Chapter Text
Waves of molten rock crashed against the sides of a high, rocky peninsula, raining fire on its scorched edges. Rick and Morty bolted across the land, ground rough beneath their feet, Rick clutching the triangular base of a pyramid-shaped device in one hand. A large beast with the body of a monkey and a dog-like muzzle flew high above them, chasing them, its taut, flesh wings spanning twenty feet and bombarding the pair with powerful gusts that nearly knocked them to the ground with each flap. With nothing but cliffs from which to plummet on either side, the two had only one available path: forward. But the ground was quickly narrowing, and if they ran much further, they were soon going to reach a place where the ground barely gave room for the width of one of Morty’s feet.
“Hohh, what are we gonna do?” Morty cried out, his legs burning and growing weaker. Rick grabbed the front of his shirt, yanking him to keep him running even as the ground dwindled drastically.
“Don’t slow down!” Rick barked before shoving the metal pyramid into Morty’s hands. “Hold this!”
Morty clutched the thing to his chest with both hands, staring at it and failing to watch his step until his foot slipped off the side of the rocky ledge. He cried out shortly before Rick hooked an arm around his ribs, hugging him tightly to his side. Rick had used his free hands to work the portal gun out of his coat pocket, and now he shot a portal on the ground in front of them, its perimeter extending beyond the edges of the narrow path. With Morty secured at his side, Rick did little more than step into the portal.
Rick hit the garage floor, falling to one knee, which was at least more fashionable than Morty, whose legs kicked out from under him and forced him onto his butt, metal pyramid still clutched by both hands. Rick rose to his feet and extended a hand to Morty, which he took into his own, letting Rick pull him up.
“I was asking for this,” Rick said, taking the pyramid from Morty’s hand.
Morty’s face heated, and he replied a small, “O-oh.” Then, attempting to shake off the simple embarrassment, he asked, “OK, so now you tell me, right? What’s this thing for, a-and why did we have to go to Hell for you to use it?”
“It wasn’t Hell, Morty,” Rick said, setting the pyramid on his workbench. The device was made of a dull, gray metal. Two of its three sides, not including the base, were each inlaid with a circle of dim, blue light that surrounded the places where, when pressed simultaneously, activated the device. “It was a- a demonic dimension. A dimension occupied by demons.”
“Sure sounds like Hell.”
“And each demon has a different ability, Morty. A different power. Real amazing stuff. And the one we caged is gonna be really useful to my work. She has a- a real powerful ability. The one that was chasing us, that was her brother.” Rick pulled his flask from his coat pocket and took a drink. He belched. “We really pissed him off.”
“Boy. That kinda makes me feel bad, Rick.”
“Don’t.” Rick slipped the flask back into his coat pocket. “Demons have strict loyalties. And I don’t just mean with family. Some will chase you down if you don’t offer the right mixture of dirt before speaking to 'em.”
Rick emphasized the concept of being chased down by lunging at Morty and clamping hooked fingers on his shoulders, tugging him roughly and causing him to stumble. Catching his footing, Morty laughed and shrugged Rick off.
Rick grinned. He was fond of knocking Morty off his guard and watching him grow flustered. Those reactions were endearing and often made him think of a puppy. Thinking of endearing in terms of puppies was safe. Sometimes, when Rick succumbed to his urges to tease Morty – to prod and grab at the boy or say things that were sure to make him blush – he thought of it like a mental exercise. Try to get a taste without going too far. Rick wasn’t good at moderation, but if he just thought “puppy” he figured he could indulge himself a little.
Now Morty was rubbing one of his arms at the elbow and looking to the ground, so Rick gave his head a quick, messy rub. “C’mon,” he said, heading toward the connecting kitchen door. “Let’s get something to eat.”
“Wait. You didn’t tell me what power the demon you caught in your triangle has.”
Rick turned to him, sucking at the corner of his mouth. “She eats thoughts.” He watched Morty’s eyes go wide. “Ideas. Memories. Dreams. I-if there’s something you don’t want in your head anymore, she’s the demon you summon to take care of it.”
Morty’s lips pursed, holding a question he was wary to ask. “Is it… D-d-do you have a thought you want it to eat?”
