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Brainstorm cursed, slamming a fist on his worktable. His hundredth attempt - he had lost count of how many - at creating a time-travelling machine had failed and imploded again. He threw the failure into the growing scrap pile of yellow suitcases tossed in the corner of his increasingly chaotic lab.
The flier cursed again, sitting back in front of his now empty desk with his servos creaking as he cupped his helm. Hundreds of years of research had proven him that time travel was an impossible science by definition, yet he still hoped to somehow reach a breakthrough. Every suitcase was an improvement, and every attempt was getting him a step closer to finding Quark again.
But more than anything else, he just hoped that his perspicacity would keep the incubators at bay.
Brainstorm couldn’t properly remember a time where the minuscule, cat-like aliens hadn’t been stalking him. There was always one somewhere, lurking in the shadows with their piercing red gaze pressuring him into contracting a wish in one way or another. Invisible to anyone but him, they were both everywhere and nowhere. He had tried squashing, burning and shooting the creatures to death to get rid of them, even going as far as creating weapons specifically for this gruesome act. Yet they always somehow replicated themselves and ate their own remains in an innocently disgusting way, munching at their torn, bloody flesh with furry skin and ruptured organs to hide the murder like it was an everyday occurrence.
Sometimes, Brainstorm wondered if he was going crazy seeing all the pesky creatures around him. However, the idea of paying a visit to Rung and chat about his vermin troubles wasn’t an appealing one; just imagining the kind of crazy diagnostic the psychiatrist would give him made him shudder. He had also considered to just finally sign a contract with an incubator to end this ludicrous, never-ending game of cat and mouse, but he convinced himself that he knew better than to trust an aesthetically unpleasing creature with an impossible task.
The scientist sighed, turning away to face the pile of yellow scrap once again. He had been so close, yet so far from achieving his goal! Maybe a little more tinkering would do the trick. Maybe the next suitcase would work properly.
The motions were familiar, if not robotic. Brainstorm would throw everything out of his worktable on the floor in an attempt to clean it up, pick up the next experiment and his tools, start tinkering again...
“You want to see him, don’t you?” a tiny voice echoed in the shadows.
“Go away, incubator,” Brainstorm growled. He didn’t even bother looking for the creature and continued to construct the next briefcase.
“I could make your wish come true,” The incubator said, perching itself right in front of Brainstorm without blinking its red eyes.
The scientist continued working on the newest project, determined to continue ignoring the speck of white dirt on his desk. It would swing its tail around impatiently for a while and eventually walk away, like most of the other incubators did before. Then it would come back to stalk him silently and unnervingly in the shadows of the Lost Light. Finally, it would ask for a contract again when he would in his most vulnerable and emotional state. That would be when he would have another failed experiment on his table.
But this time, the incubator stayed, gazing incredulously at Brainstorm’s work. “You know time travel is impossible. Science has proven it. Why do you continue?” The white alien stated in a matter-of-factly, tilting his head to emphasize his words.
Still, Brainstorm refused to acknowledge the existence of the creature. The thing had been murmuring alluring things to him for centuries now, and he certainly did not want to try reasoning with it now. He persuaded himself that If he continued to give it the cold shoulder, maybe it would eventually go away for a while.
“Why are you so persistent?” The incubator asked, not removing his gaze from Brainstorm a single instant. It continued staring at Brainstorm’s work for a long while, its tail wagging around until its victim finally gave up his silent game.
“We’ve had this conversation hundreds of times before,” Brainstorm sighed, resigning himself to having to talk himself out of the situation. “There’s no point in arguing with you. I know what you do to your victims. You grant them a single, life-wasting wish and rob them of their souls in exchange. Why would I even think of contracting to something like you?”
“Well, I normally go after young, teenage earthling girls...”
"Do I look like a teenage girl to you?!” Brainstorm interrupted, taken by surprise at the comparison. The only two robots he knew had aligned themselves with young girl avatars were Whirl and Ultra Magnus and he did not want an ugly cat to compare him to either of them.
