Screaming is a Valid Response

Sue was getting really sick of waking up in places she didn’t fall asleep in. 

She groaned as she sat up and opened her eyes to an eyeful of drab concrete ceiling.

“Hey, you’re up!” Someone said. 

Following the sound up and to the right, she found the source of the voice. Sitting above her on a metal folding chair was a man. Or, at least, something in the shape of a man. Contained within the silhouette of a human being was a fire. Red and yellow flames danced within the confines of the body, never straying too far from the center mass. Waves of searing heat were emanating off the thing, twisting the air into a shimmery mess. 

“WHAT THE FUCK!” Sue yelled, frantically crab-walking away from the monster. 

“Hey!” The man said, sounding hurt. Not from the fire currently engulfing his body in an Oscar-worthy impression of a biblical topiary, but at her apparent disgust upon looking at him. She only knew one person that vain. 

She gasped, “Johnny?” 

The fire-man waved. 

“I…” Sue started. There were so many questions she had to ask. How are you moving around? Why aren’t you in pain? Where the hell are we?

Sue settled on, “What the fuck?” 

“Oh, this?” Johnny raised one blazing arm to gesture at himself. 

“Yes, this!” Sue mocked, mimicking his movement. “What the fuck is with the fucking fire currently not killing you?” 

Johnny huffed, sparks shooting out from his nose. “Okay, first of all, there’s no need to be rude. Second, I’m not going to be disrespected by a talking head.” 

“What--” Sue looked down at herself. Or rather, where herself should be. Instead, there was just concrete and air. 

“WHAT THE FUCK!”  Sue screamed, patting herself with her hands, which she also couldn’t see. She could feel them though, could feel her palms rub against the cheap fabric of her ‘Heart of the Rockies’ sweatshirt and the pressure on her chest. 

She was there. She just couldn’t see it. 

“Keep it down,” Reed moaned on her right. Sue turned to look at him. She immediately started screaming again. 

Like Johnny, he was vaguely human in construction, with two arms and legs attached on the sides to a torso with a head on top, but every part of him was far out of proportion. The arms were at least five feet long, the neck two or three. The legs and torso were the proper lengths, but completely wrong depths, only a few inches deep. Sue was feeling nauseous just looking at him. 

“Why,” The monster with Reed’s face said, raising one freakishly long limb to rub at his eyes with a couple oversized fingers. The Reed-thing pushed himself up to a sitting position, resting his weight on his oversized elbows.

“I feel like I got hit by a truck--” He began, before turning to look at Sue and Johnny. 

The three of them simply stared at each other for a heavy second. At Reed’s noodly appendages, at Johnny’s burning body, at Sue’s lack of one besides a floating head. 

They each looked their fill. Then, all at the same time, the three of them began screaming at the top of their lungs. Reed and Sue out of sheer terror and confusion; Johnny because he didn’t want to be left out. 

“Hey, can we stop now? My throat’s getting sore.” Johnny said after a couple minutes of uninterrupted screaming. 

“You’re on fire!” Reed yelled. 

“And you look like a pile of fucked up spaghetti!” Johnny shot back. 

“I’m not trying to insult you!” Reed said. “I just-- what are you even burning? You’re not emitting any smoke!” 

Johnny made an ‘I don’t know’ sound in his throat. “I woke up like this, same as you!” 

Reed groaned in frustration. “What is going on?”

“I don’t know, but Reed could you--” Sue paused, swallowing. “Fix yourself? Maybe? You look like roadkill.”

“Wow, Susan,” Johnny said. 

“I’m sorry!” Sue exclaimed guiltily. She tried to put a hand up to shield her eyes from Reed out of habit, before realizing it was useless. “But I can’t think when he looks like that!” 

“Doctors don’t get grossed out, Johnny!” Johnny pitched his voice comically high in a bad impression of his sister. “When I was your age I was doing open-heart surgery, Johnny!” 

“IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN YOU KNOW THE PERSON!” Sue shouted back. “And it wasn’t open heart surgery, it was an emergency tracheotomy and I know you know that!!” 

“It was an emergency trache-whatever, Johnny! I’m Sue and I’m so much better than everyone!” 

While the Storm siblings bickered, Reed set himself to the task of returning to normal. It was easier said than done-- based on the limited knowledge he had accrued by simply existing in his new state, Reed now possessed flexibility more akin to an octopus or flatworm than a human being. His muscular system had either dramatically increased in density or grown entirely new groups in the span of a couple hours. Either way, there was undoubtedly a mass of newly innervated tissue inside his body right now, and he didn’t have the procedural memory required to utilize it. Trying to shrink a single elongated finger felt like trying to push a large boulder uphill. 

Focus. It wasn’t like he had never regained conscious control of an unconscious muscle system before, as Victor could enthusiastically attest. He had conquered his gag reflex years ago, and this was the same basic idea. If on a significantly larger scale. 

He could do this. 

With a sickeningly wet shunk, Reed’s body retreated back into itself until he wasn’t much more than a sphere of flesh on the ground. His clothes fluttered uselessly to the ground beside him. 

“Oh my god,” Sue said in horror.  

“Okay, now I get it.” Johnny capitulated. “That sucks.” 

Reed’s mouth reformed on the top of the ball. “Hold on! I think I’m getting the hang of it!” 

Sue gagged. 

In the half-second it took Sue to suck back her vomit, Reed shifted. That was the best term for it he could think of: his new muscles translated the well-known pattern of himself across the coordinate grid of his new body. Suddenly he was kneeling on the ground, human hands attached to reasonably-sized human arms in front of his face. 

Reed rose to his feet, observing the familiar ridges on his palms, before looking up at Johnny and Sue. “Incredible! Once I got past the strangeness of the situation, it was a matter of a few thoughts! I wonder if you two are the same--” 

“Pants,” Sue interrupted, turning 180 degrees so that she didn’t even face Reed anymore. 

Reed looked down at his naked body. “Oh, whoops.” He glanced around for his clothes, and quickly put them back on. 

“We must have been exposed to something on the station, that’s the only way this could be possible,” Reed continued after he was decent. “Do you remember that study Taras Shevchenko National University published a few years ago on deer herds that migrated into the Chernobyl exclusion zone? It’s the same basic principle--”

Sue groaned in exasperation. “Reed, if you’re talking about radiation-based genetic mutation, there’s no way that’s how this happened. We would be walking tumors, not--” Sue struggled for words, before giving up and just waving at herself and Johnny. “This.” 

“It would be unprecedented, that’s true. But no human had ever been exposed to that much radiation while in orbit. Perhaps the reduced gravity altered the trajectory of the particles, or maybe the lack of an atmosphere?” Reed snapped his fingers absentmindedly, considering. “Victor’s done some work on particle acceleration in microgravity environments. Where is he?” 

“Right behind you, dude.” Johnny pointed beyond Reed’s shoulder. Reed followed Johnny’s finger, his stomach dropping to his feet as he saw it. 

A couple feet away from him, as still as death, was Victor. He was covered in something--smooth and opaque, catching the fluorescent light like stainless steel. The metallic substance hugged his body like a burial shroud.

“Jesus,” Sue said, also seeing him for the first time. 

“Oh my god,” Reed went to his fiancé as fast as he could. Taking his left hand in his own, Reed pressed two fingers to his wrist.

His features were all still visible, down to the pores on his skin where Reed held him, but he was ice-cold to the touch. 

“I can’t find a pulse,” Reed said desperately. “Sue, I can’t find a pulse!” 

Sue was next to him in a flash, her mental gears switched to doctor mode. “Move over,” She bypassed the wrist entirely, placing her hand on Victor’s neck to check for the carotid pulse. Nothing. 

“Fuck,” She muttered under her breath. Reed still heard her.

“I’m starting CPR,” Sue said, tilting Victor’s chin up and pulling his mouth open before placing her hands on his chest. 

“Guys, chill out. He’s fine.” Johnny attempted to be reassuring. “The wall--” 

“SHUT UP!” Reed shouted at Johnny before turning back to Sue and Victor. “What can I do?”   

“Just stay where you are,” Sue said as she straightened her knees and angled her shoulders over Victor. “I’m going to push really hard, and it may seem like I’m hurting him, but I promise I’m not. Okay?”

Reed nodded shakily. “Of course,”

Sue took a deep breath in. “Alright, here we go.” 

Before she could even start compressions, Victor stirred.

The metal-looking tumors that covered his body took on an almost liquid form, specks of darkness swimming in his skin as he opened his eyes, Reed and Sue’s heads blocking out the light.

“Reed. Susan.” He said, confused but not willing to show it. 

Reed barked out a hysterical laugh at the proof of Victor’s continued survival, fear melting into relief. “Hi, honey.” 

Victor frowned. “I sense I’ve missed something important.” 

“Just a little. I can catch you up.” Reed replied, helping Victor to his feet.

“Yay, Victor’s alive!” Johnny said sarcastically. “So glad we got to figure that out as a group.” 

“Johnny, how could you have possibly known that he was okay?” Sue yelled back. 

“THE WALL!” Johnny answered, spinning to the side like a game show host to wave both arms at the wall directly behind him. 

Unlike the rest of the room, which seemed to be entirely made of concrete sheets or bricks, the northernmost wall was glass, underneath which was a massive plasma screen that spanned the entire thirty feet of the wall. At the center in massive letters were each of their names, next to which were a series of rapidly changing graphs and numbers, including one that looked to be an EKG readout and a systolic over diastolic blood pressure reading. 

“Huh,” Reed said. How did he miss that? He turned to Johnny. “Sorry for shouting at you.”

Johnny shrugged awkwardly. “‘S cool.”

Sue took a hard look at the data on the board. It seemed reasonably accurate for adults of their age, with glaring exceptions like Johnny’s temperature being 780 degrees Fahrenheit and Reed’s pulse being a mere forty beats per minute, which if anything proved that it really was their data. Which begged a bigger question. 

“How is that thing taking our vitals? None of us are hooked up to anything.” Sue questioned. 

“I’ve heard rumors of a biometric scanner that can gather accurate data from a distance. I thought they were just rumors.” Victor said with a frown. They were supposed to just be rumors. And if there was one thing he hated, it was being blindsided. 

He’d experimented with the concept on his own a few years back, long before it was even a twinkle in the eye of Popular Science’s editors. He had found the energy required to power even the most basic of designs was beyond prohibitive. Combined with the rare materials required for construction, any real application of the technology was rendered moot by the waste accrued in creating it. Nevertheless, here it was, taking in the vital information of four people, seemingly constantly, and translating it into easy-to-understand graphs and charts. 

This meant one of two things: Someone had made a breakthrough in power sourcing, or whoever had taken them hostage had enough resources to eat the loss. 

Despite the blow his ego would take, he would much prefer the first option. Some lone mad genius is manageable. He and the others could overpower them both mentally and physically. An enemy with the kind of money and power to make a version of the device like Victor’s was a bigger fish than they were prepared to handle. 

Victor walked around the room, eyes on the ceiling as he looked for a sensor or power cable. 

If nothing else, it was by far the nicest prison cell he’d ever been in. The floor was concrete surrounded on three sides by asylum-white-painted brick walls. There wasn’t a single crack in the walls or floor for vermin to nest in. The temperature was also pleasantly bearable, although if that was due to Johnny altering it with his presence as opposed to the cell having actual, functioning central air and heating Victor couldn’t decide.There were no windows, and as such no way to orient oneself in accordance with the cardinal directions, but Victor could swear, somehow, that north was behind him at the plasma screen wall. 

To his right, or to the “west”, a makeshift kitchen stood against the wall. A sink basin was sandwiched between a mini-fridge and a folding table, the latter of which was laden with food: an unholy mixture of MREs and generic snack food boxes, as well as a microwave. On top of the mini-fridge was a coffee maker. To the south and east, the only thing of note was the simple wooden doors outfitted into the walls. The shower and the solitary cell, most likely. Whoever built this cell was clearly an amateur; breaking down the doors would be the work of a few minutes. Victor moved to examine the eastern door more closely, but he barely moved a few feet before his foot caught on something and he lost balance. 

“Fuck!” He yelled, more out of habit than anything, it didn’t hurt at all, as he crashed face-first onto a gigantic pile of rocks and boulders in the center of the room. “Why is there litter here?”  

“Who you callin’ litter?” A deep and angry voice answered. 

Victor raised his head to the voice. A few inches from his face, a selection of bright orange rocks arranged in the shape of a human head lay. It was a shoddy act of sculpting, it looked like the artist had given up on chiseling in some places and just glued rocks of the right size to form the detailed features like the mouth and eyebrows.  

The sculpture opened its eyes. 

