From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

What follows is something of a thematic sequel to Mr. Mud's origin story, Halfway Crooks. I wanted to write something new for Mr. Mud, since a year had passed since I wrote anything for him and just before sitting down to write this I had been reading a great deal of 'Elseworlds' and 'What If...?' stories; Superman: Red Son, etc. So, I decided to write a 'What If...?' story about Mr. Mud accidentally stumbling across a dimension very different from Virtue and realizing how much his actions have affected his life.

The first part of this story was written in September 2008 and the story is currently on-going. However, I don't expect it to be nearly as long as Halfway Crooks and should be close to six or seven chapters long in contrast to the seventeen chapter origin. Feel free to leave any comments you have on the talk page, I always love to hear what people think of my stuff.

Thanks for reading.

- Mr. Mud

Contents 1 One: Heat 2 Two: Break Down 3 Three: Kings Park 4 Four: Going Home

One: Heat

Now.

He couldn’t ever remember feeling heat like this.

There had been a summer when he was a kid that came close. One of the hottest summers on record, so the news had said. He remembered everything about that. It started out so well. The sun shined every single day in blue skies. His mother was going through one of her good periods; for the time being she had managed to kick the drugs she had been taking and was actually lucid and responsible enough to look after not only herself, but her son as well. The fire hydrants out on the street ended up being busted open almost every day; the kids in the neighborhood would play all afternoon in the water to stay cool while the sidewalk would reach the kind of temperatures that could burn bare feet. David Dirt never joined them; he was only twelve years old but he had long since stopped being a child. Nevertheless, it was nice to see such an innocent image on the streets of The Basement, one of the worst neighbourhoods in Paragon City… and more importantly, it was nice to see the residents of such an awful place looking genuinely happy.

At least, the residents were happy for a while. The heat kept rising as the weeks went by. It passed from warm, to glorious to unbearable. Humidity swept the streets to the point where people wouldn’t even go outside. They stayed indoors, trying to stay cool in any way they could. No one in The Basement could afford air conditioning; hardly anyone even owned an electric fan. But at least if they stayed in doors, they could avoid the baking heat that battered the sidewalks. Happy faces turned to truly pained faces; the laborers who had to work all day in the heat came home exhausted, burnt and barely able to stand. The children couldn’t barely go outside with the humidity, and ended up spending all their days indoors, with mothers who tried to make ends meat while entertaining bored children all summer long.

For David’s mother, things certainly got worse as it grew hotter. She had only been off the drugs for a month when the real heat waves arrived, and she couldn’t bare them. Not only was their apartment constantly bathed in baking heat, but she began to suffer from withdrawals from superadine, and whatever other drugs she had been taking before she got clean; David tried not to keep track of the drugs his mother took, he much preferred to deny to himself that she was even an addict. When he came home to find her passed out on the sofa, an empty vial of something or other lying on the floor, he merely convinced himself she was stressed or tired. He knew the truth deep down inside, but he refused to admit it to himself. Nevertheless, he was elated when he no longer found any traces of narcotics in his apartment; even the hidden stashes were gone. He refused to admit it to himself when she was taking them, but he was all too willing to acknowledge any improvement.

One day in the first week of August, David returned home to witness a sight much like he had seen so many times before. He walked in to find his mother passed out on the sofa; a few empty vials were on the table, filled with a few drops of a strange, glowing green liquid that he recognized from the street. It was the designer drug that had been sweeping the streets since the Regulators destroyed all sources of more traditional drugs and the one his mother had begun taking when those more orthodox supplies disappeared. After only a month and a half of getting clean for her own health and the good of her son, she had fallen back into the void; she had returned to the superadine.

David was hardly an angel himself, it is important to note. Due to his mother’s affliction, he had become a mugger at ten years old, and by the time 1987 rolled around and at twelve years old, he was providing for his mother solely through crime, with the help of The Basment Boyz, the criminal fraternity of which he was a member. He had stopped when she was clean; after all, she was able to go out to work when she could get it and put bread on the table. But within weeks of finding her passed out on the sofa, David was forced to hit the sweltering streets, to pickpocket, rob and steal. It was a life he wasn’t proud of, but one he saw as a cruel necessity, a by-product of his circumstances.

It was on the hottest day of the year when it happened. Temperatures soared that August, and came to a head in the third week. David spent that entire day simply trying to keep himself cool. The streets were empty, and David remained indoors until night fell, and the heat died off; then, as his mother lay unconscious on the couch in their front room, superadine trickling from her mouth, he snuck out. He was wearing combat pants, a knife securely hidden in the back pocket. On his face, he wore a bandanna to conceal his identity. There was only one place he was headed dressed like that, especially with the weapon he was carrying. He was going to make a living.

