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Mature

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Graphic Depictions Of ViolenceMajor Character Death

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Parahumans Series - WildbowPrototype (Video Games)

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CrossoverConsequencesVillainsMorally Ambiguous CharacterMoral DilemmasShapeshiftingSuperpowersLiesCorruptionEldritchCannibalistic ThoughtsDeveloping FriendshipsHeroesVigilanteGrimdarkStealth Fix-FicObliviousHiding in Plain SightSerial KillersScience ExperimentsHuntington's DiseaseCharacter DevelopmentCharacter StudyPunching NazisAngst and HumorActs of KindnessSchemingMonster - FreeformWorm Spoilers (Parahumans)Alex Mercer is a jerk (but not irredeemable)Minor Original Character(s)Being Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver Is SufferingBut Glory Girl Won't Stand For ItCannibalismCanon-Typical ViolenceParahumans (Parahumans Series)Case 53s (Parahumans)The Protectorate (Parahumans)Alex Mercer is a JerkHorrorBody HorrorAction/AdventureCrossovers & Fandom FusionsManipulationSecrets

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Published:2020-06-02Updated:2024-05-24Words:179,353Chapters:34/?Comments:200Kudos:486Bookmarks:175Hits:27,349

Compulsion

Lead_Zeppelin

Chapter 4: Incubation 1.4

Chapter Text

Incubation 1.4

After leaving the battle to go lose himself in the industrial ruins of the Docks, Alex was met with an unpleasant surprise when he realized his wallet was no longer on his person.

Alex didn't even bother checking his pockets, his enhanced proprioception already informed him it was pointless. The reassuring lump that had been present in his left jeans pocket when he'd woken up was gone. At a guess, when he'd consumed his outer layer, the wallet had already been a casualty to Lung's flames. As a result, Alex didn't have a usable pattern to copy, so his transformation process didn't even bother trying to copy it, for lack of a better description.

The loss of his wallet was a heavy blow, since it carried his only I.D., but at least it informed Alex that his shapeshifting power didn't work by using the platonic ideal of a thing from his memories and copying it. He was able to almost subconsciously "fix" his mental templates to remove damage and injuries, but only by sampling bits and pieces of the template from elsewhere and filling in the blanks with some idea of what the undamaged template should look like. Strictly speaking, the original template of his own clothes were the burned and slashed ones he'd consumed, but the new template of undamaged clothes he wore now were as much reconstructed as they were directly copied over.

The rules Alex's power worked by were frustrating and seemingly contradictory. For instance, he had never once seen the stitched pattern on the back of his jacket, a decoration that resembled stylized wings, but he still knew it was there because he'd consumed the burned fragments that remained of it. He didn't even know what color it was, but he'd still managed to fix it by mirroring the pattern from the other half.

The amazing thing was that his power had fixed the pattern almost completely autonomously while doing countless other tasks concurrently, only working from the directive of a split-second's panicked need to be whole and undamaged. Alex's power was less like a thing he was controlling himself, and more like a system with its own agency that was interpreting his vague mental commands and desires.

Unlike his jacket's decoration, Alex had actually seen and interacted with his wallet, though, so it seemed mightily unfair that it wasn't showing up in his power's proprioception-template of himself. The hypothesis was as obvious as it was inconvenient: as far as his shapeshifting was concerned, if Alex didn't consume something, his power had no template to work with.

Like hell. He wasn't going to take that lying down, not without at least testing it first.

Alex put his search for food on hold for a minute and attempted to recreate his driver's license in the palm of his right hand from memory. That led to the second unpleasant surprise in as many minutes.

Despite focusing as hard as he could, Alex only managed to make his tendrils squiggle around for a few moments and grudgingly form into an uneven, rigid square that felt vaguely like plastic and had a trippy jumble of words and images on it. The colors were wonky, and the details were extremely sharp in some areas, yet blurry in others. It could only be described as the closest thing to a frozen instant of unreliable memory made manifest, which was more or less exactly what it was. The card was so incredibly bad it probably would have qualified as a piece of priceless impressionistic artwork.

"Eat your heart out, Vincent van Gogh," Alex muttered sardonically, trying to peel the thing off of him to get a look at the reverse side.

The card stubbornly refused to come loose. It was like trying to rip off a fingernail. It didn't have any nerve endings, but it hurt at the interface when Alex tried to remove it. He gave up and returned his hand to normal.

