Act II Of 'FANTASTIC FOUR IN THE NEGATIVE ZONE' — An Unlicensed Work Of Fan Fiction
Ever wonder what Marvel Studios' Fantastic Four would look like, or wonder whether or not this franchise can even be redeemed on film? Decide for yourself, after the jump!
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PREVIOUSLY ON F4nthNgtvZn... Two of the very best and brightest in applied military science, Dr. Reed Richards and USAF Officer Ben Grimm, have constructed a transdimensional-superpositioner out in the Nevada desert following Reed's dismissal from the Manhattan-based think tank, Future Foundation, which was carried out by his intellectual rival, Viktor von Doom. But after the FF's Latverian machinist went M.I.A. during a scuffle with their captive alien insectoid, called ANNIHILUS, the Foundation's distinguished benefactor Frank Storm, and his offspring Johnny and Sue set their sights back on Reed for his unique expertise in teleportation. In the moments leading up to the quartet launching a search party using the patented equipment Ben Grimm sold to NASA in order to recover von Doom from a deep space drift, something went wrong... a strange cosmic energy emanating from the matter transmitter device grabbed hold of four individuals, beaming them out of this life and into the next... |
Chapter 8 (cont.) - TELEPORTER REFUELED: A slow tracking shot spans the nighttime horizon of the Mojave Desert, bright static crackles into the frame from off-screen and spooks a Sierra Fence Lizard, Sceloperus occidentalis, off of its rock. We then hear a body thud onto an unforgiving desert stone pavement, the rotating shot steadily reveals an outstretched arm clawing at the gravel, then a blue sleeve, then REED RICHARDS' haunted eyes pry open behind an optical module displaying heat warnings in the HUD of his standard issue safety specs. His terrified expression sits motionless in a tight close-up that slowly leans out to reveal an anatomically incorrect elongation of the torso, followed by two liquified legs splayed out across Nevada's badlands. Feeling like he'd been struck by lightning in slow-motion then dragged through another dimension and spat out onto an unyeilding, rock solid planet, the lost scientist is too rattled to recall what happened a moment ago, and too afraid to move at the risk of discovering the full extent of the damage. He's so still that the cold-blooded critter perches itself atop his motionless back for warmth, only scampering away when Reed moves, making the oldest mistake in the book — looking down — at his lower extremities. Flaccid paralysis? Nope, much worse, advanced somatic deliquescence, a cruel cosmic joke on the guy who used to get rubber legs at the thought of public speaking.
Reed's entire lower half now resembles microwaved playdoh, and for all he knows this is permanent, and what he'll be remembered for. He flips onto his back, a disorienting perspective shot warps and color-gradients the starry desert dome above him, the focal length of his eyes are in a constant flux, zooming in and out indepentely of each other. Having had enough of this stomach-churning, psychedelic audio/visual nightmare, he flips back onto his abdomen. He attempts to raise his head and sees the faint glow from the campsite, which couldn't have zapped him more than a mile away, and knowing Future Foundation looks after their people, they should be commencing a rescue momentarily and recover the other three in no time — the other three. That's right, Sue was dragged in there with him, so were Johnny and Ben, it was never supposed to turn out like this — we were meant to be explorers, not cautionary tales. Though he's both physically and mentally exhausted, Reed makes an attempt at standing upright, he groans loudly as he feels his neck go entirely limp, too flimsy to support his head, and his limbs can't seem to coordinate anything but a tall, gangly quadripedal locomotive. Cut to an interior shot of the tented encampment where Dr. Frank Storm and his military liaison, Lieutenant Lumpkin, prepare to launch a rescue patrol when one of their scouts catches sight of a grotesque, writhing spider-monster nearing the encampment on all fours. The military reacts just the way you’d expect, closing off the site and firing their rifles at something they don’t understand — everything in this scene looks completely otherworldly.
From the starry skies and desolate landscapes, to the industrial-grade stadium lights shining a full photometric ton onto this bullet-ridden cephalopod of a man, it all looks like something H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, and H.R. Giger collaborated on. After ordering a ceasefire, Doctor Storm rushes to his side, the bullets dislodge themselves from deep skin impressions, the doctor ignores this and places two fingers between the bone and the tendon over his radial artery and tries to check his pulse, but reactively releases the drooping wrist when it melts in his hands like heated clay. A quick medical examination only raises more questions than it answers, Doctor Storm supports his student's pendulous head and cross examines the semi-conscious survivor of the mysterious accident, "Reed, look at me. Reed. Where are the others, where are John and Susan what happened to them?" Richards is clearly trying to say something but his face muscles hanging to the side prevents any vocalization, and his breathing is too shallow to muster up an answer before he's strapped to a stretcher and carried off into a medical tent, with an outstretched arm dragging floppily across the desert floor. (practical effect) Doctor Storm stands up from one knee and stares intently out into the Mojave desert, a chaotic concoction of helicopters, spotlights, scientists and soldiers occupy the background of the shot as the score swells into an intense pounding then cuts to an ambient silence in the following scene.
Sue wakes up facedown in a shallow pool of water, and in coming to this realization she inhales sharply and gasps in every last bit of air from the protective bubble formed around her face. Rolling over and coughing fluid then trying to stand up, she winds up staring down at her absent reflection in the water, past that she sees two submerged hands as they're steadily replaced by thousands of tiny air pockets covering a silhouette of invisible digits. So this is the afterlife, and I'm a ghost. Fantastic. Barely able to stand, she reels upward on two feet then looks down in absolute terror as her body vanishes in sequential anatomical layers, first to go is her blue Future Foundation uniform, then her skin and subcutaneous tissue, then her musculature, organs, ventral cavity and abdominal wall then finally her bones wither away from sight.
The invisible girl takes a few steps forward then drops to her knees in a despairing splash, screaming out for somebody to come find her, this phantasmal temper tantrum manifests in the physical world as an invisible dome displacing the water around her, pressing the canyon basin's shallow waters into miniature tidal waves EXPANDING in a circle around her, and sends out a SHOCKWAVE that topples over a sandstone collumn. Now she's standing on dry desert ground, yet with the slightest hand gesture the water retracts and floods back around her transparent feet. Trudging out of the reservoir to find an exit from the canyon, Sue doesn't feel herself regaining visibility but we start to see her distraught face reappear, her running makeup, her gushing nose, and a sodden outfit combined with a cold desert-wind has her shivering violently on the verge of hypothermia. Clutching crossed arms, she looks upward to navigate using the stars but they've all but disappeared as morning sunlight scatters through the upper atmosphere. Just then, Sue picks up on the sound of the FF's helicopter blades whirring before it flies over the canyon, and to transition into the next scene, the camera fixates on one point in the sky then tracks downward to view a completely new location.
Johnny Storm's head enters the frame from below, the look on his face tells us that standing in the middle of a fiery crater is the last place he expected to wake up on a Saturday morning, he climbs out from the impact cavity in melted soles and rippled sportswear while every patch of arid grass within a 5-ft radius of him crackles into ignition. His nostrils are burning from the smoke (or is the smoke burning from his nostrils?) he swipes at his nose and then brushes off his shirt— no literally, brushes it off into a tattered heap. Worse yet, pieces of the artificial fabric get stuck to his hands and combust into two makeshift cave torches, and the person at the giving-end of what should be an excruciatingly painful 3rd-degree burning sensation can only stare silently at his blazing forearms and walk for about fifty paces in the wrong direction while a smoldering trail of dead plants crackles behind him. He thinks to himself he's nowhere near the flatlander base anymore, this probably isn't even Nevada, I must've been teleported to an adjacent state like New Mexico or Wyoming (yeah... geography was never his strongest suit.) It isn't until reaching higher ground that he finally catches a glimpse of the wildfires unfolding out for miles — where he'd originally impacted the Earth there now strides a mountainous SMOKE PLUME resembling a dense volcanic ash cloud, drifting ominously over a dryland forest. The Future Foundation helicopter wushes through the wall of smoke minutes before any wildfire suppression squad can arrive, Johnny decides to guarantee his immediate rescue by jumping shouting and waving his hands through the air, but this motion causes his arms to combust which ignites a nearby Joshua tree. Still unaware that he's the source of the fire, his attempts at extinguishing these RAMPAGING WILDFIRES only fan the flames of the uncontrollable inferno that sprang up in his wake. High altitude aerial shots of the large-scale natural disaster segue us right into the next scene where we're following the colossal smoke-storm as it stampedes towards a nearby town...