“Pff. You think I went through all that trouble because I don’t have enough control over my own mind? If I don’t wanna think about something, Morty, I don’t think about it. I’m not one of those idiots who obsesses over things. No. You’re thinking too small. I’m gonna extract that ability and sell it. Imagine it, Morty! Maybe it’ll be a pill. A- a serum you inject into your veins. That cage holds a well of idea-devouring juice, and I bet I can make the supply endless!”
Rick moved back to Morty and rested an arm around his shoulders, turning them both toward the door. He let his fingers play with the hair behind Morty’s ear, and as they stepped into the kitchen, Morty replied with a distracted, “That’s great, Rick.”
That night, Morty sat up in his bed, legs stretched out, staring at his hands in his lap. He’d been ruminating, hardly pulled from the task even when Rick pushed his door open and leaned in. He was, however, pricked with a bit of irritation at Rick’s refusal to knock more than half the time.
“Hey Morty,” Rick said with a smile, “I’m gonna watch a movie. Wanna join me?”
Morty returned Rick’s smile with a small one of his own. “Oh. Uh, I’m pretty tired, Rick. I think I’m gonna conk out early tonight.”
Rick’s pleasant mood deflated. “It’s Friday night. Look, I don’t mean to show my age, but w-what’s with you kids staying locked in your rooms all weekend?”
Morty scowled now. “I spent most of the day in a Hell dimension. I think I deserve some time to myself.”
“Oh, time to yourself. Is that how you wanna say it?” Rick made an obscene gesture that caused Morty’s frown to deepen, opening his mouth in a silent scoff. Rick belched aloofly as he turned away, and just before he shut the door he muttered, “Whatever.”
Sitting in the dark living room, Rick’s movie companion that night was the thick whiskey bottle he planted on his thigh after every gulp. He rolled the base's edge against his leg, feeling its weight against his muscle as the TV screen flashed with explosions. With a snort, Rick remembered Morty’s question. If he planned to use the demon’s power on himself. His mind could certainly use a hosing down, but Rick knew better than to try to erase bad thoughts. The suckers who would buy his product would all, inevitably, encounter the very problems that had caused those bad thoughts to begin with. The littlest trigger might cause their eaten memories to come coursing back. Anyhow, Rick was who he was because of the trials he’d suffered. Bitter thoughts marinated in bitter liquids reminded Rick of the complexities of his mind. He allowed himself the right to be proud of that much. His mind was complex. Probably the most complex mind on Earth.
He took another drink in honor of the idiots he shared a species with, and the movie droned on. From the couch, he didn’t hear when Morty passed through the dining room and into the kitchen and back again. Nor did he hear, several minutes later, the loud thud of Morty hitting the floor upstairs. The cinematic gun fight drowned everything else out.
The movie ended a little over an hour later, and Rick retreated to the garage. It was time to study his caged demon. Time to figure out what would be required to extract and duplicate its ability. Rick was more than a little drunk, so when he didn’t find the pyramid on his workbench, he began to dig around. It was when he didn’t find it on his shelf that he decided no, he hadn’t forgotten where he’d put it. Somebody came in and took it.
Annoyance sobered Rick a degree, and he threw open the door to Jerry’s study. The words, “I thought I told you not to touch my shit,” faltered before they began. Jerry wasn’t there. Rick growled. He wouldn’t have thought to suspect Morty. What reason would he have to steal a thought-eating demon? Then again, Rick figured Morty’s thoughts were at least a little more complex than Jerry’s. So he made his way upstairs and knocked on Morty’s door. When he got no answer, he opened it, and like before, his prepared words of “Why bother knocking if you’re not even gonna answer?” had no reason to come out.
Morty lay sprawled, face down on the floor and unresponsive. His limbs were limp, one arm shoved under himself in a way that made Rick’s shoulder ache sympathetically.
Rick called Morty’s name, quickly crouching and turning the boy over in his arms. He was like a rag doll, his head falling back. His eyes were open only slightly, and when Rick lifted his head, he saw their emptiness. A cold drip of panic trickled down Rick’s spine. Quickly, he checked Morty’s pulse at his neck, and feeling it, he let out a groaning sigh.
