Instead of a witty one-liner, the perpetual Dante’s Abyss contestant drew his pistol. He couldn’t squeeze off a round before a ball of ice smashed into his hand and knocked the weapon from his grip. A curse word formed on the cancerous man’s lips, but he never got it out. The damn mouse ran up him and was gone, his tiny little form landing on a fucking flying carpet that ushered him up to a platform that now resided five or six stories above Deadpool’s head.
As Deadpool skulked, he heard a suave voice call out to him. “You know this wouldn’t have happened to Boba Fett.”
The mercenary spun and saw a grinning man in a purple suit standing at the entrance to what had once been the training area of the preshow facility. Karl Jak seemed undisturbed by the calamity as he walked over to the mercenary and set an arm around Deadpool’s slumped shoulders. “Don’t worry, Mr. Wilson. It’s never really the end.”
“It feels like it.”
“Just for now,” Karl muttered as they both looked up at the chunk that held the shuttle bay and one of the last remaining domes. “Just for now.”
“Will it hurt, Karl?”
“This isn’t your first time,” Karl replied with a coy smile. “It shouldn’t hurt.” He added as the piece of dome they floated upon shuddered and broke away. The yawning oblivion beneath them started to devour what stood around them. Deadpool didn’t bother to look down. He didn’t need to steal a gaze to know that their time was running short.
“You’re not Karl, are you?”
Karl furrowed his brow. “I mean, we’re all Karl.”
“The Karl. You don’t have the right smell. The one from a few years ago, before the crazy ‘heroes’ of this place forced him to retire to a beach and outsource his operations to himselves.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“You know where we are, right?.”
“Touché.”
“So where is my Karl Jak?”
“He had some work to do. Important work. Game-changing. He apologizes that he couldn’t see your game, sport, but I don’t think you’ve seen the last of him.”
Deadpool nodded as the ground shuddered beneath them. “Hold me tight, Karl,” the mercenary whispered as he drew the producer in close to him.
“I’ll never let go,” Karl whispered as the platform gave way and the entwined twosome plunged into the unknown.
***
From somewhere across the preshow facility, The Karl Jak watched the scene unfold on one of the monitors and frowned softly before flicking off the monitor. While he had certainly planned for the event to end in a grandiose fashion, Karl didn’t exactly recall planning for this much pomp and circumstance.
“Something feels… off,” the executive producer mumbled as he stepped away from the now inert watcher’s station and reached for his tablet computer. A sea of notifications awaited him, but he swiped right and thumbed the app that monitored the station health. When the screen flipped to a sea of angry red emergency icons, Karl’s frown deepened into a harrowing scowl as he craned his neck to look out the window. What should have been a normal, blue sky had deepened considerably into a blend of reds and oranges.
“So this is it, I suppose.” The producer whispered as he moved back to the tablet. Apparently, the Karl who had joined Wade Wilson wasn’t just spouting dialog for the purpose of creating tension and drama. No… he had recognized what was coming even before Karl had.
“I forgot just how good my mes can be,” the man in the purpose suit chuckled as he scooped up a nearby leather messenger bag and made for the observation deck’s exit.
***
Mickey soared up over the hanger. He saw Lord Zedd prepping the shuttle for final departure and knew that this was his last chance to secure the shuttle, find Yachiru, and get the heck out of this place. The mouse eyed the park dome, which was still tenuously attached to the shuttle area. The surviving secondaries had fled there, and he only hoped that he would be able to find Kenny’s companion alive and well once he dealt with Zedd.
“I SEE YOU, RODENT!” Suddenly, a bolt of lightning tore through the magic carpet, and Mickey found himself plummeting back down to the platform.
Although the mouse managed to land in a roll, he didn’t have the time to avoid the staff blow that crashed against the side of his head. Sent into yet another gosh-darn tumble, Mickey tried and failed to stop his own momentum. Instead, it was an upturned tile that saved him by virtue of his tiny spine wrapping around it.
Crying out, the mouse glance at his palm and tried to summon the keyblade. Yet, his fingers couldn’t form a fist.
