“Hey Bill,” Perry said, shrugging the phone up to his ear as he held the twins’ hands.

“You don’t call me Bill. What did you do?”

“I might’ve…sort’ve…spilled a legendary monster into your little sand-castle. Completely unintentionally, of course.”

“Explain.” Tyrannus said.

“Well, I’m standing here in a replicator bunker, collecting residue from an android copy of Abun’zaul.”

Perry lifted Gareth up and had him use a scoop on the biomechanical ceiling.

“Ewww!” Gareth said with a huge grin as the biomechanical ribs dissolved into clear goop on contact with the scoop.

“Ewww!” Sera said, peering at the goop as it dripped into the collection tube.

They finally found something they could both enjoy: Goo.

“Did you bring your children?”

“Yeah, when you’ve got small children with you, you’re temporarily safe from monsters. It’s monster movie rules.”

It was actually because Perry was the safest place for them to be, when anyone could be a mimic. With his obscene physical and mental stats, he was more likely to keep than safe than hiding them away somewhere.

“Bet I can catch some on my tongue!” Sear said, opening her mouth under the dripping goop.

Perry grabbed her shoulder and got her face out of the way as the thick goop dripped to the ground.

“Awww…”

“Not safe.”

Gareth started dipping his fingers into the bottle and Perry seamlessly stopped him with Dragor’s Kinesis.

Perry took the phone away from his ear and knelt down, eye level with his children.

“Listen you two, unless I tell you otherwise, don’t put anything in your mouth or touch it with your skin, alright?”

“Okaaay…” Sera and Gareth said…for the fifteenth time.

“So why are you calling me?” Tyrannus asked as Perry put the phone back against his ear.

“You have any unexplained disappearances on the frontier?” Perry asked. “The goop trail on the outside of the bunker appeared to be heading west before it disappeared.”

“No, not really. If anything, the citizens on the frontier are actually paying their taxes on time this year…Fuuuck. Nobody ever sounds the alarm when everything’s going well.

“Seems like there should be a ‘suspiciously high levels of law abidance’ alarm, don’t ya think?” Perry asked.

I’ll have the software made…They’re not human, are they?”

“That’s a distinct possibility.” Perry said, holding the twins in place while he fed the sample into his portable scanner. “Be careful how you handle it. I’m thinking we’ll need to coordinate to cordon off maybe…an eighth of the former united states.”

“That’s impossible. You know that’s impossible.”

“I know.”

“Any non-crazy ideas?”

“Well, targeted curses like the one we used on the war demons are likely to be ineffective and dangerous. Mimic has a tendency to shed traits that are no longer beneficial, and this one is from especially virulent stock. The spell itself might also wind up having some unwanted collateral damage on citizens who share any traits that the mimic had at the time the curse hit them.”

DING!

“Ooo, shit.” Perry said, scanning the readout.

“What? Shit what?”

“It may have possibly…fused with the magical grey-goo housed in my soul, and sloughed off any control Professor Replica might’ve had over it in the process.”

Perry had been hoping the good Professor might offer a quick and easy solution to the Zaul-inator, but it wasn’t looking good. Similar to how Perry’s dad had shrugged off the Omni-class tinker’s control, the newly created abomination might similarly find obedience to be…optional.

“…How bad is it?”

“I don’t wanna alarm you…” Perry said. “But there’s a possibility it might be able to level up. It’s pretty bad. Like…world-ending bad.” Funny there seem to be so many of those cropping up today.

“I deal with world-ending threats constantly. I appreciate the warning, though.”

“You’re welcome. I have a couple other things on my plate to address before I can come investigate. Remember the buddy system, and call me back if you get assimilated. I’ll make sure to kill you quick.”

“Likewise.” The dragon said moments before they hung up.

“Who wants to go visit Franklin city!?” Perry exclaimed, seamlessly switching tracks.

“Gramma and Grampa!” Sera yelled, fist in the air.

“Why are we going everywhere today?” Gareth asked.