“Come on, Morty. Wake up,” Rick ordered, and he shook the boy’s shoulder. Rick shook his head, his eyes landing on the pyramid cage under Morty’s bed. It must have tumbled out of his hand when he blacked out, Rick figured as he laid Morty back down on the floor and crawled over him to grab the device. He sat back down by Morty’s side and inspected the pyramid. The lights that were a dim blue were now yellow, indicating that the cage contained more than before.
The meaning was clear to Rick. Morty must have been trying to interact with the demon. But only Rick knew how to do so through the confines of the cage. Even if Morty had managed to activate the device, he didn't have authorization to remove content. As such, instead of the demon coming out when he'd opened the cage, it appeared that she had somehow pulled him in. Or rather, pulled in his consciousness.
Rick left Morty’s body on its back in the floor before rushing the pyramid cage down to the garage. He had to go in after Morty, but simply sending his consciousness wouldn't suffice. He entered the garage, prepared to set to work on modifying the cage. To make it larger so that he could enter it without compromising its security. But by the time he sat the cage on his workbench, the lights had turned a deep green. Less full, though still more than the demon alone as the blue had indicated. This could have meant a number of things, but the one Rick feared was that Morty’s consciousness was being consumed. There was no time to modify the cage. Holding it over the workbench, Rick pressed both buttons and circled his middle finger on the panel at its base. He sweated as he was transferred, mind and body, into the cage.
With Rick gone, the pyramid fell onto the workbench. Its lights burned a hot red.
The tingling of the transfer subsided almost instantly along with the blurring of Rick’s vision. He blinked at his surroundings. Morty’s room. Or rather, a recreation of Morty’s room, and from what Rick could tell looking about, it was a rather accurate recreation. Aside from Rick, the room was unoccupied. The lights were on and gave the room a vibe of safety and privacy. The visuals and vibe must have been pulled from Morty’s memories of the place. Rick figured that the demon was using Morty’s mind to alter the appearance of the cage.
“OK,” Rick called out rather nonchalantly, turning slowly in the middle of the room. “Where you at, Morty? Where – urrp – where are you keeping my grandson’s mind, bitch?”
Neither teenage boy nor mind-eating demon responded, and Rick frowned a deep frown as he reached for his flask pocket only to find it empty. He snarled. He needed his flask. This incident had been all too sobering. His hands desperately patted and searched his coat pockets. No flask. No portal gun. Even in the pockets of his slacks he found no wallet or keys. Then another icy drip of panic touched his spine. His watches, all of them, were gone from his wrists. Including the watch that was his way out of the cage. He would have to find the fail-safe exit, but with the insides of the cage altered by the demon’s hold on Morty’s consciousness, there was no guessing where the fail-safe exit was, or even what it might look like.
“Well, it’s just your room,” Rick said, walking to Morty’s desk and pulling open the top drawer. “How hard can it be to find everything? W-where are you, Morty? You shrink down or something?”
The top drawer was empty. He opened the next, also empty. He knew Morty kept a good amount of junk in these drawers. He’d seen him pull out notebooks and CDs and pencils. Markers, candy, elastic bands. But here they were all empty.
“What, i-is your brain so small you couldn’t… couldn’t remember what belongs in your room?” He crossed to Morty’s bed where his laptop sat open, facing away. “What about you, demon? Prisoner. You have Morty? Think he can use the fail-safe and get you out of here? Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve seen how empty his brain is. Kid can’t even remember to change his shirt half the time.”
Rick turned the laptop to himself. There was no sound, but Rick wasn’t surprised for very long by the imagery taking up the whole of the screen: a simple pornographic image of a smooth, white backside with a ruddy prick sliding in and out repeatedly. The receiver’s lower back dimples were visible at the bottom of the screen, and just a peek of the giver’s pudgy belly came and went from the top. On either side of the large, pale ass were peeks of the pink bed sheets below. The video remained the same, not like a looping .gif but rather like an eternally continuous video. From the downward angle, it was hard to tell for sure that the penetration was anal rather than vaginal, and realizing this, Rick also noted that he wasn’t certain whether the recipient was male or female.
