I took a deep breath, straightening my posture and swaying gently back and forth. Moving slowly, I pulled a sheet of paper off of the stack on the table before me. As I slid it towards me I closed my eyes, listening to my fingertips, to the whisper of the paper as it slid across the table, to the paper's fibers slipping apart as I folded. Colors twisted and shimmered across my vision for a moment, but I stayed focused on the craft.

With a slow and final breath out, I opened my eyes.

Perfect. Six hundred and thirty-four.

I inspected the origami crane in my hands, admiring the sharp edges and clean lines I'd managed to produce. The on-site therapist was always encouraging me to have a calming activity, and had signed off on getting me an absurd amount of origami paper after I'd taken to the art.

Relaxing my shoulders, I stood slowly and paced towards the back of my little living room. Just as I was about to add it to the rows and rows lining the wall, the lights dimmed and began to pulse blue.

"Should I put some pants on?" I asked aloud to the camera in the corner of the room.

"Yes." I winced as the voice crackled through the intercom by the door. They'd done their best to avoid spiky disruptions to my environment - changing the blaring klaxon to those blue lights, building day/night cycles into my living space, turning down the speakers - but it was still a bit jarring.

When I was done getting dressed, I grabbed the earpiece off of my nightstand and put it in.

"We've had another activity spike," Alex's voice came through as I bent to put on my socks. "Doc's projecting a nasty breach in about twenty minutes."

I put on my boots, waiting for him to continue.

"She thinks probably on the outskirts, so it'll be drop procedure if that's alright."

"Yeah, I guess," I twiddled with my dampener cuff absentmindedly, sitting on the couch ten feet from the door as per protocol. "The sound fittings are done, right?"

"Yeah, should be a quieter ride than last time," Alex replied, and I could hear the concern in his voice.

-----

Real air. Outside air. Night air.

I didn't mind the facility, honestly. It was for everyone's benefit, I understood, and the people at the facility were very accommodating.

But god was it a rush to be out sometimes. Especially on a night like this.

My combat watch's readout ticked as I walked down the empty street, but it wasn't really for me. They just wanted the data.

"Ready?" Alex asked, more nervous than I'd ever been. I felt a little bad that they were all so scared of me, but I couldn't help it much.

"Yeah, go for it."

"Cool. Uh, be safe." I let out a small laugh, but his genuine concern was always touching. "Hot in five, four..."

My dampener cuff vibrated slightly, and I watched the little lights tick down.

It always hit like a ton of bricks. My mind flickered for a moment as the power crackled through me. Reality wobbled, warped, growing sharp, impossibly fractalline. I could feel the hum in my teeth.

The facts began to filter in, whispers at first.

I was about ten feet from the hotspot and I could taste it. Strong this time. Wicked. Hungry. Different.

The breach opened and a humanoid stepped out.

Humanoid? I wasn't supposed to hurt human-shaped things. No. I always felt bad.

But humans always smelled so soft. This wasn't soft.

The figure stepped forward, under a streetlight. Acrid, it smelled.

"Well, hello there." Its voice was all wrong, like gravel and velvet. "You're quite a thing, aren't you?"

"Yes." I dragged the words to the swirling surface of my mind. They echoed in my skull like a thousand voices speaking in almost-unison. "What.. are you?"

"Well that's a good question now, isn't it?" Cold and hot at the same time, the voice burned.

They'd all been animals, before. Destructive but. Blind. Heedless hunger. This was not an animal.

The thing stalked closer. Wrong, wrong, all wrong. Poison and fire.

"What the fuck is that?" Was it Doc's voice, in my ear? I couldn't tell.

"Ooh, it has friends," the thing said, tilting its head. "Friends that don't know what we are, do they?"

"Okay, listen to me," it was Doc, wasn't it? Her voice was full of triangles. "Do you think you can take that thing in?"

"No." The word was all I could summon before the thing lunged.

My vision fractured, the creature unfolding out along four dimensions, past and future spiraling out around it. I sidestepped, smearing myself out along the same impossible directions it had. The me that hadn't moved caught the thing by the throat. I split again, driving a fist at it's head from the side while dashing towards the breach where the thing's past stretched out behind it. Then again, the me that had it by the neck squeezing tighter while dropping my grip and stepping to the other side.

As the fist made contact, I plunged a hand into the breach, grabbing the creature by its past, feeling the impact of the punch ripple through its timeline. It thrashed, twisting from my grip, but the me on the opposite side of it was ready. I drove my hand into its future-chest and it screamed.

