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Prisoner 20255 just wanted to go home.

When he woke up to the morning bell, his first thoughts were of home; how safe it was, how much more at peace he felt there, what he would do if he ever saw it again. When morning work hours came, and he was escorted in restraints from breakfast at the mess hall to his labor station in the laundry, he thought of how much he'd rather be at home, doing any job that would keep him there and out of the hell he was actually in.

Lunchtime food was so pathetically awful on most days that it just reminded him of what he was missing. He could cook better than this all on his own, the miserable rat thought to himself, as he sighed in depression and felt like an emptied-out vessel while staring into the unrepentantly unidentifiable orange slime on his tray, and tried to eat it with paws still cuffed together by power-restrictor bands.

Hunched with terrified reluctance, thinking about home was the only way he could stave off the horror that always came with his afternoon chore. Going outside to work the prison's farm fields might seem like an idyllic thing, given that it meant being out of the place's claustrophobic dungeon-esque bowels. Unless one really understood what the Void Zone was like.

Outside the concrete and steel fortress, one truly became aware of just how far from home they really were. The Void Zone, in the minds of the public, referred to an extra-dimensional prison where super-villains were shipped off for incarceration. The average fur knew next to nothing about what that really meant, except that it was a place virtually impossible to escape, even with the monstrous powers of the world's worst super-villains and greatest evil geniuses trying to do so every day.

Prisoner 20255 wanted to cry every time he stepped outside those windowless concrete walls, and was faced with the reality of things. He'd been sentenced to life imprisonment in the Void Zone, a drab and dismal concrete fortress that sat on a massive broken chunk of rock, an asteroid whizzing with breathtaking slowness through an endless void of nothing. Not a single star adorned the utter blackness out there, beyond the UV floodlights that illuminated the farm fields and spurred the photosynthesis that ultimately kept the prisoners fed.

Everyone spent at least one four hour work shift under those lights every couple of days, as mandated by the Department of Correction's health administrator. 20255 would just as well have rather gone insane from lack of sunlight and Vitamin D.

Because when he was out there, spreading fertilizer or planting seeds, maybe monitoring the growth of young plants like a good prison farmer, 20255 could feel something horrible out there in the empty beyond that made up some massive majority of the Void Zone's vast size. Even without access to his powers, he could swear he sensed something that gave him crawling, morbid shakes of horror that took every ounce of his once-legendary will to stave off until he was back in his solitary cell, where he could shake and scream and beg the darkness not to take him to his heart's content.

Nobody believed him, and that was the worst part. Even the other prisoners mostly shrugged it off, rolling their eyes, calling him a mad-fur. After all, nobody had access to powers here, so how could anyone sense anything? Even if there was some cosmic Chthonic horror out there, the prison's guards and security systems would know about it well before any of the power-shackled inmates. At least, that's what the newer, more sociable inmates assumed.

The prisoners who had been there longest rarely had anything to say, either because they'd lost it themselves or had long since been banished to the Deep Cells.

At least the perceived insanity had the side-effect that nobody liked to fuck with him. The prison gangs preferred to leave the crazy ones alone. The Void Zone's inmates in almost all cases had possessed super-powers all their life, and the loss of them left said inmates with shaken confidence. The knowledge that a fruit-cake like 20255 might flip out and rip their throat open with his teeth made them wary.

Well, most of them. As his pick hit solid meteorite crust with a loud clink, 20255 flicked his round ears and tried to pay attention as the creature in the next row over spoke in his tinny, synthetic, albeit sympathetic voice.

"Hearing voices again today, Phil?" the robot intoned. With his mechanical body, the villain once known as The Solarion could keep up work on the farm quite literally forever. Lacking the capacity for fatigue, he liked to carry on conversation as if both of his arms weren't tirelessly breaking up meteoric rock with a pick in each grip. He was solar-powered, after all, though every other one of his long list of lethal abilities was kept shut off by the electronic device beeping away on the back of his skull case.

"M-my name isn't Phil," 20255 said like a mantra. They'd had this conversation plenty of times. "And they aren't voices. I feel eyes on the back of my neck..." The rat kept his voice down, as not to draw the attention of other workers. Meanwhile, he stopped, puffing and panting after long hours of hard work, and leaned against a fence rail. His body was bathed in sweat that had mixed with chipped soil and rock dust to create an almost concrete-like mess he'd be cleaning off all night.

"Hm. You know, Phil, I've been here since the Zone opened."

20255 almost dropped his pick. This new revelation broke the pattern of their many-times-repeated conversation, and he hated change almost as much as he hated being here. Change meant something new was about to become horrible, yet another alteration that would slowly drive him mad.

"W-what?"

The robot couldn't shrug, as his joints weren't built for it. But he nonetheless seemed to communicate the idea of doing so with an off-handed gesture of a pick.

"The Department of Corrections doesn't like to advertise it, but almost eighty percent of inmates go insane if they're here more than a few years. You're coming up on what...Year five?"

"I...A-am I? I remember I got here in June..."

The robot shook its head back and forth with a soft shush of lubricated metal joints.

"Most just go catatonic, and get sent to the Warehouse. Some go violent, and get put in solitary in the Deep Cells for good. The last kind...Well, the last kind are like you. At first."

"A-at first?" he squeaked out, starting to tremble deep in his gut. He knew the eyes were real, the things that watched him, never seen themselves. This only confirmed it. It didn't make sense that so many would go crazy just from being incarcerated. There had to be a cause!

"Yeah, at first. Then they turn into one of the first two. Or find a way to off themselves."

"Th...They all hear wh-what...What I hear?"

"Hear?" the robot asked, turning its head toward him again as it nonchalantly started breaking up a boulder. "More like a feeling. Like being watched."

20255 dropped his pick with a clank, as pressure wrapped itself in an iron band around his chest. He couldn't figure out whether to laugh or shriek at what he was hearing. Anxiety bubbled, a cauldron of roiling fear and knowledge broiling over inside his body. Breath wheezed out of him in a gust. Somewhere, deep down, he knew something was coming. Something with claws and darkness meant to swallow him whole.

He woke up later on, in the Void Zone's prison hospital, with his eyes still closed against the haze of cottony sedation. Someone was talking, two someones, he thought. A rough, lazy-sounding male voice that drawled its syllables, and a younger, slightly lispy tenor he imagined came from some slender whip of a thing.

"God, wouldja lookit him?" came muffled, through a glass observation wall and a cracked door. They were standing just outside his hospital cell, and hadn't bothered to lock the door yet.

"Yeah. Can you imagine? That's Velocity. Y'know, the meta-for-hire that used to make big-league metas shit their tights. Killed Captain Fatality? Now he's a fuckin' wreck, doped to the eyes so he won't try to chew his own wrists off again. Kinda sad, huh?"

My wrists? What the hell...?

"He's a lifer, kid. You ain't been here that long. They all git this way sooner 'er later. He's jus' lucky he didn' chew deep enough t' dig out the inhibitor implant. Then they'da put him in the Deep."

"That's...Fucking inhumane..."

"Yeah. So's lettin' these fuckers blast up cities every time they get a bug up their ass."

"So you make them live here when it obviously fucks them in the head?"

"Yeah. What other choice we got?"

"I...Guess you have a point. Still...It's got to mess with a guy to be stuck here, when it's so different from home..."

Home.

The word stabbed Prisoner 20255 like a knife, dug into the cuticles of his claws to pry the nails out. He struggled vainly against the sedatives, which made his body feel like a pile of lead and dog shit. The rat tried to even just lash his tail, finding even that was taken from him.

Home.

He barely remembered it, on the tip of the darkest oldest parts of his mind. A creaky swing hanging from an old, paint-peeled roof timber. A door that slammed whenever it closed, because the springs were worn out. A screen door that had always had that little hole in it, through which he remembered looking, out at a great rolling field of corn.