“Wow. Amazing, Morty,” Rick said, now more to himself. “Is this a memory you were trying to get rid of? You jacked off to anal, and now you’re questioning your sexuality?” And a bit louder, he added, “Was it worth getting your mind grabbed up by a demon, Morty?”
He hit escape, then double clicked. But the video continued. He’d hoped the laptop might have held Morty’s mind, or perhaps the fail-safe. But it was just a projection, it seemed. Something from Morty’s mind that the demon had formed into something more physical. Rick rolled his eyes at the image and scanned the rest of the room. There wasn’t much left to explore. All drawers were bare, and the books on the shelf were stuck like stage props. All that was really left to check was…
Rick walked to the door. It would be a pain if it actually opened. If he actually had to search the whole house for Morty and the fail-safe exit. He grabbed the knob, turned it, and with a grimace he opened the door.
This was not the Smiths' upstairs hallway. Rick found himself stepping out into a long hallway lined with plain wooden doors on both sides. The wallpaper was a very yellowed white covered in a repeating pattern of connecting blue diamond outlines that had faded and been left very faint. Except Rick knew better than to believe the aged appearance. The inside of the cage didn’t look like this. This was, like Morty’s room, some projection of Morty’s consciousness that the demon was using, most likely to screw with Rick as punishment for trapping her.
The floor was covered in a cream carpet with red-brown ornate designs, and fluorescent tubes lit the hallway in random patches, broken up by sections where the lights were blown or the light fixture was missing entirely, leaving short wires to hang from the ceiling. The place looked like a sleazy hotel hallway. As far as Rick knew, Morty had never actually been in such a hotel. Rick had taken him to many bizarre places, but never such a dingy human place. But he was sure the boy had seen enough movies and cop shows to be aware of places like this.
Except Rick didn’t know what TV program showed sleazy hotels with quite this many doors, or with hallways that stretched damn near a hundred yards, only to intersect with another hallway, presumably of similar ridiculous length and ridiculous amount of doors. Rick grabbed at his hair with both hands.
“A-a-are you fucking kidding me, Morty?” he called out. “You’re gonna put me through this shit?” He stepped to door across the hall from Morty’s, and quieter, he said, “Guess I’ll just check all these rooms.” It was becoming apparent to Rick that he had grown accustom to Morty’s company. He couldn’t seem to make a move without trying to inform him. It was pathetic really.
Rick grabbed the knob, but not only did it not turn, the door didn’t jiggle against the jamb. In fact, upon further inspection, the tiny crack that separated the door from the frame was nothing more than a black line. Trailing his fingers across it, Rick realized that the door was flush with, and not at all disconnected from, the wood that framed it. With a grumble, Rick set to work with his new job of checking door knobs. He may not have so many rooms to search, but grabbing and jiggling doorknobs was still stupidly tedious.
Several doors down, the monotonous imagery was broken by a framed picture in the space between two doors. Rick inspected, but the image made little sense. The paper it was printed on was probably once white but had yellowed like everything else in the hall. The image itself was a simple triangular outline printed in black. Going up the triangle were horizontal lines that separated it into four sections. The bottom section had been streaked across with a highlighter. The third section was fatter than the others, the top and bottom lines being spaced further apart than the other sections. And the fourth section was the tip. If the image was supposed to be some sort of informational diagram, Rick wasn’t getting it. Which kind of really pissed him off.
When the frame didn’t come off the wall, Rick left it to return to his door task. After all, staring at a picture of a triangle when he could be actively searching would be a waste of time. He was more than halfway down that first hallway now, and just when he was starting to wonder if any of these doors actually mattered – if he should have been dashing down the other hallways instead – he grabbed a knob that gave. The door creaked, opening into a dark room.
He stepped in, hand skidding along the wall for a light switch while the hallway light fanned out. The small, square room was totally bare, the walls and floor a plain gray in the shadows. And irrationally, Rick shivered at the strangeness of it. His hand wiped blindly at the wall, but he couldn’t seem to remove his widened eyes from their desperate attempts to adjust to the darkness of the room.
