So began Max’s time on the ship. After Ray was done, and not before several more trips into the tank, he was thrown in the cage and carted off into a cell with the other aliens. There was no bedding, no seats, no toilet, just an inescapable room. Some of the other abductees would occasionally chatter in a shared language, one Max couldn’t make heads or tails of. That was it; this was his life. Trapped in a six-foot square cell, completely isolated. When he needed to use the bathroom, the corner had to suffice, and the cell seemed to be made from the same material as the table, because it was simply absorbed and drained away. Not that he had to go often, they weren’t fed. The restoration machine Quasar used always healed any damage so long as they weren’t dead, including the effects of starvation. Max simply got used to the constant hunger and thirst; there was no other choice.

In the beginning, Max cried and screamed and fought the little robot when it came to fetch him every few days. Unfortunately, it was stronger than he was, and surprisingly quick. Fighting or fleeing both resulted in him being dragged back to the table, strapped down, and experimented upon.

“Ah welcome back Subject #23365! Today we’re investigating this so-called ‘spleen’ of yours, see what it does. Personally I say nothing.” Ray stage-whispered to the tied up Max, who whimpered as the saws buzzed.

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“Hello hello Subject #23365! I’ve been curious as to your nervous system. Seems to run on electricity! I wonder, if we supercharge it do we increase your reflex times?” the octohumanoid chattered, stabbing a probe into Max’s spine in a chorus of agony.

“Agh! No it doesn’t work like that!” he howled.

“Pish-tosh! How would you know?” Ray said, waving his tentacles dismissively. He hit the switch.

“YEEEEAAAAAAAAA-!!!”

“Hmm. Apparently not.” Ray said to the charred body.

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“Annis Teesia? Never heard of him.”

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“WHAT DID YOU DO!?” Max screamed in terror. His arm was swelling up, the restraints cutting off circulation as it grew larger and harrier, his fingernails lengthening into claws.

“The genetic modification was a success! Your DNA code was easy enough to crack but Subject #30029’s? Whew what a challenge! So I thought to myself, ‘Ray what would happen if you combined their DNA together?’ Ta-daa! Isn’t it spectacular?” Ray cawed, the syringe in his hand spewing the contents.

Max passed out, his tongue swelling up enough to choke him.

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“Note to self, despite being comprised of nearly 70% water, Subject #23365 can not withstand temperatures in excess of 30,000 hoctaflares.” He eyed the blackened, smoking, twitching body. “Better call it an even 25,000.”

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Ax groaned, his eyes still closed. He could tell it had been a long time since he’d lost consciousness. The nearly ever-present sharp agony had dulled to a hot fire. What was it this time? Had he ripped out his nerves again? Had Ray grafted another living creature to him? He knew he hadn’t been immolated again, he lacked that charred, crispy sensation.

“Oh-ho! Brainwaves are spiking! I knew it’d work! Boy you really are sleepy though. Are you narcoleptic? But the operation was a success! This’s so much easier to see your biomechanical processes. Don’t worry I’m taking lots of notes!” Ray said cheerfully.

Max opened his eyes, blinking in the harsh light from the dias. With resignation and trepidation both, he looked down to see what Quasar had...had done…

His hands...were over on separate tables, stretching out from the one he was laying on. His legs were spread on more tables. His skin was hanging loosely on his body, in tatters. His chest was several feet below his neck. All his organs were laying in a neat little pile on another table, pulsing and twitching. And every nerve, every muscle, every last bit of sinew and fiber that was supposed to connect everything to everything else, had been carefully unwound and stretched out.

“Aaaugh...ahh...aHHH! K-Kill me! Why won’t you kill me already!?” Max screamed in anguish through his tears. The dull fire turned hot and sharp again as he realized he could still move his body.

“But why? There’s so much to learn! You can’t die yet there’s so much more life and knowledge to acquire!” Ray chirped. Over Max’s screaming protests and pleads to end his suffering, Ray Quasar blithely picked up a pair of automatic forceps, and the experiment continued.

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Jason stared at Max, openmouthed.

“Jesus Christ.” he said.

“The good lord wasn’t in much of a position to help, I’m afraid.” Max said, smiling sadly.

“How long were you there?” Jason asked.

