Looking around the meeting table, one would wonder if the scientists had been replaced by quiet, boring, 10th dimension counterparts. Ordinarily, the minutes before a daily huddle were full of chuckles, joshing each other, asking each other for advice before they gave their updates to Cortex, coordinating something for the hangout. The usual friendly stuff.

But none of the men were speaking. Tropy was staring down at the table in front of him, hands folded, thumb twitching slightly, the corner of his mouth drawn tight. Brio was scratching his chin, breaking the silence occasionally with a loud sigh, as if coming to several conclusions, subsequently, and disliking each of the eureka moments. Gin was leaning forward, arms folded onto the table, smoke lightly wafting out of the rocket, eyes closed, brow furrowed.

And Dustrielle was leaning back onto the hind legs of his chair, ankles crossed onto the table, exhaling in a slow whistling breath.

Cortex walked over, taking his own seat, nodding to the men.

"He's coming. Now."

Dustrielle opened his mouth to ask how Cortex knew that, but he was interrupted by a humming sound in the air. A quick flash of light above the table made Dustrielle shield his eyes briefly, before looking up to see the deeply scowling face of Uka Uka.

"Cortex. It's been far too soon since our last encounter. You called me here to give me updates on the plan, so get on with it and tell me."

Before his battle with Aku Aku, Dustrielle had felt at ease when hearing the mask's rich, smooth voice.

Uka Uka's cadence, on the other hand, was a gravelly, simmering concoction of disdain and raw, infernal power. Dustrielle couldn't help but shudder slightly at the sound of it.

Cortex took a deep breath and, as if rehearsed, morphed his features into a wide, confident looking smirk.

"Of course, Uka Uka. First, of course, any team shake ups are best to address early on…"

He gestured to Dustrielle.

"We have a team member that's joined since your last visit. Meet Dr. N. Dustrielle. He's the one I mentioned in the message, the one who'd successfully defended our base from Aku Aku and that wretched bandicoot. But he's also been indispensable to our plans. So far, he's made fine work. He's been here two months now and - "

"A new record." Uka Uka muttered, before turning his face towards Dustrielle.

"Well done on that defeat of the bandicoot. Ideally, I would've liked a more permanent solution, but especially considering it was your first fight, driving him away from the castle screaming works fine enough for now. After all, that's more than I can say for anyone else here!"

Those last few words, Uka Uka raised his voice to a roar, eyes narrowed nearly to slits. Gin's lip trembled, Brio scratched his cheek, and Tropy grit his teeth. Dustrielle, himself, held his breath. Clearly, Cortex had… stretched the truth… on what had taken place between Crash and Dustrielle. He just hoped that everyone could keep that story straight, because he didn't want to know what Uka Uka would do if he found out that Cortex had lied about that.

Dustrielle nodded. "I…uh…yes, of course, thank you Uka Uka." He didn't think there was a waver in his voice, and he was thankful for that.

Uka Uka turned back to Cortex. "There. Now we're acquainted. Did you actually have anything planned besides a 'Meet and Greet'?"

Cortex sharply inhaled. "Of…of course, Uka Uka. I wouldn't waste your time like that -"

"You've wasted my time plenty, Cortex, but that's besides the point. Get on with it."

Cortex nodded, eyes shining as he turned his head to the others. "Alright then, Gin, care to kick it off?"

Gin nodded, getting up from his seat.

"Uka Uka, um, can you move slightly? I just want to project the hologram above the table."

Uka Uka sighed, but obliged, drifting over to float next to Cortex, practically perched on his shoulder. Cortex winced as Uka Uka settled next to him.

Gin clicked a button on the remote, and a projection of the Intoxicator, stored in the mountainside garage, flickered to life.

"So, today I wanted to show where we were on the mechanics themselves. This'll be a recording of the testing of the features I have completed so far."

The Intoxicator, like most of Gin's creations, was a sizable, powerful structure to behold. The hologram was small, and it was odd to see the machine like this, in a way that downplayed its scale. It was built sort of like a van, except fifteen feet tall, and nearly sixty feet long. Instead of wheels, there was fold-out landing gear attached on the sides and rocket thrusters on the rear of the vehicle's body. While there was a small cockpit, just large enough for the pilot and the instruments they'd need to control, the vast majority of the craft's space was a storage tank, meant to transport the mixture of Brio's toxin and Dustrielle's catalyst. The portholes for dispersing the toxin had fans embedded into them, to aid in the spread from the air.