“Vic? Is that you?” The voice of Ben Grimm emanated from a hole in the mouth-rocks. The sculpture (Ben?) blinked his eyes. 

“You look like shit,” Ben told Victor, before turning his gaze to the others in the room, who simply watched him watch them. 

“מה לעזאזל,” Ben screamed, throwing Victor off of his chest as he scrabbled backward. “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO YOU GUYS?” 

He caught a glimpse of his own arm. “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO ME?” 

“I believe we’ve been exposed to some kind of mutagenic agent, it’s affecting all of us in different ways, which is riveting, considering we all were exposed at roughly the same intensity and for the same amount of time--” Reed began. 

“ENGLISH, REED!” Ben yelled. “VICTOR’S A FUCKING TIN MAN AND JOHNNY’S ON FIRE!” 

“I’m a what?” For the first time since he woke up, Victor looked down at his hands. 

His silvery palms acted as mirrors, reflecting his perverted visage back at him. 

His face, no, his entire body was encased in some kind of metal. It was as if he had been dipped into a vat of molten steel, an unholy modern Achilles, and removed just as the metal bonded to his flesh. A sarcophagus, an iron maiden, the Apega of Nabis restored just for him. 

“Get it off, get it off!” He screamed. He took his left wrist in his right hand, trying desperately to scrape the strange pearlescent material from his flesh. 

“Stop!” Reed ran over to kneel beside him, prying off the death grip he had on his own wrist. 

“I can’t breathe!” Victor gasped. It was crushing him, pushing down on his organs like snow onto frozen earth--

“Yes you can, you were doing it a few seconds ago!” Reed said, confused. 

“He’s having a panic attack, Reed,” Sue explained as she moved to Victor’s side. “Breathe--.”

Victor recoiled at the proximity. “DON’T TOUCH ME!” 

Scrambling to his feet, he ran to the eastern door, slamming it open and cloistering himself inside in the space of a few seconds.

Reed hurried after him, but Victor locked the door. “‘Victor!” 

“LEAVE ME BE!” Victor wailed from the other room. 

Johnny sidled up next to Ben. “Nice going, jackass.” 

Ben scooched a couple inches away, trying to avoid the worst of the heat. “Stuff it,” He grunted. 

Despite himself, Ben was a little worried for the poor bastard. He’d known Victor for going on nine years, and this was the most emotion he’d ever seen him experience. Once, when he was test-driving Reed and Victor’s hydrogen-powered car, an entire engine had fallen on Victor’s foot. Didn’t panic, he didn’t even raise his voice, just started berating one of the engineering interns to move it. Shattered three bones and couldn’t walk without crutches for a year. 

He always thought finally seeing Victor lose it would feel good, the same way that bowling over the other team’s quarterback used to feel good. But watching Reed bang on the door while Victor made weird little hitching noises, which Ben supposed must be sobs, just felt dirty. 

As Johnny was trying to think of a good comeback, something that combined being insensitive with also being a giant rock monster, an ear-splitting alarm rang through the room. 

“Fuck!” Reed groaned, stretching his fingers into makeshift earplugs. 

“ATTENTION ALL PATIENTS, PLEASE TURN TO THE SCREEN FOR A BRIEF ORIENTATION VIDEO,” An artificial voice told them. 

SWORD Emergency Protocol Video #35

The vitals data was wiped from its screen, and in its place, a VLC media player window opened, only about half the size of the whole wall. The screen went black, and then a strange government-looking logo filled the screen. An ivy wreath surrounded a drawing of Earth as seen from space, bisected by a simple drawing of a broadsword. It looked old, as did the video itself. White and black dots popped up across the picture like a badly-rewound VHS tape. 

“SWORD Emergency Protocol Video Number 35,” A human woman’s voice rang out from the same speaker the intercom used. “Cosmic Radiation.” 

The logo went away, replaced by a recording of a man in a lab coat in a laboratory, surrounded by fellow scientists who puttered about in the background. He was leaning over a microscope. 

As if he suddenly noticed the camera, the man looked up from his microscope with a jolt. “Oh! Didn’t see you there!” 

“What,” said Reed.  

The man smiled and gave the camera a small wave. “Hi! I’m Doctor Nathaniel Richards,” It was at this point the words ‘DR. NATHANIEL RICHARDS, Ph.D.’ appeared at the bottom of the screen in yellow block text.

“Richards?” Sue said. 

“Reed, is that your dad?” Johnny asked. 

“Yes.” Reed confirmed. “But how--”

“If you’re watching this, it means that you and your fellow brave astronauts have been exposed to cosmic radiation.” Doctor Nathaniel Richards, Ph.D. hissed in sympathy. “Not fun. But don’t worry: You’ll be back to work protecting our planet in no time!” 

With an eighties-style star-wipe, the setting changed to a conference room outfitted with a whiteboard. Nathaniel walked into frame, marker in hand. 

“First, you’re probably wondering what cosmic radiation is. Allow me to explain.” Nathaniel walked up to the whiteboard and drew a series of wavelengths. 

“Cosmic radiation is a form of energy that exists outside the electromagnetic spectrum,” Nathaniel crossed out the wavelengths he drew. “It’s only found in areas of incredible interstellar activity-- supernovas, blackholes, places that are antithetical to most life. The only exception to this rule is the small amount produced during the creation of a wormhole,” Nathaniel drew two circles with a line connecting them. He turned back to the camera. “This is how you came into contact with it.” 

“A wormhole?” Reed said, considering. He had done some preliminary research on the subject in college, but the largely theoretical nature of the phenomenon didn’t leave much to study.    

“Wormholes are intersections between different dimensions and versions of reality. Similar to how an earthquake is caused by two tectonic plates rubbing up against each other, wormholes are what happens when two universes get too close to each other. They only last a few seconds, and most of the time they’re in parts of the galaxy so remote no one even registers them.” Nathaniel said on the screen. 

“A spontaneous, natural energy source with a short range,” Reed said. “Of course.” 

“Did your dad just say there are alternate universes?” Johnny asked. 

Nathaniel continued, now in a doctor’s office. “You and your compatriots were unfortunately in the blast zone of a wormhole, which is how you were exposed to cosmic radiation. You may have already noticed some symptoms-- here’s the full list of hypothesized side effects to exposure.”

A massive amount of text suddenly flew down the screen. The only words Reed could catch were ‘SPONTANEOUS REGENERATION’ ‘WIDESPREAD MUTATIONS’ and ‘DEATH’ 

“If you are experiencing any of these symptoms. Don’t worry! SWORD scientists like myself are currently hard at work studying cosmic radiation. We believe that by the year 1992, we will have developed a safe way to remove the cosmic radiation from your system.”

“Nineteen Ninety-Two?” Johnny said, incredulous. “It’s 2012!” 

The screen tessellated into colors, and when it resolidified as video, Nathaniel was standing in front of a glass wall encasing a screen frighteningly similar to the one they were currently watching. On Nathaniel’s screen, old footage from the Moon Landing was playing.

“Until then, the good folks at the SWORD Annex here on the Raft will be taking care of you. You’ll be staying in this state-of-the-art quarantine zone!” Nathaniel walked to the leftmost wall, which was lined with kitchen counters and cabinets. In the background, a man in military fatigues pulled a beer out of the full-size fridge. The man then stepped away to rest against the side of the nearby oven, where popcorn was cooking on the stovetop. Upon hearing the popcorn pop, Nathaniel turned to look at the man in faux surprise. 

“Just the one, Jerry. You’re still on the clock!” He told the man, wagging his finger like a schoolmarm. The man just waved at the camera. 

Reed spared a glance to the direction his father had walked in the video, and found a similar, if ransacked, setup. The cabinets and counters had long since been gutted, and the fridge and oven replaced with the cheapest derivatives possible. It reminded Reed of his and Ben’s dorm room back at ESU. 

The video transitioned to a white-walled room; three sets of bunk beds with footlockers at the ends took up most of the space. Nathaniel walked into frame and threw himself onto one of the lower bunks. He rolled around on the twin mattress for a moment or two before turning back to the camera. “Cozy!”

The video transitioned again to a glass-encased shower. Nathaniel popped the door open, peeking out from inside the shower. “Occupied!” He said. “I’m just kidding. But your bathroom is equipped with a mirror, sink, counter, toilet, and a combination shower/bathtub.” 

Nathaniel wiggled his eyebrows. “It’s big enough for two.” A scantily clad woman pushed past Nathaniel to get out of the shower, kissing him on the cheek as she left. Nathaniel winked. 

“Oh, it’s Doctor R alright,” Ben said. 

“That’s unnecessary,” Sue said, disgusted. 

“Were they having shower sex dry?” Johnny asked. “Reed’s dad still had all his clothes on!” 

Nathaniel stepped out of the shower and stopped next to a large metal drawer inlaid into the wall of the bathroom. “This is where you’ll be depositing all biological samples for further analysis.” 

He then walked out of the bathroom and back to the main room with the glass wall. “And that’s the grand tour! Get comfortable, this place is going to be your home for the next few years or so while my team and I work out how to get you back to normal! Don’t worry, with your continued assistance on the ‘sample’ front, we’ll have you out of here in time for The Cosby Show!” The camera pushed in on Nathaniel’s face, who winked again, as the screen faded to black. 

“That was the worst porn I’ve ever seen,” Johnny said. 

“FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS, PLEASE USE SWORD HANDHELD TRANSCEIVER--” The ceiling voice paused suddenly. 

There was a loud ‘thunk’ from the bathroom. 

“LOCATED IN SAMPLE DELIVERY STATION.” It finished. 

“Hell yeah I got questions,” Ben muttered angrily as he marched to the bathroom, Sue and Johnny not far behind him. Reed didn’t move. 

Ben glanced back at him in surprise. Asking science questions to a bunch of experts you didn’t even have to look in the eye? He asked for that for Christmas, once. “Reed, come on.” 

“I…” Reed started. He didn’t know how to put it into words; the way the cocktail of panic and discovery had worn off and what had once seemed incredible was now impossibly daunting. He couldn’t do what Ben was asking. He couldn’t be the confident super-scientist they needed when all he wanted to do was curl up into a ball and stay there until he woke up from this nightmare. 

Or at least, he couldn't do it alone. 

“I need to get Victor.” Reed said. 

Ben scoffed. “What are you gonna do, talk him out of there? When has that ever worked? Leave Dracula to his tantrum, he’ll come out when he’s good and ready.”

With a wince at Ben’s frank manner, Sue reached out to grab Johnny’s arm and dig her fingernails in to prevent the ‘oooh’ noise he was undoubtedly about to make before she remembered that he was on fire. 

Reed looked hard at Ben for a moment, searching his face for something he didn’t find. He then kicked off his crocs and collapsed his entire body into something only a little more solid than a puddle, and slid under the bedroom door. 

“Oooh,” Johnny said. 

Lament

Victor von Doom was trapped. 

He was fourteen. They were running through the Carpathians, through the worst blizzard Latveria had seen in twenty years. The wind howled like a dying wolf, but the step-stomp of the Kingsmen’s horses, the rattle of the AK-47s, rose above the keening. Unseen through the white haze of the snow but always present.

His father put an icy hand on his chest to stop him. There’s too many of them, he said. We must separate and throw them off the trail.

You must keep going, Victor. I will meet you at the bottom. 

He was tired. They had been running for miles. And he was cold, colder than he could ever remember being, then or now. The truth behind the words flew past him like snowflakes in the wind. His father gave him the clothes off his back, the ring on his finger, and all he could think was how much warmer he was with the added layers. 

It wasn’t until he was at the foot of the mountain on the Romanian side, safe from the King, that the reality of what had just happened hit him. 

His father had died for him. 

At least when they killed his mother they had the decency to leave the body. Burned and bullet-ridden as it was, it was something they could put in the ground. Something to do the rites over. Without the body, without the proper procedure, there could be no rest for the spirit.

His father would be trapped between this world and the next until the end of time. 

Victor wanted to go back. To get the body. Even a piece would work-- something of the vessel that had carried his father in this life, that was all that was needed. But as he turned back to the mountain a litany of terrible thoughts filled his head. 

When he returned to the Zefiro, he told the remaining elders every excuse in the book. Good ones, logical ones.

What if the soldiers weren’t gone yet. What if the snow got higher, or the air colder, he barely got down as it was. What if the wind had blown away his tracks and it was already a waste of time. 

Of course. We would have lost you too, they said. He was absolved of the grievous sin of leaving his father to damnation.

But it was all lies. He could have done it, he knew. He was smaller then, he could have avoided the soldiers. He could have stolen warmer clothes from a farmer and come back, even. The tracks would have kept a few hours. 