She was old. She was old, frail and utterly defenseless. Years later, when he had had his accident and become the costumed criminal known as Mr. Mud, he would never have victimized such a person, and he hated himself when he thought about the night he tried to mug an old lady from The Basement who was almost certainly in the same kind of financial trouble he was in, if not worse. She was probably starving, trying to live day to day on the pittance the government called welfare. But at the time he was a naive twelve year old who couldn’t see past his own miserable existence, and only considered the plight he and his mother faced. When he was twelve years old and starving, this woman was fair game.

It went badly. He told her he had no intention of hurting her if she handed over her bag and he told her he wasn’t dangerous, just desperate. She screamed anyway. She pulled at her bag, refusing to let go. She was one of the tough ones, with dignity and pride. They were the kind David hated as a kid. He liked the cowards who told him to take everything – it was easy that way. After all, he had no intention of hurting anybody, whether they fought him or not. It was just a lot easier for him if they didn’t. The knife was for show. It was merely a threat, nothing he would ever go through with. That made it hard for him when the proud ones wouldn’t let go of their damn bags. When he got older and gained his powers, he preferred the fighters. He preferred them because, in the game of super crime, the fighters were usually cosmically powered champions or hardened vigilantes who could take the blows and roll with the punches. But as a kid, fighters were innocent old ladies who couldn’t take a hit even if he’d been morally corrupt enough to use force. He could do nothing. She screamed for help and help came.

The sound of his approach was certainly frightening. David had no idea what was going on. The ground shook as something was ripped out of the ground around the corner; the shockwave caused David to loose his footing and fall to the floor. The old lady ran from the alleyway he had mugged her in – as she reached the street, a heroic voice spoke out to her; rough around the edges, a voice from the street, but heroic all the same.

“You’re safe now,” the voice said. “Stand clear.”

David scrambled to his feet and turned. He had no idea why he did so, really. He knew the Basement like the back of his hand and he knew categorically that this alleyway led to a dead end. Turning on his heels would do him no good unless he had spontaneously developed the ability to climb walls or leap tall buildings; powers he would ironically be granted in only four short years, in one fashion or another.

He turned and saw the dead end he knew was there. He sighed, and turned back to the street. Silhouetted in the glare of a streetlight stood the Back Alley Brawler, and in his hands he was holding another streetlight. It obviously wasn’t working now, and concrete clung to it where he had ripped it from the sidewalk. It was poised above his head, and for a moment David thought himself a dead man – boy – he had no idea what he was anymore.

Then, the Brawler saw him. A scared, frightened kid – no more than 14? No, more like 11 or 12. He was skinny, frightened. The kid reminded him of himself, in some ways. The streetlight he was holding in his hands as a weapon dropped to the floor. He had grabbed it because there had been a great deal of superpowered mafia enforcers in this area for quites some time now, especially since the superadine boom. He expected to find one of them in this alley, not a twelve-year-old kid who now probably expected to be beaten half to death by a man who was supposed to be a hero. Finally, he had gotten to someone early enough; it wasn’t too late for this kid. He could help.

David, of course, was still petrified. He may have dropped the streetlight, but he could still do some serious damage with those mechanical hands. This might have been a dead end, but he could at least try and climb one of the fire escapes – there were two in this alley, and one was directly behind him. He turned and bolted for it.

“Hey no – kid, wait!” The Brawler shouted, and started down the alley. For some reason, David froze. “Look, I can-“ he started, but never finished. A voice crackled from a radio he was carrying in his belt.

“All units respond! Gang war in progress in the Gish, repeat, gang war in progress! Innocents are caught in the crossfire, all units respond!” screamed a desperate police operator. The Brawler’s chest heaved with a heavy sigh. He turned to leave the alley, and then swung his head and pointed at David.

“Wait here, kid. We ain’t finished, you got me?” The Brawler said. It sounded menacing, but truly, all he wanted to do was sit him down. Help him. He lingered a second longer, and then he was gone, to save more innocents from stray bullets and misplaced malice.

Of course, by the time the Brawler came back, David was long gone.

That was the hottest day that David James Dirt, alias Mr. Mud could ever remember, but it was nothing compared to this. The door that stood between him and his adversary glowed molten red, and the air in the room was unbearable; he was physically choking. The door was all that kept his attacker at bay; he couldn’t stay put, the heat alone would kill him, and going back out there would mean prison or the burns unit, probably.

As he tried to think how he was going to get out of this, his eyelids began to drop; he was losing oxygen, and fast.

Two: Break Down

“Get me outta this!” Mud screamed into his communicator, sweat dripping down his face. His eyelids just kept dropping. He was going to pass out if it got much hotter.

