Now you know my past. It’s time to really explain what I’d figured out about my new wedding band or whatever.
Flux’s stolen powers had limitations. I couldn’t copy objects that had crazy levels of powers. Sort of. Superpowers were weird like that. What I mean is I couldn’t summon another ring that altered reality and turned all my foes into walking pizzas, or an object that self-carved an army of sentient birds and squirrels to eat said redesigned pizza people. The line on what could be created felt fuzzier every time I used the ring.
It copied an almost unlimited number of items with slightly slower speed than my old robotic sidekick. Flux always seemed to only have a few things in play at once, but I could fill up a football stadium with nonsense. They eventually faded away, but I rarely noticed when it happened. I think there’s a magical effect about items that stop existing when you are no longer paying attention. The ring’s creations operated on that.
My concerns had shifted a lot over the last few months. I wanted to understand what was happening in the world around me. I wanted to get to the bottom of this powered nonsense in the world, because somewhere at the root of it all lay my answers. Most of all, I wanted to get Alice back because insanity makes for a good lay. All of those issues had one solution, find the strongest sources of powers I possible could, and try to break them until something shook loose. Really, that strategy amounted to my normal life except proactive, instead of reactive.
No, I wasn’t clever enough to come to that realization myself. That one came from some jerk on the internet who felt excessively clever. They, and a dozen others watching my every move, were armchair psychologists.
I’d spent the last four months breaking into any place that seemed like it’d have something powerful enough. Something unique or strong enough might even simply get Alice back for me. Luckily I didn’t have to worry about Flux giving away all my plans. The eye still recorded me, but since he did everything in hindsight it didn’t matter.
Which brings us back to semi-current events. Or at least the chronologically ordered ones that followed me being knocked out by muscle moron shortly after busting into Olympus in Olympia. And if these side trips bother you, then next time I’ll drone on and on about how I was knocked out riding a mound of meat’s shoulder like some toy teddy from a fair. Which Flux’s footage uploaded to the Hero Watch website kindly showed me.
Wait, before I launch into the action, I’m going to rant about the idiot carrying me. He serves as a good example of why superpowers are stupid. He is basically a Thor with a slightly meaner weapon, and there’s at least three other versions of Thor running around. They’re all idiots but the way I hear it, the original Thor wasn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch to begin with. These cardboard cutouts are basically copies of a copy of a copy with some serious brain cell lost in transition.
I swear it’s like the only words my dumb mind can come up with recently are variations on “stupid”. I know this plot to break into subdimensions and collapse them to reach some sort of zero plane where Alice vanished is idiocy made manifest.
“He’s moving,” the chucklehead said. Don’t ask which one the chucklehead is. Assume it’s both of them speaking in some weird twin speak that belongs to creepy kids in elevator shafts.
My arm twisted until both eyelids fluttered open then fell closed again.
I wanted more sleep. It’d been months of me actively pursuing this goal and I’d never understood how villains could make obvious mistakes until recently. The answer now is obvious, this shit is exhausting. Setting up a plan, trying to outthink someone on their home territory. Figuring out where you even needed to go took more brain cells than staring at the television.
“Keep him unconscious,” the other bright bulb ordered.
“Can’t,” replied the first. “I’ve been trying. You’ll have to zap him this time.”
I tried to wave an arm dismissively and failed. My other arm threatened to pop out of socket and that didn’t bother me. My thumb touched the inside of Alice’s engagement ring. Pillows popped into my mind.
Indistinct force hit my stomach. My body flopped to the side and landed on something cold. “Shit. He’s doing it again!”
“Sleep him!”
The conscious world and I parted ways again.
From that brief exchange we can all assume I was still in Olympus. Or at least, they hadn’t drug me out to throw me in a dumpster in some shittier town like Tacoma. That’s a place I wake up in sometimes, typically being robbed of my shoes, and shortly there after some powered event hits and makes the town prettier.
How does a powered event make the world prettier? Ask Tacoma how they’re so dirty that an earthquake makes it better. You can ask Washington D.C. the same question but that place is one of the weirdest in the world. Half the people wear immaculate suits while the other half look worse than I do. Which is terrible since I can’t keep a shirt in one piece for more than twenty-four hours.
My eyelids fluttered open. Fluffy clouds lined the sky and were perfectly spaced from each other. The sunset dimmed the sky to a pinkish hue that bordered on violet. Birds sailed by in orderly flocks with feathers of every color on the rainbow.
“Pretty,” I mumbled.
“Already?” thing two shouted.
