First building, no sandwich. Second building, something that resembled food but probably wasn’t edible by humans. Third building, shadows moving on the wall without any sign of a fire.

So, there’s where I stopped to give my surroundings a stern glower.

The shadows ignored me. My fist came up high to shake violently at the possible enemies. “Doom is here!” I declared.

Clinton snorted right in my ear. Or close enough that my brain reset. Right about then I realized two things. Those shadows weren’t monsters, they were ugly reed thin coats hanging near glowing algae. Following that, I wasn’t hungry anymore.

I sighed heavily and wiped dried green goop off my forearm. In addition to healing me, it’d also removed my starvation. At least there hadn’t been any ropes involved. Once I’d been so hungry, I’d eaten a gingerbread house. The three-hundred-pound hairy man who came out to punish me afterward had left mental scars. I’d show you on the doll where he touched me, but then I’d have to burn the doll.

He might get along with that brute of a mole person that had run from me earlier.

“Flux. Note for later. Introduce Hairy to that giant mole rat. See if they get along.”

Flux beeped. I had no idea if he’d actually note it but maybe the Hero Watch crowd would do a clever comparison later on for traumatic effect. Or they’d line them up for a sweetheart’s poll.

“Where to?” Clinton asked.

My appetite had been utterly ruined by that series of thoughts.

“We can sit here until Alice shows up and starts stabbing someone,” I offered.

“No thanks,” all of them said in unison. Yes, all. That included the girls, who’d been mostly mute since the battle. They were all falling into the hive mind gloom.

Kennedy and Clinton turned to consider the trio. WhiteWash stood in the middle, with Midnight and Laticia on either side. So close they could all clasp hands in an instant, but not actually touching. I didn’t know what to make of it, but they hadn’t let her die during the fall. That might mean something.

I couldn’t tell if my suggestions had helped them at all, or simply sped up the budding inevitable scenario.

Clinton struck up a conversation, probably to distract his still moping boyfriend. Like murdering people using their own blood is somehow “terrible”. That’s sarcasim by the way, in case you’ve forgotten who you’re dealing with.

“Anyone else notice that fall?” he said.

“Hard not to,” Midnight responded dryly. “It was a long fall.”

“Wish I’d been the one to throw you off,” Leticia in a whisper that reached my ears.

Midnight laughed then buttoned up.

I couldn’t tell if that served as a good sign. They were, horror of all horrors, socializing and interacting without punching each other. That served as a rare occurrence in my version of the world. NEvermind that they’d sat next to each other sulking back in the van.

I mean, strike the super powered aspects of everything, and we were basically on a cave spelunking school field trip. All we needed was a tour guide that barely spoke English.

Flux vroomed ahead and down the hall. I followed our metallic tour-guide and hoped to still find something edible. I’d run out of crackers a few portals ago and left my crumpled cake in the other pair of pants.

“This place is huge,” Clinton kept trying.

“That’s what she said,” Kennedy responded.

They shared a glance, I assume anyway since I wasn’t looked, and busted up laughing. Their conversation continued and echoed softly between the dirt buildings.

We had hardly enough room to go two by two. I tried to keep Flux in sight, but it cruised quickly along it’s unknown mission. We wove between buildings, down to a tunnel that looked closer to a gym’s rock wall than any sort of stairway. I jumped, ready for some mystical air glass and green goo pile at the bottom to cure my freshly budding hunger.

Clinton zipped by, running along the wall at a leasurely billion-miles-per-hour. He yanked me sideways and helped me land safely. I wiped a fresh layer of dirt off me and watched as everyone else descended with more grace.

Kennedy was using some of those metal bits as a handhold to get down. Once again, I mourned my super power and wondered what sort of cosmic asshole had given me them. My sister didn’t have these abilities. She had a giant flying pink unicorn she rode into battle while pretending to be a space cowboy.

They looked around while I mumbled to myself about the unfairness of life.

