+ Reid +

Light grew from the bottom of the elevator shaft as Reid's descent carried him past the named floors. He caught glimpses of each. Imagination was a hall full of glass-front rooms filled with assortments of plants, or furniture, or toys. Each room seemed to be color-coordinated to a single shade. Fun was painted with cotton candy colors, and had a bucket of toys a few feet past where the elevator would've opened, had it stopped. Healing was another space filled with plant life, plus an abundance of chairs, benches, and other spaces to sit - or to park a wheelchair. There were several collapsed devices that Reid assumed served the purpose of carting around the injured and recovering. Dreams was a dimly lit corridor with fake stars on the ceiling. There was a table stacked high with pillows and small pajamas in the foyer there.

Then he passed by Bravery.

That space was a mix. There were walls painted with the Vuxarinan version of superheroes and colorful chairs - but it also had a thick, curved glass wall that overlooked a brightly lit operating table. Within the wall were copies of the same black stones with silver names that the receptionist had shown him above. Lists of dead kids' names.

Moments later, the elevator slowed as Reid reached his destination - Possibility.

The elevator lobby here was a midsized circular space with a dormant fountain at its center. There were screens above the fountain, set out in a ring and angled down on the ceiling that played a rotating set of nature scenes. The walls were once again thick and transparent, only interrupted by a single, large metallic door on the far side. Beyond the walls and door, Reid could see at least two dozen benches each appeared to host a half-finished project. Some had 3d models, others stacks of papers and books. One was notable because it was surrounded by an inches-thick pile of crumpled papers. There were also a few chairs pointed in different directions, and a series of hallways that led further into the facility.

A happy chime accompanied a settling thunk as the glass doors opened, and Reid walked forward to the fountain.

The screen facing him crackled, and a plain Vuxarinan in a blue-grey lab coat appeared.

"Welcome, visitor, to the realm of possibility. Here, we work to win against nature and the universe itself to secure a brighter future for our children and our people. It is-"

Reid's face went flat and he complained aloud.

"Now there's a fucking recording? Where the hell is this guy?"

"Ah, but I'm right here. I'm Doctor Randall Ferber," The TV responded. Reid flicked his eyes around the room, but couldn't pick out any visible camera equipment. "It would be uncouth of me to do any less than greet - in real time - the helpful friend to science and advancement that promised to bring Bubbles back to me. She was on her own too long, and I feared greatly for her safety - and her state."

"You feared for her safety? Your men were talking about dissecting kids. I'm not here for your bullshit. You did something to Bubbles - and you're doing the same thing to other children. But all that stops, now. I'm here, and I'm going to make sure you undo whatever the hell it is you're doing to these kids."

Randall looked confused. "No. These brave volunteers put their trust in me to find a way forward. I won't dishonor their choices by giving up. I will ensure each and every one of them has meaning, comfort, and joy in their lives, in every moment to their last. And I will continue bearing the burden of loss that brings."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"The wrong is not with me - but the world. With whatever gods or beings determine life's brutal fate. Wrong is a fatal disease that takes every victim before they turn six. Wrong is a hereditary disorder that skips four generations, only to leave a child unable to walk for the rest of their life. Wrong is the degenerative condition that takes away someone's motor function until they are a prisoner of thought in a cell of flesh and bone. Wrong is curing those conditions with a power fit to bring the end of suffering for any child - only to double their blight with the advent of monsters. The wrong is with the world - I am one of the ones seeking to correct it, and one of the few with the means and understanding to make it done. I am the only one willing to honor the will and bravery of these children, and so I will continue to rely on them to help right the wrongs of nature and fate until my work is done."

"The awakening cured almost every disease! You're just using monsters as an excuse to keep experimenting on goddamn children! Where the fuck are you?"

The Doctor tilted his head in interest as Reid began to walk around the fountain towards the door.

"Almost every? What did it miss? What couldn't it cure? I have to know. That knowledge could be the key to the arachnicide that will make safe my island, and to why the treatment is only fully successful with children. Now that I have Bubbles back, it could fuel the next breakthrough."

Reid stopped dead in his tracks, and turned towards the TVs. Randall blinked in realization.

"Oh, right. Of course. Maybe you don't know. My brave girl - Bubbles - she followed you in. It triggered one of my safety precautions and put her into a different access shaft, and we were able to sedate her peacefully while you and I were conversing. She's resting peacefully. Here, I'll show you."

The camera shook and swiveled over to a prone form laid atop a wide, long bed in a clear-walled room. The children's toys in a basket in the corner were... normal. The drawings on the wall were normal. The nightstand and the lamp were normal.

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The form on the bed wasn't.

Bubbles was orange. She had two sets of closed eyes that twitched in her sleep. A pair of antennae were drooped down in front of her face, which had no nose. A Vuxarinan-looking pair of lips hid behind a set of mandibles. She wore a long shirt cut with extra holes in the sides, over what seemed like a Vuxarinan torso. The extra holes accommodated two pairs of arms that each ended in a three-fingered hand, and two sets of folded wings further on her back. Her legs were almost fully insectoid, and ended with two spikey toes. They rested against a vespan abdomen that sported a visible stinger.

The camera shook once more and returned to the smiling face of the doctor.