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN GRIMM: Ben's afterlife more closely resembles a waking nightmare, replete with a thick blanket of low radius-of-visibility smoke covering street corners that he doesn't recognize, at least not through the eyes of an 8ft tall, 900 pound orange colossus body. The Thing staggers weightily into the shot, two stony mitts scrape at his stinging eyes as he wades through traffic collisions and multi-car pile-ups that he may or may not have been the direct cause of. Compact cars assault him omnidirectionally as he stumbles right into a busy intersection, vehicle after vehicle swerves into his durable new body without leaving so much as a scratch, or even knocking Ben off-balance in the slightest degree. The smokescreen is growing denser by the second, obscuring the morning traffic to a point where only sets of murky headlights are visible, and at this point Ben is so disoriented that he's even fighting back against his 'attackers' — he even uppercuts a minivan which flips backwards and careens out of frame, overturned and out of view.
Despite higher brain functions telling him to stop and think it through, the unfamiliarity of his surroundings combined with the overall surreal nature of this predicament keeps assuring him that this is all just a dream, and clobberin' is the key to waking up back in a normal body. Luckily for these unsuspecting Nevadans, the Foundation helicopter's rotary wind blows away the smokescreen as it lands dramatically in the crosswalk, and from an aerial news camera shot we see the full magnitude of the pileup unveiled as the citywide fumes peel away. Ben takes a good, hard look at the reality of his situation through a haze of out-of-focus embers floating in the air, it drops down to its knees while timid SWAT teams surround and arrest the destructive stone monster, it surrenders willingly with six fingers interlocked behind its head. The scene ends with a news reel highlighting the public's reaction to the strange events that unfolded, found footage-lensed wildfire shots and a confirmed monster sighting in Boulder City, headlines like 'WILDFIRES SWEEP ACROSS SOUTHERN NEVADA' quickly made their rounds, while news stations that didn't suspect Ben's rampage of being an elaborate hoax aired headlines like 'HUMANOID ALIEN ROCK MONSTER TERRORIZES BOULDER CITY, NV.'
CHAPTER 9 - Detention Quarantino: Doctor Storm steps out onto The Baxter Building's helipad in an extreme wide shot of the Manhattan skyline and heads down to the 35th floor. The media circus erupting down at the building's ground floor entrance isn't any of his business, and whether or not his tenants feel safe living beneath his family was the least of his concerns to begin with. Down on the emporium's 3rd level, DR. ALYSSA MOY has been tirelessly running diagnostics on the team's conditions; the 33rd story houses the building's medical center, chemistry and pathology labs, she would live on this floor if she could. Dr. Storm enters, "Prognosis, Alyssa." "For... all four of them? Still inconclusive." "How so?" "Four individual, unexampled syndromes of a freak accident? They'll each take months to prognosticate." "But is it safe to enter, in your medical opinion?" "No these phenotypes aren't some kind of contagious disease." "Unlock cell 1." He enters, and pulls up a chair next to an MRI machine where his daughter is resting, his hand covers his mouth seven different ways, "I thought I had lost you, but you held in there. You stayed strong." But it's the sound of his chair scraping the floor that wakes her, she immediately tries to get up but Frank quiets her, "Shhhh stay calm, stay calm, there was an accident, remember? You're home now, how are you feeling?" "I feel... alive, please tell me I'm not the only one." He forces a smile, "You're not. Everyone survived." She painlessly removes her IV with medical precision and heads for the door, "I need to see them right now." Frank grabs her arm but has to let go when a TRANSLUCENT BARRIER knocks him back, along with the IV stand, the chair and an operatorial lighting fixture. She flattens her palm on the biometric security pad beside the door, it blinks red and registers a negative sound, so she tries it again. "IDENTITY: UNDETERMINED," and realizes that the door won't open because the Building no longer recognizes her DNA. "Run it by me again, exactly what happened to us last night."
She stares at (and through) her hands, closely examining every ridge, loop, arch or whorl to spot something out of place, "The transmitter's primary power node malfunctioned, the Zone broke through the omniverse, then some kind of extraterrestrial tempest latched onto you four, dragged you through the cosmic dirt, then sent you back to us, alive... but not the same. I'm sorry we don't have any answers beyond that." Her arms begin to display an 'anatomical layering effect' turning the skin on her hands transparent with flesh, bone and tendons in plainview, she asks why this is happening to her, "So it's degenerative?" "Not at all, as far as we can tell." "If I'm not deteriorating then why can I see my insides." But still, her dad struggles to offer any solid answers, she collapses back against the plexiglass wall behind her and slides down into fetal position, "Viktor was right about him..." "What?" She begins phasing in and out of sight, and everything around her phases out as well. She stands up, curious, and turns around, then flattens her palm against the wall, which causes a mercurial pool of invisibility to dissolve the barriers between each member of the Fantastic Four; Reed Richards sits up on his bed in the adjacent room and stares right back, astonished, nextdoor the transparency reveals a sleepless Johnny Storm pacing back and forth in a red fireproof jumpsuit, past that we see Ben Grimm situp on a stack of mattresses and look back through the conjoined cells, his megalithic head lowered in shame. All four of them occupy the same shot as the invisibility-aureoles allign like planets, the bio-camouflage recedes as soon as she removes her hand and then out of nowhere there's a building-wide POWER OUTAGE. "Sorry?" "That wasn't you, it's been happening all day." From inside Ben's cell we see the faint silhouette of Johnny igniting his hand behind a wall of fogged glass, and when the power comes back on the automated sprinklers rain down on him to douse the flames, Ben almost laughs at this but isn't in too good of a laughing mood right now.
TRAINING/POWER DISCOVERY MONTAGE: Now we enter a sequence of fragmented scenes to show the passage of time, with doctors Moy and Storm as the acting physicians of the four. Alyssa narrates, "What Reed is experiencing, we're calling it CORPOREAL MALLEABILITY. Because of his fundamentally altered physiology, his cells possess an astonishingly high level of bodily plasticity, resulting in limbs and extremities that can elongate beyond their natural human limits. His body-mass can concentrate itself into a single area of the body, without disrupting the necessary functions of internal organs. Good news is: now that his retinas are extracellularly pliable, not only does he not need glasses, but his genetic predisposition to nearsightedness gave way to an optical zoom or 'telescopic vision' allowing the naked eye to see faraway objects in magnified scale or near objects in microscopic scale." Reed demonstrates the full extent of his newfound superhuman visual acuity, first through an eye test, then out on the Baxter rooftop by spotting specific details on New Yorkers walking around in Central Park (which is 2,500+ yards away) while Alyssa factchecks through a telescope. "You're really good at this, that's 10-for-10." "Now there's a man in an Elmo costume evading authorities on a pogo stick." "Nu-uh! Where?" "Okay that last one was made up, but you never know, it could be happening in Times Square right now."
