Contributing Author: rachasudd
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Back in New City’s Botanical Garden…
Trey lay scattered into fifty pieces. Each part of himself was twitching, quivering, as his raw flesh was exposed to the flow of air in a wholly unnatural way.
Without the power of an aphid, he could not reconstitute himself. Cratherine was doing her best to scoop him up, and he appreciated the effort, but it also hurt—though he couldn’t tell her since his tongue and lips were not currently connected to his throat.
For the first time since he was a moody teenager experimenting with eyeliner, he wondered why he was even alive.
“Oh, wow this is a real mess,” said Tater, his voice strange as it entered Trey’s ears in different locations. “How are we supposed to–”
“Are y’all ready to LIFT?”
The booming voice made the broken glass on the floor jump. The steel frame of the greenhouse reverberated and hummed. One heavy footstep followed another, like an earthquake’s aftershocks.
Tater waddled over to the edge of the greenhouse. His face, if it wasn’t a crispy golden brown, would have blanched at the sight.
“It’s Vice Roid,” he murmured. “But he looks different. Real different. He’s somehow bigger? Um… I think we’re in a lot of trouble, guys.”
Um, hello, um, is this *ahem* a good time to introduce myself?
Trey blinked.
Yeah, you could say that. Can you pull me back together?
Hi, I’m, uh. This is embarrassing. I’m Weenie Bob. I can pull you back together, there’s an undo button right here, Geneva kindly labeled it and everything.
Then hurry up!
See, um, once I press the button it will activate my power and *ahem* it’s a little embarrassing…
The glasshouse shook. A monstrous fist struck the walls. Glass shattered and bent metal flew away into the night. A monstrosity reared above the exposed garden.
This was not the Vice Roid that Trey remembered kicking in the nuts.
This man, this thing, stood twice as tall and with none of the skin. Raw flesh loomed, muscles pulsed, dripping blood, as he–it–grinned with a set of massive white chompers.
“That was nothing!” the creature flexed its biceps, which flexed their biceps in turn. “Time for me to lift you to heaven so I can bring you down to hell!”
Trey shuddered.
Every time Vice Roid spoke, his teeth peeled apart and a fat cybernetic heart lurched into the open gap. [Awareness] helped Trey realize that it was the massive man’s cardiovascular core doing the talking. From the look of fear in Vice Roid’s tiny eyes, the big guy was no more in control of himself than Trey was.
“Vice!” Tater called, waving his arms. “You don’t need to do this, buddy! We can all be friends. This is Cratherine, she’s my girlfriend. We love each other. Love is the answer to all life’s problems! We don’t need–”
A bloody fist the size of an anvil mashed Tater’s head. Potato splattered the garden, and Tater’s body slumped to the ground.
Cratherine screamed, a sound like a klaxon ringing out an incoming tornado. Her body clacked as it transformed. Spikes emerged. Her eyes blazed with red light. Telescopic limbs lengthened. With heavy metal strides, she launched herself at Vice Roid.
The heart laughed in Vice Roid’s mouth as bloody hands met steel gauntlets. They grappled, jostling for some kind of advantage–until Vice Roid lifted her over his head.
“Time for some BEAST MODE!”
The heart roared like a lion as it used Vice Roid’s hulking body of blood and flesh to bring Cratherine down onto his knee. She snapped like a cheap remote.
All this happened in a few seconds while Trey lay in a discarded pile.
Give me your power! He screamed inside his mind. I have to help them!
They couldn’t be dead. He refused to believe that this was the end.
Sparks continued to burst from Cratherine’s busted circuitry. If he was able to get her some scrap, she’d be fine. Right? And if he could fix her, she could fix Tater.
But first, he needed Weenie to show his power.
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Um, I’m more of a grower than a shower. Just be careful, ok?
With a snap, Trey’s separated body parts resumed their normal form. He lay on his back staring up at the night sky glowing through New City’s light pollution while his friends lay dying in the devastated greenhouse.
His friends… how long had it been since he could call someone his friend?
He rolled over and crawled toward Cratherine.
“Hey, are you ok?”
A red LED eye blinked fitfully.
“...Scrap…” she buzzed. “...Fix…Failed…Scrap…”
Trey felt his heart breaking. Her whole body was twisted. Her joints buckled. There were bloodstained imprints in her plating where Vice Roid’s fingertips had squeezed too hard.
His Quest had been to bring love to the garden, but all he had done was bring destruction.
It’s not too late. Just feed her scrap, right? Come on Trey, this is making me sad!
Trey shook himself. Scrap, right? He focused on his [Awareness], used it to seek out what he needed.
He crawled toward a bent piece of the greenhouse roof. The metal frame that housed the glass. Carefully crawling under tables of vines to avoid the manic eyes of Vice Roid and his beating heart. He reached the scrap and his heart sank. It was too large, but he had to try.
He grabbed the steel and–why was his hand so big?
