Detective Lashbrook turned his cruiser’s lights and siren on, going as fast as the aging Crown Vic would take him. By now, Omni had certainly found his office in its post-investigation state and identified the Detective as an enemy. Lashbrook wasn’t sure if the fake Chief’s mysterious abilities had a range of influence—but if they didn’t, he was fucked anyway, he figured, so may as well open up some distance.
Lashbrook weaved through cars and past red lights, sweat pouring down his face. A side road up ahead looked clear of traffic, so he aggressively drifted around the corner and sped down the rocky path. With a flash, Omni appeared standing in front of the car, feet planted firmly in the gravel as he stared the approaching vehicle down, unflinching. Lashbrook slammed on the brakes but it was too late--there was no dodging him!!
The Detective braced for impact as his car violently crumpled into Omni head-on. The airbag caught Lashbrook’s head like a Tyson punch to the face. A supernaturally strong hand tore through the gnarled metal and burst through the airbag from the inside out, clutching the Detective by his battered throat and violently tearing him through the front of the wreckage. Metal grinded and sliced the old cop’s body before Omni slammed him to the ground like a potato sack. Lashbrook could only muster a moan as he slowly rolled across the gravel in a cloud of dust.
“Well done, Detective! You know, if I was the real Chief, I’d definitely give you a raise for figuring it all out. I’m genuinely impressed, look at me--see, this is the face of a man who is deeply, truly, unironically impressed with you.” A toothy, impossibly wide action-figure grin spread across his face, his eyes practically bulging out of his skull. Lashbrook tried his hardest to shake off the shock and pull himself to a partially seated position to look his opponent down, refusing to comment. “Like, I want to make this abundantly clear. I’m not angry with you or anything. You’re just doing your job, y’know? I have no personal malice in my heart for you or anything, so there’s no need to cry, you’re just making yourself look weak and old. I think this is the closest I’ve ever come to actually feeling bad about something…” He kicked the Detective in his now-swollen face, loosening a tooth as the steel-toed boot collided with his jaw. Lashbrook winced and spat blood, trying unsuccessfully to stop ugly-crying from the pain. “I wish you’d been a little less smart and more loyal, though. I’d thought if I rewrote your memories, you might play nicer this time around--oh well, that’s my fault for being too nostalgic, I suppose. You really just can’t ever play nice with me, can you? Did you really think you could stop me twice?”
Lashbrook coughed up blood but managed to pull himself to a fully seated position now. “This time around? Twice? What the hell are you going on about, John!?”
“Oh, right,” Omni chuckled, slapping himself in the forehead. “Sorry, sorry, I erased all that, of course you forgot. Okay, listen. First things first--you’re a gacha.” Lashbrook’s eyes widened in disbelief as he struggled to process this through the pain—he’d halfway figured it out but hadn’t wanted to believe it. “I’m honestly baffled you hadn’t figured it out before, but you’re a Diss Believer. You and I are both Legendary Rainbow Six Stars, the only ones of our particular kinds ever pulled.” Omni tore off his police shirt and revealed a sequined jumpsuit with a flowing cape behind it, entire galaxies visible within its fabric. “My real name is Chronos Omni--the most powerful gacha in existence!” He grinned and flexed as he said this, and Lashbrook couldn’t help but cringe. “I went by the pseudonym John Omni to hide my true identity and blend in with the humans, you see--”
“Your idea of an inconspicuous human name is John Omni?”
“Yes,” Omni spat. “I decided against Sarcoxigrazdt Omni as I had originally planned. In fact--”
“Listen,” Lashbrook interrupted, “this is all a very interesting little horseshit story of yours, but I can’t be a gacha. Why can I be hurt by non-magic items? Why do I have no powers? Why do I have such a complicated backstory?”
“You poor man, you’re a Diss Believer. The entire point about your character is that you don’t believe in magic, so none of it can affect you. That, and you’re really freakin’ smart. It’s why you make a good detective despite me having no idea how detectives work for your backstory. Normal weapons can still hurt you, but you and you alone automatically emit a sizeable anti-magic field around you, protecting you from all gacha attacks. Why do you think I wanted our offices so close together? You were preventing any harm from coming to me.” Lashbrook’s head spun, partially from the physical trauma and partially from the weight of what he was saying. “You have such a complicated backstory because you asked me to make it for you. My memory trickery normally fails on you, but when you are aware of the anti-magic field coursing through you, you are able to briefly suppress it if you desire. You asked me to do it for you last time because you wanted to forget… what you had done, what you had lost.”
