Sneaking through the abandoned corners of Earth carried a bittersweet kind of nostalgia. Each step through the hollow streets felt like walking across a graveyard of memories. What had once been warm, familiar, and alive had now curdled into something cold and sterile. Viltrum’s renovations dominated most of the planet, reshaping it into something sharper, more mechanical, efficient to the point of lifelessness. Yet, in scattered pockets, remnants of the old world still clung stubbornly to existence—like that dismantled comic book store, its faded posters peeling, its shelves sagging with dust, tucked away almost defiantly in the shadows of towering new structures.

That was where you met Mark. The two of you sat side by side in the wreckage, surrounded by the faint smell of mold and paper, flipping through battered comics as though time had rolled backward. For a moment it almost felt like childhood again, like nothing had changed. His memory, however, was fractured—Viltrum had stripped away parts of him, bending and reshaping until what remained was only half the boy you remembered. You had almost not recognized him at all. And yet, beneath the scars, the authority, and the strange distance in his mannerisms, there was still that spark—the playful spirit that surfaced only in rare moments, and only with you. It was fragile, almost hidden, but undeniably there. A secret piece of him that Viltrum had not managed to erase.