“Sleep him again!” thing one demanded.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“You remember what happened last time. A damn crack appeared and in order to seal it, the Oracle’s powers were drained,” thing two said.
I turned my head in hopes of figuring out where there might be but had no luck. Majestic mountains with more of that pastel colored skyline overpowered any other sights.
“How do we stop him?”
“We continue with the plan. Get this walking disaster to the oracle.” A screech filled the air. The man holding me froze still for a moment, until his companion whispered, “Quickly.”
“We can’t go faster!” he whispered back.
They had to be worried about whatever made that noise.
“You know what will happen. We need him in a place we control, or he’ll summon more of those things.”
The man carrying me shuddered. Which meant I shook violently.
“Pillows with teeth,” he whispered. “I’ll never sleep right again.”
“Welcome to my world,” I tried to say. It came out closer to “Whale bum in mind hurled” but let’s pretend my sleep talking is more eloquent.
“Come on. We’re almost there,” the bossy one said, and my world went black again.
See the problem here? If you think that I should wake up, have hyper reactions, and summon some mechanical dinosaur to fight these pseudo-gods, well that’d be awesome. It’s also a bit outside of my scope. I haven’t seen any mechanical dinosaurs this year which means my ring probably couldn’t make one. It didn’t help that my thoughts were scattered due to sleep deprivation and repeated beatings on the back of my head. Or it might have been that Morpheus guy putting me to sleep.
“Nom,” I mumbled, thinking of my giant dinosaurs eating the enemy.
“Shit,” one said.
The world dimmed a bit as something huge yelled in the background.
Since we’re back in blackness, it’s time to resume my ramblings. The ones about kids and their erroneous dream of me having ninja-like reactions. News flash, here in the third act, it’s impossible for me. I’ve got years of passive failure at most tasks. We were doing good to have a grand scheme in mind to make the world right again. At least I wasn’t like these two nitwits. Their idea seemed to be “make him sleep and drag him to the smarter guy for a solution”. I’m not calling myself a paragon of intelligence, but compared to these idiots, I feel like a literal genius.
What I’m really saying is that being a bad guy is a pain in the ass.
So, to prove time continued to pass, I can confirm I woke up a few more times. Each attempt went better than the last. Whatever they used to knock me out didn’t even leave me well rested. My shoulders hurt. My butt hurt. Hopefully those problems were from the same cause or else I’d have an awkward story to never tell Alice.
As for my brain, it thought of all sorts of nonsense while unconscious. You might even wonder why I could remember some of those wonderful thoughts while I was blacked out. Practice. That’s really the key to it, and I had a lot more time and effort put into being knocked out than summoning objects out of thin air when waking up.
Fast forward a few more wake-up calls and we’ll land in a pile of blow up dolls and lubricants. Not comfortable. Which is embarrassing, even for a man like me who’d spent half carrier being miserable and having tattered clothes.
“Sandwich,” I said as the world dimmed again. It came back quickly and the ring had summoned me one of those plastic sandwiches that tasted like sawdust fucked.
One eyelid fluttered uncontrollably. Heavy feet stomped by my head as someone switched positions. I glanced up to see my favorite kind of superhero. The one with more muscles then brains. And if you’re thinking back to my story about wanting to be that guy with all the perfect muscles, and chalking this up to envy or jealousy, you’d be totally off base and a big meanie poo head for bringing it up.
“Hold this thing back! I can’t get a good shot,” malleted muscle moron yelled.
I knew his voice pretty well by now. After all our precious time together.
My eyesight turned his body into a ragged blur. The mallet in his hand had gore of all colors painted up and down the handle. The slow-moving Morpheus hovered near me, his legs lost in a sea of sex toys and questionable liquids. His body blurred and the objects surrounding his feet shifted inward. I picked up the nearest object and threw it at him, then slipped in the mess.
“Dammit!” Thor-wanna be yelled. “I should have caved this Adams head in.”
A growl shook the air. My uncaved head tilted sideways and down I went, submerged until the piles like a kid lost in a ball pit. This is when instinct woke up and screamed “crawl away now”. I did. Every few feet something snarled. The two were shouting back and forth about battle plans that weren’t working. Something with one eye hopped along under the pile of plastic balloon fappables. I ignored the bouncing eight-inch object. You should too. It’s safer for both of us if we pretend it didn’t exist.
Stringy plastic hair hung like soggy cobwebs. I slipped every other step. My ears rang. A foot planted in my back. I tried to figure out what to summon but my thoughts were a scrambled mess. Pink undies floated by on wings made of lace. The foot loosened and someone grunted above me.
