June 2, 2014

Thor and I sat in the desert together. I was in Sandráss form, my legs crossed, Khamsin sat on my lap. Thor was next to me with Mjolnir in his fist.

Above us, the storm raged. Sand, lightning, rain, and wind. It was interesting how hot the storm felt. But it also felt peaceful. Two Asgardians channeling their powers into skies, working in tandem.

Sort of.

“I am winning,” Thor pointed out. The rain came down harder.

“You’ve got like 1,450 years on me,” I said back, not opening my eyes.

“I did not realize we were allowed to make excuses,” Thor chuckled. “In that case, I am most famished. Feeling off my game.”

Lighting struck Mjolnir, the ozone smell mixing with the rain and dust. I ignored it to push harder, forcing the sand higher and higher. The sandstorm and the thunderstorm battled each other. Columns of sand rose into the air like reaching fingers, only to get turned to glass by lightning. Rain poured onto the ground, only to be absorbed by the hungry desert.

But soon, it was too much. I couldn’t hold the storm. Every gust of wind and sand lost its power, replaced by the power of Thor. I cursed to myself and snapped my eyes open. Thor did as well.

“You did well,” he said without a hint of arrogance. The gracious winner raised his warhammer, and the storm fell apart around us, replaced with blue sky. “I’ve rarely contended with power like that. It was quite fun.”

“Yeah, it was,” I grinned at him, then looked around. The desert was soaked. We’d kept things contained a bit, but our little meditative battle still ended in a wet little spot, with glass spires rising in the sky. I raised my hand, and sand flowed around the glass structures, grinding them apart.

“The villages should be ready for us,” Thor pointed out. “Shall we?”

I nodded, swinging Khamsin around to place at my waist. With a mental thought, I brought a platform of sand underneath me and lifted off, Thor following. The two of us flew over to a large town where a UN ambassador was standing just outside of with some of the town officials. As we landed, the UN woman came over. She had bright blonde hair, a blue business suit, and was sweating just a bit in the sweltering heat.

“We have everything set up, as promised,” she said with a smile. “They planted the seeds StarkTech provided. All they need is water.”

That was putting things lightly. the town was large, sure. It was also pretty dead. The place was covered in dust and dirt. A group of African children were staring at us in awe. I gave them a smile, and a small girl gave me a gap-toothed smile. She looked painfully thin, her arms and legs little but bones wrapped in skin.

“I will provide then,” Thor said, flipping Mjolnir around in his hands. He raised his hammer. And in a few moments, the black clouds began to roll in over the desert town. The sound of thunder filled the air again. And the rains fell down in Africa.

The village leaders stared at the rain coming down with wide eyes, speaking in their language with awe as the water poured down. Soon it began to pool on the ground, washing the dust away, the sound of rain on metal roofs filling the air.

The UN ambassador, in a smooth motion, pulled out an umbrella, smiling as she looked up at the falling rain. “You really are a miracle worker.”

“Not at all. Just very good at what I do,” Thor winked, getting a blush from the UN ambassador.

“Show-off,” I scoffed, reaching for the Omnitrix symbol and tapping it. In a flash of green, I turned into Swampfire.

The form was very different now. I’d gained a lot of muscle in the form, my skin had become darker green, and fingers now ended in hard talons that could cut through stone, with red thorns along the backs of my forearms. The collar around my neck glowed with an inner fire around my neck, with some lines along my chest glowing with the same red-orange fire. My red eyes panned around everyone.

The villagers gasped in surprise. The UN ambassador stepped back, but quickly recovered to turn to one particular villager, who wore a robe with green and yellow patterns across it, his black skin glistening in the rain.

“Nana, can you go ahead and take Dial to the farm we set aside for him?”

“Of course,” he said in his heavily accented voice. He gave me a hesitant smile, which I returned. “Right this way, superhero man.”

I followed him through the village, a small group of his fellows coming along. The further we went, the more old school the buildings became until we were walking past literal huts made of packed dirt, with thatch roofs.

We eventually came upon a section of farmland. Dead farmland. Nana sighed sadly at the sight of lifeless plants, dead trees, and devastated land.

“The village hasn’t had a good year. The war is over, but the famine has yet to end. Even with the rain, we won’t be able to recover.”

“Never say never,” I said, feeling my mind stretch out. “You planted the new seeds?”

“Just yesterday we began,” he said with an affectionate look towards one man, a guy around my age. “Sammy, my son, planted it. Cacao mostly.”

“Awesome,” I reached out my hands. I didn’t need to release any spores. Just touch my mind to the plants around me. As the rain-soaked into the earth, my powers pushed the plantlife to begin to grow. Usually, I didn’t need water or nutrients to grow the plants, but when growing a massive field of different plants, I wanted to make sure they grew as healthy as possible. So the plants I grew pulled in all the water they could along with the energy I provided from my own body.

Trees sprouted upwards in mere seconds. Yam plants shot up further downwind from us, along with sweet potatoes, sugar cane, and more. Sammy had done a good shop, separating the plants out in neat rows, giving them room to grow.

