Chapter One
Darkmoor Research Labs.
It's a place that holds mixed memories for Brian Braddock … it was here that he first worked after graduating with his Master's in Physics and Engineering, and where he'd
studied and polished his thesis for his doctorate.
It was also the last place he'd been on that fateful night that had lead to his taking up the mantle of Captain Britain of Earth 616…
But now, he and his wife, the fey changeling, Meggan, worked here, testing the limits of
not only her own powers, but of his own theories about the physics of alternate dimensions…such as Otherworld.
An unearthly emerald glow was visible through the plasteel dome that house an energy emitter… Meggan's voice rang over the headsets of the scientists as she monitored the
array with her mystical and enhanced senses, "All right, gentlebeings, let's take it from
the top…."
"Thermodynamic levels increasing exponentially…" one of the scientists called out, taking a reading from her console, and another seconded her announcement, "Ambient
waveforms are fluctuating rapidly…"
Meggan looked at the swirling mass of verdant energies with all the senses she had at
her disposal, including her empathic ability to "feel" things beyond emotions.. she hovered above everyone's heads, watching in wonder, "Projecting critical paranormal
mass in T-minus 10…..9….8….7….."
Brian Braddock manned the controls of the emitter array, his eyes protected by goggles,
and his headset tuned to share communications with the rest of the crew…
"Steady there, ol' boy… steady!!" he called out as Meggan's voice continued to call out
the count down, "7….6….5….4….3….2…..1…."
"Righto!" Brian hollered, with a note of triumph in his voice, "That's it…. Riiiiight…."
"Deactivate!" he ordered as the matrix energies disappated, to reveal the armoured
form of Dane Whitman, the Black Knight, one of his oldest and best friends.
The master swordsman was also a fellow researcher, though his expertise lay in biology and genetics, and he was also a reserve member of the Avengers, with as long and august a history of heroism as Brian's had been.
He was now able to see the forms of a group of the thinktank's best and brightest as they scurried around, gathering data, and monitoring the computers…
"Deactivating spectranalisys now…." one of them echoed Brian's order, as the computer's placid tone interrupted, Results tabulating….prediction imminent.
"Admit it, man—" he taunted his friend good naturedly, "…you rather fancy yourself the mad scientist these days, don't you, Braddock?"
Dane stepped out of the residual matrix-glow and down from the platform, his strange
black two-handed bastard sword none the worse for wear, though he appeared a bit winded from the efforts as Meggan steadied his descent from the platform.
Brian chuckled, removing his goggles, "There is something appealing about torturing one's friends in the name of science, I must confess… You especially, Whitman. Nice to see the Black Knight is as much of a pantywaist as ever…. It's a wonder the Avengers ever let you into their ranks!"
"Keep talking that trash, Braddock, and—ex-partner or not—you'll be eating those words with a side of chips, once the effects of all your bloody experiments have worn off…" the descendant of the Black Knight of Arthurian legend shot back, his own formidable constitution affording him a speedy recovery as he allowed Brian to run a tricorder along
the blade's edge, "Now, why exactly did you drag me all the way across the Pond? Certainly not just to test the mystical properties of the Ebony Blades…"
Brian feigned a hurt look, "What? Can't I catch up with an old friend I've not seen in a bloody dog's age? I'm not a total recluse y'know!"
"Braddock, y'make Howard Hughes look like an extrovert!" Dane shot back as his chum completed his scan of the elegantly lethal blade, giving Brian an odd look.
The former Captain Britain swallowed hard, "Well, yes… it's all rather hard to explain..
without sounding like a raving lunatic!"
A strangely familiar voice rang over his shoulder as he donned a glove to test the heft of the ancient blade, "Like we Braddocks are any strangers t'lunacy…."
Brian wheeled around, thrusting the sword back into Whitman's hands as he saw the glowing sigil of the Crimson Dawn lurking in the shadows, followed by the armor-clad
form of his sister emerging from the liquid blackness, her dark violet hair and vaguely
Oriental features still unfamiliar to him as the mark on her face.
