All of the high-ranked Thunderbolt personnel had gathered in their main meeting room to discus Ryan's proposal. Including Mr. Makashima himself, which was a bit strange considering the last Aptom had seen of him had been when he was laid up in that hospital bed. Aptom was actually starting to regret not finding a way to send one of his "clones" into Guyver III's room, just to see what was going on in there. If only to satisfy his own curiosity.

Though, if it happened to be something particularly interesting, he'd be sure to tell Ryan.

Both since the kid was bound to get a kick out of seeing the Almighty Bastard King laid low, and because he personally wanted to find out if the kid had made up anything new for them to call him. The Dark Guyver always turned the most interesting colors when he was trying not to respond to those.

But thoughts of Ryan, entertaining as they were, weren't the most immediate thing on his mind. Even all the people in the conference room, all having the same conversation, were going almost completely unheard. Aptom was in commune.

There were others – sometimes he called them clones; mostly when he was talking to people who didn't know a lot about what he was – who had taken up residence in the ACTF's Alpha Site and were helping the soldiers to train against something like real Zoanoids; there were others who had infiltrated Chronos-controlled weapons dumps and were working to smuggle those weapons into the hands of the ACTF; there were even others that had managed to fully take over military manufacturing plants and had thereby been able to provide the ACTF with a way to make more of the parts that they would need. And now he was taking up the part of something the kid had called a Prime: calling up impressions from the minds of the others and gathering together the information that they had all gathered in their various ways.

This was what made him so dangerous to Chronos now: the fact that he could gather the thoughts and sensory impressions of the others, and put them all together into a coherent whole; and then, he could do whatever he damn well pleased with the "big picture" that he had managed to assemble.

Fuck, he was practically a Zoalord himself, now.

Come to think of it, that was probably why Balkus and his ilk hated him so damn much. A Lost Unit having the same capabilities as one of Chronos' vaunted Zoalords probably played merry hell with that old bastard's worldview. At fact that was all to the good as far as Aptom could convince himself to care.

As of right now, though, Aptom "Prime" was gathering all of the data from the others that had taken up residence in the largest centers of resistance against Chronos. He could also sense another Prime operating, and when they were mentally linked for a few, passing moments, the two of them were able to sense the other's location.

The other Prime was inside the ACTF's base just the way he'd thought; after all, he'd always kept in contact with the others that had been stationed in various Thunderbolt bases around here. It was how he kept just that much more well informed than Agito. It was a hell of a lot faster to communicate mind-to-mind than over an unwieldy and sometimes unreliable comm. unit.

All of the information that the others had obtained took a few moments, or at least it seemed to, to assemble. He always tended to lose track of time while he was in commune; so it could have either been longer or shorter. When he came back into his own mind – with the new information that he had been looking for – Aptom settled himself back into his own mind, and heard the meeting beginning to wind down. That meant they'd probably reached a consensus.

He'd find out what they had decided later; right now, he'd gotten all the information that he was interested in. Now, he was going to go see how his favorite little smartass was doing. Turning and leaving the room just as unobtrusively as he'd entered, Aptom made his way down the corridors. He only had five of the others at this base; there had been a few more of them, but two of them had been killed by that psycho-bastard Imakarum, and the other four had managed to sneak into some of the transports that moved supplies from one base to another.

There were very few Thunderbolt bases where Aptom didn't at lease have a token presence, and none of them were in Japan. Agito had been a bit pissy about the fact that Aptom had managed to get past so many of his guards, but he was very good at spotting and killing Zoanoids. So ol' Zeus tended to keep his mouth shut.

Eventually, Aptom managed to make his way back to the living area of the base. It was a good bet that he'd be able to find the kid there. And, if not, he could always check the mess hall again. Ryan could put away nearly as much as he could, at least given the right motivation. Maybe he should check there first…

Hell with it; he was deep in the living area, might as well check there first and then move onto the mess hall if or when he didn't find the kid.

Passing the rooms that had been occupied by Sho and his little friends – including 'Freezer and Feline Face; his fellow Lost Units – Aptom came to another locked door. Now, the room behind that door had been empty just this morning; he knew that firsthand, since he'd bunked down in the bed last night and no one had shown up to tell him to get the hell out. Even though he didn't need to sleep, it was still nice to have a soft place to throw himself down and not move for awhile.

Especially since prowling around this base at night had gotten really boring lately.

Still, things were bound to get interesting again now that Ryan was here, if only because the kid and His Royal High and Mightiness Agito Makashima couldn't seem to go for more than half a day without some verbal or psychological nastiness going on between them. Hell, their latest bout of fisticuffs was just one more thing that made it blindingly obvious that those two were not meant to work together.

As well as making it funny as hell to watch them try, but that was pretty much a given.

He'd already learned to override the electronic lock – which kind of begged the question of why they still bothered using them in the first place, but then his kind of "override" wasn't the kind of thing just anyone could do – and once he was inside, Aptom scanned the room for any signs that there was actually someone else staying in it. The room looked completely unused at the moment, and he would have turned right around and left for the mess hall if it hadn't been for just one, little thing. Well, more like a few things, and one of them wasn't all that little: the pile of clothes that had been tossed haphazardly on the floor would have been enough of a hint, but the music that was coming from the bathroom was a dead giveaway.

After all, there weren't many people in this base who'd be listening to that kind of music. And he really doubted that any of them liked their music quite so damned loud. So, that pretty much clinched it: this was where the kid was staying.

