08-05-2016, 08:57 AM
Update
With the way open, the trio made their way toward the hatch in the corner of the meeting room. Karl led the way, but the others followed closely behind as he plopped down onto the edge of the hole, glanced down, and slipped off the edge. The gentle thump a moment later told the pair of swordsmen that their tour guide hadn’t fallen to his death.
“Come now, Boys.” Karl shouted, prompting the two men to hop down into the bunker.
“What is this place?” Hiro asked as a series of fluorescent tube lighting hummed to life over their heads. “The same as the one at the lighthouse?” From their immediate surroundings, that appeared to be the case. They were standing in a plain corridor that seemed to match the entrance to their previous secret destination.
“No, not really,” Karl remarked as he traversed the metal hallway and presented himself to the door at the end. “You see,” he glanced over his shoulder at his two companions. “This is Central.” Placing his hand on a glass pad on the side of the wall, the executive smiled as a light flash underneath his palm. After a slight delay, the door slid into the wall with a pneumatic hiss, showcasing a small room no larger than an elevator. “All aboard.”
Once the three men were all inside the tiny room, Karl snickered and pushed the button on the interior console. After the doors slid shut, there was a brief bit of jostling accompanied by the whirring of gears before they arrived at their destination with a melodic ping!.
“Where?” Hiro asked as Deadpool and he filtered out of the elevator.
“Underground.” Karl muttered, eliciting an arched eyebrow from Chocolate Thunder.
“What are we doing here?” The hacker inquired as he stared out into what seemed to be a pleasant little waiting room decorated with a fridge and a pinball machine.
“He’s waiting for us,” Karl answered nonchalantly as he strode passed his companions toward one of the two doors on the far wall. He grabbed hold of the door knob, and when he tried to turn it, it only jiggled in his clutches. After a few subtle efforts, he glanced back over his shoulder at the pair. “Only way we’ll be able to get off this island… unless you two are interested in buying some ocean-front property? I have a wonderful friend named Ms. Aran who can probably give you the number for her real-estate agent.”
Deadpool snickered, but the remarked seemed to go over Hiro’s head. The samurai just glanced at both men and shook his head. “Whatever we have to do. I’ve had my fill of this.”
With a grin, Karl stepped away from the door and gestured to it with his head. “Then why don’t you guys have the fun?”
In a matter of moments, the two katana-wielding primes hacked apart the door, revealing a large room that looked like—
”Is this where the Star Trek kids play their bondage games?” Deadpool asked out loud as Karl scowled.
“Room didn’t used to look like this,” he answered flatly as he searched the nearby wall for a power switch. When he found one, the room received a scant amount of illumination from a few dingy bulbs screwed into insets on the ceiling. Despite the lack of light, there was more than enough to see the weird assortment of tubes that lined the walls and the weird ‘equipment’ that was strewn about. Deadpool reached down and picked up what seemed to be a stainless steel ball gag. The mercenary chuckled and dropped it onto the floor as the last of the lights flickered to life, revealing a solitary figure in a tube near the back of the room.
The sight caused the masked man to momentarily loose himself in a fit of laughs. When he regained his composure, he turned to Hiro. “Nailed it.”
Inside the tube was a man in the remnants of a purple Dolce & Gabana dress shirt. His slacks looked dilapidated and were almost falling off of his legs, and his feet were bare. Whatever elegant footwear he once wore had been long lost. Around the man’s face was a breathing mask that provided him with oxygen as he bobbed gently inside the cyan liquid of the tube. Although the brown head of hair was wholly submerged into the solution, it still had the bizarre appearance of being styled, which made it impossible to deny the identity of the man.
“The hell?” Hiro asked as he turned to Karl Jak. “Why are you in that tube?”
The executive chuckled as he walked over to a terminal and started to click at things. “How long have you been on the island?”
“Seven weeks!” Deadpool answered, eliciting a scowl from Hiro and Karl.
“Almost a day, right?” Karl tapped a few more lines of code before pausing to finish his thought. “Might feel like more for you, though. I’ve been here for a month or so, maybe more. You think this place was like this the entire time? Just a wacky place with sentient fog that moves around, deformed townspeople, serial killers, and all this other crap?” As the question hung in the air, there was a beep that startled everyone just before the tube began to drain.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Karl rolled his eyes as he smacked a few more keys and left the console. “I thought by now you or someone else here would have managed to piece some of it together.”
Deadpool took that moment to interject. “I think they’ve been too busy, with all the wandering around and killing and exposition. Subplots and side-zones are dangerous things.”
The executive smiled faintly as the freshly drained tube let out a second automated noise. Once the tune was finished, the front of the tube separated from the rest and was lifted up toward the ceiling by a unoiled mechanical arm.
Inside the container, the Karl twitched as he regained consciousness. His eyes popped open behind the mask, and while he seemed to be startled at first, he quickly found his bearings. Hands that hadn’t seen a manicure in far too long grabbed at the headgear and tore it away as Tube Karl let out a gasp and stumbled down into the arms of Counselor Karl.