Sue Storm - ETHEREAL AEROKINESIS: "I can't even begin to grasp the scope of your abilities, Susan, what we do know is that you can generate and/or control an as-of-yet unidentified form of electromagnetic radiation that resembles the hard-light photons found in the Argorian Nebula. Now these manifest in one of two ways: it bends the visible, infrared, and ultraviolet wavelengths of light around (or away from) her silhouette, which sort of acts as a retro-reflective hyperspace fabric. A sort of 'psychic camouflage' if you will. The flipside of the coin she was dealt allows her to mentally project physical barriers of distorted light that take on simple geometric forms." "Such as?" "Rectangular planes, cylinders, globes, domes, cones, deadly spikes." She demonstrates each of these shapes as they're listed out, Dr. Richards coaches her through levitating an Olympic iron plate in the Building's weightroom. Reed breaks it down for the audience by explaining this in layman's terms — "Your abilities seem to demonstrate the wave-particle duality of light: the invisibility represents the wavelike behaviors of light, while the force fields represent light's more tangible particle-like properties." "Duality, huh?" "Well, some of optical physicists characterized light as having a split personality disorder." This metaphor doesn't go over too well, judging by her reaction, "I'm simply saying that having two radically different ... powers ... it can put a strain on the mind, I would recommend you compartmentalize the photokinetic and telekinetic facets of these powers. Practice one at a time." "We start to see some of Sue's insecurities bubble up to the surface concerning her reflection (and occasional lack thereof) in the gym's mirror, as any break in concentration can cause her biological layers to oscillate in-and-out of view like a female Hollow Man, so really none of them got away from this accident unscarred. "When I was younger I always pictured myself becoming a bioengineer, or eventually leaving this place behind and becoming a supermodel." "You didn't think you'd stay here this long?" "Well, as fate would have it I'm stuck here now, stuck somewhere in the middle of my two dream jobs: a living, breathing anatomical model for 1st year med students to oggle at." "Well you're not alone." "Easy for you to say, Reed! You've always had a habit of repressing your emotions! How would you like it if every painful memory turned you into a puddle of goo?" "I've been on my own since fifteen, you've lived your whole life up here in an ivory tower." "I go places!" "Oh all those paid vacations must be really taxing, well, at least not monetarily." She fires a warning shot with her eyes, "What's the matter, Princess? Life outside the palace not all it's cracked up to be?" Now she's been provoked, she effortlessly raises a 50kg weight with a Tai Chi-esque hand motion, then wedges it between two 2-D geometric planes, she tries to rotate the iron plate but it slips out, it bounces once but she catches it midair inside an oblate spheroid where it spins around inside like a gyroscope. Reed is hugely impressed and gives her a hard pat on the shoulder, but inadvertently causes the 50kg weight to slam into and shatter the walled mirror. Sue punches him right back, twice, for flinching.
Johnny Storm - THERMOKINESIS: "As a result of cosmic ray exposure Johnny's cells now replicate nuclear fusion, converting his blood plasma into a type of star-plasma, the super-heated 4th state of matter that exists at the core of the Sun. When he's 100% enflamed his cellular cytosol exudes an extremely high hydrogen content, wherein each cell is surrounded by a cloud of mono-atomic hydrogen atoms which provides sufficient positive buoyancy, enough for him to float while engulfed in a low intensity flame — flying? That's another story. As for the perpetual hypermetabolic state this condition puts him in, he's burning fat cells at such an alarming rate, this could put him drastically underweight per the body-mass index, so we've arranged a high calorie meal plan that has him taking in an average of 9000 calories a day." We see Johnny's attempts at hovering, but his feet barely leave the floor, we also see him binge-eating high protein, high fat meals delivered from the restaurant next door. "Ordinarily his core temp ranges from 780 °Fahrenheit (the melting point of cheap, black market handguns) to 2,800 °F (near the melting point of iron), although his surface temps rarely exceed 130 °F so long as his powers are switched off — which they rarely ever are. To counteract the negative effects of his high caloric intake, we're recommending that Johnny undergo CRYOTHERAPY twice a day to decrease his hypercharged metabolism." Johnny resists this at first, "This isn't a punishment it's a precaution, or would you prefer fireproof solitary confinement to this?" They slam the freezer door shut behind him and set the timer for 2 minutes, but even that might be too much for him to handle. 2 minutes pass, Sue and Alyssa re-open the CryoChamber and narrowly evade a wall of scalding steam before Johnny swaggers out of the chamber, "It didn't work. Actually I think it made it worse.
"First order of business: sleeping arrangements for spontaneous combusto-boy here." Johnny responds from inside his dimly-lit quarantine chamber, "The hell you just call me?" "Son, you're wearing an exorbitantly-priced flame-retardant synthetic fabric developed by Manhattan FD." "Flame retardant, yeah, that's real original. Sick burn." "We're gonna need you to... set yourself on fire, on command, until we can find a material suited to your heat signature." "Whenever you're ready, Guy Montag. Light it up." He burns through the expensive firefighter clothes in seconds, along with an incombustible micro-weave garment, and a 14-layer liquid cooling-ventilated spacesuit, before they arrive upon... "Unstable Molecule Jumpsuit. Blue." "My favorite color. Try not to turn this one black." This time the synthetic fabric doesn't disintegrate, in fact when he flames off there's not a single scorch mark on it. "This stuff really breathes!" Alyssa responds, "It's an experimental fabric that's highly responsive to energized matter. We never found a good use for it." "Can I maybe get this in jacket-form? Vintage style, maybe throw in some racing stripes?" Sue walks in on him at the Building's weightroom, his face turned pallid after the accident and hasn't turned back since. Alyssa observes each of their cells through a microscopic lense, with each of their biological building blocks acting out their powers: Reed's cells constantly shift and acquiesce, Susan's cell fluctuate in and out of the visible spectrum, Ben's jagged cell composition looks orange and behaves geologically, and Johnny's highly reactive cells set the microscope on fire.
Ben Grimm - INERTIATIC MONOLITH: When the teleporter accident lifted four individuals out of their natural dimensional state, the fundamental nature of their cells began to cycle through a number of different possible evolutionary outcomes. Somewhere along the way, Ben's cosmically-irradiated epidermis became an abnormally dense yet flexible, interlocking network of orange, cobblestone-like rock patterns covering a geo-organic, metamorphic musculature that's 100 times stronger than the strongest human man. But this movie goes a step further and gives The Thing a new power, when Doctor Storm discovers there might be a metaphysical component to Ben's immunity to damage, an INERTIAL AMPLIFYER that makes Thing a living embodiment of Newton's 1st Law, you know, the one about bodies in motion and bodies at rest? Or to put it in comic book terms: when Ben is in motion he's Cain Marko, yet when he's standing still — he's Clark Kent, this explains why getting hit by a car doesn't knock him off balance even slightly, and when he clobbers back (with a running start) he can match the strength of The Hulk — this is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
In the next scene they put The Thing's strength to the test in the 'buffer zone' area which houses an 'elemental weight press' built to test the integrity of super dense new elements, which they've repurposed to test the integrity of Ben's muscles. So it should operate like an ordinary bench-press, he lies on his back and clutches two steel handles welded to the bottom component of an interlocking, telescoping mechanism. At the top there's a revolving chamber of heavy iron cylinders, each represents about 500 kg, Alyssa Moy sits at a control panel and warns Ben of an incoming weight increase, the metal cylinders rotate like a six-shooter until one is indexed to the center and drops to the bottom cartridge. Grimm claims to have not even noticed a difference so she drops another 500 kg on him, a full metric ton is pressing down on him. Frank, Johnny, Sue and Reed are standing by to cheer him on, yet another cylinder clinks down at his request — that's over thirty-three hundred pounds! Fourth time's the charm, 2000 kg of pressure per square inch presses down on him before Ben calls it quits, he sits up on the padded bench and cracks his sedimentary knuckles, daring someone else to give it a try. Reed would just flatten like a pancake, and Johnny's augmentation didn't come with a side of super-strength, they both turn and look at Susan — challenge accepted!