“No…” Mickey whispered as he saw Lord Zedd stalking toward him. “Come on,” he spoke softly to himself as he tried to will his beaten little body into action.
“You’re done,” the masked warrior taunted.
“…not a chance,” Mickey wheezed as he lifted his other hand and aimed the keyblade at Zedd. “Got’cha, fella.”
The resulting burst of ice tore the metal mask off of Zedd’s face, causing the warrior to howl out in rage and agony as he nearly lost his balance.
Despite wearing a smirk on his face, Mickey couldn’t get up. He was out of second chances. The deformed visage of Zedd twisted to face him, and the venom in the man’s voice was real.
“Game over!” Lord Zedd screamed as he drove the bladed butt of the staff down through the mouse’s outstretched palm. Before Mickey could cry out from that new pain, the galactic villain sent a burst of lightning down through the staff and into the tiny prime’s body. Pinned to the ground, the king could do little but writhe and scream in agony until Zedd relented.
“Go die with the other imbeciles,” Lord Zedd growled as he inverted the staff and used the broad end to sweep Mickey through the broken entrance to the park dome.
With the Rodent dispatched, Zedd returned to prep the lifeboat.
***
The ground shook beneath Karl’s feet as his light jog devolved into an erratic sprint while the entire corridor around him sloped hard to his left. Adjusting his gait, the man—his coiffed hair slightly unkempt after narrowly avoiding an explosion just a minute or two ago—had to leap to reach the hallway exit before the steel floors collapsed with one last, defiant screech of failing metal. Grabbing the handle with one hand as his other clenched down onto his tablet, Karl threw his shoulder forward and bashed his way through the metal door.
In the distance, there was another explosion, likely one of the facility’s domes imploding into itself as the cosmic forces continued to rip and tear at the preshow complex. Whatever was happening felt a few steps about even Karl’s pay grade, but despite his efforts to reach out beyond the scope of the Danteverse, neither his technological or telepathically means could pierce the haze of chaos that had subsumed the place long enough to glean anything beyond the fact that many other places had issues of their own. His best efforts to compose himself and will the place back to its natural state had also yielded no results, save stalling him long enough that he was almost entombed in the office complex.
Truth be told, this felt like nothing he had ever experienced over the last half decade or so. His initial thoughts of invaders had given way to a real belief that the realm around him was literally collapsing into itself. Had rent finally come due for Karl and the rest of the denizens of this multiverse?
Somewhere overhead, something else collapsed, and for all of his supernatural powers, Karl failed to drag himself out of his own mind long enough to effectively dodge the falling i-beams.
***
Elsewhere, others still struggled to survive the calamity…
He didn’t know how long he lost consciousness.
All he knew was that he was woken by a gentle shaking of his shoulders. The king opened his eyes and saw a boy with a head of short, unkempt brown hair. The blue eyes that stared down at Mickey Mouse were familiar.
“…Blues?” The boy stood up, and it was then that the mouse saw the familiar red armor and gray body suit wrapped around his companion. “Am… am I dead?”
The unhelmeted android shook his head. “You were knocked out. You okay? Can you see straight?”
Seeing as how there were now three or four preteen machines swirling in front of Mickey’s face, he shook his head. “I… I can think, but my eyes are all googly.”
“Probably a concussion,” Proto Man whispered as he gestured for someone to come over and look at Mickey. It was a young man with crooked black spectacles and messy brown hair who craned his neck to examine the anthropomorphic mouse’s head and neck.
“Looks okay.”
“Can you be sure?” Proto Man asked.
“I told you I’m not a doctor, right? I studied ecology, not humanoid rodent anatomy.”
“What’s going on?” Mickey whispered as he was helped into an upright position. “Were are we, and why the heck are you here? They evacuated the primes.”
“I stayed.” Proto Man replied matter-of-factly. “You think I was going to leave without my best friend? Plus, people tend to stop telling you what to do when you aim a gun at their face. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, but when the place started to fall apart, I ran into some trouble. I held up the bar dome as it was collapsing… to try and let all the people get to safety in time. I wound up being crushed for a while. I’m still not sure how I’m back on my feet, but I have this he spoke as he pointed to something blurry on his wrist.”
