I checked my inbox, and found no indication of additional dimensional crossover...

...which made complete sense when I remembered that I had gotten my anti-scanning implant overloaded and disabled shortly before arrival, but Dr. Skinner didn't have any such handicap.

She was here. She'd been here possibly the entire time I'd been here, and I had no idea where she was.

"Well, shit," I said.

"Indeed," the man pointing the gun at me said. "Are we going to have a problem?"

"Hopefully not," I said. "You two seem to simply... misunderstand the situation."

Every mad scientist had three aptitudes. I'd told Akane about two of mine- scanners and robots. But I wasn't one of the Curious like she was; scanners were just something I was particularly good at.

No. I was one of the Banished. And we all had an aptitude for control.

"You work for me," I commanded, my eyes glowing green and my voice reverberating in an unnatural register. Ray guns lowered, as the green glow of their own eyes shone around the edges of their sunglasses. "Now, gentlemen, if you could kindly step away from my apprentice..."

An unreasonably loud noise, like Zeus and Thor trying to spitroast a woodchipper, accompanied a painfully bright orange lightning bolt, which struck Akane's motorcycle and tore a horrific gouge into the side.

"We can pretend that was a warning shot," 8-Ball said, stepping around the corner of the gas station in their power armor. Years ago, 8-Ball had grafted their power armor onto their person permanently, on the grounds that it'd make the armor stronger. And they were right, it did grant them a level of protection unmatched by anyone but true masters of armor.

But quite aside from the diminishing returns of improved armor, 8-Ball was permanently grafted into a suit of power armor. Quite aside from the danger of their armor going haywire if they went out in public, they had trouble fitting through doors. They were a shut-in, with only other demiurges and half-mad minions as company.

Which wasn't the entire reason why I'd broken away from Dr. Skinner and 8-Ball hadn't, but it sure didn't help.

"Dr. Skinner only specified alive," 8-Ball continued, leveling their gun at me. "It's not like you need legs." They pulled the trigger... and nothing happened.

"You keep forgetting that I can remotely deactivate pretty much anything I can see, huh," I said.

"I had to try," 8-Ball said, tossing their gun to the side and drawing a sword mounted on their back. Much ink had been spilled on the fact that drawing a sword from a back-mounted scabbard was impossible, if the sword was longer than your arm. And while it turned out that was incorrect, so long as the scabbard was designed to accommodate that, the fact still remained that 8-Ball was just as much of a mad scientist as Akane and I, and doing the impossible was well within their wheelhouse. A sword that could phase through inorganic matter to strike the vulnerable flesh underneath, well, that was just downright practical. "Want a haircut, Greaser?"

"...Really? An Outsiders reference?" I asked, affronted. "Do you just not read books unless you're forced to, or are you trying to give me a hard time about growing up poor?"

8-Ball didn't answer, being too busy trying to kill me with a sword. Unfortunately for 8-Ball, a sword wouldn't be enough.

Black tendrils, each maybe three inches across and tapered not at all, sprouted from my back in numbers beyond convenient counting, wriggling through cunningly-concealed vents in my coat. Some of them lifted me off the ground and carried me backwards. Others, fully fifteen feet long, grasped at 8-Ball.

A sword was, perhaps, the best conventional weapon for dealing with tentacles. 8-Ball hacked through three of them with each slice. But I had a lot of tentacles, and no amount of armor could keep 8-Ball from getting grappled, their arm immobilized, their sword wrenched from their grasp, and their knees on the ground.

"It's honestly kind of funny, 8-Ball," I said. "By any internal metrics, looking at the raw power we both have with mad science, and our skill with mad science itself, you should be stronger than me, or at least my equal. And yet, here we are, with you on your knees, your weapons useless, and the cops arriving any minute now. Because it turns out, even with all that power, the fact remains that I'm smarter than you."

8-Ball grunted, before their armor burst into flames, scalding my tentacles and forcing them to let go. 8-Ball seemed unharmed, though; this was, in all likelihood, an esoteric variant on an energy shield.

There was no more time to think- 8-Ball was charging me again, and while I was a black belt in Judo, it was probably going to be really hard to use a grappling art on someone it was painful to touch, even with my own low-profile armor. Plus, I wasn't the only martial artist here.

"Goddamn do you like to hear yourself talk," 8-Ball snarled.

I was strong. I was quick. I was skilled. But I wasn't enough to stop 8-Ball from closing the five foot gap between us and tackling me to the ground, their armor's burn just barely over the knife's edge of hurting me.

"You can't outsmart a bullet," 8-Ball growled.

"You're right," I said, before raising my voice as best I could with four hundred pounds of armored thug on top of me. "Shoot them!"