As he stood at the foot of that mountain, he thought how horrible it would be to see his father without life in his eyes. Of the terrible noise his bones and frozen tendons would make as he ripped a finger from his hand. 

The dead shit themselves. It’s a natural part of the dying process. If you don’t get them burned or in a hole soon enough, the smell of the shit mixes with the decaying corpse and it sinks into everything. Everything. Clothes, walls, your skin. After they came for his mother, the smell wouldn’t leave for months. He had to throw out all his clothes. 

He didn’t want to do that again. He didn’t want to smell it again, to see it again. 

So Victor turned back around and began walking towards the road and the rising sun, to the world of the living. He condemned his own father to an eternity of suffering for no other reason than he didn’t want to dirty his clothes. 

He thinks about it sometimes. Less now, as he’s grown older. Saving his mother helped. 

Nevertheless, some days he will look out the window and it will be snowing. Or a mounted policeman will be walking down the street beside him. And he will wonder. 

If it was the soldiers or the cold that did him in. If it was quick or slow. If he hated Victor in the end.

It’s the snow he always comes back to. He doesn’t know why. By most metrics, being hunted and put down like a dog is the worse death. Did his father have to watch as the snow swallowed up his body, the only grave he would ever know? Did he feel it? The cold and the pressure all around him. Building and building.

Now, slumped against a strong box, once again held against his will, he wonders, did it feel anything like this? 

It wasn’t pain, in the strictest sense. It was neutral sensation taken to the highest possible level of awareness. The metal pressed on him no more than a tight shirt or a glove would, but when applied to every square inch of one’s body, the feeling was beyond disconcerting. 

“--Leave Dracula to his tantrum, he’ll come out when he’s good and ready,” Grimm said on the other side of the wall. A tired cliche, if more accurate than not.  What is this metal skin if not some higher power’s twisted idea of a coffin? 

A puddle swam underneath the door sill. 

“Victor,” The puddle said, before rising up from the ground like a geyser. Four long rivulets broke off from the center mass, wriggling like butterflies in cocoons. After a few moments, the liquid began to solidify, somehow, into Reed. 

“My god.” Victor whispered as Reed adjusted his clothes, which had fallen onto his reshaped body slightly lopsided.

It was incredible: he had just transformed from a flat disc a few centimeters in height to a six-foot-tall human man. In seconds, like an octopus squeezing into an ocean crevice. A large part of him wanted to study Reed. But an even larger part--

“Get out.” Victor gritted at the miracle standing in front of him. I don’t want you to see me like this. 

Reed did not get out, to Victor’s chagrin. Instead, he took a good look at Victor, sighed “Oh, honey,” and sat down beside him and took his hands in his own. 

Never leave me, Victor wanted to say. 

“Insolence.” He said instead.

Reed ignored him. “Does it hurt?” He rubbed at Victor’s wrist in an attempt at a carpal tunnel massage. 

Victor shook his head. 

“That’s good.” Reed said with a weak smile. “When you ran off like that-- I couldn’t help but be reminded of December 2004.” 

When they’d been working on their hydrogen engine in college, an entire engine block had come loose from the crane it had been suspended from. Four hundred pounds fell onto Victor’s foot from three feet in the air. After he’d gotten the mess cleaned up, Victor had tried to hobble to the student medical center alone. He got all the way to the biology building before he passed out from the pain. 

Victor let a breath out through his nose. “How many times do I have to tell you, I wanted to fall asleep in that laboratory. I had classes early the next morning there. I was saving time.” 

“Mm-hmm.” Reed agreed to disagree. It had taken a couple hours to notice Victor was missing, Reed had gotten caught up in some calculations, and about thirty minutes to actually find him where he’d collapsed next to a microscope.

It was another thirty for the ambulance to arrive, Reed babbling about his old chemistry Ph.D. thesis from when he was at Cambridge the whole time in an attempt to keep Victor’s mind off his myriad of broken bones. He had felt like an idiot for picking such a boring topic to regale a sick person with until he went to see the other man in the hospital the next morning. Victor had a bulleted list of everything that was wrong with his hypothesis written on a whiteboard he had menaced out of the nurses. The two of them debated the existence of element 119 until visiting hours ended. 

A few moments passed in peaceable silence before Victor asked, “Does yours? Hurt, I mean.” 

“A little when I woke up. I was…I don’t know how they got us here but I think they dragged me behind the car for a little while. My arms were five feet long and my legs were essentially flat--” Reed let out a short, slightly hysterical laugh at the memory. “Sue nearly threw up just looking at me!” 

Victor made a noise of disapproval at Reed’s blasé summary of being tortured. 

As always, Reed missed the point. “No, really! I looked like something out of the hell dimension.” 

Victor wrapped his right hand around Reed’s. “You could never.” He said, as sincerely as he could. 

Reed looked up from his kneading. “You too. You know that, right?” 

Victor snorted. 

Reed cupped Victor’s face in his hand. “I mean it.” 

Victor leaned into the touch, slightly, before changing the subject. 

“Wormholes, then.” He had heard the audio through the bedroom speakers. 

Reed’s wan smile grew, if only a little. “Wormholes. And a new wavelength of energy!” 

They both knew how ridiculous Nathaniel’s claim that cosmic energy existed “outside the electromagnetic spectrum” was. It was absolute laziness. Instead of even hypothesizing how this new energy would fit onto the current or a modified version of the table of energy classification, he just said it didn’t fit and called it a day. Which, given what Victor knew about Nathaniel as a father and scientist, seemed apt. 

“Cosmic radiation is a terrible name,” Victor said. All radiation originating outside of Earth was cosmic. It described nothing about the actual phenomenon. It was shaping up to be astrophysics’ Who’s on First. 

Reed hummed in agreement. “Dad was never a great namer. Did I ever tell you that he worked on the original internet, back in the sixties? He wanted to call it ‘hyperspace’.”

“Dear Lord,” Victor snorted despite himself.

“Maybe we can rename it, once we’ve studied it some more.”

“Von Doom Radiation.” 

“Richards-von Doom Radiation.” 

“Von Doom-Richards radiation. You already got first billing on the damn hydrogen engine.” 

Reed burst out laughing. 

Victor wrapped a begrudging arm around his waist to steady him as his body shook. The man had lost all sense of proprioception when distracted. Victor had seen him fall out of too many chairs just reading to trust he wouldn’t fall flat on his face, even if he was already on the floor. 

When the giggles subsided and Reed raised his head from his perch in Victor’s neck, Victor could see there were tears streaking down his face.

“What a mess. What a mess.” Reed muttered, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I can’t believe I just learned wormholes exist and the only thing I can think is how much I want to be back in college.”  

Victor brushed Reed’s hair back with his fingers. “The feeling is very much mutual,” A shitty dorm room sounded quite nice right about now. An engine to the foot was sounding nice right about now. 

“This is all my fault,” Reed whispered. 

“No,” Victor replied. 

Reed shook his head. “You said it yourself: we wouldn’t have even been up there if it wasn’t for me. And now--”

“No, Reed.” Victor said forcefully. “If anyone is at fault, it is the jackbooted fascists who kept this information secret for so long. Do not allow them to make you believe otherwise.” 

Reed took a deep breath in. Let it out. 

“What are we going to do?” He asked. 

That, at least, was simple. “What we always do. We’re going to solve the problem.” Victor said confidently. 

Reed disagreed. Making solar batteries or space stations was one thing-- treating previously unknown radiation-based illnesses was another. And if that video was anything to go on, they would need to find a treatment. His dad was a bit of a braggart: he would have made them make a new one if he had found a cure.

 “We’re not medical doctors.” He argued. 

“Susan is. I’m sure she could teach us the basics. And I mean no offense to her, but I don’t imagine practicing medicine is more difficult than, say, getting a probe into a black hole.” 

Reed hummed, unconvinced. “This isn’t splinting a broken leg. This is-- I don’t even know what this is. Gene therapy? Modified chemotherapy? And that’s not even taking into account the time loss we both know I’m going accumulate studying wormholes by themselves--” 

Victor lifted Reed’s chin with a finger, silencing him. “My heart. We can do this.” 

Before Reed could respond, Ben yelled from the other room, “REED! GET BACK OUT HERE!” 

Reed turned to face the door, expression akin to a man about to face the firing squad. “I don’t really have a choice, I guess.” 

He pushed himself to his feet, holding out a hand to help Victor do the same. 

“Oh, no.” 

“No?” 

“I’ll stay put, thank you.” Victor gestured to himself. “Spare everyone Dracula’s visage.” 

Reed knelt back down. “You don’t look any worse than anyone out there.”

“I can’t, Reed.” Victor insisted. “The thought of anyone seeing--” Anyone but you. “I can’t.”

Reed took a deep breath in, thinking. 

“I’m…sorry,” Victor said haltingly. He knew it would be a massive impediment to research to have to communicate remotely. 

Reed squeezed Victor’s hand. “No, don’t be. Is it just the skin that bothers you?” 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you could cover it all up, would you be able to leave the room?” 

Victor mulled that over. It wouldn’t be ideal, by any means. But it would be bearable. “Yes, I could. But how am I supposed to--” 

Reaching over Victor, Reed opened the lid of the strongbox at his back. Rummaging around for a moment or two, Reed let out a sharp exhale when he found what he was looking for. “Perfect.” 

Reed pulled out of the box an oversized hoodie and a pair of lounge pants. 

“These should completely cover you. And you can use the hood as a mask.” Reed looked more closely at the material. “We may have to cut eyeholes in it. Do you know how to sew?” 

“Yes.” Victor replied, dumbfounded by the simplicity of the solution. “Yes, I do.”

How had he not thought of that already? What was he coming to if he couldn’t even check his surroundings, too caught up in self-pity? If it wasn’t for Reed--

If it wasn’t for Reed, he wouldn’t be here in the first place. He would have burned to a crisp sophomore year. He would have died from exhaustion in the biology building. 

He would be alone in the snow. 

Reed moved to leave. Victor grabbed him by the arm to stop him. 

“Wait.” 

Reed looked at him expectantly. 

This is why Victor had written his proposal in advance. He could think of the most biting insults in seconds, at the slightest provocation, but when faced with things like this-- He couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. 

Thank you. I love you.

“How did you know what was in the box,” He said. 

Idiot. 

Reed titled his head a degree in confusion. He thought it was obvious. “That’s where Ben used to keep all his stuff when he was at boot camp. I assumed the practice carried over.” 

“Oh. Of course.” 

Victor removed the clothes he had gotten in Colorado and put the new ones on. Flipping the hood over his head, he realized the fabric was conveniently transparent on the inside. He could see Reed clearly. 

“Ready?” Reed asked. 

“Yes.” Victor said. Let us face the wolves.”  

The Wolves at Your Door Do Not Howl: They Whine

“Man in the Iron Mask.” 

“Too nineties.” 

“Man of Steel?” 

“Lame. And taken, come on guys.” Agent Marshall said, starting to get frustrated. He walked back to his chair from where he had been writing nickname choices for the new inmates. 

SHIELD had been giving prisoners “codenames” since the organization’s inception. It started as some World War Two anti-espionage thing, supposedly. Dehumanize the inmates and reduce the chance the Germans figured out who the hell they were in one fell swoop. The dehumanizing part was still very much a part of it, but nowadays the whole ‘obfuscating the enemy’ had been replaced with trying to find the most obvious, annoying, and ideally pun-based code name possible. It was big business: there were annual contests for the best one. 

In the SHIELD agents’ defense, there wasn’t a lot else to do on the Raft. There had been on the old one. If you let them, the old guard that got to serve at Rikers will talk your ear off about how they used to get off their shift and head right into the city for a couple drinks. 

That all ended when some of the mutants they were keeping broke out. They blew up half the financial district before SHIELD could get them back under control. After that, the head honchos decided it would be better to keep all the superhuman prisoners as far away from populated areas as possible. So they built the next one on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. 

There were no boats on or off the island besides monthly supply drops and personnel exchange. Even when they weren’t on the clock, agents had to stay away from the mainland to prevent any kind of information leaking. The entire place was a wireless dead zone, for obvious reasons, and an Inhuman with laser breath had blown up the only basketball hoop back in ‘89. 

“I don’t understand what’s wrong with Iron Maiden.” Agent Steve Reilly piped up. 

Agent Marshall pinched the bridge of his nose in annoyance. “Steve, I’ll say this one more time: you cannot name both the gay guys after girls. You’re gonna get us sent to HR again.”

“It’s a band! And why are we so married to Mrs. Incredible anyway?” 

“Because it’s Jake’s birthday and that’s what he picked.”