I drank in the noise, and the me standing over the breach pulled.

To an outside observer, it probably looked like nothing had happened. The monster was there, and then it wasn't. But I saw it, felt it rip back into the hole in reality it had made a mere minute ago, sliding through my hands and back out of time.

Then everything went black.

-----

[I ran out of steam after trying to write that 4-dimensional fight scene lol. Let me know if that made any sense and/or if anyone would like to see me continue this a bit further.]

Cold metal cuffs gripped his wrists and ankles tightly, while stuff and frigid chains held his arms to his torso, with dampening coils clenching his neck and shoulders. It was a binding that no one, not even Houdini's permeation could ever hope to escape without being let out by another, but to him? A rudimentary setup, a bad sense of fashion, a poor quality shirt. If he chose, he could escape with no effort and kill everyone involved, but he doesn't want to. He wants peace.

"Hey, you still breathing?" The soldier spoke all too casually to the man who did not want to be bothered, frightening those around him.

"Don't talk to him. At all. He doesn't like it and he's killed for much less than that." The doctor, the only one trusted by the man, knew that if he could not keep this beast of a man under control then it would be the end of them all.

"What?" The soldier responded "Listen, those bindings each have their own dampening wires in the cuffs, as well as in each individual chain, and that collar? Things so powerful that it's even messing with us, he's not getting out." Just as the arrogant soldier finished his sentence, the monster began to stand, an action that left everyone stricken with terror.

As he sat back down, the doctor began to explain who this individual was.

"Just... Don't disturb him, please. It took us a very long time to get him to trust me at all, the last thing we need is to rile him up. He just sort of... Showed up one day, at first no one cared because he would stop aliens, monsters, robots, anything that would normally require our heroes to do. Then, he started to simply attack random buildings and causing destruction. Eventually we managed to communicate with him, and this was what he wanted. He never explained why, and refuses to do so, but the best guess we could get is that he's mentakly disturbed in some way, a disturbance that came long before we found him." The doctor carefully looked upon the man in question, staring into nothing, almost as if he were wishing the bindings were doing something to him.

"Doctor, we're arriving at the location." The pilot informed.

Upon landing, the man was escorted to his new 'home'; several thousand feet below the deepest part of the ocean, surrounded by steel, concrete, and bedrock, walls lined with thick dampening sheets, the room was built to hold a great force, a much weaker force than it currently housed. Upon entering, the man simply sat on the bed and again stared into nothing, but this time in deep thought and contemplation. This single action scared the doctor more than anything else, as he was now witnessing the single most important decision of possibly the entire world being made in the head of a man who can not be stopped.

"Why do I still feel? Why didn't this work? I just wanted some form of peace, but my mind is still clouded, I can't think straight, the only time I can make coherent thoughts is when I'm trying to kill something, why. Is this a curse? Does magic exist? Did I slight some wizard? Or perhaps reincarnation exists alongside the magic and I was particularly horrible to a power mage in a previous life? I hate this. I just want to have a clear mind. And the doctor, he won't be able to help me, he tried and failed, my body rejects medications, my mind can not be cleared through his methods. I just want a clear head, and I need to think straight right now, I just need to be able to see through this haze. What should I do? Why do i wonder? Why do I sit here and ask myself questions i ready decided on?" The man sat unblinking before looking at the doctor and doing something he was never seen doing before; he grinned, sheepishly, but a grin nonetheless.

The end.

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The muscular and imposing figure of the extraterrestrial calling himself Thrakker came to Earth to find the ultimate fight, threatening to level the city he landed in if he was not defeated. After the city's superheroes cleared the defenseless citizens, they attacked. Hero after hero and more than a few villains fell in the battle against the extraterrestrial warrior.

"Come fight me! Who shall be next to fall by my hands, puny earthlings? My patience fades," the unscathed alien bellowed.

Being just The Ultimate Punchline's sidekick, and an unpowered sidekick at that, Kid Quip was smiling uncharacteristically for someone walking in his schoolboy uniform towards the menacing figure. Quip kept his gaze steadily upon the posturing alien menace and carefully picked his path past the fires of the former business district, past the broken and bloody bodies of friends, colleagues, nemesis, and mentors.

"Hi there, big guy," he shouted. "Are you sure you don't want to leave now while you still can?"

