The immediate next part is sheer disappointment. Collapsing Hel and Olympus didn’t end in a useful manner. My brain shattered into a billion pieces and I promptly threw up all over everything within reach. Need me to expand upon that event a bit? Hel self-destructed her world. It felt like pink elephants took me from behind for a weekend, sans lube. I woke up from my mental vacation near a hotel, checked myself in and summoned a tablet to check the news. Flux hiccupped and I ended up on a webpage with a video stream of epic proportions

Naturally I tried to find something more interesting to watch. Flux hiccupped again and I ended up on the same webpage. Our battle continued until Flux summoned a pile of tablets above my head and I ended up with more bruises and dents in my skull.

So, I watched the stupid video. It took a week to do that along with some binge drinking, ranting at a wall, making a call to Jade, and nursing my latest sets of sore muscles. Sure, I had a super power, but hyper fast regeneration was not included in the mix. Besides, Jade’s care package included some of the finest drugs known to man.

You get the short version of this nonsensical chunk of my life. Which means I’m going to spend some time summing up four hundred hours worth of boring video into a short story. Why watch four hundred hours of video? Because Flux kept hiccupping and putting me back where I left off.

The million and a half seconds-long video revolved around the other life of Hans. The one that never happened. The one we only know existed because Hans created Flux and Flux came back from the future somehow. It also meant that eyeball portion still had some form of sentience because despite Flux’s utter lack of personality since Alice yanked the heart out of it, Flux could think.

If you’re the type that hates back story then let me sum things up. Hans stole something then used it to make an assistant that wouldn’t run screaming. This unpaid intern had been designed to observe anything and copy it. Flux’s first observation was that humans are self-aware assholes. Flux then performed as intended and considered most of it’s life purposes met. Then it met me and something weird happened.

I know, my recaps are legendary. Paying attention to the quick and dirty version skips some headache inducing details. What he took and why it amounted to “stealing something he shouldn’t have” ties into everything else. The real detail here though, it’s not what he did or what he acquired from the unwilling to donate. It’s where he got it from.

Let’s start with the facts from our prior two adventures.

Flux traveled through time to end up in a bin at Hans’ store. It also created objects with supernatural properties out of thin air. Ted, frequent shopper of Hans’ store, found Flux at some point, got footage off of the machine, and put it back in a bin for me to “purchase” as a starter package to work with Hero Watch.The details on that part are still vague.

Strange enough for you?

Let’s talk about Hans himself. He’s a Technomancer or Technowizard or some weird mixture of words that basically means “He makes shit that shouldn’t work but does” and other people can actually use his stuff. The second part is pretty rare to be honest and probably has to do with Flux’s itself. Most techno-whatever’s create stuff that is for personal use only. The theory goes that their powers are actually reality altering but only in a set range. Hans’ breaks the norm by selling his items, and they work. That’s kind of an amazing.

His creations carry a curse which is probably how it all balances out. As user and abuser of his own products, he curses like a steroid laden sailor playing the worst game in the universe with the most mouth breathing teammates you can find this side of Jupiter. Ted couldn’t tell a lie. I should have died but clearly that’s not going to happen. There were others. One many had to wear pink panties on his head everywhere. Hats were optional. Another guy clucked like a chicken every fifteen seconds on the dot and couldn’t get a good night’s sleep but kept the cursed item because glasses that were also a television were extremely important. Those curses were weird and deadly.

He attended the Villain’s Bazaars and every other gathering reachable to hawk his wares. Hans got kidnapped by Vivian to make her some combination of powered items that ended up being a compression chamber so she’d be as tall as her pocket prince boyfriend. I’m not sure what Vivian actually expected. A cage for her man so she could use him as a mini-human dildo, I think. My android dad and Hans spent time in a jail cell before hell broke loose. Yet my dad had a normal version of himself. Vivian, Lady Alexandria, and Hans all stayed powered people.

That’s the long and short of the knowledge Hans. And recaps are boring so let’s move onto the new weird shit.