New hypothesis: what was made from part of Alex's body wanted to stay a part of Alex's body.

Ducking into a dark corner by a warehouse, Alex attempted to test whether that maxim applied to his clothing. He attempted to remove his jacket, only to realize that it and the layers beneath it were stuck to his shoulders and upper arms. Likewise, his shoes and socks were actually attached to his feet, and his jeans and underwear were attached to his hips as if he'd used a band of superglue instead of a belt. It looked and felt like normal constant skin contact with his clothes, but it was just as attached as the card had been.

Alex could vaguely remember stories of the skin of extremely sedentary people becoming fused with clothes or furniture, but it was a lot more disturbing when something similar happened to him. Fortunately, a quick adjustment of his shapeshifting revealed he could remove any layer in any order at will, and Lung had been naked except for his mask, so at least Alex knew he wouldn't be stuck with his current outfit forever, not that he really cared. He also discovered that his power made zero distinction between his skin and clothes; he could manifest a two-foot-long tendril out of his shoulder and instead of tearing or piercing through the jacket, the surface would seamlessly transition from nerveless clothes to tactile, fully mobile tendril.

Alex stared at the new, boneless appendage, getting a good look at what his insides were composed of for the first time. He should have been freaking out, but oddly, he wasn't. It was still a part of him, after all, and it was under his complete control. The tendril was predominantly black, streaked with veins of red. It consisted of loosely coiled strands, the smallest no thicker than a piece of twine, all flowing into and through one another like a liquid. It seemed fragile, almost, like it was made of molten glass.

At that thought, the tendril suddenly bristled with sharp points and silvery, bladed protrusions, responding to Alex's feeling that the tendril was too unprotected. It now resembled a thorny vine that had been sculpted out of melted knives and nails. It was strangely beautiful, in an organic yet alien way. His eyes widened in amazement, and he experimentally poked a thorn with his thumb, revealing they were sharp enough to easily break skin with the softest contact. He hadn't intended for that to happen, but somehow manifesting the tendril externally felt more natural this way than bare.

Alex retracted the tendril and tried making one sprout only out of his clothes, not his skin.

Nothing happened.

He tried again elsewhere, with no success. It probably had something to do with the clothes' lack of nerves—he had to have contiguous sensation to manifest his tendrils. The clothes were basically static until he started actively shapeshifting, but they were still a living part of him. They were less like dead strands of hair, and more like paralyzed, clothing-textured folds of skin.

Alex took advantage of the lack of feeling and tried tearing off the lower front corner of his white dress shirt, but even as strong as he was, it felt more difficult than it should have been. The instant he ripped the piece off, the torn edges bled out more red-tinged tar that formed the correct shape, changed texture, and shifted color to white, all in less than a second.

Disconnected from the rest of him, the piece of shirt in Alex's hand slowly melted from white pseudo-cloth into more of that black-and-red goo. It clung to his fingers, which hungrily reabsorbed the stuff. His attention was returned to his pangs of hunger by the addictive sensation. He needed to absorb more, and eating bits of himself obviously wasn't a viable option.

Experimenting with his power had given Alex a kind of mental clarity and focus that he'd been lacking before, and it was a damn sight better than wondering which tangled thoughts were his own, but he couldn't continue this while he was so distracted by hunger. Further experimentation could wait until after he'd eaten. And taken a leak, for that matter.

It didn't take long for Alex to find what he was looking for.

The blue glow of a run-down 24-hour gas station caught his attention off in the distance. Perfect. Fortunately, he still had the two loose handfuls of cash he'd grabbed from the ABB storehouse, so he at least wouldn't attract notice with a robbery. Alex didn't dare count the money while walking out in the open, lest he invite a mugging attempt—though the prospect of foiling thieves with his new powers was appealing, it ran into the same issue of drawing too much attention.

At least his clothes didn't look like a crime scene now.

Alex went inside the gas station. At this hour of night it was completely abandoned, save for himself and a sleepy septuagenarian man sitting behind a counter encased in grimy bulletproof glass, reading a book. Alex idly wondered whether the cage was there more to protect the employee, or to protect the cigarettes on the wall behind him.

Alex took a few steps inside the dingy, fluorescent-lit convenience store, then stopped.

There was that delicious aroma again. He'd faintly smelled it out in the streets every now and again, and he'd assumed it was just the smell of some unidentified, savory food. He'd smelled it much more strongly when confronted by the gangsters, but he'd been too preoccupied by the mortal threat to really be paying attention to a salivating scent. Here it was older, more stale, but it reminded him of the same aroma that drove him to consume Lung.