“It’s also really, really good,” Jake muttered. 

“Elasti-guy, Plastic Man, Rubbermaid--” Reilly began listing off better options.

“That’s a girl’s name again! Goddamnit, Steve!” Marshall yelled. 

“I think of feminine puns! It has nothing to do with the gay thing!” Reilly yelled back. 

“Okay then. As your supervisor, I demand that you turn your talents to the one actual woman. Because this is embarrassing.” Agent Marshall walked back to the whiteboard to tap the currently winning name for Susan Storm.

“Invisible Girl? Who thought of that? Who wrote that down and didn’t immediately shoot themselves? Ryan?”

“It’s better than nothing!” Ryan the CENTURION tech said defensively. “And it’s Steve’s turn!” 

“Yeah Steve, give us your ‘feminine pun’,” Jake goaded. 

Agent Reilly opened his mouth, then closed it. 

Jake and Ryan threw their empty coffee cups at him. 

“You homophobic piece of shit,” Marshall said. 

“It’s not my fault their powers have girly puns! If anything, it’s their fault for being gay and making it weird!” Steve shouted against the onslaught. 

Marshall groaned. “We’re gonna get our asses handed to us in the bracket.”

 Behind him on the console, the walkie-talkie buzzed.

“HEY! YOU ASSHOLES STILL THERE?” Major Benjamin Grimm’s, AKA the Rockman, AKA Rocky Horror Picture Show, AKA Landslide, voice burst out of the walkie-talkie speakers.

Marshall whipped his arm out to swipe it from where he had left it on the monitor bay. “Yep. Sorry about that, Major. We read you loud and clear.” 

“We got him. You can say what you wanted to say.” 

“Jesus. I’m never gonna get used to looking at ‘em.” Agent Reilly said as he turned back to the monitor.

Even the worst mutants and Inhumans they had in lockup still looked kinda human. If you shaved off the horns and the wings and, on occasion, scales. These folks were on a different level. 

The girl one was close to the worst in Reilly’s opinion. While she was knocked out, her body faded in and out like a chameleon changing colors. And not the clean, all-or-nothing invisibility she was sporting now. Or the kind where just her clothes come off, that at least would have been kinda fun-- but no. Instead, he’d spent the last five hours watching her innards do the tango: bone-to-muscles-to-organs-to-veins and back again. The only guy that can get off on that is Hannibal Lecter. 

Her brother was also pretty bad, like a zombie that shambled out of an airplane crash. They could take a couple pointers from Major Grimm: at least his body was so bloated by the rocks he didn’t even really register as a human. 

The screen with the quarantine suite’s feed showed two more figures than the last time he looked. One was the metal guy, Victor Von something, now drowning in an off-white SWORD sweatshirt five sizes too big. The other was very obviously Reed Richards. 

Jesus Christ, Reed Richards. He was like whatever fucked up the Storms had a baby with the Devil. He was better now, obviously, and based on that little trick with the door he seemed to have some control over it, but Reilly would rather eat dirt than have to review the footage to send to the lab.

Marshall snapped his fingers at him to shut him up, before hitting ‘talk’ on the walkie. “Hello there, Doctor Richards. I’m section chief Marshall, and I’ll be your point of contact with SWORD during your stay here.” 

Richards glanced at his companions, silently wondering if that was a normal greeting. Susan Storm shrugged in response. 

“I-- Okay. There’s something you needed to tell me?” 

“Yes. Your associates were asking questions about their condition; I thought it best a scientist be there to explain it to them.” 

“There was a scientist: Doctor Susan Storm,” Richards replied, confused.  

“Now who’s going to HR?” Reilly whispered vindictively. 

Marshall flipped him off. “Yes, but you’re the head scientist, right? The leader?” 

The shitty ghost costume-looking guy took the walkie-talkie from Reed.

“That would be me. And you’re not fooling anyone: say what you came to say. Now.”  With that last word, he looked directly into the camera the agents were using to monitor them. Which was supposed to be too small to see with the naked eye.

“Oh damn, that’s some Paranormal Activity shit right there,” Jake said. 

“What’s the bad guy’s name from that one, somebody write that down,” Ryan said. 

Marshall angrily gestured for them to shut the hell up. “Well, the thing is—” 

Behind ten feet of inconel bricks with an adamantium backboard, Reed sighed. His shoulders slumped far beyond what should have been anatomically possible. 

Taking the handheld transceiver back from Victor, he asked, “Does this have anything to do with the lack of a cure for our condition?” 

Ben, Sue, and Johnny turned to look at him in abject horror. 

“What the hell are you talking about, Stretch?” Ben asked, panic overriding his manners.  

“Reed, why do you think that?” Sue asked calmly, placing her fear into a teeny-tiny box in the back of her head.

Reed narrowed his eyebrows in confusion. “The video clearly stated the researchers had yet to create a functional treatment.”

“Yeah, in the eighties. It’s 2012!” Johnny replied. 

“Case in point: why would they keep something so outdated unless they didn’t have anything to update it with?” 

Johnny snorted. “Um, 'cause it’s the government? My high school’s been using the same moldy old textbooks for like fifty years!” 

“Nevertheless,” Reed continued, with a small frown at the state of public education,  “I know for a fact my father stopped working on government contracts when the Cold War ended in 1991. The video projected a 1992 finalization of the treatment.”

“He’s only one man.” Sue pointed out. “That video said there was a whole team!”

Victor shook his head. “Nathaniel Richards singlehandedly designed a carbon-negative biofuel in the year 1967. Whatever team they had with him was undoubtedly only in name.” 

“And even if they weren’t, Dad wrote all his research in code. I still haven’t deciphered some of his papers, and I’ve been working on them since he died.” 

“You’ve gotta be fucking with me,” Ben swore. “Are you telling me we’re stuck like this because your no-good, money-grubbing--” 

“Still my dad, Ben.” Reed interjected. 

“Man-whore of a father didn’t wanna share?” Ben finished. 

Agent Marshall chose that moment to butt back into the conversation. “You’re right on the mark, Major Grimm.”

“Hey!” Ben said sharply, taking the walkie back from Reed. “That’s my buddy’s old man you’re talkin’ about! Where the fuck do you get off?” 

There was some snickering in the background as Marshall responded, a little shakily, “W-well, anyway, because of research delays, I regret to inform you that there is no cure for your condition.” 

“Yeah, we got that, Agent M. When do we get outta here?” Ben asked. 

On the other side of the wall, Agent Marshall had an idea. 

“I got an idea.” He told his coworkers, but unlike Reed Richards, he made sure his finger was off the ‘talk’ button first. 

“Is it a stupid idea?” Agent Reilly asked. “Because you got your stupid idea face on.” 

“Suck my dick, Steve,” Marshall replied. 

“HR!” The other agents said in unison. 

“Shut it!” Marshall yelled back. “I think we should go off-script.” 

SWORD, like SHIELD, had a set of prepared explanations for various situations that may arise and may need to be explained to civilians, or more often in the case of SHIELD, new inmates. SWORD’s ‘incarcerated because you’re a living weapon’ speech hadn’t been updated since the forties, and it showed. It talked a lot about patriotic duty with a heavy emphasis on killing Nazis while somehow being vaguely anti-Semitic. Agents had a name for canned explanations like this that needed to be updated: punch-coupons, after the usual reaction from civilians upon hearing them. Marshall had gone eight years without having to read one, and he really didn’t want to break his streak. 

“They think they’re stuck like this, right? Well, obviously they’re too dangerous to leave. ‘Cause of the radiation or something.” He explained to his coworkers. 

“Oh yeah,” Reilly said sarcastically. “Be sure to say ‘radiation or something’ when you’re talking to the smartest scientists on the planet.” 

“You’re overthinking it.” Marshall dismissed him. 

“You’re underthinking it.” Reilly countered.  

 “Just read the speech, boss,” Jake said. “It’s not like they’re going to get out of there to beat you up.” 

“HEY! WE DON’T GOT ALL DAY HERE!” Major Grimm shouted into the walkie. 

Marshall considered the options. 

“Don’t do it,” Reilly said. 

Marshall hit ‘talk’. “Well, Major, I’m sorry to say this, but SWORD has decided that in your current state, all of you pose too serious a threat to public safety to be released at this time.”

“WHAT?” Grimm roared so loudly that the walkie speakers peaked. 

“This is going to bite you in the ass.” Steve said. 

“They’re taking it pretty well.” Marshall said, staring at the screen where they were not taking it well. 

The boy-- Jonathan, his flames grew higher and brighter, from yellow-red to practically white. Reilly could almost feel the heat. Major Grimm’s giant orange mouth opened, and the cameras shook with the force of his voice. Not that anyone in the control room could hear it: Grimm stopped holding down the button on the walkie. 

“I still can’t believe you broke the fucking microphones,” Nate told Ryan. 

Ryan shrunk down in his chair in embarrassment. “You try retrofitting a thirty-year-old isolation room with Stark tech, see how well you do!” 

CENTURION: Stark Industries’ gift to prisons everywhere. It connected everything: cameras, microphones, fancy-schmancy vital readers, and, most importantly, defense systems. Add a couple robots for serving and cleaning, and a prison the size of the Raft could be run by a crew of less than a hundred. 

When the SI guys installed everything in ‘07, they didn’t bother to do the SWORD annex, because why would they? SWORD had never once encountered something alive enough to put cuffs on. Which meant that when finally did get actual inmates, about twelve hours ago, Ryan had to put it all in by himself before the tranqs wore off. Considering the time crunch, he thought he did a pretty good job! And yes, he had managed to fry the microphones while doing it, but as an apology, he volunteered to go to the requisitions office to get the walkie-talkies. That’s a forty-five-minute walk! 

The floating head walked over to Major Grimm and snatched the walkie from his hand. The walkie hung suspended in the air for a second, before the ‘talk’ button sunk into the body of the device. 

Sue took the walkie and pressed ‘talk’ with all her strength. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”

“You can’t keep us here! Prom is in like a month!” Johnny yelled, glowing brighter in indignation. 

“We’re American citizens: this is a direct violation of habeas corpus!” Reed said. 

“Darling, traditional jurisprudence doesn’t apply to abductions,” Victor told him, rubbing the bridge of his nose. The clamor was starting to give him a headache.  

Sue continued her berating. “WE HAVE LIVES! MEDICAL NEEDS!” She pointed at Johnny. “IF MY BROTHER DOESN’T GET 30 MILLIGRAMS OF ADDERALL A DAY, HE’LL START BOUNCING OFF THE WALLS!” 

“Not cool, Sue!” Johnny whined.  “HEY, MEN IN BLACK! SUE ONLY SLEEPS IN FLANNEL BUNNY PJS!” 

“JOHNNY!” 

“I have to call Debbie,” Ben said, ignoring the hullabaloo beside him. He knew he should have found a pay phone back in Colorado. Ben grabbed the walkie back from Sue. “Agent M, I need a line out of here.” He said desperately. 

“That won’t be possible.” Marshall replied. 

“Please,” Ben begged. “I have to talk to my wife. She probably thinks-- I don’t know what she’s thinking right now. Please, I gotta talk to her. I hafta hear her voice.”

After a painful moment of hesitation, Agent Marshall responded. “To ensure public safety, all of your families have been informed that you perished in the crash.”  

If they responded ‘poorly’ to learning they were stuck, there weren’t words for how badly they responded to learning they’d been declared dead. 

The boy Storm grew even brighter and whiter, like a nuclear bomb about to go off. Steam started rising off him as he burst into tears. MREs floated off the table and careened into walls as the girl threw them with invisible hands. 

But none of that compared to how Major Grimm reacted. With another room-shaking roar, he started pounding on the walls with his monstrous fists, the Inconel bricks yielding to his strength without so much as a fight. 

“Shit,” Marshall said. 

“Look at that,” Ryan said in macabre wonder. “he has to be doing 1,500 megapascals per punch. 

“FUCKIN’ X-FILES LOOKIN’ RADIO TALKIN’ SHADOW MEN!” Ben swore, punching the south wall into dust. “LET’S SEE HOW TOUGH YOU ARE WHEN YOU DON’T GOT ME IN A HAMSTER CAGE!” 

“Ben, calm down!” Reed yelled from across the room as he stretched his hand into a wide net to catch the food Sue was smashing into the wall. “Sue, stop-- Ow!” She threw one right at his head.

“I’M PROCESSING!” She shouted as the MRE made contact with his face. 

“I can’t be dead! I’m sixteen!” Johnny wailed. His flames seemed to be impacted by his emotional state: it was getting hotter by the second.  

“I-- Johnny--” Reed sputtered. “Victor, help me!”  