The smell of Icy Hot. Housecat litter. Mud. Red mud.

Home. I want to go home. Let me go home!

He couldn't even remember where that place was any more. Or what his own name had been. All he could remember was his prisoner identification number, 20255, and that only because he saw it every morning when he got up and looked at himself in the mirror. Like every other inmate, it was stenciled on the front of his orange prison jumpsuit in big black letters.

A word from the guards' conversation rubbed him strangely, like someone had taken their paw and run it backwards up his coarse, scratchy fur. Velocity. Velocity.

Velocity equals the Speed at which an object moves divided by the Time it takes to do so.

The rate at which an object changes its position.

Speed with a direction.

Direction.

Direction towards...Home?

The sedation tried to make him stop thinking, just as the Void Zone tried to strip away who he was. He didn't realize it, so much as _remembered_these things, having realized them a long, long time ago.

But Solarion remembers everything. It must be something about his robotics. A chip in his brain, used for memory? Is his brain even flesh any more?

Images of Solarion playing dumb for the guards, acting like just another drooling lifer, slid through 20255's fractured brain. 20255 knew he had to get out of here, get back to Solarion, find out whatever he could about home before he lost the ability to even consider how to get out of this horrible place.

Wrist. Wrist. They said I almost got the inhibitor. That must be what keeps my powers turned off. Powers. What powers? What can I DO?

He tore the bandage off his wrist, pulling the IV line out in the process. Buck teeth went to work on the stitches, gnawing into the flesh, pain seeming like a shadowy phantom of the real thing.

Solarion will know!

Dr. Klass examined the scanner system that monitored inmate neural process and sighed, rubbing a shaky paw across her tired face. Ruffled as she was, the tigress looked a mess, even more than she actually thought she was. Nobody listened to her complaints about the unethical nature of the Void Zone, how the place systematically drove mad anyone who lived in it long enough.

Even the robot, Solarion, looked like a mostly-catatonic fugue patient, as he plodded through the scanner on his way from the maintenance yard back to the fields. He'd looked that way for over a year now, and just about everyone ended up at his baseline sooner or later. Only the most potent, self-mastered villains seemed able to maintain their sanity.

She had already submitted reports indicating that the guards showed signs of abnormality, though it was understandably less severe. At the end of their six hour shifts, the guards went back to the Earth Dimension, to their families, put on different shirts and pants and went to go do something else other than be in a prison.

They got to do something other than feel the walls watching them, hear strange noises in the darkened areas of the prison that sent shivers up their spines for hours. They got to ignore the fact that this asteroid seemed to be the only solid object in an entire universe of nothingness and vacuum, yet somehow managed to maintain an atmosphere and survivable temperature.

They got to ignore the fact that inmates occasionally found strange objects in the soil, things Dr. Klass could swear were made by someone, not just random artifacts of meteorite creation. She slid her fingertips over an odd piece of glittery, silvery rock that was utterly, completely flat on one end, smooth almost like glass. Back on Earth, someone would have had to take a power-grinder to such porous stone to make it smooth. Probably have to add artificial fillers, too.

The warden's note, sticky-stuck to its side, read "Someone trying to file it into a shiv? Not worth reporting. Dispose of object."

She wanted to bash the warden's head in with it. Or throw it at the Corrections Ethics Board at their next status meeting. Which was just another sign that she, herself, needed to get out of the Void Zone and never come back. Unwarranted aggression was one of the rarer symptoms of what she was terming 'Void Zone Syndrome.' At least, she was pretty sure the aggression was unwarranted.

Loss of perspective was the more worrying symptom, anyway.

For instance, she couldn't quite remember what her job actually was in the Void Zone any more. Something to do with monitoring, that much she remembered, as she looked down at a bank of equipment. Most of the screens were lit up with little green lights and slow-moving streams of information she couldn't really remember how to interpret. Interpreting that information was her job, perhaps?

The tigress' eyes settled on one particular display, where an actual ink device was drawing strange squiggly, jerky lines on a rolling ream of paper. Taped up top of it was a strip of paper labeled 'Normal Reading,' displaying something that looked absolutely nothing like the chaotic bouncing squiggles of ink currently on the paper roll.

She was supposed to do something if this ever happened, and she remembered a certain drilled-in sense of dread that was supposed to be attached to what was happening now. But the things watching from inside the walls wanted her to ignore it, and though she knew better, she tried to come up with a reason not to listen.

Dr. Klass looked up at her wall, where a sign read "Security is Safety!" Another sign, far less saccharine, read "Long Distance Sensor Station Alpha."

But I'm a Doctor! Why would a doctor be monitoring long distance sensors?

All she could really figure out was that her head hurt, that she was in a security office where she worked, and that she was really angry at her boss for a reason that suddenly escaped her. The walls were whispering for her to take a nap, or at least stop paying attention.

As her forehead touched the desk, though, something sparked in her head. Some core of her personality was screaming at her to get up, to hit the alarms. Something was coming, and the very determination that had let her get through a doctoral program in interdimensional energies spurred Dr. Klass to remember something. She was a sorceress, and ingenious enough to leave a spell lingering, already cast, hanging in the ether, in case of an emergency. What emergency, she couldn't remember, but built into the spell was a contingency enchantment that reminded her to use it. It was like a red blinking light, or an annoying, blaring alarm siren, and just wouldn't go away until she swatted it.

Activating the spell took just a moment of her will, like slapping a snooze button before rolling over for another five minutes of sleep. Only instead of drifting back off into going-to-be-late-for-work-land, this 'alarm clock' hit her like a ton of bricks.

In an instant, the neuromantic spell cleared her mind, like a firehose in a clogged rain gutter, and she could feel the cloying mental fog sliding away. Something had invaded her thoughts, dumbing them down, limiting her access to her own brain power and memory. With a rush of rapidly-ordering thought, she recalled why she was here, and what her job really was.

First, she was officially tasked with analyzing the prison's sensor grid for signs of energy fluctuations from the asteroid's core. As the last remaining piece of dense physical matter in the Void Zone's otherwise-devoid dimension, it contained massive supplies of energy attracted to the dead-seeming rock. Some as-yet-uncovered technology drew it all there, and buried it in some manner of containment at the very center-most part of the asteroid, underneath a layer of impenetrably super-dense stone.

Dr. Theorem had approached the International Criminal Court about his hypotheses, and after some negotiation had won an agreement that one of his Council of Magi should be on-station within the Void Zone at all times, in case any sign of the dimension's original occupants, or whatever caused their demise, should reappear. The ICC had been skeptical that such occupants had ever existed, despite Dr. Theorem's statements, but had acquiesced to the archwizard's request, since having a super-powered guard would help keep the Zone secure.

Second, less officially, she was here on behalf of the Council of Magi to determine who, or what, had occupied this dimension before most of its matter had mysteriously disappeared from existence. They had suspected from the beginning that the Void Zone's strange and sinister aspect was more than just the horror of contemplating that much emptiness. Dr. Theorem hadn't even wanted to make the ICC aware of the Void Zone when he'd first discovered it, on the risk that there might be hidden, sleeping Outsiders lurking.

The Council of Magi had overruled him, after extensive magical examination.

Now, looking at the readings, Dr. Klass knew with crystal clarity that Dr. Theorem, as usual, had been right.

On three dozen security monitors, she could watch over nearly the whole of the asteroid, at least what was outside the prison's confines. With her mastery of mind magics, Dr. Klass could even split her attention enough to actually make sense of that many inputs.

What she saw chilled her straight to the soul, as the darkness just beyond the edge of the great banks of floodlights' beams seemed to writhe and bubble like a boiling sea of umbral tar to her now-clear mind. A swift check, cycling through her various attention-streams, told her that the writhing globs were many but localized, not a disruption of the area as a whole. More like small bays, perfect for landing in, than a trackless and swirling sea.