In mere moments, a dead field rotting in the sun became a lush forest shining with wet leaves and branches. Flowers grew in the distance as my power pushed a bit more than needed, until I could feel almost all the plants for a full mile grow with more life than they’d ever had.

“My god…” Nana whispered behind me. I ignored him, focusing. After all, this was stop number one. I had more places I had to go after this.

Maria and Tony had come up with this. A lot of us had a lot of power. If we could use that power to make big public changes to places, we could build up a lot of goodwill for the Avengers.

Personally I was just glad to help. I didn’t even think of the publicity until they mentioned it. Weirdly enough, I didn’t worry too much about what the rest of the world thought of me. But it was awesome to see an African town given new life thanks to me. Seeing the little kids laughing as they played in warm rain, or grown men and women watching in awe, some crying.

Felt good, doing hero work that didn’t involve punches. Hopefully, the day would continue like this.

------

Once I was done in the village, I rocketed in Astrodactyl form to head to my next location. I flew up to the upper atmosphere, until I was in space, then flew towards Russia, going as fast as I could.

Seriously, I could just… go into space. Whenever I wanted. I may use Astrodactyl almost purely for transportation, but he was one of my favorite forms.

Once I reached Russia, I opened up a line of communication. “This is Dial of the Avengers, coming into your airspace. Do you read me, squawk?”

A female voice responded after a brief moment. “This is Darkstar of the Winter Guard. We read you.”

Oh right, the new girl.

“I’m heading in right now. You guys aren’t going to shoot me on the way down, are you?” I was only half-joking. After hearing that Kraven had been openly training to be able to hunt me, I was more cautious about flying around Asia nowadays.

“No, no we are not,” the female voice on the other end said with a chuckle.

“Good, almost there, squawk!” I twisted around as I began to rocket down into the atmosphere. I pulled my wings in and fell. The curvature of the Earth slowly faded away. The wind shot past my beak soundlessly. Down below, I could see the town I was visiting. Despite the importance of what I was doing, only two people were waiting. I aimed for then, turning off my jetpack and twisting in the air to aim my feet at the ground. Just a few hundred feet from my destination, I released a burst of star power from my jetpack, enough to work as a gentle break. I slowed down until I was hovering a dozen feet about the pair below. Then I released the jets, dropping in front of them.

“Hello!” a blonde young woman said cheerily, as though a space pterodactyl hadn’t dropped from the sky to land in front of her out of nowhere.

I grinned at her. “Hey, squawk! Laynia, right? Darkstar.”

She nodded, stepping forward to shake hands with me, taking my orange claws into her hand. She looked the same as the last time I saw her, with long blonde hair, eyes glowing with energy, and a face that belonged on a magazine, with a slightly wide jaw and sunken cheeks. She was wearing a black leather suit with a yellow star on her chest, with high heeled boots on her feet, and a black tiara on her head.

“And you are?” I asked the other person there.

“Grigory Plotnick,” the man, a slightly pot-bellied short gentleman with a thick mustache and shaved head, shook my hand. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, a thick jacket coming down to his knees. He looked a bit nervous. “I am a scientific consultant. I’ll be taking in the radiation readings.”

Wow. His mustache really danced when he talked. Up and down, side to side. It was mesmerizing.

“Can you really do it?” Laynia asked curiously. “Absorb all ze radiation?”

“Hell yeah I can,” I said with a chuckle. Then I looked around.

We stood in the middle of a town. Or a forest. Bit of both, really. The buildings we stood before had once been apartments. Three stories, made of concrete. Now though, trees had grown around the asphalt, plant-life replacing the humanity that had once been there. Around thirty kilometers around us would be like this. Civilization in ruins, and the wild coming back to replace it. It was like something from a post-apocalyptic movie.

Chernobyl. The three of us stood in the remnants of Chernobyl. I took my time to look around the place. As Astrodactyl, I was hardened against the sort of radiation that existed in space. But even so, the place had a haunting feel.

The closest thing I could compare it to was video games. Even in Rio, in the destroyed remains of that down, there had been a sense of energy, of recent life. The place had only recently been struck, and even when no one was around your immediate area you could see it in all the little things, from fresh blood on walls, to spilled drinks, and the cries of people in the distance.

This didn’t feel like that. This wasn’t a fresh disaster. This was something that was done. It had completed its work on the city. We weren’t standing in a wounded city, but a dead one, decaying around us.

“...Time to get to work,” I said. My voice seemed to disappear as I spoke, swallowed by the city. I tapped the Omnitrix.

In a flash of green, Astrodactyl disappeared. And NRG replaced him.

I stood there in my massive armored suit, staring around. I could feel the radiation around me now, soaking into the world around us. It was disquieting, realizing how dangerous this place was to human life. And this wasn’t even close to the most irradiated place in the world. Just the most famous.

“Ve should get to work, comrades,” I said.

“Oh, you do have a fake accent like this!” Laynia said brightly. Grigory glared at me, offended.

“Eet is not fake. Eet is how thees aliens’ language sounds in English,” I said, exasperated. “Now, vat ees the plan?”

