"True Nature"
Mark Diering, or as he was more popularly known, Brother Nature sped around the corner of the country road, leaning to the left in order to corner it correctly on his Bike. His mind wandered, his thoughts drifting back to what had happened a few days ago. Karima, the Omega Sentinel, had given him information that was potentially...very worrying.
Given that his only experience of the Celestial's thus far had been through their Gatherer's, he didn't particularly want to be involved in a cosmic scale battle. He worked the Earth, and saved nature, not saving the entire planet, that was Avenger and Fantastic Four business.
The large, old looking house loomed up in the horizon. That was here he received his phone call from. He'd not heard from her before, but somehow she'd managed to get his phone number. He suspected it was one of the Children, probably Serafina.
He skidded to a halt outside the house and propped his bike up, removing his helmet and walking towards the old oak door. The house was massive, made predominantly from wood, with very few free windows. They appeared to be boarded up.
Mark rubbed a bit of sweat from his forehead and undid his jacket, knocking on the door and setting his helmet down on the porch. A Scorpion scuttled from underneath the house as the floorboards creaked.
Still nobody at the door.
Mark tapped his foot and knocked again, this time however, the door opened.
She was about six feet tall, give or take a few inches, and covered in what appeared to be orange slate. Each was broken into chunks of what appeared to be granite but could have been any substrate. He looked up into her sad eyes, and she wiped a tear from the corners.
"You came." She said, he voice shaky and full of emotion and gratitudes.
"Well, you did ring me." Mark said, seeing she was clearly upset. She moved out the way of the door and he walked in, taking off his biker jacket and slinging it around the banister. He turned around to get a proper look at her, she wasn't unattractive, just not his type. She was covered by a large sheet, presumably because she didn't have the funds for anything else.
Sharon Venture, the She-Thing. Former Super powered wrestler, she gained powers illegally through a power broker, and was then later de-powered and raped. She regained some abilities from a similar cosmic burst that gave the Fantastic Four their original powers, turning her into a Thing like creature.
"What can I do for you?" He asked, scratching his stubble. He'd been trying to grow a beard for ages, but Serafina didn't like the way it felt. Interesting, Aguja had told him that she enjoyed it's feeling,even though he'd not slept with her.
"Some thing's happening too me. Ordinarily, I'd go to Reed but..."
"But what? What makes you think I'd know more about this than Reed Richa.." Mark's sentence dropped off as Sharon let her sheet go. As it hit the floor so did several chunks of her armoured rock form, hitting the ground and shattering into clay and sand.
What was more interesting was the fact she was leaking Magma from her pours. Where every chip had fallen from her, she was repairing herself. However, it leaked over her body, and down her naked form.
An age old question had been answered as well. Yes, everything was made from orange rock.
"How did this happen?" Mark asked, crouching on the ground and picking up an unbroken piece of her skin.
"There's been rumblings for a while." She said, sitting down heavily in a fortified chair, putting her feet up and breathing heavily, as though she were over-weight and unfit.
"Rumblings?" Mark got to his feet, taking a closer look at the skin fragment.
"I don't think I was alone in my creation." She said simply, looking at Mark, and passing him a collection of papers.
"Whats this?" Mark asked, taking them and thumbing through the first few pages.
"Before you came I hit the internet. Wiki'd up a load of information on the Fantastic Four, The U-Foes and any other Cosmic ray related incidents. There's quite a lot out there, take for example some of the back pages. I know the website isn't exactly reputable..."
Mark lifted a few pages from the back of the stack and held them up to the light. The front room was small, boarded up windows, a single chair in the room and a tatty old laptop, presumably designed by Reed Richards given the size of the keys.
"Woman turns to mist after suffering from the bends? How is that related?"
"Read on. He got the bends from being "On-Land". He can't even swim, let alone scuba-dive." She pointed to the next page.
"But it says here he's an Astronaut, don't they train in pools?" Mark asked.
"Okay, maybe that bit isn't true, but read them. They're all Astronauts from the same mission. Seven of them, all disappeared or turned into something...I'd say unnatural, but natural seems more fitting." She leaned back in her chair looking at the ceiling.
"I see what you mean. Mist woman, Fish man, Spontaneous combustion..This looks pretty familiar. Is there a large orange rock person with them as well?" Mark smirked, but Sharon said nothing.
"It's a pattern, Sharon." Mark sat on the floor, and laid out the final few pages she had printed off.
"Seven Astronauts, Seven forms. Seven missing. Three women, five men. Okay, lets see what we have. The FF are always being compared to the elements, right? Thing is rock, Johnny fire, Susan is air and Reed is water, because of their powers and stuff. Okay, so lets take these guys." He set the first three pages down next to each other.
"We've got Mist woman as air, y'get me?" he looked up at Sharon, as the pieces of paper went down on the floor, he sat down with them. Mist woman, Fish man, Combustion man.
