|
#13
APR 12 |
 |
“Incursion” Part One
“You are hereby summoned for a two week term of jury service beginning on…” Bill Foster read aloud as he opened his mail, setting the remainder of his mail on the davenport desk that sat near his front door. “Blah, blah, blah,” he continued as he skimmed the details and instantly wondered how a thing such as jury duty would affect his service to the Avengers.
“If the jury term for which you are summoned will result in undue or extreme inconvenience because of grave illness in your family or a similar serious problem, and you want to ask for a temporary excuse, you must notify the Clerk of County immediately in writing upon receipt of this summons…” Bill finished, knowing that it was only a matter of time before some serious problem would rear its head. For the first time since becoming an Avenger, he secretly hoped for something serious to get him out of jury duty.
Not to be bothered by it until he would return after a day at the newly restored Avengers Mansion, he buttoned his shirt to cover the new costume that he was hiding beneath his clothes, eager to show it to the others. He hoped that the blue and white costume, derived from Hank Pym’s old Giant-Man suit, would finally push aside the public’s predilection to call him “Black” Goliath.
He removed his Avengers Priority signal card and swiped his index finger over the biometric identifier. He intended to open his Avengers travel aperture which would allow him instant access to the Mansion but was interrupted by the serious problem that the jury duty summons had portended.
A violent eruption of bedlam in the street led Bill into action. The floor beneath his feet vibrated viciously as the dishes in the cupboard rattled precariously. He instinctively tore open his shirt to reveal his new costume beneath, popping the buttons before he realized he had ruined a new shirt. He had already begun to increase his size as he triggered the Pym Particles that permeated throughout his cells. Letting his adrenaline settle for a second led him to reduce himself and open the window.
He crawled out of his window to the fire escape, immediately bombarded with a cacophony of noise and destruction. Hesitating no longer, he hopped over the metal railing to be an Avenger. By the time he reached the asphalt of the street, he had become fifteen feet tall, coming into the action as it began to overcome the city around him.
Cars blazed and people screamed and ran in all directions while flying humanoids streaked across the sky, spewing energies in random patterns. He devised a strategy for his course of action as he ignored the Avengers signal card bleeping with urgency; he had a suspicion he knew why it was bleeping. Panicking citizens began to rally around Goliath, too scared to admire his new costume, to use him for cover.
“Get real cover, people!” he yelled as he shooed them away, surveying the airspace overhead.
With a bit of a shock and an additional rush of adrenaline, he saw the recently missing Eternal called Ikaris flying at him. The golden haired immortal left a plume of sparkling energy in his wake as he sped straight into Goliath’s chest. Ikaris imbedded his fist into Goliath’s chest as he flew into him as both of them screamed.
A cloud of grey particles erupted from Ikaris’ mouth, invading Bill Foster’s body with microscopic battleships. A hundred thousand soldiers from a microscopic universe had taken siege of Goliath.
As the tiny alien navy began to ensnare Goliath’s entire physical form, Foster kept his wits about him as well as he could. His final decision he would make was one of primal survival. He shrank himself beyond anything he had ever attempted. Within seconds, he had disappeared from human perception.
Ikaris, who had obviously been corrupted by the forces of the Microverse, stood over where Goliath had fallen, showing no emotion as the invisible evil saturated the air around him. The frightened people that had moments ago thought they had found safety in the company of an Avenger became pawns of the tyrannical Baron Karza and his growing army of human Acroyears.
The Eternal stood motionless as the battalion that controlled his body awaited further orders. Miniscule communications signals bounced across his body as the commanders of the various segments relayed their plans. Once the encoded chatter had completed, Ikaris took again to the sky only to be intercepted by the arrival of an Avenger.
Photon, fully luminous and immaterial, had travelled from her home in New Orleans in the blink of an eye, answering the Avengers priority signal and syncing with the Microversal communications within seconds. Although she was too late to save Goliath, she would allow no further harm to befall the city.
