Hey guys, I'm so sorry for being inactive for so long. I just couldn't get in the mood to write and my life got pretty hectic. but I'm back now! And I'm going to be releasing another (pretty intense) chapter in about a week.
Chapter 43
The bitter wind fluttered the ancient map within her hands. Elvira squinted at her scribbled notes and longitudinal measures that looked crude on the perfectly articulated map of the nine realms. She had stolen it from the Asgardian library and translated it into measurements she could use to teleport with under Loki's advisement. Even with his help, however, she always felt uneasy in his presence. Elvira dug into her bag for a pen. She crossed out the elegant ink that read 'Jotunheim'.
"Cold as hell and inhabited by giant ice men. Not even any good tech to steal. Not coming here again," Elvira muttered to herself through chattering teeth. In the month she had spent exploring her map, she had acquired some very handy tech as well as the tendency to talk to herself. She had visited amazing cities and villages and seen weird creatures and people she didn't have the proper words to describe. But she still felt this weird tug to return to earth. Why would she go back to the planet where she had been held prisoner and tortured by an evil organisation that was probably still searching for her?
Although every realm she had visited had presented its own dangers and she had gotten into more near-death experiences than she had hoped. But nowhere had ever felt right her to stay more than a week. Elvira sighed out of tiredness, rubbing her burning eyes. Jotunheim was the last realm on her map. She had no idea where to go from here.
There was a deep rumbling within the snowy ground.
The rumble quickly morphed into quaking as Elvira's eyes darted up. The constant blizzard-like weather of Jotunheim made it impossible to see the approaching mystery as anything more than a grey blob. The features came into view much faster than expected. The thing was traveling at an extreme speed. By the time she had to realised it was huge and sharp-toothed, the furry beast was lunging at her.
She gripped tight to her map as she rolled away from where the beast crushed the ground a moment later. The thing was 6x her size and it was hungry. Elvira stashed the map in her bag before evading a swipe of the beast's large claw. She twisted her head just as its tail swept her away.
As the beast ran at its winded meal, Elvira frantically recalled earth's coordinates. Slipping into the portal, narrowly missing the beast's jaw snapping at her head.
Her chest swelled and contracted as she gulped in big breaths. Elvira firmly decided to avoid foreign planets for the time being. Earth would have to do. She had to admit that a small part of her missed her home planet.
As she stood, she noticed that she was situated in an abandoned military base. The open field surrounded by the peeping tops of a few bunkers left to ruin. Whenever she teleported without knowing an exact location, she was taken somewhere strongly embedded in memories she still couldn't consciously reach. But she still knew those places were important. So why had she been at a military base in her past?
BBB
Elvira strolled through the darkening streets of Manhattan with her hood tugged low and sunglasses obscuring her other-worldly eyes. She needed a place to lie low, so why was she in New York? No one ever tells you that the infuriating part of losing all your memories is that you get very bad at restraining confused nostalgia. She rubbed her face irritably at the intangible sentiment guiding her decisions.
Looking up at a street sign lit by a street lamp, Elvira noticed she had wondered into Queens. A loud yelp of pain distracted her from her observation. I had come from the alley she was 10 steps away from passing. Whacks of knuckles against skin informed her of what exactly was going on. The smart thing to do would to walk away and don't draw attention. But the familiar groan of an uppercut winding the victim was too familiar from her brutal fight training for her to ignore.
Elvira teleported to the top of the building that lined the alley. From above she could see 6 men. The only one armed with a gun seemed to be the leader, 2 others had knives and the rest swung their fists at this small guy. The guy was oddly dressed in a bright red and blue tracksuit with a full-face red mask that looked like it had goggles over the eyes. He was doing a good job avoiding the obvious beat down, for an amateur at least. He was using a sticky white substance to aid him in his defense. A teenage girl hunched behind the kid in the suit. She looked unharmed but terrified.
Elvira didn't need any more information. She leaped down the two-story building, knowing her enhanced body could handle a tumbling fall from that height. Immediately after landing, still crouched she swiped an attacker's legs out from under him. Without a moment to breathe, she was standing in front of the next man who happened to hold a knife. Grabbing his hand, she thrust her other arm into his elbow, a crack signaling the breaking of the joint and probably a bone. The knife dropped from his grip. Elvira twisted with his hand still in her tight grip and hurled him over her shoulder and into the wall.
