Chapter Text
- 1 -
The apartment door slammed shut with a heavy thud, cutting off the rest of the world.
Hal shrugged out of his well-worn bomber jacket and tossed it carelessly over the armrest of the couch. He didn't bother turning on the lights, letting the evening twilight of Coast City slant through the blinds, slicing the dusty living room into alternating ribs of light and shadow. The air carried that familiar, distinctly terrestrial scent—a faint trace of salty sea breeze mingled with the lingering exhaust fumes of the city.
He hadn't smelled it in three weeks.
He threw himself hard onto the cushions, letting out an exhausted sigh that bordered on pure bliss. The couch springs creaked in loud protest, but he couldn't have cared less. All he wanted was to sink in—to bury himself in this soft, entirely personal, utterly safe pocket of space, and stay there until the end of time.
Calling the mission a "disaster" would have been an understatement. He’d spent the better part of it playing diplomat to an alien species that resembled moldy cheese, whose primary modes of communication seemed to be shrill shrieking and projectile slime. In the end, he had managed to avert a pointless interstellar conflict. And his reward? A stench of slime he couldn't scrub off, and a... gift.
Hal’s thoughts drifted for a second before he remembered the thing he’d shoved into his jacket’s inner pocket. With supreme reluctance, he pushed himself up, snatched the jacket off the armrest, and rummaged through the lining until his fingers closed around the supposed "token of gratitude."
It was an egg-shaped gadget roughly the size of his palm, smooth and strangely warm to the touch. A small dial sat at the top right corner, and its casing was deep navy, dotted with a few lopsided silver stars. In the center lay a small, pitch-black screen. The whole thing looked like an alien knockoff of a nineties Tamagotchi.
The planet’s elder—an alien whose head looked remarkably like a polished bowling ball—had pressed it into his hands with grave solemnity right before he left.
His honest thought at the time had been that it was too light to even make a decent paperweight.
Now, under the dim light of his apartment, the "alien Tamagotchi" looked even more absurd. He gave it a gentle shake; nothing rattled inside. He was about to toss it into the trash can, but as his thumb brushed against the surface, the screen flickered to life, displaying a spiral of alien script.
"Fine. Just one look," he muttered, mostly out of sheer boredom.
The green power ring flared in response, washing the egg-shaped device in an emerald glow. The alien characters began to shift and reconfigure, finally translating into words Hal could understand, projecting outward into the dim air.
At the very top, a line of stiff, awkwardly translated text blinked into view:
"Inter-Individual Emotional Bond Nurturing Apparatus."
"...Say what?" Hal turned the clunky mouthful over in his mouth. "Do these aliens ever hire someone who writes in plain English?"
User Manual:
- Step 1: Designation. Input the target individual's identification handle using the character selector located below the screen. (Note: This apparatus has auto-adapted to the dominant linguistic system of the local space sector.)
- Step 2: Incubation. Once designated, hold the apparatus, visualize the target individual with clarity, and depress the activation button on the lateral dial to initiate the Incubation Protocol.
- Step 3: Nurturing. Within the 24 standard Earth hours following successful hatching, provide diligent care to the hatched lifeform and satisfy all of its requirements.
- Step 4: Bonding. Upon successful maturation, the Emotional Bond will automatically initiate with the target individual, lasting for a duration of 24 standard Earth hours.
Capacity & Restrictions: This apparatus contains eight hatchable lifeforms and operates as a non-reusable consumable. (Note: The originating civilization utilizes a base-8 octal numeral system; 8 represents an integer of completion.)
At the very bottom of the projection was another line of fine print marked with an asterisk, but Hal’s eyes only skimmed past it. His attention had already checked out—his patience was tapped, and let’s be honest, who actually reads the terms of service all the way through?
He killed the ring’s translation feed. Rolling the cold little alien egg between his fingers, he gingerly pressed one of the three tiny buttons beneath the screen. Sure enough, an alphabet selector built out of chunky pixels popped up. As he toggled the dial, those bizarre extraterrestrial glyphs smoothly shifted and rearranged themselves right before his eyes, eventually settling into something he knew like the back of his hand—the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet.
"Well, I’ll be damned..." The thing was a hell of a lot smarter than he’d thought. And weirder.
He hauled himself up, walked over to the fridge, cracked open an ice-cold beer, and chugged down half the can. The cold shock cleared some of the lingering fog from his brain.
An emotional-manipulation gadget that let him manually type in names and actually processed English... It smelled suspicious as hell. What in the world was an "emotional bond" supposed to be anyway?
Skepticism and curiosity staged a vicious dogfight behind his eyes. In the end, that reckless impulse commonly branded as fearlessness scored a decisive victory—he’d worked himself to the bone for nearly a month; what was the harm in getting a little entertainment out of his reward?
