[Plot] [Issue 45] And I'll Hear You Scream Again...

[Will Stanton]

A dozen years from now, billions of years ago, and three steps to the right...


50-block radius is clear, Plasticine, the voice crackled over Will's earpiece. It's just you and Doctor Crazypants over there.

...Try not calling him Doctor Crazypants when you talk him down, Dad.

I need five more minutes to take down the amplifiers, another voice chimed in. Keep him talking.

"Understood. Good work, Genbu, Robbie. Once they're down, fall back behind the perimeter. We'll do tapas when we're done here."

Will Stanton clicked his earpiece off as he adjusted the collar of his uniform, and stared up at the gunmetal grey doors of the abandoned warehouse in front of him. Why was it that the Supervillains always seemed to find an abandoned warehouse, or disused factory, or condemned amusement park to work out of, anyway? A little bit of urban renewal would do London quite a bit of good.


"Doctor? It's Plasticine. I've come alone," he shouted, sliding the door open and placing his hands behind his head -- not that that meant anything in the long run, being a shapeshifter and all, but he found that it kept the baddies more at ease. "I'm unarmed. I just want to talk."

Silence greeted him at first. This was not unexpected, and not unprecedented -- the good Doctor had no way of knowing that Slight had hitched a ride after their last encounter, revealing the location of his evil base. As always, Will found it useful to stay two to three jumps ahead of the baddies; beat them before they knew they were fighting. Win the chess match, and you don't have to win the brawl afterwards. Hence why all the teams had evacuated a hefty stretch of London for this encounter; hence why the tech teams had already scouted and found the dark energy amplifiers before they could be switched on to full power; hence why the LSCU was waiting with advanced patrol wagons and a nice warm cell in Blackfriars. The game was already over; the X-Teams had won again; it was just a matter of tallying up the final score.

So long as he could give John those two minutes. Four and a half, now. If not, the amplifiers would turn the good Doctor's gun from a localized spacetime distortion to a black hole that would envelop not just London, but significant chunks of England and Wales, as well. This, Will supposed, was not the Brexit that the HLS had been trying to organize.


"Doctor? We can play this however you want to play this, but it's over now." Four minutes. "All that we get to decide now is how you're going to come with me. Come quietly, and you'll spend your next stretch in relative comfort. If you want to play it loud..." he trailed off, leaving the threat unspoken. No threat he could make would be worse than what someone could make in their own mind; let them do the work for you.

"Stand back, Plasticine! For in my hands, I control the fate of the world!". Doctor Zero stood atop a crate, proudly lifting a nasty looking piece of tech above his head. The Gravity Gun -- an innocuous name for a very nocuous object. And one that, at least for the next 210 seconds, was powerful enough to back up his words.

"Your towers are down, Doctor," Will said. "And the building is surrounded." Bluffs, both of them -- not outright lies, as long as you considered a 50-block cordon as "surrounded", but nowhere near ready yet. Will's poker face was a good one, though, and none of the uncertainty of the situation danced across his face. "You've already lost; I don't see any need to run up the score here. You can still make things right -- the distortions in Sheffield, the chaos in Edenborough. Your ledger could be much worse than it is. Just put the gun down, and come with me."

The Doctor looked around, panic and desperation in his eyes. "You can't...you can't fool me, Plasticine! You'll lock me up and throw away the key, and Doctor Zero bows to no man!" He turned, and trained the gun directly on Will. "I may not have enough power to bring this city to it's knees, but I wager I can still gather enough power to send you away. Call everyone off, or we'll see just how uncanny you really are."

Shit. Two more minutes, if his mental countdown was right. And to make matters worse, the Doctor was twenty steps away. Will could move quite quickly when he wanted to; his muscles already coiling with potential energy as he shifted his posture slightly. But, best-case scenario, he could make up a ten-step gap before the Doctor could fire wildly. Not 20.

