A/N: Yes, you read that right. I'm going on a hiatus for about two weeks minimum because of personal reasons I won't go into here. If all goes well, I'll be able to start writing again within the last few days of this month.
Thank you for understanding and I hope you guys have a wonderful day/night.
However, I also don't feel right with leaving you guys with nothing to see, so here's the rough incomplete draft of the next chapter. It isn't final, and like previous chapters before it, it may go through a major revision when I come back from the hiatus:
Cecil processed the kid's reaction. It seemed genuine. In fact, he'd even say this was the most emotive the kid had been so far.
Which opened up a different category of problems entirely.
White Mask had walked into this room with enough classified information to give Cecil's entire intelligence organization a heart-attack. He gave names, described organizational structures, provided tactical intelligence on the most powerful being on Earth, and built in his own limitations with the precise consistency of someone telling what they believed was the truth.
But he hadn't known about Aria.
A child who had been part of the Grayson household for her entire life. Nolan's daughter. Mark's twin. A half-Viltrumite who, if White Mask's logic about Mark's significance held, was equally significant to the Empire's goals and had been completely absent from everything White Mask had described tonight.
That was either the most specific and inexplicable gap in genuine precognition Cecil had ever encountered, or it was a crack in the story. He needed to know which.
He raised a brow at White Mask.
"I'm guessing your precognition neglected to show you that tidbit of information?"
White Mask slowly shook his head, head hanging low with pure disbelief in display. "No… Not even once."
He recalled a passing remark from earlier in the conversation. A small correction the kid had made, almost offhand, that Cecil had filed.
"You corrected me earlier," Cecil said. "When I asked if you'd seen the future. You said you saw a future. And you added that you weren't certain it was the one we're living in. Why did you say that?"
A beat of silence passed before a quiet sigh escaped White Mask's lips.
"There's a man named Angstrom Levy," White Mask said. "He has the ability to view and travel the multiverse through the use of portals he can create at will. Every universe is accessible to him. In what I saw, a horrible accident Mark indirectly caused turned him into one of Mark's most dangerous enemies. Angstrom used his power to gather a group of evil Invincible variants and made deals with them. In exchange, they helped him destroy Mark's planet."
While the astonishing information made him frown, Cecil said nothing and let him continue.
"When I realized the multiverse was genuinely real, I corrected you before to cover my bases. It seemed worth acknowledging that if infinite alternate universes existed, then the future I'd seen could theoretically belong to any one of them." White Mask's voice turned into a whisper. "I didn't think it would turn out to be true, and I didn't want to claim certainty I didn't have."
Cecil considered it was internally consistent with everything else about the way White Mask managed his own uncertainty. He flagged it and moved forward.
"Why didn't you mention him earlier when you were listing threats worth flagging?" Cecil asked, crossing his arms.
The kid's posture shifted.
"I assumed the future I saw was one of our world's potential futures," he said. "With that assumption in mind, I thought that since the accident that made Angstrom Levy dangerous hadn't happened yet and wasn't likely to happen anymore given my interference, he could be left alone until he actually started moving."
He shook his head once.
"…I just didn't think of him as an immediate priority."
"You thought wrong. Walk me through the accident," Cecil said.
"…Angstrom Levy was a smart guy that wanted to turn the world into a utopia," White Mask said. "To fulfill that goal, he took in versions of himself from hundreds of different universes, and in the process, he finds out he was the only one with the power to travel. Each one possessed knowledge that could be useful to him like the cure to Cancer or new schools of thought, and he wanted to transfer their knowledge into his brain. But since he didn't have the scientific expertise to pull it off, he decided to hire the Mauler Twins. Broke them out of the GDA's prison using his power."
"And after that?"
"The GDA's sensors picked up the energy output of the machine they were using, so you had Mark interfere. Unfortunately for Mark, it turned out Angstrom had hired about five more pairs of Mauler Twins from different universes and they beat his ass. To keep things short, Angstrom didn't want to build his utopia with blood and took his helmet off during the transfer process. This caused the machine to explode during the fight, turning almost everyone inside to ash. Angstrom somehow lived through it, but… with dire consequences."
"He survived?" The edge of Cecil's lips quirked up at the absurdity of it. "Lucky bastard."
"Lucky?" White Mask scoffed. "Not even close. What Angstrom forgot to take into account is that in every other universe aside from his, Invincible was evil or had become evil. One of them said they even killed their dad. The transfer process being interrupted made it impossible for Angstrom to distinguish which memories were his and which were from the hundreds of different versions of himself that hated their world's Invincible. Even worse, the accident also expanded his brain so much it reached his back."
Shit. That certainly sounded like a recipe for disaster. Cecil could see why this led to Angstrom becoming Mark's enemy.
"As a result," White Mask sighed, "Angstrom became single-mindedly focused on destroying Mark. And it nearly worked."
"So you said the accident isn't likely to happen anymore because if Mark's trajectory in this world diverges enough from what you saw, the accident may never happen?" Cecil summed up.
"…Yeah."
"Let me emphasize the wording there. Not won't," Cecil said. "May. You're saying there's still a chance?"