“I can’t really see it.” Mickey spoke softly.
“It’s a recall device of some kind, from what I can figure. I can’t tell where it’s linked to, but I don’t think it’s somewhere in this verse.”
“It could take us to somewhere even more terrible,” Mickey replied as his vision started to come into focus. The mouse looked around and saw that there was about two dozen secondaries grouped into the roofless remnants of the dome. A distant hum caused the mouse to turn, and he saw a ship depart from the remains of the hanger area. It looked as if they had drifted miles from that location… how long had Mickey been out cold?
“It’s worth a bet, isn’t it?” Proto Man whispered as he took his friends bloody, broken hand. “Anything is better than dying here in this place, right? Wherever we wind up, we will still have each other, and that’s the most important thing. More important than all the other noise and nonsense.”
“You sure?” Mickey asked as his friend pulled him into a soft hug.
“Always.” Proto Man replied with a warm smile as he let go and held up his hand. “You ready?” The preteen machine turned to the others. “Everyone come together and lay a hand on someone… Get close, this might be a bumpy ride.”
Mickey looked around as the secondaries formed a tight group around the pair of small primes. In the crowd, the mouse spotted Kenny’s small companion, but he couldn’t meet her wide, unknowing eyes. That conversation would have to wait a little longer.
“To the next adventure,” Proto Man said with a smile.
“To the next adventure,” Mickey replied with a few tears in the corner of his eyes as the group vanished in a burst of white light.
***
“Sir?” A pair of hands grabbed at Karl Jak’s shoulders. The touch was gentle at first, but when no response came, a frantic energy suffused their owner. “Mr. Jak? Are you okay?”
With a feeble groan, the executive producer’s eyelids cracked open, revealing a haze of blurry objects. Before he knew what was going on, Karl was being dragged along the ground. He could vaguely hear what sounded like yet more malformed metal grinding and scraping behind him, but he couldn’t crane his neck. A second set of hands hooked him by the armpits and hoisted him up onto his feet, and despite the fact that his vision was still a barely coherent hell scape of fire, smog, and failing architecture, Karl’s legs didn’t immediately cave under the weight of his shuddering body.
“Are you in there, Mr. Jak?” A second voice inquired as someone snapped their fingers a few inches from Karl’s soot-stained visage.
The man recoiled from the noise and almost lost his balance, but he was able to catch himself and put out a pair of hands to fend off the group who had liberated him from the debris. “I’m okay,” Karl murmured as he rubbed his eyes in an attempt to stave off the last vestiges of unconsciousness. “Just probably post-concussive, that’s all,” he added as he looked around to see that he was now in what seemed to be part of the barracks complex. “How did I get here?”
“We found you maybe three minutes ago, half-buried under a collapse in the connecting corridors, Mr. Jak.”
The speaker was the one who had originally shaken the producer awake. With his eyes and ears now working as best they could, Karl could see that his wakeup call had come from a young man who worked in post-production. “Steve, right? Steve…”
“Steve Stevens,” the young man interjected as he brushed the scorched remnants of his work clothes. “We pulled you out from underneath the debris and dragged you along with us, Sir. We didn’t know if you’d regain consciousness or not, but we figured you were our best bet on where to go from here.”
There was still a dull throb that seemed to stretch to every nook and cranny of his brain, and with no painkillers or malbec in sight, Karl knew he’d have to grin and bear it. “The verse is collapsing.”
While the assembled Syntech workers had already made that assumption ten to fifteen minutes ago, hearing it from the realm’s creator caused several of them to audibly gasp. One even offered up the question that lingered on most of their minds: “You didn’t plan this, Mr. Jak?”
Karl shook his head. “I was just monitoring the competition and chatting with some associates in other verses when everything just started to unravel,” he remarked as he looked up through the shattered ceiling. Normally blue, the skies of the Danteverse were… a tapestry of chaos. While the majority was a conglomeration of reds and oranges, there was clear traces of a yawning blackness that was beginning to spread.
“We need to move quickly,” Karl muttered as he turned to face the collected group of technicians, office personnel, and visiting dignitaries. “Truth be told, I don’t know what’s happening, but fortunately for all of us, I’m always prepared.”
