April 2029

Out in the distant blackness of space, 5.21 times farther away from the Sun than Earth is, a spaceship, dubbed the Fantastic, suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Up close, one could see that it was no ordinary spaceship - it was considered the least aerodynamic ship anybody had seen, it did not emit any visible exhaust, and it possessed immersion technology, which allowed it to hide from plain sight and allowed one to view its surroundings in real time.

Envisioned by an astrophysicist with dreams of exploring the universe and searching for alien life, the ship was built by him with the assistance of three friends. The first was his childhood friend, an aerospace engineer, pilot, and astronaut, the second his girlfriend, a doctor and archaeologist, and the third her teenage brother, a mechanic and aerospace engineer. Together, with the resources and funding of plenty backers, the astrophysicist and his friends built the first spaceship that could travel faster than the speed of light to go explore the universe and search for alien life, starting with the Jovian system.

These backers included NASA, the Baxter Foundation, the Breakthrough Initiative Breakthrough Warp, co-founded by the astrophysicist alongside Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and others upon hearing that FTL travel was possible, Charles Xavier, Emma Frost, the Life Foundation, Stark Industries, the UN organization SHIELD, and a newly funded organization called SWORD, founded by Maria Rambeau.

The ship made its way to the planet that could be found at this distance: Jupiter, king of the planets, displaying its vast atmosphere of multicolored clouds made of ice crystals, striped into cloud bands, the darker colored belts and the lighter colored zones, streams, ribbons, eddies, whirlpools, storms, and spots. It launched a probe dubbed a mapper probe that could take one hundred percent true-color images, would orbit the planet vertically, and map it in all of its entirety.

It made its way towards the Northern Equatorial Belt, its clouds in different hues, shades, and chromas of yellow, reddish yellow, orange, and scarlet, some lighter colored clouds here and there. They lay on top of the lighter colored Equatorial Zone, which lay over the Great Red Spot. The ship entered the atmosphere through the belt, near the intersection between it and the zone below, where they deployed a probe shaped like a polyhedron with equilateral triangles on all of its faces, which would absorb the turbulence around it to propel it, unraveling whatever secrets the planet's atmosphere still hid.

The ship flew through a layer of white clouds of ammonia crystals, and then a layer of clouds of various colors: yellows, oranges, reds, and browns, made of ammonium hydrosulfide, the colors the product of complex photochemistry. The ammonium hydrosulfide clouds were arranged in a vast, sprawling cloudscape, one the crew spent time marveling at. But its wonder would pale in comparison to what they would find next: alien life in the Jovian atmosphere, in four different species.

The first species were photosynthetic, microscopic organisms dubbed sinkers that drifted along atmospheric turbulence, making sure to reproduce before falling, their offspring riding along updrafts that took them to higher altitudes. The second species were giant, kilometer-wide, jellyfish-like creatures dubbed floaters that took in gases and pumped out helium and heavier gases from their interiors, leaving only hydrogen gas to keep them afloat, or kept their insides warm. They either ate molecules from the air or made their own with sunlight, and many of them were arrayed in vast, lazy herds. They reproduced by fragmenting into smaller organisms that would be carried up by updrafts. In spite of their sizes, they remained hidden from the eyes of space probes due to blending in with the ammonium hydrosulfide clouds and being obscured by the many clouds in the atmosphere.

The third species were fast, maneuverable creatures dubbed hunters. They possessed a pumpkin-like head that pecked on the floaters for their vast storage of organic molecules and pure hydrogen. Their bodies possessed four fins, two on top, and two on the bottom, as well as one tailfin. They reproduced by landing on top of each other and spinning around, and they would give birth to baby hunters that flew as soon as they were born. The fourth and final species were balloon-like creatures dubbed scavengers. They were similar to the floaters, but were found in the deeper and hotter layers of the atmosphere, where they fed on the disintegrating remains of the creatures higher up, which disintegrated through heat as they plummeted into the hot depths of the interior.

