Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A whirlwind of sound, then an eternity of nothing. The atmosphere wrung the air out of his lungs, but despite the effort, despite the strangulation, he couldn’t die. A tight pincher kept him anchored to life despite ballooning agony around his midsection.

All at once, the lights turned back on, and Gibson was falling.

He glimpsed a cool grey sky and the tip of an impossibly tall, icy wall, and he was careening downwards. Gibson hit a soft, cold pile shoulder blades first, somersaulting backwards to end up face down in a snow pile.

Stunned, Gibson kept lying face-down on the ground, not moving, brain gluing back together from the oxygen deprivation that had ripped it apart. The freezing cold felt soothing against his face, bringing him back to awareness molecule by molecule.

As he came to himself, Gibson came to a terrible realization.

He didn’t know where he was, how he’d gotten here, or what had just happened to him.

Gibson cranked his forearm under his body and hoisted himself up, shaking his head to get rid of the snow. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“I must have gotten hit,” Gibson said. “Is everyone else inj—”

Gibson cut himself short when he realized he was alone.

Gibson was kneeling in a crevasse. The air was still as two walls narrowed in on him. He sat back in the snow and gathered his thoughts. He could’ve sworn that…No, he knew for a fact that he’d been with the other members of the Hyperforce. Although their faces blurred together and he couldn’t quite remember what they’d been doing, he distinctly remembered Sprx calling, then the world shuddering and falling in on itself. They’d been doing something—something important, something verging on life-or-death.

Gibson inhaled and prepared to shout, then caught himself. If it really was life-or-death situation, it wouldn’t do to alert the enemy to his position.

Snow fluttered off of the top of the crevasse and fell in dusty particles around him.

Or to cause an avalanche.

Gibson scrambled up. The crevasse extended in two directions, one winding deep into darkness, and the other illuminated by the thin, grey light he’d seen in the sky. He scrambled to the light, and took two steps before a gust of icy wind cascaded against him, circumventing his internal heating systems and sinking deep into his bones. Normally his robotic components sufficed to cope with all extreme temperatures, from the vacuum of space to extreme water pressure at the depths of the ocean. It took extremes of heat or cold for it to fully take effect. So it was to Gibson’s great and raw surprise that he felt the cold with such potency that a reflexive shudder crawled through his bones like something out of Nova’s personal nightmare.

A series of thoughts quickly swarmed through his mind, one question after another. Why could he feel the cold? Was he malfunctioning? Had the fall jostled something loose? Nova would hate this weather. Where was she, anyway? Where was anyone? Where was he and how had he come to rest at the bottom of a crevasse? In his spotty memory, he couldn’t remember anywhere near a crevasse. He remembered…

Gibson stumbled on the snow and graced himself against the icy wall, pinching the bridge of his nose. He remembered…something. Flashes of bright colour against frigid white, and then an impossible cold not unlike the one he felt now.

The blurriness cleared and he arrived at the triangle of light, which he realized was a tight part of the crevasse just barely enough for him to squeeze through, shining down on him below. The sky outside was grey and he caught sight of a few stray snowflakes, while snow poured on the ground below.

A short fly on a jetpack would do the trick. Gibson went to activate it.

Nothing happened.

Gibson’s brow furrowed and he tried a second time. Nothing. No warning signal, no error message, no clack or crank indicating a mechanical failure. Just nothing.

“Strange,” Gibson murmured. He reached behind him to pat at his jetpack, to no avail. “I must’ve broken it in the fall..”

Even to his own ears, the explanation didn’t sound quite right. He’d taken hits before, and this time he’d landed not only on his shoulder blades and not his back, but on snow, as well. That should’ve cushioned it enough…

Instead, Gibson crawled up the steep slope and out of the crevasse.

Gibson nearly fell down a sheer drop, extending far down to a greyish lake dappled with thick blots of ice sitting on top like droplets of oil paint. Beyond it, a hellish and barren landscape extended like the surface of a rocky planet. Desolate and brown, there were rocks and hills as far as the eye could see, and bordering on the edges were snowy hills that continued upwards into distant peaks. He scanned the landscape for signs of the Super Robot.

He went to activate his scanners and…they didn’t work.

“Are you serious?” Gibson hissed. He tried a second time, tapping on his helmet as if he went to the Sprx School of How to Fix Problems. So no jetpack, and no scanners. What else wasn’t working?

Gibson tentatively looked at his hands and tried to activate his drills. Nothing.

Well.

That was a thing.

Gibson let out a breath that came out in white puffs and inhaled chilled air that stung the back of his throat. He lapsed into a brief coughing fit before covering his mouth with his hand and going to activate his mask, which he discovered also wasn’t working.

“Well, what IS working, then?!” Gibson demanded.

No matter. Something must’ve short-circuited his systems during his lapse in consciousness. A little tune-up from Otto and he’d be right as rain.

He looked around the barren landscape.

As soon as he could find them.

It took Gibson an hour to make his way down what he now realized was a sizeable glacier, and another to hike the hill surrounding the dip in the landscape. This place looked familiar, but Gibson could not be certain how as he walked, scanning the landscape for signs of the Super Robot. They couldn’t have parked far, right?

Even away from the glacier, the cold sunk deep, and Gibson shivered and was almost numb by the time he reached the top. There, he peered over the barren land and squinted. Below, the land stretched out and became jagged. Then further, tall, black spires jutted out of the land, and upon squinting, he knew that there was no conceivable way for it to be natural. He just had to take a few steps down the hill before he froze.

It was a wasteland.

His heart lodged in his throat as he drank in the sight. The landscape wasn’t jagged with rocks—it was metal. Thick slabs of metal, some still in distinct shapes suggesting tanks or weapons or aircraft, bent at odd angles, and some charred black from some ancient explosion. The wind howled like the voices of people who had died here. It was a battleground or sorts, an old scar abandoned by those who had created it.

Further past it, some of the jagged shapes rose, and he realized that what he thought were hills were, in truth, buildings of a sort. Gibson cupped his hands around his eyes. One spire rose far above the others, far in the distance, where the mountains slopped back down into a flat, white valley—back where the snow started again. They rose like fingers pointing to the sky.

“Is that—?” Gibson stopped himself short. He could get a better look at it if his components worked.

He knew a bridge when he saw it, though. And he knew that bridge. It was the bridge leading to Shuggazoom City.

Gibson lowered his hands and stood there for a moment, astonished. This landscape didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen near Shuggazoom City. Beyond the city was the Zone, and in the Zone were vast forests and wild animals. There was nothing alive except for rocks and the distant echo that life had been here, long ago.

Well, at least he was orientated. Maybe he’d been knocked unconscious or something for a spell and something had happened in his absence. His eyes were fooling him, it was just wishful thinking that made him hallucinate Shuggazoom City. Best to reunite with the Hyperforce as soon as possible and find out what happened.

Gibson shuddered as the wind howled through him. His hands clutched at his sides. “If I don’t freeze first, at least.”

The windchill would get him. Gibson hurried down the hillside and took shelter in the towering spires of wreckage and metal. It was only a few degrees warmer—he didn’t need a thermometer to determine that. The reality was that the mind-numbing, all-consuming cold was impossible to ignore–and he wouldn’t live long enough to reach the bridge if he didn’t find some sort of protection.

He spent a few minutes scouring the wreckage and fortunately didn’t have to look far to find a piece mostly intact. A fighter ship, maybe? Not any model he was familiar with. He rummaged inside and found an abandoned medical kit, along with a tattered emergency blanket. The bandages left inside he tore up and wrapped firmly around his extremities. He improvised the blanket into a coat of sorts, holding in place with what was left on the bandage roll. By the time he was done and caught a reflection of himself in the metal, he looked like a mummy wrapped in tinsel foil.

Sprx would have a field day with this.

Gibson grimaced at his reflection, abandoned the medical kit at the site, and set off. He probably wouldn’t need it long enough to warrant carrying the extra weight. Soon he’d be back at the Super Robot and be able to put his rather confusing ordeal behind him.

It took all day to cross the wreckage, and by the time he was drawing close to the spire marking the bridge, snow had drifted down. Gibson was nearing the edge of the graveyard and the silence hadn’t let up—nothing except the quiet rumble of distant weather systems churning in the atmosphere above. He kept on track during the journey, picking up extra equipment to stave off the cold. There were a few bodies here and there—but just bones, shattered beyond recognition.

He found bits of ragged cloth that he added to the growing collection he was wrapping around his body, and was even lucky enough to find a corpse with a bomber jacket still around its shoulders. The dry air and low humidity mummified the body, but it was easy to see that it was a Shuggazoomian. The jacket didn’t come off easy, and Gibson tried not to think about how someone had decomposed while wearing it. He layered it over his emergency-blanket coat and it was the closest he felt to warm all day, though still his fur prickled with a now-familiar chill.

Gibson did his best not to think about how this strange graveyard had appeared in the Zone and why the Zone looked like this, but the best he could estimate was that a sudden and absolute catastrophe had blown the landscape apart, maybe to the extent where it changed the weather system. Snow on Shuggazoom was limited to a few isolated climates to the south, but in and around the city itself, it was a rarity. The weather rarely went below freezing even during the height of winter.

As night rapidly fell, Gibson realized he wouldn’t make it to the bridge before nightfall and took shelter in a self-made teepee he hastily threw together using large beams of metal and covered with flat sheets. At first, he hoped that the temperature would remain where it was, but those hopes were dashed and he improvised a fire or else risk freezing to death in his sleep. It took all of his concentration to find something to burn; there was no wood around, and no trees to take it from. In the end, he took what few spare bandages and bits of cloth he’d found, huddled up as best as he could, as close to the fire as he could, and lay in the cold.

The night lasted a grand total of four hours.

Gibson was always conscientious of his time and knew that he slept for less than an hour, spending the other three looking at his tiny, very pathetic, barely acceptable fire. The night was so short that just as he thought he might take advantage of the darkness and sleep, the sun clawed over the horizon.

Oh. That wasn’t right.

Gibson did a few quick calculations in his head. That wasn’t right at all. Four hours of nighttime didn’t align with Shuggazoom’s axis.

It had to be a bad dream. He was hallucinating, delirious from cold and hunger. And thirst. He was very thirsty.

Gibson used a piece of metal curved slightly into a bowl shape and heat up some of the sparse snow into a small amount of water. Food would have to wait until he got back to the Super Robot, and he was going to need a very hot meal and maybe a bath to forget his experience. After checking his cybernetic components for any signs of damage caused by the extended cold, he gathered his senses, kicked his fire out, and continued on his hike.

“I am delirious,” Gibson concluded. “I am delirious from exposure. I will return and Sprx will make a joke about how I look like a space invader, we will have a good giggle, and then have some tea. Warm tea. With sugar. And cream.”

The machine graveyard thinned out, and the snow fell more steadily now. He was walking in ankle-deep snow that became knee-deep and then almost waist-deep and then head-deep. There were trees, now—trees that looked a little more familiar, if not frozen and hardened by the harsh weather. Still, it only took a little effort to tug down some branches and improvise them into hasty snow shoes.

“I bet I’m not even on Shuggazoom,” said Gibson. “None of the facts align with Shuggazoom, wherein blow-freezing temperatures are uncommon and snow does not fall this far north, nor does the sun rise and set like that. I must’ve crushed the Fist Rocket and landed on a foreign, align world that only has a bridge that resembles the one leading to the city. We must’ve been on a mission here. Simple explanation, really.”

But what about the body?

He must’ve been mistaken. The body must belong to another alien race. There were plenty out there that had a passing resemblance to Shuggazoomians.

The most impossible explanation was the most possible. Gibson took as deep as breaths as the frigid air allowed him too and kept his senses steady.

“Let’s not get hasty,” Gibson told himself. “There’s an explanation. There’s always an explanation.”

He crawled over the last slope before reaching the edge of the bridge, and down below him the landscape expanded in all directions—a sea of white framed by the frigid sky, ground and air indistinguishable from one another.

And before him was the bridge, tall as ever, with icicles hanging off of it. It strung across a frozen sea, almost impossibly bright white except for varicose veins crisscrossing the surface to reveal dark blue water beneath. Ice floes extended over the water, and on the other end, its silhouette unmistakable, were large tombstones towering over the landscape, reaching into the sky as if frozen in its last hope to escape the ground. It was Shuggazoom City. Still there, cold, desolate, a graveyard—like the twisted metal wreckages he’d left behind him.

Gibson stood there for a long while, stunned. The glare of the sun off the ice blinded him and he blinked rapidly to clear it. Must be a trick of the light. He squinted as the sun retreated behind a cloud.

No, that wasn’t Shuggazoom.

He was delusional from exposure.

Gibson looked back over the graveyard behind him, frozen over in a thin layer of snow that steadily grew thicker and thicker. Then at the sparse forest separating him from it, and beyond it, somewhere behind the hills and debris he’d crawled his way through, the glacier where he’d first emerged.

He looked back at the city. No, it was still there. Yes, it still had the familiar shapes of Shuggazoom. Greater in height than it was in width, perched on a distant island, surrounded by the sea. Which was frozen. Snow decorated the towers and it didn’t look unlike that day, long ago, where they’d experienced their first snow day, much to Nova’s chagrin. The cold here was different as it snaked through even his layers of protection, and it took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t just the air it did that—it was his own dawning realization, as he drank in the sight in front of him.

He listened for sound and heard nothing but the howl of wind, and even from a great distance, he saw no signs of life. Not even a ship on the sea—not one that wasn’t frozen. From here, he saw some sort of aircraft carrier flipped on its side and lodged permanently in the ice like a forgotten toy. That brought the question of: since when did Shuggazoom have carriers? But it seemed like an irrelevant question in the light of things. Just another one in a series of questions.

And he had the sense he wouldn’t get answers any time soon.

Gibson found a log to sit on and thought for a long while. Once in a while, he would look out to Shuggazoom City to see if he was imagining things, then go back to the log to think again. He repeated the cycle at least four times before he stopped keeping count, and then when emotions failed him, he fell back on the one thing he knew best: facts.

Fact: he’d mysteriously appeared with spotty memories in a glacier outside of Shuggazoom City with no memory of how he got there.

Fact: Shuggazoom City was buried in arctic-like conditions.

Fact: There was no sign of life. No human life, anyway. As he sat on the log, some birds flitted between the trees, and there were some sizeable tracks in the snow showing that something lived here. None of them belonged to people.

He fell back on theories. Valeena was the first person he thought of—she certainly had the power and the motivation to transform the landscape. What better way to get back at the Hyperforce? Of course, that left the question of where was the Hyperforce. Had they evacuated? Did they even know he was here? Were they distracted by the immediate concern of looking after the civilians? There were other options, but the fact was that he didn’t have enough facts, and there was no way he was going to get facts by sitting on a log in what was left of the Zone of Wasted Years.

Gibson steeled himself and crossed the bridge into Shuggazoom City. On the way, he encountered abandoned vehicles, and more notably, several blockades spaced at even intervals. The blocks were made with thick steel plating, welded tightly together, with some of the abandoned vehicles moved to hinder movement, and others gutted for scrap parts. One had a massive hole blown clean through and the metal was singed at the edge like something had exploded through with massive force.