“Children, please. What will the company think.” Victor said placidly, bypassing Sue’s barrage to get to the mini-fridge, which he promptly turned one-hundred and eighty degrees and began gutting. 

“VICTOR!” Reed cried as he realized what he was putting together. “No bombs!” 

Victor shushed him, pointing a metal finger at the ceiling, where SWORD’s cameras and microphones were undoubtedly cataloging their every move. “Now we have to pray Grimm’s paroxysm is loud enough to drown you out.” He said in Latverian. 

“I--” Reed started, but Victor shushed him again. 

Reed switched to Latverian. “No incendiaries in closed spaces! We’ve talked about this!” 

“I’m well aware; if I had any other option, I would be using it. But these neonazis weren’t kind enough to leave us a shoddy kitchenette made of plastique, and needs must. I’m not spending the rest of my life as a captive of the United States Government.” Victor spun the coolant tank around in his hands, frowning at the level of chemical decay on the casing. The poor machine hadn’t been serviced in years. It was still functional for his purposes, but only barely.

“Start on the coffee maker for me, my love?” Victor asked Reed. “I need detonator parts.” 

On the other side of that wall, the agents were starting to panic.

“Activate CENTURION. Complete neutralization.” Reilly ordered frantically. He technically couldn’t authorize the use of it, he was only second in command, but Marshall was just standing there staring at the screen with his mouth open like a fish. 

“Now?” Ryan asked. 

“Yes, now! Are you stupid?” 

“It’s kinda early to ‘neutralize’ them, isn’t it? And the General said he wanted them alive--” 

“Harrison can kiss my ass! What do you think is gonna happen when he gets through that wall, huh?” 

“Hold on!” Nate interrupted them. “Look, he’s stopping!” 

It was true: on screen, Major Grimm stopped tearing through multi-million dollar building materials like tissue paper. He had turned back around to face Richards, who was saying something.

“EVERYBODY STOP!” Reed shouted over the din, stopping the others in their tracks with the steel in his voice. “This is a waste of time!” 

“So?” Ben said.

“I beg your pardon,” Victor said, still in Latverian and insulted. 

Reed sighed. “I’m sorry honey, but one bomb with that low a yield isn’t going to get us out of a base full of armed soldiers. Unless you could harness Johnny’s flames--” He shook his head, the physical action reinforcing the mental one. He could research the military uses of superheated freon later! 

“That’s not the point! Guys, we’re better than this!”

Sue dropped the MREs and fixed her most withering look upon Reed. “What else are we supposed to do?”

“We--” Reed began, but quickly realized he didn’t have an answer. He looked over at Victor, who had taken his advice and was trying to solder two pieces of metal together by holding them up to Johnny, like a kid trying to roast a smore. 

“We can solve the problem.” He said decisively.

He seized the handheld transceiver from Sue had dropped it with an elongated arm. “Agent Marshall, I have a question for you.” 

“Y-yes?” Marshall responded timidly. 

“Would it be possible for us to join the investigation into cosmic radiation?” Reed asked. 

There was silence on the other end for a couple seconds. “Excuse me?” 

“I know we’re not employed by your organization, but we’re more than qualified. Myself especially, I’m the only person alive who can translate my father’s notes.”

“Well--” Marshall started. 

“We wouldn’t even have to leave quarantine! Your scientists could execute experimental procedures that we design, and then we could analyze the data from here!” 

He glanced around at his friends, trying to muster the courage he didn't feel. “What’s a little genetic mutation compared to going to space?” 

Marshall thought it was a pretty good proposal. Except for the fact that SWORD never had any intention of fixing them. Not that he could tell Richards that, he and his motley crew would just start rioting again.

He didn’t know how to get out of this. 

“I don’t know how to get out of this.” He told his agents.

“Just shoot ‘em,” Reilly said.  

“Well, that’s one way,” Marshall said in distaste. 

“They’ve proven to be a danger to themselves and personnel. Protocol says we neutralize and bag the bodies for analysis.” 

“I know!”  

The thing was, Marshall had never killed anybody before. He’d transferred over to SWORD relatively early in his career. And it was one thing to waste a couple super-criminals trying to kill you, it was another thing to watch a machine gun mow down five innocent people, however fucked up, who just wanted to go home. 

Seeing Marshall's hesitance, Jake grabbed a piece of paper and wrote ‘MONEY’ on it in big letters, before holding it up for Marshall to see. 

Marshall gave him a thumbs up. “That’s very kind, Doctor Richards, but I’m afraid your services are a little out of our price range.” 

“Price?” Richards repeated, like he couldn’t believe Marshall had even asked. “It’s our lives at stake here! A consultant’s fee is the last thing on our minds.”

“I see. How generous.” Marshall responded feebly.

Steve knew that look. “Just shoot ‘em! They attacked us, nobody is going to say a damn thing--” 

“It’s not like the lab guys weren’t going to do tests anyway, it’s free labor! And Harrison said he wanted them alive!” Marshall said.

 “They probably won’t mind getting poked as much if they think they’re the ones who ordered it,” Ryan said, consideringly. 

Reilly huffed.“You’re just kicking this down the road, do you get that? One year, two years, they’re gonna have a vaccine or whatever and we’re gonna be in the exact same place we were five minutes ago, but now they’ve got that much more experience with their powers.”

Marshall hit ‘talk’ on the walkie-talkie again. “When can you start?” 

“Right now, if you’ll let us!” Richards answered, and began listing off the supplies they would need.

“This is a mistake,” Reilly warned over Richard’s droning. 

He was right. 

Mamma Mia Watch Party

“Classmates of the deceased Jonathan “Johnny” Storm are gathering at Glenville High School tonight to honor the young astronaut with a candlelight vigil,” said the journalist, tightly bundled in a thick winter coat. Behind her, a crowd of people holding candles surrounded the Glenville High School front door. 

“Oh yeah! Look at that turnout!” Johnny, sitting cross-legged in front of the screen wall, said excitedly. “Sue, look! It’s even better than yours!” 

“That’s really great, Johnny,” Sue responded absentmindedly, doing some calculations as she waited for the SWORD laboratory to answer the satellite phone. She was, as she had been for the past few days, semi-translucent. It was better than just being a talking head and much better than the complete visibility below the skin level she had been sporting for the entirety of day three. She had scared Johnny so bad he lit Victor’s sweatshirt on fire from halfway across the room. For now, she would take looking like a bad watercolor painting of herself: at least she could tell where her hands were when she was typing.

Victor, Reed, and herself had commandeered the kitchen folding table for their research, stuffing it to the point of collapse with all the scientific materials they could get their hands on. Unfortunately, that still wasn’t a lot. In the four days since they woke up in quarantine, the SWORD guys had managed to get them five file boxes worth of Reed’s Dad’s data, two ancient laptops, three scientific calculators (not even graphing!), a box of number two pencils, and about twenty reams of printer paper. 

“Would any of you happen to know how many turns there are in an official baseball game? ” Reed asked.

“Nine. And they’re called innings, buddy.” Ben said, not looking up from the five-year-old copy of The New York Times the SWORD guys had dropped in with the tv remote for the big wall screen. 

“Thank you.” Reed replied automatically as he entered the numbers into the rudimentary program he had designed to test cipher solutions. The computers they were given didn’t have the processing power to brute force the codes, so Reed had spent the past four days winnowing down possible solutions based on the doodles his father had drawn in the margins of the notes and then trial-and-erroring his way to the correct translations. Currently, he was working with a baseball, some kind of tesseract, and what he hoped was a face with two spherical eyes and a very large nose. The work was slow going, to say the least. It probably didn’t help that he hadn’t slept in going on seventy-two hours, but what was he supposed to do? Sleep while his friends put their hearts and souls into discovering a cure for an illness he caused? 

“The community here is absolutely shattered by the loss, and perhaps no one understands that better than Johnny’s best friend, Michael Snow.” The journalist continued.

The camera panned left to reveal a teen boy standing next to her. He had a candle like the rest of the people milling about in the background, but he was holding an iPhone and texting with the other hand.  

“What the fuck.” Johnny said. 

“Michael, how are you feeling, seeing so many people coming out to mourn your friend?” The newscaster asked. 

The boy looked up, startled, glancing at the woman and then into the camera. “Uh, sad. Really sad.” He nodded, trying to make up for the lack of any actual grief. “Johnny was my best friend, you can ask anybody. We were like blood brothers.” 

“That asshole shoved me in a locker every day for the past two years!” Johnny spat at the screen. “I didn’t know he even knew my name until right now!”

“Shoutout to my actual brother, Jake, and my boy Damien.” Mike threw up a peace sign. 

“Aw, come on!” Johnny groaned. “It’s my memorial!” 

“Is there anything you’d like to share with the world about Johnny?” The journalist tried to get the interview back on track. 

“Oh totally. Really cool that he bit it in a space explosion. Also, party at my house at ten, everybody’s invited.” He glanced at the newscaster. “You too. Do you like beer? Cause we’re definitely gonna have some.” 

“SERIOUSLY?” Johnny yelled. 

Ben scooched a few feet back on his makeshift queen mattress. “Watch it, Matchstick. I ain’t in the mood for pyrotechnics.” 

Johnny wasn’t on fire all the time anymore, which was good, because they only had so many sets of pants in the footlockers. But he had way too many flare-ups for anybody to get too comfortable. Reed and Sue said it was because he was a teenager. Something about how all those hormones floating around his brain turned his emotional control and his powers to soup. 

All Ben knew was the kid hit 2,000 Kelvin when he realized he had eaten the last of the sour cream and onion chips, ruining the clothes he was wearing and all of the microwave popcorn they had left, and since the SWORD guys had told them the wall screen gets cable and gave them a remote he’d been sitting pretty at 470 Kelvin. For reasons that Sue should probably look into, he was loving watching all of the media coverage about the crash and their supposed deaths. 

“Or better yet,” Victor said, voice sharpened to a razor edge. “Turn it off entirely so those of us actually working can focus.” 

Unlike Reed, Sue, and Johnny, Victor had failed to return to human form. It was making him what Reed called “cranky” and what Ben and everyone else on the planet called “an absolute bastard.” 

“Wait, what? No!” Sue yelled into the satphone, the lab having finally picked up. “Do not waste the samples running another CBC! You need to start isolating the altered DNA!” The SWORD scientist on the other line said something, but whatever it was just made her angrier.

Sue was in charge of coordinating with the SWORD biology labs. It was the shittiest of the jobs available, but the one she was most qualified for. When Reed had made the deal with the SWORD guys, they had all been under the impression that they would be in charge of the experiment design and data analysis. They were wrong.

“I don’t know that? I don’t know?” She screeched. “I graduated med school at sixteen! I literally wrote the book on gene therapy, and I don’t know how to treat nuclear degeneration?”  

“DON’T HANG UP ON ME! DON’T-- FUCK!” Sue scooted her folding chair a good three feet away from the table so she could angrily gesticulate without having to worry about bumping it. After she had exhausted herself, she slumped downward with a groan and buried her face in her hands.

Having to watch the SWORD lackeys fumble their way through basic molecular physics was kind of like having to watch someone who didn’t know how to drive steal your car and try to drive it away, Sue thought. She knew what they were doing wrong: blowing past red lights, not using a turn signal, going 50 in a 15, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. 

After a heavy moment, she raised her head and rubbed her tired eyes with her fists. “Well, that’s another two days on DNA analysis.” She made a noise of disgust. “‘More information on blood radioactivity’, my ass! Where the hell did these guys go to school?” 

Victor frowned but didn’t look up from his own work. “Fools, all of them. We do have the data from the preliminary physicals. Could you work backwards from the symptoms?” 

Sue nodded tiredly. “I can try.”

She stood up to push her chair back to the table but was stuck in her tracks by a muscle spasm in her back. “Fuck!” She groaned, drawing out the vowel in agony. 

“You okay?” Ben asked worriedly. 

“Yeah,” She said, annoyed with herself. “It’s just my back.” She had torn a muscle swimming competitively as a teen; for the first five years of her twenties, it was the bane of her existence. When Baxter Solutions took off the first thing she did after paying off her student loans was buy a two-thousand-dollar ergonomic office chair. 

She rubbed her back, but the pain didn’t abate. She groaned. “I can’t believe I used to deal with this all day.”  

God, she missed that chair. She missed it the same way she missed non-instant coffee and an apartment separate from her place of work: desperately and without reserve.

“Take a break, Suzie.” Ben shifted to the side, making some space on his mattress, which was really just two twins pushed together. He patted it invitingly.  “Come watch TV.” 

