Alexa burst out of the long hallway back into the original train station she had arrived at. She considered heading for Gate 7, but she also didn’t want to leave the station, didn’t want to simply follow the path that was preordained to her by Wizard Revolution.
She bounced on her spring shoes up and down and down and up, reaching higher and higher with each jump until she grabbed at a metal beam overhead and pulled herself up and rushed to the edge of the beam, concealing herself in a nook formed by the convergence of several steel beams.
Once there, she pulled the conceptual gun out, aimed it at the booth below and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened.
“Hey, what gives?” She demanded
“I’m a conceptual Conductor, not a raygun,” the liminal being answered. “I simply conduct the passage of someone or something from one state to another, I have no external source of power to zap things with as you expect me to."
“So you’re all talk and no action, huh?” Alexa mulled. “Weren’t you threatening to eat me just a minute ago? Didn’t I take your conducting job away, Mr. Nobody?”
“Even if I no longer wear the uniform, it will take time for the concept chains that were hung upon me by Wizard Acolyander to fully decay away,” the Conductor answered.
“How much time?” Alexa asked.
“The sooner you stop thinking about me as Mr. Conductor the faster I’ll be able to devour you,” the useless raygun answered.
The faceless, beady-eyed man in the gray suit suddenly folded out of a hallway, moving like a worm that was stepped on far too many times. It twitched and thrashed, head snapping left and right right below Alexa.
Then it looked up, spotting her.
“That thing can’t climb or jump up here, right?” Alexa asked.
“It cannot,” the Conductor replied. “But it can stretch.”
The faceless nobody grabbed at the air above it, reaching out for Alexa. Its joints popped, limbs and fingers growing longer. Alexa gulped.
Her fingers dug through her multitude of pockets, encountering nothing of use… finding nothing that could help her here. Once again, she grabbed at the two cards that represented the two heroes, the Multiplier and the Surgeon.
Her mind clicked. The Multiplier could multiply powers while the Surgeon could cut things away from reality.
Alexa snapped her raygun open. The pink hairdryer was empty from within, just as she expected, just a mess of wires and boxes not really connected to anything, conceptually wrong, unfinished. She shoved the two cards into the plastic slot that usually contained the battery and snapped the gun shut aiming it at the lengthening nobody.
“Divide by Zero,” her lips spoke, as her sweaty, trembling fingers pressed the trigger, as she repeated the words uttered by the two heroes who had erased her dad and nearly erased Alexa herself from reality.
A ray of pure nothingness struck the nobody, cutting right through him, cutting right through the floor of the station and other floors beneath it.
The nobody made an incomprehensible noise. Its ridiculously lanky body wobbled, shimmered and popped like an over-inflated air balloon, gray and black flakes, remnants of the suit, shreds of what looked like human flesh and crystalline white dust pouring from its innards.
Alexa let go of the trigger, staring at the hole she made in the liminal space. The hole seemed to go on forever, disappearing into impossible depths, having carved through far too many floors down below her. Looking at the hole made her mind twitch sideways, hurt, as if she was staring at an infinity that had been punctured.
The station groaned, cracks running from the hole in the floor.
“That was… exceptionally dangerous,” the reality-erasing conducting gun commented.
“Hey it worked,” Alexa said. “It got rid of Mr. Nobody.”
Pieces of stone disconnected from the sheared floor below her with ominous sounds of cracking stone and metal, plummeting into the infinite abyss below.
“You didn’t just get rid of the nobody, foolish wizardling, you’ve also irreparably damaged the Everywhere terminal!” the Conductor growled. “At the current rate of conceptual decay, this entire liminal space will collapse into itself!”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Eh, breaking things under pressure is what I do,” Alexa commented. “Didn’t I tell you that? Pretty sure I did.”
She shoved the raygun back into her belt holster and ran down the length of the beam, leapt off it and reached Gate 7. The station all around her shuddered, ever widening cracks running across the floor, walls and ceiling. The iron beams above her groaned, bending and twisting as if they were being sucked into the black-hole like nothingness in the floor.
“You’re no installer,” her gun commented. “You’re a destroyer, a darkling. Whoever gave you a ticket to Manchester made a grave miscalculation.”
“Eh, I could have been an installer or whatever,” Alexa shrugged, stepping through the warping, tearing gate. “But alas, I only got two hero cards whose combined powers are only handy for permanently erasing something from existence. I’m a destroyer purely by circumstance, see? If I nabbed Dora the Terraformer then I probably would be able to terraform the shit out of this place, or build something cool like a GLM… or something, although I’m not entirely sure how that would conceptually work as a gun. Oh well, gotta work with what I got.”
