...oh. Someone is trying to get her attention. Her kidnapper, presumably.

"What?" She snaps, sniffling. (She's not looking at the screen. She can't really bring herself to care what this "False Sage" looks like.)

"Hi. I kidnapped you because I want to be immortal."

"I don't care! I hope you die."

(She starts sobbing again)

"... You'll feel better after you've had a bit of a rest. Takeout preferences?"

No response but some quieter sobs, for a bit.

"...Vegetarian. Spicy." 

"Sounds good! Szechuanese all right?"

(The False Sage speaks English fluently but has a Taiwanese accent.)

She shrugs, then curls up more tightly and resumes crying. 

<Musoka...>

She snarls. <Leave me alone!>

...she can do that.

She hopes Musoka will feel a bit better after she's had something to eat and had a bit more time to process. Until then, there's not much either of them can do. 

A pallet of bottled water, a portable toilet, a trash can and a steaming hot bag of Sichuanese food with a receipt in Chinese all trickle in over the next half-hour.

Musoka, by the time the water arrives, has a pretty bad headache from crying. (She could probably fix it with her ring, along with the pain in her hand, but she doesn't want to, right now). She sniffles, wipes her eyes, and cracks open a bottle. 

She drinks far too quickly, gets some in her air pipe, and spends a minute or two coughing violently.

The food is... annoyingly good. She scarfs it down. 

She... does feel quite a bit better. She's still mad, at both the False Sage and Mom 2, she doesn't feel... quite so hopeless.

<...do you see any way we can get out of this?>

<Not really, though I assume Minerva will have tasked someone to try and rescue us if that's at all possible.>

She turns back to the screen and scowls again.

"I can't actually make people immortal, you know. How were you imagining this would work? You keep me in a box and let me out every 30 years to de-age you?"

He lowers his book. (He's got his feet up on a cushioned footrest with the label of a major Chinese furniture store, price tag still attached.) "Nah. I just thought you'd de-age me once and I'd let you go."

"Will you pay me for it?"

"I was kind of hoping to pay you with me not smashing Beijing? But sure, why not. Fair warning, though, I've got deadman's switches for miles."

Musoka rolls her eyes.  "And I was hoping not to be kidnapped by a crazy man with box-related powers. Disappointing evening all around, really."

She pauses. "...why are you warning me about deadman's switches?"

"Hey, I have NO superpowers, that's even less impressive."

... He wrinkles his brow. "You're a superhero? Just registered? Superheroes can usually be warned off from murdering me under the guise of healing me by saying 'if I don't cancel the deadman switch, bad things will happen.'"

"...If you have no superpowers, how did you get me in here?"

She frowns back at him. "I wasn't planning on murdering you. Apparently assholes are going to keep trying to kidnap me so I can de-age them, and probably that will go better for me if I have a reputation of doing this for money instead of being threatened into it."

"Oh, that. It turns out everyone else is an idiot and thinks the cosmos is three-dimensional? If you know how to rotate things properly you can build outwards into vacuum, escape the earth's gravity well, and get started on some kickass asteroid mining. You're 6.39 meters spinwards of Earth, right now."

He pauses.

"... So, you're not following what's been going on on Murdernet, are you?"

...what? <...does that make any sense to you?>

<...yeah, that's not how anything works. He's just an extremely powerful tinker; he can build things that break the laws of physics.>

<...ah.>

"...Murdernet?"

"It's a site for putting bounties on assassinations and kidnappings and prison breaks and whatnot! Totally anonymous, it works through some kind of tinker power or something. Anyway, someone put three billion dollars on your head and then you got de-listed, which has so far happened to... I think a few people in nuclear security and nobody else?"