He puts a towel over my head. It’s dry and coarse. It smells, but I can’t pinpoint what it smells like…and maybe that’s for the best.

I can’t see him, but Glasses starts screaming at me. I can feel his spittle across my neck. It’s warm in the cold, and in a strange way welcome.

Someone wheels me toward the faucet. My first guess is Glasses, but the arms are wheeling me from the left. Glasses is to the right. I can feel the bristle of arm hair on my forearms. The arm hair, just like the towel, is dry, so my guess is it’s Beard. He grunts something, and I can’t tell if they’re words or not.

I can see the indentation of the faucet. It’s blots out a portion of the rusted-over light that hangs above. Glasses continues to scream and shout, and with it comes more spit. How the man hasn’t reached levels of dehydration is beyond me.

Beard turns the faucet. It’s rusted, I can hear the strain. The faucet groans, like a beast awaking from a winter slumber. And then it belches water. Warm for a handful of seconds and then it’s ice cold.

Damn fools. Stupid enough to think that they can drown me. The one and only. Captain Sponge. The water floods through the towel, and I consume and consume. Glasses is still screaming, and it’s hard to hear over the water, but he sounds panicked.

He should be.

I expand and expand. I can feel my fingers broaden. My joints growing fat with water. My torso gets wider and wider. Fulfilled is the first term that comes to mind. Beard is screaming too. Or just grunting in fear.

I am fully absorbed. I rip through the feeble restraints, the chair tornados into the wall. The towel falls from my face and slops to the floor. Glasses goes for his pistol, but I stop him before he can manage a grip. I extend my hand and launch a surge of water at him. There’s so much water that I can’t even see him, but I somehow can hear his scream. As well as his body colliding with the wall. I think I can hear his bones crack.

Beard grabs me from behind, his hairy arm wrapped around my throat. I tighten every muscle, jets of water shooting upward from my legs, lifting Beard high into the sky, slamming him into the ceiling.

I stop and assess the damage I’d done. Glasses doesn’t have a face anymore, can’t call him Glasses anymore. There are, however, shards of glass protruding around his eyes. Beard’s a mess too, and he also lost his title. Hard to call a man Beard when he doesn’t have a face. I’m glad they understood the power of Captain Sponge in their final moments.

I can hear the stampeding down the stairs. The shouts and screams. They’ll be through the door at any moment.

I am ready.

Captain Sponge is always ready.