People crashed to the right and scrambled to new positions. Their fancy battles had all the hallmarks of a high paced hero fight. I pushed aside the gunk piles and peeked out. A giant teddy bear with one black eye and one white eye clawed at the muscled god. That should buy me a few seconds to keep crawling away.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Next to the god-copy floated the robotic eye.
“Flux?” I asked.
The glorified camera did nothing. I stared at my ring for a moment and wondered how separating that essence inside of him had created something so dead but powerful. Flux still just showed up at will but had no personality.
The thought got shoved into a box along with every other “why” question in my life. My chest heaved in a painful sigh and I resumed my escape plan.
My ring generated more objections. Giant golden loops flung into the air. They were utterly useless and only made clanging noise. My vision kept tilting sideway then dovetailed into a full spin. I made it another ten feet before muscleman bellowed in rage and the ground shuddered violently.
I summoned more random items. The box that Ted used on general. It started beeping in a high-pitched tone. If it functioned the same, it’d be useless. On I went, trying to formulate a solid thought while my ears died.
Hairy feet tumbled through the mess around me, smearing away a huge pile of snow and lube. I froze at the edge of the cleared swath and glanced both ways. We were still on the stupid path of forever toward the glowing city in the distance. I needed faster transportation. The Stingray would take too long and my body hurt too bad to run.
A slide would get me nowhere without a jetpack. I lifted the ring and summoned my comical escape tools. While my captors continued to battle with the teddy bear nightmare from who-knew-where in a field of no-one-wanted-to-hear-about-it, I made finished a ramp.
I grabbed onto a freshly formed rocket that resembled a fancy fire extinguisher. Out came the pin. I pointed the hose toward the battlefield and pulled the trigger.
“Fuc-” my abrupt scream cut off as force slammed into my stomach.
“Morp-” and muscle man’s words were lost too.
I tightened around the rocket and prayed this would end with me closer to the goal. The slide went on and on. My neck couldn’t turn. The ring on my hand shone brightly, as if laughing at my misfortune. I vowed to throw it and myself into a volcano at the next opportunity. If only to see what would happen.
Now, you shouldn’t worry about my ring being lost. Those fears turned out to be unfounded. People put my arm in cement, it didn’t stop me for long. My personal powers of being an unstoppable magnetite for powered trouble went into overdrive when any portion of me became forcibly restricted. Dampening handcuffs turned a hulking demon of flame into a mild-mannered nerd from accounting. They turned me into ground zero for some superhero throwdown.
That included the ring. One mad scientist tried to remove it a few months ago and spilled goo on his arm. A minute later it split at the seems into some snake noodle things that promptly attacked his face. Luckily, after raided the dead scientists liquor stash and found some effective memory blotter.
Anyway. Being vaguely unstoppable is how I got survived one of the earlier mini-dimension I’d been after. Power dampening gauntlets versus an arm of spore covered mice and their big bulbous brained overlords. I won by accidentally squishing some pint-sized pink mouse.
Back to reality. I’m flying across the landscape with a rocket smushing my guts. Flux floated by at the same high speed. It’s engine and direction of travel ran counter to each other.
I found energy and tried to yell at the damn machine. “This could have been over by now!” My hand shook then I almost lost my grip. “If only someone had something useful to-” the jet ran out. Or my slide did.
I tumbled ass over head along a quickly shifting landscape. Two women in centurion armor hefted pikes at me as I slipped between them. The rocket spun off one way, into a wall. Globs of lube went all over.
My body continued to tumble along the curving miniature waterslide. Part of me wondered how the ring had kept this creation going on for so long. My plan had been mere escape toward this realm’s heart. Wherever that might be. The ring took a vague goal and spun me a path.
“This way,” the guards shouted. “He’s heading towards the priest’s section.”
Dozens of loud clanking footsteps rang through the air. They grew closer. The fun filled ride ended in a pile of hay. I pushed my way out and fell forward, keeping legs under my hanging head. Everything hurt, but I could outrun the something-something lizards of planet I-forgot. A few guards wouldn’t catch me. Muscle for brains couldn’t find a drop of water in the ocean if someone dropped him in it, and Morpheus should be napping.
Or they were fighting teddy bear monster still.
I fumbled around buildings and pillars, following a half-formed slide and hoping it went in the right direction. It’d be just my luck that it’d lead to some interdimensional outhouse instead of the heart of this zone. Don’t laugh. A place to shit comfortably is the center of some people’s reality.
That thought slipped away as the bellows of angry other-dimensional denizens grew closer. Now, imagine I’m escaping while this needless explanation goes on.
