Post by DiscipleofBob on Nov 1, 2014 3:51:53 GMT -5
Fantastic Four #2:
Underground Movement
By Adrini and DiscipleofBob
Underground Movement
By Adrini and DiscipleofBob
Doom Industries Executive Office
January 1, 2000
11:04 AM
“Look, this is urgent! Get Lucia or Victor or whoever you have to down here now! Every microsecond you delay could mean the difference between life and death!”
"Sir, I'm sorry but Miss Von Bardas very, um, occupied with matters at present. I will let her know that you came as soon as-" Lucia Von Bardas’s secretary was hired for his ability to defer unwanted visitors, something he was normally quite skilled at. But the two individuals in front of him were not only exceptionally adamant, but held very high standing in the company. The blond man in the tux, slightly worn from the night before, was Dr. Henry Pym, head particle physicist and a mind only rivaled by Reed Richards and the president himself. The very angry, very beautiful brunette behind him in the cocktail dress and folded arms was more than just a pretty face as well. Dr. Janet Van Dyne was a prominent entomologist who defied every scientist stereotype.
"I am so done with this,” Jan said with a scowl. Slight and short she easily slipped past the man and kicked down the door with her petit but surprisingly athletic legs.
Where the secretary failed to be intimidating the vice-president’s office more than compensated. The ceiling arced to a point in gothic arches with rafters that kept the room awash in shadows, illuminated only by a dim, green glow. Her ‘office plants’ were thorny ferns covered in twisting vines that seemed to reach As difficult as it was for anyone else to believe this was Lucia Von Bardas’s idea of a comfortable working space.
Now she was anything but comfortable. Several wall monitors displayed videos of employees Von Bardas was addressing, though it was clear they weren’t the only men she was addressing. "Do better! I need exact whereabouts now, do not contact me again without them!" The lines clicked out simultaneously and she turned to her new visitors, truly frazzled. "I am so sorry. I have every line I can think of open and I'm still hitting walls. I swear we will find them, someone who works here has to be more than an idiot."
"What do we know? Tell me everything you have. Please," Hank pleaded. “We’re not just talking about our co-workers here. Reed, Sue, Johnny, Ben. They’re family.”
Just as she had forced her way past the secretary, Janet stormed over to the desk and turned around one of Lucia’s laptops without so much as a please, but she was quickly locked out by lack of authorization. Annoyed, she silently wheeled the laptop back around and glared at Lucia expectantly.
Her boss sighed. “Look, I’ll gladly accept any and all help we can get on this, but it won’t do anyone any good if we don’t coordinate the search and rescue effort.”
“Do we even know what caused the crash? Are they... alive?” Hank asked cautiously.
“Of course they’re alive!” Janet snapped.
“I want to assume the best, but I also want to be prepared for the worst,” Lucia said carefully. “Between Dr. Richard’s engineering designs and Dr. Pym’s work with unstable molecules they have every chance possible of surviving. But we can’t take any chances and we have to move as efficiently as possible.”
“Who have you contacted? NASA? The military?”
“No one but our own people.”
“What?!” Janet said outraged, with Hank equally astounded.
“We don’t know what exactly happened or why the Station crashed yet. The Station was a huge risk for our company in many ways. If we don’t have every last detail of information before this hits the media, it will be a complete catastrophe. For all of us.”
“Un-Be-Freakin-Lievable!” Janet yelled. “Our friends might be dead or dying and you’re worried about PR crap?!”
“I am doing everything possible to ensure the safety of everyone aboard that station. There’s nothing the military or NASA can do that we can’t besides leak the whole thing and let the media have a field day with us.”
Hank shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t possibly believe Mr. Von Doom would agree to that. Where is he? I want to speak with him personally.”
Lucia hesitated, knowing she couldn’t give a straight answer, instead taking a large dossier. ”Here, you said you wanted to help. This is everything we know about the Station and its descent. It’s not much, but if anyone can use this to calculate where they would have crashed, it would be you.”
Janet wanted to protest, but Hank eagerly accepted the dossier. "Send the electronic files after us so we can start correlating. You'll have a full report by tomorrow."