Returning to the spot where the Super Robot was typically parked was muscle memory at its finest, and it was only thanks to his muscle memory that he got there at all. Everything was completely unrecognizable, the land built up impossibly high with ice and snow. There were signs, however, that someone had made efforts to make getting around easier. Gliding across the snow between buildings were metal walkways lying flat against the ground, complete with handle bars and markers showing which directions were safe, and which were not. The walkways were more clustered in some areas than another, but it only took one look to see that they hadn’t been in use in a while. He followed walkways until he was almost a block from where the Super Robot was, then went off track for the last leg of the journey.

When he found the clearing where it should be, it was empty. The entire area was frozen over and covered in deep snow—there wasn’t even a sign of the spot where the Super Robot typically stood. It was an outcome Gibson prepared himself for, but that didn’t make the sight any less jarring or distressing.

Still, the facts were clear, and the facts were what he fell back on.

The fact was he was on his own.

Gibson spent the next few days relying on his survival training. There had never been a huge need for it until now. Robot Monkeys could survive for days without food and slightly less without water—however it wasn’t ideal and he couldn’t only last on energy reserves for so long. The temperature was a more immediate concern. His system and scanners damaged, his drills not operational, and evidently no power In the city, it came down to skill and knowledge.

Fortunately, Gibson had both.

He made camp in an abandoned military tank close to where the Super Robot was supposed to be. It was odd—when he stumbled across it and had a look inside, he immediately saw a resemblance to one of the Foot Crushers. It wasn’t a replica, but the inspiration was unmistakable. Then he pushed it out of his mind and focused on surviving long enough to figure out what exactly was going on. Fortunately, he scavenged some old, dry rations, which he supplemented with food caught from some small, rabbit-like creatures which he trapped using a makeshift snare made from wire and pieces of wood. There were better materials for building fires, so freezing to death was avoidable at least.

The extremely short night cycles took a bit of getting used to, but measuring shadows to estimate the day length was something to occupy himself In between securing food. He also recovered additional bits of cloth from curtains in abandoned buildings and out of military vehicles. Gibson used these to further mummify himself until he was mostly cloth, with only his eyes sticking out at the top. He had to check twice a day to make sure frostbite wasn’t developing where his metal components met flesh and his metal joints threatened to lock up with each movement. So he covered everything that was exposed.

For all his efforts, the cold never left. Even when he was sufficiently covered, the wind found one part where the cloth was too thin or there was a hole, or even when he was inside and by a fire, he felt cold eyes watching him. It was like he was being watched at all times, observed, like the wind was omnipresent and holding a bitter grudge. The type of grudge that was far-reaching and long-lasting, that never faded despite time and fading memories.

Throughout it all, Gibson refused to think about how this had happened, and it was easy to do that when Shuggazoom City was unrecognizable. It was easy to pretend that he was stranded on a deserted island light years away.

He just had to. Not. Think. About. It.

Then came the time when he had to think about it.

Gibson put another tally mark on the wall in his…tank. That made six days. Fortunately, he was getting a little used to sleeping on the ground even has the wind howled against the tank. Aside from the wind, the metal groaned as it expanded and contracted with the changing temperature.

The only way Gibson could stop himself from thinking about where and how he was here was spending each day keeping busy. Today he had it in his mind to fashion a bow. Since his drills weren’t working, and he didn’t yet have the resources he would need to conduct repairs or diagnose the problem, survival had to come first. Once he felt assured he would live, then he could solve that problem. Until then, he would need a bow. The snares were good for catching the strange rabbit-like creatures, but he’d seen glimpses of larger game that seemed to be some sort of polar reptile about the size of a car. They were strong. But the prizes were too great for him to pass up. If he could get the meat and the hide, they would easily help him survive in the event of a cold snap or the natural changing of seasons.

He ate some cooked meat leftover from the day before, packed some rations just in case, and climbed up the ladder leading out of his tank. Standing on the top, he found that the sky was a clear blue, the sun was ever-present, and there was a significant glare off the ice. The wind was slight—the first time in days it had let up, and in its absence the city was terrifyingly still.

He preferred the wind; it was enough to drown out his thoughts.

Gibson tore his eyes from familiar skyscrapers and focused on the path he was taking. The walkways were a novel source to get around the city without having to rely solely on the snowshoes he had strapped to his back, just in case. That, besides his natural dexterity, getting around on a clear day was something he became quite accustomed to, and with the excellent visibility, he could get a better look at his surroundings more than he’d been able to in previous days. Without cloud cover, fog, and snow, he could see for miles at the right elevation, though the buildings got in the way.

All the same, it still took a while to get to the park, and in that time he studied the local wildlife. He stopped once in a while to write in his journal and draw some quick sketches, particularly of the large arctic reptiles. They had a dusting of light fur or feathers across the humps on their backs and they used their tusks to poke at some plants half-buried in the frozen ground. The plant life suggested seasonal patterns, at least. There must be a few months that allowed tough, arctic plants to grow before the snow built up again.

He remembered nothing like the large reptiles living on Shuggazoom, though. The rabbit creatures were strange to him, too. And so were the birds. Everything was strange in general.

“No, don’t think about it,” Gibson said. “We’re just cataloguing the local wildlife on a strange, foreign planet that I have no connection to for research. No other reason.”

He stored his journal back in his jacket and moved along until he reached the park. It was overgrown—not well-manicured like he knew it should be. The trees were bare and jutted out at odd angles; they were the wrong type of species to thrive in this environment, however the wood was bendy enough to make a bow.

For a monkey, it was a simple task to crawl into a tree and find a few suitable branches. Much of the wood was dead from exposure, shocked grey and black from some force that had gone through here years ago. It took a lot of searching before he found a branch suitable for his purposes, so he settled himself under the tree where he’d found it and used his knife and wire to fashion a makeshift bow, using his feet to hold on to the materials while his hands bent it into a shape that wasn’t too pronounced but not too shallow, either.

He finished tying the bow and gave it a few experimental tugs, before drawing it all the way back and testing the flexibility. Could be a little tighter, but not terrible. Rummaging in his bag, he pulled out a rudimentary arrowhead he’d formed from scrap metal and tied it tight atop a makeshift arrow shaft.

Snap.

Gibson froze. Acting on instinct, he grabbed his bow and crawled into the tree branches, swinging from one to the next to assess the source of the noise.

Two trees over, he peered down into the clearing and expected to see polar reptiles foraging through the trees.

What he saw, instead, sent a fresh chill up his spine.

At first, all he saw was an icy white surface that he mistook for a rock.

Then, the rock moved.

Gibson gasped and ducked down as the rock shifted and he released it was the shoulders of a massive beast, larger than the polar reptiles, although he couldn’t tell the exact length. It took a few steps, snorted, and finally moved to a clearer point.

It had to be nine meters along, easily. Its back was coated in large slabs of spiked ice that trailed all the way down its whip-like tail, ice cracking together as it moved its muscles. Its underbody, however, appeared to be a white, shapeless mass vaguely formed into four powerful legs, and ending in a terrifying face with massive, pointed teeth.

As Gibson watched, the creature clawed at the ground, sniffing at the path Gibson had taken to get to where he was.

“Did you find something?”

Gibson ducked low as someone emerged from behind the creature.

It was his first sign of intelligent life here, and they were not much different from him, clad head-to-toe in winter gear, their face covered with a mask to stave off the worst of the cold. The figure was roughly his height, and a synthesizer completely masked their voice, distorted by the mask covering their face.

The stranger bent to the ground where the creature had been clawing and picked up a line of discarded bandages.

Gibson peered at his leg. That had come from his leg; it must’ve come loose.

A second voice called from nearby. “Well, was this a giant waste of time or not? The less time I have to spent out in this wretched wasteland, the better.”

Gibson nearly fell out of the tree when Mandarin emerged from the shrubs.

Gibson’s first thought went from ‘Oh God, Mandarin is here’ to ‘Oh, he looks terrible.’ Because Mandarin truly looked the worst he’d ever seen him: twisted by corruption, scarred by age, half his face consumed by a white that he realized with a twist of his stomach was his skull. As if conscious that someone were staring, Mandarin pulled at a black cloak draped over his shoulders and pulled the hood to conceal the worst of the damage, advancing on the stranger with the even stranger monster.

Gibson felt his breathing become uneven. He couldn’t deny it now. He couldn’t escape the facts. This was Shuggazoom, but—there were so many questions, what had happened, how did it come to this? Why was Mandarin free to roam deserted streets? But clearly there was no one to defend here. They must’ve evacuated or—

He thought of the barricades and the abandoned cars and weapons of war.

“Well, what is it?” Mandarin demanded.

The Stranger handed the bandage to him. Mandarin sniffed it.

“Ugh, it’s one of them,” Mandarin wadded the bandage into a ball and threw it at the Stranger’s head. “Disgusting cockroaches. If they must live here, couldn’t they at least stay out of sight?”

The Stranger stood quietly, watching.

“Might as well have a bit of fun,” said Mandarin. “Go catch them for me.”

“What’s the point?” the Stranger asked.

“Pleasure.”

The Stranger sighed and gestured to his monster, who shifted and stalked off easily through the snow. Well, it didn’t look like it was fast, at least. “I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. After all, what else is there?”

“I don’t appreciate your attitude!”

Gibson was so engrossed on the discussion that he didn’t notice the slight movement of the beast until it was too late to think about avoiding it.

The creature bared its teeth, sharply growled, and dove into the ground beneath it. Gibson gasped, not sure what was happening until he saw a trail of ice travel across the ground and then up the trunk and a shapeless mass formed alongside him, enough to crush branches and take him off guard. Gibson leapt blind as the ice took the shape of the creature’s head and snapped at where he’d been seconds before with enormous teeth

A shapeshifter. At least partially. A Formless? But not like any Formless Gibson had ever seen.

He face-planted into the snow with enough force to rattle teeth. The Formless came after him, twisting mid-air, flying far above like an oversized bird. Gibson dug his heel into the ground and ran. He skirted across the clearing and he picked up Mandarin saying, “Was that a Robot Monkey or a mummy wearing a fashionable coat…?”

Gibson bolted into the thickest part of the forest. There was no point in trying to outrun a beast that size. No weapons, no defence, only reason, and the fragmented hope to slow it down enough to slip away. Gibson slipped into a thick shrub, aiming for the buildings ahead. But the ground…it wasn’t just solid under his feet, it was moving with him. Blocks of ice shifted and jerked up, throwing him up into the overhead trees.

Fast. Shapeless. And it had teeth. And here Gibson was with a bow and no arrows.

Gibson threw himself through the trees and then he was falling again, crashing hard against a snowbank and rolling down. There was no orientation or sense of where he was going, except that he was going, rolling down into the ground as the ice crushed above him. He pressed his head flat against the ground, protecting it as best as he could as snow cascaded onto him.

He cowered in a shallow trench framed on both sides by white and a casing of fallen branches and trees that the Formless had pressed upon it. It was desperate and tight, but it gave him time to get his barings. Breathing heavy, he heard the distinct crunch-crunch-crunch of its enormous feet pressing through branches.

The trench was enough that he could crouch, and he got up on his feet and shuffled forward to get out from under the branches. The Formless had lost him, but it wouldn’t be for long.

He took steps. Then a weight clamped down on his leg and there was white-hot agony.

Gibson had the presence of mind to clamp both hands over his mouth to muffle the worse of the scream, though fortunately the movement of the Formless disguised what small noise that raked up his throat. His forehead slammed against the snow and it was from there that he peered back to see what had caused the damage.

There was a bear trap on his foot and crimson everywhere.

Gibson blanched in raw panic that he swallowed down like a too-large chunk of rotting food. Get away. He needed to get away. His foot was lodged in the trap and the trap was lodged in the ground and he was lodged underneath the weight of cracking branches as the Formless continued its dig for him. It was a lot of lodging with few options, but desperation, the need to survive, the need to think, pulled Gibson forward, and it was this refusal to give up that made him turn back to claw at the place where the trap was lodged.

There was no telling what the damage was. The delicate bones in his foot were likely broken. If he tried to pry the trap open, he might bleed out. Instead, he dug in the snow until he found the anchor attaching it to the permafrost. He grabbed his knife and pried the bolt loose, leaving the anchor behind, and dragging chain behind it as he scrambled back from the branches. The claw dragged behind him, tugging on the injury, and he could only drag it along by physically grabbing the trap and pulling it along like a ball and chain. From somewhere nearby, the Formless prowled in the bushes, ripping them apart with fervour and tenacity.

Gibson crawled out of the wrenched and shimmied forward on his hands and knees, relying on the commotion it was making to drown out the worst of the background noise. Making his way out of the trench, he turned to see Mandarin and the Lieutenant staring into the bushes where the Formless was searching. He scanned desperately. There was a slope nearby. A steep slope, leading back into the city and beyond. Just a simple fall down and he’d be free.

Before he could act on his escape, the Stranger turned, and he knew he had to act. Gibson grabbed his bow and the single arrow, and just as the Stranger turned in his direction, he fired.

He saw everything in slow motion, calculating the distance, watching the subtle curve and wobble of the arrow shooting through the air, and watch, mesmerized by the simple physics that had brought it to that point, as the arrow sunk into the Stranger’s chest. The Stranger toppled backwards, and at once the Formless let out a low groan and suddenly dissolved, the thick blocks of ice falling uselessly to the ground.

Interesting.

Mandarin let out an inhuman roar and glided across the snow with a force he didn’t expect from him, but Gibson readied the knife and thrust it into the exposed part of his skull on his approach. Mandarin howled and clambered back, clawing at it, hand raking at the coverings on Gibson’s face and pulling them loose.

“You need to mind your temper, old friend,” Gibson said.

Mandarin froze. Looked up. Drank in the sight of Gibson.

Gibson had never seen Mandarin with such a geniun look of shock. It tugged at his wrinkled, scarred skin, brow curving upwards, small eyes dilating. He became small, like Gibson was a revelation he’d never seen coming, a something he’d never accounted for. Something strange and terrifying in the new world he found himself in.

“Gibson?” Mandarin said disbelievingly, quietly.

The tone made Gibson falter. He hadn’t heard that tone of voice from Mandarin since back in the old days, when he’d been their friend and their leader. He could almost see it. Gibson, huddled in his laboratory. Mandarin, in the doorway. Inquiring about his projects, asking how his day was, playing with his emotions like it was a casual game where he was cheating and knew his victory was assured.

“But…that’s…that’s impossible!” Mandarin said.

Gibson didn’t stay to ask why it was impossible. He fell backwards and rolled down the hill.

It was a rough tumble to the bottom and one that involved a lot of pulling and tugging on his now-numb leg. Gibson hit the bottom hard and rolled back with his bow. He didn’t have an arrow or a knife anymore, but the bow was better than nothing, and worried as a crutch to keep him up and moving, dragging the heavy metal clamped tight around his foot.

Mandarin, though, wasn’t following. He stood at the embankment’s peak, and even from the substantial distance between them, the shock written on his face was palatable and visible, a bright flare against the white backdrop of the city.

Gibson didn’t stick to question why or how. All he needed was distance. But it still came to a surprise as he hobbled away around the street corner that Mandarin didn’t even bother pursuing.

Chapter Text

When he woke up, Gibson was lying on at the bottom of the ladder leading out of the tank he’d taken shelter in. The hatch was still open and a fierce wind had settled in, howling over like air being blown over the lip of a jug.