"Aria existing is proof that our universe isn't the one I saw in my vision. It already diverges from what I saw by an enormous degree and the accident that created the version of Angstrom Levy I know about was tied to specific circumstances in that specific universe. Those circumstances might never align here. But I also can't rule it out."
"No," Cecil agreed. "You can't."
He was building a mental inventory. Everything White Mask had described tonight, reassessed under the new framework.
The Viltrumite population problem was a structural fact that didn't depend on timeline specifics. High confidence.
The Depth Dweller. Specific and verifiable, moderate confidence.
The Guardians' fight. Speculative.
The Liu weakness. Already proven wrong by a single cross-reference, filed under alternate timeline contamination the moment Cecil had caught it.
And now Aria's absence.
A fundamental absence of a person who had been part of the Grayson household her entire life, who was equally significant to the Empire's goals by White Mask's own logic, and who had never appeared once in any version of events the kid had described.
"Whatever future you saw," Cecil said, still looking at the parking lot, "the split from that world happened long before tonight, long before you got here. Which means every event you described needs to be treated as a reference point rather than a blueprint. The broad strokes may hold. The specific details are now open questions."
"…I know," White Mask said. There was a weight in it that hadn't been there earlier.
Cecil moved toward the center of the room and stopped, looking at him directly.
"Here's what that means practically," he said. "In the universe you saw, Angstrom Levy was the only version of himself capable of traveling between universes. That specific detail is load-bearing for everything you described about him. The accident required him to gather alternate versions of himself. It required the Mauler Twins. It required Mark to interfere at a specific moment. Every one of those requirements is a variable. Change any one of them and the accident doesn't happen the same way or at all."
"Yes," White Mask said.
"But here's the other side of that," Cecil continued. "In a universe where the divergence point is fifteen years back, where Aria exists and apparently didn't in whatever you saw Angstrom Levy may also be different. His goals might be the same. His power might be the same. But the specific circumstances that led to the accident in your vision may never align here for reasons that have nothing to do with you or Mark." He let that sit for a second. "Or they might align in ways neither of us can predict precisely because this world is different."
White Mask was quiet.
"You said he wanted to build a utopia," Cecil said. "That he wasn't trying to hurt anyone. That it was the accident and the contaminated transfer that made him what he became." He crossed his arms. "A man with access to infinite parallel universes, currently walking around this world with genuinely good intentions and no reason yet to become dangerous. That's an asset worth considering."
White Mask's head came up. "You want to approach him?"
"I want to know about him," Cecil said. "There's a meaningful difference. A man who can access any universe, retrieve any piece of knowledge, move personnel or materials across dimensional boundaries without any of our conventional detection methods-" He stopped to take a breath. "You understand what that capability looks like from where I'm sitting."
"I do," White Mask said. "But so does every other intelligence agency on the planet, if they ever find out he exists. And so would the Viltrum Empire."
Cecil paused.
The kid had arrived there faster than he'd expected.
"That's the other side of the coin," White Mask continued. "In my vision, Angstrom only wanted to help people. He went to the Mauler Twins because he didn't have any other option. He needed scientific expertise he didn't have himself. If the GDA approaches him first, with the right framing, he might not need to go to them at all. But if he's approached wrong, you could create the problem you're trying to prevent."
"Which is why I said consider, not contact," Cecil said. "Not yet."
"Not yet," White Mask agreed.
The approach to Levy, if it ever happened, would need to be handled with more care than almost anything else on the growing list from tonight. A man that valuable, that capable, that fragile in the specific way that idealists were fragile when the world disappointed them required the right person at the right moment with the right ask.
He didn't have any of those three things yet. He'd work on it.
"Is there anything else?" Cecil asked, raising a brow and giving a pointed look. "Anything else you classified as low priority because you assumed events here would track the timeline you saw?"
The pause that followed was the longest of the night.
It was, Cecil thought, the most honest answer the kid had given him so far. The length of the silence before them spoke for itself.
"There might be," White Mask said finally. "I went through tonight prioritizing what I thought was most urgent. But I was prioritizing against a timeline that's already proven to be different from this one in at least one significant way. I need to go back through everything I can remember and reassess what I treated as irrelevant because it seemed resolved. There could be more gaps like Angstrom. Things I left out because I thought the conditions for them no longer applied."
"How long will that take?"
"I don't know. Some of it I can work through quickly. Some of it I might not recognize as a gap until something happens that shouldn't be possible according to what I saw."
Cecil accepted that. It was the honest answer rather than the reassuring one. He'd learned to value the distinction.
"When you have something, you contact me directly," Cecil said.
He reached into his jacket and produced a plain card. It had no name, no logo, and no identifying marks. It only had a phone number printed in clean black type.
"That line is secure and monitored only by me and one other person whose discretion I'd stake my career on. Leave your name if you call and I'll return it within the hour. Don't use it for anything that can wait for a face-to-face."
White Mask took the card. He looked at it for a moment before putting it in his pocket.
"Understood," White Mask said.
Cecil looked at him for a moment longer.
"One more thing," Cecil said. "Aria."
White Mask looked up.
"When you think about how the Grayson situation, how does her existence change it in your assessment?"