

“Absolutely not,” Logan looked up from the camera. “That discussion should be tabled until we figure out what happened and restore ourselves to our true state.”

Roman groaned but turned back to Patton and his dog, smiling at them as he walked over, the two talking with Thomas’s friends as Logan and Joan looked over the camera.

A new peace fell over the room, as the new additions to the apartment began to settle in. They would all grow into their skin, their colored eyes changing back to Thomas’s normal brown and they’ have to find new ways to distinguish themselves between each other.

Joan in particular was quickly picking up that all three of them were slowly deviating, both from how Thomas usually reacted to things and acting very distinctly from each other. But every once in a while one of them would do something that would remind Talyn or Valerie of Thomas.

It took awhile for everyone to adjust, everyone working in their own way to figure themselves out. All the while the specter of “the Dark Sides” as Roman indelicately called them looked in the back of their mind. There was no noise from the four that had left the apartment, but Logan wasn’t as foolhardy as Roman to think they were gone for good.

He would make sure they were ready when they returned, and like Patton he hoped that the reunion would be pleasant. But Logan was braced for it not to be at the same time.

[inkribbon796]

Where the Crossroads Meet Ch 3

Summary: As the dust settles, heroes and villains meeting don’t necessarily go as planned. Some first meetings are peaceful, others catch the town on fire.

<= FIRST

<= PREVIOUS

Chapter 3: Reformation

Silver never much liked fighting magic, too many ways for stuff to go wrong. So fighting a magician with a penchant for starting fires wasn’t how he wanted today to go.

Wade was battling the fires, but magical fire tended to act like an oil spill, so Wade was trying to smother the fires rather than blast them out of existence.

“Can’t you do something?” Wade spat.

“Only if I can hit the bastard!” Mark shouted back angrily.

“I am no such thing, you blasted cur!” The mage spat, his red and white outfit with a sparkling red cloak billowed out behind him despite their being no wind. His red and white opera mask was covered in gold glitter that caught the sun. He had an immaculate sword in his hands. “En Garde!”

Silver sighed, bringing his fists up, “Yeah, buddy, why not?”

He smiled, “A worthy adversary! At last!”

“Do you have one volume for everything?” Silver quipped.

“He does,” another unfamiliar voice, the city seemed to be full of them.

“Back off, Lo, this fight is mine,” the regal mage said.

Wade was standing at Silver’s back. “Hey, pal, we don’t need to fight.”

“Correct,” the unfamiliar voice agreed. “None of us should be fighting at all, The Prince is merely desperate for a fight after our failure at the bank.”

“Hey,” “the Prince” complained. “No I’m not.”

“Your friend, Iblis, sent us,” Logic continued.

Silver chanced a look at the fully masked person with a visor in front of his eyes. He was in a mostly dark blue outfit.

“Princey, I insist you stop your games and help the Captain and I look for the Duke, I am certain he is one of the causes for destruction, you being one of the others,” he was looking around. “I am also about to ask a question that I want the correct answer to: who started these fires?”

“Uhhhhh,” Princey drew out, looking nervous even past his mask, pointing to Silver. “Him?”

“No I didn’t!” Silver shouted back.

“Obviously,” he said, you could practically hear the eye roll in his voice. “I fail to see how two people with super athletics, and hydrokinesis can start fires at will.”

“Well, that’s judgmental of you, and you’re better than that,” Princey told him.

“Just do us all a favor and put the fires out,” he dismissed curtly. “We’re about to have enough problems.”

“How so?” Silver asked, walking. As a man who looked like he’d stepped out of an old black-and-white vaudeville cartoon and another person in a light blue outfit and puppy dog mask were helping to carrying an unconscious hero in a mask.

“Because me and other of our soon-to-be compatriots have upset two very angry and unstable super powered humanoids, and one of them wants me dead,” he explained. “In other important information, you can call me Logic. The personification of ludicrous fairy tales over there is Prince Charming, and our companion over there is Captain Morality.”

“Which one’s which?” Wade asked, which Mark was secretly happy about because he’d been thinking the same thing but now he didn’t have to take the fall for asking it.

“Neither of these are your compatriots, are they?” Logic turned to J.J. He shook his head and Logic groaned. “Well, our chances of meeting a violent demise have raised.”

“Why?” Silver asked.

“Lo upset some demons,” Patton smiled.

“I hardly believe there is a supernatural element at play with any of this,” Logan proposed.

“That’s absolutely impossible,” Roman reminded, chuckling a bit.

“Have you met Anx?” Patton agreed.

“I don’t believe in ghosts or wacky stuff like that, and even I have to admit my city is controlled by a fucking demon,” Mark commented.

“We’ll table this for later,” Logic ordered.

Roman walking up to the unconscious man. “Is he safe to hold up?”

The mute hero nodded and Roman picked him up in his arms. “What happened?”

He made a couple signs and Logan sighed, “He says it was demon possession.

“Silver!” Wilford called out and Silver screamed.

“No!” Silver flew over and slammed into Wilford, knocking him into the nearest wall and just pinning him there. “I’ve had enough bullshit today, and I don’t want more!”

Wil had a huge smile on his face. “I’m so glad I found you, I can’t find Abe or the police and something happened to the city.”

“What did you do? You insane asshat!” Silver knew that whatever happened, Wil was somehow involved.

“I did nothing,” Wilford balked, sounding insulted. “It was that chatterbox that did it.”

“Quit deflecting, you maniac, what did you do?” Silver demanded. He could hear another conversation going on behind him.

“What the hell happened, Jay?” A voice behind him asked.

Silver felt someone tapping on his shoulder. The mono-colored hero looked back to see the mustached silent hero holding up a chalkboard.

“Leave Wil, Dark is coming and we need to be gone,” his whiteboard ordered.

“Oooh,” Wil said in relief to J.J, suddenly appearing out of Silver’s grip to stand next to the mute hero. “And what a dapper gent too.”

J.J just stared at him.

Wilford snapped his fingers in disappointment, “Ahh, shame, maybe some other time then.”

“Hold up a second,” Silver interrupted, “if Dark’s coming, I’m not going anywhere.”

A series of explosions rocked the city a couple blocks down and Silver turned to the source.

“Oooooh~” Wilford cheered, “that looks like a big enough problem. Darky can’t possible ignored that.”

“Can you slow yer roll there fer five seconds, pal,” Jackie told him. “We’ll find him, but there are people dying.”

Wil made a scoffing laugh, “Oh, that’s a good one, this hasn’t been going long enough for games like that.”

“This isn’t a game!” The Irish hero shouted.

“Welcome to Egoton,” Silver greeted dryly to Jackieboy Man. “He’s literally insane.”

The explosions were getting closer.

“It’s too late already,” Logan groaned as a shrill ringing began to flood the area as color began to drain from the area.

