Let Me Introduce a Thing I'm Working On.
This week, I thought I might post a bit of a project I’m currently undertaking, in which I’m writing a story to try to answer how the Marvel Universe would react to DC characters.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these characters (their rights are currently held by Marvel Comics, and in this specific section some references are made to material held by DC Comics). This is written under fair use.
THE STORY WASN’T OVER when the battle was. There was no ‘happily ever after, end scene’ for New York. Life continued on, as life always does. With the closing of the portal and the encapsulation of the tesseract, the Avengers disbanded for the most part. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner kept in touch, having developed a strange compatibility through their short tenure on the team. Captain Steve Rogers returned to his apartment and his attempts to reintegrate himself into modern society. Thor took Loki to Asgard to be punished for his crimes against Midgard and hadn’t been heard from since. Agents Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov went back to doing whatever it was they did when they weren’t spying on vigilantes or stopping alien invasions, and S.H.I.E.L.D. itself seemed to keep a fairly low profile.
It took a little while, but New York recovered. The alien corpses were collected, the human bodies were buried. Rubble was removed and debris was swept away. Buildings were rebuilt. Support in many forms poured in from all corners of the earth, in part due to recognition of the Avengers’ bravery and New York’s sacrifice because of it. And slowly, subtly, life returned to normal.
Two months later, the portal reopened and a meteor crashed into the harbour.
TONY STARK IDLY FLICKED the sound control on the monitor to his right. In one corner of the screen was a live newsfeed of a reporter standing on the waterfront, commenting on the harbour incident just a few days ago. Another window was tracking internet hits on the incident, including everything from Twitter hashtags to conspiracy blogs to Google searches. Still other windows had the feed from C-SPAN on the emergency Congress meeting called concerning the recent events, the United Nations proceedings on whether or not this heralded a second invasion, S.H.I.E.L.D. and NYC’s public statements, and Wall Street stock reports.
On the monitor to his left was nothing. The screen was filled with data that was constantly being updated as the sensors collected more information, but none of it made any feasible sense. He glared at the data, then flicked the volume up a few more notches.
“That loud enough for you, Tony?” Bruce commented mildly from the other side of the lab.
“Hardly,” Stark replied, but he turned the volume down just the same, then decided to just mute the thing altogether. “I could still hear myself think.”
“Mm,” Bruce agreed, then, “any luck on your end?”
“Luck has nothing to do with it.” He sighed. “But I wouldn’t object to any right about now. The data just doesn’t make sense. I mean, there’s really only room for one in this thing, although I’m not sure how exactly you’d fit in there. There’s also no source of power anywhere on it. It’s made out of crystals, for chrissakes. I can’t even picture how the damn thing got off the ground, let alone landed in the harbour. And I make this sort of stuff.” He swiped his hand and the screens on the right monitor disappeared. “You?”
“Not a clue. The whole thing’s irradiated to the nines, but the wavelength doesn’t match anything known on earth. If I had to make a guess, I’d say it’s similar to gamma. The radiation can pierce concrete and steel, but not lead. From the look of it, lead’s about the only thing that’ll stop it.”
Stark pulled up the radiation data. “Huh. And that was on the ship?”
“And the debris sucked along with it.” Stark shifted the screen to display the data on the rocks and dust that had accompanied the ship. “The difference,” Banner continued, “is that the debris seems to have a bit more of a… well, a toxic radiation, almost.”
“Is it harmful to humans?”
“We haven’t tested that yet. Rats seem to be okay on short-term exposure. No guess yet on what long-term exposure will do.“
Stark pushed his wheeled chair away from the monitors and steepled his fingers. “So what do we know, then? We know that a few days ago, a small ship and a couple of rocks landed in the New York harbour, ostensibly from the same portal that brought the Chitauri in. We know that the ship is some complicated alien technology –”
“That eludes the great Tony Stark himself,” Banner interjected with a smirk.
“–That will need further review,” Stark amended, glaring at his friend. “We also know that the ship and the rocks are highly irradiated, although we don’t know if it’ll harm humans yet. That about it?”
“You forgot one thing,” Banner said. “We know that the ship was inhabited.”