First things first, though: he needed to see if the manual was full of hot air. That meant finding a test subject who was completely safe, totally harmless, and wouldn't blow up in his face.
The image of a sunny, golden-haired boy with an easy grin flashed into his mind instantly—Barry Allen. Perfect mark.
A smirk crept onto Hal’s face, one so wicked he almost felt guilty about it. He headed back to the coffee table, picked up the egg, dropped back onto the couch, and set to work. Hands that could pull Mach 3 in an experimental jet fumbled awkwardly with the minuscule buttons. On the tiny screen, the pixelated cursor crept through the alphabet at an agonizing pace.
B... A... R... R... Y...
After "Barry," he painstakingly dialed through "Allen." The name blinked neatly across the small monitor: BARRY ALLEN.
Step one: check.
Hal took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and conjured a crystal-clear mental image of Barry stuffed into the Flash suit, cheeks full of powdered donuts and grinning like a goofball.
Then, he pressed the activation button on the side dial.
The screen lit up with a soft chime, displaying a massive pixelated egg that rocked gently from side to side.
The incubation had begun.
- 2 -
On the screen of the egg-shaped device, the giant pixelated egg began rocking rhythmically from side to side, accompanied by a soft, hypnotic electronic chime.
"Incubation in progress..." Hal muttered to himself, feeling a bit like an idiot standing vigil over some cosmic miracle. He turned the gadget over and over in his hands, hunting for more controls, only to confirm that aside from the dial's trigger on the side, there were really just those three unassuming buttons under the screen.
The interface was so bare-bones it was almost insulting, making it hard not to suspect whether this cheap plastic toy could actually deliver on the grand claims in the manual. Hal set it down on the coffee table and decided to hit the shower first, eager to scrub off three weeks of grime, cosmic exhaustion, and alien slime. But he’d barely stripped off his shirt when an urgent, piercing string of beeps erupted from the living room.
Beep-beep-beep!
He rushed out of the bathroom. The egg was rocking violently now, fine pixelated fracture lines spiderwebbing across its surface.
"Are you kidding me? Already?"
He scrambled to pick it up. The second his fingers closed around the casing, the screen flashed with blinding brilliance. A triumphant, 8-bit fanfare blared through the tiny speaker as the eggshell shattered with a crisp crack. Right in the center of the display, a tiny pixelated creature bounded into existence.
It looked... well, like a little red blob of jelly sporting a lightning bolt emblem. It couldn't sit still for a single millisecond, ricocheting off the edges of the tiny screen like an ADHD-addled pixel cluster, leaving a faint trail of red afterimages in its wake.
A second later, an icon flashed prominently above its head: an empty food bowl.
"Hungry?" Hal tapped the leftmost button on a hunch. A menu popped up showing just one lone item: a chunky pixel hamburger. He pressed the middle button to confirm.
The burger dropped into the frame out of nowhere. The little red blob shot toward it at a speed the naked eye could barely track, opened its "mouth"—if you could even call that slit a mouth—and inhaled the thing in a single gulp. Then it bounced happily in place, and the empty bowl vanished.
"...Well, that was easy," Hal sighed, figuring he'd worked himself up over nothing. How hard could it be? Feed it a little, entertain it a little—basic babysitting.
He slipped the digital pet into his sweatpants pocket, took his sweet time in the shower, and even felt leisurely enough to slap together a sandwich. But just as he took his first bite, his pocket went off again.
Beep-beep-beep!
He pulled it out. The bowl icon was back.
Hal raised an eyebrow and hit the feed button. The red blob scarfed down another burger in one bite.
He went back to his sandwich. The moment he swallowed—beep-beep-beep!
Bowl.
Feed.
Beep-beep-beep.
Still the bowl.
Five minutes later, Hal gave up on his sandwich entirely. He sat on the couch with a deadpan stare, his thumb hitting the feed button in mechanical rhythm, watching the little red blur devour burger after pixelated burger with monstrous velocity. In the corner of the screen, a neat little counter had popped up, already ticking up to: x32.
"Hell," Hal's mouth twitched violently. "Did I just hatch a virtual pet, or a digital black hole?"
He finally understood why the manual called it a "Nurturing Apparatus." What had popped out of that shell was nothing less than the digital avatar of Barry Allen—a walking energy sink possessing limitless stamina and a genuinely bottomless stomach.
For Hal, it was an absolute living nightmare.
Here he was, a proud former ace test pilot, a core member of the Justice League, a celebrated superhero of Sector 2814—and he was sitting on his couch like a total lunatic, furiously mashing plastic buttons on an alien egg.
When the little red blob finally scarfed down its fifty-seventh burger, it left behind a chunky, pixelated pile of... unnameable digital filth. Almost instantly, an animated fly buzzed onto the screen, and the beeping took on an agonizingly shrill, indignant pitch.
