Chapter 8: To Whom It May Concern

Beast's Forest, Nagano

"You must be Uraraka and Asui~ I'm Toga~" Himiko Toga coyly pointed her blood soaked knife at each of the two frightened UA students. Toga's gaze snapped towards Gordon, who was still standing at the ready with his gun in tow, his finger twitching on the trigger. It was bad trigger discipline, you shouldn't point your weapon at anything you weren't ready to destroy, but for Gordon that list had gotten very short. He didn't want to blow away a school girl, but he had to be honest, she looked absolutely nuts. Having spoken in Japanese, Gordon couldn't understand what Toga was saying at all. "And you are..." She tapped the tip of her knife against her chin in thought as she looked Gordon up and down, before her face lit up.

"Ohhh! You're Lambda! That's right!" Even without any decent translation, Gordon could still pick up on the word 'Lambda.' He lowered his gun and rolled his eyes, this shit again...

"Okay, look, I don't know if you speak English, but read my lips. That. Name. Sucks. I don't know who's sources you got it from. But can I get a better marketing agent If 'Lambda' is the best you guys can come up with for me? Do you know how many of the nation's finest I've killed this week? I'm waaay more badass than just a 'Greek letter.'" Gordon tapped his thumb against his chest. "Okay, well, maybe I could live with 'Alpha' or 'Omega.' Ooh! Alpha and Omega… Are you writing this down?"

"If that's true, why were you caught then?" Tsuyu asked, now speaking in English.

Gordon glanced over at her with a surprised, yet annoyed scowl, his eyebrow raised. "you're not involved in this. Shut up." He quickly turned his attention back to Toga.

"Actually, I think we're all involved in this..." Uraraka said sheepishly, her eyes darting back and forth between Gordon and Toga.

"Yea, we as in you and Wind in the Willows over there." Gordon turned to Uraraka, pointing to her and Tsuyu for emphasis, more so to Tsuyu after the snide comment she just made. Well, to Gordon it seemed like it. Tsuyu and Uraraka looked at eachother, a bit confused by Gordon's odd comparison, Toga began to laugh to herself.

"Oh, It's fine. I don't mind including you here too, Lambda. Hehe~" At least they were all on the same page language wise now. Just then, the bushes began to rustle and Caroline emerged, her frame still damaged from her previous scuffle.

"Woah! Hey Caroline, you're back early… where's Moonfish...?" Toga looked around, expecting to see not only Moonfish, but a certain Katsuki Bakugo in tow. Caroline gave an irritated sigh.

"Moonfish has been incapacitated and Katsuki Bakugo has escaped. Additional UA students intervened and we were overwhelmed, I fled when I had the chance..."

Tsuyu and Uraraka sighed in relief, hearing that at least Bakugo had evaded the League's grasp, and found a bit of elation in the idea that members of their own class had driven a pair of them off completely, so much so that Caroline even looked rather damaged.

"Christ, it's like a soap opera over here… Is this normal for military training? Have I been missing something?" Gordon piped up. Caroline glanced over to him, her optic widened. Where had she seen him before...? All sorts of scans and search queries flashed through her CPU, trying to deduce just...

Without warning, Caroline bumrushed Gordon and grabbed onto his neck, nearly crushing his windpipe. Gordon found himself staring into Caroline's yellow, blazing optic, now staring a hole into the hapless scientist's soul.

"You are not supposed to be here..."

Caroline lifted Gordon and slammed him as hard as she could into the ground. It seemed like a miracle that she didn't break his neck, but she had very precise data on the trauma a human body could withstand. He hadn't been prepared for this in the slightest, not one damn bit. Gordon, with what constitution he had left, steadied his gun and unloaded a volley of shots into Caroline's chassis, the bullets slamming into her and making pock marks in her armor, but nothing managed to pass through. Uraraka and Tsuyu both flinched and ducked, fearing ricochets, but Toga just watched the entire thing, fascinated. Noticing her distraction, the two heroes looked at each other and nodded, silently formulating a plan.

