I looked at the messy room. Felt frustration building inside me. I said I was going to take care of her, and this wasn't taking care of her.

I'd been hiding out in the rest of the lab. I'd been stewing in my anger towards her for how she screwed up that last fight with Dr. Lana.

I came to a realization as I looked at the mess she'd made. It looked like she was some slob of a college kid who'd had mommy picking up after her all her life and she didn't know how to actually clean for shit.

Which was entirely possible, now that I thought about it. The only thing I knew about her past was she lived in an apartment off campus. An apartment that always looked like it'd been given a quick once over the few tims I arrived for "date night."

I'd always been so focused on watching a movie and "chilling" that I'd never given much thought to it beyond encouraging her to come to the lab more often. I told her it was because the lab was a massive underground complex with more square footage than she could ever imagine, but mostly it was because I had an army of cleaning bots keeping the place spotless.

I liked spotless.

Only now she'd fixed that, and I couldn't shake the feeling that it was partially my fault it had happened in the first place.

I'd been so worried about everything around whatever it was Dr. Lana had done to her that I'd forgotten to take care of her. I'd forgotten to spend time with her.

Or maybe it was that I was afraid to spend time with her considering I couldn't get over what I'd helped do to her. Dr. Lana might've pulled the trigger on that weird ray gun, but I was the one who put Fialux in the crosshairs of that ray gun in the first place.

Obviously watching those robots rip up the city had done a number on her. Maybe it was the stress of watching the creatures that had helped to rob her of her powers rampaging through the city. Maybe it was the impotent feeling of knowing she couldn't do anything to save the day.

Maybe it was simply the frustration of being locked up in a room in my lab that was made to look like a guest room at some fancy lodge out west somewhere.

The point I'm trying to get at here is obviously she was suffering from depression, or at the very least she'd gotten into a funk, and it was time for me to do something about it.

"That's it," I growled. "We're doing something about this, and we're doing something about it now."

Fialux let out another growl that might've been disagreement. Then again she might've been giving me the recipe to a really nice steak, for all that I could make out what she was saying from under those covers.

Maybe she was even saying something in the language of whatever strange new world she presumably came from, though the way she acted like a second-generation immigrant who'd gone completely native had me thinking she'd been raised here in the good old US of A. Even if my suspicion that she was from somewhere much farther away turned out to be true.

I still didn't know if she was actually from another world, or if that was something Rex Roth had implanted in her memories and she'd gone with it. And now that memory might be gone forever.

"You're not going to sit around here anymore Miss Grumbles," I said. "I'm doing something about this."

She appeared for the first time. Her head popped out from under the covers. She looked like the proverbial groundhog popping out of its burrow. Her hair was a mess, flying every direction but down.

Her nose wrinkled. Maybe she'd been hiding under that comforter to keep herself safe from the smell. I would've done the same if I was stuck in this temple of stench.

"What are you talking about?" she asked. "And what the hell is that smell?"

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"What I'm talking about is I'm done putting up with this shit," I said. "And that smell is what happens when you destroy every cleaning bot that comes into your room. Eventually their AI learns that here there be dragons, and in this case it's a stench dragon."

"Whatever," she growled. "Why cant you leave me alone?"

"Because this isn't who you are. You might not remember it, but I know you're Fialux. I don't care if you've had your powers taken away. You're not going to sink into a depressed funk. I'm not going to let you."

"The last time I checked nobody asked you," she said. "Besides. Haven't you already done enough?"

Her words were like a slap to the face. They cut far worse than any other attack she could launch at me. She didn't realize what she did to me when she talked like that. Playing on my guilt. On my own feelings of inadequacy that I'd let this happen to her in the first place.

That really pissed me off. I looked at the mess around me. Looked at the desiccated corpses of cleaning bots and the remains of meals she'd tossed to the floor rather than throwing them into the garbage chute that would send everything down to a recycler for the stuff that could be salvaged and then eventually an incinerator for anything else.

That growl turned into a yell. I activated the teleporter unit at my side and my suit materialized around me. I had to actually hit a button the old-fashioned way now because the computer wasn't smart enough to figure out when I wanted my suit delivered to me via teleporter.

God I missed CORVAC. Crazy megalomaniacal murderous impulses and all.

At least the button made a nice satisfying mechanical click. Cherry MX Blue, thank you very much. There was nothing like a button that made a nice satisfying click.

I did a quick scan of the room. I picked out all the little metal objects and then did a scan for organics so I could pick up all the various foodstuffs that had been scattered around.

I raised my wrist blaster. It was time to clean house, and I was going to do a cleaning the likes of which no lazy teenager had ever seen. Not before switching the settings just a little, though. I wasn't blasting doors off of a bank vault here or fighting off a living goddess in a crop top and distracting skirt.

Fialux hit me with a sardonic smile that said she didn't believe I was actually going to do it. I was getting sick and tired of people underestimating me because I'd saved the city one damn time.

Besides. I was pretty sure she figured I wasn't going to fire on her, and she was absolutely correct. She wasn't my target, but I hoped this would give her a kick in the proverbial pants.

So I started blasting.

That got Fialux up pretty damn quick. Maybe she couldn't remember everything that had happened since we got together, but it was obvious she sure as hell remembered the sound of my wrist blaster going off.

Or maybe she was remembering a bit of my lessons about how stupid it was to try and outrun a beam weapon.

Either way, I imagined my wrist blaster was something that was pretty well carved into her memory considering all the epic fights we'd had leading up to deciding we were in love with each other. Sure that sound hadn't been an outright threat to her before, but it sure as fuck was a threat now in her currently mortal state.

"What the hell are you doing?" she shrieked, holding the comforter up as though it would protect her from my wrist blaster as well as the stink.

"Cleaning," I said.

I continued firing. Things disintegrated. Though I was using a setting on the device that only made it look like they were disintegrating. I was actually firing blasts that teleported anything I hit to another part of the lab where cleaning bots could sift through and salvage what they could from the mess while throwing the rest into the incinerator.

Hey, like I said. Those cleaning robots were expensive. Imagine how much it costs to buy one of those geeky little disk vacuum cleaners that could only suck up maybe a cubic inch worth of autonomous rodent disposal unit hair before they need to be changed, then multiply that cost by having advanced AI that did way more than tell the bot when it was about to hit a wall.

Yeah, these bots were expensive, and I wasn't going to throw them away no matter how annoyed I felt. Even their parts would be good for scrap that could maybe be used to build more of the things.

Waste not. I just had to get their remains into a part of the lab that hadn't been turned into a cleaning robot chamber of horrors by an angry heroine with an axe to grind against anything automated.

"You've gone crazy!" she shrieked.

She pulled up into a corner of the bed, pulling her sheets up as though they'd protect her. She didn't even have the desire to try and fight me off. I'd wanted her to be aware of her own mortality, but this was taking things too far.

Maybe I'd overcorrected, or maybe this was always bound to happen and there was nothing I could've realistically done about it other than scare the shit out of her in the hopes it knocked some sense into her.

Either way, it was time to stop with all of this touchy-feely bullshit. I was going to fix this the only way I knew how.

Most of the room was clear now. It'd been a pretty fast cleaning because I could shoot it all and let the bots sort out the rest. Now it was time to take on the last mess in the room.

She was a hot mess. Literally and figuratively.

I leveled my wrist blaster at Fialux. Her eyes went wide. I grinned.

"I'm not crazy," I said. "I'm just a villain. People keep forgetting that lately."

She screamed. I fired.

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