An evacuation was ordered in an instant.
First by the computer, then confirmed by the humans at the console.

Of course, those too close would immediately find themselves unable to resist the pull of the black hole -- it wasn't an event horizon for nothing.
Even the data they collected couldn't flow out to the computer for analysis.

Anything else being contained at the facility, all the other monsters, mythicals, and supernaturals, were left behind in the chaos; with just how instantaneous the event was occurring, not even a simple criminal or traitor would be spared the fate that may yet await them.
The few big machines that had finally managed to start up were evacuated alongside all the human guards and little robots; depending on how fast it spread, very many or ver few might end up making it.

In the seconds or minutes that the computer had left--for surely it would be consumed all the same--it began outpouring all the data and information it had gathered in the last twenty-four hours.
All data within this period was stored in an underground bunker alongside the brain itself, uploaded to the capital's banks every midnight on the dot.
The bunker lay not at the core (that was where all the electrical energy components were), but near one of the edges of the compound; not the same or opposite fenceline as the black hole now forming, but one of those to either side of it.

There wasn't much at all that could be done to stop a black hole, certainly nothing this compound held.
An emergency call was sent out alongside the data...surely someone in the capital was withholding some form of portal technology that could have an effect on the black hole, shoot it far from the planet?
There was no telling how big it would get; it could consume only the compound and its surroundings, or even worse -- the city, the continent, eating through the planet's own core....

Outside the compound were wide tracts of farmlands, part of the facility's own, and beyond that were all the things that the warden himself held no control over; the edge of the capital city, civilian farmlands, and wilderness.


Yes...yes!
YES!

The number couldn't contain its overjoyed giggles as finally, FINALLY the beads were gone!
The monster had up and swallowed them up, and now...well, black hole, apparently!
Bada-boom-bing!
Implosion's zip'n'gone!

Tiny fireworks sparked in the air around the singularity's growing event horizon, crackling and spaghettifying with everything else in the vicinity.
Besides that, the number remained hands-off as it had been doing these past few minutes or so (too many curious things going on all at once, what was it to do?), at least trying to observe the black hole's growth without missing too much of the destruction.

Then--


Before the computer's brain could be struck, the black hole would up and disappear.
Much of the compound would remain a mess.
Besides what the monster had already done, there were now containment breaches to deal with.

All processing power had been directed to uploading the data and evacuating the staff, leaving the computer blind to what was going on until the upload was complete.
Only the robots left who were near enough would notice the outpouring of freed convicts, although many were too busy following their last order of getting the heck out of there.

The humans scrambled.
They'd lost many of their weapons, didn't have time to pick up any on their way out, leaving them with only what they had on their person at that moment.

It was more than they could properly handle, but at least the emergency call had already been sent out.


The number would pop the black hole out of there.
Briefly, they would slip through the void, before ending up somewhere else entirely, the number tracing the length of a line, leaving a trail in its wake just so that it could follow it back later.

Didn't want to lose that planet's location, now did it?
It was only an inconceivably tiny blip on the radar of alternates, parallels, perpendiculars, multis...not a difficult thing to do at all.

There was a big hole in the universe where the planet sat.
Another, if far, far smaller, universe had crashed into it.
A universe with different rules.

A linear and musical universe of a fluid darkness pulsing with aquatic lights that grew and swayed like anemones and coral.
Currents flowing in glowing cords, lights humming as they streamed along threaded lines.
Like blood vessels and neurons, it was an otherworldly body more so than a universe, where gravity was as floaty as lotus leaves swirling on still waters.

The brain was fast asleep, but stirred as a foreign gravitational pull was felt within.

"Present for you!" a voice sung out to him, cackling.
He didn't recognize it.
Couldn't tell what it was saying.

All he knew was that something had breached his body, interrupted his rest -- from where, he couldn't quite tell...the footprints that the stranger had left seemed to lead off from nowhere, dropping off into thin air, and began to disappear as it followed them back from whence it came, leaving something behind.

The universe struck a dissonant cord.
The package had been left at his doorstep, near his garden, swallowing parts of it.
Smaller things, but that didn't make it any better.

A newborn black hole.
How long before it reverted?
He groaned, lights and sounds pulsing in a strange audiovisual language.

