a/n: Welcome to my belated NaNoWriMo project for this year! Sorry that it's for a fandom that nobody cares about. I don't honestly expect to hit anywhere near 50,000 words (I'll probably be lucky to hit 15,000, given my work schedule) but this is the first year in a long time I haven't had some medical issue keeping me from participating, and I really wanted to go for it! I've been toying with this AU idea for a while, and even if it seems weird and complicated, all you really need to know going in is that in this incarnation of the Marvel universe, Katie Power was the first born of all her siblings, followed by Jack, then Julie, then Alex, instead of the other way around.

Everything else is pretty much the same. At least, it is at the onset. Enjoy.

"What did you do, Alex?" she shouted, unable to stop the furious tears streaming down her face. Katie knew she had to be ugly in this moment, snot and spit and blood dripping down her skin along with the tears, but the unstoppable rage boiling in her had evaporated her capacity to feel shame, to feel anything but hate. All she could conceive in this moment was anger, unspeakable betrayal. "What did you do? What! Answer me, y-you, you stupid dumb—ALEX! Damn you, Alex, talk! What did you do?"

She savagely kicked him where he knelt, shaking, on the ground. Then again. And again. Alex collapsed on his side, hardly seeming to notice the physical pain as she continued hitting him. He let out a choking, grief-strangled noise that sounded more feral than human, pulling wildly at his face and hair as he cried. It only made Katie angrier. He was the adult, he was the one who had let it happen in the first place, so he wasn't allowed to cry and fall apart in front of her like a little boy.

"NO!" she screamed, smashing her foot solidly into his ribs, twice, stopping herself before she hit three times. "Don't you dare, Alex! This is your fault! You don't get to act like this! Get up and talk! STAND UP!"

Issue 01: Power Potential, Part 1

"...He swings! It's a long fly ball to right center. It's in there! Holy cow—it's right into the right field bleachers!"

"Wahoo! A homer!" Jack crowed from the sink, tossing the empty glass in his hand up into the air in celebration. He caught it again a moment later when it fell, calloused fingers catching firmly on the smooth glass despite the fact that the dishes were wet.

His sister Julie was not impressed. "Hey!" she said angrily, stepping back and glaring up at him with something cradled to her chest. "You're getting water on my book!"

"So?"

On the other side of the kitchen counter, five-year-old Alex perked up at the sounds of his siblings' voices. He'd been hovering near dining room table since dinner, watching his father pore over some important-looking blueprints from work, but he didn't miss the movement of Jack tossing something out of the corner of one eye.

"Stop it, Jack!" Alex yelled at him over the tinny voice of the radio announcer. "You'll smash it!"

"Oh yeah? What are you gonna do about it, Mister Smart-Alex?" Jack countered, leaning over the counter threateningly to remind him which one of them was ten years old and bigger. "Want me to smash your face next?"

"Cut it out, you two!" Jim barked loudly from his seat at the table, silencing his children before their argument could escalate any further. "Alex, don't worry about your brother, just take care of your own business. Jack, don't bully your brother and sister around just because they're younger than you! And get back on those dishes—Julie's drying them faster than you can wash. And she's reading a book at the same time!"

The two middle children, thus rebuked, went back to their chores without further comment. Alex waited a moment to make sure Jack wouldn't start throwing things again, then returned to his spot hovering near the dining room table. "What are you working on now, Daddy?" Alex asked him eagerly, invading Jim's personal space with childish unconcern for his privacy and quiet.

Jim sighed, knowing his youngest son too well to think he could change the subject before sating his curiosity. How could he put this in a language a five-year-old would understand?

"The government has asked us to build a machine for them, using a formula I created for matter/antimatter conversion," Jim began, careful to keep his language simple but also accurate. "If it works, the machine will create energy for things like car fuel and electricity. The formula was designed to be safer and cheaper than the other forms of energy we use right now, but I'm just not certain about the finished model."

He sighed, forgetting who he was speaking to for a moment as he lifted up a page of design specs for closer inspection. His eyes furrowed behind his glasses. "On paper, it looks fine, but I have this funny feeling—!" he said, feeling a familiar growing irritation welling up within him. "Maybe it's just that I've been rushed to complete the device before I feel we're ready. My boss insists that we test it tomorrow morning."

Alex took a moment to process this, looking contemplative. From across the table, Margaret Power approached to collect her husband's half-eaten dinner plate, tutting knowingly at their conversation.

"I really don't like that old Mr. Carmody very much," she said, leaning over the top of Jim's chair and pulling his head back to look up at her.

"Me neither," Jim said with a tired smile. "I guess it would be too much to ask, that we liked everyone we work with?"

"Tell me about it!" Margaret laughed softly and kissed his forehead, standing with the plate in one hand. "Between old Carmody and that jerk of an art director who buys all my paintings, you and I really don't have an easy time of it at work, do we?"

He and Alex laughed. Margaret smiled at them, then glanced over at her oldest daughter, Katie, at the window. Though normally excitable and quite talkative at dinner, tonight the girl was silent, staring beyond the reflection of herself in the glass to behold the twinkling stars in the night sky. Whatever thoughts might be on Katie's mind, no one could say. The expression in her clear blue eyes, though intelligent, still held the guileless wonder of a child. Disconnected in thought from the dining room she stood in, and her family within it, Katie failed to register a sudden change in the voice that had been broadcasting the baseball game on the radio.

"We interrupt this broadcast to report that a rash of UFO sightings have just occurred in the broadcast area…We take you now to our reporter in East Harbor..."

