FANTASTIC FOUR
"The Super-Skrull Cometh"
Chapter 1
"Somebody jus' shoot me a'ready!"
Even though Ben "The Thing" Grimm thunderously stomped so anxiously about the overelaborate living room, for communal use, in the Fantastic Four floors of the now world-renowned Baxter Building...
"What?" absently asked Johnny "The Human Torch" Storm as he lazed about on one of the fire retardant, frame reinforced chairs. His fleeting attention centered upon the extreme sports presentation currently playing on the floor to ceiling wall-screen TV. "Did you say somethin', Ben?"
Stopping short, his rocky countenance contorting into an acrimonious mein, even as a rumbling grumble immediately preceded what such as Sue "The Invisible Woman" Richards had come to call irritatingly predictable...
"Yeah, I said somethin', Flame-Brain," Ben sonerously said with a growing growl. Then, just as the prevailing peace of the past several weeks quickly crumbled...
"Hey!" loudly exclaimed an angry-as-Hell Human Torch as The Thing swiftly snatched the TV remote and easily destroyed it via one enormous rock-encrusted four-fingered fist. "What's your problem, Rocky?"
Even as such had slipped so spitefully from the hotheaded Human Torch, Thing's constant source of suffering fully flamed on. Instantly rising several feet into the living area's elegant enormity, forming fireballs in preparation for tossing same at the man of marble.
"Go ahead, Matchstick!" riotously roared a formerly bored-to-tears Thing as a super-powered standoff seemed moments from erupting into war. "Even goin' stony toe to flamin' foot with you would be better than nothin'! Let's have at it!"
"You got it, Brick-Brain!"
By the time Susan "The Invisible Woman" Richards happened along to witness what she had hoped never ever to encounter during downtimes for the FF...
"Ben! Johnny!"
Her outraged shriek was swallowed whole by the incredible conflagration before her. One that, between balls of burning plasma and super-strength tossed sofas and chairs, left the living room looking like a deadly destructive battle area.
The Thing's singular super-strength turned formerly reinforced furniture into so much mangled framework and shredded fabric.
The Human Torch's super-hot plasma flame reduced the remainder into smouldering cinders. Items that, initially, were resistant to such destruction via fire, yet which were overwhelmed 'neath Johnny's white-hot heat.
Only the literally wall-sized television seemed to survive.
"Damn it!"
Once again The Invisible Woman quite quickly sent forth fields of unseen force...
"Hey, cut it out, Suzie!"
...one wrapped a little too tightly about the bombastic Thing.
"Hey, Sis, you know I hate being cooped up!"
...and the other slapped so snuggly about the formerly firey form of the easily excitable Human Torch. Said plasma flame snuffed as swiftly as a flickering candle 'neath an upended cup.
"Let's start," Susan suggested whilst maintaining mental control of said unseen force-spheres, "with what the hell started this!"
"Don't ask me," grumbled the brother of the beauteous blond in the self-same dark-blue FF uniform. "Ask the block-head here! He started it!"
"Ben?"
Uselessly struggling via super-strength against an invisible field of force he already realized was as absolutely solid as his own rock-hewed hide...
"'Cause I was bored, okay?" The Thing explosively espoused, even as The Invisible Woman very gradually allowed those imperceptible body-bubbles to duly dissipate.
"Bored?" she parroted in puzzlement.
"Yeah, bored!" The Thing rowdily reiterated, then explicated a little less loudly. "Am I the only one who's noticed that, ever since Captain America and his Avengers appeared in our New York...we ain't had to do a damn thing?"
"Well," agreeably groaned the still flamed off Human Torch, "Ben's got a point. It has been a long time since the FF's been needed. No Dr. Doom endangering anyone. No cosmic bad guys about to abuse us with their godlike abilities. Nothing. Nada."
"And that gives the two of you the right to destroy this entire area?"
Susan's purposely pointed interrogative left two members of the famous Fantastic Four utterly lost for words.
Even though, to be honest, at least with herself!, The Invisible Woman had to also admit that ever since the cosmic combat 'twixt the Silver Surfer and an incredibly powerful entity called only The Stranger...
...whereby the walls, aphoristically speaking, separating one Reality from another were abruptly obliterated...
...allowing super-powered personages to suddenly share what had previously been the province of the Fantastic Four...
"Let's go talk to Reed," Susan suggested with a sigh, basically because of the burnt and broken debris that used to be a nice set of living room furniture. "Maybe he can come up with...something. Besides...he has to order more replacement pieces. Again."
While three cosmic ray-created superheroes prepared to seek out their scientist leader down in his super-lab...
And as the Avengers, led by Captain America and accompanied by Thor, Giant-Girl, Hulk, Black Panther, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, take on everything from common criminals to anything slightly "super"...
A Skrull Warship awaited just out of range of Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards' space scanning sensors, beyond the Earth-Moon section of the solar system.
Awaited the completion of something first conceived under the rule of the Skrull Emperor, though no Empire remained after such as Galactus hyperspatially slipped into the Andromeda Galaxy for a "cosmic snack". And only a few hundred remnants of that reptilian species proceeded toward the Milky Way...and humanity.
"It is time, Your Highness," proudly proclaimed the Imperial Minister of Science. About to bring the end result of rapid genetic manipulation before the bloated Emperor of the surviving Skrulls...
"Allow me to introduce to you...and your Imperial Court, including our heroic Skrull General...the Super Skrull!"
END OF CHAPTER 1