Reid took a deep breath to steady himself at the idea - and implications - of Bubbles' Vuxarinan-Hornet-Hybrid form. How the fuck do you even start to fix something like that? He took a few more breaths, and found a bit of fleeting comfort when he imagined her as a child wearing an over-realistic costume. One she could just... take off..

RESISTANCE ACTIVATED

Reid grimaced, and flit his attention around the room. The fountain was spewing out a wispy, bubblegum-colored gas. Above, Randall was still smiling.

"Thank you again for bringing Bubbles home. This was supposed to be a temporary visit, but I must implore you to stay longer, and share your knowledge with me. I apologize for the methods - you don't strike me as someone particularly willing to share. The gas will put you into a comfortable slumber, which should... huh. Which should have happened over a minute ago."

Reid cracked his neck, and walked over to the door in the wall.

"Better idea, Randy. I'm going to break your door, then your lab, and then I'm going to break you. Sound like a plan? Great."

"You can't possibly be serious. That door is a superalloy made from system-rated G-grade materials. You couldn't budge it with a bomb."

The door looked to be two feet thick and solid metal. The walls were four feet. Reid leaned back, pushed power into his knee and heel, and kicked forward. Metal screamed as the less-than-E-grade door twisted around his foot, and pulled the entire frame loose. It clattered to the ground the same time an alarm started ringing.

He spared a glance back towards the screens and caught Randall with his mouth half-open.

"Huh... That isn't good."

./\.+ Lycra +./\.

Lycra failed often. He made design after design that didn't work. He singed his eyebrows and used up barriers with errant explosions from bad assumptions. He tested and proved that he shouldn't follow dozens or hundreds of methods before one finally worked. Through it all, he kept his passion, and his drive, and his excitement to learn from each mistake.

But in those failures, it was just him - his ideas and his progress and his setbacks.

Failing others was different.

Sometimes you were part of a group where failing others didn't matter. Sure, there were physical, violent consequences, but those were the groups you never got too attached to. Failing, leaving, getting kicked out - in those times, it was as much a good thing as a bad one. The same wasn't true for the good groups. Those were harder.

In good groups, you made friends. Liked people. You cared - and so you cared about what happened to them, because of you or not. You cared if you couldn't stop someone from hurting the others. You cared if things didn't go right. If you got someone else hurt or captured or worse. Because once it happened, you couldn't undo it. Like dropping stale bread in mud - you would never get it clean again. You just ate through the dirt and tried to ignore the grit between your teeth.

Reid and Win were more than a group. They were family - and that meant they weren't supposed to fail each other, but they could without losing each other. He knew that, but he still didn't want to fall behind. He didn't want to be left behind. It was one of the main reasons he pushed himself so hard.

Jenna and Hirvonen, and Hugo, and Edith and Vidita and Norton and everyone else - they made a good group. A great one. Most of the time, he didn't think about what that might mean. But the idea was always there - that everything he had with their group, with Jenna, was just as fragile as every other group he'd been part of. That one dip into the mud would ruin things.

That failing them would lead to losing them.

And he had failed.

He failed to get the crystal cart before they rolled it away from him, which meant he failed to restock his team, which meant he failed to buy himself enough time to assemble the plasma cannon, and he failed to even summon out a single piece by the time Jenna had arrived.

His heart had been pounding in his chest, consumed and overwhelmed with the idea, the failure, the consequence of losing people and getting turned away.

But Jenna didn't care. She just bent down and hugged him. Like family.

She saw him struggle, really struggle for the first time, and her first thought was to struggle together. Not because she had to. Not because he asked her. Because she wanted to.

And Lycra felt a piece of himself he'd never known was broken start to heal.

It settled him. Calmed his mind, and allowed him to build the weapon and activate the crystals to fire it.

#

The plasma cannon had cut through Belar's troops like paper, and filled him with notifications that would take hours to review. He used the weapon to to clear the hall, then advanced further on and wiped out the enemy presence in the entire building as the teams behind him picked off stragglers, restocked the cannon's crystals, and did emergency medicine on Jenna. Even hurt, she insisted he continue forward. So he had. All the way through the processing building, and out to the small dock where ten floating craft were abandoned.

He expected resistance there, but the enemy was gone, or running. Burgundy armored guards ran and climbed up the steps of the mine. As he watched them go, the teams they'd left at the digger began to emerge from the processing building.

"Glad we caught up with you," Hirv said as he strode out to join Lycra, Vidita close behind him. "Can't let you do everything yourself. Damn good work scaring them off, though."

"Right? And here I thought I would be needed once I finished my rest. I barely got to use my magic." She added.

Lycra only half listened. Something was wrong. It felt wrong. The people running weren't looking back at him.

They were looking up.

Lycra tilted his gaze to the sky and squinted. Even with his high perception, nothing was visible to his naked eye.

He plopped his backpack to the ground and fished around until he felt a conical crystalline device. With a twist to a single silver dial on its side, Lycra held it up, scanned the sky, then froze.

The silver dial clicked twice to change the focus, and a blob directly above them sharpened into a thick, fortified-looking space station. Lycra frowned. Normal space stations weren't build like that. It looked like an orbital fort, or a space battlement. But why have one of those here?

His eyes went wide in realization.

It wasn't a fort.

It was a weapon.

High above, two red-orange pinpricks of light were rapidly growing from the center of the orbital battery.

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