She takes off her labcoat and pulls her hair into an updo, her dad says the failsafe mechanism means she isn't in any danger of getting crushed under the weight, Sue rolls onto the bench and cracks her wrists as her teammates cheer on. She smirks beneath the oversized steel handles and instead of grabbing hold, projects a hemispherical dome, so with a worried look Alyssa drops a thousand-pound weight on her boss's daughter. Her nose gushes red and trickles back into her hair, but she's actually holding it, suspending the 500 kilo plate and pressing it upwards like an Icelandic strongman, the dome expands and contracts like a lung as it takes both a physical and mental toll on the Invisible Girl. Alyssa refuses to add anymore weight, but Johnny's happy to oblige and with the press of a button, 50% of what The Thing can sustain is now plummeting down on her, aaand — THE POWER GOES OUT AGAIN — the lights, the control panels, along with the entire building goes pitch black.
Johnny ignites his hand as a solitary light source while his dad curses at New York's utility costs, prices keep going up yet the city can't even keep the damn lights on! Sue releases her dome — but the electronic failsafe is down, and two thousand pounds plunge downward in an instant, smashing the bench that she'd luckily rolled off of in the knick of time. Alyssa says she'll switch it to a back-up generator as an excuse to leave the room while Doctor Storm has an explosive rage meltdown, Ben asks Johnny to light a cigar he'd been saving for a special occasion, upon regaining his composure Frank Storm politely asks him to put it out, The Thing's own hand happens to be the nearest ashtray — jumpcut to another NYC establishing shot.
Chapter 10 - FIGHT THE POWER: When half of New York periodically loses power at random intervals and floods their utility companies' phonelines, eventually the city has to dispatch a small army of electricians to get to the bottom of these blackouts — literally, the bottom — by going down and fixing Manhattan's underground electrical grid. Could be some water left over from Hurricane Sandy, 14-foot tides soaked up miles and miles of electric cable a few years back and cost the city an arm and a leg to have it all replaced, or this could be a blown transformer in which case it would only take an hour or two to have citywide power restored. Three flashlights illuminate an abandoned subway station that looks to have been very recently ransacked, ATM machines lay overturned and cannablized, cracked display cases, electronic turnstiles dismantled. Past that area, they walk the length of the track for a few dark and suspenseful moments before reaching the power station, yes there's some minor flooding going on, but not enough to shut down Manhattan's entire electrical grid. Then the men turn their flashlights upwards and share a petrified look — a densely packed colony of ARTHROSIAN MEGASPAWN has been chewing on the power grid this entire time.
LED lights shimmer onto their rainbow-metallic wing cases until one of the beetle-backs flutters open, the electricians try to make a break for it but the faint signals being emitted from the their equipment makes them too easy to spot, only one NYEC worker makes it back to the subway exit, but he's inadvertently just lead them up to the surface... 'THE ANNIHILATION WAVE' pours out of the midtown kiosk in droves and begins their systematic retrieval of loose gadgetry, mugging New Yorkers for their smartphones, snatching purses, cruelly lifting and dropping the ones that decide to put up a fight, ripping apart surveillance cameras and cannabalizing traffic lights. The NYPD impulsively fires their guns to the sky, but their human firearms are no match for these marauding arthropods, they number in the hundreds and they'll be gone before any heavier artillery can arrive. An interior shot of the Baxter Building shows our heroes peering out from safe within their impenetrable, glass fortress as this unified entity of TECHNOVORES begin to sense all the technology contained inside, and some Arthrosians even pelt themselves against the windows in a horrific manner. Sue asks why they're encircling the Baxter Building, Ben explains that they live only to support the colony, and that means no one goes home empty-handed. Sue starts to worry about the wellbeing of Baxter's ground floor employees, and that revolving door downstairs won't put up much opposition, she asks her brother if he'd undergone cryotherapy yet that day... nobody answers.
Johnny Storm stands at the summit of his family's 35-storied legacy and taunts the swarm, igniting his arms like a devil and shouting "Come on! Make yourselves at home! Take something! I dare ya!" The insectoid horde congregates into a single hiveminded superorganism and surges towards the Human Torch who charges back at them in a full speed sprint, "FLAME ON!" His whole body COMBUSTS on voice command as he dives over the Building's edge, forming a jet stream that propels him straight through The A-Wave. Incinerated insect bodies fall 35 stories to the streets below, and this being his first flight, Johnny doesn't have any idea how to sustain it or change direction so he aims himself at the nearest gravel-covered rooftop and lands sloppily in a botched parkour shoulder roll. The swarm isn't quite done with him yet! The remaining Arthrosians regroup for another synchronized attack, he again charges them by going airborne, but they avoid him like a bug-zapper, because they seem to be drawn towards another flying monster— ABC7's news helicopter was getting some really great footage of the Annihilation Wave attack before Johnny showed up, but now they're getting an EXCLUSIVE first look at the elusive elemental that burned down those forests in Nevada, who appears to be acting heroically and dwindling the alien's numbers. From the aerial news cam's point of view we see the Torch searing through the swarms in short, gliding bursts before slamming into the sides of buildings as he's not able to maintain control over his flight mechanisms. He clings to the glass paneling on the sloped side of the Bank of America Tower, his torched winter clothes crumble away and fall 50 stories down, and with only a dozen or so aliens left, the next freak-of-nature to arrive on the scene is a blonde girl standing on a flying disc, seeing this brings a smile to his face, "That's the spirit, sis! Give 'em hell!" Balancing precariously 1000 feet above the ground, she lands on the open air terrace of the adjacent skyscraper's rooftop, then encloses the leftover bugs in a giant orb that contracts down to the size of an orange, he lands beside her and begins to clap. "So much for keeping it covert!" "Sue that was... brilliant, can you imagine what we could accomplish as a planetary defence force?" "You don't get it do you, the planet doesn't know what we are! We don't even know!" "Look, these things attacked us, and the law says I can stand my ground so I stood my ground." "Stand your ground... we're not in one of those states, Jonathan —do you ever hear yourself speak?" "Nope, but I'm pretty sure ABC7 is dying to hear what I have to say." She grits her teeth and clenches her fists, "Whataya say we give them an interview, eh? Right now." She sees the terrace gardens burning to ash within proximity of his fiery aura, the look on her face suggests they're about to fight, but when the traffic copter ascends to get a close-up of the dueling siblings, they've both suddenly and anticlimactically disappeared before Channel 7's cameraman can frame even the shot.