“I have some other survivors on short-range communications, Mr. Jak,” a voice called from near the back of the group of two dozen. “They’re still alive and fleeing the destruction… where should I tell them to meet us?”
Karl pointed a thumb down at the floor beneath them. “Basement.” He stated before waving his hand slowly in front of him. It took a little longer than he would have liked, but the steel panels started to peel away to reveal another hallway illuminated by flickering emergency lights. “There’s an emergency access tunnel that runs underneath this part of the facility. Tell them to follow the arrows to the door at the end. That is where we’ll be waiting for them.”
“What is waiting for us?” Another frantic voice asked.
“Hopefully,” Karl spoke before pausing to choice his words correctly. “A lifeboat… or perhaps an ark, if you want to be dramatic.”
Either that, or it would be their tomb.
***
Lord Zedd sneered as he looked into the vid screen and watched the last vestige of the facility collapsed into the yawning maw of oblivion.
“Goodnight, you idiots,” he wheezed as he rested his head. Finally, a moment to rest and enjoy the silence. No drama. No intense emotional outbursts. No more violence or hand-wringing or sleepless nights. He had just earned himself the best damn vacation that money couldn’t buy. Perfect, enjoyable quiet, with no primes or secondaries to infuriate him.
And just like that, a gratingly saccharine voice chimed in over the speakers inside the cockpit.
“Congratulations to #05 Lord Zedd. You are the winner of Dante’s Abyss IX, and our illustrious Grand Champion.” At the sound of Karl Jak’s voice, a compartment opened beneath Zedd’s seat that contained a championship belt and a small blue gem housed in a gold-plated metal glove.
“The shuttle will take you to the coordinates that you desire. Simply enter them, and you’ll be prompted to record a nice message to our viewers before being piloted to your destination!”
“Screw you,” Zedd growled as he reached out with both of his hands and tore out the speakers. Discarding the handfuls of scrap, he set his head back on the seat and clicked on the autopilot. He would figure out the manual flight systems when he felt like it.
For now, he needed a nap and a long break from all the idiots he had dealt with over the years.
***
Elsewhere, amid the final convulsions of the verse, another much larger vessel slipped loose the tethers of this reality.
As Deadpool skulked, he heard a suave voice call out to him. “You know this wouldn’t have happened to Boba Fett.”
The mercenary spun and saw a grinning man in a purple suit standing at the entrance to what had once been the training area of the preshow facility. Karl Jak seemed undisturbed by the calamity as he walked over to the mercenary and set an arm around Deadpool’s slumped shoulders. “Don’t worry, Mr. Wilson. It’s never really the end.”
“It feels like it.”
“Just for now,” Karl muttered as they both looked up at the chunk that held the shuttle bay and one of the last remaining domes. “Just for now.”
“Will it hurt, Karl?”
“This isn’t your first time,” Karl replied with a coy smile. “It shouldn’t hurt.” He added as the piece of dome they floated upon shuddered and broke away. The yawning oblivion beneath them started to devour what stood around them. Deadpool didn’t bother to look down. He didn’t need to steal a gaze to know that their time was running short.
“You’re not Karl, are you?”
Karl furrowed his brow. “I mean, we’re all Karl.”
“The Karl. You don’t have the right smell. The one from a few years ago, before the crazy ‘heroes’ of this place forced him to retire to a beach and outsource his operations to himselves.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“You know where we are, right?.”
“Touché.”
“So where is my Karl Jak?”
“He had some work to do. Important work. Game-changing. He apologizes that he couldn’t see your game, sport, but I don’t think you’ve seen the last of him.”
Deadpool nodded as the ground shuddered beneath them. “Hold me tight, Karl,” the mercenary whispered as he drew the producer in close to him.
“I’ll never let go,” Karl whispered as the platform gave way and the entwined twosome plunged into the unknown.
***
From somewhere across the preshow facility, The Karl Jak watched the scene unfold on one of the monitors and frowned softly before flicking off the monitor. While he had certainly planned for the event to end in a grandiose fashion, Karl didn’t exactly recall planning for this much pomp and circumstance.
