It's been about three hours since they were first pushed into this dismal cell, and the seconds keep dragging on.
The platypus has finally stopped throwing up, but he's still shaking and burning with fever. Perry does his best to keep him calm, running his hand through the fur (or is it tiny feathers? Either way, it's delicate and probably very soft) on the platypus's back.
His mind has finally slowed down from its nearly ceaseless racing, accepting these circumstances for the time being.
It's probably a good thing that they're here, actually. The platypus might actually get medical attention here.
Apparently, platypuses are also extinct at this point in history, so they might clone him too. They're over five hundred years ahead of 1996, and if they could clone a sheep back then, they could probably clone a platypus in 2358.
Would it hurt to be cloned? Perry has no idea- he's never been cloned. It probably depends on what sort of method they use.
Regardless, it'd be pretty cool to say. I've been cloned in the future- man is platypus Perry going to have a cool story for when he gets home.
The door rattles, like someone is unlocking the lock. Perry sits bolt upright, his hand tensing on platypus Perry's back. His other hand curls into a fist, the spikes on his knuckles popping out without a second thought.
The door squeaks as it opens, and a guard with an opaque face shield and a strange electric katana on his belt enters the room.
"Give me the platypus," the faceless guard says, their voice completely monotone. Almost robotic- but the way the guard shifts their weight suggests that they're a real human.
Perry stands up, pushing the platypus behind him. "Why?"
"It's sick, right?" Perry nods.
"We might have put you both in prison, but we're not cruel. We're not going to let it die," the guard says. "Besides, if we get a DNA sample, we'll be able to bring back the platypus, and thus traveling through time with this particular extinct species will no longer be illegal." He pauses. "Because it won't be extinct any more, you see."
Perry nods. He got that, actually. He's not quite as stupid as he looks.
That's part of the problem of being an ex-brute force killer. In the public eye, especially with the whole mind-control thing, everyone either sees him as a threat or an idiot.
It depends on what they believe. If they think he wanted to do it, he's a threat, if they think he was weak minded enough to willingly go along with Doofenshmirtz, he's an idiot.
Nobody ever thinks about the truth. He doesn't blame them- it's hard for him to think about too. There's still days where he blames himself for his past, psychoanalyzes himself until he's convinced he wanted to be at Doofenshmirtz's right hand.
He doesn't even blame people for the threat part. He's trying to be as unassuming in normal life as possible, but that's a bit hard when your face is half covered in titanium alloy and your hands still have spikes in them.
Either way, people tend to make the assumption that he's about as smart as a can of Spam.
Somewhat reluctantly, he picks up the shivering platypus and hands him over to the guard. The guard takes platypus Perry away, cradling him with a surprising amount of care, and Perry is left on his own.
Perry's stomach sinks when he realizes that the spikes on his hand are still extended. Three years, and he still can't shake the damn reflexes. Talk about being a threat- if this is what happens in a situation like this, then what happens in a real fight?
Sure, the spikes have been blunted to the point they can barely cut through softened butter, (one of the many, many concessions from his trial, and one of the first ones he agreed with) but it's the principle of the thing.
Still, he hopes he never has to find out.
Perry sighs and sits back down on the cot, eyes roving over the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cell, looking for anything interesting. Anything that might give him an escape route from this dismal prison.
As far as he can tell, there's nothing. The floor is a solid concrete slab, with a circular drain the size of a softball in the center. Much too small to fit down, even for the platypus, and it's covered with a metal grate that's been cemented in anyway. The walls are made of the same concrete. One of them has a solid metal door on it, with a three inch tall slot at the bottom of it. Food tray slot, probably.
The ceiling has one square vent in it, directly above the floor's drain.
Now that might actually be big enough to fit through. If only he could get to it...
Perry stands on the cot in an attempt to reach it, but he's just a couple inches short of being able to reach. Being five foot four- not fun. Jumping up to reach it proves fruitless, as all it does is rattle.
"Hey, cut that out," a voice shouts from farther down the hall. It sounds fairly far away (yay for enhanced hearing), but Perry startles anyway. He sits back down on the cot, heart pounding.
After a few minutes, when it becomes fairly certain that he's not going to be punished, he gets up to look closer at the walls.