A violent tear in reality opened up, a portal as dark as a black hole ripped and Dark stepped out. He looked around and stopped when he saw Wilford.

“There you are!” Dark spat in rage. “What did you do?”

Wilford was too happy to be angry and ran over to hug Dark. “Darky, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“No! No!” Dark shouted, using his aura to push Wil back and pin him in place. “You are going back to the Manor and staying there until I fix this.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Wil pouted.

“Then why is my city stapled to three other ones?” Dark shouted, gesturing to the city around him with one hand.

“I don’t know, the box didn’t tell me,” Wil snapped back.

Dark held up his hands, his aura was still around Wil to keep him in place, “I’m not dealing with this right now, you are going home and that is the end of that.”

Another explosion rag out, closer than the last.

“See?” Wil defended. “I’m not the one blowing up the town.”

“I don’t have time for this,” Dark groaned.

“Give it up, Dark, you’re in on this,” Silver spat.

Dark’s aura snapped out and stabbed Silver, who was too close to get away in time. “I didn’t ask you. I am dealing with enough today and I don’t need your childish antics.”

Dark glared at J.J, “And you, we will be having words after I deal with you.”

J.J signed something that made Wil giggle a bit. Dark glared at him. The sentence had actually been, “Over your dead body”. But due to a lack of anyone translating, Dark assumed it was more vulgar than it actually was.

“So am I in trouble?” Wil asked

Dark glared at him, “What do you think?”

“No?” Wil smiled as he wasn’t about to be shaken like a ragdoll.

“Try again,” Dark warned, tapping his arm angrily.

“Alright, I understand you’re angry but I found you something that might make you feel better,” Wilford bargained. “If you’ll give me one moment, I can show you.”

“No, I’ve had enough of your games,” Dark spat.

Silver, who had been too busy fighting the two to really stop to think about the villains’ personal lives, realized, “Wait are you two dating?”

J.J and Logan just stared at Silver.

“Isn’t he one of your rogues?” Logan asked.

“Yeah really,” Roman laughed, “these two are obviously as gay as the month of June.”

“As much as I like me some men, I’m actually pan—”

Dark shot out some of his aura towards Roman, J.J frantically pulling out his watch but Jackie was already pulling him to safety.

“Will no one leave me alone for five seconds? If I wanted my personal affairs invaded, I would have continued to keep talking to that insufferable power switch.” Dark snarled.

“Well if I knew how to solve that, I would,” Wil said.

“Wil, you are lucky you can’t die, or I would have painted the wall with your entrails YEARS ago!” Dark roared.

“I was just answering your question,” Wil pouted.

Dark’s eye twitched, but before he could say something Anti appeared next to Dark.

“Hey ‘coon eyes,” Anti smiled, ignoring Dark stabbing him through the heart with his aura. The Entity promptly let go of Wil to glare at Anti. “Yeh find Electro Nerd yet?”

Dark just looked a mix of tired and furious.

Silver looked around to notice that Logic was gone, wherever he was, J.J shook his head at Silver, tapping his finger to his mouth. The black and white colored hero nodded, watching Dark whose aura was churning angrily.

Anti stopped when the glitch demon saw Wilford, looking between him and Dark. He slowly started smiling.

“What?” Dark growled at Anti.

The standoff was momentarily distracted when Marvin was forcing Remus into the ground next to Jackie with inhuman speed and force. Fortunately neither of them were exactly human anymore so they still had usable bones. Both of them were cursing at each other, their clothing singed and burned.

Then Remus noticed Wil, winking and saying, “Hey hot stuff, having fun?”

“Are you kidding me?” Dark muttered angrily.

“Well, I’m a bit busy at the moment but maybe some other time,” Wil smiled encouragingly.

Dark rolled his eyes, opening up a portal and pushing Wil through it, closing it up as quickly as he could, “Stay in there until I get back.”

“Yeh know, yer supposed ta take yer boyfriend outta the closet,” Anti commented with a huge smile.

“You can’t just hijoke me like that,” Remus shouted at him, a giant snake quickly snapping and forcefully dragged Remus towards him, Virgil hiding behind Janus, the Deceitful Side was controlling a massive two headed albino python.

“There you are,” Janus spat. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“Oh, Dee, you’ve been missing all the fun,” Remus smiled as the Virgil was starting to tie Remus quickly to the back of the large serpent with yards and yards of spider silk to make sure he couldn’t run off and cause more trouble.

“Come on rat boy, stop squirming,” Virgil spat.

“Only if you make me,” the Duke raised his eyebrows suggestively.

“Ugh,” Virgil groaned and slapped a mass of spider silk over his mouth. “Shut up for five seconds, will you.”

Remus looked elated, mumbling something that Virgil couldn’t understand but still looked upset. Deceit quickly taking them away, throwing up barriers so that he could put as much distance between him and Marvin as possible.

Dark took the distraction as an opportunity to slip away, going back to his warehouses to check on them, Anti glaring after him before counting the amount of heroes and dissolving into green and black pixels.

Jackie had to calm Marvin down from chasing after the three Dark Sides with single-minded anger.

NEXT =>

[inkribbon796]

Black and White

Summary: Silver and his superhero friends think it’s time to finally take on the monster that’s had an iron grip on their town.

~::~ Twenty-Five Years Ago ~::~

Silver ran up the final flight of stairs to get to the room. It was dark, the sky illuminated by the street lights.

The monochrome-themed superhero was excited, months and planning and finally they were ready to take on Dark himself. Mark and his friends had gotten into a lot of fights with Dark’s cronies and middle-management enforcers, but they’d never come up against Dark or Wil directly.

Mostly not coming into contact with Wil was partially Daniel’s planning, and another part sheer dumb luck.

“You freak of nature,” Daniel gasped as he followed him up a bit more slowly. “How do you still run like a maniac, you can fly?”

Silver paused, so full of energy he was jogging in place. “Sorry, you need to rest, man?”

“Just a minute to catch my breath,” Daniel breathed a little bit heavier than usual. “The others in position?”

“Yeah, they’re just waiting for our signal,” Mark jumped up a bit, levitating off the ground about an inch or two. “This is going to be awesome.

“Oh yeah, awesome,” Daniel rolled his eyes, finally catching his second wind. “Okay, let’s go.”

Silver smiled as they both checked their costumes and then Silver safely grabbed onto Iblis’s arms so he could safely fly him down to the ground and they could quietly and in the dead of night heading over to the series of warehouses that made up Dark’s base of operations.

Everyone in Egoton knew to avoid the warehouses, everyone who was trying desperately to be a somewhat honest citizen in the despotic, wretched town they lived in anyways. The warehouses were stationed almost too close together, and bordered an old abandoned church that had long since fallen into ruin.