"Liz?" he stammered, more surprised by how she arrived than the fact that she had, "Crikey, sis, what are you doing here?"
Meggan smiled reassuringly at her sister-in-law, who had just arrived from the States,
she was relieved that the telepath was here…
The regal warrior regarded her brother suspiciously for a moment before moving to embrace him as he stood gaping at her, "You could sense my thoughts all the way across the Pond? I didn't realise your telepathy was so far reaching!"
"It wasn't… until I had an accident…" she told him as he finally hugged her back.
"But then…how did you--?" he sputtered, unsure of what to make of things as they
were, especially since the link they once shared had been severed back when she'd
been body swapped into the form of an Oriental assassin.
"Oh, y'know, that secret language of twins thing," she jested before she gestured over to Meggan, "Actually, a little faerie told me…"
Meggan cowered behind Liz's formidable form, her voice timid, and her features becoming more plain as she sought to divert another explosion of her husband's temper,
"I rang yesterday and told her about yer nightmares… I was so scared.. Please don't be cross with me?"
Dane laid a restraining hand on his old friend's shoulder as the former superhero wheeled around to glare at his empathic wife, "Meggan. Darling. I'm telling you… I'm fine!"
Liz met his glare with her own intimidating violet gaze, "No, you're not, Brian. Something is bothering you, I can sense it…"
"Not that secret twins rubbish…?" he muttered as he wanted to crawl away from his sister's powerful presence, though the shadowy warrior-telepath didn't let him off so easily, "Brian, luv, I know you better than anyone… "
He turned away from her, resting his weary weight on the railing of the Lab's balcony, his voice barely audible, "Aye, that you do, bets… that you do…"
He turned back to them, his face in a stubborn set, "Do we really have to talk about this?"
Liz nodded sternly, "Yes, we do."
Dane nodded, clapping him on the shoulder, "Whatever it is, you obviously need to get it off your chest, Braddock. Trust me, you'll feel a lot better once you do…"
Liz's penetrating gaze still bored into him as she reached into the shadows beside Meggan and withdrew a sword composed of pure darkness, as unreflective and light absorbing as the Black Knight's own mystical blade, "And you'll feel a lot worse if you force me to use this…. Just because I am not going mucking around in your head doesn't mean that this is any less effective!"
Brian grumbled as his sister called his bluff and forced him into a corner, "Well, when you put it that way…"
He gestured to his office in a corner of the labs, and the trio followed him in, taking up
various seats, with Meggan hovering in a corner. as her irascible husband leaned on his desk with a heavy sigh, "Ever wonder who you are? Wonder why you were brought into the world? Or what your true calling is? Or even what purpose you serve?"
He removed his glasses, revealing his bloodshot eyes as he turned to his wife, sister and best friend, "Those are precisely the questions I've been trying to answer since that fateful night when I first became Captain Britain…"
"It all started here, at Darkmoor, when I was just a Thames University grad student with more smarts than stones." he continued, the memories still haunting him, "We were attacked by Joshua Stragg, a psychotic called 'The Reaver', hellbent on stealing our top secret research for his own insidious affairs….it was mayhem, I panicked and fled… Dad's old Triumph motorbike was swift, but I wasn't half the rider he, Jamie or Liz were. The crash should have killed me, I wished it had…. I was lying near death, and thought I'd gone mad, that the spirits of the land, Merlyn and his daughter, Roma, who appeared to me were the tortured elusions of a dying mind, and not the truly the beings that they are…. If only…. They made me face destiny.—they made me become a hero. I fought alongside some of the worlds greatest heroes, and stared down death facing some of the most sinister villains…and all that time, running around with the fate of the world in my hands, I thought I could handle the responsibility…."
His bleak expression told them as much as his next word cost him, "I was wrong… My body was strong, nigh invulnerable, but my mind was weak, my spirit never as strong as
my father's…or my sister's. I became suicidal."
