As both parties take knees and face one another, Stamey and the Dreadpools interact. Nearby, the other Dreadpools watch. Every now and then, one of them sneezes; just as often, one of the tacked hyraxes does. Just as often, one of them belches. Less often, one of them falls asleep while standing up...and starts snoring.

A flerken, an alien creature that looks like a Singapura housecat from Earth, skulks around. He wears a cat-fitting variant of the Dreadpool suit. Every now and then, the flerken uses his gut-storing powers to regurgitate, and promptly re-ingest/re-store, his own Bloodstone. (The Bloodstone is a recurring element of the Dreadpool suit...but hardly standard-issue armament.) Like most flerkens, he can store, via his gut, objects of immense size, despite his own very small relative physical size. As a flerken, the tentacles that aid him in his gut storage/unloading are reminiscent of those of a gelatinous octopus of Earth...and, sadly, often leave the same gelatinous mess of the same. He's likely a housecat that Carol Danvers would not likely enjoy always having to clean up after... And if not her, Muneeba Khan, mother of the Inhuman heroine Ms. Marvel, surely wouldn't...

Nearby, the huddle continues. A few more details have become apparent. (Some of the trio have their comms open, so that other Dreadpools can listen in. This might or might not include Springerpool, Rugbypool's canine companion...

In the beginning, there was a ranch woman. (She was a gigantian Eternal.) She had a baby. It was an egg...and even for the extreme rarity of gigantians laying eggs, this egg was very large. (She did not enjoy laying it at all.) After the egg was laid, the ranch family took it upstairs and laid it in a crib.

Alas, the egg started growing. No one ever saw it grow...but it got too big too fast. It soon became apparent that it wouldn't fit through the door before too long. Hence, they moved it to the back garden. (This is less maternal, as many would know; but it wasn't like the egg had hatched yet. Plus, as things were, they didn't have a choice.)

Before long, though, it was about to outgrow the garden, too; a lot of its plants had died. (Gigantian Eternals have been known to throw fits about their garden plants being destroyed, after all...) Not knowing what else to do, they loaded it into a flatbed and drove it out to a dried-up lake in the canyon...where it continued to grow.

The gigantian Eternals living nearby began to worry. The evacuation whistle was blown; a lot of neighboring gigantians complied and left the ranch as well as neighboring ranches. The egg's mother, alas, was harder to sway; she put up a slight fit when her egg was moved into the canyons...and was only compliant because even she had to admit that the egg's girth had become a problem. Either way, her male relatives had to throw her over a cliff, and into the crossfires of a pentagon of sonic cannons just to knock her out. Once she was, they placed her on a flatbed and drove her away. Stamey assures the Corps that the egg's mother is nowhere nearby; she's locked up in a mental hospital near this planet's antipode, and taking at least six sedatives intravenously.

That aside, the egg is still where it was. The few remaining locals can't tell whether it's still growing or not; it's gotten so big, that one could tell even less now than they could've back when the egg was still diictodont-size. (That's much smaller, for reminders...) The men in Stamey's family would rather not dishonor the egg's mother, if there's a way around that...which is why they've summoned the Dreadpool Corps. To put it simply, they'd like the Dreadpool Corps to commit an abortion.

"Sounds challenging enough." Rugbypool smiles and rubs Springerpool behind the ears. "Now... About our pay?"

"Pay?" Stamey stops and thinks; he could take less time to do so... "Oh! Right..." He smiles shyly...and scratches his head. The other Dreadpools have a bad feeling about those... Those of them who actually have souls, that is...

"It'll be waiting for you, at the gate," he tells them, "as you extract. And if it's not there, then there's another place where it might be. Someone came and told me, earlier...about fifteen minutes before I got here, in fact."

"Oh? What did they look like?"

"Don't know. He wore a robe and kept his hood up." He surveys them. "He said he used to be one of you. He said that they used to call him..." He holds up his finger, trying to remember... "Oh yeah, I remember now. You called him, he says, Roachpool."

"Oh yeah," Rugbypool starts to have vague memories. "Yeah, the brooder... I..." He looks around, confused. "I wasn't aware that he'd quit." He looks around again. "Did anyone else know...?"

The other Dreadpools shrug. The Springer Spaniel whimpers in confusion.

"Anyway, thanks, Stamey," Rugbypool finally un-takes his knee. Behind him, the others follow suit. Before them, Stamey un-takes his knee...and towers over them once more...not that he didn't when he was taking his knee. "If we don't see you again, good luck with the family." He looks around. "The ranch, too. It could use some better stock; it seems like everything here is either a skeleton or a watchdog."

Stamey shrugs abashedly. "We evacuated the herds shortly after everyone else got out. Either way, I'll wait around to learn if you've succeeded. If you don't succeed... Well, I suppose you'd guess where I'd be."

"Not here; yes, we get it." The Dreadpools salute the gigantian Eternal and are soon on their way.

Among the tacked hyraxes, the crowfellow has returned. He and the other birdfolk have found the target, of course. And via the open comms link, they've learned of its relevance. They'd sighted it earlier; they just weren't sure if it was the target or one of many eccentric sights that there are to bypass on this ranch.

