Aliens.

Of course it would be aliens! Everything made perfect sense now! Still, Ryan wondered if these visitors would look like tiny grey dwarves, or humans with ridged foreheads. If the eight-meters tall monster in the snow was any indication though, they were probably cold-blooded.

Wait… Ryan glanced at the monstrous creature’s corpse, and came to a sudden realization.

“I knew it!” He shouted, pointing a finger at the colossal beast. “I knew it was the Reptilians!”

These scaled bastards had tried to infiltrate human governments to destroy democracy!

“It can’t be aliens,” Shroud said in denial. “Maybe the Alchemist… maybe she’s building a spaceship to leave the planet?”

“That piece of crap obviously crashed years ago,” Sarin pointed out. “If I listen well to our jackass-in-chief, a good four-fifths of it is buried in the ice. Who would build a ship like that?”

“We… we know Elixirs came from alien dimensions,” Len said, trying to scan the ship with her power armor. “It’s… it’s not impossible.”

Shroud still shook his head. “Can’t be aliens.”

He could accept the existence of a time-traveler, but not extraterrestrial visitors?

In any case, Ryan activated his time-stop as his group debated. Although he sensed an opposing force struggling back against his power, the icy wasteland turned violet to his relief. Since the strange purple lightning bolts in the alien skies kept moving in the frozen time, Ryan guessed they were made of Violet Flux.

Much like his experience in Monaco, his time-stop would work as long as the Resonators kept the portal open, allowing him to converge the Purple World with this pocket dimension.

But something else caught the courier’s attention. The Black Flux particles produced by his armor seemed to devour the space around them, creating tiny, almost invisible cracks in the fabric of reality itself.

“Huh?” Ryan said as time resumed. Though the black particles vanished, the damage they had caused remained.

“What is it, Riri?” Len asked, noticing his confusion.

“It seems my power has an anomalous effect on this thin place.” Come to think of it, Ryan remembered Black Flux consuming Alphonse ‘Fallout’ Manada’s radioactive Red Flux during their fight.

All hints so far indicated that the Black Ultimate One had given the courier the power to kill what couldn’t die. But how far could you push that definition? Could you kill energy? Items? Ideas?

Black powers were paradoxes, and didn’t follow the rules. Lightning Butt himself had become more like an animated statue than a man, and yet Ryan’s power could damage him. It could even kill a ghost.

Maybe it could kill Elixirs, or the alien energies they produced.

“That power gives me a headache,” Ryan said, deciding to prepare his team for battle. Sunshine and See-Through observed the dome cautiously, Sarin looked tense, Len and the Panda didn’t hide their anxiety, and Mr. Wave barely restrained himself from going in guns-blazing. “Alright mooks listen up, who’s never explored a spooky alien spaceship among you? Raise your hand if this is your first time.”

Everyone raised their hand, except Ryan and Mr. Wave. “Mr. Wave caused the Fermi paradox,” the genome explained. “When alien civilizations see Mr. Wave, they go extinct.”

“Riri, why didn’t you raise your hand?” Len asked.

Sarin looked at Ryan with skepticism, which wounded the courier’s heart. “You saw aliens before, oh great and powerful leader?”

“Yes, but their ship was round and flatter.” Also, the passengers had kept trying to pay him in seashells for some reason. “In any case, rule number one for spaceships, and the most important one by far: don’t touch the eggs. A good egg is a boiled egg.”

The Panda gasped. “But Sifu, eggs are cute and rounded!”

“Eggs are the enemy, soldier!” Ryan snarled with the passion of a drill sergeant, the Panda adopting a military salute. “Any egg found in an alien ship is a potential W.M.D.! Boil them all!”

“Y-yes, Sifu!”

“Second rule, we don’t split up. Ever.”

“It wouldn’t change much,” Mr. Wave boasted. “Even if Mr. Wave faces an army alone, they will still be outnumbered.”

“I agree,” Ryan conceded, “but this is the principle of the thing.”

“I am usually more fond of dividing forces to cover a greater area, but in this case numbers might prove safer,” Leo agreed. “We have no idea what to expect within.”

“Which way do we use to move in?” Shroud asked, glancing at the blast doors.