Hans’ powers started from what looked like a dream world. I know this because Flux had recordings of it. Yes, the floating eyeball could record stuff that happened in a dream. The robotic camera could also upload footage to the Hero Watch website on it’s own and hide it well enough that no one ever asked me questions.

The journey of four hundred hours begins with the first events ever recorded by Flux’s beady little eye.

Queue solitary ray of light in a landscape of blacker than blackness. One long thin beam that slowly inched open. One millimeter at a time. Imagine it, this boring line slowly widening in such a majestically painful way that you fall asleep. Which I did, multiple times. It got so boring I had to fast forward like seventeen hours just to get to something interesting.

Door wide open. Light cast in a long carpet like row toward the exit. Slowly a shadow figure appeared. Not simply “pop” and there it was, but it blurred into reality or stepping toward the door from endless miles away. They lifted an arm to one side. Something clicked and the rest of the room lit up.

The rest of the room had zero of interest. The figure in the door abruptly hunched. Both hands came forward like a rat washing his paws. The figure stepped in, slowly looking to each side as if expecting an ambush.

A second someone stumbled in behind the first, knocking rat hands onto the floor. The first figure got up even as the second wandered on by. It didn’t take notice of Flux’s camera or anything else. Not that I could rightfully call Flux a camera at that point. It was more a point-of-view. A place that watched the doorway.

Said boring doorway continued to let people in. None of them were Hans. That’d be too predictable. No, the next figure had a long puffy jacket and a three-day beard growing. Part of his hair had been combed wrong and he twitched constantly. With each jerk his body faded in and out of view. He stumbled by, not even looking at Flux.

The mentally absent people continued to wander in. They all had glazed eyes and absent slack jaws. Some gazed at their hands as if they held cell phones that didn’t exist. Fast forward another billion hours and I noticed a pattern. People only came from the door. All of them went by Flux and no-where else. Every so often, one would stop and stare into Flux’s dreamy eye. Hopefully they were dreamy.

Fun fact. In all of Flux’s footage, not once does it film itself. Not even when there’s mirrors around.

The figures were all human. Some were too tall. Other’s shorter than they should be, followed by increasingly short people like those Russian dolls but with lets. Little else stood out about them. Those that stopped to stare at Flux would often be blurry minus out one or two distinct markers. The rest slipped into the forgettable.

So, let’s agree to forget all the pointless members in the crowd and move onto those that matter. There were three that came into Flux’s camera repeatedly. This is a bit of a spoiler but I hate those sneaky reveals. “Oh he was dead the whole time”. That’s a horseshit move when the writers on the show can’t figure out how to get out of the episode.

Our three contestants were a girl with blonde hair that looked like the saner Alice. Second was an absurdly dashing young Hans. The final clear face belonged to a kid that might have been me or maybe Ted when he had more hair. Really, I’m not to sure on the third one because someone once pointed out that we looked alike as kids. Which makes me wonder about my mom. I like to pretend it wasn’t me. Seeing my own face in Flux’s weird “Before reality” montage implies secrets beyond my desire to fathom.

Hans’ first appearance came as during his childhood. Five years old. Gloriously blonde hair. Kind of like Hitler’s wet dream before drugs and cynicism merged with a body builder’s beer gut.

Five-year-old Hans showed up and stared into Flux’s beady lens. Fast forward a few minutes and Hans’ eyes go glassy then he wanders off. Some time later, Hans showed up again. He came from the doorway wearing a button up shirt with one of those pocket protectors in it. He looked like a young over-the-top nerd ready to tell someone why Pie is a perfect number.

Keep in mind that no one ever went back out the door. They only came into whatever space Flux occupied. They passed by his frozen gaze to an unseen space out of sight. Hans’ return proved to be the first time I realized people were going in a loop.

The young kid showed up again with his buttoned shirt askew and longer hair. He moved erratically from one side of the room to the other. His eyes glazed over, and he vanished outside of Flux’s view for the umpteenth time. Each time Hans reappeared he got a little bit older. A few minutes of skipping ahead got me to semi-bearded Hans.

