Welcome to the aftermath. I guess I should clear up a few things for everyone. Not that I cared a lot myself, but hey, it’s the ending of the second adventure and closure is probably a good thing. You get to benefit from the information presented to me.

Before I get into closing out a few concerns, I want to reiterate how absolutely dead I was inside. Not dead like oh my legs and body are sore, getting out of bed sucks. That feeling is me on a good day. This time, I felt that feeling squared, or cubed, or whatever “fuck existence” is on a mathematical equation. A zero and infinity symbol and some dot that means multiple these together.

Time happened, but I didn’t. I nothinged. My brain entered magical space where conscious thought fell apart before even registering. My eyes were wide enough to park a jet plane in and I should have slept. The problem is that the idea of going to bed kept getting aborted in infancy.

I was that.

If you’ve ever been there yourself for any reason, then know I understand. I’m sorry life is shitty. You should also know that no matter what you do in the future, the events that lead you to be so broken will always exist in the back of your mind. You don’t move past it. You learn to exist with it and still function.

For me, I learned to function with a shred of hope and a vague plan to make it all better. But that plan isn’t in this story. That’s the next one. My final tale where it all ends.

For now, you were promised answers to some of the hanging problems of this story.

I don’t want you to that people just dropped by and let me know all these details. No one cared if I got the news. They cared more about proving their intelligence to each other on the internet for brownie points, or electronic penis inches, or some magical ratio of ego strokes to word vomit. Something phallic. Internet denizens are so kind and I will treasure their unwanted, undesired, and unfiltered trash talk until the day they die.

Anyway, after my adventure closed, Alice vanished and I found myself on the moon, Flux automatically did its thing. Don’t get me wrong, the robot eye seemed off. Its red eye was dimmer and the oomph in its hover lacked flare. However, since it recorded and uploaded details automatically, the people at Hero Watch’s website did their thing. In turn, internet posters all around did their things.

They did their things while I sat numb and occasionally forgot to breathe. Silence felt so real and thick that I wondered if my ears had stopped functioning altogether. Trees and other plants lined the entire doom but they refused to move. The only half thoughts to fully register is that the cake candle still burned, and that there should have been bugs landing on it.

Back to the internet people. First major result, there were no Shadow Lords or whatever. There were people operating in the shadows that were real estate moguls. They wanted to cash in on freshly made oceanfront property, because apparently California pricing is so out of hand that they wanted to wipe out half the planet. Those idiots were in the process of being arrested, sued, and punched in the nuts.

To extrapolate, a Ted word meaning “You didn’t want more details but who cares,” they had a plan to protect most of California’s central population from a moon crash and all the remaining fallout. They had superheroes and some mad scientist with a technological whatever that’d keep the atmosphere stable somehow. In the end, they’d resell all the fresh land to people desperate to move to California. Which meant the moon colliding with the earth had been a real threat.

That news story had nothing to do with the mole people planet. There were no mole people of any sort, not even the ninja ones, in any of these news mentions. I take that back. Maybe there were ninjas. Either way, my entire adventure had been into some aspect of reality that only vaguely mirrored real events.

I couldn’t help but assume it was all somehow related to Alice. Or that smile that swallowed up all the toy versions of people. Think about it. When did I meet Alice? When we start dating? Sometime during an adventure in Wonderland with mole people. Where did I go to see her vanish? Some planet that had been the home world of space faring mole people. See a connection?

At that point, where I sat there, dumb in the dome, I didn’t. I only knew that what happened left me utterly numb. My legs were cramping from being in one position for too long. The cake’s candle still burned. It’s psychics defying nature simply made me feel more detached. And I knew, I knew that if I took a bite of that cake to satiate my hunger even a little, it’d somehow confirm everything as real. That Alice had gone and I’d lost the one woman capable of raising my pulse in an otherwise dreary world.

While I moped, a second series of posts started on the Hero Watch website. This topic was all about my family. The agents Millard were in Rhode Island with my sister. They were healthy and whole. My sister’s legs didn’t work. She’d been attending college at some point. Guess what that means? It means that the people I’d been visiting weren’t really my parents.

It might explain why the two I’d met were made of plastic. Or maybe they were some sort of far flung science robot clones of my parents. I could even guess that they were some sort of made up toy figures like the trio of students. Maybe when I’d closed my eyes in denial, those other figures flying through space had been my blow-up doll, maid of a mother. Or dad. Or maybe the family in Rhode Island wasn’t real. The problem with superpowers is that there are too many possibilities.

