The Atan Correctional Facility was divided up into the possible threat of danger an inmate could create; type of ability, and intelligence level.

  Long ago, before the Empire tried to turn Paradis into its vacation beach home, all prisons and jails on Paradis were separated by the regur means: age, type of offense, mental sanity, or ck thereof.

  The influx and births of people with new powers made that now impossible.

  The government didn’t care much for petty criminals anymore.

  The real danger was astrals with rare, unique, and dangerous abilities. Even an astral with an extremely common ability but with high intelligence was dangerous if they decided to turn to a life of crime.

  If someone fit any of these two profiles they were monitored heavily from the appearance of their abilities, until the end of their lives. Human rights coalitions everywhere would decry the stripping of personal freedoms, that is, until the emergence of the worst kind of criminal possible.

  An astral with a rare, extremely dangerous, evolutionary ability that could turn into something much worse, who was born with a high level of intelligence.

  A super-vilin.

  Super-vilins themselves never called themselves that, they found the term derogatory.

  They considered themselves outws. Many of them were people who preferred to live in the wilderness, away from the government's incessant surveilnce of their lives, assuming that they would take their first chance to destroy society.

  Some were criminals, some were mentally ill, most were a mixture of both, but the most prolific of all the outws was a man who went by the name of Kerkys of Andros.

  He had a wonderful penchant for history, and various hobbies. Whenever he broke the w, and his outw name would be announced over the television, holo-screens, internet, and radio, he would giggle softly to himself.

  They got mah dick in their mouth.

  Flustered news reporters soon realized his official outw name was loosely transted to Biggus Dickus of Man Isnd. Kerkys of Andros would always grin, at home, with his wife and daughter whenever they said his name on-air, while he drank chocote milk, his constant sugar cravings never fulfilled.

  Kerkys of Andros was not a well-spoken man, a horrible habit he could not break. He made himself sound dumb and stupid to blend in, so people would not catch on his daily life that he was so much different than everyone else. When feeling comfortable around others he would speak normally, and sometimes would slip, feeling embarrassed.

  On the fourth day of the Week of Night, the smartest outw who ever lived, Kerkys of Andros, was Ace’s temporary cellmate in the maximum-security portion of the jail where they kept the inmates until trial.

  Kerkys was given a cellmate for the first time since he had been imprisoned. It was not that they never trusted him with a cellmate, it was that he never was in prison long enough to get one.

  Kerkys had been imprisoned for the longest time ever, three months. He would break out every time within a week, return home to his wife and they would go about their lives as if he went on a business trip and came home a little ter than expected.

  Kerkys’s first cellmate was Ace.

  Ace had the bottom bunk, Kerkys the top, and they were a good match for each other.

  Kerkys that morning was reading his favorite book, How to Train Your Earthian, and Other Clean Jokes, the pages worn, his copy he brought to prison himself, and the guards let him keep it because he said, if they didn’t he would leave.

  You can’t stop me.

  Ace did not like being on the bottom bunk, because Kerkys was a very obese man, and he worried that he would sink through the bottom of his bed and kill him in his sleep, a fear he told Kerkys, and he chuckled, telling him, if that happened, you would die instantly, the force crushing your skull.

  Don’t worry about it.

  Ace had been quiet the entire morning but now he had no choice but to speak up.

  “Hi,” Ace said, sitting on the bottom bunk. “Can you uh, can you turn to the wall?”

  “Why,” Kerkys asked.

  “I need to pee.”

  Kerkys snickered, scratched his round nose, and told Ace that he wouldn’t st long here.

  “I won’t be here for long once everyone knows I’m innocent,” Ace said. “They must know!”

  “It does not matter if you are innocent or guilty, what matters is that your wyer can prove that you might have not done it, if you want to leave here,” Kerkys replied.

  “I just want to pee. Please.”

  Kerkys sighed, rolled over to face the wall, and waited until he was done peeing, washing his hands in the small tiny sink provided, and Ace whispered a quiet thank you.