He’d fallen in.

Getting back to the tank had been an arduous and long journey, and his refusal to leave behind any of his gear had made it impossibly difficult. The trip involved a lot of crawling around the ground and using his hands and good foot where possible. Fortunately, being a primate, he had dexterity on his side, although he’d passed out from the raw pain once or twice.

Gibson shifted upwards; there would be no getting up to close the hatch, but the ambient temperature in the tank was sustainable. More importantly, the trap was still locked over his mangled foot and a steady stream of crusted red blood pooled around it.

He sat up and leaned against the ladder to reorientate himself. Mandarin was here. Of course he was. Mandarin had that kind of persistent presence, never changing despite the circumstances. Still, it filled Gibson with existential dread. Gibson hadn’t recognized the companion who was with him. Mandarin wasn’t the type who was good at team work, and Valina had been an exception. Even when he’d led the Hyperforce, everything was fabricated—a miserable lie that stung deeper than the trap around his foot.

Gibson inhaled some chilled air and set to work. He couldn’t fix what was going on in the city—not yet, anyway—but he could fix his injury.

Lighting a small fire, Gibson took stock of his immediate supplies and options. His knife was gone, lodged in Mandarin’s exposed skull, but he’s been working on an improvised one made out of a sharpened stone. As much as he loved modern technology and the advances in it, there was something brilliantly simple about the tool, and the edge was more than sharp enough for his purposes.

The bear trap had sunk its jaws into the middle of his foot. The bone was broken; he could tell just by the swelling. It wasn’t a large trap and the size suggested that it was used to hunt small game, like rats or the rabbit creatures. But the grip was intense and had been at just the wrong angle for disaster. Using the improvised knife, he pried the jaws open enough to slide his foot out. He grit his teeth to stop a scream as fresh blood gushed out from the spots where tooth met flesh. Gibson shoved a wad of cloth into his mouth to stifle the sounds he made while he wrapped his foot up as tightly as he could, elevated it above his heart, and squeezed with all his might. He felt the broken bones shift and scrape against one another, though he could deal with that after he stopped the worst of the bleeding.

It was a long while before the worst of it stopped. With his tail, he pulled the first aid kit closer, although the pickings were meagre. He had a needle but no thread, and he would have to sacrifice the bandages staving off hypothermia to bind the injury. Setting the bones would be tricker. Without X-rays and scanners, he relied on location, visual cues, and gentle prodding to diagnose the problem. Of his three digits, two of the metatarsals were broken: the middle and the right. The right appeared to be a clean break, while the middle had taken the full force of the trap’s bite. There was no telling how bad the damage was. Back in the day, it would just take a spell in the healing pods or maybe a minor surgery to correct any complications.

Gibson looked around. Not exactly a sterile environment, without the comfort of his lab or the reliable assistance of his team mates.

He cleaned out the cuts with water and sterilized the tweezers over a fresh fire to pick out a few visible specks of dirt and grime that had wormed their way in. After, he sterilized the needle over the fire as well and used some fishing wire to sew the wounds closed. He tried twice to pierce the needle through his own skin but was left gasping and panting with pain and threatening to white out again. He went with his best option, and dug his foot into a pile of snow that had settled underneath the hatch to numb his foot as best he could. Gibson grimaced with each tug of the string as he sewed.

The bones were…more complicated. And there also wasn’t enough snow in the universe to numb what he had to do.

In total, Gibson blacked out four more times before the bones were in a place he thought might heal properly, then he bound his foot as tight as possible without cutting off circulation. At that point, he was spent, but the fire was burning and it was enough. He made himself comfortable inside his nest of cloth and sheets. Whether it was exhaustion, the pain, a desire to forget what he’d seen, or a combination of all three, he drifted off at once.

For the next two days, Gibson was largely unable to move from his nest and shivered under his blankets in an attempt to conserve as much energy as possible. He eventually managed to rig up a hook using a fishing hook and a metal pole to grab the hatch and close it to keep the wind chill out, but that was the most he expended. He kept his foot elevated and the dry rations were enough to sustain him for a time.

It wouldn’t last long, however. Gibson knew the risks and the food situation was priority. Being held up with an injury was the worst outcome—to his foot, no less. So as soon as his mind cleared enough to think straight, he forged a plan.

He rigged up a system wherein the only extreme movement he would have to do was climb up the ladder, which he managed with his three remaining limbs well enough. Primate advantages. He attached a rope to the end of his arrow and perched on top of the tank so that he had a good view of the neighbouring area. From here, small game would pass through, usually the rabbit like creatures. Gibson practiced shooting at them, then using the rope to pull back the arrow. He broke two and lost five before he started to get a feel for it. And on the forty-third try, he hit a rabbit right in the chest.

Gibson steeled himself, worried that if he pulled the wrong way, he’d lose both the catch and the arrow. With some extremely careful tugging, he got it close enough to use his pole to pull it close enough to reach.

The system worked. He could save his dry rations and sustain himself off of fresh meat, hopefully until his foot recovered enough for him to walk on. That was four to six weeks, maybe less if he pushed himself.

He might have to, Gibson thought as he skinned his meal and hung up the hide to dry. A broken foot was a death sentence if he had a bad day of hunting.

After that, Gibson lived day by day. Thanks to his implants, he was able to stretch out his food supplies much longer than if he’d been a human. Between hunting for food from the hatch, he kept still and quiet on his chest, foot propped up high enough. Often the pain was too extreme to do much of anything except lie down with a damp cloth covering his eyes. He changed the bandages often, eager to avoid infection, and although he knew he should cauterize the wound, the fear of pain was too much for him to act on.

One night, when the fire had been reduced to embers, he heard heavy, unnatural footfalls that vibrated through the metal in the tank so violently that he was jostled out of his sleep, teeth clacking together. The low growl audible on the outside was unmistakable: another one of those Formless. Gibson kept still and didn’t breathe. After a few minutes, the footfalls finally moved on and when he woke up the next morning, he found distinct tracks just outside his hatch. Just to be safe, he lay low for the next day or so.

After that, cabin fever. Sure, he was able to sit outside at the edge of the hatch, but soon he started to feel antsy and restless. He’d never been a good patient and there was so much about the city he had to investigate. He couldn’t find out why or how Mandarin was here from a tank.

So long story short, he set to work trying to get the tank to work again.

It wasn’t long into the venture that he realized that not only did he not have Otto’s technical know-how, but the engine was buried under several feet of snow and damaged beyond repair. However, he did manage to salvage a few interesting parts. After fiddling with them for a bit, he switched to an alternate project and constructed a rudimentary telegraph machine. If he couldn’t go for help, help would have to come to him, and without any other reliable transmitter in arm’s reach, this would have to do. Best of all, he couldn’t picture Mandarin having the presence of mind to monitor a morse code frequency.

Fortunately there were plenty of materials to cannibalize to make a simple telegraph. Pieces of thin metal for the key, some screws, a few blocks of wood. The tricky part were the batteries. He found some in the tank, but they were dead despite being in good condition. After some thinking, Gibson realized that it may not be a coincidence that a good battery and his cybernetic components weren’t working. An electromagnetic pulse, maybe? It would have to be a pretty powerful one to cripple most of his implants.

What would’ve taken Otto a day to solve took Gibson something close to a week, but eventually he rigged up a homemade battery using the tools leftover in the tank. By the time he was done, he’d ripped apart the entire interior of the tank using his pole for leverage and a few very precise movements to avoid jostling his foot. He did bend it in the wrong direction a few times, after which he felt nauseous with pain and even vomited on one occasion. And by the time he was done cannibalizing the tank interior, he improvised a rather large lead-acid battery shambled together from the parts he’d been able to find.

Of course, he wasn’t sure it would work, not until he finally attached the morse code machine and he heard the extremely welcome dots and dashes.

He rigged up an antenna with bent metal. By that point, he had better maneuverability in his foot and was able to crawl his way to a place closer to the buildings where he could to disguise it, just in case Mandarin came. If there was one thing he didn’t need, it was exposure.

And so, he crawled back into his tank and set to work tapping out an SOS signal.

The arrow shot across the clearing and sank into the rabbit. It let out a final squeal and twitched on the ground. Gibson limped over, leaning on his bow for support, seized the poor thing by the neck, and twisted it to put it out of its misery. He was something like a professional hunter-gatherer now.

It was going on week four, and Gibson’s foot ached as he hobbled back to the hatch. He was pushing himself, and he knew it. He needed to rest for at least another two, but he needed to cut that time in half if he hoped to live. Subsiding on rabbits wouldn’t do. With each one, he was sacrificing a portion of the meat to dry on a rack for consumption in case he got snowed in. Thus far, the weather had been cold but manageable, but he did note that the sun got a little lower with each day, so he estimated that it was somewhere between summer and autumn. A little push and the temperatures might dip low enough that even his small fire wouldn’t sustain him, and smarter creatures would migrate to warmer climates.

Gibson tossed his kill down and hopped his way down the hatch, snapping it shut behind him. He’d rigged up a small LED light that was the only source of light in the cramped space. The tank was getting a very lived-in feel. His bed in the corner was piled up high with all of the spare blankets and fragments of clothing he’d been able to find, and he’d made a small workshop where he worked on various projects to keep him occupied. His morse code machine was right by his bed where he was able to access it at any time, day or night, wind or snow. Or more snow. Lots of snow. Only snow.

He sighed. He felt tense all over.

Gibson forced himself to not think about his situation and prepared the rabbit. He was getting better and better at it with each catch. When he was done, he tossed the entrails and various bits out the hatch and buried it in the snow so he could dispose of them later. The smell was…something. Then he tossed the good meat in a bucket by his fire to let it cook.

Spent from the minimal movement, Gibson lay back on his bed and pulled his telegraph closer.

The message was near-automatic. A series of dots and dashes and what, to a lay person, would look like a meaningless series of letters. It was impractical to tap out individual letters, so he relied on abbreviations, although amateur radio operators had been in short supply even when Shuggazoom was…not what it was now. Still, the meaning of his message would be clear to anyone familiar with it.

CQD SOS THIS IS FR4

He kept repeating it, over and over again, staring at the ceiling, thinking of ways to set the message to repeat automatically. If he rigged up some sort of pulley system, maybe he could arrange that.

And then there was a dot.

Gibson had been tapping with his eyes partially closed, but he sat bolt upright at the sound. He scrambled for the headphones to amplify the sound and listened close, determining two letters coming out of the quiet.

CS

Gibson’s heart lodged in his chest.

There was something.

There was someone there.

They were asking for his callsign. He tapped out his answer. Just to make sure he wasn’t imagining thing, he called for the operator to repeat his message, and there was a long pause before the answer came.

CS

He scrambled for his journal, hands trembling as quickly jotted down the messages as they came, eager to not forget.

CQD SOS THIS IS FR4.

The answer came. THIS IS B0B. WHO IS THIS?

“Bob?” Gibson murmured. He hoped his annoyance conveyed through the code. THIS IS FR4.

PLEASE REPEAT MESSAGE.

Gibson sighed. FOOL. THIS IS FR4. IF YOU’RE GOING TO ASK REDUNDANT QUESTIONS, GET OFF THIS FREQUENCY.

WHAT IS YOUR LOCATION?

SHUGGAZOOM CITY. WHERE IS THE HYPERFORCE?

Long pause. Too long. So long that Gibson thought he might’ve lost the signal.

Bob finally answered, THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. HYPERFORCE DISBANDED.

Gibson wrote out the word.

Disbanded.

He read it twice.

“DISBANDED?!” he shouted. Gibson flailed. He was careful enough to aim away from his telegraph machine, but towards his nest of blankets and the pot holding the rabbit meat. The food seemed trivial. Hyperforce. Disbanded. Two words that didn’t belong together.

It must be a mistake. He must’ve misheard.

REPEAT MESSAGE, he said.

Bob repeated.

No, he hadn’t misread. Disbanded. But…how? That didn’t make any sense. The Hyperforce would never let Shuggazoom turn into whatever the hell this was. He let himself lie there for a long while.

Moreover, ‘long time ago.’

Don’t think about it. He couldn’t think about it. Gibson had seen some insane instances of science over the years but this was beyond his grasp. Gibson was afraid to ask Bob how long ‘long ago’ was or what constituted ‘long ago’ in this kind of world. He breathed deeply. The important thing was that he had to get a hold of himself.

Bob was still talking in dots and dashes. Gibson came back to himself and found that he was staring at the discarded meat on the floor—now ruined. He put it back in the bucket and pushed it away, appetite gone.

B0B TO FR4, HOW DO YOU COPY?

Gibson dragged himself back to the telegraph. I READ YOU. IS THERE ANYONE LIVING HERE? 

A FEW.

Gibson grit his teeth hard. If this person was anything like him, they had to be struggling as well, and resources were stretched. Despite how desperate he’d been to get help a few weeks ago, he was less frantic now, and he was hesitant to ask for it. It had taken him close to a year to develop a bond with members of the Hyperforce. He was slow to make friends and he knew that.

But desperation and survival instinct swelled up inside him, made him queasy with defeatism. Despite the risk, he needed this. ‘Bob’ might be the only person alive in the city capable of giving him the answers he desperately craved.

MAY WE SPEAK IN PERSON? Gibson sent out.

WHERE ARE YOU?

Gibson described the park where he’d encountered Mandarin and his companion.

THAT’S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CITY FROM MY LOCATION. TRAVELLING THAT DISTANCE MIGHT BE DIFFICULT.

I’LL COME TO YOU, THEN.

IT COULD BE DANGEROUS.

I WILL MANAGE.

Bob was again quiet for a few eternities. Then he seemed to make up his mind. IF YOU WANT TO COME, YOU’LL HAVE TO DO IT BEFORE WINTER.

It became a matter of preparation. Gibson had never planned to live in the tank forever, and it made sense to live close to other survivors. He cringed at the word ‘live.’ Lived gave him the impression that this would be an extended arrangement, that he would spend the rest of his days toiling in the arctic. Although the solitude was an introvert’s dream, it made him feel anxious. Like he would never have anyone to bounce ideas off of or force him to eat meals or discuss new findings. Or literally anything.

He never thought loneliness could feel so crushing.

He’d locked himself in his lab so often for the sole purpose to get away from his team members, and now that he had his isolation, he craved for an interruption.

Either way, the only way he would find out what had happened to Shuggazoom would be questioning someone who’d experienced it first hand, and by the sounds of things, Bob was that person. Whoever he was, whatever he knew, Gibson could get more information out of him and pull apart the mystery surrounding the city enough to get a clearer picture about what had happened to the Hyperforce in what he was beginning to realize was an extended absence.

By the fourth week, he was able to stand on his foot, but still walked with a pronounced limp. Times were too desperate for him to get bogged up, and Bob was insistent on Gibson coming before winter. He was careful to avoid discussions about his identity: that could come later. And if the Hyperforce really was disbanded, it didn’t matter anyway. Of course that left the question as to what had happened to his team mates following the alleged disbandment, but the question left him off-balance and in disbelief. He couldn’t even think about it. Gibson, the serial thinker, couldn’t think about it, and his trust in Bob was selective at best.

In the meantime, he made preparations. After contemplating many options, he knew that with his healing foot, walking across the city was a no-go. He settled on boating around the city to Bob’s rough location.