I had to succeed in bringing this place to a close. These people weren’t real anyway. They were probably all toys of some cosmic entity and would be sucked away into nothingness like Alice had done upon our parting. Collapsing this place should let me see the same effect on a higher scale. And yes, dimensions were ranked by idiots on the internet. They ranked everything.
The mole people planet from my last story had been about a six on the one to ten scale. Enough to threaten normal people but not unstoppable by any means. Sixes could be stopped by enough teenagers screaming mindless at the sky. A three could be solved in an hour-long television episode. Four might require a movie. Eights required a super powered team, and tens took a war involving half the powers in a time zone to step up, which is the same amount of time it takes to binge four seasons of shows.
Remember, we’re skipping the action for these explanations. I assume you don’t want to hear about “oh Adam went around a building intrepidly, hid in endless hay stacks, summoned a string to guide mind, dropped more teddy bear nukes in what seemed to be a bathhouse, and laughed at the gladiatorial arena as he threw the replicating blow up dolls in there and made a joke of the hallowed sporting event”.
And if you want to hear about those things, too bad. Back to explaining why collapsing this place wouldn’t hurt real people. They didn’t exist.
In the weeks following Alice and my sister’s disappearance, she had this entire life that popped up out of nowhere, still wheelchair bound. Do you understand? The entire time I’d been roaming around the moon and the dark mole people underworld living out a mockery of real-life events involving real estate investors and bankers trying to defraud the little man, my sister hadn’t been there. What did that say about the nature of existence?
Did powered people simply retire to reality upon dying? Or just the ones that ended in a planer dimension like the one’s I’d been popping?
And okay. The gladiatorial arena thing is still really funny. Imagine a bunch of half armored men sweating their brains out suddenly stuck in a jelly-covered wrestling match. Now imagine they’re trying to scream at you in manly outrage and getting plastic titties in their mouth then popping the dolls with arm spikes or whatever. All of them would sit there for this magical second, looking like someone smushed birthday cake in their face and they couldn’t believe anyone dared be so rude.
Now let’s pretend I’d glittered the hell out of them, which I hadn’t. I wish I’d thought of it while they were still inside the arena and not chasing me but you do what you can when it occurs to you.
I ran down a open air food market of some sort. The ring spun piles and piles of glitter and goop into existence behind me. Leather bound men bolted after me, slipping on fabulousness and stopping once they hit the fruit piles.
A food cart shattered as a glittered man mistimed his leap. The hungry part of my brain registered food. I grabbed an apple out of the air, the kind of coordinated move I can only pull off while starving, and kept on moving. Gods had great food even in their most derelict areas. Something about the power of divine belief or super soil.
Guards came out of another cramped set of hovels build in the shadows of some large marble building. Nets flew in their direction. They may have been made of imitation cheese that also tasted like sawdust.
“Halt fiend!” Guard B demanded immediately upon arriving from another direction.
“You halt,” I shouted and beaned him an apple core. “I am unstoppable!”
The chase continued. Guards piled up. They were the default idiot minion kinds with no obvious superpowers. They were thwarted by an endless supply of spawned items that no one could expect. I mean, normal people don’t use two story plastic squirrel toy that quacked as a defensive object.
“What the heck is wrong with this guy!” a defeated guard cried.
“Hel is with me! Or Hera. Wait, is this Greeceland or Norseland?”
Those aren’t real places.
“Heathen,” the guard said. He tried to stand up and slipped on a conveniently placed banana peel. I stepped over his technically not a corpse-corpse and followed two fluffy clouds that had taken the place of my slippery slide and the string. I didn’t remember summoning them but hey, when you’re running madly a lot of stuff just kind of happens.
Two blocks later wind smeared away my guiding path of clouds.
Guards arrived from all directions. Someone above me shouted, “I’ve stopped him!”
I tilted my head up and gazed at the latest arrival. Atop a sturdier building stood a woman with long flowing blond tresses. “His magic is cut off. Quickly, surround him!” She waved an arm and commanded forth untold legions of men to tackle me.
Glittered guards arrived behind the others. Their impressive muscles heaved and rolled.
“What are you waiting for?” blonde bellowed to her minions.
They hesitated so I pulled out the ring and thought of two different paths. One towards the center of this stupid realm and the other towards the Oracle that the heroes that stopped me had talked about. Clouds formed above for a second. Would you believe me if I said they both went the same direction?
Well they did. The clouds scattered as blonde summoned forth another gust of wind.
“Get him!”
