“You should come with us,” a collection of voices, identical to the first Guards, said from behind them.
Atomik Lad’s fist clenched and unclenched.
They’re only doing their jobs
, he reminded himself.
Atomik Powers would not be nice
. He caught sight of Rachel in the corner of his eyes.
Too close anyway
.
“Fine,” Rachel said. “We’ll go with you, but only so we can bitch out your boss. I suggest getting your resumes in order.”
Giant Mall Guard hands wrapped around their arms and lifted them off the ground and shoved cloths over their mouths. It only took a few seconds for everything to go dark.
__________
“Ah, so it’s an old fashioned stare down, eh?” Nuklear Man said to himself. Variel’s unflinching blackness was exactly far enough away for an old fashioned stare down. Or an old fashioned gun fight, depending on the circumstances. This was the former though.
“Yessir, the ol’ stare down,” Nuklear Man said. “As much a battle of wits as it is a battle of nerves. It ain’t for the weak hearted or the weak stomached. Nosir, this is a conflict for steel willed do-or-die manly men. ‘Cause the first guy to crack, the first guy to show even the slightest, oh so
tiniest
hint of weakness, that guy’s a goner. There ain’t no turnin’ back. Once you start a stare down, especially these here old fashioned ones, it can’t finish until one of the starer downers is no more.” Nuklear Man was silent. Complex mathematics swirled through his mind. “Wait a second. Two men enter, one man leaves?! Why, that means I’ve only got a fifty-fifty chance at survival! This is utter madness! What kind of
idiot
enters into a contract of death like this?! I’ll be damned if I’ll be the first to lose my stoic resolve. I'll show that Variel. I’ll just bash him now while he ain’t expecting it!”
Nuklear Man raced to Variel like a golden bullet.
Until he came to a screeching halt mere inches from his target.
Variel lowered his gaze to the Hero. Nuklear Man was suspended in mid-air and still in his
Charge!
pose.
He looked up at Variel’s silvery eyes. “Gah! You’re even weirder lookin’ up close.”
No response.
“Hey, I was all flying at ya fast and stuff. What’s the deal, why haven’t I bashed you yet?”
“This is why,” Variel’s inverse voice answered simply.
Nuklear Man felt an incredible weight press down on him. “Ergh,” he uttered while trying to stay afloat. After about a second he was unable to mount much of an offensive against the invisible force. He slammed head-first into the already thoroughly beaten ground. “Ouff,” he grumbled through a face full of dirt.
“I’m afraid, Arel, that you are going to find it difficult to defeat me when you cannot so much as move,” Variel unsaid.
Nuklear Man’s body quivered in a failed attempt to stand.
“I’ve been watching you. I know now that you can only access the smallest fraction of your true power at this time. And it’s not nearly enough to resist my dimensional powers. I have warped the space around you into an irresistible gravitational pull. Just relax. Lord Nihel will be along soon enough to transfer your star essence to me. And then I will have what I’ve always deserved. Equality. No longer relegated to the role of head slave. The heavens will bow to me. Fate will bend to my will.”
Nuklear Man was able to turn his head to one side so he could speak. “What is with you guys and all this power stuff? I mean, I know I’m the strongest mo-fo on this rock and everything, and that everyone else on it is incredibly jealous of me but unable to act on said jealousy ‘cause they fear me even more than they envy me, but geez. You guys have really taken it to the extreme. Especially with this whole Using My Insignia thing. I’m serious about suing, you know.”
Variel nongrumbled and pushed Nuklear Man deeper into the ground.
“You’re only making it worse on yourself,” Nuklear Man grunted.
Variel specifically pushed the Hero’s head down.
“Ah!
I’ve got dirt in my eye. Ow!” C’mon, let me up!”
Nothing.
“I’m not kidding, this hurts!” Still nothing. “Fine. Ouch, ouch, be that way!” Nuklear Man’s mighty arms shook with effort.
Variel willed more gravity to oppress Nuklear Man.
“I’m serious, this really
hurts
!” Nuklear Man said through clenched teeth. He had already managed to adopt a push up like position.
Variel ungrowled. “I won’t let you escape! I’m too close. I will not endure Nihel’s heel any longer!” He shifted from the strain of exerting his spatial manipulations to their fullest extent.
