The light was what woke him. Bright overheads beaming directly into his brain. Daylight, Dan thought. Time to get up. He instinctively reached for his nightstand, looking for the time. The leaning motion toppled him straight out of his bed and onto an unfamiliarly hard floor.

"Guh!" Dan grunted, startling fully awake. His hands scrabbled against the cold tile, forcing himself upright. He glanced around, cautiously taking in his surroundings. He was in what looked like a refurbished doctor's office; something that had clearly seen better days, and had recently been subjected to a hasty patch job. The walls were covered in a fresh coat of white paint that couldn't quite hide the cracks striking through them. The overhead lights dangled loosely from the ceiling, suspended precariously from a hastily mounted metal plate. He could see the wooden struts peeking past the holes in the decrepit ceiling. Wood laced with rot.

Dan's gaze found the door. A large crack ran through it, and strips of paint were peeling away, showing the battered particle board beneath. A folded piece of paper had been taped to it, bright red READ ME IMMEDIATELY scrawled across the surface. Dan stared at it for several moments, shrugged, and moved over to it.

He peeled the letter off the door and unfolded it. Inside, scrawled in reedy cursive, was a letter addressed to him.

Daniel Newman, it began, my name is Andros Bartholomew, and you are now my prisoner. If you leave this room, you will die.

Well then, that was succinct. Dan had suspected the mad scientist would attempt something eventually, but he assumed the feds would catch him before any shenanigans came to fruition. Somewhere inside him, hiding beneath a feeling of deep disappointment with the local FBI branch, and slight unease at his present situation, there lingered a quietly building anticipation.

He continued to read.

Now, I understand why a man with your power might be skeptical of such a claim, but before you attempt to prove me wrong, finish this letter. I promise, it will save your life. Teleporters are rare, I will admit, but humankind has always adapted when faced with new challenges. The United States Government devised an effective means of stopping teleportation as early as the sixties, by simply poisoning the subject and holding the cure hostage. I, myself, have gone a more twenty-first century route. I have placed within your body, approximately two inches above your heart, a device of my own design. A small, innocuous orb, no larger than a fingernail, and filled with a most deadly toxin. The device is currently inert, and will stay that way so long as it receives my standby signal. Such a signal is centered on the room you are currently standing in. Should you leave, you will meet an astonishingly painful, if brief, end. Do not take this information freely given as an opportunity, but rather a sign of my own certainty that I can contain—

Dan retracted his opinion on Bartholomew's succinctness. The damn letter continued on and on, waffling from one threat to another, occasionally pausing for Andros to fellate himself on his own genius. The letter had virtually nothing of substance to say, aside from a few key points: there was something inside of Dan that wasn't supposed to be there, that if he left it would kill him, and finally that Andros would notice him waking, and make an appearance shortly thereafter.

Dan supposed he should be more worried. It was the natural response to this situation, wasn't it? Uncertainty and fear. Except he wasn't uncertain at all. Not even a little bit. This wasn't because of some unfounded confidence, or disbelief. He didn't think for a second that the mad scientist who had kidnapped had lied about his circumstances. Dan wouldn't delude himself into thinking he was somehow so important to the man's plans that he wouldn't be horribly killed if he did something foolish. Nor was his lack of fear because he thought he could somehow overpower the mad scientist, or force him to deactivate the device. Gregoir hadn't even managed that, even if Andros had to bring down the building to prevent it. Dan doubted that there was much of anything he could do to a man who could discorporate himself at will. Still, he wasn't afraid.

Because he could feel that tiny device inside of him. He could feel his veil curling around it, identifying it as unnatural, whispering an important message into his ear.

Not him.

It felt like a lifetime ago that Dan had first started experimenting with his veil, pushing it out of himself and testing its limits. He could still recall the feeling of his pool running dry, and of pushing forward anyway. That distinct tug, as he uncovered another, entirely full pool beneath it. The one that was constantly inside of him, suffusing his body. It seemed unwise, at the time, to play around with it. The last thing he needed was to leave a piece of himself behind on accident.

Now though, he needed to leave a piece of something else behind on purpose.

He'd only get one shot at it, though, so he better do it right. Dan walked back to the bed that he had awoken on. It was a simple cot, the kind you'd expect to find in any given doctor's office. He sat on it, and closed his eyes. He was reasonably confident in his success. He'd grown far more comfortable with his power, despite its eldritch baggage. He trusted, at least, that it would listen to him, that it would not harm him. At this point, he was even willing to reconsider interacting with the massive, alien existence that seemed to be connected to him. But not now. Now, he needed to focus.

Which, of course, was when the door slammed open, and Andros barged in.

"Good evening, my dear test subject!" the man announced, spreading his arms wide. He looked exactly like as Gregoir had described him, a skinny, pale fellow in a lab coat with a bird's nest on his head. His eyes were wide-eyed and manic, magnified unnaturally large through his glasses, and his fingers clenched rhythmically as he spoke.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"I am Andros Bartholomew, and I will be your scientist for the foreseeable future!" he continued with a smile on his face. "Ah, and you'll have to excuse my enthusiasm. My last few plans have gone rather poorly due to minion error, so I'm a little ecstatic that I've finally found one competent enough to follow basic instructions!"

Oddly enough, spending time with Marcus had ill-prepared Dan for dealing with other mad scientists. For one, his normal strategy of being irritating and argumentative probably wouldn't work on someone amoral enough to kidnap him. Dan had no intention of inviting corporal punishment should he say the wrong thing. Not, at least, before he was certain he could escape.

