"You absolutely cannot do that," the slightly distorted voice said, seemingly from several places behind Lane.

"I can and I definitely will," Keenan said in reply. While he did notice that the presence expressed distress, there was no hint of disagreement; merely that they both knew what he wanted to do was... well, considerably less than legal. On that thought, "you know perfectly well that they stole the DNA needed for them, themselves. Without consent, making them into these highly modified individuals." His history with the company was less than friendly. Come to think of it, any hero worth their badges would have a less than friendly relationship with Crey.

They stole what they could from anyone that entered their facilities, particularly those expecting a battle: blood could be very handy for this, and they tended to spill it more than often enough. They'd attempted to steal his genes. That had only happened once, and not on that dimension, and not from that company. Wait, wait - twice but it wasn't him or in Paragon City, and it wasn't completely without consent. A little distracted by this thought, he wondered whether any version of himself on any dimension hadn't had their human form copied or cloned. He knew that Kale-Baah had... Enough; that line of wandering thought wasn't going to help these new cloned children out.

Still he looked at this darkened room, lit - barely - by the tubes themselves in a slightly scintillating green that danced around the center of the chamber below. He could tell by glancing over them all with his Vortal senses that they were sleeping; not dreaming, but their own individual minds rested there none the less. They had been growing there for a month or more from mere clusters of cells, never having been touched by human hands. And now, almost all of them looked to be teenagers in age.

What would have come next for this group of cloned 'kids', however, rested in Keenan Lane's gut like a weight. To his companion, he muttered, "I cannot in good conscience allow these young minds to be blasted away and replaced by their propaganda."

The dark presence coalesced into a man. Slightly shorter than Lane, much younger looking, but no less serious in expression or obvious aura of authority. "I do know." His voice hardly changed from the echoing it had done before. He paused, black eyes glancing away, but then back toward the tubes in this laboratory filled with clones. "It's just a formality, one entity to another."

Lane smirked, thin lips quirked up to one side. "I appreciate the reminder." He took his own turquoise-eyed glance around that same room. "You would do the same, had you the connectivity."

There was no reply from the younger man. He stood with his hands grasped behind his back, in a long slate black jacket with diamond shaped buttons in two rows down the front, and at the wrists. Snug dark pants were tucked into large black boots, fashionable one decade a thousand years ago on another dimension's World. His short but tussled dark hair gathered over his forehead, almost getting into those infinitely-black eyes, but always falling short and allowing his sharp eyebrows to flicker into brief postures. He floated slightly, those boots hardly ever actually touched the floor.

Then again: neither did Lane's, but that was because he was merely projecting himself into a temporal construct, looking at this laboratory of Crey's. They watched in silence, as Crey scientists and assistants checked measurements and watched gauges on panels surrounding the clone tubes. Silence on his end was broken only on the occasion that one or the other of these men would speak; and they rarely needed to, to communicate. A faint undulating frequency did come through to Lane's Vortal ears, the echoes of the Void where his companion usually resided. He wondered briefly if Levi heard his frequency, or if his Vortal construct even had one. He also absently wondered whether Crey would ever detect either of them with their 'advanced' technology? They stole from everything else - from alien invaders like the Rikti, to alternate dimension mages from Oranbega. Could they have ever stolen anything from Ulathoi?

"Where will you put them?" Levi asked finally, "obviously not your Paragon mansion." His aura shuddered around the construct, flickering as though an electrical short moved it around. Pieces of his aura made more chiming sounds, vibrating physically, or at least what passed for physically, in this realm.

"Oh, no, no not there." Lane waved his hand as if to shake off the idea. "They would take up much too much room there." By Levi's expression that wasn't what he expected the reason to be.

As was typical for Lane, however, he waited just a moment before giving a more thorough explanation along with a Vortal jibing grin. "The Paragon Convocation's sites are... already being watched by some of those authorities." Lane shook his head slightly with a frown, "I don't like having Crey breathing down my neck, even though they know better than to confront me personally." He adopted a more pondering, then impish look. "I think... one of my... children... will appreciate their presence, though. I believe Wilson's Vent in Crescent City has a sizeable chamber below ground, ready for such intrusions."

Levi's face adopted a mockingly sour expression, "he will not be happy to hear you're going to fill his larder with stolen cloned heroes."

"They're not another invasion," Lane smirked. "He only gets testy when the Mad Gods bring aliens and monsters there. A group of young super-heroes? I'm sure that he and Aurora will have a fun time tending to them."

"They're busy with their child," Levi chuckled. "I'm going to be watching this with great interest." He leaned forward, inspecting the spied-upon room and its unusual, submerged and comatose, children.

