Dimitri opened one bleary eye. It felt like the morning after a huge party, where everyone had been mixing drugs. He sat up, thumped his head on a low roof for his trouble, and fell back down again, holding his head. It was not doing his headache any favors. Taking more care, he tried again, this time avoiding the sloped roof above his head. Rubbing his eyes, he looked around. A Medical APC – That meant he was still on the scene of the crime, and judging from the way sunlight shone in through the windows, it was early morning. He stood, and winced. He looked down to see his feet were somewhat raw from sprinting across and jumping from and to rooftops. Usually he wore shoes when he did that sort of thing. Casting his gaze around, he espied a roll of gauze; still the number 1 wound binding substance after 3 centuries of use. After a bit of crude bandage-work, he stood on now heavily bound feet. His feet looked like they were made of snow, but at least it didn’t hurt to walk on his tenderized feet.

As he began to walk, he noticed a large glass tube with fluid in it. Looking closer at the glass, he saw through the glare, and saw Epsilon, wearing a basic skintight bodysuit that covered the thighs, neck, biceps, and the torso; floating in the middle of the tank.
“Suspension tank, Dimitri,” said a voice. Dimitri turned to see Silvertie, leaning against the frame of the APC.
“So, what’s going on in the world, Silver?”
“Oh god, don’t get me started.” Silvertie ran a hand down the metal mask of his face, which made it a self-defeating action. “I’ve been up all night running a search, but here’s what wee have so far; first, your incapacitating shot allowed our snipers time to change to knockout darts and take aim. Unfortunately, due to the shape-shifting nature of their targets, they had to shoot everyone on the roof to be safe; including you. As you can see, wee’ve kept the spy under since then.
Secondly, wee searched Sasha Carnstrom’s quarters, and wee found an EM-wave scrambler and encrypted communicator. The scrambler looks like it was built a lot of other electronics; the impostor must have assembled it on-site. And lastly, the real Sasha Carnstrom; so far, none of my Agents scouring the compound have managed to find her. Wee must guess-“ Silvertie stopped, as the sound of running footsteps could be heard, and they were only getting louder. Dimitri and Silvertie looked at the door, as Jonathan showed up, panting hard.
“Silvertie, I found Sasha; her body was stuffed inside a supercomputer on the Databank Level.” The databank level was one of a few areas that only authorized personnel were allowed into, and so Silvertie had asked Jonathan to search it himself.
“That’s quite unfortunate.” Silvertie’s dismissive comment belied how upset he was. He turned to Dimitri, “Well, I suppose that takes care of thing number three then. Do wee have any idea of how our imposter did this?”
“Epsilon is like me,” said Dimitri, waving a hand, “she can copy people. But she’s obviously not very good at it, she kept making behavioral errors. Add that to her incompetence at attempting to assassinate me, and wee have a very green person.”
“That’s another point raised, Dimitri;” stated Silvertie, “How on earth are you still alive? I saw her stab you, and as green as she is, she did it quite thoroughly. You should be dead, and yet, you are perfectly healthy in that regard.”
“I healed myself.”
Jonathan leant on the wall of the APC, “You want to elaborate on that, Dimitri?”
“She gave me the idea by mentioning reincarnation. I figured, couldn’t I just transform my torso into a healthy one? So I tried it; it took longer than a regular transformation, but it got there, and my stomach was just a little sore, but not cut or internally damaged.” Dimitri prodded his stomach through the hole in the undershirt he was still wearing. “And I suppose you know how well I was after that.”
“Quite. Well, I-“ Silvertie was interrupted once more, but this time by his communicator. He pressed the “receive call” button, and waited.

“Boss!” It was Hal, and he sounded panicked. “Wee have a huuuuge problem! Like, really huge!”
“Calm down, Hal. What’s happening? Silvertie stood quickly, and began to walk out of the APC, Jonathan standing aside to let him pass, and Dimitri throwing on a Suit Jacket over his bloodstained rags.
“Wee got a lot of reports of violated space-time inside the confines of the complex! It must be Biologic Metals!”
“Wait, what?” Jonathan boggled; he could hear Hal as Silvertie didn’t have it pressed to his ear completely on purpose.
“Space-time is being interfered with on a really big scale, but only on our compound! Wee’re shutting down crucial systems and trying to get defensive systems up but it’s useless! The violations are being induced by an off-site system!”
“Hal, do wee have any intel regarding the problems wee might face with this?”
“No, it’s right out of the blue, this! None of our taps have picked any of this up before!” Hal was steadily getting more and more hysterical, clearly out of his league.
“Does Doctor B have any ideas about this?”
“Haven’t been able to get him on the line; Every other division must be calling him too!”
“Force a connection; you’re Int-Sec. You can override everything.”
“Okay, I’ll give it a-“ Hal’s voice was lost to static, and Silvertie held the phone away from his head, looking at it in disbelief… or what passed for that with Silvertie and his immobile metal mask.