Nuklear Man’s Plazma Aura rippled and flared into an instant of perfected harmony. He shrugged off Variel’s shackles and stood. “Man,” he said and rubbed his eye. “That could’ve scratched my retina and permanently damaged my vision. You should be ashamed.” He blinked a few times and wiped away a tear. “Lucky for you, I’m darned invincible.” He jumped to a Plazma Beam charging pose. “But unlucky for you, I also happen to be darned invincible! Hoo-ah!”
Variel unsighed. “It’s going to be a pleasure ripping your powers from you.”
“It’ll be more of a pleasure for me to PLAZMAAA BEAM!” The beam wavered at Variel and twisted around him. It traveled on and blasted the hell out of the foreman’s abandoned office some distance behind him. “Hm,” Nuklear Man said. “That was unexpected.” He examined his hands. “No more screw ups, got it? Good. Now then. PLAZMAAA BEAM!”
It wrapped around Variel and shot off to his right utterly obliterating a group of Port-a-Potties.
“Are you quite finished?” Variel asked.
“Well. Yeah, that’s about all I’ve got up my sleeves,” Nuklear Man said.
“Glad to hear that you have come to your senses.” Variel raised one arm parallel with the ground, though it was hard to distinguish it from the rest of his voidness at Nuklear Man’s angle. He pointed at the Golden Guardian.
A man-sized bubble appeared at the blackness of his finger. It was visible only by the effect that it played with the light traveling through it. The scenery on the other side looked like it was pinched through a lens that stretched images an infinite distance at the center.
“Whoa, trippy,” Nuklear Man commented.
“Isn’t it?” Variel unasked. The sphere shot to Nuklear Man. It made a continuous tearing noise, like a thunder crack that wouldn’t quite finish, as it rushed through the air. It struck Nuklear Man. He felt his body curve itself inside out and back again. It was like becoming a Picasso painting. The sphere pulsed and disappeared. Nuklear Man fell to one knee. He felt like most of his internal organs had been rearranged with a rusty chainsaw.
“So that was the most painful thing ever,” he groaned while barely holding on to consciousness.
“No,” Variel unanswered. “But you’ll wish it
had
been.”
Nuklear Man’s body floated but not by his will. His limbs hanged limply and his face was twisted in agony.
“You see, Arel. That was merely what happens when a body of normative space is intersected by more dimensions than it was ever intended to.”
“Let’s not do that again,” Nuklear Man weakly pleaded as Variel drew him closer to his blackness.
“Don’t worry, we won’t.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“Instead, we shall see what happens when a body of normative space travels into null space, a dimension without dimension. No beginning, without even existence itself.” Nuklear Man hung in mid-air mere inches from Variel’s implausible body. “If this doesn’t kill you, it’ll at least serve as an impenetrable prison for you until Lord Nihel arrives. Nothing can escape it. Not even your power, for there is nothing from which to escape.”
Nuklear Man squirmed in resistance. The idea was to throw a mountain-breaking punch or two, but the majority of the effort was lost somewhere along the way. Instead, Nuklear Man floated straight into the depths of Variel’s voidness and was gone.
__________
Atomik Lad was vaguely aware of himself floating in a sea of darkness. His first reaction was to lose this awareness and slip back into the warm embrace of sweet, sweet sleep. Unfortunately, in the final moments of his vague awareness, he became more aware that he was sitting up which served only to further sharpen his awareness in general.
Take for instance: he became aware of other bodies with him in the darkness. That wasn’t normal.
And then there were his hands to think about. All bound at the wrist and tied up behind the back of his chair. That wasn’t normal by a whole lot.
The darkness was attacked by a gang of miscreant light rays from the wall that he turned out to be facing. He cringed and looked away to bide time for his eyes to recover from the light speed assault.
“Is my aura of power too much for your minds to comprehend?” a rasping wheeze of a voice said from somewhere in the vicinity of the blinding wall of light.
“What?” Norman asked from the ex-sidekick’s left.
“Ah’ll show ye an aura of power,” Angus grumbled from in front of him.
“Hai,” Shiro said, sounding as if he and Angus were right next to each other.