“Which way?” Kennedy turned around slowly to gaze at four separate tunnels. They were darker than the area we’d been in prior and showed no signs of illumination in the distance. Leticia’s red glow barely made the first thirty or forty feet obvious.

“Where did that eyeball go?” Leticia asked. “It knew where to go, right?”

“Flux?” I asked.

Clinton nodded while preening Kennedy’s clothes. He stopped to dust himself off and pull clothes tighter. Kennedy’s face briefly lit with a smile, but the poor kid still looked exhausted. Or mentally worn. I mean, it was the same look I had every other weekend but I couldn’t tell you how to describe it. I can only equate it to doing ten hours of hard labor then being told you need to go shopping or everyone in the house will starve. Numbly, you march on to get food while your mind is basically a bike with long deflated tires. Whatever that look is, Kennedy had it.

“Yeah. Him. We were following it for an hour there. He seemed to know which way to go to avoid the patrols and was heading toward the heart.”

“How do you know?” Clinton asked.

Leticia thumbed back toward her sister and Midnight.

“We can feel it,” they said in unison. A second later, Leticia nodded once.

Which probably meant she could also feel it. Which probably wasn’t good. Which definitely meant this was situation normal for me.

“That can’t be good, right? Your powers on their own don’t have anything to do with this planet, or shadow cores, or energy sources.” Clinton zipped around the girls, taking in their appearance from all angles. “Wait. You’re talking about a resonance effect.”

WhiteWash nodded slowly then cast her eyes downward. “I think is has to do with our powers somehow.”

“All of you?” Clinton asked. “Even you Letty?”

Leticia’s lips pursed tightly at the nick name. Her aura flared brighter for a second before a wisp of fear crossed her features. “Yeah. We all got our powers at the same time, from the same source. Whatever’s down here is related to that somehow.”

“Does that help us?” Kennedy asked.

Clinton shook his head slowly, for him. Which for the rest of us looked like a dog shaking off water. His body resumed utterly normal speeds and he sighed. “This has to be why we were allowed to go out into the field. Somehow Mister Walker expected you to be tied in thing. All three of you since your powers have the same origin.”

I’m pretty sure I’d already had that thought a dozen times over. Kudos to Clinton I guess for catching up. Assuming he survived another few years of back to back super powered encounters, he might become one of the greats. Even a well-meaning one. Assuming they didn’t all die here, horribly under the butt cheeks of some terrible goliath mole monster.

“It won’t matter,” I said. “Agent of Chaos here.”

“Your power is warping probability to keep you alive. Violently. I can’t see how that means you’ll be able to nuke this planet from orbit. Or do anything to it. If we get to the planet’s core. If Flux is able to copy out the crystalline core and drive this planet into override.”

“None of that will matter if somehow the Christmas tree trio over here goes nuclear?”

Clinton nodded. “We need a better plan.”

“I’m not a plan guy.”

“I’ve noticed.” He responded dryly. “You’re practically suicidal.”

“Clint,” Kennedy admonished.

I perked up, as much as a mud and goo covered man is able to seem perky, and said, “Not suicide if you can’t be killed.”

Clinton shook his head. “What about the rest of us? What if you getting into danger escalates until the rest of us are caught in a crossfire? We can’t go near whatever is attracting the trio if your powers are going to make that even worse. We can’t complete our mission without going in that direction. And if we don’t work on this, the planet is probably going to have a lot more real estate and a lot less people.”

Here, dear listener, is where I want us all to pause. I want us to pause and really consider what Clinton’s idea means. I’ve said it before, sometimes when I go too far, things get bad. Really bad. Not a simple war between this powered group and that one, or between aliens and stare cruisers. Those, everything you’ve heard from me is simply normal stuff.

It can get worse. I’d been so blissfully happy, by my skewed standards, that I’d forgotten that my powers rarely deescalated a situation. Clinton’s words were also like an ill omen of what was to come. If only I’d fucking listened to him instead of simply being a self-centered twit. But alas, that’s one of the things all of humanity has in common. We’re self-centered twits.