Fuck. Alex was smelling people, wasn't he? To say that was an ominous sign would be an understatement. He could smell the food, too, but it seemed normal, even plain by comparison. It didn't affect him like the aroma of people did.

Shaking his head, Alex made a beeline for the hot food section, feeling apprehension start to coil in his gut along with the hunger. Along the way, he noticed that the bathroom door had a lock and a sign on it that said PAYING CUSTOMERS ONLY.

Alex resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the various signs of Brockton Bay's urban decay and pulled out one of the two wads of bills he'd stuffed in his pockets. He was pleased to find it was all fives, tens, and a few twenties, maybe a bit over two hundred dollars' worth. He kept a crumpled ten in his hand and put away the rest, then surveyed what was on offer.

The mummified hot dogs rolling in their incubator were obviously out, and he was way too hungry to settle for the various packages of candy bars, nuts, and chips. Alex chose a greasy paper box of fried chicken and a banana that didn't have too many spots on it, plus a bottle of water. That should tide him over at least until morning.

Alex went to the register and impatiently shifted from foot to foot as the pug-faced cashier rang him up.

"Three forty-five is your change," the old man said, dropping three silver dollars, four dimes, and a nickel into the metal transaction tray under the bulletproof glass barrier.

Alex scooped up his change and took his purchase, heading out. He fished in the box of fried chicken and grabbed a lukewarm drumstick, taking a bite as he pushed open the door of the convenience store.

The third unpleasant surprise of Alex's experimentation came when he tried to swallow. His insides were so threadbare that he didn't really have a stomach as such, because most of his body's substance in his upper torso had been diverted to shore up the lungs, spine, ribs, and larynx. As a result, his food just kind of fell down into his upper abdominal cavity, until he made a conscious effort to consume it with his tendrils instead of waiting on a digestive process that clearly wasn't in the cards.

The hits just kept coming, though. His tendrils broke down the food in a moment, but Alex didn't gain anything from it. No, that wasn't quite right—he could feel that the tendril which absorbed the food felt a little less fatigued, for lack of a better word, but the sensation was already fading fast, and he couldn't feel his body's substance multiplying from the food. Not like with Lung. It was that particular hunger which demanded satisfaction—the need to consume, grow, and repair the rest of the damage to his body.

Alex rapidly finished the rest of the chicken, and then the banana, but to no avail. The food was more analogous to drinking water than to eating. His body wasn't making more of itself like it did when it was consuming Lung. Why?

A cold dread come over Alex, the nameless suspicion looming in his mind, but he didn't want to even acknowledge his growing certainty until he'd exhausted all other possibilities.

Alex distractedly uncapped his water bottle and raised it to his lips, taking a swig as much to calm himself down as to find out how his body reacted to water.

That led to the fourth unpleasant surprise.

Alex coughed and sputtered as the water started to sting and burn on the way down, settling in his gut like he'd swallowed acid. He retched, his tendrils forcibly expelling the water out of his mouth, then gasped and coughed as some went down his porous throat and into his lungs instead.

"Augh! What the hell?!" Alex cursed, bracing his hands on his knees, the water bottle crumpled in his right hand. He was glad that no one had been around to see that display.

Once the stinging had died away and he finished coughing, Alex raised the water bottle to his nose and took a suspicious sniff.

It didn't smell like anything harmful. It just smelled like the chemicals they put into godawful municipal tap water, and the plastic of the bottle. In other words, it smelled like normal bottled water. Alex poured some out onto his left hand, and it felt for all the world like normal water. No stinging.

Okay, this demands further examination, he thought to himself. If fucking water of all things turned out to be Alex's kryptonite, he'd just die.

Alex marched back into the convenience store and grabbed the things he might need. A can of coke to test whether he'd react to strong carbonic acid and sugar. A bottle of cranberry juice to test whether different acids and sugars behaved any differently. A bottle of alkalized spring water to test which end of the pH scale he was having trouble with. A pint carton of milk, just for the sake of diversity and a more neutral pH.

On a whim, Alex noted the camera in the corner of the ceiling and turned away, letting his arm come apart and slipping the more expensive bottle of alkalized water into a pocket he created in his body. The cashier didn't even look up, much less notice Alex's subtle act of parahuman sleight-of-hand.