Then one of the bubbles, for lack of a better word, ruptured. From the pustulant-looking thing, spilling like effluvium from a corpse, came a swarming horde of what looked like tiny, shiny black segmented snakes, bursting and sliming their way across the northern outer grounds of the facility, towards inmates who sat motionless and stupefied on the recreation field.

Never the brightest lot in the first place, the mostly-henchman-level baddies on that rec field seemed even more vacant than usual. They just stared at each other, the walls, the ground, as the roiling wave of slimy serpents smashed into them like a small tsunami wave. With no sound, she couldn't hear the sounds, but Klass imagined she could hear horrible squelching sounds as they were buried in the mass. They didn't even open their mouths to cry out, utterly hypnotized.

Dr. Klass sucked in a breath, suddenly realizing she'd been holding it, then smashed her fist down onto the intercom button, which sent her voice directly to the security main office.

"Security! Security can you hear me? The prison is under attack!"

A drowsy, drawling voice came back, after the tigress' third urgent yell. By now, she could see two more of the great blackened boils erupting, spilling a growing river of pustulent, wriggling, caustic murderousness that was rapidly getting its bearings and moving towards the main prison.

"Wassss wrong, doc?"

"Unidentified life forms are...Oh bloody hell, your brain's fried too isn't it?"

"Huh?"

"Fuck it. Stay where you are. I'm coming to you. I'll start the defenses my god-damned self!"

20255 was crying as he ran, tears dribbling down his long ratty face as he hopped over someone who was lying in the hall slumped like a string-cut marionette. Nothing was making sense, and it was even worse than usual; why would a guard fall asleep in the corridor? On top of that, his wrist hurt like hell and was bleeding freely, as he continued scrabbled at the back of it with his digging claws on a half-remembered notion there was something alien there he could pull out. He didn't notice when a black chip of circuitry and glass fell free, and was crushed underfoot.

There should have been a closed set of bars between the medical wing and the outside. Two whole sets of double-cages, actually, but they were all yawning wide open like mouths. As he sprinted, sobbing, through them, he prayed this was all a hallucination and he'd wake up back in his cell with nothing more wrong with the world than a terrible headache and another day of hard labor.

The thought that he had to find Solarion burned at his mind, though, and kept him running, resisting the near-overwhelming temptation to curl up in a ball and let whatever was coming find him. Just like the many prisoners and corrections staff he sprinted past, who lay where they fell as if someone had just turned out the lights in their heads.

Only one fur in the medical wing's holding cells seemed to have staved off the effect, and that fact caused 20255 to slow down and look into that glass-walled cell. There, sitting with his legs crossed in the Full Lotus position, was a creature that, even divested of its costume, was rather intimidating. Fully seven feet tall and built like a willow branch, the male was dressed in the same orange jumpsuit every inmate wore. His species would have been hard to identify but for the long, white and black leopard tail that looped around in front of his feet.

His face would be identifiable regardless of costume. The skin was shrunken, furless, and pasted to the bone beneath. His lips were striped with black lines that looked like decay, and rendered his face into looking even more like a massive, vaguely malformed skull. With his eyes closed, he seemed strangely at peace, a deathly shadow content to sit and wait forever for what it wanted. 20255 remembered knowing this fur, or having worked with him, though the memories weren't clear. The fear of him, however, was.

All the same, 20255 stopped running, crouched down, and dug electronic key cards off the belt of a prison guard. Still struggling for breath, panic thick in his chest, he looked up at the skull-faced rictus.

"R-reaper? Wh-white Reaper, is th-that you?"

The eyes snapped open, and when they did bathed the prisoner's glass medical isolation chamber in a dull reddish light, like sunlight through a blood-splattered window.

"I...I th-think I remem-"

White Reaper cut him off with a hiss and a short pair of emphatic sentences. The villain's voice was chilling, cold and hard like broken glass covered in a rime of frost.

"Get me out of here you twit. You do not die today, unless I stay trapped!"

20255 had the key card sliding through the magnetic card reader before he even thought about it. Even though his knees were shaking and he wanted to pee himself. White Reaper was a serial murderer, a fur who could see peoples' futures and believed himself the arbiter of when they should die. His speed and lethality seemed spawned from the same source, and had left more than a few heroes bleeding and slaughtered like calves.

Nonetheless, 20255 knew he needed all the help he could get. The voices were shrieking now, no longer bothering to be seductive or stealthy. Their voice now was the cry of hunting predators, calling out in bloody exultant signal to one another where they had found prey.

"Wh-where do we g-go? What do we d-do?" 20255 whined out in a tremoring voice, even as the see-through security cage let out a hiss of depressurization. White Reaper had his paws against the glass before it was even fully open, helping the slow thing along with a patient expression.

"The portals back to the Earth Dimension are just above the Negative Zone cells. We go there. On the way, we stop by security and open all the cages. Not every inmate will have fallen to the mental assault. Releasing them will give us a better chance of escape. I must admit...I am surprised a weak-willed idiot like you managed to resist even this much."

For a moment, 20255 wanted to do just what the Reaper suggested. The simplest route home would be through that doorway at the prison's heart. But a niggling thought wriggled at his consciousness like a burrowing worm.

"No. I...I have to go get Solarion."

White Reaper snorted and fixed him with a baleful, glowing look that seemed to be filled with mocking silent laughter.

"What is he, your friend? How adorable! Leave him. We have better places to be when this gets to the next stage."

"N...Next stage? Y-you...You saw this coming..."

"Yes?"

"Why didn't you warn anyone?"

"Because I thought it would be funny to watch them die."

Prisoner 20255 might have forced out more questions, except that one of the doors to the yard suddenly wrenched off its hinges, letting in the most horrible howl he'd ever heard. A thousand warbling impossible voices blotted out the whispering shrieks, and the rat fell to his knees grabbing at his skull as it filled to bursting with maddening echoes. The wall of ichorous black that hurtled through the doorway went straight for them both like a freight train filling a tunnel, howling all along.

White Reaper threw his paw out to the side, calm as could be, and called out to his weapon. In a gloaming burst of shadow that dimmed the hall lights to distant candles, his scythe appeared as if from nothing. The bandage on Reaper's wrist fell away, revealing the savage but bloodless wound where the psychotic villain had torn his own chip out just half an hour before. 20255 whimpered and shrunk back, a half-memory sliding to the fore of his mind, of some time that felt almost mythical when he and White Reaper had teamed up once in the past.

A simple bank job, as 20255 recalled. They had been hired to break into Chicago's main Great Lakes Bank branch, to retrieve some forgotten trinket from an old safety deposit box. Some magical thing that 20255 had been offered a fat sum to procure.

Mercenary. The word dug into his brain, even as Reaper's glimmering white and black bone scythe appeared from the nowhere between worlds, and the killer whirled in a dance-like move to bring it down in an arc that left glimmering dark sparkles in its wake. Where it hit the mass of squealing ichorous worms, its hissing blade sucked the life right out of them, leaving behind a carved wave of dried husks that clattered like falling bones.

Still, the wave came on, inexorable and unstoppable, even as the White Reaper danced through it, whirling like Fred Astaire in a deep and deadly dancing trance. Combining his limited precognition with a magical scythe that sucked life force like a camel sucked water made a lethal combination. 20255 remembered the psychopath going wild with that power during the bank heist, when guards interrupted their night-time raid.

20255 turned and bolted, back down the hallway from the medical ward, as White Reaper cackled his trademark ear-ache skitter of a laugh.

"You always were a coward, Phil!"

