Strange never cared for clubs.
He didn't like noise, didn't like rules, didn't like attention. But he loved structure. And control. And systems that allowed people to disappear without question.
That's why the first thing he did at Deadman's wasn't attend class.
It was form a club.
"Strange Investigations Club of Knowledge," he called it. A mouthful by design. Bureaucratic. Bland. It sounded harmless—like a bunch of students playing detective with dusty tomes and fake mysteries. Monsters laughed when he passed out flyers.
Until the first student vanished.
⸻
It was a vampire named Lask. Second-year. Known for acing blood alchemy and charming the pants off anything with a pulse.
He vanished after midnight during a storm. No evidence, no witnesses.
But by morning, a report was filed—by Strange.
"Strange Investigations Club will take the case."
Staff nodded. Administration approved. The council of monstrous elders barely blinked. That's what the club was for, wasn't it?
To investigate the unexplainable.
No one noticed that it was Strange who filed the missing person's report.
No one knew it was also Strange who took Lask.
⸻
"Vampire flesh doesn't decay the same," Von muttered, dragging a blade across the exposed muscle, noting the way it twitched post-mortem. "This'll make a fine exosheath."
"Healing factor is still active," Sheridan said, watching the blood bubble. "We'll need to stop the stem reflex."
The lab wasn't on school grounds.
It was under them.
Deadman's had catacombs—real ones, old and endless, layered like the internet itself. Strange found a chamber sealed in iron and carved it into his sanctuary. Surgical tables. Cryo pods. Summoning circles scrawled with code. Sheridan called it "The Downbelow." Von called it "The Playroom."
Here, Strange worked.
Here, he created.
⸻
Lask's arms were just the beginning.
By midterm, five more students had vanished.
Each was marked as "under investigation."
Each file was locked in Strange's club records.
By the time whispers began, it was already too late. He had the infrastructure. He had the trust. And more importantly—
He had the parts.
⸻
The first attempt at creation was Orion.
Pieced together from a banshee's lungs, a psychic's spine, and Lask's brain—Orion was meant to be a perfect mentalist. Mind-reading. Telekinesis. Cognitive override.
And in a way, he was.
But the body failed him. Too fragile. Skin too thin. Muscles pulled loose when he sneezed.
He cried the first time he looked in a mirror.
"Kill me," he said.
Von put a muzzle on him.
Sheridan gave him purpose.
They let him live.
⸻
Next came Moratax.
Bigger. Brutal. More stable.
A werewolf's core. Zombie muscle clusters. Reinforced bones from a drowned cyclops. He couldn't speak, but he didn't need to. He understood pain. And he loved it.
Unlike Orion, Moratax didn't beg.
He howled.
And when Strange fed him scraps from the new experiments, he growled a low, thankful noise that might have been affection.
Von liked him.
Sheridan didn't trust him.
Strange?
He called him Prototype Two.
⸻
But they weren't the goal.
The goal was The Prime.
The perfect hybrid.
Psychic mind. Werewolf strength. Ghoul adaptation. Banshee scream. Vampire healing. Chimera hunger.
He would call it Perfection.
⸻
And he almost succeeded.
But on the night of full convergence, when the blood moon lit the Downbelow like a red sun, the body twitched wrong.
The eyes snapped open.
It didn't obey.
It rampaged.
It tore through Orion like paper. Broke Moratax's jaw in two. Clawed its way through iron and fire, screaming in voices it had never learned.
It fled.
Into the school.
Into the world.
⸻
Now Strange had a new problem.
A rogue monster.
One he made.
One with a hunger for evolution.
Every second it lived, it grew stronger—stealing powers, ripping monsters apart, learning as it consumed.
Worse, the school district—the High Council—had begun to notice.
If they investigated, they'd find him.
And if they found him…
Not even Von's madness or Sheridan's precision could save them.
Strange had to act.
But not alone.
⸻
So he merged them.
Orion's mind. Moratax's mind. Another addition to the Strange collection.
Orion had splintered—his psychic essence adrift, broken, unlikely to recover. But Strange wasn't one for sentiment. Where others might have waited, tried to help, Strange chose utility. He told Orion to fuse what was left of himself with Moratax—and anchor both minds to his own.
The beast was already dying, its body barely holding together. Orion's powers were mental, and as long as his mind remained intact, illusions could form, objects could move, and, with time, perhaps stability would return.
Moratax was the real risk. Volatile. Animalistic. Unpredictable. Strange had no idea what binding the monster's mind to his own would truly do.
But he figured, how could it not be useful?
And if Moratax turned out to be nothing more than dead weight?
"I'll lock him in a corner," Strange thought. "Where the rest of the noise goes."
It was a gamble. A desperate one.
But Strange was no longer just a scientist.
He was becoming something else.
One last monster.
Built to hunt the first.
And so they stepped out of the Downbelow, three-in-one.
Human in shape. Monster in function.
A secret war had begun.
One student knew the school was in danger.
But no one suspected it was the student they trusted to investigate the missing.
Because Strange had written the rules.
And now, he would break them.