Shining bright and golden, she motioned her arm upward as Ikaris had finally took notice of her arrival. The Eternal swiveled in midair to greet her; the billowing microscopic battleships had begun to attack from his body.
“Ikaris?” she questioned as she had started to understand the situation despite the encoding of the communications that she had intercepted. “Stop this now!”
There was no hint of emotion or acknowledgement within Ikaris’ face as he attacked, both with the cosmic energy enclaves within his cells but also with the battleships that were now his master. A tiny voice broadcast a reply to Photon; a greeting and a warning to humanity.
“The ones that call themselves Avengers will not stand in the way of the great Baron,” the voice stated with an indiscernible accent, his message transmitted directly into Photon’s energy field. The message reverberated off of the film of light that formed her eardrums. “We are trillions strong and have penetrated everything. We are everywhere. There will be nothing left for you to avenge.”
“You obviously don’t know us very well,” Photon replied as she effortlessly sucked the cosmic radiation that powered the enslaved Eternal. Ikaris plummeted to the ground below, smashing into an already burning car. Photon heard what she could only assume was a variety of curse words in an alien language as Ikaris impacted. She dispelled the cosmic energies into the upper atmosphere before it could be recollected as she waited for a counterattack.
As she stayed her distance, she saw other enslaved Eternals beginning to surround her; dozens of immortal powerhouses slowly moving toward her from all directions. The Eternal known as Makkari had attempted to tackle her from the air, ignorant of her immateriality. He leapt at her three times before the crew within his systems had updated their intelligence. Photon shot several blasts at Makkari but the speedy Eternal was too fast, anticipating her light-speed attacks and easily maneuvering around them.
Zuras, of the first generation and current Prime Eternal, approached through the closing crowd of immortal slaves. Photon received further threats that she ignored, tired of their alien propaganda. She had no idea who this Karza person was, but she knew that she greatly disliked him. With a wave of his oversized hand, he generated a cosmic pulse of unknown energies that hit Photon full force, despite her untouchable form.
She screamed as the light which formed her entire physicality was disrupted on a cosmic level, a virtual black hole that sucked away her consistency. Snapping painfully back to her form of flesh, she plummeted to the street below, only to be snatched by the death defying arrival of a metallic stranger.
Before Photon could have suffered further damage from smashing into the concrete, the green and gray armored new arrival spun his body around, still ill practiced within his new armor. He flashed his boot repulsors and tweaked his trajectory to avoid skidding into the parked cars around them. As the front of his body faced upward, holding Photon’s injured form in his arms, his head clanked into a fire hydrant. He lost complete control of his trajectory, simultaneously losing his grip on Photon as well.
The green Iron Mystery spun into the brick of a nearby boutique in a spiral of smoke and flames while Photon’s body flew into the air. Photon was propelled like a marionette as the Eternals watched, unaffected by the interruption. Before she could yet again fall catastrophically to the ground, she was snatched by a tornado of air that caught her in mid-fall and cushioned the impact of her almost fatal collision. Overhead, the Avengers Quinjet’s bay doors opened from the belly of the sleek silver aircraft. The Texas Twister had arrived at the precise last minute.
“That’s right, shiny bastards!” Texas Twister laughed as he descended into the battle, assisted by a column of wind under his control. “Texas Twister saves the day in the coolest way ya could ever imagine!”
Shooting Star, the Twister’s long time partner, leapt from the bay door, landing acrobatically on the street as Photon’s body was gently placed safely to the ground. “Less lip, more grip, Twister,” she replied as she drew her magical six shooters, immediately assaulting the Eternals with Uru metal bullets. “Pat your own back once we save everybody’s necks.”
“Do you always quip in clichés?” Ultra Girl, the young Kree mutant hybrid, asked as she streaked through the action to Photon’s side. “We have a casualty. Can’t you be more considerate?” She already knew that Shooting Star was not paying attention to her.
