Chapter 112: The Thing (1/2)

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

“Eggs are the enemy, soldier!” Ryan snarled with the passion of a drill sergeant, the Panda 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.

But then, what 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 other path would bring less attention.”

“Let us refrain from hostile actions until we can figure the truth out,” Hargraves said.

“Speak for yourself,” Sarin said, her fists clenched. “No way I’m not roughing up that bitch of a mad scientist along the way. She owes me more than a decade of pain with interest.”

“As odd as it sounds, I agree with the Psycho,” Shroud declared. “While we might need her knowledge, there’s no way I’m leaving the person responsible for Last Easter unmolested. She has far too much blood on her hands, whoever or whatever she is.”

“The Alchemist might deserve 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 then decide if we use force or not.”

The argument won out, and the group settled on exploring the dome by the open entrance.

“Alright, time to explain the third and final rule then. If it looks cute and cuddly…” Ryan loaded his chest cannon. “It really isn’t.”

The courier grabbed the Panda and flew with his bear inside the hole, followed by Shroud, Mr. Wave, and Leo the Living Sun. Shortie used streams of pressurized water to launch herself at the ship’s roof, while Sarin did something similar with a shockwave.

As it turned out, the dome was only the upper part of a colossal sphere with a diameter slightly more than two hundred meters wide. One end of a five-meters wide bridge extended out to a 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, and huge, colored holographic projections hovered in the air all around the platform.

The place reminded Ryan of Mechron’s own holographic orbital monitoring systems, albeit far more advanced and damaged. The projections flickered, and all the platforms’ devices were deactivated. Whatever juice the ship used, it was starting to run out.

His group landed on the platform, with Len, Sarin, and the Panda crossing the bridge to secure the dome’s other entrance. Meanwhile, the courier and the Carnival members checked out the projections and tried to make sense out of them.

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

A white 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 at its core.

A crimson, vibrating storm of energy, full of lightning bolts, burning stars, and lights. A shining heart of nuclear chaos burnt at its center, the first and greatest sun illuminating the universe; and when Ryan squinted at it, he realized that this star had the shape of an eye. One that looked back at him.

A Rubik’s cube with countless 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 seen, crystals that shifted like living beings, blackened metal as dark as night, or pinkish liquid. Orange lines separated each pit of matter from one another.

A strange golden carnival of cubic angels, many-legged demons, cohorts of ghosts, and 2D picture-like worlds. It was the strangest of them all, a patchwork of chaotic ideas made real. Nothing unified the creatures and places of this realm, except that they only ever existed in human dreams and imagination.

A green sphere that superficially imitated 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 buzzed like trillions of microscopic flies, and the poles briefly opened to reveal eyes and jagged tongues.

A strange 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 tendrils constantly organized galaxy-sized libraries.

A familiar violet expanse of compressed space and strange mirrors closed this alien panorama, all overseen by an eerie, inverted pyramid at its center.

“The colored worlds,” Ryan said, recognizing the Purple World from his brief contact with it. “With one missing.”

“The Black?” Leo Hargraves asked, causing Ryan’s head to snap in his direction. “It’s a long story.”

Shroud, who had decided to float amidst the holograms, swiftly pointed a finger at the Orange World’s projection. “Here. Look at this one.”

Ryan’s eyes widened as he followed his friend’s finger. One of the stickers of the Rubik’s cube was made of a substance that the courier had already seen before. One that looked very similar to ivory, and yet with a unique texture.

“Doesn’t this remind you of anything?” Shroud asked grimly.

It did. The ivory sticker’s location was unusual as well. The substances that surrounded it were all metals, from iron to bronze and gold. It was at the very center of it all, the core of one of the cube’s faces.

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

One loop ago, Ryan had theorized that Lightning Butt’s body was made of an anomalous metal. It was the only 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 to frozen time?

Now, it suddenly made more sense.

Augustus’ power gave his body the properties of a metal from the Orange World, the source of all inorganic material. A world made only of matter, without energy, without life...

“Death does not exist in the Purple World.”

A world without time.

“Adamantine…” Ryan whispered.

Shroud looked down on him from his vantage point. “Adamantine?”

“Hello, mythical material from Greek mythology, said to be harder than anything? Did nobody read the classics?” Ryan shrugged. “It’s as good a name as any.”

The courier stopped time by causing the Purple World and Earth’s dimension to align, creating an anomaly where he alone could affect causality. But that substance, the adamantine, didn’t come from either reality.

It was an unnatural metal from a higher realm where things like death, time, or the laws of physics held no sway. From its location in the cube, it might even be the ur-metal, the ultimate substance that all lesser ores derived from.