Edward's Dilema

Twas the night of a Friday, when all through the lab. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse... Well maybe a few mice, and Edward was there too, of course.

He was winding down after another long day of passively torturing his lab assistant, who was fun to have around.

She was probably going to scold him again for pushing all of the scrap and trash on one of the few metal lab tables down to the floor so he could have a place to lay down. Not that it mattered, from what he could tell. Just like the cluttered surfaces around the Laboratory, the dirty tiled floor was barely visible beneath all of the broken gadgets and electronics, various different lengths of half-smoked cigarettes, empty beer cans and liquor bottles, tablets of both ancient curses and blessings made from all different sorts of stone and/or metal, not to mention the occasional blade or fully-loaded firearm.

What difference could another table-load make?

Laying on his back with this legs gingerly crossed, the large bald man with a golden-blonde beard and a labcoat comprised of every color aside from a sanitary white took the final drag of his joint, then aimlessly tossed it off into the darkness of his lab. He exhaled a cloud of smoke directly into the near-black ceiling above. The cloud dispersed and sparkled with life just as it began to completely disappear, adding to lingering fumes above and creating a pulsing carpet of rainbow fireworks throughout.

The embers of the falling lights rained down on Edward and his lab, which caused lightning-bolts of euphoria to explode throughout the man as they phased right through almost every inch of his physical form. He smiled, then let out a peaceful yawn as he felt consciousness slip away from him in the silence of the Laboratory. That was, until, his goddamned glorified butler spoke up and ruined the moment.

"Creator." Alpha said, his calm and disembodied voice echoing through the lab. "Zoey is approaching with your dinner, and she appears to have Amanda with him."

Edward sighed, this time with frustration. If Mandy was with her, then Zoey probably let it slip that Carrie was the one keeping her from a set of jugs, and that Carrie caved and is giving him permission to make some kind of deal with her daughter to justify turning her into the slut she desperately wants the excuse to be. Frankly, as nice as a hot plate of his sister's cooking sounded, Edward didn't want his night spoiled by the perverted antics of his creepy niece.

"Tell them I'm busy." He grumbled, then yawned again. "Don't let either of them in, no exceptions."

"Yes, Creator."

Edward didn't hear from Alpha again for the rest of the night. He laid there on the table for quite a while, enjoying the silence that filled his surroundings as he waited for some much-needed sleep to take hold of his mind. Some time passed, and it seemed like such a thing was just about to take place. Then, the lab became even more silent than it already was. It was unnerving, and instantly alerted the man that something was wrong.

He opened his eyes and slowly sat up on top of the table. Glancing around with bloodshot eyes, nothing looked any more out of place than it did before. It was something that didn't have to do with the lab itself, he realized; rather, it was something that was going on outside of the lab.

Edward turned and hopped off of the table, beginning to roll his shoulders and neck in a vain attempt to loosen his stiff and achy body up a bit.

It was then that a revelation was made.

There was no gravity.

He floated upwards to the dark ceiling instead of landing the lab's floor, wearing a flat and emotionless expression on his rugged face. Well, he could soundly say that he didn't expect anything like this to happen, the man thought to himself. Now it was up to him to find out exactly what the fuck was happening.

"Alpha..." Edward grumbled, his head softly bumping up against the ceiling. "What's happening?"

He received no reply.

"Cool, thanks." He said aloud, shaking his head as he floated back down to the floor. "Okay, so, there's no gravity, Alpha's unresponsive, I feel like I'm being watched, aaand..."

While Edward was softly mumbling to himself, he grabbed a hold of the bolted table he had previously been laying on when he descended back down to it, braced his feet against the floor, reached down to grab something, then swiftly shot up and pointed a silvery handgun towards an old junky computer monitor located in one corner of the lab.

"Found you."

Edward pulled the trigger, and a bullet exploded from the firearm towards the bulbous CRT screen of the monitor.

As expected, the black glass shattered.

After another moment, the wall behind it cracked. The crack spread vertically and horizontally and diagonally in every direction, continuing through the floor, the ceiling, and every other wall. The sounds of concrete breaking and the whistling of air escaping through these cracks filled the lab, and it was then Edward realized that he probably shouldn't have done that.

"Shit." He sighed. The man lazily reached down to pick up a half-empty pack of cigarettes, a rusty metal lighter, and a bottle of whiskey that maybe had a few sips left in it and stuffed each item inside of his labcoat's many inner pockets, along with the pistol.

Before stashing the lighter, he grabbed a half-smoked cigarette floating near the floor, put it between his frowning lips, lit it up, and then pinched the right corner of his labcoat's collar.

Gray material was spit out from his collar and spattered out in a thin line around Edward's neck. The goo quickly swelled and expanded into a perfectly cylindrical and rubbery ring, which began releasing a mixture of both oxygen and carbon dioxide from billions of condensed microscopic plants and fungi that the material was weaved from. Almost instantly, a thick glassy material dispersed from the ring and surrounded his big head, forming into a perfectly spherical helmet.

Immediately afterwards, the breakage that'd spread to every inch of the Laboratory shattered apart like the old computer monitor's screen.

Aside from the helmet and clothes on Edward's body, everything was sucked out into a black void, absorbed by the vast and seemingly endless vacuum of darkness that the mad scientist found himself in. With his limbs relaxed as he floated around in absolute nothingness, Edward took a long drag of the cigarette between his lips and exhaled into his helmet, which was absorbed and filtered through the rubbery band secured around his neck. The illumination from that drag seemingly the only source of light in wherever-the-fuck Edward now found himself.

He had a good idea of where he was now, but the likelihood of that actually being the case was basically infinity-to-one. Accessing the Void, the opposite side of Reality's Coin, through his Laboratory being torn apart and acting as an isolated bridge between existences only meant one thing. Someone activated his ultimate contingency protocol, the one that Edward had put in place years ago as a fail-safe.

Y'know, just in case that the most evil being to ever exist compromised the security of his lab.

And now, apparently, it seemed that he was somehow caught in his own trap.

He wanted to blame Zoey and Mandy, but there was no fucking way that either of them could've guessed his passcode by mistake.

Edward would've enjoyed playing around with the possible 'how's and the 'why's of everything, but when the Void begins to roar, it would be unwise (and impossible) to focus on anything else. The viciously obscene noises that were assaulting him from every conceivable direction sounded like a mix between metal grinding against metal and the screams of every single individual on Earth. Frankly, if it weren't giving the scientist a headache, he figured that it wouldn't be a bad choice for an opening to a **** metal opera.

It lasted for nearly a full minute before silence rang in the scientist's ears once more, the depths of his mind ravaged by the multi-frequency barrage.

"Ouch." Edward grumbled, exhaling more smoke into his helmet. "Hello to you too, you rude fuck."

"Identify yourself, Anomaly." Roared the endless spectrum of voices from the Abyss, its true emotional context behind the demand masked by the vast range echoing of tones and frequencies, if any. "Answer quickly, or face assimilation."

Edward took the longest of drags from the nearly-finished cigarette between his dry lips.

Exhaling, the scientist boldly stated:

"Eat shit."