The moon was out but barely, like a pale bruise behind Gotham's smog-choked sky. Most people didn't look up anymore.
Paradox did.
He always did.
He stood on the rusted bones of an old bridge, hands in his coat pockets, eyes fixed on the stars. His breath fogged the air, but his mind ran hotter than ever. He wasn't here for nostalgia. He was here to test something. Not a machine this time.
A choice.
Behind him, a single hover-drone buzzed silently, displaying holographic telemetry. Ivy sat on the hood of a beaten-up armored truck nearby, running diagnostics on a batch of hybridized flora—plants that shimmered with bioluminescent coding and whispered to one another in rustling, binary leaves.
"Are you sure this is a good spot?" she asked, not looking up. "It smells like wet rat and copper regrets."
Paradox smirked. "Perfect conditions. Low surveillance. Active leyline disruption underneath. And the best part? It's where the city forgets itself. Makes it easier to rewrite the script."
He raised his hand. A thin disc, no larger than a coin, hovered just above his palm. At a glance, it looked like nothing—an old microchip, maybe. But through his eyes, it pulsed with uncollapsed probability, tangled loops of intention coiled in fractal lattices.
"I'm calling it the Tomorrow Key."
Ivy finally looked over. "Sounds poetic. What's it do?"
He tilted the disc slightly, letting starlight ripple across its surface. "It's an anticipatory seed. Not a weapon. Not a device. A… developmental narrative engine. Think of it like a time-agnostic idea. When planted in a specific environment—emotional, geographic, social—it begins to 'grow' toward a possible future. Not by force. By suggestion."
Ivy blinked. "So it convinces reality to want something?"
"Exactly."
He tossed the Key into the air. It hovered, then zipped off like a spark of thought vanishing into the sky. Somewhere, not far from Wayne Tower, it embedded itself into the foundations of a community center where people still believed change was possible.
Small moves.
Big outcomes.
"You scare me when you're subtle," Ivy muttered.
"That's the idea."
In the city below, a shadow watched them. A shape on the edge of sense. Human, but not. Wrapped in layers of refracted light, like a man moving through water.
He whispered into a communicator.
"I've located the anomaly."
A second voice replied. Calm. Rich with ancient fatigue.
"Observe only. Interfere, and you risk destabilizing the skein."
"I know," the first voice muttered. "But you should see what he just did."
He paused.
"He made hope tactical."
Back at the lab, the real work resumed.
Paradox's desk was now cluttered with sketches, not of machines—but of cultures. He'd started building simulation models of civilizations. How they'd rise. Collapse. Evolve. Not just tech trees and war logs—but dreams, art, language.
At the center of the room floated a holographic construct titled: Project Aegis.
It was a city. But not one of steel.
This was built from principles across fiction and science: Wakandan power grids braided with Luthor's fail-safe redundancies. Asgardian energy anchors. Hidden Mist optical camouflage. Sector 2814 temporal buffers. And right at the core—a reactor modeled after Studio Ghibli's magical engines, built not on power but intent.
It wasn't just architecture.
It was philosophy made physical.
Ivy stepped in and stared. "Is that… a fantasy?"
"No," he said. "It's proof of one."
She walked around the projection slowly. "Are you planning to build this?"
He nodded.
"But not here. Not yet. Earth isn't ready."
She turned. "Then where?"
He smiled without humor. "Anywhere the rules are optional."
That night, a knock echoed through the outer tunnels of the lab. Rare. Unexpected. Ivy reached for her thorn whip. Paradox didn't move.
The knock came again.
But this time, the door opened on its own. Not pushed. Not hacked.
Just… invited.
A man stepped inside. Smoked trench coat. Burned-out soul. Grin like a man too tired to care but too stubborn to stop.
"Bloody hell," John Constantine muttered. "You're a real thing, aren't you?"
Paradox blinked. "I haven't decided yet."
Constantine chuckled, flicked his lighter, and lit a cigarette. "Name's John. Heard whispers you were cooking up something reality-breaking."
"Depends who's asking."
"I'm asking as a friend." He exhaled smoke shaped like Latin curses. "The kind who might need a get-out-of-doom free card if things go sideways next week."
Paradox studied him.
"Why come to me?"
Constantine shrugged. "Felt a disturbance in the weird. Then I flipped a coin."
Ivy tilted her head. "And it landed on us?"
"Nah. Landed in a duck's mouth. Figured that was a sign."
Paradox turned back to his console. "You want help with something?"
Constantine's smile dropped.
"I want in."