Don't eat my garden....

There wasn't too much he could do.

A random singularity seemed to have just popped into existence.
As near as he could tell, something had come with it, but whatever that something was, it was gone now.

Slowly, he began to form small waves in the stream of fluids that the black hole now found itself in, trying to push it away from his garden, nudge it towards the hole in both universes.
Although clearly akin to water, the cosmic fluid was not made of particles, nor did it possess its own gravity; save for a spherical depression where the black hole sat, which he now aimed to wash over with a strong current, the faux liquid remained unaffected by the singularity's gravitational pull.

Far below--or above, or to the side, dealer's choice really--sat a superheated lake of quark-gluon plasma that was galaxies long, the remnants of a supercluster that he'd sealed off, still waiting for it to cool down and break apart into its proper particles before shunting it back into its original universe.

In and around the hole that now connected the two universes, separated only by a planck-thin barrier of the two reality's laws, there were a few additional holes in the universal fabric, at least on his side, which led to the emptiness that lay between universes.
Once he managed to move the hole close enough--if he could move it at all--he'd unplug one of those holes, hopefully to force the black hole into draining out into the void, swirling down with some of the dark aether.
Losing some of his material wasn't the best of prospects, but perhaps he'd be able to pull some of it in before plugging the hole back up....

Thankfully, it seemed to be working.
As the black hole was washed down the hole, a brief flicker of lights played above it in a relieved sigh.

He didn't know where the black hole belonged, where it came from.
All he knew was that he didn't want it here.
Best to leave it to the void instead of imposing it on someone else.

Pulling back what little material he could, the hole was plugged up, and all was well again.
Slowly, he fell back into slumber.


The black hole dropped into the void, pushed forward by the dark aether that came with it.
Before long said aether vanished, unable to persist in the emptiness outside its shelter, and the black hole was left alone and without sustenance.

In the darkness, a familiar voice made its return.
"Oh, yer back already, are ye?"

In a grumble, it added to itself, "Man, what a fuddy dud.
Won't even take the littlest singularity...."

The number rolled, listening to the silence that met it.
Okay....

"Kid, I'm talkin' to ya."
It paused, waiting.
No response.

Its heart skipped a beat --it hadn't KILLED him, had it?
He was still there...wait, no, what did it care!
He'd deserve it, anyways.

...Erm--

A small figure took form in front of the singularity, immaterial, a simple human shadow.
An arm was stretched through the event horizon, reaching into the singularity's depths of infinite density.

Yup: that was a black hole, all right.

Detaching the arm, tapping its chin with the remaining hand, the shadow vanished in a blink.

Well...this was no fun.
It thought to leave him there like that, but then who was going to cause mindless destruction?
Besides itself.

Who was it going to pin the blame on!

Sure, nothing had really happened thus far that would require that, or otherwise make it inclined to do so, but IT COULD.

The number racked its brains; it was looking at this in all the wrong ways.

It was beginning to feel a little sick.
Perhaps it should give up on this revenge kick-- hadn't it done enough already?

This was the first other maybe "it" it had met, with all the gravity and the--the--everything!
And now it had just MURDERED him!

"Dude, come on," it pressed, feeling an impulse running through its veins, but no way to know how to fulfill it.
"Go get a drink or something.
Ahahaha...."

Nothing returned its teasing.
The singularity was silent, motionless, starving.

It writhed.
Damn--shit...FUCK.
What did it do?
How did it fix it?

"Uh-- hold on, wait--!
I got an idea."

Grabbing the black hole, once again adding onto that trail so it wouldn't lose the planet they'd come from, it once more spirited away the singularity.


He was resting in a recliner, lounging with a book in his hands.
The stick figure of a naked bird made out of lavender triangles, a robe trailing from his starved body.
In a small den of browns and subdued reds, flames burning in a brick fireplace beside him.

"1!"

He sighed-- and then the room disappeared, his book, the house.
His one eye twitched as he turned to see that he was now hovering beside a black hole.

"What in the fuck-- what are you doing!" he snarled.
One slash of a pointed arm and a stick-similar shadow fell out of thin air, blinking beady eyes that were like burning cinders.
The arm then reared back again, preparing to strike the black hole--the shadow grabbed the arm, flipped itself around, tossing him backwards.

