“Stephen, if you would like to do the honors,” Reed Richards smiled. The Master of the Mystic Arts smiled, shaking his head at the idea, and stepped forward to engage the power to the Dimensional Engine Reed Richards had devised.

A lot of power in a variety of esoteric wavelengths began to flow through cables and wires of some equally exotic Elements, and resonators and emitters of even rarer Isotopes. Particle effects gathered smoothly in the air, working slowly and smoothly at the Veil, starting to peel it back and open up a science-made Gate to another dimensional place, the first of its kind on the planet.

“Extraordinary.” A quiet light was glowing on the Amulet at Strange’s throat as he stepped back to me. “The energies to do this are completely wrong from what I am familiar with, and are being used in a completely different manner...”

“Opposite side of the Law/Chaos divide,” I replied to him, watching my own panel of readouts as a back-up set of eyes. “Not surprising. This is a very rigid and fixed way of doing what magic does almost organically.”

“We have projection of an operating vortex! Vortex tunnel extending out towards target coordinates!” Said coordinates on an empty moon in an alternate dimension provided by a Portal from Dr. Strange, devices sent through to establish the target lock and a homing beacon there for us to track and lock onto, giving us more metrics to work with.

This was a whole new area of science, as it were, and the stuff we were inventing here was going to form the foundation of dimensional science for a long time.

There was a blip on one of my readouts, and my Red Eyes suddenly bounced up into crazy alertness. “Tracking a sudden shear along axis-5!” I swore, as the reading started to return to normal. I immediately pulsed out to verify, and half my board went instantly red, Eyes looking all over them in a mad dance. “CUT ALL POWER!” I demanded loudly, and smashed my own hand into the Interdiction generator’s button.

“GOT IT!” Grimm rumbled, slamming the power bar down before Reed could say anything. By agreement, I was on safety override. If I said it was to shut down, it was to shut down. No excuses.

Reed could be a little too overeager about exploring the unknown dimensions whose residents might want to eat us. The winding, modulating energies faded away and began to unspin as the Veil was smoothly restored, the Interdiction hurrying the process along quickly.

I noted the particle effects were not dispersing correctly, however... and so had my Red Eyes.

I swore and restored specific juice via my crackling hands to the pulsing sensors, and my readouts blared at me in agitation as they suddenly had the power to do their job again. “We’ve got an incoming planar breach along the vortex path! Stephen, can you tell where it’s going to manifest?!”

The Eye of Agamotto lit up, driving into the whirling chaos of particle effects that should have been long gone, and instead were boiling and swirling erratically inside the engine.

“This... there is a hostile force that seized onto your vortex and is attempting to follow it back here. The Interdiction is holding it at bay, or it would have already opened into this room!” the Sorcerer Supreme reported quickly. “They are attempting to increase the power level to pierce the obstruction...”

“If they can put in enough juice, it’ll join at the nearest high-mass Interdiction boundary!” I deduced, and was promptly sprinting out of the room. “Everyone outside and into the parking lot!” I called into the building-wide. “We’re gonna have some hostile aliens opening a Portal right outside the building!”

----------

It was kind of hard to miss the hole of purple-black particle effects clawing its way through the Veil, and the various brutish creatures with remarkably advanced weapons in hand who boiled out of it in endless numbers to make a bridgehead.

The huge, massively-built guy in grey who was roaring out bombastic orders and blowing the shit out of everything around him with unending energy bolts from his fingers was likewise easy to focus on.

Unfortunately for them, we did things after hours both so civilians wouldn’t be caught out, and so more members of all the teams would be around in case something went on.

“Nova!” I pointed at the big guy. “Soak every one of those blasts! Those look like fast neutrons with an axial twist to them! Every blast you eat should be like an hour on the generator!

“Grimm! Beat him up!”

A big orange ball of rock landed amid the purple-grey alien’s personal guards, blowing them away, but the guy promptly bellowed out, “” and tried to blast Ben, only for Richard Ryder to zip in and take the hit head on, grunting as he was smashed to the ground.

Everyone had quickly moved into various jobs of containment or combat, but the flood of inhuman beings coming out of the tunnel was going to be a problem soon enough.