Dr. Klass slammed her paw down on yet another security gate's release button, and shoved her way past the mostly-insensate guards as she pushed her way back out the door and ran through the opening gate. Cursing, she tried pointlessly to hustle the gate open quicker, pushing against the slow-moving automated steel bars. Automated weapon systems that would have defended the gate remained inert, still all folded up and cozy inside their titanium-walled mini-turrets. She caught herself thinking their barrel assemblies looked as useful as flaccid penises, the way the whole mount drooped forward when it was un-powered, and chastised herself for wasting time on dick humor when the lives of the whole prison were on the line.

As she passed through the barrier, once it was finally open, bright red signs on the walls reminded her of just where in the prison she was. Due to size constraints and the dangers of building too high, the head security office was placed squarely above the center of the maximum security zone. Which itself was directly above the so-called Negative Zone Prison, a place which even Dr. Klass shuddered to consider.

Some inmates' powers could be easily shut off with medical implants and drugs, power-disrupting cuffs and wards, or were cancelled out by the very fact of being in the Void Zone dimension. Others were not so simple, and had to be sequestered in the strange nether-void of the Negative Zone. It was called the Negative Zone because it simply negated everything - Any matter that entered ceased to exist, until a signal was transmitted to draw it back out. Yet the few villains who had been interred there and later drawn back out claimed that consciousness didn't cease within it. They were cognizant of floating, alone in a void, with nothing but their own mind. Klass had argued with the warden until she was blue in the face that such treatment was textbook torture. He hadn't relented.

His rationale had been simple - The prison system had no other way to contain the monsters held within. They were too powerful, too uncontrollable, or simply too smart to be contained with any lesser measure.

Rushing past the deceptively simple steel elevator door that led to the Negative Zone's entry chamber, Klass felt her heart constrict with fear...If monstrous entities were pouring in from the outside of the prison, might they also have some way to enter and interact with the Negative Zone? The sorceress pushed the fear down, though, and hurried past yet more comatose guards, headed for the main security center. There wasn't much use figuring out what to do if the Negative Zone was breached. The villains and monstrosities contained in there were too powerful to plan effective countermeasures against anyway. Besides that, her head was already starting to pound from the exertion of power necessary to keep the constant mental assault at bay.

Just ten paces away from security, she had to pass through a hallway that looked down, through a foot-thick pane of armored glass, at the main high-security lockup. The pane looked out on an open space, across which was a concrete walkway lined with transparent aluminum-fronted cells. Above it, below it, on either side of it, cubes of self-suspended material held dozens of villains, many of whom were murderers, rapists, and worse. Each and every one was super-powered, or else they never would have been placed in the Void Zone prison.

Each of them was a mighty champion of their given beliefs, though often those beliefs could be best-categorized as 'narcissistic self-interest.' Still, Dr. Kate Klass couldn't just leave them to die. Some seemed aware something was wrong; they moved around, peering into other cells, fiddled nervously at their restraint collars or banged on the glass soundlessly shouting at insensate guards.

They couldn't know what fate was coming for them, if she failed to activate the defenses, or if the defenses couldn't hold. But they railed against it, whatever it was, many of them easily smart enough to know something was so very wrong. All the best-laid plans of their erstwhile 'protectors,' the warden and the state who'd planned this prison, were failing.

While all that had been going on in her head, Dr. Klass' footpaws had steadily carried her onward, through the glass-walled corridor past several half-open security doors and a dozen slumped and heavily-armed guards. When she finally reached the door to Main Security, her heart dropped from her throat to her feet.

Double doors built to stop the world's most powerful villains, if they somehow managed to break free of their nullification, stood closed. Though she was certain they were unlocked, the things weighed tens of thousands of pounds, and were electronically operated from the inside only. The tigress let out a sharp yell of anger, and banged her fist against the dully shiny silvery door, though she might as well have beaten against a solid granite mountainside.

"Let me in you dumb fuckers!" she roared, to no avail. Behind her, she could hear the low murmurs of prisoners, starting to build into calls. Many were dire enemies of one another, she knew, kept from killing each other only by their restraints and the high-tech magical cells containing them.

Cells too powerful for her to break into, even with her fairly potent skills with magic.

Admonishing herself to stay calm, Klass double-checked her mental defenses, and found the spells to be holding, though under constant low-grade assault from whatever effect had neutralized the guards that was already starting to strain her body's energy reserves.

Thus as prepared as she was likely to get, the tigress sent her mind out, drifting away from her body, and began making expanding circles, searching through the Void Zone for anyone strong enough or in the right position to force those security doors open. Anyone who wasn't already cut off, anyway, by the rising tide of roaring, slavering, starving monstrosities.

Prisoner 20255 was sobbing as he ran, lost in the bowels of the prison. Every day since his arrival, he'd walked the hundred and twelve paces from his cell to the mess hall, then two hundred fifty six paces to the work detail center, where he was told what he'd be doing for the day. He'd never ventured into the prison administration center, or the maintenance halls. 20255 had never been to the medical wing before, at least not that he remembered, and now was hopelessly lost trying to find a way to Solarion.

The warbling call of the monsters that came for him had risen to a deafening crescendo in his head, which wasn't helping, and 20255 was starting to desperately pray he could find his way back to his cell, where he could curl up and sleep. He mentally slapped himself, upon realizing that was what he was thinking, and focused hard on the fleeting images of a half-dead, gnarled old pine tree with a raggedy tire swing hanging from one of its low, thick boughs.

Home. The cell isn't home. Home.

The rat shook his head sharply, painfully, and charged down yet another near-featureless hall, past doors that had no handles, only lock plates. He felt like he was swimming through a swirling battle, seeking some opponent who hid away behind the faces of his fellows. The fog of war. The thought somehow made him feel less like pissing his already-soiled uniform, so he embraced it.

When he suddenly recognized a hallway he'd never been down, 20255 didn't bother questioning it. He was guided that way, though he didn't recognize it, his perceptions skillfully manipulated by careful paws. Chewing on the end of his tail in trepidation, he trotted on, all the while hearing strange noises that seemed to bang down the hallways as if furs trapped in the very walls were heralding his passage.

20255 rounded a corner and smashed right into a mountain of muscle wrapped in prison oranges. Squalling out an apology, knowing such a casual accident could result in him being beaten, raped, or worse, 20255 staggered back waving his paws. That stagger saved his life.

With a swipe that seemed to smash the very air aside with its power, the inmate whirled, and nearly took 20255's head off. The rat shrieked and leapt backwards, work boots sliding on the waxed floor. The creature who stood before him was huge, muscular, and suddenly stalking towards him. It had a long, horrible black worm hanging from its scarred leonine muzzle, and smaller ones from his nostrils, and his gut was wriggling and writhing-full of the things.

In the creature's eyes was only bloodlust and savagery.

It's second blow backed 20255 against a wall to avoid it, and the rat shrieked again, visions of his own skull exploding like a watermelon at a comedy show filling his mind as the giant lion reared back for another super-strong swing. Then, 20255's body did something he wasn't expecting.

The blow came for him, and he stepped forward towards the on-rushing train of a fist. His pink, bare paws came up, touching his attacker with the lightest, most ghosting of grabs. A swift twist and a sudden motion, and his opponent was flying past him into the wall with a dull metal noise like a badly-made bell.

20255's hyperventilating breaths had suddenly slowed to a deep, chest-filling inhalation, and he felt a strange sensation of energy, power and energy potential building warm and vaguely uncomfortably in his chest.

He'd taken the attack's inertia and force away, sucked it into himself, and held it ready for use. As if watching someone else, 20255 saw his own pink paw fly forward in a jabbing, knife-like motion. The big fur, easily twice his weight, jolted hard, like he'd been hit by a truck, as his own kinetic energy was re-directed, concentrated into a single point, and punched through his chest like a bullet.

Black ooze sizzled out of the hole that passed right through his heart, and the dead inmate flopped once before laying still, blank empty eyes staring back at 20255. The worms that had hung from its snout seemed to have lost their motion as well, though 20255's mind couldn't generate the concentration to ponder why.