So, while Clinton’s actions of trying to keep me safe slowly registered in my addled brain, we were attacked. Like the gods wanted to make a point. Mole people gibbering echoed out of the tunnels.

Clinton blurred. His body dashing down each tunnel to check for our enemies. “Three of them, thirty seconds maybe. Only one way out,” Clinton said while pointing toward one of the tunnels.

“Trap?” Kennedy asked. “I can sense a thin trace of metals that way.”

“I’ll take point,” Leticia said. Her body brightened and off the woman charged. Super powered fists of fury ready to pummel whatever creatures dared sit in ambush.

We all followed. I walked quickly, in fear that Clinton might help me move faster, throw me into a dirt pile, and ruin the last remaining untouched spot on my clothes. And if I’m being honest, I had no clean spots on my clothes.

Midnight and WhiteWash watched the back end. Their illumination coupled with the red lightbulb in the distance kept our path lit.

A minute down the tunnel, something gargled down there and the dirt around us violently shuddered. A tentacle of sorts was lit up by red. It went left, followed by Leticia’s body flailing behind it. Chunks were yanked out of the wall.

“I hate this planet!” she wailed in the distance. Red flared with green. The tunnel thudded again.

“Should we?” Kennedy asked.

Clinton shook his head and held back his boyfriend. The tunnel shook a third time then squelching sounds echoed out.

Behind us, the tunnel shook. Sounds of the oncoming horde could be heard. Which sounds like four hundred elderly people trying to find the restroom. I tried to ignore it.

White and black spun along the walls. We turned to see the girls glowing behind us.

“We’ll bring it down,” Midnight said.

“It’ll buy my sister time to finish off that thing,” WhiteWash followed up.

The extreme colors grew, melded, then the ceiling rumbled. The tunnel we’d been escaping down collapsed. My hands lifted to give a golf clap but Clinton’s stare stopped me. He watched the girls until their hands separated, and the colors returned to normal.

I turned back to the forward path. Leticia’s cries continued. Red flared along with green, blue, and some other color that might have been puke after ingesting all the world’s cotton candy and gummy bears.

“Should we?” Kennedy asked. Clinton shook his head again. He loved to order people around.

“You’re a natural born leader,” I mumbled. His eyes narrowed at me and I shook my head. If he didn’t hear me the first time, that was his problem.

We all waited.

Leticia went flying by in the other direction, screaming. The tentacle whatever had her waist now. It looked thinner, like it’d been wrung dry.

“Die you fucking piece of horse shit!” she chased the fleeing monster limb the other way. By now, I had no clue which end was the front. It’d been fleeing both ways, through walls, and looked more like a violent worm than any sort of squid extension.

We kept waiting. I half expected a dozen mole people to pop out of the walls but they never did. My finger jabbed into the dirt to dig at it. A few inches deep sat harder material. I scrapped off a panel in between Leticia’s comical chase montage.

The harder substance was balance and reflective. It reminded me of Obsidian, which had littered the surface of this planet.

“Let’s go!” Leticia yelled.

My head snapped around. Everyone had moved while I’d inspected the hardened substance keeping us safe from tunneling rats.

The obsidian-like material I’d picked at cracked. Clinton yanked me sideways abruptly. In snapshots the entire mess hit me.

Kennedy had already vanished. The girls were walking leisurely onward as the speedster took my perpetual damsel-in-distress ass down to safety. Leticia had a twisted a dead monster’s corpse in some violent bear huge. Her slow growl pierced the bubble of Clinton’s super speed. Or maybe it was high pitched screaming. Or audible foaming at the mouth.

Then the world brightened. The ceiling pulled away at a sharp angle as we exited the tunnels. Kennedy’s body stood still, frozen in a perfect moment as Clinton sped his way along. My head tilted up to see the roof of this cavern, high enough that the motes of light above might be stars.

Down I went, slamming into a armchair sized mushroom. It snapped around me into flakes.

