The Crooked Place ... Somewhere ... else ...

The room shifted. One moment a kaleidoscope of horrors, the next a quaint tea room, then a garden of fringed birds masquerading as elegant topiaries. The woman, too, shifted. One moment she sat upon a bag of bones and mucous, the next a Regency chair, the next a wicker sun lounger. And she, herself, changed. From the, albeit, sensuously beautiful dark, young woman, to a child bearing pigtails and a striped pinafore dress and back to the old woman. All without changing at all.

Eventually, things began to settle down and stabilise. The room became a room. The woman remained old and stooped. The nausea threatening to erupt from Betty became little more than a turning of the stomach and the old woman looked around, rather pleased with herself, continuing to sip from a cup that now only looked like a cup, her little finger raised as she drank.

"Ah. The Crooked Place is starting to accept you. That's good." She patted the arm of the chair she sat upon. "She tends not to like strangers. You should consider yourself privileged."

"Look!" Betty jumped to her feet, though she couldn't remember sitting, and she had no idea what she was about to say, wiggling a threatening finger. "I just wanted a few questions answered, for an article, not to be transported to some place Lewis Carroll vomited up from an LSD nightmare!"

"I'm giving you the answers. Answers to questions you aren't even certain you wanted to ask." A beagle accepted the cup and saucer from Madame Misstery and wandered away, its tail thrashing happily. "We stand at a precipice. With Principle gone, none can stand in the way of what Psycona is becoming. Feelings he thought lost forever with the loss of his people has broken him and only you can bring him back to the light."

Betty gripped her fingernails into her scalp, turning in a circle and trying to avoid looking at anything. This madness had to end. She wasn't responsible for Psycona, or whatever troubles the super suffered. She was a reporter. She would say 'only a reporter', but there was nothing about her reporting she could describe as 'only'. Saying that, she still had no idea what she could do. And Madame Misstery continued to look at her as though they only engaged in a polite, fireside chat.

"Why can't you do it? I assume you have powers? This ..." Betty waved her hand around her. "... isn't the normal kind of thing you find in a psychic's shop. Who are you? What are you?"

"I'm just a woman. Truly. But, yes, I have power, but power won't save Psycona, or the world." Madame Misstery rose to her feet, tugging her laddered stockings up. "Only the truth and reality can find victory here. Psycona will see me as a threat and will fight, and much suffering will follow. What he needs is a friend."

Madame Misstery raised her hand and moved to slip one of the rings from her fingers. The silver ring with the blue stone. She held it up to the light, admiring the cut and depth of the colour. Then, with a sigh of great loss, she offered it to Betty. It looked a little big for her fingers. Still, she took it from the old woman's hand, looking at it much as Madame Misstery had.

"It's beautiful." To her surprise, the ring became smaller as she held it. "What's it for?"

"It will unlock your potential, while allowing you to process the change without overwhelming you. It will hide your power until it needs to be seen and it will also look lovely on one of those delicate fingers." The old woman grabbed Betty's hand, turning it over and tracing her fingers along the skin. "What moisturiser do you use? I've tried everything and I still have dry skin. Never mind. Off you pop. Things are getting bad out there."

Before Betty could begin to protest, Madame Misstery slipped the ring upon her finger and everything changed.

-+-

Torquay Heights - East Side of Faraday City ...

Flames erupted everywhere as people struggled out of the rubble where once buildings stood. Modern apartment buildings that had housed the up-and-coming rich. Young entrepreneurs, bankers, brokers. The kind of place where money came and went with the flip of a digital switch. Now nothing more than a burning, smoking ruin.

Psycona spun on his heel, cape wrapping around his legs and tried to understand how he had arrived here. When he had arrived. And how it had come to this. He hadn't seen such devastation since the Masters of Chaos had made a push to take over the States in a coordinated effort that had taken almost the entire superhero community to stop. A firefighter fell to his knees, ripping the mask from his face and gulping air into his lungs.

"What happened here?" Psycona fell to a knee, easing the man's breathing with his mind. "Who could do this?"

"You don't know?" The firefighter looked up to Psycona, shaking his head, features blackened and lined. "That new cape. Phaross. Just came out of nowhere and ... and ... there are still people in there. We can't get to them. Please, don't let any more die!"

As EMT's rushed to the firefighter's side, Psycona could only gape at what he saw and had heard. Phaross could not have done this because Phaross did not exist outside of his will. If it was true, then this, all of this, was his fault. The dead and dying, the burned and maimed, the lost and alone. All his fault. But if he did nothing now, only stood contemplating his mistakes and his sanity, more could die and he was not about to let that happen.

Flipping his cape behind him, Psycona rose into the air and cast out a wide, psychic blanket upon the buildings surrounding him. He could sense the helpless, the pained, the dead and those close to death. He had never wanted this! Telekinetic, invisible fingers dug through flaming rubble and gouts of water spraying from broken pipes, creating passageways, gaps in the tumult and disaster. Some victims could escape under their own power, others required more help.