  Kerkys cmbered down from the top bunk, like a monkey, walked over to his pstic bin for personal belongings, which was only three steps, and put a bookmark on the page he was st on, a joke about fish that always made the fish-people during lunch ugh.

  “What is your name,” Kerkys asked. “You haven’t spoken to me since you entered. It’s quite rude.”

  “Sorry. My name is Acheus. Call me Ace.”

  Kerkys smiled, scrunching up his face, his gsses rising up. He found everything about Ace amusing, from his funny ears, skinny frame, bright hair, his awkwardness.

  Like all high-functioning socio and psychopaths, Kerkys had great fun making people squirm, but Ace was more akin to a court jester to him, the look of fear in his eyes apparent, his pale face sweaty and red.

  Ace’s name was the nail in the coffin.

  “Your name is Acheus? As in anteros acheus ,” Kerkys asked.

  Ace nodded, confused that someone would understand the origins of his name, and grinned. Kerkys grinned back, then snickered, and ughed, deep and heavy, seeing his strange ears twitch, the ridiculousness of it all.

  “A grown man with the name of a butterfly,” Kerkys ughed. “I thought my name was silly.”

  “What is it?”

  Kerkys of Andros told him his name, expined the meaning, and they had a nice chuckle about it.

  The fifty-year-old man was never short of jokes, loving to shout puns at his enemies before he killed them, thinking it would be quite a bit of fun that the st words they would hear would be a joke about fish, said by a man called Biggus Dickus.

  “The guards told me to be careful of you, that you’re dangerous and slow, but you seem fine to me,” Ace said.

  “They are ignorant and I make them believe I am both of these things. They put you in here with me in the hopes I would hurt you,” Kerkys replied. “I am the smartest man in possibly all of Atan.”

  Ace waved his hand, made a pssh noise, and was no longer afraid of Kerkys, believing him to be another crazy maniac who happened to be born with powers and an infted ego.

  “I will not bend over backward to prove it to you. The proof is in my past actions, that I have broken out of prison in a manner of a week, every time,” Kerkys said.

  “....really…?”

  Kerkys nodded, and he shuffled through his bin and pulled out a crossword puzzle, and a pencil with the end so rubbed and dull it was impossible to use as a weapon unless someone was smart enough to do so.

  Kerkys was, and he requested the crossword puzzle and pencil for this very reason for his pn that would come to fruition at the end of the week.

  “It takes me a few hours to execute my pn, a day to notice patterns in the security, and by the end of the week I leave,” Kerkys expined. “Soon this town will be decimated, maybe even all of Paradis, and the safest pce would be underground to survive the attack.”

  “You’re nuts,” Ace replied. “You’re pnning to destroy all of Atan!”

  “No, you idiot, ” Kerkys hissed. “The Empire is coming, they will arrive at the end of the week.”

  Ace could handle being called all sorts of insults, but idiot was not the one he could handle well. He id down on his bed, the mattress a soft substance wrapped in pstic, his sheet warming up nothing. He turned to face the wall and ignored Kerkys, and this made him even more upset.

  “You are a child. I have children older than you, and you ignore me, ” Kerkys said.

  Ace said nothing.

  “I am tired of no one believing a thing I say,” Kerkys huffed. “I have pyed the fool too long, and now I pay the price, and we shall die by the weeks’ end.”

  This got Ace’s attention, and he turned around to look at Kerkys, sitting in the standard blue pstic chairs littered throughout the jail, scowling, trying to find a four-letter synonym for AMOUR.

  “You aren’t stupid. You don’t sound like it,” Ace said.

  “I have no need to pretend around you because it is clear that everyone else is smarter than you,” Kerkys replied. “I assumed you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

  Kerkys scribbled in the word FUCK, chuckled to himself, erased it, and then put in LOVE.

  “I may be stupid, but what are you,” Ace said.