His mouth moved in words that were unheard. If we read his lips, we can pretend Hans said “This place again?” then his eyes went milky and off the man-child version wandered. I realized Flux’s opening hundred hours of boring footage weren’t recording sound.

In came Hans again. He mouthed something awesome and useful then wandered off. The cycle repeated on and on with increasing focus on Hans’ teenage years. Until one day he stumbled in, twitching and ragged looking. Teen-Hans lifted an eyebrow and glanced around. He opened his mouth again and again. Through the fine art of lip reading I’ve reconstructed the following sentence. “Why can’t I stop talking out loud?” and “This must be a dream.” And “This is the center. This has to be it.” There were other interesting lip reads. “Fuck this place. Let me out.” Followed by wringing his hands. Maybe he said “This isn’t hooker wonderland” and off he went.

I’d like to say I learned a lot about Hans from this part of Flux’s footage. That’d be a lie but let’s pretend. During his childhood years he frequently had blackeyes. His clothes were often torn in one place or another. There were bruises on his arms. Whatever happened to him probably involved fights with doorknobs and falling downstairs.

Of course, that’s a lie. I’m not that naive. It’s impossible to say if those were things that really happened to him or if they were a projection of his psyche in a nightmare. Visible trauma meant something.

Hans spoke English but that he could have come from anywhere on the globe. Maybe somewhere besides the Middle East or some Asian country. His regional origins weren’t important beyond measuring his opportunities. I can tell you regardless of whatever pandering feel good flag waving you feel the need to do, some countries are simply worse off for kids.

The reason these thoughts even occurred to me had to do with all the other people showing up. Most of them, if I were to make wild assumptions based on their one or two notable features, were also English in some way or another. The fact that Flux recorded these people all coming from the same general region meant something. Pandering cynics may assume that I’m simply a white dude from America only seeing white dudes from America.

Let’s move past the study on human nature. We’ll veer away from boring snapshots of people’s lives as they ventured into a weird strange room that only seemed to contain Flux’s recording mechanism. Let’s think about Alice yanking out Flux’s power core. Let’s think about the weird smiling face that cropped up abruptly in my dreams and when Alice vanished. Or the poster above my bed.

Flux floated like an eyeball but watching this weird video capture of life made me around about the other eye. Did it have it’s own footage? Maybe it covered all the people from Asia or something.

Here’s where I paused my review of Flux’s footage and found the nearest liquor store. Because thinking about metaphysics of a mad super powered world is enough to drive anyone insane. That and imagining two of the toaster humpers floating around while beeping out mockery of human beings and summoning useless objects from nothing.

Skip a few more hours of footage and we’ll get to Hans looking absolutely insane. His hair flopped around and every few seconds he twitched violently. “I must!” he shouted inaudibly. The curses continued as he paced wildly around Flux’s camera.

Eventually he snorted then opened his mouth to scream inaudible obscenities.

“It’s all your fucking fault!” he mouthed.

Hans reached out and tried to throttle the orb. Fingers clasped around the edge of an object smaller than I’d expected. Chains rattled in the distance. All the ghostly people stopped moving as one. Flux’s recording shook with static.

The recording went black. It picked up later in a garage but we’re backing up a bit.

This story isn’t as simple as Hans showing up a lot then touching the orb. Sure, watching him grow up and grow increasingly erratic is sort of fun, but it’s not the point of this story. There were two other people that popped up between Hans’ doing his thing. I simply didn’t talk about them yet because it’d be super confusing to recount these events the way I saw it.

Moving on to contestant number two. A young girl who wore ragged clothes walked into the room. Not ragged like you’d think of a homeless person. These were burlap at best. At worst they were worn through and qualified as straw badly woven together. She smiled. Sometimes that smile broke down the middle until her cheeks twitched and her expression stayed trapped between happiness and sadness.

