Mark woke up with the worst headache in his life and a terrible feeling of breathlessness, of his lungs being stretched out and his diaphragm strained so much he was only capable of shallow breaths. Disorientation followed. He'd been unconscious but the planet's gravity was pulling towards the wrong way as if he was...

He blinked the haze of a really terrible sleep from his eyes to find himself hanging from metal cuffs as thick as suspension bridge cables in nothing but his boxers. More steel - or probably some space age metal enhanced with powers - wrapped from his ankles till halfway to his knees, pulling at his legs with the force of a few dozen tons. That was probably the reason he could hardly breathe; while the force was not quite as bad as being crucified would have been to a normal person, it was still unpleasant and left him with a lingering pain so he fumbled for a vehicle with a lot of horsepower to stop feeling so weak.

The electrical shock that followed made him scream and shake against his bonds, looking for something, anything that would make it more bearable. Yet the tougher he made himself the stronger it seemed to get, adjusting to always be painful, scrambling his mind with PAIN! PAIN! PAIN! until all thoughts of using his powers fled. Only then did the agony stop, leaving him even more panting for breath than before.

"Ah, young Mark," a rather pleasant but otherwise unremarkable man's voice drew his attention away from his singed nerve endings and towards his surroundings. It was neither strong nor weak, neither young nor old, neither warm nor cold, neither sharp nor mellow, and had no signs of any accent, emotion or inflection beyond that initially pleasant demeanor. "I see that you, like your friends before you, have discovered the downsides of the Warden's two hundred and seventh failed attempt at a cell that can hold supers."

Mark blinked again and tried to find the source of that voice. Its total absence of identifying characteristics made it so remarkable to his brain's pattern recognition that he could easily track it across the chamber he found himself in. Not the shallow, open metal pod all around him but the room beyond that in his slowly focusing eyes were now taking in. It looked nothing so much as a doctor's office, complete with medical charts, examination tables, various surgical equipment and countless bottles of various substances, both in various colors and transparent. The examination tables might be thicker and sport wrist-thick steel cable restraints, the surgical equipment might double for heavy duty industrial tools but it was all oddly fitting... except for the glowing green crystal walls with the embedded silver and gold circuitry... and the giant tube of lard of a man wearing a doctor's uniform so stretched out it was ripped in places.

"...was only a failed attempt because of how it restrained prisoners." Oh, the tube of lard was still talking. "See, after a long series of trial and error in cooperation with several other supers, the Warden managed to build a device that could roughly detect a super's powers. It could only get details with the super's consent but for just detecting the presence of powers and their physical impact it worked." No, not a tube of lard. The enormous man just had a layer of fat over the kind of grotesque musculature Mark had seen in the undead brutes they'd fought. Given his size and girth and how the solid metal chair he was sitting on strained under his mutated bulk he had to weigh well over a ton. "...that detection in place, the proper motivation to discourage use of powers could be applied without risk of killing the prisoners."

So basically a giant version of shock collars? Mark made a note to have Maya ask the General about what the fuck the research teams had been doing and how come it had ended up being used against them. Or... he could listen to the still monologuing supervillain.

"Told them it was perfect, but they dismissed it out of hand! Told me my research was too unethical, that I should stop it or there would be consequences. They could not see the whole new fields of research. The potential for curing all human frailty, achieving biological immortality not just in our lifetime but in less than a year." The mutant doctor sighed. "Fortunately other, less super-influenced parts of the government were more eager to listen. They wanted not only medicine or control methods but weapons that would make a difference in the dawning new Age. Weapons I am finally capable of providing!"

"So you just went full mad scientist," a very familiar, derisive, female voice cut into the mutant's monologue. What the hell was Cindy doing? Why was she antagonizing the crazy mass-murdering freak with the zombie army instead of shutting up for once in her life until they found a way to esc- oh! That's why she was incensed enough to throw caution to the wind.

Mark was pretty sure he was concussed now. There was no other explanation for not noticing his two teammates while taking in the room before. Like him, they were each strapped into their own lidless, upright, metal pod with restraints powerful enough to hold even people with super-strength. Also like him they'd been stripped of everything except their underpants, which had left the frequently annoying girl naked from the waist up. She caught him looking and her pale skin flushed prettily while her glower promised they'd have words about this if... when they managed to get out. Mark shrugged as much as he was able in his bonds. What was he supposed to do, keep his eyes shut? Besides, it wasn't as if Cindy herself hadn't flashed both him and Gabby just to get a reaction in the past. He shook his head. Either the view of the admittedly gorgeous brunette was getting to him or his concussion was worse than he thought because for a split-second he could have sworn he saw a flicker behind the supervillain's back.

