She never thought she'd see Manhattan again, but there it was, right outside her window.

The highest peaks that surrounded Talia Walker had gone back and forth in her life. She was born and raised amid the mountainous terrain of Vermont, before trading that in for a landscape of skyscrapers upon moving to New York City for college and her career.

Fate seems to be putting me on a seesaw between the two, Talia thought. Her life's path had brought her away from the city and back to her native Vermont for a time. And now, as she stared at the towering buildings around her, man's towering creations welcomed her once again.

Rachel's face was almost glued to the window of the coach bus, her neck craned backward attempting to frame the height of the buildings adequately from her vantage point. Talia smirked, remembering her first time seeing the grandiosity of New York as she arrived on a similar bus ready to attend university. She had been matter-of-fact about the whole thing, naturally, but she would be lying if she had claimed the place didn't have an impact on her.

This time, her entrance into the city again was strictly business, and she found herself void of any nostalgia-driven warmth or awe. This is the only option I have. There's nowhere else I can go.

As the bus entered the Port Authority, the tall skyline was replaced with concrete barriers, and the sunlight that had been streaming through the brief glimpses of sky had now been replaced with artificial beams showering upon them.

Talia handed her laptop back to Rachel, who placed it within her bag. "Everything there?" Rachel asked, her attention finally attainable now that the city's peaks were temporarily unavailable. "I feel like you didn't take your eyes off that screen for the entire ride down."

"Yes, thank goodness," Talia responded. The nanobot data had uploaded from her lab computer to the cloud storage, accessible from the laptop she had given Rachel after the transformations had first started "I still can't make sense of some of it, though."

After the incident with Colvin and the yellow Humvees, she hadn't been able to get back to her computer in the lab to safeguard it once more. She hoped that the security measures kicked back in themselves, but there was also a chance that the detective or whoever had attacked the creature had access to that same data. Detective Colvin already has too much for his own good.

She waited until she and Rachel had disembarked the coach bus that had brought them from upstate down to the city before continuing her thoughts. "The more I study the nanobot data," Talia said, turning her head to make sure the other passengers were out of earshot, "the more I'm convinced that its findings may hold the the key to my metamorphosis into the creature."

Nodding slightly, Rachel brought her right hand through her hair in an attempt to dispel the effect the bus seat's headrest had had on the back of her head. "I really hope so, Tal."

Soon the pair had exited back onto the streets of Manhattan, and once more Rachel's head craned back in order to stare down the city's skyline.

"I still can't believe you - you - lived here for so long," Rachel added.

Talia snickered. "I used to thrive under pressure, ironically." Talia began walking, keeping her head level and letting her old internal GPS start guiding her down the city streets. "I feared this place would eat me alive," she said. "However, we found an understanding."

Rachel mindlessly stepped out onto the nearest street and was immediately greeted with the angry honk of a yellow taxi that stormed by at an excessive speed. Frazzled, she stepped backward onto the safety of the sidewalk. Talia leaned her body off the sidewalk and extended an arm up into the air, and soon a subsequent cab slowed silently and idled at their location.

"Hello there," said Talia. "Can you get us to Empire State University?"

Talia leaned her weight into the heavy glass door that stood as the entrance to Empire State University's science building and felt the rush of cool, climate-controlled air flow past her as she pushed her way in, Rachel a few steps behind.

"Wow," Rachel commented. "This place is huge!"

The pair moved through the large atrium, weaving their way around several glass-encased exhibits featuring the works of students and resident scientists. They reached the far wall, where a large monitor, standing at least five feet tall, was embedded into the marble. Talia reached out and placed her finger upon the touchscreen, which reacted immediately with a menu. With a few quick touches, she navigated to staff directory, which was divided into different fields of study. She scrolled down to the 'G' section, briefly pausing on Gamma Radiation Lab before moving on to Genetics Lab.

Finding what she was looking for, she made a turn for the elevators.

The ride upward felt like she was back in her old daily routine, even if it had been a few years. She reached her hands to the sides of her light jacket and wrapped the covering around her, suddenly swept over with a cold chill. The action didn't escape Rachel's sight.

"You OK?" Rachel asked, placing a hand on Talia's shoulder.

Talia turned and nodded. "Yeah." She touched Rachel's hand with her own in affirmation. "Just feels weird coming back, you know? So much has changed."

The elevator chime rung, and the doors opened onto the 11th floor. Talia and Rachel stepped out and walked down the hallway, Talia's eyes scanning the numbers and names of offices, her heartbeat growing stronger as each nameplate grew closer to the one she knew she would soon find.

Soon they had found their destination, and swallowing back a lump in her throat, Talia allowed her fist to knocked upon the closed door.

"Come in," a voice responded.

With a deep breath, Talia opened the door. A man with light brown hair, wearing a blue checkerboard-patterned dress shirt adorned with a canary yellow tie, looked up. His face instantly paled, his smile fading and his pupils dilating, as if he had seen a ghost.

"Talia?" he squeaked, slowly pushing himself up from his chair. "You're alive?"

Martin Colvin sat at the old, worn dining room table in his apartment, piles of papers littering the surface. The sound of an inkjet printer echoed through his tiny, sparse space; printed pages falling out the bottom and joining others on his floor behind him.