The warehouse Silver and his friends were going to try to break into was at the center of almost an oval shape except for a bend in it. Silver and Iblis snuck into the abandoned church. Silver took the time to fix one of the windows that stood as the signal that he and Iblis were in place.

The reflection of something caught Silver’s eye and he smiled at Iblis. “Time to raise some hell.”

Iblis smiled back and leapt out the already broken window to shoot a fireball at the closest warehouse, the same one they’d visit before they’d been accidentally taken to the Manor.

“Batter up,” Iblis smiled, throwing a large rock towards Silver who used a plank of wood lying around to hit the rock against the wall of the warehouse leaving a huge dent in the metal and distingrated the rock into a small cloud of sand and pebbles.

The reaction was almost instantaneous, which normally happened when fire came into the picture. Instantly Dark’s enforcers were alion them, some of them already drained from how late it was.

Something Mark didn’t quite calculate was how fast Dark showed up. The two heroes felt Dark’s aura a split second before the creature thinly disguised as a human actually showed up.

Silver was grabbed by the back of his neck and the fledgling hero felt energy completely course through him and sent him flying towards the warehouse that had already been attacked.

If Mark hadn’t already been granted super strength and super healing, he was certain that at that very moment he would have died instantly.

Silver slammed into the steel wall of the warehouse, his nose bleeding, neck aching, and head ringing. But Silver forced himself to stand and flipped Dark off as he wiped his bleeding nose.

The Entity actually looked impressed, glancing over at Iblis and then back to Mark, frowning. “Huh.”

“Yeah, we’re not dead, fucker!” Silver proclaimed loudly.

The mob boss’s frown became a scowl, “That is quite a shame.”

Silver lightly shook himself, gently around the neck to give it more time to heal and then fly at Dark as fast as he could at the same time that Iblis was launching more fireballs at him.

The aerial hero was smiling a little at the clear frustration on Dark’s face as he threw up his aura to block the fire being thrown at him. Leaving him open for—

Suddenly Silver slammed into a nearly invisible barrier of aura, Dark turning to smile at him. “Fly too close to the sun, and it will burn you, little Icarus.”

The hero pulled back a little Dark’s smile widened, the villain leaning in head brazenly closer as Silver tried to punch through the aura but was stopped and his wrist was aching.

“However you two survived,” Dark mused, “it’s of little consequence to me.”

“You—” Dark’s aura grabbed Silver by the foot and prepared to launch him. “—are nothing but mud at the bottom of my shoe, and I will dispose of you just as easily.”

Silver was thrown up into the air, he could feel aura still wrapped around him, trying to slam him back into a pile of twisted and jagged metal.

Before he could hit the shredded pile, a barrier started slowing his fall so it felt less like sharp spikes almost-death, and more like falling on pins and needles. Still hurt but it hurt less.

Bob stepped out from behind the warehouse, looking like he’d already gotten into a couple fights, Wade following him at more of a run. Both of them were in costumes that the group had patched together from a box of old costumes that Mark’s mom had in her attic and some old hoodies.

“Great,” Dark snarled, Iblis rushing to stand with them and away from Dark. “More technicolored vermin.”

“Your reign of terror over this city is over,” Silver told him.

“We want our city back!” Wade shouted.

Dark got a dark chuckle out of that, “Your city? You all are gravely mistaken. This city is a writhing, dark abyss that kills everything it touches. I did not summon evil into Egoton, I was summoned because of it. If anyone should be blamed, it’s your people.”

“Hey, fire and damnation!” Iblis called out before he threw a small fireball at Dark. Dark just watched it hit his aura barrier and then the smoke bomb in the middle erupted into a massive cloud of smoke.

The fledgling heroes for the first time in their lives heard Dark led out a loud and audible, “Fucking dammit!”

This would also be the last time they’d head Dark audibly curse in years but Mark took it as a victory.

Dark just flew towards them, his eyes red and blue, the ringing of his aura shrill and Mark could swear his ears were bleeding with how bad it was. Bob was the one to throw up a barrier but Dark slammed himself and his aura into it hard enough to knock Bob back into Mark a bit.

Shadowy tendrils of Dark’s aura trying to get into their barrier.

“Let me out of there so I can punch him,” Silver said, stomping on the bits of Dark’s aura that was trying to come up through the ground. He could tell that continuing to fight. Silver could feel almost like the warmth being drained from his entire body.

“I’m trying but he’ll get in,” Bob shouted. “Give me a second.”

Silver looked back at Wade and Daniel, “On my signal.”

Dark grinned.

“Oh ho!” Wilford called out and Silver internally cursed, Dark’s concentration faltering significantly. “And here I thought you were going to be working all night.”

“Not now!” Dark growled, Silver noticed that using so much aura had done something to Dark. It sparked something in Silver. That Dark was beatable, that they could do this.

“You busy?” Wil asked, canting his body a little to his left.

“If you could do something I’d be really appreciative right now,” Dark growled.

“Like what?” Wil asked.

Dark glared at Wil, as if he was trying to set the other villain on fire. Wil held up his hands, smiling nervously, “Right, right.”

He snapped his fingers and suddenly it was day time and all four of them were lying in a dumpster. Silver felt like he’d gotten into a fight that left every joint sore and he had cuts all over him . . . cuts probably from falling on a bed of metal shrapnel.

Silver took a moment to just stew in his own fury. They had Dark, they had stalled him.

“Dammit!” Silver spat, his fist slaying on something that squelched uncomfortably. “We almost had him.”

“What time is it?” Bob asked.

“I’m going back,” Mark tried to pick himself out of the dumpster, and completely lost the ability to adhere to the floor, he was just floating there.

“Mark,” Daniel called out. “We can’t, it’s daytime. Dark’s probably had time to recover.”

“We were so close,” Mark argued. “He was weakened. That cotton candy asshole had to come in to save his ass.”

“Mark!” Bob called out. “Stop!”

That finally got Mark to stop scrambling towards the ground and look back. All of them looked tired and beat.

“We need to sleep,” Bob said. “We’ve all missed work.”

“Sides,” Wade slurred, clearly half-asleep. “You literally smell like shit.”

The jab got a tired, sad sigh out of Mark. A sigh that turned into a little chuckle that spread to the rest of the group.

“Yeah, but we almost had him, he was on the ropes,” Mark repeated. “If Wil had just stayed to wherever the hell he was, we would have been able to stop him.”

“Next time,” Bob promised.

“Next time,” Mark mumbled. Iblis dragged. Himself out of the dumpster and grabbed Silver by the ankles. Wade helped to hose some of the trash and filth off them with his water powers.

The four heroes made their trek home, vowing to themselves to try again to bring the demon of Egoton down.