Clinton came to a stop next to Kennedy. He put a hand on his boyfriends’ shoulder and bent over, huffing to catch air. “Can’t do much more. A few bursts?” Despite complaints, he recovered quickly and stood back up then proceeded to dust himself off.

“Energy doesn’t recover that fast here. It’s almost, cut off?”

Clinton shook his head. “Maybe. We were warned of dead zones. We need to finish here, get back to Earth proper.” He looked my way then tilted his head briefly. “Which way do we go?”

I shrugged.

“There’s got to be a way out,” Kennedy insisted. “Maybe a lunar link? Some phase which ties this place to Earth proper? That would explain how mole people keep attacking the Earth so regularly. They breed here for six months, reach critical mass, find a portal out?”

It was an interesting idea. I also hadn’t noticed there was a link between other worlds and powers recharging. Everywhere I went there were supers of some sort doing their thing.

While I mulled that over, Clinton tried to get an answer from the trio. The girls weren’t much help. They’d gone all fuzzy again and were catching up slowly. They walked at the same pace, left foot, then right, together as a creepy unit of dayglow lamps.

Kennedy glanced around. “That way?” he pointed in a direction that resembled every other direction in this hellish landscape. Dirt, glowing stars, and mushrooms that might be food for someone.

“Good as anything. At least until the others have,” Clinton’s words died down. The boys shared a glance and I shook my head. The three of them had to work through the whatever was going on and clearly avoiding it hadn’t been working.

At least Leticia wasn’t a bundle of threats anymore. What should have surprised me is that this entire turn about only took half a day at most, or maybe a full day since there was no sun to judge by and I didn’t have a watch. I liked to think that was a sign of things working out the way they should have all along, not that the people weren’t fighting each other as much.

We marched briskly onward. Leticia walked slower and with less energy. Her red lamp illumination softened but went further than the sharper energy she’d been using to beat up the tunnel worm. Midnight and WhiteWash waited near her, then the three of them continued.

So, while we marched, I wondered about these energy limits. Did the girls have them?

I didn’t know. Probably not. That domain thing that someone had mentioned a few days ago likely circumvented any regional power drains. If there was such a thing and it wasn’t simply Clinton getting tuckered out by lugging me around.

If you’re wondering about all this idle thought and annoyed at nothing happening, that’s because nothing did happen, for at least half a day. We wandered in that cavern, ended up eating mushrooms which came with zero interesting side effects, and even managed to find a place to sleep in something that resembled a cabin but probably didn’t have an ounce of wood in its makeup. Let’s call it crudely made but functional and leave it at that.

The entire time the girls were useless, the boys prattled on, and Flux mocked me with occasional beeps. Eventually, I passed the hell out.

Then I woke. My legs were numb and head too heavy to lift.

“Hey sexy,” Alice whispered in my ear.

I groaned happily. Some great mornings had started this way. My heart skipped a beat. Some bad mornings had also started this way.

“It’s almost time to go,” she said.

The muscles in my neck refused to work. My lips moved slowly, and everything distorted. “Go?” I mumbled.

“Destiny sexy. Creeping in the darkness after them. It has me. It almost had me. It doesn’t have me yet.”

My head hurt. That made no sense. I hated things that came in threes.

“You?”

“Me. Mes. You found me. I found you. We haven’t found each other yet.”

It was a dream. I knew it was a damn dream but my body didn’t work right. It felt like something fat sat on my chest, squeezing the life out of e until my brain stopped functioning. I managed to ask, “Alice?”

“The next time we meet, it’ll be time to go.”

My eyes opened. For a moment I saw the students, sleeping in their respective corners of the hut. They blurred as my mind drifted lower into the dream.

Alice whispered in my ear, “You’re in wonderland.”

I jerked to sudden awareness and my brain started to really process what had just happened. The words were already half gone and hell, you wouldn’t even know they’d happened if I wasn’t telling you. Flux records a lot, but not everything. Not this.