He instead thought back to Gregoir's enthusiastic recounting of his encounter with Andros. "Mad Scientists always monologue," he had said. "They can't help themselves. If you're ever in a position where you can't immediately escape, let them. It will buy you a truly astonishing amount of time. Ask them questions. Be interested. They're often so narcissistic that they assume you are interested, because," and here his voice had broken into high pitched cackling, "of course you are! Who wouldn't be interested in their genius? It's very effective.

"Of course, always be working on your escape route."

It had seemed like good advice at the time, not that Dan had ever thought he'd need to use it. So, with a curious tilt of his eyebrows, he asked, "How did you manage to capture me?"

The scientists's grin widened. "It was a quite simple affair, actually. You see, this entire time, a person you trusted was actually working for me! She was constantly relaying information on your capabilities and limits, and I used that to design the perfect plan for your retrieval. A certain Matilda Fairbanks!" His voice escalated in pitch as he shouted her name, raising both hands dramatically to the ceiling and pausing expectantly.

Dan stared at him for several seconds, before realizing what the man was waiting for.

"No!" Dan gasped with all the melodrama of a high school play. "Not her!"

"Yes!" Andros crowed victoriously. "Her!"

Dan suspected that the man's time on the run since Gregoir had disrupted his operations had rather unhinged him. This kind of insanity was several levels beyond what the blonde giant had described.

"You see," Andros continued, stepping forward, "she, like I, has an exceptional interest in the effects of cosmic radiation. Though my interest is purely academic, hers is more personal in nature."

Dan's veil slowly pushed into the mad scientist's device, drenching it with his power. He'd already learned to selectively activate parts of his veil. Would it be safer to send the thing to t-space, or to try and leave it behind as he teleported? Hmm...

"Her sister, as it turns out, was crippled for life as a result of a poorly tuned upgrade," Andros revealed with a mad smile. "She believes, like I do, that upgrades and Natural powers are inexorably linked to each other. That they are one and the same. That they both can change and grow! We simply haven't discovered how yet."

Once Dan escaped, what then? Who should he alert? The FBI should probably be the first on his list. He probably wasn't giving them enough credit. It had only been a couple of days since he'd dropped that information in their lap. He doubted they could make an arrest based off some fuzzy photos and a background check. And calling Matilda in for questioning would only spook their real target. They would have put her under surveillance, waited for Andros to contact her. How long did wire taps take to set up, and did they even have enough evidence for that?

Damn! Dan wished he'd watched more cop shows.

"—simple matter to arrange the destruction of that silly apartment complex. My formula targets the most common materials used in construction and slowly eats away at them, fueling itself as they break down. It has proven itself to be a surprisingly effective distraction. Why, the whole city might end up going if they aren't careful about it." Andros noted Dan's blank stare, somehow interpreting it as consternation through the warped lens of his own insanity. "Oh, but I doubt that will happen. I've grown quite fond of this city, despite its belligerent police force. And you needn't worry about smog either. Not only will you not be seeing the sky for quite a long time, all my formulas are environmentally friendly! The smoke will break down into harmless water vapor after about three hours, so long as it finds no fuel. Those large eyesores hanging over the city have already started to fade."

The bizarre admission had Dan forcing down a laugh. Instead, he asked an important question that the mad scientist's rant had reminded him of.

"How long have I been unconscious?"

"Oh, maybe two hours," Andros replied accommodatingly. "You see, the formula I used was designed to mimic nausea, progressing into dizziness, and then unconsciousness. A natural result of a civilian like yourself seeing someone as grotesquely maimed as that unfortunate soul that I had prepared."

And just like that, any anticipation Dan felt was doused by cold reality. This man was a murderer, a kidnapper, a capital V Villain. This was the monster who had traumatized Connor and experimented on countless others. It hadn't really sunk in until just this moment.

His heart raced and his fists clenched, as Dan considered exactly what he was going to do to this man.

"Matilda played her part perfectly, of course," Andros continued, oblivious to Dan's growing anger. "It was a simple matter to trigger the apartment collapse on her signal, and she so adeptly maneuvered you right into my clutches. I'll be certain to uphold my end of the bargain, and share with her the information I gather from you."

"What is it you're going to do to me?" Dan asked mechanically, focusing all the while on the foreign piece of machinery inside of him. His veil wrapped gently around it, cocooning it in a shell of his power.

"Rest assured, it will be some time before there will be any dissections," Andros said pleasantly. "We will begin by recreating the tests that Miss Fairbanks had you perform. She is but a layman compared to myself, and I cannot trust that her data was not corrupted by her incompetence."

Dan's veil triggered around the orb, a flash of will and cosmic-fuckery shifting its existence from one reality to the next and back, all in the same instant. Whatever signal it was receiving remained constant and steady, no time having passed at all. It reappeared in Dan's clenched fist.

"As a Natural, your own teleportation must express itself in an entirely unique way. I fully understand your reluctance to inform Matilda of your full capabilities, but I'm afraid that, with me, you have little choice—"

Dan flicked the fingernail-sized piece of plastic down Andros Bartholomew's throat. It wasn't hard, as the man was five feet away and his mouth hadn't closed since he'd entered the room. Then, while the scientist clutched his neck and gagged, Dan vanished.