"Thanks to some much needed support and guidance from the Black Knight," he continued, "I was able to resume the mantle I'd been handed with some renewed sense of purpose and fresh perspective… And we fought the good fight for Otherworld and for the Isles. Through Merlyn's tutelage, I learned of my father's extra-dimensional, non-human, origins…and about the metaphysical connection to the land and the people of Otherworld—and for a time, I achieved a sense of spiritual peace that most beings never experience in their lifetimes… but it didn't last very long. My services were needed elsewhere, and I was given an new image, better suited to the challenges that lay ahead…and I gained an "invisible friend"..something most children abandon with childhood… Jackdaw guided me in saving another Britain, another world, from the madness of Sir James Jaspers and his vision of holocaust against any and all metahumans in the Isles."
"We failed and we died," Brian whispered, thinking of the techno-organic horror of the Fury, "But even in death, there was no escaping destiny…. Merlyn brought me back, once more, for there were greater evils to be fought, for in that interim, my own sister had taken up the mantle of Captain Britain…and I was jealous of her success…and it was I who should have faced the Slaymaster and the Vixen, not you, Liz…"
"I was busy facing Sat-yr-9 on another sidereal Earth, while you were fending off my psychotic doppleganger, Byron Bhra-dok, her lover…" he continued, thinking of all those things that had happened, from his misadventures with Gatecrasher and the Technet, to his sticky cooperation with Inspector Dai Thomas of Scotland Yard, to the Warpies and the Weird Happenings Organisation's involvement with Excalibur… friends long dead but
not forgotten… "There were lives to change, alliances to forge, and traditions to uphold… For the first time in my life, everything seemed to be going according to what ever bizarre design fate had mapped out for me… I lost my sister, not once in Dallas, but twice, if you count the Seige Perilous…"
"Excalibur danced through time, and I saw other lives, that might have been mine… happiness still eluded me," Brian continued, "until a confounding jaunt into an alternate future awakened me to yet another alternate reality beyond any one man's hope of salvation…"
"If not for Rachel Grey, the Phoenix," he said trying to steady his voice, "who plucked me from the timestream, exchanging her existence for mine, I would have been trapped there forever…"
"I adopted the name "Britanic" and renewed my persuits of science and engineering, hoping to find some focus, and rebuild my life here, on Earth 616… but then Liz's accident brought me to the attention of the Dragons of the Crimson Dawn, proving that my attempts to define myself as I saw fit were but a temporary respite from the chaos…"
"To save the world from their ancient evil, and to save my sister from Kuragari, Captain Britain had to die once more.. leaving only the man, Brian Braddock, to try to pick up the pieces and carry on," he said quietly, "And I thought that marriage to Meggan would be the best thing that ever happened to me… I was wrong about that too…"
Meggan sniffled in the corner, knowing she was hearing the truth…while Liz was not so devastated, she knew that Brian's life as a hero had taken its toll on his sanity, which even he was beginning to question….
"So… here I am, right back at the beginning, doing what I've always loved most….my research," he admitted, "Still, I've this nagging suspicion that It's all about to start again.
Like at any given moment, when I least want or expect it, that other shoe's going to come crashing…."
"….down?" he finished as the sound of braking glass and explosions interrupted his soliloquy as the door was blown off its hinges before anyone could seek cover… Meggan, Liz and Dane were all attired in armor, and unhurt by the shrapnel, but Brian wasn't, he was "merely human" and without his former invulnerability to protect him, it was his nearly-estranged wife who shifted her form and mass to act as a shield for his more frail form…
When the dust cleared, they saw the battered form of Linda McQuillan, Captain UK, lying beneath the rubble, a group of cyberneticly enhnased individuals landing in the ruins of Darkmoor Labs.
A harsh mechanical voice rang out, Captain UK of Earth 839. Status: Terminated.
The form of Widget materialized overhead, static electricity arcing around her, Captain Britain of Earth 616. Designate: Terminal Status: Immediate.
Dane's eyes narrowed underneath his helmet, as he drew the Ebony Blade and summoned his shield, "Not if I have anything to say about it! For Avalon!"