Before leaving the atmosphere, the ship sent reflective, golden spheres dubbed exploratory spheres to collect samples and data throughout Jupiter's interior. Leaving the atmosphere, it did one orbit around the planet, passing over the Great Red Spot before heading for its moon Io, mottled in multiple intensities of yellow, orange, vermillion, reddish brown, white, and blue gray sulfur and lava, as well as a couple of black flecks here and there, the result of constant volcanic eruptions.

The ship landed in an area without volcanic activity, the closest volcano being Surt, where the honor of being both the first person to step on the surface of Io and set foot in the Outer Solar System belonged to the teenage mechanic and aerospace engineer.

Congrats, kid, you're the first person to ever set foot in the Outer Solar System," congratulated the astrophysicist.

"Sweet," the mechanic said to himself, looking at his surroundings with a smile of awe and wonder plastered on his face, seeing a surface of mostly rocks made of sulfur, with volcanoes erupting in the distance, all under a black sky.

The astronauts then deployed a robotic probe to drill into the moon's surface interior to collect samples, conduct experiments, and search for alien life. As the probe did the dirty work, the astronauts collected their own samples, did their own experiments, and searched for aliens on the surface, with the astrophysicist claiming to have found some unusual material within the vicinity of the volcano Surt.

As expected, they did not find any life on its rare ices - the moon was dosed with too much radiation, which prevented any of its chemicals from forming the necessary ingredients. However, they were treated to a nice view of the waning gibbous Jupiter in the night sky, its Great Red Spot visible, with the volcano Surt erupting in the foreground.

Leaving Io, they went to the giant planet to retrieve the exploratory spheres. They were astounded by the samples collected, which included liquid and metallic hydrogen, as well as different points in Jupiter's core. All these discoveries, they knew, would revolutionize astronomy, physics, and materials science, especially metallic hydrogen. Before moving on to the icy moons, they confirmed the existence of five new moons, located near the L2 point of the Sun and Jupiter. They then sent exploratory spheres to those moons and to Jupiter's 75 other moons which weren't spherical and fully map them.

They landed on the icy moons of Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, where the honors of being the first to land there belonged to the biophysicist, pilot, and astrophysicist, respectively. This time, the probes that drilled into them came equipped with hydrobots, submarine-like probes designed to explore subsurface oceans, collect samples, and search for life. For the first two moons, the subsurface oceans proved to be void of life, unlike the third one. There, the hydrobot found sulfur-eating microbes huddled near hydrothermal vents.

The four searched for life and collected ice samples on Europa's icy crust, underneath the gaze of the waning gibbouses of the giant Jupiter and its moon Io in front of it. Upon hearing there was life in Europa's oceans, the astronauts returned to the ship and went into the oceans, not before plowing through layers of ice 15 to 25 kilometers deep. There, they found far more species than in Jupiter's atmosphere. The ship left the icy moon of Europa, preparing to head back to Earth, the water that came out as they left instantly freezing into ice. The exploratory spheres that were sent to Jupiter's non-Galilean moons, as well as the mapper probe that went to Jupiter, which all became visible, then returned to the ship. In addition, four other mapper probes, sent to the Galilean moons eighteen days ahead of launch to completely map them, arriving via quantum fusion, became visible and returned.

They had done it - the astrophysicist had unlocked all of the secrets that Jupiter, its cohort of moons, and everything else in the Jovian system, still hid until then, but he wouldn't have done it without his crewmates. But as one book of secrets closes, another one opens.

As the ship's computers made the necessary calculations for their return home, the four were still in awe and disbelief over what they had discovered, particularly the youngest, a teenage boy at 16 years of age, with spiky, medium length blonde hair, and a well-toned body from a year of astronaut training. He was Jonathan Lowell Spencer Storm, Johnny for short, the youngest child of renowned quantum physicist Dr. Franklin Storm. Although he did not inherit much of his father's intelligence, he was still smart in his own right, breezing through academics and athletics, leaving plenty of time for fooling around and flirting with girls. He didn't share his father's interest in science, but he had a knack for strategy and tactics, the kid unbeatable at chess, and engineering, fixing up cars and wanting to build rockets, even starting a car repair business that failed after complaints over unnecessary modifications.