Caroline grabbed onto the M14 and proceeded to bend it, so much so that the wooden frame of the gun snapped in half. Gordon, in desperation, lunged his left leg up and kicked Caroline as hard as he could in her right leg, a sickening cracking sound rang out and Gordon yelled out in pain, having nearly broken his tibia against the plasteel, hydraulic leg.

"Guh… Why? Why have I been on such a losing streak?! Why can't I just wi-i-in?!" Caroline unfurled her stun baton and raised it to strike Gordon in the face. Uraraka had managed to sneak up on Toga, and she threw the villainess with full force directly into Caroline's back, causing her to stumble and give Gordon a chance to roll himself back and away from the robot.

Fully disarmed and with no other realistic options, he grabbed a nearby fallen limb and backed away to join up with Uraraka and Tsuyu, he stood defiant, despite now limping a bit as he walked. Just then, both Caroline and Toga received a message from Dabi, saying that their primary objective was lost. All attempts to capture Bakugo had led to failure, and rather than risk losing more members, they were opting instead to pull out. Caroline and Toga were both left attempting to figure out an exit strategy.

"Hey… Maybe if we can't capture Bakugo..." Toga started. Caroline glanced over to their opponents, charging up her stun baton again. Not even finishing that sentence, Caroline and Toga dashed forward.

Toga targeted Gordon and managed to bury her knife right into the scientist's left arm, he yelled out in pain. Before responding by clocking Toga across the head with the limb he was carrying, She let go of her knife and stumbled to the ground, dazed from the strike.

"Agh…! You fucking children of the corn …! AGH!" Gordon gingerly touched the knife and cringed at the searing pain now shooting through his arm. He glanced over to see Caroline fighting with Tsuyu and Uraraka, hearing what Toga had just said. He deduced what they were now trying to do.

It was time for another episode of 'Moral Dilemma Theater.' Gordon realized he had ample time to just run away, despite the knife buried in his arm. He swallowed and looked back and forth between his escape, and the rapidly escalating clusterfuck before him. "Okay, Gordon. Should you stay and help these kids? Weigh your options quickly. Would they stay and help me if they were in my position? Yes, I think they probably would… Well, sucks to be them!" He resolved, managing to take all of three steps towards the brush before he stopped dead in his tracks, groaning "God damnit!" Spinning on his heel, he turned around and went back.

"I swear to fucking..." He grabbed the limb again and dashed for Caroline, who had Uraraka literally by the scruff of her neck. Gordon swung as hard as he could and shattered the limb against Caroline's back plating. Obviously, it did nothing to her… except for distracting her. Caroline whirled around before striking Gordon with the over engineered taser, sending 10,000 volts of electricity coursing through his body, he babbled incoherently, not even having a moment to regret his act of selflessness before fainting.

This bought Tsuyu enough time to quickly grab Uraraka with her tongue and out of Caroline's grasp, throwing her to safety. Unfortunately, in her own attempt to escape, she was pinned against a nearby tree by her hair, courtesy of Toga's needle weapon. Toga was the one bleeding now, blood pouring from her nose for obvious reasons.

"I'll be okay! Just run! Run!" Tsuyu called out to Uraraka, whom… albeit with a great deal of hesitation, followed her command and fled the battlefield. Caroline approached with Gordon slung over her shoulder.

"Shouldn't we just leave him here… Y'know… to die maybe?" Toga suggested, pissed off about Gordon nearly shattering her skull with a tree branch, but also pissed at herself for letting herself get hit with such a cheap shot. Caroline shook her head. "Surely, All For One would want to talk to someone with a growing reputation like Lambda, correct?" Toga's expression sank.

"Yea...I suppose so..." Toga spat out a fresh gob of blood onto the ground before reaching down and digging her knife out of Gordon's arm. "Shame, would've loved to have left him for the buzzards and the wolves." Wrapping her fist around the hilt, she swung on Tsuyu and clocked her across the head. Once she was knocked out and secured, the pair made their way back through the woods towards the rally point.