[inkribbon796]

A Doctor’s Vow Ch 1

Summary: Good doctors are hard to come by in the superhero business but Iplier has learned to make do. He’s learned how to help his super-powered patients through experience. Experience that sometimes hasn’t come easy . . . especially in the early days.

Chapter 1: The Hippocratic Oath

~::~ Twenty Five Years Ago ~::~

Dr. Iplier was sitting in his office, having some lunch when his phone went off. He groaned and answered it. “Yes?”

“Hey, Doc,” Abe’s voice greeted through the phone.

“Abe,” Iplier greeted hesitantly. “If you’re looking for a drinking partner, I’m still working.”

“No, no,” Abe said quickly. Now that Iplier was listening he could hear someone groaning in the background. “I need a favor.”

Iplier groaned, resting his office phone on his forehead. “Why?”

“Because we’re friends,” Abe tried.

The Doctor didn’t say anything.

There was a loud groan, “Fine, asshole you owe me for smoothing over things with the ex.”

“Fine,” Iplier grumbled. “I’ll tell the desk that you’re coming, just try not to be too conspicuous.”

Iplier hung up, and against all odds got to enjoy his sandwich before the front desk called that the Detective had arrived with his next patient,which set off a couple of alarm bells for the doctor, but he moved into a room as Abe was half dragging someone behind him. It was someone Iplier recognized, he was barely twenty — or at least he looked it — and Iplier was pretty sure he worked for Dark with the amount of odd injuries he’d walked in with before today.

Wordlessly the Doctor walked in with Abe and his new patient, eager to put a door between them and the nurses.

“Yeah, kid,” Abe tried to soothe as the young man held his side. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

“I don’t help the network,” Iplier reprimanded Abe.

“Yeah, why do you think I brought him here,” Abe defended. “Kid’s been more of a help to me than the whole damn police force. He’s not working for Dark, he’s working with me.”

Iplier looked between the detective and the kid, “You sure?”

“Oh yeah,” Abe smiled. “This guy is responsible for the Haddenburg arrest I made last week.”

Cautiously Iplier washed his hands and put on some gloves. “Okay what’d the kid get into?”

“Well,” the young man looked nervous. “I got hit in the side by an exploding road sign.”

“Points for humor, kid,” Iplier groaned, starting to carefully investigate the side he was holding. Iplier’s eyes bugged out when he saw a green-colored piece of metal sticking out.

“Abe, please tell me he’s not a minor,” Iplier felt the color run out of his face.

“No, no,” he pleaded. “I’m twenty-one, you don’t have to call them.”

“Good,” Iplier said and started working to clear the bits of shrapnel. It was a case of the wound looking way worse than it actually was, the street sign shrapnel was small, and not buried in too deep, but it was clear from the location of several of them that the guy couldn’t have pulled them out by himself.

As Iplier was sticking up his side, finding that he really had to work to get the needle in, he started talking to the guy. “So, how’d you wind up like this?”

“I was trying to take on Wilford and he got a little bit dangerous,” he responded, clearly trying to avoid giving away too many details.

“You’re crazy,” Iplier told him. “You know how many people had tried and died trying to kill that maniac?”

“Someone’s gotta do something,” he reminded, “if the police are too scared to do anything and the mayor’s in Dark’s back pocket, I need to try.”

“You got a name?” Iplier asked. “Cause we’re a bit too close in age to be calling you kid.”

“Yeah, it’s, Ma—” the guy started, before Abe roughly elbowed him in the shoulder, the side that hadn’t been hit with shrapnel. “Uh, Silver, I’m the Silver Shepherd.”

“Nice name,” Iplier smiled, trying not to feel too bad. “You come up with that, or did someone else?”

“What do you mean,” Silver huffed. “Of course I came up with it.”

“Well thanks,” Iplier told him, Silver looking a bit confused.

“Dark’s had the run of this city for years,” Iplier clarified. “No ones really had the guts to stand up to him and that circus-themed nightmare except for Abe.”

“Hey, you don’t seem like you’re gonna ask a lot of questions,” Silver smiled. “Am I able to transfer over to have you as my doctor instead of that other guy?”

In for a penny, Iplier thought. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Iplier was thanked and the two of them left, Abe trying to encounter the least amount of people possible, leaving “Silver’s” personal number with Dr. Iplier. Leaving Iplier to get back to his shift.

For the next day or two, Iplier didn’t hear anything from either of them. Which he guessed was for the best. It either meant that Silver was being careful, or laying low. Although he really doubted that Silver was staying out of trouble.

Something that proved to be the case when about an hour after Iplier got to work, the entire staff was asked to come into a meeting room. Which was about as bad of a sign as his ex-wife had given him when she was spending more time at her sister’s than at home.

A bad sign that became even worse when a guy in a police uniform walked in. He was talking with the director as he came in. Iplier, because of the part of town he lived, he’d seen the “officer” in a very different outfit, a nice crisp suit that probably cost more than Dr. Iplier’s car.

“Thank you everyone for coming, it’s come to my attention that a dangerous criminal was either admitted into our hospital or different hospital,” the hospital director began.

Dr. Iplier was barely able to contain the comment, “Yeah his name’s Dark, he lives in a creepy mansion at 1304 Hill Road.” Iplier bit his tongue, not wanting to get himself killed or Silver found out.

The man at the front of the room was one of Dark’s lieutenants, Lynel Bargs, he walked into the room, looking tired and bored. “Hello everyone, we’re looking for a freak who likes to dress up in white and black spandex. Would’a come in recently either with bullets in him or metal shrapnel from a little run-in with a couple of our officers. You see him, tell your director. He’s wanted for assault, and theft, he is also extremely dangerous. We believe he’s trying to take over several gangs in the area. So please for your safety, be careful and let us take care of you.”

No one came clean, Iplier tried to look as concerned as everyone else, but Iplier could see that a couple people were skeptical, even if they didn’t challenge what the young doctor knew to be one of Dark’s enforcers.

Some questions were asked, and they were dismissed, Iplier heading into his office and grabbing the phone, making a quick call to Abe. Thankfully the detective picked it up relatively quickly.

“Abe,” Iplier greeted. “Doc here, make sure you watch out for Silver, Dark’s trying to turn the town against him, make sure he keeps his nose clean for a little bit,”

“Can’t make that promise, but I’ll do what I can,” Abe promised.

“Thanks,” Dr. Iplier sighed, hanging up. He knew he couldn’t turn Silver over. That guy was the closest thing to hope that Egoton had gotten in decades, and if Silver turned up again, Iplier knew he was going to need help. Help that Iplier was more than willing to provide.

NEXT =>

[inkribbon796]

Jackieboy Man Origins: Chain Letter

Another Origin story, I did one for Silver a while back and I wanted to do one for Jackie.

