Beep!
BEEP!
BEEP!
Rex jolts awake. White Knight's voice is blasting in his ear, telling him to get moving. Rex's hand fumbles for his ear and he takes out his earpiece. He groans and chucks the thing against the wall. His head is ringing.
"Darn, I thought I remembered to take that thing out before I went to bed last night," he mumbles as he rolls out of bed. "Let's hope I don't forget tonight, three times in a row in a week is gonna kill my ears."
Rex trudges over to his closet to get dressed for the day, but a glance in his full body mirror shows he's already fully dressed. Which…is weird because Rex is fairly certain he changed into pajamas before bed. He must have been really out of it last night.
Begrudgingly, Rex grabs his earpiece off the floor and slips it into his pocket, and heads out the door.
The base is busy as usual and Rex sleepily dodges several agents running around frantically as he heads over to the cafeteria for breakfast.
"Rex!" Bobo pops out of nowhere, scaring Rex.
"You're in big trouble," Bobo says, "And that says something, coming from me. Follow me!"
"Jeez, what's the rush?!" Rex yelps as they go deeper into Providence.
"Hey Six, am I tripping, or is this the same exact EVO we fought yesterday?" Rex yells over the chaos as he chases after a part of the blobbo EVO. "You know, the one that Cèsar managed to merge back together with whatever he injected into its bloodstream? Where is he anyways?"
Six raises an eyebrow at Rex as he slashes the falling debris from a nearby building.
"Who's Cèsar ?"
Rex stares dumbfoundedly at Six. "You're kidding, right? My bro-" Rex cuts himself off as a familiar unpleasant feeling bubbles up from his stomach.
"Oh dang, incoming," Rex says, doubling over. "…Ow, my stomach."
Rex's eyes glow as information beams directly into his head. It's the blueprints to the machine Cèsar made Rex build yesterday, the one that trapped him in that awful bubble.
Rex opens his eyes to find his stomach being, once again, the anchor point to Cèsar's machines. He awkwardly tilts his body to face Six and the other Providence agents, who look at him in bewilderment.
"Ooookay," he says. "Either I dreamt up yesterday or something very strange is happening here."
"Rex, is that you?" his brother asks, taking off his helmet.
Rex grits his teeth and bonks his brother on his head with a small smack hand.
"Ow!" Cèsar says, clutching his head in pain. "What was that for?"
"Where the hell have you been?!"
"Uh, funny story, hermanito! So I was-"
"Arg, I'm not asking about your faulty laboratory!" Rex cries, stamping his foot in frustration. "I'm asking about—! You know what, forget it."
"Dammit, does anyone have eyes on Rex?" Six yells into his earpiece as he runs towards a group of Providence agents. The last he saw of his kid was twenty minutes ago when the boy ran off at the sight of the pink starfish-like EVO to only god knows where, and Six hasn't seen even a glimpse of him since.
"Lookup in the sky!"
Something crashes to the ground, and Six slaps his hands over his ears as a shock wave hits him.
Rex crawls out of the crater, his face covered in soot and his clothes in tatters. He falls to the ground and starts hacking.
"It turns out-," he coughs, "You can't just pluck objects going at light speed out of orbit. God, at least I didn't die this time."
"What?!"
Cèsar steps into a Del Taco, unsure of why tracking the omega nanite led him to this particular establishment.
"Hey, Cèsar ! Over here!" a young Hispanic teen yells from a booth, waving him over. He's wearing gaudy sunglasses and a rhinestone jacket.
"Jesus Christ. What happened to you, Rex?"
"Gah, how come you always recognize me within, like, two seconds?! I didn't even get to quote the Del Taco vine at you!"
"Rex, why are you wearing a gorilla suit?"
"HOW?!"
"You want to see a picture of you and Papi?" Cèsar asks Rex as the lab violently flips over.
"Yeah, sure. Bring it up," Rex says as trips and falls face-first on the floor.
Rex bursts through Providence's doors and skids to a stop.
"OH MY GOD, SIX! WHAT DID YOU DO?!" Rex yelps.
"Invaders know the risks of breaking into Providence. I simply took them out," Six says calmly as he yanks his swords out of Cèsar 's suit. Blood gushes out of the wound.
"Not that one! That's my brother, and he's an idiot! He wouldn't know an EVO if one smacked him on the head!"
Rex lays asleep in his bed, hot and sweating. He's murmuring as Holiday checks his temperature.
"White Knight, Rex is in no condition to head out into the field today. He's sick, and has a very high fever."
"I thought he wasn't supposed to have those?" White Knight asks as Holiday marks something down on her clipboard.
"He's not invincible to disease." Holiday rolls her eyes and continues with Rex's in-bed check-up. "He must have caught something big, his nanites are multiplying at a faster rate than what they would be if the common cold virus was in his body."
"Aaaaand another +2 card. Your turn, Biowolf," Skalamader says, carefully laying down a red Uno card without scratching it with his crystals.
''I hate this game," Biowolf grumbles as he's forced to draw from the deck continuously. "I never have any reds."
As he's doing so, a blue portal rips into the fabric of space, and out falls a battered Rex, who grabs Breach by the arm.
"Breach!" he gasps.
Breach starts at the touch of his hands and shrieks.
"Hey Breach, I need— Ok, stop screaming. Seriously stop, I have a headache. I need your help with creating portals. I figured out how to tear space but not time. It would be utterly talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, showstopping, and spectacular of you if you would help me. I've been having this one problem and I've been going nuts."
"Oh, this is trippy," Rex says as he flies above the frozen Earth. He dodges a rocket held in place.
"Okay, just gotta find a grey blur a mile wide. This is gonna take forever."
Cèsar frantically clicks off all the warnings popping up on his lab's screens as he reboots the engine system. Sounds echoed weirdly about his moving lab, likely due to the speed at which the lab is going, which is heading ever closer to light speed.
His head hurts. The lab doesn't stop. The engine has almost finished rebooting. He thinks he accidentally knocked down a cup of coffee in Abysus, which has probably molded by now.
Suddenly it all lurches to a stop and Cèsar finds himself on the floor with no memory of falling. He groans as he sits up. He needs to know how long he's been flying around but his false eye isn't where it's supposed to be (his eye socket) and he can't see straight without it. He feels bare without its electronic graphics overlaying his vision.
Cèsar is on his hands and knees searching for his eye when he hears the familiar sound of nanites powering up. His lab door opens.
"HA!" a young man yells. "I finally did it," he says with a smug face.
"Who are you?" Cèsar asks.
The man stares at Cèsar incredulously and then bursts into a huge grin.
"Oh, you know me," he giggles. "I'll give you a hint: it's been five years~!" He wiggles a charred gloved hand.
It takes Cèsar a moment to place the young man. A very long moment because the guy standing in front of him has very few similarities to his cute little menace of a brother.
"Rex?!"
"That's me! ;D "