The old man raised an eyebrow at Alex as he rung up the new purchase. "Feeling thirsty?"

Alex grunted noncommittally, paying for the three items he hadn't stolen and leaving again in a hurry.

This time, Alex lurked behind the chain-link fence housing the store's dumpster, for peace and privacy just in case someone passed by.

The first thing Alex sampled was the coke. In something of an anticlimax, the most acidic of the beverages by far tasted completely normal to him, and even energized him a little, just like the food did. He downed the rest and wondered whether the independent variable was the calories, but then again, that wouldn't explain why the water's lack of calories would make it feel acidic. It hadn't been all that painful, either, more startling than anything else.

Next, Alex tried the milk. That refreshed him noticeably more than the coke did, and also felt and tasted completely normal. Score one for the calorie hypothesis—milk had roughly twice the calories of coke per unit volume.

The cranberry juice was all but indistinguishable from the coke, in every way except taste and effervescence.

Lastly, Alex uncapped the alkalized water, eyeing it dubiously. He wasn't looking forward to this. Sure enough, the tiny sip he took burned like acid, or something spicy, as soon as it reached the tendrils inside him. His mouth felt no different, just the tendrils, and the feeling vanished almost as soon as it had arisen.

Alex checked his surroundings again, making sure he was alone. He was, so he ducked back as far into the shadows as he could manage, and manifested a tiny tendril at the end of his index finger, which he dipped into the bottle of alkalized water. The tendril started stinging, slowly at first, then growing more painful. Nothing like being burned alive, but enough to catch Alex's attention and frustrate him to no end.

There were too many possible causes, that was the problem. Alex's first hypothesis was that the common factor was water. His second hypothesis was that both bottled waters had been alkaline, and that his body could tolerate acids but not bases. The problem with the first hypothesis was that all of the liquids he'd tested were mostly water. The problem with the second hypothesis was that normal bottled and tap water were usually slightly acidic, not alkaline, and they still tasted different even though they both stung.

So if both of those explanations were wrong, what else was there? Additives like chlorine and fluoride? Wouldn't those also be present in the coke? Maybe not, but then what about the cranberry juice? Wouldn't that also have natural dissolved minerals, salts, and chemicals?

Then, another possibility occurred to Alex—osmotic pressure. If his body had a low tolerance for hypotonia, then drinking plain water would damage him just like an ordinary person drinking distilled water would. The stinging effect would be caused by his cells undergoing lysis, and that would last only until the water was diluted or it reached equilibrium. The effect would diminish as the level of dissolved solids increased in the solution, until it became unnoticeable. The hypothesis seemed to fit.

What would that imply about his tendrils, though? Ordinary somatic cell membranes could be vulnerable to osmotic pressure, but that was part of the reason why the body's tissues were caked in largely watertight epithelial cells, inside and out—they kept everything separate. Did his tendrils not have epithelial cells? He couldn't assume anything about their composition, really. Were his tendrils even made of cells?

Alex wasn't exactly equipped to answer that question. He'd have killed someone for a microscope and some slides in that moment.

That passing mental image caused his train of thought to derail. What the hell was he even doing? How did he know all of this chemistry shit? Lung had been a high school drop-out. Lung only had the vaguest idea what an acid was, barely understood the concept of pH, and he certainly didn't know scientific terms like 'epithelial' or 'hypotonia,' not even in his native Japanese or Mandarin.

In other words, this whole line of inquiry must have been coming from Alex, not Lung. It was oddly gratifying. Alex had no episodic memories, but his semantic memory kind of kicked ass when it came to experimentation.

He'd still hit a dead end, though, and now he was feeling even more waterlogged than he did before.

Alex went into the store for the third time in ten minutes, much to the cashier's apparent exasperation.

"Bathroom key?" Alex asked.

The old man gave Alex a suspicious look, as if judging the likelihood of whether Alex was going to go in there to get high, before giving a resigned sigh and placing a key attached to a wooden plank into the transaction tray.

Alex took the key and hurried over to the bathroom, unlocking the door and locking it again behind him.

The bathroom was single-occupancy, and actually not as filthy as Alex had expected. It was still pretty filthy, and had graffiti tagged all over the far wall, but it was better than the corner that Lung had shit in during his stay at the bottom of Tōng Líng Tǎ's stone shaft.

Alex passed in front of the mirror above the sink, and stopped in his tracks. This was the first time he'd ever seen himself, beyond the picture on his driver's license.