"We've got no earth yet. What else do we have...Electrical man? Okay, he goes with air.." He placed a piece of paper down above the mist woman. The plant man underneath the fish man, and the feral woman next to the plant man.
"So, that's six, where's the final one?" Mark asked, looking up from
"She's not been found. They don't know what happened to him." She answered.
"Well, it's certainly a convincing pattern, something has changed these people. Cosmic rays, perhaps? Is that your guess, because it seems to make a fair amount of sense."
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking."
"So why call me, you're not part of this astronaut business. You're not even an astronaut."
"I called you because I can feel the movement of the planet underneath me. I have that feeling you get when you're on a roller coaster all the time. My stomach is pushed against the side of my body because we're moving so fast." She looked at him, her eyes welling up.
"I don't know what to do, Mark. My whole world's been changed. Yesterday the sand outside tried to talk to me. I know it was the sand because there's nobody else here. People think I'm going crazy. I'm not, I promise you I'm not."
Mark got to his feet, taking her large orange hand in his own and giving it a gentle stroke.
"We'll get to the bottom of this, Sharon, Okay? I know it's a bit weird at the moment, but there's got to be some connection with all of this. There's got to be a reason why this is happening to you, and I think I know who to call in." He pulled his phone from his pocket, and tapped it a few times, calling up a number and standing a few feet from Sharon.
"Josef? Hey, it's Mark. Look, I'm in Texas and I need some help here. I'm with Sharon Ventura, do you think you could come and give me a hand here. I need some of your juju. Right,alright." Mark hung up the phone and walked back to Sharon.
"Do you have anything you eat or drink? Josef's going to be about an hour, and I really can't be bothered to sit here in silence until then."
Mark watched through the slits in the boarded up windows, as the flying SHIELD car landed in the Texan sands. A man, dressed not in SHIELD uniform, but his own clothes, including a somewhat heavy hooded trench coat considering the weather, walked towards the house.
Mark answered the door, and gestured for him to come in.
Josef Huber, Former Mutant. When he tried to latch onto a particularly powerful mutants abilities, he found he was redirected into the Earth, and mutated further. Upon waking up, he found that he could no longer siphon the powers of mutants, but he could only use the power of Nature itself.
"Hi Josef. How's SHIELD treating you?" Mark asked, as his partner emerged from behind the car. Mark's heart jumped a few beats, and he felt it rise into his throat. It was her.
"SHIELD's pretty good. I'd like you to meet my new partner, she's also the second officer of the unit I work for now. We're pretty unique."
"...Figures." Mark croaked, as she walked towards the duo. Mark ducked into the house and headed quickly towards She-Thing. He didn't want to talk to her right now. What was important was Sharon.
"This is the situation, Josef. Sharon here got hit with cosmic rays the same way the FF did. She's got powers like the Thing, but she's falling apart. Her skin keeps coming off and she's complaining of feeling the G's of the Earth, and hearing substrate talk." Mark kept his vision fixed firmly on Sharon, as Josef got onto his knees beside her, pressing his hand against a loose fragment of skin, and pulling it free.
"I'm sorry, my love." He said with a slight German accent. Sharon winced as it came off, and Magma seeped from the wound.
"I need a few minutes alone with Sharon, if that is all right with everyone?" Josef asked, running a hand over his bald head, and pushing the hood off. He removed his coat and dropped it on the floor, leaving a tall, muscular body standing before Sharon.
"I apologise if this hurts, my love, but I need to make a connection."Josef said, before gesturing for Mark to leave the room. Mark shot him the finger and closed the door, standing in the hallway where his Jacket hung, and the woman stood.
Kate Waynesboro, former Liaison to the Hulk, and lover to both the Hulk and Mark himself. High ranking SHIELD agent, commited and passionate, she has no powers beyond being human and extremely good at her job. Currently in charge of the SHIELD Environmental unit, headed by herself and Josef Huber.
"Kate."
"Mark."
The silence and tension was as solid as a rock between the two of them. There were clearly still feelings to be voiced, but Mark said nothing. She'd left him after all. She'd left him, why should he feel so guilty.
He looked at the floor and scuffed his boots against the old floorboards, looking around for something to do or say. He wanted a fight, something to hit. Not this...prancing around waiting for science and detective work to kick him. He wanted something palpable.
"Cosmic rays, huh?" Kate said, putting down her briefcase and looking at the PDA in her hands.
"That's an old school Origin, right?" She asked, her face serious but the joke was there. Mark said nothing, running a hand through his hair.
"Come on, Mark. Just give it up, yeah? I didn't mean to hurt you, but you've got to understand, we're both from different ends of the spectrum."
"Not so much anymore, Ms. Environmental officer unit leader." Mark spat, gesturing towards her smart clothes. Not more SHIELD uniform for her, Civilian clothes, a gun in her jacket. Mark saw that. He wasn't stupid.