But here we are and I’m saying that hadn’t been a happy dream. It’d been a sad Alice. That was a strange version of Alice. Not aggressively demanding we make twins, or scared like when I’d first met her blonde persona. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell what her color her hair had been or any other details about the dream.

Just that it had been Alice. That had been her and she’d been warning me something was coming. Something that meant we’d separate. I repeated her words to myself, and even now, I’m not sure I’ve remembered them right. But while the rest of the room slept peacefully, I remembered one word clearly.

“Wonderland?”

At that point, I felt like a good scream was in order.

So, I did.

Which went as well as you might expect. Clinton woke like a bullet and slammed his hand over my mouth. I kept up yelling while muffled.

It was too much, you know? Way too much. My parents, this planet, the kids and their drama. My sister and her stupid pink horse because of that stupid black unicorn. I’d set myself up and now Alice. Alice who’d chased me every few months for years as a result somehow ended up dating me.

“He’s lost it,” Clinton shouted over my yells.

I kept on screaming but couldn’t find fresh air. My nose plugged with snot or goop from earlier. My brain kept replaying that word, wonderland. I was in wonderland. The place of nightmares twisted beyond sanity to mimic a childhood story.

Clinton’s fingers slipped a moment and I took the chance to shout, “Fu”- then he secured his grip.

Spots grew in my vision. Both leg’s flailed wildly and I collapsed on the ground. Clinton followed me quickly and kept a hand over my mouth. My eyes rolled. Everything went darker, and this time I passed out without a hint of any dreams.

Just oblivion.

Until some idiot said, “He’s coming around.”

No clue who it was either. My head had more lead in it than the entire state of Texas. Which, is a lot. Mostly because everyone there uses lead to keep their assholes open wide for all the shit that comes out of their mouths.

So sue me, I’m even angrier at the world after being forcibly knocked out. Being suffocated until I passed out wasn’t exactly new. People had all sorts of ways to knock me the hell out. That’s the worst part about my powers. I survive. I have little say in how.

“You going to scream again?” Clinton asked.

I sat up slowly and pressed a palm into my throbbing temple. Painkillers and water were in order and we had none of those here.

“He’s not hyperventilating,” Kennedy said.

Leticia snorted. “Wish I’d been the one to do that. Been wanting to since we first met him.”

“Going to scream again?”

I stared at Clinton then shook my head slowly. “If my doctor asks where you touched me, I’m pointing to all the bad places on the teddy bear.”

My humor missed the mark. Clinton didn’t even snort. “Good. Because I’d rather you were able to run on your own. There’s an entire field of those damn things up ahead and I’m not sure if we can get around them.”

We were in a long dirt field with stalks of moss that were stringy. Almost like a field of hay but we were still underground and the smell was nothing like a farm. I sat for a few moments before following the others to a ridge of sorts.

There was an entire army there tilling the field. Ten mole people were row. The ones in the front were picking moss wheat whatever. Those behind tore up the ground. At the tail end were three lugging a sack and planting fresh clumps of muck. I assume it would grow new fields to replace the ones they were clearing out.

The rows of mole people went on for miles.

“Great,” I muttered. “Murder a few hundred, and there’s thousands more to replace them.”

Kennedy bit his fingernail while staring at the army. “They breed fast. Stupidly fast. You know one of our teachers capture two for an experiment. A week later he had thirty. No one saw them being born or anything. They’d suddenly just increase in population.”

Clinton shook his head then sighed heavily. “We had to burn the whole lot.”

Kennedy’s face went green as he nodded. “They screamed like babies. Literally babies. Most disturbing thing I’d ever seen.” A shudder rippled through his body.

That sounded horrifying.

At the harvester army’s head was a muscled naked mole man. By naked, I mean furless, by mole man, I mean violently obviously man parts with more wrinkles than all the people in a retirement facility put together.

“Is that one riding a worm?”