“It’s a little hard to determine, I wasn’t in the best of circumstances for keeping track of days. But near as I can figure, I spent about nine months like that, in a cell or on the operating table.”

“I thought I had it bad.” Jason muttered.

“You did. Just because my suffering went on for a longer time than yours, doesn’t mean you didn’t go through that pain. It’s not a contest. Besides, even if it was, there's still folks who’d probably beat us out, and I do not envy them.” Max said, shaking his head.

“Jeez. So how’d you get away?”

“Honestly, I didn’t.” Max had been smiling sadly throughout his whole story, a haunted look on his face. But now his grin held real warmth. “I was saved.”

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Day after day after day. Dragged out of his cell, tortured, restored, then put back in. Or just left to rot as another alien was taken whimpering into the operating room. Max felt bad for them, but he wasn’t sure if he would swap, given the chance.

There was no entertainment, no food, just blank walls and experiments. After what he guessed was a few weeks, or at least several cycles of sleeping, Max’s face had the same hollow, beaten-down stare the others had. One of the gang.

As it went on a pattern emerged. Quasar liked to keep his subjects in rotation as evenly as possible, barring whatever he ‘acquired’ a new one. Then it might be several days before he was finished running through his initial experiments. Then it would be into rotation again, unless he liked working on the subject. They got into the rotation more. Max was fairly popular, judging by the three times a week minimum he was restrained on the table. If they were lucky, they weren’t kept up with and starved to death before Ray remembered to get to them. Such was life aboard the Pinso’s cabinet, as Ray translated the ship’s name during one of Max's visits. Extreme boredom, to extreme horror.

Until one day, Max was sitting in his cell, staring at the wall and tapping his knees as usual. He yearned for his pencil and sketchbook in his backpack, long since eradicated by the experiments and restoration machine. He idly wondered if he could chew open his arm and use the blood to paint on the wall, then remembered it would just be absorbed. He sighed dejectedly. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something float past the window out in space. While that wasn’t unusual, what made Max sit up was that it looked like a piece of the Pinso’s Cabinet’s fin.

“Huh?” BOOM. BOOM.

Max got to his feet, the whole cell vibrating with the dull thuds of...something happening to the ship. The other aliens started to take notice too.

“What’s going-”

KA-BOOOOOOOMMM!

The massive explosion rocked the bay, sending all the beings on their feet tumbling down. There was a moment of silence, then several crashes in the distance. Getting closer. The other aliens started to chatter in their shared language, the ones who could anyway. Max couldn’t, but he shared in their hope. There were footsteps rapidly approaching the far door.

It opened, and...Ray ran in, followed by a veritable army of his robots. The disappointment and despair of the prisoners was palpable. But something was off; he was out of breath, and holding some kind of disc-like rifle. He barked orders at his mechanical minions, and they immediately zipped to the cells, imputing codes on the locks. With a rumble each cell decoupled, the robots picking them up and carrying them to the other end of the bay. Ray was watching the door he’d come through the whole time, barely sending nervous glances back as the robots worked. Suddenly, the whole bay shuddered.

Ray screamed something and the robots doubled their speed. Max was the first to be taken out, but not before seeing a blue fist punch through the door, and a deep voice bellow out “Quaaaaaasaaarrr!”

“Nglphi! Gozk! Gozk!” Ray shrieked, running ahead, firing wildly behind him. It seemed like a flamethrower, but much, much hotter and concentrated. Instead of heading to the operating table, Ray and his prisoners turned left, descending a ramp leading to a large rectangular ship that looked perfect for transporting cargo. The door was open, and the robots rushed to it.

“Quuuaaaaaaaaaasaaaaaaarrr!” came from behind them. The booming grew louder. This was perhaps the only chance Max was going to get.

“H-Hey! Here! Over here! Help! Help us, please!” His voice cracked, but he shouted as loud as he could.

Ray slammed a palm into his cell, making it shake. The tentacled face seemed to fill the window.

“Young man please refrain from calling attention to our location otherwise we might all die.” he said pleasantly. But it was too late. The other aliens started to make noise as well, beckoning and calling out in all sorts of languages.

