Prologue
The energy generator's silhouette of wires and metal had been loaded onto the truck already.
The Professor was pleased.
His reflection smirked back at him from the sheet of polished aluminium for the last time before it, too, was wheeled into the darkness of the truck.
A bumpy road trip to the middle of nowhere later and he would have his dream realised; an amalgamation of two worlds into one.
It would be beautiful, glorious! He would finally return to his home, see his mother again, see his beloved Sever... and rule over everything as the genius he was.
Very soon, he would be realised.
And the dawn of Team Psychose would begin.
Chapter I
"Sorry, Mom," The sneaking teenager breathed, dirty backpack slung over her shoulder and dirty grey trainers braced for a sprint, "Everything's gotta end sometime."
She looked up in the darkness of their front garden to the window at the right of the house's face and gave a sad smile to the still, lacy curtains there before turning and jogging away, her green chequered shirt flapping out behind her as she took the lane left, instead of right, as she might have for school.
Her sprint towards the woods at the edge of town was liberating and fulfilling and mind-blowing all at once. She realised, not for the first time that she wouldn't be going back there.
But, she really realised it.
And it hit her like a dodge ball to the stomach.
A good one, though.
And her dancer's legs carried her swiftly through the underbrush and into the first clearing she would come across, where she, Brody Ralph, gave an unbridled whoop of excitement and an impromptu, ungraceful, jittery, blindingly happy dance, before running on.
Brody, you could say, was not the most comprehensible of people. She took after her father that way; He disappeared when she was fourteen and, now at sixteen, Brody was following him.
It wasn't that she was unhappy with her life, by no means; she was just the type whose feet itched. Not in a gross way- she just had the constant need to be going, doing and being, in that order.
Her father had been a guitarist and a flutist and a harpist and a violinist and a cellist.
Brody had been taught the piano from a very young age and the violin by her father. But she was also a dancer, and loved to sing. Very clichéd for a young girl, she admitted even to herself, but she was the real deal; she wanted to be a famous musician.
After all, 'Brody Ralph' isn't a common name, right?
Shut up.
Her mother, unlike her father, liked the talk of adventure, much more than the adventure itself. Theirs was a whirlwind romance of two colliding Arts. He was her muse, she was his. And Brody was their result. She looked a little like each of them; her father's weirdly cattish eyes, slanting a little too much, but blue, her mother's long, dark brown hair and peachy skin (that Brody had ruined with a light tan by constant exploring in the sun), and her thin, willowy frame. Brody was fairly tall for a girl, as well, but not too tall not to be partnered in her dance school.
But that didn't matter now. She was on the road (The metaphorical one at the moment, as she was in a forest in the middle of nowhere) and adventure was afoot-
The ground jumped (?!) beneath her feet and she was thrown to the earth.
"What was that?" she muttered to herself, returning to the stage in her childhood when she'd been scared of the dark.
Her legs had been pushed up and she'd lost her momentum.
It happened again and she was almost lifted off of the ground after the strangely seismic shift.
"We're not near any plate boundaries here..." She muttered again, glad she remembered at least that much from her Geography lessons. Well, that and 'cumulonimbus' because she was reading Harry Potter at the same time.
It had felt a little as if something huge had been dropped.
Or like something huge was walking past.
"Godzilla," she tried to chuckle, but it happened again, and she swallowed her words.
Brody made herself as small as possible and listened for any growls, and the next footstep.
But it never came.
Instead there were voices. Maybe it was people from town searching for her? Maybe even her Mom?
Oh she'd be pissed.
Scrambling to her feet and brushing the dried mud off the seat of her blue jeans and white tee, she grabbed her dirty pack and snuck towards the voices, intent on checking before she scarpered forever.
Who knew? Maybe her Mom would wish her 'good luck!'
Not likely.
The clearing she spotted was strangely lit up with a bright, white floodlight erected in the centre.
In front of her were a mess of dark tents and she quickly flashed forwards to hide behind them, discarding the disconcerting flash of thought beforehand.
"This can't be the people from town."
Finally Brody reached the front of the tents, backpedalling quickly so as not to be seen by the people gathered in the centre of the clearing. Many were wearing dark purple and standing perfectly still. However, directly beneath the floodlight, many men and women flitted around two big, rounded off, triangles (at least, that's what they looked like to Brody), just with a large sheet of polished aluminium positioned between them like a massive gothic vanity mirror.
The large, black, 3D triangles looked rather ominous to Brody and their black surfaces seemed to pulse strangely.
"Those triangle-things must've been dropped there... they're sunk into the ground a little..." She thought to herself, growing more and more suspicious, her eyes darting about in intrigue.
"Hey!"
Brody looked towards the voice and gaped. She had leaned forwards and out of the tents shadows' and right into the view of a burly, brute of a man who was now charging towards her.
She, of course, screamed and tried to run, only to fall into the non-existent arms of a giant beast.
It's single, scarlet eye stared down at her not with malice, but curiosity and she strangely relaxed.