While he prepared, Bob became something like a pen pal, giving practical advice on surviving and becoming a little too excited when Gibson mentioned living in a tank. Bob even suggested getting the tank back up and running. Of course, before Gibson could shoot him down, Bob was sending schematics and technical advice his way.

STOP TRANSMITTING, Gibson said. It took three tries before Bob finally stopped. I’M NOT FIXING THE TANK.

IT MIGHT JUST NEED A FEW PARTS, said Bob.

I HAVE STRIPPED IT BARE.

DO YOU HAVE A CAN OPENER?

I CANNOT FIX A TANK WITH A CAN OPENER.

I WILL TELL YOU THE STEPS. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

DO NOT CLOG THIS FREQUENCY. ARE YOU INSANE? I AM NOT TAKING THE TANK, I AM TAKING A BOAT.

Long pause. Whenever there were long pauses, he took it to mean that Bob was coming up with another insane idea.

DO YOU THINK YOU COULD ATTACH TANK PARTS TO THE BOAT? Bob asked.

Gibson sighed. He was learning to expect these kinds of insane, impractical ideas from Bob. He seemed to have a preoccupation with them.

Solving the issue of where to find a boat was a little more complicated, but Bob directed Gibson to the docks where he found slabs of driftwood not yet frozen by the cold. In a few months that would be different. For the time being, he fashioned a makeshift hatchet and used twine to string pieces together. It wasn’t easy. On the first day of making the boat, he spent too much time walking and ended up unable to get up the second. On the third, he got a little more sense into him and sled the short distance to the ocean shore to continue working, and spent the majority of his time out sitting down while working

It didn’t have to be sturdy. It didn’t have to be big or complicated. It just had to float.

IT COULD BE A FULL DAYS JOURNEY, Bob told him over the telegraph.

“More with a broken foot,” Gibson murmured. He didn’t tell Bob that, though. He was careful to avoid all mention of injuries, in the event that he couldn’t trust him.

WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE CONTACT WHILE YOU TRAVEL.

I’LL FIND A WAY IF THERE’S TROUBLE, Gibson assured him.

ARE YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT ME TO COME TO YOU?

NO. I WILL MANAGE.

BUT YOU’RE NOT FAMILIAR WITH THE AREA.

I’M FAMILIAR ENOUGH. I DON’T NEED ASSISTANCE GETTING THERE.

AT LEAST LET ME MEET YOU HALF WAY.

A prickle of annoyance flashed through Gibson. I DON’T NEED TO BE CODDLED LIKE A CHILD. I KNOW THE WAY. I WILL MEET YOU AT YOUR LOCATION.

Week five crawled along slowly, and at the end of it, Gibson’s gait was improving and the boat was mostly put together. At the end of it, it resembled a makeshift kayak, narrow at the sides and unsteady when he tested it on the cold waters. Bob had warned him that in the coming months, the ice floes would freeze over, however at this time of year, they were thin along the coastline and accessible at the very edge of a dock. The trek to and from his hideout to the boat was an arduous and he was always on alert to possible threats.

He wasn’t fully confident in the kayak’s seaworthiness, but it didn’t need to take him out to sea. It just needed to get him around the ice floes to where Bob lived. Easy.

Gibson woke up to an especially biting cold one day and found that his fire had gone out during the night. He was running out of things to burn, too. The sooner he got to Bob’s, the better, and he decided that he would have to leave by tomorrow if he hoped to live long enough to meet Bob. Today, he would have to get some of his supplies in order for the trip, so he stuffed a few rations into a backpack, packed some basic things he would need for the journey, and climbed out to the hatch.

Upon opening it, Gibson scanned the area. The sun was up and it was clear daylight. At first, he had no idea that there was anything amiss.

And then he came face-to-face with Mandarin.

Gibson’s heart lurched but he managed to hold himself back from screaming. A snide smile enveloped Mandarin’s lower face.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t find you?” Mandarin said snidely.

Gibson slammed the hatch shut and bolted it.

Panting now in the near-darkness, Gibson waited. Something was digging at the snow—he could feel large claws at the hatch, and when they couldn’t get it open, they started digging.

Well, he was going to be late. Gibson rushed to his telegraph and started broadcasting.

FR4 TO B0B, I MAY BE LATE.

He repeated twice before he heard an answer back. Bob must’ve been right at his machine.

DID YOUR BOAT FREEZE OVER? Bob asked.

NO, MANDARIN IS AT MY DOOR. MAY TAKE A WHILE TO GET RID OF HIM.

GET OUT OF THERE. MANDARIN WILL KILL YOU.

I’D LIKE TO SEE HIM TRY.

That was the last thing Gibson managed to send before the entire tank tilted sideways.

Gibson grabbed the telegraph and held it tight to his chest as the other objects around him clattered against the walls. It was still for a moment. Then with a screech of bending metal, he looked up to see massive claws piercing the ceiling. With a jolt, the tank started rising.

The tank rattled. Gibson was only vaguely aware of things crashing against him like he was inside of a shaker, without the melodious and pleasing music to go along with it. Instead of music, his ears started ringing. There was a flurry of movement, a roar, and then a sudden quiet and stillness as he recollected himself. He was on the roof of the tank, the telegraph smashed against the wall, his meagre possessions scattered around him.

Gibson blinked a few times, trying to clear the confusion, and then a sudden beam of white light came through a hole he realized was in the wall. There was no mistaking who was looking through it.

Gibson spotted his bow and makeshift arrows in the rubble and adrenaline coursed through him. The powerful wave of confidence blinded him and he dove for it. Questions later. He shot off an arrow. A few weeks of shooting small game had honed his skills over the last few weeks, and the arrow lodged right in Mandarin’s good eye, causing him to stumble back, screeching. That was his last one. Gibson threw the bow, took two steps, and then something heavy and hard hit his back and he slammed into the ground as if experiencing the full force of a gas giant’s gravity well.

He felt the cold breath of the Formless on the back of his neck, fur standing up on end. Gibson cranked his head sideways to peer up at the toothy muzzle of the Formless, and beyond it, Mandarin pulling himself together. With a yank and a squelch, the arrow popped lose. Gibson observed as the eye strung black threads across where it used to be, reforming into something a little more tangible. Whatever it was, Mandarin didn’t need an eye to be fully reformed as he rounded on Gibson with fury and focus.

“You injured my lieutenant,” Mandarin said.

Mandarin’s gaze skirted around as if searching for something, but he didn’t seem to find what he was looking for. He knelt by Gibson, one cold hand reaching forward to touch Gibson’s helmet.

“Don’t touch me,” Gibson demanded, smacking his hand away.

“You’re young,” Mandarin realized. He blinked twice as if to centre himself, then his voice gained a familiar bite it had possessed back in his days as the Hyperforce leader. “How did you come to be here, Gibson?”

“Mandarin, allow me to put this in a way that your lunacy might be able to comprehend,” said Gibson. “I despise you. I detest the ground you walk on. I would appreciate if you would cease to address me as if that we were still friends. Kindly take me prisoner, kill me, or what have you. Just do whatever it is you intend to do and get it over with.”

The corners of Mandarin’s mouth twitched as if he was trying to smile. Of course, in his case the aborted smile was not without a touch of worrisome insanity Gibson wasn’t used to seeing on Mandarin. Usually he was more calculated than this. He always had a purpose even when Gibson had questioned his mental faculties. But as he looked at Mandarin, he realized that there was another difference: not just the exposed skull or the obvious corruption pulling his body apart or the influence of black magic that kept him alive. The cruel twinge Mandarin always hid surged unrelenting to the surface and there was no attempt to disguise it: horrible, gleaming irrationality, pure insanity.

“This wretched city just became a little more interesting,” Mandarin mused. He started pacing. And he laughed. “Oh, no, you should really think twice before making an offer like that, Mr Hal Gibson! That is your name right? You’re not just some pretender sent here for my amusement? It would be just like something she would do.”

Gibson’s face scrunched up, confused.

“Oh, you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” Mandarin asked. “Of course you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t! How could you?!”

Mandarin brandished his claw, snapping it menacingly.

“I’m going to start by taking your toes,” said Mandarin. “And then your feet. And your knees. And your legs.”

Gibson was taken aback. “That’s a little grim even for you.”

“I have nothing I need from you, not like the old days, Mr Gibson,” said Mandarin. “This is all about pleasure.”

Gibson’s gut sank.

The insanity seeding into every part of Mandarin’s features was interrupted by a distant pop-pop-pop. His head raised, like a prey pivoting to search for a predator. Far in the distance, beyond the frozen skyscrapers, three tendrils of light shot into the sky, a warm glow contrasting with the pale sunlight. Mandarin squinted, confusion written on his face and then replaced by something akin to resignation.

“Damn it all, does he have a radar or something?” Mandarin sighed. He rounded on Gibson. “You! You’ve been talking to him, haven’t you?”

“Talking to who?” Gibson asked.

Before he could process the blatant confusion twisting Mandarin, a dark object arched into the sky from the point that the three flares had come from. Smoke trailed after it like long fingers lifting it up. Gravity and basic physics being what they were, the object only got so high before it started falling towards them at a breakneck pace Gibson found very concerning.

“Is that fool coming right for us?!” Mandarin shrieked.

Just as Mandarin asked the question, a flurry of noise screamed over Gibson’s head and the weight from the Formless lifted. There was an incredible heat on his back that sunk into his chilled bones and disturbed the snow around him, before it all shifted like sediment settling at the bottom of a pond. Gibson protected his head as a massive explosion sounded from someplace too close for comfort that made his ears ring and a shockwave trembled through his being.

When the worst of the noise settled and Gibson decided that he couldn’t keep hiding in the snow, he raised his head to find water all over his back. The heat had been intense enough to melt the snow in a long line around them, but the cold was starting to creep back in. The Formless was gone—at first he thought that it had been chased off, until he saw the shattered fragments of ice and realized that it had been scorched away. Both he and Mandarin looked up and saw something lodged in a nearby building.

It was a spherical object that Gibson recognized as an escape pod in use on some ships, although this one was severely beaten up. Understandable, given the journey it had presumably taken, but even before then it must’ve been a wreck. Black smoke billowed out of a sizeable wound on its side. The shock at the shuttle’s sudden appeared paralyzed them for precious seconds.

Then, the hatch opened with a loud pop and crashed down.

The figure that jumped out was covered in black soot, making them contrast with the snow. Almost three foot tall, wearing full winter gear, a snow mask, and reflective googles that perfectly mirrored where Gibson and Mandarin were. Gibson glimpsed Mandarin’s stunned expression in the goggles.

A tail whipped out from behind the stranger. It was a Robot Monkey. And there were only six of those in existence.

The newcomer lifted up a metal crossbow and fired at Mandarin. The bolt slammed into Mandarin’s exposed skull and he stumbled, brandishing his claw to protect his good side. The newcomer glided effortlessly over the snow, wall-running across the building, then launched off to slam their full weight into Mandarin.

The two tumbled, slashing and clawing at each other with the full primal ferocity Gibson had only ever seen in wild animals. Regaining his senses, Gibson dug through the snow and recovered his bow and two arrows. He pulled back the string and took aim. The two struggling monkeys clawed at each other. He waited for his opening. When it came, both he and the newcomer weren’t expecting it—Mandarin arched his head just so, claw drawing back to drive into his flesh. Then Gibson’s grip on the string slipped and the arrow joined the crossbow bolt sticking out of his head.

The newcomer swung around to look for the source of the arrow, and for the first time, their attention settled very clearly on Gibson.

Gibson wasn’t sure what reaction he’d expected from one of his friends, but the way they froze wasn’t it. For a suspended moment, they just stared. Although he couldn’t see their expression through the goggles, he saw it in everything else. In their sudden freeze, in the tenseness in their shoulders in arms, the way they completely turned their back on an enemy as if lost in thought.

Speaking of.

Gibson released his last arrow and it flew over the newcomer’s shoulder to lodge into Mandarin.

The newcomer came to their senses, arm drawing far back with a knife to slice. Mandarin dodged. Then, the newcomer brandished their crossbow, pulled a lever, and several bolts shot off at once. An automatic feature—clearly customized. Mandarin’s body jolted and jerked with each strike. Bolts went through him, hard and fast, and at the end of it, he was pinned against the building with more than a dozen holding him in place, body twitching in reflective and pure imitations of pain.

The newcomer wasn’t occupied with that, though. He took two steps forward, stopped. Then he reached up and threw his mask into the snow.

Otto looked back at Gibson with an expression he’d never seen before. Gibson knew that a lot had changed, but it wasn’t until he saw Otto’s scarred face that he realized just how drastic the changes were.

Chapter Text

Otto was scarred.

Gibson scarcely recognized him. There was a vacant, older, harder look in his gaunt features, and one half of his face was so horribly disfigured that he had to look away, then back again to see if it was a trick of the light. A bit of snow blindness or a hallucination or a bit of delirium caused by fever.

No, it wasn’t a trick. The right side of Otto’s face was mangled beyond recognition. There was no fur, only raw, angry looking skin. His missing eye was replaced by an empty, skeletal socket, gaping back at him like a second mouth. His jaw had broken at some point, and the right side of his mouth had been burnt away, exposing a chipped canine tooth. A deep scar ran from the corner of his mouth to where his ear piece should’ve been, though that was replaced by a cybernetic attachment cobbled together with dented metal. Otto’s left side, however, was untouched, and familiar, and if Gibson held his hand over the scarred side, maybe he could believe that this was the Otto he remembered.

Maybe he could’ve. If he didn’t look so old. If he wasn’t so scarred. If he wasn’t so changed.

“Otto,” Gibson said. He staggered back.

What the hell was going on.

He came to his senses and slapped the crossbow out of Otto’s hands. 

“Why the HELL would you choose ‘Bob’ as a callsign?!” Gibson shouted. “You couldn’t have chosen something more professional? There is no describing the hits it’s taken to my dignity to call you Bob! Do you know how much confusion could’ve been prevented if you used your name?!”

Otto stared at him.

“Well, don’t stand there and gawk! I’ve been flailing around in the snow for close to a month! Have you seen Mandarin?! He’s missing a substantial portion of his epidermis! Is this some sort of elaborate practical joke?!”

He didn’t touch on Otto’s scars. Gibson chose to speak to the unscarred half of his face, and still Otto didn’t speak. He looked queasy and faint.

“Stop looking at me like that!” Gibson shouted. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Otto got all focused and hard around the edges like a burnt batch of cookies. He’d never seen anything like it on Otto. He’d seen it on Sprx, and on Nova, and even Antauri on rare occasions. Never Otto. Otto seized Gibson by the arms, and pulled him close until they were nose-to-nose.

“Who are you?” Otto demanded.

“Don’t get coy,” Gibson snapped. “You know who I am!”

Otto pulled off a glove with his teeth and prodded at Gibson’s face, then held his cheek. The move was tender.

“Will you stop that, this is serious! Let me go at once! I do not appreciate this invasion of my personal space. Contrary to popular belief, free hugs are NOT always welcome.”

“Who are you?” Otto demanded a second time. He pulled out a knife and held it up to Gibson’s throat. His hands trembled.

“Don’t you point that thing at me. I’m not in the mood. You are perfectly aware of who I am. My name is not Mister. Not Hal. Just Gibson.”