The detective sat with a stack of papers in his hand, the name "Walker, Talia" headlining the page. Everything he knew about the doctor, and the She-Hulk, was in this apartment.

Thank you, Mike. That one phoned-in favor had unlocked so much information previously restricted to him.

"See, Martin?" he murmured to himself. "This is what happens when you actually try."

He quickly scanned the papers, his eyes darting left to right, line to line, trying to find a word, a place, a clue to help him figure out the enigma of the woman who had slipped through his fingers. Instead, this printout, like so many of the others, held nothing. He threw the pages across the room.

The detective glanced up at his clock and saw the hands at roughly twenty past the hour. Shaking the grogginess from his head that the coffee hadn't eliminated yet, Colvin reached for another pile of papers.

All the stuff he had found on Dr. Walker had been digital, but Colvin had an attachment to the physical. He enjoyed holding paper in his hand, highlighting text and scribbling notes, making piles of useful information and crumpling up and tossing insignificant items basketball-style into his trash can. He turned just as another piece of printed material fell from his printer and watched as the paper floated its way to the floor.

Colvin leaned back in his chair and began to tap his pen against his forehead. He had been digging through papers for hours at a time, spread across days. Prior to the She-Hulk, her record seems pretty clean.

Colvin began reading through the next paper close to hand, this one Dr. Walker's bio page from Byrne-Lee University, where she had operated her lab until recently. At the top of the page was a staff picture of Talia, quite similar to how he recognized her from their recent encounters — feigning a smile that seemed to be hiding a deeper sadness.

"Born and raised in Vermont," he read aloud to himself, "Dr. Talia Walker graduated as valedictorian of Pallas High School before attending Byrne-Lee University on a full scholarship." He paused to take sip of coffee. "She graduated from the university with a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude, and moving to New York City to get her Masters of Science and Doctorate in gamma radiation studies at Empire State University, where she then continued to work on staff as a lab researcher.

"After years of field-leading research at ESU," Colvin continued, sneaking in another brief sip, "Dr. Walker was thrilled to return home and join the staff of Byrne-Lee, where she continues to explore the untapped potentials of gamma radiation."

He lay the paper on the table and started writing in the blank, unprinted section at the bottom of the page. She's smart, that much I already know. Only strange thing is why she would leave a no-doubt high paying career at ESU to come back to small-town Vermont?

Colvin tapped his finger on his ceramic coffee mug. "She said the She-Hulk was born here in Vermont, so its creation couldn't have been the cause." Though that monster rampaging around Manhattan instead of here would have made my life so much easier.

"Empire State U, eh?" Colvin muttered, as he began to shuffle papers. Moving piles around, he finally recognized the school's name on a messy stack of pages on the other end of the table. Sliding them over to him, he placed his coffee down on the table hard, a bit of the dark liquid inadvertently splashing onto the clean pages. "Crap," he grumbled, trying to wipe away the liquid futilely. The stain wasn't bad, however, so he moved on.

Press releases, grant details, award nominations, all pretty straightforward, he thought to himself, eyes darting across the ESU documents. She had been focused on gamma radiation at the university, no surprise. He stopped as a press release caught his eye.

"'Empire State University Gamma Radiation Lab awarded for new breakthroughs in animal muscle restoration,'" he read to himself. He started to scan the rest of the release, but he paused, his eyes drawn to a photo set at the top of the page. A group of men and women clad in white lab coats stood gathered around an older man in a black suit, all smiling. The man was handing a small, engraved plaque to one of the scientists, a woman who looked absolutely sunken and frail. Cheekbones were prominent, hands were bony - she looked to be in poor health.

But the face, the face…

"Holy hell," Colvin shouted. He immediately ran to the floor and began digging through the discarded papers until his hands lay claim to the Byrne-Lee University biography he had read through minutes earlier. He slapped the page onto the table next to the ESU press release, and whipped his head back and forth repeatedly until his neck began to ache.

The woman in the picture accepting the award was Dr. Talia Walker, except this was a Talia who looked weeks away from death. The Byrne-Lee photo, despite being dated later, showed her looking as she did now - small but healthy.

Colvin shot up, knocking his coffee to the floor in the process, but he paid it no mind. He began digging through the pile of unorganized pages that lay on the floor underneath his printer. "Where are they?" he growled, taking quick glances at pages in each hand before tossing them into the air. "I know I printed them!"

Finally, the document caught his eye. Walker, Talia - Medical History. He had requested it as part of the investigation but had originally paid it no mind, considering the doctor appeared in fine health. Aside from changing into a giant green rage monster, of course, but why would that be on her records?

Unsurprisingly, the She-Hulk was not listed on Dr. Walker's medical records, but the answer Colvin was looking for stood out like a sore thumb.

"Degenerative muscle disorder," the detective read. She received years of treatment, but nothing worked, so she stopped receiving care it looks like.

Colvin stared blankly at the wall. "She came back to Vermont to die." His eyes suddenly widened, and the detective almost dove for his car keys off the counter. "I know where she's hoping the She-Hulk will die too!"