The mouse's breath immediately shot back to hyperventilation, as what he'd just done, by some sort of autopilot, registered.

"OhgodohgodohgodI'mamurderer!" he squealed, turning to run again, towards that strange beckoning sensation that was calling him onward.

Getting her mental message to the unknown prisoner through all the waves of mental assault had Kassandra Klass gasping, bent over and sweating, by the time she was sure the message had gotten through. The mind she'd contacted had been fractal, pulsing like a fresh wound, livid with mental bruising that had her praying he was worth bringing to her.

Then a soft splat heralded the arrival of a crawling worm, falling from a ventilation duct, and Dr. Klass pulled her consciousness fully back into her body. The horrid thing was fat, the size of a chain of breakfast sausages, and slithered first toward her, paused, front raised as if tasting the air, before altering its course toward one of the prone guards. It nosed around the bulky ursine, even as Dr. Klass was hunting around for something to smash the disgusting creature with.

When she looked up from pulling off her shoe, it was slithering into the guard's snout, straight up a nostril that should have been too small, forced grotesquely wide by the invading horror. A sudden sense of nausea nearly made her empty her stomach as the tigress realized what was about to happen, and what she was too late to stop.

The guard jerked upright, eyes wide and staring, unblinking, as black ooze started to drip from his snout and ears. Klass reacted immediately, gathering her will and weaving energy into a potent spell she'd used dozens of times before to knock attackers flat.

She threw her paw out, fingers contorted in an arcane sigil, and yelled the mystic words that focused her growing energy into a specific image of an effect, and released it.

"Clavum mentis!"

It was bastardized Latin, the words having no real power of their own except to help her focus. It was her will that forged the raw magical energy into a spell. Dr. Klass was a specialist in mind magics, and had used the same incantation to drop villains quite a bit more dangerous than a simple prison guard before. Her focused spike of power would slam their mind like a freight train, shatter their thoughts and motor control. Most lost consciousness immediately.

The spell connected, and she felt a sudden surge of numbness in her fingertips, weakness in her muscles as the energy used was taken from her body. Her opponent didn't even shudder. Mindless, she realized with a spike of anger at herself for being so foolish. If there had even been an unconscious living mind in there, the body should have reacted. The guard was brain-dead.

The guard's fist connected with her jaw like a wrecking ball, sending her flying backwards off her feet. Dr. Klass hit the ground hard enough to rattle her teeth and fill her vision with streamers of pain and bright redness. Multi-colored pens streamed from her lab coat's breast pocket.

Stunned, head spinning, she fell back on hard-trained instinct, and rolled to the side as the big black bear came at her, stomping a hole in the concrete where her head had been a moment before. The tigress lashed out with her claws, hitting flesh that tore under their razor sharpness, as she tried to get her bearings, her balance, even her sight back.

If the thing felt pain at her hit, it showed no sign, roaring out in a throat-tearing sound of rage as it rushed her again. This time she was ready, and threw up her spell before the possessed bear could smash her down again.

Evocation wasn't her strong suit, not by a long shot. The unsubtle workings of energy magic were too bombastic for the concise, withdrawn wizardess. Nonetheless, she was one of Dr. Theorem's apprentices, and he'd made damn sure she could get creative if it came down to that.

The worm-possessed guard's blow struck high as she ducked and scrambled backwards, casting her spell as it rushed at her again in its predictable strike-rush pattern.

"Lux lumina!" she cried out, fingers contorted in an arcane gesture.

A blast of silver light flew from her paws and struck the guard just below his sternum. While impressive to look at, the light was just a side effect of a single accelerated particle being released from its trap between her fingers. The massive, muscular bear's back exploded outward in a shower of gorey bits and flaming bones. The spell was just too strong for her, though, and Klass landed flat on her back, sucking air like a dying fish, as darkness swam through her vision.

"F...Fuck..." she muttered, feeling like someone had covered her in a few hundreds pounds of thick, heavy cloth soaked in warm water. Her muscles wouldn't move, and she felt as if there was nothing left in her, no energy even to breathe.

When the door she'd entered by opened, and a dozen black ooze-dripping guards started shambling in, the fear was too distant to keep her awake.

20255 ran around a final corner, feeling like a feral rat about to finish some barely-understood maze, and collided with the back of a guard in a tooth-rattling impact that knocked him down flat. It roared, and turned, eyes glimmering with a vicious feral instinct that would have emptied 20255's bladder if it hadn't already run down his leg sometime after his last brawl.

He knew whatever it was he was looking for lay beyond the thing, though, and scrambled on black-goo covered tile trying to get to his feet. When the thing came at him, howling around the worms drooling from its lips, 20255 fell back on the strange instincts he'd discovered not ten minutes before.

The beast dove toward him, and 20255 rolled nimbly to the side. His enemy landed with a crunch and roar, and was twisting around as the rat's heel came down hard on its face. It felt so GOOD to be fighting back, that he didn't even question when his instincts told him to spin and side-step, narrowly missing a spray of worms and blackness that came from a second opponent emerging from a door he'd barely registered.

20255 slipped a dancing step to the side, as his supine opponent threw itself upright and flailed its enraged limbs at him. Ducking, bobbing, tapping with two fingers whenever a limb came too close, he could feel the building power, the kinetic energy stolen in bits and pieces from his foes. The fight had drawn something out in him, some deep reserve of calm and confidence. This was a dance he'd known for a long, long time, and he was its master.

The rat didn't need a costume to be Velocity, a powerful, deadly meta-for-hire. Velocity was a master of unarmed combat techniques, and able to steal his enemies' kinetic energy and turn it against them both in conventional and not-so-conventional ways. He could do it quickly, by just touching someone who was coming at him full-force. It would stop them in their tracks, and give him a huge battery of power to refocus and throw back at them. But doing that was risky; if he held a large single mass of kinetics too long, the energy would eventually backlash on him. It was better to take it in small bits, to be recombined at his leisure.

The force of a bulky guard moving his entire body wasn't much, in terms of horsepower. But when it was compressed, squeezed down to a tiny point of thrust, that power could be devastating. The worm-filled guard who'd vomited all that sludge at him was rearing back to try again, and Velocity jolted forward, throwing his paws together to eject the dozen or so bits of kinetic energy he'd absorbed.

Two hundred sixty four pounds of combined guard and equipment weight had been moving at perhaps ten miles an hour during that last lunge. Combined with the kinetic energy stolen in bits from wild haymaker swings, Velocity quickly calculated his available force.

The blast that came off his paws was focused into a flat fan of energy, widening by a tiny factor at the end so that it became a punishing shotgun-like blast. The worm-spitter was blown into gore-spraying halves with a sick ripping noise that was quickly overwhelmed by the sonic boom that bounced off all four concrete walls.

His second foe, the one who he'd taken all that energy from, brought a fist down in a motion meant to smash Velocity's skull. The rat was too fast, and had predicted the move, though. He grabbed the arm as it came in, stepped back until he was back-to-chest with his foe, stole energy, then threw the offending former-guard over his shoulder with a simple Aikido move known by anyone who'd taken a class more than six months.

With the addition of his power, though, it sent the worm-infested guard sailing through the air, slamming into an armored door, and smashing it off the hinges with a heavy shriek of warping steel.

Two dozen sets of eyes turned towards him, all leaking black pustulent ichor, most wearing guard uniforms, their firearms still holstered at their sides. Three were in orange, though, and Prisoner 20255 swallowed down a rush of bile as he remembered just what those three could do, when a lick of orange flame trickled from one of their mouths.

He felt his confidence drain, like water through a suddenly unstopped drain. The rat felt a surge of hot wetness down one pant leg, as quivering horror sent his limbs into shakes. He screamed not in defiance, but in terror, as that brief time of calm mastery vanished as if it had never been.

Then the wall to his left exploded inward, smashing guards into blackened paste with flying bedrock and reinforced concrete.