After a pleading look from Hank, Janet reluctantly grumbled, “We're on it."
The two eagerly left for their own offices to get started. Watching the two leave, Lucia returned to the screen and opened a new line. “You still there?” Lucia said softly. A garbled, earthy voice responded, audio only.
"Yeah, boss lady?" it chuckled.
"Status report. How are they doing?" Lucia asked before sinking into her chair and getting down to the conversation the two had so rudely interrupted.
The village was burning.
Its destitute residents fled in terror, but there was nowhere to go. Evil flanked them on a three sides.
From the mountains, a tyrant and his army marched on the village. Iron soldiers made up a phalanx. Black-winged steeds soared through storm-filled skies like dark valkyries. Large metal monstrosities marched through the wilderness and the town, destroying each equally in their wake.
From the forests, hellfire danced as unearthly shadows grinned with misshapen teeth. Their blood-encrusted claws grabbed any living creature they could find and dragged them back to whatever underworld they crawled from.
From the heavens a sickly green glow permeated spiraling storm clouds as a single, giant iron mask impassively overlooked the carnage below.
In the center of all of it, a young boy watched it all in terror as his mother held him close. The boy somehow saw all of it. No matter how hard he tried to shield his eyes, he could see every villager butchered by soldiers or demons, every house burned to the ground, and above it all the mask above stared silently in judgment.
Suddenly, demonic claws wrapped around the boy's mother and yanked her away. He silently screamed for his mother, barely holding onto her hand. His grip was strong for his age, but the demons were far stronger still. One by one, his fingers lost their grip, just barely holding on, until finally...
Victor woke up violently in a cold sweat. It took a few moments for the night terror to fade until he could no longer remember the details, only that it chilled his soul.
Once he finally started to regain his wits, his unease returned as he realized he wasn’t in his bed or anywhere else he recognized. The bed was small with thin sheets, more like an operating table. The walls were rough stone, not even carved into corners or a ceiling, just seemingly naturally formed tunnels with dim miner’s lamps strung around the room.
Victor tried to recall what led him here. All he could remember was the space station falling apart, burning up as it entered the atmosphere. “What is this place? Am I dead?”
“Far from it, Vic.” The thick, gravelly voice caught Victor by surprise. In the dim light and in his disorientation he hadn’t noticed the figure sitting in the corner.
He was short, squat, round little figure in large baggy clothes that looked like they’d been found in a thrift shop a decade ago and never washed. Victor couldn’t tell if the pungent, earthy smell came from his surroundings or from the disheveled man before him. Thick, dark glasses kept Victor from staring his host in the eye. “Where am I? Who are you?”
“Woah, relax, Mistah Doom. You’re in friendly territory,” the squat little man said in a thick accent Victor guessed was Bostonian or at least from that region. Then again, Victor doubted the man had been near any civilization in a long time. “The name’s Harvey Elder. I work for you.”
“You... do?” Doom Industries was a large company and not even Victor had every single project memorized, but someone like this, in someplace like this, seemed like it would have made more of an impression on the quarterly fiscal report.
“Yeah. Sorry about the mess. I don’t exactly get health inspections all the way out here in the boondocks, and my pets always leave messes wherever they go.”
“Pets?” Victor examined his surroundings again, this time noticing a darkened hallway and several pairs of dim, beady eyes staring back at him from around the corners of the abyss.
“The Moloids, my personal project. But we can talk shop after you’re feeling up to it. You’ve been through a hell of a day, I can tell.”
Victor’s senses were slowly returning, including the intense pain racking his body. The last thing he remembered wearing was the formal suit for New Year’s, just before everything went completely crazy. Now his entire body was wrapped in bandages, from head to toe. From touch alone he could only guess the extent of the damage. “I need a mirror.”
Harvey shook his head. “Sorry, but I don’t got anything like that. I don’t get a lot of basic amenities all the way out here. It’s just me and the Moloids. I have to keep the light dim around here so a mirror wouldn’t be much good.”
