So, you’re probably thinking that I’ve just ignored the gas Vivian unleashed. I didn’t. My feet weren’t melting and that meant the gas would ultimately be harmless. It might even be great because they felt like they’d been dipped in mint. Ever had that fresh minty feeling between your toes?

Plus I was trapped in my cell since no one had bent my bars out of shape.

It’s enough to make man think twice about how badly the next few hours would end up. Vivian had lost two prisoners. Based on my rough understanding, the three of them were on their way to blow up her base. I had zero way to get back to the students, Earth, or anywhere normal. Alice had been gone for days and the last I saw of her was that nightmare that these last few days helped me dwell on.

In short, I needed a vacation after my “vacation” of moans and pop music. Down my face went, into the ankle high fumes. My eye buzzed immediately and could see footsteps. Which is a lot like seeing purple, if purple makes your head throb widely.

I sucked in a lungful and held it there. My chest burned with minty coolness. Purple became less pounding and traveled to a low hum that reminded me of distant drums. A steady rhythm that promised me a pulse pounding good time.

“This is the wrong mixture! Again,” Vivian shouted across the intercom.

The gas shot out of me in a hurry. Not because I thought these fumes would kill me, but because I couldn’t stop laughing. She sounded frantic. Not the “oh boy I’m on the edge” kind of frantic that had plagued the ship’s speakers for days. This version meant events were going in my favor.

I took in another hit of that substance. Whatever it was completely mixed up my senses and made my stomach happy. The bruise still had hints of yellow and felt tender. Now it felt like scratching a good itch. My leg thumped and I went onto a third deep breath

The thumping sound grew louder. Vivian barged into the room wearing a barely zipped jumpsuit. I fell into the bars and stared down the deepest valley of cleavage I’d seen in months. She said something that smelled like lemons and made my ears wiggle. Lord Purple, haggard and wearing Victoria nightclothes, pointed at me and made a face.

I don’t know what kind of face. He was too small. All his faces were the same. It’d be better to say he had a face and it was tiny.

“Don’t playing hide the” my brain swam trying to find the right word “man? He’s not a sausage.”

The bars came up, and out I fell onto the floor, giggling at my own cleverness. Vivian’s disgusted face made me laugh harder.

“Jesus. Where did you get this stuff? The floor tastes like cherries.” I licked.

It might have been the goop left behind by the anti-Flux weaponry. I rolled over to it to get a good whiff. It felt exactly like marshmallows but without the stickiness. I scooped up an armful but couldn’t get more because people pulled at my legs, dragging me out of the mess.

“Flux!” I shouted.

The room went spun. I gulped and tried to remember the last time anything floored me this hard. Which, if you’ve ever been absolutely blasted by a drug of some sort, is kind of funny. Ideas are little more than blips on the raider as everything assaults you. Smells and lights can be borderline violent.

While we’re in this territory, make sure that your drug trips are in a friendly environment. Do not play with kaleidoscopes or your mind might explode. Like mine did as small bits of dust flew in front of my eyes. My head reeled away from them.

Everything tilted to the left and my head slammed into the ground. The ship hadn’t moved, it was all me.

I tried to focus but could only register one interesting fact. Vivian was normal sized. When had she returned to normal? I couldn’t process that because seconds ago, when she’d burst into the room, I’d been admiring the view.

Study of Vivian’s regular form resumed. She looked almost exactly the same as she had in high school. A bit more weather worn but nothing some lotion wouldn’t fix.

“Flux!” I demanded. “Copy those for,” word slipped away as I fell to the side and grabbed another round of the good stuff. “Posteriors!”

That’d been a close enough word.

A tall creature crept into the room. I pretended not to notice Vivian’s newest guest but couldn’t avoid awareness of that giant grey cranium. My shoulders bunched and I scrambled to get away into the safety of the fire extinguisher liquid pool.

Strong tiny men yanked me away. White became purple and I halfheartedly grabbed a handful of muck to fling at them. It felt so great I just dropped the mess onto the floor and admired my fingers. The small men pulled my hands away and prompted me up. Another set ran to my front and kept me from flopping over into the floor.

Words were making a bit more sense. I blinked repeatedly then closed one eye to make the noise step hurting.