Hal stared at the pixelated dump, experiencing a profound wave of mental whiplash. With a trembling thumb, he hit the right-hand "Clean" button. An 8-bit broom swept into the frame and whisked the mess off-screen.
He chucked the Inter-Individual Emotional Bond Nurturing Apparatus onto the opposite end of the couch, thoroughly drained in body and soul.
And so far, a grand total of three hours had passed.
Over the next twenty-one hours, Hal gained a crystal-clear, firsthand understanding of the word hell.
That damn "Barry-egg" was a black hole for his life force. The moment he tried to lie down and catch some sleep, a shrill burst of beeping would drag him straight back from the precipice of slumber—hungry. He’d get up to warm a mug of coffee, and in the three seconds his back was turned, the creature had managed to dirty its enclosure again, demanding a "Clean."
Worst of all were the Barry-egg's social demands. Even in the dead of night, the screen insistently flashed a prompt every twenty minutes: [EMOTIONAL INTERACTION REQUIRED]. Hal was forced to play games with it until its happiness bar filled to the brim. The game itself was painfully bare-bones: an endless runner where a pixelated figure sprinted forward while Hal frantically mashed buttons to give it "speed boosts" and dodge obstacles.
"What am I even doing with my life..." Hal muttered into the darkness at 3:00 AM, his bleary, bloodshot eyes fixed on the gadget as he played the mini-game. It was a question aimed directly at his soul. "I am a Green Lantern. I guard Space Sector 2814. And I am sitting in my Coast City apartment playing an alien bootleg of Temple Run for an egg."
This was, without contest, the absolute nadir of his superhero career.
Finally, by the evening of the second day, sporting two bruised-looking dark circles under his eyes, Hal fed the creature its 274th pixel burger. Only then did the device that had tortured him for twenty-four uninterrupted hours fall completely silent.
On the screen, the red blob stopped bouncing. It spun in place, glowing brighter and brighter until it finally "matured" into a... well, a somewhat more complex cluster of red pixels, now crowned with a tiny golden lightning bolt. A jaunty 8-bit victory jingle chimed through the speaker, followed by a blinking prompt:
[NURTURING COMPLETE. EMOTIONAL BOND INITIATED.]
Then, the screen cut to black. The device went completely inert, as though it had drained its battery to the absolute dregs.
"...It's over." Hal let the egg drop limp onto the sofa cushions, utterly spent. He swore to high heaven he would never touch the damn thing again. The price of admission had been far too steep.
He dragged his leaden limbs into the kitchen and downed a full mug of black coffee in one go. Now came the moment of truth: what had all that torture actually produced? What kind of effect was this twenty-four-hour "emotional bond" supposed to have?
He waited ten minutes.
Twenty minutes.
A full hour.
Nothing happened. The apartment remained tomb-silent, with no sound except the thrum of his own pulse.
"Figures. Got played." Hal dragged a hand through his messy hair in annoyance.
He felt a bizarre mix of disappointment and relief. It seemed twenty-four hours of round-the-clock babysitting had amounted to absolutely nothing.
Which was fine, honestly. At least he wouldn't have to deal with a weirdly acting Barry Allen. Shrugging off the whole fiasco, he turned toward the bedroom to finally get some sleep.
Right at that exact second, a sonic boom violent enough to rattle every window pane in the building detonated in the middle of his living room, carrying a gale of rushing air.
Hal spun around in shock.
There stood Barry Allen, dressed in civilian clothes, planted squarely on the living room rug.
Barry was panting heavily, his expression a chaotic blend of survival-grade euphoria and sheer disbelief. He stared at Hal, his blue eyes glittering with what looked suspiciously like unshed tears.
"Hal..." Barry’s voice trembled with raw, electric intensity.
"Bar? What the hell? It’s the middle of the night—"
"I couldn't stop it!" Barry surged forward two paces, his gaze so scorching hot Hal felt like he was about to melt on the spot. "Just now—literally just now—I was running analysis on samples in the crime lab, and out of nowhere... my brain got struck by lightning!"
Hal: "...What?"
"The lightning of love! I couldn't stop myself from thinking about you!" Barry pressed both hands theatrically over his chest, his eyes wide. "Suddenly, clearer than anything I've ever felt in my life, I realized something—I love you, Hal! I'm completely, hopelessly in love with you!"
Hal: "..."
He stared at his best friend, who was rambling with incoherent passion, and suddenly remembered the harrowing twenty-four hours he'd just survived: the relentless feeding, the shovel duty, the endless runner mini-game.
So that was it. All that agonizing "nurturing" had been building toward this grandiose, syrupy, toe-curling confession.
In a split second, every trace of exhaustion evaporated from Hal's system.
His only thought was: God damn, that was totally worth it.