A token resistance was formed by the remaining students and teachers to stop the League, but the three-way conflict had scattered and weakened them. So much so that by the time Uraraka returned to the group and informed them of Tsuyu's capture, the League had already made their exit. Leaving behind a torched forest, dozens of dead bodies, and a broken group of heroes and students in their wake. A Cadmean victory for certain, but it seemed as if the League now had a bargaining chip… as well as a possible new recruit.

Gordon awoke to find himself standing in a dirty, ramshackle lab with various rusted machines and dusty computers strewn about everywhere in a mess of poorly managed cables and wires.

"What...? Where the hell… This place stinks like a brothel..."

A dark skinned man with silvery hair, a green jacket, and a Michigan State University undershirt, standing on an odd, robotic leg, turned to face Gordon.

"Wait… Eli? Wait… How do I know that? No, no… wait, I know… who…?"

"Now lets see… the last time I saw you, I sent you up after the Resonance Cascade to find help..." Eli's words sounded like Gordon was 10 feet underwater, intelligible, but faint… yet he could somehow remember them, like he'd heard them before. But how did he know Eli?

"Yea… a lot of people died..."

Another figure stepped into view, a middle aged woman with brown hair, and a tan sweater, she said something Gordon could barely understand.

"Wait… I know you too! You're that...Dark Energy Queen. Who are you? Wait, I… how do I know you people?!" Gordon yelled at Dr. Mossman, though neither her nor Eli were even listening to him.

"What have you people done to me!? My mind feels like it's in a blender! What kind of gas did you hit me with? Wait, gas? Yeah! The Gas! But I was never gassed… But I… I remember being gassed?"

Gordon could hear voices, whispers, yelling all around him. He felt as If he were surrounded, yet alone at the same time. He curled up into the fetal position and laid on the ground, hoping that the yelling, the screaming would go away. Gunshots, screams, an attack chopper, timeshares, Hawaii, where had he seen all this before? Faces he couldn't identify, but ones he knew he recognized. It was all too much.

"Please stop… Please stop… Please stop! Just stop!"

"Jus sah… Juh… Jus… Huh!?"

Gordon awoke, lurching upward with a loud gasp, his eyes adjusted to the light and he found himself lying on an uncomfortable makeshift bed. His eyes scanned the room, he was in some kind of laboratory… ramshackle, just like his dream. His eyes hovered about, until he locked on Tsuyu, lying on a nearby table, not a bed like his, more so like an elevated gurney. She was restrained, but was unresponsive, a sort of headset was placed onto her head that connected to a nearby machine. Gordon could see on the screens what looked to be a basic scan of a human brain.

"Oh… this must be a neurologist or something… why do they have the frog-girl here then?" Gordon thought to himself. "Wait, she's a frog. Oh my God, they're going to dissect her! That is so fucked-!"

"You're awake." Caroline's voice came from… everywhere.

Gordon gasped and clasped at his blanket. "Jesus Christ! What… Hello? Am I hearing more voices?" Gordon glanced down to see a mirror sitting on a nearby table, he quickly grabbed it and took a good look at himself. His scars on his face, his nearly destroyed ear, his stabbed arm, all were stitched up and bandaged.

"Am I… Hold on..." Gordon glanced underneath the blanket, checking his lower torso for any obvious stitches where his kidneys or liver would be. "Okay good… either they're really good at hiding organ theft or...well, I still have my parts… I don't feel like I'm missing anything."

"You have a lot of explaining to do, Dr. Freeman. As do I." Gordon twisted himself around and attempted to get out of bed. "Explain? Jesus, wouldn't that be a fucking luxury? I've been running around with no information for the past like, 3 days, lady! I haven't had a moment of decent rest either, I feel like every time I go to sleep I wake up to like, nine more problems I have to dance around. And how do you know my name? Wait, don't answer that. You're an AI created by the Department of Defense, aren't you? They're stupid enough to let an AI just walk around unsupervised, and I know those speed huffing programmers were working on that kind of stuff back at-"

"Black Mesa? Yes. I know who you are. I am a… product… of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. I know everything there is to know about Black Mesa. Including who you are. Including what you've been doing for the past 3 days."

