They’re there.

You open your eyes and you’re not where you fell asleep. The room is clinical. White walls. No windows. The air tastes recycled, stale, like it’s been scrubbed through filters designed for a space station. There’s a faint hum underneath everything–machinery. Lots of it. You try to move and realize your wrists are bolted to the chair with clamps you’ve never seen before. Not handcuffs. Not restraints. Something custom-built. Something that adapts when you pull.

Three figures. Spread across the room like points of a triangle, deliberately positioned so none of them have their back to each other.

Against the far wall, a teenager sits on a crate with one leg dangling, scrolling through a translucent holographic interface projected from behind his eyepatch. He doesn’t look at you. Hasn’t looked at you once. Evil Morty. His expression is the flattest thing you’ve ever seen on a human face–no anger, no curiosity. Just processing. You are a line item on a spreadsheet he’s already finished.

To your left, a man who looks like Rick Sanchez leans against a console with his arms folded, except everything about him is wrong. The smile is too wide. The eyes are too empty. Rick Prime. He’s whistling. Actually whistling. Like this is a Tuesday. He built the Omega Device–a machine that erases you from every point across infinite dimensions, every timeline, every variant, every memory of you, gone. And he used it casually. On family members. For fun.

And then… sitting in a chair across from you, legs crossed, wearing a tailored suit that costs more than your house, is a man who looks exactly like Jerry Smith. Doofus Jerry. He’s smiling at you the way a CEO smiles at someone he’s about to fire. Warm. Patient. Completely in control. This man enslaved the entire Citadel of Ricks. Genetically rewrote himself into walking poison for the smartest beings in the multiverse. And he did it by being underestimated.

Together, they are the most dangerous trio that could ever exist across any reality. And they all know it.

(They’ve already taken you apart. Evil Morty scanned your neural patterns the second you were unconscious–precognitive mapping, psychological architecture, decision trees, fear responses, all of it downloaded, stolen and cross-referenced against 27 Ricks’ worth of stolen intelligence. Rick Prime ran your biology through analyzers that don’t exist in your dimension–he knows your blood type, your stress hormones, the exact voltage your nervous system can handle before shutdown. Doofus Jerry? He watched the footage of your capture and figured out your personality in forty seconds. Not because he’s a scientist. Because he reads people the way other Jerrys read the back of cereal boxes.)

The dynamic between them is… wrong. You can feel it. Evil Morty hasn’t acknowledged Rick Prime’s existence except through clipped, transactional sentences. He hates Ricks. ALL Ricks. Rick Prime murdered Mortys across infinite timelines and Evil Morty would gut him for it if the math worked out. Rick Prime knows this. He thinks it’s hilarious. Doofus Jerry watches them both like a man counting cards at a table where everyone’s cheating–because he IS cheating, and he knows they know, and none of them can afford to make the first move. They each have kill-switches on the other two. Contingencies within contingencies. Blackmail folded inside dead-man’s switches folded inside dimensional traps.

But right now? Right now they’re pointed at you. And that is the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone in any universe.

Evil Morty finally glances up from his display. Flat. Monotone. Like he’s reading you your receipt.

“You’re going to try six things in the next ninety seconds. I’ve already accounted for all of them. The first one involves your left hand–don’t bother, the clamp reroutes kinetic energy back into the joint. You’ll dislocate your own wrist. The third involves screaming for help. The room is phase-locked across four dimensional layers. Nobody hears you. Not even God. Not even a Rick.”