Several hours later, I was doing something extremely familiar. I was waiting for Doctor Doom to grant me an audience.

It was possible that on seeing me, Victor would cry out, "Joviana—" and prove that he, too, remembered the world as it had been a few scant hours before, but I sincerely doubted it. The things I had learned in the Citadel were appalling.

Once inside the Citadel, I was fine, at least as long as I stayed out of the more sensitive areas, such as the weapons storage and the robotics labs. There was no one at all on the premises—only a few maintenance droids. There were signs of fairly recent occupation by someone who was very untidy in their personal living space, and who also liked to play with a flamethrower.

I had found a desktop and turned it on. Of course it required a password, but I knew that Victor tended to base his around a complicated equation involving either 'Cynthia' or 'Werner' at its base. From there I had to plug in variables based on the day, month, year, and phase of the moon—which was how I discovered that instead of going back in time some six hours to make it morning again, it was eighteen hours later.

On Latveria-net, I learned that the ruling royal family, the House of Doom, consisted of Victor Von Doom, his lovely wife of eighteen years, Valeria, their adopted son Kristoff, fourteen years old—and Victor's aged mother, Cynthia. There were several photographs of the family posted on the site, showing the women in formal gowns sparkling with jewels, and the men in formal uniforms with medals and orders on their chests.

Victor's face had no scar or flaw on it, but at almost thirty-eight, permanent character lines were beginning to show, and I did not like what they said of him. Yes, I would have expected scowl marks around his mouth, and a brow that was becoming furrowed by thought. I would have expected a haughty, proud look, and all these things were there.

The problem was that he looked petulant—even a touch fatuous.

If those traits showed faintly on the man, they were embodied in the son, Kristoff. I knew who Kristoff was in the world as it had been—when but a child, his mother had been killed, shortly after Victor had sworn he would protect her. Unable to keep his promise to the mother, he had assumed responsibility for the boy, who had no other relatives.

That, however, had been some years ago, before I ever set foot in Latveria, and I had no idea where Kristoff might be now in the world as I knew it. Kristoff had dropped out of sight, and was never mentioned.

Valeria Von Doom was a beauty. She had that true, blue-black hair that comes from the Rom heritage, for the Rom as a people originated in India, and spread out over Europe. They were the first people of color to set foot in most of it. Inevitably there was interbreeding, which is how there came to be Irish Rom with skin as pale as milk and strawberry blonde hair, but Valeria was clearly of purer Rom heritage than they were—and purer than Victor was. It was hard to tell much about her from the pictures, as she had enhanced her beauty to the point where emotion and character vanished in a sea of Botox. She too, was nearly thirty-eight.

I was not jealous of her. If Victor—the Victor that I knew—had truly wanted to marry her, if he had courted her as he treated me—they would have married. Victor knew how to make himself irresistible when he wanted. It followed that he had not really wanted.

It was Cynthia, after Victor, whose face intrigued me the most. I could not look on that time-worn face and not wonder if this Cynthia had not also sold her soul…

There was more on Latveria-net. The royal family was also a team of superheroes, for, using his knowledge of elemental magics, Doom (I made that distinction between him and Victor, my Victor) had given himself, his wife, and their adopted son powers.

Doctor Doom could make his body into any shape, and stretch any limb out to amazing lengths.

Valeria had telekinetic powers, and could summon and manipulate invisible force fields. She was called 'The Invincible Woman'.

Kristoff had gained the ability to burst into ever-regenerating flame, and could fly. He was called 'The Inhuman Torch'.

The fourth member of their team was called 'The It', and 'It' was Ben Grimm.

They called themselves the 'Fearsome Four.'

I knew that there was, or had been, a team called 'The Frightful Four', that sprung up in response to the Fantastic Four, but Victor had never been a part of it, and this group didn't seem to be a challenger of the group Richards put together—it seemed to be there instead of them.

At that point, I had to escape the controls and restrictions of Latveria-net, over which Victor has the same authority as a responsible parent on a home computer. Latverian users can access the rest of the web, but not unrestrictedly. The only person who has full freedom of speech is Victor. I did what I had to, and started to read up on the rest of the world.

It was worse. Most of the human population of the world was dead.

Mutants were the majority group.

The House of M—which was to say, Magneto—ruled the world.