"You could," he said, with a well-practiced casual air. "Though I should point out, if your gun is as strong as all that, you're not going to get out of this very pretty either. And everyone out there," he added, intentionally turning his back on the Doctor and pivoting to his right as he grandly gestured, making up two steps in the process, "Would come in after me, so even if you do have protection...well, there's no way you're getting a second shot off." He pivoted back again to the right to face the Doctor again -- making up another two steps. "They're not going to take kindly to taking down the leader of the X-Men. Besides, I owe half of them beer money," he joked. "And if I'm dead, I can't pay." 90 seconds.

"So let's just cool the air here some, Doctor. There's no need for anyone to get hurt today. Not me, and not you. We can walk out of here, together, and go from there. How does that sound to you?"

"Silence!" Zero spat. "The world will known and fear the name of Zachariah Zero, the man who tamed gravity itself! All nations shall tremble before my might, and pay homage to me, so that they may continue to exist! And as for you, my X-Man -- today shall be your last day on this Earth! Make your peace with your gods now," he said, looking down the sights.

"My Gods don't care much for peace," Will said. "And your dream won't come true. I'm sorry, but there's no way out of this for you. Put down the gun, and we can..."

Will saw Zero's finger begin to wrap around the trigger. Ten more seconds, five more steps, he needed either to make sure everything was safe. Maybe John had worked his magic faster than anticipated. Maybe Zero was slower on the trigger than he hoped. Either way, the time for action was now.

Leaving his words unfinished, Will sprang forward, leaping through the air like someone fired out of a cannon, stretching himself to his limit to try to stop Zero before he could fire. His hands wrapped around the barrel of the gun, as it warmed up and fired...

[Will Stanton]

The pain was indescribable.

Well, no, that was a cop-out. It's just that, for most people, a black hole forming in your gut would snuff you out long before pain entered the equation; the sheer time it would take for the signals to travel down your nervous system to your brain would be far too long; you'd be dead before you knew it. Will was made out of tougher stuff than that, however, much to his eternal dismay.


The first problem was that, with the amplifiers down, the black hole was very small. That's probably great news for Greater London; less great news for the shapeshifter who saw it forming right before him. He could feel his atoms stretching out, his body contorting like a piece of spaghetti, beyond what was possible for any normal man; beyond what was possible for him. The heat of the Hawking radiation charred him to his core, and he could feel every cell in his body roasting and puncturing as the intense pressures and unbelievable forces of nature ravaged the shifter, shredding him, reducing him to a pile of loosely connected ash. His vision -- for even this was not enough to stop him, not enough to kill him, not since the Morrigan had brought him back -- dilated into a point, his senses winking out one after another, leaving him just with the sensation of pain, raw, agonizing, utterly inescapable pain, ripping him apart even as the space he was in winked down into a singularity; everything crushed down into a very tiny point.


And still he did not die; not even as his mind came unglued at the seams. He could feel himself slipping away; bits and pieces of him disconnecting and disembodying. Every piece of him silently screaming; a chorus of tens, hundreds, thousands, uncountable numbers and varieties of pain and torment. In desperation, what little he had left of himself began focusing, turning inwards, focusing on what he could find of his core self. What he held dearest; what was most important to him; put it in a box and throw away the key; let the waves of nothingness wash over him. Trust in his family to find him. Trust in those he cared most to take him across the finish line. Part of him sealed away, protected, guarded.

And the rest of him? That could drift away; could be reformed and reworked when needed. Let them find their own protection; their own boxes; their own sense of security. He could live without them, for now...not that that was a conscious choice, mind you; a mere side-effect of the instinctual method of saving himself he had fallen back on, in the Nothingness that was Everything.

And then there was light.

Blinding, inescapable light. And heat; hotter than anything anyone had ever experienced. And space, too -- where once everything had been condensed into one solitary point, now there was too much space, and what was once Will was thrown forward, back, up, down, inside and outside and parallelwise and in directions which didn't have words or frames of meaning. Flung across space at the speed of light, what was left of Will in the Box tumbled through a chaotic and expanding universe, broken, shattered, incomplete...but alive.