“We’re locked down and surrounded. We can’t get back to you,” Mindswipe yelled back to him. Mindswipe was the leader of the Rogues Gallery, a criminal syndicate of which Mud was a high ranking member, and was usually extremely calm under pressure but this was something else; an entire fleet of superheroes had ambushed them, and they were outnumbered at least three, maybe even four to one. “I hate to say this, but you’re on your own. There’s just no way through. They’re everywhere!”

The problem had arisen halfway through the heist. Mr. Mud and the Rogues Gallery had been attempting a very simple crime: breaking into, entering and looting Fort Knox. Of course, Mr. Mud and the Rogues were not on this earth when attempting this crime; rather, they had used stolen Portal Corporation technology to open an interdimensional gateway to a world where superpowers and, as such, superheroes had never existed, and as such a robbery of Fort Knox would be a walk in the park for such powerful individuals as those on the Rogues Gallery payroll. Of course, that depended on their knowledge of this universe being correct and quite obviously, that wasn’t the case. Either Dr. Defect and War Play had configured the portal wrongly and pointed them at the wrong dimension, or there was some reason why their scout teams had not encountered any superheroes on this earth, not least the one who was currently trying to burn Mr. Mud alive.

Right now, whose shoulders the blame rested on didn’t really matter. Mr. Mud was more interested in getting out of the vault he had locked himself into to escape Flameboy out there, at least before it became his tomb.

“Man down!” came a cry over the communicator. The voice sounded like Nimrod’s, the group’s tactician and strategist, but in Mud’s current delirious state and with such background noise it could have been anyone. “Razzle-Dazzle is down! Retreat and regroup! Regroup!” the voice screamed. Definitely Nimrod.

That was it, then. Mindswipe and his group were surrounded and couldn’t get back to him; Nimrod was regrouping his team before they all fell in battle, and Mr. Mud was forced to abandon his group when the human microwave out there and a small band of other heroes had separated him from them. As far as he knew they were still back in the main vault, trying to salvage some loot and fight off whatever heroes had ambushed them.

It was all on him. No help was coming. He could stay here and suffocate or he could get back out there and brave the flames. At this point, there didn’t seem to be much other option.

Mr. Mud inhaled as much oxygen as he could from the stifling air, and with his last scraps of energy he initiated his powers, turning his body to rock hard earth. He lowered his shoulder and charged at the molten door; perhaps this would end badly, but he would rather die in battle with a hero than he would choke to death in a tomb he’d walked himself into.

The door came away with some ease; the heat had weakened it and Mr. Mud had put all the strength he could muster behind his charge. There, on the other side of the door was the fire-powered superhero he didn’t recognize. The other heroes were gone; they must have left this guy to deal with Mud and gone to pick a fight with some other Rogues. That was good. He could handle one little fire-throwing punk. All he wanted was to kick this guy’s ass and get back to his own dimension, where he would never hear of this guy again his whole life. The Rogues wouldn’t be looting this shard again anytime soon, especially since they had learned it was swarming with the heroic element.

The heat was only slightly less intense on the other side of the vault door; the room was ablaze from the flames this vigilante had been throwing around, and the heat was only slightly more bearable. The onslaught came almost immediately; small fireballs pelted his earth armour. He tried to reposition the plates of earth and rock covering his body to block the incoming flames, hoping to protect what areas of his anatomy that remained flesh and blood from being burned.

“Just give up already! I gotta turn you golden brown before you’re done?” the hero quipped through the flames, a smirk creeping across his face from behind a deep red mask emblazoned with a flaming insignia. “I eat two-bit goons like you for breakfast, even if I gotta cook ya first!”

Mr. Mud hated the arrogant ones. They were always the nerds who got bullied at school and then accidentally stumbled across some superpowers. He’d lay down money this guy was no different. Mr. Mud grew his fists to three times their size and hardened them to solid rock before bringing them crashing down on the marble floor; the floor shook and the hero lost his balance, stumbling backwards – this was his chance.

In a flurry he dropped his armor and charged across the room; the armour slowed him down and he needed to get into close quarters. At range, he was getting taken to the cleaners. Yards away from his attacker Mud reformed a minimalist form of his armor and brought down two giant earth hands, scooping up the hero in his open palms. He held him up in giant rock hands and began to crush him, pushing his hands together. He wasn’t going to kill him, he was simply going to squeeze the guy until he fell unconscious, and then he was going to get the hell out of here before his friends came back.

The hero squirmed, but he was definitely feeling the pressure. His head kept drooping as if he was battling unconsciousness, and he kept trying to free his hands, probably hoping to bring them up to Mud’s chest and burn him from inside out. It was all for nothing; Mud was too strong for him. Not only did he keep the fiery champion’s arms pinned to his side where they were no use to him – he was also slowly squeezing the breath out of him. It wouldn’t be too long now before he passed out and Mud could get the hell out of here.

