"Where is your granddaughter now?" I asked Boris, hoping the answer would be something like, 'She and her husband and children are living in Minsk (or New Zealand, or Ohio). Let me show you some pictures of my great-grandsons.' but Boris looked out over his pastures, and said:

"I don't know just where she is, right now. It must be five years since I saw her last. She still leads the traveler's life…I get word of her, now and then. She swears she'll never set foot on Latverian soil again. That was the hardest part of all. I had to choose between them, and I chose him. She was my flesh and blood—but I knew she'd be all right, among our people. He needed me more."

"So he never came around, regarding her?" If Boris regretted that Victor had not married Valeria, he certainly wasn't showing it.

"But he did. She wouldn't have him. I don't know what all went on, but that Diablo character, the one with the long droopy mustaches that claims he's a thousand years old, he kidnapped her, and told him he was holding her against his doing just what Diablo wanted. He rescued her—got rid of that Diablo—and then—But she wouldn't have him. I don't know why. She told me afterward that she loved Victor, and wanted to marry Victor, but Victor was as gone as if he were dead and buried. All that was left was someone who called himself Doom."

"That's just not true!" I said. From what I had heard of her, Valeria was selfish, shortsighted, and really unperceptive. "Was that before or after…?"

"He started wearing the mask? It was after. I hope with all my heart it wasn't the mask that put her off—because I would be ashamed that my granddaughter turned out to be as shallow as that." Boris shook his head.

I was wondering if this might somehow tie into Reed Richards and why no woman should marry Victor. "Well. You were saying that he went to America."

"So I was." Boris began.

At that moment, a blinding flash of white light seared my eyes. Afterimages danced in my vision as I blinked and rubbed, and when they cleared enough for me to see again, I said, "That was odd. I wonder what that was. Boris?" I looked over at the place where I had last seen him.

He wasn't there.

The horses weren't there. The horse farm wasn't there. All of them—man, horses, farm—all of them were missing. Not in an 'abducted by aliens' missing, nor even in a 'big smoking hole in the ground' missing—but as if they were never there. I was looking at a barley field.

It was undeniably the same piece of property—all the other landmarks were unchanged—the way the hill sloped, the tall trees, the mountains—it was only the man-made features that were different.

Something very strange was going on. The light in the sky had changed—the sun had been on my right, heading toward the west—but now it was on my left. It was morning again. I looked around, cupped my hands, and called out, "Boris?"

There was no reply.

At that point, seeing how different everything was, I wasn't really expecting one. I turned and headed back over the hill, to the road, where the car and driver should have been waiting. The road was there. The man and the vehicle weren't.

I was stranded, possibly in more ways than one. Was this another dimension? A time-jump? An alternate universe? I didn't know.

I had several options open to me, though, but before I decided which one to choose, I wanted to find out what was going on, so rather than return to the castle and find that Haasen was still king, or that some other unpleasant shock was waiting for me, I decided to retreat to a place I knew of, a place that was usually devoid of living inhabitants, yet from where I could reconnoiter—the Citadel of Doom.

Castle Doom wasn't just a residence—it was the center of government, a scientific research facility, a museum, and an art gallery. It teemed with people both day and night.

The Citadel of Doom was where Victor went when he wanted to be entirely alone—and it was where secrets were kept. If the United States decided to search for weapons of mass destruction in Latveria, they wouldn't find any, but not because there aren't any here… It was where he had brought me when I first came to Latveria three years ago, before my name was Joviana. I remembered it well.

It was once the stronghold of the Draasens, cousins to the Haasens. Smaller than Castle Doom, it was also less accessible, built as it was on top of and partly in a cliff above the river Klyne. I knew where the river was—we had followed it to get to Boris's horse farm. The Citadel was about twenty kilometers from the castle, but we had driven at least eighteen kilometers, so the Citadel could not be far away.