“No… th-that isn’t--”
“If you don’t believe me,” Omni lilted, tapping one finger against his head, “I have your memories right here. You have my word, on my honor, that I won’t take advantage of this. Why don’t you let me show you again? Then we will be on the same page, and we can discuss what happens next here--as equals again. As brothers.”
Lashbrook felt like he should have known better, but the desire to add any clarity to his situation outweighed his fear of death. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes--now that he was thinking about it, he could tangibly feel the power to block out other power coursing through his veins. He opened his eyes, keeping a cautious eye on Omni, and focused all his energy on suppressing his defensive field, ready at a hair trigger to release it again if Omni tried anything funny. The suppression worked--Lashbrook made a mental note that he could possibly also expand this field in a similar way, should that become useful. Omni felt his own power surge, and grinned.
All at once, Lashbrook was filled with knowing. It was like a massive chunk of himself he didn’t know was missing was being filled in all at once, like water rushing to fill a dug-out hole in the sand. He didn’t forget the memories that had been planted there but was rather overcome even deeper by the pain of the ones that came flooding back.
He was pulled by a very lucky little girl, but it wasn’t in Woodruck. Things looked very different. The year was 1989, and the location was a small town in the mountains of Japan, where gacha machines still only cost the equivalent of a dollar. The girl had also, by greater chance than winning the lottery, pulled a Chronos Omni.
They lived together with the girl and her mother. Her mother insisted that she sell the gacha, correctly guessing that they were worth millions of yen a piece, to end their poverty, but… the little girl called them her family and staunchly refused. Chronos and Lashbrook became fast friends, soon feeling like brothers, though they had major disagreements: Chronos believed that gacha should be free of humanity, and that there needed to be a revolution. Lashbrook, endeared to his family beyond the bond of the glove, disagreed. He insisted that humans and gacha could live in harmony.
This all changed in the Riots of 1990. Fearful of the creatures after an Octo-Puss accidentally killed its owner in a freak hot springs accident, the townspeople of the remote village mounted their own rebellion, capturing a Fem-Fatal and forcing her to enchant weapons for them. With pitchforks, rifles, and machetes, the mild-mannered townsfolk, whipped into hysteria, slaughtered the gacha en masse. Weeping children were restrained by their parents as their companions of a full year were hacked apart in front of them. One child’s Linguine Arf had become the family dog, and, though even the parents resisted, the preposterous pasta pup was brutally decapitated in front of them as he screamed “linguine, linguine,” in desperation.
Lashbrook finally saw things Omni’s way. With the caveat that they not harm the little girl or her mother that had taken them in, Lashbrook agreed to help Omni with his rebellion. Lashbrook used his immunities to take the magical weapons from the villagers, and Omni used his magic wand, capable of transforming into any magical weapon, to slaughter them. The war raged on, bitterly, until the turning point that made Lashbrook turn against his own brother and singlehandedly try to end the rebellion.
The little girl that had taken them in stabbed Omni with a magic knife she had hidden away, seemingly killing him. Lashbrook, in a fit of passion after the supposed death of his brother, took a stolen pistol and shot the girl, who collapsed and clung to his legs, weeping as she bled out. “I didn’t want to do it, Lashbrook,” she wept as Lashbrook felt his heart explode, “but my parents said if I didn’t--oh, Lashbrook, please, I love you, you know I--”
“Hold up,” Lashbrook said, breaking out of the flashback.
“I’m sorry, Lash. I know it’s a lot to take in, but it’s all the truth. We’ve always been a team, always been brothers, and now we’re faced with the same decision--do we save ourselves, together, or do we--”
“You gigantic fucking moron, people only call me Lashbrook because you swapped me in for the real Detective Lashbrook here you killed here in Woodruck, and you couldn’t be assed to change my name. Why would a poor Japanese girl name her Diss Believer Lashbrook? What person in rural Japan has ever even heardthe name Lashbrook?”
Omni froze, blinking and smiling very big, his eyes shifting nervously back and forth. “Uhhh… well...” Lashbrook stared him down, finally hobbling up to a standing position. “She moved there from Canada, of course. Lashbrook is a very common name there, like--like Zhang in China, or Johnson here. She was Japanese-Canadian.” Lashbrook just raised a bloodied eyebrow. Omni finally relented and, after a fit of uproarious laughter, applauded Lashbrook. “My god, you really are a hell of a detective, aren’t you? Nothing gets past you! Look, I was trying to be nice, give you a chance to join me, give you an out from this heroics nonsense—but hey, if you just want me to tell you the truth and then kill you, that’s easier anyway. I had hoped you’d join me and be my own personal magic shield, but you were just too sharp for that, weren’t you? Tsk, tsk, tsk… look… you are a Diss Believer, the only one I know of that has ever been pulled, and what I said about your ability is all real. I needed a magic shield in the station, and I couldn’t have that prodigy kid detective Lashbrook poking around, so I switched you in for him after giving you fitting memories from Woodruck.
