The broadcast kept on showing terrible, awful things, one after the other.

Bob Klein looked back at Agatha… or Alexa?

He wasn’t sure anymore. He felt incredibly ashamed. He had contributed to this… endless torture and misery.

He didn’t feel like a good person anymore. They were the baddies. He took off his Officer’s hat and put it down on the seat. If he didn’t get fired, if they didn’t shut Tartarus down he would quit working there regardless. What hero Resonance had done to Alexa in the simulation was absolutely, irrefutably evil.

He didn’t want to look at his crimes anymore. Bob closed the broadcast on his watch holo panel and flicked it to the Market tracker app. The S-credits were already plummeting in value. Whoever Alexa was - a villain or an auditor, she was right. No human on Earth would trust the Superstate from this point onward. The Doomsday Warning broadcast was used to create literal economic doomsday, already hemorrhaging the global stock market.

He quickly flicked through the news blogs. He was the first person to sell all of his credits and this had already been noticed. The more various news networks screamed that everything was fine, the worst the selling panic became. Had he triggered the market crash by dumping all of his family’s savings into gold?

Bob wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

The train lights flickered.

“Open Pandora!” Alexa said.

“Huh?”

“Now, please! Horrible things are about to happen.” Alexa looked at Bob with determination. “Open it if you want to live! We’ve just pissed off some very important supers! They’re coming to murder us! Now Bob!” She rushed towards him, trying to hide herself in his much larger body.

A dark portal flashed into existence behind Bob.

All of the windows in the train exploded, the train screeching to a halt. Alexa slammed into Officer Bob and both of them were flung into his portal by the force of her impact and then by a tremendous release of power. The dark portal snapped shut just as the world caught fire.

Nonpareil appeared in the extremely mangled train car. He hung in the middle of the train, eyes blazing with brilliant light.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, GIRL?! WHERE ARE YOU?!” He screamed as the automated train groaned. Everything around the hero burned and melted. He must have flown into the train at top speed without even slowing down. He was angry. He must have checked the value of the S-credits, stopped looking at her broadcast earlier than anyone else.

Alexa and Bob were floating in a dim space, held up by two-dimensional tentacles, existing somewhere right beneath reality, still able to see what was happening in the burning train, albeit much dimly.

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“Holy shit. It’s Nonpareil,” Bob whimpered.

He was facing one of the windows at the moment of the explosion, so he was bleeding all over from lacerations made by glass shards.

“Yeah. Kittening Nonpareil,” Alexa sighed.

“Kittening?” Officer Bob asked, wincing in pain. He wasn’t having a good time.

“Trying to keep it PG, yo. Gota stay cool. Look!” Alexa pointed at the burning train interior. A doorway flashed open in space and a man wearing a gray coat, round spectacles and a wide brimmed hat stepped out.

“Where is the girl?” Three spoke, his shoes and coat instantly catching fire.

“You…” Nonpareil growled, blinking. “Who are you? What are you doing here?!”

“I am the hand of the future. Where. Is. The. Girl?” Three spoke calmly with his awful nasally accent as his clothes burned. His fake face caught fire, starting to melt away.

“I know not of you! Be gone, villain!”

“I reckon we should run now. I think they’re gonna have a turf war. You can move real fast in your weird shadow-world, right?” Alexa grabbed Bob’s hand. “I know you can go inside it and reemerge safely elsewhere. Take us as far away as possible please. Preferably in the direction of lake Eerie please.”

Bob nodded. He didn’t let go of Alexa. She wouldn't survive inside of his shadow-realm without him. His job was to take her out of Tartarus and he would finish it at the very least. He owed her that much.

“Okay.” He took a step forward and in that step he moved across several kilometers of space in an instant, traveling like a ghostly shadow through solid rock, heading towards the great North American lake.

“Get out of my way, whoever you are! I know she was just…” Nonpareil growled.

“Nullify!”

Eye lasers struck from Three and from Nonpareil at the same time as the hero responded to a clear attack. An unstoppable force met an immovable object. Something that could erase anything met something that could not be deleted.

The universe shuddered.

Bob felt something truly horrific coming from behind him. He stepped forward again, as far as his shadow-jump could take him. He felt his body getting strained past its limits. He wanted to live. Wanted to survive. He knew, felt something coming through his power. Whatever was catching up to him would shred him whole.

He pushed as far as he possibly could all at once and something tore in his head, a fractal pattern sparkling in his mind, burning and dimming.

Alexa and Bob were flung out of the shadow realm falling down onto the shore of lake Eerie. They fell out of the air, rolling across a crystalline, white glass pebbled beach. Many thousands of kilometers in the distance the world flashed with blinding light as a whole section of a mountain chain vanished out of existence. A gargantuan mushroom cloud rose into the sky, spreading out across the stratosphere.

“Well this is very kittens,” Alexa muttered looking at the mushroom cloud. “Wowzah. Have you ever seen an explosion that big, Bobby? I sure haven’t. This is some Tzar Bomba kittery right there.”

Bob didn’t feel so good. He groaned, heaving. The fractal pattern inside his mind darkened as his power had strained past its absolute limit. He turned and looked at the enormous explosion. He was alive. He did it. He escaped. His eyes watered, he fell onto the pebbles and knew no more.

“Bobby-sama?” Alexa poked the passed out Tartarus Officer. “Ah. You went too far all at once. It’s okay, you deserve a nap now. Take it easy. Thank you for saving me.” She petted him.

She stood up and stared at the enormous explosion until the blastwave reached her, flinging her silver hair up in the air and she laughed. She did it.

She had triggered the wrath of gods and titans and managed to escape with her life. She had passed between Scylla and Charybdis like Greek hero Odysseus so long ago.

She had avoided both Three and Nonpareil and made them butt heads.