Thank you Strange Quark for entering the contest:
(Author's note: The following is a chronicle of Strange Quark's first
direct encounter with the alien threat known as The Legion. Although
it is a stand-alone episode on its own, it is a continuation of the
events that lead up to this point in Quark's RP story: HERE
The preceding
episodes also place what follows in context.)
*****
Quark woke up in a
strange place.
He felt very
strange, much stranger than normal (if that was even possible). He
sat motionless for 10 minutes before he was able to collect his
thoughts and piece together the events that led to his current
predicament.
Slowly, bits of his
memory came back. He was in Dr Fulcrum's research lab that was
contructed in a dimensional pocket that existed in a virtual limbo.
Nowhereland. It would take a great feat of space-time manipulation to
get out of that.
"Coerced"
by his teammates to go undercover as Foxy Moron to investigate Dr
Fulcrum's bizarre activities that seemed to be connected to The
Legion, Quark was starting to rue the day he agreed to Fallen's crazy
idea for "Operation Tootsie".
Plus, he had run out
of Ichi's multivitamins (Morphon-infused ethanol pills), and the
resulting sobriety was messing with his memory (and sanity).
He tried his best to
piece together the fragments of memory that floated hazily around
him.
Dr Fulcrum was
trying to figure out why Foxy Moron was ageing backwards. Of course
it was just a trick of Quark manipulating his physical molecular
form. But Fulcrum did not know that. Test after test yielded no
explanation, so he got desperate and resorted to taking Quark apart
atom by atom. This he did by trapping Quark in a "room"
which was actually the core of a particle accelerator. Then he
proceeded to bombard Quark with protons from opposite directions
until the collision energy exceeded 14 TeV, unheard of since the LHC
at CERN.
Quark did not have a
chance to do anything. The last question on his mind was where
Fulcrum obtained all this technology from, but before he could even
comprehend what was happening, he felt his body turn into a mass of
Higgs bosons, which quickly decayed into a billion bottom quarks.
Then everything
became a blank.
Endless nothingness.
Suddenly, a trio of
eyes materialised, followed by a set of white teeth and a nose.
"Oh no, not
again!" Quark sighed. He recognised this state of quantum
uncertainty. "I'm back in Schrödinger's box!"
He vacillated
between his improbable states of existence and non-existence, back
and forth until suddenly he heard a voice.
It came from a cat
sitting in the middle of the virtual box.
"Who...?"
Quark stammered as he started to ask.
"Don't you
recognise me? It's Higgs. Higgs boson. I am an improbable version of
you!"
"But... Why do
you - do I - look like... a cat?" Quark was flabbergasted.
"It's just one
of my - our - many improbable states of being. This one is courtesy
of Erwin Schrödinger." The Higgs boson cat replied with a grin.
"You are not
supposed to be here," Higgs the cat-boson added. "You have
to pull yourself together... Literally!"
"But how? Do I
even exist?" Quark asked.
"Probably.
Probably not. We all may or may not exist in this probability wave
function. But you have a consciousness, and therefore the power to
will yourself into existence." Cat the Higgs boson said
emphatically.
"And you must
do it before it is too late. Not here but in the temporal universe
from which you came.
"Your
consciousness already knows it. Dr Fulcrum is not who he seems to be.
His physical body has been taken over by a symbiotic version of The
Legion. He must be stopped before he infects all of humanity with
Legion DNA."
Quark knew it had to
be true. An improbable version of himself just told him so.
"How do I will
myself into existence?" he pondered. "OK. I will to be,
therefore..." before he could finish that thought, he felt the
probability wave function collapse around him.
*****
Dr Fulcrum was busy
examining the results of the proton-proton collision when suddenly
Quark began to rematerialise before his very eyes.
"Who...?"
his jaw dropped as Quark summoned all his will power and directed all
his energy into Fulcrum's body, causing it to disassemble into a
billion particles, and, in that brief moment of vulnerability,
evicted the Legion symbiote from its host.
Freed of the
symbiote, Dr Fulcrum passed out and collapsed on to the floor in a
dishevelled mess.
As for the Legion
symbiote, Quark sent it screaming into the uncertain oblivion of
Schrödinger's box.
"Have fun with
Higgs boson the cat," he grinned.
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