The bar felt light in his grip. He shuffled backward, and the tables jostled. They had shrunk or, no… he had grown. He tried to crawl out, but he couldn’t, so he stood. The tables blasted away and his head cleared the shattered greenhouse roof. The wind whipped at his hair as he stared out at the city beyond the garden hills. The steel beam in his hand looked like a long French fry, and he tossed it toward Cratherine. She grabbed it with a limp arm and greedily began to consume and assimilate the metal. Her joints and fractures repaired before his eyes.
She should never have been in such a state!
As he turned away from Cratherine, he glared down at Vice Roid. Trey realized he hadn’t stopped growing. He just kept getting bigger.
The mammoth meat man had towered above the building, but now he only reached up to Trey’s knees. With the wicked grin of a triumphant toddler, Trey bent down and picked up the bloody-skinned man. His hand squeezed around the musclebound villain. It felt like gripping a frenzied squirrel, but Trey only grew, and with it, his strength magnified.
“You think YOU can lift ME?” shouted the heart. “I am the one who LIFTS! Me!”
Trey brought him up to his head. It was like holding a squirming, rubbery action figure. But Trey was beyond giant. He looked at the bug in his hands, and grinned.
“I’m going to rip your head off.”
Trey placed two fingers around the bloody, snarling hunk of flesh as though he were popping a pimple on prom night. But he was distracted by his power, by the sight of the city. His lungs heaved, blowing a gale between skyscrapers like a breeze between swaying trees. The air was thinner, this high up, and his ears popped with a sound like thunder in response to his change in altitude.
He returned his attention to the villain’s head, ready to make a mess when something small–and insignificant–brushed his ankle.
He looked down. Looked so far down he couldn’t believe it, and saw Tater Tot. Somehow, the mashed-up potato man was still alive. Dimly, his thoughts slowed by the extended length of circuitry in his brain, Trey realized a potato has no vital organs. Tater Tot was probably more indestructible than Cratherine was.
The potato man was saying something, and Trey had to crouch, kneel, lay down, and put his monstrous ear to the ground to hear the starchy whispers.
“Please, Trey,” Tater Tot wheezed in his crinkle-cut voice. “Don’t kill my friend.”
Trey’s monstrous eyes, each the size of a house, pupils like gaping doors into darkness, iris full of veins like gorged pythons, stared at the struggling muscle man. Stared at the muscles that bulged with bloodlust and hatred. Stared at the cybernetic heart screaming to lift, to crush, and destroy.
The man’s eyes were small black beads, like a doll’s, devoid of all but a single, horrified spark of humanity. But that spark was there, and it shone bright, a match lighting up a dark alleyway, desperately trying to hang on.
Something wriggled out of Trey’s thundering heart. A root. Growing through flesh and soul. A root became a tree, and a tree became a branch and it reached through Trey to the struggling man in his grip.
Hate destroyed, and it was never Mother Plant’s answer. It wasn’t her way. She lived, and in living, she created.
Yes, Trey. You understand! It sounded like Weenie was crying inside his brain, and Trey felt the same emotion welling up inside him like the crescendo of a choir.
Trey’s fingernail was the size of an awning, and with it, he delicately scraped away the cybernetic implant on Vice Roid’s heart.
“NO!” the heart shouted. “You cannot unlift me! No! Noooooooooooooo–”
The implant shattered between Trey’s grip, and he set Vice Roid down on the ground. Tater crawled over to his muscle-bound friend and threw a thin, half-smushed arm around him.
Trey stood, his head swaying through the clouds, and light struck his eyes. Thousands of stars glowed in the sky. Each bright as the glint of humanity in Vice Roid’s eyes. When was the last time he truly saw the night sky? Without all the pollution, the smog, in the way? Had he ever seen it? Had he always lived beneath the haze that, he now knew, was Beetlebub’s making?
“Thank you,” he boomed out in a voice that shook distant windows and set off car alarms. “Thank you Weenie Bob, thank you aphids, thank you, Mother Plant.”
The light of the stars burned into his brain.
Thank you, Trey. We never abandon hope. Never abandon the cause. But, well, before you… we thought hope was all we had. Now, we have a chance. It’s time for me to go.
Trey nodded, too entranced by the dazzling celestial display to speak any further words.
No further words were needed.
[NEW SYNCHRONIZATION]! - 00.10% | (W) Weenie Bob
The glow of the night was replaced by a fierce radiance that seemed to erupt from the ground below. Trey shrunk as the aphid’s power left him, and he descended into a light unlike any he had ever experienced. The root that had grown out of his heart shattered into a thousand shimmering spotlights. But the brightness of it all wasn’t terrible. It was like wading through a dream inside the sun, pleasant and vibrant and shielded from everything bad, everything terrible. And as Trey fell back to the earth, the soil lifted itself up and caught him in a warm, welcoming embrace.
[Root Development] Complete.