  “Smarter than you.”

  Their bickering continued, getting the attention of a guard, and he peered inside the looking window. He said nothing, watching intently, waiting for the round man to tear off the Ionadians head.

  He texted the guards in the group chat, telling them, it’s happening.

  Bets were pced on who would win, and then, to much of the guard’s dismay, Ace and Kerkys became quiet, whispering to each other. They sat next to each other on the bed, and immediately the guard turned away to text the group chat.

  It was a false arm.

  They are not arguing, they are “lonely and went fishing together.”

  More bets were pced on sexual positions, but that did not happen either as the guard watched from outside the cell door in anticipation, and also disgust that he was curious.

  Their quiet and suspicious conversation ended and the guard decided that it was time to do his job. He pulled out his work-issued control pad and pushed it into the grey metal slot on the wall.

  It slid in, with a click, and then on the wall appeared his Control Panel. A small portion of the wall imitated a digital screen, and after four taps, two swipes to the left and another tap, the door opened, and the security guard walked inside.

  “What are you two doing,” asked the guard.

  “Nuttin’, Naran,” Kerkys replied. “Jus’ tellin’ jokes.”

  Ace gave Kerkys a side-eye, his voice changed, demeanor different. He seemed to look at the floor when he spoke, simpering, and Ace was horrified at how well his acting was. The man fumbled with his fingers and seemed to nod when there was no need to nod, continuously licking his lips.

  Ace said yes, only jokes , and Naran the guard put his nose up at them and asked them for a joke.

  “Did you hear about the inmates that escaped from prison,” Ace asked feebly.

  Naran groaned and said that they should humor him.

  “Ya gotta say yes or no,” Kerkys said. “‘Das how dis works.”

  “ No, I have not,” Naran groaned.

  “That’s because you won’t be alive to see it,” Ace growled, flickering his eyes pitch bck.

  Naran ughed nervously, realized he walked into a cell without another guard present, and quickly left. Ace grinned, Kerkys snickered, and once they were sure the door was closed, Kerkys returned to his normal manner of speech.

  “I told you, they’re all idiots. They think you’re dangerous, they think I’m stupid. Use it to your advantage,” he told Ace.

  “Like how?”

  “In an hour’s time we will leave for lunch, or whatever rubbish they give us, ciming it is food. I will show you how.”

  There is no such thing as a free lunch, and this was too good of an offer to pass up. Ace knew Kerkys had ulterior motives but didn’t know what kind.

  “What’s in it for you,” Ace asked.

  “When the Empire invades, I would like a transtor. The Union doesn’t have their nguage installed on the C-Chips. You’re an Ionadian, you could help with that.”

  Ace ughed nervously, because for the second time Kerkys had mentioned that the Empire would be coming, what a ridiculous idea, but it was not far-fetched with the many attempts they had made in the past.

  “I know you don’t believe me, but I have been doing research,” Kerkys said.

  He got up from the lower bed, went to his bin, and brought out a folded piece of paper. It held many drawings of various objects, and one of them Ace recognized, The Sword of Vengeance.

  “Where did you get this? Why are you showing me this,” Ace asked.

  “Another Ionadian came by here, but he quickly escaped,” Kerkys replied. “He cimed he was looking for celestial objects, with magical powers. I thought him mad until he told me many specific details about the Empire that not many would know unless they’ve lived there themselves. I knew of these tales, from my visits and personal research.”

  Ace did not meet a single Ionadian in his two years in Atan, he was a walking rarity, and wanted to meet him badly, a mix of curiosity and wanting more information about the collection of angry swords and nosy mirrors.

  “What did he look like,” Ace asked.

  Kerkys described the man from Ace’s dream who had iridescent blood, and Ace knew that Kerkys did not lie, that their days would be numbered. The safest pce was, ironically, prison, and Ace didn’t want to be found innocent anymore.

  If he were to leave prison he might be the first to die.