I did not make any sudden movements, nothing that would call attention to myself, as the impostor Doom and his teammates met Magneto and with an obviously insincere and cheerful welcome. "Come—let us show you what I have done for you!" said the pretender, and led them away. I did catch a glimpse of Magneto's face as they went past. He looked---as if he had guessed an ambush was waiting for him. And as if he were prepared for it.
One of Magneto's people stayed behind—Polaris, his green-haired adopted daughter, who possessed magnetic powers like his own. Oh, that was an error on the part of the false Doom. How could anyone with even half a brain not see that even if the plan involving that other dimension forever succeeded, Polaris would rescue them? So stupid. But no, villains never see the flaw in their plans. It's all part of the Laws of Heroics.
I looked down at the page I was working on, where I had written, 'So his brothers-in-law gathered together the pieces of Ivan's body, washed them, put them back together in their proper order, sprinkled it with the Water of Death—and the pieces joined up together again. Then they sprinkled him with the Water of Life—and he sprang up from the ground, as lively and healthy as ever.'
People came back to life all the time—that is, the heroes and villains did. When the terrorists flew their planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11, none of the people killed that day came back to life. Not one of them. Some people were subject to the laws of the real world. Some were governed by the Laws of Heroics. I wanted the same natural laws to apply to everyone.
What if I were to kill Magneto? Just to kill him, without asking questions? It might bring this 'end of the world as we know it' to an end. It wasn't as if he'd be dead permanently. Sooner or later, he would come back.
It sounded like a pretty good idea to me. It might hurt for a moment, but he'd get over it.
I unclipped the page from the desk, and tore it in half, then in half again. Then I got out a fresh sheet, and wrote the story the way I thought it should have gone. 'Once Koshchei was free, he seized Ivan and flew off with him. Then he went to Marya Morevna, and said "I have taken your husband prisoner, and until you surrender to me all your lands and fortune, he shall cut the wood for my fires, and draw water from my well, and all other tasks I shall put him to as well, until his hands and his feet blister from his exertions, and the blisters break and bleed, and he curses the day he ever heard your name."
"Oh, no!" cried Marya Morevna.'
Then I went on with the story. She was going to rescue Ivan, and kill Koschei forever…
The Fearsome Four returned, in higher spirits than before. "Deal with the Lady Polaris, Valeria. The It shall destroy the dimensional portal before it goes back to its cage—and then, Kristoff, I want you to incinerate every fragment of the mess. I'm going off to draft a speech about the…accident which so tragically took the lives of the House of M…" the impostor tossed over his shoulder as he passed through the Great Hall.
"No." said Ben Grimm.
"No!" asked the pretender.
"No more cages. No more filth. I'm part of this team. I want—respect."
"Respect?" The impostor Doom was outraged. "You're a monstrosity. We already give you far more respect than you deserve. What I ought to do is thrash you within an inch of your miserable, worthless life."
The It stood silent, immovable.
The impostor backed down. "Fine. But for your sake, you'd better be housebroken." He left in one direction, while Ben Grimm shambled off in the other.
That left Valeria and Kristoff, mother and son.
"Hey, Mom, can I help you with Polaris?" Kristoff asked.
"Of course, my sweet prince." She crooned to him. "Although I know who I wish we were about to dispose of…" I could feel them both looking pointedly at me. I kept writing, in blithe unconcern. Things were about to come to a head. I could feel it.
"The Lady Polaris's green hair is really pretty." Kristoff said. "I can't wait to watch it burn!"
The two of them went off in search of Polaris.
Funny, I didn't hear the sort of sound I would have expected—the sound of Ben Grimm smashing up a dimensional portal. It should have been very, very loud indeed.
That meant he wasn't doing it.
That meant the dimensional portal was still intact.
I put my finished pages away in a folder, so they wouldn't be ruined. It was only a matter of time now—.
I watched the It lead Polaris back to the chamber where the equipment that opened the dimensional portal was kept. Shortly thereafter, the House of M emerged. They didn't look happy…
The Great Hall of Castle Doom erupted into violence as Magneto and his Enforcers retaliated against Doom's failed attempt to lure them into another dimension and slaughter them there, where the laws of physics were different and Magneto's powers would not work. The castle's security forces streamed in from all directions to join the affray, but they were ineffectual against the powers of the mutants, being all too human.
The only forces on Doom's side who were at all effective were the Invincible Woman and the Inhuman Torch, and they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Magneto and Doom were locked in combat in the middle of the battle, and it was not going well for the ruler of Latveria—not well at all.