“Not so chatty now, chump.” Mr. Mud uttered, allowing himself a moment of satisfaction and in the same instant, disobeying one of his golden rules of supervillainy: It's Not Over Til It's Over. Right on queue, something wrapped around his legs and he felt as if a carpet had been pulled out from under him. More accurately, his legs had been pulled out from under him; when he landed he turned to see some guy holding a whip that glowed emerald green. From Mud’s experience with such things it looked like it was probably magical, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was now two on one, and his quick escape plan had been ruined.

He fully armored himself and got to his feet; it was time to play defensive. The flames began licking his fortified limbs; the whip lashed across his chest. The whip was much more powerful than he’d anticipated, however. It pulled away chunks of his armor as if they were nothing.

“Portal’s up! Mud, where are you?” came a scream from his communicator. “We can only hold them back temporarily, what are you doing?” it was Mindswipe.

“This is kind of a bad time…” Mud said, blocking a powerful swing of the whip with one arm and trying to hold off the flames with the other.

“Whole job is bad,” Cryoblast, the team’s icy ex-soviet screamed over the communicator in his distinct Russian drone. “You come to us comrade, or we leave without you!”

This was going to get worse very fast if the Rogues abandoned him. He’d been pretty good at science in school… Well, when he’d attended, that was, but high school physics wasn’t exactly enough to erect a portal to a parallel dimension. If he missed the boat, he was stuck here.

The whip came at him again; in a flash, he caught it in a huge mud fist, and with all his might he swung it in the direction of the other, fiery hero. The whip wielder hung on to the other end of his weapon until he couldn’t keep his grip any more; he let go and collided with the other hero at full speed. Mr. Mud readied himself; he hoped to God they’d both been knocked out instantly and he could finally take his leave, but that wasn’t certain, especially with his luck.

After a couple of seconds, they hadn’t gotten up. He said a silent thank you to a God he didn’t really believe in and dropped his armor; it was time to get out of here.

“Hold the portal,” he spoke into his communicator as quietly as he could. “I’m just trying to remember how the hell to get out of this place.”

“Watch yourself,” Nimrod replied. “There are patrols everywhere and we can’t get back to you, we’re holding back hundreds of them ourselves.”

“And you hurry, yes?” Cryoblast’s scream was unmistakable.

Mud ran through Fort Knox as fast as he could, trying to remember where they’d come in and how he could get out. He dodged several groups of heroes who now, he gathered, were probably looking for him and him alone. If the other Rogues had already set up the portal outside, everyone else was probably free and clear. At least, he thought so until he tripped over a body lying in a doorway and crashed to the floor.

“Watch that last step, it’s a da-hoozy,” said a pained voice, which was followed by a giggle that started out tired and world-weary, and somehow ended up manic and uncontrollable. Mud turned to see one of the Rogues he tried to avoid contact with at all costs, the Rogue Nimrod had reported fallen earlier in the battle; Razzle-Dazzle. She looked as she always did – insane. She was dressed from head to toe in lime green and black, a clown’s face painted across her own. In her hand she held an over sized revolver with a giant cork in it, and blood was seeping through several holes in her costume. From what Mud could tell, she’d been shot, and more than once. For a split second, he considered leaving her. The Rogues could do with one less of these mentally unstable types. But frankly, he knew he was never going to carry through with that thought.

“If I carry you outta here, you’re staying quiet, you got me?” Mud said, pointing down at the bleeding and battered Razzle-Dazzle. She looked up at him and flashed a smile from which at least two teeth were missing, but she didn’t reply in words. Rather, she waited until he had hoisted her up on to his back before she started singing a loud rendition of the hokey pokey, broken up with fits of pained laughter.

She continued to sing all the way through Fort Knox, as Mud made his way through the only way he knew how; the way they came in. None of the security or vault doors were a problem; War Play and Dr. Defect had made short work of them on the way in with the use of various explosives, and where they once stood there were now just large, gaping holes through which Mud could simply step. The hero patrols had disappeared now, as well. Mud could only theorize they were probably outside, waging the battle with the Rogues, and when he got outside, his suspicions were confirmed.

Nimrod hadn’t been exaggerating; in front of Fort Knox, a war was being waged. On the ground and in the air, Rogues traded blasts and punches with hundreds of heroes, and they were severely outnumbered. Like him, many other members of the Rogues Gallery were carrying injured villains on their backs or over their shoulders. He was almost flattered they were waging this battle just long enough for him to get to them; a lesser group of villains would have left him behind. Right there, in the middle of them, was the portal. It was shining a brilliant blue, and swirling endlessly into the abyss.