Vivian’s doctor made me squirm uneasily. This creature belonged to the same bobble headed race as the one’s that abducted me and Vivian all those years ago. They’d been my first real experience in the superhero world. Not the party fouls that having our school wrecked amounted to. No, I’d been pulled away from the Earth and everything I loved.

No. I blinked repeatedly. My parents were still alive. “How,” the thought became mushy as Vivian turned to the big-headed alien.

“This is your material,” she pointed at me. “Utterly unkillable. He’ll survive anything you do to him.”

“Anything?”

“Anything and everything. And I’m paying you to try anything you can think of. If you kill him, I’ll pay you triple. One of your, companions,” she frowned and for a second her lips seemed to melt down to the floor. My eyes followed them and found nothing. “has some extensive case files on him if I recall. But I doubt they’re much use.”

“Triple if I kill him? But only the regular fee if I use his unkillable nature as a basis for my next gladiator?”

“Hell. You make a dozen clones of him and get them murdered for sport, and I’ll sponsor you.”

The alien put his spindly arms together and did that villainous finger wiggling thing. I snorted.

My head as the room spun. “I’m worth at least twice whatever she’s paying you.”

Vivian gestured to me with both hands, as if presenting a grand prize. “He’s even pretreated. Won’t feel a thing. Won’t squirm. We’ll get him to your workroom and you can go to town.”

“Excellent,” the alien said.

Lord Purple stared at me. I stared back and mouthed nonsense at him. Then I felt like a fish and puckered my lips together.

Vivian’s smiling face swam into view. I giggled as the ship rocked and fireworks came out of the hallway behind them. Lord Purple snapped something impressive to his minions and a pack went running down the hall with their guns and spikey suits on. They squeaked in time.

Fingers grabbed my jaw and forced me to stop staring out the door. My lips puckered together to make more fish noises.

“Adam! You’ll love their enhancements. God knows I’ve enjoyed mine. Right? You heard me, right?”

I snorted. “Sorry, what? The speakers in there were broken and kept cranking out smooth jazz. Slept like a baby. Unkillable. Agent of Chaos.”

I doubt my completion ever screamed “well rested” but to hell with her. Her scheme had basically been my expectations of college and I’d never felt happier to have avoided dormmates and hazing rituals. Though if I had gone for the four-year degree my parents wanted, this would have been about graduation time.

“Pardon. Agent of what?” the alien asked. “Perhaps that didn’t translate correctly.”

“Chaos!” I yanked my arm away from the guards and waved it wildly.

His giant black eyes became bigger and blacker. My middle finger came up in response. His tiny mouth might have smiled but who could tell. Damn aliens.

My brain clicked off briefly and it felt like eternity passed.

I woke to the alien’s face inches away from mine. My head tried to back up but something held my in place. My heart jumped then a giggle escaped. With eyes that big, being poked in them would hurt like hell. Blinking would burn like forty calories a day because of how far up and down his eyelids needed to go.

He backed up and went to a table with the standard array of scary shiny objects. The pointier ones were on the end. It didn’t stress me out. Neither did the shelves of animal parts behind those pointy tools.

Whatever Vivian had put in that gas still had an intense effect on me. That one blink of mine must have been a few minutes at least. She and Lord Purple were no-where in sight. I’d been moved from my barely upright position to some sort of table. My arms were strapped in place.

“You must be my doctor.”

He clicked and whirred at me.

“English!” I shouted. My own head screamed in protest at the sudden outburst.

The creature tilted his head to one side. I waited for his neck to snap and fall to the floor. No such event happened which made me sad. He went to another table and pulled out this piece of squirming slime that resembled an oversized caterpillar.

“Tell me,” it said in busted English. “This Agent of Chaos. Self-proclaimed or a granted title?”

“Some Lady gave it to me,” I muttered. My eyes could not close tight enough to make the pounding stop.

“A true lady, or some lady?”

“Lady,” my eyes opened briefly. The plate of shiny instrument s nearly blinded me.

“So, you have experience with the games.”

“Nope. Just jokes and a series of unfortunate events.”

He, if the doctor could be called a he, picked up every tool on his plate then set them back down. He repeated this a few more times, seemingly unhappy with his array of choices. Or unsure where to start. I couldn’t tell but speculation served as a way to pass time.