Ultra Girl checked Photon’s vitals and was immediately shocked to see that Photon’s body was the site of a huge Microverse construction project. Multitudinous hordes of tiny spires grew from her body as the minions of the Microverse had already begun the process of transforming Photon into a human sized super-class battle-chassis. Quickly, she tried to brush away the structures, devastating their forces and destroying thousands of soldiers with each swipe. With each brush, more forces joined the construction, attaching to Ultra Girl’s glove and spreading their battalions to her body. Like a malicious virus, it infected her and extended up her arm.
Ultra Girl bolted up in a panic, bumping into Shooting Star as she did so. “Dammit, girl, watch yourself,” Star shouted as she stifled the urge to elbow Ultra Girl in the face. “You almost knocked my aim into Twister!”
With the physical contact, Shooting Star received a fraction of the Microverse’s horde. Clumsily, the Avengers were falling.
“They’re everywhere and growing!” Ultra Girl feared as she could do nothing to help herself or her teammates.
Texas Twister deduced that something was going wrong and swooped his three female companions from the street. Jetting them to the roof, he set them down and joined them. The Eternals floated around them eerily, motionless yet with all eyes upon them.
“What’s going on?” Texas Twister asked, trying to take in the entire situation. It was well beyond his level of experience; his first outing as an Avenger seemed doomed to be wholly unsuccessful. Witnessing the immobile immortals, still as the grave, as well as the accelerated panic of his companions, he knew he had to swallow his doubts and be a man. He was a Texan as he was usually so proud to point out. He needed to act like it.
“You will cease resistance!” a message was broadcast from all of the Eternals’ mouths simultaneously as they began to slowly levitate towards the struggling Avengers. “There is no point to be anything other than one under the Greatest Karza!”
“I don’t think so!” Texas Twister defied as he siphoned all of the air from the atmosphere around him into a mighty cyclone that instantly swirled at inhuman speeds before him. As the Eternals began to be sucked into the twister, Texas Twister felt a strange tingling on his shoulder. The tingle quickly turned into a burning pain as his flesh became the host for a microscopic battle station.
Snarling with pain, he turned to see Ultra Girl, Photon and his beloved Shooting Star, their skins crawling with the hordes of the Microverse. As he felt his arm and chest succumb to the foreign technologies, he felt his heart drop as defeat set into his mind. His artificial tornado dissolved as his consciousness was submerged and he joined his fellow Avengers as receptacles for the microscopic weapons of mass destruction.
Captain America treaded cautiously through the seemingly abandoned New York streets. Minutes ago, flying Eternals swarmed around him, infecting the citizens of the city with their infectious armies. As the Eternals left, Captain America was left alone. He could hear the commotion from afar, the Eternals were nearby. He was concerned that the Avengers had been defeated already, they had yet to answer is distress call. Usually, when the Avengers were called to assemble, they assembled. Something was wrong, he knew it.
Judging the calamity to be close enough to reach with a prolonged sprint, he took to running. He covered three city blocks in one minute before being interrupted an unearthly snarl. Halting abruptly, he surveyed the area. He could see a mass of his opposition ahead but had intuited that the noise was not from them. Listening carefully, he heard the noise again, originating from one of the small shrub trees that lined the sidewalk. He then saw the glowing red eyes and held his shield to his chest.
A diminutive yet intimidating dinosaur launched from the leaves at Captain America but the hero was well prepared despite the curiosity of the event taking place. The dinosaur’s snout banged against the shield silently as the Vibranium alloy of the shield absorbed the sound of the impact. The beast backed up a bit, snarling as it prepared to lunge again.
“A velociraptor?” Cap said to himself in disbelief. Of all of the things he would expect to oppose him with all that had transpired today, a dinosaur would not have been considered.
“She’s a deinonychus,” a young girl corrected him as she revealed herself to the Captain. She was a bit overweight and had purple hair; she gave off an immediate air of unpleasantness. She pushed her glasses back into place on the bridge of her nose as she approached the dinosaur and petted it. “Her name’s Old Lace.”
Captain America was mildly bewildered and a little impatient, hearing the noises of battle from the distance. “Pardon me, young miss, but I have business that needs to be addressed,” he said with a curt bow. “You should get to shelter. It isn’t safe out here.”
