He made his way through the palace's grand corridors to a well-appointed suite that served as a gilded prison.
The door was not locked, there was nowhere for her to run in this private dimension, but two of his more disciplined Amazon Lily guards stood posted outside. They nodded and stepped aside as he approached.
He entered without knocking.
The room was spacious, furnished with elegant, if unfamiliar, celestial furniture. Lilith, Punk-02, the embodiment of Vegapunk's "Evil," was sitting on a plush sofa, her chin propped on her fist.
She was staring out the window at the impossible, cloud-draped vistas and floating islands of the Heavens dimension, a bored look on her face.
Her appearance was striking. Short, messy orange-brown hair stuck out in defiant spikes. Her signature pink bodysuit, emblazoned with 'PINK 02', clung to a figure that was all sleek, scientific curves, a generous bust, a narrow waist, and hips that flared dramatically.
Ragnar idly wondered, not for the first time, what the hell the old man Vegapunk had been thinking when he designed this particular satellite.
The combination of genius-level intellect and this kind of visual presentation was either profound absent-mindedness or a very specific, unspoken joke.
Hearing the door, Lilith turned. Her usual bravado, the loud threats, and the aggressive posturing, were absent. Seeing Ragnar, the man who had casually threatened the Five Elders, dismantled an Admiral, and then whisked her away to a pocket dimension, had a sobering effect.
As a Vegapunk, she had access to classified data. She knew exactly the scale of the monster who stood before her. A being who would blow up Mariejois would not hesitate to scrap a troublesome android.
She remained seated, her expression guarded, unusually quiet.
Ragnar didn't stand on ceremony. He dragged a heavy, ornate chair across the room with a scrape and placed it directly in front of her, sitting down so they were knee-to-knee. He leaned back, assessing her.
"So," he began. "Punk-02. Lilith. The 'Evil' of Vegapunk." He offered a small, neutral smile.
"Nice to finally meet you properly. Apologies for the invitation method. Kidnapping is so uncouth. But, given your employment and your likely… programmed loyalties, I doubted you'd come willingly for a chat."
Lilith pressed her lips together. The polite, fearful response bubbled up, something deferential, careful. "It's… an honor to meet you, Lord Ragnar. I assure you, I-I"
"Drop it," Ragnar interrupted, his smile turning sharper. "The polite act. The scared scientist routine. It doesn't suit you. I know 'your Evil' means blunt, ambitious, ruthless in pursuit of discovery. So speak. Normally."
The command, delivered with such casual certainty, broke through Lilith's caution. The change was immediate.
Her shoulders slumped out of their tense line, and the fiery, irritable intelligence flooded back into her eyes. The fear wasn't gone, but it was now mixed with a hefty dose of her natural frustration.
"Fine!" she snapped, crossing her arms under her chest.
"You dragged me here! I've been staring at sky islands for hours! What do you want? If you're gonna scrap me, get it over with. If you want to ransom me back to Stella, good luck. The World Government might just decide I'm a liability and tell you to keep me!"
"I don't want to scrap you," Ragnar said calmly. "And I don't want a ransom. I want you. All of you. All the Vegapunks, Stella, Shaka, Pythagoras, Atlas, Edison, and you. To work for me."
"Work for… you?" Lilith blinked, thrown. That wasn't on her list of expected demands.
"Well," Ragnar amended with a slight shrug. "Except for Greed. York can stay with the Celestial Pigs, sorry, Dragons she's so eager to join."
The casual insult to the Celestial Dragons barely registered. It was the exception that caught her. "York? Punk-06? Why not her?" Lilith's curiosity overrode her self-preservation.
"We all sync to the main brain on Egghead. Our base directives align with Stella's. She can't just… defect."
Ragnar's gaze was steady, knowing. "What if Greed, whose entire facet is desire and ambition, has found a way? A backdoor in the sync? A way to feed the Stella main brain selective information while pursuing her own agenda?" He leaned forward slightly.
"You all are facets of a whole, but you have individual consciousness. You underestimate the depth of your own aspect. York's greed isn't just for resources or credit. It's for status, for power, for a place at the table she's been told all her life is the pinnacle. What if she's already made her deal with the Five Elders?"
The theory hit Lilith like a physical blow. Her eyes widened behind her glasses.
"That's… not possible…" she muttered, but her voice lacked conviction. Her mind, a supercomputer running on human genius, was already racing, analyzing the premise.
York's recent behavior, her increased demands for resource allocation, her longer periods of "deep-data analysis" where her satellite feed to the main brain could be spoofed…
"The sync protocol has redundancies, but… if she found a zero-day exploit in Stella's own link code… or if the Elders provided a Black Tech jammer…" She was talking to herself now, her fingers twitching as if typing on an invisible keyboard.
The implications dawned, cold and terrifying. If York had turned, then Egghead, their home, their life's work, their very network, was compromised. Stella, the original, trusting and often naive in social matters, could be in danger. The other satellites, unaware…
She shot to her feet, anxiety overriding her fear of Ragnar. "You have to let me go! I have to warn Stella! If what you're suggesting is even remotely true, Egghead is a trap waiting to spring!"
"I will," Ragnar said, his calm a stark contrast to her panic. "But first, my offer. And my incentive."
He remained seated, lifting his right hand. In the palm of his hand, the air began to shimmer and warp.
This was the power of pure, conceptual Imagination, limited to manifestation within his own dimension, but potent beyond measure.
Light coalesced, twisted, and solidified into intricate shapes of polished metal and glowing crystalline structures.