Summary: For an Irish web developer, it’s been a long night. A long night that turns into a strange morning when he wakes up in the hospital and no memory of how he got there.

~::~ 25 Years Ago ~::~

   As a young man was dragging himself and his friend back from a haunted, twisted mansion in a half-dead hypnotic stupor, an Irishman was sitting at his computer in the dark early morning. Unseen to him, something in the wires of his computer were waiting, watching him for the slightest mental distraction, a fatigue to help it.

   For the man at the computer, it was late. Later than Sean usually liked to be up. Especially in the cabin he lived in with its thin walls and out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Ireland.

   At the moment he was getting a call from his old friend, Chase. Both of them worked as coders and web designers for the same company.

   “Look, it’s not that I don’t believe ye,” Sean told him. “It’s just that yer full of shite.”

   “Hey, I did what I could, an’ it’s not workin’,” Chase answered, contacting him over the phone.

   Sean audibly groaned,  “Fine, send it. If it’s because yer wife downloaded another virus again, I will personally come over to Brighton and kill ye and yer computer.”

   “If yer gonna buy me a new computer, then bring it,” Chase dared.

   Sean groaned, “I’ll tell you when I’m done with it. Prolly gonna be done later in the week. I’m tired as shit.”

   With a goodbye and a couple barbed insults, Sean hung up. He was about to shut down his computer and go to bed. Closing up programs until the email from Chase came in.

   “Come on,” the Irish man groaned, and against his better judgement opened up Chase’s email and started reading through some of Chase’s notes.

   Two paragraphs in though his eyes started to get itchy, and his throat began to feel dry.

   “I’m tired,” Sean muttered, not meaning to say it out loud.

   “I’m tired.”

   Sean looked around, trying to find the voice.

   “Tired”

   The Irishman was looking around for his glasses, his eyes tired and having problems focusing. It made it look like the whole monitor was going fuzzy with static.

   “Tried”

   “Ugh,” Sean groaned, scratching at his own throat. “Arrrghhh!”

   “Aren’t you just sooooooo tired?”

   Sean stared at the screen, hazy with static and it seemed to be reflecting his smiling face back at him.

   “Ch—” Sean scrambled for the phone. Something was wrong, as if thousands of strings were being tethered to every muscle in his body. “Chase—”

   The Irishman’s head hit his desk and then . . . like a stiff marionette puppet being suspended by strings . . . he got back up again.

   The next thing Sean became aware of was lying down on a slightly cold surface, with a beeping noise echoing off the walls.

   “Ugh,” Sean coughed out, more and more of his body aching by the second. “Am I dead?”

   “No, but you’ll wish you were when the guards get back in here.”

   Sean startled and saw another of his friends sitting in the chair next to him was one of his friends, and his roommate, Marvin. “Marv, the fook happened to your face.”

   Scored down Marvin’s face were long claw marks, stitched to hold the wound closed. Marvin glared at him, looking like he was about to punch him in the face.

   “Yah get inta a fight with a cat or somethin’,” Sean tried to joke.

   Marvin leaned over him, glaring murderously at the other Irishman, pointing to his own face. “You did this to me?”

   “What?” Sean tried to sit up, but found out that he had both hands closely handcuffed to his hospital bed.

   “Yah scratched up my like a fookin’ demon cat,” Marvin spat at him. “Ye almost tore yer own throat out, an’ then ye tried to take my eyes out.”

   “I didn’t,” Sean tried to defend, but a sinking pit formed in his stomach. As if his body knew what he’d been up to last night, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember a single thing that had happened. The web designer was pretty sure he’d fallen asleep at his desk while working. “I wouldn’t—”

   Suddenly, Sean felt like a lump was forming in his throat, and it itched. The urge to reach up and scratch the skin of his throat was eating at him. His brain spiraled into a panic attack, and it felt like his body was physically spinning out of control.

   It took Marvin, two nurses, and a doctor to calm Sean down again. Now with Sean knocked out, Marvin was left to think. He’d known Sean for a long time, and the last thing he expected the other man to be, was violent. Marvin was pretty sure Sean didn’t actually have a violent bone in his body. He could get loud and belligerent, but never violent.

   But thing Marvin had stumbled upon while entering the cabin, that wasn’t Sean. It had taken everything Marvin had to convince everyone that Sean wouldn’t have purposefully tried to burn the cabin down, or attacked Marvin or the officers. Which got harder when his blood work came back clean as a whistle.

   But everyone was letting Sean rest. Sean was still sleeping while Marvin had to think. Yeah, he’d talked Sean out of getting thrown in a cell for arson and attempted murder. But that wouldn’t stop it from happening again.

   Desperate for anything to help, Marvin ran out to a store he typically got his candles and magic supplies.

   “Hey, Marv,” the girl behind the counter smiled at him, using his stage name since he could count on one hand the people he told his actual name to.

   “Hey, Clara, ye still got those weird doll parts?” Marvin was already running towards the back of the shop.

   She just stared at him, “Yeah, why? You inta puppets now or somethin?”

   Then she got a good look at the scratches on his face, “What the hell, man, what happened ta yer face?”

   “If I told you you’d stop me,” he told her, and handed her the money to walk out with his kit.

   “Be careful,” she warned him.

   “Will do,” he promised, and then rushed back to the hospital, smuggling in his kit back into Sean’s room.

   “Okay,” he took a steadying breath, over Sean’s still unconscious body. “This is such a bad idea, but yah can thank me after it works.”

   Then Marvin began working, trying to make the doll look as close to what he saw in the cabin. The dark, glowing green eyes, the slit throat, the wraith-like form. Once he was done with the life-sized model, he waited for the nurses to make their rounds and check on Sean. Marvin smiling, having the doll hidden from them in the bathroom. Cause a life-sized model of a guy was a sure fire way to get him supervised in the room at least.

   Then Marvin waited for them to leave before setting up the room for his Plan A: exorcise his friend and roommate. If he needed a Plan B, Marvin would burn that bridge when he crossed it.

   “Hey, Jackaboy,” Marvin tried to smile. “You awake?”

   No answer.

   Marvin frowned, then he took out a spellbook, “Good.”

   He uttered a quick summoning spell, standing outside the containment spell he’d drawn on the floor. Sean began to convulse and scream, his skin literally buzzing.

   Sean’s screams were so loud, the door flew open as a passing nurse came in, “What the fook?”

   Then a force of pure static electricity shot out of Sean, as a creature that looked almost exactly like the Irishman still passed out on the hospital bed, except for the gash on his throat. The being of malic and chaos just floated in the air above Sean’s bed.

   “Well, well, looks like I found myself a street magician too big fer his own britches,” the creature cackled. The nurse was still at the door, staring at the creature in horror. It smiled back at her.

   “Hey, you almost got my friend arrested,” Marvin tried not to show any fear.

