It's a pun, you dumb gopher.
Anyway, our heroes have been mind-controlled and captured by the Power Broker, who is apparently a woman called Melina, not, as was previously believed, Aldrich Killian. They each come to in various stages of "capture."
Magnus has been stripped to his boxers and is strapped to an upright table. No one else is in the room, but he's clearly being observed because he can't teleport. Maria is strapped into a chair being prepared for interrogation by three Widows. Spider-Man is strapped down on a surgical table, a team of doctors about to start harvesting tissue. Killian is in the room, generally backseat doctoring, while Melina is nearby messing with a tablet.
Bucky is in a room, on a bench, staring at a wall. No one has told him to do anything different.
Maria, recall, had managed to crack her Chemical Behavioral Modification with Magnus' help, and wriggles her bonds loose. One of the Widows gives her an order to stay still and leans in to re-secure her, but she resists the order, head-butts the Widow, and kicks her legs out from under her. The other two Widows attack - one swoops in with a taser, but Maria disarms her and zaps her, and then as the last one goes for the alarm, kicks her off-balance and takes her out.
Maria re-arms herself and gets the door open, slipping out into the shadowy hallways...
Meanwhile, Spidey starts to panic. They're arguing whether to start with lymph or blood (Killian is disappointed to realize that his web-shooters are mechanical, not organic), but Spidey manages to channel that fear into strength and snaps his bonds. He leaps to the ceiling and Melina hits a button her tablet, and Spidey feels his muscles start to lock up - but then he fights through it!
Melina backs out of the room and tells Killian to find her when this punk is unconscious or dead, and Killian throws punches and then fire. Spidey, however, is way too quick, dodges every shot, kicks Killian into the floor (which causes enough damage to the room that a bin pops open and reveals his web-shooters!). Spidey webs Killian to the wall and hot-wires the door open as he starts to burn through it.
Magnus is annoyed. The power of the multiverse at his fingertips, but these people manage to capture him? He focuses and calls on a pact with an extradimensional being he made a long time ago, whispering one request to fulfill their bargain: chaos.
At first, nothing. And then from somewhere in the facility, Magnus hears a scream, and suddenly he's unobserved again. He teleports out of the restraints and out into the hall. Something's going wrong - the lights are flickering and he can hear people running around in a panic. A guy in surgical scrubs runs around the corner and Magnus grabs him by the neck. "Where's my stuff?" he growls, being as intimidating as a guy in his boxers can be. The guy sputters a little and Magus threatens him with being folded into the fourth dimension, and the guy breaks and points Magnus toward the lab down the hall.
Magnus runs toward the lab, but spots someone hiding in the shadows. Fortunately, Maria figures out who he is (pretty easy, given his garb) before tasing him. They talk briefly and then hear Spidey calling for them. They split up - Magnus goes to get his stuff and Maria goes to find Spidey.
Maria finds Spidey coming out of the door. She shuts it and fries the controls with her taser, and a moment later the door starts to heat up - Killian. They get the hell out of there; neither wants to fight Killian. Then they'd have to listen to him.
Spidey and Maria find a control room, figuring they can orient themselves and find Bucky. But the room is darkened, the lights are flickering, and there's some kind of black ichor all over the walls...covering the bodies of the two techs who were monitoring the camera feeds. They enter the room, cautiously, but the ooze slides off the walls and lunges at Maria!
She dodges and zaps it with her taser, and Spider-Man flips over it, lands on the console, and starts calling up schematics. Maria dodges out of the way of the stuff, and yells "turn on the sprinklers!" Spidey does, water cascades down, and Maria shocks the stuff again, dissipating it. Maria finds a map of the facility and realizes that Bucky is in a cell on the next floor down. She opens the doors, and she and Spidey run off to find the others.
Bucky, for his part, notes the open door, but does nothing.
Magnus, now wet and glistening (we decided that since Stephen Amell plays Magnus this is pure fan service) finds the lab - door's open, and the sprinklers aren't on in here. There are multiple tables with all kinds of machinery and gear laid out, some of which doesn't look consistent with the tech on this world. Magnus notes that, but he's really more interested in the guy on the other side of the room.
In front of the guy is Magnus' runed suit, and the guy is poking at it with various tools, probably trying to figure out how to activate it. Magnus strides across the room and the guy looks up, curiously. "You've got one chance to live," Magnus says. "Give me my suit and the rest of my stuff, and get out of here, or I kill you in ways that don't even exist yet."
"Um." The guy gives him a once-over. "But you're just..." he gestures to Magnus' apparent lack of anything threatening.
"OK, then." Magnus moves, and the guy slides his hands into some mechanical controls on his table. Two apparent piles of junk rise up into robotic turrets, and Magnus finds himself under automatic rifle fire!
Magnus dives towards the guy, under the line of fire, and finds his hat on a shelf under his table. "Oh, now you're screwed." He reaches into his hat to pull out a comically large mallet...but can't. Something is still watching. Maybe the cosmic being he called on earlier? Whatever it is, it's interfering with his powers.
The tinkerer (hey, that's catchy) realigns the guns, and Magnus decides that this isn't worth his while. He backflips out of the room, taking a few scratches and nicks on the way, and plops the hat on his head.
He runs down the hall and meets up with Maria and Spidey, and the three of them find a stairway to Bucky's room. They try to get him to move ("ready to comply"), but figure they'd better crack the conditioning first. Maria has Spidey web him up and then shocks him with her taser, and somewhere in Bucky's head the thought occurs that they normally give him a bite-guard for this...and then he comes to.
"Sorry," says Maria. "Had to snap you out of it."
"My head feels...full," mutters Bucky. Clearly he's still not entirely out of it. Meanwhile, Magnus pulls his suit out of his hat and puts it on; the Tinkerer looks away for a moment and looks back to an empty table. He shrugs; he wasn't really getting anywhere anyway.
The facility is still going haywire, and Maria notes that this kind of chaos probably got Wanda's attention - meaning she's probably on the way. They could confront her here? Bucky votes for leaving. They have a safehouse to fall back to, and he's not feeling 100% anyway.
They find an elevator shaft and pull it open. Bucky slides down using his arm as a brace, Spidey just crawls with Maria on his back, and Magnus pulls a feather out of his hat and drops. (Bucky watches: "Is he..." Maria: "I'm sure he knows what he's doing.")
The four of them land on the elevator, Bucky punches through it, and they drop into the cab and then out into the lobby. As they're leaving, a TV monitor kicks on and Killian's smug-ass face greets them. "OK, well, thanks for dropping by..."
Magnus considers whether his request for chaos is going to result in something eating the building. He hopes so.
"I'd say you've got about half an hour before some old friends drop in," says Killian, and the TV kicks off.
The heroes get out onto the street, and start heading back to base. They aren't entirely sure what's happening next, but out here they're a little exposed.

No comments:
Post a Comment