“I’m out,” he sternly spoke into his communicator. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” The moment he gave the word, he saw a costume he instantly recognized as Cryoblast’s disappear into the portal. He would have laid money that the Russian would be the first one to retreat.

Mud sprinted across the battlefield, Razzle on his back. As he ran he saw scores of his fellow criminals disappearing into the portal. Above him, a hero gave an order not to follow; they couldn’t be sure where these criminals came from or where it would lead them, were they to give chase.

“Stand firm!” yelled the leader of the heroic battalion, who somewhat resembled a mixture between Ascendant and Xanatos, heroes from his own dimension. Perhaps some strange gene-pool stuff had happened on this world. “Do not follow them, but stop as many as you can from getting through!”

That was bad for Mud; as moments went by, more and more of the Rogues disappeared back to his home dimension; it quickly dawned on him that by the time he reached the portal, he and Razzle would be the last ones through. Bolts of lightning, energy, fire and ice barely missed him, landing at his feet and narrowly missing his head. He ducked just in time to avoid a boulder that would have taken off his skull clean off his shoulders, and skilfully slid underneath the outstretched arm of a super strong hero. He had made it; he was only yards from the portal.

Mindswipe was the only villain that remained, waiting for him.

“Go through!” Mud screamed over the sounds of a thousand superpowers gunning for him at once. Reluctantly, Mind turned and bolted into the portal. Mud readied Razzle - who had since passed out on his back – and with a heave he launched her into the portal. Then he was alone; the last villain in a battle against a hundred heroes.

Home was a mere few steps away; he had one foot into his home world when the Xanatos-Ascendant hybrid took aim in mid-air and let fly a sniper blast of icy cool energy. It flew through the air and just as Mr. Mud was halfway between worlds, collided with the central power unit for the interdimensional portal.

Suddenly, Mud felt as if his whole body was being ripped apart, each atom coming loose and floating into the ether.

He saw a bright blue light, and then there was nothing.

Three: Kings Park

When Mr. Mud opened his eyes again, he was forced to close them immediately. The sun above him was shining through what few clouds lingered in an open, blue sky, and had almost blinded him when he unsuspectingly came round from unconsciousness. He turned his head and opened his eyes again to realize he was lying on his back in a beautiful, idyllic park.

He slowly climbed to his feet and wondered how he was even alive. He had survived some serious things before, things he certainly shouldn’t have lived through. His two hundred foot drop into a quarry, for one, not to mention the punches he had taken from guys who could bench press bulldozers. But he had been convinced he was a goner this time; he had been sure he’d felt his body come to pieces, but maybe that was just some weird mental side effect of portal travel he hadn’t experienced before.

He stood up and took a look at his surroundings. He was in Founders Falls, Paragon City, or somewhere that looked very much like it. That was strange; usually interdimensional portals tended to drop you in exactly the same space. Even if the surroundings were drastically different, you could be sure you were in an identical geographical position. Maybe that had been caused by the portal malfunction, some how he’d ported from Fort Knox back to Rhode Island. Either way, he was standing in the middle of a very affluent district that looked very much like Founders Falls. There was a fountain in front of him, and all around the park were beautiful apartment buildings surrounded by trees. This certainly wasn’t an area of Founders Falls he recognised, though.

Not that Mr. Mud had had much experience with that most affluent of Paragon City’s zones, especially since the Rikti War and villains were driven to the Rogue Isles. But even before that, David Dirt had only been there once or twice, on the rare occasions when he had attended school field trips to museums that were based there, or his mother had insisted on showing him what his life could be like if he made something of himself. She did that a couple of times when he was a kid, especially when she was going through her good periods. She’d save up a couple of dollars to blow on the bus ride, lecture him all the way there while he absent-mindedly stared out of the window, drag him around parks, fountains, rivers and monuments, and then remain strangely silent on the bus ride home. David had hated that silence as a child. He had always wanted to ask her what was wrong but deep inside, even at ten years old, he already knew.

David was, of course, aware that being in another dimension meant that things could be drastically different. Founders Falls could have been laid out completely differently; it could even be in a different place. He could even be at Fort Knox right now, or at least where it was supposed to be in his dimension, and the dimension the Rogues had just attempted to loot. It was while he was pondering this fact that he realized the park was full of people, and every single one of them was staring straight at him. It was then that it occurred to him that he had probably just dropped out of the sky, or at least fallen out of a brilliant blue portal completely unannounced. That was the sort of thing people tended to notice.

“Which hero’s that, daddy?” asked a child, bewildered. He was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with an earthy brown logo that consisted of the letter ‘D’, through which fault lines were running as if an earthquake had hit them. He didn’t recognize it. He supposed it must have been some brand name unique to this shard.

“I don’t know. Quiet down a second, okay?” said the boy’s father, pushing the boy behind him and placing himself in front of his son as if to shield him. “You okay, buddy?”

