Back underground, the lab had gone eerily quiet, save for the soft warble of a violin playing itself in the corner. Ivy sat cross-legged on the lounge sofa with an open book in her lap, though her eyes were on the central screen. The energy readings had spiked the moment Paradox re-entered Earth's timestream.
"Let me guess," she said without looking up. "A tear in the Fold?"
Paradox tossed his coat onto the nearest console. "Scout. Sloppy one."
"Did you kill it?"
He shook his head. "Marked it. Implanted a sub-temporal echo to follow it home."
"And the bystanders?"
"Time bubble. All they remember is a car backfiring."
Ivy sighed and closed her book. "This keeps happening more often."
He gave her a glance. "I know."
"You promised me a year. One quiet year."
"I lied."
Her expression softened just enough to show she wasn't truly mad. "You always do when you're trying to protect people."
He moved toward the central console and began keying in commands. "It wasn't just a Fold scout. It was an Echo-Strain. Synthetic. Manufactured. That means someone's tampering with what's already unstable."
"Someone like you?"
Paradox smirked. "I don't make monsters. I make solutions."
Ivy stretched and stood. "And yet, the more you solve, the more they crawl out of whatever cosmic sewer you keep poking."
"Maybe I should start poking harder."
Axiom floated by, blinking warnings about containment breaches and processor stress levels. Paradox waved it off. He walked to the far end of the lab, past the experimental gravity vault and past the restructured Asgardian crystal chamber, until he reached the newest installation—a rotating dome of silver metal shaped like a Möbius strip folded into itself.
"Is this… new?" Ivy asked.
Paradox didn't answer right away. He placed his palm on the interface. The metal shimmered and rippled like liquid mercury.
"I've been working on it since the Geneva incident," he said. "It's not just a reactor. It's a forge."
"For what?"
"For synthetic realities."
She blinked. "You're building… universes?"
"Test chambers," he corrected. "Worlds with isolated physics, accelerated time, and clean feedback systems. If I want to figure out who's corrupting the Fold, I need to simulate possible timelines at micro speed."
She crossed her arms. "And if one of those realities spills over?"
He grinned. "Then I get to test my containment field."
"That's not funny."
"It wasn't a joke."
He tapped a sequence into the terminal. The forge came alive, casting rainbow arcs of quantum light into the air. Ivy stared at it with a kind of reverent fear.
"Is this what you do when you disappear for days?"
Paradox nodded. "And I think I found something."
He turned to her fully now, his voice dropping lower. "There's a timeline in which the Fold doesn't happen."
"What's different?"
"A name. A single person who doesn't exist in this one."
"Who?"
He hesitated.
Then said: "Lex Luthor."
Ivy frowned. "He's dead."
"In this world, yes. In others? He thrives. But more importantly… in timelines where Luthor and I never met, the Fold doesn't invade."
"You're saying you are the catalyst."
"I'm saying someone out there is trying to edit me out of causality by manipulating versions of my past."
Ivy took a slow breath, visibly processing it. "And your answer to that is building toy universes?"
"Not toys," he said, dead serious. "Blueprints. Maps to survival."
The room fell quiet again.
Until Axiom buzzed a soft alert: INCOMING VISITOR—DNA MATCH: KRYPTONIAN.
Paradox turned. "Now?"
Ivy read the subtext instantly. "Clark?"
The door to the lab slid open a moment later with a mechanical hiss. Clark Kent stood in the threshold, trench coat soaked from the rain, expression neutral—but not relaxed.
He looked around the lab slowly, like a man stepping into a memory that had been tampered with.
"Alphonse," he said finally.
"Clark."
"I've been hearing things," Clark said, stepping forward. "Whispers. Warnings. Words I haven't heard since Krypton died."
Paradox nodded. "You want to know what Paradox really is."
Clark's eyes flicked to Ivy, then back. "I want to know who you are and why reality bends when you speak."
Paradox walked to the middle of the room and pulled a sphere of metal from a drawer. It unfolded in the air, displaying layered images—ghosts of timelines, snapshots of alternate selves.
"I'm what happens," Paradox said softly, "when the universe tries to correct a mistake… and fails."
Clark didn't flinch. But his jaw clenched.
"You're Kryptonian."
"I'm everything but," Paradox said. "I've rewritten my genome eighteen times. I've died twice. The man you see now—he's stitched together from theory, defiance, and a ridiculous amount of caffeine."
"And you built this?"
"I built beyond this," Paradox said. "This is just the shell."
Clark took another step. "Why the secrecy?"
Paradox gave a tired smile. "Because if I told you everything I knew about the future, you'd try to stop me. And we'd both lose."
The two stood in tense silence. Then Clark glanced at Ivy again.
"You trust him?"
Ivy raised a brow. "I garden with him. You don't do that unless you trust someone."
Clark exhaled slowly. "Then show me."
Paradox turned to the forge, reached into its light, and pulled out a crystalline map of possible futures. "Here," he said. "Let's take a walk through the mistakes we haven't made yet."
And together, the three of them stepped into the unknown.