"You always do," Lane smiled gently, "if you have any gifts to bestow, wait until they're ready. I don't yet know that any of them would be... appropriate for such channeling." Though Crey's systems certainly nabbed the mutations and occasional 'naturally occurring' powers from heroes that drifted too close to their collection plates, they had been known to siphon magic or even stray nanotechnology in the process as well. Only a few of those might be comfortable with a direct connection to the Void, and its incredibly vast magical power.

"Possibly not," the Void's emissary said with an echo that meant he was already fading into his own realm once more, "but perhaps. You know I like to see what might come of a little chaos."

A broader grin spread across the older man's lips. As he gazed still at those tubes hanging from the ceiling of a large square room in a maze of labs deep beneath Paragon City, Keenan Lane muttered, "oh... so do I, my friend. So do I."

It might have been considered the crime of the year, if Crey could tell anyone about it. The fact that they could never release more than a statement about 'increased security since a highly classified area had been breeched' (which was true) and 'nothing of significance had been damaged or removed from the facility' (obviously and patently false), brought a broad smile to Keenan's face. He'd put on his younger cloned body for this occasion, leaving the older one back in his Paragon mansion. Dipping between his various forms had become far more than habit for him, more of a necessity around these parts. As his younger body was hardier and more fit, he was also able to express different power sets back at Paragon City.

In his older looking form, he kept being mistaken for a Kheldian, and he let the authorities be led by that error. After all, it was harder for him to explain what he was in the confines of their existing database, than to just let them think he was another kind of alien entirely. But what Kheldian could move an entire facility's interior equipment from one location to another?

The machinery, lighting, air conditioning and recycling, even the restroom facilities were still powered or hooked up to something, while they were in stasis between worlds. "All this, and you didn't even break a sweat," Rita chuckled, looking the lab and its contents over. "Oh this takes me back."

"Rita, everything takes you back," Selene nudged the other woman with a grin.

"I mean, true," Rita quipped, "I don't know how many times I've lived through bashing Crey's labs to rubble, but I love it every single fucking time." She punctuated her statement with a fist-palm smacking taunt in time with each word.

The group of heroes stood in that recently-relocated lab, now nestled in a transitory space that Keenan had created for the move. Far easier to stage it this way, than to slam it into Wilson's basement and hope for the best. That trick didn't work very well on some Earths. A pang of memory and regret flickered in the back of his mind, but Keenan put it to rest soon enough.

He glanced at Rita who grinned eagerly, and then up toward their floating companion Levi while clearing his throat. That sound caused the Outsider's aura to judder in reply as he backed away from one of the tubes.

"Shall we?" Keenan asked, and as one they seemed to fold reality around itself very gently. The facility was no longer merely an echo of itself in a nonexistent space, but had been firmly put into reality once more. This time, on the other side of the North American continent, on the Skin side of Twoarth. Though none of them were particularly used to working on concert with another to teleport, all three were decidedly good at it. Levi felt the hum of the Void as it settled into the edges around the place and matched the local frequency; Keenan had obviously decided where exactly to put it and how to hook up the amenities as well as providing the outright raw power to move it at all; Rita apparently made sure that the place was in the right exact moment of time as well as space. The other two, Selene and Sonith, felt a weird ripple of power and a slightly-sideways bump as they 'landed', but otherwise nothing else. As far as their internal sensibilities were concerned, they were still somewhere under a Crey lab in Rhode Island on an Earth with only one sphere...

A few moments later, with Keenan carefully tweaking details around the spot to make sure that there were no dramatic problems with the space being filled like this, he shook free from his slightly trance-like expression and took a deep breath. He seemed to relish that breath; only Rita knew why.

"Do we have an assessment of their qualities?" Lane asked in general, and Selene took that as her cue.

"We do, well they..." She indicated the Crey labeling on the crate next to her, "obviously keep extensive records for things. Enough to have that kind of security to protect it from prying eyes." She rolled her own silver-tinted dark brown eyes, a move easily visible against her very dark brown skin. She carefully picked through the printed out files, "there are twelve from this batch of twenty, that have survived their... processing," she noted the wince from Lane. "They were weeded out before you moved them into stasis," she clarified.

He seemed thankful it wasn't his doing. His own family had gone through numerous trials and treatments in their own childhoods, sometimes with terrible results. "They've got a pretty wide variety of abilities, but only these three body builds," Selene said, holding two more clipboards and handing them off to Lane and then Sonith who made grabby hands to see.

"It's like they got stamped out of a mold," Sonith said, her long silver antennae gently bobbing a little and picking up who-knew-what sounds or scents on the air. The rest of her also bobbed gently, her hair splayed almost as though she was in freefall; she was apt to hover just barely above the ground and had a bit of a haze around herself that made it look like she could scamper away in a split second.

"They did get stamped out of a mold," Rita reminded her, nodding her head and tossing her dyed-red hair out of her eyes. "They have templates. The processing fills those templates with... donor DNA," she air-quoted, "but the basics are all right there in the vat before they even start."