Victor grimaced, his many bandages itched to the point of insanity, and there was no way to know the true extent of the damage. “How’d you find me?”
“Lucy called me. Said you might be in a real jam.”
Lucy? The name didn’t immediately ring a bell. “You mean Miss Von Bardas?”
“Yeah, scary boss lady. Let me tell you, I expected it to be a colder day in hell when SHE’S the one giving ME a call,” Harvey chuckled.
“What happened? I remember the space station crashing.”
“Well, you got that part right. It crashed. Bardas called me to try and pick up what was left. Me and my boys found you in the wreckage. You’re one lucky guy. I don’t know how anyone could have survived a fall like that. Guess that Richards guy really knows how to make ‘em, huh?”
Images of his four friends flashed in his mind. “Is Reed okay?! What about the others?!”
“I’ve got Richards and the kid locked up downstairs.”
Suddenly Victor leapt from the table and grabbed the squat little man by the throat, lifting him with frightening speed and slamming him against the stone wall. “You imprisoned them?!” His voice filled with rage and the dim lights started to flicker more erratically.
Harvey was definitely surprised, flailing his arms and gagging at the surprisingly strong grip of a supposedly weak and injured man around his throat. “Easy, Vic! I didn’t know what you wanted me to do with them!”
“So you throw them in a stone dungeon?!”
“They were spiking radiation levels something fierce! If I just threw them in the nearest hospital, which is some distance away anyway, they could turn a whole town into the next Chernobyl! You checked out fine though! I don’t have a lot of medical equipment here, but Bardas already knows the situation and is sending a full team. Your friends couldn’t be in better care.”
Victor slowly calmed down, and with it he set the short little man back down. He thought he felt something large grab his shoulder from behind, but a brief glance revealed nothing. He remembered Harvey’s ‘pets’ and tried to remind himself to be more aware of his surroundings. He also noticed Harvey cling to a clay staff, taller than its wielder, he assumed it was to help with walking, but Harvey clung to it like a shield. “Fine. Until their radiation levels go down, keep them quarantined, but treat them well. They aren’t prisoners, they’re patients. You said you found Reed and Johnny. What about Sue? What about Ben?”
“I hate to tell you this, Vic, but we haven’t found the other two yet.”
“WHAT?!” Victor’s rage flared up again, but Harvey was quick to follow up.
“We haven’t found any bodies yet though so there’s still a chance! If you and the other two somehow survived the crash then they’ve got a decent shot too! I’ve still got some Moloids searching the area. We’ll find them, one way or the other.”
Victor sighed, though it sounded more like a growl. “I’ll take over leading the search. We have to find them-“
“You let me worry about that. There’s a few things we still need to discuss.”
“If it’s payment you’re looking for, you’ll be generously rewarded for your efforts, AFTER we’ve found Sue and Ben.”
“While I appreciate the gesture, I’m talking about some of the other things we found in the crash.”
Victor’s mind raced to try and fill in the blanks. “Other things? Did some of the experiments survive?”
Harvey shrugged. “Hell if I know what they were working on up there. But we found some... thing... some kind of rock creature in the wreckage. We brought it in and have it confined for now. You know anything about it?”
“I don’t know everything Reed was working on, but rock-creature-thing doesn’t sound like his type of work.”
“Unless he was trying to beat a scissor-man,” Harvey said with a low chuckle, though Victor only glared in response. “Sorry, bad joke. I don’t get a lot of visitors down here.”
“Whatever it is, just make sure it doesn’t get loose. Anything else? I’d like to speak with Reed.”
“Actually, yes. But it’s probably easier to show you. And I’d check this out before you make any plans,” Harvey said as he grabbed his staff and led the way, waddling through the tunnels as Victor followed behind. “This is going to be a real earthshaker...”
Reed Richards woke up in near absolute darkness. From touch he hypothesized the walls appeared to be consolidated bedrock, carved or hewn away by crude implements. This wasn’t the work of some wild animal either. The function for a cell being carved like this had to be clear and deliberate.
With little else to observe he peered out of the solitary hole in the bedrock showing dim light outside. As he suspected, there was a similar stone hallway outside, though there didn’t seem to be many other cells from his point of view at least.