Otto’s grip on the weapon slipped. It fell blade-down in the snow.

Mandarin laughed.

In the shock and relief of seeing Otto, Gibson had forgotten his presence, though Mandarin had a way of making it known. Still pinned to the wall by the crossbow bolts, they weren’t quite enough to stop him from smiling.

“He’s the real thing, Otto,” Mandarin cackled. “He is as real as you and I.”

Otto’s gaze didn’t stray from Gibson, but his pupil dilated, a small dot orientated in the centre of his black eye. Gibson’s gaze flicked between him and Mandarin, unsure.

Finally, Otto grinned. “GIBSON!”

He’d seen Otto grin before but that one was the biggest he’d ever seen. He grabbed Gibson, crushed him against his chest, lifted him off his feet, and swung him in a circle.

“OTTO, THIS IS—” Gibson yelled. “RELEASE ME AT ONCE!”

Otto swung Gibson, holding him close and tight like a long-lost and much loved friend. Gibson supposed he was.

Finally, Otto settled and sank to his kneees, dragging Gibson with him. He stumbled a little, and didn’t have much of a choice in the matter as Otto had no intention to release. Instead, he sank into the contact, recognized the scraping desperation behind Otto’s hug, and noticed the meaningful shudder of his body.

Mandarin kept laughing. Snide and high, like the way he used to laugh back in the old days.

“Isn’t it wonderful, Otto?” Mandarin cackled. “I finally have something I can kill that you care about.”

Otto pulled back.

“Otto, what are you—?” Gibson started.

Otto reached into his supply pack and pulled out a retractable ice climbing pick.

In full stride, he reached Mandarin and rammed the pick into the warped, distorted body of their former leader.

Mandarin was ripped from the wall and Otto climbed on top of him, striking over and over again, drawing back long, fluidic black stripes that splattered across the snow. Despite the sickening squelch of a sharp instrument piercing flesh, the glacial silence clenched around Gibson like the vice grip of an ancient hand. It squeezed tighter and tighter as he tried to equate the monkey in front of him with the lovable, happy Otto that he knew. He contrasted the two pictures. The young, smart, cheerful mechanic. The vicious, hardened survivor.

His Otto couldn’t hurt, couldn’t bring himself to maim. This Otto went for the kill.

When Mandarin was reduced to a pile of black ooze-encrusted bones, Otto wiped his hands on his pants, which were drenched in a black liquid. Inexplicably, Mandarin was still breathing. Gibson squinted, somewhere between nauseous and fascinated as something inhaled and deflated, and a single eye rotated towards him.

“That’s not normal,” said Gibson. “Otto, that’s not normal.”

Otto grabbed Gibson’s hand and pulled. Then, they were running.

For Gibson, running was a difficult task when his foot was still recovering, and he only got a block before Otto hoisted Gibson over his shoulder and was running for both of them, despite his protests. Otto was moving off of something beyond adrenaline—desperation? Was there a word for it?

Otto didn’t give him time to question. He glided through the city, using the pick as leverage to vault over snow mounds, up vertical walls to low roofs, leaping on the remnants of toppled street lights and dead trees. If Gibson wasn’t so busy being nauseous from the sudden movements, he’d admire his dexterity as he took off into the city, further from Mandarin, deeper into the unknown.

When Gibson woke up, he was warm for the first time in weeks, huddled underneath several thick blankets and awash in the warm glow of artificial light. He never thought he’d see the day where he’d want to sleep in, but it was far too comfortable to get up. Gibson settled deeper, a hermit crab tucking into a freshly acquired shell, and listened to a howling wind buffeting the walls of the shelter.

The last few days were a blur and it had taken an inordinate amount of time to hike back to Otto’s place of residence. They’d done it in relative silence, not out of lack of things to say, but a howling wind had kicked in that made it difficult, if not impossible, to hear each other. They slept little and kept moving, sleeping in small shelters Otto must’ve setup before hand. Throughout it all, there was a silent agreement that they’d talk in depth when they were safe and out of the harsh weather.

During one of their brief rests, Otto had given Gibson a full examination, amused at the mummy wrappings and cobbled together clothing Gibson was using to keep the cold at bay.

“Well, let’s see you do better in these conditions,” said Gibson.

“Here, take this.”

Otto shed the upper layer of his parka and put it over Gibson. It was easily the warmest thing he’d had in weeks.

“I don’t need your pity clothes,” said Gibson. Pride demanded that he at least fight it a little. “Also, this isn’t my colour.”

Otto looked surprised. He laughed. It was raspy, a seldom-used muscle in his throat. It sounded as though he’d had a vocal injury at some point.

When they finally made it to Otto’s residence, Gibson had been so exhausted that when he sank into a hammock, he was out almost at once. He was warm and safe. That was the most he could hope for.

Getting the sense he was being watched, Gibson twisted under the blankets and his heart skipped a beat, then tumbled over a few more. Otto was watching him.

“It’s rude to stare,” said Gibson. He threw off the blankets and cleared his throat. “Good morning, by the way.”

“It’s afternoon,” said Otto.

Otto’s home was cone shaped, with a stove and heater in the centre and a metal chimney sticking out of the top. In true Otto fashion, every inch was occupied by half-finished projects, raw materials, and workbenches. There was a metalworking bench, buffers, a drill press, drills, woodworking tools—modern amenities that contrasted with the pelts on the wall and the furs Otto had laid over him. Some meat was drying by the stove and Otto’s much more sophisticated telegraph was in the corner. Over all, it had a very lived in feel.

It was also only large enough to accommodate one person.

“You should eat something.” Otto handed Gibson a plate of meat stacked high enough to satiate an Otto-sized appetite.

“I don’t need that large a helping,” said Gibson.

Otto offered a teacup.

“Is that tea?” Gibson asked.

“Yup! Otto-certified leaf juice. It’s kinda old, I’ve been saving it.”

“Please don’t call it leaf juice. I suppose some nourishment to meet basic dietary requirements is in order…I don’t suppose you have a proper dining table and chair?”

“I like to eat off the floor.”

“Of course you do.”

Gibson let out an exasperated huff through his nose, but food was food. He ate quietly while Otto sat there in front of him, hand covering his mouth and staring, mesmerized by his every move as if he expected Gibson to slip up and reveal his true nature.

There was no deception to be had, though. Gibson had entertained the possibility that even he wasn’t who he thought he was, that he was a clone or a ghost or a Formless or a very insane recluse who thought he was Mister Hal Gibson. However, he’d run a battery of tests and they’d all come out the same way. Gibson was who he thought he was. Now came the true test: to see if Otto came to the same conclusion.

“How are you feeling?” Otto asked.

“Fine, thank you.”

Otto’s mouth twitched. “Gibson…you’re young. You haven’t aged.”

“Yes, I believe I’ve been…um…’absent’ for a significant period of time. I’ve analyzed the soil and what organic remains I’ve recovered and my estimates suggest it has been approximately twenty-five years, perhaps thirty at most.”

Otto’s eye tensed and was watery. “Twenty-seven. It’s been twenty-seven years.”

Gibson had prepared for the moment, but it didn’t make the crushing blow easier to handle despite tensing his body for the impact. He sipped his tea for a little too long until the heat threatened to burn his tongue. When he lowered the cup, he slipped the mask of cool intelligence back on.

“I see, that is in line with my analysis,” said Gibson.

Otto’s brow furrowed, then a mischievous smile crawled up, like a teenager attempting to deceive a disapproving parent. Then he stopped trying to hide the smile and let it blossom.

“What?”

“You’re the same. You’re exactly the way I remember you.”

“More than I can say for the city.”

Otto reached forward to touch his knee. Gibson jerked out of reach.

“It is very good to see a friendly face, but I do not wish for more hugs at this time,” said Gibson.

Otto paused. “What happened to you?”

“You’re probably in a better position to explain than I am. I am experiencing significant gaps in my memory and there isn’t a distinct moment that I remember ‘disappearing.’”

He let the silence hang while he ate a few more bites, although his appetite was suddenly gone. He gave Otto the chance to expand on it, and when Otto didn’t take it, Gibson set the plate aside.

“You gonna finish that?” Otto asked.

“No,” said Gibson.

Otto started eating off the plate, gaze not straying from him. “Can’t afford to waste food.”

“I see. I will be cognizant of that in the future.” Gibson glanced around. “Where are the others? Are they dead?”

His voice was calm, but he dreaded the answer. Fortunately, he saw from the Otto’s easy expression that it wasn’t the case.

“No, we’re all alive as far as I know,” said Otto. “I haven’t seen Chiro or Antauri in a while, but I winter with Sprx and Nova and visit a couple times a week. Sometimes I stay over when the weather gets bad.”

That was surprising. Sprx and Nova didn’t always get along. It seemed strange to Gibson that Otto wouldn’t live with them to act as a buffer, but there were more important matters to pursue.

“Why do you stay here, though?” he asked.

“I need the metal for my projects.”

Naturally. “How did this happen to the city? The last I remember, it wasn’t like…this.”

“It’s complicated.”

“We have plenty of time.”

“It’s a long story. I don’t want to get into it right now. It was a long, long time ago.”

“Why live here if the city is in such a state? Surviving can’t be easy and if there aren’t any civilians, what is the point? Why not find refuge on another planet or further south?”

“Well, the war—”

“What war?”

Otto slapped his face. “Right, you were gone by that point. Well, there was a war.”

“I surmised that. Who won?”

“It’s a bit complicated, there wasn’t really a clear winner. Everything is…” Otto’s expression was complex and deep and as strange as the city around them. “Everything is fine. We were fighting Valeena. She’s still around, but she’s too weak to be much of a threat anymore. Mandarin still works for her, even though I’ve invited him to dinner and I don’t think she pays him very well. There’s not really a point for anyone to fight anymore, so we just avoid each other.”

“You’ve invited Mandarin to dinner? Are you insane?”

“That’s what Sprx tells me!”

“This really must be a strange future if Sprx is making sense.” Gibson sighed. He unfurled his feet from under the warmth of the blanket and let them hang. “Otto, a lot of things seem to be complicated and if I don’t get the answers—what is it now?”

Otto’s attention had travelled from his face to his foot, frown deepening. He pointed.

“What, that?” Gibson asked. “Just a small accident. Nothing to worry about.”

“That looks bad,” said Otto.

“I treated it. It’s fine.”

“Doesn’t look fine. Lemme look at it.”

“I’m the medic, not you.”

“Who do you think did that stuff after you were gone?”

Otto reached for his foot and Gibson was quick to curl it back under his body. “You may look if you explain the events of this war to me in chronological order.”

Otto turned his head a quarter to the right, eyes squeezing shut as if a sudden, unpleasant memory hit him. Then he regained control and nodded.

“Glad we’re in agreement,” said Gibson. “Start with me. How did I ‘disappear?’”

“We were sure you were dead,” said Otto. “Antauri felt you die, we all did.”

“Otto, I am clearly sitting in front of you, alive and well. What. Happened?”

“Well, Valeena was planning to try to resurrect Skeleton King, but she needed some magical artifacts, his ‘essence,’ or something like that. There was this thing called the Ice Crystal of Vengeance, so we went to try to get it before she could. We got there, and you went to grab the Ice Crystal. Sprx saw it all happen. He said you reached for it, then something happened.”

“What happened?”

“Sprx saw…” Otto stopped. His eyes squeezed shut.

“What did Sprx see?”

“The Ice Crystal stabbed you.”

Gibson blinked. “What?"

“The Ice Crystal stabbed you. It expanded and stabbed you.”

Gibson sat back on the hammock. He thought back to the day he’d first appeared in the glacier, how he’d felt a raw, stabbing pain in his chest, but there’d been no injury.

“That’s not possible,” said Gibson.

“There was blood. There was blood everywhere.”

Gibson tried to process the revelation. Stabbed. Blood everywhere. He could almost see it. Suddenly his head started to throb. In sharp flashes of still images, like a stuttering camera, he saw a flurry of white and a smattering of red, felt the pain dig into his chest, heard a distant scream and an endless cold as something—someone—was holding his heart in a vice grip.

He didn’t want to believe it and yet it had happened. The truth was in the pain in his chest—the constant, endless ache he’d attributed to the emotional nature of his situation, was in fact a real wound. He blacked out for a moment. When he came to, Otto was holding his shoulders looking close to tears, keeping him upright and steady.

Despite the agony, the only thing that kept him going was the incessant need to know. “Please continue.”

Otto hesitated.

“Otto, what happened next?” Gibson asked. “What happened to the Ice Crystal?”

“It disappeared, and so did…so did you. Never did find out what happened to it after what happened. It was just gone.”

“If Valeena was looking for these ingredients to bring back Skeleton King, then I assume that since this Ice Crystal vanished, she wasn’t able to do it.”

Otto shook his head.

“Well, that’s some good news at least.”

“She got really angry,” said Otto. “I think she kinda lost her marbles, kinda like I do then I’m hangry. Except after the Ice Crystal disappeared she was extra hangry.”

“Is it really necessary to describe her mood as ‘hangry? So she froze the city?”

“That’s what we think. It happened over years. One year it was just a little bit cold, and then it got colder and colder. Valeena went crazy, Gibson. A lot of people died. We fought her to a standstill.”

“Why not evacuate the city if the situation became so dire?”

“Something happened to our technology. Valeena used some kind of spell to create an electromagnetic field that shut down most technology. It’s like an electric blackout zone that covers the planet. Even now, it’s hard to get some things to work. By the time we realized what was happening, everything had shut down, and the last feeds we got from the satellites in orbit suggested that the climate change was a planet-wide event. I think more people died trying to walk south than they did in the fight against Valeena.”

“Are there any survivors?”

“There’s a small town with a couple dozen people.”

The implications were obvious. Shuggazoom was a city of millions. Gibson elected not to pursue that line of questioning; the dead couldn’t be helped.

“I saw Mandarin with someone who looked like one of us,” said Gibson.

“His lieutenant? Yeah, he’s not one of the old Hyperforce. He’s been working with Mandarin and Valeena for a while now, we think it’s some kind of ascended Formless or something.”

“Well, he did seem to have a connection to them. By the way, where’s the Super Robot?”

Otto grit his teeth and drummed his fingers on his knees like a nervous child sitting in the principal’s office.

“Don’t tell me you lost it,” said Gibson. “How do you lose a giant robot?”

Otto shrugged. “Like I said, all our tech got creamed. The Super Robot was included.”

He sat there with his arms folded. Then he drew his foot out from under his body and let Otto rest it on his knee and prod. Gibson couldn’t reflexively pull back at the slightest touch. It felt like Otto was prodding him with a branding iron when it had just been his finger.

“Do you mind being a little more careful?” Gibson demanded.

Otto shrugged. He pulled out a medical kit and selected a syringe.

“What are you doing?” Gibson asked. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“I’m gonna poke you.”

“What for?”

“Because I want to see how bad the nerve damage is.”

“There’s no nerve damage.”

“So there shouldn’t be a problem.”

Gibson huffed and slouched down. “I don’t know why you’re worried about a foot when the city’s in a state like this. It’s bad enough that the Hyperforce disbanded.”

Otto prodded Gibson with the tip of the needle.

“Be careful with that,” said Gibson.

“You’ll tell me if you can feel it?”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to tell if I can feel it or not. I’m just not convinced you know what you’re doing!”