I nodded and pursed my lips. “Tribal mole people, great. You’d think even the most savage ones would wear a loincloth.”

Midnight gagged. Leticia snarled. I blinked and tried to measure up where that package would rank in my top ten worst visuals. After a few blinks, I realized it didn’t even come close to the top thirty. I turned to Flux and asked it, for the website audience later, “Well, is this hall of fame material? Remember to rate, follow, and check out the rest of this glorious website.”

I bet Ted would hate me for that one.

Midnight wiped off her chin as her forehead wrinkled. “Did you just use the bad guy as an ad?”

I nodded then Midnight’s eyes flared with a black light. Pain jabbed into some magical part of my brain above my right ear. An eyelid fluttered. My jaw cranked open and shut to try and relieve the pressure.

They decided to back up and see if there were other routes. I wandered with them because it was that or think more about Alice’s dream message. Which we all know is a lie because I spend so much brain power on it that Flux got bored and I didn’t hear a damn thing any of the other kids said. Or teenagers. Or young adults.

Whatevers. I heard none of what the whatevers said. Because I could remember Alice saying we’d meet once more, and then it’d be time to say goodbye.

I kept my arm from trembling with strong powers of denial. I kept my eyes dry by smearing more dirt in them and using my mess of a shirt to clean up the dirt. Then I pretended to ignore that all the other whatevers had clean clothes somehow, but I’d been left an utter mess.

They had powers to clean up but hadn’t spared me any. Which made sense because I’d been an utter twit, terrible teacher, and mostly useless.

At some point, with all of our clever sneaking, someone who’s name doesn’t rhythm with the number of fucks I give, stumbled into a second slightly smaller army of mole people. Or I assume that’s what happened because suddenly the others were running, and slobbering mongrels were shouting behind us.

“Destroy them all! Let none trespass our sacred lands!”

“For the queens!” the charging army shouted in unison.

I stumbled onward while everyone around me kicked into high gear. Midnight waved her arm and a row of them fell screaming, clutching their heads. WhiteWash’s body glowed that milky color and half of them turned to their friends to give each other the creepiest hugs ever. Leticia was simpler. She punched holes in people’s heads.

My job became “dodge bad things so Clinton stops whining”. Not to bore you, but obviously I’m still alive and the murder spree of terror continued forever and ever and beyond that into boredom land. Which means I’m not describing the battle.

Instead, fast forward two hours of blood guts and bore until we got to some sort of safety a dozen tunnels deep, arriving at another rock wall mess. This one went down for another age, clearly leading us closer to the planet’s center. Or to the top and maybe gravity didn’t play by normal rules.

“We just going to,” Leticia paused to catch her breath. “Keep running?”

“That will get us closer,” WhiteWash said. Midnight nodded. After another moment, Leticia nodded too.

Clinton stopped at the pit’s edge and zipped back and forth, checking the area behind us while virtually pacing at super speeds. I looked around too. The army we’d, they’d, been mowing through seemed utterly defeated. Either they’d pulled back to find more people for a second attack wave, or they’d removed everyone alive.

Both options sounded bad for different reasons. I mean what kind of teacher lets his students commite mass genocide on an entire race? After a moment I realized the race involved and the sheer annoyance of their existence, and put the moral conundrum out of my mind.

Clinton kept pacing. His face flushed red from exertion and arms kept waving back in forth. He seemed to be silently ranting about something, or I’d finally learned to tune him out.

My head swooned. The girls stood at the edge of the pit together, ready to leap to the unknown below.

“Clint,” Kennedy said while putting a hand out to grab Clinton. His boyfriend stopped pacing but continued to rub his head at high speeds. Kennedy continued, “You remember that day class about causality and fate?”

Clinton’s eyes tightened. He nodded.

Kennedy continued, “We’re on this road. I know you want to have a plan to keep us safe, but we don’t have time to think about it. We were lucky to get rest last night. Even if it was cut off abruptly.”

By my screaming.