Most of the Void Zone's inmates were well and truly helpless. The combined effects of the Void Zone's strange disruptive nature, drugs invented by various pharmaceutical firms, implants designed to dispense them, and magical wards left behind by government-hired magicians, rendered almost all powers inert. Those whose powers were found to still function, despite all countermeasures, were almost inevitably consigned to the Negative Zone, to float in lonely madness for perpetuity.

As the Void Zone's first inmate, Solarion pre-dated most of the screening programs that would have detected whether his powers were completely inactive. While the ingenious government technicians who had gone over his metal body with a fine-toothed comb had, in fact, managed to deactivate the majority of his super-tech abilities, they'd missed a few.

On top of that, they had made the mistake of deciding that he was a cyborg - a living brain encapsulated in a robotic body. The truth was that the living brain installed inside his heavily-armored skull was just a side-processor that the awakened AI called Solarion used to simulate human life. His creator had been trying to give new life to his son, who had died young at age 20 from cancer. He'd hoped the AI would gain his boy's personality, through analyzing the pathways and memories available in that biological co-processor.

It had worked, somewhat. Eventually, anyway. Solarion could understand fur emotions, even emulate them when necessary. He had reconstructed most of the young fur's memories, too, and had learned to enjoy emotion and connection. However, it had taken time, and during that formative period the robot had killed his creator, then gone on a rampage of crime, his mentality more or less that of a frightened two year old with super powers.

Prison had matured him. Or, more properly, prison had given the AI a chance to create an identity out of the memories of a dead young male and his own relatively limited experiences. Prison taught him the value of having friends, since they were interesting sources of unpredictable input, of connections he found he craved, probably as a side-effect of that parallel bio-processor. Prison had also quickly taught him the value of subtlety, and of concealing his powers.

So, he had concealed his own intelligence, unaffected by the mind-numbing power of the Void Zone, and contented himself to observe the strange behavior-altering nature of the place. Right up until he started seeing signs that the effect was becoming more and more powerful, working more and more quickly.

After dropping Phil off with the medics during the rat's nervous breakdown in the planting field, the supposedly-brain-damaged AI had doubled back to the farm, retrieved his digging shovel and ground-breaking pick, and walked casually down into one of the many low depressions created by the asteroid's rumpled bedrock.

There, he had quickly disassembled the pick, and used his crushing strength to mold the metal into the tool he needed. Then he took the shovel, tore the head into two pieces, and polished them glossy as he could against the nearly glass-smooth stones he'd discovered in that gully a few months before.

Crunching them into crevasses in the rock, he used the pieces of metal as a series of mirrors, to give himself visibility as he went to work with the modified pick head, levering open an armored plate on the back of his own skull, and oh-so-carefully delving inside. The techs who had installed his inhibitor chips had been quite skilled, graceful, doing their best to conceal and secure the hardware against just what Solarion was doing.

However, he knew every piece of his internal hardware the way only a computer could. He ran diagnostics as he worked, checking each part against his internal inventory. Yet again, their assumption that he was a biological brain in a mechanical body proved to be the Achilles Heel of their efforts. Still, it took him several hours of careful work, which reminded him to e-mail the federal techs to compliment their skill when he had the chance. From a securely anonymous email, behind plenty of encryption, of course.

As soon as the chips were out, he knew they would be transmitting signals, indicating that Solarion had reactivated himself. But his sensors told him it was too late for those signals to mean anything to anyone who could do anything about them. Massive energy fluctuations from the asteroid's core, and an even more disturbing utter deadening of the background radiation from outside the asteroid's atmosphere, told him something was about to happen. Something the prison knew nothing about, and had no real defense against.

He climbed out of the ditch just in time to see the first swarms bursting out of the blackness, rampaging over the farmland he'd spent the last decade cultivating. He'd come to like the little plants, how they grew in ways that were both wonderfully mathematical and yet unpredictable, beholden to so many factors even his advanced AI processing couldn't quite tell what exactly they were going to do.

Where the wave passed, the flowers and plants died, fruit withered black on the vine. Solarion watched, disappointed, as the plants crumbled before his very eyes, and gripped the acrylic handle of his disassembled pick-axe before throwing it into the roiling mass of blackness. What he saw confirmed his suspicion; the plastic hissed, and rapidly slagged. The metal bits still attached rapidly rusted away to puce.

Checking his energy levels, Solarion found them full, and patted one of the UV light poles. If he hadn't been able to charge his capacitors, he would be just as vulnerable to these creatures as the guards and other prisoners. Luckily, that wasn't the case.

His first blast of energy in over a decade, fired from the palms of both paws, vaporized large swathes of black crawlers all across the fields. It was more a test of his capacitors and energy transmission lines than any attempt to stop the tide. With his battery indicators at 99.7%, Solarion nodded once and turned away from the farm he'd spent his last few years cultivating, marching straight towards the prison where the few furs he really cared about were about to become embattled.

Accessing his internal map of the grounds, learned over years of walking paths and pretending to be befuddled and lost, Solarion passed straight through the outer security gates. Gaped open, their guards unconscious, those yawning portals confirmed a few things for Solarion. First, that the whole prison was affected, or else the automated defenses would be online. Second, that someone had screwed up in planning how the defenses worked; the gates should have shut themselves when power started fluctuating, rather than yawning open. Third, that he had to find Phil and get out of there quick, regardless of the consequences waiting on the other side of the portal. The Void Zone was going to fall, and there was no way to really be sure how bad it was going to get. As soon as the prison authorities operating the Earth side of the gateway discovered what was going on, they would have no choice but to shut the portal down entirely.

Examining the map in his hard drive, he determined it likely that the swarmers were already inside. The south part of the prison sat on a large, flat open expanse, where the farming was done. However, the opposite side ran up to a massive cliff's edge that stuck out over the yawning darkness, and he theorized that the swarmlings could only enter from the edge of the asteroid for one reason or another. It would explain why they bothered to swarm the largely-empty farm yard before attacking the much more populated recreation fields beyond them. Since the swarmlings tended to cluster up where there were furs to attack, he figured their objective must be the living entities alien to this realm.

He turned left down one corridor, walked past a dozen holding cells for prisoners who were being moved from one block to another, then turned right to face a solid concrete wall. Solarion slammed a fist into and through the reinforced concrete, grabbed onto a piece of the rebar latticework, and began to pull. The robot worked doggedly until he was through, slowly building speed as he evaluated his own frame's response to the work.

Soon he was plowing through walls, a living bulldozer, hitting them with blasts of energy to bake and crack the cement and weaken the steel reinforcements before slamming his body straight onward. When he finally reached the elevator shaft down, Solarion wrenched the doors open with a squeal of bent metal, and leapt straight out into the shaft, grabbing onto the elevator cables and sliding down in a spray of sparks.

Crawlers were already slithering down the walls in a growing tide he hoped to outpace. While his chassis and armoring were built primarily out of acid-resistant titanium, much of his internal machinery and electronics were far more vulnerable materials. He didn't have the time to make certain he was still air and water-proofed enough to keep that viscous acidic touch out.

As soon as he could see the shaft's bottom, Solarion let go of the cable and fell, landing with a resonant thud that echoed up the stygian darkness above him. The robot chuckled, inwardly, as he imagined himself Orpheus, traveling into the underworld to retrieve his wife. He doubted Phil would find the comparison amusing. Not, of course, that Solarion had the equipment to make a prison wife arrangement a reality.

Consulting his inner map, the artificial intelligence judged his remaining journey to be just the elevator shaft doors and one more wall beyond that. Facetiously, he reminded himself not to look back once he had Phil well in paw. Then he made his fingers rigid, like the tines of a forklift, and slammed them through the elevator door, levering it open against the shriek of armored resistance.