“Oh lawdy; Look at that.” Dimitri looked at the skyline, pointing. Silvertie and Jonathan followed suit. The skyline was shimmering as if the whole sky were covered by a force-field, and then it… solidified, for want of a better word, and it was if the sky was made of glass… incredibly flawed, cracked glass.
“Reality is bending. If wee don’t end this soon, who knows what would happen,” said Silvertie, stating the obvious.
As the trio looked out at the environment, they saw smaller distortions, rents in thin air that briefly revealed glimpses of unreal landscapes and sometimes darkness, and then collapsed on themselves, vanishing completely.
“I think wee’d better move; this location doesn’t seem too safe,” suggested Jonathan, picking up a biohazard combat suit.
“Excellent plan; wee should also try and get to Doctor B. If anyone knows how to stop this, it’s him.” Silvertie quickly threw on as much of the hermetically sealed suit as he could over his existing one. Dimitri, for his part, also pulled a spare on, but had no issues with too many layers of clothing. When they were done, Silvertie adjusted his helmet, and then placed his hat on top; earning him odd looks from the Srides.
“It’s my hat.”

5 Minutes later, they were jogging quickly through the outskirts of the residential area, with a small retinue of Agents following them. The Agents, who had been combing various sites for Sasha, now known to be a corpse; and when the distortions and rifts showed up, they had hunkered down in plain sight, and waited for help. They quickly got courage back when they realized that they’d be running behind three of the best agents in the whole complex.
Some of them were having a good time of it; interesting things to look at, and people to chat to them about, and nobody actively trying to kill them. Others, namely the people carrying large, awkward pieces of forensic equipment, or those who had to listen, were now running through a micro-hell.
“Where are wee headed, anyway?” asked one sufferer, of Dimitri.
“The R&D department; Doctor B’s got so much causality-violating equipment experiments on record, they made the area more stable than usual, wee hope!”
“What, wee’re going to R&D to be safe? You’re nuts, you know that?”
“Possibly… but my dad and Silvertie say it’s the best plan wee’ve got so far.”
The Agent adjusted a tripod, his designated cargo, and made a noise like a snort. “What a load of bullchocolate, you’re telling me that the two best Agents on this planet decided to – ohchocolate” The Agent’s accusation was cut very short as a large rift opened quite fast directly in front of the running group. Displaying incredible reflexes, the two leading Agents stopped just short of jogging through the portal, and had the strength to withstand the inevitable people-stacking that occurred behind them.
Jonathan watched as the portal a bare 10 centimeters away from his face closed, leaving no trace.
“That was a close one,” he said in a voice which indicated he’d been holding his breath, cautiously waving a hand through the space in front of him.

The trip to the R&D department passed without incident to the party, although they were witness to how dangerous the rifts were. An APC driving along not too far from them failed to stop in time to avoid a rift not dissimilar to the one that the party did avoid. The APC skidded into the rift, and then… broke. As it passed through, the APC jerked, shuddered, appeared to be a lot of different objects at once; and then when it cleared the rift, apparently receiving no damage, everyone was proven wrong and surprised when it flashed, and turned into an equal mass of what appeared to be wood. With what seemed like its job done, the rift closed.
The Agents and their retinue looked at the smoking pile of wood now sitting in the middle of a city, on a planet which never even had wood-analogues before.
“What. The. Fuck.” Stated an Agent carrying a large gun which was like a SMG, but manlier. He walked over to the pile, and prodded it with the barrel of his gun, eliciting a dense *thunk* *thunk* noise as he did so. Another Agent with a device that looked like a hand-held camera walked over, and looked at the wood through it. After a moment’s decision, they announced their findings.
“It’s redwood, from earth.” Silence greeted the statement.
“What.” Jonathan broke the silence, “I’m fairly sure nobody got Redwood to grow on some other planet, and earth’s gone.”
“Well, if that’s really Redwood… wee’re now looking at the last 12 tons of Redwood left in the galaxy,” said the analyst. Everyone thought about the wood; more specifically, how rich they would be if they found a buyer for one ton of it; right up until Silvertie cleared his throat loudly.
“In case you daydreamers forgot, wee’ve got places to be, and rifts to avoid.” To punctuate his statement, a whole building rippled, and was eaten by a rift at its center. Everyone got the message, and began running.