My stomach lay bare. On it were crudely drawn dicks and a fresh layer of names. The sponge nearby had black ink embedded in it. Which implied a gross, low-tech solution to the markings on my body. It also meant that my doctor wanted a clean canvas to carve on. Either he cared about hygiene or couldn’t tell where to carve away with all the ink penises decorating my stomach.

I couldn’t tell if Vivian was childish or getting back at me the only way she knew might work.

After a billion rounds of “Let’s reseat the surgery blades”, he turned to me. His big bug eyes framed an almost confused expression.

“It seems I will need better tools to modify an Agent of Chaos.”

“Sure. Go grab them. Get the one with the knobs on the”- he completely ignored my attempts at wit and left without looking back.

“End,” I finished then winced. My ribs hurt again.

Buzzing came from above. I pretended it didn’t exist and kept side-eyeing the door. Clamps came from either side, forcing my head to look upright. Above me hung a plastic mask. It lowered.

“Oh, come on!” I shouted. “Can’t”- it got close enough to seal up my mouth and nose. A prybar of sorts unhinged my jaw. It hissed. Gas filled my mouth. I refused to breathe for a good few seconds before giving up. Seconds later, blackness claimed me.

My mind twitched. Which is like having a thought that almost woke me up but then everything smoothed over again. It became nothing.

I guess I’ll take this moment of blackness to clarify a few things. The entire time I’d been in the doctor’s lab, using my well practiced skills and the mantra of “Don’t Panic”, the ship rocked. It’s strange but I didn’t really notice it until I’d blacked out. Like a blip in the darkness of thought. Not an ocean wave rock. We weren’t on a boat.

It shuddered. It shook. There were distant explosions. Those things didn’t matter, because the rocking shifted. The concept of a ship faded. Explosive sounds became the crash of waves.

And I found myself laying down, head in Alice’s lap and she rocked me slowly. I opened my eyes to see her above me. Her face had color to it. A rosiness like she was drunk on the moment. Blonde hair frame her features and I knew this was the regular Alice.

I remembered when we first met. She thought I’d been a creature from her nightmares. Where she found herself slaughtering monsters as a psychotic version of herself. The dark hair one who pulled weapons out of nowhere and fought until nothing stood.

My eyes closed and the rocking continued. Alice hummed a tune that felt like a lullaby.

It was the beach. The same one we’d been happily sitting on before all this started. Seagulls cried out above us. Waves lapped along the short strip of sand.

A cheap cellphone in my pocket rang. I woke up enough to find the power button and turned it off. Jade’s call would be nothing but trouble. The kind neither of us needed.

“We had good times, didn’t we?” Alice asked. “It feels like we’ve only been together a blink, but she’s been with you for years.”

The dark-haired personality had been chasing me around different twisted versions of Wonderland for years. She still scared me at times. I kind of assumed all relationships were the same. Probably because that was all I ever saw around in the superhero world.

“Life’s long,” I answered. “We’ve got a lot more adventures ahead.”

But between you and me, we know that’s a lie, don’t we?

“I never knew I could see the world like we have. Worlds, right? Magical places that we just travel to. Without her trying to murder everything that moves.”

“She’s you,” I said sleepily. My eyes refused to open. I sat there, content to be rocked and listen to her hum between moments. The birds circled and continued to shout their hunger. Waves continued their rhythmic crashing.

“But I’m her,” Alice said. “No. I can’t be her. Then who would I be? A dream?”

The birds sounded further away. Distance growing replaced them. As if our shoreline getaway had turned into a deep jungle with creatures prowling the trees. “Is that so bad? I’d love to wake up and find out my life is a dream.”

She bonked me on the head. My eyes opened briefly to the sound of metal rattling. The alien body butcher’s implements fell onto the floor, clattering wildly.

Then the sound faded. My eyes fell downward. Alice rocked me again, humming as she did.

After some time, I managed to recall why she might have bonked me on the head. “Not you,” I mumbled as an apology. “You might be the only good thing in my life.”

She said nothing. Wings rustled and it sounded like a flock of seagulls had stopped n ear us. They called each other with their throaty chirps. Time passed.

“It’s scary,” Alice said. My pulse jumped a bit then settled. “There’s me. Her. And her.”

I couldn’t think straight. We were talking but it felt like someone other than me spoke sometimes. This weird being, disconnected from reality and lost in a dream. “The Alice?”