"Man, I still can't believe that we were the first humans in history to find alien life," he said incredulously.

"Agreed. Life on Europa and Jupiter of all places? This has so many implications for the evolution of life on other worlds." stated the brilliant astrophysicist Dr. Reed Nathaniel Richards, a tall, lean man, 6 '1, at 29 years of age, wearing large, circular, rimless glasses. He was, by every definition of the word, a genius, a master of every science, not the single best in most, but the world's greatest expert in astrophysics, astrobiology, cosmology, and just about anything space-related, fascinated with it ever since the day he was born. His brilliant mind, combined with hard work, took him to some of the world's greatest colleges like MIT. A theoretician by nature, he was way beyond observation, and has speculated on just about everything in the universe, from life in the Jovian system to parallel universes to the possibility of faster than light travel, and it eventually led him to proving that the latter was indeed possible, earning him the funding to build his ship.

"With that on your resume, kid, it's an instant ticket to MIT," replied the ace pilot and astronaut Benjamin Jacob Grimm, or Ben for short, a tall, burly man, 5 '8, 29 years of age, with short, orange hair and blue eyes. He was Reed's best friend, having met when they were five when he first defended him from bullies. On the outside, he was a tough, all-American hunk, but he had a softer side. As a kid, he told his friend that he would pilot a spaceship he made. Years of football and a passion for the arts got him scholarships from multiple colleges, where he pursued aerospace engineering, enlisting in the military and NASA afterward as a test pilot and astronaut. After going on a couple of missions, when he heard about Reed starting construction on his ship, he left the military, ready to fulfill his childhood dream.

"Now, let's not get too ahead of ourselves, but yeah, it's still pretty impressive," replied the doctor and archaeologist Dr. Susan Marie Storm, or Sue as she preferred, a tall, slender woman from 28 to 33 years of age, with shoulder-length blonde hair. She was Reed's girlfriend, the oldest child of Franklin Storm, and Johnny's older sister. She was known to be quite mousy, but was secretly quite snarky. Abandoned by her mother when Johnny was a kid, she took up the responsibility of acting as his mother at a young age. As an eyedoctor, linguist, and archaeologist, she studied the things no one usually saw, the things that seemed invisible to most doctors and archaeologists. This allowed her to make breakthroughs in medicine, linguistics, communications science, and archaeology. In addition to that, she was a brilliant polymath, adept in multiple fields of knowledge, and a polyglot, able to speak over 23 languages.

"And I don't see why I gotta go back to school after this," said Johnny, looking out the window, watching the icy white moon of Europa shrink with increasing distance. "Though I wish Dorrie were here."

"I thought she wanted to go along with you, Johnny," replied his sister.

"Eh, she's not really the adventurous type, but boy, when we get back to Earth, I'm gonna send her so many pics."

"All 1,996,000 of them?" joked Reed.

"Pretty sure it's just gonna be pretty boy's selfies," followed Ben, earning light chuckles from everyone. "Alright, back to business." He pressed a button on the control panel, prompting a female voice.

"Preparing for warp in 10-" she was cut short by a slight jolt of the ship.

"Did any of you guys feel that?" asked Johnny.

"Yup," replied his sister.

"Me too. Trying to see where it came from…" said Reed, typing in inputs on the control panel.

"Got it! The cause is a gravitational wave, the strongest one ever recorded, trillions of times stronger than the ones first detected by LIGO."

"Whoa," said Johnny.

"Whatever caused it was an unusually strong gravitational event, and no, I'm not talking about the merging of two black holes or neutron stars," Sue stated.

"Did the data say anythin' 'bout what it was or where it came from?"

Reed replied, "It did. The strange thing about it is the point of origin is nearby - it's just at the L1 point between Io and Jupiter, some sort of spacetime anomaly. Something like that could not just have originated right there - the amount of energy that created it would have ripped apart the Sun."

"You're not saying…?" said Sue.

"Based on the available data, it did not originate from here, but somewhere far beyond our Solar System. Don't know what else it could be, other than an Einstein Rosen bridge."

"A wormhole..." uttered Johnny. "No way!"