An Arc Reactor, Tony Stark's miniature fusion heart, materialized above his palm. It was a perfect replica, humming with a soft, blue-white light, the contained energy palpable even from a few feet away.
Lilith's frantic momentum halted. Her scientist's soul was snared. "Wha… what is that?" she breathed, taking a step closer. Her earlier panic was shoved aside by raw, insatiable curiosity.
"That energy signature… It's clean. Dense. It's not chemical, not electrical in any standard sense… Is that a contained fusion reaction at that scale? Impossible!"
She was at his side in an instant, her glasses (which Ragnar now realized were sophisticated scanners) sliding into place over her eyes.
A faint, red scanning beam licked out from a lens, tracing over the reactor. She ignored Ragnar completely, muttering to herself in a rapid-fire stream of technobabble.
"…Palladium core! Brilliant! Using it as a catalytic medium to channel a proton collision chain… the magnetic containment field is… gorgeous! The efficiency loss is negligible! This could power a city block for decades! The applications for propulsion, directed energy, sustained ecosystems…"
Ragnar let her drool for a full minute, watching the awe and hunger transform her face. This was the language she understood. Not threats, not politics. The siren song of impossible science.
He closed his fist. The Arc Reactor dissolved into motes of light.
"Hey!" Lilith protested, reaching out as if to grab the vanishing particles.
Before she could complain further, Ragnar began conjuring again. A sleek, matte-black plasma rifle appeared, its barrel glowing with contained hellfire.
Then it was gone, replaced by the holographic schematics of an FTL jump drive, equations scrolling too fast for a normal human to follow.
A fragment of a starship hull composed of a self-regenerating metallic polymer. A vial containing nanites that swarmed like liquid silver. A data crystal containing the theoretical principles of gravity manipulation.
Each creation was more breathtaking, more advanced than the last, technologies centuries, perhaps millennia, ahead of anything on Egghead, born from the collective sci-fi imagination of many anime Ragnar had watched.
Lilith was practically vibrating. She followed each apparition like a child chasing fireflies, her hands clasped together, her earlier fear and urgency completely forgotten in the face of this technological rapture. She was mumbling, calculating, and theorizing aloud.
"...reverse the polarity of the neutron flow to achieve localized temporal stasis… the molecular bonding in that alloy defies known physics… those nanites are operating on a quantum-entangled hive-mind protocol! This is… this is…"
Ragnar let the final image, a beautiful, impossible Dyson Sphere schematic fade away. The room was silent but for Lilith's excited panting.
"You, and the other Vegapunks, can study these," Ragnar said, his voice cutting through her reverie.
"Reverse-engineer them. Understand them. Build upon them. I believe with your collective intelligence, you can do it. This is the knowledge of realms beyond your world. This is the future."
Lilith stared at the space where the Dyson Sphere had been, her mind ablaze. The temptation was not just strong; it was absolute.
This was the dream of every scientist who ever lived, laid at her feet. But the practical part of her, the 'Evil' that dealt in logistics and resources, surfaced.
"The… the theories are one thing," she said, trying to sound pragmatic despite the breathless excitement in her voice.
"But resources! Stella is always complaining! The World Government doles out funds and materials in drips and drabs. They're terrified of what we might build if we had real, unlimited resources! We've had to scrap half a dozen projects because some CP0 agent decided a component was 'too dangerous' to procure!"
Ragnar nodded as if he'd expected this. "A short-sighted policy, but typical of decayed regimes clinging to power." He gestured towards the large window, beyond which the breathtaking, impossible geography of the Heavens dimension sprawled. "Look out there, Lilith."
She did. She saw floating mountains rich with unknown ores. Rivers that glittered with energetic particles. Forests of crystalline trees. Strange, docile fauna that seemed part organic, part mineral.
"This dimension is separate from our world," Ragnar explained. "Its resources are untouched, unknown, and vast. What isn't here…" He turned his gaze back to her, his eyes holding the certainty of a conqueror.
"…we take from the main world. From islands the World Government hasn't mapped, from the depths of the Calm Belt, from the territories of Emperors who won't miss a mountain or two of rare earth metals. Resources are not a problem. Ambition is the only limit."
Lilith's eyes, reflected in the window glass, sparkled with a light that had nothing to do with the external sun. She saw it. Not just the toys, but the canvas.
Unlimited funding, unlimited materials, no ethical review boards, no CP0 agents looking over her shoulder, and a patron who actively encouraged pushing boundaries into the realm of the godlike. It was everything the "Evil" in Vegapunk had ever wanted.
The last of her resistance crumbled. The potential betrayal of York was a problem, but it was a problem that could be addressed with these tools, with this backing.
She turned from the window to face him, all pretense gone. A wide, sharp, genuinely excited smile split her face. It was the smile of a shark that had just found an endless ocean of prey.
"Okay," she said, the word simple and final. "You've got me. And you'll get the others. Stella will see the logic. Shaka will approve of the philosophical leap. The others… they'll follow the science. But we need to move. If York is compromised, Egghead isn't safe. We need to extract Stella and the loyal satellites."
"Welcome to the team, Lilith." Ragnar stood and extended his hand.
Lilith looked at his hand, then up at his face. The fear was gone, replaced by the thrilling tremor of a scientist on the brink of a paradigm shift. She grasped his hand, her grip firm and eager.
"Just promise me one thing," she said, her smile turning wicked. "When we build the first plasma cannon big enough to vaporize a Marine battleship, I get to press the button."
"Deal."Ragnar's smile was a mirror of her own.