Day 1 Evening

[Magus]

The unlikely pair continued down the road Magus had travelled before the mysterious metallic man had appeared without a word between them aside vague assurances that they would not betray one another, on the unspoken condition that the one called ‘Mickey Mouse’ would die.

Stupid fucking name.

Magus would help eliminate the creature whose name sounded like something out of a children’s television show so long as the bizarre robot man would hold up his – or its – end of the bargain and help him keep his would-be allies alive. Assuming the fools hadn’t already fallen on someone’s sword.

It wasn’t that he was above having allies – having faced off against tremendous odds without them had proven to him the necessity of working with others – he just found them tedious. Even now, the metal… thing. Just lightly clinking along sort of beside him, barely in his periphery, like some nuisance flicker of movement always out of the realm of perception.

What the hell was the point of summoning a thing like Kopaka to this realm anyway? Was Omni so unimaginative that he failed to realize he could build his own robots? Or was he just lazy? Whatever the reason, godhood was wasted on him.

He found himself wondering about the robot’s masks, or faces. There seemed to be more to the thing than it let on. But then, he’d personally met a robot with programming so sophisticated that it had been able to pass for a real person in his own reality.

Perhaps such creatures of sophistication existed beyond. It seemed likely.

“Kopaka, is it?” he inquired, before his mind could go off on an existential tangent about whether or not machines could claim personhood as a human could. The machine nodded. “What is your motivation? Now that you’re in the Omniverse?”

“I told you. I’m here to eliminate the mouse.”

Magus repressed a scoff. Kopaka didn’t seem like the kind of… person… to take derision lightly. “Right. I meant after. Beyond all of… this.”

“We are allies of convenience. Professionals working together, both with our own ulterior motives.”

Kopaka didn’t need to continue – the wizard got the hint.

Wizard. Maybe not here. Typically he could feel the dark energies coursing through and around him. Here, he felt… cut off.

It was strange. When he had first began to harness dark magic, he found himself overwhelmed with the heaviness of it. The energies gagged him like syrup in his lungs and wasps under his flesh. Every contact with it was an assault to all of his senses.

And now, separate from all of that for so long, all he felt was… hot. Where dark magic had at first chilled him to the bone, at some point he must have become used to the constant discomfort and now felt on edge, as though he were right on the verge of something horrible.

At least, without the ability to phase into the Plane Immaterial, he hadn’t seen any of those horrible Shadow People. He still didn’t know what they were. Or what they wanted. All he knew was that even thinking about them made him unconsciously clench his teeth.

“We should keep moving,” he said. It certainly wasn’t because it felt like the road was narrowing, even when it wasn’t. Or that the thick, humid trees seemed to be lording over them, leaning into them.

Magus grabbed at the thick fabric choking around his neck. He was sweating in spite of the storm. Profusely. Without magic, he might as well have been any other asshole, if not for the chainsaw slung awkwardly across his back.

That damned Teucer had better deliver.