Sue glazed longingly at the mattress, expression souring as she glanced back to the screen. “I don’t wanna watch Johnny’s fake funeral.” 

“We can change the channel,” Johnny said, uncharacteristically affable. “Nobody cool even showed up. Let’s see here…” He switched to the TV guide.

The SWORD base had sprung for the cheapest cable plan they could, so there were only five channels to choose from. He began to list off the options. “We got ‘In Memoriam: Reed Richards’ -- ”

“No,” Sue said quickly. 

“The sixty minutes episode they did on Baxter Solutions,”

“Also no,”

“Spongebob Squarepants,”

“Hard no.” 

“And Mamma Mia.” 

Sue considered for a second. “That sounds fine.” 

Johnny switched over to Mamma Mia, where Amanda Seyfried was about to break into the first number. Sue walked to Ben and gingerly laid down on the mattress, moaning in relief as she did. Sue turned to lie on her stomach, resting her chin on her hand so she could watch the movie. 

“God, I wish my biggest problem was having my wedding on a gorgeous Greek island.” She sighed.

“Your wedding to a stone-cold fox on a Greek island that you also live on.” Johnny agreed. Sue nodded sadly. 

“Susan, I need you back here in fifteen minutes,” Victor said, typing away on his laptop.

“She’s on break, Vic.” Ben told Victor, before turning back the wall screen. “Is that little blonde girl doing ABBA?”

“A break that needs to end in fifteen minutes,” Victor replied darkly. “We have work to do.”

“Don’t be such a slave driver, Vic,” Ben said. 

That got Victor’s attention. “Need I remind you that we are being held captive here until we find a cure for our condition? You can watch Mamma’s Mia on your own time!” 

“It’s Mamma Mia,” Johnny interjected. 

“The adults are talking,” Victor dismissed him. 

“She’s a human being, not one of your little robots. She needs time to relax!” Ben replied. 

“She is also capable of speaking for herself,” Sue said, rolling onto her side so she could see Ben and Victor. “And Victor’s right. I’ll start on the symptoms in half an hour.” 

“Suzie,” Ben pleaded. 

Victor nodded, taking it for the victory it was. “Acceptable.” 

“Great. Now both of you shut up for the next thirty minutes.” Sue turned back to the movie.

While Victor and Ben argued, Johnny had taken it upon himself to grab some stale chips from the pile in the “kitchen”. “Marry bang kill the dads,” He said as he sat back down. 

Sue thought for a second, stealing a chip from Johnny as she did so. “Marry Stellan Skarsgard, bang Pierce Brosnan, kill Colin Firth.” 

“That’s ridiculous,” said Reed. 

Ben, Sue, and Johnny all turned to look at him. 

“What?” He asked after he realized they were staring. “In what universe do you kill Mr. Darcy?” 

Reed had seen Pride and Prejudice after mistakenly wandering into a Jane Austen festival that was being held next door to the engineering convention his dad was keynote speaking at in 1997. He loved it so much, he asked his dad’s assistant to get him Jane Austen’s entire oeuvre the very next day. 

It had been a mad dash to get through everything before the convention ended, his dad found out that he had been slacking on his actual reading list of theoretical physics papers published 1950-1990, and promptly threw the books out of their limo back to the airport as distractions. Luckily with his eidetic memory, he only needed to read them once. Victor had taken him to the movie version on their first non-science-based date; it was the first time Reed had ever enjoyed being in a theater.   

“He’s got a point. I’m killing Stellan, no question,” Johnny said. 

Sue guffawed. “You’re taking Reed’s side?”

“You get put into a room with James Bond, Mr. Darcy, and some dude named Stellan Skarsgard, and you’re telling me that you’re gonna go for him first?” Johnny replied.

“Yes! What is hard to understand about that? He was incredible in Hunt for Red October!”  

“It’s not about his talent as an actor. The point of the game “Marry Bang Kill” is to determine who the player finds the most sexually desirable. If you’re basing your decision on additional factors, you’ve spoiled the data set,” Reed explained. 

“Yeah!” Johnny said, not really understanding what Reed said but knowing it probably proved his point. 

“Okay, Doctor Richards, then you play! Marry bang kill, go!” Sue said. 

“That’s easy. Based on the names that Johnny mentioned, I would obviously marry Colin Firth, as he is the most attractive to me, have a passionate one-night-stand with Pierce Brosnan in the time before Colin Firth and I are together, and kill Stellan Skarsgard in his sleep as humanely as possible.” 

“Reed.” Victor’s voice was brimming with barely restrained rage. He couldn’t believe Reed of all people had been dragged into this time-sucking nonsense.

“Not that I ever would,” Reed quickly added, misunderstanding Victor entirely. “Uh, do that. With anyone. Because I’m in a happily committed relationship that gives me everything I need sexually.” He nodded to himself at the end of his sentence, pleased with his wording. 

Johnny grimaced. “Gross. Also, you could never bag Colin Firth.” 

“That’s just--” Reed began, but Sue shushed him. 

“This is my favorite song. Johnny, turn it up!” On-screen, Meryl Streep was singing the first bars of the title song. Johnny turned the volume to 75 percent. 

“Absolutely not,” Victor stood up from the table in indignation. “I can’t hear myself think!” 

“Just for like four minutes!” Sue tried to placate him. 

“And again when they do Lay All Your Love on Me,” Johnny added. He thought for a second. 

“And Does Your Mother Know. And Take A Chance on Me.”

Ben asked, “Do they do Waterloo in this? I’ve always liked that one.”  

“And Waterloo if they do Waterloo, but that’s it.” Johnny amended. 

“On that at least, we can agree,” Victor growled. He marched over to Johnny and snatched the remote from his hands, turning the TV off forcefully. “That’s it.” 

“HEY!” Sue shouted. 

“I’m sorry, Susan, truly, but I’ve withstood this for as long as I am willing. I will buy you tickets to see this film as soon as we’re cured.” Victor said. 

“Victor--” Reed started. 

Ben stood up and lumbered over to Victor. “There’s five people in this room and four of ‘em wanna watch TV. Majority rules.” He moved to take the remote back, but Victor pulled his arm out of reach. 

“Majority also ruled that we would do everything we could to escape this place,” Said Victor.

“It’s a two-hour movie, you schmuck!” Ben yelled. 

Victor scoffed. “I can’t believe you, of all people are my opposition. Don’t you want to go home? See your wife?” 

“Don’t you talk about my wife,” Ben said lowly. 

“Ben--” Reed said urgently, realizing where this was going. 

Victor could see he’d hit a nerve and dug in. “Every minute we stay in here is another minute she believes you’re dead.” 

“Shut your mouth.” 

“That she grieves you while you sit here, thumb up your rocky ass--” 

“SHUT YOUR MOUTH!” 

“Watching a bunch of has-beens sing the greatest hits of nineteen seventy-nine!” 

“VICTOR!” Reed said, pushing himself in between Ben and Victor. “You’ve made your point.” 

Victor and Reed looked at each other for a second. The worry in Reed’s eyes quieted the rage in his belly. 

“Fine.” Victor snarled. “Let’s get back to work.” Reed nodded, taking his hand to lead him back to the table.

Ben snorted humorlessly. He didn’t really mean to, but nine years' worth of resentment boiling over needed somewhere to go. Better out his nose than his mouth. 

Victor whirled back around to face him.  “What.”

Ben shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. 

“What, you hulking ignoramus! Speak your mind!” Victor demanded. 

Okay, fuck it.

“You never change,” Ben said. 

“What the hell does that mean?” Victor asked.  

Ben shrugged. “Say what you will about me and my wife, I’ve never needed her to talk me down from a fight. Or a tantrum. Or pull me out of a fire I started.” 

Victor’s metal face darkened in an approximation of a blush. “You--” 

“And yeah, right now she thinks I’m dead. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever put her through, hands down. It’s killing me.” Ben continued. 

“But I’ll be damned if I take that out on somebody else.” He inclined his boulder of a head at Reed. “Can you say the same?”

Reed paled. “Over the line, Ben--”

“Is it?” Ben challenged. “I’ve been watching you try to kiss a frog into a prince for nine fucking years! When are you gonna get it through that thick skull? This is who he is! You can give him your time, your money--”

“BEN!” Reed barked. 

He kept going. “But at the end of the day, he’s still gonna be a robot.” Ben laughed dully. “He even looks the part now.” 

Victor simply stared at him for a moment or two, trying to collect the swirling rage inside him into a cohesive sentence. “I’m going to crush you into gravel.”

Ben sneered. “Try it.” 

Ben pulled his rocky arm back and punched Victor in the stomach with all of his monstrous new strength. Or at least, he tried to. Reed had shoved in front of Victor in a last-ditch effort to keep the pair from fighting. So instead of caving Victor’s gut in, Reed’s rubbery body absorbed the brunt of the blow. The remaining force sent both of them flying back into the mini-fridge. 

“Aw, fuck,” Ben said. 

“Reed!” Victor squawked in horror as he pushed his lover off of him. The weight of his carapace had completely crushed the mini-fridge, sending coolant and scrap across the room. 

“Ow,” Reed groaned. 

“Are you alright? Are you hurt?” Victor asked him as he did a visual inspection. The lower half of his head was partially flattened from the impact, but there was no blood or bruising. 

“‘M okay,” Reed mumbled as his chin slowly reinflated. Radically altering his physiology without proper mental preparation was quite disorienting. His brain felt squishy. “Face kinda hurts,”  

“Thank god,” Victor said under his breath, before turning back to Ben. “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!” He howled. 

What I did? Ben wanted to shout back, but before he could get the words out Victor was barrelling towards him, shoulders low like he was taunting a bull. He slammed into Ben with more force than he expected. It threw him off his feet. Shoulders low in a dead sprint. Tackle, duh. He didn’t know Victor knew how to do that. He would have gained a sliver of respect for the man if he didn’t immediately follow it up by punching the living shit out of him. Victor’s new hands made brass knuckles look like boxing gloves. 

In the confusion, Victor had dropped the TV remote. Johnny scooched over to where it had fallen, a healthy couple of feet away from the brawlers, grabbed it, and turned the movie back on just in time for Meryl Streep’s rendition of Dancing Queen.  

He turned the volume up to maximum before turning back to the fight. 

“GET OFF ME, YOU FUCK!” Ben yelled. 

Victor ignored him, spouting a bevy of Latverian curses as he hit him. Giving up on blocking the punches, Ben grabbed him by the shoulders and threw the man over his head, where he crashed into the other wall. 

Victor shook it off quickly and ran back at Ben, but Ben was ready for him this time. As soon as he got close enough, he grabbed Victor by the head and slammed him into the ground, Victor grasping fruitlessly at Ben’s wrist. 

“Twenty on Ben,” Johnny told Sue as sat next to her on Ben’s mattress. 

She didn’t answer, too horrified by what she was seeing. 

Victor and Ben had always hated each other; she knew that. But she thought it was that halfhearted kind of hate that was almost indistinguishable from friendship. They sniped at each other, but at the end of the day, they shook hands and had a drink. They didn’t fight. They were practically thirty! 

“Dancing Queen, really?” Ben asked Johnny from where he was squatting over Victor. 

“It’s what’s on! You hold him down there long enough, it’ll change on its own.” Johnny replied. 

Underneath the fist, Victor was scrabbling for some way to get out. His damn burnished-iron hands couldn’t get a proper grip on Grimm’s rocky flesh. Not that it would even matter if they could, there were several thousand newtons of force pushing down on him. It set his blood ablaze to know that the oaf was going to beat him based on sheer physical size. Victor was a better fighter, a better tactician. He could win if only he could get this godforsaken hand off his head.

He thought of the cranes they used when building the Argo. He could see the blueprints in his mind, down to the smallest measurements and specifications. If he had one now—

Grimm continued nattering on about fucking ABBA. “I’m not complaining. I mean, Waterloo would be better--” 

“Oh, they actually don’t do Waterloo. I just remembered.” 

They used an engine based on the one he and Reed had designed in college. They could take stray hydrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into mechanical energy, moving up to one hundred metric tons without any structural damage. He could see it so clearly--

“Seriously? It’s the best one!” 

“That’s your opinion, dude.” 

“It’s not. Suze, back me up here-- FUCK!” Victor started pushing against him with more force. Ben pushed back, but it didn’t stop him. If anything, Victor got stronger. 

Steam poured out of Victor’s forearms as hydrogen engines sprung to life underneath his metal skin. 

“Oh damn,” Johnny said appreciatively as Victor not only raised Ben’s arm up but managed to raise the entire fucking guy off the ground.

“Shit.” He said less appreciatively as Victor threw Ben into the screen wall, missing his head by a matter of inches. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the point of impact as Mamma Mia went dark. 

