Spider-Bat: New Way Home
Chapter Seven: Rocket Man
Over the next few years Bruce Banner had made great strides in his discovery of creating black holes and worm-holes. Although minute, on a more microscopic scale, the studies were still conclusive that a black hole could truly exist, and that was one of the greatest discoveries of mankind. He even won a Nobel Prize for his research findings.
After his discovery, Bruce was determined to figure out a way to open a bigger black hole in space, but he couldn't quite figure out the mathematical equation to support his theory, and Bruce refused to do any tests that weren't properly formulated. If he was to accidentally create too big of a black hole it could engulf the entire planet.
He decided to hire another theoretical physicist by the name of Dr. Phillip Sterns, who had previously been working at a chemical facility in Nevada. Dr. Sterns would only agree to come on board if his brother, Samuel Sterns, was allowed to come along as well. Samuel was aspiring to be like his older scientific brother, though he wasn't quite as smart as him, but he still proved to be useful around the lab and for running errands.
Bruce could still remember the first time the black hole/worm-hole possibility entered his mind; it was the day he studied the trajectory of the spaceship that crash-landed in Smallville, Kansas nearly twelve years ago. When the satellites picked up imaging of the unidentified flying object, Banner realized the trajectory and the rate of speed it was traveling must have meant that somehow the UFO had been launched from somewhere beyond the Milky Way galaxy, which would have been nearly impossible, mostly due to the several clusters of stars, large meteor fragments, and thick dust it would have had to travel through. Therefore, the only possible way the spacecraft could have made it through, would have been to completely bypass the Milky Way altogether, opening up some sort of a portal, traveling through its worm-hole, and being thrusted into our galaxy from the other side. This meant, if Bruce truly wanted to figure out the mathematical equation of the black hole anomaly, he would have to travel to Smallville and find the couple who first discovered the spacecraft, and hope they would somehow be able to provide some answers.
He left the Sterns brothers in charge while he was gone. They were mostly working on the design of a rocket, which would end up being the first gamma-rocket to explode in space, creating a worm-hole big enough for another rocket to travel through it; a space shuttle to be flown by John Jameson.
It was about 3 PM when the Kents got a knock on their door. Martha was doing laundry, and Jonathon had only been home from work for a short while.
"May I help you?" Martha asked, slowly creaking open the door.
"Hi, ma'am. My name is Dr. Robert Bruce Banner. I'm a scientist and I'm here because I have some really important questions to ask you pertaining to a certain spacecraft that crash-landed near your home almost twelve years ago."
Martha immediately shut the door in his face. "Go away!" she demanded, hollering through the window of the door. "We're tired of you tabloid people asking us ridiculous questions like that!"
"Please, Mrs. Kent. I am working on an important scientific discovery, one that could save humanity's future." Bruce begged, though Martha wanted none of it, closing the blinds as he spoke.
Bruce began knocking again. "Please hear me out! I swear I don't belong to any tabloid magazines! And I promise this has nothing to do with your son!" He continued knocking, until suddenly-
"GET THE HELL OFF OF OUR PROPERTY!" A man's voice demanded from the side of the front porch.
When Bruce turned to look he found himself staring down the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun, causing him to quickly put his hands up in the air above his head.
"Sir. I mean your family no harm." Bruce calmly spoke. "I'm a nuclear physicist, and I am currently working on the discovery of black holes, which I assure you are going to play a pivotal role in the future of mankind."
"You sound more like a nutcase if ya ask me!" Jonathan retorted. "Now, I'm not gonna ask you again. Git!"
Bruce slowly started backing up, taking one step off the porch at a time. "I know about the small spacecraft you and your wife recovered. I know about the little boy also. How old is Clark now?... About thirteen years old I'm guessing."
Jonathan began walking closer to him, the rifle still pointed at Bruce's head, his face growing a meaner scowl than before. "What the hell did you say about my boy!?"
Bruce continued backing up, until finally bumping into his own car. "Like I told your wife, I'm not here for your son, and I don't plan on telling anyone about this visit. I'm only here because I have questions about how the spacecraft managed to make it here from where it originally came from, that's all."
Jonathan kept his mean glare on Bruce for a few seconds longer, until finally he lowered his weapon. Jonathan could see the desperation on Bruce's face and he believed Bruce was telling him the truth about his reason for being there. "Follow me," he insisted, waving his hand towards an old barn.
Bruce cautiously followed behind him.
After entering the barn, Jonathan began to open a stall door which held a rather large cow. "C'mon Betsy, time to go out to pasture," he said, ordering the cow to get out of the way.