He looked absolutely terrible. Granted, he didn't seem too out of the ordinary, relative to his horrific internal state, but compared to the baseline of his pictures, he looked more than half-dead. His skin and lips had a bloodless pallor, contrasted by the dark bags under his eyes, which only served to highlight his pale blue eyes.

Feeling a bit shaken, Alex adjusted his hood to cover more of his face, then went over to use the toilet. He unzipped his fly to relieve himself, only to be hit with yet another unpleasant surprise. He had lost count of which number this one was supposed to be.

For some unfathomable reason, Alex's urine was blackish-red, and it smelled strongly of ammonia, burnt hair, rust, and what could only be described as death. The mix of industrial chemical smells and all-too-organic rot made him want to gag, but he lacked the requisite organs to do more than dry-heave.

Alex somehow kept his stream straight as he was getting his gag reflex under control, and tried to gather his thoughts. He might as well choose to believe that this dire symptom was just another sign of his body's general weirdness, and not actually a sign he was about to die from catastrophic renal failure. It wasn't like he could go to the hospital anyway. Not only would his secret be out as soon as they noticed he had no pulse, but he could also feel his own kidneys with no need for an X-ray, and he highly doubted that the tattered, tendril-strewn vestiges that had once been his kidneys would respond to conventional medicine.

For that matter, why the hell was this taking so long? Christ, he was pissing like a racehorse, and he was showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Alex turned his focus inward, using his proprioception to try to figure out what was happening with his freaky anatomy this time.

Alex quickly realized why he didn't notice what was happening sooner. He could feel all the parts of himself that were flesh or tendril, with far more of the latter than the former inside him, but he couldn't directly feel the fluids his tendrils were surrounded by. That interstitial fluid was what was draining out of him, leaving behind hollow spaces. It had nothing to do with his bladder, which as far as he could tell barely even existed beyond a few useless shreds.

So, apparently all that fluid was waste, and Alex's body wanted to get rid of it. He gave up on trying to fight it at this point. He was in no position to try arguing with what his body wanted to do, since he didn't have any better ideas, and anything he tried might backfire spectacularly—such as drinking water when he wasn't actually thirsty.

What felt like an eon later, Alex finally purged all the fluids out of his body, which did weird things to his sense of balance for a moment before he shifted his body weight around to compensate. He flushed and washed his hands, more out of habit than any concern for hygiene, then left the bathroom key on the sink, not bothering to return it. He stomped out of the gas station in a foul mood that was only made worse by his hunger.

Alex was sick and tired of being blindsided by his bizarre biology. It made him feel stupid, like a student that had shown up for a hard test without studying. It wasn't a rational emotion, since he had no reasonable way of guessing how his body would react to things, and his power sure as hell didn't come with an owner's manual, but still, his ignorance rankled him.

He really needed to address the elephant in the room.

What the hell was he supposed to eat?

The fact that normal food had done nothing for him, that humans smelled enticing, and that the only thing that satisfied his hunger so far was Lung all pointed to one blindingly obvious hypothesis: Alex needed to cannibalize people in order to heal himself.

Alex's rational mind refused to accept that explanation. It was just too arbitrary, it made no goddamn sense! Why humans? What possible vitamin or nutrient could they have that fried chicken and a banana lacked? It wasn't like he was allergic to other foods; he just got energy from them instead of growth. Then again, judging from Lung's memories, parahuman powers were under absolutely zero obligation to make any sense.

The fact that Lung was human was just one of the variables at work, though. Lung had been alive but the chicken had been cooked, so maybe that had something to do with it? Alex's dietary restriction could be something as simple and broad as the fact that he needed to eat raw meat, and it didn't matter whether it came from a human or not. It may even need to be living, but assuming Alex was an obligate carnivore, the reason the raw banana wouldn't count as being "alive" was because it was a plant.

That, at least, was something Alex could test, if he could get his hands on a non-human animal.

Alex set off in search of a live animal, preferably something mammalian rather than an arthropod. That goal wasn't just because the latter was disgusting, but also because the mammals' genetic similarity to humans might be a relevant factor, and he wanted to eliminate as many variables as possible.

Fortunately, it didn't take long to find something. Alex had expected to eventually come across a stray dog or cat, but as it turned out, the thriving rat population of Brockton Bay had long since grown too bold around humans. He was able to cut off and corner a rat in the gutter before it could escape down a storm drain, and he snatched it up.