Thrakker regarded the boy with a dismissive look, not seeing a battle worthy of his awesome might in the puny child. "Foolish mortal, I will grind your planet's very bones..."

"Yeah, yeah, we've all heard this repeatedly for the past few hours," Quip interrupted, waving at the large screen video billboards that the news drones had been haphazardly live-broadcasting onto. "We've gone easy on you till now." He raised his other hand, brandishing an old but sturdy single-button remote control.

A perplexed look appeared on Thrakker's face. "Seriously? A garage door opener?"

"Well, yes, but it's been repurposed," Quip replied. "With it I can open a portal to summon...", then started making choking sounds as Thrakker rushed him, effortlessly lifted him by the neck, and snatched the remote.

"I care not for your prattle, whelpling," said Thrakker, casually tossing Quip into a distant dumpster. "The eternal quest for glory is my only desire," he exclaimed, posturing for the camera as he dramatically pressed the button. "Come face me, champion!"

The remote clicked and wheezed. A singular, glowing, forest-green dot that wasn't in midair a moment ago casually unfolded itself into two dimensions, becoming a line reaching a bad 6 feet from the ground. A conscious but concussed hero reached up in a vain attempt to stop it from unfolding further, but her injuries begged to differ and pulled her the rest of the way to a slight case of coma.

The energy line started rotating slowly, but doubled speed every passing moment, soon forming an optical circle. Thrakker unconcernedly tossed aside the remote, and pounded his fists together in anticipation. Grinning broadly with teeth a sentient shark would be proud of, saliva dripped off his jaw and started eating away at the cracked pavement beneath his feet.

As the portal fully formed, the very air held still, and the sounds in the area stopped as an female voice called out, "Kitty? Did I hear a kitty? Where are you, kitty?"

"Just to catch you folks at home up to speed," Quip narrated, as a friendly drone videoed him in the safety of the dumpster, "back when the Age of Supers began, there was a young heroine that went by the moniker Menagerie, but her name was really Margaret."

The most powerful being on the planet, aka Margaret, stepped out of the portal to save the day. Picture a young, voluptuous heroine in her 20s wearing a body-fitting spandex with glowing blonde hair, alluring eyes with a promise of things to come in them, and a smile that could charm anyone's socks off. Now age her an additional 50 years, her hair is all greyed and frazzled with some curlers perpetually stuck in it, the spandex has been traded for a comfy bathrobe and slippers, swap soda-bottle glasses for the alluring eyes, and her teeth have been replaced with charming dentures, and that would be the savior of the day, Margaret. She looked up at Thrakker and said, "There you are kitty," obviously not quite seeing him clearly, as Thrakker resembled a house cat as much as she resembled a person with a modicum of self-preservation or sanity.

Quip continued, "Back in her heyday, Margaret could turn criminals into whatever ordinary animal she desired. The old footage of this is just so adorable, but nobody had imagined that there was a drawback to her powers."

Thrakker gazed upon his new mortal enemy, then looking up and around, clearly disappointed and a bit bewildered. "Uh, is this a joke? I can't just pummel an old..." and then yelped as she suddenly reached up, grabbed him by a large floppy ear, and effortlessly and, quite possibly for the first time in his life, painfully pulled him down face-to face with her. "Bad kitty! Where have you been? Come when I call you." Then she reflexively snapped the fingers on her free hand.

Thrakker shrieked as his massive physical form crumpled inward.

Quip monologued on, squirming and getting comfortable on the trash and definitely not getting out of the safety of the dumpster, "But the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted... and, in Margaret's case, absorbed. And a human has a lot more mass and therefore energy than, let's say, the standard housecat. This worsened exponentially when she transformed Supervillains, as the potential energy of their powers had to go, well, somewhere."

Steam and other vapors arose from the cute little ginger cat as Margaret picked it up and cradled him in her arms. The air around the pair loudly vibrated and thrummed as potential energy was absorbed by Margaret, who was now giving the former city-destroyer some very nice scritches behind the ears. As the purring commenced, she shuffled back towards her portal and the interdimensional comforts of home.

"While she could physically handle the energy, her mental acuity started deteriorating rapidly and for the safety of everyone else on the planet, she had to be contained," Quip carelessly fanboyed on.

Margaret's and the new cat's ears perked up at Quip's monologue, and Margaret the Crazy Cat Lady looked over to Quip's formerly safe dumpster and ominously said, "Kitty?"

Quip's eyes went wide in shock as he muttered, "Oh crap."