“Mmm…” Ryan approached the gates to observe them. On a closer look, while the blast doors were mostly made of the same black metal as the rest of the ship, they showed hints of having been breached in the past. Someone plugged the cracks with a standard steel alloy. A cursory scan from his armor told the courier that the doors could probably survive extreme conditions such as atmospheric reentry. “Sunshine, we might need a solar eruption or two.”

“I see another perfectly good entrance up there,” Sarin said, pointing a finger at the hole in the ship’s metal dome. “If the lizard blasted his way out, then it means that path is clear, right?”

“Possibly,” Shroud conceded. “But we might find workers repairing the damaged area.”

“What bothers me is that nobody came to intercept us,” Hargraves said, his radiance dimming for an instant. “I expected more activity in the Alchemist’s base of operation, but the area looks deceptively empty.”

“Perhaps the thing killed everyone on its way out,” Sarin guessed.

But then, what killed the creature? The gash that slew it came from a claw. “I am tempted,” Ryan said. “On one hand, blowing our own hole would be good and proper. But using the other path would bring less attention.”

“Let us refrain from hostile actions until we can figure the truth out,” Hargraves said.

“Speak for yourself,” Sarin said, her fists clenched. “No way I’m not roughing up that bitch of a mad scientist along the way. She owes me more than a decade of pain with interest.”

“As odd as it sounds, I agree with the Psycho,” Shroud declared. “While we might need her knowledge, there’s no way I’m leaving the person responsible for Last Easter unmolested. She has far too much blood on her hands, whoever or whatever she is.”

“The Alchemist might deserve our scorn,” Sunshine conceded. “But we clearly only know a small piece of the full truth, and an open conflict will lead us nowhere. Let us act cautiously, figure out what is happening, and then decide if we use force or not.”

The argument won out, and the group settled on exploring the dome by the open entrance.

“Alright, time to explain the third and final rule then. If it looks cute and cuddly…” Ryan loaded his chest cannon. “It really isn’t.”

The courier grabbed the Panda and flew with his bear inside the hole, followed by Shroud, Mr. Wave, and Leo the Living Sun. Shortie used streams of pressurized water to launch herself at the ship’s roof, while Sarin did something similar with a shockwave.

As it turned out, the dome was only the upper part of a colossal sphere with a diameter slightly more than two hundred meters wide. One end of a five-meters wide bridge extended out to a central platform equipped with strange biomechanical devices, while the other part led to smashed blast doors. The debris of the dome’s ceiling glittered at the bottom of the sphere, and huge, colored holographic projections hovered in the air all around the platform.

The place reminded Ryan of Mechron’s own holographic orbital monitoring systems, albeit far more advanced and damaged. The projections flickered, and all the platforms’ devices were deactivated. Whatever juice the ship used, it was starting to run out.

His group landed on the platform, with Len, Sarin, and the Panda crossing the bridge to secure the dome’s other entrance. Meanwhile, the courier and the Carnival members checked out the projections and tried to make sense out of them.

Ryan counted seven holograms, each using different arrays of colors; each representing strange and wonderful places.

A white shapeless cloud that lacked substance and permanency. It was as feeble and immaculate as a dream, but sometimes colored splashes gave it variety. A red star here, a green bird there. These phantom images only existed for an instant before returning to the white, and the shapeless blob at its core.

A crimson, vibrating storm of energy, full of lightning bolts, burning stars, and lights. A shining heart of nuclear chaos burnt at its center, the first and greatest sun illuminating the universe; and when Ryan squinted at it, he realized that this star had the shape of an eye. One that looked back at him.

A Rubik’s cube with countless stickers made of different matter: steel, glass, iron, stone, gold, zinc, water, gas… all metals, all liquids, all inorganic matters Ryan knew of were represented there. Other stickers contained substances he had never seen, crystals that shifted like living beings, blackened metal as dark as night, or pinkish liquid. Orange lines separated each pit of matter from one another.

A strange golden carnival of cubic angels, many-legged demons, cohorts of ghosts, and 2D picture-like worlds. It was the strangest of them all, a patchwork of chaotic ideas made real. Nothing unified the creatures and places of this realm, except that they only ever existed in human dreams and imagination.

