Reed put his hand to the wall, and spread it out across the surface, looking for even the tiniest crack he could exploit to escape. There was nothing- the room was airtight, which meant that he'd be unable to breathe in a few minutes. "Doom!" He shouted, "Come down and face me yourself!" It was his only hope, he realized- and likely that for the others as well. Doom had kidnapped Valeria, damn him, and brought her here. The Fantastic Four had followed, and in doing so, had strode directly into one of Doom's diabolical traps. Reed was certain that this adamantium room had been matched with an equally inescapable trap for the other three.
Then, the thing he had least expected occurred. The door slid open. It had been day when he had entered the room, but it was now the midst of the night. Obviously more time had passed than he had observed, and his keen mind immediately set to mind at finding a reason, even as his equally supple body prepared to meet any threat. His first thought was of some kind of mind altering gas. Certainly Doom would be capable of producing such, and of making it colorless and odorless, but had that been the case, Reed would have expected to awaken in chains, or in some more diabolical holding device. He also wouldn't have expected Doom to allow him to remain unconscious for so long.
As he was pondering this, he happened to glance at the sky, and was literally staggered by what he saw there, almost pitching onto his face. Whatever his faults might be when it came to names and sometimes important dates, Reed had a near photographic memory for any number of things, and the stars were one of them. The stars were extremely different than they had been the night before he had entered the room. Even as he reeled from this unexpected information, he carried out a series of complicated calculations in his head, the result of which left him even more surprised for an instant. "Twenty years…" the words seemed to fall from his lips of their own accord.
It was not, perhaps, so surprising when he took a moment to think about it. He had known for years that Doom had developed time traveling technology. The Baxter Building itself contained, or, more likely, had contained an early example of it. On the other hand, the surprise had never been the concept of time travel, or that it could be used by Doom, but rather the shock of knowing that the world had changed, seemingly in an instant, from what he had known. Now that he took a moment to more closely examine his surroundings, he found that much else had changed. What had been a sapling when he entered the door was now a tree taller than him. The sides of the wall were cracked and moss covered. It was most likely then, that he had in fact been sent approximately twenty years in time. That only left the question of what had happened in the meantime.
"I thought you would never arrive," a voice said, snapping him out of his reverie. He glanced towards the source, which, as it happened, was directly in front of him, but saw nothing there. An instant later, though, there was a young woman standing before him, wearing what appeared to be some form of blue military uniform, with her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Reed blinked, and once again spoke without meaning to. "Sue?" He said, for the woman was almost the exact image of his wife at that age. Then he realized that if this was twenty years in the future- a fact he had already accepted and was not ready to discard, Sue would be even further from this age than she had been a handful of moments and twenty years ago. With that realization, he was able to look at her shorn of his preconceptions, and see the dozens of subtle differences. The most striking was her eyes. Where Sue's were blue and incredibly round, these were brown, and there was a look of gears perpetually turning behind them. In short, they were his eyes. Reed Richards had always been good at math, and it didn't take him more than a few thousandths of a second to add two and two and come up with… "Valerie?!"
The woman- his daughter!- tilted her head to the side and looked at him quizzically. "Yes," she says, flatly, and there was none of the warmth, or even recognition, that he had expected. That made sense though, when he took a moment to think about it. After all, if he had been transported twenty years into the future she would have grown up without ever really knowing him. Though that was assuming that he had never returned, which was a worrying thought.
"You need to come with me," she said, and there was an urgent tone to her voice. Reed hesitated, but only for a moment. She was his daughter, damn it, even if she had no idea of who he was. He nodded, and she turned and started sprinting through the long grass. Reed followed her, stretching his legs just enough to keep up easily. She glanced at his legs, and there was something familiar in her eyes. Almost at once he realized what it was. He had seen that look in his own eyes several times, glancing in some reflective piece of equipment, while he was deep into discovering why something worked the way it did.
"Where are we going?" He asked, glancing at the horizon. It was empty, though the moon was beginning to come up over it. Valerie certainly seemed to be in good physical shape, but even so, she surely couldn't keep up this frantic pace for very long. That meant that wherever they were headed had to be somewhere fairly close. Since there was nothing visible, that meant either an underground location or somewhere in the hills.
"Somewhere safe," responded Valerie, "Less talking, more running. We're almost out of time." Reed put the dozens of questions he still had on hold, and nodded once more. There had been no fear in Valerie's voice or expression as she spoke, but there had been a tightly controlled urgency that, through its simple and unemotional rationality, convinced Reed he was in danger far more effectively than gibbering terror or shrieking hysterics would have done. They ran in silence for some time, but then the moon was full overhead, and Valeria stopped short, muttering something under her breath. Reed couldn't hear it, but by the tone he was fairly certain it was something he didn't approve of any daughter of his saying.
"We're too late," she said, audibly. "I hope the stories about you weren't exaggerations." As she spoke, a shape rose up out of the ground. It bore a vague resemblance to a dog, in the same way that a grizzly bears a resemblance to a teddy bear. Red eyes glowed above slavering jaws, those suspended above a freakishly wide chest. Valeria moved, flicking the wrist of one hand as if throwing something, and the dog creature leapt back, blood trickling from its snout. Before Reed had time to consider this, there was a growling sound from all around, and he whirled, one arm darting out to strike another doglike creature in the chest. It fell backwards, and then there was no time for thought, even from Reed's keen brain. There was only a whirlwind of blows and desperate dodges.
In the end, it was not enough- the dog creatures seemed to be as innumerable as the now moved stars in the sky. Eventually one closed its jaws on Reed's arm, and though the fangs, be they ever so sharp, could not penetrate his elastic flesh, it seemed that the drool was acidic. His arm burnt, and he could not seem to free it, and then a dozen more of the creatures were on him, bearing him to the ground. Behind him, Valeria fought with an ever changing invisible weapon, but she was outnumbered, and, it seemed, as doomed as Reed himself.
Then, from the sky, came a bright ray of light, piercing the skull of one of the dog creatures intent on savaging Valeria. It was followed by more rays, soon so many and so close together that they seemed to transform the night to noon. The dog creatures, struck down by an enemy they could neither see nor comprehend, soon broke and fled howling into the night. A figure, clad in a cloak of a deep green, was helping Valerie to her feet. She threw her arms around him, and in doing so pushed the hood of the cloak back far enough that Reed could see the metal mask beneath. "Doom," he said- snarled, really, even as Valerie exclaimed "Father!"