A rather large, cumbersome contraption stands at the center of a rather cluttered, chaotic mess of a laboratory, a tangled jumble of twisted metal pipes connected to a cylindrical pod of faded transparent glass. Attending to this convoluted metal behemoth is a rather sorry looking young man clothed all in white; white lab coat, pants, boots, even his skin seems afflicted with the same ghastly pallor that tinted his clothes.

The frail young man is completely still as he stands before his machine; his hands limp and unmoving at his sides, his knees weak, dangerously close to buckling, his entire frame precariously close to collapse. He's on the verge of unconsciousness, this young man, from hunger and sleep deprivation both. He's frail and he's weak and his body is falling apart at the seams, but he knows that this is what he must do. He's accepted this as necessary, so he just stands, still, a silent sentinel before a goliath of a machine, waiting... waiting....

His eyes, those deep pools of piercing electric blue, hover slowly over a set of flashing, swiftly changing numbers on a panel set in the chamber, drift back to the glass, and then back again as he waits, desperately wanting it all to end. He is tired, unbearbly so, the soul draining sort of tired that just doesn't go away. But still he stays, devoted to his work, his gaze unblinking, his will unwavering. Vision of glory, of success, of power, of wealth, of change, of the League dance inside his mind as he struggles to keep sane, to keep awake, to keep standing, and he doesn't know how much longer he can take, but then... then he catches a glimpse of the timer back on the panel and a smile manages to finally find its way onto his sullen, weary, wrinkled face. It's finally time, he thinks, watching the numbers slide on down from two... to one... and then... zero.

Hiss! A sputtering of steam and a cacophony of clanking gears ring out in synchrony into the silence. The young man attending to the machine steps back, the grin spread across his features growing wider and wider, the fire in his eyes burning brighter and brighter.

The cylindrical walls of the chamber begin to disintegrate, and a quaint looking gush of polychromatic mist wafts into the air of the small laboratory, and as the smoke clears, dissipating into the atmosphere, as the colors fade back to the bland, boring monochrome of the lab's dully painted walls, the young man is finally able to see the result of his many months of hard work. Standing there, suspended by tubes and pipes and wires, is a body, male, broad, tall. His eyes are shut, his hearbeat nonexistent, but the ghost of a proud, proud smile still lingers about his once handsome features.

"Rise and shine, Captain Hammer," says the man, Johnny Snow, leaning close, bringing him just inches away from the corpse, his manic, crazed breaths conjuring puffs of thin smoke in the face of the hero that once was. "It's time to save the day."

Doctor Horrible spends most of his time in the dream nowadays, his head wrapped in that hideous metal helmet, his crown domed, pipes jutting out of it, his eyes visored, hidden from the rest of the world, his soul, his mind, his heart encased in that... horrible hunk of steel. But as foul as it is, one can't help but be amazed by it, by the sheer wonder his marvelous, disgusting invention can bring about, and, sad as it is, one can't blame the poor man for staying so long inside. He spends, now—though his compatriots at the league don't ever notice how the black below his eyes seems to darken with each passing day, don't see that his self was in fact, slipping swiftly away, that his identity now was just a facade—his almost every waking day inside the dream, inside that machine, wallowing in the incredible images it can bring forth, surrounding himself with the very substance of his every fantasy, alone, in his laboratory, until the League summons him forth from his cave.

And so he stays there, all his sorry, miserable while, and he has no care for the beauty of the sunset or the feel of the crisp whispers of the wind blowing through his hair. He only cares about what he has fabricated, his creations, the bastard children of his mind. He only cares about Penny, now, or at least, the Penny he has fashioned from the clay of his mind, his thoughts, his imagination, the Penny that lives only inside of the dream, the Penny he can only see behind that visor.

Everyday he walks away from her, he comes back feeling worse, every minute he has to spend away from her, he suffers, and so he tries his hardest to spend as long as he can in his lab, not coming up for days at a time, instructing his servant, Moist, to deliver him food and drink through tubes connected to the helmet. But today is different. Today, Moist doesn't come.

The helmet clatters harshly to the ground with a resounding thud at fifty two hours into the Doctor's trip, as Horrible falls to his knees at his table, crippled with severe pangs of hunger and thirst. The images of Penny fade around him, and he finds himself alone in his old lab. He tries to stand but only manages to trip and fall over many toys he'd once fancied he'd use to take over the world. The room is blurring, fading, distorted by his weakened senses, by the feeble condition his mind is in.

"M-moist!" He is surprised himself when a word finally escapes his dry lips, but even more so by the softness of his own voice, marveling at how weak he now sounds. He looks up, reaching for the doorknob with fumbling hands, and when he finally secures a firm grip on it, he tries to pull himself up.

But suddenly, the door swings forward without a push from his side, and the Doctor, having been using it for support, stumbles with it, falling face first onto the ground. He groans sorely, and as he writhes and struggles to stand, he comes face to face to....

"Well, hello there, Doc! It's been a while." Hammer's face is but a faint shadow of what it once was; the smile on his face is too sinister, the fury brimming behind his squinted eyes unbecoming of the former hero. And in that moment, staring up at his old nemesis, weak and powerless, Horrible feels fear for the first time in a long while, fearing dearly for his life, for the first time since joining the League, shrinking and wincing at the thought of pain, at how absolutely defenseless he is.

And then he looks up, and Hammer is gone. J-just... a hallucination, he thinks, trying his best to shrug it off, trying his best to calm himself, to slow the thundering pace of his heartbeat as it pounded in his chest, a startlingly, painfully clear hallucination.

Slowly, the Doctor manages to stand, clutching onto a nearby desk for support. He staggers forward and into the living room, looking around for any sign of Moist. Familiar sights, now faded with the passing of time, jump out at him, his computer, where he once filmed his now-retired blog, the freeze ray on its tripod right next to it, the couch, where he once sat with Moist.... The memory jolts him back into action, reminding him why he was hurting so, and he slowly walks forward, suddenly becoming more and more aware of the burning in his throat and his stomach, trying to find the man Moist, who had once been his friend.

"Moist!" His voice is less rough than it was, but it was still painfully weak. "God damn it, what the hell am I paying for if you're not even—"

He stops mid-shout, as a translucent blur of sky blue crystal catches his eye. It's oddly shaped, a towering likeness of a human carved from ice, and as Doctor Horrible lumbered toward it, the face encased in the deathly pallor of winter's frost became clearer... more... familiar.

"M-moist?"