“Training time.” They all groaned together, even Parker. “Today’s lesson: Fastest way to piss off a super-scientist!” They all blinked as I spread my hands out over my lab. “Do NOT destroy anything, but if, for instance, you wanted to distract some nefarious and sinister twat, what exactly would you break, accidentally or deliberately, to do so?”

Parker was the first to point, at a device with something spinning inside it that was glowing in some strange colors. “Is, is that a centrifugal atomic filtrator?” he squeaked.

“Which variant?” I asked Parker to clarify.

Nobody had any idea what I was talking about, but Parker scratched his head. “The Thaumic model?” he guessed.

“Last year’s. Dr. Richards gave me his spare. Cost to replace?” I inquired blandly.

“Um, I think... about five million?” Parker said hesitantly.

“If I wanted a new one. This model could probably be had for about three million.” They all pursed their lips. “Nice pick. Third most expensive thing in here.”

Surprisingly, it was Rand who surveyed the room and pointed at something that looked like a combination between a microscope and a microwave oven. “What’s that?”

“Optical paraphotonic conduction field scanner.” Parker’s jaw dropped. “Excellent eye, Master Rand. Stumble through that, someone is out a cool seven million.”

“That thing? Like, the big computer?” Gwen pointed out a bank of computers against the wall hastily. Lots of moving diodes and wave displays.

“This is important,” I raised a finger. “That’s just a server, a storage and calculating computer for the other instruments here. It’s worth a couple hundred thousand based on it being cutting edge and stuff, but it’s actually totally replaceable.

“However, if your super-scientist is the kind who doesn’t back up his data,” I smirked, and they all did the same, “yeah, you can TOTALLY piss them off by trashing something like that, and sending lots of their time and effort down the drain.”

“I’m gonna guess that,” Luke Cage pointed out a bulbous thing that looked like a steel beachball trying to have kids with a poly-armed horseshoe.

“Transphasic field resonance inducer. Used for mixing stuff that doesn’t want to mix. Congrats, nine million to replace that thing, Master Cage! Your degree in lab-smashing is coming along nicely.”

He beamed.

Suddenly wandering through a lab wasn’t so boring, as I completely shifted the focus from what everything did to what would be best to destroy and why; what was just mundane wrapped in fancy lights and colors; what was time-intensive and complex, but not really expensive; and what would really start a tic going on some genius if you stumbled into it and too bad, so sad...

---

“That is a LOT of E-Elements,” Parker murmured, looking at the rows of stuff stored here. Glass was common where possible, but a lot of stuff here needed special materials to store them in and remain intact.

There were a lot of strange colors among the things, and some were glowing, sparking, misting, or even dripping slowly.

It was definitely the biggest show of E-Elements they’d seen outside the Museum of Technology and Science, and they didn’t dare have the really expensive stuff at the museum there, or some Powered crook would certainly come in and clean them out.

“There’s nothing here that is not known to be usable in something,” I told them all. “The real research in both science and alchemy is finding uses for the totally oddball E-Elements.”

“What’s this one?” Jessica said, pointing at a collection of grey metallic spheres that were floating in the middle of their container, odd shimmers around them.

“Gravity Cobalt, sometimes called Levitalt. It’s used in the rotary coils and gravitomagnetic generators of anti-gravity devices. You know who The Vizard is?” They all nodded. Schmot Guys who run around in bright purple and yellow and declare themselves Da Schmotest to the world were hard to forget, especially when they messed with the Fantastic Four so often. “Uses the stuff in his anti-grav disks and the like. Probably found a vein of it somewhere and figured out how to refine the stuff. It goes for about ten grand an ounce, and that’s with only Schmot Guys knowing how to use the stuff.

“And he uses it in his sticky disks?” Cindy Moon piped up, a cunning look in her eyes.

“There’s about half an ounce in each disk, yes.” I pointed at the spheres. “All the little ones of the same size are from his levitation disks.”

They all laughed despite themselves.

“You’re the flier, so you’re probably feeling it ripple in the gravity field, Jessica?” She turned a startled face on me, and nodded after a moment. “So, point out the other three Gravity Elements in here for us.”

She hesitated, biting her lip, and then stepped forward, waving her hands back and forth. After a moment, she pointed twice, and after some concentration, at a dark box on the bottom row.

“Very good. Gravity Cesium, redirects a gravity field, creating a conducted gravity beam. If there’s a strong enough source, you can shoot stuff with it like a railgun... or use it to pipe water. Gravity Silicon down there, sometimes called Floorium,” I smirked, and explained the pun as Parker groaned. “It creates a gravity field along an axis when there’s no prevailing gravity field if you run the proper modulation through it. So, you use it to make artificial gravity fields... like, say, floors you can walk on in space. One of the most commonly-used Gravity Elements among all space-faring civilizations. You can find it packed under all their floors.

“The one down in the corner is Gravity Iron, which is pretty inert until you run an electrical charge through it, at which time portions rapidly reverse gravity around itself. At full charge, it powers up to exactly one negative prevailing-gravity and falls upwards against gravity until it loses its charge.