Once the cow mooved, Jonathan proceeded to reach down towards the ground, grasping onto some sort of a handle below the hay, and pulled up on a hidden wooden door. Below the door was a hidden bunker, about four feet deep, six feet wide, and eight feet long. There was something bulky covered up inside. Jonathan pulled off the cover, revealing the spacecraft Clark had traveled to earth in.
Bruce's eyes were astonished. He then knelt down and rubbed his hand along its sleek alloy frame. "A real spaceship," he thought aloud.
"Yep." Jonathan replied nonchalantly, or at least not as enthusiastic as Bruce anyway. "It's been sitting under Ol' Betsy for quite some time now."
Bruce began looking it over more closely. "Not a scratch on her," he continued in awe.
"Nope. Though it was covered in some kinda black tarry residue when we first found it."
Bruce began looking for something that could have possibly created a portal, but he couldn't seem to find anything. "How did you do it?" He began talking to the spacecraft as if it could answer him back. "How did you make it through the Milky Way?"
"Perhaps this will help." Jonathan proclaimed, holding in his hand the Codex. He then inserted it into a drive on the spacecraft, bringing up a hologram of Jor-El.
"Kal-El?" the hologram spoke, asking if Bruce was his son.
"No sir, I'm not Kal-El…whoever that is." Bruce responded.
"Where is Kal-El?"
"If you are referring to Clark, he is in school." Jonathan interjected.
"Clark?" Jor-El repeated. "You must be his Earthling father."
"Indeed I am."
"Does he know he is from another planet? Another galaxy for that matter?"
"Sort of… I guess… Not really." Jonathan fumbled his words. "Even after eleven years I'm still trying to wrap my head around it all myself."
Bruce spoke up. "You said your home planet is from another galaxy. Why did you send Clark… Kal-El to this planet? And how did you manage to bypass the Milky Way?"
"Our home planet was destroyed. Kal-El is one of our only survivors. We sent him here because your planet was the most compatible with ours. As far as bypassing the Milky Way, before Kal-El's escape pod was launched into space, we first launched another weapon which could create a portal to open up, allowing the escape pod to safely enter your galaxy."
"The portal was a worm-hole, correct? Created by a Gamma-implosion?" Bruce eagerly wanted to know.
"Correct. The first weapon we launched exploded like a supernova, and then the gas imploded in on itself creating the portal."
"Yeah… About that," Bruce continued. "What algorithm did you use to perform such a feat?"
Moments later, after Bruce had found out everything he wanted to know from Jor-El, he said his goodbyes to the Kents, then hopped in his car and left. He couldn't wait to get back to his laboratory so that he could run the numbers.
While he was driving away, a school bus pulled up in front of the Kents' home, dropping Clark off from school. Clark could see Bruce's car as it drove away despite it already being more than a half a mile down the road. He then noticed the barn door was open and Betsy out in the field. He knew that wasn't Betsy's normal time to be out grazing.
Suddenly, as Bruce was driving down the dirt road, he was startled when he looked out his rearview mirror and saw a kid running very fast behind him, a trail of dust followed, and he was closing in rather quickly. Soon, the boy was already running right next to Bruce's window.
"Pull over!" Clark demanded.
"What?" Bruce said in shock, looking down at Clark's legs, which seemed to be only a blur at the moment. "How are you doing that!?" he blurted. "I'm going nearly fifty miles per hour!"
"I said… PULL OVER!" Clark demanded, grabbing hold of the car, making it begin to slow down under his sheer strength.
Finally, Bruce brought the car to a screeching halt, leaving a dust storm to form around them.
Clark reached into the window and grabbed a hold of Bruce's collar. "What did you want with my family?" he demanded to know.
"Nothing. I swear!" Bruce answered. "I only had questions about the ship that brought you here. But I swear I don't have any intention of talking to anyone about my findings. Your father… Your Earth father, that is, seemed to be under the impression you didn't know much about what was going on."
"My Earth father?" Clark repeated with surprise in his voice. He then let go of Bruce. "If anyone in my family ever gets hurt because you came to visit us, I will destroy you." He warned just before scurrying back towards his home.
Bruce could only sit there in shock after what he had just witnessed. Not only did he get to see an actual spaceship, he also got to come in contact with another alien besides the symbiote compound, one that looked completely human; and he would never be able to tell a living soul about it. Not to mention, how strong Clark was already. "He is probably just as strong as Captain America... Maybe stronger. Man... What I could do if I had that kinda strength."
Days later, at Richard Parker's home, Richard was visited by someone he was not expecting to see.