“Something feels… off,” the executive producer mumbled as he stepped away from the now inert watcher’s station and reached for his tablet computer. A sea of notifications awaited him, but he swiped right and thumbed the app that monitored the station health. When the screen flipped to a sea of angry red emergency icons, Karl’s frown deepened into a harrowing scowl as he craned his neck to look out the window. What should have been a normal, blue sky had deepened considerably into a blend of reds and oranges.
“So this is it, I suppose.” The producer whispered as he moved back to the tablet. Apparently, the Karl who had joined Wade Wilson wasn’t just spouting dialog for the purpose of creating tension and drama. No… he had recognized what was coming even before Karl had.
“I forgot just how good my mes can be,” the man in the purpose suit chuckled as he scooped up a nearby leather messenger bag and made for the observation deck’s exit.
***
Mickey soared up over the hanger. He saw Lord Zedd prepping the shuttle for final departure and knew that this was his last chance to secure the shuttle, find Yachiru, and get the heck out of this place. The mouse eyed the park dome, which was still tenuously attached to the shuttle area. The surviving secondaries had fled there, and he only hoped that he would be able to find Kenny’s companion alive and well once he dealt with Zedd.
“I SEE YOU, RODENT!” Suddenly, a bolt of lightning tore through the magic carpet, and Mickey found himself plummeting back down to the platform.
Although the mouse managed to land in a roll, he didn’t have the time to avoid the staff blow that crashed against the side of his head. Sent into yet another gosh-darn tumble, Mickey tried and failed to stop his own momentum. Instead, it was an upturned tile that saved him by virtue of his tiny spine wrapping around it.
Crying out, the mouse glance at his palm and tried to summon the keyblade. Yet, his fingers couldn’t form a fist.
“No…” Mickey whispered as he saw Lord Zedd stalking toward him. “Come on,” he spoke softly to himself as he tried to will his beaten little body into action.
“You’re done,” the masked warrior taunted.
“…not a chance,” Mickey wheezed as he lifted his other hand and aimed the keyblade at Zedd. “Got’cha, fella.”
The resulting burst of ice tore the metal mask off of Zedd’s face, causing the warrior to howl out in rage and agony as he nearly lost his balance.
Despite wearing a smirk on his face, Mickey couldn’t get up. He was out of second chances. The deformed visage of Zedd twisted to face him, and the venom in the man’s voice was real.
“Game over!” Lord Zedd screamed as he drove the bladed butt of the staff down through the mouse’s outstretched palm. Before Mickey could cry out from that new pain, the galactic villain sent a burst of lightning down through the staff and into the tiny prime’s body. Pinned to the ground, the king could do little but writhe and scream in agony until Zedd relented.
“Go die with the other imbeciles,” Lord Zedd growled as he inverted the staff and used the broad end to sweep Mickey through the broken entrance to the park dome.
With the Rodent dispatched, Zedd returned to prep the lifeboat.
***
The ground shook beneath Karl’s feet as his light jog devolved into an erratic sprint while the entire corridor around him sloped hard to his left. Adjusting his gait, the man—his coiffed hair slightly unkempt after narrowly avoiding an explosion just a minute or two ago—had to leap to reach the hallway exit before the steel floors collapsed with one last, defiant screech of failing metal. Grabbing the handle with one hand as his other clenched down onto his tablet, Karl threw his shoulder forward and bashed his way through the metal door.
In the distance, there was another explosion, likely one of the facility’s domes imploding into itself as the cosmic forces continued to rip and tear at the preshow complex. Whatever was happening felt a few steps about even Karl’s pay grade, but despite his efforts to reach out beyond the scope of the Danteverse, neither his technological or telepathically means could pierce the haze of chaos that had subsumed the place long enough to glean anything beyond the fact that many other places had issues of their own. His best efforts to compose himself and will the place back to its natural state had also yielded no results, save stalling him long enough that he was almost entombed in the office complex.
Truth be told, this felt like nothing he had ever experienced over the last half decade or so. His initial thoughts of invaders had given way to a real belief that the realm around him was literally collapsing into itself. Had rent finally come due for Karl and the rest of the denizens of this multiverse?