"Or one that's forming - it's emitting large amounts of Hawking radiation. We gotta go investigate it. Ben?"

"Sure thing, chief," his friend replied, turning the ship around in the direction of Jupiter, skimming over a volcanic plume of Io before stopping near the L1 point between the two. The part of the ship containing all of their probes and the data they collected detached, landing on Callisto and turning invisible.

"Don't see anything," said Johnny.

"You can't see Hawking radiation using electromagnetic radiation." Reed pressed a button, and a cyan grid appeared on screen, a cluster of crackling purple and black dots emitting purple and black dots appearing on top of it.

"There, you see it, everyone?" Reed asked. Everyone nodded. He started scrutinizing the data, hoping to find something interesting.

"Space-time foam is currently somewhat unstable in the surrounding space. Looks like it's about to appear to the naked eye." Reed pressed a button, causing the window to return to normal. A bluish ball of light suddenly appeared against the black background of stars the astronauts were currently seeing.

"There it is…" the astrophysicist quickly started typing in commands on the control panel. A hologram appeared in front of him, displaying data and equations being crunched in milliseconds, converting into a graph showcasing two vortexes connected through their throats, as well as a diagram showcasing two light blue spheres connected by a string.

"Cosmic strings vibrating to keep the throat of a wormhole open, dark energy fields surrounding wormholes upon their creation, all of which have the ability to warp space-time… more methods for faster than light travel solved!" he said excitedly. "Oh man, our knowledge of the universe is never gonna be the same again, and it's all within our reach."

"Sue added, "It really is, Reed. Just look at what we've got! Hints of dark matter potentially clumping together, possibly hints of dark fusion and concentrated versions of dark matter, the nature of dark energy and how it expands space, and it basically being the fifth fundamental force of the cosmos. We've just solved some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, Reed! Now we can figure out how the universe ends and how it really began."

"Yeah.."

"Ben, take us closer to the wormhole."

"No, bad idea!" interjected his best friend.

"Why not? That wormhole over there holds the answers to some of the biggest secrets in the universe. It would be a waste if we didn't investigate."

"I get ya, Reed, but we still have no idea what else it holds, and we dunno where it leads to. For all we know, we could end up in some weird place in the universe where we can't go back or end up in a trap set by hostile aliens."

"I don't really think aliens would be like that, Ben - they'd probably be peaceful due to all the tribulations they'd have to go to reach Type 1 status. But anyway, our ship was designed to handle the harshest environments in the cosmos. It can handle the pressures in the core of a hypergiant star, the immense energy output of a quasar, heck, even the insides of a black hole."

"But we still don't have a complete idea about what that wormhole is like."

"That's why it's the perfect opportunity to get near it, provided, of course, we keep our distance. And don't worry about it. I am 4000% sure that our shields won't give in."

"Come on, Ben," intervened Sue. "This will probably be our only chance to investigate something like this."

"Oh fine," he sighed. "But we gotta stay a couple kilometers away - that thing seems to have a gravity of its own."

"All right!" pumped Johnny. The ship revved up, inching closer and closer to the ball of light until it covered a fourth of their view. Upon that, the passengers experienced a slight jolt as the ship's motion ceased.

"Okay, that's the closest we can get," replied Ben. The four stood there for a while, watching the ball swirl.

A small blue-white glow appeared at the center of the ball. It gradually grew bigger and bigger, until it engulfed the ball fully and blasted the ship in a spherical wave of light. As it faded, it revealed a glowing blue-white light at the center, the event horizon of the wormhole itself, the space surrounding it in different blue colors and flowing like ambient water, an illusion of light, the result of it being warped by the wormhole and its exotic matter. Alarms started blaring within the ship, the four frantically looking around, unsure of what was going on.

"I warned you about this!" Ben hissed at Reed. He input a few commands onto the control panel as he tried to steer the ship away from the wormhole.

"Try the auxiliary thrusters!" yelled Johnny." For a while, the ship moved backwards, until the wormhole's cosmic strings went haywire and one of them lashed the ship, small rays of faint, white light being emitted from the tendril as it did so.