Sensors in his snout told him that the air reeked of blood and offal, as the robot stepped over a splattered orange-suited corpse. If he'd possessed a heart, Solarion felt it might quicken its beating. Instead, he merely quickened his pace, striding over the rent corpse and dead crawlers, as his paws came up and fed a surging blast of power into a wall to weaken it. The cement swelled and cracked under the surge of heat, the air flickering into flame as it was consumed.

Then he planted his feet, drew back with a whine of servo-motors, and drove his whole body forward, straight through the reinforced concrete and steel armor plating.

Concrete and shattered rebar blasted out of the wall, and the air filled with cloying, powdery fog. 20255 screamed like a little girl, scrambled to all fours, and ran blindly away from where the mob of infested furs were entering the room. When his footpaw caught on something soft and yielding, he went down in a sprawl, yelling out as the room behind him seemed to explode into noise, flashes, heat, and terrible shrieks that didn't sound like anything he'd ever heard a fur make.

20255 scrambled half-upright again, only to see he was climbing over a living, breathing tigress, rather than another worm-crusted horror. In the back of his head, he felt the strangest urge, a voice yelling at him to do something. So he grabbed her under the arms, grunted, and started dragging the noodle-limp female away from the chaotic, smoky battle behind him.

Somehow, without realizing he was doing it, he'd gotten her up over his shoulder, freeing one of his arms as his left paw settled on her back to keep the tigress from sliding off. Ahead of him, a massive double steel door stood, blocking his way with all the impregnability of a locked-up portcullised castle.

Somehow, he knew that what he had come down here looking for was behind that door. Maybe it was home! He shook that idea off with a grunt and a quick twitch of his neck, then put his paw to the great steel portal, concentrating hard as that strange calmness settled over him once again.

Velocity could feel movement in the large room beyond, though it somehow felt claustrophobic. Hundreds of computer processors worked and worked, hard drives spinning, transistors ticking away by the millions on tiny circuits. If only he could have touched them, Velocity knew he'd have all the energy he needed to plow those foot-thick steel doors right off their hinges. Sadly, even his powers had limits.

Behind him, he heard a strange, tinny laugh, and turned to face the oncoming horde, only to find the last of the monsters being vaporized by a searing energy bolt that left stars dancing in the rat's eyes.

"Solarion!" he yelled, with a suddenly effervescent grin.

The robot turned its sleek, vaguely spheroid head, and gave Velocity a noise that sounded like a chuckle put through a synthesizer.

"Well I couldn't just leave you alone to die down here, could I Eurydice?"

Velocity blinked and tilted his head, confused.

"What?"

The robot shook its head, and made a vague 'tsk' noise.

"Oh nevermind. There are hundreds more on their way down the shaft, and plenty of guards in the side corridors for them to take. Can you open those doors?"

"N-no. I hoped you could..."

A quick shift of his head, and glimmer of his optics, and Solarion shook his chin in the nugatory.

"No. The metal is too thick, and too well-insulated. My batteries are at 85%. I have neither the power nor the time."

Velocity's throat began to constrict, and he could feel the panic starting to rise, as strange noises echoed through the underground hallways. From down below, he was also starting to hear sounds that muddled their way through the armored glass, as prisoners in their cages started to see the very first crawlerlings emerging from ventilation shafts.

The rat knelt down, and gently lowered the unconscious tigress, before standing back up to face Solarion. Tilting his head, the robot seemed quite curious, then began to lightly chuckle as it understood Velocity's intent.

"How hard can I hit you, before it will hurt?"

Velocity snorted and shook his head. "You can't. Not when I'm prepared to absorb the energy. Give me all you've got."

"Famous last words, Phil."

Dr. Klass woke to the sensation of bees buzzing around in her brain. They were stinging everything, too.

With a groan, she forced herself upright, and blinked as the blurry world tried to focus.

First, she noted the air was full of dust. Concrete dust, she was fairly sure, by the way it stuck to her snout and blanketed everything. Second, she recognized two furs from her inmate files, who were poring over a series of computer banks, not-so-gingerly pushing unconscious guards out of seats and away from long lines of workstations.

Her heart jumped with sudden hope. They were inside the control center!

The other two with her, however, made her gut clench in sudden fear. Her body was too exhausted for more magic, at least for now, and she wasn't entirely certain her spells would work on the robot.

"None of these buttons are labeled!" the rat chattered out, frantically going over a control board Klass vaguely recalled had something to do with climate control.

Solarion, meanwhile, was much more methodically poring over the stations, striking a button here or there. One turned on the fire suppression in one of the upper levels, if her guess was right. Another shut off the air conditioning, causing rat and robot to look up at the vents, which stopped humming and started clattering as the white-noise of climate control stopped masking the sound of segmented worm things moving through.

The look lasted only a long moment before they frantically went back to work, redoubling their efforts as the chittering clatters reminded them what was coming and now close it was.

Klass managed to grip a computer bank next to her head and slowly stood up, evidently unnoticed by the two others as they frantically tried to find some way to save their own lives. Her head felt heavy and hot, filled with buzzing discomfort that wasn't yet burning agony only because her thought-based magics kept the pain response tamped down. At least for the moment.

When she tried to speak, the words came out slurred and garbled on the first try. The rat in the orange jumpsuit turned toward her, blinking and looking startled and a bit frightened. Klass fixed him with a glower, and pointed emphatically at one of the workstations. When she tried to speak again, the words came out jumbled, and the sorceress felt a jolt of fear. She'd been hit in the head several times, and if her words were garbled, it could mean brain damage. Not to mention how difficult it would make spellcasting. Or it could be temporary, just a concussion. Which didn't matter, if they all died in the next ten minutes. So she pointed again, emphatically, at a station too far away for her to walk in her dizzied state.

The rat seemed to get the idea, nodded, and ran to that spot.

"What do I do?" he asked in a pinched, fearful voice. Klass felt a surge of relief that she could still understand him. Aphasia was bad, but if she could still understand people, it wasn't as severe as it could be. She pointed at a button, hard, and tried to marshal enough will to send a telepathic image. Her head felt suddenly like it was about to explode, and she gasped while falling down to her knees, feeling the pain-reducing spell slip out of her grasp and dissipate.

Nonetheless, the rat seemed to get the picture, lifting a plastic cover and hitting a red button with his palm, before getting up and running over to her.

Oh great...I owe my life to a prisoner who smells like pee.

He took her arm, and helped her up, even as the world was swimming back out of focus.

"We gotta go, the swarm things are coming!" he yelled, which sent a ribbon of yellow pain across her vision.

Klass tried to whisper out the escape route she'd been made to memorize on her first day of work, but it came out as rubbish. She managed to point towards an unremarkable doorway, before she blacked out again.

The button Klass had told 20255 to push hadn't done anything immediately obvious, and the rat had assumed whatever she wanted it to do hadn't worked. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Floating in an endless blackness without form, dozens of mostly-catatonic minds trapped in nightmarish nothing began to wake. At the same moment, hundreds of glass-walled cells were starting their unlocking cycle, silent as the grave as they began to open locks made of transparent aluminum and government-commissioned magic.

Dr. Klass was many things, but she wasn't about to let these prisoners die and donate their powers to whatever those swarm-monsters wanted. She wasn't a monster. They were owed a fighting chance.

Unfortunately the button she'd had 20255 hit wasn't a cell-block release. It was the general release, there in case of major fires or emergencies. On top of that, it would open the Negative Zone. Based on what she'd sensed coming, what she suspected might be behind the massive attack, she didn't think there was any choice.

The first few who exited through the glowing blue portal from the Negative Zone did so stumbling, falling down, their wills shattered by the experience. Years of sensory deprivation had robbed them of their wits, and they fell down, curling up on the floor in the attempt to reclaim the calm soupy nothingness that had become home.