Levi floated in a different manner than Sonith, as though suspended in the sea, and with a dark half-visible halo still clinging to him. It made very faint chittering sounds as he moved up to the nearest tube and peered into it with his Void-black eyes. "I like this one," he said simply, though his voice still reverberated gently between dimensions and unnerved Selene and Sonith. "I think I'll want to watch them more closely." He could also be seen taking long gazes at another, across the room, but only Keenan could see the tendrils of his Void magic reaching out to that second clone.

"Aaaaand you're hogging my power supply again Lane, wh-" Wilson Carver's abrupt appearance in a Vortal teleport that looked a lot like molten, shattering glass startled two of the others present, but unsurprisingly the three who could teleport merely looked up at his arrival rather than jumping. The taller, much more massive clone of Keenan tried to look like he was taking it in stride as he walked up to his prime, glancing over the collection of people who were awake, and then staring more intently at those who were still slumbering in their dangling glass tubes. Wilson didn't need to move his head so much, turn his body around, or even do that exasperated spin to check behind him, really. He recognized that layout and those logo designs on the equipment instantly. "Fuck me, man, what did you do."

Keenan merely grinned, and appeared to share Vortally rather than discuss it vocally where others would listen in. He didn't have to explain much; after all, the business of errant cloning had stung this pair considerably more than most. The elder did not need to defend his actions to his clone, at least they were completely in accord there. Of course Wilson knew about the Revenant Hero project that Crey ran, he just thought it was only found in Paragon City, back east and on another version of Earth. They'd been getting quite a few teenagers showing up at Carramba, though, from Paragon in recent times. Maybe there was a deeper connection, maybe Primal Earth was much closer to Twoarth than they thought.

Finally, Wilson took a resigned deep breath (did he relish it like his prime did?) and shrugged, rippling muscles visible since he had apparently just come down from the gym he owned. That motion caused all three ladies to all but drool. That simultaneous release of highly feminine mental energy caused Lane to have to turn away with a smirk. Wilson drank it in. "So... what, are we picking and choosing who to spot?" Wilson asked, and Rita nodded enthusiastically.

"Leviathan has already picked out a pair," she said, patently ignoring said floating man's surprised look - even he hadn't actually 'claimed' that second clone to help instruct to himself yet. "And Selene has her eye on two more."

Keenan walked over to look when she was tapping her fingers on the clipboard in thought. He said, "we're going by their records to see what skills they might be best suited to train, and what powers they exhibit. But our... hasty retreat from the facility meant that any more detailed records were left behind. Which means our information leaves a bit to be desired. We can't risk waking them up just yet without the proper... precautions and safe spaces set up," he would also be the one to make sure that no one from Crey could find them here. "But I'm ... hesitant to say, perhaps we should ask Melissa to help. Even though Rita is quite adept with her mastery of mending flesh and bone," Keenan said while said healer beamed, "their powers may be a bit more subtle or varied than what she can discern."

Wilson shook his head quickly, thinking about bringing in their hive queen to this shindig. "She'll steal even more of their DNA, I'm gonna nix that right now," he replied. Pondering, Keenan didn't object - he knew Wilson was right, Mel would just want to 'share' it with others - like Shy or Faust - and that would just be sloppy.

Thinking on it further, however, Wilson said, "but... there are other professors at Carramba and C4 that might be able to help and not drool all over the merchandise."

Together they developed a plan of action: to speak with those professors, and head into the Rookery briefly, where these new young students would get their initial basic skill downloads. They couldn't possibly trust the stolen lab equipment with that task - not that it wasn't up to it, but that they expected Crey would have hidden all manner of subliminally important instructions to obey their corporate head. This group did not want that to happen at all. In fact, Keenan would be happy if they never even heard of Crey.

They decided to exit the lab and head up through the gym, where Wilson was ambushed by his daughter Celeste Fortuna, and her lovely pink-haired mother Aurora Chase. Though she was ostensibly a 'normal' human, Levi detected an overtone of magic on her, while Selene and Rita knew she was registered with powers that were all but off the charts. This daughter of theirs... was powerful in ways that even her superhumanly strong father couldn't match. After a few minutes of explaining, Aurora was fully on-board with this, and decided to simply pick up their daughter and concentrate on other things: the less they knew, the less any Crey assholes could extract.

Not that any Crey would be stupid enough to try and grab her either. While Rita and Sonith stood around gawking at the athletes sparring in the gym's boxing ring, and Levi vanished into the shadows as was his typical fashion, Keenan and Selene decided to head back to Carramba's administrative torus, and check up on those extra professors.

** Those involved in this madness include Keenan's Paragon version, Wilson Carver (strong), Sonith Jensen / Silverfish (mutation), Leviathan Shindaerey (magic), Selene Alcott / Moondive (tech/sci), Rita Tailor the Retail Retali8r (natural/local)