The rat struggled in Alex's grip, squirming around and attempting to bite his finger, but failing to break the skin.

The wriggling little thing was hardly appetizing, and it definitely lacked that alluring smell that humans possessed. Alex was hungry, though, so he didn't really care if the rat tasted awful, so long as it was edible.

Alex ducked out of view of the street and reluctantly forced his feeder tendrils to come out and take apart the rat.

There was a brief surprise when Alex felt the rat's weak memories flicker briefly in his mind. It was muddled, but one interesting takeaway was that rat emotions and human emotions were almost indistinguishable, even if she didn't think in complicated concepts or have much of a sense of self. The rat also relied far more on her sense of smell, which blew a human's completely out of the water in ways human language lacked the vocabulary to describe.

Alex felt his arm where he'd assimilated the rat, and to his furious disappointment, the rat had proven no different than the food had been.

"Fuck!" Alex swore, twisting around and viciously kicking the side of a dumpster. His foot punched a hole straight through the rusty metal with a deafening boom.

Alex extricated his foot, cursing continuously as he did. Then he ran away, hoping the loud noise didn't draw anyone's attention to him.

What was he supposed to do now? He'd just eaten a huge dragon-man that must have weighed four hundred pounds if he was an ounce, and he was still hungry. After all that, he'd only managed to get roughly halfway recovered, which meant his efficiency of converting human meat into tendrils was abysmal. He couldn't sustain himself by just taking a finger here and a pint of blood there, no—he needed to consume entire human bodies just to make a meaningful dent.

Was Alex doomed to not just be a cannibal, but an obligate cannibal with a lightning-fast metabolism as well? That would be a real problem, to make the understatement of the fucking century. He searched his stolen memories for any solutions.

Lung had gotten away with a lot of killing, Oni Lee even more so, but only because the ABB mostly targeted other criminals and was too much of a hassle for the local Protectorate to remove. It would have upset the delicate balance of the city and weakened the heroes enough that they wouldn't be able to keep a lid on the chaos that followed.

The problem was one of reputation. It was one thing for the powers-that-be to overlook Lung oppressing, enslaving, and extorting the powerless peons of the city, especially since they knew they weren't strong enough to really do anything about it, but if anyone ever found out Alex was a cannibal, it would be another matter entirely. The public outcry would be too great for the Protectorate to ignore. Alex didn't have any proven reputation built up to protect himself like Lung did. The Protectorate wouldn't hesitate to bring their full force to bear against Alex, and the villains would behave likewise if they ever found out he'd eaten one of the pillars of their little community. None of the gangs would tolerate that kind of threat in their midst, not even if he wanted to join one of them. He'd either have to take over a gang himself or avoid them entirely, there was no middle ground.

The idea of becoming a gang lord appealed to some part of Alex, but he was unsure whether that part came from himself and not Lung. Thinking about it practically, though, the last thing Alex needed was the notoriety and attention of taking over a gang. He needed to hide his true nature, at all costs. That meant covering his tracks for any investigations as well.

The best thing he could do would be to feed on bodies that nobody would miss or care about. He could always try getting a job at a crematorium or morgue and use his sleight-of-hand trick to sneak bits of human flesh here and there, but that would take entirely too long and he had no references, no documentation, nor enough money to get those things. He could skip that step by consuming and impersonating a coroner, but that would leave him stuck, and being around the same people all the time would risk exposure in countless different ways. He could try feeding on the plentiful homeless population of the city, but that wasn't a viable long-term strategy either. Eventually, some bleeding heart on the police force or in social services would notice them disappearing and start snooping around. It would be best to feed on them sparingly, if he could manage it.

Alex considered Lung's strategy of targeting criminals. It had worked for a while, at least until Alex had come along. Nobody thought it was unusual for low-level criminals and gang members to suddenly disappear. They did so all the time, and no one gave a single shit. The ABB would be a good target; Lung didn't know much about the world at large, but he knew his little fiefdom inside and out.

Before Alex could set any of these ideas in motion, though, he needed more information. Lung hadn't known anything about Alex, but that wasn't saying much. Alex needed to research himself, find out if he was wanted by the police, continue experimenting with his powers, and eventually plan a way to get someone to eat before he succumbed to his hunger again and did something incriminating. By his own rough estimation, he had a few days before it got that bad—Assuming he didn't get burned alive again, at least.

It was going to be a long night.

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