The next few were stronger, but no less mad. One blew himself to pieces with a laugh, setting off his power, which was to detonate any flesh he could touch. His flying bits killed the catatonic ones who'd come before him, too. The next after him pulled a gun out of the nether and shot himself immediately, unwilling to face the world after all he'd learned about his own inner beast, while trapped in a place where there was nothing else to do but contemplate.

Several others subsequently stumbled over the bleeding body, and wandered half-conscious towards the doors to the Negative Zone entry chamber, smacking into transparent dividers and containment cages, too disoriented to notice the doors to those blockages were open.

The last, the most feared of the Negative Zone's prisoners, was the first to have been placed inside it. In fact, the Negative Zone had been conceived out of the need to contain him. Incarceration had merely led to him killing guards and other prisoners, destroying walls, making escapes. Drugging had utterly failed to do anything but further impair his already limited judgment. Certain government cabals had debated simply killing him, but the scale and horror of his powers made them hesitant, not knowing what effect his death might have; some of the so-called Class Omega metas were known to explode when put down, or unleash their power on a catastrophic scale.

So, they had consigned him to the discorporation of the Negative Zone. And he'd loved it. Finally, the quiet he'd been searching for all his life had been handed to him by those who thought it a torment. All he'd ever wanted was to be left alone, after all. That's what he'd said at his trial, and his sentencing hearing, but as usual nobody had listened. They had railed at him about his rights, about the law, about the rights of those he had killed for attacking him first.

So when the darkness suddenly split apart in a blinding blaze of cerulean light, dumping him unceremoniously naked and cold onto a blood-slicked floor, the meta known only as The Beast snarled out in furious uncomprehending rage.

Having already fled the operations room, 20255, Solarion, and Dr. Klass had no way of seeing what had just been unleashed. The Beast rose up from his knees, uncaring of his own nudity as he stared around with baleful, flickering red eyes, and saw the carnage that filled the entry chamber. If the mind-deadening effect of the crawlerlings had any effect on him, it didn't show in the least. Certainly his powers were unaffected.

He thrust his red-furred vulpine paw down and forward in a claw-shape, and all of the bodies and pieces around him began to jerk and dance a crunching, squelching wriggling jig. For a moment, they bubbled and smoked. Then, with a roar of hissing, squealing meat, hundreds of tiny beings made of living flame exploded from the vaporizing mess, cavorting and whirling in vaguely humanoid shapes as the hungry flames consumed the fleshy wombs from which they'd been drawn.

The Beast was creating living fire from the bodies of the dead, and from the twitching, dying forms of the few who were still clinging on to life. Their flesh boiled as both corpses and crippled furs screamed soundlessly, bursting eyeballs sending forth geysers of white-hot fire.

When a wave of crawlerlings began to pour through the door like water in a cracked dyke, the Beast snarled in hatred, and flung his paws forward, hurling the fiery entities into the mass of shrieking insectoid monsters with the fury of a holocaust. The hungry fire elementals whirled and shrieked like expanding gases, a tornado of fire and destruction, carbonizing and immolating, their numbers growing as the enemy died and gave up every iota of stored cellular energy to The Beast's terrible will.

He walked, without breaking pace, straight through the defenses built to contain the Negative Zone's entry area, the heat around him so intense that armored plate glass instantly slagged, and hardened titanium began to wobble like jello and turn white with heat. The intense, kiln-hot air didn't phase him in the least, and The Beast walked through the molten structures and frying enemies like a cruel and deadly Moses through the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, in the cell blocks, inmates were finding their cages opening, the locks clicking off even as the swarmers were starting to drop in trickling rivers from the air vents. Trickles that were swiftly becoming a torrent, even as prisoners were doing their best to tear off restraints and try to figure out what in the hell was going on.

One of them screamed, and pointed, as guards began getting up, streaming black ooze from their maws. Then the fighting began in earnest, as a dozen meta-powered villains unleashed their abilities in a sudden desperate attack.

Someone yelled, "Get to the portal!" Then they were moving like a tide of their own.

"H-how do we...Oh," 20255 puffed, as Solarion yanked open a hatch, ignoring the shriek of metal locks breaking apart. He was looking down through a concrete shaft, with metal rungs sunk into the wall. Painted in a bright, glowing stripe down the wall was an arrow with the words 'emergency escape vehicle' stenciled alongside.

"B-but wait," 20255 protested, grunting as he shifted the unconscious feline on his shoulder, "Isn't the only d-doorway in the prison?"

"No. They just told us that to keep us from trying. There is a second rock floating out there, with a portal that goes someplace other than the Gateway Lockdown. Those idiots in the prison cells will burst through the portal, if they live that long, only to be immediately arrested again. I don't intend to be caught a second time."

"How d-do you...?"

"I know it because I helped them build the rocket. Why would they need a rocket to reach a portal inside their own building?"

"Oh...M-maybe it's for research!"

"It isn't for research. Get in."

They'd reached the bottom, despite 20255 having climbed one-pawed the whole way without seeming any the worse for wear. Their ride sat in what looked like a small subway tunnel, brick-walled and railed down the center. A dusty tarp covered a large, vaguely arrow-shaped vehicle, and as Solarion started pulling the blue plastic aside, 20255 swallowed his trepidation down and started walking forward.

It was a rocket, of that he had no doubt. The thrust ports at the rear, plus the general shape, were a dead giveaway. What was less obvious in function was an odd spider-web of thin black fabric that girdled the thing, attached by diaphanous metal strands to the hull.

Without thinking twice, he took the unconscious tigress' paw and touched it to the paw-print pad on the rocket's airlock. It hissed, and irised open, admitting him into a space that looked almost like a small bus' interior with its rows of seats arranged along a central aisle. At the front, a compartment contained what had to be the controls, which he hastened towards even as he dumped the tigress in a chair.

Like he was walking through a dream, 20255 watched as his paws seemed to know just what to do. He pressed into the cramped cockpit, slid into a chair, and quickly started playing the buttons and dials like a master pianist.

"The mind forgets, the paws remember," Solarion commented with amusement in his tinny voice, while strapping Dr. Klass into her seat.

As 20255's symphony of confident button-presses and dial checks continued, Solarion joined in, dexterous articulated fingers playing along.

"Wh-what else am I...F-forgetting? Why does my chest feel so...So tight?" 20255 stammered out, feeling his face grow hot with the threat of tears. "W-was I an astronaut or something? H-how d-do I know how to...?"

"Your name is Phillip Phastos. You were a pilot for the United States Air Force, until they discovered your powers. Then they forcibly discharged you, less than honorably because you fought it. After that, nobody wanted to hire you, because they were afraid of your powers. You started hiring out your skills as a meta, which was a bit of a slippery slope for you I'm afraid."

Phil nodded numbly, staring down at his paws, as they wrapped around a throttle and a control stick.

"Wh-what else? That's...Not enough to explain it..."

"When you were incarcerated, your wife Penelope lost her job as an assistant district attorney. Then she lost her career, because even the most sharkish of a legal firms didn't want someone tainted by marriage to a meta-powered villain. She refused to work for the only one that made her an offer. By now, she will have lost your home to foreclosure. Or perhaps sold it, unless she is very, very stubborn."

Phil squeezed his eyes shut, and breathed deeply. The pain in his chest wasn't going away, but he felt somehow able to tolerate it. The stronger fur within him made it possible. He couldn't recall his whole identity, but everything Solarion told him seemed like the truth. It fit in a way he couldn't describe.

"I have to get home to Penny. The house...It's important, but it isn't...It's not home unless she's there with me."

Solarion stared soundlessly out the viewing glass into the tunnel beyond, as the shuttle began to speak in a soft, feminine voice, telling them the launch bay doors were opening. When he spoke, it was with an air of caution, as if he were trying not to panic the other male.

"Then we will go there and look for her."

"Where...Where are we going?"

"Ithaca. Ithaca New York."