It was only as she got older that I recognized the face. It belonged to the blonde version of Alice. Then there was that darker side. The frowning unhappy one. Her hair grew more distinct. Sharded on the two sides of her face. She followed the same pattern as Hans except instead of cursing, she cried a lot. At some point she snapped. That young girl that might have been Alice reached out and touched the orb with tears dripped down her face and a twisted smile. The sliding sound of metal upon metal filled the air before Flux’s recording went dark.

There was a third kid. I like to pretend it was Ted but none of the features matched. In fact, nothing really stood out about him at all. He had a bit too much lank no matter what age his face seemed. He always had some form of food in his hands which clearly couldn’t put meat on his bones. It was more about being thin and not tall. If I still had pictures from my childhood, I’d suspect him to be me. Here’s the thing though, I didn’t remember any dreams involving reaching out for Flux’s eye.

Because that third young kid, that might have been me reached out to stick chewing gum onto the screen or whatever Flux saw with back then. Nothing rattled. No ghostly smiles appeared. The recording turned to static then went black.

Mind blown yet? No? Well fine. Back to Hans and his life creating an impossible Flux.

It took a bit of digging to find this part. Flux had a lot of footage of fuzzy people showing up and walking by. Days, maybe years’ worth of it. There’d been so much that part of me wondered about gigabytes and storage space on Hero Watch’s website for at least two minutes before walking out of the hotel to find something more effective than beer.

I still don’t know what the chains mean. There was no footage of that place after Hans. Flux’s secret files also didn’t show me what happened to the girl or the boy who may or may not have been Alice and I. It only showed the aftermath of Hans.

The video restarted with static. That dialed around. Horizonal lines linked up and showed a messy workbench then blurred the other direction. Those lines of black and white came together to form a color picture and a figure moving around.

The picture kept going in and out. Watching the video of Hans’ first moments with Flux made me really happy I lived in a world of streaming video service and internet television. At least when the picture went out, it froze in an awkward position. Usually with an actors mouth hanging at some angle that made me laugh. These old VHS style scrambles on Flux’s video made my soul cry.

Hans stretched out his hand toward Flux.

Abruptly audio kicked in with a high pitched whine. The tone went up and down.

“Is it working?” he asked.

“Is it worth it? Matter or energy, there’s a conversation. A ratio. If I could just figure it out.” He twitched abruptly. “It’s fucking rocket science on steroids you ignorant twats!”

He repeated that one curse at least a dozen times. The only differences between each repetition proved to the static slowly going away as Flux’s video tuning refined itself to near-eighties perfection.

“Ah-ha!” he bellowed then danced around a much clearer room. The camera turned a little to follow him which Hans didn’t seem to notice. He continued dancing around and playing an air guitar while shouting poorly rhyming obscenities for lyrics.

Once again I engaged in liberal use of the fast forward option. Footage continued to play. Most of it felt dull. Sometimes the scene would shift to a workbench outside where Hans welded together bits of metal. I fast forwarded the video because Hans had obviously been working on some sort of suit of armor for Flux. The lens that went around the eye looked far too familiar.

He spent years working with Flux. Literal years. I watched Hans fast forward from teenager to middle-aged man in what amounted to a training montage. At times he’d be worn to a nub and pale. Whenever something went right he’d be full of more pep than a school of cheerleaders. Every so often part of his metalworking laboratory would explode and the next set of footage would be taken in a new garage or new yard somewhere else.

I never got to see him get kicked out, but every time the scene shifted he’d work silent with a frown on his face. Every so often his lips would twitch but he fought back the curse of cursing and continued to create a bigger and better lab. His teenage garage workbench turned into a grand shop with pieces of machinery everywhere.

All the objects Hans made started to give me an inkling as to why Flux had been so obsessed with workbenches. At some point he shifted from crazy workbench creations to the small red orbs I’d seen back in his store. The one I told you guys about in my first story.

“Same technology. Same laws being bent.” He used some creative curses in there that my mind simply glazed over.

Hans shuffled back and forth around the workshop, rambling the entire time about how it would work this time. I had to fast forward another few hours of footage before seeing a successful experiment. He stuck a small red jewel into a pot of dirt. A few seconds passed and out popped an object that spawned when someone mated a television remote control with a miniature spa for hamsters.