Their father is in a state of apoplectic rage, "I hope you're happy!" "I'm glad you hope I'm happy." "You just breached our arrangement with the National Guard to keep this situation under total lockdown until we can file a comprehensive report on your mutations! Now the New York City Council wants us to come out to the public, tomorrow!" "About time." "And when did you learn how to fly?" "Base jumping in Zealand, mate." "Goddard almighty, I can't do this with you right now Jonathan. You'd be in more trouble if there weren't much bigger fish to fry. You saw what happened this morning, the armies of Arthros were discovered at the Con Edison Power Station by the NYEC, this prompted an attack on the surface world that now has the people of New York reeling in fear for their lives, and worst of all, pinning the blame on us." A holographic projection of the Manhattan skyline zooms in on the point of incursion and depresses its skyscrapers into a 3D topographical map of multi-colored tunnels. Doctor Storm kneels down at eye level with the table-hologram, "Somewhere in these trenches lies a portal to the Negative Zone, and there's enough electrical equipment in those tunnels to keep it open indefinitely. But at a certain point the power lines reach a dead end, the trail goes cold, off-the-grid, into uncharted territory." "No doubt this is the work of that flying cave beast." Alyssa raises her eyebrows and breathes in deep before suggesting they enlist the aid of Harvey Elder. They all respond with variations on the word 'no,' but Johnny laughs. "You're kidding me, the Mole Man still walks the earth? Who'da thunk it." "He's taken on a teaching job at ESU, apparently making contact with that cosmic artifact rendered him partially sightless, but I've never met anyone who has a keener instinct for subterranean environments." "Sooo... you guys want a blind man to guide us through a lair of darkness, doesn't that sound stupid to anyone else?" Doctor Storm asks if her former mentor had a history of mental health issues, Alyssa says she was not his protégé, but after he botched the whole 'ANNIHILUS incident' he tried to go public with his story, not a soul believed a word of it which only further tarnished his reputation, so as far as the public's concerned he is ...completely batshit, excusez mon français. Reed says he can't keep a secret and can't be trusted, but Sue thinks he's our best shot at closing the portal, plus he survived a cave collapsing, which is admirable, he may be our only chance of surviving this mission.
EMPIRE STATE UNIVERSITY: Reed gumshoes his way into the ESU campus courtyard, blending in with a bunch of undergrads by dressing inconspicuously, until he finds the entrance hall to Professor Harvey Elder's lecture on Greek history with only a minute left to spare and takes a seat near the front row. As soon as class gets dismissed Reed stands up and waxes poetic about the lecture despite not having been present, "You're 31 minutes early to the next presentation, ma'am, or forty minutes late to the previous one, and I'm afraid loitering between classes won't be permitted." Ma'am? Poor old codger can't even see three feet in front of him, Reed almost considers leaving at that point before clearing his throat and introducing himself, saying he came here on behalf of Future Foundation. The professor stops what he's doing and expresses a look of extreme guilt as if the FF has reason to incriminate him, "Reed Richards, you were one of the four who was... transmutated, correct?" "That isn't why I'm here, Elder. As you're probably aware, New York was attacked yesterday and we—" "Can you show me the... ?" "Show you the.. ? Oh, 'fraid not Sir, and considering your visual impairment there isn't much to lo' and behold, no they sent me here to recruit you, the leading mind in... subsurface activities." "I see, so they want me to do some digging, is that it." "Precisely." Harvey lowers his head and walks back behind his desk, "You know for a moment there I thought I'd be lead away in cuffs." "Now why would we spring that on you now, Professor, after all you went through." "To get back what I've stolen, the GENESIS DEVICE from Monster Isle." Reed squints his eyes doubtingly, "Keep talking." Elder opens the door to a backstage chamber and gestures for Reed to follow, "and your girlfriend might wanna see this as well." "How did you..." Sue Storm materializes out of thin air as she had been leaned against his workdesk during that whole conversation. "I thought he was blind." Reed looks dumbstruck, "I guess you're not invisible to the other 4 senses."
Elder's laboratory has a surprisingly high clearance for a person of such meager height, the air is thick with a mycologists' musk and littered with open philosophy books, aquariums and terrariums filled with mutated animals, and giant bug parts pinned onto the furthest wall. "How did you get those specimen?" "From that." The weapon that fell out of Annihilus' possession, THE TYANNAN SPORE RIFLE sits on a cluttered deskspace in the corner, "That, is the origin of life in the Negative Zone, every paradrone enters the world in microbial form, housed inside an embryonic spore, and the mass amplifying components of this gun is what turns them large, causes them to mature to Herculean proportions in a matter of minutes, and live longer lifespans. I've hypothesized that a more ancient, more powerful forebearer race developed these weapons, either as a means of invasive species warfare, or for planet-seeding." "That's one heck of a theory, Professor, but I have to ask: why the sudden shift in interests? First you went all Jules Verne on us with that Hollow Earth stuff, and now this. Just seems... fortuitous." "I've seen a great many things, boy. I've seen worlds within worlds, I saw an inner space inhabited by macroscopic behemoths, I saw a room full of scholars telling me I was insane. But nothing, no earthly spectacle could've prepared a man to be robbed of his vision by a transcendental object, an object of the highest order of knowledge and truth in the universe, and I wasn't about to let the residual effects of it control my life. So I moved on, I emptied my psyche and started anew, and using this spore-rifle I spawned an Arthrosian of my own to study its activity patterns and life cycle, I named him Philbert." His guests share a puzzled look, "I consulted a team of entomologists who specialize in urban pest control of parasitic wasps, and researched thousands of natural bioeffector-methods — this species has an immunity to all known chemical pesticides. I must've read through a dozen of these ecology textbooks to find an organism here on earth that could be its natural enemy. Now answer me this: what is the largest living thing on Planet Earth?" Sue wants to say the Blue Whale, but Reed knows the correct answer: "It's the mushroom. There's 2,000 acres of mycelial mass filaments running beneath Oregon. "Ah yes, and the answer to my pesticidal applicator conundrum came to me straight from the minds of the Mycological society." Elder opens a storage closet and reaches for a glass cannister, tossing it blindly over to Reed who catches with an outstretched hand, he wipes the dust from the jar and sees a cluster of giant puffball spores.
"CORDYCEPS MILITARIS: An endoparisitic fungi known to infect and modify the behavior of Tibetan rainforest ants, replacing the hosts' tissue with its own fruiting body to generate the biomass needed to reproduce and sprout a mushroom — mother nature's version of an Alien chest-burster. When the Cordyceps' mycelia colonizes an insect it mummifies the living tissue, keeping it alive long enough to rupture the chitinous exoskeleton and sprout a reproductive mycelium branch, which acts as a "spore factory" that spreads the infection to those around it. Normally this effect takes place over a few hours and only affects the smallest members of the insect kingdom, but when you run the spores through a mass amplifyer — instantaneous mycotic implosion, with an infectious blast radius that is equally magnified." "And you've tested this out on live specimen?" "Yes, with some notable failings, my aim isn't what it used to be." "My business partner Ben and I, perhaps you've heard of him?" "The rock man?" "Yes the rock man. We exterminated aliens for a living, now if we could combine our findings into a single weapon..." He picks up the gun and aims it around... "Have you tried retrofitting this—" It breaks apart into smaller components that clank onto the floor, "I see you've already taken it apart a couple times." Sue and Reed bend down to pick up the pieces, they look at an ammo cartridge, "How much can this can store?" "Oh I don't know, quadrillions. Spores are a virtually unlimited resource." "So it seems... we may be able to broker a deal. How would you like to be given unlimited resources, and restore your good standing with the scientific community?" "The community? Absolutely not. The community and I have a longstanding mutual contempt." Reed takes that for an answer, nods and turns around to leave but Sue asks him, "How would you like to join our team, and hunt monsters... underground?" He considers that for a minute. "Fine. I'll accompany you on your hunt, but on one condition, show me the monsters they made out of you." Sue conjures a mezmerizing series of light displays and torroidal force bubbles, "Hunting monsters... with monsters, my only question is how am I expected to discern one from the other." "We'll be wearing matching suits."
