In the beginning the great hand reached from the previous universe into this one. As time and space manifested as light exploding in every direction, it's grasp crept ever larger. The big bang was coursing through the great void that would soon fill with universe, and in its center the hand pushed a hole from what came before. But as it carried on its great business, light traversed a vacant cosmos. Light which varied in frequency and depth and organization, and as if guided by an unseen force, the light began to feel. That which was inert began to feel rage, and love, and greed, and hope. All the while the hand pushed even deeper into the universe.
Susan Storm stood on one of the balconies of the Baxter Building. It was a rare moment of quiet for her. Franklin and Val were visiting the Inhumans on the moon. Ben was at a poker game across town. Johnny was out on a date. Reed was stuck in his lab. And Sue, well, she was enjoying the sun setting across the New York skyline. She breathed in the slightly polluted air and smiled. Maybe she should take a swim. Then, something far across the horizon caught her attention.
Against the reds and oranges of the setting sun, it was almost invisible. It was a tiny streak of red rushing to the ground, arching across the sky. It looked insignificant, almost imperceptible. Which meant, she knew after all those years as a member of the Fantastic Four, that it was incredibly dangerous. Nothing ever fell from space that wasn't incredibly dangerous.
She started leapfrogging from rooftop to rooftop on a giant slinky of an invisible force field. She sent out the alert to the other Fantastic Four members that indicated probable future trouble (as opposed to certain now trouble). Sometime she would have to talk to Reed about his tendency to over categorize.
She lost the streak in the city, but continued heading towards where she saw it last. At least there had been no explosions, which meant it wasn't, say, an Asgardian hammer. But just as she was thinking that, there was an incredibly loud explosion. But it was to behind her to her left. She had been so focused on not losing the streak that she had lost track of her situational awareness. Inwardly she cursed. Doctor Doom would have killed her if he was here right now.
She reluctantly backtracked several blocks, towards a giant smoking hole in a small park. Lying, unconscious, in the hole was a human-ish figure. It was shirtless, but with black pants, red boots, and a black mask. It grasped two red swords, one in each hand. "Red Shift?" She exclaimed in startled confusion. She surrounded him in a force field and gently lifted him off the ground. This was the first time he had ever been to Earth, she believed. She only knew about him because Reed made Galactus a priority on all occasions.
She sighed as she started carrying him back to the Baxter Building. Every time a herald of Galactus crashed into Earth it meant a ridiculous, over-the-top battle for the fate of the universe was going to occur.
Jean Grey felt the, sadly, familiar feeling of being sucked through time. It was never pleasant, and always meant something terrible was going to happen. She had spent the past few years in the future, raising her kinda-sorta-not-really son, Nathan Christopher Summers or Cable. Her kinda-sorta-not-really daughter Rachel had a natural ability to time travel and had plucked her mind out of the past and placed it in an artificial body in the far-flung future. At this point she had decided just to accept the insanity that was her life.
She found herself in a massive tube, like one always did when they were time traveled, or cross dimension traveled, or kidnapped in a couple of other ways. The tube lifted and she tumbled out onto the ground. The glowing, pink crystal ground. She vomited. Then she looked up and saw little insects running around, most of which were holding paperwork and shouting in a language she didn't know. Most of them were about three feet high. Some looked like grasshoppers and others like pillbugs, but they all seemed very busy and very concerned.
"Jean?" came a confused and startled voice.
Jean looked over to see a woman dressed in mostly red with some pink accents, also falling out of a tube. "Wanda?" she replied.
"Are we in the past or the future?" Wanda Maximoff asked.
"Don't know," Jean said with a shrug. "I was just in the future."
"Is this when you were raising Cable and you and Scott were going by 'Redd' and 'Slym?'"
"Yep, how did you know about that?"
"It's in my past, I was just in Greece where a village had been turned entirely into Hulks."
"Sounds complicated."
"Not as complicated as time travel."
"Nothing is as complicated as time travel."
A light flashed, and another tube opened, spilling someone to the floor, who was groaning. Jean recognized him instantly. "Peter!"
He was certainly Peter Parker, but with dyed blonde hair and wearing a barista's apron. Peter immediately hopped up, and instinctively his fingers reached for his palms.
"Calm down Spider-Man," Jean said. "Everyone seems to be too busy to care about us."
"You can't just assume that every time you get abducted into a time travel caper it is due to evil villains. Half the time it is future or past heroes trying to recruit you," Wanda added.
Peter coughed and said, "Spider-Man? What? No, I'm not Spider-Man."
Jean rolled her eyes, and said, "First off, I'm a telepath so I've known you were Spider-Man since I first met you."
Wanda raised her hand, "Mystic mutant. Plus Doctor Strange blabs when he gets drunk."
"Secondly, you wouldn't be here unless you were someone important."
"Hey, I am not even Peter Parker."
"Well that's a lie," Jean said, bluntly. "Telepath. Telling if someone is lying is like the first thing you learn."
"Okay, fine. I am Peter Parker, the real Peter Parker. See, this villain, the Jackal made a clone of me, but I thought I was the clone, so I wondered the country for five years going by the name Ben Reilly before coming back to New York..."