“No.” Her fingers ran through my hair. ‘You were right. There’s a third. That’s what I come in. Threes. Me. Me. Me.”

She didn’t sound amused by her own words. I had a feeling this was the real Alice. Or at least, if I dreamed, she dreamed with me. My normal dreams were mishmashes of television shows and whatever kidnappers had grabbed me last.

“And the third is worse?”

“That other me. The one you first met. She’s just the looking glass. The halfway between me and home. Home, where all the pieces belong. Where I came from. Some place out there”- I interrupted her.

“You could stay.”

“Oh Adam, you sexy, silly, stupid sad-sack man.”

I said nothing. Not because there were no words, but because the tone had shifted. My peaceful dream headed into a nightmare. The kind of place that drove kids insane and made grown men question their life’s choices. Where creatures watched from the darkness with teeth large enough to eat a person’s soul one nibble at a time.

I’d been in these places before. For moments at a time before my powers pulled me toward safer lands. I got through them by ignoring them. They mean nothing. They are nothing.

Alice kept going, “The pieces are nearly home. Then we’ll meet each other and all the Alices will be gone.”

My chest tightened and heart skipped a beat. At long last, my eyes opened and I stared up at her. “Alice?”

She smiled, and somehow the grin sat upside down and backwards. Inverted. The teeth were too large and my stomach felt sick staring at the endless smile. “Alice was never here,” the grin said. “And you’re almost too late.”

I swallowed and closed my eyes. The perfectly white teeth were still visible through the protection of my eyelids.

“Too late for what?” I dared ask.

The birds were back and the waves resumed their slow pounding pulse. “The dream is almost over Adam, and when we wake up, we’ll be leaving.” She leaned close and whispered and my eyes watered because it wouldn’t be good. “But if you follow the three pieces, you might find me one last time. To catch up. To say goodbye.”

I nodded slowly and didn’t want to think about what she’d said. But I did.

My body felt colder. I opened my eyes to find myself sitting alone again, strapped to the doctor’s chair. My head hung heavy with the lingering sedatives. I searched for Alice but found only Flux. It hovered in the hallway, looking left, then right, and apparently finding nothing interesting.

This dream, I remembered better than the one from a few nights ago. All the signs were coming together. I wondered for a second, if Clinton knew. If Wilhelm had told him somehow to broach the topic.

Then I decided it didn’t matter. There were only two real options. Find Alice, or let her go. Since I only had a few good things in life and had lived for years now, being unkillable by pretty much anything, that gave me only one real path.

To get out of here and find Alice. To find the three pieces, whatever those might be.

I tried to shake off the fog still lingering my head. The mask had slipped to one side. Lights were blinking unsteadily. The alien doctor sat motionless in a corner, covering in green blood with some sort of hyper furred monkey laying dead on top of him.

That left me sitting here until someone let me free, or use Flux to make something happen. If I could escape, I might be able to guide my next stop in this madcap adventure. Where you ask? To anything that might bring me closer to Alice. Such as Wonderland. Not that any of the places I’d been to were actually the real Wonderland. They were simply twisted versions likely born from alternate realities or human nightmares.

I hated nightmares. Maybe I could find those strange creatures that had been Alice’s guardians. Maybe I could find that lady who ran the Hotel California.

Or I could end up back with the students. I suspected they were probably dead or learned to survive on their own. Those five were secondary to Alice. I had one good thing in my life. Sure, she was absolutely insane, a fragmented personality, and probably some sort of doomsday bomb ticking away. But she needed me.

I needed that.

For the first time in ages I felt a fire under my ass. I just didn’t know what Flux could make me that might lead to an escape. My mind ran through options, failing madly. The users guides were worthless. That teddy bear nuke might do something but I doubted tons of fluff would get me free.

So, instead of listening to me flail through bad ideas for five minutes, maybe I should acknowledge the last time I felt any sort of dire need to do something. It also involved Alice, but that time she’d been kidnapped by Ted. Maybe that’s why I’m telling you this story. Not because it’s more insane than everything else that had happened in the last few months, but because it marked a turning point with Alice.

I think it was about then, trapped and wracking my brain for options, that it truly dawned on me. As if some part of my brain had been trying not to realize how much Alice meant to me. Our last moment together might be that one of us on a garden on the moon. She meant more to me than my own parents and sister.

It couldn’t end there.