"Madness and genius are often the same thing, girl," their host said in that far too reasonable tone of his. It was more than just an unremarkable and simply pleasant voice, it somehow made the horrible things the guy, no, the monster before them spoke of sound just as unremarkable and maybe, possibly, reasonable... if the three of them hadn't nearly died several times fighting off those ideas' applications. The voice had to be some sort of power. "Using the funding and raw materials my benefactors provided along with the freedom and secrecy afforded by this place I've accomplished more steps towards my ultimate goal more quickly than I'd thought possible. Not only just curing all the flaws of the human condition, but taming this alien magic and granting them to those truly worthy of it."

"All I'm seeing is a fat bastard with a fetish for bondage and mass murder," Cindy mouthed off and Mark winced. "How can you claim to have cured all human flaws when you're still a bloated sack of ugly?" For a moment he was sure the girl had gone too far, that Mark would get a front-row seat to one of his teammates being tortured. Even a week before he'd have paid to see that. When this mission started he would have been mostly indifferent, discount Barnes as just a bitch that made her own bed. Now... when had he started thinking of her as a real teammate? Before he could resolve his newly confusing reactions, the monster of a man just laughed. Despite being two thousand pounds of undulating flesh, he still sounded pleasant.

"I'm so glad you asked, my dear," their host explained. "There hasn't been anyone around to share my thoughts on the project for a good long while. It feels good to share information, to educate the... less erudite, I always thought, but even my benefactors' men failed to understand the glory of our undertaking in the end." Probably because even the kind of men the CIA would use for their black projects would see horror and monstrosity where this madman spoke of glory, Mark thought.

"The process of developing powers is simple enough if one has enough fuel. That the fuel requires a level of rudimentary intelligence is solvable with cloning; where problems arise is granting the desired powers to the desired subject. See, what powers we develop fit our... character for lack of a more scientific word. We can't truly pick anything we want; even those of us who seemingly have endless options to pick from will somehow always end up picking thematically appropriate abilities rather than the most efficient." His enormous hand shot out, crumpling the nearest examination table in a sudden fit of fury that Cindy's defiance had failed to cause but just one hang-up in this... project had him raging about in an instant. For a good minute he yelled and beat at the medical table until it was a shapeless, crumbling heap. Mark could have sworn he saw more flickers of Cindy during it, but it was probably his imagination. Then as if a switch had been flicked, he was perfectly calm once more.

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"Excuse my outburst. These arbitrary, unscientific limitations make me so angry, you know?" The deranged, mutated madman took in several long breaths in silence, before sitting on his chair once more. "Where were we? Ah, power transference." His bloated, beach-ball-sized boulder of a head gave the three teenagers a smile that would come up in their nightmares, Mark was certain. "Despite such obstructions, the invaders somehow fielded whole legions of troops with identical abilities so picking the powers we wanted had to be possible. That simple fact got me through the most fruitless period of my research and into the eventual breakthrough." The monstrous face twisted into a self-satisfied grimace as if it couldn't quite express human emotions any more. "Through trial and error I found that clones of the original super would develop the same powers if fed enough fuel. Did this mean powers were genetic? How could this be when even the dead or incorporeal beings could have them? I couldn't find an answer to those questions but ultimately it didn't matter for I found that sufficient... donation of raw material fed with further fuel would let a patient develop the same powers himself!"

"You didn't need all the exposition, I could already see where this whole spiel was going from the start," Cindy scoffed and teammate or no, Mark felt like murdering the stupid girl right then. Why could she not shut up for once in her life? The longer the fat bastard talked, the longer they had to find a way out of here or wait for reinforcements!

"Really?" their host asked, for the first time showing genuine emotion in his voice; curiosity. "You do not wish to play for time like your teammates are doing? How unusual. Every other single super either delivered to me or captured would invariably try to prolong things when given the opportunity. They would test the limits of their captivity, try to find weak points in their restraints, even beg for their lives in the end. The results got repetitive after the first hundred subjects or so but proper research requires sufficient sampling until actionable data is found." The madman stood up, walked over to where Cindy was stretched out and leaned forward to examine the mostly naked girl from far too close for Mark's liking. It wasn't sexual, but the kind of look a greedy man throws a major paycheck or a very expensive jewel. "You on the other hand just tested your restraints once and have since deviated from the behavior of other supers. What makes you so atypical?"

"I'm just special," the girl said with her usual mocking eye roll. Was she... was she daring the mad supervillain to kill her, or something? "Now can we get to the good parts of this plan of yours and why you believe you'll get away with this?"

"Ah, I see." The monster moved away from Cindy and back to his desk where he started searching his drawers for something. His enormous hands were having great difficulty fitting into the too-small openings so he kept his every move slow and delicate to avoid breaking things. After a good minute of searching, he came up with a remote control and even more carefully started fiddling with the buttons. "You are confident enough to banter so not because you have a death wish but because you have faith in your teacher. Allow me to... ....which button was it... aha!"