All I could say for sure is that once I found the webpage, and stared at that entire thread of comments, I felt sick. Utterly sick.

Cindy, that dead girl, had told me Alice was a figment. She hadn’t known that my parents or my sister were also figments. If she knew about one, she should have known about the other. But it turned out Cindy was also a lie because I’d watched her dolly-self go flying into the sky.

A thought formed there and canceled itself out just as quickly. In hindsight, this magical time we share together, I could tell you what the thought had been. I won’t. I want you to guess. Then I want you to feel the same heart stopping panic once reality sets in.

At the same time, someone found footage of three girls that looked an awful lot like Leticia and her sister, with Midnight sitting next to them. They shared a meal at some takeout place and were laughing. See how creepy the internet can be? In the days since this nonsense ended, someone had proof that it never happened. Their timestamp on the trio of girls eating displayed the same timeframe as my layover in the storage locker, where I’d been huddling in a borrowed sleeping bag watching reruns.

That brings me to a third point. Or fourth. I’ve lost track.

Someone had footage of the battle above the earth. That epic fight between the mole people and the moon. It showed us, specifically a toy car sized van, cruising through the sky while lasers went off around. It showed the black hole portals swallowing ships up and sending them away. It showed Ham-Star the Eight whatever of Uranus flying around and eating ships. It wrapped up with Lady Alexandria, headbutting her way through tin cans in space. The explosions were tiny but exactly as intense as I’d expected.

Then the video went away. As if that event had been redacted out of existence and the only proof of it ever happening were my memories and the Hero Watch articles. I assumed it to be some government watchdog hunting down free media and censoring everyone. Immature reporting would not be allowed under Uncle Sam’s watch.

Either way, I had a lot of questions, zero answers, a ring, and a cake that I still hadn’t touched.

My fear though was simple. Alice had invented an adventure that somehow involved Wilhelm’s students. The whole point being to bring the girls together with her, and Flux, and somehow awaken the part of her that had been sleeping.

The adventure had links to reality. Which meant those people fighting on the internet deserved their electronic hand jobs. With Alice’s powers near the end, it stood to reason that she somehow pulled crap from reality, modified it, and sent me in some meta adventure that loosely related to the more mundane reality. Of course, that theory didn’t come from me. It’d been posted by the same user that linked the video of our fight above the planet with Crystalline ships and everything else. Which meant that guy or gal or toaster deserved an internet blowjob.

So, it was nice finding out nothing I did was actually meaningful and somehow, I’d been on a drug trip. Bet you’re surprised.

Here’s where life got a bit weird. It’s also where I hit a wall. And since it’s all on video courtesy of Flux, we get to talk about it.

Flux beeped. My thoughts jolted because it’d been the only sound in hours. I looked at him but couldn’t bring myself to speak out loud. The moon forest’s silence stifled me. A leg jerked, then I found myself standing, a hand pressed against the trunk of a nearby tree.

I set about finding my damn sandwich. That’s the long-standing crisis I chose to solve, despite having solved it once before. Finding a good sandwich is an every day mission.

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Around the abandoned base I wandered. The kitchen my mother had been in sat untouched and empty. A thin layer of dust lined the countertop. That meant two things, the filters in this haven of oxygen weren’t functioning perfectly, and my mother hadn’t been here in the first place. My stomach twisted into knots and the bitter barf of denial threatened to add to the dust. I pushed aside and wandered on.

I trailed along until finding a storage room of some sort. It reminded me a bit of the docking station where Vivian had been. Her and her tiny husband, along with their endless piles of minions. They might be toys and could have been sucked into oblivion.

I pushed that aside and searched through boxes of supplies before finding something that resembled a sandwich. My prize for hours of work had been a bar inside a bag inside another bag. It tasted like paste.

“I wanted a real sandwich.”

Flux hovered silently.

“A real one. I know this is outer space but it wouldn’t kill anyone to put a sandwich here. Bread. Sliced bread. They can drive a van to the moon but can’t deliver me a decent hoagie. And a beer. And oh god. I think I’d kill someone for a joint.”

Flux maintain its vigil.

