Chapter 1: FORGOTTEN FOES
I'm an artist, damn it.
Justin DeVeere was used to looking at things from every angle, looking deeper than the surface, understanding the parts and pieces of things. It was what he did, who he was.
But, even he had to admit, never before had he seen anything like this. Not even in his mind's eye. It was incomprehensible. It was a world thrown through a blender, torn apart yet still whole, shifting in impossible ways, coming together and splitting apart, like a world-encompassing kaleidoscope.
He looked down at himself and yelped, a sound that didn't so much come out as a sound as a puff of angry smoke. He was two people at once, the human and the monster. Justin DeVeere and Knightmare were superimposed over/inside/around each other. He could see his human body, made unfamiliar by exposed tissues and veins with blood running beside them, at the same time he could see that blue-and-coral exoskeleton with its lobster claw on the left and sword-like blade replacing his hand on the right.
He wandered, not so much walking as drifting, with only a vague sense that he was still somehow in Grand Central Station. It was impossible to have any sense of time in this place, this twisting fractal maze of pipes and wires and marble and tile and train tracks. It might have been a minute, it might have been a year, but after that interminable length of time, Justin knew he wasn't quite alone.
"Argh, help me!" came a voice that wasn't a sound so much as a mist, like the fog rising from a stream before the sun's heat could chase it away.
It was the mutant who called himself Bengal Tiger. He was similarly split between his saber-toothed beast of a morph and his human form, an impulsive, reckless young man named Caleb Abernathy. But his morphed form was destroyed. It looked like he had fallen into a shredder, one of those industrial machines for destroying documents, up to his thighs. Ragged tatters of flesh hung from his hips where his legs should have been, and he lay gasping in agony in a pool of his own blood.
Justin rushed to Tiger's side, more out of eagerness for the potential lifeline Tiger represented than out of any concern for his teammate's well-being. He recognized the pattern of the damage. It was Dekka's power that had done this.
"De-morph, you idiot," Justin chastised him. The morphing process healed injuries as long as your human form was not injured. Or at least, in the "normal" world, that was how it worked.
Funny, Justin thought, that anything about that world seemed normal now.
But Caleb/Tiger shook his head impatiently. "Morphing, de-morphing, that clearly means nothing here. I'm already morphed AND de-morphed! I can't- ugh, it hurts! Where the hell are we? How do we get out?!"
"There was a girl, right? Skin like a rainbow?" Justin asked. "She touched me and then here I was. I'm guessing you too?"
Caleb nodded, still wincing in pain. Justin noted with indifferent curiosity that he could literally see Caleb's pain, written in glowing light jabbing sharply across his brain and nerve endings. "Who was she?" Caleb asked.
"No idea. Clearly a mutant with some kind of madness-inducing power." But even as he said it, he knew that wasn't true. This wasn't mere madness, this was no hallucination. If anything it felt more real than reality.
Justin sighed impatiently at another wail of agony from Caleb. "Just, I don't know, focus on your human form. Your human form is fine, just try to tune out your morph, or whatever!"
As he spoke, he tried to morph, himself. He could feel his Knightmare body strengthening as he focused, layering itself over his human form. "Like this," he said to Caleb.
Caleb had had a lot less experience with morphing than Justin. Yet, as Justin watched, Caleb focused, and his human form seemed to layer itself over Bengal Tiger, just as Knightmare had done.
Something was wrong, though. The morph wasn't healing. Instead, Caleb stood up on his human legs while his broken morphed body seemed to levitate. As if he was standing on legs that weren't there.
The bleeding hadn't stopped, but somehow seemed to reverse. Tiger was still bleeding, but now the blood was looping tightly around and back into his body as fast as it was hemorrhaging out. It reminded Justin of solar flares, those telescope images of flames looping out of the sun and then back in.
Or at least that's what it looked like was happening. It was impossible to be certain what was actually happening inside this reality-kaleidoscope. The only thing he knew for sure was that the pain signals in Caleb/Tiger's brain and nerves had ceased. He was healed, even while simultaneously still injured. Both at once. A feat that would be impossible anywhere except here.
Schrödinger's saber-toothed cat. Justin laughed silently to himself at that parallel. He was no physics major, but like everyone else he'd seen the memes, the t-shirts with alive-and-dead cats, enough times to find Caleb's situation funny.
"What's so funny?" Caleb asked, and too late Justin realized that Caleb could see his brain waves the same as he could see Caleb's.
"Schrödinger's cat. Alive and dead. Or in your case, injured and whole."
"Schrödinger's Cat," Bengal Tiger, whose uninspired "mutant name" was already changing in his mind, mused. Then, the newly-minted "Schrödinger" grinned. "Yes, I quite like that. Come on, Knightmare, let's get out of here."