Chapter 11 - GOING UNDERGROUND: We speed through a quick 'Lock and Load' montage, where their Unstable Molecule jumpsuits become their uniforms, the number 4 becomes their logo within circular badges, and to gain an added advantage against the underground invaders, Reed digs up an old alienbusting handgun prototype that he never got to work, and together they manage to reverse-engineer the mass-amplifying/life-accelerating components out of the alientech, and combine it with humantech. From that they're able to forge three new weapons, two handheld MYCOTIC BIO-EFFECTOR SPORE GUNS (also called MB-SG1's) that function the same as .40-caliber submachine guns but fire a stream of baseball-sized spores at 600 rpm instead of actual bullets, and the original copy of the Genesis Weapon is outfitted with a new grip, handguard and shoulder-strap fitted specifically to Ben's giant measurements. This technology is explained to the unitiated characters, "By replacing the ammo with Cordyceps Militaris mushroom spores, we can now instantly neutralize an insectoid in half a second, in such glorious irony to an alien weapon that caused the microscopic 'Spores of Life' to grow exponentially in size and mature into adult Arthrosians instantly, one of Earth's parasitic fungi that would normally take hours to hijack an arthropods' nervous system can now take effect immediately, one direct hit should cause the affected entity to superheat and explode in a violent, swift, and decidedly messy end."
Some military personnel guard the entrance when the team steps out in broad daylight, the NYPD are straining to keep the paparazzi behind a barricade, but Johnny decides to step out of line to show them some love before jumping into the back of an armored vehicle. Scientists from all over the world pour in to attend the Future Foundation's latest demonstration in the circular DEBRIEFING ROOM, originally reserved for H.E.R.B.I.E.. They had to set the droid on auto-pilot and release him into the N-zone so that the room's panoramic screens could be reset to display a live-feed from the FANTASTIC FOUR's headsets, and when the screens flicker on, they're displaying the inside of an armored truck.
The armored truck backs up into a steel-reinforced tent covering the subway kiosk to let the team out covertly, Johnny races ahead and hops the turnstile while the rest casually descend the staircase to the 42nd STREET TERMINAL, "The busiest metro station in New York. I've never seen it this empty before." Reed leads the way, H.R. Elder is the last to reach the platform, slowed by the heavily padded green impact suit he's wearing, not to mention an insect-repellant cloak and night-vision goggle headset. His weapon of choice is what he calls an Ultra-Diode Rodule which doubles as a walking staff and essentially gives him the sillhouette of a steampunk wizard. The professor pushes past the mechanical gate and instructs the Human Torch to stay behind as their last line of defense, should anything go beyond this point, go supernova. The rest climb down into the trench and begin walking the length of the track, Johnny Storm waits for them to be out of sight before opening up his bag, pulling out an airline respirator mask recently 'borrowed' from Swanson's Garage, and then fire-glides across the trench landing on the two feet of ledge on the other side of the tracks. He unzips the bag all the way and, using the particular set of skills he acquired during his short stint as an autobody graphic artist, begins painting a giant mural to preempitvely let the subway-goers know which superhero team saved New York when the space-bugs attacked. Meanwhile, the remainder of this subsurface battalion patrols the tunnels directly underneath Lower East Side and waits for the next BLACKOUT, the tunnel lights dim and three gun-mounted flashlights switch on, yet the Tesla coil at the top of Elder's hi-tech walking staff burns brighter than any other light source.
Reed stretches the focal length of his eyes to see farther and take in more light, this is visualized for the audience with contrazooms, and reverse shots of his POV swerving around distant corners to spot the approaching swarm, there's already a few dozen incoming and they're about to get the surprise of their lifespans. Sue steps to the forefront to cast a protective shield, but Harvey tells her to step aside and slams his Diode Rodule onto the rails, his walking stick telescopes two feet higher, the Tesla Coil at the top hums with an ultrasonic frequency meant to repel the insects, but also doubles as a high-powered bug zapper. This tactic works beautifully as the swarm splits off into two streams, viewed from an overhead shot, making them easier to target with pinpoint accuracy. Ben's shoulder-strapped Cordyceps rifle proves to be the heaviest hitter as a few carefully-placed shots under the wing results in instant volatile reactions, the anamorphic fungi is so fast-acting that their exoskeletons end up stuck to the walls and ceiling, and when the dust settles they discover that these mushrooms have glow-in-the-dark properties.
Reed radios Johnny to warn him of the Arthrosians they failed to pick off but the muffled audio suffocates inside Johnny's bookbag. He's putting some final touches on his subway meteora that reads 'FANTASTIC 4' in an interlocking 3-D graffiti font when he hears the low frequency beating of giant wings and undoes his mask, glides back across the tracks and prepares to activate his 'flamethrower.' Storm's hands burn red but nothing comes out, he intensifies the effect a few shades hotter, orange, yellow, white but still, nothing. By now he thought he'd be able to emit flame from arm in projectile form, but he's too slow to react and the alien swarm bombards him head on, lifting him up and throwing him against a nearby trashbin. And one of them just nabbed his bag! He zeroes-in on the bugger, dodging and weaving through the others then grappling the thief to the ground and flame-punching its head in. He ignites his thumb, whips around and uses a makeshift incendiary device to turn an angry horde of space-wasps into piles of ash in seconds, a few of them ixnay down the tunnel from whence they came, but the Human Torch has other plans. Looking down at the paint-coated Krylon spraycan in his right hand and turning it into a FIREBALL, Storm chucks it at the wall with enough force to explode on impact and scorch the remaining squadron, which causes the fresh paint on his spraytag to catch fire, emblazening their logo.
The other four reach an abandoned trolley station located directly beneath YANCY STREET which was under renovation when the attacks happened. It's remarkably well-lit as part of an urban renewal project to pump natural daylight into the subterranean space with a series of solar fiberoptic cables to photosynthesize the future site of an underground park. Ben says he recognizes the area from his days in the Yancy Street Gang, he and his brother used to host a Fight Club down here. Sue had no idea Ben used to be in a gang but says she can relate to having a delinquent brother, hers is a high school dropout with a few priors in grand theft auto. "No kiddin, for street racing?" "Ha! Try 'failure to return a rental vehicle' but I guess street racing sounds better." "Yeesh what a burnout, no pun intended." "Yeah ...no pun made?" Ben laughs for the first time in a long time. Harvey Elder says he sees potential in her brother and wouldn't mind taking in a new apprentice, is he interested in cryptozoology? Ben mocks that idea mercilessly, so Elder suggests they'll try and prove the existence of the fabled 'Boulder City Rock Monster.'" "Uhh, try the Golem." "Sorry? I'm not familiar." "Y'know it's an old Rabbi's tale of a big, dumb Thing made of clay, inanimate matter brought to life, made to perform tasks like a mindless slave. Sounds a lot like me." "That doesn't sound anything like you," Sue reassures him. "Well you know they kicked me outta Hebrew school, which don't exactly make you feel like one'a the chosen people."
The lights go out again, gunlights flicker on as they hold out in suspense waiting for the invading forces to ambush them, pouring in from a distant tunnel and arriving in greater numbers and greater caste variety. Tracking shots flow dynamically between rusted steel beams, showcasing each character's fighting style while giving each shot composition a nice depth-of-field with each individual light source (waving flashlights, glowing spore bullets, force fields, Elder's staff, glossy insect wings) accentuated by the darkness permeating throughout the environment. Since his power-set lacks any sort of offensive capablities, Reed's Bio-Effector weapon is his only means of attack, Invisible Girl ends up using her actual powers more often than her Spore Gun so she hands it over to Reed for a double-weild, but this only makes him a more valued target in the eyes of the technovores. A crimson-shelled bugger latches on to one of his hands with prehensile grip but Richards refuses to let go of the gun, so another one ensnares his other hand and flies in the opposite direction, stretching him apart then wrapping his various limbs around the steel beams. Luckily Sue sees this and thwacks them down to retrieve the weapons, H.R. Elder resorts to using the Diode Rodule as a melee weapon, extending his reach to land critical hits since it utilizes a highly dangerous protonic current which has a high damage radius, and upon direct contact with a biological entity, one hit from the weapon yields fatal, explosive results. Ben neglects to mind his surroundings and catches his foot on one of Reed's blue, elastic tripwires then slams facefirst onto the concrete, shaking the underground park to its foundations, the Megaspawn gangs up on him while he's down: catchphrase! The Thing THUNDERCLAPS one of 'em between his hands, the shockwave disorients the rest allowing him to punch his way out of the horde, but he accidentally clobbers a few a steel beams into sharp bends in the process, depressing the ceiling spaces above them and causing a panic-prone Harvey Elder to anticipate a cave-in as ceiling debris rains down on him. The swarm turns their attention towards Elder in a moment of weakness so he swats back at them blindly, then tries Bo Staff-spinning the Rodule like a propeller, but when the coiled end scrapes the ground it electrifies the air then goes dark. Invisible Girl leaps to his defense and casts a protective barrier, then attemps a tricky maneuver with her other hand, spreading her fingers to open a small breach in the FORCE FIELD and then discharges her firearm through it. She whips around to check if Elder's alright, but he's not even behind the barrier! One side of her face momentarily morphs into a cellophane-covered skeleton when she scowls, then phases back. Having retrieved his weapon, Ben starts running around trying to untie Reed, but he's having some trouble finding the source of the knot.
