Kang was surprised at the pride he felt that this young woman, nominated by him for the contest, had been the only combatant to transcend the fight and actually challenge the controllers. "Do you believe it's recoverable?" he said to the Grandmaster.
The Grandmaster looked up from the fragments of the Jadzian singularity. "Well, this is not my field, but were I," he smiled, "a betting man, I would say no. How did she know what would happen?"
Kang shrugged. "I would assume she didn't. But still, to have realized that there was a way around the fight, that is extraordinary."
The Grandmaster stood up. "In life as in chess, the pawn that can cross the board can do anything afterwards." He moved to collect the few things he had brought with him. "Congratulations on your misdirection, by the way."
Kang smiled. "Oh, it was a small thing – "
"Not at all. The misdirection was the piece you built your strategy on. If you could replicate such a feat, you would become truly unbeatable."
"Thank you. Tell me, do you know what became of the youths?"
"Not for a certainty," said the Grandmaster preparing to teleport away, "but if I had to look, I'd look at the locations of the last two teleports that were made."
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When Patriot could see again, he was in the construction site. The exact same construction site where they had left, it looked like. "Everyone here?"
In various shades of exhaustion and bewilderment, Hulkling, Wiccan, Stature, Hawkeye, Vision and Speed showed they were here.
"What happened?" said Stature, feeling her arms for lasers burns she'd got while giant-sized.
"I shot some doodad that was floating around Kang," said Hawkeye, blushing. "I thought it was important, but I never thought it was the teleporter."
"So… what? How did we end up back here?" Speed was recovering well, considering how close he'd come to death.
"If Kang and the Grandmaster were using the teleporter, then since we were teleported as a group, we were sent to our last location. Given that our opponents were unused to working as a team, it is possible the same thing happened to them."
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Abigail had just finished rebooting the hardware in her helmet when the flash of light had obscured her vision. When her sight returned, she saw that she was indoors, at night, and accompanied by Were-Ape, Cobalt Lad and Nal-Rogg, all looking the worse for wear. "Anybody know where we are?"
There was a general moan of denial from Cobalt Lad and Were-Ape, but Nal-Rogg stood up. "I think… I think…"
"Yes?"
Suddenly, the light flashed on, and the room they were in was filled with angry-looking blue-skinned aliens. All of them were yelling in their own language, and Nal-Rogg was yelling back. Abigail sighed. Considering how far they were from home, her only hope was that they were feeling charitable enough to drop the three humans off home before the week was out.
One of the aliens turned to her. "You are the helpers of our student Nal-Rogg?"
So this was his school. "Yes, uh, you could certainly say that." Behind the alien talking to her, Nal-Rogg was gesturing to a thing the size of a memory stick in his hand.
"For helping our student to return safely, we thank you. But your arrival was part of the original arrangement."
"Well, um, we're very sorry, sir, and if you could just drop us off home your, uh, nearest convenience, that'd be – "
"We cannot do that. There is a war between the Kree and the Annihilation Wave. Travel is restricted. Information is restricted. You will not be allowed to leave this planet until the war is over."
"And when will that be?" She couldn't believe this was happening. She had been suckered into a fight by some alien nutjob with a few neat tricks, and now she was faced with the prospect of dying on the barricades of a foreign war, so far from home that she couldn't even comprehend the distance.
"Perhaps months."
The argument between Nal-Rogg and the other aliens got louder but Abigail just got quieter. This whole situation had two causes: the Grandmaster and the Young Avengers. Hadn't either of them guessed that she and her allies were stranded in a warzone? Didn't they care? Or were they just too removed from the rest of the world to have feelings like that?
As the argument wound down, she swore she would track down the Young Avengers, and the Grandmaster, and make them pay for standing her away from home with no warning for long enough to be considered dead. As soon as she had –
"Excuse me, human female, but we cannot understand the written. The programs of the robot which Nal-Rogg examined. The programs are written with reference to English, and we cannot understand. Can you help us?"
– leverage, thought Maggie. This would earn them enough brownie points to get them back to Earth, with maybe enough left over that they could borrow some firepower.
And of course there was always the chance of finding something interesting, she thought, as she plugged the memory stick-sized device into an alien computer, and read the words "Avengers Failsafe Protocol"…
Closure is good. So is the knowledge that I finished what I started. Best of all is the fact that I created the Young Masters of Evil before Allan Heinburg got to do it.
To prevent big gaps between instalments, I'm going to do the next one in one go, s soon as I have it finished!