It took Mr. Mud a few seconds to realize that the question was aimed at him. They didn’t recognize him, which was good. At least that meant in this dimension he wasn’t well known and he didn’t need to ready himself for a fight with this shard’s protectors. On the other hand they seemed suspicious of him, which was bad. Perhaps in this dimension heroes had been registered or something.

“Uh… Yeah, yeah. I’m good,” he said – the only thing he could think of to say. “I just, uh…”

“Fell out of the sky?” the man replied. There wasn’t a hint of humor, just confusion. “Look, you need medical attention or something?”

“No!” Mr. Mud barked, abruptly. He hadn’t meant it to come out that harshly but the last thing he wanted was the draw attention to himself. “Look, is Portal Corps around here?”

“Are you sure? Olivia’s only around the corner. Maybe we should call the cops, or The Kings, I mean…” the man started to reply, still cautiously trying to keep his son behind him. The rest of the people standing around were losing interest and walking away, which was good for Mr. Mud. Less attention was most certainly good.

“…Olivia?” Mud replied. Hearing that name was like having a knife plunged into his chest. It was a buzzword that could disorientate him more than the most powerful of super abilities. It was his mother’s name.

“Yeah, Olivia Medical Center… Did you hit your head or something? I think we should call the cops…” he repeated, and reached for his cell phone. For a second he was in a daze. Olivia was hardly an uncommon name, and he was positive it had nothing to do with him but just hearing it reminded him of painful memories he would much rather repress and forget.

Then it hit him. The guy had a cell phone to his ear. He was calling the police.

In a flash, Mr. Mud outstretched an arm and as if by instinct, it morphed itself into a thick, stretchy mud. His arm had stretched across seven meters in a flash before an over sized, earthy hand grabbed the cell phone from the man’s hand, almost taking his fingers with it. With a final movement, Mud squeezed his fist and crushed the cell phone, letting it drop to the grass. With his other rocky hand he had picked up the man and thrown him off his feet, just in case he had some other way of raising the alarm. Suddenly, the people who were losing interest not two minutes before were screaming.

“Run! Greg, run!” the man shouted to his kid, watching his crushed cell phone hit the floor. The child ran and suddenly there was hysteria. “Someone call the Kings! Call the Kings!” he shouted as people scrambled for their cell phones. There was a lot more panicking than there would have been back in his dimension at such a thing. All he’d done was crush some guy’s cell phone. Clearly this place was much more crime free than home, people weren’t used to this. However, they were talking about calling some guys called The Kings. He had no idea who they were, and he had no intention of sticking around long enough to find out.

By the time the alarm had been raised, Mr. Mud was long gone. The fact that the alleyways he was moving through, the sewer systems and underground passages all seemed so familiar didn’t really register with him at first, but they aided his escape greatly. He had cleared a couple of miles by the time the cops turned up at the park he’d woken up in. He seemed to subconsciously know his escape routes; they were different here, but in all the same places. Unlike in the Paragon City of his home dimension, they weren’t crawling with Lost creatures, Rikti hordes or Circle of Thorns mages. They were completely empty, devoid of life. It looked as if no one had been down into the sewers or into the abandoned subway system in years. It was only when he went above ground again that he truly realised where he was, and how he knew his way around quite so well.

When he opened a manhole cover and crawled back up onto the pristine streets, he noticed a sign looming above him, and his jaw dropped. He then realized that he knew his escape routes because he had grown up on these very streets. He had been born just a few blocks from here in his home dimension, and his whole life from then until he was twenty nine had been spent right here, in Kings Row. Or at least, that’s what this neighborhood was called back on his home shard. In this shard, a giant, sparklingly clean sign told him where he was.

“Welcome to Kings Park,” the sign read. “Please drive carefully.”

Four: Going Home

He was in Kings Park, Paragon City, and it was about time he got out.

Kings Park seemed like a fantastic place, it was true. After all he had landed in a Kings Row that would have afforded him a great deal more opportunities in life had he been born there, because being born there would probably have meant his parents were rich, and he could have gotten into the best schools in Paragon City, and perhaps gone to some of the greatest colleges in the whole of the United States. It seemed like the sort of place he had often wished he’d been born when he was a kid. If he’d been born there, he might even have been born with two competent parents, not just one afflicted mother.

But Mr. Mud, or more accurately the man behind Mr. Mud’s mask held certain contempt for the Kings Row of this world. It wasn’t the neighborhood he grew up in, and it had probably never been home to his mother, her acquaintances or anybody he knew from The Basement back home. He had lain low for a couple of days since waking up in the park and had done some research; not a lot of research, just where he could find Portal Corp, if there even was a Portal Corp, that sort of thing. From what very brief observation he’d taken, it merely seemed like this was a Kings Row where rich folks had moved in and developed it, making it ‘trendy’ and ‘modern’. Both terms David Dirt hated with his very heart and soul, along with the sort of people who threw them around.