“Sorry, no Gramma and Grampa today,” Perry said, kneeling. He didn’t feel comfortable letting them out of his sight. Not until things settled down. “As for why we’re going everywhere…let’s just say an eldritch being gave us a hint that something bad’s gonna happen soon and Daddy wants to get ahead of it.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

In the back of his mind, the desire to unilaterally freeze his entire family with Paradox’s Time-out and squirrel them away into another dimension until the six-month deadline passed reared its ugly head again.

He could do that, but he’d be throwing away his relationship as a husband and father. Not to mention, this was the kind of world-ending shit Solaris dealt with on a yearly basis and kept quiet about.

It wasn’t the first world-ending threat on Earth, nor would it be the last. He needed to find a different solution rather than just abandoning everything.

That’s what dads do.

“Today, we’re going to visit…Gramma and Grampa, actually,” Perry mused.

“Yay!”

“Along with a few others.” Perry added, standing up and creating a portal to Franklin. “Keep in mind, you’re not supposed to call them gramma and grampa in front of other people, okay? They’re working.”

“Okaaaay!” Gareth and Sera said, eagerly hopping in place in front of the portal.

They’re not gonna remember. Oh well. It was an open secret anyway.

Together the three of them stepped through the portal into a well-appointed underground chamber. One of Mechanaut’s secret conference rooms

There were four people there:

Hexen, Mechanaut, Chemestro and Locust.

“Gramma, Grampa!” the twins shrieked, sprinting across the room to jump into the arms of their grandparents.

“You brought the twins?” Mechanaut asked.

“Reasons,” Perry said with a shrug, meeting Locust and Chemestro’s gaze for a moment before taking his own seat on the round table.

“So what did you call us here for?” Locust asked. The grey-haired mutant wore her traditional leather jacket and laser pistol. “I’ve got shit to do today.”

“You’re literally in hundreds of places at once right now. You’ll be fine.” Perry said, taking a steadying breath while mom and dad bounced the twins on their laps.

“So, who here is aware of Solaris’s auto-immune disease?” Perry asked, scanning the room. “You know, the one damaging his brain?”

Dad stiffened slightly and Locust’s jaw dropped.

Chemestro and Hexen were ‘official’ anchors, so they didn’t show as much surprise.

“I see. I called you here, because you are the anchor or anchor-adjacent supers I have an in with.” Perry said. “I want to know what’s being done to help him, and I want to help any way I can. Tell me what I can do.”

Hexen folded her hands over Gareth and leaned her chin on them.

“It’s…delicate. Solaris is outright immune to nearly every form of technology or magic. The only way that Scrape managed to infect him was he obtained a sample of Solaris’s DNA from before he’d become Solaris.”

“How does that work?” Perry asked. Just having a DNA sample didn’t in and of itself give you a magical backdoor into someone’s body…unless you used magic.

Was gramma part of this? Perry thought silently. The old woman was one of the people gunning for 1st place. It was highly suspicious that Scrape alone could manage to bypass Solaris’s immunities.

“We’re not sure yet.” Hexen said.

“The disease seems to present itself as rapid-onset dementia, From what we can make sense of Scrape’s notes, The virus was designed to be asymptomatic, making unnoticeable changes to Solaris’s DNA over the course of several days. Every time Solaris changed to light, the virus in his system was wiped out, but the modified DNA in his cells would cause them to spit out more of that same virus the moment he turned back to flesh and blood. The newly created viruses would then pick up where the previous wave left off. ”

Hexen rubbed her temples with a sigh.

“We think he’s had the virus for eight months and three days. The reason it took so long to see any changes was because Solaris is always changing to light to go from one place to another, or to fight something. It kept getting wiped out, over and over, but each time he spent in flesh and blood, it infected a little more of his body.

Once it had a significant amount of his body infected, a trigger inside the virus mutated it to hijack Solaris’s immune system, teaching it to attack his nervous system.”