"Richard. Thank god I've found you."
Richard's eyes became enlarged. "MARY!?" He blurted, having to shake his head to make sure he was seeing straight. "How can this be?"
"I don't know. The last thing I remember before trying to find you was being shot on the plane. After that I woke up in a desert somewhere. It was a completely different year. I didn't even know how I got there."
"How did you find me?"
"I'm not sure of that either."
Just then, Mary suddenly fell down to her knees. Something strange seemed to be happening to her. A black tarry substance began taking over her entire body.
"What's happening to you, Mary?"
The symbiote got up from off the ground. "Mary is no longer here. We are Mary now."
"What have you done with her!?" Richard bellowed.
"When Mary was shot, in order for us to survive we had to go dormant. We were awoken by Gamma radiation tests in the New Mexico desert. Only a small amount of Mary's brain is still functioning, just enough for us to make it here."
"How did you find me?"
"We could sense you."
"How?"
"In your veins lies one of us. However, you are dying, and- if we don't reconnect soon, you and the symbiote will die together."
"If I have one of you inside me, why am I not covered in black goop like Mary is?"
"Because the bat that bit you had only a small amount of us attached to it, causing you to get more of the bat DNA than ours. But I assure you, our symbiote is very much a part of you."
"What exactly are you?" Richard asked.
"At first, we were nothing more than dark energy, floating around the primordial void of the Living Abyss."
"Living Abyss?" Richard repeated. "I don't know what any of that means."
"Anti-life," the symbiote answered. "Located in the furthest regions of the galaxy, where the light cannot reach. Our creator, Knull, was guardian of the Living Abyss, given the rank of the King in Black by the Celestials; but he rebelled against the Celestials and all of existence, creating our kind, parasites which could bond to the Gods, corrupting their properties, destroying stars, and devouring entire civilizations. From out of the abyss Knull also manifested an artificial planet, called Klyntar, for us to thrive, creating the symbiote Hive-Mind."
"If you had your own planet, then why the hell are you here on mine?" Richard continued asking.
"For several millennia we fed off the dark energy of the Netherworld, but a powerful being by the name of Thanos found us, imprisoning our kind, and commanded us to do his bidding. He sent some of us to Krypton, hoping to conquer the Red-Sun planet, but when the Klyntar and Kryptonians rebelled against him, he chose to completely destroy our planet and theirs. Our kind would have become extinct if it wasn't for the All-Black, the first symbiote of our kind, managing to board a retreating spacecraft just as Krypton exploded. That spacecraft then landed here."
"Well… That's a nice story and all, but what do you plan on doing once we are all bonded together?"
The symbiote grew a mischievous grin. "We shall create a new Klyntar here on planet Earth."
"So… The All-Black symbiote is in my veins?"
"Yes. He is the last of our true kind."
"What are you then?"
"I have been forged through a human. I am the symbiote brother of Eddie Brock. I can sense another one of us on this planet. It is currently feeding off of a host in a hidden cave; the one who was birthed with your son. We must find it and reconnect, so that we can thrive once again."
"Fine!" Richard piped up. "I will rejoin you… under one condition."
"Name your demands."
"You must allow me time to spend with my wife once again."
"Impossible. She can barely function."
"Then forget it! Go find someone else to bond with!"
The symbiote was finally willing to submit to Richard's demands. "You will only be given a few minutes with her. After that she will be completely gone."
"A few minutes is better than nothing." Richard replied.
Just then, the black ooze began fading away, leaving only Mary visible. Richard quickly moved in to give her a hug.
"I'm sorry, Richard." She could barely speak. "You can't allow the symbiotes to join each other. They'll take over everything until there is nothing left for them to bond with."
"I know. I have an idea." Richard replied.
Just then, Richard pulled out a syringe which was filled with a powerful tranquilizer; the same tranquilizer he used to subdue his bat transformations. He then plunged it into her neck.
"I'm sorry, dear. I love you." Richard said softly, catching Mary as she slumped over, passing out in his arms.
He then got on his phone and made a call. "Dr. Banner, this is Richard Parker. I need your assistance."
Several hours later, the symbiote finally awoke from the sleep Richard had put them in. It could feel the rumbling of afterburners.
"Where are we!?" It demanded to know.
"We are on a rocket ship, heading into space." Richard replied. "And soon… we will be a part of the first black hole ever created by mankind. Earth is better off without us on it."
"NOOOOOO!" The symbiote shrieked, looking for any way off the ship that it could.
It then quickly shot towards the ventilation system, but before it could escape-
KABLOOM!