The Perfect Run

Aliens.

Of course it would be aliens! Everything made perfect sense now! Still, Ryan wondered if these visitors would look like tiny grey dwares, or humans with ridged foreheads. If the eight-meters tall monster in the snow was any indication though, they were probably cold-blooded.

Wait… Ryan glanced at the monstrous creature’s corpse, and came to a sudden realization.

“I knew it!” He shouted, pointing a finger at the colossal beast. “I knew it was the Reptilians!”

These scaled bastards had tried to infiltrate human governments to destroy democracy!

“It can’t be aliens,” Shroud said in denial. “Maybe the Alchemist… maybe she’s building a spaceship to leave the planet?”

“That piece of crap obviously crashed years ago,” Sarin pointed out. “If I listen well to our jackass-in-chief, a good four-fifths of it is buried in the ice. Who would build a ship like that?”

“We… we know Elixirs came from alien dimensions,” Len said, trying to scan the ship with her power armor. “It’s… it’s not impossible.”

Shroud still shook his head. “Can’t be aliens.”

He could accept the existence of a time-traveler, but not extraterrestrial visitors?

In any case, Ryan activated his time-stop as his group debated. Although he sensed an opposing force struggling back against his power, the icy wasteland turned violet to his relief. Since the strange purple lightning bolts in the alien skies kept moving in the frozen time, Ryan guessed they were made of Violet Flux.

Much like his experience in Monaco, his time-stop would work as long as the Resonators kept the portal open, allowing him to converge the Purple World with this pocket dimension.

But something else caught the courier’s attention. The Black Flux particles produced by his armor seemed to devour the space around them, creating tiny, almost invisible cracks in the fabric of reality itself.

“Huh?” Ryan said as time resumed. Though the black particles vanished, the damage they had caused remained.

“What is it, Riri?” Len asked, noticing his confusion.

“It seems my power has an anomalous effect on this thin place.” Come to think of it, Ryan remembered Black Flux consuming Alphonse ‘Fallout’ Manada’s radioactive Red Flux during their fight.

All hints so far indicated that the Black Ultimate One had given the courier the power to kill what couldn’t die. But how far could you push that definition? Could you kill energy? Items? Ideas?

Black powers were paradoxes, and didn’t follow the rules. Lightning Butt himself had become more like an animated statue than a man, and yet Ryan’s power could damage him. It could even kill a ghost.

Maybe it could kill Elixirs, or the alien energies they produced.

“That power gives me a headache,” Ryan said, deciding to prepare his team for battle. Sunshine and See-Through observed the dome cautiously, Sarin looked tense, Len and the didn’t hide their anxiety, and Mr. Wave barely restrained himself from going in guns-blazing. “Alright mooks listen up, who’s never explored a spooky alien spaceship among you? Raise your hand if this is your first time.”

Everyone raised their hand, except Ryan and Mr. Wave. “Mr. Wave caused the Fermi paradox,” the genome explained. “When alien civilizations see Mr. Wave, they go extinct.”

“Riri, why didn’t you raise your hand?” Len asked.

Sarin looked at Ryan with skepticism, which wounded the courier’s heart. “You saw aliens before, oh great and powerful leader?”

“Yes, but their ship was round and flatter.” Also, the passengers had kept trying to pay him in seashells for some reason. “In any case, rule number one for spaceships, and the most important one by far: don’t touch the eggs. A good egg is a boiled egg.”

The gasped. “But Sifu, eggs are cute and rounded!”

“Eggs are the enemy, soldier!” Ryan snarled with the passion of a drill sergeant, the adopting a military salute. “Any egg found in an alien ship is a potential W.M.D.! Boil them all!”

“Y-yes, Sifu!”

“Second rule, we don’t split up. Ever.”

“It wouldn’t change much,” Mr. Wave boasted. “Even if Mr. Wave faces an army alone, they will still be outnumbered.”

“I agree,” Ryan conceded, “but this is the principle of the thing.”

“I am usually more fond of dividing forces to cover a greater area, but in this case numbers might prove safer,” Leo agreed. “We have no idea what to expect within.”

“Which way do we use to move in?” Shroud asked, glancing at the blast doors.

“Mmm…” Ryan approached the gates to observe them. On a closer look, while the blast doors were mostly made of the same black metal as the rest of the ship, they showed hints of having been breached in the past. Someone plugged the cracks with a standard steel alloy. A cursory scan from his armor told the courier that the doors could probably survive extreme conditions such as atmospheric reentry. “Sunshine, we might need a solar eruption or two.”

“I see another perfectly good entrance up there,” Sarin said, pointing a finger at the hole in the ship’s metal dome. “If the lizard blasted his way out, then it means that path is clear, right?”

“Possibly,” Shroud conceded. “But we might find workers repairing the damaged area.”

“What bothers me is that nobody came to intercept us,” Hargraves said, his radiance dimming for an instant. “I expected more activity in the Alchemist’s base of operation, but the area looks deceptively empty.”