   “Still got time fer that,” it dismissed.

   “Here’s the deal, ye go into this image I made, and I don’t destroy you,” Marvin threatened.

   The doppelgänger just cackled, sounding like Sean just with a crackling, static-like tone to it. “An what? Let yah rip me apart, I don’t think so Two-Bit Copperfield.”

   “Yer going to do it, or I’ll make yah,” Marvin threatened.

   It just laughed again, the very air charging with static electricity, and the creature lightly touched down on the floor, looking at the symbols and lines that were keeping him in. “Yah pay for those magic tricks?”

   “None of your business,” Marvin finally started actually getting brave.

   It took one of its feet and stubbed out one of the lines, blowing back the power onto Marvin, who flew into the wall.

   “Cause, ye got yerself ripped off,” it cackled and moved closer to stand over Marvin’s pain wracked body, the magician slumped against the wall as muscles in his body shook and trembled with electricity.

   “When you want ta learn some real tricks, call me,” the thing took its claws and scored a name into Marvin’s arm: ANTI. Marvin screamed in pain and watched the cop that had been taking questions early bust in.

   Anti looked back at him, standing up and walking back over to Sean’s bed. Marvin heard Sean make a confused groan. “Well, this place has gotten a bit stale. I’ll be seeing you around Copperfield.”

   Marvin tried to pull himself back up, his arm burning. “Wait,” he growled.

   “Hey, get away from them,” the officer barked, rushing for Anti.

   “No, I don’t think so,” Anti grinned, his head almost glitching. “So, buddy, yah got a gun or a TASER? Cause I’m itching to have some fun.”

   There was a loud grunt, and everyone, even Anti, looked over to see Jack struggling weekly against the cuffs tethering him to the hospital bed.

   In the distraction, the officer grabbed onto Anti, trying to wrestle him onto the ground, and got jolted with visible electricity for his troubles. The officer dropped and convulsed on the ground, screaming in pain. The nurse closest to the door rushed to him.

   “Aww, what’s wrong?” Anti smiled at Sean as he walked over to him.

   “No,” Marvin panicked, trying to weakly scramble with his good arm for anything to make Anti go away.

   “I’ll be with you in a second, Copperfield,” Anti summoned a dagger from almost a violent tear in reality itself and threw it. It perfectly nailed Marvin’s other shoulder. Effectively disabling him. Marvin screamed.

   Another dagger got the mannequin Marvin had made, electricity catching it on fire. “And there we go,” Anti’s smile got wider, “get rid of that eyesore.”

   With another step, Anti was leaning over Sean, barely out of reach as Sean. “Hello, well, it has been fun, but I’m tired of you. So, let’s have a little fun with you and your friends before I go.”

   “Get away from them,” Sean threatened.

   “Oh? Puny little human,” Anti cackled, grabbing the Irishman still cuffed to the hospital bed and started to jolt him. As the glitch demon shocked and coursed electricity through him, his whole body glitched the very air around him. “What ye gonna do about it?”

   Sean screamed and sudden his whole body seemed to move, as if every part of his body was just vibrating and shaking, rattled by the electricity.

   Three things happened almost at the same time, and to Marvin’s perspective they did. Time seemed to slow down as Anti reached for his throat. Sean gave a final tug and the cuffs came free. As quick as he could, Sean hit Anti in the face, what felt like electricity coming off his entire arm, but he didn’t see anything.

   The glitch demon recoiled back, mostly in shock, holding the side of his face and just staring at the Irishman who was struggling to get out of the hospital bed and to get in front of Marvin. Adrenaline was coursing through his body, keeping him upright.

   “Yer goin’ ta regret that,” Anti warned.

   “Get away from him,” Sean told him. “Yer not gonna hurt him again.”

   Anti cackled, his body glitching, “What are yeh goin’ ta do? Bleed on me?”

   Sean took a nervous step back, almost stepping on Marvin’s leg, Marvin was able to pick himself up enough to lean against Sean’s legs, placing a hand on the back of his leg, and starting to draw something, his hand shaking as he screamed out in pain.

   “When I kill you, I’ll enjoy it,” Anti promised.

   “If I hit yah once, I can hit ye again,” Sean threatened, just hoping that his body wasn’t nearly as hurt as he thought it was. The police officer seemed to finally be getting up, coughing and holding his arm. Sean hoped it might help get Anti under control, even if he didn’t think whatever Anti was could even be arrested.

   Anti just walked over, “I will enjoy tearing you apart.”

   Sean winded back for another punch, but when he tried to hit Anti, the glitch just stepped to the side. Giving Sean an amused, chortle.

   “Little fly,” Anti chuckled, the glitch demon’s eyes glowing, the iris of his mostly black eyes green. “Somethin’s never change.”

   Then, Anti scratched Sean across the chest, making him stumble back as Anti floated above him and gave him a smug look. Sean already felt drained, a mix of the painkillers, his throat, and the fact that he’s been mentally out of it for hours. But his body also felt absolutely wired with adrenaline.

   He lifted his arms but Anti froze, jolted by something. His eyes almost crackling with static. “You!” he snarled at Marvin. “What’d yah do ta me?”

   Marvin let out a chuckle. “Plan B, thanks fer jumping outta my friend.”

   With a harsh scream, Anti began to glitch and distort, screaming as he was trying to reach out for Jackie but burst into static and seeming disappeared.

   “Is he dead?” Sean gasped.

   “Prolly not,” Marvin coughed. “Should leave us alone fer a while, though,” Marvin slumped over onto the ground. Sean just sat down as two nurses raised over to them.

   “Well kid, yah off the hook,” the officer said. “I don’t think the boys are gunna take ghosts as an excuse. Sorry I couldn’ta been ‘a useful back there.”

   “No prob,” Sean told him. “I’m tired, can I got ta bed?”

   “Try to stay with me a bit longer,” the nurse told him, checking his eyes and all the deep scratches on him. The nurse that had been treating the police officer was now treating Marvin, calling on the radio for back up. Sean’s tied mind losing the voice in all the medical jargon.

   “What’dya do back there?” The officer asked. “I lost sight of yah and suddenly yah were in front’a yer friend.”

   “I just hit him, think it surprised him,” Sean admitted. “Marv’s got a spellbook or whatever the hell he calls it.”

   Looking over, Sean saw the cheap journal Marvin used to store and record his “notes” lying all the way across the room. “Give me a sec,” Sean said. “Maybe Marve took some notes on the bastard.”

   “Wait, you shouldn’t,” the nurse began but Sean was already up.

   He took a couple steps and faster than his brain could process it, Sean had slammed into the opposite wall, knocking him flat on his back. At the sudden loss of air in his lungs, Sean began coughing, trying to roll over but found that the adrenaline in his body was already starting to drain out. “Ugh,” Sean groaned in pain.

