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Some moron once said Morning sun never lasts a day. Clearly they hadn’t been able to fly into the Mesosphere. Alex idly stared at the sun, slowly drifting backwards, keeping it seemingly perpetually in the same spot in the sky.
You know your experiences aren’t universal, right?
Alex grimaced, but continued floating. She idly glanced upwards. The world below was quiet, for once, but it wouldn’t last. The heroes would come at her, they always did. And it’s not like she was hiding.
Her gaze resettled on the sun.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She blinked once, shaking her head lightly. There wasn’t any point in checking the device, the screen would hold the same results on it as from before.
That didn’t stop her from opening it, from her focus settling onto the screen with both to much, and not enough, never enough, information. There were only two things that mattered in this world on this screen anyway.
The single, unmoving white line, had somehow wormed its way into the number one spot. Previously it’d belonged to the name, the person, at the top of the screen. Then the heroes had gone and fucked it up. The white line that had bounced eighty times per minute.
Alex had left it like that. She tried to be patient. Despite how it made her skin crawl, her stomach shudder, and her own heart tremble, she’d tried to be patient. Time had been her ally her whole life.
She crushed the phone in her hand, letting the shards of metal, glass, and wiring fall away. It didn’t matter anymore.
Some vindictive asshole had started this, it had been a play on her. Morgan was a villain, sure, but they didn’t have any one that would have done something like this to them. No nemesis that would choose death over prison. No rivals that they wouldn’t team up with, or meet to play poker with regularly.
No, someone had wanted to try and hurt Alex, and they’d out Morgan in the one place worse for them than any jail or prison.
After all, what self-respecting hospital would bother to continue to waste resources on a villain.
Alex snarled, staring at the sun again. “Waste?!”
The staff had left Morgan cuffed in a room for all of a week, Alex serving as a constant vigil, before heroes involved themselves. She’d immediately brought the fight outside of the city, as far away from Morgan as she could quickly achieve.
Then her phone had buzzed in the middle of the fight.
Alex might be proud of herself in other circumstances. She’d ended plenty of fights quickly, but todays had been a new record, before she’d left the battlefield behind. She had to double check, to see for herself.
The room had been even more quiet than it had been when she’d left.
She mentally flipped through the catalogue of powers she could access, that she knew about, that she’d even heard rumors of. It’s not that dimension hopping was hard after all.
No, the problem was the destination.
Most powers that let the user dimension hop were little different than doors. You could go through it as many times as you liked, but it would only go the same two places.
Alex let out a frustrated shriek, eyes clouding, and she rapidly rubbed at them. She finally looked back up at the sun, and felt something sink into her gut.
The sun had climbed higher.
She thought idly to a poem she’d heard once. Maybe Morgan had read it to her, maybe a minion, hell, she might have recited it once to taunt a hero.
“Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.”
She couldn’t think of who said it, but something settled. Burned into her bones. She straightened her spine, and let her gaze drift downwards, from the sun to the planet far below her.
This was a wasted planet without Morgan. A planet giving out its last gasps of air. Perhaps Alex could show mercy, just once.
After all, all things must die.