A green sphere that superficially imitated a planet, but one where everything was alive. A pulsating cell with seas of green slime, teeth mountains, and forests of blood vessels. The atmosphere itself buzzed like trillions of microscopic flies, and the poles briefly opened to reveal eyes and jagged tongues.

A strange blue sphere of data, pictures, and numbers; a compendium holding all knowledge and information that ever was, is, and would ever be. The azure glow of a supreme godmind cast the light of enlightenment like a lighthouse in the night, while its neural tendrils constantly organized galaxy-sized libraries.

A familiar violet expanse of compressed space and strange mirrors closed this alien panorama, all overseen by an eerie, inverted pyramid at its center.

“The colored worlds,” Ryan said, recognizing the Purple World from his brief contact with it. “With one missing.”

“The Black?” Leo Hargraves asked, causing Ryan’s head to snap in his direction. “It’s a long story.”

Shroud, who had decided to float amidst the holograms, swiftly pointed a finger at the Orange World’s projection. “Here. Look at this one.”

Ryan’s eyes widened as he followed his friend’s finger. One of the stickers of the Rubik’s cube was made of a substance that the courier had already seen before. One that looked very similar to ivory, and yet with a unique texture.

“Doesn’t this remind you of anything?” Shroud asked grimly.

It did. The ivory sticker’s location was unusual as well. The substances that surrounded it were all metals, from iron to bronze and gold. It was at the very center of it all, the core of one of the cube’s faces.

“Augustus’ body,” Leo Hargraves whispered, astonished. “It’s the same color, the same texture… I would wager my life on it.”

One loop ago, Ryan had theorized that Lightning Butt’s body was made of an anomalous metal. It was the only explanation for why Frank the Mad’s ability to absorb these alloys had seemed to affect the invincible warlord. But doubt always remained, because how could an invincible metal make one immune to frozen time?

Now, it suddenly made more sense.

Augustus’ power gave his body the properties of a metal from the Orange World, the source of all inorganic material. A world made only of matter, without energy, without life...

“Death does not exist in the Purple World.”

A world without time.

“Adamantine…” Ryan whispered.

Shroud looked down on him from his vantage point. “Adamantine?”

“Hello, mythical material from Greek mythology, said to be harder than anything? Did nobody read the classics?” Ryan shrugged. “It’s as good a name as any.”

The courier stopped time by causing the Purple World and Earth’s dimension to align, creating an anomaly where he alone could affect causality. But that substance, the adamantine, didn’t come from either reality.

It was an unnatural metal from a higher realm where things like death, time, or the laws of physics held no sway. From its location in the cube, it might even be the ur-metal, the ultimate substance that all lesser ores derived from.

No wonder it behaved in such an anomalous way!

“So… Augustus might be an Orange,” Sunshine whispered to himself. “I always wondered why Julie couldn’t…”

“Julie Costa?” Ryan asked.

“She could alter life with a touch,” Mr. Wave answered, his voice more somber than usual. “Create new life, or give people cancer. Pretty nasty power, but one that could have saved many.”

“I thought Augustus slew her before she could make contact with him,” Sunshine said, “but it may be that Julie’s power simply didn’t register him as ‘alive’ in the first place.”

“But how do you explain his aging and tumor then?” Shroud asked, having clearly done his research. “We know he doesn’t eat or breathe. If he is made of metal, how can he age?”

“Stone degrades and iron rusts,” Sunshine pointed out. “And if he had a latent cancer before he gained his power, the tumor might have gained his invulnerability too.”

“I think his power only gave his body the properties of that alien metal,” Ryan theorized. “Lightning Butt may not eat or breathe, but I know for a fact that he sleeps, creepily so. There are still chemical processes taking place inside him, they’re just no longer biological in nature.”

It could be that Lightning Butt’s body reacted negatively to the laws of physics themselves, causing a slow, almost imperceptible degradation. It could resist atomic explosions, but not reality itself trying to reject a foreign element.

It wasn’t a perfect defense either. Frank could affect Augustus, as did Livia’s time-skipping. Other conceptual abilities might bypass the invulnerable nature of this metal.

“If so, then Frank the Mad might be the only person capable of harming Augustus,” Shroud said, “or whatever ability you used to defeat Geist—”

“Over here,” Len shouted from the other end of the bridge, interrupting the discussion. “Look.”