Gertrude Yorkes scoffed at the understatement. “Yeah, no kidding,” she said. “That’s why Old Lace sniffed you out…Well, not you specifically. Some kind of Avenger or something. Bonus points to the dinosaur for getting the jump on Captain Freakin’ America.”
She grinned smugly, seeing that Captain America was not dashing away. “I think you can help me end this,” she said, pausing for dramatic effect. “You see, my parents are the known as The Travelers from the Pride. And thusly, I have a time machine. We can cut this down before it even started.”
Captain America recognized the names revealed to him and knew reluctantly that the day was about to become infinitely more complicated.
Simon Williams ignored the incessant beeping that tried to alert him to the emergency taking place across town, lost in his thoughts enough to not even realize that it had been beeping. It seemed to him that all of his thoughts were lost of late. He did not understand why he was still an Avenger. He had nothing left to fight for, nothing remained.
Wanda had left; gone without saying goodbye. Their child had been murdered, erased seconds after he had taken his first breath. He had done little but wallow in pity, teetering on the verge of mental breakdown. He knew, despite the values and morals ingrained in him from years of service as an Avenger, that soon he would seek true vengeance and the murderer of his son would be dead at his hand and the Avengers would not stop him.
As he slowly sat at the fireplace in the living room of Avengers mansion, he tore individual pages out of a diary that Wanda had left behind in her haste. She wrote of her first glimpses of her feelings for Simon. He was ignorant of how she felt until recently and as soon as they had found each other, they were pulled apart.
Anger boiled behind his ionic eyes. Purple energies welled from his tear ducts. He wished that he had somewhere to go; he wished he had someone to kill.
He tore the pages from their binding, watching as each one burned into fluttering ash. Once the book was down to nothing but an empty spine, his guest had finally arrived. With the smell of noxious damnation, the indescribable demon-spawn of Mephistopheles, Blackheart, took a seat across form Wonder Man.
His huge evil eyes narrowed as he leaned in to gather Simon’s attention. “Let’s get straight down to the business at hand, shall we, Mister Williams?”
Wonder Man wiped the tears from his eyes as, with a scowl, he nodded. “Yes.”
After minutes of systematic maintenance and a hard reboot, the armored pseudo-hero that has been referred to as the Iron Mystery finally rose from the crumbled remains of the destroyed shop where he had embarrassingly crashed. It was becoming quickly clear to him that he might not have been cut out for this line of business.
Although he was unhurt from the collision, he imagined that he had failed to save Photon, who was most likely now dead, and he had squandered his first real attempt to put the armor to good use. It was much more difficult than he thought it would be.
As soon as he peeked his head out of the glassless window, he was greeted by the blunt trauma of a metal fist. His makeshift Iron Man suit absorbed a sufficient amount of the force to keep his head connected to his body but the sound of the metal on metal contact would reverberate in his eyes for hours.
Shaking away the echoes within his inner ear, he collected the particle receptors within the suit with hopes for retaliation. Not one to be unfamiliar with the various super humans of the world, he was rather shocked to recognize his attacker, not only because the man attacking him known to be a hero in high esteem but the man was also long dead.
“Colossus?” the Iron Mystery asked to the miraculously alive metallic Russian mutant.
He never got a reply verbally but was instead smashed in the head again, launched through the air to add to his growing list of failures.
Wordlessly, Colossus watched the Iron Mystery disappear over a building and then turned to the others. He was surrounded by a multitude of Eternals and converted citizens alike. Photon, Texas Twister, Shooting Star and Ultra Girl joined them as they gathered around the huge, shining mutant.
Colossus raised his mighty arms to the sky, rallying his troops. “Infest them all!” Colossus exclaimed, no hint of the usual Russian accent. “Please your Overlord! Do not rest until I sit atop the throne of this world!”
In unison, the entire fleet of human battleships applauded. “Yes, Baron Karza!”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
To Be Concluded...
Previous Issue | Next Issue