"I would strongly suggest, Doctor Connors, that you don't in fact do what you're about to do."
Curt froze in shock, having been sure he was the only one in the entire lab complex, at the sound of the voice behind him. One he'd never heard before, and one with a very odd accent.
"The results wouldn't be what you desired. While the end result would be interesting to me, I feel that you'd probably find it less so. I have a better solution anyway, if you're interested."
He became aware that there was a light, as if someone had opened a door behind him, streaming past and illuminating the lab bench in front of him more brightly than it had been moments earlier. The only problem was that there was no door there. He knew that without doubt.
Very slowly, he turned his head to look over his shoulder. The face, and indeed the entire body, of the person who had spoken and was watching him with interest was not what he was expecting to see.
Not even a little bit.
Numbly he thought that at least the giant violet lizard that was standing in the doorway which had appeared from nowhere seemed in a friendly mood as far as he could tell, and her voice was calm and even.
A metahuman? He'd certainly never heard of this one, or anything resembling her. Possibly a mutant? Or an alien?
His heart hammering in his chest, he took a cautious step away, then winced as he banged into the bench he'd been standing in front of and had in his shock temporarily forgotten about. The lizard creature tipped her head a little to the side at the solid clunk his knee made when it impacted the leg of the metal construction, and appeared mildly amused as he locked up in pain from the crack to the exact point on his knee to cause maximum anguish. "That sounded like it hurt."
He nodded involuntarily while his eyes watered and he suppressed a scream. She waited politely until he recovered enough to say hoarsely, "Quite a lot."
"I apologize for startling you," the huge reptilian female said, smiling a little as he rubbed his knee with his only arm, grimacing in pain. "But I didn't have much time to stop you from doing something that would end badly." She looking meaningfully at the vial on the bench, next to a hypodermic which was sitting on top of his research notes. "Your regenerative serum is flawed, I'm afraid, and has mutagenic properties that make it more than a little dangerous."
He looked at the vial, then back at the lizard, feeling shock added to the current bewilderment and pain. All in all he was wondering if he'd actually already injected himself with the stuff and was hallucinating as a result. "How do you know about my serum?" he asked slowly. The pain from his bruised knee, now that he thought about it, seemed to make a hallucination unlikely.
Which implied there really was a seven foot tall violet lizard woman standing in his lab, having come out of a door where there couldn't be one…
He wasn't sure which was more peculiar, the door or the lizard.
"My relatives keep an eye on a number of realities for various reasons and this one is one we've visited a few times now," the creature replied somewhat casually, walking over to him with almost silent steps and bending down to examine the vial for a moment. She picked up his notebook and flipped through it, nodding to herself. "I've been following your work with some interest and decided that it was probably a good idea to step in before something happened that would cause a number of pretty serious problems in the long term."
Putting the notebook down again, she turned to him. "My name is Ianthe, and I'm a member of a group called the Family. We're not local."
He stared at her, then at the door, through which he could see into a space that clearly couldn't possibly be on the other side of the wall. Another reptile-person walked past, glancing in at him and nodding politely, before going about its business. Beyond that, he could see machinery that looked far higher tech than anything he was familiar with, even from Oscorp or Stark Industries.
After some time, during which he tried to get to grips with how weird things had very abruptly gone, he looked at Ianthe and asked in a bemused and somewhat wavering voice, "What does 'not local' mean under the circumstances?"
He had a shrewd idea it didn't mean 'Comes from Canada' or something along those lines…
Not unless Canadians were even weirder than he'd heard, anyway.
Ianthe smiled, showing a hint of a lot more teeth than most people had. "Basically another universe, to put it in simple terms. It's more complicated than that, of course, but it would take hours to even begin to explain."
He looked at the open doorway again, then back to her. "You're saying that through that door is another universe?!"
"Yes. More or less. Like I said, it's complicated and some of the terminology doesn't translate into English very well," she chuckled. "Or at all, in a couple of cases. My cousin Saurial would talk your ear off about it given the chance, but not many people have the math skills to really understand it properly."
"And you just wandered from another universe to stop me from making a mistake?" he pressed, the feeling of unreality that had come over him when he'd heard her voice not getting any less obvious.
She shrugged. "Pretty much. Saurial had some business in the area, so I thought I'd stop in and say hi. And try to preemptively fix a situation that could have gotten a bit difficult." Ianthe picked up the vial of regeneration serum and peered at it again, then poked a claw tip through the rubber seal into the liquid inside as he gaped. "Yep, definitely not something you want to be sticking into yourself. Unless you really like scales and a very aggressive attitude." She grinned at his shocked expression. "I mean, I've got no problem at all with scales, of course, you can't go too far wrong with scales, but the aggression would cause problems."
He raised his hand to his eyes and rubbed them, while trying to work out what to say. Eventually he just said, quite faintly, "What?"
Apparently taking pity on him, she leaned back on her strong tail and relaxed, looking comfortable. "You've been attempting to create an agent based on reptile DNA to promote limb regeneration in humans. Your work is very impressive, but you've unfortunately managed to make a couple of subtle although fundamental errors in the process. As it stands, this agent would result in a regenerative effect, but it is also strongly mutagenic as I said, with a better than ninety-six percent chance of causing gross physical changes along with some unpleasant mental effects. Heightened aggression would be the first one, along with paranoid delusions, megalomania, and a number of even less pleasant problems."
She shook her head a little. "Trust me, you wouldn't enjoy the results, and neither would anyone else."
Curt just stared at her for nearly a minute, somehow believing her. Then he sagged a little, slumping against the bench. "Shit. You're serious, aren't you."