"Negative: auxiliary thrusters offline," said the computer.

"Damn it."

"Try warping us out of here," cried Reed.

"Negative: exotic matter reactor core compromised by external source of exotic matter."

"Have you considered using the quantum fusion drive?" asked Sue. Ben's eyes lit up in realization, pressing a button and taking control of the steering controller, grabbing it and pulling it backward. For a brief while, the ship resisted the pull of gravity, and it seemed to be working as the ship slowly inched backward for a few seconds, until they died out due to another whip of a cosmic string.

"Blasted controls won't work! Spatial distortion's just too damn strong in this area! Gravitational field is just too much for this ship to handle." Ben held on to the controller with all his might, trying to steer it out of danger.

"Warning, warning. High intensity dark energy levels critical. Frequently asymmetric dark energy levels critical. Effect of exposure to cosmic strings and vortons unknown. Dark fields interfering with ship's navigational system. Ship has taken damage from spatial distortions generated by the wormhole. Cooling system compromised-" the computer shut off.

"Oh no," said Sue.

"W-what's going on now?!" asked Johnny

"I-I don't know," said Reed, equally unsure. Put on your goggles, and brace yourselves, everyone!" Reed shielded his eyes from the wormhole, as its event horizon started getting brighter with decreasing distance between it and the ship. In an instant, blue, protective goggles had formed around the eyes of the astronauts, yet it still wasn't enough to protect them from the wormhole's intensity as they got closer and closer, bathing them in even more bluish energy, their goggles shattering. Soon, blue and white strings, ribbons, and filaments, and multicolored dots, started to appear out of nowhere and fade in and out.

One of them passed through Johnny, causing him to grunt in pain, feeling a burning sensation in his chest. Sue went in front of her brother, yet the energies just passed through her, feeling light-headed and faint, yet simultaneously energized on the inside.

Ben struggled to steer the ship out of harm's way, getting hit with the brunt of the energies, yet to no avail. As he was hit, he started feeling heavier and heavier, yet he continued to hold on to the steering controller until his body gave in, collapsing on the ground and feeling heavy as a rock. His only hope was that the ship's autopilot would kick in, warping them back home, but he knew that it wouldn't happen.

Reed stood as he watched the ship approach the event horizon as various energies passed through him. First, he felt his bones and joints become limp, like they were made of water. Then, his entire body started to feel like water as billions of thoughts raced into his head. He clutched it, unable to process them, as he collapsed onto the ground, struggling to reach the control panel.

At last, the ship reached the event horizon, engulfing it in blue-white light. Inside, the same happened to the four. Johnny's body started to glow like fire, Sue's faded into nothingness, Ben's crumbled into dust, and Reed's liquefied, before being absorbed into the light. The wormhole then collapsed after the ship fully entered the horizon, leaving behind no traces of it or the ship. All that could be seen was the blackness of space.

The four found themselves in a swirling tunnel of faint blue light, yet they did not feel anything, like they were ghosts. And in a way, that statement was correct - upon entering the event horizon, their molecules were disassembled to allow them to pass through the tunnel, watching various blue colors pass them by, yet their consciousnesses were still intact. They experienced a flash of light, and they started moving quickly through the tunnel, watching stars whiz by them on the outside as they moved at FTL speeds, twisting and turning along the way. Soon, they could see the end of the tunnel, a glowing white light. A flash of white light, and they were back in regular space again.

They saw two small spheres, one colored in icy browns with a heart-shaped feature on its surface, and one colored in muted browns with a reddish-brown cap on its north pole. It was the double planet system Pluto and Charon, situated 39 AU from the Sun. They quickly whizzed by it, passing by the various icy comets of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.

They turned around to see just how far they were, where they could see a halo of comets 1 light-year across with two giant, horizontal, oval-shaped holes stacked vertically, which indicated a lack of comets in those regions. Sandwiched between them was a faint light between them, our Sun. They marveled at how far they were, before being whisked away into the vastness of interstellar space.