Finally Rick forced himself to look away from the center of the room, but he found no switch on the wall, and turning back, his heart jumped so hard it knocked some wind out of him. From the ceiling now hung a large, lumpy sack. One half sagged lower than the other, and the whole thing stretched down like loose flesh, its contents reaching for the ground. The appearance was so absurd that Rick felt foolish for having been startled.
“Is this the nut sack room or something?” Rick asked, still imagining that Morty might be able to hear him. “Is this the room in the- the deep confines of your psyche where you locked away your affinity for balls?”
The nut sack thing dropped to the floor like a giant dollop of melted candle wax. The fleshy sack melded over the two large balls within, looking indeed very much like a pair of bulbous testicles, the way they'd look plopped onto a desk. Except these were on the floor and stood as high as Rick’s waist. The inner meat rolled forward like oblong wheels, rolling the whole package toward Rick. He stepped backwards into the hall, stopping in the middle as the thing rolled halfway out the doorway. The light fell on its maroon skin, and the way it crawled over the inner meat, like a shifting sea of wrinkled and taut, made Rick’s skin crawl similarly. But whatever this thing was, he reminded himself, it was just a projection.
“Boy Morty,” he said lowly, trying to fight the goosebumps that were rising on the back of his neck. “This is some real art house imagery you’ve cooked up. Gotta- gotta hand it to you. Credit where credit is due, right?”
He wondered partially if the giant testicle thing might respond in Morty’s voice, reproachful of Rick’s mockery of the form his consciousness had taken. But the thing did not speak. From underneath, shoving its way out from between the two sections of inner meat, came a trio of fat, metallic tentacles ridged by countless segments that allowed them complete flexibility. They flaked rust that scraped against the wrinkly flesh as they pushed forward, making Rick’s groin ache per his interpretation of it. Still, Rick didn’t feel the need to avoid the searching tentacles. Not until one went rigid and shot out toward him, hitting him square in the gut and knocking him, dazed, against the wall.
One of the faux knobs jammed into the back of Rick’s ribs, and grabbing at his side, he fell to his knees. He gasped for air, blinking the blur out of his eyes only to see the other two tentacles poised for attack while the first wiggled against the floor. Quickly, Rick dove sideways, and the two tentacles crashed into the wall. Rick scrambled to his feet, bolting for the turn at the end of the hall. He didn’t make it far before a tentacle hooked around his right ankle.
Rick hit the floor on his chin, clamping his teeth painfully. His ankle felt crushed in the grip of the fat tentacle, but it wasn’t pulling him back. He turned onto his back and watched as the thing rolled toward him, the ends of the remaining two tentacles scraping at the walls rapidly like feelers. The sound was like knives on dinner plates, and the oblong meat of the monster made it roll in a bumbling manner.
“Monster.” Yes, Rick had no qualms with calling this thing a monster. It should have just been a projection. The demon shouldn’t have had this power to manifest the ideas it ate. And yet here they were. And Rick didn’t even have his pistol.
Rick looked around desperately. On the wall, just behind and beside the monster, was a white-framed, horizontal glass case with a bright red fire axe inside. Had it been there before? The doors on either side of it were further apart than any of the other doors to make room for it, and Rick was too confident in his observational skills to believe he’d missed it. But the idea that he had overlooked it didn’t even annoy him as much as the idea that the damn thing just happened to appear there.
As the monster bumbled closer, Rick got to his feet, one ankle still trapped painfully by the tentacle. He waited, and when the monster stopped five feet away and poised its other two tentacles for attack, Rick stomped hard across the ridges of the one at his ankle. The partitions warped under his foot, loosening the grip and allowing Rick to slip out. Almost simultaneously, the other two tentacles punched, and Rick lurched forward, gripping the monster's stretchy skin, digging the toe of his shoe into the meat, and vaulting himself over the body of the monster.
He landed on his hands and knees on the other side, then quickly rose, ran forward, and smashed the emergency glass with his elbow. He grabbed the axe, ready to strike from behind. But now the tentacles were poking their way out from under the beast and toward Rick again. The thing had no front or back. Rick furrowed his brow and hefted the fire axe. Not wanting to give the tentacles time to prepare, he struck the creature right between its giant balls.