   The room went dead silent.

   Then, the nurse swore. “Did you just?”

   “Ugh, everything hurts,” Sean complained, and then passed out.

   Next thing Sean process was that he was in a new room, about three doctors in the room and sensors monitoring his pain. But at least, he had enough painkiller not to feel how absolutely destroyed his body probably was.

   “Hey, jackaboy,” Marvin greeted, he was sitting next to him, his shoulder and arms bandaged up. “So, quick question, yah have any secret identities I should know about?”

   “No, why?” Sean asked, already feeling pretty loopy.

   “Good, cause I’m pretty sure some suits have been in here, and they walked away with a lot of yer blood,” Marvin told him. “Mine too.”

   “Pretty sure, they can’t do that,” Sean reminded.

   “Well they just did,” Marvin told him, “I tried to fight them, but they were about to arrest me if I didn’t comply.”

   “Fer what? Doin’ magic without a license?” Sean tried to joke.

   “No, cause you went 0 to 15 with just yer feet, before colliding with a wall and took a chunk outta the plaster,” Marvin told him.

   “Huh, yah’d think I’d remember that,” Sean thought out loud. “But hey, if I did, I can maybe become a superhero or somthin’. Wouldn’t that be funny?”

   “He awake?” a woman’s voice got Sean’s attention.

   “An’ drugged ta hell,” Marvin warned.

   “Then this won’t take long,” she said and walked over to where Sean could actually see her.

   “Hey,” Sean smiled.

   “You’re Sean McLoughlin, from Althone, Ireland?” she looked at him, studying him up and down.

   “Yeah?” Sean answered. “Who’s askin’? Is this about the wall I broke?”

   “We’re more concerned with how the wall broke, than who broke it,” she corrected.

   “Shit,” Sean shrugged, immediately regretting it because of how sore he still was, even with the painkillers. “Ow. Why did I do that?”

   “Are you still hurt?” she asked.

   “Nah, it’s just sore,” Sean correct. “What were we talking about?”

   The woman didn’t seem to even be frustrated. “Do you know what happened, Mr. McLoughlin?”

   “Nah,” Sean dismissed. “I think there was some glitchy reject video game character, an’ now everythin’ should hurt, but doesn’t cause’a these awesome drugs.”

   She looked at Marvin, but Marvin shrugged, “Hey, guy’s as high as a kite, what do ye want from me?”

   “Mr. McLoughlin, my name is Agent Laine,” she told him.

   “Kay,” Sean smiled.

   “We’ll let you get back to sleep,” Sara told him. “I’ll be back.”

   “Hopefully with an actually reason to take our blood,” Marvin reminded.

   “Only if we find anything out of the ordinary,” she said and left.

   “Finally,” Marvin growled.

   “She doesn’t seem nice,” Sean commented.

   “Alright, you might not remember this, but last night you moved fast, like superhuman fast, and I did actual magic. It was amazing.” Marvin smiled. “Unfortunately the suits figured out.”

   Sean just laughed, “Yeah right, an’ I’m a superhero.”

   Marvin shrugged, “Sleep it off, I’ll try and keep the suits from locking you in a padded cell.”

   “Yer the best, Marv,” Sean told him, and they just kept talking, more joking than anything else until Sean got tired again.

   In five days Sean would run through town in a colorful, oversized hoodie and an old Halloween mask he’d find in Marvin’s box of things. In five days, Sean would race around the city, testing out his newfound super speed.

   But today there were just two friends in an isolated room, talking and laughing. Both of them enjoying the little bit of peace they had while it lasted.

[inkribbon796]

Egoton Origins: The Silver Shepherd

Chapter 1: When the Void Looks Back

~::~25 Years Ago~::~

    Mark had been living in Egoton as far back as he could remember. He’d been born in Hawaii, but had lived his whole life here. Egoton, in the kindest regards was one of the worst places to live. It was under the heel of a creature that couldn’t die, and an equally crazy reporter who ran the news and seemed to keep everyone in line.

    His life was spiraling out of control and even at 21, he felt like he was staring at the uncaring jaws of death. He’d just come out from a surgery to get rid of a tumor a couple months ago. So after a rather terrifying existential nightmare of realizing that he’d done nothing with his life, he was trying to figure out how to fix it.

    He’d started going back to class again, probably shouldn’t be but he was so close to the end of the year and didn’t want his grades to tank.

    So he was walking from the bus stop to his apartment he shared with four other guys. He just wanted to go home and take a nap. Maybe play some Quake mods after he finished up his homework.

    “Fire!” Someone screamed.

    As if set off by some primal urge, Mark ran towards the sound, his stomach hurt a bit but after controlling his speed and movement for a bit he made it into an alleyway where there wasn’t a fire. Someone was being attacked.

    The guy looked like one of Dark’s mafia enforcers. He had some young woman that looked about Mark’s age backed up into the corner of the alleyway.

    To Mark’s chagrin, he did hesitate, but as the woman kept begging to let her go and the guy was being a creep, he finally did move. Mark crept up as slowly as possible, and carefully grabbed a nearby pipe from a bunch of trash bags near the mouth of the alley.

    He had one shot really, the guy had a knife in his hands, and Mark wasn’t in the best of shape since his surgery. The girl either didn’t realize he was there, or was doing her part to not sell him out.

    “Let me go,” she tried to push him off.

    “You’re not going anywhere,” he spat.

    Mark quickly hit the guy on the head and he just went down. “Go,” he told the woman.

    “Thank you so much,” she said, already starting to walk over the unconscious gangster’s body.

    “Just go,” he urged, and tried to leave as quickly as possible, burying the pipe he’d taken back with the others and trying to escape as fast as his body would let him. Mark didn’t look behind him or stop fleeing until he was in his apartment, deadbolting it and finally catching his breath.

    It was only then that Mark realized how much he was shaking. Carefully limping over to the couch and sitting down. He needed a nap, badly, and maybe when he woke up his body would stop shaking.

    Mark didn’t tell anyone what had happened. He didn’t want the press, and he knew his friends weren’t involved with Dark or his network, but he didn’t want to chance someone overhearing something.

    The bigger problem, at least for Mark, was that he found himself looking for trouble. It took a couple more weeks for him to figure out that he hadn’t been shaking just because of fear or because he was coming off a surgery.

    It was the adrenaline.

    Mark couldn’t quite put his finger on why beating a mafia guy was the thing that seemed to get his blood pumping. But the fact of the matter was that Mark found himself barely a month after saving the woman, who he hadn’t run into again, looking for more of Dark’s enforcers. It was dark, late at night. Honestly Mark shouldn’t be out here, but no one else was going to do anything else about Dark and his thugs. So Mark had to do something. Sometimes it felt like he was the only one who could.