Chuckling deep in his throat, Aptom make for the bathroom. He could hear a lot of falling water, which meant that the kid was probably taking a shower. That, of course, meant that now was the perfect time to screw with the kid's head a bit.

The two of them may have been friends, but that didn't mean Ryan was exempt from this kind of thing.

Hell, that was what made it fun. He'd have never done this kind of thing with Sho; both because he still hated the little bastard, and also because said little bastard couldn't take a joke. In fact, it was pretty damn obvious that neither of the two Japanese Guyvers was very good with jokes.

Agito was too damned self-important to appreciate any kind of humor. And as for Sho, well anyone could see that he was too much of a sap to have a laugh at anyone else's expense. And if he ended up being the butt of someone else's joke, he'd probably start whining and blubbering all over the place.

There were times that he was particularly tempted to play a prank on him, just to laugh at his inevitable reaction. Of course, there were also times when he was tempted to just beat the little shit to within an inch of his life and leave him lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Aptom knew about temptation better than most people; he liked to think he resisted it fairly well.

Stripping off his own clothes, worn more for propriety than necessity, he tossed them down next to Ryan's; no sense in getting a perfectly good set of clothes wet, no matter how unnecessary they were. Closing his hand around the handle, Aptom let himself into the bathroom as quietly as he could manage.

Although, considering how loud the music was, combined with the fact that Ryan was singing at what sounded like the top of his lungs, he probably didn't need to have bothered all that much. Then again, you never could really tell with him; there were times that Ryan was a lot more conscious of his surroundings than he let on. That was what made screwing with the kid so damn fun.

"Come on come on, move a little closer," the kid sang, his voice blending pretty nicely with the guy who was actually singing the song. "Come on come on, I wanna hear you whisper."

Stepping into the shower – because there wasn't anything that could be taken as a more concrete invitation than that – Aptom felt the warm water pelt him. It was a lot hotter than he'd been expecting, and for a few seconds he wondered just how the kid could stand to take showers with the water so hot. Then, as he ran his hands over Ryan's soaking-wet shoulders, Aptom decided that it didn't particularly matter; the kid was tough, so what if there wasn't really any deeper explanation for it than that?

Hell, the kid himself wasn't really one for thinking too deeply about what made him tick, so that was the only answer anyone was like to get from him, too.

Ryan definitely had some muscles on him, Aptom noted; he wondered just how much of that came from the Guyver. Brushing his left thumb over one of the marks that the Guyver had left on the kid's back, Aptom glanced lower. That was when he saw the scars. There were three sets of them; each running parallel to one another, and all of them with that same stretched out "S" shape.

They were almost in the center of the kid's back, just below the Guyver's marks, and about half an inch from the spine on either side. When he touched them, Aptom thought that they felt like old burns; something like the scar on his face when he wore his humanish form. Something hard and blunt slammed into the left side of his head, distracting Aptom from further examining the scars.

Didn't stop him from wondering just where in the hell they'd come from, though.

He was sure that none of the other Guyvers had anything that even remotely resembled those kinds of scars on their backs. Of course, none of them could fire off electricity from their fingertips, or-

"Ow! What the hell, kid?"

"Does the concept of 'personal space' just not register with you? Or is it that you find something particularly fascinating about my ass?"

"I wasn't looking at your ass, kid," he said, rolling his eyes briefly, even as he saw the kid brandishing the bottle of shampoo he was holding in a distinctly threatening manner.

"What, is there something wrong with my ass?"

Aptom knew a loaded question when he heard one. "Not even going near that one, kid."

The kid chuckled, and he – being annoyed at having been smacked upside the head with a mostly full bottle of shampoo twice – grabbed Ryan's chin and planted a sloppy kiss right on his lips. It wasn't nearly as wet as Aptom would have liked, considering the facts that they were both still in the shower and he didn't really have any saliva glands anymore, but he liked to think he got his point across. That was, of course, right up until he opened his eyes to see the look on the kid's face.

Ryan was still smirking.

"Your technique could use a little work, you know?" the kid drawled, grinning in a way that reminded Aptom a lot of himself.

That was the last straw.

Grabbing Ryan's chin again, Aptom forced a bruising lip-lock between the two of them. Then, just to make things more interesting – well, interesting for him; traumatizing for a certain little smartass – he forced the kid's jaw open and shoved his tongue into his mouth. Feeling pretty pleased, since there wasn't much chance-

Aptom yelped, braking the lip-lock. "The hell- Did you just pinch my ass?"

Annoyed as he was about being one-upped again, Aptom still knew when he'd asked a stupid question. And damn, but that was a stupid question.

"Just give it up, red-eyes. You're never going to win this round."

Making a noise of annoyance, Aptom decided not to dignify that with a response. "How many more times is that song going to play?"

"A lot."

"When's it going to stop, then?"

"When I get out of the shower and turn off the CD player."

Aptom grumbled a bit; still, he knew better than to argue with Ryan about his music. Rampaging Zoanoids couldn't keep the kid from enjoying his tunes; not for long, anyway.

"Look, scarface, either make yourself useful and wash my back." Aptom caught the bar of soap that was lobbed at his head. "Or get the hell out and let me enjoy the rest of my shower."

Chuckling, he tossed the bar of soap into the air and caught it, one handed. "Whatever you say, kid."

"Oh, and if I run out of hot water because of this, you are so getting Mega-Smashed."

Aptom laughed, even as he continued lathering Ryan's back; their relationship might have been weird as all hell, but it worked. Somehow.