Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.
Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.
Previously, Christa got Liam’s help in carrying Baz’ blood sample up to Dr. Marissa. But how will he repay her trust? And under the circumstances, how much longer can Marissa avoid confronting her real feelings about her favorite test subject?
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Dr. Marissa was in her second-floor lab, if the strains of late-nineties pop audible through the door were any indication. Christa knocked as she opened it anyway.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Christa and…” She glanced sideways at her companion. “Lord Hades.”
“Titan Beetle asked us to bring up a specimen,” Hades added.
“Ooooh. Much appreciated. Figures he’d send you, the poor kid's scared stiff of me. I can’t understand it.” Marissa emerged from behind some equipment and leaned over at the desk to turn her music down. “Do you know, I have been waiting years to get to work on a cyborg? A real cyborg, not just peripherals. And now we finally have one, and he’s from like the worst and most insane future you could think of, and he has full neurointegration and everything, and he won’t let me take one little minimally invasive network scan! It’s so lame.”
“Uh-huh,” Christa said, understanding exactly why Jonathan wouldn’t want to come up here.
The scientist dropped onto her rolling stool and extended a hand to Hades, making impatient grabby motions. “Give it here, Hellboy.”
A muscle twitched above his jaw as he passed the bag over. “You’re not allowed to nickname me.”
“You’re in my lab, and I’ll call you what…oh, this.” Marissa held up the little container of Baz’ blood between finger and thumb, all the excitement having left her face. “Of course. Gamma-twelve panel for the wannabe superman. Make sure his organs aren’t dissolving or something, y’know.”
Hades constrained himself to raising one eyebrow. “Was that a known risk?”
“Considering that it was some other and possibly just slightly evil me that designed the stuff we gave him, anything’s possible.” Marissa tilted the tube slowly back and forth, watching the thick dark liquid inside with half-parted lips and deepening uncertainty. “Christa,” she said finally, “you were talking to Nick, weren’t you? Did he happen to say why he needed to find a timeline where Sebastian doesn’t get himself killed?”
Jacob hadn’t mentioned that part, and neither had The Matrix. “No, he didn’t.”
“Damn.” She shook the sample vigorously and slid it into the tray of a tall, square machine. Christa considered what The Matrix had said: that their original timeline was the best situation for their future children. He’d also as good as admitted that Ignis was one of Marissa’s, as if anyone couldn’t tell—very possibly, though Christa hadn’t considered this before, her son with Baz. Was this just another of the stories he’d told to get the resources he wanted onboard? Or had another familiar face led him to let something slip about his true goal? Or—
Christa realized suddenly that no one had ever clarified why The Matrix’s Dr. Marissa had teamed up with him to pull this off. In retrospect, she’d be the obvious choice—with her cancellation powers, she’d have retained enough memories from before the timeline damage to understand Nick’s motivations, and Christa didn’t have the highest confidence in her scientific ethics—but, still, why would she have agreed?
“Life really is just a cruel joke,” Marissa said, jabbing savagely at the control panel.
“Of course it’s not!” The sentiment was automatic, but perhaps not as heartfelt as usual.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re goodness and light in every universe, aren’t you?” She paused, biting her lip. “Sorry. I wish I could be as optimistic as you are, honestly.”
“Marissa…”
Marissa broke off staring at the progress screen to turn to Christa, leaning forward with the force of the words spilling out. “I think this whole thing might be my fault.”
That didn’t track at all. “What on earth do you mean?” Christa said.
“It’s just…Nick’s talked about things that the other me, I mean in his timeline, had planned or convinced him about,” Marissa said. “And then he told me that I was the one that made him actually go, and I—I realized I don’t know that any of it was his idea.” She took a long, steadying breath. “I mean, how could I just send him to punch a hole through the multiverse? How could I care about anything so much that I’d risk a friend’s life, not to mention reality itself? Losing your sense of proportion like that—that’s supervillain territory, right? Destroying and killing for what you love...I’m better than that. I’ve tried so hard to be better than that. Full offense, by the way,” she added.
“Taken,” Hades answered cheerfully from where he was now poking through an unattended stack of printouts on another table. To her embarrassment, Christa had entirely forgotten that he was still here and in need of supervision.
She shot a stern look his way, satisfied to see him put the papers down and slink back, before returning to their conversation. “Why don’t you just ask him what happened?”
Marissa shook her head. “If Nick thought I’d take it well, he would have told me. Whatever’s going on, he knows me well enough to believe it’ll go better if I figure it out for myself, the twerp.”
Christa wanted to bring up what he’d said about Mheksos and Addie’s erasure, but—Hades was right there. How much could she trust him with? She was just making up her mind to hand him off to Makaria and double back so they could sort all this out when Dr. Marcos came in the door.
Lautaro Marcos was not, by nature, an intimidating man. However, all his bespectacled, middle-aged approachability was offset for Christa by a single-minded devotion to his research into atypical abilities; she hadn’t forgiven him yet for introducing himself on their first meeting with a request to compare her DNA to Jacob’s. She smiled blankly and said nothing as Marissa greeted him and reached for the tray he was carrying, with four glass vials identical to the one they’d brought.
“I convinced them all to consent to an immune screening, at least,” Dr. Marcos said.
“Oh, good. The last thing we need is to add some alternate-timeline super-corona—ow!”
Marissa had banged her elbow against the edge of the table, and dropped the tray with one tube still in it. A wave of queasiness passed through Christa at the sight of blood spattered across the floor. She shut her eyes tightly while Marissa made swear-studded apologies.
“Which one was it?” the doctor asked.
“It was…ugh, Ignis’. I bet he gave you trouble, too.”
“So he did. Well, this time I will have Titan Beetle sit on him.”
A cold hand touched Christa’s arm, and she opened her eyes on Hades looking at her. She steeled her face immediately, ashamed of herself—when she was acting, when she had her armor on, these things didn’t bother her at all. He had no right to see the weak girl on the other side of Lady Radiance’s mask.
As she turned to avoid his gaze, she saw Marissa tear open a sterile swab, swipe it across a bloody piece of glass and back into the envelope, and quietly drop the sample into her pocket.
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Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.
❗️ Next week begins my planned hiatus. ❗️ I had hoped to post continously through the end of this serial; however, November and December are very busy months for me and my family. After writing straight through them, I need some time off to recover and catch up. We have now essentially reached the halfway point of the story, so this is a good time for a break in any case, and one month—the remainder of the greater Christmas season, as it happens—seemed a reasonable amount to give myself.
Mirai, Mirai will return on Monday, February 2, with Part Four opened by #27: Sparks, Terra-86—Ignis’ flashback episode.
Feel free to scream among yourselves in the comment section…
This was a wild ride that moved forward and still ended nowhere I AM BEGGING YOU PLEASE ANSWER LITERALLY ANY QUESTION
As the kids say, Marissa, girl, WHAT ARE YOU DOING???