Disentangled, Reed falls loose onto the ground watching a smaller unit of insectivorids swerves past Grimm to the unlit underpass, there the team sees fiery flashbangs in the distance and hears a few metallic explosions, then a hooded figure emerges from the shadows and asks Reed what the heck he's doing on the ground. "Nobody called for backup, Johnny." "Yeah you didn't miss a damn thing, kid." "Well I sure as hell didn't miss you of all Things." "Can it, gearhead! Or I'll cram those spraypaint cans down your face and paint yer insides purple!" "Woah woah! Hot temper, gang member." "....He wasn't even here when I said that—" "Forgot to shut your radio off? That'd be this button right here." He holds up his own tranceiver but flinches embarrassingly when it spontaneously bursts into flame in his hand. "Yeah you got the Midas touch, Torch." "Shhh, guys quiet for a second," Reed's radio transceiver lights up when Frank Storm buzzes in over the intercom, he says that up ahead there's a fork in the underpass where either tunnel could lead them straight to the PORTAL, so he suggests splitting off into two teams: Johnny, Ben and Reed take the right while Sue and Harvey take the left, that way neither group is stacked unevenly.
On second thought maybe putting Ben and Johnny on the same team wasn't such a good idea, since one just overheard the other ridiculing his life choices, Reed has to walk deliberately between them to prevent a violent altercation. First they argue over petty things like extreme sports vs. competitive sports, until Johnny decides it's Honesty Hour and drops the bad news bombshell that, "Reed can't cure you, you know. He said it's impossible." "Damn it all to hell Johnny, I said not to say anything!" "Fine by me, y'know there's more important things that need curin' than whatever I got, and if a cure for cancer takes precedence over a cure for Ben, then science must have their priorities in order. But nice try, though." "Wow man, you really do got a heart of stone under there. It's your turn now, tell us the honest truth about this brother of yours, he still around or what?" Reed cautions him to walk on eggshells with this subject, "No he ain't. We parted ways shortly after a couple'a Thompson Ave. thugs shot him dead in the street." Johnny stops walking and hangs back for a bit then runs to catch up with them, "That's horrible. I'm sorry to hear that, were you guys close?" "We were brothers, 'nuff said." "So like ...Ronnie and Reggie Kray close? Or...like, Frank and Jesse James close?" Ben's facial rocks slide into an intense grimace, "Hey kid, you mind steppin' on that 3rd rail for me?"
Meanwhile, Sue and Harvey patrol an old mudbrick corridor with vintage lightbulbs flickering on and off eerily, the sound design and lighting here is straight out of a horror movie, and even moreso when THE POWER GOES OUT entirely. They stop and check with eachother to make sure that the distant whirring noise they're hearing isn't only in their minds before the Megaspawn barrages into the narrow passageway, barely fitting through the corridor all at once. Sue projects a FORCE FIELD then throws an arm across the professor and shoves him back against the wall when he tries to stand his ground, "Stay behind me this time, for your own sake." She activates a retro-reflective aura, they vanish momentarily until the coast is clear then she radios HQ to let them know they're headed on the right track, and apologizes to Harvey for slamming him against the wall like that. The further they press on the more evident it becomes that they're getting closer, dual flashlight beams illuminate moulted bug exoskeletons that line the ground, then shine upward at the various hollowed-out burrows that adorn on the ceiling — this has to be it. When the tunnels reach a dead end they locate a small, glowing mineral formation where stalagmites and stalactites conjoin to form a barrier, "There's a light emanating from the other side, can you see the source?" "Can't, too much blockage. Maybe if I use my powers to—" Elder jams the stick-end of his staff into the cavern and breaks apart the blockade of mineral deposits, shattering them like icicles. "—make it transparent. Let me know when it's all cleared out."
CHAPTER 12 - The Buried Alcove: Somewhere in a dark, non-descript alien throneroom, the King Bug plots their demise atop a crystal cathedra, when one of his underlings warns him that the humans have stolen the planet-seeding device and are now using it against them, Annihilus jumps off his throne.
Jumpcut to Harvey and Sue breakIng all the way through the stalactite barrier to find the entrance to a hidden crystal repository buried seventy feet below the surface of Manhattan that, through an alchemical combination of selenite beams and a limestone foundation, is allowing someone or something to keep a portal open down here. Neither can believe their eyes, what we've found here is... it's impossible, something this grand and beautiful would've already been discovered by now. "Not unless this formation hasn't existed for very long," her dad responds, the international team of scientists behind him is having an even harder time believing what they're seeing, an unmapped CRYSTAL CHASM under NYC is streaming live via their headsets. In the distance, Elder spots two enormous crystal beams jutting out from the ground and intersecting at the top, covered in the same alien symbols etched into the pillars beneath that dreaded island, alien symbols that could only have been engraved in stone by the self-proclaimed Ruler of the Negative Zone. "Elder, have you found something." His ungloved hand brushes against the emblems as he tries to read them like braille dots, the residual effects of the COSMIC CONTROL ROD are slowly coming back to haunt him. "Tell me something, Harvey. You're freaking me out here." The professor offers nothing resembling an answer as he attempts to enter that state of mind again, trying to recall the visions and decipher the alien language. Suddenly the pillars become hot to the touch, Elder pulls back his visor, his white cataracts reflect the afterglow emanating from the crystal beams, and as the glowing interface intensifies in brightness, the space between the pillars starts to blur. "Hands off! You're doing something to it!" Sue holds her MB-ESG1 up at arms length, shouting authoritatively, "I'm not doing anything to it," the crystalline phosphorescence lights up the entire room as a sudden power surge opens the triangular portal, siphoning energy from the electrical grid at 15-minute intervals. Like clockwork, another A-WAVE piles through the dimensional gate, the swarm fills up two panaramic screens, startling Frank and the other scientists half to death, "Get outta there! It's done, we can end the mission later after we regroup! Abort the mission, now! Do you copy?" No one copies.
Jumpcut to an empty, static shot of that fork in the underpass, the sound of the approaching swarm builds and builds to deafening decibels before they funnel towards the screen then pull a sharp U-turn — the shot zooms towards Reed, Ben and Johnny with their backs turned, overwhelming them in sheer numbers to the point that we can barely even see the characters through it all.
