Strangers
“Sue! Sue, wake up!”
Only then the woman realised that she overworked herself to sleep, with her head on her desk.
Machine Man’s voice managed to wake her up when the base’s alarms failed. She looked around in horror as the room was lit up red.
“You’re kidding– No, not now! Please, not yet!” she grabbed hold of her notes, she tried her hardest to wake up from the nightmare without realising that her eyes were already forcing themselves to stay open beyond their capability.
“Susan, please calm down. We have to go...” her partner tried to calm her down, seeing her bloodshot eyes.
She uttered: “Daniel, you don’t understand! I don’t have an alternative, I only have–”
She froze seeing the device in front of her. Just like a detonator but with the weight of a nuke.
“I can’t use that… please, I couldn’t come up with another plan.”
“I know.” he replied, moving towards the exit.
“You don’t… I…” Sue stumbled mid sentence on her way towards the same path but he managed to catch her in time, “I’m sorry…”
“I know.”
She was too weak to even muster up a platform under her feet and had to hold on to him as he extended to high ground.
She just prayed that the orb in the sky would be blue but for every metre of height they gained, the lighting said otherwise.
In normal daylight her eyes would have been too weak to stay open once she stepped outside. The light wasn’t bright gold, it was blood red.
It was just shallow enough for her to see with her own eyes that this was the worst possible scenario.
Since there were two twins in space staring at each other, she wondered if her own twin was staring towards her.
She wondered if her twin also had a whole team staring at her in anticipation.
Tony was armed already and he tried to say her name but he was quickly interrupted by her frustrated: “I know!”
“I know you know but we have to… Sue?”
She was staring at that horrible thing in the sky once again, frozen in place and with the face of someone who had seen a ghost.
A pair of hands grabbed her shoulders and tried to stop her from shaking. She still looked up.
Sam tried his hardest to speak through the fear: “Susan, it’s time. We were too slow. We couldn’t do it on time and we failed… We can’t deny that but we can still save ourselves.”
Sue shook herself out of that hold. She slowly and frightfully walked ahead of everyone.
Everyone saw her raise the overly complex silver detonator but not everyone knew what the trigger would cause.
“What’s the plan?” asked the most recent addition.
Sam quietly and shamefully answered: “That’s the Ultimate Nullifier. We used it to drive away Gah Lak Tus.”
If it managed to make the fearsome hive mind escape, then it was the only certain method they knew of to get rid of that celestial body in the sky.
A portal would open to a newborn universe and the power of the Big Bang would come out, disintegrating everything in its way. Sue imagined the scene and her right hand trembled even more.
Sue thought about the last discussion she had with Reed. She was afraid of proving him right.
Jessica, at the end of the line as if she didn’t belong, thought about Kitty Pryde.
She figured that there must have been another Kitty in that world. Maybe she was older, younger or the complete opposite of the one she knew.
Perhaps that variant didn’t even know her. It wouldn’t have been her Kitty but it was still Kitty Pryde.
“Wait! This is insane! There must be another way!”
Everyone except Sue turned towards her. All incredibly quiet and, ironically, it almost seemed like the one that wanted to speak up was T’Challa, who couldn’t.
Tony walked towards her, though she noticed Sam moving around her, and he weakly said: “Jessica, we already looked for other ways but now we have no choice.”
She retorted: “We could create another Cube. Maybe the gems are still around—”
“We don’t have the time.”
“But it could work.”
“I… I’m not even sure about that…”
What if the power to control a universe wasn’t enough? And yet she cried out: “Tony, we’re talking about eight billion people!”
“It’s either us… or neither of us.”
Sue secretly begged for someone to volunteer and take the device from her hand. She didn’t want a world on her conscience.
But it seemed that no one else wanted that either. She had to choose whether to let the two planets destroy each other or destroy one to save the other.
She closed her eyes. She raised her arm and everyone else looked down. Lightning struck near them and her thumb turned an inch away from the irredeemable action.
She asked her family to forgive her. Both the one she knew and the one she just saw.
But a wave passed through the air and Sue returned to her surroundings. The Earth above was replaced by a red nebula and dust.
There was no noise. The portal never opened.
After the initial shock, T’Challa gestured something to Stark, who replied: “Maybe… they’re the only ones I can think of.”
Sue fell to the floor and everyone ran to her. They managed to get her to her knees but she couldn’t stand any higher.
She refused to look at them as Tony said: “You didn’t do it, Sue. Whatever that was, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
She cried: “I was about to do it… what does that prove about me?”
Silence dropped once again and the Think Tank was just a sad little husk of what it was supposed to be.