“It’s mixed into the hulls of many starships, but our production methods for it are abysmally slow. Dr. Richards uses it in the Fantasi-car to lighten the load.

“The most valuable thing by weight in this room is the Void Iridium.” I pointed to an inky black finger-sized arc of metal sitting alone in a small box. “It’s used in inertial compensators as the focus of the mass offset by some unknown means. That bit is off a Drakka ship. We have no functional means of producing it at this time, and the only compensators we have are restricted to personal effects.”

“So, worth a lot, but we can’t do anything with it?” Luke Cage asked, smirking despite himself.

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Something you CAN do, however...

If you're not reading this on Royal Road, you're helping pay a thief. Please read it in its original home, it's still free! You get the foreword and afterword, author comments, and comments from people with questions! I have not given permission for this story to be posted ANYWHERE ELSE.

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“Inertial compensators are one of the things a society needs to develop faster-than-light drives, or the infinity/mass interaction just shuts you down. So, yeah, worth a lot, can’t use it... yet!” I agreed with him.

“And you use all of this?” Gwen Stacey asked, looking around at, well, everything.

“No, but I could. I’m sticking with less esoteric stuff for the most part. I’m not trying to find new quark-level isometrics, so the subatomic wave oscillator worth twelve million stays up in Dr. Richard’s lab.”

Parker was almost salivating with eagerness.

“And you don’t need super-tools to do math, which is what runs everythin’!” Grimm spoke up as he wandered into the lab.

“It’s Mr. Grimm!” “The Rock!” and variants thereof rang out, and the whole crowd of starstruck teens mostly converged on him. He dealt with it all affably, pointing out that he’d heard of all of them and knew who they were, and then getting a round of approval cheers for a tour of the upper levels, where all the really cool stuff was.

He winked at me, I waved him off, and followed along as he showed off the rocket ship, the hangar, the real labs, the workout rooms where the REAL weights were (handily winning a tug of war against the whole team), and then cookies and sandwiches in the family room afterwards.

I tossed him an Energized Amethyst to suck on. Grape gobstobbers were totally cool with him.

Of course, the FF were all there having lunch, so naturally conversations started going off.

Parker and Dr. Richards almost immediately fell into technobabble and equation-trading, which actually devolved into a discussion on new potential designs and uses of his web-fluid and deployment devices, polymer comparisons, and other egghead stuff such that the two totally lost track of the time and the rest of us.

That was fine. Johnny Storm ended up taking the guys back to the rec room to test things out with equipment SHIELD didn’t have and to show them his motorcycle collection, Sue easily fell into real fashion, society, and professional social talk with the girls, and I was basically left there chatting with Grimm.

“How’s that Circle working for you?” I asked him. I’d put up a mana-focusing Formation down in the building’s basement, running a hole right down to the bedrock to bring up the Earthpower. Grimm was spending a lot of time down there, feeling the Earthpower and how he could use it, crystallizing his Matrix.

“I got something,” he admitted, patting his stony gut, and I smiled at him encouragingly as he shook his stony head. “Damn, you were right about that cultivatin’ a Matrix stuff being addictive at times. Watching that first grain form, and learning how t’ do it t’ draw in the next one, trying t’ do it quicker and purer and bigger... you can lose a lot of time that way.”

“Earth-users are most prone to it. Earth has always been the most stable and patient of the Elements,” I nodded along. “Getting anything out of it?”

He hur-hurred deep in his belly, clearly pretty satisfied. “Using that basic Landwave maneuver you mentioned, been putting in some practice at a local junkyard. Just focusing all the power into a wave instead of all around... damn nice, that was, sent a bunch of Doom’s robots all flying, shocked the hell out of old Doomie when I ignored physics like that. Helped me tank his blasts without getting knocked around, too.” His blue eyes gleamed at the thought.

I tossed him an E-Citrine. His eyes lit up as he caught it nimbly with his three-fingered hand and tossed it in. “Mmm. Somewhere between orange and mango?” he slurped at me.

“Sounds about right?” I shrugged.

“So, how long before I can start looking like a human again?” he asked, thumbing his barrel of a chest.

“You’ll know when you can feel your skin as a bastion of earthpower, and can draw it inside yourself, ‘storing it’, as it were. I’ll note that’ll mostly be an external change,” I warned him. “You’ll look pretty human, but you’ll still be heavier than human, and your insides aren’t going to be human.”

He looked away from me for a moment. “Could I, y’know, be with a woman?” he asked after a moment.

“Yes. You can probably have kids, too. They may or may not inherit the Earth bias you have.” I tilted my head, and smiled slightly, his broken rocky face surprisingly mobile. “You sweet on someone, Mr. Grimm?”

He coughed and looked around awkwardly. “Well, there’s this nice gal who likes to sculpt I been seeing...” he admitted after a few more coughs.

“Pretty open-minded,” I noted, lifting an eyebrow.

“She’s, uh, blind,” he managed to say, saw I wasn’t going to give him any grief over it like Johnny instantly would, and went on, “And she’s, um, the Puppet Master’s daughter.”