Back in The Crystal Chasm, Sue and Harvey remain separated by a constant stream of insects blowing past them, "Professor, we need to go now!" But Elder presses on against the alien tide, muscling past the battering swarm while his cape blows dramatically in the vacuum-suction wind. He flattens his palm against the pillar's surface, arbitrarily pressing keys on an 'alien keyboard' that light up on contact, "He who fights monsters ...should see to it that he himself does not become a monster." The Professor spins the Diode Rodule over to its broken-coiled end and holds it up to the crystal face, "And gaze for too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also ...into you." Elder cranks the protonic current up to 11, causing a radiant glow to travel upwards and reveal to them — 'THE OMNIVERSE' — the spaces between each crystal block form new geometric segments, opening polygonal windows to various uncharted dimensions, each dimension displays its own color and abstract shapes repeating eternally. Her father shouts orders into her earpeice but she can't hear them, all she can feel is the rapid decompression effect from said unprotected portals. The shot leans in on Susan's shadowy eyes as she goes from her 'damsel' pose lying on the ground to springing into action, focused, cutting through the swarm with a sharp wedge projection then grabbing the professor by his collar and pulling him to safety.
Meanwhile up at street level, the subterranean vacuums are tearing up the streets in front of the Baxter Building, the camera fixates on a fissure in the concrete as it slithers past pedestrian feet like a python then enters the Building. The concierge runs away as soon as he sees the indoor water fountain crack in half, leaving an oblivious janitor with headphones on (cliché) to fend for himself; the elderly custodian with slick hair and sunglasses doesn't notice his custodial bucket get pulled down through the floor, the camera follows it down the marble crevice and transitions back to the Crystal Chasm. Every loose stone and mineral is pulled into the air by the rapid decompression as Invisible Girl and Mole Man continue to clash over control of this mission, but when the omni-dimensional dome finally gives way and collapses down on them, they make a break for the exit while narrowly avoiding gigantic pillars that topple over left and right, but it appears to be too late for them as we see both characters get buried under piles of earth until they're no longer visible. Reed, Johnny and Ben are so completely exhausted from fending off this unending paradrone swarm, that as a last resort Johnny is instructed to — GO SUPERNOVA — the heat and pressure of this Finishing Move sends manhole covers flying 300 feet into the air, transitioning us back to the skyscraper-level plot. Frank Storm's absolute worst fears are now realized, the lives of his kin hang in the balance as the World Science Community watches his failures play out in real time. He commands Alyssa to send in the robot sidekick, she chair-swivels around and opens an inclined holograph, "Hang tight, guys. I'm sending HERBIE to your coordinates."
H.E.R.B.I.E, a self-piloting space probe programmed to eliminate A-wave forces using a system of portals, banks left through an asteroid debris belt in the Negative Zone to take out the waves converging at Sue's coordinates, then— ANNIHILUS! —impales it off-course and slams the droid onto a floating rock. "Using my own relics against me... let us see how the humans fare against one of their own infernal contraptions." The insidious insect punctures Herbie's neck module with a clawed hand and rips loose a tangle of wires, his LED eyes and electronic voice fade into a forced shutdown. "Time to level their playing field."
Back on the surface world, the crevice running across 42nd street and Madison Avenue has collapsed into a concave valley, car alarms and pedestrian shrieks fill the soundscape, the shot closes in on a loose layer of dust puffing up from the rubble. Seconds later, a blue bubble pushes apart loose chunks of concrete, then a third time it sends the rocks flying and Sue Storm emerges from the wreckage, exhausted, wiping a nosebleed on her sleeve. New York City has fallen into a state of panic, but rather than demonizing the Fantastic Four's female member upon sight, most people in the area seem preoccupied with something up in the sky; she blocks the sun with her hand to see what it is they're all staring at, but she can't believe her eyes. The other three saw a glimmer of daylight peeking through the exit hole and climbed out from behind her, one by one their heads tilt back to see what everyone's looking up at — from an intentionally lens-flared low-angle shot panning up, we see a 200-ft wide circular PORTAL fracturing The Baxter Building right in two, bifurcating the Storm Emporium from the lower residential half while an Annihilation Wave encircles the skyscraper's summit in an angry, swirling mass. "How, Reed? How is this happening?!" "Someone had to have opened a gateway from inside the mechanical room, but no one could of... there were preventative measures." The team is helpless to watch as everything they know, everything they've worked towards descends into the empty abyss inside a sealed container with no hope of immediate rescue. Johnny grabs an intercomm from off of Reed's belt and screams at his dad to get outta there ...nobody answers. "Reed, how did they..." "The only thing that could open a gateway that wide is..." "HERBIE. They shot down our satellite, they hacked our company weapon and used it against us." "Reed, what are we gonna do?" The pressures of leadership begin to weigh down on him, having just inherited the responsibilities of an entire organization by standing by while his superiors get taken out of action, and now everyone is looking to him for guidance, everyone except for Sue, that is.
The blast doors slam down as the building's airlock containment procedures go into effect, the Storms had this safety measure installed in the event that a dimensional breach or experiment in engineering were to go catostrophically awry, the residential areas would be sealed off from the danger. And so the smartest people the world has to offer — NASA scientists, physicists, futurists, cosmologists, astronomers — are now TRAPPED inside a pressurized box with all of the most advanced human hardware stored inside it, they all pour into the nearest room-with-a-view to witness the Manhattan skyline ascending seconds before it disappears. Bright blue skies give way to dark red cosmos, the lighting and color palette changes drastically from daylight to spacelight in an instant, they look down and realize gravity no longer tethers their feet to the floor, the shot leans out continuously until they're only but a speck of dust, floating...
— IN THE NEGATIVE ZONE — TO BE CONCLUDED IN ACT 3 —
since Reed's pliable intracellular fluid makes it impossible for his cells to crystallize, he can withstand the cold a lot longer than a human torch. Johnny glares at his cellmate with a mix of admiration and disgust, "Man, how are you not some kind of weird alien creature sent here to destroy us? You hardly ever eat, you don't get cold. And you've been in here for what, let's see, -200 subzero °F's for 6 straight hours, and that's what? Negative 12,000 hours shaved off your life expectancy, right? I can math as good as the next guy." Reed lifts his surgical mask and responds with a cold-induced stammer, "It does the complete opposite of that actually. It's a healing chamber, repairs tissue damage, mends torn ligaments and ruptured muscle fibers, slows the heartrate and increases vasoconstriction, diminishes musculoskeletal trauma for—" "You know what, forget I asked." After a long pause of one's stillness and another's bored fidgeting, they experience yet another BLACKOUT. Pitch darkness takes up an inordinate amount of screentime before a human hand flickers on like a lantern, casting a healthy orange glow on the book. "I gotcha covered there, Stretch." "Yeah, thanks." "So what's the book about?" "You might wanna snuff that out when the doors open, the wall of oxygen might react with the liquid nitrogen vapors in the air and—" But he spoke too costively and the entire chamber INCINERATES as soon as the power comes back on,
"And they said if I do this one last thing for 'em I can relocate to the place of my choosing, we just gotta secure some military contracts with the brass on the West Coast and I'm moving all my shit back to Cali' I swear, no more alien business from here on out, 'Licia, I promise." Reed and Alyssa eavesdrop on Ben's phonecall, but since his booming voice permeates through every corridor it's not like they have any choice in the matter. He hasn't seen his fiancée in well over a month now, Reed is asked if he thinks those two will last, he says Alicia Masters isn't the superficial type, she won't care what he looks like. So have you told him yet? Told him what. About his condition, that it's irreversible. No, not yet. Hopefully not ever, the idea of finding a cure might not even cross his mind if they move forward with the engagement. You think? Yeah, I'm thinking she'll be his rock, and vice versa. Alyssa shifts the topic over to Reed and his romantic future, and this exchange goes on for a while because she's under the impression that Reed is playing coy and referring to her in the 3rd person, but Reed thinks they're talking about Sue so there's a bit of a misunderstanding going on. She closes the gap between them and yanks up the zipper on his blue jumpsuit without warning, then zips it down an inch for comfort and wishes him luck.
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