Ryan’s group rejoined their allies, making their way into the next room in a tight formation.

The next area had a source of light, namely red crystals embedded in the ceiling. This laboratory was far smaller than the metal sphere outside, but large enough to house workstations, biomechanical servers, and heart-shaped vats full of swirling liquid. Alien orange crystal growths had started taking over the ceiling like an infection, while piles of Wonderboxes lined up the southern wall. A large hole led into a dark corridor beyond the room, with the remains of a shattered blue gate laying in the middle of the room.

Forgetting all caution, Sarin immediately moved to investigate the boxes.

“I’ve never seen so many Elixirs at once!” The Psycho whistled as she opened a wonderbox, revealing seven bottles inside; one for each Elixir color except Black. “It’s a full war chest!”

Ryan paid more attention to the strange vats, finding seven of them north of the laboratory. Each contained gallons of Elixir, one for each of the seven standard colors. Computers, human computers, were linked to the devices by nerve-like cables.

It appeared someone had connected Earth technology to alien devices with biomechanical technology. All of them joined up in a central computer, equipped with large control panels and a comfy chair. Though energy still flowed into the machine, the screens had gone dark.

“Can you access the database?” Sunshine asked Shroud, as they immediately moved to secure the vats.

The young game designer approached the computer and reactivated it, but quickly shook his head in denial. Only a white spot to write numbers and letters had appeared on the screen. “It’s password-protected, and that machine is clearly Genius tech of some kind. It might take me a while to figure out a way to extract the info with—”

The Panda calmly put a paw on the glass man, gently moved him aside, and took the seat for his own. How the chair managed not to crumble beneath a seven hundred kilos bear of mass destruction, Ryan would never understand, but it survived. The Panda typed three passwords in a row on the computer, before the screen let out a melodious ‘ding’ sound and revealed a hundred files.

“How did you do that?” Shroud asked in shock, as Len joined the Panda to examine the computer’s data.

“I, uh, I studied profiling, psychology, and behavioral sciences,” the Panda explained sheepishly. “I made a psyche profile of the Alchemist based on compiled second-hand information, tried to figure out the likely passwords, and one of them clicked!”

“What was the password?” Ryan asked lazily as he approached the vats, observing the Blue Elixir through the membrane separating it from the outside world. To his surprise, the slime created a tentacle and waved at the human. “WorldDomination666?”

“HomoNovus6MagnumOpus!” The Panda replied, before explaining his guess. “Six is a perfect numerical number and a better bet than seven, the exclamation point reinforces security, and since the Alchemist likened herself to a god creating perfection, I figured ‘Homo Novus’ and ‘Magnum Opus’ were put somewhere. Everybody loves latin!”

“Nice guess, nerd,” Sarin replied, unimpressed. She kept searching through the Wonderboxes like a child through Christmas presents. “Anything interesting?”

“It’s all encrypted, but I can figure it out!” The Panda said happily.

“Once you remove the safeties, could you transfer data to my suit’s computer?” Len asked the manbear. “This… this may contain all the information we need to understand Elixirs. This room… this room might very well be their birthplace.”

Leo Hargraves crossed his shining arms, before glancing at Mr. Wave. The laser genome had moved in front of the demolished door leading into the next part of the complex. “Do you see anything?”

“It’s quiet,” Mr. Wave replied as he peeked through the blasted hole in the walls. The corridor beyond had no lamp to light it, leaving only an abyss of darkness. “Too quiet.”

“Keep an eye open,” Hargraves said warily. “This place is too precious to be left undefended, and yet nobody intercepted us. Something happened here, something terrible.”

“I agree,” Ryan said, touching the vat. The Elixir swirled in its container in response. “I suppose you won’t tell us what happened?”

The answer came in French, of all languages.

“Are you a homo sapiens?”

The voice echoed in Ryan’s head, between his ears, and inside his neurons. The courier flinched, while the Elixir grew agitated inside its vat.

“Are you a homo sapiens?” The alien voice repeated. It was neither male nor female, more like a robot trying to imitate words it didn’t fully know how to vocalize.

Ryan glanced at his group, but none seemed to have heard the Elixir. As he guessed, the creature used telepathy. “I have the pleasure of being one, yes,” the courier replied in the French tongue while he focused back on the Blue Elixir.

