14/09/2026
The thick midnight fog hanging over the pine flats of West Louisiana offered the perfect cover for mischief. Behind the tree line along an old rural bypass, a telltale scraping sound echoed through the damp air: metal dragging against gravel, punctuated by high-pitched, frantic chuckling.
Rusty Knutt was having what he considered the score of a lifetime.
Short, wiry, and thoroughly disheveled, Rusty stood barely waist-high against an towering heap of abandoned machinery. His frayed, rust-colored bodysuit was smeared with oil and orange flaking oxidation, and his mismatched goggles sat askew over his uncombed hair. In his dirt-smudged hands, he wielded his latest jury-rigged contraption: the Oxidizer Wand—a sputtering spray-rig powered by saltwater and sulfuric grime.
"Perfection!" Rusty cackled, spraying a jet of brown mist over a magnificent, forgotten 1960s aluminum semi-trailer. The clean silver metal immediately began to dull, pockmarked with creeping orange stains and chemical decay. "Shiny things make my head hurt! If it’s clean, it’s useless! Corrode it! Ruin it! Everything looks better when it's crumbling into the mud!"
He had already dragged three cracked car batteries and two heavy coils of tarnished copper wire into a muddy drainage ditch, fully intending to bury the whole lot under a blanket of chemical filth.
"You're making a terrible mess of good elemental history, Rusty."
The deep, steady voice echoed through the clearing.
Rusty jumped three feet into the air, dropping his nozzle. "Who’s that?! Who’s snooping on my aesthetic improvements?!"
Stepping smoothly out of the tree line was the Alloy Avenger. Tall, commanding, and calm, the hero’s emerald-green superhero suit gleamed under the pale moonlight, the bold recycling emblem on his broad chest pulsing with a faint, iridescent light.
"Alloy Avenger!" Rusty spat, wiping his greasy nose on the sleeve of his rust-toned suit. "Go back to your neat little sorting bins! I'm reclaiming this place for the crust of the earth! Oxidation is the natural order!"
"Oxidation is just neglected chemistry," Alloy Avenger replied, folding his arms. "And what you're doing isn't art, Rusty. Those batteries in that ditch contain lead and acid. The rain starts tomorrow morning, and if that leaks into the watershed, you poison the bayou for miles. Not to mention that copper wire and aluminum trailer—you’re trying to destroy materials that can be remelted and reborn infinitely without losing a single bit of their strength."
"Don't lecture me about cycles!" Rusty shrieked, snatching up his wand. "Have a taste of Quick-Rust Prime!"
Rusty squeezed the trigger. A concentrated stream of foaming corrosive gunk shot straight toward the hero’s chest.
Alloy Avenger didn't flinch. Raising his gauntleted hand, he activated his forearm shield—a polished alloy disc that caught the spray. Instead of eating through the surface, the hero triggered a low harmonic frequency. The sonic vibration shattered the dried chemical crust instantly, shaking it loose into a sealed capture-canister at his hip before it could touch the soil.
Before Rusty could prime another blast, Alloy Avenger moved with swift precision. With a wave of his magnetized magnetic-resonance wand, the corroded spray nozzle was gently yanked right out of Rusty's grip, flying straight into the hero's hand with a satisfying clack.
Rusty stared at his empty gloves, blinking. "Hey! That took three weeks of scrounging junkyard gaskets to build!"
"And it’s going straight into the parts tumbler to be cleaned and re-machined into something actually useful," Alloy Avenger said, stepping forward.
Rusty took a scuttling step backward, his boots sliding in the mud. "You can't stop the rot, Avenger! Rust sleeps for no man!"
"No, but smart stewardship doesn't sleep either." Alloy Avenger tapped his chest emblem, engaging his suit's high-capacity grav-lift field. With a low hum, the cracked vehicle batteries lifted safely out of the wet ditch, locking securely into a neutralized, leak-proof transport crate. "Every pound of lead safely reclaimed means cleaner ground. Every foot of copper saved spares mountains of raw earth from open-pit mining. You think you're returning metal to nature, Rusty, but you're only robbing tomorrow."
Rusty grumbled, crossing his scrawny arms in his rust-colored suit and kicking a clump of moss. "Bah. You make everything sound so... productive. Where's the grit? Where's the grime?"
"The grit comes from doing the hard work to protect the planet," Alloy Avenger said, a warm grin breaking across his face as he extended an open hand down toward the little troublemaker. "Tell you what. You've got an eye for finding hidden scrap, Rusty—even if your methods are completely backwards. Help me load this copper and grade the aluminum, and I won't lock you in the municipal compost yard for the weekend."
Rusty eyed the green hero, then looked at the heavy crate of safely sealed batteries and the gleaming semi-trailer waiting to be hauled for proper processing.
"Do I get to ride in the front of the flatbed?" Rusty muttered, his goggles slipping down his nose again.
"Only if you wipe your feet first," Alloy Avenger laughed, guiding the little villain toward the transport truck as the morning sun began to burn off the fog, revealing a cleaner, safer stretch of road.
