A/N: Yes, I'm alive. Yes, this is extremely delayed compared to my normal Monday uploads. My brain malfunctioned and I forgot to save before I closed the document. Had to write what I added and revised from scratch, which may have led to a poorer quality chapter.
This conversation between Leon and Cecil has been dragging on for too many chapters and I've been itching to get back at gambling for Leon's next set of rewards, so the next chapter will be the return to Leon's POV.
On another note, while I'm technically back, the issue that led to my hiatus still hasn't been resolved completely. What this means is that for the rest of the month, I will probably be uploading 2 chapters a week max. I'd write more if I could, but it is what is it is. Not much I can do right now.
That'll be it from me. Y'all have a wonderful day. Enjoy the chapter.
-x-
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 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 a 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 this 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, but 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 seventeen years back, where Aria exists, 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 slightly. "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. The length of the silence before them spoke for itself.
"There might be," White Mask answered. "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," Cecil said, "you contact me directly."
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 would unfold, how does her existence change it in your assessment?"
"…The only thing I'm certain of is that her existence will alter everything so significantly that I can't even predict what could happen. Worst-case scenario? She and Mark join Omni-Man in taking over the planet."
Cecil had arrived at the same conclusion. He sighed.
"That's good enough for me. For now, I think it's about time I check on the kids and see for myself what condition they're in."
"Right." White Mask stood and approached the bathroom door. Cecil followed a step behind. "Just a heads up. Don't be surprised if the people back at the GDA can't listen in on us or track your location the moment you step inside."
"Let me guess." Cecil raised a brow. "It leads to another dimension?"
White Mask's hand hovered over the handle. "Pretty much."
The instant the kid's hand touched the handle, the door transformed into shimmering liquid gold, and under his feet, smooth obsidian replaced the yellow tiles.
"Mi casa es su casa."
White Mask pushed the door open and what laid behind was unlike anything he expected. Cecil wasn't sure what he expected, but it certainly wasn't a five-star suite with a view of outer space.
"Come in. Or you can stay here and I'll bring the kids out."
Cecil hesitated only for a moment before stepping inside. He stayed silent as he followed White Mask, eyes scanning for any hint of danger.
What drew his attention first was the anthropomorphic panther with a physique of a battle-hardened warrior. This was the one from Robot's report. The panther was in the middle of peeling kiwis on the countertop with his claw when their presence alerted him.
The panther's sharp eyes locked onto Cecil first before moving towards White Mask.
"Welcome back."
"Hey Lily," White Mask waved and pointed a thumb at Cecil as they walked. "This is Cecil, the help I was talking about."
Lily lowered his head in greeting. "A pleasure meeting you, Cecil."
"Nice to meet you, too," Cecil greeted back.
While surprised by the new sight, he'd seen hundreds of far stranger things. A civil cat person bigger than Nolan was near the bottom of the list.
Ahead of them, three kids sat on a couch. Smiles appeared on their faces when they saw White Mask, but those same smiles fell when they noticed Cecil.
"How are you three still awa–woah!"
The kids grabbed onto White Mask, appearing to use his figure as a shield between them and Cecil.
"And these three," White Mask's hands softly tussled their hair, "are the kids that still haven't slept for some reason. The rest are asleep in the guest rooms. This, kids, is Cecil. I know he looks scary, but I trust him. He'll be helping all of you get back to your families."
The three kids stared at Cecil from behind White Mask like he was something that had crawled out of a drain.
He was used to that reaction. Kids, criminals, foreign dignitaries—the response was more or less the same across the board. He had a face that terrified or unsettled others.
What he didn't expect was the specific quality of it. This was something practiced. The kind of stillness that showed up in people who had learned the hard way that the wrong reaction got you hurt.
Cecil crouched down to their eye level. He kept his hands visible and his voice level.
"Hey. I know I'm not exactly a friendly face." He glanced between the three of them, mustering the best smile he could. "You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to. I'm just here to make sure you're okay."
"You said before that the police was going to help," one of the boys said, as if stating a fact.
Cecil kept his expression neutral. The sentence was aimed at White Mask.
White Mask went still for just a fraction of a second. "…Yeah. I did say that."
"And then he pointed his gun at us," the boy said.
Having read the report and knowing what kind of relationships organized crime holds with corrupt law enforcement, the implications came together in his head without delay.
A corrupt police officer. Machine Head's reach inside local law enforcement. Children who tried trusting the system and got a weapon pointed back at them for the trouble.
He added it to the list of things he was going to pull apart as soon as he could.
"That cop was working for the same people who had you locked up," Cecil said, slow and careful. "He wasn't supposed to be, but he was. That's my fault as much as anyone's. The people who are supposed to protect you shouldn't be on the other side, and when they are, that falls on people like me to fix." He held the smallest one's gaze. "I can't fix what already happened. But I can make sure where you end up next isn't somewhere that person or anyone like him can get to you."
Silence.
The boy who had spoken studied Cecil with the exhausted skepticism of someone twice his age. "How do we know you're not working for them too?"
"You don't," Cecil said. "Not yet. You've got no reason to trust me and every reason not to." He gestured vaguely at White Mask. "But he trusts me. And from what I understand, that doesn't exactly come cheap."
