By the time she was lucid enough to call herself awake, she knew the story, but not the score.

Someone had grabbed her, drugged her, and kidnapped her. By the feel of it, they’d tied her up at the ankles with her wrists tied behind her back. Of course the Plot would do this to Erin.

Erin lay there, still, quiet and tired from the drugs, struggling to open her eyes.

When she could finally pry her leaden eyelids open, she found herself in darkness. Of course. Erin closed her eyes again. Why didn’t the Plot just make her a Puppet? Did it expect her to do something?

She settled a little more comfortably onto the concrete beneath her, which was not very comfortable at all. Erin lay there on the concrete for some time, probably drifting in and out of sleep without realizing it, still under the effects of the drug used to knock her out.

Finally, there was an electric ‘click’ and the buzz of fluorescent lights slowly ticking to life. Erin resolved herself to face the worst of fates at this point. Some psychotic serial killer, some gang, or even Rex Magnum.

Every part of it would be horrible. She’ll have wished she’d died. She’ll have wished she’d never been born. Erin will have wished she’d been made a slave, mind and body, rather than be here. Erin was sure the Plot would have something to make her life more miserable.

Instead, as her eyes adjusted to the room, she found herself alone in a concrete and cinder block room, a mostly empty storage room with bare fluorescent lights and aluminum electrical conduit running along the walls.

In the corner where she’d been, there were stains of what must have been old buckets slowly corroding, and lots of dust. In another, there was a box proclaiming the contents to be two hundred feet of Ethernet cable. There was a TV in the third corner, and a metal door more or less occupied the last corner. She suspected the Ethernet cable was what made up her bindings, having had to negotiate her bonds to look around.

Of course, the most ominous thing was the bomb looking device in the center of the room. It was composed of a pair of those pressurized medical gas cylinders - each slightly bigger than a two liter bottle - taped together with duct tape. Atop and around the bottles were a tangle of metal and rubber hoses. Half the tubes and wires fed into a black box perched precariously on top of the bottles. It couldn’t have been more obviously telegraphed as “gas bomb;” otherwise Erin couldn’t make much sense of the tangle.

She wondered where the camera was. And there had to be a camera for a show like this. All half decent kidnappings had cameras.

Erin struggled to get into a position where she could get to her feet, or at least regain some mobility. She wiggled around, managing to get closer to the television. Perched half against a wall with her butt digging painfully into the concrete, her new position let her see that the box on top of the canisters was a timer, counting backwards, patiently, from thirty eight minutes, seventeen seconds. Of course.

Erin was bait for some stupid storyline. How embarrassing. For a minute or two, she shook with rage and the lingering exhaustion of her efforts to sit up. As she did so, the television, a small old flat screen that was fed from cables through the wall, fizzled to life.

The screen powered to life, showing a black and white image of Doppelganger’s - or, at least their biosuit’s - face. Apparently, they grew another suit.

Their voice came through the speakers built into the screen, just as atonal yet slightly mocking as it had been with the Cavalry. “Hello?... Erin Razor? Finally... awake? It is, yes… it is The Doppelganger.”

Erin exhaled, staring at the screen, flatly saying, “Yes. What do you want.” She saw no reason to be polite to a villain. It was a Puppet, as all super villains were. She could say nothing, and the Plot would carry on without her.

The face wrinkled into something of a smile, thought it wasn’t a becoming gesture. “That’s it? Nothing... more? Just… what do I want?”

Erin looked away from the television to glance down at the cable wrapped over her new boots and her slacks, in and out between her legs. Her legs had some give to wiggle, but the knot was so tight that the blue plastic had turned white.

“What do you want, Doppelganger,” Erin asked again. She didn’t offer any more enthusiasm than the first time.

She guessed her hands were bound by the same cable and unless she could get her feet free, she wasn’t going to get them from behind her back. Limber, she was not.

Doppelganger’s sigh was a wash of static and they pulled back from the camera, revealing that they were in some sort of office with sets of monitors. “Well, when you ask like that, it makes... me feel like all the effort was... for naught.” As the villain talked, Erin began to start trying to work to wiggle one of her feet out of her bonds. Anything but sit here idly and listen to prattle. 

“I thought this world valued... its spectacle. Ugh…” Doppelganger’s tone shifted, speeding up and sounding more natural. “Do you mind if I drop the ‘pause’ thing, by the way? It's, like, kind of annoying to keep up and you don’t seem to care.” Erin hesitated, listening, her ears ringing with the jolt of adrenaline. Frozen, she felt herself fall into that place she’d been before, just as Rex cornered her in the parking lot. 

“Really though, the spectacle is more for them, anyway, right? I mean, I got the TV and the camera in your room and everything. Like, any second now, the Cavalry will come into my staging area, talk with my pre-recorded hologram, to give them the skinny.”

Erin began to struggle with her boots, all the more desperate to slip them off, along with the electrical cable. “Why bother-” she said, struggling against creaking cables, “-with me?” The boots creaked and her ankle already started to hurt from the effort. She tried to convince herself she was just meeting a new particularly weird Pawn villain.

“Oh, you know,” Doppelganger wasn’t even looking at the camera as she talked to Erin. “It's really dumb to kidnap a hero’s main squeeze, you know? I’d be for sure destined to fail, ‘specially because I’m not supposed to be here. I am mostly just testing the waters. Pun intended, though you won’t get that. I want to see how far, like, the limits are. Not that you are even processing these words. You are just a local, am I right? Gods, that must be confusing.”

Cold fury filled Erin’s head as she shoved on her boot again.  ‘Just a local’ echoed in her head. She could feel her own pulse in her aching shoulder as she braced against the wall. 

Erin tugged harder. Her ankle burned.

She wouldn’t be taunted idly by this piece of shit that was using her world for fun, a villain Protagonist. A true Invader. 

“Anyway, it’s been lonely, Obsidian hasn’t arrived yet, so I figured I’d play around with Ferret. Oh but hey, the Cavalry has arrived, ha ha. But, like, don’t worry, they totally can’t hear you, or see me talking to you.” 

Erin took a breath and asked even though she didn’t want the answer, “Play around? By putting mutagen in the water treatment plant?” She wanted to scream, but she was already struggling with her breath so her words came out more as a chiding tone to someone misappropriating an inefficient code string at work.

If this monster was another Protagonist, just like Rex, then Erin could play for time. They all seemed to like rattling on as if the world were theirs to narrate.

“Yeah, there are four dispensers, and one for you, and only four of the Cavalry. I don’t exactly expect it to work, but I was just wondering what they would do to-” Doppelganger paused, Erin could see from the corner of her eye, to look at one monitor in particular. “How do you know about the mutagenic agents or the water treatment plant? And what are you doing?”