“That guy who mind-controlled a bunch of people a month or two ago?” I asked incredulously. “Have you been eating your magnapsium?!” I demanded of him, wagging my finger at him. “You know those control freak guys love using personal connections!”

“Yeah, yeah, I got five pounds of it, pounded up in granules, ordered it from Lensherr himself. Just came in yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

“A teaspoon at a time, in the morning and the night, no more. Taking too much of that stuff too fast could really have an effect on your intelligence for a long time, as it’ll coat some of the neural paths too fast. You’d end up Dumb Grimm Da Rockhead for a good year or two. Err on the safe side unless you like being stupid.”

“Like that Hulk guy?” he nodded quickly. “Will do. Man, one color change and they give you an entirely new name...”

“Well, he got out of the city pretty fast when that happened. I hear the U.S. Army is chasing him for some reason?”

“Apparently he gained his powers from a really hush-hush explosive bomb test using gamma energy.” Grimm’s voice dropped. “Reed actually knows the guy, says he’s probably the best atomic physicist on the planet, save for himself, a really smart guy. Bruce Banner, he called him. Says he still logs into the Quantum boards occasionally, and they had a good relationship while he was over at the Avengers place.”

“No offense, Mr. Grimm, but the States military has a lot of batshit crazy arseholes in it.”

He was former Air Force, and looked at me sharply, but I didn’t back down. Instead, he just sighed. “Lots of good people in the military, Dynamo. And yeah, some total arseholes. This General Ross chasing the big angry green guy ain’t giving the vibes of the former.”

“Did he try to rope you in, or reactivate your commission?” I asked incredulously.

“He definitely wants me to go take Banner’s Hulk form on,” he scoffed. “And, y’know, if he ain’t all mad and stuff, I could take him. Soon’s he gets angry, however, all bets are off.”

“Yeah, I heard. The madder he gets, the stronger he gets. Nobody knows if he’s got a limit. He’s probably an Avatar of something, too, what with the body change and everything.” And that totally meant his rage trick wouldn’t work in a strong Forsaken Aura. Sama and Briggs could roll right over him, most likely.

When your biggest and best trick involved mainlining some form of external power feed, just cut the feed. Not much different than pulling the plug on a rampaging machine. He might not be able to maintain the green form at all in a Forsaken Aura, as that was a lot of energy to be spending.

Hells, a Null Strike could probably destroy the Hulk transformation!

“How do you compare to Thor?” I asked him professionally.

“Welllll, everything with that guy has to be a bit of a competition, so we had a lifting contest, and he beat me soundly. He called me a ‘mighty rock troll’, I called him Goldilocks, and we had some brews together.”

“Makes sense. Supposedly he’s the son of Odin and Gaia, the Earth Mother. So, he’s drawing strength from both the earth and sky. He’s not a pure Strength god like Hercules, but he’s definitely going to be up on the scale.”

“Yeah, but soon’s I got my first grain, my max bench went up a ton.” His blue eyes gleamed.

“Nice!” I gave him a thumbs-up. “If I may ask?”

“86 tons now,” he declared proudly. “I can brace a lot more than that, o’ course, but that’s lifting.”

“Speed?” I pressed.

“Well...” he replied hesitantly.

“Wrestling works just fine if you get your grip and lifting up, Mr. Grimm, but if you can’t get moving faster, it doesn’t help your boxing at all. You still hit things a lot lighter than the big guys. You know Hercules can throw a punch that breaks the speed of sound, right?”

“Huh. Nope, didn’t know that...” He looked thoughtful at the implications.

“KE equals one-half m-v-squared,” I reminded him. “Stop thinking you’re big and slow. If you can’t move faster than a normal human being as strong as you are, you’re falling behind, Mr. Grimm.”

“Well, I ain’t got the lightning reflexes like you do, either,” he sniffed a bit defensively.

“They aren’t the same thing,” I chided him. “Reaction time and speed of movement are two very different things. Yeah, it means you might be able to move faster than you can see, so you might need to keep it to simple movements, like, oh, punches and kicks.” His eyes rolled. “And jumping. Jumping would probably work.”

“Huh.” He thought about that a bit. “The big green rage machine can jump an awful long way...”

“At least three miles. I don’t think I have to tell you how fast something has to be going from a standing start to go for three miles, right? Just think how fast he has to be in order to be able to move to get that kind of speed from a crouch. There’s no doubt he’s using kinetic energy tricks, but that mound of muscle is moving!”

“Can I do that kind of stuff?” he asked reasonably.

“There’s a specific kind of machine you can build to test out your striking speed. Furthermore, it’s made of metal and gears.” I gave him a serious face. “Earth stuff. If it can move that fast, then you damn well should be able to.”

“What’re we talking?” he asked, leaning forward with some interest and a slurp on his gemstone jawbreaker.