He stretched his powers to their limits, almost as much as he had done in creating Phaross. This time, however, he strained himself in a selfless act, a 'humane' act. Though, as he continued to fight to rescue more, he considered how selfless he could call it, considering his own psychic invention had caused the destruction.

Along with the emergency crews, Psycona fought throughout the night to save as many people as he could. These humans. His charges. His penance for long-ago failures and recent mistakes. He fought until exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, and still he could not stop. Not until everyone who lived found safety, not until everyone that had died found dignity in the recovery of their body.

As the first light of dawn began to crawl across the broken ground, Psycona allowed himself to fall. He had not exhausted himself as much for some time and still he had not managed to finish what he had begun. No truer statement had he made, either. He had caused this, however unwittingly. Somehow he had allowed the illusion of Phaross to manifest once again and that illusion had wrought great devastation to this city. Psycona could never repay the debt he had incurred here.

To the side, the emergency teams laid thick, plastic bags beside thick plastic bags. Each holding a body. The body of a wife, a husband, a mother, a father, a lover, a sibling. A child. Some of those bags held bodies so small. Visions of his homeworld assailed him. Memories of seeing the bodies of his people, thrown onto pyres, or tossed into ditches, many left to rot in the heat of their bloated sun.

And Psycona tasted tears upon his lips. He had not wept since that day. The day that he and the heroes of Earth had arrived too late. The day he had found the remains of his family, burned to ash and cinder inside their home. He had failed them, that day. Today, he had failed himself and these humans. He had no love for them, of course, but he had taken on the responsibility to care for them, to protect them and not only had he failed to do either, he had caused it all.

"Hey, buddy?" A hand rested upon his shoulder and Psycona turned an eye toward the firefighter he had met earlier. He, too, had lines of tears in the soot upon his skin. "There's nothing more you can do. You got all those you could."

"I could have done more." The gloves upon his hands were an illusion, but he dug the fingers into the ash before him, lifting it and allowing it to fall, cast away by a passing breeze. "I should have done more."

The firefighter crouched beside Psycona and, for long moments, said nothing. Together they stared at the remains of the buildings before them. Then, after some time, the firefighter laid an arm across Psycona's shoulders and Psycona had to force himself not to twist away from the touch, or grimace in distaste.

"I remember one time, we came to a brownstone. The whole building looked like the gates to Hell, you know. Damn! We fought that one all night but it didn't want to die." The firefighter shook his head, dipping it. "On the top floor, I saw this kid. Can't have been no older than six, you know? I got a kid that age right now. And ... and I ran right back in. Or tried to. Only, my captain stopped me. See, my rebreather had run out. We'd used all the spares. And he told me, I'd never make it. That brownstone was coming down and coming down soon. It was like he timed it. Down it came, right then. To this day, this very day, I see that kid's face. Because, even though I'd have died trying, I still think I could have done more. I should have done more."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Humans. They did like their stories. "Because it does not."

"Nah, buddy. Nothing will make it feel better." The firefighter slapped Psycona's shoulder and groaned as he rose to his feet. "It's just to remind you that, no matter what you do, people will die. You just can't let it stop you trying to make sure they don't. Do more, but only when you can, because, sometimes, you just can't and you got to live with that. Go home, buddy. You did all you could and that's all anyone can expect."

Psycona watched as the firefighter headed back to firetruck and his waiting crew. Every so often, the man rubbed his back as he shuffled away. That man had looked almost ready to drop when Psycona had first exited his fugue state, yet he had continued on through the night. He had no powers, no super-strength, nothing. Only a man, pushing himself to the limit to save people he didn't even know. That should humble Psycona, but it didn't.

With the last ounce of his psychic strength, he lifted himself into the air and turned for home. Perhaps Betty had awoken? Perhaps he could talk to her? Maybe then he could remember what it was about her that he had wanted to talk to her about?

-+-

Below, in an alley ...

Betty had expected to emerge from the Crooked Place where she had entered, but, no! That would have been the normal thing to happen. Instead, she had found herself here, watching buildings burn to the ground. Her journalistic instinct told her to record everything and take eyewitness statements. Her sense of self-preservation told her to stay well away.

He was there! That villain, Phaross. But, at the same time, it wasn't Phaross, it was Psycona. And, at the very same time, it was someone, some thing, very, very different. Alien. Betty shook her head as she realised she could hear thousands of whispers invading her mind, whispers that fell away to a minor, inconvenient buzzing as she thought about it, and then was gone. That wasn't the most surprising thing, though.

What surprised her the most wasn't that she saw different aspects of, what she could only assume was, one person, being. No, that felt crazy enough, but what really made her question her sanity was that Psycona, Phaross and the alien weren't the only aspects she saw. She saw someone else amid the twisting images. Someone familiar.

Her neighbour. Sean Smith. And things started to make both more and less sense at the same time.