Atomik Lad chanced another look at the light wall. He had to squint and it still hurt his head. The wall was a collection of small gray and white screens that looked down at storefronts all over the Mall’s bowels. Happy shoppers walked into and out of their frames in a maddening web of movement. He began to see meaning in the chaos. One shopper leaves a Shoe Junction as another enters a Frame Junction and yet another pauses in front of a Pet Junction—it was clear now. The Mall, laws of conservation of consumers, universal constants of sales, coefficients of returns, a microcosm of all reality. Every cog working in perfect symmetry with every other piece of the great machine without any one element having the slightest concept of its place in the larger scheme of Being!
But it was probably just the ether talking.
He could make out a humanoid silhouette in the middle of the wall of light-epiphanies. It was sitting down behind a huge desk and seemed absurdly frail, the skull was far too large for the neck that supported it. He turned to his right. Rachel was there, tied to a chair just like Norman and himself.
Which isn’t to say that Angus and Shiro weren’t tied, because they were. It’s just that they were each strapped to small brightly colored plastic chairs. The kind a little girl would use at a tea party. Atomik Lad fixed his attention on them for a few seconds while his mind tried to reconcile what it was being told. Namely: Shiro was wearing a tuxedo while Angus was wearing a white dress. They looked like some sort of wedding cake decoration gone horribly,
horribly
wrong. He turned to Norman and whispered, “Did I miss something?” with a nod to their diminutive compatriots.
“Silence!” the voice barked. Or wheezed. But it was a mean-hearted wheeze, you can be sure of that. The wraith-like figure rose and leaned on its desk. “Brave souls you may be, but the fool’s path has brought you here.”
“What’s he talking about?” Rachel asked.
“Such insolence,” he whisper-wheezed. Mort shambled from behind his desk, always certain to keep one frail hand on it for support, and shakily made his way to Rachel. He leaned way too close for her taste.
“You ever hear of a Circle of Comfort?” she said while trying to keep the maximum possible distance between herself and Mort even though she was tied to a chair.
“Yes. But I am quite immune to such trifles.” He traced one skeletal finger across her jawline.
Rachel nearly fell back from yanking her head from him quickly. “Get
away
from me, you letch!”
Can’t kill insane old man
.
Can’t kill insane old man
, Atomik Lad repeated to himself. He channeled his aggression into struggling against the restraints at his wrists. They were already beginning to loosen.
The old man shuffled back to his desk. His body wavered from the strain of standing. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asked with a gleeful hint to his wheeze.
“One soon to be dead old man?” Angus guessed with a snarl.
“I am Mort Dakainen! Also known as the Mall Wizard. You know, because I’ve set up so many malls across the nation. Tremble before my power!”
Atomik Lad struggled, struggled, struggled. “So you own the mall. Big deal.”
“You pathetic little adventurer. You cannot hope to grasp so much as a fraction of the power at my command. I built this tower, this unholy blight upon unspoilt land. I drew in the townsfolk, made them think they needed me, and then one day, one fateful day, they believed it. My spells, composed of catchy slogans, Limited Time Only Sales, and New and Improved Products That Make Life Easy, they were to lure the townsfolk into my clutches. But there was one more ingredient. Time. Muwa. Muwa hahahahaha
wheeeeeeze
.”
“This guy’s out of his gourd,” Norman said.
“Am
I?” Mort asked. “Or am I the only sane man alive?”
“I’d have to go with that first one, Mort,” Atomik Lad answered. His video game strengthened fingers worked their voodoo on the ropes around his wrists.
“Bah! Madness is a label the meek use to categorize that which they do not understand. I have a loyal army of monsters at my disposal. Yes, monsters I say, for one could no longer call them truly human. These are but mere beasts driven by greed and pride. And they are my pets. My wonderful, wonderful pets. But they are also your neighbors. My eager little pawns. And they brought you here to my tower, oh brave adventurers.”
Atomik Lad had nearly freed his hands.
Keep talking old man. I’m almost there.
“You are not the first party of hardy souls to invade my keep, oh no,” Mort continued. “There have been many who attempted to rush into my treasure troves to steal what they may. But always, yes always, my faithful monsters deliver these poor wretches unto me.”
There was an audible snapping sound as Rachel’s patience reached its limits. “What are you talking about, you insane old
fuck!”
It was not panic. It was the perfect clarity of anger. “What the hell are you holding us for, you wrinkled bastard! Let me outta this chair and I’ll rip your lungs out through your ass!”