Gin had admitted in private, to Dustrielle, that while the Intoxicator was nowhere near his favorite creation, it was, objectively, probably one of his best ones.

Displayed in the projection, the landing gear was in use, propping up the Intoxicator, the bottom of the vehicle raised about ten feet off the ground. Gin was sitting in the cockpit, giving the camera a thumbs up. He looked like a mere insect, with how small the projection was and how far away the camera had been from the Intoxicator.

"Right, so the rocket thrusters have not been tested yet, but they're the exact same ones that I've used for Doom Mechs 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, and Excavation Expert -"

"Skip it, I have no doubts about those working. The fans, the tanks?"

Gin nodded. "Okay… so for the purposes of this trial, I filled the tanks with water. Though, from a materials perspective, neither Dustrielle's catalyst nor Brio's toxin degrades the tank's metal one bit."

He clicked a button, and the video played. Brio's hand appeared in front of the camera, giving Gin a thumbs up as well.

The Gin-Projection pressed a button on the console in front of him, and pulled on a lever, bringing the craft into the air. It slowly rose higher, until the top of it seemed to threaten to scrape the ceiling of the garage, roughly forty feet into the air. While not visible in the video, Gin then hit a button in the cockpit, and a loud humming echoed for a few seconds, before a light mist began to spread over the ground.

Gin cleared his throat. "So as you can see, the fans have been successful in circulating the liquid in a way that disperses it evenly, without any waste. Based on the dimensions of the tank, and the effectiveness and self-sustaining nature of our chemical agents, we should be able to disperse enough of the toxin in a single trip."

Uka Uka tilted his face. "And fueling shouldn't be an issue?"

Gin shook his head. "Combination approach of petroleum, fission and solar. Same as the mechs. That's never been too much of a problem for me."

Uka Uka nodded. "Fair enough. I assume tweaks still need to be made."

"Of course, I want to fine tune the fans a bit more, see if I can get the cockpit any smaller and more efficient, and I need to run some more trials to make sure that it'll stand up to wind conditions, in case there's a hurricane that day or something."

Dustrielle watched Gin closely, as he made his report, and knew, deep down, that Gin was deliberately avoiding mentioning the potential use of an Elemental. Cortex had explicitly banned the others from mentioning the Elementals, and to let him do all the sweet convincing. After all the successful things were shown off and bragged about, of course.

Tropy cleared his throat. "Unless there's anything else that you need to see from Gin, I think I'd like to demonstrate some…well…technically it's physics. But I don't think that I'd be remiss in also calling it a bit of magic. Do you mind, Uka Uka?"

Uka Uka set his face in a firm expression. "If you mean to make me laugh, N. Tropy, it's not working. Get on with it."

Tropy chuckled. "Of course, of course." He got to his feet, and Dustrielle watched him straighten his back out, moving his arm in a wide sweeping gesture. While Dustrielle wasn't sure if Tropy had ever been a "theater kid", he could tell that Tropy was enjoying this opportunity to show off and perform a bit.

That was no clearer than when Tropy grinned widely. "I don't suppose I can get a volunteer from the audience?"

The men all looked at each other. Tropy was supposed to demonstrate the Quantum Lock, all of them knew that. But it seemed that none of them knew what Tropy wanted one of them for.

Tropy sighed. "Don't be shy, gentlemen. How about Dustrielle? Come here." He raised his hand, curling one finger, beckoning for Dustrielle to stand next to him.

Dustrielle looked at Brio, shrugging, and got to his feet. As he stood next to Tropy, he asked. "I don't suppose you're trying to make me disappear or anything like that?"

Tropy shook his head, laughing.

"No, of course not. Would you mind holding your hand out for me?"

Dustrielle narrowed his eyes, but obliged, raising his right hand up in front of him. Tropy waved his arm and a long cable-like item appeared in his other hand.

"Gentlemen, as you can see, Dustrielle is an almost normal and ordinary human being. Most importantly, for the purposes of this demonstration, he is a solid, physical being. One capable of interacting with other physical things in the universe."