“Johnny! Full nova-grade flame through the Portal!” I said grimly. “You have to fry the machinery on the other side! If they retain knowledge of Earth’s coordinates, they’ll be able to open Portals to here, or anywhere in our dimension!”

He understood the risk, and left off the strafing runs that were sending everyone flying in explosive gouts of flame, streaking towards the Portal like a burning missile.

Ruby-red optic beams, TK hammers, eruptions of ice, webs relieving these guys of their weapons, and invisible force fields plowed a road for him. Blastaar saw him coming, but his attempt to pick Johnny off with a blast of energy was intercepted by Nova, who was looking a little queasy at the moment from absorbing the alien energies, uncontrolled green particle effects dribbling out his mouth and nose.

Johnny unloaded right into the vortex and the light and shadows within, a searing blast of heat and flame that would have rivaled the primary shockwave of an atomic bomb, and dumped it all into that Portal.

One could imagine the havoc on the other side, especially as the vortex began to shake and break up.

“!” the big gray brute swore, pushing Grimm away, who let him do so, actually using the force to bounce and roll like a big orange ball right back to his feet. Some of Blastaar’s closer guards followed him as they all lunged for the Portal home, and all but the last couple actually might have made it. “” came out from the other side just before it closed, voop, done.

I chopped another alien rifle in two, glared at the half-insect/half-frog holding onto the halves, and he wilted. The fighting intensity of the invaders who were still conscious had dropped off precipitously, and the one knot that actually still felt like fighting was first tossed into the air by a ruby optic blast scything through them, and then slapped back down by a TK burst.

They stopped fighting. Broken bones do that to even the best soldiers.

“Are any of these guys even using the same model of gun?” Peter asked, webs thwapping out, grabbing firearms and yanking them out of the hands of the soldiers before tossing them into a pile with the others. Gwen and Cindy were doing much the same, hastily disarming everything, sensitive to the least hidden danger.

“Chaositech,” Strange informed us, surveying the aliens being herded into a circle close to where the Portal had arrived. He was building up power for a spell, while I was playing security for him. TK and force fields, along with ice fields, slid the unconscious and battered aliens after their conscious but defeated brethren. “Such technology is literally impossible to make exactly the same way twice.”

I surveyed the frankly incredible array of soldiers there, although the core of them were the heavily-built, apish guys in uniforms who looked like Blastaar. “I count at least fifty different species here, McCoy?” I asked, glancing overhead where Hank was scanning from a Fantasicar, a hastily-contrived sensory array plugged into the front end.

“Fifty-three, possibly more, Dyna,” he called back. “With very interesting physiologies, as you might guess.”

Dr. Strange raised his hand, and the Mists of Morpheus rose from the ground, sweeping suddenly over the armored fighting beings. Magic didn’t care about physiology; they all slumped instantly, unconscious.

“Doc, you got what you need?” I asked into coms.

“Ben got the tracker on him, verifying direction and destination. We should be able to open our own tunnels there without effort,” Dr. Richards replied calmly. I gave a thumbs-up to the orange guy, who lit up a stogie contentedly, even as he stood over Richard Ryder, who was holding his stomach with a really nauseated look on his face.

I pulled out my Rod Function and vivus lit up on it. “Rich, bite down on this. Inhale through the mouth, exhale through the nose.” Without asking any questions, he proceeded to do so, the green energy igniting into a sparkling stream that disappeared back into his mouth. His cheeks got very big, but I stuck Function to his teeth so it wouldn’t fall out, and he continued to breath in and out, vivus refining the alien energy into something palatable for him. “Mentor, confirm he’s getting some good stuff?” I asked his AI.

“Very good indeed, Miss Dynamo. The quality of this energy should propel him to Tier Three if digested correctly,” the Helmet replied on coms.

“Take it easy, kid. I gotcha. Ain’t going nowhere,” Grimm said softly, patting Ryder’s shoulder. Still holding his gut, Richie nodded with a groan, closed his eyes, and concentrated on breathing and not throwing up.

Warren touched down next to me, his two-foot electrum psword humming. He’d just flitted through their ranks, chopping apart their firearms for the most part, fully confident everyone else could mow them down if they couldn’t return fire effectively. “What are we going to do with them?” he asked, letting the psi-blade vanish, and he instantly went from a 4 to a 10 in appearance, it wasn’t even subtle.