Otto shrugged. “So what happened?”

“I fell,” said Gibson. He wasn’t in the mood to go over it.

“Did something bite you?”

“Are you going to check for nerve damage or interrogate me? You apparently can’t do both now so pick one and stick to it.”

Indescribable hurt flickered through Otto like a single flame being jostled by the wind. The Otto he knew would’ve let the fire burn out, let the words sink deep and rip him apart from the inside. The Otto in front of him, however, was a different monkey. Instead of flickering out, the flame wavered but regained its strength, clinging fast to the wick.

Otto readied with the needle, gently feeling Gibson’s foot, checking for broken bones. There was that focus again and with it came gnawing guilt. His words had been too harsh and had been from a place of emotion he wasn’t used to feeling. They hadn’t been logical, but apologizing seemed an impossibility.

“I can’t believe—ouch, please be careful—I can’t believe this is happening,” Gibson said. “I was here. I was just here a few weeks ago and the city was fine. Everything was fine, everyone was fine. You can’t tell me that all those people are dead, that the Hyperforce is gone. Don’t you see the contradiction in that?”

With a forceful jab, he sunk the needle into Gibson’s foot.

“OUCH!” Gibson jerked his foot. “Do you mind?”

Otto gave an apologetic smile that was not without a hint of sadness. He didn’t have to speak for Gibson to catch the meaning.

“Circumstances change over time,” said Gibson. “Nearly three decades is more than enough time for change to occur and I should not expect circumstances to be as they should be. Although you could have at least kept better track of the Super Robot…”

“Gibson.”

“Did you even bother looking for it? How can you lose a giant robot? How is that possible?” He sat up a little straighter. “Who piloted Fist Rocket 4 while I was gone?”

“Gibson?”

“I suppose you looked everywhere for it, too,” said Gibson. “But the tracking on the Super Robot, how could it be—wait. If there was an electromagnetic pulse…that would explain why no complex electrical systems are working…but clearly it doesn’t effect anything, only…most of everything…Certainly anything larger than a small battery…It explains why my implants aren’t working, I suppose anything as complex as my drills is beyond help.”

“Gibson.”

“What?” Gibson demanded.

The needle was inserted all the way into Gibson’s foot, on the outside side near his toe. And he couldn’t feel it.

Both he and Otto stared at the needle. Then at each other. Then at the needle again.

“I don’t feel that,” said Gibson.

Otto removed the needle and poked at a spot further to the tip of his toe.

“No, not that either.”

Down. It produced a slight prickling sensation, like someone was sinking their nails into his flesh, yet not hard enough to pierce. He tried to wiggle his toe, but barely managed to move it when a sharp, burning pain rocketed up his leg and he gasped out in surprise, unsure why he’d never noticed it before.

Otto looked at Gibson with a raised brow.

“It isn’t as though anything can be done about it given current circumstances,” said Gibson. “The foot is a delicate bundle of nerves and small bones, especially on a monkey. Anything corrective couldn’t be done without surgery or a healing pod, and even the healing pods could only handle fresh injuries. I highly doubt that you have the expertise or medical supplies needed for a delicate foot operation.”

Otto grimaced and each word he said with his expression held slow and steady, like he was searching for the right one. But expressions were malleable and changed no matter how hard the person who owned it tried to control them.

Well, no time like the present. Gibson stood up. His foot buckled. Otto reached for him, but he managed to brace himself against the wall and right himself.

“Well, there are probably chores that need to be done,” said Gibson. “Why don’t you give me a quick tour?”

“Gibson,” Otto said.

“A tour will do fine.”

Otto shoved Gibson back into the hammock. “No. You’re going to rest for at least another day. You’ve been surviving on your own out there for a month. It’s amazing you even lived this long.”

“I’m not going to sit here like a useless weight and—”

“Not negotiable. I’ll chain you if I have to!”

Gibson looked at Otto in surprise. He didn’t like what he was seeing. Gone was the cheerful twinge of harmless insanity, gone was the cheerfulness. He looked broken. Someone had ripped the seams and left him wanting and destroyed. Like everything else in Shuggazoom, a whirlwind had roamed through and obliterated everything Gibson had known. And he realized that Otto had been the last thing to go, and if the Otto he knew had transformed into this, then it meant everything was a wasteland that the universe had forgotten.

He placated Otto by resting for the day. It gave him time to regain his composure and it was apparent that he wasn’t the only one having difficulty. In quiet moments, when Otto thought he was asleep, he would take a few minutes to be emotional in a corner. Gibson respected his privacy. Otto was a stranger to him now; there was no sense in encroaching on him more than he already was.

When Gibson persuaded Otto to let him leave the safety of the house, he found that Otto had made his home in an old shipyard, dangling off of a precarious pier overlooking the ice field. He saw an ice fishing hut set up not far from the shore. Otto gave Gibson better winter gear—the fur parka he now donned was much more efficient—and walked him through the local piers and docks. He’d created walkways across vast, empty reaches of empty space, between abandoned ships and piers and shops and everything that was devoid of life. A graveyard of metal and ice.

“I’ve lived here for about a year,” Otto explained. “Moved closer to Sprx and Nova after I salvaged most of the useful stuff from my last place.”

“Why not live closer to the town?”

Otto didn’t answer.

Gibson learned that Otto didn’t live in one spot for more than three years, and sometimes less than a season, depending on the salvage available. His whole life revolved around metalwork. His icepick and crossbow were hand-made, as expected, and most importantly, not reliant on electricity. Nothing Otto had seemed to rely on it; he heated his house with animal blubber harvested from some enormous seal-like creatures that wandered the ice floes. Gibson wondered where all these new animals had come from, but Otto told him they had just appeared as the climate had shifted. Whether they were migrants from elsewhere on Shuggazoom or created by Valeena’s magic, no one seemed to know. Gibson made a note to study the animals later on.

Nothing more powerful than a personal generator to power some workbenches worked, and nothing portable could function. Often, he felt as though he didn’t know Otto. And then fragments of him would burst through at random moments, like when he showed off his improvised tools or sometimes in the way he looked at Gibson. Other times it showed up when he was proud of something, like when he showed Gibson a metal pole outside his house.

“It’s my licking pole,” said Otto.

“I’m sorry, your what?” Gibson asked.

“My licking pole! It’s how I tell how cold it is by how hard it is to get my tongue off when I lick it.”

“Otto, don’t you dare put your tongue on—that’s disgusting!”

Gibson made a mental note to never go near the licking pole again.

The good thing about Shuggazoom’s drastic change was that it made iteasier to forget where he’d come from. It was easier to adapt, to learn, to imagine that he was on a hostile planet. If the changes had been subtle, it might’ve been harder for Gibson to forget that the city had once been peaceful and protected. Otto didn’t seem to be in a rush to talk about Sprx and Nova, but one night, when they were eating a stew from a fish Otto had wrangled, he found the courage to ask about them.

“I assume you haven’t told them that I’m alive,” said Gibson.

Otto stirred his soup absently.

“Why the hesitation?” Gibson asked.

“Things are different now. It’s complicated.”

He dropped it after that. He’d find out soon enough. Besides, there were other things to worry about.

Gibson became accustomed to feeling cold, to huddling by the fire at night, to fishing for food. His body recovered from the insistent hunger and weakness he’d experienced since his arrival, as Otto took up a lot of the slack. Resources were present in the new Shuggazoom City, but it took skill to be able to find them. Otto had a lot of that natural intuition that Gibson had yet to develop.

Slowly, he pieced together details about the world he now lived in. Antauri and Chiro lived across the ice floes in silent meditation, though Otto couldn’t tell him the exact location. Most of the Hyperforce’s allies were dead, missing, or left when things got bad. The mystery behind the Super Robot was a little more difficult to solve, but after Otto referred to the Super Robot’s pieces as opposed to being whole, he determined that they’d been separated a long time ago.

“Where is Foot Crusher 5?” Gibson asked. “Lost with the rest of the Super Robot, I presume?”

“It went swimming, but it didn’t get very far.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“It’s underwater, in the sea. Just offshore from here, actually.”

Gibson frowned. “How did it end up there? No, let me guess: it’s complicated. Just like everything else around here.”

“I told you, it went swimming. I meant to salvage it.”

“Why didn’t you?” Gibson asked.

“Well, the submarine doesn’t always work and I can’t breathe underwater. I don’t want to take it out and then it stops working and I get stranded.”

“Submarine?”

The submarine turned out to be a small, compact craft Otto kept at the end of the dock. It was in perfect working condition. Otto had spent a great deal of time bringing it back to shape, only to not use it. That confused Gibson. Why build a submarine and then not use it for its intended purpose?

“It’s specially rigged for cold waters,” said Otto. “Took forever to build! There’s even a toaster in it! Except we don’t have bread, so, we can’t have toast.”

“But you’ve never used it to fetch Foot Crusher 5?” Gibson asked.

Otto shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I told you, sometimes things just break around here.”

A half-truth. Otto didn’t have to use words for Gibson to pick up on the lie; it was obvious in the subtle shifting of his weight as he shifted it from one foot to the other. It was an observation Gibson filed away for later.

Otto frequently pulled him in for hugs or gave him wistful smiles. In every physical sense, he was keeping Gibson close, but his eyes and words kept him at arm’s length.

Eventually, Gibson started pushing Otto aside. He knew he didn’t deserve silent treatment. He could see the heartache written all over him, sense him watching Gibson when he thought he wasn’t looking. The silence was maddening, and he didn’t know how to deal with it aside from prodding him with questions every time he walked into the room.

One afternoon, Gibson found a tablet Otto had hidden in a box. He tried turning it on, hoping to infer information on it, but frustratingly he couldn’t get it to turn on. He wondered if Future Otto was as prone to breaking and repairing his belongings as much as Past Otto did.

If he could turn it on, maybe there would be information on it that would give him more clues.

He went to find out, and found Otto dismantling a tank. Gibson watched him, and thought back to watching Otto work in his workshop aboard the Super Robot, ignorant to the war that was coming. Had come, and ended. All without Gibson. Something pinched inside Gibson’s chest, so hard that it took him a moment to realize that Otto was waving at him.

“Your tablet is broken,” said Gibson.

Otto stared.

“It won’t turn on,” Gibson elaborated.

“Yeah, nothing like that works,” said Otto.

“I’m surprised you haven’t been more proactive in finding a solution to this problem, considering its significant drawbacks.”

Otto shrugged, looking unconcerned. He went back to cranking his wrench on the tank.

A flare of anger shot in Gibson’s gut. Otto wasn’t telling him something.

“Otto, how am I supposed to infer the facts if you refuse to tell me anything of substance?” Gibson asked.

“You were gone a long, long time, Gibson,” said Otto. “A lot happened.”

“And you’ve had plenty of time to get over it, and every morsel of information I know, I’ve had to piece together from nothing.”

Otto’s shoulders rose and fell. When he looked back at Gibson, he looked old and tired.

“It’s hard to talk about,” said Otto.

“I think I deserve to know.”

“You do, but I’m still registering the fact that you’re here.” Otto went back to cranking the wrench. “Can you head into the shed and grab me a snack?”

“What…? Shouldn’t I go to the kitchen if you need a snack?”

“I left a sandwich at the workbench. Pretty please?”

Gibson rolled his eyes and was halfway to the shed when he remembered Otto saying that they didn’t have bread.

When he recovered it, he realized that what Otto called a ‘sandwich’ were actually three whole fish stacked and frozen together. Of course Otto thought with his stomach rather than his head.

He let out a long sigh and tossed the fish into the nearest bin. Better to get him some healthier food, even if he did have a strong stomach. He could still picture Otto where he had been just months ago from his perspective, scarfing down the unhealthiest of snacks and coming out on top and—

The throes of the changes sent anxiety tingling down his spine. Gibson took a moment to focus on his breathing. He really had to stop thinking about it.

He took two steps when his foot gave out underneath him and he hit, hard, against a closet to his right. The door jostled and Gibson seized the doorknob to keep his balance, breathing hard through his nostrils to control the pain shooting up his leg.

It was nothing compared to the blank eyes looking out from inside the closet.

Gibson yelped and scrambled back, shoulders hitting the workbench. There was something standing in the closet, something humanoid with two arms and two legs and empty eyes that saw nothing, their face blank.

It was Jinmay.

Gibson couldn’t stop the sudden intake of cold air that pierced his lungs. He grabbed her arms.

“Jinmay?” Gibson said,.

Her body was stiff. She was dressed in winter gear, with a thin dusting of frost over her face.

A shadow darkened the doorway and Gibson swung around to find Otto, framed by the whiteness of the sky.

Gibson’s temper flared. It had been simmering under the surface for weeks, threatening to burst at any moment. When he’d been alone, it had been easy to use the anger for warmth and motivation, but now that Otto was here, now that he had a target, it was all too easy to lash out.

“What is this?” Gibson demanded.

Otto bit his lower lip.

“What is this?” Gibson repeated. “Why is Jinmay in a shed? And offline, too!”

Otto’s hands jerked to the right, as if about to say something, then changed his mind. Then he said, “I can explain.”

“Explain? Explain what? Explain why you’re keeping a team mate and friend in a closet like she’s an item?”

“Gibson, I’ve told you, again and again, that all our tech got creamed. All of it.”

“Is she damaged?”

“She’s just offline. It’s like a coma.”

“Why are you keeping her in a closet?”

“It’s—”

“If you say ‘complicated’ one more time…”

From the aversion of Otto’s eyes, to the shuffle of his feet as his knees pressed together in an obvious sign of guilt, it told Gibson all he needed to know. It told him that he wouldn’t be getting the truth out of Otto anytime soon no matter how hard he pressed. Whether there was malicious intent behind it or simply a desire to spare him from the truth of the last twenty-seven years, he couldn’t be sure.

All Gibson knew was that he couldn’t stand by any longer.

He looked at Jinmay. Chiro had loved her. He didn’t know if that was still the case, but certainly there had to be a sentiment. Either way, he shut the door and locked it again. Jinmay was a more complicated problem to solve some other day. There was another, more immediate one he could solve.

Gibson headed out. Otto jogged behind him.

“I’m going to get Foot Crusher 5,” said Gibson. “That tank is part of the Super Robot. I’m not going to let it languish at the bottom of the sea. You can’t possibly stand there and tell me that you haven’t tried.”

“There’s no point. There’s nothing left down there except a wreck.”

“That tank is part of the Super Robot, which somehow or other you’ve managed to lose! You’ve refused to tell me ANYTHING substantial about what happened in my absence except for ‘It’s complicated’ and what I suspect is a heavily condensed version of the truth! I don’t know where Chiro and Antauri are since you’ve barely mentioned them at all, you won’t tell Sprx and Nova that I’m here,you’re keeping Jinmay in a BROOM CLOSET, and I’m just supposed to accept these things because I’m some—ghost from the distant past who doesn’t know anything! Well, regardless of where I’ve been for the last near-three decades, I’m here now! And I absolutely, unequivocally, indisputably, REFUSE to accept any more half-truths from you! Now I am going to take the submarine and go down there to find out just what kind of condition you’ve left Foot Crusher 5 in and hope beyond hope that maybe I’ll get more answers out of that wreck than I’ve gotten from you so far!”

Gibson stormed off. He got just outside the house when Otto tossed aside his tablet and moved to intercept, eyes drawn with fear.