As Hiro watched the scene unfold with more confusion than anything else, Deadpool leaned in close to him and poked him in the ribcage with an elbow. “Is it just me or does this feel like the beginning of a porno?”
“I see you haven’t lost that sense of wit, Mr. Wilson,” freshly woken Karl, whose voice was still hoarse, smirked at his own remark as he got back to his feet with the help of his double. He glanced over at the samurai and had to think for a few moments before the answer came to him. “Hiro Protagonist, right?” The Karl that the boys had been with nodded when he got a look from the speaker. “Were you enjoying your time in Coruscant? It was rather nice of you to come.”
“I’m not sure what’s going on,” Hiro replied. He turned to Deadpool in the hopes of some illuminating remark or witty retort, but the mercenary—his masked face somehow showing more emotion than it should be—seemed positively giddy at the situation.
“You crashed here, right?” Karl asked, eliciting a nod from both Counselor Karl and Hiro. “You weren’t the only ones. There was plane that crashed before you, and I was on that first plane.”
“You were on the second plane.”
Tube Karl shook his head. “Yes and no. That was someone else.”
“It was you.”
At that, both Karl’s pressed their palms against their foreheads in an identical display of frustration. Once that moment passed, the same producer started to speak once again. Before he did, he looked over toward Deadpool. “Wade can attest. The last time we had a public event, I had a lot of… angry faces. So I did what any reasonable person would do, and I created a stash of backups for a ‘rainy’ day. In this instance, I stopped reporting back to headquarters, so one of the backups would have been woken up to replace me. It’s quite possible that they a few others may have been woken up as well to help seek me out.”
Hiro furrowed his brow. “So… the Karl on the plane wasn’t the real Karl?”
“Of course he was. He had everything he needed to be me, except the ability to manipulate omnilium. I mean, come on, could you imagine the panic if people thought I was gone?”
“So many tears.” Deadpool replied, although it was hard to tell if he was serious or making a mockery of the executive.
“Exactly, thank you Mr. Wilson.”
At that, the counselor-themed Karl interjected. “He’s White Lightning now, Karl.”
“Oh, I do like that… what about the brown one?”
“Chocolate Thunder.”
At that, both Karls started to chuckle for a few moments. They were only stopped when a frazzled Hiro tried to reel the conversation back.
“The crashes, though.”
“You would think, if you created the climate, that it wouldn’t conspire against you,” prime Karl remarked. “Tropical storm.” The man made a fist and smacked it into his palm. “Lightning strike brought me down… I imagine your crash was intentional. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t just land normally here… seems like a waste of a plane.”
“Maybe the Island did it? Oh! Another secret bunker? With an EMP? I bet you someone forgot to press the button, damn it!” Deadpool snapped his fingers and scowled behind his mask.
Prime Karl snickered and turned to Hiro. “We need to get off this island. Everything here needs to be formatted.”
“What?” Hiro asked.
“For someone who is supposed to be smart, you take a while to learn.” Prime Karl remarked, eliciting a snicker from both Deadpool and the other Karl. “The island wasn’t like this. It was just a seaside town with some mining operations.”
“What’s with the wacko shit?”
At that, prime Karl frowned. “I believe that’s partially my fault. The people who found the wreckage of my plane would have brought me here to recover, but a comatose prime is an awful thing, you see. Their minds are still working. A wandering mind surrounded by a world that can be mutated by sheer force of will? I can only imagine that the results were so worse because this place was made by me to begin with, which would have made it all the more susceptible to my subconscious thoughts.”
“You’re telling me that we’re living in one of your nightmares?”
“OH!” Deadpool shouted, snapping his fingers once again. “Super Mario Bros. 2! Does this make me the plumber?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Chocolate Thunder,” prime Karl replied after smiling faintly at Deadpool’s ‘deadpooling.’ “I design competitive events for a living. A few of them were just… willed into existence by my unconscious mind. Once they were there, they just proliferated a little too quickly, which explains why I was never woken up. It also explains the extra mes.”
“I stabbed one of those.” Deadpool added, eliciting a snicker from prime Karl.
“Was it good for you too?” The prime inquired before unbuttoning and discarding his ruined t-shirt. “So unless you want to stay here, we should make preparations to leave.”
“If you’re real Karl, can’t you just magic us back?” The surprisingly coherent question came from the mercenary.
“Do I have a magic wand?” Prime Karl inquired. “We need to stop by at the Census Building before we head out of town.”
“Why?” Hiro demanded.
“Because I need the records there. All the records on the town’s population are stored there. Before we go, I need those documents.”
“For what?”
Prime Karl rolled his eyes. “Do you know how many secondaries I have? Do you think I remember everything while I’m thousands of miles away? I need the data so that, when I redo this island, it returns with the people who used to live here, rather than a bunch of random idiots who will need weeks of training to understand how to use a damn drill or bake a pizza.”