As Alexa took another step forward, the gate behind her winked out of existence, turned into a solid wall of stone. Billowing gray smoke filled with orange sparks slammed into her face and made her cough.
She took another step forward, inhaling the air thick with smoke and a strange, metallic tang. Cold wind brushed against her face. Blinking rapidly, she saw that she was now in a train depo.
Gleaming steel girders soared overhead, supporting a network of crisscrossing tracks that stretched into the distance, vanishing into the swirling, gray fog that obscured the far end of the station.
The station teemed with activity, a cacophony of voices and the clatter of footsteps echoing through the space. Humans and human-like things dressed in a kaleidoscope of colorful clothes rushed about, their faces etched with a mixture of excitement and anticipation. They all seemed to be emerging from the gray fog and heading into the train, climbing aboard over the steps.
“Another liminal space, eh?” Alexa looked at the endlessly stretching train.
“Yes,” her gun answered.
“Is it a train cus I like trains?” She asked.
“Yes,” the reply came.
“Fair enuff,” Alexa replied. “Question?”
“Yes?”
“Who are all of these travellers?”
“Transients that managed to make it here,” the Conductor answered.
“Are they friendly or are they gonna try to eat me like Mr. Nobody?”
“This is the second layer, most things that simply want to eat you have been filtered out,” the Conductor replied. “There will be entropy-affected individuals here, no doubt, but they’ll be less prone to simply attacking you. Plus you’ve just obliterated the Everywhere terminal… this action will have grave consequences.”
“Such as?” Alexa asked.
“Such as lawful entities being afraid of you or desiring to imprison you for the crime of unlawful deconstruction,” the Conductor explained.
“How are they gonna know I did it?” the supervillain girl asked.
“The Everywhere terminal hung a pin on you before it perished,” the liminal gun replied.
“What? Where?” Alexa spun around.
“Left arm,” the Conductor said.
Alexa’s eyes shot to her left arm. Above the orange safety vest hung a shimmering, half transparent, glowing pin. [Murderer] it declared simply in a blue window with plain text woven from white sparks.
Alexa attempted to grab the pin, but her fingers simply went through it.
“Nu-huh,” Alexa’s hands pulled out the gun, pointing it at the pin. “Not gonna be tagged like that.”
“If you fire the all-nullifying ray here, you will obliterate this space and kill a countless number of sentient transients,” the Conductor said. “The weapon you have made from me and your NPC data cards seems to be particularly effective at deconstructing liminal spaces.”
Alexa frowned.
“I was just going to threaten to say something less hostile,” she said. “You know… threatening is what villains do best. It usually works.”
“The tag pin does not listen to orders,” the Conductor said. “It is an exceptionally simple, albeit potent curse, one that is impossible to remove.”
“You better change that definition to [Definitely-not-a-murderer] Alexa demanded of the pin, or else…” Her fingers slightly pressed the trigger.
The pin didn’t change, didn’t say anything.
“What did I tell you?” The Conductor asked. “The pin doesn't speak.”
“Freaking talking gun ruining my supervillain mojo,” Alexa grumbled under her breath.
Tall men and women dressed in gray and black uniforms and black helmet-hats with silver stars on them suddenly began to emerge from gray fog-wrapped tunnels, their stern faces looking over the colorful crowd. The number of people boarding the train lessened.
“Is that the local lawmakers?” Alexa asked, retreating back into the gray fog of her sealed gate, back pressing against hard stone.
“Yes,” the liminal gun replied. “The Bobbies of Manchester. They were likely notified that someone here killed the Everywhere terminal and are looking for the culprit. As soon as they see that pin, they’ll book you.”
“Book me… where?” Alexa asked.
“To the Wizard PrisonSphere,” the Conductor answered. “The liminal, absolute containment space designed by Wizard Revolution to keep murderers, darklings and other chaff permanently sealed away from the rest of everywhere orderly.”
“Peachy,” Alexa pursed her lips. “What, no trial?”
“Oh there will be a trial, Miss Terror,” the Conductor said. “But it won't take long. That pin will tell them everything about your murderous deeds.”
“It was self-defense!” Alexa hissed. “I didn’t think that I’d undo the nobody and the station at the same time, damn it!”
“You deviated from the path and now you reap the price,” the gun on Alexa’s belt seemed to shrug. “Congratulations.”