—----------—————————————————
There was a man and a machine in a room and the machine was the livelier one of the two.
It had eyes to see that its creator’s spirit was down the drain. It had a voice to try to get him back to his feet.
“Is there anything I may do for the Maker?”
The Maker didn’t bother to look at the creation but he replied: “Forgive me, Dome, but it’s not something you can do anything about.”
The Dome wasn’t supposed to feel hurt but seeing that he couldn’t accomplish what it was made for, it felt some indeed.
In the desperate attempt to be of use, it tried to act human.
“I believe that the Maker isn’t doing anything wrong.”
“Of course you would say that.” he quickly and tiresomely replied.
The Dome returned to silence but it remembered cases of disagreement between the two, meaning its approval wasn’t granted.
Humans were weird, even its lord the Maker.
The Dome’s red eyes lit up and it said: “The Incursion is commencing now, as predicted.”
The Maker finally stood up and looked at its creation just to order: “Send me there.”
To the Maker’s surprise the teleportation only sent him above his current position, on the surface of New York.
Not only did he stay out of people’s sights, the helmet allowed him to see radio waves and avoid satellites.
He looked up and saw that it was red. Of course it was. Murphy’s law.
Some seconds passed and Reed caught himself staring. Did he care?
No, he couldn’t let that get in the way. He couldn’t waste anymore time.
A tiny speaker extended out of his helmet and he asked: “Dome?”
The Dome’s visage appeared on his hud and its voice was heard: “Usual procedure, Maker?”
Hearing it, Reed remembered the first robot he made to help Ben train at football.
“Yes… just on the count of three…”
The device didn’t object to the unusual request. Reed remembered joining the class at the Baxter after finally teleporting a toy.
The count started. At the count of 1 Reed remembered watching the N-Zone with Dr. Storm.
He spent a second just mourning him and at the count of two, the Earth above disintegrated.
The Dome promptly confirmed his thoughts: “That wasn’t us.”
Reed’s mind was conflicted but in the end he uttered: “…Sue?”
He told himself that it couldn’t have been her. He knew her too well.
For once, instead of satisfying his mind, his machines satisfied his heart by notifying him of something entering the atmosphere.
It was invisible to anyone bar him. A shuttle was carrying seven life forms and it headed east.
The Maker followed suit.
He teleported miles in that direction and found himself on an invisible platform in the middle of the ocean.
The target kept flying and he told himself: “Not quite…”
He teleported again, this time ending up in a ghost village next to a goat. It still didn’t stop.
“Nope.”
Reed ended up in the Valley of Kings and he quickly noticed that this time the vessel moved north.
“I guess we can’t have everything taking place here.”
But then, when he teleported again and noticed the shuttle finally slowing down, he cursed himself recognising the grassy fields around him.
There had been far too many incidents in the castle farther ahead. A place he hated ruled by someone who would kill him, if he figured out a way. He couldn’t go there.
He was forced to let him get one over him, just this once. “It’s up to you, Victor.”
—————————————————————
The hall was set like Latveria was hosting friendly royals. The King’s guards already felt useless after the invention of the Doombots.
They never felt more useless than that day.
The man that had memorised his entire family tree sat at the head of the table, his red eyes pierced the thick darkness.
He glanced at his hosts but wasn’t the least bit surprised by their existence. It would have been foolish to think he didn’t know about other worlds.
The first one he took note of was identical to an old enemy of his. He just had shorter hair but it was him, the Submariner.
Another man presented himself like some kind of royal but he looked like a hobo. He thought he saw someone like him in Richards’ files.
There was a brute too large and ugly to fit in his nice chairs. Every team had one of those.
A gremlin, if there ever was one, refused to leave his spear even at the table. Doom was used to that kind of disrespect.
Another of the aliens was a woman and Doom just wondered why, whenever they met aliens, the women always looked so plain and normal.
Sitting next to her there was another lady and she felt a lot more ethereal even without a blue coloured skin.
Finally, sitting on the opposite side of the table, there was a figure that emanated pressure proportionate to his size.
His strength of mind, as the Doctor deduced, must have been equal to his strength of body.
The only appropriate title for him was titan.
Buried deep in his mind, there was a similar figure. He was just a lot more colourful than his world’s variant but it was him.
His voice made the atmosphere tremble, “The situation is dire but I’m sure you know that.”
Doom replied with unimpressed silence.
“What you will be glad to know is that soon there will come the final Incursion and we want you to join our Cabal in the final solution.”
Everyone looked towards him making the exact same expressions that Victor expected.
“I’m listening.”