High in the Rocky Mountains, at Cerebral Center HQ, Captain Cortex stared out at the peaceful, pristine land. As far as heroes went he certainly wasn’t the most physically imposing, but his psychic abilities easily made him one of the most powerful beings in the known universe.
Small, steady movements of air in the distance signaled that an SUV was moving toward him. He tried probing the driver’s mind, but when he detected the faint resonance of copper coating the vehicle’s body, he quickly retracted his mental tendrils in pain.
He shivered.
He paced back and forth as the SUV slowly wound its way up the hill.
He tried focusing his mind elsewhere, but his mind was so great that a large portion of it remained fixated on the vehicle…
…The vehicle slowly winding its way up the hill…
…The vehicle that surely contained his next hit of Tesseract Grade-M.
Another tremor ran down his spine… A symptom of withdraw…
At the rate it was moving, it would take another 45 minutes before his dealer arrived.
Captain Cortex gripped his head in pain. He let out a scream. He couldn’t take it. He extended his psychic tendrils once more, grabbing the road and trees and land that surrounded the SUV and pulling it all toward him. In two minutes, large chunks of landscape sat in the courtyard of the Cerebral Center with a shimmering black SUV perched atop It all.
A serious looking woman with red hair and a black suit stepped out from the driver’s seat and looked around.
“A bit destructive.” She commented. “And it’s surely against county regulations.”
“I had to! You were taking too long!” Captain Cortex’s words were telepathic, but still conveyed the pain he was beginning to experience.
“So you decided to destroy the beautiful scenery as an act of revenge?”
“No! But I couldn’t grab your car! It’s covered in copper! I had to improvise!”
The woman still looked annoyed, but slowly clambered down from the mound of uplifted land and onto the lawn of Captain Cortex’s headquarters.
“I’m Agent Shelly.” The woman said, extending a hand.
Captain Cortex accepted it and shook it vigorously, but it was her other hand, the hand holding a copper-lined suitcase, that he focused on.
Agent Shelly stared down at the suitcase and gave the faintest impression of a smile. “I see.” She said simply. “Well, shall we?”
No sooner had she asked that a large recliner materialized out of thin air. Captain Cortex quickly took a seat, telekinetically rolled up his sleeve, and closed his eyes.
Agent Shelly moved at a far more casual speed, slowly unclasping the suitcase and withdrawing a large copper orb containing an unknown liquid. She grabbed a hypodermic needle, stuck it into a small rubber stopper in the orb, and filled the syringe.
“Another dose of T-Grade-M.” Agent Shelly said. She stuck the needle in Captain Cortex’s arm and pushed down on the plunger. A look of relief instantly overtook the hero’s face. His mouth turned up in a smile and he gave a small, goofy chuckle.
“That’s so much better.” Captain Cortex shivered.
“Gotta give you your fix.” She said. “Keep the junkie nice and happy.”
Cortex felt a growing sense of dislike toward this agent. “I know you’re wearing a copper-lined suit, but I could still kill you in a thousand different ways. It’d be easy. You’d do well to remember that and not insult me.”
“Kill me, and you’ll never get another drop of T-Grade-M ever again.” She said flatly.
Cortex gave a harumph. “I could just steal a drop and have it synthesized. It’d be easy enough to recreate.”
“You couldn’t penetrate the copper canister that holds it.”
Cortex gave a devious grin. “Your container? No. My veins?” A few drops of transparent fluid flew out from the spot in his arm where the needle had punctured. He gave a small, victorious grunt before sending the fluid back into his body.
“Well? What’s stopping you?” Agent Shelly asked.
Cortex gave a slight frown. “I just don’t want to.”
“No? But then you’d no longer be reliant on anyone. You could take over the planet, just like you tried to do before we gave you your first dose and reined you in.”
Cortex appeared to grow increasingly uncomfortable. A silence fell over them.
“You can’t, can you?” She asked.
A malicious aura permeated from the hero’s body.
Shelly didn’t smile, but it was clear from her movements and tone that she felt somewhat victorious. “You’ve already tried synthesizing it, haven’t you?”
“Saline, methamphetamine, and trace amounts of unrefined uranium. Nothing else was detected. I thought it might’ve been the meth, but it doesn’t have the same high as Grade-M… The same relief. I tried getting the ingredients and mixing them together, but nothing worked.”
Agent Shelly nodded.
“So what is it?” Cortex asked. “Is it a formula with a secret ingredient? Maybe the substance instantly breaks down when it comes into contact with blood or air?”
“Could be.” Shelly nodded. “Sounds reasonable. I couldn’t tell you, of course, since I’m just the courier, and even if I did know I-“
“-you wouldn’t tell me.” Cortex nodded. “You need me to be fully reliant on you because you know if I weren’t, I’d start running things my way.”
“More or less.” Agent Shelly agreed. She withdrew the syringe and placed it and the copper orb back in the suitcase, closed it, then nodded to Cortex. “Mind giving me a hand here?”
Despite still being annoyed, Cortex grabbed the Earth beneath Agent Shelly’s feet and lifted it toward the driver’s side of her SUV. She opened the door and stepped inside, then closed it. She didn’t start the vehicle, but instead waited while Cortex grabbed the giant chunk of displaced land and levitated it, along with the SUV it carried, back down the mountain from whence it had come.
The top of the mountain was silent… Relaxing… Captain Cortex shivered in ecstasy as a wave of euphoria washed over him…
…
“He told me he tried synthesizing it.” Agent Shelly said. The room was deep underground and lined in three feet of copper. The man behind the glass, a glass that had been synthesized with copper, was a shadowy silhouette with no distinct form.
“We expected him to try that. So he now knows the ingredients.” The voice, which had been digitally scrambled, stated.
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t know that T-Grade-M is nothing more than a placebo?”
“I’m worried he’s getting close to figuring it out.” Shelly said.
“The greatest mind in the known universe… So great, in fact, that we’re able to use its own powers of suggestive mental influence to keep itself in check. A mind so powerful that it convinced itself to get addicted to something that’s not real.”
“But if he figures it out, what do you think he’ll do?”
“The long drive up the hill, the frequent lateness of our couriers, the official look of those who administer the drug… All of it a pomp and circumstance performance that reinforces the importance of T-Grade-M. Even if he does realize it’s a placebo, even if he tried injecting himself with a perfect version, he’d still have a small, lingering doubt about its efficacy. That’s the funny thing about a placebo… It works best if you don’t know it’s a placebo.”
“But that doesn’t keep us safe from his retaliation, which will surely follow.”
“If that happens, then we start giving him T-Grade-C.”
“Another placebo?”
“Naturally.”
“And you don’t think he won’t instantly figure that out?”
“Agent Shelly, it’s not that he won’t figure it out, because he most certainly will. Rather, it’s that he won’t want to figure it out. He’ll remember how good he made himself feel when he believed Grade-M was a real, addictive substance, and will want to feel that way again. He’d begin to understand that he’s such a powerful psychic that no one, not even himself, is immune to the influences of his powerful mind.”