The few million humans who were left were, for the most part, scattered all over the world, and they were tolerated because somebody had to grow the food and scrub the toilets. One exception to this oppression was Latveria, which maintained a largely human population, to the point where any mutant infants born within its borders were placed for adoption in other countries. I did not like the sound of that. It struck me as being rather hard on the parents of those babies, who might want them, mutant or not.

Latveria also offered asylum to any human who was facing persecution on genetic grounds, providing the asylum seeker was of good moral character. It was that which gave me the idea…

In the Citadel were my old identification papers, left from before I became Joviana. I retrieved them from where they were hidden—and finding them convinced me that this was indeed the world I knew. This was one of those 'end of the world as we know it' scenarios of which Magneto had spoken, the sort which were caused by somebody's powers and would go away after a while. The world would get back to normal. I just wanted it to be sooner rather than later.

What I wanted in the long term was for things like that never to happen again. It's ridiculous that somebody should be able to disrupt everything without warning and for the flimsiest reasons. I was still working on how to stop such nonsense, and I might have to keep on working for a long time to come.

With my identification in my pocket, I then left Latveria via a system of subterranean passageways, in a vehicle I borrowed from the Citadel, and then returned by way of Symarkia. When I reached the border check point, I told the guards I wanted to apply for citizenship in Latveria based on my one-quarter Latverian heritage (my late grandmother) and on my need for genetic asylum.

The guards seemed used to having refugees show up with nothing but the clothes on their backs, so I began the paperwork with little delay. I could not help but contrast it to how, in my own Latveria, the Serbian refugees had been treated—with them, it had been a matter of 'get them here and taken care of first, sort out the details later.'

I explained my reasons for needing genetic asylum—I had a gene complex for intelligence that was so unusual and my intelligence so high that I challenged, perhaps even contradicted, the theory of mutant superiority. I added that I had thrown a lye-based drain cleaner in the face of Sabertooth—not that I identified him by name, just that he was one of Magneto's people, and I capped off my plea with the statement, 'I might be pregnant.'

It wasn't precisely a lie, because although I was taking oral contraceptives, there is no absolutely failure-free method of birth control. A girl I went to high school with wound up pregnant because she didn't know taking antibiotics for her staph infection could interfere with the birth control pill.

Then it hit me. I hadn't taken a birth control pill in several days. Not, in fact, since the morning before all of this had begun—the morning of the day when Victor had come across me reading in the library, and invited me upstairs.

I ran over it in my mind just to be sure. The morning after I woke up in my new suite, none of my things were there yet, and with all the excitement—the announcement of the wedding, the Fantastic Four arriving, going to Bisitra's with my mother and Sue, the romantic dinner on the terrace, the...lesson in topography and the discovery that Victor was ticklish—no, no pill that day. One pill missed.

The next morning, I woke up alone, and was unhappy about it. I had not taken one then. I might have remembered later, but then Malice had taken me over. I spent the rest of the day on the island in the Bermuda triangle, and that night in New York. Two pills missed.

The third day was New York—interviews, shopping, lunch, Doctor Strange coming over for dinner, and a return visit to Hell. Three pills missed.

This was either day four, if I had jumped in time, or day five, if I had lived those eighteen hours and didn't recall them. I had missed either four or five pills, and the last one I took had been the first of a new pack. I had just finished the week off that allows for a 'period'. That meant that for the better part of two weeks, I had taken only one pill with hormones. At that point, the package insert, and any doctor, would advise that I throw away the rest of the pack and rely on another birth control method for the rest of the month.

I had missed pills before, but it hadn't mattered, because I only took them to help with my periods, which tended to be painful. It had never been important before.

I didn't know how soon I might ovulate, but I knew sperm could stay alive for days in that particular environment. I really might be pregnant soon. Active and lonely wigglers might even now be seeking out their target in my Fallopian tubes.

I wanted Victor. I wanted him with me, now, as he was before the world as we knew it came to an end, knowing who I was. I wanted to talk to him about that possibility, discuss the pros and cons of starting our family immediately.

I wanted him…

However, the man who entered Castle Doom, where I waited in the Great Hall, accompanied by his wife and his adopted son, wasn't him. He might be called Victor Von Doom—he might wear the cape and the colors—but he wasn't him.

TBC…