“Mandarin’s a threat,” he said.

“It was an empty threat,” said Gibson. “You said yourself that there’s no point to fighting anymore, so what is there to worry about? There’s barely anything alive out here.”

“Mandarin will kill you.”

“Why should he even care if the war is over?”

“He’ll kill you for pleasure”

“He can try,” said Gibson. “Don’t think I intend to let him. It’s not like I sent him a message telling him I’m going in a submarine to look for a wreck.”

He started to sidestep, but Otto intercepted him. “He won’t give up!”

“Yes, he’s always been a little stubborn, hasn’t he?” He sidestepped in the other direction, and Otto’s arm shot out with something not unlike desperation. “Otto, I’m not going to hide inside for the rest of my existence.”

Otto went stiff and his eye watered like a flooding sink and the tap was stuck and, despite Gibson’s attempts to clog it, the water kept coming. Otto shattered in front of him. He didn’t know sadness could have a scent but it stung his nostrils.

Otto inhaled. “You died once. I won’t do it again.”

Gibson tore his eyes away from Otto, unable to look any longer. Instead, he looked towards the white skyscrapers sticking out like jagged teeth about to devour the sky. Even when looking away, he couldn’t see—the changes surrounded him so absolutely that even when his eyes were closed and he pretended he was somewhere else, inevitability brought him back to the present.

The bite of the wind woke him up.

Otto had a scrap pile next to his hut.

“Your scrap pile is a mess, it needs to be organized,” said Gibson. He started sorting the metal out.

Otto’s touch his shoulder.

“Leave.”

Otto’s prying eyes finally tore away and he retreated into the shelter. In the absence of witnesses, Gibson let himself sink to his knees. Was this the way it had to be now? This landscape, this city? Everyone dead except the last, dispatched remnants of the Hyperforce? He stared at the docked submarine.

It was a moment of impulse. First he was by the scrap pile, and then suddenly he was climbing up the submarine and jumping in.

The controls were familiar. Otto had based it off of the Fist Rockets. The start-up included a touchpad that was dark when he entered. He remembered what Otto said about electricity being intermittent, and the absolute chill in the submarine was proof of that. Even if he did manage to get this thing underwater, he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t die of oxygen deprivation with his ventilator not working.

Gibson jabbed impatiently at the touchpad, glancing frequently towards the house. “Come on, come on…Please just work if only for a short time…”

He saw Otto exit the shelter. The confusion pinching is face was visible from a distance.

“Just…ONCE!” Gibson yelled.

A spark. A violent jolt. If Gibson hadn’t been firmly at the controls, he would’ve been jostled around like loose pebbles inside of a shoe. Around him, the screens lit up with a flicker, and managed to hold for the time being. He was at such an angle that he got a perfect image of the abundant terror that overcame Otto as he sprinted for him just a moment too late.

Everything was white and blinking, and then the familiar rush of water swelled around the submarine, making the hull creak and groan. Then a swathe of deep blue filled Gibson’s vision and he didn’t look back.

Chapter Text

The water was impossibly blue at first, shimmering underneath the white underside of the ice floes covering the sea. But below it was an inky, terrifying darkness that Gibson dove the submarine towards, pushing it further and further from the surface, his frustration and anger and grief as intense as the pressure of the surrounding sea. He felt the haul strain and crackle, and for the first time he wondered if he’d been a little too impulsive with diving underneath the ocean, chasing a literal ghost.

His emotions were coming fast and hard though and the sole thing that propelled him forwards. As the blackness encased him, he switched on floodlights that illuminated the sea and scanned them left to right, searching for debris. There was no shortage of that. There were plenty of old wreckages from boats, aircraft, and unidentifiable garbage littering the area. The sea used to scare him, but not anymore. He’d seen plenty of things in the last few weeks that scared him a lot more.

Separated from Shuggazoom City for the first time, Gibson could turn off his mind and focus solely on the task at hand, sinking deeper and deeper into the black. He stared through the view port at the ice floes far above him, speckled across the surface like scales, before they faded away and disappeared altogether. The submarine was slow and cobbled together from nothing, but only Otto could make it work as well as it did, and Gibson felt fully confident that it would take him to his destination and back. Otto was reliable.

Still, he wasn’t entirely sure what direction he should go in, and opted for a grid search of the area. Otto had said it wasn’t far and Gibson trusted he was accurate. Even he’d been cagey about everything else. Gibson was determined not to think about it though, determined to only think about how to progress forward, instead of looking back into a past that was apparently far behind him. He had to deal with facts now, and facts dictated it was idiotic to leave a piece of the Super Robot languishing underwater. Who knew how long Otto had left it! He certainly didn’t seem to care now.

The submarine was equipped with two pincers which he used to maneuver pieces of debris, looking for clues, and it wasn’t long until he stumbled upon a hull fragment which was unmistakably part of the Super Robot. He only knew because he was so familiar with it, even if it was weather-beaten and covered in grime from being on the seabed.

He followed the trial smoothly along the seabed, the flood lights moving across the debris field, two enormous eyes scanning the area, a massive, strange creature from the deep—and the submarine was the creature. Gibson was the strange one. The trial continued down for a while, and for a long time, he closed his eyes and just breathed in the stale, cold air, and realized just how cold he felt. He saw his breath hanging in the air, his hands trembling against the controls as he became cognizant of the sudden dip in temperature. It felt unnatural.

Finally, the flood lets set upon a familiar, boxy structure half-buried in the seabed, completely still, with algae and overgrowth over the hull. Still, it was unmistakable as Foot Crusher 5, the two mounted cannons pointed skywards as if aiming towards an enemy that had long since won the battle. He pulled the submarine alongside it just to make sure. Fortunately, the hull looked to be intact, if in severe disrepair.

“How long did you leave it down here?” Gibson wondered aloud. He studied the growth. Maybe a little more than a decade, although he didn’t entirely trust a visual analysis. If Valeena had transformed the climate so radically in less than three decades, then there was no telling if she’d been able to affect the sea floor in the same way.

He performed a quick analysis with the submarine’s scanning equipment, which was meagre and clearly salvaged from a much more primitive vessel. However, for his purposes, it did the trick, and he connected with the Foot Crusher’s hatch, connecting to the submarine’s power system.

“Hm, the hull integrity is mostly stable, at least,” Gibson remarked, overlooking the damage report on the screen. He wiped away a spot of frost and felt a shiver rattle down his spine. “I think we can isolate the damage and pump the water out.”

He looked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see Otto give him a damage report from somewhere nearby. After all, he was the expert, but Gibson could make do in his absence. A small twinge appeared in his stomach that he swallowed down and replaced with a laser-focus on his task.

Gibson set the Foot Crusher’s systems to quarantine the damaged area and pump the water out, gathering a few tools for when he bordered. He wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when he came on board; chances are Otto had left it completely abandoned, an infuriating move on his part. It made him wonder what kind of state the other components of the Super Robot were in.

“Who’s been piloting Fist Rocket 4?!” Gibson suddenly realized. “Whoever it was better not have touched the control configurations. I just got them the way I prefer!”

But there was no one to hear his complaints, nothing except the void of the ocean. He milled about, gathering a wrench left improperly on the floor—surely a safety hazard. At least some things about Otto hadn’t changed.

And then something hit the hull.

It was such a gentle jostle it could’ve easily been mistaken for a current, except that the water had been achingly still since he’d dove underneath it. Gibson heard a low drone come from outside, and crushed to the view port to look out.

Nothing.

Just nothingness.

The water was mostly clear, but Gibson knew better than to trust it. He listened close for the sound again. This time, the drone was louder—and distinctly animal-like.

“Well, better move up the timeline,” Gibson said calmly. He was shocked out nonchalant he felt about it. It was probably a curious whale or something, or maybe one of the large walrus-things Otto had pointed out to him. Whatever it was, he needed to investigate the Foot Crusher before it jeopardized hull integrity.

He checked to make sure that the water finished pumping out from the Foot Crusher, then opened the airlock hatch and jumped inside. In the space between the two vessels, he couldn’t see into the Foot Crusher, but he could smell the decay. Not decay of a body, but sea life, salt water, and abandonment.

It took two tries to force the airlock open, and it did so with a tremendous gust as oxygen rushed into the Foot Crusher. He leaned over the opening and heard the drip-drip-drip of water, a small groan as the Foot Crusher pressurized, and he looked inside to see a worn-out interior, dripping salt water and completely dark. He fumbled for a flashlight, which didn’t turn on until he violently slammed it against the hull and a faint light flickered into existence.

Gibson jumped into the Foot Crusher. There was still a thin layer of freezing cold water at the bottom. The jolt of the cold water sent him clinging to the various equipment patchwork into the Foot Crusher’s sides, components which he was sure hadn’t been there before. Everything was covered in slime, making his trek difficult as he climbed his way through the partially lit interior to examine one console. At least this way, he didn’t have to worry about using his bad foot.

Hanging upside down from a pipe on the ceiling, Gibson slapped the consoles twice and it lit up—fuzzy at first, displaying random data and a very long damage report which mentioned some sort of irate sea creature.

He had minimal interest in it beyond checking the logs and most of them were too badly damaged to be of any use. He made a mental note to repair them later when he had a proper computer.

His hands felt numb. Gibson rubbed them together, trying to centre himself amid the ice cold air. It was colder down here than it was on the surface, which he should’ve expected, should’ve prepared better for, if he hadn’t been in such a hurry to depart before Otto could stop him.

It was an impulsive act. Impulsive, stupid, emotional. All the things he tried not to be, he’d become in a momentary lapse of judgment that left him at the bottom of the seabed.

The monitor in front of him flickered and gave out to darkness, reflecting his drawn, stressed face. The reflection stared back. He didn’t recognize himself.

A metallic groan shuddered through the hull. It was low at first, barely perceptible, and he thought for a moment that it was the quiet shaking of his body. Then it became deafening. Gibson held onto the console and went still, listening to the hull quiver so hard that his teeth clattered together. When it halted, Gibson had a sudden sense of overwhelming dread, and he swung over to the airlock door to seal the latch shut.

Darkness came on so suddenly that he thought he lost conscious. His senses were heightened. The frigid air on his tongue, the subtle groan of the hull, the numbness in his extremities—all dead giveaways of his continued being. His breathing quickened.

The only subtle light came from the view port. He scrambled through ankle-deep water to reach it. Sunlight streamed in glowing fingers through the ice above them, creating a dappled pattern on the seabed. Intersecting the light were massive shadows that made him recoil in the shadows.

The creatures swimming just beneath the surface of the water were massive and slow-moving. Gibson’s heart thundered in his chest. His limbs were shaking and he couldn’t tell if it was the cold or the anxiety. 

The anxiety didn’t settle until a low call echoed through the water, through the metal surrounding him. A whale call. One creature turned enough for him to discern its silhouette framed by the light.

The low song hummed around him like a gentle assurance. Gibson watched the whales churn and twist in the water, impossibly graceful. There were a half dozen of them, swimming and calling to one another in the dark expanse of the sea.

An emotion wrenched hard at his heart. Gibson almost doubled over in pain, but the creatures spinning transfixed him far above them, massive mammals rendered weightless by the water. He saw them bump affectionately against one another, a family even in the empty, lifeless world they lived in.

But it didn’t matter to them. It didn’t matter to them that the world was in tatters. It didn’t matter that so many were dead. It didn’t matter to them that Gibson’s world was in ruins. They were animals—social ones—who had each other and a vast habitat filled with all the riches they needed to survive.

Antauri, Chiro, Sprx, Nova, Otto—all alive. Only Jinmay was offline, but at least she wasn’t destroyed.

If none of them had died, why did Gibson feel like they had?

Gibson didn’t get to reflect. Foot Crusher 5 pitched sideways.

The water resting at the bottom sloshed upwards. A full, chilly strangle-hold grabbed his midsection, and Gibson gasped out for air that didn’t come. Instead, icy water cascaded into his lungs, until the cold became internal, until his senses were lost, until he blacked out entirely. Then came desperation. Gibson’s body seized, but he couldn’t breathe, and it took a great deal of focus and effort to quell the extreme panic, making his heart flutter erratically.

Gibson didn’t know how he got his head above water and vomit up gulps of freezing water. The danger wasn’t over, though. He felt like he was in a bottle being shaken, and the water sloshed dangerously from side to side as something shoved against the hull. Foot Crusher 5 groaned as the hull scraped against the bedrock.

He had to grab something, had to get out of the water. Gibson tried to grab at the various instruments to heave himself up, but his fingers weren’t cooperating, had no strength to them, and he lost grip the moment another wave rammed his helpless body against the hall. He felt the full-body bruise form on impact.

He was pinned close to the viewport. Foot Crusher 5 slid across the seabed, kicking up sediment. For a moment, he saw nothing. Then, it all opened up and he was peering over a drop-off.

Below him, the sea floor gave away to the depths. Gibson scrabbled up, trying to escape what seemed like an inevitable drop to the bottom of the world. He could scarcely breathe. It seemed like soon he wouldn’t be able to breathe at all. The maw of the ocean opened up to swallow him whole.

Gibson squeezed his eyes shut, prepared to face what seemed like fate. Or rather, an extraordinary series of events brought about by his own impulsiveness and stupidity and stubbornness. It was really his own fault that he was down here to begin with.

Then, he cried out as something long and spiked slice through the hull above him.

It was an icicle of a sorts: a huge one, a jagged tooth made out of translucent ice and a predation instinct. Gibson grabbed onto a pipe onto the wall and held on. The mouth of the ocean beneath him peeled back as something dragged it along the seabed. He became a passenger. He was helpless as the creature pulled him back up through the water, towards the surface.

Ice shattered around him in a deafening cacophony as they broke the ice floes. The massive tooth retracted from the hull.

The Foot Crusher hurtled through the air. The white earth beneath him spun. Gibson squeezed his eyes shut, holding tight, prepared for a hard landing.

In truth, he couldn’t be prepared for it. He was distantly aware of hitting the ground, but he lost his grip on the pipe and his head rammed against metal, knocking him senseless.

He saw nothing for a while. Then, blinding light as the massive teeth sank into the hull and peeled it back.

Gibson came to himself and stumbled towards the light, tripped over something, and rolled out into a snowbank. It was bitingly cold. He felt like he was being stabbed all over his body. The fur parka Otto had given him was soaked through. Stupid. Another tick against him.

A foot appeared beside him. For a fleeting moment, he hoped it was Otto. Then he looked up and it was Mandarin’s lieutenant.

“You should’ve stayed dead,” he said.

They were on the bank of the sea, and from the broken ice floes, a massive formless covered in ice crystals dragged itself from the depths, the same creature that had pulled him up from the sea floor. The ground trembled as it moved behind its master, baring its massive teeth at him.

Otto emerged from behind, looking swallow and shaken.

“Gibson!” he cried out. He hurried to help him up. “Gibson, are you okay?”

“We’re even now,” said the Lieutenant.

“Thank you,” said Otto.

Gibson couldn’t keep his voice steady—it wavered and constricted with the deep cold penetrating his entire body. He looked from Otto to the Lieutenant and back again, searching for an explanation and finding none.

“Don’t thank me,” said the Lieutenant, ignoring Gibson. “You’re pathetic enough as it is.”