Now informed, the ground cavalry packs up and prepares to move out. Their target has been acquired; now only the rest of the preliminaries remain to be attended to. And after that, an epic abortion to remember. And with luck, the target won't fight back; which, in the many diverse (and no shortage of sick) minds of the Dreadpool Corps, is the best kind of target.

Personal (1930s-era Technicolor) interview sequence:

This is a dancer. She's from Harlem and is a time-traveler from the 1930s. In her time, Harlem has become a mega-mural...and its graffiti artists are mostly the black demographic of New York. (And in the world that she's from, this'd include demographics of sapient siamangs, black howler monkeys, golden-backed uakari monkeys, and black lemurs.) One of the siamangs once climbed the Empire State Building...right before getting shot by an airship-gunship while still atop it, and making the epic plummet back down to the street...) Also in this world, the Red Ghost is a black man...and from Harlem.

Her dancing dress is Dreadpool-themed...and also a Dreadpool suit. Needless to say, she's a co-member of the Corps. She's not just a dancer; she's a hostess. And she's just as deadly within men's imaginations as she is with a pair of spadroons and/or a pair of Steyr AUG submachine guns. Her preference within the void of the latter, though, would be a Thompson SMG...if only to empty its magazines into a racist white man's crotch. (Way too many of those still live in New York in her time, as one might know.) In her time/world, there's also a huge stegotetrabelodon paleo-elephant, trained by racist white Republican men, who goes around New York, blowing its trumpet and attacking the local blackfolk... Nola's been told that they once tried to make the stegotetrabelodon a circus elephant...but that he was too big (and not to mention too scary) for them to take; apparently the circus was no circus of terror. With its wrath on watch, it's a miracle that the Afro-artists of Harlem ever proliferate any art at all...

"I've a bad feeling about this," Nola Wilson tells the fourth wall. She hesitates. "And it's not just because we've been asked to commit an abortion..." She shrugs. "I don't know anything about that. In my time, when people got knocked-up, the only shit they had to worry about was a miscarriage. I didn't even know what an abortion was until the Sentinel mutant told me." She hesitates. "I'm not a mutant; that's not why I talked to him. He's just one of the few Dreadpools within the Corps who always says things like they are. Everyone else here jokes so much, they can't be serious anymore."

In the seat next to Nola, a black cat crawls around. He's not what he appears; he's a cat-sìth. A cat-sìth is a human that can morph into a black cat. The very first one was a Celt of Earth...although other races have produced their own since. This cat-sìth wears a cat-fitting variant of the Dreadpool suit...and is, hence, a co-member of the Corps.

In the time/world that Nola hails from, they're common...and many of their alter-egos are either black, Jewish, Wakandan, or something like it. In her hands, Nola takes the cat-sìth and places him in her lap. She strokes his fur while finishing the sequence.

"I'll just try to be thankful," Nola continues, "that this egg we're about to destroy...this fetus we're about to abort, or whatever...isn't one of my sisters or daughters from back home in Harlem. Plus, based on what I've heard, killing it might be for the better. Everyone on this ranch is gone, because of it." She scoffs. "I've been told that in Germany, there's this invention called the cuckoo clock." She smiles and shakes her head. "In moments like these, I can't help but wonder if the Germans made the cuckoo clock just to insult the Jews..." She shrugs. "But at least those cuckoos are small enough to fit within the sockets that they always come out of, each time they tell the time. Most actual cuckoo chicks, I've been told, are too big for their nests." She attempts to look into the cat-sìth's eyes. "You ready for your bowl of milk yet, baby? Eh?"

The cat-sìth leaps out of her lap and runs off. At this, she shakes her head and scoffs again. "I keep forgetting that he's not a real cat."

Back at the bivouac, the other Dreadpools begin to prepare for the expedition they've just been deployed on. They're all aware of it; again, many of them have been listening to the Dreadpool suits' comms link.

From cases with locks, they retrieve equipment. On the surface, they look like action figures of self-propelled howitzers. They're a lot more than that.

All alone, in the middle of open ground, they're left... Via Van Dyne particles, alas, they're soon enlarged...to the size of actual self-propelled 155mm howitzers (for the most part, regarding the caliber...). Their engines start, shortly after they've been enlarged.

The sides of the howitzers' self-propelling vehicles bear the same roundel; the one of the Dreadpool Corps. As far as the Dreadpools are concerned, their own mask, on the side of a howitzer, looks much better than that "Don't Tread on Me" snake flag that the US Navy once used, back when the War of 1812 was still a fad...and then some, mostly during the Georgian period...

Into a long file, the howitzers soon form a caravan. Into the ranch's canyonlands, they soon proceed. They'll also soon be reunited with the recon elements of the Corps, airborne and grounded.

A duck-footed dum-dum, a co-member of the Corps, sits atop one of the vehicles in the caravan. A bass drum is often slung to his back; a big Canadian maple leaf is painted across both of the drum's canvases. While lying on his front half, he uses his back legs, alternating them, to beat a marching tempo for the caravan.

The mobilization has been greenlit. The cuckoo kaiju's egg will soon be in peril... Or rather, that's what these Dreadpools would prefer to believe...for their extraction from this mission would potentially be very hard to pull off, if this ordeal didn't go their way... (Most things don't go their way, it seems... And yet, they never learn. Or rather, the Deadpool Corps remains more popular among prospective clients than the Dreadpool one does. More popular, understand...)