Hours later, Katie awoke groggily from a fitful dream to cold air and the sounds of nature—and more immediately, to a bright, unrelenting light that shone directly in her eyes. Groaning, she covered her face with one hand and tried to figure out why on earth she was sleeping outside.

Slowly, the memories from that night came flooding back to her: dinner, the window, the bizarre lights she'd seen flashing across the sky. And then, of course, the argument with her younger siblings that had followed, about whether or not UFOs could be real and whether or not she'd actually seen one. Grumpy and sulking in the aftermath (because nobody had believed her except Alex, who happily believed anything that had to do with science and science-fiction), Katie had elected to spend the night outside, with the telescope she'd built in the third grade to keep watch for alien spacecraft. The decision had more to do with getting some distance between herself and her siblings than the principle of UFO sighting itself, but unfortunately, her plan had backfired when the others all elected to camp out on the porch, too.

Katie couldn't begrudge them much for it at the time, given that she was the oldest and was responsible for looking out for them anyway. Getting mad at her younger siblings just for following in her lead would be plain-old mean.

Now, though, a few hours of restless sleep in a cold sleeping bag and Julie's flashlight blinding her made Katie feel a little less generous. Falling asleep reading again, she grumbled mentally to herself, clambering out of her sleeping bag so she could make her way lightly toward her younger sister. Even though Mom and Dad already told her to stop wasting batteries...

The irritation faded a little when she saw Julie's sleeping form—she was curled up snugly in her sleeping bag, the flashlight held loosely in one hand, and a well-worn copy of Alice in Wonderland cradled in the other. She was holding the book like a stuffed animal, snuggling close with a contented smile on her lips. Typical Julie!

Most other seven-year-olds can't even read chapter books by themselves, Katie thought to herself with a bit of pride, reaching down and clicking the flashlight off. She began to carefully pad her way back toward her own sleeping bag, ready to crawl back inside and be warm again.

But something made her pause before she got there. On a whim, for no real reason except for that she could, Katie took an extra moment to glance out over the patio to the moonlit beach below. Her family's house was built on the shore of the James River, and the sounds of rolling waves often soothed Katie to sleep at night whenever she was feeling restless.

Tonight, however, the river had a surprise in store for her. A big one.

"What is that?" Katie whispered, squinting as she leaned over the rail to try and get a clearer look at a strange, luminescent shape she could see drifting in the water. In the darkness, she could distinguish nothing in detail, only that the object was very, very large to be washed up on their little beachfront property. It was certainly not a fish, nor a piece of driftwood or trash. The outline was too solid, and there had to be a reason it was glowing. She needed to get a closer look to find out exactly what it was.

Her telescope...

She ran quickly to the center of the patio, fumbling to aim the lens in the dark so she could see. She was so absorbed in her task that she didn't register any small forms stirring on the ground beside her, until a small, sleepy voice asked, "Katie…?" from the patio floor.

And just like that, before Katie quite knew what was happening, her brothers and sister were suddenly wide-awake and arguing excitedly among themselves, about the form she'd spotted below in the water.

"What if it's a UFO? Not a pretend one, a real one?"

"Come on. There's no such thing!"

"But that's—"

"There is too such thing! Mommy paints space ships all the time for her work!"

"That's cause they're for book covers, dummy! Come on, I'll show you. Let's go check it out!"

"Shouldn't we wake up Daddy first?"

"Yeah, I guess—if you're too much of a scared baby to go by yourself!"

"I'm not, but..."

"Then let's go!"

"Jack, wait," Katie said, interrupting their conversation before her brother could goad Julie any further. "Maybe she's right. I did see something in the sky earlier. I think we should go get Mom and Dad."

"And then what?" he demanded, grabbing his baseball cap and flashlight from his sleeping bag. He glanced up for a moment at the moon in calculation, then stood and faced Katie with a challenging glare. "By the time they get ready, the tide'll have turned and washed it out to sea. We'll never find out what it was!"

Katie hadn't considered that. "Well..." she said, hesitantly glancing down at the water lapping the shore again. She hated to admit it, but he had a good point, even if he had to go about it in that contrary, disagreeable way of his. Jack might not have been a genius like Katie, but he wasn't stupid, either.

"Okay, I guess," Katie said uneasily, relenting. "Let's go now."

Jack didn't hesitate, didn't even stop to acknowledge that he'd won: with a flashed grin at his siblings, he was off, racing down the wooden steps in his bare feet. He'd taken the flashlight with him, so Katie took Julie's hand in her own without being prompted, to assuage the fears she knew would be racing through her sister's mind. Julie could have a very active imagination at times, especially when it came to science-fiction.

Alex bravely navigated the stairs on his own, clinging to the rails and chattering excitedly about aliens like the ones he'd seen on TV, though his pyjama-clad form trembled nervously as he moved. Privately, Katie felt more than a little apprehensive herself about going down to the beach. She had seen something in the sky tonight, something flashing and glowing like it was out of control. It hadn't flown like a plane, even one that was downed in the air on the verge of crashing. It might have been a silly thing to worry about, but Katie couldn't help but wonder if the strange thing was a UFO. And if so, she wondered what she and her siblings were supposed to do about it when they found it. Even if she was a genius, and even if it was theoretically possible for otherworldly life-forms to travel to Earth...what could a group of four kids actually do, if an alien spaceship were to somehow touch down in their own backyard?

She had no way of knowing that the answer to that question would forever change—forever define—the rest of her existence as she knew it. And her brothers' and sister's as well.

Katie sucked in her breath and stepped down with her siblings toward the water.