What did interest him was the strange brown humanoid creature walking almost on all fours across the hall like a sort of guard. “Excuse me, sir, but in the interest of scientific inquiry, are you sentient?” The guard reacted and quickly turned towards Reed’s cell, though more from the noise than anything else.
It had a very natural earthy coloration, likely an evolutionary trait of the environment. It had eyes, but they were small beady things in great round sockets. They were also glazed over as if they served no function in this environment. Reed wondered if the creature was just an anomaly (after all it seemed counterintuitive to designate a blind one of these creature to guard them.
The creature sniffed and growled, but otherwise made no noises or any actions that could have been interpreted as a sign of language. “You, sir, are a quite extraordinary specimen, and I would love to study you at some point. In a humane environment of course. However, I must conclude that you cannot understand a thing I’m saying so further negotiation for my release would only serve to debate the merits with myself.”
“Reed? Reed, please tell me that’s you.” It was Johnny’s voice which Reed could only assume came from a cell next door.
“Jonathan! You have no idea how wonderful it is to hear that my confinement isn’t completely solitary!”
“Um... thanks?”
“Could you verbally describe your situation for me? The more information I have, the better.”
“Uh... I’m in a dark, stone room. I can’t find a light switch or a door handle or anything. There’s a little bit of light coming from a crack in the wall, but not much.”
“Similar to my predicament, as I expected. Ben? Sue? Victor? Anyone else there?”
It took a few moments before a low, gravelly voice sounded from the other wall. “Hey, keep it down in there, Reed. How’s am I supposed to get any sleep with you yappin’?”
“Ben! Are you all right? We appear to be in some form captivity!”
“We is?” For a moment Reed heard no response from Ben’s side of the wall. “All right, I’m bustin’ us out o’ here.” Reed could hear the loud, clunky shuffling as Ben no doubt got to his feet.
“And how do you propose to do that?” Reed asked. To his shock, a loud thud shook even his stone cell as he realized what his friend was trying. “Ben, this is solid bedrock! You need more than just brute force to break through material this dense and thick!”
There were a few more pronounced thuds so forceful Reed was worried that the cave might collapse before they could get free. Suddenly the impact came with a loud crash as dust sifted through the light opening in Reed’s cell.
“You was saying?” Ben gloated.
“These’s nothing more dense or thick than Ben’s skull,” Johnny said with a snicker.
“Watch it, kid, or I’m leavin’ you in there.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Grimm,” Johnny replied meekly.
When the boulder blocking Reed’s cell cracked and shook, he knew to back up as Ben pried it off and threw it to the side. Before the dust settled he did the same with Johnny’s.
Reed stepped out into the cavernous hallway, dimly lit by hanging lanterns to better survey his surroundings. His interest in the cavern and its true origin and purpose was completely forgotten when large stone humanoid met him in the hallway.
“S’matter, Reed?” the golem spoke in Ben’s voice. “You figure somethin’ out, yet?”
“B-Ben? Is that you?” Reed asked.
The golem arched one of its thick orange brow-shaped configurations. “Of course it’s me. You lackin’ oxygen or something?”
“Woah,” Johnny commented as he looked. “Hey, Ben, do this.” He waved his hand in front of his face as a demonstration.
Ben was confused, but complied. “I don’t know whyHOLY CRAPPOLA! What’s wrong with me!” Ben immediately started patting himself down to find that his whole body was the same. Either a thick layer of stone covered his body seamlessly, or he was rock all the way through. Confused but trying to remain collected, Ben turned to the one person he relied on for answers of any kind. “All right, Reed. Explain. What the hell’s going on?”
“I... can’t be sure. Not at this point, without any tests to base this off of. It is a pretty fantastic condition, though.”
“Fantastic?! Look at me, I’m a walkin’ Cheetoh!” Ben yelled.
At that moment, low growls emanated from one end of the hallway. All three looked down to see strange humanoid creatures shamble towards them in a swarm. "We can debate the merits and origins of your condition once we're safe. For now, we need to move!"
