a/n: What if the tubes at Stonehenge were prototypes for the tubes in NPC during M3? We know that Porky well could have been plenty powerful by then… when does he get that mech, anyways?

x:x:x:x

A city.

A glowing city. Practically pulsating with energy, choking with exhaust, swimming in spirits.

You feel… bubbly. Bubbly and light and really really happy, so happy you think you're going to toss your cookies right then and there. Or is that terror?

Tony is sick.

You don't like this city. Not that you can get a good look at it to make an objective decision, you're half blind and the scraps of scenery you can detect are dancing through your senses, jabbing at your oxygen-deprived brain. H…happy.

Tony knows that he is sick. Half-blind, see? Your eyes still tell him little, his prison is dark, the inside walls glimmering, sickening painted, or one-way visibility, he can't tell at this point, can't remember if it's changed or has always been this dark.

Glamorous. Gaudy, the city, and you're going two hundred kilometers an hour, it feels like. Tony's lost all sense of time. He can't base time passage on breathing, either, as each in-out cycle is as irregular and difficult as the last. His respiratory system is not designed for this type of abuse.

He hears a sickening laugh, catches a broad swatch of movement somewhere beyond his cell. The laugh both pierces through and reinforces his hallucinations, and the simultaneous anger, fear and no no not reverence, you try to tell yourself make his head spin even more.

If he had any cookies to toss, Tony decides, they would have been, but both sustenance and oxygen have been sparse here. In the city, there is no such thing as want, as thirst or hunger, according to the King. He is…. good.

Many parts of Tony hurt by now: the bruises, cuts, scrapes from rough handling; the aches of food and water deprivation; the way his throat screams at him from the way he's been forcing this fluid through it he doesn't even know how long now. It… hurts…

An almost-image swims through your cluttered consciousness, and you recognize it as Him. The King. You… you feel… so… h-happy, that you could scream, and Tony wants to. To scream.

Tony has tried everything he can to get out of this dark bright, faraway place, but he's tired and just about out of ideas.

Jeff never seems to run out of ideas. That boy is a threat to the King. An enemy, and as soon as Tony feels that thought and that totally foreign hatred—no, I never! Never Jeffrey, he knows someone, something is in his head, changing him in a way he was altogether quite opposed to being changed.

He can only hope that if he makes it out of here, he'll still know who Tony really is.