"Haven't seen you since you deployed the Lang Weapon to get at Huber when he went mental." Mark said after a few long minutes of silence, sitting down on the stairs.
"Still feeling the effects of being a giant bitch, or did the particles wear off after a few months?" Mark said, snide comments slipping from his lips like poison from a barb.
"Oh, Fuck you, Mark. You're fanaticism drove me away. "Rain forest this, ocean over fishing that." Just give it a fucking rest, we can't do everything okay?" She threw her hands in the air, and slid her PDA into her pocket. Her face was red with anger.
"My Fanaticism, you're the one who didn't give a shit about what I did on a daily basis. "Oh, Hi Honey...you wouldn't believe the day I've had, Wendell from Accounts told me I'm not getting paid until the sixth, can you believe that?" No, I cannot believe how BORING and Self centred, you are, Kate. I've just been punched in the face by the last remaining Sasquatch!"
He got to his feet, getting closer to her. She slapped him in the face, and he growled.
"Sensationalism always was your drug, wasn't it, Mark? Not happy being a fucking game keeper, you have to be the only idiot in the world to have a nervous break down and discover he is chosen by Gaia? Give me a break. Why can't you just be a mutant like everyone else, why do you need to make yourself special!"
"Yeah, maybe it was you that made me need to feel special, Kate. You're always going on about how important you are and how great you are, and how hard you worked, and how I've never known it in my life. Maybe you made me feel like shit." Mark's voice dropped a few octaves, away from shouting and more towards baring his soul. Kate was visibly shocked, and she reached out for him.
"Mark..Look, I'm sorry, I just.." He gripped her hand, and her face turned to hate again.
"So, that was it was it? You want to just get it back together like that. With a yell and a soul showing? Fuck you, Mark. You have NO IDEA!" Mark pulled his hand away, and snorted, as Kate lunged for him.
He grabbed hold of her shoulder, and twisted her back, her lips hitting his in a passionate kiss. He grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled it down, tearing at her neck with his teeth as she gasped in his ear. He tore a chunk from her clothing as the door to the front room opened.
They both froze.
"Well, it appears you're both more natural than I thought. Come in here."Josef said calmly, ignoring the compromising position they were both in. Mark released Kate, who growled at him in disappointment with herself, almost as much as anger at him. They both walked into the front room.
Around Sharon were hundreds of stone fragments, as well as spires of sediment that seemed to dance with her smile. She looked calmer, happier now. Josef had done something.
"I won't pretend to understand the concept of it, or the purpose, but it appears, as you have detailed on the floor, that the cosmic rays have aroused some sort of...reprisal from nature itself. I believe the Fantastic Four, and to a lesser extent, Sharon to be precursors to this. It might not even be cosmic rays at all." Josef extended his hand, and pulled Sharon from her seat, she almost danced on the floorboards.
"I need to conduct more experiments though, but it appears as if Sharon has had some sort of mutation. She is now completely and utterly connected to the Earth itself. She is almost as though she is a living representation of the Mantle. She has a crust floating across her, the mutation made it seem as though she were loosing segments of herself, but it was all part of the convection and subduction of her skin, much in the way the Earth's own crust moves in on the mantle itself."
Josef gestured towards the door, Kate and Sharon went first, heading towards the car.
"So, she's Okay, Joe?" Mark asked quietly, as the two girls walked towards the car in silence, away from the house.
"I don't know, Mark. She is definitely in a transitional state. Her powers are not her own, and I am unsure as to what triggered this transformation, I will have to check to see if the Earth is being hit with an unusual amount of cosmic radiation, or if it is coming from a terrestrial source." Josef had picked up his coat, and thrown it around himself, pulling the hood over to prevent his head from burning.
"You think it could be from someone Earth-side?" Mark asked, looking around the barren Desert around them.
"I think it is a possibility, Mark. If these Astronauts are similar to Sharon, then their own powers may be developing in a situation similar to hers. We may have people able to control and feel the very environment we live in on an elemental basis."
"Scary thoughts." Mark said, as the Sand swirled underneath his own feet.
"Isn't it? Sharon will be under my observation, and I will keep Kate and you in the loop, and Mark?" Josef asked, looking back to the women who were already in the car.
"Yeah." Mark said, with a sigh knowing what is coming.
"Be careful. I have grown to care for Kate, I do not wish for her to be hurt and ineffective in the field. I require her for support." Josef was choosing his words carefully. He wanted to remain diplomatic.
"Alright, Joe. I'll keep it platonic. Sorry, I just...Like the old days yeah? You fight to fuck, and you fuck to fight. Then one day the fuck does and you're just fighting. It's not a good way to be."
"It did not sound like it was a good way to be from the start, Mark. Speak to you soon." Josef started towards the car, and Mark sighed, he shot back inside to grab his biker jacket, and headed back towards the bike itself.
Time for the long ride back towards the Conquistador, plenty of time to think about what happened today.
And to think about Sharon as well.
To be continued in an On-Going series!