"I ain't goin' nowhere!" Ben growled. "If these things are the reason I'm covered in Tang, I'm gonna beat the snot out of every last one of them!" He grabbed one of the boulders used previously to block the door and hurled it towards the crowd of mole-creatures.
To everyone's surprise, three of the creatures banded together and not only caught the giant boulder, but hurled it back in the same instance, directly at Reed Richards.
"Hey, poindexter! Watch out!" Ben yelled, but it was too late as the giant rock slammed into Reed's torso, only for his torso to bend unnaturally backward, the boulder cradled in his abdomen. His torso stretched back as far as it could possibly go before slingshotting back, turning the boulder in one united maneuver against the mole-people who had tried to throw it back at them. The narrow corridor and the clustered enemies turned the whole affair into a deadly bowling league.
"That was... also fascinating," Reed summarized.
"Yeah, well, we still got more coming, so get ready Stretch!" said Ben.
The mole-creatures moved even faster than before, swarming into the tunnel. "Johnny, you stay behind us," Reed said as he tried formulating their retreat plan.
Ben grabbed two slightly smaller rocks, ones that he could potentially use as weapons if needed.
Just as the mole-people were getting close, a bright light enveloped the hallway along with a searing heat. The mole creatures recoiled in horror at the sheer intensity of the light, all running away until they had all found refuge in distant shadows.
"Okay, who turned on the lights?" Johnny asked, unaware of what Ben and Reed saw when they turned around. Johnny was literally on fire. His entire body was wreathed in flames.
"You did," Ben commented.
"I did, I... Whoah..."
"Does it hurt? Are you suffering any burns?" Reed asked as he tried to analyze any connection between the three to explain their cause.
"Feels fine to me," Johnny said as Ben started coughing, shortly before Reed had trouble breathing as well.
"Can you turn off the flames?" Reed asked.
"Why would I? It seems to me like this is the perfect way to deal with those mole things until we find out more about what's going on,"
"Yes, but as long as you're on fire, you're using a considerable amount of our air supply while we're here. We'll run out of oxygen if you keep that up."
"Oh. Okay, um, let's see... Fire down? Blaze off? Burn less?" Johnny fiddled with his powers for a bit, but the powers were still completely new to him. As for how to control it, in his teenage mind a code phrase of some kind made the most sense. Exactly what though he was still trying to figure out though the fires did eventually go away without suffocating them.
The mole-people were gathering in the tunnel again, this time more cautiously than before. "So if I can't scare them away with fire, and Ben can't punch them without causing a cave-in, where do we stand?"
"I dunno, kid. But I ain't never backed down from a fight before," Ben grinned. "You know what time it is?"
Reed interrupted. "It's time for us to retreat to a safe location without fighting hordes of creatures that, for all we know, are just trying to defend their territory."
Ben grimaced. "Come on, Reed. I can take 'em!"
"I'm sure you can, but we have to find Sue and Victor. Logic dictates that they're probably somewhere in this cave system as well. Exactly why we were separated in the first place, I simply don't know. But either way, we have to try everything we can to find them.
The blizzard raged on.
Sue Storm huddled in the cold. She’d fallen asleep a few times, but had managed to wake back up. With only large pieces of scrap for shelter against the blistering cold of the wind.
It was hard to believe the thin blue suit she wore could protect, but the unstable molecules making it up would adapt her suit and her body for even extreme environments such as these. She had to thank Hank Pym for her survival when she got back. If she got back. If she could. The cold wasn’t cut off completely though, and the pain from her injuries was difficult to distinguish from the pain of the cold.
Sue hadn’t managed to find any of the others, but she had seen strange creatures wandering in the cold, taking bits from the wreckage and hauling it off to parts unknown. She’d managed to stay hidden so far despite a few close calls. The communications equipment had already been stripped and salvaged by the brown humanoids, along with most anything she could use to call for help, locate the others, or even survive.
Which left Sue one choice, and that was to tail the creatures back to wherever they originated. If she got lucky, she might even be able to find the others.
To Be Continued...