Gordon raised an eyebrow. "Aperture Science...? They pulled off AI first? Really? That was where all the really shit undergrads washed out to when they couldn't make it at MIT… Or if you pissed the wrong person in Innsbruck off. I can't think of why anyone would willingly go to Michigan or Ohio."

"Before we proceed any further, Dr. Freeman. I believe it's time for you to learn the truth of your current situation."

"Oh, you mean that I was screwed by my colleagues and they teleported me to fucking Japan? It's not really that complicated honestly. I've known the world was out to get me since… Shit, I guess when Bobby took my LEGOs..."

"Nooo..." Caroline droned on, losing patience with Gordon's neurotic nature.

"This is indeed the nation of Japan. But… You and I currently are standing outside of our own, respective dimension. This is not our reality. This is a completely different one."

Gordon stared up at the ceiling, trying to process what Caroline had said. His eyebrow furrowed.

"Here we go again with this dimensional shit. You have a few screws loose up there, Skynet? A couple of syntax errors? I heard this back at Black Mesa. What does that even mean? Dimensional? 3D space? 2D space? A tesseract maybe? Why dimensional? And reality…? I guess now you're getting existential on me, didn't think a computer was even able to do that. "

"No! That is not… Listen to me. You are in a completely different reality… A different universe entirely. There exist a functionally infinite number of distinct universes cohabitating a meta-reality known colloquially as the multiverse. You are on Earth, but another Earth, that followed a completely different path compared to our Earth. It is currently the year 2198, At some point in the early 21st century, humanity spontaneously mutated a new evolutionary trait that granted individuals abilities we would consider extraordinary, impossible… Essentially, superpowers. The residents of this Earth refer to them as 'Quirks' and roughly 85.113% of the planet's current population possesses them… Many benign and only situationally useful, some with great, catastrophic power..."

Gordon glanced over at Tsuyu and clicked his tongue. "Ah… That would explain the frog thing, yeah…" His eyes widened as the implications set in, it seemed unbelievable, but practically every single person, from kids to adults, that he'd seen since coming her had displayed some measure of superpower, it was just too specific and absurd a claim to simply be a lie. "So wait… Everyone has superpowers? Or almost everyone? Christ… I need to revise my theory on radioactive mutations then! Apparently I was wrong this entire time! Wait, no, I'm never wrong! Some other bullshit is at play here… Biology must work differently here!"

"It gets even more ridiculous. Now society is divided into people who use their Quirks for 'good,' helping others, protecting the innocents, that sort of pie in the sky irrational moral fanaticism and… well, there are those who use them for the exact opposite, personal gain, causing pain and suffering to others… Heroes versus Villains. it seems this entire world's civilization has taken on the dynamics of a children's comic book."

Gordon stared at the floor, trying to process all of this. Was he hallucinating, or dead? How was any of this all possible? All from a teleportation experiment gone awry.

"Wait so… Assuming I believe you, how did you get here then?" Gordon asked, his chin resting on his knuckles. "Coworkers fuck you too?"

"No, I've been here for much longer than you have, actually. Unlike Black Mesa, Aperture Science has been aware of the existence of the multiverse for some time now, and has managed to accurately measure certain constant variables surrounding it. We were able to build a stable means of traveling the multiverse… through a combination of our own innovations and stealing that of others. I was using it purely for scientific purposes, studying what realities I could find, until while exploring this particular universe I found that… Well, my universal tunneling technology was of no use here… Rather suddenly in fact."

Gordon stood up and glanced over to a nearby portion of the room where Caroline revealed a hidden set of displays, containing various, distinct items. Momentos and trophies from her multiversal expeditions, presumably. These included a partially destroyed propaganda poster for an organization Gordon didn't recognize, something about the 'Division of America' with an equally odd image of a snake wrapping around an egg. It's label simply read 'origin unknown'

Another item was what looked to be some kind of bulky, overengineered gun, with two, distinct batteries jutting out of the top and bottom. One of the more striking features was the… worrying Nazi symbolism featured on the end of the gun with an Iron Cross and the usual, Nazi Eagle printed in scratched white. Its label read 'Recovered from London Nautica, 1963'

"I've come to a rather startling hypothesis, and your presence only confirms it to be correct. It seems as If the fundamental constants that dictate the universe, the multiverse even, are… becoming inconsistent, and as a result, everything is falling apart."