As it turns out, there's nothing save for a few scratches on the wall above the toilet that spell something in cryllic letters. Perry doesn't know Russian, so whatever information is on that wall is completely and utterly useless to him.
Oh well. It was probably something entirely unhelpful like "Vlad was here" or "the food sucks" anyway.
Which, yeah, it's a prison. Of course the food sucks. It's kind of a given. And that's if you get any- the memories of his "reprogramming" with the Doofenshmirtz of his dimension are still vivid.
This cell isn't even all that different. The walls are gray, instead of plain white, and the cot is along a different wall, but almost everything else is similar.
It's unsettlingly familiar. So much so that the little voice at the back of his head- the one he's been working on silencing for years now, clearly it hasn't been permanent- is wondering what he can do to pledge his loyalty to the powers keeping him here.
He presses his face into his hands. No, no, don't think about that. Bad idea. Remember how bad the last dictator that used you for a free death-machine was?
Perry takes a deep breath. There's surely a way out of here that doesn't involve waiting ten to fifteen years, or joining a facist dictatorship.
He closes his human eye. With a few presses of the buttons on his left arm (having a partially computerized central nervous system isn't all bad), his robotic eye is scanning the room for cameras.
Oddly, nothing. He tries again, this time looking for the signals given off by anything wireless, but this attempt yields no results either. Thermal scanning only tells him that the air flowing down from the vent in the ceiling is seventy one point five degrees fahrenheit, and that the water in the toilet is sixty eight point nine degrees fahrenheit.
Even concentrating on the sounds in the room does nothing. There's the soft sound of air flowing through the vents, the sounds of footsteps a little ways down the hall, but no tell-tale electronic whine.
Well, either there aren't any cameras around, or they've got some sort of technology he doesn't know how to scan for.
Or can't scan for. After all, this is five hundred years into the future. Tech is different, as evidenced by the flying cars.
Flying cars. Pretty hard- okay, maybe not that hard to believe, given that the Doofenshmirtz from his dimension had one.
Perry had never set foot inside it, in fact he had barely even seen it. After Doofenshmirtz was hauled away, it got confiscated, along with pretty much everything else from the tower.
About a third of that tech had been taken by the military, another third or so had been destroyed, and the remaining third had been sent to research labs all over the place.
And Perry himself had been partially included in that last third. He doesn't live in Danville anymore- instead, he moved to Bridgeton, the capital of the Tri-State Area. Mostly so his apartment is only a five minute walk to the research center in charge of studying him, instead of a forty minute drive. (And it's not like he trusts himself to drive anymore.)
They poke and prod at him about once a week, but at least they aren't rude about it. They're very generous with rescheduling around bad days, and the lady that does the majority of the maintenance on his eye has an appallingly large library of eye-related puns.
The guys from the defense department, though, are another story. Perry hates them on principle (he did so many horrible things with his enhancements, and now the military wants to copy that?), but they're also unpleasant to deal with. He hates them, they hate him, but at least they only show up every other month or so.
At least he's doing some good. Cindi (the eye lady) has told him about the various prosthetic prototypes that are in development, based on his own eye. Some of them are already in testing, restoring sight to veterans and accident victims and such. And they've made some major improvements to the already available prosthetic limb technology based on his own. So he really can't complain.
No, really, he can't complain, or at least it would be in really bad taste to do so. Most of what he does these days has been mandated by the court that tried him after everything had settled a bit, and considering he hadn't been locked into maximum security for the rest of his life, he's more than happy with his current situation.
Well. Current in general, not this particular situation. This prison cell is rather unpleasant, and he'd rather like to not be in it. But it seems like there's no escape. The vent has started rattling, but with a consistent pattern that suggests nothing more than just a different air pressure flowing through the system.
Perry sighs aloud. Good thing they don't have only three days to get back to their home dimensions.
Maybe when he's gotten back to the present, he'll ask how everyone got home. If they spent the first day or so rescuing him from Doofenshmirtz, they have to have had other adventures. Four other versions of himself should have resulted in some pretty wild adventures. Even the one that teaches high school.
Now there's something he could never do. High schoolers are wild. His niece had one hell of a time going back to a normal teenage life- considering she missed nearly seven years of formal schooling and insists on carrying some form of weapon around with her at all times, it's a miracle she was able to adapt as well as she did.