“Perhaps the thing killed everyone on its way out,” Sarin guessed.

killed the creature? The gash that slew it came from a claw. “I am tempted,” Ryan said. “On one hand, blowing our own hole would be good and proper. But using the

until we can figure the truth out,” Hargraves

of a mad scientist along the way. She owes me more than a decade of pain

her knowledge, there’s no way I’m leaving the person responsible for Last Easter unmolested. She has far too much blood on her

our scorn,” Sunshine conceded. “But we clearly only know a small piece of the full truth, and an open conflict will lead us nowhere. Let us act cautiously, figure out what is happening, and

out, and the group settled on

and final rule then. If it looks cute and cuddly…”

bear inside the hole, followed by Shroud, Mr. Wave, and Leo the Living Sun. Shortie used streams of pressurized water

central platform equipped with strange biomechanical devices, while the other part led to smashed blast doors. The debris of the dome’s ceiling glittered at the bottom of the sphere,

reminded Ryan of Mechron’s own holographic orbital monitoring systems, albeit far more advanced and damaged. The projections flickered,

entrance. Meanwhile, the courier and the Carnival members checked out the projections and tried to make sense out

counted seven holograms, each using different arrays of colors; each representing strange and wonderful

shapeless cloud that lacked substance and permanency. It was as feeble and immaculate as a dream, but sometimes colored splashes gave it variety. A red star here, a green bird there. These phantom images only existed for an instant before returning to the white, and the shapeless blob

of nuclear chaos burnt at its center, the first and greatest sun illuminating the universe; and when

stickers made of different matter: steel, glass, iron, stone, gold, zinc, water, gas… all metals, all liquids, all inorganic matters Ryan knew of were represented there. Other stickers contained substances he had never

It was the strangest of them all, a patchwork of chaotic ideas made real. Nothing unified the creatures and places

a planet, but one where everything was alive. A pulsating cell with seas of green slime, teeth mountains, and forests of blood vessels. The atmosphere itself

blue sphere of data, pictures, and numbers; a compendium holding all knowledge and information that ever was, is, and would ever be. The azure glow of a supreme godmind cast the light of enlightenment like a lighthouse in the night, while its neural

familiar violet expanse of compressed space and strange mirrors closed this alien panorama, all overseen by an

recognizing the Purple World from his

head to snap in

float amidst the holograms, swiftly pointed a finger at the Orange

of a substance that the courier had already seen before.

remind you of anything?” Shroud asked

well. The substances that surrounded it were all metals, from iron to bronze and

body,” Leo Hargraves whispered, astonished. “It’s the same color, the same texture… I would wager

explanation for why Frank the Mad’s ability to absorb these alloys had seemed to affect the invincible warlord. But doubt always remained, because how could an invincible metal make one immune

it suddenly

from the Orange World, the source of all inorganic material. A world made only

does not exist in

A world without time.

“Adamantine…” Ryan whispered.

down on him from his vantage point.

from Greek mythology, said to be harder than anything? Did nobody

creating an anomaly where he alone could affect causality. But that substance, the

held no sway. From its location in the cube, it

in

an Orange,” Sunshine whispered to himself. “I always wondered

“Julie Costa?” Ryan asked.

answered, his voice more somber than usual. “Create new life, or give

she could make contact with him,” Sunshine said, “but it may be that Julie’s power

asked, having clearly done his research.

had a latent cancer before

not eat or breathe, but I know for a fact that he sleeps, creepily so. There are still

a slow, almost imperceptible degradation. It

defense either. Frank could affect Augustus, as did Livia’s time-skipping.

then Frank the Mad might be the only person capable of harming Augustus,” Shroud said, “or whatever ability you

the other end of the bridge,

their way into the next room

the metal sphere outside, but large enough to house workstations, biomechanical servers, and heart-shaped vats full of swirling liquid. Alien orange crystal growths had started taking over the ceiling like an infection, while piles of Wonderboxes lined up the southern wall. A large

immediately moved to

opened a wonderbox,

more attention to the strange vats, finding seven of them north of the laboratory. Each contained gallons of Elixir, one for each of the seven

someone had connected Earth technology to alien devices with biomechanical technology. All of them joined up in a central computer, equipped with large control panels and a comfy chair. Though energy still flowed into

Sunshine asked Shroud, as they immediately moved to secure

appeared on the screen. “It’s password-protected, and that machine is clearly Genius tech of some kind. It might take me a while to figure

him aside, and took the seat for his own. How the chair managed not to crumble beneath a seven hundred kilos bear of mass destruction, Ryan would never understand, but

Shroud asked in shock, as Len

a psyche profile of the Alchemist

observing the Blue Elixir through the membrane separating it from the outside world. To his surprise,

exclamation point reinforces security, and since the Alchemist likened herself to a god

guess, nerd,” Sarin replied, unimpressed. She kept searching through the Wonderboxes like a child through Christmas

encrypted, but I can figure it out!”

to my suit’s computer?” Len asked the manbear. “This… this may contain all

glancing at Mr. Wave. The laser genome had moved in front of the

the walls. The corridor beyond had no lamp to light it, leaving only an abyss of darkness. “Too

precious to be left undefended, and yet nobody intercepted us. Something happened here,