They could speak for themselves. I had all the time in the world. Still, I didn’t jump down by myself. The handholds were pretty far apart from each other, but I might be able to climb down safely without causing my powers to kick things into high gear and save me by summoning some hellish monster.

Down I went. I stood the steps slowly. All three girls floated down ahead of us. Their energies or powers clearly becoming more in sync with every passing hour. I wondered what critical mass would look like. There’d be candy and party favors involved.

I chuckled weakly and felt half insane. The rock wall went on forever. They were barely visible. A few feet to the left Kennedy and Clinton both climbed down. Either they kept me company or were saving their powers. Two hours, or some other random amount of time since it was all the same, of nonstop use must have worn them thin.

Rocks tumbled down the wall form above us. The grip I had slipped and my free foot slammed into a support, sending my next handhold downward.

“Shoddy workmanship,” I mumbled. “You’d think they’d have elevators. Mole people can invent spaceships. No elevators.”

No one responded to my attempts at humor, again. Not one to be denied I tried again. “It’s living underground for so long. Ruins your eyesight. Probably why space works, because they think it’s a big stupid cave.”

That made zero sense. I couldn’t think of anything better because part of my mind kept coming back to the nightmare from Alice. This didn’t feel like Wonderland.

Though, we’d met before in a version of the place that had been filled with Mole People and not even remotely in line with the original story. There’d been two queens there. Maybe their entire race had a matriarchal society, since they were constantly frothing about “Mothersland.”

At that moment, on came the second wave of mole people.

“Death to the invaders!”

I blinked.

“Mister Millard we’re going faster!” Clinton shouted.

“Nice to know you-“ air went out of me in a huff as he sped into my stomach.

Black spots swum over my ears. Repeated trauma in such a short time couldn’t be healthy. Down I went, flying into a pile of dirt that redefined feathery softness. I rolled off to the side and fought to catch my breathe.

Gibbering screams came out of path we’d been climbing down from. Kennedy got a much gentler landing right next to me. A bright glow of red flared up to the sky. Flux’s distant chirps of happiness as certain doom charged our way.

We got the bottom and once again nonsense ensued. The girls were working together now. Black, white, and every other part of the rainbow flooded the base of the cavern as we engaged in the fourth of fifth chase scene since we’d landed on this stupid planet. Potential hours and a million-mole people later we were all hungry and exhausted. Though I was only exhausted because they kept throwing me against stuff in their vaunted rescue attempts.

And, you know, the rest of life.

We stumble down more tunnels trying to find any sign of food. The rest of them were hitting their limits and I’d been muttering under my breath for ages.

“Sandwich,” I babbled. “Bacon. I’d punch a kitten for bacon.”

“Shut up,” Leticia said slowly. “You’ve been talking about food for hours.”

“Pepper. Freshly ground pepper. With a bit of mashed beebops.”

“There’s no such thing,” Kennedy said.

“Not on this planet. It’s”- I drifted off. Beebops had been from somewhere. They tasted awesome when mixed with pepper. Any lettuce though and they’d taste like foul excrement. Kind of weird.

“Look here,” WhiteWash said ahead of us. I stopped and stared at a perfectly normal door sitting in our latest dark dreary tunnel. It could have been at home on the front of any house, in almost any neighborhood.

Further along were more doors, each one perfectly out of place. Like rows of those homes they have in London along the crowded streets. Butt without proper houses attached.

Right before the first door, sat a large stone carving with foreign lettering all along it. WhiteWash ran her fingers along the stone. Her eyes glazed over briefly and a milky white flashed as her powers did something. She reached out for Midnight, who gave her a hand, literally, but still attached, in case you’re too literal.

Black and white swirled into grey for only half a second before they let go of each other. The letters she’d been tracing shifted to English. WhiteWash tilted her head and the revealed message. “Larder?”

“What’s larder?” Midnight’s face tightened. “Do they mean fat?”

“Close,” Clinton said. “It’s like a food storage.”