The party gathered in the R&D Foyer, which, even though it was a foyer, bore marks that said “something went wrong here”. With all the random Agents they’d picked up deciding to make themselves comfortable in the foyer and other administrative areas, Silvertie, Dimitri and Jonathan made their way into the labs. Carefully entering in case the recent spatial turmoil set some experiment off, they found Doctor B sitting next to a post-like machine radiating a pleasant green glow, and working on one that looked similar. He looked up as the trio entered, and relief etched itself all over his face.
“Oh thank god, you’re alive. I was worrying I’d have no pieces to play in stopping this thing.” He stood up, and shut the hatch on the device.
“Wee’re alive; what’s going down?” Dimitri asked, removing his helmet.
“Going down? Everything! Look.” Doctor B bustled over to a large angle-poise monitor, and swiveled it to face them. It looked like a live feed from a camera, which was pointing at the Agency Tower. He picked up a microphone, and spoke into it. “Johannes, you read me?”
“Yes doctor,” responded Johannes in a near flat monotone through a desktop speaker.
“No system malfunctions?”
“No doctor.”
“Could you please look at the anomaly?”
“Yes doctor.” The camera’s view shifted, bobbed back and forth a bit, and then looked up. About 400 meters above the camera was one of the biggest distortions, and while no rift was forming, it was certainly a huge distortion, and looked like a giant globe of ripple-covered water.
“Is that the source of all this spoon?” asked Jonathan.
“Mhmm,” responded the Doctor. “Johannes, please activate the distortion filter.”
“Filter activating.” The view flickered, a click was heard through the speaker, and the view suddenly turned into a rainbow-hued one, not unlike a view through a thermal filter. Doctor B turned to the three Agents.
“This is the distortion filter. It measures how heavily an object or anomaly impinges on space. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the rubber-shit and ball weight metaphor.”
A few grunts and ‘Mhruhm’ greeted this statement.
“Oh, alright,” exclaimed Doctor B, “I’ll be brief. Space is the rubber shit, and its corners are pinned down to time; and objects sit on it. The weight of the ball sitting on the ‘shit’ depends on how much it messes with space. Most objects are nothing more than polystyrene balls. But this anomaly-” he pointed at the screen “-Is like a massive 20-Kilogram weight on the surface of reality. Just being here’s going to fudge with stuff. Things will move to it; it produces gravity; it is like a little brother to a black hole.”
“Okay… I think wee get the idea, what’s that thing for?” Silvertie pointed at the green-glowing post thing. On closer inspection, it was probably more like a spear, only the tip was no more than a glass-walled, rounded-edge cylinder chamber from which the glow was emitting.
“That’s the anti-distortion scepter.” Doctor B picked up the non-functional one, and threw it to Silvertie. “That thing is like an anti-weight on the shit of reality, rather than press down, it presses up, and can counter the effects of a weight. Just leave it in an area, and everything inside its effect range will be subjected to a negative weight on the rubber shit, as it were.”
“And the idea is to put this next to that source?”
“Quite, although I warn you; while it sounds simple, it no doubt has defenses against this sort of thing, and that scepter has a maximum output. If the distortion power surpasses the stabilizing power of the scepter, you’ll be hit with whatever’s left over from the distortion after it’s been stabilized; and I trust you’ve seen examples of what happens to things that get hit by rifts.”
“Yeah; APC into 12 tons of Redwood.”
“Redwood, huh? I saw an Agent running around outside get hit; he turned into slices of watermelon.”
“That sounds pretty brutal,” chipped in Dimitri.
“No, I mean he literally got turned into a platter of watermelon slices. I have no idea why or how, but I retrieved it, and put him over th-” Doctor B pointed over at a desk, and faltered as he saw Jonathan standing there, munching on a piece of watermelon, the plate next to him covered with rinds and seeds.
“What?” Jonathan asked, as they stared at him.
“Well,” Doctor B said, abandoning the train of thought, “he WAS over there. Anyway, that scepter will only cancel the distortions, it won’t actually stop or destroy the source; and its battery powered for about 3 minutes.”
“So, can’t wee just shoot the distortion?” asked Jonathan, after spitting out a bunch of seeds onto the plate.
“No, Jonathan. Anything that gets close tends to get polymorphed, that’s what wee call it when something hits a rift and is transformed.”
“Hmm. What if the scepter was near the distortion when wee shot at it?”
“Then it might hit, assuming you can hit a target from that far away, and you have a way of keeping the scepter next to it long enough.”
“What if wee put the scepter on an aero-drone or something, have it hover next to the distortion?” Jonathan persisted, doggedly pursuing the destructive options.
“Johannes; play video file 3, if you please.”
“Yes doctor.” The camera’s view was changed to that of a pre-recorded segment.