There was a rumbling explosion behind them, and something impacted Max’s cell. He was knocked from the robot, his cell skidding behind the cargo ship’s thrusters. He couldn’t see anything, but could hear a pitch battle, with the stench of metal twisting and flying apart and the robots beeping animatedly. He saw one of them skid across the floor, only it’s head and arm attached together.

There were shouts and cheers, then gasps as he heard Ray firing his gun. There was a lot of shouting in what Max recognized as that shared alien language, along with several other crashes. Then, to his horror, the cargo ship’s thrusters started up, straight ahead of him.

This was it, he thought as he scrambled backwards to the cell’s wall, screaming his lungs out. He’d been abducted, taken into space, experimented on, and now he was going to be incinerated just before whoever was threatening Ray could kill that monster. The engines roared and the thrusters heated up, and he closed his eyes and prayed while the end came. Dear God, let it be quick. He’d had enough pain.

Suddenly, his prison was thrown to the side, sliding along the floor and smacking into the wall. Max shook his head; the impact hadn’t been gentle, his bell had been rung a little. There was a thud, then a crunch, then a gigantic CRACK!

He looked up as the side of the cell was broken off and lifted into the air. Holding it aloft was an enormous, blue, very obviously female humanoid alien. She was wearing a black short-sleeved wrestler’s singlet with yellow stripes down the sides, and instead of hair she had soft, full tentacles running down her neck and shoulders like braids, unlike Ray’s harsh, writhing beard of worms. Her slitted, almost nonexistent nose was eclipsed by two large, shiny black eyes set not quite diagonally on her face.

“Nsshim alooqe? Nssink-oh, wow! A human, ain’t seen one of you in years! You speak that main human-talk? Heard you guys got a lotta languages down there, don’t make sense to me but whatever!”

“H-Huh? Y-Yeah, I speak E-English.” Max stammered out.

“Great! That’s one less I gotta worry about then.” She tossed the cell wall aside as easily as an empty pizza box and turned to the others. “Contool f’xrabasa, bisallin ta ah ellen! Zellmna saina eh ta Askennian?” Max was able to recognize what she said as that shared language, and a bunch of the others started jumping and waving excitedly, yammering on in the common language. A few began to cry as she strode over and busted their cells open with ease.

“Simwah gah esh rffcog, ta stch’ono saina. Ta, ta!” she said, helping the prisoners to their feet. At whatever she said, most of the aliens cheered. Max was suddenly aware of how small and alone he was, surrounded by a press of bodies that were all larger than him, appearing to be fully grown. He tried to back away, and bumped into a greenish centipede thing with bird-like feet. The V-shaped head with a humanoid face and four eyes bent back to stare at him.

“S-Sorry.” he muttered, shuffling off. It was apparent there was only one person he could even communicate with. And she was currently...kicking holes in the interior walls of the ship?

“Uh, e-excuse me? W-What are you doing?” he asked her nervously. She pulled back her fist and let fly, the impact blowing the wall to smithereens.

“Oh, just clearing a way back to my ship. It’ll be a little crowded, but it’ll be faster than this heap, that’s for sure. ‘Sides, I dunno how to fly this thing!” she said, beckoning the others to follow and kicking another hole in a wall. “This ship’s gettin’ blown up anyway. There’s nothin’ here but bad memories.” she added bitterly.

“W-Where’s your ship? W-Why are you even here? N-Not that I’m not grateful, of course.” Max said quickly. She raised a hairless eyebrow.

“Ray really liked you, didn’t he? Must’a did a number on you, huh kid?” she said, knocking another hole through.

“Y-You c-could say that.” he said. A heavy arm slapped his shoulders, and grabbed him before his knees buckled. She grinned at him.

“Well, you ain’t gotta worry ‘bout any’a that no more! Guess I ain’t in the habit of intraducing myself much these days, but I guess that place you come from’s not contacted yet!” She drew back her fist and with one punch broke a giant hole in the last wall, revealing her tractor-trailer-sized ship, and held up her bicep. “I’m Talaxnia! No matter what the Askennian Republic thinks, I’m always here to help people across the galaxy! I’m a superhero, and I’m here to save you!”

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“They...they have superheroes in space.” Jason said in disbelief. Max nodded.