His blade swung through the partially immaterial form that hung below the metallic unit, causing some sort of disruption, though the cyborg shimmered and drew in current from the damaged structure to stabilize itself…
We come for Braddock. We will not be denied. Widget repeated as the group of cyborgs began to mobalise against the quartet, one knocking Whitman from his feet
as Meggan flew out of range of the others and Liz melted into the shadows..
Brian attempted to flee the scene….
The former Avenger was irrepressible, "Whoever sent you, is going to be sorely disappointed… the only one –hunnnrrr- going home headless is you, robot!"
The Black Knight used the leverage of being so low to the ground to his advantage, throwing two of his assailants into another and swiftly turning to parry the energy-mace of a third as Meggan play catch-me-if-you-can with two of the fliers, shifting her form to
augment her strength and invulnerability by adding raw muscle mass….
Widget's observations weren't lost on the warrior-telepath, Your birth-world lays dying, Daughter of Braddock. Soon the entire universe shall be remade as it should be….
Liz dodged the blows of one of the more massive constructs with supernatural ease, using her martial arts prowess, blended with her shadow-melting powers to confound Widget and her fellow cyborgs' ability to track her as she suddenly dropped out of what remained of the ceiling's darkened surface, a blade of solid shadows aimed point downward….
"Get your facts straight, I was born here, in England," she snapped, "and you're talking to a former "superhero"!! I hear such idle boasts from bloody idiots far more threatening than the likes of you lot on a regular basis… And I am not impressed, cyborg!"
Her shadowy blade impaled the cybernetic being's CPU shell, housed within Widget's head, disrupting the energies with the alien magic of the Crimson Dawn….
The ensuing explosion threw her back onto the rubble, but Liz relaxed, allowing her armor to absorb the brunt of the impact as dissonant voices emerged from its speakers,
You struggle in vain, Daughter of Braddock! You are the past. We are the future… The future…is NOW!]
The static coils emerging from the disrupted Widget crackled over the remainder of the cyborgs as they winked out of existence, leaving the smell of ozone and electrical fires in their wake….
Darkmoor Research Labs.
It's a place that holds mixed memories for Brian Braddock … it was here that he first worked after graduating with his Master's in Physics and Engineering, and where he'd
studied and polished his thesis for his doctorate.
It was also the last place he'd been on that fateful night that had lead to his taking up the mantle of Captain Britain of Earth 616…
But now, he and his wife, the fey changeling, Meggan, worked here, testing the limits of
not only her own powers, but of his own theories about the physics of alternate dimensions…such as Otherworld.
An unearthly emerald glow was visible through the plasteel dome that house an energy emitter… Meggan's voice rang over the headsets of the scientists as she monitored the
array with her mystical and enhanced senses, "All right, gentlebeings, let's take it from
the top…."
"Thermodynamic levels increasing exponentially…" one of the scientists called out, taking a reading from her console, and another seconded her announcement, "Ambient
waveforms are fluctuating rapidly…"
Meggan looked at the swirling mass of verdant energies with all the senses she had at
her disposal, including her empathic ability to "feel" things beyond emotions.. she hovered above everyone's heads, watching in wonder, "Projecting critical paranormal
mass in T-minus 10…..9….8….7….."
Brian Braddock manned the controls of the emitter array, his eyes protected by goggles,
and his headset tuned to share communications with the rest of the crew…
"Steady there, ol' boy… steady!!" he called out as Meggan's voice continued to call out
the count down, "7….6….5….4….3….2…..1…."
"Righto!" Brian hollered, with a note of triumph in his voice, "That's it…. Riiiiight…."
"Deactivate!" he ordered as the matrix energies disappated, to reveal the armoured
form of Dane Whitman, the Black Knight, one of his oldest and best friends.
The master swordsman was also a fellow researcher, though his expertise lay in biology and genetics, and he was also a reserve member of the Avengers, with as long and august a history of heroism as Brian's had been.
He was now able to see the forms of a group of the thinktank's best and brightest as they scurried around, gathering data, and monitoring the computers…
"Deactivating spectranalisys now…." one of them echoed Brian's order, as the computer's placid tone interrupted, Results tabulating….prediction imminent.