"You have got to be kidding me? This thing?" asked Wanda.
"What thing?" asked Jean.
"It's the most absurd, drawn out super hero drama that started, I believe, right around when you left. I don't even want to go into it. I doubt anything more ridiculous or pointless will ever happen."
"That's my life you are talking about!" said an offended Peter Parker.
"I'm sorry, I really am," said Wanda with as much sincerity as she could muster, "but this entire incident with the various clones is just a lot of absurdity that doesn't end well, I'm afraid."
"Would you shut up?" asked a new arrival. He was an archer, dressed entirely in red. "When I am abducted into a time travel thing, I really don't want to hear a lot of people arguing about clones or whatever."
"And you are...?" asked Wanda.
"He is Red Arrow." said a very placid voice, also from a new arrival. This was a being who was entirely red, with yellow markings across his body and a blue cape.
"Vision?" asked Jean.
"No..." replied Wanda.
"Red Tornado," he said, simply.
"Good, you are all here," said a voice that was familiar to some and unknown to others. "Sorry I was a bit late... but time travel and all that." Susan Storm entered the room followed by throngs of bugs. "I also want to apologize for the abductions. I know how rude it is to be plucked out of time."
"Sue why is it that you always happen to be at the center of all the weirdness that happens?" asked Wanda.
"Hey!" she said, defensively, "No one in this room can judge anyone else's weirdness. But this is going to get pretty weird. Even by time travel standards." She walked over to a tube which held an immobile Red Shift. "This is Red Shift, one of the heralds of Galactus you probably haven't heard about and definitely don't care about. I swear that guy goes through heralds like tissue paper. He crashed into Earth, our Earth three days ago. Well, three days ago my time. It's in some of your futures and others of yours past. Time travel, am I right?" She waved her hand and a hologram descended around them depicting deep space. In the space Red Shift floated alongside a giant in pink and blue armor, across from them, clearly with ill intent, was a massive red bull. The bull charged across into Galactus who grabbed it by the horns and attempted to rip it in two. They continued fighting.
"This is Galactus and the Butcher. They're from two different universes who somehow met, fought and did horrible, incalculable damage to both. Galactus is a giant who eats planets and the Butcher is bull who represents anger. It's a whole thing. But the long and the short of it is..." she paused as the two titans made one final charge resulting in a massive explosion. Space and time warped around them and red energy poured in multiple directions, two earths appeared in the warp, acting as gravity wells, drawing the energy to them. The unconscious form of Red Shift floated towards one.
"As the energy flowed to the Earths, it coalesced into this form," Sue gestured again, magnifying the image of the falling energy, revealing each as a red ring with a symbol on them of a circle between two lines.
"A red version of the Green Lantern ring?" asked Red Tornado.
"Yep, exactly."
"What's a Green Lantern?" asked Peter.
"It's like a Nova Corps knock-off," Sue replied. "When it happened the Panoptichron, that's here outside space and time where everything in all universes is monitored, went insane. It should never have happened. And the Timebreakers," she gestured to the insect people, "Went looking for a cause, the closest they could find was Red Shift, and since I happened to be with him..."
"So," said Roy, "How do we factor into this? Shouldn't you be talking to Superman? Or... you know... any of the Green Lanterns?"
"Well," begain Sue, "The Timebreakers have an algorithm that allows them to view the probability of success based on a team's composition. And, for some reason, this team is the most likely to succeed in securing all the rings."
"And how do we do that?" asked Red Tornado.
"Well you get them off of whomever has them, and then we need to convert them into Red Son rings, allowing you to access their power but without all the rage and menace, and then when we're done, we can throw them into a black hole or something. Until then you will be the Red Sons."
"Red Sons?" asked Jean. "like 'Sons' as in the sun in the sky or son as in Cable?"
Sue paused, "I don't know. I never thought to ask." She turned to the nearest insect, "Can we get someone to look into that? Homonyms! What are you going to do about them?"
"And what if I don't want to go into battle against Red Green Lanterns with just a bow and arrow?"
Sue sighed. "We've all been through this before, haven't we? 'No, I don't want to join!' 'Oh no, the word's ending, I'll join!' 'Our team is now a family!' That's basically every other day in Wolverine's life. Why don't we skip all the dramatics about pointedly not joining or reluctantly joining, because we all know you're at least joining right at the moment everything seems bleak and like we will all lose."
Roy looked at her for a moment and then said, "You've been doing this too long."
"Yes, yes I have." She gestured again allowing another hologram to descend, "And here is your first mission, the nation of Morvania." A man in red with white skin, long blonde hair, and two tentacles emerging from his wrists placed a bright red ring upon his finger. He heaved, vomiting blood from his mouth, and then it was like a wave of death emerged from him. Grass turned brown and dead. Trees withered and collapsed. Birds fell dead from the sky. "Omega Red has found a Red Ring." Sue waved again and a portal appeared in front of the group. "Go, get it back."
They shrugged and walked through.