After our brief little bout with Technovore, we now move on to a story arc that's been one of the mainstays of the story. We also get the Misfitverse introduction of a former Runaway...yeah, people who have read the first eighteen issues should know who I'm talking about.

DISCLAIMER: I own Derrick Bolris. The Misfitverse this story takes place in belongs to Red Witch, the characters of G.I. Joe belong to Hasbro, and everything else belongs to Marvel.

Chapter 26: Not Another Alternate Dimension!

The seventh month came after the Technovore incident. While supervillains still attempted to sieze control of Los Angeles, the Runaways were confronting another kind of foe.

"I'LL RIP YOU APART!" cried a man in a massive red-and-purple armored suit with a pair of cannons mounted on top. "YOUR PARENTS WILL PAY FOR WHAT THEY DID TO ME!"

"Who's he talking to?" Chase asked.

"YOU!" the man roared, pointing his finger at one person.

Molly.

"Your damn mutie parents cursed me!" the man snarled. "They messed with my head…they made it so that I couldn't move or blink…for seven years! The people at the hospital had to put these drops in my eyes so they wouldn't dry out! They tortured me for seven years, and they weren't even near me for most of that time!"

"Kind of small potatoes compared to what everyone else's parents put people through," Gert said simply.

"I'LL KILL ALL OF YOU!" the enemy of the Pride roared, only to find his shoulder-mounted laser guns suddenly unable to fire. "What?!"

The man was then electrocuted into submission, courtesy of Derrick draining the power out of his armor and then sending it back at its former owner through his hands.

"Well, that was quick," Chase said. "Anyone up for a smoothie?"

"I want a vanilla one!" Molly cried.

At that moment, however, a portal opened up underneath all of them, sucking the Runaways in. After falling through a vortex, the team fell out in a world entirely different from the city of Los Angeles.

In fact, there was no city of Los Angeles.

"Where are we?" Victor asked.

"Looks like another alternate dimension," Karolina observed.

"What happened here?" Nico asked. "Everything's so…barren. Even for LA."

"There's no LA," a familiar voice said as a hooded figure approached them. "Not anymore."

The figure lowered its hood, and there stood an alternate Nico Minoru, holding her own Staff of One.

"Cool!" Molly said. "An alternate Nico!"

"Guys, I…I need your help," Alternate Nico said. "I need your help to fix a mistake I made."

"What, you did this?" Derrick asked.

"No…well, not directly," Alternate Nico said. "See, the thing is…the Gibborim have wiped out almost everyone on the planet."

"What?!" Chase cried.

"Wait, who are the Gibborim?" Derrick asked.

"A bunch of giants who made the Pride," Gert explained. "They had our parents kill children every year and sacrifice their souls to said giants in order to power them up. The Gibborim wanted to wipe out every single person on the planet, but promised to leave six alive."

"Why didn't you stop it?!" Nico yelled at her counterpart.

"Alex, he…he offered me to be one of the six that survived, along with himself, his parents, and my parents," Alternate Nico sighed. "And I was dumb enough to accept."

"ARE YOU FLIPPIN' INSANE?!" Chase roared, the other Runaways absolutely dumbstruck. "You know that he wanted to kill everyone in the world, you know that he tried to kill the others, and you JOINED HIM?! Some friend you turned out to be!"

"I loved him, Chase," Alternate Nico replied sadly, her eyes watering. "Believe me, I've been paying for my decision. I could have stopped Alex, but I wasn't thinking straight. I let how I felt about him get in the way, and it's cost me virtually everything. He's killed the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Misfits, every human, mutant, and superhuman on the planet."

"Because you sacrificed your friends to make time with Wilder?" Derrick sneered

"Exactly," Alternate Nico nodded. "I need your help to try and fix everything. I really want things back to the way they were, but I need something the Gibborim have in order to do that."

"If you wish for redemption," Xavin said, "we will help you. Otherwise, you will find yourself in an unpleasant positon."

"I already do, uh…name please?" Alternate Nico asked.

"Oh, I'm Victor Mancha, the android son of Ultron," Victor said. "Xavin there's a Super-Skrull-in-training."

"Like that one the Fantastic Four fight?" Alternate Nico asked.

"Yes," Xavin nodded.

"Guess you two ought to come in handy," Alternate Nico said. "Assuming, of course, the others and the Gibborim don't know we're coming."

"How would he?" Victor asked.

"There's this book called the Abstract," Alternate Nico explained. "The Pride got it from the Gibborim. It tells the past, present, and future. In other words, Alex is pretty likely to know we're coming."

"All that means is that we need to move fast," said Nico, "so Alex and the remaining Pride members don't hit us first."

****

A dark-skinned boy with glasses and a rather untidy afro paged through a black book. Every page was turned by using a skeletal version of Chase's Fistigons covering his hands, long fingers at the edges of the paper. As his eyes scanned the latest page he read, the boy's mouth curved upward into a smirk.

"Try as you might, Nico," said Alex Wilder, "no one can turn this world back into the hell it was. We saw to that."