Hans fell on the ground and kicked his feet in excitement. Flux’s camera vision followed him slowly. Hans held up the inappropriately mixed devices cheered. “It worked. By Satan’s unwashed taint. It worked!”. For the next hour Hans kept shoving small red orbs into the dirt. By the end of the night his garage had been crammed full of mishappen devices.

I rewound the tape a few times then fast forwarded. All this fantastic footage told me even more about the mad mechanic. He’d come into his real powers by studying Flux. Or somehow studying Flux increased his powers. Either way, they were linked. That fact should hold true in this timeline as well. Based on the footage I could assume that Flux existed well before Hans but didn’t really function that well before the technomancer started fiddling around.

Halfway through my drunken realizations, Hans bellowed. “This has to be enough for a proof of concept. Those twat-waffle munchers at The Factory will never believe it. And that bitch faced rotten twisted tomato fucker can’t stop me now!”

None of the footage clarified who slept with vegetables but Hans clearly hated them. I chalked it up to one of those competitive profession problems. You know the kind, “Bob in Accounting is fouling up my totally pointless shit reports and I’ll get fired over it!” followed by “I stabbed Bob in his stupid face and he got me fired!”. Blaming other people is stupidly easy. I should know.

Hans’ life kept going and Flux sat nearby, always recording. People came and went. Hans’ emotions traveled a rollercoaster of optimism and disapointment. Based on endless curses his application to The Factory failed and he decided to start his own shop.

I expected the video to pick up with Flux suddenly appearing, floating around my head. It never happened. Time kept right on going and Hans’ dreams of taking over the magical factory world never came to fruition. Hans got older and older. Eventually he shifted set his sights on a new life goal.

“I’m tired of taking care of all this shit on my own,” he said while rubbing his hands. Hans poured out a cream and lathered it over dried knuckles. “If only I had an assistant.”

Hans got assistants. They left shortly after. None of them seemed capable of putting up with Hans’ constant stream of cussing. He aged poorly. Ragged strands of clumpy hair lined his face. Sweat dripped down further. His sunken eyes stared off without focus. The workshop spread started reducing in size.

Take the growing mess from the initial part and play it in reverse. Everything wittled down. People showed up and handed over cash for items and the amounts got smaller and smaller. He rambled to himself less and grew withdrawn.

I attributed it to either single minded pursuit of an impossible goal or failure as a businessmen followed by stubborn persistence.

The years marched until he seems to return to where he started. A garage with the door wide open. I rewound the four hundred hours back to where Hans originally started. Even the house across the street looked nearly identical.

An aged Hans sat at the workbench. His gnarled fingers grasped around a thin pencil like tool that sparked on the end.

“Done,” Hans said. “With that it’ll make anything. Anything it’s seen.”

Maybe old age screwed up his cussing curse. Maybe he simply didn’t have the energy to spout off. I paused the playback and sat there, wondering what it meant before moving on with my life and the video Flux wanted me to watch.

Hans stood up and stretched slowly. Bones popped. He went to the doorway of his garage and stared out down the street.

Maybe completing his project loosened something in his mind. Hans started mumbling to himself again, “Who would have thought. All those years ago. Walk into a dream hotel, come out with the source of everything. Now I just need to let it cool then it’ll be all mine.”

Does that sound like one of those things stupid villains say right before something goes wrong?

Hans stepped outside. Then a mushroom cloud formed over the building across the street. Not one of those far away ones like you see in the duck and cover videos. No, this looked like it was three feet behind the building. Luckily, Flux captures something like seven trillion frames per second.

Everything went kaboom. Hans didn’t even get to blink or utter an interesting curse. Just whoosh, ash.

The footage grew increasingly boring. Something about a vaporized landscape and the ruins of buildings held no dramatic appeal. I fast forwarded the video until green beams of light caught my attention. I recognized the color and angles of those tracking lines. They were the same ones that scanned objects at the supermarket. A few moments later and the garage sat in one piece again. Completely with wet piles of ash where the old house used to be.

