Not in the charming "he'll cure cancer one day" way, but in the tragic "why does this kid know how to collapse a quantum waveform with a microwave?" way.
By thirteen, he'd built a mini fusion cell using junkyard scrap and an old Xbox fan. He submitted the project to the national science fair. The judges disqualified him because they thought it was fake.
By fifteen, he was blacklisted from three Ivy League databases for breaking into their closed research portals "for fun." By seventeen, he was sitting in a classroom where the teachers knew less than YouTube and the students called him "freak" like it was his legal name.
And by twenty-two?
He was working the night shift at a dusty little electronics repair shop in Brooklyn. No degrees. No friends. No future. Just old consoles, dying tablets, and a paycheck that barely covered rent.
The world didn't reward genius. It punished it for not playing along.
Lucien didn't mind the solitude. He liked silence. It made the math louder.
That night, he sat slouched behind the counter, legs crossed, a dead drone splayed open on the desk like a metal autopsy. A cracked tablet played an episode of My Hero Academia nearby—the one where All Might saves Izuku for the first time. The music swelled as the hero posed in front of the rising sun.
Lucien scoffed. "Overdramatic steroid junkie."
He reached for his soldering iron, nudged a capacitor into place, and started muttering under his breath. "This kid lives in a world where eighty percent of the population has superpowers and he still gets bullied. People really suck, huh?"
He adjusted a lens on his glasses and squinted at the wiring. The air was stale with burnt plastic. The clock behind him read 2:42 AM.
Lucien worked in silence for another minute, then leaned back and stared up at the ceiling tiles.
His breath fogged in the cold, and for the first time in a long while, he whispered something out loud.
"I wish something would change."
The lights above him flickered.
He frowned. "Oh don't you start, I just fixed the surge box yesterday."
Then the hum began.
Low. Vibrating. Like a machine warming up... or a universe tearing just a little bit.
The air crackled. The drone on the desk buzzed, then sparked. Lucien dropped his tool and stepped back, eyes wide. His phone screen turned to static. His laptop blinked out.
Then a soft voice—not spoken, not heard, but felt inside his skull—said:
Incoming Data Transfer: Multiversal Cognition Archive
Source Identity: R. Sanchez (Prime)
Target Neural Matrix: Kessler, L.
Warning: Host Brain Exceeds Recommended Capacity. Initiating Emergency Sync.
Lucien had half a second to think What the f—
Then his mind exploded.
It was pain, yes—but more than that. It was like someone set his soul on fire, turned his thoughts inside out, and poured the entire internet, every science journal, and the nightmares of a mad god directly into his brain.
He screamed. Not a scream of fear. Not even one of agony.
It was a data scream. Every neuron in his body overloaded. Every sense flipped. His vision became equations. His hearing turned into binary. Smells translated into molecular codes.
He collapsed to the ground, convulsing, the world above him spinning through colors he didn't have words for.
Then everything went dark.
Lucien woke up in his garage. No idea how he got there. No memory of time passing.
He sat up slowly, hands trembling, cold sweat running down his spine. His brain buzzed with static and numbers.
Something felt... different.
He looked down. On the table in front of him was a machine. Roughly shaped like a gun but pulsing with unstable quantum energy. He didn't remember building it. But he knew what it was.
A multiversal portal drive.
He grabbed it with numb fingers. The moment his skin touched the surface, blueprints flooded his thoughts—design principles, safety parameters, calibration sequences. He could see alternate universes in the back of his mind like folders waiting to be opened.
He staggered to his feet and stumbled to the mirror.
His reflection stared back: red-rimmed eyes, hair a mess, grease on his face—but behind his eyes, something sparkled. Something... impossible.
He wasn't just Lucien anymore.
He was Lucien Kessler, plus Rick Sanchez.
He laughed. At first soft. Then harder.
And harder.
He collapsed into a chair, gripping his face, teeth clenched.
"I'm either insane... or I just became the smartest bastard in the multiverse."
His hand hovered over the activation button on the portal gun. The targeting drive had already loaded a random coordinate:
AN-198.MHA. Timeline: Quirk Genesis Earth
Status: Hostile, Superpowered Society
Entry Type: Blind Jump
Lucien exhaled through his nose.
"Anime Earth, huh? Let's see if fiction can handle reality."
He pressed the trigger.
A portal ripped open in front of him, swirling green and blue and screaming with unstable energy.
He didn't hesitate.
He stepped through.
And the garage was gone.