They've bonded to a surprising degree, actually. Being involuntarily forged into weapons with single objectives, then being forced back into a world where nobody understands what you've been through is a rather unique experience. Having someone to share at least some of that with is nice.
And complaining about the random things that get affected in their day-to-day life (both of them absolutely despise car horns now) is fun too.
Above him, someone coughs. Perry jumps to his feet, his head whipping up so fast he gets a crick in his neck, causing him to cuss up a storm.
"You okay?" the person in the vent above him asks. The voice sounds somewhat high, so it's probably a young woman, but it can be hard to tell. It's also accented, with some sort of accent Perry's never heard before. Like a British accent collided head on into the most stereotypical Southern drawl you've ever heard.
The accent of the future, apparently.
Perry nods, the crick having abated, then pauses.
"...Are you in the vents?" he asks after a long moment.
"Nah, I'm all in your head. Spooky." The voice laughs. "Of course I'm in the vents."
A million questions pop into Perry's brain. "Who are you? How did you get up there? How did you get here? Is that the way out of here?"
"You sure have a lot of questions, don't you. Hang on a sec, I'm coming down."
The vent creaks a bit, then the grate falls. Perry lunges forwards, catching it in his left hand before it can clatter to the concrete floor.
A few seconds after that, a girl dressed all in clashing neon colors (including her hair) drops into the room. She lands almost silently, then tosses a bright green satchel down onto Perry's cot.
"Hi, I'm Landroma," she says, offering her (cybernetic!) right hand for a handshake.
"I'm Perry," Perry says simply. He looks up at the hole in the ceiling. "So is that a way out of here?"
Landroma (strange name, but hey, that's the future for you) shrugs. "If you want to leave, yeah. There's no problem if you wanna stay."
Perry laughs, short and sharp. "You mean people actually want to be locked up in here?"
Landroma shrugs again, tucking her bright purple hair behind her ear. "It's three squares and a toilet, and they crack down pretty hard on gangs, so as long as you're not a pedo you're honestly okay." She laughs. "Better here than in some crime lord's work camp in the Rockies, am I right?"
Perry shrugs, not having any sort of frame of reference for these work camps.
"So you want to leave, huh?"
Perry nods. "As soon as possible," he says.
"Sweet, shouldn't be too hard. Unless you want your platythingy back, in which case…" She pauses, taking in the look on Perry's face. "You want your platythingy back, don't you."
"Platypus," Perry corrects, "and...yeah."
Landroma sighs. "Fine. We'll rescue your platypus too. Just don't blame me when we can't get into the med zone."
Perry grins. Man, this is easy! They'll be out of here in no time at all. Then all they have to do is find the artifact and get back to the time machine. Easy as pie.
The slot at the bottom of the door rattles, then a tray is pushed through.
"Must be lunchtime," Landroma remarks. Perry looks down at the tray. Plastic pouch of water, a flat brown square with the word "chicken" stamped on it, something green and mushy that might be vegetable matter, what looks like the stalest ...biscuit? ever, and a spork.
"Eat up, decent food ain't cheap out there," Landroma says, rummaging through her pack and coming up with what looks like a granola bar of sorts.
Perry shudders. If this is decent, he hates to think about what might pass for merely edible calories. Either way, he's had worse, so he chokes down the water (vaguely salty), "chicken" (dry), and green stuff (might be spinach, but it's hard to tell).
The biscuit is hard as a rock (probably a solid five and a half on the Mohs scale, and that isn't even an exaggeration), so Perry puts it in his pocket instead.
"Ready to go?" Landroma asks, standing up and shouldering her pack.
Perry nods. "Do you know where they're likely to have taken the platypus?" he asks.
Landroma rolls her eyes, but she nods. "Yeah, I have a good idea. We'll get your platypus back." She picks up the vent grate. "Give me a boost?"
Perry laces his fingers together to create a step, boosting Landroma up into the vent. Once she's up in the ducts, he jumps up off the bunk and grabs onto the edge of the vent.
Landroma grabs him under his arms and helps pull him up into the surprisingly spacious ducts. She reaffixes the grate of the vent with practiced ease, and turns back to Perry.
"C'mon," she says under her breath, gesturing ahead of them with her head. "Let's get out of here."
Perry nods. "Let's go."