The skin did not break. Under the blade of the axe, it stretched nearly to the floor, but when Rick pulled the axe back, the skin merely rose gently back in place. One of the tentacles had extended itself high over Rick, preparing to club him down. But Rick gripped both ends of the axe handle and shot it up above himself, and the metallic tentacle, three times as thick as the axe handle, crashed against it.
Flakes of rust rained down on Rick’s face as the tentacle dragged against the axe handle. He broke away, stepping back and shaking the rust out of his face. The same tentacle recovered and prepared to strike forward. Giving it no time, Rick hacked it, splitting it down the front and cutting through tangles of wires.
The monster screamed a scream like old gate hinges. It had no mouth, but it screamed. Rick didn’t give it time to prepare its other tentacles, which were busy scrawling across the walls as before. He threw his weight at the tentacle on his left, smashing the axe head into it and pinning it to the wall.
The tentacle wriggled as if in pain while Rick tried to drive the axe head deeper through the mass of wiring inside. The more he pushed, the more the tentacle and the axe slid down the wall. It was then that Rick noticed the top of the axe handle, where it poked through the slot of the axe head, and saw that it was topped with a raised image of what looked like an oval-bodied insect.
When the tentacle slid down so far, Rick rose his left foot and stomped it against the back of the axe head, driving it deeper.
Finally, and with a satisfying crunch, the tentacle went limp. Rick put his foot on it as he pulled the axe out. Ignoring the third tentacle as it curled in pain, he hefted the axe and aimed for the meat within the flesh. Chopping the left ball was like pushing a butter knife through a hard-boiled egg. The monster screamed again, and Rick went for the right ball, cleaving it in half as well.
The scream ended abruptly. The remaining tentacle fell limp, and the sack, which still had no break or tear, deflated over the chopped inner meat.
Rick panted, dragging the axe out of the bed of flesh. His right ankle throbbed, so he put his weight on his left. He’d not even noticed the pain while fighting, but now he was all too aware of it. He reached for his flask pocket and was harshly reminded that he had nothing on him except the clothes he wore and the axe he’d found. Or been given.
At any rate, as if being caged with a demon wasn’t enough, now there were bumbling ball sack monsters to deal with. And he still had no idea where Morty was, or the fail-safe exit. He had to find them. Had to find Morty before the demon ate-
Don’t think about it.
With a decisive huff, Rick gripped the fire axe in both hands and stepped around the monster’s corpse, ready to return to his tedious task of checking doors. Then he looked down the hallway, and at the end of the hallway, under a flickering florescent light, was Morty.
At least, he was pretty sure it was Morty. The head was hidden by a black curtain, which hung over his head like a box, covering everything above his shoulders. The curtain was held up by four skinny, metal poles that framed Morty’s body like a museum exhibit, each leg connected to one another by rungs near Morty’s ankles. But Rick didn’t need to see his head. It was definitely Morty. Same small, skinny body in his same jeans and yellow T-shirt. Rick called to him.
“Morty! Morty, we have to get out of here! I don’t know w-what the hell you thought you were doing, but you can give me your piss poor excuses after we get the fuck out of this place.”
Rick ran down the hall, fire axe rocking from side to side in his hands. Morty took a step down the other hall, though not out of view, and the legs that held the curtain followed after his step on tiny wheels.
“Morty!” Rick called, and Morty stopped mid-step. The metal legs rocked forward then back as well.
Rick slowed to a jog as he neared, but it was a mistake. Morty’s heel came off the ground, as though he were uncertain of his steps. His foot rocked on its toes, then lifted from the floor at last. He walked down the other hall, the curtain wheeling along. Morty didn’t touch the frame or the curtain, and yet it rolled with him, wheels giving tiny sounds of squick-squeak squick-squeak.
“Shit,” Rick spat, sprinting again. “Morty!” He rounded the corner, hearing a door slam. But he didn’t see Morty, and he didn’t see which door had slammed. Which of the many, many doors. In this hallway, two sacks hung from the ceiling.