In the video, Johannes (or his camera, anyway) watched an aero-drone fly up to investigate the anomaly. Audio was set to the radio channels at the time.
“Watch where you’re flying that! If it touches the anomaly…”
“Shut up, I got it. I’ll fly it under the anomaly, that way I can’t crash into it unless I fly too high.”
The drone wobbled and jerked as if under heavy turbulence, and flew under the anomaly, where it hovered.
“See, perfectly fine.”
The second voice was proven wrong very quickly; the drone bucked and shuddered as if it were travelling through a very violent storm, and the camera panned to watch the drone plummet to earth burning, bits of propeller following it.
“What the spoon!? How in the name of hell did that happen?”

The video stopped, and the trio turned back to the Doctor, seeking explanation.
“It seems that the anomaly can use it’s distortions to mangle the air currents around and in it. As you saw, it can also wield some particularly violent currents; that drone had its propellers and main engine obliterated by a Mach-2 current of air, not generally something wee find on this planet, if any.”
“Ouch. Well, I suppose wee will work something out on our way there,” Silvertie said, drawing his gun, and giving it a quick field clean.
“You’re not serious about this, are you? How are wee going to find an air vehicle which can take that kind of poo poo?” Jonathan waved his hands around in emphasis.
“Well, now that you mention it…” Doctor B held his chin, deep in thought.
“You’re kidding me. You have a flying vehicle capable of withstanding such punishment?”
“If I remember correctly…” Doctor B closed his eyes, retracing his memories, “In the storage warehouses on the south side of the complex, there’s a R&D Vault for everything too big to fit in the one here; mostly vehicles. If you poke around in there, you should find something that looks like a giant hollow glass prism... I never tested it against Mach-2 wind spears, but it’s got basic hover tech, and I’ve shot it with a solid tank shell, it didn’t falter; No weapons, but sturdy as heck; Never mass-produced because it was so expensive to make and had limited applications.”
“That sounds like the business. I think wee should get going while the going’s good.” Silvertie put his gun away.
“Hold it; you’ll need access codes, and someone to find the vehicle for you.”
“You’re not coming with us, surely?”
“Of course not!” Doctor B ‘harumph’ed and affected an air of disdain, “I’m over 60! I’m far too old for such gallivanting around! But I know someone who would fit this job perfectly…” The doctor walked over to a giant locker built into the wall, and punched in a quick 7-digit number. The metal-slatted door rolled up, to reveal what looked like a big, 6’5” tall robot.

“It looks like a big, 6’5” tall robot,” observed Dimitri.
“That’s because he is. Everyone, meet your new guide, Duncan.”
“…Hello Duncan?” Jonathan volunteered.
“GREETINGS TO YOU, AGENT,” boomed the big robot, stepping out of the darkish room, and revealing his build. The robot looked like a man wearing a combat biohazard suit and helmet, although clearly the helmet was not supposed to be removed, and he sported a larger-than-normal power pack, presumably to power him, too. “HOW MAY I ASSIST YOU?”
“Duncan’s a little enthusiastic, I missed a decimal point when inputting his parameters, and once an AI is initialized, the parameters cannot be altered, unfortunately;” Doctor B turned to the robot. “Duncan, listen to me.”
“DADDY!” The robot turned, recognized his creator, and quick as a blink, grabbed Doctor B in a hug which, while it meant to convey love and affection (which it did in spades, to be honest) it also conveyed clicked vertebrae and similar back problems. “I LOVE DADDY!”
“Daddy feels your love Duncan let go of me please” Doctor B quickly commanded, all in what was left of his breath after having it squashed out of him by the robotic-love.
“Are you sure you only missed ONE decimal point there, Doc?” Jonathan chuckled.
“Okay, maybe I missed a few,” admitted the doctor, clicking his back once Duncan let go, and checking for broken ribs. “Duncan; I have a job for you-”
“ANYTHING FOR DADDY!”
“-yes, yes, I can see that- NO I DON’T NEED A HUG THANK YOU –Look, Duncan. Take these three men to the experiment warehouse on the south side; help them find the Incredible Flying Prism. It’s very important.”
“YES DADDY ANYTHING FOR YOU!” The robot danced in what can only be described as pure joy at being given an important job by ‘Daddy’. “WHAT IS EVERYONE WAITING FOR, LET’S GO!” The robot began to skip its way out of the lab, not noticing that nobody was following his lead. The Agents watched it go, dumbstruck.
“And wee don’t have robots because of things like…” began Dimitri,
“…like that, yes.” Doctor B finished, an embarrassed expression on his face.
“Can I kill that thing when wee’re done?” Jonathan whined, dreading having to put up with that aggressively cheerful monstrosity.
“You can’t just kill stuff… make it an ‘accident’, Jonathan.” Silvertie’s posture was slack, as he was dumbstruck by just how bizarrely enthusiastic the robot was. They flinched collectively when it poked its head back around the corner rapidly, and its visor stared at them.
“COME ON THEN, AGENTS! WEE HAVE A JOB TO DO FOR DADDY!”