Nuke vs. Cryolator

Clyde Langer

In all the excitement aboard the Valiant Mk.2, Clyde Langer didn't manage to dodge the razor-sharp icicle that breezed past his ear and sliced open a segment of the cartilage with its tip. It didn't immediately hurt because the ice came that quickly, but it stung and bled a second later so that he looked like Clara Oswald did when Rose had slugged her round the side of her skull. Confused, he turned around to look for his assailant, and grew disoriented when Donna Noble wailed in Mickey's direction and sent him flying backwards out of the hangar they were bunched together in. Clyde clamped his hands over his ears, the bleeding one getting red all over his palms, and was then knocked right off his feet by some cold protrusion coming out of the floor.

"What the-?" he began, and saw big shards of ice sticking out of the metal in front of him, chunks that had just thrown him backwards onto the floor. These shards had a sparkling trail of frost leading from Clyde to a figure standing opposite; none other than Adam Mitchell, the boy genius and multimillionaire. Not to mention cryokinetic. There he was, radiating cold from his pale hands, his glasses frozen around the edges, looming towards Clyde. "What are you doing!?"

"Ending your life," Adam declared.

"But – why?" All around, similar scenes were playing out. Friends became foes and turned on each other – even Rani, the love of his life, had turned psychotic and had tried to race Esther Drummond. And the thing was, even though he did love Rani Chandra more than anything in the world, he knew that Esther was miles faster, could flit around at light-speed if she wanted (he knew this because yesterday, when she'd arrived, he'd asked her to show off her powers every time she complained about being bored.) The only one who didn't accept Esther's superior speed was Rani herself, and now she'd gone haring away in a race she would never win. God – he hoped she was okay. Esther wouldn't do anything to hurt her, would she?

"Because I'm not stupid," Adam shrugged. Really, Clyde thought? Wasn't this Project Crystal making people go a bit, uh, funny? In the head? He couldn't think of a world where anyone in their right mind would jump into the Irish Sea in pursuit of a man who could breathe underwater, but that was exactly what Donna had done just minutes ago. "You're the closest, and one of the weakest. By the time I'm done with you, I'll just be able to freeze everybody who comes back solid. If they come back. And then Klein's masterplan will come to fruition."

"Oh, great – what did I do to get stuck with the only evil doppelgänger who hasn't been reduced to having the IQ of a toddler?" Clyde said. Of course. Adam Mitchell was some sort of genius – his intelligence, no doubt, had diminished. It just hadn't diminished to a point of legitimate stupidity yet. Adam laughed and threw another icicle in his direction he had to dodge. It shattered to pieces on the metal floor, them surrounded by debris from Donna's attack on Mickey. Nearby, Amy Pond appeared to be having an argument with thin air, but Clyde didn't have time to pay attention to that.

He tried to roll over onto his side to get up and scramble away, but as he had his foot on the floor to push himself back to his feet, he found his toes ice-cold and stuck fast. When he glanced behind him he saw what had happened; a thick casing of ice had clamped around his ankle and kept his right foot attached to the floor. Too quickly for him to react, the other foot was frozen solid, too, Clyde now rooted to the spot and struggling.

"I'm warning you," Clyde threatened, "Stop this right now, or I'll… I'll…"

"What? Microwave me?" Adam remarked. Clyde didn't know what to say. He didn't say anything in the end.

Adam was right. He wasn't stupid, and he could freeze people solid. Rather than 'playing with his food' as the saying went, this was what he did to Clyde. He almost wished he'd had Rose tackle him and take him off to whatever exotic place she'd dragged Clara. It had to be better than the Valiant, right? Well, unless she'd just dumped her in the vacuum of space. Then again, while outer space was cold, so was being not-so-steadily being turned into a novelty ice cube. And maybe dying in a vacuum wasn't as painful as it sounded…?

The ice was creeping up Clyde Langer. Feet, ankles, legs, hips; it rose all the way up his torso as he struggled to try and break free.

"You can't just freeze me!" he protested, his teeth chattering already. He couldn't feel anything below his knees at all. Funny, he'd never had frostbite before. He flailed his top half quite uselessly, Adam Mitchell looking highly amused and holding out his hand to entice the ice encasing Clyde to grow.

"I mean, I am just freezing you," Adam said indifferently.

"But you can't."

"I am, though. Obviously."

"Morally – it's morally wrong," Clyde argued.

Adam shrugged, "Don't really care."

"What would your girlfriend say if she saw you freezing me?" Clyde countered, hoping he might strike a nerve. Clearly Adam knew what he was trying to do, though, and the Project Crystal was making him too psychotic to care what Oswin may or may not think about his actions.