"Admit it, man—" he taunted his friend good naturedly, "…you rather fancy yourself the mad scientist these days, don't you, Braddock?"
Dane stepped out of the residual matrix-glow and down from the platform, his strange
black two-handed bastard sword none the worse for wear, though he appeared a bit winded from the efforts as Meggan steadied his descent from the platform.
Brian chuckled, removing his goggles, "There is something appealing about torturing one's friends in the name of science, I must confess… You especially, Whitman. Nice to see the Black Knight is as much of a pantywaist as ever…. It's a wonder the Avengers ever let you into their ranks!"
"Keep talking that trash, Braddock, and—ex-partner or not—you'll be eating those words with a side of chips, once the effects of all your bloody experiments have worn off…" the descendant of the Black Knight of Arthurian legend shot back, his own formidable constitution affording him a speedy recovery as he allowed Brian to run a tricorder along
the blade's edge, "Now, why exactly did you drag me all the way across the Pond? Certainly not just to test the mystical properties of the Ebony Blades…"
Brian feigned a hurt look, "What? Can't I catch up with an old friend I've not seen in a bloody dog's age? I'm not a total recluse y'know!"
"Braddock, y'make Howard Hughes look like an extrovert!" Dane shot back as his chum completed his scan of the elegantly lethal blade, giving Brian an odd look.
The former Captain Britain swallowed hard, "Well, yes… it's all rather hard to explain..
without sounding like a raving lunatic!"
A strangely familiar voice rang over his shoulder as he donned a glove to test the heft of the ancient blade, "Like we Braddocks are any strangers t'lunacy…."
Brian wheeled around, thrusting the sword back into Whitman's hands as he saw the glowing sigil of the Crimson Dawn lurking in the shadows, followed by the armor-clad
form of his sister emerging from the liquid blackness, her dark violet hair and vaguely
Oriental features still unfamiliar to him as the mark on her face.
"Liz?" he stammered, more surprised by how she arrived than the fact that she had, "Crikey, sis, what are you doing here?"
Meggan smiled reassuringly at her sister-in-law, who had just arrived from the States,
she was relieved that the telepath was here…
The regal warrior regarded her brother suspiciously for a moment before moving to embrace him as he stood gaping at her, "You could sense my thoughts all the way across the Pond? I didn't realise your telepathy was so far reaching!"
"It wasn't… until I had an accident…" she told him as he finally hugged her back.
"But then…how did you--?" he sputtered, unsure of what to make of things as they
were, especially since the link they once shared had been severed back when she'd
been body swapped into the form of an Oriental assassin.
"Oh, y'know, that secret language of twins thing," she jested before she gestured over to Meggan, "Actually, a little faerie told me…"
Meggan cowered behind Liz's formidable form, her voice timid, and her features becoming more plain as she sought to divert another explosion of her husband's temper,
"I rang yesterday and told her about yer nightmares… I was so scared.. Please don't be cross with me?"
Dane laid a restraining hand on his old friend's shoulder as the former superhero wheeled around to glare at his empathic wife, "Meggan. Darling. I'm telling you… I'm fine!"
Liz met his glare with her own intimidating violet gaze, "No, you're not, Brian. Something is bothering you, I can sense it…"
"Not that secret twins rubbish…?" he muttered as he wanted to crawl away from his sister's powerful presence, though the shadowy warrior-telepath didn't let him off so easily, "Brian, luv, I know you better than anyone… "
He turned away from her, resting his weary weight on the railing of the Lab's balcony, his voice barely audible, "Aye, that you do, bets… that you do…"
He turned back to them, his face in a stubborn set, "Do we really have to talk about this?"
Liz nodded sternly, "Yes, we do."