Somewhere overhead, something else collapsed, and for all of his supernatural powers, Karl failed to drag himself out of his own mind long enough to effectively dodge the falling i-beams.
***
Elsewhere, others still struggled to survive the calamity…
He didn’t know how long he lost consciousness.
All he knew was that he was woken by a gentle shaking of his shoulders. The king opened his eyes and saw a boy with a head of short, unkempt brown hair. The blue eyes that stared down at Mickey Mouse were familiar.
“…Blues?” The boy stood up, and it was then that the mouse saw the familiar red armor and gray body suit wrapped around his companion. “Am… am I dead?”
The unhelmeted android shook his head. “You were knocked out. You okay? Can you see straight?”
Seeing as how there were now three or four preteen machines swirling in front of Mickey’s face, he shook his head. “I… I can think, but my eyes are all googly.”
“Probably a concussion,” Proto Man whispered as he gestured for someone to come over and look at Mickey. It was a young man with crooked black spectacles and messy brown hair who craned his neck to examine the anthropomorphic mouse’s head and neck.
“Looks okay.”
“Can you be sure?” Proto Man asked.
“I told you I’m not a doctor, right? I studied ecology, not humanoid rodent anatomy.”
“What’s going on?” Mickey whispered as he was helped into an upright position. “Were are we, and why the heck are you here? They evacuated the primes.”
“I stayed.” Proto Man replied matter-of-factly. “You think I was going to leave without my best friend? Plus, people tend to stop telling you what to do when you aim a gun at their face. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, but when the place started to fall apart, I ran into some trouble. I held up the bar dome as it was collapsing… to try and let all the people get to safety in time. I wound up being crushed for a while. I’m still not sure how I’m back on my feet, but I have this he spoke as he pointed to something blurry on his wrist.”
“I can’t really see it.” Mickey spoke softly.
“It’s a recall device of some kind, from what I can figure. I can’t tell where it’s linked to, but I don’t think it’s somewhere in this verse.”
“It could take us to somewhere even more terrible,” Mickey replied as his vision started to come into focus. The mouse looked around and saw that there was about two dozen secondaries grouped into the roofless remnants of the dome. A distant hum caused the mouse to turn, and he saw a ship depart from the remains of the hanger area. It looked as if they had drifted miles from that location… how long had Mickey been out cold?
“It’s worth a bet, isn’t it?” Proto Man whispered as he took his friends bloody, broken hand. “Anything is better than dying here in this place, right? Wherever we wind up, we will still have each other, and that’s the most important thing. More important than all the other noise and nonsense.”
“You sure?” Mickey asked as his friend pulled him into a soft hug.
“Always.” Proto Man replied with a warm smile as he let go and held up his hand. “You ready?” The preteen machine turned to the others. “Everyone come together and lay a hand on someone… Get close, this might be a bumpy ride.”
Mickey looked around as the secondaries formed a tight group around the pair of small primes. In the crowd, the mouse spotted Kenny’s small companion, but he couldn’t meet her wide, unknowing eyes. That conversation would have to wait a little longer.
“To the next adventure,” Proto Man said with a smile.
“To the next adventure,” Mickey replied with a few tears in the corner of his eyes as the group vanished in a burst of white light.
***
“Sir?” A pair of hands grabbed at Karl Jak’s shoulders. The touch was gentle at first, but when no response came, a frantic energy suffused their owner. “Mr. Jak? Are you okay?”
With a feeble groan, the executive producer’s eyelids cracked open, revealing a haze of blurry objects. Before he knew what was going on, Karl was being dragged along the ground. He could vaguely hear what sounded like yet more malformed metal grinding and scraping behind him, but he couldn’t crane his neck. A second set of hands hooked him by the armpits and hoisted him up onto his feet, and despite the fact that his vision was still a barely coherent hell scape of fire, smog, and failing architecture, Karl’s legs didn’t immediately cave under the weight of his shuddering body.
“Are you in there, Mr. Jak?” A second voice inquired as someone snapped their fingers a few inches from Karl’s soot-stained visage.
