The first morning after the escape, the sun didn't rise. Not really. The Alps were buried beneath storm clouds and fog thick enough to silence even the birds. Somewhere below the peaks, a stolen mountain facility hummed with new life—and in its deepest level, a boy who wasn't quite a boy anymore stood over a slab of humming metal and rewrote the future.
Paradox had been awake for thirty-six hours straight.
He hadn't planned it. Sleep just never showed up.
There was too much to do, too much to map, too many devices in his brain demanding to be built. The knowledge he'd been reborn with—Rick Prime's godlike intellect, Megamind's hyper-imaginative engineering, Azmuth's galaxy-bending mastery of science—was like a fire he couldn't put out. He didn't just understand reality; he could bend it like wet clay.
The lab around him had once been part of a Weapon Plus black site, one designed for experimentation on mutants and other "anomalous" entities. He had killed its director, hijacked its AI, and reconfigured it into something far more dangerous: home.
The walls still bore scars from the old regime—scorch marks, scratched steel, containment runes etched in blood and regret. But the heart of the place was new. The AI, now renamed DIA, was no longer just a security system. It was evolving, integrating itself into his custom neural blueprints and developing a sarcasm protocol that bordered on sentient.
He paced through the central lab chamber, bare feet slapping softly against cold alloy. Above him, glass spheres floated in a complex lattice—housing simulations of weather patterns, nanite swarms, and alternate quantum collapse theories.
"You need rest," DIA said from the ceiling.
"Rest is for people who didn't just defy death, god, and government in a single night," Paradox replied.
"Even gods sleep."
Paradox smiled faintly. "Then I guess I'll be the exception."
He stepped to a half-assembled console that looked like it belonged in a spaceship and twisted a dial. A projection burst to life, displaying hundreds of blueprints in a constantly rotating stream: weapons that rewrote physics, cloaking fields powered by dark energy, and one particularly unstable engine labeled "Tachyon Sandwich Generator" which had no purpose besides making him laugh.
But despite the tech, despite the power, a strange silence hovered over the room.
Not loneliness. Not yet.
But something adjacent.
His thoughts returned to the dreams—the ones that haunted his sleep before he'd stopped having any. Flashbacks from a different lifetime, or perhaps echoes of the consciousnesses embedded in him. Rick's voice telling him to never care too much. Megamind's dreams of being loved despite his genius. Azmuth's endless warnings: The smarter you are, the more the universe becomes your burden.
He shoved the memories aside. He had work to do.
Hours later, the lab doors hissed open and the lights dimmed automatically as Paradox stepped into the biometric forge chamber. This was where he experimented on himself.
Not recklessly. Not like the fools at Weapon Plus. His upgrades were precise, calculated. He didn't need claws or heat vision. He needed versatility.
So far, he had managed to give himself a subdermal storage matrix—three terabytes of data encoded into the collagen fibers under his skin—and a nano-adaptive circulatory patch that could purge most toxins within seconds.
But the most important was the neural hive.
He called it The Cortex.
A living network of quantum filaments embedded in the base of his skull, acting as a second brain. It didn't speak. It just thought. Fast. Beautifully. Tirelessly.
He could feel it now, whispering in packets of light-speed thought. Suggesting new ideas. Highlighting flaws. Correcting him before he even made mistakes.
The forge machine scanned his body and paused.
"Your heartbeat is elevated," DIA noted. "You're stressed."
"I'm building a power core that could blow a hole through ten realities. I'd be worried if I wasn't stressed."
"Do you want a hug?"
Paradox snorted. "Only if it's emotionally sterile and doesn't involve touching."
"Noted. Deploying metaphorical hug… now."
The chamber lights shifted to a soft blue.
He didn't say it aloud, but it helped.
In the days that followed, he began testing the lab's outer defenses. He reactivated the orbital cloaking field, seeded the valley with anti-tracking pulses, and reprogrammed the facility's old security bots into childlike repair drones with names like Zap, Scribble, and Bombs-but-with-legs (BBWL for short).
He gave each drone a distinct personality. Megamind's influence, maybe.
"I'm not alone," he told himself. "I've got me. That's more than enough."
But even he knew that wouldn't last forever.
He needed to go outside.
And when he did—on the fifth day—he met her.
The village down the mountain wasn't remarkable. Maybe three hundred people. Wood and stone homes. Some old tech. A school. A café. Quiet and stubborn and very much alive.
He disguised himself before stepping into it. Simple jacket. Black gloves. Dark goggles. A faint dampening field that shaved the edges off his energy signature.
He just wanted to buy materials.
Instead, he found a girl reading a book upside-down on a bench outside the bookstore.
She was humming to herself. Hair like wildfire. Freckles like a sky full of stars. When she looked up, she caught him staring and grinned like they were old friends.
"You're new," she said.
"You're… observant."
"I'm Ivy. You're clearly not from around here, and you look like someone who doesn't get sun often."
"I like shadows," he replied. "They don't ask questions."
Ivy laughed. "Okay, Mr. Mysterious. What's your name?"
He hesitated for half a second.
"Paradox."
That raised an eyebrow. "Is that a name or a warning?"
"Both."
She didn't flinch.
Instead, she scooted over on the bench and patted the empty spot.
"Sit. I'll pretend not to ask a hundred questions if you pretend to answer only the interesting ones."
And somehow, that was how it started.