Starter for @rulesxunbroken
The obituary of Doctor Olivia Octavius had been a lackluster affair of grainy black type and a small picture that one could only assume was the one on her Alchemax employee ID. The dark mane as untamed as its bearer, eyes not quite focused on the camera lens, even if pointed in its general direction. A picture of necessity, so unlike those hidden in the shoebox in the back of May Parker’s closet, buried under winter coats she’d never wear again but couldn’t bring herself to throw away.
Was that some sort of comment on the pictures as well? In the back of her mind, May thought it probably was, but she’d become rather good at shoving away those ideas before they came to the forefront of her mind where she’d have to deal with them.
Well, she couldn’t very well do that now, not with the amount of concentration required to rebuild the machine that had nearly destroyed the city. Liv’s collider might have been demolished between the efforts of the varied heroes who fought her and the city officials that refused to let a single bolt remain once the whole fiasco had come to an end, but May Parker had the benefit of knowledge. Not to mention her shared history with the shamed late Olivia Octavius.
May snorted to herself as she thought of Olivia as gone, shaking her head as her thoughts returned for the hundredth time to the line printed in a tiny font beneath the scientist’s obituary in the paper.
Efforts to locate the body of Doctor Olivia Octavius are still ongoing.
Right. It was all the proof May needed. Liv was alive. There was a rumour she’d heard from more than one source, one that could only have been started by someone who’d been there, that a green figure had been seen hurdling into the portal in those seconds before it was destroyed. So yeah, May was convinced, and she wasn’t about to let the woman get away with what she’d done.
And the race was on. The only way May could chase her down would, logically, be if she acquired a collider of her own. May Parker might have been a clever woman, capable of rather spectacular feats of engineering, but she was no physicist, a crucial prerequisite when it came to building something as complex as a machine that could literally rip holes in time and space.
Luckily, May was blessed with a fairly decent memory and the knowledge of where Liv had built the smaller prototype of her collider. And why wouldn’t she know? Back in those days, they’d been far from enemies.
With the last bolt secured, May swiped her arm across her forehead and stood back to survey her work. It wasn’t pretty, and she’d had to replace a few metal panels in places where they didn’t seem entirely solid, but the hard parts, the mathematics, were already programmed in from the endless testing that Liv had undergone before ever starting on the proper version of her collider.
Now it was just a matter of luck, as the power that the collider necessitated, albeit less than its larger little brother, was sure to draw a whole lot of attention. It was underground and on the edge of the city, so unlikely to cause any real damage upon success, but May was well aware that she would only get one shot. Failure would bring a number of consequences that she chose not to consider just yet.
Taking a deep breath, May also refused to acknowledge that the hunt for the scientist was itself likely doomed to fail due entirely to the sheer number of possible realities she could have ended up in. But May Parker was nothing if not an optimist.
A low, pulsating hum began as she initialized the power up sequence, May could feel the vibrations in her bones. As it the hum accelerated, she wiped clammy palms on her jeans and stepped closer to the machine. So far so good. The second sequence followed the first, spindling power from every source it could and drawing it into a single point and allowing it to bounce within the collider.
Faster and faster the machine hummed until it was no longer a pulse, just a steady, baritone groan. A pinprick of light appeared and splintered in seconds, filling the collider space with a scattered path reminiscent of lightning. And then, dead center, the light bloated, pushing outwards into a sphere.
It was working. For now, at least, and there was no time to waste. Heaving her go-bag onto her shoulders, just a few necessities, May set her jaw and stepped forward into the brightly shining abyss. In an instant she was pulled into a countless number of directions all at once, feeling as if her cells themselves were being split apart and put back together and rearranged. It wasn’t painful, but there was a wrongness to it that had violent shudders traveling down where her spine was meant to be.
And just as quickly, it was over. May felt the ground beneath her feet and stumbled as she worked to relearn where up and down were and how it felt to possess a physical form.