“You see, most planets capable of supporting life eventually evolve intelligent species, and most of those cultures eventually resemble humanity’s in some way. Or rather, humanity’s civilizations are indicative of universal life as a whole. We’re not that different, when you get down to it. Heck, most of the aliens I met were humanoid. Two arms, two legs, a head. ‘Course, exceptions exist.” he explained, rubbing his chin as he recalled his adventures.

“So, this Talaxnia saved you. What happened next?” Jason asked, all anger forgotten.

“Well, Ray’s ship was in one of the deepest, furthest quadrants of space, away from civilized worlds. His...experiments,” Max growled the word through clenched teeth “were highly illegal, of course. Turned out Talaxnia was also a former...guest of his.” he finished with a sour look on his face.

“Of course, Quasar being who he was, he implanted her with a genetic data packet that was designed to collect and enhance the strengths and abilities of any living organism, and he’d collected the DNA of many species before he put it in her. Askennians aren’t known for exceptional physical power, but after he implanted it she tore free of her restraints and ripped his head off.” Max was smiling far too fondly at that thought. It creeped Jason out.

“Wait, she took his head off before you met? Then how did he, y’know, do all that stuff?” the shapeshifter asked.

“No one knows what Quasar’s people are like, but what is known is he’s been experimenting on not just others, but himself too. He regrew his body in a matter of minutes, and managed to escape. For all his insanity, he knew when to fold ‘em, I guess.” Max shrugged.

“Jeez.”

“Oh yeah. Anyway, Talaxnia saved us, and managed to get us all back to where we belonged, or close enough. See, Quasar’s ship had a Rudikkio warp drive-a thing where you go at your normal speed, but it’s a sub-space distance shortener, so you go super-fast while you go at the rate you always were, don’t ask me I have no idea about it. All I know is that it makes starships go real fast.” Max said meekly. “But thanks to that, Earth was basically on the opposite side of the universe. I was basically stranded.”

“Yikes.” Jason said, wide-eyed.

“Yep. But it wasn’t all bad. Talaxnia vowed to get us all back home, and she wasn’t going to let something like a fifty-trillion light year distance stop her. So, she got a ship with a Rudikkio drive herself eventually, and we set off for Earth. Turned out to be a bigger problem than you’d think because to start, Earth's basically in the intergalactic boonies, so even getting a map was an adventure in itself. But I think we should pick this up later.” Max said, eyeing the sun. It was sinking to the horizon, and the warmth of the day was being blown away in the wind. He picked himself up and flexed, growing big again.

“Long story short, I became her sidekick and partner of sorts. Our names were known across the galaxy and beyond as she broke up pirate rings, planetary conquerors, and other injustices. With a bit of help from me.” he added with a note of pride. “I’ve been where you are. And I can help where you go. So how about it? Together, we can avenge your family.” He held his hand out to Jason.

The shapeshifter still had embers of rage, no doubt. But whenever he talked with Max, those burning, muddy feelings in his chest began to loosen a little. There was something else beginning to take its’ place.

“Ugh. How are you like this? How are you so...cheerful, after what you’ve been through?” he muttered.

“It wasn’t easy. I had more nightmares than I care to admit, and more than one breakdown. But with Talaxnia’s help, I got through it. I learned the value of life again. So please. Let me help. When I see you, it’s more painful not to.” Max said. His hand was still outstretched. Jason trembled, then sighed. His chest was shifting again.

“Fine! I’ll do it, I’ll do it! Hell, I came this far already.” Jason huffed, grasping the enormous palm and being lifted onto Max’s back. He had figured it out, what the feeling he was experiencing was. Not since January, and the disappearance of his old life into flames. “And how can you be so corny? It’s embarrassing listening to you.” he said without heat.

“Ha ha! That’s because I’m speaking from my heart!” Max declared with a big grin and thumbs-up.

“See, now that’s what I mean.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll come to see the merits of this way of life yourself! And I believe, the best way to start with that is ice cream!” Max bent his knees and took off, zooming and bounding towards the city in the fading sunlight. Jason held tight, but tried to keep his eyes open as much as he could. He felt lighter, somehow, clinging to Max’s back.

He knew the feeling in his chest, for the first time in a long time, was hope.