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[center][b]Zac WIlson[/b] | [b]Zac Wilson (Dreamverse)[/b] | [b]Decrepit Old Man[/b][/center]
[center][b]August: 5 Months Before Concurrent Posts[/b][/center]
A decrepit, old man sat in the corner of a small cell, clinging with both of his wrinkled hands to a long, wooden staff. He seemed to have been staring into the wall, but his eyes were glossed over. His blindness was the curse of his amazing gifts. Next to him was a small boy, his guide, his eyes. The child was focused on the comic that his hands grasped, reading it at a lightning pace. A pile of additional comics sat next to the boy, waiting for him to explore their pages. There were Spider-Man comics, ones of Batman, of Iron Man. There were even several comics based on the Heroes television series.

Even though the old man could not see it, he heard a group of men walk into the larger chamber adjacent to his own cell. It sounded like they were dragging someone into the chamber, no doubt the next test subject.

“Tiresias, prep the child for another run at Project Dreamrunner.”

Tiresias knew well what this meant. His captors had been attempting for the last several months to find something in the dreams of his child companion, something that could further there goals. They had already developed a serum that would bestow superhuman powers onto normal humans by activating dormant genes within the human genome. However, this group has not yet determined the correct genes required to create a stable transformation. Therefore, they would use the failed test subjects from this unperfected project as guinea pigs, forcing them to explore these dreams. The formula was so instable that the subjects would die within days, so what is the harm in using them for this project too, or at least that is what the captors thought.

The small child reclined on the small mattress within Tiresias’ cell, falling asleep in seconds. Tiresias then placed both of his palms on the child’s forehead. A wave of lights crawled up his arms, finally arriving in his eyes, causing them to have an eerie shine. The guards creaked open the cell door, allowing Tiresias to exit. One of the guards pulled the old man towards the center of the room, guiding his hands toward the next test subject. Once Tiresias’ hands covered the next victim’s face, the light in his eyes surged into the unconscious body in front of him, until finally he could not feel anything in front of him. The body had disappeared.

----

A blinding light jarred Zac awake. As he started to sit up, he felt that something was off. Why was he sitting on a table? In fact, why was he not at home?

“The patient is awaking, doctor! We need more sedatives!”

As soon as the word “sedative”, Zac finally crashed back into reality. He was in a room surrounded by a staff of doctors and nurses, with probing devices and needles everywhere. All Zac knew was that he needed to get out of there. But as soon as he started to leave the surgery table, one of the nurses yelled, “Someone restrain the patient”. Fortunately for Zac, his speed gave him an edge, allowing him to outpace all the guards who piled into the room. As Zac tried to escape, he discovered that he was aimlessly blitzing through wherever he had been taken. While Zac was trying to figure out in his head how he was going to escape this massive maze, he failed to calculate the proper distanced that he required so that he might stop before he crashed through one of the exterior windows.

The window shattered as Zac torpedoed through the glass, smashing down onto the ground. While the fall was not high enough to wound Zac mortally, nevertheless, he still sustained some bruises, in addition to the cuts from the broken glass. Zac tried to get on his feet, but the pain from his bruises and cuts deterred him from moving. Suddenly, Zac felt a rush of wind strike his face. Right before him stood a costumed figure.

“Who are you?” Zac asked.

“Hello, Zac. Glad you’re awake now.” The man said, his voice sounding eerily familiar. The man was wearing a costume that made it seem like he was from a comic book. His whole costume was brown, with a lighter brown coloring the inside parts of his arms and legs, his torso, and his neck. In addition to this, there were also black stripes running down the man’s back, with smaller ones covering his arms and legs. The material seemed to be spandex (the most common material amongst all superheroes), but for some strange reason, the texture did not seem right, as it looked way more comfortable than spandex.

“You sound familiar, but I can’t quite place my finger on who you are.”

“It’s because I am you, or at least a different you from an alternate universe,” the man said, pulling back his mask, revealing that he had the same face as Zac did. “But you can call me Raptor-Man, just to avoid confusion.”

“Alternate Universe? How did I get here? I was just answering my front door and then BANG! I’m knocked unconscious.”

“We’re not sure how you got here, either. We only know that you suddenly appeared on our doorstep a few hours ago. And you were in a pretty bad shape when we found you. Apparently, the serum that gave you your powers was not yet perfected, causing your body to reject it. We were lucky enough to have injected you with a stable version of the formula when we did, or you could have died.”

“So it was my powers that were making me feel so miserable this morning, not the pierce wound I got when Kelly stung me.”

“Pierce wound?”

“Yes, the one on my right foot.”

“Oh! That wound. We definitely found a shard of glass where that wound was. Don’t worry, we removed it.”

When Zac heard this, his heart sank down into his stomach. The previous night, Zac had just cursed out his girlfriend, falsely accusing his girlfriend of something she obviously did not do. She even tried to tell him that her barb was still sheathed. Nevertheless, he did not listen, since he also just had a dream in which she had just jabbed in him the foot. How was he ever going to make it up to him? She probably is sieving in hate right now.

But another thought struck Zac’s mind. If he had almost died from the imperfect serum, what does that mean for Kelly? Was she dead now? Would he be too late even if he could go back to his own reality right now? How could he let her leave his life when the last thing he said to his girlfriend, the girl who meant the world to him, was that she was his worst nightmare?

“Alternate me, er...Raptor-Man! We need to get me back to my own time! A life depends on it!” Zac again tried to jump to his feet and this time he succeeded, but it was obvious to Raptor-Man that Zac was still hurting from the injuries that Zac had received from his fall through the window.

“Don’t worry, Zac. We are trying to figure out a way as fast as we can. In the meantime, let’s get you back inside so that we can tend to your new injuries”.