Numerous stars passed them by, in different colors and sizes and at different stages of their lives, ranging from the small and cool red dwarf stars and the large and hot blue giant stars to the ginormous supergiants to the average sized medium sized, main sequence stars not too unlike our Sun, watching the births and deaths of suns before their very eyes. Some of those stars possessed planets, but they did not find any planet like Earth.

The four passed by the Pleiades, a star cluster mostly made of hot, blue stars, the most prominent being the seven brightest stars, the daughters of Atlas, whom Orion the Hunter pursued every night. After that, they eventually stumbled upon a bluish planet, not unlike Earth, with oceans and a nitrogen and oxygen-rich atmosphere of clouds, with four stars illuminating its skies, one blue, one white, one orange, and one red. They looked down, and they could see a web of dotted lights. They were shocked and amazed, as they learned, for the second time, that we were not alone in the universe.

They then headed to a star surrounded by rings of gas and dust, where they passed by baby planets still being fed asteroids, comets, and gas. They made their way to the center, where there lay a bright, young star. The fires of nuclear fusion had ignited in its core, a flash of light indicating the birth of a new star. The gas and dust rolled back, revealing a fiery, hot planet covered in lava, the first member of its planetary system. As they made their way out, the four saw other planets come to life, some made of just rock, others with thick envelopes of gas.

They were then whisked to interstellar space, where they saw a lone, rocky planet surrounded by an asteroid field and a few planetary companions, as they drifted across the void. The rocky planet was relatively massive, almost as massive as Earth, but it was barren, no atmosphere to hold in water - it was just an arid desert full of rock.

They passed it by, eventually reaching a yellow star, like our Sun, with a lone planet orbiting it, one with a pearly white atmosphere obscuring its surface. The star itself orbited a dark star, one that bent the light from the stars all around it, and the fiery ring of gas that encircled it, where nothing, not even light, could escape it once it got too close: a black hole.

After passing it, the four found themselves in a region of space full of extremely faint patches of blue nebulae. Up ahead was a mass of swirling, superheated gas and dust in different blues, the center glowing a very bright white. As they approached the center, they could see an ultradense, white star collapsing as its innards fell into the event horizon below - it was a collapsing neutron star inside of an Einstein Rosen bridge, another wormhole. They made their way into the event horizon, entering another swirling tunnel of blue light, only this time, the blues were much fainter and brighter and there was a lot more white, plus far more energies, filaments, and strings, as well as some white and blue white matter - neutron star matter and strange matter, the star's spilled guts.

As the four went through the wormhole, their molecules reconstituted their human forms as the ship was rebuilt around them. The four were back in their original positions, before they disintegrated, before they were shipped through the wormhole. Finding themselves back in their bodies, they tried to move around, but all the strain from the disintegration and journey was too much for them. All they could do was watch.

They watched as the tunnel disappeared around them, and they returned to normal space. They watched as galaxies of all types, spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, irregular, and lenticular, pass them by. Soon, they organized themselves into galaxy clusters, and then superclusters, large, giant webs of galaxies. As the four continued to move through space, the galaxies soon started becoming brighter and fuzzier, a faint light appearing at the center of their view.

Their surroundings slowly became fuzzier and fuzzier, until they were all just a dusty blur, slowly getting whiter and whiter. The dot of light grew brighter and more golden, until it fully engulfed their view. Everything went white, and then it all went black.

Soon, the ship found itself traveling through the once more inky black of space, filled with stars in every degree. It hurtled towards a star, one with planets around it. It approached a blue planet with white clouds and a gray white moon orbiting it appeared, before landing in a violent crash...

"No, the four wouldn't die this time. Fate had other plans for them, lots of them actually.

And those plans, would be fantastic.


This is my take on the origin of the Fantastic Four. I created this take largely because I greatly dislike the use of "cosmic rays" or "cosmic storm" or "cosmic cloud" as a means by which the Fantastic Four get their powers, and I wanted to do my own take.

I would like to thank Firebringer2077 on Discord for some comments and suggestions, particularly on Reed's backers, as well as Regina Magia, who I'm working with to expand this into a full-blown origin story that's not just the way they get their powers.