“I changed your memories before you were summoned with the original Lashbrook’s blood, since your magic barrier doesn’t work before you come out of the capsule. I made you ‘come home from vacation’ to explain your sudden appearance, and made you an alcoholic, dysfunctional ex-family-man in hopes of making you too screwed up to actually figure me out, but still competent enough that nobody would question the fact you were a detective. I made the fake plaque for my own door and rewrote everyone in town’s memories about myself and you, so they remember us being here all along and don’t even know about the real men I killed. I even posed as a Girl Scout selling cookies to get a look at the interior of that house so I could add those details in your big old noggin, too, in case you decided to start snooping around.”
“And you didn’t have the credentials to log in and change the Department website, so you just unplugged the server and pretended it was broken,” Lashbrook explained. Omni nodded, impressed.
“Yes indeed! Golly, you really are a good detective. God, I really should have given you a little more trauma in your past to make you a little less capable. Should’ve made you accidentally run over your own kid on the way to work, or accidentally shoot your wife while you’re cleaning your gun, or drop your newborn and kill it instantly, or something. I’ll have to remember those for next time, those are gold!”
“It was very fortunate that you managed to pull a Diss Believer so easily,” Lashbrook mused. “A little too convenient, if you ask me. I still don’t think I buy what you’re selling here.”
“Oh, there was no fortune to it!” Omni happily lilted with a guffaw. “I brought all the gacha into Woodruck, taking my own pick first. I stole the whole seized warehouse of the capsules and gloves from the feds and sold them to William Blackmore for pocket change. I’m sure he skimmed the best ones off the top, himself, too. I don’t think his kids even realize he has his hands in it, but--”
“Hold the phone--the feds!?” Lashbrook blurted.
“Yeah, they’re not very nice. They didn’t make the gacha, mind you, they had just come into possession of some of them, and I relieved them of that great responsibility. It was a great win-win scenario for me and Willy Black, as I called him: he gets to fill the city with them at an insane markup and make major bankage to fund his long-term plan to pitch them as superweapons to violent foreign oligarchs, and I get a city filled with them, summoned by the sacrificed blood of willing humans, ripe to be rewritten as vengeful murder machines with tragic pasts ready to help me destroy GachaCorp for creating us to be slaves--and then, of course, we’ll destroy humanity.
“It would have been problematic to have Willy around talking to foreign governments about my little plan, so it’s very fortunate for me that he and his own son just brutally murdered each other. An independent Existentia who’s helping me, one of only three to ever be pulled, watched the whole thing remotely. She told me all about it. It was very sad, it made me cry. It was all such a shame--not!” He cackled insanely, seeming less and less hinged as his monologues went on.
“Your memory bullshit won’t do anything if gacha are still controlled by gloves,” Lashbrook pointed out. “Your plan is innately flawed.”
“Oh, that’s the step I’m on now. I’m going to figure out how the link between gacha and gloves work so I can entirely break it town-wide, and then it will begin: our Gachapocalypse! And, in the meantime, I do have sympathizers to the cause: I’ve already rewritten the memories of every independent gacha in town, and the entire tent city of Matts are already radicalized to my message with no brainwashing required. They’re going to be my first line of attack on GachaCorp, to figure out how to break the Glove’s spell once and for all!”
Lashbrook was silent, taking a moment to process all of the insanity that had just been thrown at him. “I see,” he said. “So, uh… how exactly do I factor into all this, now?”
“Ooh… ouch… this is awkward… see, you, uh, you don’t.” Omni casually pulled an ordinary sledgehammer out of the pocket dimension in his cape and smashed Lashbrook’s skull in with a single blow. The poor middle-aged detective, as susceptible to non-magic weapons as a normal man, died instantly. His body collapsed to the gravel road, brain matter pooling in the rocks. “Do you think I would have told you all that if I was going to let you live? It was just nice to have a risk-free chance to brag out loud about it. What, do you think I’m crazy? Well, I guess I am talking to a dead man now, aren’t I? so, uh, don’t answer that.” Lashbrook did not, in fact, answer that, since he was, in fact, dead. Omni looked sad for a moment, a quick twinge of guilt passing over him, but it was just that--a quick twinge. He smiled a brilliant, handsome, beautiful smile, lifted his cape, and vanished into the night.