What had lead him to this conclusion was the fact that the Portal Corp of this dimension was centered in the middle of Kings Park, along with a university and several other academic and scientific research facilities. In his Paragon City, back on his earth, Portal Corp and the university’s main campus had been based in Peregrine Island and Founders Falls respectively. They were the affluent areas of his earth, ergo he came to the conclusion that Kings Park was this world’s equivalent to such districts. It was a pretty strange leap of logic but at the time Mr. Mud was merely concerned with getting out of Kings Park and getting back to Kings Row and then on to Warehouse 13, the Rogues Gallery HQ. This might have been a pretty nice place in the grand scheme of things, but it wasn’t the Kings Row where he was born and it sure wasn’t where he planned to stay.

Getting into Portal Corp seemed like it would be fairly easy. Mr. Mud’s theory that crime must have been low in Kings Park, and indeed the rest of this world’s version of Paragon City, seemed to be confirmed by the fact that security was incredibly lacking for a place of such immense power. He had cased the joint for a couple of days now, and there never seemed to be more than a couple of rent-a-cops who patrolled the grounds and some metal detectors for visitors entering on field trips or to do research, but no particular police presence. No heroes patrolling the premises. Not so much as a panic button, from what he could see. This place was a relative utopia compared to where he’d come from, which had clearly led the authorities to become complacent.

His plan, as always, was very simple. Another of Mr. Mud’s golden rules for costumed villainy applied in this situation, but for once it wasn’t one of the rules he was fond of breaking: Don’t Over-Complicate the Job. If he could get things done with smash-and-grab tactics, he would and often did. David Dirt had never been one for over thinking things. He simply planned to bulldoze his way through the metal detectors, knock out any rent-a-cops who got in his way and re-program one of the portals to take him back to his own dimension. He hadn’t been to physics class enough in High School to know the first thing about building one of these things, no, but he’d taken part in enough interdimensional heists in his later years that he knew how to program one to some degree, and he certainly knew the co-ordinates to get him back to his shard, if nothing else.

He pulled his mask down over his face as he reached his stop; he had used the abandoned subway to move across town. He hadn’t managed to get hold of any clothes since he arrived, and he assumed the authorities would be looking out for his costume. He was getting tired of sleeping where he could find shelter, more than anything else, and that as much as anything was what drove his assault on Portal Corporation.

The moment he came above ground, the alarm was raised.

“Intruder!” screamed a guard, who hastily removed his baton and gun from their holsters, his hands shaking. “Assistance required!”

A gunshot rang out across the Portal Corp courtyard, but by the time it reached Mr. Mud his skin had already turned to solid rock. The bullet deflected and flew off into the air.

“He’s a meta, repeat, meta!” the guard screamed into a communicator, “Call in the Kings!”

At that moment, something that sounded like an air-raid siren began to wail across the courtyard. Mr. Mud hadn’t planned on being exactly stealthy about all this, but a siren and shots fired three minutes into the job? This was just sloppy, unprofessional.

Nevertheless, the plan remained the same. He charged for the front entrance of this world’s Portal Corp. As he ran, he almost absent-mindedly picked up the security guard who had been firing on him in his hand and threw him across the courtyard; he hit the ground twenty feet from where he’d been standing, knocked out cold.

He encountered a great deal more of them, but he had expected that. So as not to lose his momentum, Mr. Mud lowered his shoulder as he got closer and closer to the ornate glass doors that led into Portal Corporation. He didn’t have time for doors.

The glass came crashing down all around him as he sprinted through the doors and into the main lobby, shards bouncing off his armor at all angles; Five more guards were suddenly in front of him.

“We’re going to need back up,” was all one of them managed to utter before Mud had dealt with any threat they may have posed; the first two he picked up in opposite hands and slammed together, knocking both of them immediately unconscious. He then swatted a third away with a mud hammer forged from his fist, and kicked the fourth ten feet across the lobby. The fifth stood cowering in front of him, shaking. Mr. Mud grew his hand to three feet wide and scooped up the guard.

“You can either tell me how to get to the portals,” he began in as much of a menacing growl as he could muster. “Or I can drop you like those other chumps.”

“Th-th-they’re all un-under-underground!” the guard blurted out. “J-j-just take my c-card, j-just t-take it!” he screamed, pushing his security clearance card into Mr. Mud’s chest.

He hit the floor with a thud as Mud released him, and with the sound of earth cracking, Mr. Mud’s body turned from earth and rock back to flesh and blood. He took the card in his hand and walked across the lobby to the elevators. He scanned the card the guard had just dropped, and the elevator sprung open; too easy.

