As the motel room's cheap bulb hummed overhead, casting harsh shadows across the faded floral wallpaper, Cecil stared at White Mask for a long, heavy moment. Cecil's expression was unreadable, the kind of professional neutrality that came from years of dealing with the world's strangest and most dangerous people.
Precognition, huh?
Something about the way White Mask said it made Cecil pause. There was a tired resignation in his voice and the lack of theatrical grandeur. The guy's posture was also too relaxed for a liar. On top of that, the information he'd already dropped was too actionable to be pulled from thin air.
This nobody who'd appeared all of sudden and dismantled a child trafficking ring in a single night wasn't making vague claims, either. He gave names. Specifics. Details that would require top-level clearance.
"You understand how that sounds," Cecil said. "People have been claiming to see the future since before recorded history. Not a single one has ever been right about anything that mattered."
"I know." White Mask's shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. "Which is why I'm not asking you to take my word for it. I'm asking you to verify and cross-reference what I tell you against your own intel. Some of it you'll be able to confirm immediately. The others, however... you'll have to wait and see."
Cecil's eyes narrowed. "And what happens if I decide you're full of shit and walk out that door?"
"Then you walk out that door, and I figure out another way to stop what's coming." The masked man's voice didn't waver. "But you won't. Because you're Cecil Stedman, and you can't afford to ignore a potential threat. That's not who you are."
Bastard's got me figured out already. I'll give him credit for that.
Cecil walked to the window, pulling back the cheap curtain to glance outside. The parking lot was empty, the street beyond quiet.
"Let's say I believe you," Cecil said slowly. "Let's say you had a vision of the future. What did you see?"
"Not the future," White Mask corrected, holding up a finger. "A future. There's a difference. What I saw was… one possible timeline, and I'm not even sure if it's the one we're living in. Could be from another universe for all I know. It was incredibly detailed in some areas, but frustratingly vague in others. It was like watching a movie with half the scenes missing."
Cecil filed that away. It explained the gaps in the man's knowledge while still allowing him to act like he knew things he shouldn't.
"Convenient."
"It's frustrating." The masked man's voice carried genuine irritation. "You think I want to have gaps in my knowledge of the future? You think I enjoy not knowing if Machine Head's project is going to succeed or fail? I'm flying blind in the dark here, Cecil. I'm giving you everything I have because I need help, and you're the only person on this fucking planet with the resources to do something with the info I'll be giving."
Cecil studied him. The frustration sounded real. The exhaustion, too. This was far from the performance of a master manipulator. Strangely enough, this all seemed like it came from a kid who'd been thrown into the deep end and was barely keeping his head above water.
Kid. The word stuck in Cecil's mind. He'd been thinking of White Mask as an adult, but something about the way he talked, the way he carried himself...
"How old are you?" Cecil narrowed his eyes.
The masked man went still. "Does it matter?"
"Answer the question."
A long pause. "Seventeen. Turning eighteen in a few months."
Ceci's jaw tightened. A teen. The person who'd dismantled Machine Head's operation, fought two supervillains simultaneously, and was now trying to prevent some kind of apocalypse was a damn teenager. And this kid was allegedly new to superhero business?
"Jesus Christ," Cecil muttered, rubbing his temples. "Alright. I'll ignore that for now. Start talking. Tell me what you saw."
White Mask looked up.
"Well? We don't have all night."
"…Okay. I don't have a graceful way to say this," White Mask said. "So, I'm just going to be blunt."
Cecil felt his gaze through the mask.
"Omni-Man is going to kill the Guardians of the Globe. And he kills them in their own headquarters."
Cecil kept his face very still as the words sat in the air.
He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. A muscle in his jaw tightened before it slacked.
Say something, he told himself. Respond. You're a professional. You've heard worse.
Had he? He genuinely couldn't think of anything right now.
"In the vision I had," White Mask said, his voice careful and low, "Omni-Man ambushes them. He lures them into their base using an emergency signal and slaughters them one by one, painting their headquarters in their blood." He sighed. "And he does it to weaken the planet's defenses."
"To weaken-" Cecil stopped himself, taking a deep breath. "Why?"
"Because that's why he came to our planet in the first place. To weaken Earth and prepare it for the Viltrum Empire, an empire spanning thousands of planets and multiple galaxies. Without Earth's strongest defenders in place, our planet becomes significantly easier to take."