“No, but your emotional profile does suit my needs,” the incubator revealed. “You must know about entropy, Brainstorm. You are a scientist,” it baited, already expecting the answer from its prey.
“The second law of thermodynamics,” Brainstorm answered out of habit, “The entropy of an isolated system never decreases. Which, in theory, leads to -”
“The heat death of the universe,” The incubator finished. “My civilization, much like yours, is technologically-advanced. But while your kind remained focused on science for millenias, we discovered the power of magic, which creates new energy. This magical energy can postpone maximum entropy,” it explained.
“So you want to delay the end of the universe,” Brainstorm scoffed, his voice deep with sarcasm. “What a noble cause, coming from a vile thing like you.”
“But our magic isn’t powerful enough. Magic needs emotion to be a redeemable source of energy. However, our civilization is incapable of emotions,” the incubator added.
“Which is why you travel the universe hunting for beings with greater emotional potential in the most obnoxious way possible,” Brainstorm concluded, falling back into his work. He honestly couldn’t care less about the alien’s needs and pitiful lack of feelings. For all he knew, it was just attempting to pull him in using basic scientific facts. Now that it had proven itself to be as suspicious as ever, he tried to ignore its existence even harder to make it go away.
But the incubator was more difficult than usual. He stayed, glaring at Brainstorm unsettlingly for a long while before it dared to speak up again.
“It’s an equivalent exchange,” it said, walking around Brainstorm’s desk. “I grant you your dearest wish, no matter what it is, and you pay for it by fighting witches. Usually, the more emotions a host has, the more powerful the wish and the contractor’s powers become. And the more energy they create, the better it is for us. It’s simple, isn’t it?”
The incubator sat up again, continuously gazing at Brainstorm. Not once did it bat its eyelids, if it even had some to start with. Both stayed like this for a while, the creature never really leaving Brainstorm’s desk while Brainstorm tried even harder to ignore it by continuing to work needlessly. It had stated its motives for signing up a contract with him multiple times in these centuries of emotional hunting, and Brainstorm had still refused to come up to an agreement with it. However, no incubator had remained this long with him before.
“What are you willing to do to see him again?” The incubator whispered ominously, suddenly sitting right next to his audio receptors. “Would you die for him?”
Brainstorm tried to bat the alien cat away from his audios, but the vermin kept teleporting itself out of his reach. He truly thought that there was nothing else it could tell him that could possibly change his mind.
“He had a contract with me, you know.” The incubator added, firmly planted next to his faceplates.
Brainstorm froze, Despite knowing that it was a pressure tactic. The incubator was bullying him into contracting a wish, pulling his emotional strings by saying exactly what he refused hear. But he couldn’t delay the inevitable any longer.
This time, the incubator was winning.
“Who?” Brainstorm whispered, awaiting the evident answer.
“Quark.”
Brainstorm didn’t want to contract an incubator. He knew the risks of doing so as well as what it would do with the newly created energy. But pronouncing his dearest wish would save Quark from the incubator’s merciless clutches and inevitable death. For both his and Quark’s sake, he needed to beat the incubators to their own game.
The next thing he knew after finalizing the contract to the incubator was the pain of his spark being extracted from its casing and transformed into an amaranthine, diamond-shaped jewel that embedded itself in a gold encasing behind his faceplates. A new, magically enhanced suitcase soon followed, chaining itself to Brainstorm’s wrist like it had always belonged. Both items were a testament to his imprisonment to the incubator race.
Brainstorm effortlessly opened a time-travelling portal to the past, walking into it without hesitation and leaving all of his failed projects behind. He was going to find Quark and protect him, even if it would be from afar. How many tries it took and how much he would miss the crew of the Lost Light didn’t matter.
If sacrificing himself meant sparing Quark from a terrible fate, then he would.