The man recoiled from the noise and almost lost his balance, but he was able to catch himself and put out a pair of hands to fend off the group who had liberated him from the debris. “I’m okay,” Karl murmured as he rubbed his eyes in an attempt to stave off the last vestiges of unconsciousness. “Just probably post-concussive, that’s all,” he added as he looked around to see that he was now in what seemed to be part of the barracks complex. “How did I get here?”
“We found you maybe three minutes ago, half-buried under a collapse in the connecting corridors, Mr. Jak.”
The speaker was the one who had originally shaken the producer awake. With his eyes and ears now working as best they could, Karl could see that his wakeup call had come from a young man who worked in post-production. “Steve, right? Steve…”
“Steve Stevens,” the young man interjected as he brushed the scorched remnants of his work clothes. “We pulled you out from underneath the debris and dragged you along with us, Sir. We didn’t know if you’d regain consciousness or not, but we figured you were our best bet on where to go from here.”
There was still a dull throb that seemed to stretch to every nook and cranny of his brain, and with no painkillers or malbec in sight, Karl knew he’d have to grin and bear it. “The verse is collapsing.”
While the assembled Syntech workers had already made that assumption ten to fifteen minutes ago, hearing it from the realm’s creator caused several of them to audibly gasp. One even offered up the question that lingered on most of their minds: “You didn’t plan this, Mr. Jak?”
Karl shook his head. “I was just monitoring the competition and chatting with some associates in other verses when everything just started to unravel,” he remarked as he looked up through the shattered ceiling. Normally blue, the skies of the Danteverse were… a tapestry of chaos. While the majority was a conglomeration of reds and oranges, there was clear traces of a yawning blackness that was beginning to spread.
“We need to move quickly,” Karl muttered as he turned to face the collected group of technicians, office personnel, and visiting dignitaries. “Truth be told, I don’t know what’s happening, but fortunately for all of us, I’m always prepared.”
“I have some other survivors on short-range communications, Mr. Jak,” a voice called from near the back of the group of two dozen. “They’re still alive and fleeing the destruction… where should I tell them to meet us?”
Karl pointed a thumb down at the floor beneath them. “Basement.” He stated before waving his hand slowly in front of him. It took a little longer than he would have liked, but the steel panels started to peel away to reveal another hallway illuminated by flickering emergency lights. “There’s an emergency access tunnel that runs underneath this part of the facility. Tell them to follow the arrows to the door at the end. That is where we’ll be waiting for them.”
“What is waiting for us?” Another frantic voice asked.
“Hopefully,” Karl spoke before pausing to choice his words correctly. “A lifeboat… or perhaps an ark, if you want to be dramatic.”
Either that, or it would be their tomb.
***
Lord Zedd sneered as he looked into the vid screen and watched the last vestige of the facility collapsed into the yawning maw of oblivion.
“Goodnight, you idiots,” he wheezed as he rested his head. Finally, a moment to rest and enjoy the silence. No drama. No intense emotional outbursts. No more violence or hand-wringing or sleepless nights. He had just earned himself the best damn vacation that money couldn’t buy. Perfect, enjoyable quiet, with no primes or secondaries to infuriate him.
And just like that, a gratingly saccharine voice chimed in over the speakers inside the cockpit.
“Congratulations to #05 Lord Zedd. You are the winner of Dante’s Abyss IX, and our illustrious Grand Champion.” At the sound of Karl Jak’s voice, a compartment opened beneath Zedd’s seat that contained a championship belt and a small blue gem housed in a gold-plated metal glove.
“The shuttle will take you to the coordinates that you desire. Simply enter them, and you’ll be prompted to record a nice message to our viewers before being piloted to your destination!”
“Screw you,” Zedd growled as he reached out with both of his hands and tore out the speakers. Discarding the handfuls of scrap, he set his head back on the seat and clicked on the autopilot. He would figure out the manual flight systems when he felt like it.
For now, he needed a nap and a long break from all the idiots he had dealt with over the years.
***
Elsewhere, amid the final convulsions of the verse, another much larger vessel slipped loose the tethers of this reality.