I couldn’t take it anymore. My mouth ran, unchained by the constraints of sanity, and babbled about all the things you could put on a good sandwich. They took any kind of meat. They took any kind of cheese. Sometimes the wrong cheese or meat might result in some serious reflection about life’s choices. Ever planet I’d been had a version of the meal. Even if bread wasn’t bread, they still had sandwiches. My mouth steered away from Alice and any of the other events, but complaining about food served to pass time.

“I remember this one place. Can’t remember the name, but they had a boot on the sign. Like one of those old cobbler boots. Some dive of a diner with the best Ruben’s. I mean, I’d been stared for at least three days by the time I showed up. They made me go out the back so as not to scare anyone else, but they gave me a Ruben.”

Honestly, thinking aback on it, I was pretty sure they’d given me half of someone’s uneaten leftovers. Sometimes the best meals are like that, someone else’s leftovers. Sandwiches were like that. Starvation turned them into works of art. My babble continued for over an hour talking about all the food I’d had over the ages. Some of it great. Much of tasted great because of desperation and a gnawing belly.

The ring on my hand lit up abruptly. Colors swirled across it at high speeds. Then a sandwich formed in my lap.

See, weird, right?

It sat on top of my hole filled, dirt covered clothes. I stared at the food. My stomach growled loudly but didn’t make me shove the food in my mouth. Any other day, I’d have rolled with it. But that sandwich had come out of the ring. It’d had almost the same kinds of beams that Flux’s copying ability did.

I took a slow bite. It tasted like a sponge. My stomach curled in revulsion. It couldn’t be edible. Not if it worked like Flux did. That gave me a powerful ring that put me in control of Flux’s creation abilities. The ones it used to have. Used to being the right words, because Flux refused to copy anything. Not even the user’s manual. It ignored all those demands and hovered, silent and focused.

For an hour I pondered my engagement ring. Or wedding ring, whatever it might be. My gift from a mad goddess named Alice.

The ring had spiraling visible etchings all along the surface. The dips they should have formed were smooth. I tried to follow where they went and analyze the traces of color that lanced along the surface occasionally. The twisted along the inside. I pulled at the jewelry. It refused to move. Up came my hand and I studied my knuckles to see if they were just fat. It should have slipped off easily but didn’t.

I shrugged. Something would happen to my latest weapon of power. It’d be stolen by an urchin or my arm would be swallowed by a whale. When my limb regrew, it’d be without the ring and somewhere in the ocean, the world’s second largest mammal would grow torpedoes to fight back fishermen.

Hours later I found myself in a room filled with television screens and sleeping bags, but you know what? No real sandwich. The ring could create anything that I might imagine but couldn’t give me food. I fired up the internet on some tablet I’d copied out and read through all the stuff I’ve already explained to you. Shortly after, I created myself a toilet to throw up in. The cake remained untouched.

I couldn’t find it in myself to be filled with awe. Alice had the power to simply tear half of what Flux was out of its robotic shell. She’d put into this glorified wedding ring. Or maybe it simply qualified as an engagement band. It didn’t matter at this point because it all meant the same thing. Either way, that implied she was so insanely far up the power hierarchy a still interested in me.

Wherever she was.

Whatever she was.

I ate another crappy ration and went to sleep. It was that or ponder how she’d torn Flux to bits and pulled out part of it to make a ring. I won’t lie, I did that too and resting came far, far after I’d run my mind in circles.

With all the shit’d I’d seen over the years, few things peaked like Alice’s last moments. It wasn’t even that she went out in some flashier way than anyone else in the hero world. Though she’d certainly reached top ten after turning other heroes into toys and packing them away like a kid going to bed for the night.

Remember that thing I’d talk about, where higher powers were often beat by lower ones? Alice and all those abilities she’d shown could have easily run rampant on Earth. That level of creation, or destruction, whatever made it happen, is the kind of stuff normal people in packed cities couldn’t handle. Those tendrils wiping away armies of dead bodies could have yanked out the bottom parts of skyscrapers.

She’d been defeated by a glorified curfew, packed up her toys, and left.

I woke up the next day and continued exploring what the ring could do. If it could create stuff, like Flux had, maybe it could get rid of things, like those tendrils of rainbow color did.

After a good half hour of shouting and power poses, I made a hole in a wall. Stupid me, I’d forgotten I was in space. Or maybe grown used to not really caring about my own location because something would intervene and save me.

The small hole grew. The wall curled as the vacuum tried to swallow all the air around me. Space sucked out objects and I stood there, leaning against an impossible weight of the void. Then I created an army of sandwiches. They packed into the tiny opening and the suction stopped.

