[b][i]Allure City[/i][/b]—In their penchant for the pseudo-anarchistic, Allure City’s citizens dubbed the lone hypermax security prison within city limits the D-Vault, an unnecessarily abbreviated subriquet where D implied Dread, Dead, Desolate, Detestable, Devastating, and so on. Just under three quarters of the city's radius southeast from the city’s center, near former Murcia, a number of residential towers twisted up over the faceless plastisteel edifice the prison presented as its sole public facade. Through and an unknown depth below the entrance was the primary complex that allegedly contained Allure’s most violent and socially disruptive citizens—most held in cells tailored to their specific gifts and physiology.

Amongst the prisoners was Reaex, a silicon-based entity from the planet Metallo guilty of prolific and wanton ferrous infrastructure destruction.

Locked in a cell deep in the D-Vault, where the electromagnetic force was utterly neutralized, Reaex spread across the floor, its actuators unable to synchronize with its distributed nervous system due to the environment. Amethyst arcs of violent energy and erratic crepitations disquieted the acid-charged and ice-flecked mist that obfuscated the cell’s interior surface of frozen helium-4. The very air corroded the senses. Therein, across the frigid floor in a digitized reinterpretation of the kalachakra mandala, was itself—a reflective gray soot centered on an iridescent bramble connected by a central knot like a horrid vitrified, petrified, and immobilized ratking.

Then power went out across the entire city. 

The D-Vault’s generator ignitions clicked impotently. Without energy to maintain the environment, the helium-3 sublimated. Filled with steam, relative visibility in the cell was usurped by an utterly opaque wall of white. 

Minutes later, a beam of strange energy struck the city’s center and radiated energy throughout the world. 

Suddenly, the cell vibrated with a loud bang against the wall—as though a cannonball violently exploded against a concrete barricade. A second and third bang followed. Then silence. Almost an hour later, with the power finally restored and the helium-3 redisposed, sensors indicated the cell was empty, although there was something new: a large ugly hole in the plastisteel wall.

Meanwhile,  Reaex, its actuators and nervous system resynchronized and the bramble covered by a shiny dark gray quadrupedal exoskeleton,  ran south like a mad dog, reached the elevated edge of Allure City, and threw itself into the Mediterranean.