“DAMAGE DETECTED. DAMAGE DETECTED.” A robotic voice screeched from the speakers. “CENTURION PROTOCOL I-17 INITIATED.”

“Wuh?” Ben grunted.

“Protocol?” Sue repeated. 

“Centurion?” Reed asked from the floor. “Did that thing just say--” But before he could finish his query, a four-by-two foot square of what he had thought was the singular slab concrete ceiling, opened, revealing a circular installation of uniformly perforated tubes. A milky-white gas began flowing out of the holes. 

“Nobody breathe!” Sue called, pulling her shirt over her mouth in a makeshift gas mask. 

“What? Talk faster, Sue, I already did! Am I gonna die?” Johnny asked as he followed suit. 

“Not today,” Victor growled, manifesting a high-energy laser emitter in his index finger and pointing it at the ceiling. This did serve the intended purpose of melting the tubes so that gas could not pass through them freely. However, there was an unfortunate side effect. 

“YOU FUCKING IDIOT--” Ben yelled as the gas already in the room ignited. 

“I DON’T WANNA DIE!” Johnny wailed, dropping his shirt to cower on the ground, arms over his head in the tornado position, and waited for the blast. 

But it never came. As soon as the gas shook itself into plasma, it flew to Johnny’s outstretched hands, like calling to like in blatant disregard of the laws of energy conservation. The flames pressed harmlessly against his skin for a second or two, before sinking into him: a drop of water returning to the ocean. 

“Holy shit,” Ben said, pulling himself up from the ground. 

“Johnny, are you okay?” Sue asked, nervously inching closer to him. Johnny jumped back a foot at her approach, afraid of what was going to happen. 

“I…” Johnny patted himself down. “I feel kinda--” He sneezed; four-foot flames shot out of his nose.

“Oh, I don’t like that,” Johnny said, pale as a sheet. 

“KITCHEN SINK PROTOCOL INITIATED,” The ceiling said. 

The entire ceiling unfolded above them, revealing a space twice as tall as the room they were in, and filled as far as the eye could see with weapons. More gas vents, machine guns, rocket launchers, and what looked to be dart guns, all installed on spindly black levers, allowing the usually stationary equipment to move around the space with ease. 

“Oooh, fuck.” Ben said at the sight. 

A horrible humming filled the room as the weapons readied themselves for use. 

It was at that sound, at the way the inky arms started swinging around to aim at herself and the others, that Sue Storm started to panic. 

It should be said that panic was not a normal emotion for her. In fact, she considered it a personal point of pride that she wasn’t the kind of person who panicked. When her dad, drunk off his ass, had started throwing his and Mom’s wedding china against the wall and the shards left a four-inch gash in five-year-old Johnny’s forehead, did she panic? No. She called her dad a piece-of-shit-waste-of-space, threw her brother over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, ran to their nurse neighbor's house for stitches, and stayed there until she was sure Dad had passed out. 

When she was fifteen years old, a week into her ER rotation in med school, and a heroin addict tried to hold her at knifepoint for drugs, did she panic? No. She kneed him in the balls, flipped him the way they taught in her Judo class, and got a $35 gift card to the hospital cafeteria in return for not suing. 

Susan Storm did not panic. 

But she was about to die by overkill, stuck in a room with her brother, her best friend, his best friend, and his fiancé who had just started fighting over him like they were all still in high school, and everyone else she ever cared about already thought she was dead. Her heart was pounding and her head was spinning and her stomach was trying to make a break for it through her throat, and Sue hadn’t gone through three years of med school as a teenager to not know what that meant. She was panicking: it was a medical certainty. 

It made her incandescently angry.

She had made it twenty-seven years without losing her cool in a crisis. Occasionally to her own detriment, she was coming to realize that as she got older. She should have told her neighbor the real reason Johnny got hurt instead of covering for their dad. She should have sued that hospital. But now, in what was probably the worst crisis of her life, her legs were getting weak and her vision was blurry and it was just so fucking unfair. All she had ever done was try to make the world a better place, and this is what she got for it? Gunned down in some government black site? There was so much she had left to do! She wanted to fall in love, get a dog! She hadn't even gotten a Nobel prize yet! 

She wanted to see Johnny graduate. She wanted to see Reed get married.

“No,” Sue whispered. The anger, the fear, the regret, overwhelmed her.

And suddenly, it didn’t. 

“WE HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED YOUR STAY AT THE SWORD ANNEX. BEST WISHES TO YOU AND YOUR GOD.” The ceiling said. 

I don’t want to die here. 

Light exploded out from her body in a bright wave that shook the room. 

The guns fired. The reverberations shook them all off their feet. And yet,  the bullets never made it to their targets. 

“My god,” Victor said as he looked up, confusion metamorphosing into wonder. 

A waxy barrier had manifested in the space above their heads. It looked delicate, no thicker than a soap bubble, but it singlehandedly withstood the force of thousands of projectiles, reflecting them back into the ceiling where they tore through the apparatuses that had fired them. Explosions boomed: the bullets igniting the gas. 

“MALFUNCTION. MALFUNCTION. MAL--” The ceiling howled before regressing to static. Two flat sheets of metal came to cover the cavern of death above them. There was a loud crunching noise as thousands of pounds of machinery fell onto the sheets, indenting them severely, but not enough to break through to the people below. 

The threat of imminent death dealt with, Victor, Ben, and Johnny all turned to look at their savior. Sue had gone from watery to practically transparent. The only color not muted on her person was the bright red blood streaming from her nose. 

“I better be here when I wake up,” Sue muttered, and promptly passed out. 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“Wait, what? No! Do not waste the samples running another CBC! You need to start isolating the altered DNA!” Susan Storm said over the satphone. 

“I’m sorry, Ms. Storm, but with all due respect, you don’t know that. Our first priority is more information on blood radioactivity.” Doctor Jerry Hanes replied, idly doodling cubes on a notepad.  

“I don’t know that? I don’t know?” Storm shrilled.   

Hanes sighed. “You’ve obviously too emotional right now to communicate professionally. I’ll call you back later.” 

“DON’T HANG UP ON ME! DON’T--” Hanes hung up. 

“As you can see, things are progressing pretty smoothly.” Agent Marshall said, holding the door open for General Harrison. “The scientists believe there’s a 98% chance that the mutations have stabilized at this point.” 

“Their blood radiation levels are consistently decreasing. What they are now is how they’re going to stay.” Doctor Hanes agreed. 

Harrison hummed. “What do they do?” 

Marshall swallowed nervously. “Daily? Well, they’ve actually been assisting--”

“That’s a stretch,” Hanes muttered. Being yelled at eighteen hours a day by a shrieking harpy that thought she knew how to do his job better than he did just because she “graduated med school at sixteen” and “cured pancreatic cancer” wasn’t his idea of assistance. 

“Assisting in research efforts. Richards alone has translated about half of Nathan’s old papers, and von Doom has been a big help to the engineers--” 

Harrison raised his hand to silence him. “That’s great, but what do they do. Their powers.” 

“Oh! We’ve been pretty lucky on that front, sir. Pyrokinetic manifestation, invisibility, enhanced malleability, metallic skin,” Marshall pointed to the corresponding pictures on the whiteboard with each listing. “And epidermal transformation, durability, and super strength.” He tapped Major Grimm’s picture. “Major Grimm is the only one higher than epsilon on the power classification chart, and even he’s just a beta.” 

Harrison frowned. Marshall could swear he was almost disappointed by the news, which was insane. Why would he want more dangerous super-people on Earth? 

Marshall probably needed to lay off the Kree caffeine pods. 

“You said they’re helping with the research?” Harrison asked. 

“Um, yeah. They asked to.” Marshall answered.

“It’s not often you find people willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good like that,” Harrison said appreciatively. He looked up at the camera feed, where Richards was diligently rewriting his father’s papers. “It seems the apple fell pretty far from the tree.”

Agent Reilly, who until this point had been staring at the bottom of his coffee cup in silence, snorted. 

“Yeah,” Marshall said weakly. “About that--” 

On screen, Major Grimm punched von Doom and Richards into a mini fridge.

 “INMATE VIOLENCE DETECTED. PLEASE SELECT A METHOD OF TRANQUILIZATION.” Centurion’s tinny voice shot through every speaker in the control room. 

“Fucking Ryan,” Marshall muttered as he hurried to the control desk. 

Harrison quietly watched the fight from where he stood. Richards’ skull was caved in, but judging by the response from the others he was still alive. Enhanced malleability seemed a bit of an underestimation if his brain could survive getting flattened. Richards’ boyfriend bum-rushed Major Grimm, knocking him off his center of gravity. Grimm recovered quickly and smashed the other man into the floor. The concrete crumbled under von Doom’s body, while the man himself suffered no injuries. He was still alive under Grimm’s fist, trying to push it off.

“Initiating CENTURION,” Marshall called out.

Harrison waved him off. “I want to see where this goes.”

“Sir, they could really hurt each other,” Marshall said, hesitantly. 

“Who cares about them? Grimm throws that guy hard enough, he’s gonna land in here!” Reilly grumbled. 

“This is a good opportunity to gauge their actual abilities. You never truly know what a man’s capable of until you put his life on the line.” Harrison explained. 

“I-- okay.” Marshall acquiesced. 

Harrison was vindicated mere seconds later when von Doom turned part of his metal body into engines, giving him the strength to push Grimm off. 

“That’s new,” Hanes said. 

Harrison smiled, pearly-whites glimmering like razor blades. 

Von Doom threw Grimm into the wall, shattering it. Glass rained down on Grimm and von Doom, but not one shard could get past their inhuman hides.

‘Okay, that’s it. Time out.” Marshall said. “Ryan, tranquilizing protocol.” 

“Agent Marshall--” Harrison said angrily before the sleeping gas was ignited by a laser von Doom manifested on his finger. 

“Good idea.” Harrison amended.

“Oh no,” Marshall said. Then the Storm boy sucked all the fire into himself, blowing it out as a harmless sneeze. 

“Manifestation and manipulation,” Harrison said appreciatively. It was getting better by the second. 

“Jesus Christ,” Reilly said in disgust. 

“Not quite, Agent Reilly. There was only one Jesus Christ, after all.” Harrison leaned over the console. “And here we have five.” 

He was proud of them.

A lot of things came into focus for Reilly at that moment. Innocuous comments, little glitches, the minorly incongruous events of the past twenty years of service coming together into one, horrible whole. 

He didn’t bother trying to confront Harrison over it. What was the point? He would just deny it, and the others would believe him, and then they’d just throw him off some building with a fake suicide note in his hand while this abomination continued. 

Instead, Reilly took out his gun and shot Marshall in the head. 

“FUCK!” Ryan shouted. “STEVE, WHAT THE FUCK!” 

Hanes sprinted out of the room, practically shoving Harrison to the ground in his mad dash for the exit. 

“Kitchen sink protocol,” Reilly said, turning his gun onto Ryan. 

“Agent--” Harrison tried. 

“SHUT UP! KITCHEN SINK, NOW!” Reilly shouted. 

“Agent Ryan, under no circumstances--” Harrison said. 

“DO IT OR I BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF!” Reilly cut him off.

Ryan’s panicked eyes bounced between Harrison and Reilly for a second, before he turned back to the console and typed something in. 

“KITCHEN SINK PROTOCOL INITIATED,” CENTURION howled through the speakers. 

“NO!” Harrison shouted. But it was too late. 

Installed into the rafters of every room on the island was a sampler platter of Stark Industries’ finest machines, ready at any time to tranquilize, neutralize, or simply blow up whatever you told them to. There were only a couple situations where they ever needed to use more than three of the weapons in conjunction to take down an inmate, and even then the biggest number was five. But if there was one thing SHIELD was good at, it was anticipating threats. So, in the interests of national safety and security, SI designed CENTURION’s kitchen sink protocol, which fires every single gun or grenade in the room at once. 

Using it was a massive financial (as well as ethical: SI could not assure that the firing of that many weapons in a short span wouldn’t have obscenely massive collateral damage) undertaking, and every agent was made well aware of the consequences of giving the command. As such, SI hadn’t seen a need to add a confirmation feature. What was the point if everybody already knew how dangerous it was? An honor system was free, after all, and SHIELD was over budget as it was. 

All of this is to say that once initiated, the kitchen sink protocol could not be stopped. Once it was on, it was on. The false ceiling opened to give the weapons silo the best possible shot: the guns aimed and fired. 

The bullets didn’t get any more than four feet out from their barrels. They began spinning backward as if they’d just ricocheted off a wall. The errant, armor-piercing and occasionally incendiary, bullets eviscerated every installment inside the silo they had come from, lighting up the mustard gas canisters on the way. 