"She'd probably say something funny," Adam said. Damn it, Clyde thought, he's right. Oswin would say something funny. Didn't really matter, anyway, because the ice had reached Clyde's neck and was crawling down his arms, locking his shoulders and his elbows and his head into position.

"I never thought death by Frozone would be the way I'd go out…" Clyde croaked out dramatically as the ice slipped around his mouth, ears, and finally sealed him away in a chilling tomb as it closed around the top of his head.

Okay. Perhaps he wasn't taking this as seriously as someone else might take being locked away in ice like Walt Disney, wasn't pleading for his life and begging for Adam Mitchell to spare him. Adam Mitchell wasn't going to do anything of the sort, and it also figured that Adam – while, yes, being very clever – was stupid. Well, possibly not stupid, but he didn't know what Clyde's powers were. He thought Clyde could only shoot microwaves, and while, yes, Clyde could, and was great at heating up cold tea again with his bare hands, he could do a lot more than just shoot microwaves.

Infrared radiation, for instance. For a split-second, he could see through the sheets of ice against his eyes. Adam Mitchell looked victorious, smug, he being the first one to 'defeat' his rival. And while Clyde probably could manage to wait it out until Esther got back – because he didn't really think that when it came to tiring somebody out Esther Drummond would ever fail – so that she could thaw him out with a bolt of lightning five times hotter than the surface of the sun, he also didn't need to.

It was probably hard to tell at first that the ice wasn't lasting very long, that water was dripping off of Clyde's arms and outstretched, panicked fingertips. Adam Mitchell's cockiness was stopping him from noticing that the ice, as Clyde forced reams of infrared out of his body, was melting. But he wasn't dumb enough to just look away and pay attention to Amy's argument with nobody.

"What are you doing?" Adam asked him, the ice melting away from his head enough to let him hear and speak again.

"You und-d-derest-timat-ted m-m-me," Clyde's teeth chattered. Adam grew angry.

"No, no, no. You're not breaking out that easily." Again he held up his hands and tried to re-freeze the ice, and then it became a battle between hot and cold. Could Adam freeze faster than Clyde could melt? The answer was, actually, no. It was the floor that was the real thing ending their duel. It kept being heated up and frozen and heated up and frozen, melting and hardening and melting and hardening until it was damp and saggy and then, when Adam in all his rage tried to stamp forwards to send even more cold in Clyde's direction, it shattered. They both crashed through the metal and into darkness below, the ice keeping Clyde solid crashing apart around him. In the light pouring down from above he saw Adam Mitchell swearing and gripping his right foot. Didn't he have some old injury there? Clyde could have sworn he recalled Adam mentioning it earlier in the day, or at some other point in their lives when he and Oswin 'dropped in' to wreak havoc.

Adam's injury gave Clyde all the opportunity he needed to run away. Could he just dodge and avoid Adam Mitchell down there until Project Crystal wore off? But then, how long would that take, exactly? It could take hours. He didn't think he could evade anybody for that long, even down in the dark, hot belly of the Valiant. Where they were there was a whole lot of piping, a whole lot of hissing and other mechanical sounds. They were probably near bits of the engines, the things keeping the Valiant afloat (well, a-hover) above the Atlantic.

"You can't hide from Cryolator forever, Clyde," Adam called out, Clyde ducking behind some high rows of pipes in the shadows. He frowned.

"What did you just call yourself?" he called, trying to keep moving, stay out of sight. Retorting probably wasn't the best course of action, but he couldn't help himself when he heard a nickname so stupid as Cryolator, especially when someone called themselves it in the third-person.

"Cryolator," Adam answered, then there was a funny noise and Clyde glanced back to see a patch of ice growing on the wall where he had just been. He crouched down to crawl through a gap in all the machinery, coming out the other side to see Adam there, but Adam was facing the other way and glancing at where Clyde had just been.

"Cryolator? Is that because you'll be crying later?" Clyde remarked, Adam whirling around and throwing five small, sharp icicles right at Clyde. Funnily enough though, they were way off the mark, missing wildly and just bursting into pieces against the wall as Clyde ran sideways to get away from Adam, whom he now noticed was limping.

"Of course I won't be crying – and neither will you, because you'll be dead."

"Hilarious."

"What sort of a name do you call yourself by?"

"Nuke," Clyde answered immediately. What? As if Clyde Langer, who'd been working to run a railroad for fugitive Manifests for more than a decade and possessed unnatural powers himself, wouldn't have thought of his own superhero name already.

"Nuke? It doesn't even make any sense, you shoot microwaves. Microwaves aren't radioactive. You should call yourself Ready Meal." He knew microwaves weren't radioactive, because Luke told him so constantly. But Clyde could shoot proper, deadly gamma radiation when he tried really, really hard. Plus 'Nuke' was just a cool name.