There was a click and a viewing screen deployed from a slit in the green wall, a single pane of gleaming white material roughly in the shape and size of a large flat-screen television but using some sort of alien tech. If Mark didn't know better - and he didn't - he'd say the whole thing was made up of tooth enamel. Then it turned on and the white surface became a viewing screen showing a distorted view of four tentacles holding a human in their grip. Either the human had been somehow shrunk to only a couple of inches or the tentacles were of a truly stupendous size, a couple hundred feet long at the very least. Since the human shown was a rather... stacked blonde woman wearing a white and blue costume, Mark was pretty sure the latter was true. To his great dismay, he could also see the figure he was pretty sure was Maya not just held against the ground by those massive tentacles but twitching as lightning crackled around her form.

"As you can see, I prepared sufficient countermeasures against the greatest threat to the project. There is no need to bravely hold on as you wait for rescue, for your would-be rescuer will soon be a captive herself." He sounded inordinately pleased to have just crushed all their hopes, Mark noted idly as a suffocating numbness spread across his thoughts. What could they do now? "In fact, our little discussion was a pleasant way to pass the time until your teacher could join us - or did you think I was monologuing for the sake of it?" He snorted and unlike his voice it was not pleasant at all, more like a dozen pigs doing so than a man. "I am a man of reason and progress, not some comic book supervillain."

"She'll get out of this and come save us," Cindy said, sounding mulish and hopeful and not very Cindy-like. "You think whatever you cooked up in your little lab will succeed where the invaders failed?"

"Of course it will, my dear. The core concept of technology is using tools to exceed what our bodies and minds are naturally capable of. With enough time, knowledge and resources, what we build will always surpass what we are." He pressed more buttons and unseen machinery in Cindy's cell began to whine. "Your teacher is the strongest superhuman on record, orders of magnitude more powerful than the dregs the CIA provided for my experiments, but that just means I had to go for quantity over quality. Were you not paying attention? I succeeded not just in copying powers but transplanting them. Even if most of the samples I had were trash, I only needed to stack enough copies. My latest creation masses half a million tons while the human brain a mere three pounds. It's not as if I was going to run out of space."

"You move around powers by stealing brains?!" Cindy screeched. "Wait, does this mean you got extra brains yourself? Eww... that's so fucking gross!"

It was, it really was, but Mark was too busy testing options to be disgusted. They were running out of both time and possible outside assistance, if they were going to escape they had to do it now. The problem was this containment system they had been put in. Not only could it detect powers and punish them until they stopped using them or passed out, but the bindings were too thick. Even if they were just steel, a wire an inch thick could hold thirty tons? Maybe fifty? He could not remember exactly but it was around that ballpark and he could not trust they were only that strong given the supertech. Since they were also several inches thick, there was no way for them to burst out just with their basic strength... or it hadn't been a day before.

"Sacrifices have to be made on the altar of progress," their host proclaimed like every mad scientist ever. "Speaking of sacrifices, I'd been hoping to have all four of you in my grasp before we proceeded to the harvesting, but your teacher is proving stubborn and you girl are far too ungrateful for this opportunity to see progress made." The whirring of unseen machines intensified and green tentacles started growing from the walls of Cindy's pod; it was do or die time.

Their one chance was given by their own captor. For all his protests, the monster was very much a textbook mad scientist, complete with monologuing and wanting to gloat over his beaten enemies. How had he put it? Even those supers with endless options would somehow always pick stuff that fit a theme? Mark would appreciate the irony when all three of them were safely back home and this bastard was dead and buried, but until then he would use the information the enemy had so helpfully provided.

The superpower detector was inaccurate and lacked detail. It had almost immediately started frying Mark when he copied the abilities of a locomotive, noting the great strength increase. But how broad was this inaccuracy? Mark had killed hundreds of the hulking zombies earlier and tens of thousands of the smaller ones; the power he'd gained from the last battle was even now slowly increasing his abilities without the machine shocking him at all. Could it tell the difference, or was its margin of error larger than the bad guy wanted them to think? There had to be a better reason than morality the Warden and the General had discarded the device; neither of them had struck Mark as very caring about morality.

While the enemy played games, he tested just that inaccuracy. First with a wind-up toy adding practically nothing to his own base attributes, then with a remote-controlled car, then with a motorbike and an actual car. He didn't dare go much higher than that but a speed increase of a good twenty percent over his baseline didn't trigger any response. He similarly checked for horsepower and durability, always keeping to the margin he felt his new power growth afforded him. Then came the real test; a gun. No response. A rifle. The same. A machine gun nest. Still nothing. Feeling bolder and also his available time dwindling he tried for something bigger; a surface-to-air missile system. The machine remained unresponsive and Mark's heart skipped a beat. Could it not detect abilities he was not actively using?

A glance at Cindy's pod saw the girl uncharacteristically unresponsive as the first slowly growing tentacles reached her arms. Gulping and hoping he was right, he reached for the combination he was sixty percent sure would get him and by extension his teammates out of there. Then the screen showing Maya struggling in a giant monster's grip exploded. A split second later all the glowing bits over the walls followed. His eyes widening at the convenient distraction, Mark grit his teeth and activated his chosen powers.

And he screamed in pain...