Not that I particularly cared if the impostor was killed or not—my moment of sympathy for him was long past. I had another goal now—to kill Magneto, and hopefully turn the world back to normal
I had to do something to distract Magneto. I seized an inkwell off my desk, and visually tracked the blur and the falling bodies that showed where Quicksilver, Magneto's super-fast son had just been. If I aimed for him and let fly a hundred thousand times, I could never hope to hit him, not at the speeds of which he was capable.
So instead I deliberately threw the inkwell in a direction where he wasn't. I hit him square on the chin—or rather, he ran right into my missile.
The Heroic Law of Odds: Million to one chances always succeed.
I admit I first encountered that law in the works of Terry Pratchett, but careful observation had proved it to be true.
The 'thwack' that was barely audible above the din when the inkpot hit was as nothing to the sound of Quicksilver's skull hitting the stone floor with a dull 'thunk'. At the speed he was going before I intervened, his head shattered like a watermelon falling off a speeding truck.
"Pietro!" howled Magneto, breaking off his fight with Doom to rush to his son's side. He was not the mutant leader now; he was a father. I didn't waste a moment. I took up my pen, stopped him by the ludicrously easy tactic of stepping on his cape.
As he turned toward me to remonstrate, I grabbed a handful of his silver hair in one hand, and brought my other hand around in an arc that ended when my pen pierced his eye. His electromagnetic powers washed over me, to no avail. I wore nothing metal, and my pen was made in Venice. It was completely impervious to his powers. It was a slender shaft of tinted and shaped glass—that came to a wicked point.
He shrieked in pain, and vitreous humor spurted out over my hand, but I drove the pen in deeper still, until it dug into the brain, and then I dragged it from one end of the eye socket to the other, until I felt the fragile glass snap and splinter.
Magneto gurgled, twitched, and died, sagging suddenly to the flagstones.
All around me, the battle had ground to a sudden, shocked halt. "You—you killed him," someone said, in disbelief.
"I killed them both." I said, wearily. The blue-black ink stains on my hand and on Pietro's face bore witness to my other deed.
Doom pushed his way through the crowd, looked at the corpses, at the stump of pen which I still held in my hand, fragments of brain tissue adhering to it.
"You," he breathed, in awe and triumph. The breathtakingly handsome face, the perfect, unscarred face of Victor Von Doom turned toward me. "This is your doing. For your services and loyalty, I here create you the Duchess of Brantzia and Keeper of the Citadel."
"Brantzia is mine!" protested his wife, Valeria, the Invincible Woman, who had fought her way through the press to his side. "And the Citadel is mine!" insisted their adopted son, Kristoff, the Inhuman Torch.
"Bah! They were yours." growled their leader. "I bestowed them and can reclaim them as I choose. Take care that is not all that you lose." he said, glaring at them. "And as for that traitor!" he spat, looking at the rock-like, orange skinned It that crouched in the corner, "I shall have it crushed into a million fragments and used to make ornamental garden paths."
"Now!" he raised his voice, speaking to everyone, Latverians and mutants both. "The House of Magneto is overthrown. Your leader and his heir lie broken and bleeding on my floor. The House of Doom rules over all!"
He turned back to me. "Whatever it is you want, you have but to name it, and it is yours." He took my hand, and looked searchingly into my eyes. Yep, I had him hooked. He was prepared to divorce Valeria and disown Kristoff on the spot.
"I thank you for the offer, but there is nothing you can grant or give me that I want." I said, fighting the impulse to free my hand.
"Are you so sure?" he asked, in a velvety undertone.
"There is something that I want," came another voice, from the head of the stairs. "And that is that you should let go of my wife's hand." All heads turned to look at the imposing masked figure that stood there, his cloak falling about him like two great wings.
Victor came down the Great Stair, as only he could. "You!" fulminated the Doom who stood before me. "Who are you to appear in my armor, in my castle? Why do you not show your face, you craven?"
"Who are you, who calls himself Victor Von Doom?" retorted my Victor. He had the air of authority that the other Doom lacked, the aura of command. He swept across the room toward us. "For I tell you now that I and I alone am Doom, and you, who bowed your neck under the yoke of this offal," the toe of his boot prodded Magneto, "are nothing but the palest shade of what I am. How many years did you seek to free yourself, you and yours? And in the little time which my wife has spent here among you she vanquished them with less effort than it would take her to swat a fly."