Brody could only think to herself that it vaguely resembled a bulky, one-eyed mummy before she was ripped away and frog-marched towards one very powerful-looking man. He was tall, even for a man, she could see, with wispy black sideburns and a shaggy mop of black hair on his head, too. His brow, creased at her, was striking with shapely brows above grey eyes and an altogether handsome face. Aside from the venomous snarl pointed at her, struck through by a scar on one side of his mouth, Brody would very happily have conjured up daydreams about him. (Jacob)
He watched her approach, ugly and beautiful all at the same time. She could see, over the man's shoulder, that the people in white must have been some sort of scientists, as they scurried about, typing things into computers inside a truck that she hadn't paid attention to before.
"Who are you?" The almost Bowie-like man spoke, his voice melodic and robust, capturing her attention and fright instantly.
She almost snorted at herself for her moe-ish behaviour, but remembered that; yeah, she was almost certainly in danger.
"Brody Ralph, sir." She answered quickly, knowing all too well from her mother's fiction that you never back-sass the villain.
Was Bowie-Man the villain?
The girl clenched her fist to stop herself from laughing at that. She was acting like Daphne (1), or something.
Then her internal monologue withered, because he was approaching her and she'd been let go.
"Why are you here?"
"Not to spy!" she blurted, before slapping her hands over her mouth and feeling crushed because she was about to die.
The man raised an eyebrow slowly, his whole posture relaxing as he chuckled, rubbing a long, tapered hand over his face wearily.
She watched him apprehensively, her body tense and feeling as if she might explode from fear and nervousness.
"I'm Jacob." He said after a long while of them merely watching one another, and Brody finally saw that he couldn't be as old as she originally thought. He wasn't a man at all. He was just older than her.
Nevertheless, her body stayed tense and her mind was screaming at her to 'Run! As soon as you can! Run!'
"Also known as Professor Nettle," He smiled to himself and Brody wondered at that.
An inside joke?
"I'm not from here," He continued, and Brody stared disbelieving as, yes, he began to monologue, "In fact, I'm not from this universe. Parallel's are odd things... but to be ejected... from your friends and family... the ones you love," He looked at her then, as if searching for some understanding, and she felt awkward. It was one thing to have him speak directly to her... but for it to be anything other than threats when she had been spying on what was clearly supposed to be secret... after all, it was gone midnight.
"That's evil, don't you think?" He startled her out of her musings, and she nodded, knowing that was the answer he wanted from the look in his eyes.
"Professor!" one of the scientists cried in alarm, just as Professor Nettle was about to speak, and he span around in time for them all to see the triangles pulsing faster now. Brody could feel the hair on the back of her neck stand on end as the pulses grew faster, and reached out farther and farther with each bone-quaking gush of murky miasma.
Then it reached her, and Brody very nearly threw up.
It felt cold, and smelt dead and she saw the beast with the bright crimson eye lurking towards it. People were rushing everywhere. Purple, white and the murky nothingness of the miasma was all around her, and she was stumbling forward, pushed and pulled and, suddenly, she was seeing herself from far away as the mummy-thing disappeared into its own reflection.
Now it was just Brody and her own taunting reflection in the polished aluminium and the triangles didn't seem so frightening now.
Slowly, she reached out both her hands towards It.
And, all of a sudden, the noise swelled up from nowhere and she was running towards It to escape the noise, and there was a voice screaming out her name, to stop!
Then everything was gone.
The sound, the feel, and the cold of the night, the light, and the scent of the forest... those things she hadn't really addressed were gone and, in the back of her foggy mind, she felt remorse.
The nothing lasted for what seemed like forever before she was suddenly colliding with horrifyingly sharp claws and talons, and sharp eyes were staring down at her.
Brody screamed, and remembered her name.
Everything came rushing back and, suddenly, she was that girl that ran away from home, but she was falling to the ground, and being knocked unconscious.
---
"What happened?!" Jacob growled, stalking up to the scientists cowering by their machines.
"Th-th-tha-at dusclops, sir!" a young woman with curly locks and a peaked nose wailed, "It did something and we tapped the wrong source!"
"What did it do!" he snarled, feral.
An older scientist quite used to Jacob's outbursts stood forwards and cleared his throat.
"It appears to have unleashed its evolutionary power earlier than predicted." The older man explained, "As it has yet to master its supposed power, the portal we conjured for you was too much for it to resist and it, therefore, destroyed our link and replaced it with its own."
"My dusclops is nowhere near the evolutionary stage yet!" Jacob insisted. "I should know!"
"That's what I'm saying!" The older scientist shouted, staring Professor Nettle down. "The powers related to an evolutionary stage vary. It may well be that your dusclops is far more powerful than you ever dared to dream. Be that as it may, you have another problem on your hands!"
"Oh shut up." He sighed, waving his hand as if to shoo him away. "I'm tired of this. Sever will return when I call, we shall just set the Ambigulator up again."
He began to walk away, barking things at his grunts and assuming the scientists would just begin.
However, he slowed as he remembered something.
"Where is that girl, by the way? Brody?
---