I set out, found the river, and traced my way up stream. After a while, I took off my sandals and walked in the shallows. In summer, the snowmelt water wasn't numbingly cold—just pleasantly so. Whatever had happened in that flash of light, everything around me seemed fairly normal. It was hard to get too anxious about it—that could wait until I found out just what was going on, and in the meantime, it was a lovely morning.

It was not more than half an hour before I saw the boiling mist from the waterfall, and raised my head to squint at the Citadel above, part and parcel of the cliff. The pale rocks had pockets of earth in little crevices here and there, where greenery and small trees had taken root and flourished where no one would suppose they could take hold.

The Citadel was on the other side of the river, but I could cross it easily enough by stepping from rock to rock. There were steps carved into the cliff that led right up to the small castle, but I knew better than to just climb them without thinking twice about it. There were five different death traps on the way up.

The first was easy to avoid— putting any weight on the metal handrail would complete an electrical circuit with a deadly amount of current running through it. I supported myself against the rock when I had to.

The second was a matter of remembering where not to step. Some of the stones had explosive charges underneath them.

The third was a passage where lasers fired at random. I called it the hopscotch stretch, as one had to hop over the sensors' fields to keep from getting hit. This trap, however, was not operating at all, because something had melted the walls and floor, making it run like lava. I carefully picked my way over the uneven surface, and went on.

The fourth, which was a nerve-impulse scrambler, was not immediately fatal—just incredibly painful. If someone persisted in remaining in its field, their heart would cease to beat once the nerve impulses were sufficiently disrupted. However, there was an off switch for this one—all I had to do was pass a retinal scan. The problem was that I might not be cleared in this other world.

I remembered the Heroic Law of Devices: any technological device, however sophisticated, can be circumvented by a Hero using a commonly available object—even a chewing gum wrapper— and, picking up a eye-shaped bit of quartz, I allowed the scanner to read that instead. (The converse Law of Devices is this: any device the hero comes up with in the nick of time—even if it has to be held together with baling wire and spit—will not only work, but outdo anything the opposition has on its side)

It blinked as its beam bounced around inside, rebounding from the flaws and fractures—and then decided I was Victor, and disengaged the field. The screen said he had been the last visitor—evidently I had got it to remember his scan. I kept climbing the stairs. If Victor had appeared out of nowhere at that point, and asked me again if I thought he was paranoid, my answer would have been a resounding 'Yes, you bloody well are!'

The last obstacle should have been a Doombot…

The Doombots were a defense that has been phased out for the most part. A few years ago, Victor got the idea to make robot duplicates of himself in armor, ones which were sophisticated enough to take his place and go undetected. They were even programmed to believe that they were him—except when they were in his presence or the presence of other Doombots.
The flaw was that when a Doombot had been autonomous for too long, they kept on believing they were Victor when they shouldn't have. Plus, their judgment was never as good as his. He programmed them to act like the person he thinks he is, rather than the person he actually is. I was never fooled by one of them for long, not even from the start. They couldn't remember past conversations which they had never had, so they simply commanded silence when someone tried to talk to them.

Victor had stopped making them, and now only a handful were left. One was supposed to be on guard at the Citadel's door.

Instead there was a Thingbot, a robotic copy of Ben Grimm, which made no sense, because Victor hated Ben almost as much as he hated Reed.

Since this was a Thingbot, it would believe it was Ben, and it would act like Ben until I tried to enter the Citadel. Then it would attack me. I paused, and said gently, "Hello, Ben. What are you doing here?"

"Guarding the door."

"Who are you guarding it for?" I asked.

"The Master."

"What's his name?" I pressed.

"Doctor Doom."

That was enough for me. Like the robot in The Day The Earth Stood Still, all of Victor's robots had a code phrase that would reset their programming. In his case, the 'Klaatu Barada Nikto' was always 'Ave Doom, Rex Mundi'— the Latin for 'Hail Doom, King of the World.' I had been privy to that bit of information since I had to decapitate a Doombot with an axe one dark night. Victor said it would be easier on both his hardware and on me.

I said the words, and watched the glow in the eyes of the Thingbot suddenly die. I entered the portal of the Citadel without further delay.