“No,” Reilly murmured in horror. “No! How?” 

Harrison laughed. “Telekinesis! Oh, fantastic!” He patted Ryan on the back. “That was a close one, huh?” 

Ryan just sobbed. 

“Monsters. They’re monsters.” Reilly gasped. 

“Yes,” Harrison agreed, stepping over Marshall’s corpse to stand in front of Reilly. “But importantly, they’re tools. Raw potential. The future of this organization.” 

He placed a hand on Reilly’s arm, signature affable smile on his face. Reilly could see now how empty it was now, the way his dead eyes twisted the light to seem kind. “And you just tried to gas them.” 

“This is an affront to everything we stand for,” Reilly replied, quaking in fear. 

“Good thing you won’t have to see it, then,” Harrison injected Reilly with the cyanide-filled syringe in his sleeve. 

Reilly collapsed to the ground, body spasming as his mouth foamed. 

“REILLY!” Ryan screamed. 

“Get someone down here for the bodies,” Harrison said, voice as pleasantly neutral as ever. “And requisition some memory-wiping solution. This little stunt has ruined any chance we have of cooperation with them.” 

“You killed him,” Ryan whimpered. 

“He murdered your superior officer and attempted to murder five innocent people. I’d say this one won’t cause too much trouble with Saint Peter.” Harrison said, disgust at Ryan’s squeamishness poorly hidden by his joking tone.

Ryan didn’t say anything, just picked up where he left off with his body-shaking sobs. 

“Oh, grow up!” Harrison yelled, the façade finally dropping. He once again stepped over the bodies to reach Ryan and slap him. 

“There’s work to be done, boy, and I will not have you ruining it.” Harrison growled. “Now man up and call a janitor!” 

“CENTURION OVERRIDE COMPLETED.” Centurion bleated through the speakers. 

“What does that mean?” Harrison asked, but Centurion answered for him before Ryan could. 

“ADMIN AUTH “R-RICHARDS” ACCEPTED.” 

The Tech Industry Does Something Good for Once

When Victor came back from Latveria to be with him, following three days of marathon sex wherein Reed learned it was, in fact, possible to orgasm solely from prostate stimulation, Victor had some demands. 

I won’t stay in this country to become another cog in your capitalist machine, he had told Reed.  I was going to free Latveria with only the tools I could carry on my back. If we are to make a life here, I expect that we are going to change the world.

And thus Baxter Solutions was founded. Well, back then it was Modern Solutions. They weren’t based out of Baxter at first. In what they would very quickly realize was a mistake, they thought it would be acceptable to just stay in their shared lab at ESU. It was modern, fully stocked with chemicals, and close to their apartment.

It was also incredibly easy to break into. 

This had never been a problem before-- why would it have? Two graduate students’ thesis projects, no matter how genius those students are, are small-scale and perhaps most importantly, usually offered for sale following the completion of research. But doing research as a separate, competitive business entity was a whole different ballgame. It didn’t help that they scored a home run right off the bat. 

Based only on Reed’s father’s history and reputation, Modern Solutions was offered the contract to build the United States’ new all-in-one prison operating system, to be installed in prisons nationwide. Following the delivery of an alpha build, they would be paid twenty billion dollars with an additional five hundred million for each year the system was used. Not that the money mattered.

This, my heart. Victor had said, so excited he didn’t even bother masking his smile as a sneer. We can do something world-changing with this.

They named their system CENTURION: an all-in-one defense program that linked all cameras, defense systems, and even prison guard body armor together. CENTURION allowed for streamlined prison control and analysis on a level never seen before. Unknown to everyone but Reed and Victor, it also contained a rudimentary “whistleblower” AI given the sole task of spotting and reporting prison guard brutality and corruption, sending video files and transcripts anonymously to civil rights organizations. It was supposed to spark a revolution in the American prison system, reducing unlawful incarceration and human rights abuses. And it would have too, if Howard Stark hadn’t died a year before they started programming it. 

With Tony Stark effectively MIA for the entirety of the late aughts, the major players at SI were scrambling to find another golden goose. The prison OS project was theirs, before Howard died. They had built it into their profit projections! The shareholders were already pissed that the automatic waterboarding machine kept catching on fire, they couldn’t also lose the twenty billion that they already said they had! 

And no, they didn’t steal it. Are you insane? A multibillion dollar company stealing designs from two grad students? I mean, what was more likely? That a start-up with a grand total of two employees got in over their head and couldn’t come up with a working build in time, or that Stark Industries, the Stark Industries, creator of the atomic bomb, committed intellectual property theft?

You’d never guess who the government believed. 

It was a mess after that. They fought, both in court and with each other, but nothing worked. Victor almost went back to Latveria.

In the end, they decided that they would keep going, with significant security increases. Victor developed a line of autonomous robots that would patrol the lab 24/7, while Reed found them a much more defensible location to work from. They changed their name to Baxter Solutions, made a hard turn away from government contacts, and started again.

Reed thought that it was the last he would ever hear of CENTURION: A memory he would rather forget and a lesson he never could. 

Until now. 

“She’s dead!” Johnny wailed. 

“She’s not dead.” Victor said, sitting next to Sue’s prone body. “I can feel her pulse.”

“Ohgod, she’s gonna haunt me forever! How am I supposed to hide stuff from a ghost?” Johnny moaned.  

“Kid, I’m gonna need to take it down to like a five.” Ben said tiredly as he inspected the wall he had been smashing before. The fake bricks had given way to a silvery sheet that Ben couldn’t even make a dent in. “C’mere, let’s see if you can’t melt these things. We need to get outta here before reinforcements come.” 

“If only we had some kind of bomb,” Victor said loudly and pointedly. 

But his target wasn’t listening. Reed had slunk his way over to the folding table and Victor’s computer, overlong fingers tapping frantically. “Victor, do you still remember your admin password for CENTURION?” 

“Excuse me?” 

“The whole system runs on CENTURION, I heard it when it was announcing the attacks. I need both of ours for a complete override, and like Ben said we don’t have a lot of time so if you could just get over here that would be really helpful.” Reed said, not stopping to breathe in between sentences. 

Victor swore in Latverian and rushed over to the laptop. 

“My god, it does.” He said when he saw the familiar coding screen. “This is-- I can’t believe they put us in a prison we designed. Your country’s government is more vacuous than I could have ever possibly imagined, my dear.”

“Password?” Reed asked. Victor pushed his fingers aside and typed it in. 

“CENTURION OVERRIDE COMPLETE.” The computer announced over the speakers. “ADMIN AUTH “R-RICHARDS” ACCEPTED.” 

Several live feeds popped up on the screen. Their own cell, offices, laboratories, a cafeteria-- and a dark room labeled QUARANTINE CONTROL ROOM. An older man was yelling at a man who appeared to be crying. 

“Jackpot,” Reed said, and sent several commands. 

Mea Culpa

A lot of things happened very quickly after that. First, all of the computers in the control room’s screens turned bright red, with a blinking exclamation point in the dead center of all of them. Secondly, the SI silo above the control room opened up and several hundred guns pointed themselves at Agent Ryan and General Harrison.

“HELLO! IF YOU ARE HEARING THIS, THE CENTURION SYSTEM HAS EVALUATED THIS PRISON TO BE IN STARK VIOLATION OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION. A LOCKDOWN HAS BEEN INITIATED FOR THIS LOCATION, AND THE AUTHORITIES HAVE BEEN CONTACTED. PLEASE REMAIN CALM. WHILE YOU WAIT, FEEL FREE TO READ HANNAH ARENDT’S “EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM”, AVAILABLE ON EVERY MONITOR, TO BETTER UNDERSTAND WHY YOU ARE IN THIS POSITION. ‘JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS’ IS NOT AN EXCUSE!” 

“W-what?” Ryan blubbered. 

Beside him, the walkie-talkie screeched back to life. “Hello, Agent Marshall.” Victor von Doom said. 

Ryan grabbed the walkie. “Did you do this?” 

“I believe it would be more accurate to say that your organization “did this”,” von Doom reasoned.  “However, if you are asking who reactivated the whistleblower program, that would be us.”

“Whistleblower--” Ryan started, but Harrison took the walkie from him before he could finish the thought. 

“Doctor Doom! I want to apologize for the events of the last hour. A couple bad apples gained control of our defense systems: you can rest assured that they are being dealt with.” Harrison said, tone light but eyes dead. 

“Oh, I know. Tell me, do the bodies next to you smell yet? It looks like you poisoned one: that always leaves such a nasty odor.” 

“Wh-- I--” Harrison, for the first time in decades, stuttered. 

“I have full access to the cameras, sir. As well as the weapons systems, as you’ve probably noticed,” One of the machine guns seemed to wave at that. “Stark Industries is nothing more than a butcher’s union. CENTURION was designed to be a force for positive change, and they’ve warped it into a fascist’s daydream. It’s almost enough to bring a tear to my eye.” 

Von Doom sighed. “Oh well. In the absence of the perpetrators, I suppose I will have to settle for giving all of you the same treatment you just gave me and the love of my life. ‘kitchen sink’, you called it? How creative.” 

“No,” Harrison said quickly, silently gesturing for Ryan to do something. 

“Oh, he’s just as helpless as you are. Our admin privileges go far beyond the jury-rigged version Stark gave your technicians.” 

“You’re bluffing.” Harrison said, dropping his affable pretense. 

“Maybe. I suppose it would be more fitting to release the entirety of SWORD’s database to the internet, and see how the public reacts. I don’t think they would be very pleased to learn of another unconstitutional prison operated by the United States government. They did react so poorly to the truth about Guantanamo. Reed, darling, what do you think? Quick death or slow?” 

“He’s enjoying this way too much,” Ben said back in the quarantine room, watching as Victor paced the floor and talked into the radio. 

“Who cares, he sounds kickass!” Johnny said. 

“Huh?” Sue muttered, eyes fluttering open on Ben’s mattress where she had fallen. 

“Sue!” Johnny said excitedly. 

She pulled herself up, and looked around. “Why is Victor monologuing?” They generally tried to discourage that. 

“He’s getting us out!” Johnny explained.  

“You so rudely called me Doctor Doom. How about I make the title accurate?” Victor continued on the walkie. 

“HELL YEAH! FUCK ‘EM UP, VICTOR!” Johnny yelled. 

Victor took his finger off the talk button, and shushed Johnny angrily.  

“Sorry!” Johnny whisper-yelled. “You’re doing great! Also, Sue’s alive!” He pointed at Sue and then gave Victor a thumbs up. 

Back in the control room, Harrison has the sinking suspicion that there was no way out of this one. “What do you want.” 

“Wonderful, already down to brass tacks. First, all five of us are safely returned to our homes, alive. Second, our status as living persons is reinstated. Third, you and your organization swear to never bother any of us again.” 

“I’m not authorized to do that,” Harrison lied. 

Von Doom tisked. “General Harrison, I thought we were beyond such falsehoods,” 

Harrison grunted angrily. “It’s not as simple as that--”

“I didn’t ask you how simple it was, did I? I told you to get it done, and if you have any care for your agency and the people in it, you will. We are leaving this place one way or another, Harrison. Whether we have to walk over your corpse to do so is up to you.” 

Harrison sighed. “Fine. Fine. Ryan, let them out.”

Ryan opened the door to the quarantine room. To the inhabitants, it seemed to materialize out of nowhere.

“Get out.” Harrison growled. 

“Wonderful. We’ll be taking your ferry back to the mainland. I never would have guessed Maine was the epicenter of the world’s shadow government. Tell me, did they run out of space in Area 51? Was it too arid for your fragile constitutions?” 

“Get out, Doom,” Harrison answered. 

“Very well. But before I do, I’d like to inform you that I’ve taken the liberty of installing a modified version of the whistleblower AI onto all of SHIELD’s systems. If anything untoward were to happen to any of us-- car bomb, unexpected suicide, that kind of thing, the system will dump all of its contents online, as well as activate the ‘kitchen sink’ in every possible location.” 

Something ripped the door to the control room off its hinges. On the other side stood all five of them. Grimm holding the door, Susan Storm leaning on her brother for support. At the head, von Doom and Richards, a laptop computer in the latter’s arms. Von Doom was still holding the walkie. 

“Wonderful seeing you, General. Pray it never happens again.” von Doom said, crushing the walkie in his metal fist. He then turned around and started walking out of the facility. The others weren’t far behind.  

“That was so cool!” Jonathan squealed.  

“Stop talking, you’re ruining the effect!” Von Doom whispered back.