----------

It looked like a web, but the Earth-Boron Carbide over-reacted on exposure to air, puffing up and crystallizing in a glittering array of gem-like crystals over the surface of the strands. The nature of their expansion also made them more prone to expand in sheets and harder geometric patterns than standard webbing.

It was still unstable and would collapse within an hour, and more pointedly, it wasn’t sticky. However, the crystals did tend to grow into one another, as well as get caught on one another easily. Wrap something up, and they were basically stuck until the stuff disintegrated.

Stronger than base webbing, too, as well as stiffer. Probably not as good for safety net bounces for people, but for falling junk it was just fine.

It was also pretty vulnerable to the right sonic frequencies, if someone could figure them out, but we couldn’t have everything.

“Nice work,” I told Peter, as we watched the stress tests for the standard cables. “Way too much work for appearances and something not as useful as your base webbing, but it works just fine.”

The shooter had three settings, instead of the initial two I had envisioned: a basic string, for extended reach and wrapping something; a spray mode to form a larger net; and a flat plane mode to make a more defensive shield once the crystals grew together. The initial strands were only sticky for a few seconds before the crystals grew out, but that would be enough to completely wrap up a target or anchor themselves if required.

“Thanks!” He was plenty excited that this alternate formula was working out the way it was. Of course, it was on the expensive side, but Ryder and Jones had started taking ‘vocational courses’ in law enforcement, basically preliminary SHIELD training, and were collecting a per diem now, giving them some income and a sense of worth, instead of struggling to make ends meet with no real job while going to school.

Peter had already received his first royalty check for his polymer patents, a permanent variant of his own webbing that could be sprayed down externally with yet another polymer coating, and would basically last for years, if not decades, as long as it was maintained. It was a quarter the weight of steel, far easier to make, non-magnetic, and non-reactive, as well as environmentally neutral.

The materials to make it were fairly easy to come by, too, not needing expensive iron deposits. Oil, silicon, graphite, and a few reactants were basically the gist of it. The models we’d whipped up together to actually make different size cables were also patented, and pretty damn thorough.

Susan Storm and Peggy Carter were actually investing in a plant to make the cables over in Queens, and there were inquiries coming in from Europe and the Tribes, too.

Yeah, it was a nice royalty check, and it was only going to get bigger.

I knew he was aching to run home and give the check to his aunt and uncle, but we still finished out the tests for Jewel’s shooters.

We were almost done when Peter’s phone rang. He grabbed it up, and had a big smile on when he answered, “Hello, Aunt May! I have some good news!”

“Peter, there’s been an accident at the plant where Ben worked. They found him unconscious near the reactor, and he’s in the hospital with some strange scarring on his face...” she interrupted him breathlessly.

Like that, his euphoric mood drained to a pale face. I watched as he listened, got the details on where his uncle was, and hung up brusquely.

“My uncle Ben is in the hospital, some accident where he worked. I have to go see him!”

“Two minutes.” He paused before tearing out of there. “Two minutes, finish up, clean up, and I’ll go with you,” I said reassuringly. “I’ve wanted to meet your aunt and uncle for a while, this is as bad a time as any.”

His mouth opened, closed, and he didn’t know what to say. I pushed him towards the tensile-tester. “Get the last two sets of break numbers, and we’re out of here.”

------

They’d moved him out of critical care, although he was still unconscious, and he was laying there in bed as if sleeping.

He was pretty much as I’d seen him before, a middle-aged man closing in on retirement, his wife May tall and thin and graceful in a white-haired manner.

The lightning bolt patterns on his face were completely new, however, and the hackles rose on my arms on seeing them.

Oh my fucking gods...

I tore my eyes away from them and contemplated the wall, my thoughts racing.

Sunuvabitch. They screwed over Owen Reece big time...

Well, that was to be expected. Reece was a bit of a whiny wuss who never really grew up, and who never should have had the power that he did.

The job at the Hudson Nuclear Plant had been good paying for the light work, maintenance-centered, and he’d been lucky to land it.

There was no way I could chalk this particular event up to luck, however.

I knew that if I went looking there wasn’t going to be an Owen Reece listed working here. He was probably safely and happily employed many, many miles away, and likely was married and had kids now, his life completely re-written for him to keep him a long way away from anything nuclear.

Instead, another figure with potentially cosmic significance was in the right place at the right time.

I left the two of them to stay by his side while I went to the window. I couldn’t believe the nerve of the two, making this happen this way.

If they had, there definitely would be more moves made to help the process out, right? Instead of Uncle Ben stumbling around and accidentally finding out what he could do...

The sky went red, painting the room behind me, bright and suddenly enough to spin the Parkers around, while the Red Eyes all manifested, gazing at the sky.