Dane nodded, clapping him on the shoulder, "Whatever it is, you obviously need to get it off your chest, Braddock. Trust me, you'll feel a lot better once you do…"
Liz's penetrating gaze still bored into him as she reached into the shadows beside Meggan and withdrew a sword composed of pure darkness, as unreflective and light absorbing as the Black Knight's own mystical blade, "And you'll feel a lot worse if you force me to use this…. Just because I am not going mucking around in your head doesn't mean that this is any less effective!"
Brian grumbled as his sister called his bluff and forced him into a corner, "Well, when you put it that way…"
He gestured to his office in a corner of the labs, and the trio followed him in, taking up
various seats, with Meggan hovering in a corner. as her irascible husband leaned on his desk with a heavy sigh, "Ever wonder who you are? Wonder why you were brought into the world? Or what your true calling is? Or even what purpose you serve?"
He removed his glasses, revealing his bloodshot eyes as he turned to his wife, sister and best friend, "Those are precisely the questions I've been trying to answer since that fateful night when I first became Captain Britain…"
"It all started here, at Darkmoor, when I was just a Thames University grad student with more smarts than stones." he continued, the memories still haunting him, "We were attacked by Joshua Stragg, a psychotic called 'The Reaver', hellbent on stealing our top secret research for his own insidious affairs….it was mayhem, I panicked and fled… Dad's old Triumph motorbike was swift, but I wasn't half the rider he, Jamie or Liz were. The crash should have killed me, I wished it had…. I was lying near death, and thought I'd gone mad, that the spirits of the land, Merlyn and his daughter, Roma, who appeared to me were the tortured elusions of a dying mind, and not the truly the beings that they are…. If only…. They made me face destiny.—they made me become a hero. I fought alongside some of the worlds greatest heroes, and stared down death facing some of the most sinister villains…and all that time, running around with the fate of the world in my hands, I thought I could handle the responsibility…."
His bleak expression told them as much as his next word cost him, "I was wrong… My body was strong, nigh invulnerable, but my mind was weak, my spirit never as strong as
my father's…or my sister's. I became suicidal."
"Thanks to some much needed support and guidance from the Black Knight," he continued, "I was able to resume the mantle I'd been handed with some renewed sense of purpose and fresh perspective… And we fought the good fight for Otherworld and for the Isles. Through Merlyn's tutelage, I learned of my father's extra-dimensional, non-human, origins…and about the metaphysical connection to the land and the people of Otherworld—and for a time, I achieved a sense of spiritual peace that most beings never experience in their lifetimes… but it didn't last very long. My services were needed elsewhere, and I was given an new image, better suited to the challenges that lay ahead…and I gained an "invisible friend"..something most children abandon with childhood… Jackdaw guided me in saving another Britain, another world, from the madness of Sir James Jaspers and his vision of holocaust against any and all metahumans in the Isles."
"We failed and we died," Brian whispered, thinking of the techno-organic horror of the Fury, "But even in death, there was no escaping destiny…. Merlyn brought me back, once more, for there were greater evils to be fought, for in that interim, my own sister had taken up the mantle of Captain Britain…and I was jealous of her success…and it was I who should have faced the Slaymaster and the Vixen, not you, Liz…"
"I was busy facing Sat-yr-9 on another sidereal Earth, while you were fending off my psychotic doppleganger, Byron Bhra-dok, her lover…" he continued, thinking of all those things that had happened, from his misadventures with Gatecrasher and the Technet, to his sticky cooperation with Inspector Dai Thomas of Scotland Yard, to the Warpies and the Weird Happenings Organisation's involvement with Excalibur… friends long dead but
not forgotten… "There were lives to change, alliances to forge, and traditions to uphold… For the first time in my life, everything seemed to be going according to what ever bizarre design fate had mapped out for me… I lost my sister, not once in Dallas, but twice, if you count the Seige Perilous…"
"Excalibur danced through time, and I saw other lives, that might have been mine… happiness still eluded me," Brian continued, "until a confounding jaunt into an alternate future awakened me to yet another alternate reality beyond any one man's hope of salvation…"
"If not for Rachel Grey, the Phoenix," he said trying to steady his voice, "who plucked me from the timestream, exchanging her existence for mine, I would have been trapped there forever…"
"I adopted the name "Britanic" and renewed my persuits of science and engineering, hoping to find some focus, and rebuild my life here, on Earth 616… but then Liz's accident brought me to the attention of the Dragons of the Crimson Dawn, proving that my attempts to define myself as I saw fit were but a temporary respite from the chaos…"
"To save the world from their ancient evil, and to save my sister from Kuragari, Captain Britain had to die once more.. leaving only the man, Brian Braddock, to try to pick up the pieces and carry on," he said quietly, "And I thought that marriage to Meggan would be the best thing that ever happened to me… I was wrong about that too…"
Meggan sniffled in the corner, knowing she was hearing the truth…while Liz was not so devastated, she knew that Brian's life as a hero had taken its toll on his sanity, which even he was beginning to question….