I rewound then fast forwarded again. Judging time passage proved difficult in the wake of a nuclear blast. If that had even been an atom bomb and not some other lower grade explosive. For a moment, I considered trying to establish kilotons to area destroyed ratios. The idea fled quickly. My experiences with “booms” had always been a little skewed and the internet wouldn’t be helpful.

It did show me Flux’s first power usage. Flux’s first power usage was recreating the garage he’d been living in. Every so often the beams would flickered across the garage again, changing a few minor details here and there. I paused the four hundred hours of footage there and stared at the floating eyeball next to me. The current Flux gave zero beeps to give over my speculations. After a minute, it hiccupped then the video resumed.

I tried to piece together my understanding. In theory, these were all a single version of Flux. One that traveled through time. None of that explained how it had become bound to me. Had that been the luck of the draw and I simply pulled it out of a pile?

The workbench and garage continued to exist until one day in stepped me. Future me. Guess what I said. Go ahead. Guess.

Did you guess, “Maybe there’s a sandwich in here?” Because that’s what other me said.

A nuke had gone off and future me from a timeline that never happened apparently only cared about finding food. My stomach twisted and eyes lost focus. The drink I’d been drinking to cope with this insane binge watching had finally kicked in.

I found the bathroom and threw up. As I threw up, I heard myself say quiet calmly, “Oh. You,” Not-me to an unseen third party. “I hate you.”

Then the video replay audio became pure static before Flux hiccupped again and the entire thing shut off.

As I lay there barfing, I had time to think. If you find yourself unable to focus while feeling sick enough to empty your stomach then here’s a tip. Practice makes perfect.

Hans said he stole Flux from a hotel. Recently I’d run into Hel outside a hotel with chains locked over the door. Chains could rattle just like the same noise that played in the background of Flux’s initial recordings where Hans, Alice, and totally-not-me touched the orb.

Here’s a better question.

Why hasn’t Ted put the absolute insanity of Flux’s original footage up on the Hero Watch website? It could be chalked up to journalistic integrity. It could be close to fear of what it might mean about the nature of reality. Or perhaps he simply believed it wouldn’t get the ratings.

The most likely possibility is that Flux never showed it to him. Which meant that it was for my eyes only. I can’t even be sure that Flux uploaded the footage of me watching those boring videos at high speed. When I went back out to the bedroom to try and find the four hundred hours of bordom I’d been watching, it was gone. Not even the webpage remained.

Oddity Study Highlights

Name: “Reset Button”

Translated from Technobabble by Captain Longhall, the sucker currently in charge of Area 52

One of the rumors out there on the internet talks about a secret government “reset button”. There’s a dozen different versions of this dumb idea, all of which say we have some grand plan in case things go horribly wrong. A way to bring the world back, keep humanity going, and somehow copy then paste all people in existence.

My favorite is the arc with the unkillable lizard who knows everything. Great stuff. Reads like pure fictional drivel because we killed the lizard they cited. It has not regenerated. Turns out it was deathly allergic to jalapenos mixed with bath salts. But aren’t we all?

Anyway. I get the hope that our lives are protected against the great unknown. In a world of super powers like reality altering kittens it helps people sleep at night if they think we’re not all absolutely fucked. And if you’re wondering about the kittens, they’re a thing. They tend to turn people they don’t like into birds. Which goes exactly like you’d imagine. Strangely the kittens grow up, the powers go away and the only sign of their former abilities is a holier than thou art expressions as they glare down from the highest spot in a room.

Back to the reset button. The safety net for existence. If one is out there somewhere, it’s not in our hands at Area fifty Two. You won’t find a file on it hidden in my personal toilet reservoir. And it certainly won’t show up if you sprinkle my ashes from my cold dead alcohol saturated corpse on it. No sir. We’ve got portals to other dimensions. Seals to an apocalypse. We’ve got a room full of monkeys who predict the future. But this mythical reset button? Impossible.