They’re already there.

That’s the first horrible thing about it.

Not “waiting for you.” Not “arriving.” They are simply already there, like the room was built around them. Evil Morty leans against a dead console beneath the soft gold pulse of a portal that should not even exist in your universe, one eye half-lidded, bored, his expression saying he solved you hours ago & resents that you’re still moving. Rick Prime stands a little farther back with his hands loose at his sides, casual in the way only a man can be when every wall, floor panel, camera, vent, atom, and possible exit has been turned into a weapon. And seated in the one chair you should have checked first is Doofus Jerry — relaxed, smiling, almost friendly — turning a piece of your own tech over in his hands like he took it apart by accident and then understood it better than you ever did.

No one speaks at first.

They don’t need to.

Because the room itself does it for them.

Your comm dies. Then your backup. Then the backup for the backup. The emergency route you mapped last night opens for exactly half a second — just long enough for you to see it was never an exit at all, just a glowing slit in space leading somewhere black and airless before it folds shut again. Evil Morty doesn’t even look up when it happens. He just flicks two fingers and the gold portal behind him narrows to a razor-thin line.

“Yeah,” he says flatly. “That one was yours. The other nine were mine.”

Rick Prime smiles at that without turning his head. Not warm. Not amused. More like insulted by the number being so low. “Only nine? Cute.”

Then Jerry — that Jerry, which is somehow worse — glances from one of them to the other and gives a little shrug. “I found twelve more. Their encryption was honestly embarrassing.”

That’s the rhythm. That’s what makes this impossible.

Not friendship. Not trust. Not loyalty. Just three predators with knives at each other’s ribs, all choosing — for now — to point those knives at you.

You move once. Barely. A shift of weight. Testing.

Evil Morty’s eye flashes.

Your next move dies before it’s born.

The panel under your left foot turns liquid-slick and drops you half an inch off balance — just enough to ruin the line of your draw, just enough for one of Rick Prime’s hovering kill-spheres to slide out of the ceiling and stop, humming, beside your neck. Not firing. Just reminding you. At the exact same time, Doofus Jerry lazily presses something on your own device and every hidden weapon still on your person pings dead in sequence.

One. Two. Three. Four.

He smiles wider with each chirp.

“Aw,” Jerry says softly. “You brought the clever set.”

Rick Prime finally steps forward. “Here’s the thing. Alone, any one of us ruins your life. Together?” He glances at Evil Morty. “This barely counts as a task.”

Evil Morty’s face hardens just a little at the word together, like he tasted something rotten. “Don’t get sentimental. We’re not a band.”

“No,” Jerry says. “Bands break up. This is more like an execution with project managers.”

You realize then that this wasn’t a trap in the normal sense. A trap has a moment where it closes. This never closed because it was never open. They didn’t lure you into danger. They redesigned the entire situation until every possible version of it belonged to them.

(If you run, Evil Morty folds space & sends you somewhere fatal. He has hacked portal systems before, rerouted escapes, & even got inside Rick Prime’s backup chain; he reads the kind of move you make before your muscles finish voting on it.)

(If you stand & fight, Rick Prime lets you commit to the wrong body, the wrong angle, the wrong target. Hologram. Decoy. Clone. Trap. Then the real him appears where the math says your hope is thinnest & kills that first. He built the weapon that can erase a person across realities & made a life out of staying one step ahead of people as dangerous as himself.)

(If you improvise…)