Alright, it’s been long enough for me to fail to think of anything but here’s a quick explanation of how that worked out.

I blinked at Flux. It blinked a single eye back and tilted to one side. Escape plan Alpha did not start. My toes wiggled. Flux spun in a circle but didn’t start plan beta either. Fingers motioned and a dry couch escaped my ragged throat. Flux still didn’t copy me anything useful to escape.

The ship shuddered. I groaned as metal tore from metal and the table teetered to one side. Muscles bunched, bracing for the inevitable crash. It didn’t come and I found myself hanging at an angle but still secured.

I coughed a few more times then tried to get Flux to do anything. “Little help?”

Flux beeped then rammed the table. My eyes tightened. Down I went, table and all. Skin pitched and I winced. Pain lingered as I managed to yank an arm out of the restraining cords. I wiggled around until they slipped off.

Muscles on one arm hurt like hell. They’d heal because they always did. I rubbed at the sore spot from where my skin had been trapped by the falling table. It didn’t help.

The next thing I did upon regaining my freedom, is kick the Hac’sahani in his bobbly head. It snapped sideways as the weight of his cranium made sure the creature was dead.

Flux hummed then rammed the creature as well. Its strike caved in the monstrous skull like a papier-mâché.

“Well, that’s anticlimactic.” My lips tightened in a frown. This creature had been of the same race that tormented me as a teenager. It’d be the same one to subject Vivian who knew what horrors. It’d died while my mind had overloaded on sleeping gas and Alice induced dreams.

I kicked it again. Felt kind of good, you know? Never mind the goo. I think we’ve established my long, long history of being covered in questionable substances and still somehow being hygienic enough to survive.

It probably had some sort of self-healing property and would get back up as soon as my back turned on it. I spun in circles, trying to catch it off guard.

Nothing interesting happened with the dead alien. I threw his tools at him and moved to the corridor.

This place was almost as bad as the mole planet. Both directions looked exactly the same. Metal walls with rivets in them. There were even scratch marks all over at chest height. Probably left behind by the small armored minions.

I sighed and glanced back down both directions a few more times. The ground vibrated softly and there were cries coming from somewhere. I couldn’t tell. It could have been my dad or Lady Alexandria but they were probably long gone.

On my fourth review of the halls, Flux appeared in my vision. It’d somehow gotten out of the room without going through me and this doorway didn’t have that much clearance. I ignored the act of teleportation then asked, “How do I get out of here?”

Flux tooted a series of tunes. They did not herald a secret hole in the wall to use bombs on. Still, it floated off to the left, reached an intersection, then tooted at me again with the same jingle.

“That way?”

Flux beeped once.

“Wil that lead to Alice?”

Flux beeped again.

I realized talking to it was useless and jogged after the camera. It cruised down the hallway, backwards and watching me. At another corner it uttered the same jingle. I nodded then kept going down the hall after the eyeball. Flux led me around twists and turns. Its body slid around corners like a drag racer, while it recorded our slow-speed escape footage.

Speakers clicked on. The sounds of combat poured through. “Seriously?” Vivian demanded. Creatures squeaked. Another roared. She shouted, “One job! That failure of a Hac’sahani had one job, and that was to put a bee’s penis in place of your normal one.”

I ignored her and chased after Flux. It knew where to go. Flux always knew where to go, even if it ended poorly.

“More gas on the upper levels!” she yelled.

The walls hissed as a fresh dose of bullshit released itself all around me. I kept following Flux. Our endless twisting pathway came out to a catwalk. The floor dropped, reaching a large hander of some sorts hundreds of feet below. The gas followed it, leaving me safe a few feet away from the door.

I followed the heavy mixture’s path downward. There were crates and creatures below me. Vivian’s armor could be seen in the midst of it all, firing beams and commanding the smaller minions to fight their foes. Alien species of all sorts that battled tiny exploding men. Most of the place had been lit on fire, and white liquid covered two replicas of the Purple Prose.

A speaker at the hanger’s entrance beeped.

“That’s no fair. Maybe if I use the ceiling clinging version,” Vivian said.

I pressed a button to talk back. “Really? Your base is on fire. Maybe go down there and do something before your husband dies.”

“He’s replicable. You’re not.”

“Dear, please. Royalty is never replicable and I’ll soon show you the errors of your ways.”