He raised the thing in his hands. "This, here, is a quantum lock. I could delve into the temporal manipulation components, the ideal qualities of its effects, but let's shelve the lecture and show you."

He took Nathan's wrist and wrapped the cable around it, firmly but not tightly. Attaching the two ends of the cable together, he stepped away from Dustrielle.

"Now gentlemen, let's say that Dustrielle happened to be styling this quantum lock on a day when I'm so very cross that I could snap at the slightest annoyance…"

Before Dustrielle could even open his mouth in response, Tropy had wound his arm back and sent a slap straight towards his face.

Dustrielle yelped, and attempted to dodge, but he didn't have enough time to get out of the way. Or even enough to fully brace himself.

But as he closed his eyes, he felt nothing, and heard nothing for a few seconds. Tropy's chuckles and deep exhaling breath from the others eventually broke the silence. .

He opened his eyes and reached up, touching his face. He didn't feel any sort of bruising or pain. And that meant that he could put the full force of his anger and shock into his words.

"You dick!" He spat out, furrowing his brows further as Tropy grinned wider.

"My apologies, Dustrielle. I couldn't resist going for something dramatic. Besides, if, for some reason, the demonstration failed, I knew that you could take a slap with minimal damage. A hit like that might've killed Cortex."

Tropy turned back to the others. "So, Dustrielle, here, looks the same as you or me in this present moment. His consciousness is experiencing our time stream at the same speed and point in time as we are. But where the quantum lock comes in, his physical body is less than a second outside of our time stream. Meaning that nothing surrounding can connect with anything physical about him. I'd hate to leave him like this, though. I don't think a ghost would be as valuable a team member. So let's get him unlocked."

He pulled out a small remote-like device and clicked the button on it. The ends of the lock came apart, and the cable slid to the floor. Tropy bent down to pick it up, prodding Dustrielle hard in the shoulder as he straightened up. Gin gasped and applauded with a wide smile. Probably caught up in the theatrics and magic-show of it all, Dustrielle supposed.

"In essence, we can control which components of the Intoxicator we want to place outside of our time stream, keeping anyone from messing with the mechanics themselves. I think, considering that we're looking to delay any meddlers as long as possible, it would be best to wait until after the initial spread, when we plant the Intoxicator into the ground and teleport Gin out of there, before activating the temporal scramble. Leave the Intoxicator in an isolated, but fairly easy to find, place, while we finalize the launch of the Super Cortex Vortex. That way, the bandicoots can go right ahead and get confused and try to troubleshoot the ruse as long as they'd like, to no avail. We'd love for them to spend their final moments with free will scrambling to…well…unscramble the scramble, wouldn't we?"

Uka Uka sighed. "How many times did you rehearse the speech?"

Tropy raised an eyebrow, smile not wavering. "Does it matter?"

Uka Uka grumbled but shook his head. "It works. But get to the point faster next time. Anything else, Cortex?"

Cortex looked at Dustrielle and raised an eyebrow. "I believe that we still need to demonstrate our chemicals. Dustrielle, are you ready?"

Dustrielle took several deep breaths, still a hair unsteady from Tropy swinging at him, but nodded. "Yeah, I'm ready."

He walked back over to the table, bending down next to his chair to pick up the small potted hydrangea bush, and set it on top of the table. As he looked into Uka Uka's eyes, he felt his heart stop, and a slight wobble form in his hand as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the vial of mixed catalyst and toxin. He unfolded his prosthetic and pointed at the vial as he reached into his pocket to pull out a pipette.

"So, Brio's toxin here is going to be what actually shrivels the plants up. My catalyst, mixed in with it, will be speeding the process up and making the toxin more effective. With both substances combined into one liquid, a dosage of 9 milligrams per kilogram of plant is going to be enough to knock out pretty much any vegetation matter."

He picked up the pipette with the unfolded metal fingers and drew up a tenth of a milliliter into the pipette, dropping the liquid into the hydrangea.

"This dosage is somewhat concentrated for a plant this size, so the reaction will be a bit quicker than we'd expect it to be during the actual initiative…"

The plant began to shrivel as Dustrielle continued speaking.

"With the concentrations we'd expect during launch, the process should take roughly 17 seconds from exposure to cellular hibernation."

He pulled out a small jar from his pocket and sprinkled the dust inside over the bush, and the men watched as the plant began to grow green and straight again.