Cecil sat with that. He let the professional part of his brain do what it was trained to do. Process, file, identify implications.
He knew what Omni-Man was capable of. A direct confrontation with the Guardians would only result in a slaughter.
"The Guardians," Cecil said, surprised his voice managed to stay level. "How does it go?"
Something in White Mask's tone shifted. "I can guess what you're thinking, and no, it wasn't one-sided."
Cecil merely looked at him, urging him to elaborate.
"They fight back," White Mask said. "Hard. War Woman and Immortal in particular do a lot of real damage."
"What about the others?"
"They support and distract. They keep Omni-Man from being able to focus on any one target long enough to end the fight quickly. Red Rush especially helps at the start. He makes sure no one gets hit before they see it coming." White Mask's voice turns into a whisper. "They make him work for it. By the end of the fight, they're all dead, but Omni-Man doesn't walk away clean."
"How bad are his injuries?"
"Bad enough that he loses consciousness at the end."
Cecil blinked. Just once. "Come again?"
"He goes unconscious," White Mask repeated. "The Guardians hit him hard enough that after they're all down, he goes with them. Temporarily, at least. He recovers after you find him still breathing, but…" He paused. "I'm telling you this because it matters. People think of Omni-Man and they think of something invincible. Truth is, he's far from it. The Guardians, fighting together with everything they have, pushed him harder than he probably expected."
Cecil processed that with great care.
In the twenty years of working alongside Nolan Grayson, he had seldom seen the man below a hundred percent. He had seen him shrug off a self-proclaimed god's blow. He had seen him walk away from attacks that forced entire maps to change. The idea that six people, even if they were extraordinary, could push him to unconsciousness was the kind of information that changed everything.
"Before that," Cecil said. There was something missing in White Mask's declaration. "Walk me through what makes Omni-Man do this."
White Mask seemed to relax some more, losing tension in his shoulders just a little. "His son, Mark, gets his powers and starts training under him. He doesn't know what his father did for a while, but he finds out eventually."
"How?"
"Omni-Man's wife figures it out first. Her name's Debbie, right?"
Cecil went still.
Debbie. Debbie Grayson, who had known her husband better than Cecil. Who had built an entire life around a man she loved without reservation. Who made the best lemon cake he had ever tasted at the GDA holiday function four years ago and who had pressed him, with genuine warmth, to take a second slice because he looked like he hadn't eaten properly in weeks.
Which, in fairness, he hadn't.
"How?" Cecil said.
"She starts noticing things that don't add up. The Guardians are dead, Nolan starts acting strange and gets fussy about his costume, and the story he tells her doesn't hold together the way it should. She puts it all together piece by piece with the help of Damien Darkblood. When she finds out it was Omni-Man that killed the Guardians… she doesn't take it well," White Mask said.
Cecil sat down on the nearby chair. The alternative was standing there with his hands doing nothing while his mind tried to reconstruct fifteen years of intelligence assessments under a completely different framework.
"You're telling me," Cecil said as he pinched the bridge of his nose, "that the most powerful being on this planet has been running a long game since I was in this job. That every filed report, every joint operation, every-"
He cut himself off.
The worst part was how logical it seemed to be when he looked back at Nolan's old behaviour.
Nolan's excessive ruthlessness. The way mercy was a completely foreign concept to him. The condescension that crept into his voice whenever human beings demonstrated their limitations.
Cecil had catalogued all of it, rationalized all of it, and filed it under cultural differences and alien psychology like a man wilfully misreading a map.
Calm down, he told himself. You still don't know if everything he's saying is true or will happen.
"When does Mark get his powers?" Cecil asked.
White Mask held his hands apart briefly. "I don't know the exact timeline except that it should be around when Mark is in his third or last year of high school and that he gets them after the Mauler Twins attack the White House. Him getting his powers is the trigger that sets Omni-Man off, and once it happens, events start moving quickly. You don't have much time to prepare."
"How quickly?"
"I… I don't know. From what I can tell, the Mauler Twins haven't attacked yet, so months at most maybe?" He paused for a beat. "And if you're thinking about briefing the Guardians… don't. Not yet, at least. Unless they're the best actors in the world, Nolan would immediately know something is wrong and it will set him off. Plus, you'd lose the only advantage you currently have."
"…And what advantage is that?"
