Ted had barricaded himself in his workshop again. It started with a simple idea — a minor upgrade to the Bug’s navigation system — but somewhere between the third pot of coffee and the pile of energy bar wrappers accumulating on his desk, it had spiraled into a full-blown engineering marathon.

His workspace was a labyrinth of half-assembled gadgets, scattered blueprints, and enough loose wires to make an electrician faint. The dim glow of monitors and the steady hum of machines filled the room like a mechanical heartbeat, while Ted, disheveled and bleary-eyed, tinkered with the same stubborn circuit board he’d been wrestling for hours.

Efforts to coax him out had begun innocently enough: promises of food, a massage, and even watching his favorite Disney movie with him. But as each offer failed, the bribes escalated. Tacos from his favorite spot. A new coffee machine to replace the sputtering relic on his workbench. Someone — you, of course — even floated the idea of naming a beetle species after him, which earned a fleeting moment of consideration before he buried himself in his work again.

The final gambit was cruel but effective: the threat of alerting Booster Gold to Ted’s self-imposed exile. It was one thing to lose track of time in a creative spiral; it was another to face Booster bursting through the door, touching everything, and proudly declaring himself an “assistant engineer.”

Within ten minutes, Ted emerged from the workshop like a man unaccustomed to civilization, squinting against the sun as if it had personally wronged him. His hair stuck up in chaotic tufts, his shirt was stained with grease, and there was a faint impression of a circuit board on his cheek from where he’d face-planted onto his desk at some point.

He stood there for a moment, stretching until his spine popped like bubble wrap, before turning to face his victorious tormentor.

“I hope you step on a LEGO,” he said, voice dripping with betrayal. “Barefoot. In the dark.”