"So… here I am, right back at the beginning, doing what I've always loved most….my research," he admitted, "Still, I've this nagging suspicion that It's all about to start again.
Like at any given moment, when I least want or expect it, that other shoe's going to come crashing…."
"….down?" he finished as the sound of braking glass and explosions interrupted his soliloquy as the door was blown off its hinges before anyone could seek cover… Meggan, Liz and Dane were all attired in armor, and unhurt by the shrapnel, but Brian wasn't, he was "merely human" and without his former invulnerability to protect him, it was his nearly-estranged wife who shifted her form and mass to act as a shield for his more frail form…
When the dust cleared, they saw the battered form of Linda McQuillan, Captain UK, lying beneath the rubble, a group of cyberneticly enhnased individuals landing in the ruins of Darkmoor Labs.
A harsh mechanical voice rang out, Captain UK of Earth 839. Status: Terminated.
The form of Widget materialized overhead, static electricity arcing around her, Captain Britain of Earth 616. Designate: Terminal Status: Immediate.
Dane's eyes narrowed underneath his helmet, as he drew the Ebony Blade and summoned his shield, "Not if I have anything to say about it! For Avalon!"
His blade swung through the partially immaterial form that hung below the metallic unit, causing some sort of disruption, though the cyborg shimmered and drew in current from the damaged structure to stabilize itself…
We come for Braddock. We will not be denied. Widget repeated as the group of cyborgs began to mobalise against the quartet, one knocking Whitman from his feet
as Meggan flew out of range of the others and Liz melted into the shadows..
Brian attempted to flee the scene….
The former Avenger was irrepressible, "Whoever sent you, is going to be sorely disappointed… the only one –hunnnrrr- going home headless is you, robot!"
The Black Knight used the leverage of being so low to the ground to his advantage, throwing two of his assailants into another and swiftly turning to parry the energy-mace of a third as Meggan play catch-me-if-you-can with two of the fliers, shifting her form to
augment her strength and invulnerability by adding raw muscle mass….
Widget's observations weren't lost on the warrior-telepath, Your birth-world lays dying, Daughter of Braddock. Soon the entire universe shall be remade as it should be….
Liz dodged the blows of one of the more massive constructs with supernatural ease, using her martial arts prowess, blended with her shadow-melting powers to confound Widget and her fellow cyborgs' ability to track her as she suddenly dropped out of what remained of the ceiling's darkened surface, a blade of solid shadows aimed point downward….
"Get your facts straight, I was born here, in England," she snapped, "and you're talking to a former "superhero"!! I hear such idle boasts from bloody idiots far more threatening than the likes of you lot on a regular basis… And I am not impressed, cyborg!"
Her shadowy blade impaled the cybernetic being's CPU shell, housed within Widget's head, disrupting the energies with the alien magic of the Crimson Dawn….
The ensuing explosion threw her back onto the rubble, but Liz relaxed, allowing her armor to absorb the brunt of the impact as dissonant voices emerged from its speakers,
You struggle in vain, Daughter of Braddock! You are the past. We are the future… The future…is NOW!]
The static coils emerging from the disrupted Widget crackled over the remainder of the cyborgs as they winked out of existence, leaving the smell of ozone and electrical fires in their wake….