Otto pulled Gibson’s drenched parka off his body and tossed it into the snowbank. The exposure to the raw air made Gibson senseless from the cold. It took concentration to keep himself from fading away entirely, to keep himself grounded in his body.

“Well, I’m thanking you anyway,” said Otto.

“The deal was I retrieve him from the water,” said the Lieutenant. “I made no promises about what would happen to him afterwards.”

Gibson saw the tension through Otto’s whole body, prepared for a fight. “Please don’t do this.”

“Valeena wants him alive.”

“What for?”

“Not my business. Just hand him over and you can go.”

“I can’t.”

The Lieutenant put his hands on his hips, like he was scolding a child. “Hand him over.”

Otto dropped Gibson and stood, pulling out his ice pick. His expression was dangerous. “Make me.”

Gibson watched the standoff. His whole body was shaking. He wouldn’t be going with anyone if an extended fight took place, if Otto defended him while he was freezing his tail off in a snowbank.

Otto had his hand crossbow in his belt, right at eye level to him. Gibson calculated his next shot. His hands were trembling. But he had just enough strength and conniving to pull it off.

He seized the crossbow and shot a bolt right between the Lieutenant’s eyes.

For the second time since he’d known him, Mandarin’s lieutenant hit the ground, evidently dead or seriously injured. The formless let out a terrible roar and charged.

They both went in opposite directions. Unable to scramble up in time, Gibson rolled, while Otto dove the other way and hacked at the formless with his ice pick. The cold was penetrating. His limbs wouldn’t cooperate. Snow dusted over his clothing. Even his hands no longer shook. He felt as though he was being stabbed by every flake that landed on his body, all while Otto flailed from somewhere nearby.

Gibson swung his attention around, frantically looking for any fleck of green in the white landscape. He saw the lieutenant’s body. Then the arching, angular back of the formless rising over him like a ragged mountain. Otto was on the ground, ice pick between him and the gnashing teeth.

Gibson’s mind blanked. First with fear. Then with anger. Finally, fierce protectiveness injected straight into his veins and he felt a powerful adrenal surge, more intense than anything he’d felt before.

Shuggazoom was lost. Everything he’d known was gone.

But Otto was here, and he would not add him to the list.

Suddenly, the cold was gone.

He thought his heart might’ve stopped, that he’d dropped dead from fear, but he couldn’t see his own body on the ground. Gibson’s legs kicked out from underneath him and he was standing, a sudden surge of icy wind blasting past him, though he felt nothing. The constant ache in his foot forgotten, Gibson bolted forwards, grabbed the discarded machete, and charged forward.

He hacked into the formless’s head, though it was like hacking right into solid ice. It was enough to cause it to startle back from Otto, for him to crawl out from underneath the creature and get a better angle of attack with the ice pick. It was  a far cry from the reliability of their built-in weapons. The hacking was desperate, filled with a survival-fuelled mania.

The formless leapt back from them, diving straight into the snow-packed earth. Otto and Gibson went back-to-back as it moved underneath the surface of the snow, its icicle spikes moving underneath the surface and back to the body of its master.

It sprang out from the snow, arched his head back, and let out a terrible, haunting roar that caused Gibson’s head to rattle.

“Uh oh,” said Otto.

“‘Uh oh?’” Gibson repeated.

“More coming. Run!”

The ground was already moving beneath them.

Adrenaline was a powerful drug, but not powerful enough to numb the agony rocketing up his left side. Otto was quick. His reactions were faster than they’d been—well, before—and he scooped Gibson into his arms and started sprinting. There was no time for Gibson to protest, no room for him to argue, not when he was the liability.

He rearmed the crossbow and fired over Otto’s shoulder, though the bolts did little more than peck at the hard caprices of the monsters diving in and out of the snowbanks. The ground looked like it was moving. The world had been so still since he’d come into it. It was startling to see such violence. Gibson didn’t know where to look. He’d become so accustomed to the stillness that seeing the landscape break apart made his heart cinch.

Gibson saw the telltale signs of Otto hatching a plan in his eye, attention sifting back and forth from Gibson to the formless to Gibson again. If he ran faster, he might make it to the hut in time, but what then? There wasn’t anywhere to go after that. So Otto turned and ran towards the glistening skyscrapers.

The area around Otto’s home was a mess of scrap metal and half-finished projects. Otto navigated through it with ease, outmaneuvering the snapping jaws that came at them from every angle. Towards the edge of the scrapyard, Otto unceremoniously threw Gibson ahead of him, and skidded into cover behind a pile of metal, digging elbow-deep into it.

“Do you MIND?!” Gibson yelled. “What are you doing?!”

“Cover your ears,” said Otto.

He pulled out a detonator. It was like something out of a cartoon, and Gibson immediately saw where things were going.

Gibson didn’t lift his head to watch the explosion, but he saw a flash of Otto’s excited grin as he plunged down the lever.

White light seared through his eyelids. Gibson was thrown back. He had no awareness of where his body was in relation to his environment. It hadn’t been one explosion, but multiple bangs that he felt through the earth.

When he looked up, fragments of debris were still raining down atop of them, and Otto was holding him down into the snow. Gibson wiggled out from underneath him and peaked out.

There was a crater where Otto’s hut had been. Several more pockmarked the area, marking where the dynamite had blown up. The pieces of the formless scattered in large blocks of ice around it.

Otto had a satisfied grin on his face when he looked back.

“Are you crazy?” Gibson asked. “Did you just blow up Jinmay?”

“Of course not! I didn’t wire the shed.”

“Have you left dynamite around your home this whole time?!”

“Just for an emergency.”

“It poses a safety hazard.”

More movement. Gibson looked back in the other direction. All of the formless were in pieces around them, but one drew up from the snow, back arched and jaws gaping and vicious.

Gibson pulled Otto out of the way just in time as the formless charged at them, smashing through the pile of debris they hid behind.

It felt like a mad scramble to the finish line, and the formless was going to barrel over any competitor it found in its way. Even if it meant eating them. Otto grabbed Gibson like a sack of potatoes and sprinted to the nearby warehouses, expertly flying over and under obstacles in his path. Gibson could do nothing except be a passenger, forced to watch the formless snap madly at them in its rabid pursuit.

Otto dodged through a few tight spaces that the formless thrashed madly against, claws raking against metal. Ahead of them, the path narrowed into a tight squeeze. Wooden boards were across it. Otto hacked at them with an ice pick, dislodging one enough to shove Gibson through.

Gibson dropped a story. He hit something hard on his way down, but adrenaline was pumping too fast for him to take in what it was. The next moment, Otto, too was shoving his way through the boards. He cried out. Disappeared a moment. Then he was back out, a long line of red trailing out from the fresh wound overtop his deep scars.

Otto fell on top of him. The formless slammed against the wooden boards, clawing madly at them. Gibson thought it might hold a minute. Then they broke and landed near to them, claws outstretched and ready to slash.

Gibson thought maybe they were going to die right then.

But Sprx’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

Maybe it was fate. Some cosmic force of nature beyond Gibson’s understanding, beyond scientific reason, beyond all possibility, pulling the proverbial strings somewhere in the ether. The moment he thought that he and Otto were going to be eaten, suddenly ended with a red blur emerging from the white landscape like blood spouting from a severed artery.

Sprx descended from the rooftops spear-first. He drove it straight between the creature’s shoulder blades, and it twisted violently, trying to either buck him off or bite him.

Sprx was thrown off, and he somersaulted in the snow. The spear was lodged in the formless.

“Otto, stop trying to tame these things!” he yelled over his shoulder.

“It wasn’t me!” Otto denied.

The formless was recovering from the strike and advancing fast.

The three of them all tumbled through a nearby window, into the corpse of the nearest warehouse. The window was too narrow for the creature to force its way through, but that didn’t stop it from trying.

Sprx pulled off his hood, expression focused. “They aren’t pets, Otto. They will eat you if you give them the chance.”

“It wasn’t me!” Otto denied a second time. His eyes travelled to Gibson. “It was…uh…”

Sprx’s gaze settled on Gibson.

The freeze response. An involuntary response to a perceived threat. Gibson hadn’t seen Sprx freeze before, but like Otto, the changes in Sprx were so profound that he may as well have been a different monkey. Stress had aged him. Although he wasn’t that old, his fur was more peppered with grey than Otto’s. He didn’t see any visible scars on his face, but he saw the ones in his soul just by looking into his eyes.

Sprx was frozen as the formless clawed desperately, trying to get inside, and Otto struggled to hold the door closed. Gibson moved to help him. Sprx drew out a serrated knife.

“What?” Sprx said.

“Sprx, I can explain—” said Otto.

 The formless gave an especially hard push. Again, Gibson moved to help him. Sprx moved into his path, knife raised. Unlike Otto when Gibson had first encountered him, Sprx looked like he meant to use it.

“What the hell are you?” Sprx demanded.

“Mind your language.”

“Come any closer and I’ll kill you!”

“The door.”

“What?”

“The door, you fool!”

Sprx scrambled just in time to throw his shoulders against the door, holding it closed against the beast.

“Otto, what’s going on?” Sprx demanded. “What is that thing and why does it look like Gibson?”

“I…I found him, out in the wastes,” Otto hissed.

“When?”

“A week ago.”

“Are you frakking serious right now? And you didn’t come tell me or Nova?”

“I didn’t know what to do!”

“Why does it look like Gibson?”

“I’m standing right here,” said Gibson.

The formless pushed against the door. Otto and Sprx threw their full weight against it, and Gibson stepped forward to help, only to meet the end of Sprx’s knife.

“Don’t you come any closer!” Sprx yelled. His voice frayed. “Otto, why does it look like Gibson?”

“I think it is Gibson,” said Otto.

“Be for frakking real!”

“I am Gibson,” said Gibson.

“Otto, did you make a Gibson robot or something? Have you finally gone full crazed loner? I thought you learned your lesson after the incident with the toaster!”

“No!” Otto denied.

“What did you do?”

“It wasn’t me!”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know who or what. I just found him, that’s all, I swear!”

“Don’t frakking lie, Otto!”

“I’m not lying!”

“Will you two stop!” Gibson shouted. “We have more important things to worry about than who brought who back and what caused it! In case you haven’t noticed, we are about to be eaten, so I suggest we get out of here before I lose my patience and eat YOU TWO instead!” Gibson slapped the knife out of Sprx’s hand. “And stop pointing that thing at me!”

The door buckled. Gibson scooped the knife off of the ground and hacked it at the icy claws forcing their way through the crack in the door, knocking off a few good talons enough to get it closed again.

“This isn’t possible,” Sprx said. “This isn’t possible!”

“We can discuss possibilities later,” said Gibson.

He scanned the room for an exit. The lobby was deserted, long overrun with the elements, and the only conceivable way out was a shattered skylight letting dim light stream down in a waterfall of white light.

Otto followed his gaze and pulled out a grappling hook. It caught the edge of the skylight, and the thick wire was easily enough to hold all three of them as both Gibson and Sprx grabbed around him. Gibson’s hand momentarily came into contact with Sprx’s arm, and he looked at him with such an expression of disbelief that he could scarcely tell that it was directed at him. There was a hard, furious anger in his eyes, uncharacteristic of him. Another difference to add to the list. It was an anger long-forged by the hammer of war.

The brief glimpse felt like it lasted forever. Then the ground vanished beneath them and they rocketed skywards to the light just as the formless forced its way through the window.

In a blink, they were on the rooftop, and Otto quickly rummaged around in his coat to retrieve a stick of dynamite. Before Gibson had time to reprimand him, he lit the fuse and tossed it down.

“That could destabilize the structure,” Gibson said factually.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine!” Otto grinned, leaning over the ledge to watch the explosion.

Looking back on it later, Gibson would wonder just how Otto survived the blast. The next thing he knew, the ground tilted beneath him, rocking back and forth like a sickening seesaw.

The rooftop bowed inwards, like a giant hand had cracked a karate job over it and then he was falling.

Gibson’s senses went blank. Awareness flooded back in a powerful surge that would’ve knocked him down had he not already been face-first in the ground. His nose was bleeding. Red was smeared across the snow.

For a long while, he lay prone, staring at the stray snowflakes drifting calmly from the sky. His senses slowly realigned himself. He shook terribly when he hoisted his body upright, resting uncomfortably in the rooftop, now flattened against the ground as it had pancaked the ground floor. Even if the formless had survived the dynamite blast, the collapse probably would’ve finished it off.

He got up. His body was trembling, but not from the cold. He didn’t feel it anymore.

The weight hit him from behind, and Gibson momentarily thought that the formless had gotten him from behind, and the adrenaline hadn’t caught up to his sudden, violent death. Then his attacker rolled him over and it was Sprx.

They were in a desperate struggle. Sprx had a knife raised. Gibson grabbed him by the wrist and they vied for dominance.

“Get off me!” Gibson yelled.

“Let me kill you first!” Sprx screamed back.

“I’m not an unknown entity that resembles Gibson! I AM Gibson!”

“I’m gonna knock your teeth out!”

They rolled around, struggling, clawing, biting each other in a primal frenzy Gibson hadn’t experienced with Sprx since the day they first met—at least, the first time he could remember. Sprx had been angry back then. Lonely, abandoned, scared. He saw so much of that in the stranger in front of him, dredged to the forefront and moulded into a rotting pile of wasp-like fury.

Gibson hadn’t recovered from the weeks he’d spent living alone in the city. Sprx was strong. As he tried to hold him back, he felt the strength in his arms. Sprx pushed against him, the tip of the knife just an inch from his head.

“Sprx, no!”

Otto grabbed Sprx from behind and pulled him into a bear hug, scrambling to pull his knife-hand away from Gibson’s face. He gave Sprx a good kick to the stomach, scrambling back in the snow.

“He’s real!” Otto shouted at Sprx. “He’s real!”

“You’ve lost your mind!” Sprx yelled back at him. “I’ll prove it to you—”

“The blood! Look at the blood!”

Gibson looked around, trying to find the source of the blood, to find who was bleeding. But it was him. He was the one with blood coming out of his nose. He tasted copper on his tongue.

Sprx’s eyes searched, and scanned up and down. His pupils were dilated into intense pinpricks to take in all the light that remained in the world. First, they were fixated on Gibson’s eyes. Then his body. They wobbled around as if uncertain what to focus on.

Then he saw the blood.

For the second time, Gibson saw the freeze response. Sprx blinked slowly. His pinprick pupils grew in size.

Otto released Sprx. He still held the knife. Slowly, it lowered.

“This is real,” said Otto. He seized Gibson by the shoulders. “Formless don’t bleed, Sprx. They don’t bleed.”

Sprx staggered back a step, disbelieving. “It’s…It’s a trick! Valeena’s made some kind of new formless—”

“Why? Why would she do that? She hasn’t come after us in over ten years. Why would she try to infiltrate us? What secrets would she want to learn? What more can she take from us that she doesn’t already have?”

Sprx looked like he was being ripped apart. He kept his distance from Gibson. The fear on him was palpable. He looked like an animal used to scurrying about, running from predators, being on the defensive and on the lookout, always, forever, never resting, nursing a festering wound that was forever raw and bloody and infected. Absently, he twirled the serrated knife in his hand, looking at Gibson as he would a stranger.

Beyond the ruins, the sun was setting. Twilight was ending.