The answer came swiftly, and with a very different tone.

“I’m so happy!” The Elixir let out a psychic sound that could pass for a squeal of joy, and its voice turned cheerful. “Do you want to bond with me?”

Even though the voice sounded like nothing human, the tone reminded Ryan of an overactive child. “Uh, maybe later,” the courier replied, taken aback. He sensed his comrades’ gazes on his back. “What happened to the door?”

“It fell down,” the Blue Elixir replied, before instantly returning to the subject that truly mattered. “Can we bond now? Has later become now? That concept of time is so weird!”

“No, it hasn’t,” Ryan replied. “Can you tell me what happen—”

“Look, I really, truly, deeply want to bond with you. Can we bond now?”

“I’m… no!” Ryan said, finding the creature’s insistence oppressive. “No!”

“Why don’t you want to bond with me?!” The Elixir whined, annoyed and disappointed. “Don’t you want to be happy?”

“Riri, what is it?” Shortie asked. “Who are you talking to?”

“Why in French?” Somehow that was the part that bothered Shroud the most.

“Ignore him,” Sarin said, not even paying attention to the scene. “It’s better for everyone.”

“All I want is to have a passionate bonding session with you,” the Blue Elixir continued to court Ryan, not taking no for an answer. The courier was tempted to call it Nice Guy. “I want to be with you. I want to be inside you, to know everything about you. I want to fill all your cells and molecules, until we become one! It will be great! I will learn everything about you, know you, love you! I will always be there with you, for you!”

The wording sent shivers down Ryan’s spine. “You can’t force someone to bond!” The courier protested, and this time half his team looked at him as if he had lost his mind. Or at least even more so. “You need consent!”

“But all you have to do is let me out, so I can slip inside you!”

“I’m sorry, but… I am already in a committed relationship with my Violet Elixir.”

The Blue Elixir didn’t answer instantly, and when it did, its tone had suddenly turned into something far less friendly. “It only wants you for your cells,” it said.

Ryan sighed, and he suddenly realized that Elixirs being unable to talk might have been the Alchemist's intended feature, rather than a bug.

“It only wants you for your body. It doesn’t appreciate you like I do! It doesn’t know what you like! It can’t make you happy, but I will make you better! I will make you super-duper smart, or warn you of all dangers, anything you need to be happy!”

“I’m sorry, Nice Guy, but I am Elixir-monogamous.” Wait, did Ryan getting a Black power count as cheating on his Violet Elixir with Darkling? The courier never considered it that way, but now he felt slightly guilty.

“We can share!” The Blue Elixir tried to haggle. “If there’s not more than one, I’m sure we could share. Even if your Elixir doesn’t understand what you need, I’m sure I can teach it! I can fix you!”

Alright, this had gone on long enough. “Look, I’m not interested but I know people who might be,” Ryan said, trying to distract the creature. “There is a girl called Sarah, who I’m sure you’ll get along with. Or Simon.”

“Oh?” The Blue Elixir calmed itself. “Are they homo sapiens too?”

“Yes.”

The Blue Elixir let out a happy squeal. “When can I bond with either of them?” it asked. “Can I bond with them now?”

Ryan glanced at his comrades, their embarrassed silence music to his ears. His eyes then wandered to the Psycho in the room.

“What?” the lovely Sarin asked.

“Don’t look at me like that, you double-timer,” Ryan replied in his native tongue, before glancing back at the other captive Elixirs. Since one of them could talk but not tell homo sapiens apart, the courier wondered if they were in the process of being conditioned.

“On a second thought, I don’t even want to know,” the Psycho replied, grabbing a Wonderbox for herself. “Are we done yet?”

“Almost,” Len said, trying to find a spot to link the computer to her suit.

“Shush, Mr. Wave is hearing something,” the genome said, his body shining with bright red light. “Mr. Wave knew he couldn’t pass unnoticed.”

Indeed, Ryan’s suit picked up sounds approaching from the corridor. A thump, then another.

Footsteps.

The Elixirs suddenly started to get agitated, and Ryan sensed something familiar through their psychic link. An emotion as old as life and time.

Fear.

“It’s them…”

A green visor appeared in the darkness of the corridor, followed by an alien gargle.