“Why?” I yelled back at them. “What the fuck is wrong with this? You were dragging me in the direction I need to go anyway.”
I threw my hands up and mumbled to myself.
Which brought us to the part of this story where I realize something important and the chase comes to an ass grinding halt. I ran from guards because they were annoying and wanted to stop me with violence and unconsciousness. Now I was surrounded and verified they’d end up taking me where I wanted to go anyway. That means the important realization was that other than comic relief, I had no reason to even fight these guys.
I mean, I could have just napped the entire time and saved myself the attempted escape.
The guards tightened their ring. My original muscle bound captor pushed his way through the glittery crowd and stepped closer. He held a bear’s head in his hands. The white and black eyes of his defeated foe were listless.
Muscle man had won his battle but suffered. He had a black eye and claws had torn the hell out of his clothes. The massive mallet he used was nowhere to be seen. I smiled happily then asked, “Can we not knock me out this time? It’s bad for the environment.”
“Take him to the oracle, without knocking him out this time,” the woman above ordered. “Like you should have the first time!”
He stared at me and his chest heaved in one of those “I’m big and really angry but am smart enough not to punch you” that comes from too much muscle. I smiled and tilted my head in victory. He turned, threw the bear’s head into a wall so hard the building shuddered, then stomped off ahead of me. The glittered men party.
I followed and summoned myself a nice shirt with buttons and a collar. The nice shirt said “Athens Sucks” on the back. Which wasn’t really the right demographic, but like I said before, take your victories where you can.
The path meandered onward until we reached an wider street. Way down the path a large temple sat atop a hill. The guards continued marching behind us. Regular people in those clothes roman’s wore lined up to watch me be escorted toward the temple. Mothers muttered in distaste and covered their children’s eyes. Men said prayers and offered goats in sacrifice. White robed men poured vials of water in my wake and freshly turned dirt to, I don’t know, erase the tracks of my existence as I passed by.
A bell chimed, followed by dozens of others. We got closer to the source of the continued banging sound and I found the noise sources weren’t bells. Large metal sheets lined the stairs upward. Young men beat them with mallets. I guess even Greek god wannabes used flat metal plates just like their boring ancestors.
As the pathway reached an end, my escort stomped dainty up a series of polished steps towards the temple. I continued up the stairs without hesitation. The banging stopped. The crowds of people fell away and even those white robed people stayed below.
Imagine one of those great larger than life cathedrals with spiraling ivy at the front and pillars made of marble. Along the walls were hand carved scenes of men and monsters fighting each other. Light poured in from above in a perfect summer day, making the floor seem both pristine and clean but somehow one with nature.
At the top stood a lone figure. He had zero hair, the purpliest robe I’d seen this side of the moon, and a frown. Thor or whomever walked up, whispered at the man, and the man nodded.
If you haven't guessed, this guy is the Oracle. And I hate oracles.
***
Adams Notes on Stupid Things
Oracles: "There is a spoon because I said so"
Oracles are annoying and it’s not because they tell the future. It’s because people believe them and that the future is immutable in some way. I mean, it is but it isn’t. Mostly it’s people listening to this guy who knows the future and their actions bringing about the prophesied future..
Imagine there’s one of these future readers. We’ll call her Lacey. Let’s pretend that Lacey isn’t a real prophetic oracle or whatever. She says “Doug, the Man-Child of Light and Penis Mightiness” is going to die in a car accident on his eighteenth birthday and with him shall die the future master race of penial enhanced supermen. Suddenly people who don’t like Lacey, which is nearly everyone, are out to kill Doug. Lacey, who totally isn’t real, sends her army of loyal but slutty bimbos out to save Doug. A war starts.
Doug dies, fulfilling the future that she saw come to pass. Then he comes back to life with a stronger than ever manhood, punches the bad guys, and sweeps Lacey off her feet. Future results achieved and Lacey gets to look like a genius and get laid by super-dick.
Back to my point about spoons. Oracles tell people that the wind will blow in a place that’s notorious for being windy. They’re people pick up a slightly curved rock and go “this is now a spoon”. Then people slowly turn said rocks into real spoons and the oracle takes credit. Then the rock becomes a magical religious artifact signifying faith in the oracle’s grand plans.
Back to Doug. He did die in a car accident after a cuckolded boyfriend ran into him with a car. Doug got to his girlfriend before Lacey even became aware of Doug. All those ninja assassins out to get him were incidental because Doug would have died anyway. Lacey took credit for the wind blowing.
Conclusion, same as what I said earlier. Oracles are annoying.