All the stupid items Flux would make for me. I could make them now. Without needing to communicate my desires to it. Without needing to juggle that bit of nonsense and his silly user’s manual. Destroying stuff proved a lot harder, unless it was something created by the ring.

It could make stuff. It could uncreate that stuff. It could impact other real objects but that took a lot more work, which all told me that the power Alice had displayed had limits. It was within reason.

And if it was within reason, then it’d be possible to get her back. I resolved to find a way to do just that. Right then, right there. As longa s I had the ring, I was in control of my life. Even if my poer sucked me off into spaces unknown, I’d never be without clean pants.

I wandered back to the silent garden or forest or whatever. It had trees. They weren’t huge giants but they were taller than me. It didn’t matter because the size of the plants isn’t what made this place unique. Even being on the moon didn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

It was the absence of noise. A quietness that reminded me of churches. Big spaces with high ceilings, so large they might house god. I sat there, fiddling with my ring, wondering what kind of clothes to bring forth from the ether.

In between that, I tried to understand what the face had represented. Was it a living thing, or simply my mind trying to understand a higher power? That happened sometimes. Some creates were so far out on the edge of reality that it would be impossible for my mind to process their real forms. I’d met one eldritch monster that looked like a talking ice creame cone.

Honestly, I was pretty sure his original form made more sense than a talking ice cream cone. He’d worn a “Best in Show” sash like a pageant winner.

Alice had simply yanked something out of Flux, made the face whole, and collapsed that into jewelry. Flux made Wilhelm worried. Flux had been an impossible creation, and now that I knew its abilities were somehow stolen form the sky face to begin with, it made a bit more sense.

It had been easier to accept all those powers when they weren’t melted onto my hand. The more I replayed Alice’s final moments, and compared that to Flux’s nature, the more I realized that this probably wouldn’t go away with my arm being chopped off.

While I sat there, contemplating the deper meanings of life, a single van flew across the moon’s horizon. It slide out of view toward where the hanger should be.

I sat and ran my fingers across the ring. What had Alice meant when by saying if we were married we could share everything? Her power? I mean, our dating life had been going well, but she also tried to stab me with a knife an awful lot.

“Mister Big?”

I turned to see the Crystalline child at the doorway. She didn’t step past the doorway. Lady Alexandria loomed behind her. Her eyes were glazed and a goofy grin took up most of her face.

After a moment she shook off the dreamy look and stared at me. “This skirmish is over. It is best to return you to mundane surroundings.”

I rubbed my forehead and tried to reason through everything that had happened. For anyone who knows me, you should realize how much of a struggle that “thinking about it” would be for me. Normally I went with the flow. Normally things just happened to me and I nodded, smiled, and played along until fate set me back down in front of the television.

Lady Alexandria and the whole Crystalline race had to be real. It made no sense for them to be figments like everyone else. By the same token, I didn’t have a good grasp on the powers in the world. If they were simply figments, what would they turn into? Would Lady Alexandria be one of those heroic male dolls but in a princess dress with some badly applied makeup? The idea made me giggle.

I didn’t really like applying the question to the little Crystalline. She, I think, was basically a child. I hoped they were real. After discarding thoughts I decided to treat everyone as if they were real, until they turned into toys and flew off into space.

They were waiting for me. No one else existed on this base. I nodded. Lady Alexndria poked her head in and looked around, searching for who knew what, then she nodded in return. As if we shared some secret.

Off the hulking woman went.

There on the table sat the damn cake. I glared at it and wondered why everything in here felt so calm. Not happy. Not warm. Just a sort of dull peace that made the rest of the world cease to matter or stress me out.

That feeling from before, that detachment that left me numb. It wasn’t a bad thing. I needed it. I had needed to be mentally removed from all my woes and have time to process. Then it hit me.

I knew why it was a cake. My chest heaved a slow sigh. Both eyes closed tightly. That feeling of emptiness filled me for only a moment, my eyes closed, then I broke the silence.

“Happy birthday to me.”

I blew out the candle then left to catch a ride back to planet earth.

The untouched cake stayed behind.

***

Oddity Study Highlights

Name: The Source (Bonus Question)

So, I didn’t tell anyone, but those monkey’s got me a response to my question. Only their response also had a question, which makes them monkey fuckers that scrawl out their answers in shaky English using feces and blood.

The source has been aware. But what if that source is fixates on a single person?