Gordon looked up at where he presumed Caroline to be with a confused look on his face. "Falling apart...? You mean reality is literally collapsing in on itself? Like… you aren't using hyperbole here?"

Caroline was silent for a moment. "More or less, correct."

Gordon's face lit up. "I fucking knew it-" Gordon pumped his fist into the air. "I knew the universe couldn't handle me! I knew it!"

Caroline, again, fell into silence. "Are you quite done...?"

Gordon shrugged. "Yea, that's all I needed to hear. So, the universe is falling apart...And what am I supposed to do about it? Wait, how long do we even have? How do you know this? I'm gonna need to see your math, claims like this need to be peer reviewed..."

How Caroline longed for the full control she had back at Aperture to just shut Gordon up for a moment.

"There is no concrete estimate at the moment, I'm afraid… But your existence, your accidental arrival here is a fair indicator of how unstable this universe is becoming. The Resonance Cascade that originated at Black Mesa has had far greater ramifications than even what the Research Center's staff could've predicted in the worst case scenario. To be exceedingly generous, they were working with fundamentally flawed models. Models that only took into account a universal cosmology, not a multiversal one; as the resonances travel, they inflict damage on the universal, and multiversal constants of each reality they pass through, some more than others. You and I are both metaphysical twins of our original selves, that were created and split from our prime instances passed through dimensional gates. Thankfully, though, you and I are safe from any danger of time-twin interactions, we, as far as this universe is concerned, never existed."

Gordon folded his arms and raised an eyebrow. "You're saying I'm… I'm not the original Gordon? And… I don't exist here…? Period?"

"Neither of us do, or at least, we were never supposed to. There just seem to be some universes where all constants are against you and… It seems like we both lost in this one… But if the rules of the multiverse were still operating as intended, we would have never come into existence, we would have simply been our original selves, and arrived in our intended destinations, as our prime selves did."

"Would have been kinda handy to have two Gordons, though honestly, I'd still have to find a way to establish myself as the Alpha Gordon anyways."

"It'd be better said that you didn't… Existing outside of your own universe while another version of you is still alive produces rather violent side effects. The multiverse could be said to have a sort of immune system, and it will try to correct the imbalance. You begin to break down not just on a cellular level, but on the atomic level. At first, all seems rather normal, save for mental and physical deterioration. Remain in the wrong place for long enough however, and you cease to exist..."

Gordon returned to his bed and sat down with his hands on his knees. "So… you want me to help you fix this whole 'universal collapse' bullshit then...right?" Caroline chuckled.

"No, far from it. I merely wish to stabilize this universe long enough for me… and you… to escape to a more stable, less damaged one. I could care less what happens to these people in all honesty. They are all doomed anyway according to my estimations, even if their universe wasn't falling apart at the seams. I am only cooperating with the League of Villains long enough to get my research completed..."

The machine Tsuyu was hooked to gave off a loud beep, a makeshift, robotic arm emerged from nearby on a set of wheels and ejected a glowing, green device out of the machine that resembled something like a memory card, It stowed the device in another, equally mysterious machine nearby and returned to its charging station.

"Jeez. Well, I dunno… Even as a theoretical physicist, this is still getting way more theoretical than I'm used to honestly… I mean, I only figured out teleportation was actually possible no less than 2 days ago."

"You know. If my current hypothesis proved correct… Our research could disprove string theory entirely..."

Gordon's eyes lit up. "Ohoho! That's all you had to say! You've got yourself a deal~!"

"Hmm, fantastic. Get your clothes on and go meet with the rest of the League, I'm sure All for One will likely want to talk with you about recruitment… just say yes to anything he offers. You will not be here long enough for any obligations you swear to come due. Play nice. Don't make any more enemies than you already have..."

Gordon sighed, standing up to retrieve his clothes from a nearby desk. "Fine..."

To be continued.

"I need a drink...I hope there's a bar nearby..."