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, yes, the ray guns the two mooks I'd mind-controlled were carrying were armor-piercing. 8-Ball screamed as they were knocked off of me by the impact of the ray guns, and with some breathing room, I managed to turn off 8-Ball's burning shield, just in time to roll on top of them and tear open a maintenance panel, pulling a screwdriver from my pocket with my free hand. The wiring layout in here was insane, and I'd never fully understood it, but I did know where the power supply was coming in. A quick short with the screwdriver, and it would shut itself down immediately, preventing 8-Ball from doing anything useful until they got five minutes alone to manually restart it.

I took out a multitool, and cut the wires from the power supply. Now 8-Ball would need a soldering iron to fix this.

"Right, well," I said, retracting my tentacles into my back and turning around. "Are you o...kay..." I blinked. "...Hello, Veronica, I found the dimension-hopper for you."

Veronica Vega, half-alien princess, floated there imperiously, arms folded.

"More than one, it would seem," Veronica noted.

"Y-you..." Akane began, slowly standing up. "...You are a bounty hunter."

I sighed, glancing around. The gas station itself was more-or-less untouched, surprisingly. However, I saw the corner of my pack of zingers sticking out from under 8-Ball's bulk, the cakes themselves likely completely crushed. Not a completely flawless victory.

"...Well, I suppose I've been fairly caught," I said. "Yeah. I was a bounty hunter. Still am, I suppose. Hunting my old mentor, Doctor Beatrice Skinner." I sighed. "I came out of retirement for this, you know? One last job that only I could do..." I groaned in frustration and kicked 8-Ball's armor, accomplishing nothing but making a loud noise. "I'm never getting out of this fucking life. I am cursed to spend the rest of my days fistfighting asshole after asshole for my next paycheck."

"It's not sunshine and rainbows for me either," 8-Ball groaned, muffled by the armor now that the communication pass-through was turned off.

"Shut up! Nobody asked!" I yelled.

"Who is Doctor Beatrice Skinner?" Veronica asked.

"Right," I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. "So, in the 20th century, there was one Doctor Burrhus Frederic Skinner, a famous psychologist and one of the most influential in the field of behaviorism. You may have heard the term 'Skinner Box'; that was based on one of his experiments with pigeons. Well, Doctor Skinner died in 1990, and a few years later, a group of mad scientists dug him up to use his corpse for various experiments. One tried to resurrect him through bodily restoration. Another tried to call upon his ghost. And the third, with a post-cognitive brain-scanning machine, grabbed a copy of his psyche from before his death. Only the third was particularly successful- the first just got a zombie, and the second learned that ghosts aren't nearly as smart as the original.

"Of course, a psychic scan is useless if you don't do anything with it. So this mad scientist implanted the psychic scan in her younger sister, on the grounds that said younger sister was a huge asshole that nobody would miss. This turned out to be one of the worst decisions anyone made in the year 1994, and this younger sister became a huge asshole with the knowledge, skill, and expertise of one of the most reknowned psychologists in history. She renamed herself to Doctor Beatrice Skinner, and ever since, she's been trying to use psychological programming and social engineering to get her way."

"...And she was your mentor?" Veronica asked.

"After a fashion," I said. "She's been, essentially, a cult leader for nearly thirty years, and that cult targeted me when I hit a particularly low point in college. Unfortunately for them, my brain isn't wired like a normal person's, and the ordinarily-effective cult tactics just made me bitter and angry with them. I had a Breakthrough, becoming a mad scientist in my own right. Dr. Skinner tried taking a more personal touch with me, but at that point, I'd already started putting myself back together."

This wasn't the full story, of course. That full story was between myself and God. I certainly wasn't going to tell them that I'd had my Breakthrough after having sworn that I'll Show Them, I'll Show Them All!

And I definitely wasn't going to tell them that, for a good while, Dr. Skinner's approach did work. She'd appealed to my sense of superiority over the dumb sheep making up the bulk of her following, training me to become her lieutenant... and I hadn't even broken away from her because her ideas were trash. I'd broken away when I realized I'd been the final puzzle piece to her figuring out the pinnacle of mind control, the art of permanently rewriting someone's personality. So, right when she finished the gadget that'd let her do that... I kidnapped her, threw her in the river, and used that gadget to deprogram all of her cultists and destroy everything she'd built up on the backs of others. Then, at last, I broke the gadget, and left to find my own way in the world.

I should've just killed her. I mean, I certainly tried to. I bound her hands and tied cinderblocks to her feet before throwing her in the river. But I didn't just slice her throat, because I was rapturously angry with her, and I wanted her to die as painfully as I could manage.

Those were not proud days.

I grunted. "At any rate, what's done is done. Now, we must look to the future. Technically, I am the one who set off that alarm, and I am the one Valiant has asked you to hunt. However, all things considered, I think you and I can both agree that the Bond Villain cult leader with mind control technology might be somewhat of a bigger problem. So! How's about we talk this one out, and come to an agreement?"

"...This is above my pay grade," Veronica admitted. "You're going to have to talk to Valiant yourself. On the plus side, after all this, he's likely on his way right now."

"Fantastic. Alright, Akane, let's... try to fix that motorcycle before the police arrive."