"They should call you Aura Boy," Clyde remarked. Adam got annoyed by that, Clyde knowing he'd never been a fan of his frankly useless power to see peoples' auras, what with him being colour blind. Another icicle struck the pipes right in front of Clyde, breaking into fragments sharp enough to tear away at the metal of the pipe. Out of the tiny cracks in it, boiling steam hissed out at Clyde, who jumped away when his skin stung. It gave him an idea, though. He had a few ideas, in fact, looking around at the smooth floor and the steam valves… he just had to try not to die for a couple more minutes, at least. "You're a rubbish throw, you know."

"I throw just fine!" Adam argued. Adam knew exactly where Clyde was, but couldn't move fast enough on his obviously injured foot to pursue him, and so ended up stuck in the middle of the room just pivoting in a circle. Clyde stuck his head up from behind his barricades and smiled, waving. Adam, furious, hurled another icicle for him, but it completely missed and hit somewhere up and to Clyde's left, leaving condensation dripping down the wall.

"Did you never do PE, or were you too much of a geek for that?" Clyde said, as though he himself had not been pulled deep into the recesses of nerdhood by his friendship with Luke Smith.

"Shut up!"

"You're clearly insecure about how bad you were at PE."

"Nobody likes PE!" he argued.

"It's alright if you're good at it. Not like you."

"I was!"

Clyde didn't believe him, and thought it was funny how worked up he got about something so unimportant.

Some bits of metal debris from Donna's attack on Mickey had fallen down into the lower levels with them, and slinking around the room Clyde found one of these and grabbed it when Adam Mitchell couldn't see him. He'd stopped talking for a few moments, tiptoeing around, and Adam appeared to have lost track of where he was. This lump of debris, probably just a part of the floor that had been torn up, Clyde took in his hand and threw towards the other end of the room.

Adam didn't see the projectile arc along behind him, Clyde ducking into the shadows again, but he did hear the noise and turned (as best he could) to see where it had landed. That was when Clyde seized his opportunity and, still crouching, moved as quickly as he could to get near Adam. Adam still distracted but too close for comfort, Clyde jumped to his feet to grab one of the steam valves on the many, snaking pipes underneath the Valiant's main hangar. Heating up his hand as hot as he could, he melted the whole pipe and the valve clean off. Adam heard the ruckus, turned around to see what it was, and got blasted in the face by boiling hot steam.

As Adam Mitchell screamed, Clyde utilised his other power, the one that only benefitted him when it came to getting in and out of Silverstorm. It was tricky to describe the sensation of going from a solid man to a puddle of flesh-coloured goop, and even trickier to describe the sensation of actually being said puddle of flesh-coloured goop, but oddly enough it nearly felt like floating. The transformation itself even felt like those moments when you were almost asleep and were jolted away by the sensation of falling, as his entire body liquefied.

Adam, stunned from the steam and vapour in his face, staggered backwards, and Clyde didn't have to do anything more than simmer there on the floor to make Adam slip, falling right over and thwacking the side of his head on another of the myriad of pipes down there. Liquid or solid, being stepped on still wasn't a pleasant feeling, and Clyde had to pry himself off the bottom of Adam's shoes before he could suck his whole self back into a proper form.

Clyde reformed and Adam stayed there on the floor, and for a moment Clyde was horrified he might have inadvertently killed Adam Mitchell, merely trying to knock him out to see if a concussion might be the solution to being taken over by a malevolent chemical compound. Remarkably, going by the incoherent way Adam slurred his girlfriend's name, it worked. It was kind of sweet how Oswin was what he thought of, but there was noise coming from the hangar above them now, shouting again – it couldn't be that some of the others were back, could it?

"Adam? Adam – wake up," Clyde said. Adam was just woozy. "Mitchell!" Clyde said sharply. The name only Oswin, the object of Adam's affections, called him by. Of course it was that, Clyde thought with an eye roll, that made him regain awareness.

"What's going on…?" Adam dazedly asked.

"Had to bump you on the head, mate, sorry," Clyde apologised, "Klein's drug took you over, you tried to freeze me." Adam frowned.

"How'd you get out?"

"Magic. Come on, you have to help me find a way back upstairs, because we can't go up the way we came," Clyde said, trying to haul Adam Mitchell back to his feet. He yelped with pain when any weight was put on his right foot, though; he must have really damaged it in the fall.

"Where was that?" he asked.

"Through there," Clyde said, and he pointed for the big, gaping hole in the roof where he could definitely hear the other members of their group returning from where they had been. Unfortunately, though, neither of them could fly, and it had been quite a long drop. So Clyde Langer and Adam Mitchell ended up a little bit stuck below deck on the Valiant Mk.2.