“We don’t want them here,” Dr. Strange stated calmly. “They form target locks for their home dimensions. We need to either purge them completely, or send them off.”

“Can you Banish them back home? Reed can pop up the beginning vortex... one Fangs of Farallah should send them off, right?”

“Hmm. Yes, that would work nicely. Reed, can you open a preliminary Portal down here? No further than you reached on your own, I can do the rest,” Stephen asked the air.

“Sue?” I inquired, and she glanced around to me. I pointed at the weapon mound. “Furnace. Johnny, Jean, slag it all. We’re not going to risk chaositech contamination, either, but I see no reason they should get their popguns back intact.”

“Save at least a couple for study!” Hank called down politely. “It may come in useful if we have to defend against them or shut them down in the future,” he amended quickly.

“Spiders, pick one gun each.” They looked at one another, the pile of shooters, and quickly enough grabbed one rifle-esque firearm each, although one looked like a writhing worm, another looked like flowering clam-heads on a starfish body, and the last one was a solid-state crystal glowy-thing.

The least potentially dangerous to us of the lot, as it were.

Sue swept it all together in a force field cauldron, and Jean joined Johnny in pouring down enough flame to slag them and their power sources down, setting off some minor explosions Sue dealt with without a problem.

------

From there, it was just opening up an offset Portal, and Dr. Strange opening up the Fangs of Farallah within that Portal. As the spell gaped open, it latched onto the alien nature of the beings there, and his Will and power sent the whole mass of living and unconscious soldiers hurtling back along it towards wherever they’d come from.

“Interesting target coordinates. On the 5-axis, they could be said to come from almost precisely opposite us on the probability lines,” Dr. Richards reported from up above. “Almost like they came from a negative of our own reality?”

“A Negative Zone?” Peter quipped instantly. “Should we call up Rod Serling, ask for a TV series to be made about them?”

I eyed the dozen or so dead who had been left behind. “What we do need to do is get a good aliens forensic team in here to help with the post-op. Pym’s a natural. Anyone else, McCoy?”

“The Tribes are scary thorough about this stuff. The Golden Hag is probably the best in the world,” he replied after a moment. “Some of the post-ops I’ve been allowed to read...” he actually shivered.

I glanced at Dr. Strange, who sighed and grabbed his Vaccine. “I’ll make the call.”

-----------

The Hag cursed us all up and down for allowing dimensional raiders into our world, but showed within a half-hour to take charge of stuff. That she wasn’t supposed to be in the States at all didn’t stop her for a moment, and judging by the brainpower that hurried over to help in the forensic investigations, none of the scientists cared to point that out to her, either.

She took over one of the extra labs in the Baxter Building, transformed it into a state-of-the-art forensic facility within fifteen minutes, and an hour after we’d sent the Negative Zoners off, she was using her fingers to cut through shells, carapaces, hides, and bones with equal ease, a non-stop stream of high-end gobbledygook coming out of her mouth that Richards, Pym, Strange, McCoy, Doc Bronze (‘porting in to join the fun when he heard she was there), and even Peter, despite his queasy stomach, could not help hanging on.

Oh, and she didn’t forget to ‘congratulate’ Dr. Richards on his Dimensional Engine, and he meekly had me send to her the upgraded science-side dimensional theory stuff I’d worked out that he’d improved on.

That mollified her somewhat, and she gave me an appraising eyeball as she looked over the Theory, easily picking out the parts of it that were missing.

I had to admit it was fascinating how quickly she could work out organs, functions, isolate different liquids and their uses, and identify threats and analyze the weaknesses of these things. She cut them all up with her fingers, needing no knives or scalpels or anything, and had no problems handling anything, regardless of how contagious, poisonous, acidic, or anything else it might be. One thing that was full of flesh-eating larva serving as a secondary neural system literally got itself pop-sliced as it was trying to eat into her flesh, and she totally ignored its efforts even while relating what it was, what it was doing, why, how to identify it, and so forth and so on, while pulling out its guts, noting it breathed through its skin, and kept right on going.