White Mask made a sound that might have been a quiet laugh under different circumstances.
The smallest girl loosened her grip on White Mask's jacket just a smidge. It wasn't much, but it was a step forward.
"We're going to find your families," Cecil said. "The ones who have families to go back to, you'll be home before the week is out. The ones who don't… We'll find somewhere good. Somewhere I and White Mask can check on personally. You have my word on that."
"What's your word worth?" the skeptical boy asked.
Cecil thought about that for a second.
"Ask him," Cecil said, and nodded at White Mask.
The boy looked up. White Mask looked down at him.
"He keeps his word," White Mask said with certainty Cecil deduced was from knowing the Cecil he saw in his vision. "Even when it costs him something."
Another beat of silence.
The smallest girl stepped out from behind White Mask's jacket entirely. Just one step. She looked up at Cecil with the direct, unsettling focus that very young children and very dangerous people had in common.
"Promise?" she said.
Cecil held her gaze. "Promise."
She studied him for another three seconds. Then she walked to the couch and sat back down, pulling a blanket around her shoulders with the decisive air of someone who had made a decision and was done deliberating.
The other two exchanged a look before following her lead.
Cecil stood. His knees registered a complaint about the crouching, which he ignored.
He turned to White Mask. "How many in total?"
"Twenty-three. The three still awake and twenty more in the guest rooms."
Twenty-three children in a pocket dimension attached to a motel bathroom, being looked after by a seventeen-year-old and a giant anthropomorphic panther.
The world Cecil lived in was genuinely something else.
"I'll have a team I trust here by morning," he said. "Medical personnel, case workers. No law enforcement presence, not until I've personally cleared every individual on that team." He glanced at the sleeping rooms. "Nobody gets moved anywhere until I know exactly where they're going."
"I'll keep them here until then," White Mask said. "Lily can manage another day."
The panther, who had returned to the kiwis, raised one hand in acknowledgment without turning around. Oddly enough, his tail was swaying in the way a cat's tail would when they were enjoying something.
Those kiwis must be top tier.
Cecil took one more look around the space. First was the impossible view of outer space through the window. Then the ridiculous quality of the furniture relative to the motel room it connected to. Finally, the three traumatized children sitting on a couch, sharing a blanket in a space that shouldn't fit in a dingy motel bathroom.
"Nice place," Cecil said.
"The gacha has good taste," White Mask said.
Cecil had absolutely no idea what that meant and decided it could wait for another time.
"If that's all, I'll start heading back to the GDA."
He turned back toward the bathroom door.
"Cecil."
He paused at the doorway.
"Thank you," White Mask said. "For coming tonight and listening to me and my requests."
Cecil looked back at him. His eyes traced the ruined suit, the scorch marks, and the steady, unreadable mask.
"Get some sleep, kid," Cecil said, his lips curling up a tad. "You look terrible. Let me do the rest of the heavy-lifting."
He stepped back through the door.
The bathroom tiles, the cheap bulb and the smell of cheap soap came back all at once just as he activated the teleporter.
The Hub reassembled around him with its usual clinical efficiency. Servers, terminals, the low sound of multiple conversations being conducted in hushed professional tones. There were his people, working through the night the way they always did.
Donald was at his side within the next second.
"Sir. How did-"
"Later." Cecil started walking. "Get me a secure team. Medical, case workers, people I have personal files on. No exceptions. There are twenty-three children in a location I'll provide, and I want them processed with full GDA oversight, separate from every existing trafficking task force channel until I can audit it top to bottom."
"Understood." Donald kept pace, already typing. "Anything else?"
"Upstate University. Find a student named DA Sinclair. Pull his academic records, his lab access logs, his comings and goings for the last six months. Quietly." Cecil pushed through the door toward his office. "And get me everything we have on Viltrumite biology. Weaknesses, limits, medical vulnerabilities, theoretical assessments, field observations. Every scrap regardless of how speculative."
"That file is nearly-"
"Empty. I know. Start filling it." He stopped at his office door and turned back. "Open a new file. Provisional ally status, my eyes only. Flag it White Mask."
Donald's stylus hovered. "What goes in the initial assessment?"
Cecil thought about the seventeen-year-old sitting calmly in a one-star motel room and the first thing that person had asked him for when he arrived.
Help for the children.
The kids had been first. Everything else came after.
"Note that every major action he's taken since making his debut in this city has started from the same priority of protecting innocents," Cecil said. "Add that he maintains that priority under pressure, when it would be easier not to, and without being asked. In all my years of this having this job, I could count the people I've met who did that on their debut on one hand."
Donald wrote it down without comment.
"And add a joint file," Cecil said. "Mark and Aria Grayson. Protection priority at the top, above everything else, my eyes only."
He went into his office and closed the door, sitting in the dark for a moment. It was something he allowed himself between walking in and turning the light on. Thirty seconds, maybe. Enough to let the weight of the night settle before he picked it back up and started moving it.
Countless thoughts and worries circled his mind like an asteroid belt.
Cecil turned the light on and opened his computer.
The join file Donald sent earlier was on the screen.
Mark Grayson.Aria Grayson.
He stared at those two names for a moment before he scrolled back to the top, added a new line under the title, and started filling in the rest.
Cecil Stedman didn't stop until morning.