"Hold on--" the number stumbled, dancing around an arm as he stabbed it forward.
Part of the edge caught it in the side, ripping a small hole that went all the way through its paper-thin body.

Holding a hand over it, it quickly tried to explain to the other what was going on.
He began to lower his arms, although his muscles remained tense, something akin to a frown smudging his triangular face.

The black hole was shrunk, shoved in a glass bottle that resisted its effects, the house and the room returning around them.
Handing the bottle to the shadow, the thin avian huffed as he pulled himself back into the lounge chair, the book he'd been reading returning to his sharp, fingerless hands.

"Um...," the shadow mumbled, pointing to the hole he had carved in its side.

"Let it heal on its own, you maniac," he said.
"You're lucky I don't do worse to you, after what you told me.
Now get out."

"But how do--"

"Just smash it."

Glass littered the carpet, shards flying into some of the bits and baubles that lined shelves attached to the walls.
He'd stood up in an instant, slamming the book into his brow out of exasperation.

"Not here, you little shit--!"
With a groan, he fell back into the chair, opened the book up and began to read, pretending that absolutely nothing was going on.

The shadow grinned sheepishly, a barely visible crescent upon its face.
The bottle broke with ease, and within one hundred seconds the black hole slowly reformed, its temporal properties reversing to return it to what it had once been.
The process wasn't perfect--something could end up a little off, physically or otherwise, a weirdness that would likely be felt in one's gut even if it wasn't consciously known--but there the rancid stranger would be.
After what he'd been through, it wouldn't be any wonder if it took some time for his mind to catch up.

Subtly peering over the book's pages, he would make sure that it had worked.
The stranger would only have a small amount of time to process his surroundings, if he even could at all, before the pair of them would be unceremoniously flung back into the void that they'd come from.

The shadow would once more be rolling in the void, ember eyes watching as it continued to hold onto the hole in its body.

Watching how the black hole reformed into a human body was innately disgusting and fascinating to the number, and it kept its eyes locked on the transformation process, amazed and bemused.
It hadn't quite seen such a metamorphosis before, and certainly not from an actual black hole.
Reminded it of that time it slipped into the fifth dimension; boy howdy, had that been a confusing trip!
And it thought the fourth was weird....

--a-hem--COUGH.

As the human made his return, clutching at his stomach, the number recalled something.
Something that seemed remote then.
Something it had forgotten since all the hubbub that began in the white room.

It didn't seem likely that the fluids it had injected into his gravitational stream would still be circulating, but, then again, how would it know?
He was probably just really hungry; hell, it probably would be too, if it turned black hole and back.

The hand holding onto its side stripped away some of the flesh, making the hole in its body just that little bit bigger.
With a flourish, the slice of smoky skin was bloated up, like a big black muffin, and tossed it his way, somewhat expecting it to just bounce off his face and the man to implode for no other reason than to continue being an absolute dickwad.
He didn't seem to be looking at anything.

If he swallowed it, perhaps it would help settle his stomach, whatever was wrong with it.
If not, well, the number was well worn out, so fuck him.

Watching how he snapped up the piece of flesh was mildly amusing, like seeing a gator leap out of the water for a scrap of fish, or how a moray eel stretches out its pharyngeal jaws.
Nothing like that boring stuff with the human and the...wait....

It was then that the number realized that the beads were still gone.
And he wasn't a black hole.

S...success?

Was he going to collapse any second?
It didn't know what the beads were for--besides suppressing what should be the right of any singularity--just that a black hole happened the second they had spiraled into his body.
And he continued to seem a bit out of it, seeming to have forgotten the whole ordeal.

"I cut it up," the number answered, swishing one of its hands through the void with a murmured SFX of "whoosh".
Before he asked, it added, "And then you ran through a bunch of walls."

Looking away from him for a moment, it poked a finger through the hole in its body, which seemed to disappear instead of come out the other side.
Its head hurt, it had already been drowsy when this whole thing started, and now after everything that had happened...it suppressed a yawn.
It was probably lucky it wasn't outright passing out in that moment.

It wanted to leave, but it wasn't yet sure the deed was done, and so struggled to suppress the rising impulse, the edges of its body beginning to flicker like static.