“Like MS?” Perry was aware MS was acquired when a piece of myelin sheath accidently gets scooped up by an immune cell, and the immune system ‘learns’ to attack nerves. It stood to reason a designer virus by a madman could achieve a similar effect.

“Similar, yes.”

“What’s stopping us from fixing him?” Perry asked.

“In short? He is.” Chemestro said. “In order to for our bio-tinkers to diagnose the exact nature of the changes to his DNA and acquire a sample of the virus itself, we would need to be able to take a sample of his blood.”

“And you can’t do that.” Perry said.

“Any part of Solaris no longer connected to Solaris goes MC squared,” Chemestro said, nodding.

Perry nodded, his mind awhir with possibilities.

“I think I can help with that.” He’d already thought of several possibilities.

“What if we didn’t remove the blood? What if the diagnostic hardware were inside him?”

“It’s been tried.” Hexen replied. “Instruments left inside Solaris for any length of time have a tendency to melt and burn any sample they might be working on.

“I could probably make some pretty durable ones,” Perry said with a shrug.

“We’ll consider it.” Hexen said.

“Another option is to fake a sample into thinking it’s still connected to Solaris. Mind-taker ichor can do that.”

Hexen’s brow twitched.

“Yes…that might work. Can you…”

“I’ll make both,” Perry offered “And I’ll do research on auto-immune brain disorders in the meantime. I may need it.”

“And do be quick about it, sweetheart. We’ve hired some discrete doctors to diagnose solely based on Solaris’s behavior. They universally say that the disease seems to be eroding Solaris’s emotional control center faster than the rest of him.”

“Is that by design?” Perry asked.

“I Believe so. I think Scrape wanted to drag Solaris down to his own level and smear his legacy.”

“What a petty asshole. Is he not talking?” Perry asked.

“He’s not breathing.” Hexen said.

Perry sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“Solaris lost his temper and vaporized Scrape upon learning of his involvement.”

“Yikes,” Perry said. It was worse than he’d expected.

“If you’re going to try something to help, you’d better be fast.” Hexen said. “Solaris is now spending all his time as light to halt the disease, but every now and then he needs to make a public appearance. Like your wedding.”

“Each public appearance is taking time off the clock. One more outburst like the one that ended Scrape and the Anchors will have to take action.”

Hexen scanned the surrounding supers.

“He’s losing memories. I don’t need to remind any of you that Solaris’s background is less than pleasant, and built on a foundation of paranoia and tightly controlled violence. If he begins to regress…we do not need a world-ending threat re-enacting his PTSD from gang warfare in the seventies.”

Perry nodded.

“I’ll get right on it.”

Perry stood and rounded up the kids.

“And Paradox?” Hexen said.

“Yeah?”

“Be careful what you say and who you say it to. You never saw much of it, but Solaris has always been paranoid. This disease…it’s making things worse. He may assume you’re trying to kill him.”

“Why would he assume that?” Perry asked.

“I can help with that,” Mechanaut said, turning towards the wall, a bright light projecting from his palm.

The wall blinked to life as a list of events began to scroll past.

“This is the list of times people close to Solaris have tried to kill, control, or depose him in the past.”

It was a long list.

“Oh.” Perry muttered as the events scrolled past, processing each of them and matching them to his knowledge of specific super deaths and disappearances. A long history of turmoil, sixty years in the making. “Damn.”

“Alright kiddos, we’re heading out. We’ve got more stops to make today.”

“Aww…” Sera and Gareth pouted, but Perry managed to bribe them into leaving their grandparents laps.

Honestly, Mom made more of a fuss about the twins leaving than they did, but everyone had work to do.

Perry gave everyone a firm goodbye and left them to unpackage the news with Mechanaut and Locust, while Perry popped through the portal.

They arrived at a little clinic in the middle of Funkytown.

“Aww…not Great Gramma…” Sera sulked. “Why are you taking us here?”

“Because when you’ve got small children with you, you’re temporarily safe from monsters. It’s monster movie rules.” Perry said, pinching her cheek.