"Plus, of course, Brio already had made this stuff, so we do have our way to reverse the process, once we finally have the world conquered."

Uka Uka nodded, turning to Cortex. "You've made progress, Cortex. You surprised me. Are we still on the agreed timetable for the plan's execution?"

Cortex smiled. "Yes, Uka Uka, we are absolutely on track for executing the plan next November. I did, however, want to bring something up. A potential way to speed up the initiative. I don't know how fast it would speed up the initiative, but I would guess by at least six months. Just a spitball idea, really, but I think there's a lot of potential in it. Do you mind if I-?"

"Get it over with." Uka Uka's voice had risen again, tenuously striding the line between speaking and roaring.

Cortex nodded, swallowing hard.

"Good, yes, of course. So, I was thinking about all of the processes that would need to go into the execution, and I realized that each element could use a little bit of help. Supernatural help. Perhaps from the Elementals…"

Uka Uka shook his head. "You remember how that went last time. Or did you hit your head too hard, the last time you fought the bandicoot? They weren't able to stop him."

Cortex held up his hand. "Well, we won't need to rely on them to actually do the work. I managed to capture and harness the power of the Quantum Masks, so the Elementals should also be easy to capture and channel their energy. And we're not going to be fighting with their powers either. We'll be using them without any potential for interference: just in the production and initial spread. We just need to summon them here again, we'll get them captured and…and…"

Cortex trailed off as Uka Uka's eyes glowed almost bright enough to blind all the scientists at once

"I will make my words clear enough to get through your thick skull. You have consumed resources after resources, squandered year after year, drained my time, patience and energy again and again and again. You finally have a plan with some tangible potential, that mostly involves what you're best at: slinking in the shadows. You will stick with this plan exactly as we have plotted it out, because I will not have you diverting attention away from the one thing we have going for us now for a wild mask chase. At best, that diversion will delay implementation beyond what it is worth. And at worst, yet another failure. Consider this your final warning: one more major blunder, and you will no longer have my favor. Your leadership role will be relinquished. And I already know who will be your replacement. Consider him to be 'on deck' and watching your every move."

Cortex's neck was coated in sweat, but he nodded, his voice coming out in a strained whistle. "I…of course, Uka Uka. Yes. My apologies, it was definitely a bad idea. Wasn't all that serious about it, just was wondering."

Uka Uka's eyes dimmed down a bit. "Good. Next update for me will be?"

Cortex tilted his head. "Probably three months from now, with reports coming every two weeks until then."

Uka Uka rose back above the table. "Keep your productivity up, minions. For once, you've made me almost confident in you."

A bright flash filled the room once again, and Uka Uka was gone. None of the men said anything for a few seconds. Then Cortex deeply scowled, breath coming out in a loud huff.

Tropy perked up his eyes. "What did I say, Cortex? Razzle dazzle, alone, won't convince Uka Uka that-"

"I don't give a shit, Tropy. I don't give a shit what Uka Uka just said. He said it himself, we finally have a plan that plays to our strengths. And we finally have the chance to add even more power to that. We're sticking to the plan, and going after the Elementals. If he's not going to summon them, then we'll just pay them a house call. And if any of you say a single word to Uka Uka, you will be dismembered, your individual parts subjected to the Evolvo Ray, and whatever things come out of the Evolvo Ray will be subjected to the Cortex Vortex. Understood?"

The scientists all looked at each other. Gin looked perplexed, Brio's face was pale as snow, and Tropy's brows were furrowed.

He cleared his throat. "Need I remind you that this plan was already reckless and risky? And you're going to add going behind Uka Uka's back to this? This plan will bury us in early graves, Cortex."

Cortex grit his teeth. "And, technically speaking, Nefarious, I am your superior, and we will carry out the ideas as I see fit. I know, full well, that you're still aching for command again, but after your little misadventures with your egg friend and that other version of you, Uka Uka made the right call in giving me the reins again. We finally have the chance to get the world under our boots sooner than any of us would have ever dreamed of. Besides, if, for some reason, it goes south, Uka Uka always goes after me, doesn't he? So stand down, and start working on a new wormhole system that can get to the Fourth Dimension. Unless you want to find out if your severed right leg could prove a better minion than you are."