With the thud of a 130 kg body hitting the wall, the men had finally registered her sudden appearance. She heard a shout of, "What the f-", before she turned to elbow one of them lunging at her. The leader of the group loudly shouted orders to "Take the bitch down".
She wrapped her hand around the back of the elbowed man's head and roughly thrust it into her knee. As her foot touched the ground she ducked an oncoming fist. Elvira turned around and sent a round-house kick to the back of the man's head. With a quick roll, she collected the knife the man had "dropped", promptly hurling it into the 4th man's torso. She took a second to observe the oddly dressed guy still protecting the young girl. She now could see from his size that was younger than first thought.
Turning back to the remaining men it was clear that the other knife and the gun were going to become trouble and she needed to remove the scared girl crying against the wall. Elvira sighed knowing what she had to do to protect those kids.
So much for flying under the radar.
The man with the remaining knife stupidly roared as he charged at her. She calmly stood and just as he was about to skewer her, she opened a small portal right in front of her. The man in his momentum had plunged most of his arm through before he realised the glowing hole in space. The portal swiftly closed, cleanly severing the arm. The new amputee screamed as Elvira turned and opened a portal right behind the sobbing girl. She squealed as she fell through it, into a police station.
She gestured for the boy to follow but instead, he shouted frantically, "Look out!".
The man had finally stopped screaming to take revenge. She blocked the oncoming hook with her forearm before quickly dipping her hand into an awaiting portal to collect the knife still clutched in his severed hand. Shifting back from another enraged but sloppy punch, she had enough distance to jump at him and drive the knife into his torso, where the neck met the shoulder. Using her grip on the knife to pull herself over the hulking body. Elvira landed as he collapsed behind her, knife still nestled in his shoulder.
She turned her gaze at the gun pointed at her. A squeak comes from the web guy who apparently was still behind her. She heard the rustling of his clothes, rolling her eyes at his predictable attempt to shoot the gun with one of his sticky webs.
"I got this under control kid," Elvira warned lowly while still facing the gun with a casual stare.
The street thug holding said gun glanced suspiciously at the exchange before trying to assert his dominance over the situation by shouting, "You're gonna pay for taking out my guys."
As his finger clicked the trigger into place, the bullet propelled into the awaiting portal Elvira speedily placed right in front of her like a pulsing blue shield. Before the thug realised, the bullet had exited the paired portal behind him. He flew to the rubbish littered ground as the bullet struck his back.
"Jesus!" the cartoonishly dressed kid yelped.
A portal opened before her, she stopped short of it and turned to him, "Go home. The police are going to be here soon."
She stepped through the portal has she heard him shout, "Wait no, stop!". The call was punctuated by a sharp pull on her shoulder as she exited onto a deserted street off Toronto. The heavy thud behind her made Elvira tense.
Turning around she saw the blue and red amateur-hero sprawled on the crisp pavement. He groaned, clutching his ribs as he tried to stand. "Please just hold up," he paused with a few pants, "Well first, thanks for saving us back there, and second, you can't just kill people!" When he had finally taken a moment to breathe and regain his bearings, he gasped. "Is that- and that is- a-are we in Canada!? Wha- how?"
She watched him panic and then slap his own forehead as he muttered in disbelief, "That means you're a teleporter. You can open wormholes! But how is that possible on such a small scale without tearing the earth apart? The concentrated force should have instantly incinerated us!"
As he rambled about the science of how her portals worked, she noted that he was definitely a teenager. His suit was obviously homemade from a sweatsuit. It was clear that he was attempting to be a costumed hero from the spider symbol drawn on his sweater vest with a black marker and the mask made out of a large sock and some make-shift goggles.
"I need you to train me," he suddenly stated with fleeting confidence. At her bewildered expression, he continued, "I know this is crazy and I really shouldn't trust you but you saw how badly I did back there. But you took them down without them landing a single hit. I know you killed some of those guys. Which is wrong. But now that I think about it you did it to protect me and that girl."
Elvira crossed her armed, sending a stern glare at the boy, "What makes you think that? Maybe I just wanted to kill them."
The boy stiffened, "Y- you ah didn't though did you?"