"Completely, I'm afraid." Ianthe nodded slightly. "I can show you exactly where your genetic sequencing failed if you'd like, and how that would cause the problem I just described. Unfortunately it's not an easy fix, you'd have to start pretty much from square one. This particular approach isn't the most stable in any case, there are a number of ways it can fail, some more serious than others. Grafting the gene sequences you're interested in onto a human DNA strand is a very complex task, as is making only the relevant genes express themselves when required. Miss even one activation trigger and it all falls over."
"Ten years work, and all I have is something I can't use," he mumbled, looking at her, then at the vial in her hand.
"It's not as bad as that," she replied with a smile. "At least you didn't find out the flaws in the serum the hard way. And you learned a lot even if you didn't quite end up where you wanted to be." She put the now-useless vial down, before producing a small box from somewhere about her person and holding it out. "And I think I can help you with your main problem." Opening the lid of the box with a flick of her thumb, she showed him the contents.
"What are those?" he asked curiously, still feeling oddly detached from reality. For some reason he was just accepting the presence of the huge reptile in his lab without the shouting and running away that he vaguely felt would have been more appropriate.
"More or less a superset of what you were trying to achieve," she said, sounding pleased with herself. "One of my more successful projects, in fact. And unlike your version, these ones won't make you grow a tail. Unless you want that, of course, in which case it's easy to arrange."
Raising his eyes to meet hers, he looked at her with shock.
She shrugged again. "What can I say? Tails are useful. So are arms. Here." Picking one of the small off-white things out of the box between two talons, she offered it to him. "Perfectly safe, we've been using them for a long time and never had any trouble at all. Just press it on your skin until it squeaks."
Curt stared at her for a very long time, then accepted the thing with a confused look and the thought that if this was a hallucination, it was a very impressive one.
Ten minutes later when he was still staring at his completely functional right arm, opening and closing his hand, something he hadn't been able to do in many years, he was pretty damn sure that whatever had happened it was probably a good thing. Even his knee didn't hurt any more. In fact, he had never felt so good in his life before.
He didn't know where this bizarre lizard came from, but she certainly had some good tricks up her sleeve.
"I've got to go, I need to find Saurial and make sure she's not doing something too weird again," Ianthe said with a smile, watching him feel the back of his no longer missing right hand with the fingers of his left one, a wondering expression on his face. "I may see you again at some point, Doctor Connors. Your work, even with a couple of issues, is pretty good." He looked at her as she produced another container, this one about the size of a shoe box, then put it on the bench. "You may find this interesting. Some of my own research notes on a similar form of genetic modification, along with the relevant background data needed to understand it, reference materials, that sort of thing. Feel free to use it if it helps. There are a few other things in there that might come in handy too."
She stepped back, nodding to him, and raised a hand. "Until next time, Doctor. I'd suggest destroying any of that serum that's left, just in case something happens with it, and possibly it would be a good idea to delete any records for manufacturing it too."
With that she headed for the door into another dimension or whatever it was.
"Thanks," he managed to say as she went through it.
A large reptilian head reappeared, grinning at him. "It was my pleasure. Oh, my contact details are in the box too, if you ever find you need a little help. See you around." Ianthe vanished, the door swung shut, and vanished into an orange-bordered hole in space that immediately winked out, leaving only the wall of his lab behind.
Curt stared at it blankly for some time, then cautiously walked over and gingerly felt the surface. It didn't feel any different than it should have done, and wasn't even warm.
"What in god's name just happened?" he whispered to himself, stepping back and keeping his eye on the wall just in case something weird came out of it. Nothing did, so in the end he turned around, not without looking over his shoulder several times, and went back to the workbench. Putting both hands on the top, one on either side of the box, he just looked at it for a while.
Then he lifted his right hand and stared at it, a smile gradually growing.
"That wasn't what I expected but I can live with it," he murmured to himself, feeling that the statement was barely scratching the surface of his current mindset. He thought absently he was probably in shock, although in a more or less positive way. Making a fist a couple of times, he studied the regrown hand and arm, something he hadn't been able to do in nearly twenty years. "Lizards. That's… I have no idea what that is."
Hooking the nearby stool with a foot, he dragged it closer, then dropped onto it, resting both elbows on the bench and staring into space with a strange smile on his lips. Eventually, he shook his head, deciding that he was going to leave thinking about what the hell he told people had occurred to Monday, and sat up, pulling the box closer. When he happened to put his hand on the top surface of the metallic container it beeped quietly and opened, which made him jump a little, before he cautiously lifted the now-loose lid and peered in.
Several hours later, at around four in the morning, he put the book he'd been reading down with a feeling of bemused excitement and just sat there, thinking. He'd learned more just by going over the documents than half a decade of study had taught him, and felt sure that the coming years were going to be very intriguing.
Sighing a little, half in amazement and half in tiredness, he carefully put everything back in the box, shaking the little bottle of bright pink spheres and watching them roll around for a moment before replacing them as well. Snapping the lid shut he heard another beep as it locked once more.
Before he went home for the night, he carefully gathered up all his regeneration serum samples, along with the hard-copy documentation on the manufacturing process, and dropped it into the lab incinerator. When he was sure it was ash, he erased the computer records as well, including the backup tapes.
He suspected that his visitor had been entirely serious about the danger of his research, and he wasn't going to take any chances.
When he'd finished, he grabbed the unbelievable box of incredible wonders, locked up, and went home whistling under his breath, oddly happy despite the abrupt end to a decade of research.
Curt was pretty sure the next decade of research was going to be a lot more interesting and successful…