WhiteWash dove for the door and pushed it open. Blackness resulted, the kind that even her glowing whiteness didn’t pierce. That probably implied a portal of some sort. Or mumble mumble powers stronger than her reality altering abilities. The idea of something scary enough to do that didn’t sit well.

“Food’s in there?” Midnight tilted her head back and peered into the darkness. Her hand lifted and the black light didn’t help. She stared at it as if confused then shook her head violently.

I pulled her back and went to pursue my dream sandwich.

Clinton sped in front of me. “You can’t go first. You don’t have any defensive powers.”

My arms folded tightly. “I’m going.”

“Too dangerous,” he repeated with excruciating slowness.

“Unkillable,” I responded. “And while it may cause problems if someone tries, I’d bet on the doorway going to some other dimension. Or angry dirt spirits shaking the ground and breaking the door before we go through. But either way, larder, food, and we need something.”

He sighed then zipped out of my way. Which either meant he was tired of arguing with me or couldn’t find it in his heart to disagree. Really, I had always been the best person to shove into a portal first. I went back down the doorway, ignored the confused stares of my pretend students, and flipped the door back and forth a few times in testing. With each successive opening and closing it showed the same results. Dark wall of black that went no-where.

“Well. Here goes nothing. Remember to say only good things about me if this somehow kills me.”

They said nothing. I rolled my eyes, clenched my stomach, and went in. One arm stretched into the distance while my main arm sat a billion realities away. Then my body slammed together like a rubber band. I didn’t feel any worse than normal after being sent through a portal.

A few tentative footsteps in I found nothing super interesting. This was only a separate storage room. A cold frozen bit of hell that had lots of uncooked meat packed onto the shelves. Milk, but frozen. That sounded gross but better than nothing. I didn’t see anything that resembled mole people perishables.

“Flux?”

It didn’t beep. The door behind me creaked and slowly slid across the frozen floor.

“Hello?” I called. A large door on the otherside had been firmly shut and showed no easy way of being opened from the inside.

The door behind me kept on sliding. I looked at it, at the possible escape into normal Earth, and between the two spots for too long. The door I’d come through continued to slowly close. Which implied that when it did, I’d be trapped here somehow and cut off from the students.

“Hello!” I shouted.

No one answered.

The door had almost completely shut. Outside the larder might have been earth proper, or some alien world. The students could honestly starve without me or might do perfectly fine. I eyed newly discovered boxes of ice cream then sighed. Something had to be better than starvation or mole people goop for dinner. I took them, milk, and dove back through the door before it closed completely.

A guy wrenching portal later, and I found myself in front of all the students. I eyed the side of the boxes I’d grabbed. The milk carton had a familiar name. The ice resembled normal ice cream. With a quick jerk I secured myself the first bar and practically yelled around food, “Alright class. Here’s todays pop quiz. If this mole people planet is somehow linked with Earth, what happens if we try to blow it up?”

I mean, I knew the answer. It included me ending up on a floating island with flying monkey’s and a banana tree. Sole remaining witness to the end of the world. Probably without Alice. Somehow that doesn’t sound very romantic, you know?

***

Q&A With Adam Millard

Dear Adam,

Flux copies stuff. Ever consider having him copy something, useful?

Dear Random Internet Poster,

Flux barely obeys its own sanity. Hell, after watching it for so long, I’m pretty sure Flux has his own agenda. Keeping me alive, not part of it. Being extremely useful, not part of it. Doing something funny that gets ratings and makes me a perpetual comic relief? Probably right on the money.

I mean, think about it. Think about everything you’ve ever seen Flux do here on Hero Watch. Has any of it been like, copying me some world-shaking gauntlets of ultra-power so I could, punch some galactic douche in the face? Ever once? No. I’ve tried. To date, the most useful thing I’ve gotten out of him, aside from a vibrator for Alice, is a sandwich. And if it seems like I’m on a food kick lately, you’re wrong.

And if it seems like I’m in denial. You’re wronger.