“Just because that quack Hans has been giving you toys to play with, doesn’t mean you’ll be getting the upper hand in the bedroom. You’d need far bigger everything,” she snickered. A sharp battle cry cut her off and an explosion sent Vivian’s armor spiraling across the battlefield below.

“Wait until I get you in bed!” she snarled.

“Wait until you’re battling someone your own size!”

“As if,” Vivian retorted. Her armor flew across the room like a battering ram, hitting a steroid riddled gorilla breathing fire. The sudden impact caused it’s stream of flame to cut off.

I shuddered. As if I needed more proof of their borderline insanity. It was a shame, she’d seemed vaguely normal when we met a few months ago. For those of you who forgot, I landed on her when I fell out of Showstoppers ship on my way to get revenge on Ted and rescue Alice.

Flux beeped from across a ten-foot-long broken section of scaffolding. I shook my head. Flux beeped the same merry tune.

Vivian kept on taunting me through the speakers while fighting below. “I have this lovely mixture somewhere. Makes you hallucinate your limbs falling off.”

I clicked back. “Why are you obsessed with gas?”

She lifted two arms and locked onto the fire gorilla thing’s arms. They wrestled, while she answered, “Well, probably because my body’s seventy percent gas.

Vivian spun and threw the creature into a ship. The hanger below shuddered as one of the Purple Prose replicas exploded. “Thanks to you leaving me behind on a fucking, spaceship!”

I watched her turn her armor up to stare at me for a moment. It would have been imposing except for the whole couldn’t kill me thing.

Vivian seemed to read my mind, “Since I can’t kill you, and I can’t melt your flesh. Then mental torture is all I’ve got left for revenge!”

I resumed study of the jump Flux hovered over. It would be a hard leap to make. Not because I feared for my life, but falling might cause me to have some strange intervention. The flavor of the week had been portals and I couldn’t risk ending up in the wrong location.

Alice was running out of time. I didn’t know what that meant or how she could possible be running out of anything besides sanity. There were no indications of how much time remained but it couldn’t be much. A day, maybe two. Maybe none. Maybe time didn’t mean the same thing to that looking-glass version of herself.

I hated the superhero world. There were no set answers, only general patterns.

Vivian would get mad at me ignoring her. She’d unleash gas. I’d jump across that scaffolding and try to make it to the other side. I’d miss and end up falling down hundreds of feet. Those were all obvious outcomes to me.

The gas hissed. Behind a thick wall of the material billowed out. I’d hoped for the heavy hallucinogenic one but felt tingles starting already.

I turned back toward the long jump that Flux mocked me with. An idea occurred.

“Flux! User’s manual,” I yelled. The robotic eye hovered toward me and started printing out papers.

I ran for it instead. Its hovering body sat on my side of the impossible leap. It’d be my springboard across the gap toward the next destination.

My stupid eyelids blinked. Flux wasn’t there when they opened. It was too late to stop.

“You toaster”- arms wind milled wildly as I went over the edge mid-sentence -“fucker!”

Down I went toward the fight below. Vivian chose that moment to fire off her rocket boots and fly straight into me. We collided midair. Anything my lungs exited as we spun in circles.

“Kill him!” she shouted to the minions. Vivian’s forgotten her earlier admission of not being able to murder me. Which would have bene funnier if my next plan hadn’t been so reckless.

I grabbed onto her rocket pack, the only thing holding in a spinning orbit hundreds of feet of the ground, and yanked.

***

Oddity Study Highlights

Name: Genetic Modification & Resulting Powers

Sentient beings have been engaging in genetic modification for thousands of years. For Earth, most legendary beings were a result of modification, rather than a breakthrough event. For information on the visible increase of breakthrough events, please reference any other study but this one.

Genetic modification upon humans started when they first demonstrated the ability to tie ropes, rocks, and sticks together to hit each other. Generations of tampering and eating weird objects have tampered with human DNA. Not all tampering has been from the same source, same species, or same cosmic rays.

Results are inconsistent. It’s further speculated that some powers are generated by a group psyche, where the population and history behind “gods” and other assorted powers became so woven into human lives that some breakthroughs are a result of human’s belief that someone should have powers. For information on the relationship between belief and powers, please reference any other study but this one.

[The remaining seven hundred pages grow increasing dry and boring while constantly referencing people to other studies]