    So Mark and a friend were investigating one of the warehouses that Dark was known to almost never visit. Maybe once in a blue moon, but in Mark’s paltry research he knew that there was a warehouse Dark worked out of, but which? Mark had no idea. All he knew was that it wasn’t the one he was at right now.

    “Hey, Mark,” Daniel whispered as he crept up, finally catching up to him. Daniel was one of Mark’s roommates, and so far the only of them that Mark had told what he was starting to do on the weekends. Both of them were in masks. Mark in a black and white outfit that looked more like an alien than he intended. Daniel was in a blue outfit with a cyan-colored mask and sash.

    “Not my name, Iblis,” Mark hissed.

    Even though the mask, Mark saw him roll his eyes. “Fine, Silver, whatever.”

    The two guys Mark was watching finished loading the boxes into the back of a covered truck.

    “This is a bad idea,” Daniel reminded him.

    “Go home, then,” Mark whispered, and smiled as the two enforcers left the truck alone to go back inside. “I got this.”

    Mark crept towards the truck, Daniel trying to call after him but Mark was already at the side of the covered truck and climb into the back. He was pretty sure he was alone until he heard the faint thud of Daniel climbing into the truck with him.

    “Fancy seeing you here,” Mark whispered, smiling.

    “Shut up,” Daniel scoffed. “This is dumb. We shouldn’t be here.”

    “We’ll be gone before they even know we’re here,” Mark promised, already starting to check the boxes. The first box he opened however was empty. So were the next five.

    “Why are they all empty,” Mark realized.

    Then the two heard voices as the doors locked. Plunging the two of them into darkness, but from the slightest sliver of light from the nearby street lights outside. Mark was thankful it was dark, because he could feel Daniel glaring at him.

    “Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” Mark told him quietly. “As long as we don’t get taken to the main warehouse, we’re good.”

    “What are we supposed to do?” Daniel spat. “You got us into this mess, so get us back out.”

    “We wait for them to open the door and knock them out,” Mark made sure to still talk quietly, not waiting to tip off their presence to the drivers of the truck. It took forever, enough time for Daniel to stop being so furious with him, and the last part of the trip was a steep incline.

    Finally, there was a creaking and metallic grinding sound. Then, the truck stopped.

    Mark and Daniel braced, both of them creeping towards the door.

    “Alright,” one of the enforcers groaned. “It’s late, I hate this place.”

    “Can’t believe the bastard lives here,” the other enforcer chuckled nervously. “Place gives me the—”

    The door opened and Mark smiled as he saw that the two enforcers were standing close enough. Mark and Daniel grabbed an enforcer each and pulled them into the truck, muting them and choking them out so they couldn’t raise an alarm. Mark struggled to close the door a bit to muffle the sound.

    Once they were taken care of, Mark opened the door all the way, and they stepped out in what looked like a poorly constructed hangerbay. Like it had been meant to hold horses and carriages and instead now held cars. The ground was compacted dirt, two large windows at horse height that looked like they could be opened as doors to take horses through. The place felt like it should reek of mold and old money. But it didn’t smell like anything.

    They didn’t get far before everything went south. Mark could barely take the triumphant smile from their entry off his face before the world began to turn into shades of gray. Mark froze, as a ringing echoed shrilly off every surface around him.

    Daniel cursed, immediately turning to the closest door, which was the huge garage door the truck had entered through. He barely made it two steps, Mark trying to cover Daniel’s back, but it was much too late.

    Mark would later come to his own conclusion that Dark probably knew they were there when they entered the Manor. The more they ran, the further the front door got from them. Mark finally grabbed Daniel, pinning him in place, “We’re just wearing ourselves out.”

    “He’s going to,” Daniel spat back.

    “I’d rather do this here, than half-dead in an endless corridor,” Mark looked around, trying to keep Daniel behind him.

    After a full minute, Mark felt goosebumps all over his body, and Daniel startled. Mark looked behind them, and in between the two vigilantes and the door was Dark. The creature looked more like some Eldritch monster wearing a human skin suit. Its neck gave two deafening snaps as Dark’s neck snapped from side to side.

    Mark almost jumped out of his own skin, trying to get Daniel away from the inhuman being. The realization of how human and mortal not only Mark was, but how vulnerable Daniel was hit him like a truck. Suddenly all the rumors about him seemed horrifyingly true as both vigilantes were grabbed by shadowy wispy tendrils. Both of them were painfully squeezed.

    Dark smiled, looking at the two intruders up and down before he paced around them. “Well I’m used to masks,” Dark said, surprising Mark by the low human voice that came from such a clearly inhuman creature. “Have to say, the spandex is new.”

    “What?” Mark said, Dark snapped his head to look at Mark.

    Maybe it was the shock, or the fact that his brain had processed that he was going to die and didn’t bother telling him, but he opened his mouth and said the dumbest thing ever. “What are you?”

    Even Mark was surprised by his own sudden fearlessness.

    Daniel let out a scream, as Dark began to tighten his hold on Daniel. Dark, for his part, calmly stared at Mark. Even if vigilante could see the malice and bottomless pit inside the entity’s eyes, as if bubbling just under the surface.

    “Who are you?” Dark asked. “Don’t make me kill your friend.”

    Mark felt nauseous, unable to help or protect Daniel, “You’re going to kill us anyways.”

    Dark grinned evilly, one of his fingers going to the bottom of Mark’s silver mask, “Oh, I can do far worse than kill you.”

    Then, slowly he started to lift Mark’s mask, and Mark absolutely panicked. He reacted without thought, although even if Mark had thought of the situation for longer than a second, he didn’t really know what else he could have done. In an act of terrified stupidity, Mark bit his hand.

    Two things happened. First, Mark had the sensation that he’d bitten into something akin to clay. Second, Dark looked honestly surprised for a second, before he looked absolutely furious.

    Dark threw Mark into Daniel, knocking them both down onto the ground. “I was going to just kill you two,” Dark roared at them. “But it looks like mercy’s off the table boys. I’ll let the House have you instead!”

    Mark used what little sense he had left to grab onto Daniel’s cape, the first part of him he could reach, and the whole world went black as Mark had the sensation he was falling. It felt like he was being ripped away from Daniel and Mark felt himself scream rather than hear it.

    Time seemed to unfold, as if he had lived a whole lifetime he didn’t remember experiencing, but it only lasted a second. He fell through what looked like red mist that seemed to be trying to stick to his clothing. Then, he felt himself hit the ground and he blacked out.

NEXT => Chapter 2

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Hope you guys like it.

I want to say, this one took some time to make, but I decided that this was the origin I was going with because not including Iblis would have been a tragedy and a betrayal of the lore of Silver and I refused to commit either travestry.