Elvira sighed and reopened the portal back to Queens, "Go back to home or I'll leave you here."
The teen deflated at her response and turned to enter the portal. He took a few steps before his shoulders steeled themselves and he spoke in disbelief, "You know I've only had these abilities for like a month but it's been lonely and really hard." He turns to face her again with an odd determination settling in his frame, "And then you come bursting in to save me and I think 'Wow! finally someone like me'. And I know that I probably shouldn't trust you because you have this whole gritty antihero thing going on- but I can tell that you feel it too. The responsibility that comes with being able to do things no one else can."
She watched him curiously, wanted to see where this went. He continued in a stronger voice, "Someone important to me said with great power comes great responsibility. I understand if you don't want to train me but I'm still going to go out there a protect people. It's just that if you trained me a little, I might not get as many bruises."
A small man with brushed blonde hair and light eyes that sparked with the same determined flashed before her eyes. "You can't just sit around…" she murmured to herself. She was overwhelmed with familiarity. She kind of missed it.
She huffed and shook her head, "I can't believe I'm doing this but you remind me of my br- someone. What I remember of him." She sighed the last part to herself.
A grin split across the boy's face, stretching the sock that covered it. "Wait, Are you serious?! I-I'm Peter by the way." He tugged the mask and goggles off his face to reveal a youthful face, tousled brown hair and warm innocent eyes.
"Elvira."
"That's an interesting name," he smiled.
Elvira shrugged it off with, "I didn't come up with it up. So where do you want me to take you?"
"You mean anywhere in the world?" Peter gushed excitedly.
"No, I mean where is your home."
BBB
Elvira slowly strode through a tiny bedroom, cluttered with mis-matching technology. Boy would this kid die if he saw the things she had stashed away in a cave in Alfheim, Elvira mused to herself.
"I live here with my Aunt May- but she doesn't know about the superhero thing!" Peter frantically added. Elvira nodded along. "If you need somewhere to stay, 6B on the sixth floor is free. No one has been here for like a year because Mrs Popindrus died here."
Elvira leaned down to examine a framed photograph of a slightly younger Peter with a man and a woman. Peter seemed anxious to have her in his space as he tried to ease the tension by asking, "So your powers… how did you get them? I got mine from this experimental radioactive spider that bit me- that sounds really ridiculous now that I say it out loud."
As his pause continued to drag on, she realised he really expected her to share as well. Turned to his hopeful face, Elvira felt a little guilty at the lack of info she had to offer. "Uh, I don't know…" she shrugged.
"You were born with them?" he prodded in astonishment.
"Maybe," she shrugged.
"Okaaay-" Peter replied when she didn't elaborate, "Well then how do your powers work? Because from every way I can think of its scientifically impossible without destroying the planet instantly."
"That's because space doesn't want to move that way so you end up forcing it. If a small portion of space wants to move that way then it is quite gentle," Elvira responded disinterestedly as she sat on the neatly made single bed.
Peter and his scrunched-up eyebrows stared at her incredulously. "That doesn't make any sense on so many levels."
"Look kid, I don't know how it works but I know that it does. I call out to space for it to fold between me and where I want to go, then I give it a little push open and I walk through. It listens to me because we're connected someh-"
"OH my god, then you just proved how wormholes work- but- I," Peter almost wheezed as he roughly combed through his mussy hair.
From this angle Peter finally noticed a faint but odd glow lighting the interior lenses of the sunglasses the women had yet to take off, "Wait a minute," he murmured as the naturally curious teen leaned over to peek through the gap between the glasses and her eye.
"Holy Shit! Your eyes are glowing." He gasped, hands stuck to the sides of his head.
With a sigh Elvira removed her glasses, the pretense unnecessary now. She begrudgingly glanced over at Peter. His eyes widened as he stared at her eyes like he was studying them. "How on earth- can you still see? Did this happen at the same time you got your powers?"
It was clear to Elvira that Peter had no intention of ceasing his questioning of topics Elvira didn't enjoy fruitlessly trying to remember. "Hey!" she aggravatedly waved her hand in from of his face. She huffed as Peter eagerly look at what she had to say, "Is it really that important how I make portals or my perfectly functional eyes or why you have webs that don't come out of a spider butt. You just need to tell me what you can do so I can teach you how to not get fucked up by street criminals."
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