My Victor turned to me. "Come. Swiftly. Put your arms around my neck." I did so. He slid an arm around me, boosted me up so I was half sitting on it, then raised his other hand and vaporized a large hole in the roof. The suit's propulsion field engaged, and we shot up into the sky, leaving a very startled Great Hall full of people below us.
"My dear, I have the answer." He said, shielding me from the wind with his cloak. "The one behind this is Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch."
"Magneto's daughter and Quicksilver's twin," I said, identifying her immediately. "She made her father the ruler of the world, using her powers."
"Yes." He confirmed it, nodding. "She may again. It is not beyond her powers to resurrect them even now. She is attempting to create her own private world where she and everyone she loves have what they always wanted. Unfortunately, she has imposed it upon our own."
"There is a problem with that." I said, as I wiped my hands on my smock. "A lot of the people she didn't love are dead. Given that she was for many years an Avenger and Janet's friend, she must be—quite literally—insane."
"She is." was his reply. "Nor does she want to be helped, because if she returns to sanity, her two sons will cease to exist."
We were on a really tough deadline to get things back to normal, too. Our wedding was supposed to be tomorrow.
"Cease to exist?" I asked, as he adjusted the direction in which we flew. "How can that be?"
"They are not precisely real." Victor said. "Have you ever heard of the Vision?"
"Costumed adventurer, crimson skin, wears a green and yellow costume, and is an android." I identified him.
"Precisely. He was Wanda Maximoff's husband. Being an android—fully functional or not, I do not know—he was not capable of siring children. Childless and unhappy, the Scarlet Witch participated in a magical rite which summoned to her empty womb two amorphous fragments of that same substance of which Mephisto, Hell, and all its demons are made. There they took root, and grew. The intensity of her desire and belief imprinted upon them the form they had when they were born—twin boys."
"Did she know they were really demonic ectoplasm?"
"No. She thought they were hers—hers and her husband's."
"What kind of a woman marries an android and then believes she can have children—even with the help of magic? Don't answer, that's rhetorical. Where are we going, by the way?"
"To the Citadel. Time is of the essence, and I cannot carry you like this all the way to Genosha, where the Scarlet Witch is now. You would freeze if I were to go any faster."
"What of the impostors?"
"We shall deal with them there. At the moment, you are rather vulnerable."
"All right." I agreed. "What brought Wanda to this state, anyway? What melted down in her life?"
"The Vision belonged to the United States' federal government. They—ah—repossessed him, on the grounds that he was a security risk. Then someone realized the twins sometimes ceased to exist when she was not thinking about them. They were extremely handsome children—however, they were not normal. They never got dirty—never squabbled—never tore their clothes or cried. No children are as abnormally well-behaved as those two were."
"Like a pair of dolls, that she could cuddle and dress up and play with, but which she could put back in their box and not worry about when she wanted to do something else…" I said, thinking about it.
"A very apt comparison. Here we are…" He landed us on the roof of the Citadel. "I believe we have about fifteen minutes before the impostor should catch up with us. Come."
We went down the stairs. "When did Wanda find out about her sons' true nature--or did she?"
"A year ago or so. She was devastated—she went quite mad for a time. Finally, in a misguided effort to be compassionate, Dame Agatha, her mentor in witchcraft, and Franklin Richards's nanny, took away the memory of her children entirely."
"That was a terrible idea. That sort of fix never works—and it isn't as if Wanda was the only person who has ever lost people she loved—even if they were only figments of her imagination in the first place. It's part of being human. You deal with your loss—you grieve, you move on, you grow."
"I agree with you. Agatha's poor decision led to the murder, by Wanda Maximoff, of several of the Avengers, about six months ago—when they observed she was descending once more into madness. Since then, she has been kept drugged—and in the care of Professor Xavier."
"Another error. Where did Wanda get the power to do all of this, anyway?" I asked. "I thought her power was to cast hexes and make things go wrong—little pockets of localized bad luck. Sort of a human personification of Murphy's Law."
"It was, but she found that she could affect probability on a larger scale than that. This way." We went in through a double door into a high-security area, where I had never been before.
"I do mean to fly us to Genosha in a vehicle, but you will require greater protections than that." He opened a vault as I watched. Inside—were several spare suits of his armor.
"You don't mean…?"
"Yes." he said, in all seriousness. "You are going to wear one of my suits. Start changing into this—." He handed me a set of—silk long johns? "You will need to use the bathroom first. I'm afraid the—arrangements in the suit are not unisex."
A/N: Next Chapter--what you have been waiting for: Doom vs DOOM!