“Welcome, Mr. Bronson,” the computerized voice in the lift spoke. “What level do you require?”

“Uh… Portal level?” Mr. Mud spoke to no one. He was hoping the computer didn’t have some kind of fancy voice recognition system that would pick up on the fact that he wasn’t, in fact, Mr. Bronson.

“Sub-Level 5, accepted,” the computer spoke and Mr. Mud heaved a sigh of relief. “Going down. Have a nice day, Mr. Bronson.”

All was going smoothly, until the lights went out. Seconds later, the lift jolted to an immediate halt, throwing Mr. Mud off his feet.

“An intruder is present on the compound,” the computer spoke through the darkness. “This elevator has been stopped merely as a precautionary measure. Your journey to Sub-Level 5 will continue after authorities have checked this elevator. Thank you for your patience, Mr. Bronson.”

Of course, by the time the computer had uttered the word ‘authorities’, Mr. Mud’s patience had long run out. He had already morphed his hands into earthy, paper thin wedges, slipped them through the tiny gap in the elevator doors and had just begun trying to prize open a big enough gap to escape through when the doors suddenly and unexpectedly flew open, throwing Mud flat on his face.

He looked up to see an illuminated sign that read ‘Sub-Level 4’. He was only one level away from the portals themselves. He’d just have to find a way down. Surely there had to be stairs in this place?

He was still thinking about that when a battalion of Paragon Police forces came around the corner. Mostly in contained hard suits, although there were some S.W.A.T. officers as well; they would have been fairly easily dealt with if Mud had decided to stick around. Of course, Mud didn’t intend on staying long enough for the PPD squad to open fire, let alone to crush the S.W.A.T. team among them. Instead he turned around, got back in the elevator and morphed his left fist into a sharp stalactite. With all the might he could muster, he slammed it into the floor, puncturing the metal and creating a hole perhaps half a foot across. He brought his spike down on the cold steel again and again, widening his escape route. Just as the first energy blasts were fired from hard-suits and S.W.A.T. officers loaded their weapons, Mud had created a hole big enough to drop through. He just hoped Portal Corporation didn’t go down any lower than Sub-Level 5. He’d survived long drops before but they didn’t exactly feel like tickles, either.

He held his breath and dropped through the floor of the elevator. He only fell for around twenty-five feet before he hit the bottom of the elevator shaft; he had reached Sub-Level 5, the portal rooms. As Mr. Mud swung his arm at the door between him and the portals, the stalactite where his fist should have been turned to something that resembled a giant mace and smashed a gaping hole to freedom. This was it. He was going home.

Mr. Mud stepped through the open hole and into a room bathed in brilliant blue light. All around him were giant portals, and even better, the room was completely devoid of life. He guessed the scientists had been evacuated from this level already, and the police wouldn’t get down here for a while; it would break every safety code in the book to follow him through the hole he had created, at least until they secured some abseiling equipment. Of course, there might have been stairs after all, but by the time they got to him that way he’d be long gone.

Mud dropped his armor and sprinted to the nearest portal control panel. He entered his home shard’s dimensional co-ordinates. Time to get off this messed up world and get back to the reality he knew.

Mud was a mere two steps from home when a loud crackle of electricity came from behind him, sparks flying across the room. The portal in front of him fizzled and disappeared, the brilliant blue fading to nothingness. He turned around to see a giant, steel spike sticking out of the control panel he had just used to set up this portal to send himself home.

“Not so fast, buddy,” said a voice. “We’ve got some questions to ask you before you disappear.”

Mr. Mud turned to see three, spandex clad men that could only be superheroes. That wasn’t the shocking part; superheroes always turned up right when Mr. Mud was about to get what he wanted. The shocking part was that he recognized all three of them.

On the left was Spikeman; or at least, it looked like Spikeman. Back in his home dimension, Spike was a villain who didn’t really wear a costume; he just put clothes over his flexible steel body. Here, he was clad in a professional looking black and silver body suit adorned with a ‘K’ logo in the top corner.

On the right was an old friend of his, who at home was now wrapped up in all sorts of gang related activity and organized crime, and for a time had been a world-renowned rap act before his fall from grace and conviction for drug related offenses. On this world, he was a superhero wearing a black and gold get up, almost identical to Spikeman’s, with the same ‘K’ emblem on the upper right of his chest.

“We’re the Kings,” spoke the one in the middle. “Now, just who the hell are you?”

This one was clearly the leader, and was wearing a black and bronze version of the ‘K’ costume. Mr. Mud instantly recognized him, too. He was looking at the same face he saw every day in the mirror. He was looking at David James Dirt.

He was looking at himself.