"That he doesn't know you know. You were on the backfoot in my vision, always trying to keep up with the changes. But now? You have time to prepare."
Cecil mind went back to the time Nolan had asked him, in that slightly bewildered way of his, why Cecil never seemed to go home.
Because someone has to watch the front door, Cecil had told him.
Maybe he'd been watching the wrong door the entire time.
"What happens after Debbie and Mark find out?" Cecil asked. His voice had gone somewhere flatter and quieter than usual.
White Mask was silent for a moment.
"Omni-Man tells Mark the truth about Viltrum and tries to convince Mark to join him. He tries to make Mark understand what he is, how short-lived humans are, and what humanity is from a Viltrumite's perspective. It… It doesn't work. I think he actually had a chance of convincing Mark, but he ends up calling his wife a… a pet."
Cecil couldn't help but close his eyes and turn his head away. Jesus Christ.
"In the end, Mark refuses to enslave humanity and Omni-Man fights him."
Cecil sighed. "His own son."
"Yes."
"And?"
"Omni-Man takes their fight to Chicago and uses him as a weapon. I mean that literally," White Mask said. "He turns Mark into a helpless immovable object, holding him in front of an incoming train. Everyone riding it dies. Men, women, children. No one is spared. By the time they leave the city, a lot of downtown Chicago was already turned to rubble, with countless civilian casualties on top."
It just kept getting worse and worse.
"Mark tries, but he doesn't keep up with Omni-Man. It's not even close," White Mask continued. "Not at that stage, anyway. Omni-Man beats him to the edge of death, giving him injuries that would kill an ordinary person several times over. And then he just… stops."
"Stops?" Cecil repeated. What could give Nolan pause?
"He doesn't finish the job. He simply asks Mark what he would have in 500 years. Wanna guess what he says?"
"How the fuck should I know?"
"Okay, okay! Geez. No need for the profanity." White Mark recoiled, raising his hands in a placating motion. "Mark says, 'You, Dad. I'll still have you,' and whatever it would cost him to actually kill his own son… he doesn't pay it. Omni-Man leaves the planet."
White Mask hands clasped together in a tight hold. Cecil sat in the silence that followed.
"Now explain to me," he said, "why Mark developing powers is the specific trigger. Because 'two decades of waiting and then he decides to move' isn't an explanation."
White Mask was quiet for a moment.
"The Viltrumites have a massive problem," he said. "They have far fewer pure-blooded members than their empire's reputation would suggest."
"How few?"
"Fewer than fifty."
The number landed the way significant numbers always did when you fully understood their implications. Cecil processed it once. Then processed it again.
"You're telling me that the empire responsible for conquering thousands of planets across multiple galaxies has a total pure-blooded population of under fifty individuals," he said, measuring each word.
"Yes. I don't know why there are only that many left. It wasn't included in my vision, but Nolan himself said that it's their most guarded secret."
Cecil absorbed that. He followed the logic chain the way he did with every existential threat, tracing cause to effect until the full shape of it became visible.
His frown deepened. "He's not here just to conquer Earth, is he?"
"Honestly… that makes sense. With the problem they have, they likely want to see if Earth could become a breeding facility," White Mask confirmed. "Nolan settling here, marrying Debbie… It was a test. The Viltrum Empire need proof that humans are biologically compatible with Viltrumites and that viable hybrids are possible. Most of all, they want to know if their population could be rebuilt."
"And Mark…"
"Mark is the proof that it worked." White Mask's voice was resolute. "A half-Viltrumite who develops pure Viltrumite-level powers is confirmation that humans are a compatible host population." He paused. "To Nolan and the Empire, that means the test succeeded and the next phase can proceed. Fifty Viltrumites could rebuild their species through breeding with humans all over the planet."
Cecil stared at the far wall.
"Fewer than fifty, huh?" Cecil repeated.
"And they've held an empire together with it," White Mask said. "Because of what even one of them can do to a planet that resists."
Cecil thought of his casualty projections for a hypothetical Viltrumite incursion, where each one was an Omni-Man level threat. The image alone put a sour taste in his mouth. But he accepted their bleak reality. Now, it was time he started building a response.
"Do you know about any Viltrumite countermeasures?"
-x-
A/N: Sorry for the single upload last week. Struggled with writing this chapter. Next chapter will be up tomorrow.