Chapter Nine: Morality

(The following moment…)

Sally turned to face Hammer, who was dressed uncharacteristically in a sweater-vest and khakis. He was cramming a cupcake in his mouth and somehow managing to look impatient (angry and disgusted).

Or maybe he was just eating a cupcake.

Her cupcake. She had paid extra for a custom design, for the tiny icing goggles and sugar-glass beakers. And it was silly, but she was just being creative in her spying duties. First rule: know thy enemy… and buy special cupcakes.

Hammer didn’t notice… or he didn’t seem to. But what he had said…

“Uh… Will I…” Sally had no intention of finishing the sentence.

Captain Hammer tossed the empty box down and grinned down at Sally. “This’ll be easy, huh? Evil or not, every villain has one of those fatal flaw…things. Horrible, well, he doesn’t see things while they’re happening.” He shook his head and laughed.

They went back to the Command Center after that, and Hammer explained the course of action. Dr. Horrible had to go down before those walls did. They had four months, and Sally would lead the attack (apparently Hammer had to “man the fort”). She would have back-up and her choice of ray, since it was her brother who designed most of the Force’s arsenal.

The rays… they were far more advanced than her old gun. They stunned, killed, froze, dematerialized, teleported, and steamed. Just what did she want to do to the man?

Sally left with a large, weaponry-stuffed duffel bag and was thankful the HoverCams weren’t patrolling.

And that night, she sat in her kitchen with a near-cold cup of coffee. She missed her teaching position. Those text books, they were so familiar, and even if it wasn’t her dream career, for reciting facts and making circuits, the children thought her to be brilliant.

Those who can, do…

She smiled into her cup. Was she really feeling nostalgic over a job she had barely quit two months ago? Besides, she had been placed into a better sector… not that she’d ever be able to set foot in Horrible Labs again. Plus, not meeting her weekly hours would mean having to miss designated shopping days. Every other Monday was food, the second Saturday of each month was for clothes, and first and last Wednesdays were for miscellaneous items to be disclosed before those days. And they would notice if she was gone. An excuse could be made, sure, but all excuses, regardless of sector, had to be verified by Horrible Labs, which was just where she would not be able to go.

Sally laughed. Just what was she worrying over? Things were about to change. It had become her duty to return power to the hands of someone who didn’t…

(eliminate hunger, smile-blink-and-twitch, wish her (everyone) a good morning and night)

…kill coldly and indiscriminately, have aspirations of global conquest, and call himself Horrible.

Will you beat your lover dead?

It wasn’t about love; it was about right and wrong. And she didn’t love Big Brother, or Big Brother’s murderer, or whoever would be staring down the other end of her gun.

A digital clock on the counter glowed 11:08 PM and Sally desperately wanted to rip those fucking implants right out of her head.

O-o-.-o-O

Dr. Horrible spent the rest of the night finishing his plans. The girl from the park had made a good point: retrace your steps. Well, maybe it was bad advice when it came to actually finding a lost thing, but where his portal problems were concerned, the advice was perfect. Instead of trying to get the time travel machine to read a certain time and location, he reconfigured it to rewind every moment of whatever location it was set up in.

He had considered the implication of dragging Penny out of the past, what might change, how he might lose his city, and the possibility of his world. Everything he wanted… it was all was so close. Nothing could be jeopardized.

So he found a way to rewind a parallel universe. That world would have to learn to deal without her. He had certainly gone long enough.

But the problems continued. It would take too long to rewind roughly four years; the regression would have to pass quickly at first. Mixing in altered freeze ray technology, time would dilate at some point, near when he and Penny had known each other.

Hopefully his parallel past self wouldn’t be there. Horrible wasn’t quite sure how that scenario would play out. And just what would happen after removing Penny was even harder to envision. Plucking a girl from a frozen-in-time past would be easy. Explaining why she had a stone in the cemetery would be a different story all together.

But it was a story he could worry about later. Much later. But not too much later.

The night melted away, and so did the next morning, and maybe mornings and nights after that.

The Doctor left his lab only for brief periods: most frequently for morning and nightly updates to the city. The habit was so deeply engrained, it just couldn’t be broken. Not for Penny. Not for anything.

Some nights, Horrible thought he heard skittering across the floor, and sometimes, he would find spots of dirt dotting the wood. But those things were all very unimportant.

The invention was finished on a Wednesday, and set up in the abandoned Laundromat (there were more efficient methods to cleaning now, after all). Horrible opened the portal and left a HoverCam floating nearby, to eliminate the need for constant check-ups.

And so, two cameras, one in a laundromat and the other in a mad-scientist-designed home, were carefully monitored. As time ticked by, the two people who viewed those two cameras would surely agree on at least one thing: Soon, everything would be going, well...

Horribly.

………………………….

Muahahaha . . . ? Yay for kinda-double-meanings. xD And, of course, the Big Brother thing is a reference to George Orwell’s 1984… I should reread it sometime. Mhm.

Also, a note of self-triumph: I finally remembered that “each other” is two words! Victory! … Though if I’m ever in a position to change the dictionary…