A/N: I do not own any characters appearing in this fanfic.
Chapter 6: Attack of the Fun Police
THE CITADEL AT THE END OF TIME – FERBUARY 10, 2025
I crossed my fully-grown arm over my baby arm and stared daggers across the table in the Citadel at Loki. Loki glared back at me and looked ready to summon actual daggers to throw at me.
"Guys, cut it out," Sylvie said. "Put aside this childish crap."
"Men are stupid," Harley said.
"Aren't you two even yet?" Magik asked. "Wade, you broke Loki's nose; and Loki, you stabbed Wade in the crotch and broke two of his fingers. Let it go!"
"No," I said. "Our injuries offset. We've gotta go again since I did nothing wrong here."
Hi again. I trust you're back here to see who won the duel between me and Loki. Turns out neither of us won because, as you heard above, we each managed to inflict some injuries on each other. But then Sylvie, Magik, Rose, the Doctor, and Spectrum broke up the fight. After that, Spectrum left and we took the Carlysle back to the Citadel. We sat down in the meeting room there, and that's where we've been ever since.
"I'm not waiting all day for this nonsense to finish," Sylvie said. "This morning I finished figuring out which universes the Sentinel and Dalek came from, and what I found is…disturbing."
"He's disturbing!" Loki and I yelled at each other.
"SHUT UP!" Magik yelled, slamming her armored fist down on the table and pointing her Soulsword at each of us in succession. "You two, cut it out right now!"
"He dissed Vanessa!" I yelled.
"It was nothing personal; I diss everyone," Loki said.
Some excuse that was! Granted it's a me-ish excuse, but whenever people meet someone who's exactly like them, it never goes over well. Except me and Harley, who are more or less each other's Marvel and DC counterparts; and Sylvie and Loki, who somehow get along despite being basically the exact same person.
"Well, I don't want you wasting any more of our time on this," Sylvie said. "Now for what I found this morning. The Dalek, as I mentioned previously, was from Earth-328767; and I discovered the Sentinel was from Earth-9466."
"What does that mean?" the Doctor asked. "Are those realities significant?"
"As it turns out, they are, and it's not good news for us. Earth-328767 is an alternate universe in which the Daleks and their leader, Davros, succeeded in detonating a catastrophic device called a Reality Bomb that wiped out everything in the entire universe except the Daleks and their fleet."
Rose, the Doctor, and I gasped, while everyone else just looked more concerned. The three of us were the only ones who really knew what Sylvie was walking about. Rose and the Doctor because they lived through the Reality Bomb crisis, and me because I watched it on BBC America.
"And what about the Sentinel?" Loki asked. "What's important about Earth-9466."
"It's a future where planet Earth has been overtaken by an army of robots and machines, and all the humans have either been killed or put into suspended animation to be used as power sources for the machines. One of the humans, named Thomas Anderson, tried to create a truce with the machines by stopping a computer program that threatened both the humans and machines. He died stopping the program, and the leader of the machines betrayed him and slaughtered all remaining sentient humans."
In other words: its nexus event was that Deus Ex Machina ordered the Machine Army to press its attack on Zion after Neo killed Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions.
"So basically, we've got two incursions from universes where all humans have been killed and robots have created an empire?" I clarified. "Did I get that right?"
"Yes. And that's where it gets even worse."
Oh, here was little ol' me, thinking this was bad enough on its own that robot empires had discovered how to travel across the multiverse and were probably gonna go full-on Infinity Ultron and try to kill all life across the multiverse too.
Sylvie continued, "After discovering these two universes, I detected some sort of…strange activity going on in each of them. Identical activity, the same energy readings."
"What sort of energy?" Harley asked.
"The same sort of energy that powers those things." Sylvie pointed to a TemPad device on the table. "I've taken to calling it M-Rip Energy, short for Multiverse Rip. It's the only energy I know of that's strong enough to tear a hole across the multiverse."
"Okay, so that's how the Sentinels and Dalek got out. Problem solved. I fail to see how that makes things even worse," I said.
Sylvie grabbed a large shard of metal off the floor next to her chair and placed it on the table. "This is a piece of metal from the Dalek that attacked us last night. After scanning this too, I discovered that it's made of vibranium."
Okay, that certainly explains why my knives couldn't cut through it. But now I'm a bit lost about Magik's Soulsword, since I thought that was basically a Marvel lightsaber, and as I recall, the Mark Hamill-Chris Evans debate from a few years ago about a lightsaber vs. Cap's shield was settled in favor of the lightsaber. So maybe the Soulsword isn't as strong as I thought it was. Actually, I should do that. Go to the Star Wars universe, get a lightsaber, then head back to the New Avengers Compound and go up against Cap's shield with it. To-Do List just got another item added to it.
"How did Daleks get their hands on vibranium if the Reality Bomb destroyed everything in their universe?" Rose asked.
"From another universe," Sylvie continued. "And this just seems a bit too coincidental that first a Sentinel steals a bunch of vibranium from Wakanda, and then later that day we're attacked by a Dalek made of vibranium. Not to mention these universes are both giving off identical readings of M-Rip Energy…."
"You think the two universes are...linked somehow, and are working together," the Doctor said.
"The thought had crossed my mind."
"So we're going to stop them, right?" Magik said. "They destroyed the human race and the entire universe in their respective realities. I doubt they're coming to other realities to…share their tech with us or something."
"I want to see what we'd be up against first," Sylvie said. "I'm planning for us to head to Earth-9466 and see what's causing the M-Rip Energy there. Then we can try to figure out how to shut it down."
Cool; a mission. Perfect chance to take the Carlysle out for a test drive since Spectrum ruined my fun earlier today.
But Sylvie must have sensed this somehow because she pointed at me. "And we are not taking your new ship on this mission. This is a stealth job. Recon only."
"#$&%," I muttered.
The Fun Police were sure out in full force today, between Spectrum, Loki, and Sylvie. Then again, the Fun Police probably just detect fun and then zero in on it. Like Colossus stopping me from finishing off Ajax on the highway, and Cable countless other times, and Sylvie and the Dalek ruining the Super Bowl, and now this. It seems I am forbidden from having fun. Harrumph.
"So are we going to go there now?" Loki asked.
"Probably the best idea, since we don't know what they have planned," Magik said. "We don't want to waste any time, after all."
"My thoughts exactly," I said, cracking the knuckles on my fully-grown hand.
Sylvie sighed. "For once I agree with you." She grabbed the TemPad device off the table and changed some of the settings. "Earth-9466, coordinates set to planet C-52…."
"I thought we were going to Earth," Harley said.
"C-52 is what the pompous aliens of the universe call Earth," I explained. "Everyone else just calls it Earth, Sol-3, Midgard, or Third Rock from the Sun."
"'Third Rock from the Sun'?" Loki raised an eyebrow.
"You got a problem, take it up with Joe Diffie."
"Okay, the coordinates are all set," Sylvie said, pressing a button on the TemPad device. The familiar orange portal opened before us. "Let's go."
Time to fly, I guess.
A/N: Next time will be the trip to Earth-9466, followed by…ah, spoilers, all I'll say is that it gets even crazier than what's happened so far. By the way, I use the 'phone code' technique a lot when making up universe names, so 9466 is code for 'ZION' and 328767 is code for 'DAVROS.'
Please R&R, and again, I'm open to suggestions for characters/universes you want incorporated in coming chapters!