Grigory was still looking suspicious of me, but he took out a geiger counter, pointing it away from me. “We walk to the most irradiated zones, and you will absorb the radiation.”

“Very vell,” I said thickly. My armored body clanked along as I turned and started absorbing the radiation I could feel around me.

Grigory blinked down at his geiger counter as the number dropped like a rock.

“Let’s get to know each other, shall ve?” I asked Laynia. She nodded.

The three of us began our trek.

------

You’d think an apocalyptic city would get boring after a while. But that’s very untrue, as far as things go.

Chernobyl reminded me more of video games like Fallout or Last of Us than any place I’d been to in real life. We walked through buildings that had accumulated a bit more radiation. Going through those places were what brought memories of games played a long time ago to my mind.

The halls of apartment buildings were covered in faded out wallpaper. Everything had a washed-out tone to it. There were piles of debris gathered in the corners, old newspapers, books, glass, and toys in the case of a room that had belonged to a small child. There were rooms with open windows that seemed to blend with nature outside, grass growing through what used to be carpet. At one point, I got a very odd feeling of wrongness when a breeze entered through my helmets opening and ran along my face. It was only after a bit that I realized I’d never felt a natural breeze while inside an apartment complex.

And I could feel the radiation. In some places, it was thick in the air. Grigory told me that we were headed towards the reactor, where the workers who were cleaning the site had evacuated to allow us to work in peace.

That gave me time to speak with Laynia. Who, it turned out, was a gamer as well.

“I have never played the Fallout games,” she said in Russian, the Omnitrix translating for me. “But I played the Metro games. This feels so strange. Like I’m Artyom, but I forgot my helmet.”

“Glad I deedn’t,” I said with small chuckle from under my helmet. “Eet’s a good theeng you are eemmune to the radiation. Thees place feels so dangerous.”

“It is dangerous,” Laynia held a hand to her chest for a moment, closing her eyes. “Even with my powers protecting me, I can feel the radiation. Grigory will be fine at these levels. But it’s still so strange to feel it pressing against me. But, such is life in the zone,” Laynia said with a small chuckle.

Grigory coughed nervously. “W-Well, at least your power is working for us, Dial. The radiation levels are dropping significantly.”

I felt a bit of pride at that. Granted, after eating a nuclear bomb, even this background radiation was nothing.

Walking along the streets of Chernobyl, we soon reached places that were currently populated by those commissioned by the Russian government to clean the area. It was a project slated to continue to 2065. Hopefully, I could cut that time down to almost nothing.

We stopped next to a parking lot to see something shocking. They hopped out of bushes, running towards us. I stared at them, shocked at the tiny pair of creatures coming towards me.

“Vhat.”

“Puppies!” Laynia said brightly, rushing forward to kneel before the two dogs that had come towards us.

“Oh great,” Grigory said with some nervousness, staying far away from them.

The puppies were so small and cute. One had black and white fur, a black spot over one eye, while the other dog had much more muddy red fur. Laynia cooed at them as they ran up to her. One of them yipped in happiness as she ran a hand through its fur, while the other one came up to Grigory. The pot-bellied scientist shied away from it.

“You don’t like dogs?” I asked.

“I love them, actually,” Grigory said immediately. “But the dogs of Chernobyl are known to hold radioactive particles in their fur.”

I looked down at the red-furred bundle sitting on the ground in front of me. She looked up at me. Then she toddled over to me, tripping a bit over her own paws. Finally, she stopped at my armored boot and stood on my foot, looking up at me.

I kneeled down and picked up the puppy, absorbing the bits of radiation clinging to her. She yawned, then curled up in my large palm, falling asleep.

“I am such a sap,” I said in my heaviest Russian accent.

“So am I,” Laynia mumbled, holding her own puppy close. I waved her close and absorbed the radiation from her puppy as well.

Grigory, thankfully, didn’t say anything. I put the puppy down, and she woke up in moments. Laynia did the same. We walked away, the puppies yipping and following us, to my surprise. We walked through the empty city, radiation flowing into me all the while.

We soon reached reactor 4. When the initial fallout of Chernobyl happened on April 26th of 1986, reactor 4 was the one that caused it. It happened during a safety test, ironically enough. The whole thing exploded, sending radioactive materials into the air. We all know what happened next.

Now, the reactor was covered in a massive steel and concrete structure. Called the Sarcophagus, it was an impressive feat of engineering, made just to prevent the insanely deadly radiation from the 200 tons of material within from getting out any further. It was awesome in scope.

It was also failing. I could feel the radiation from hundreds of feet away. As I pulled it into my armor, it started to become very clear that no amount of media really gave me an idea of the real scope of the place. We got to the very edge of where a person could go without protective gear.

Grigory stopped, the puppies flopping next to him. “This is as far as I go until you confirm the radiation is clear.”

He sounded skeptical. I couldn’t blame him. Chernobyl had been around for a hell of a long time after all. It must have seemed like an impossible dream in some ways.

Laynia and I shared a nod with him, continuing forward. The puppies went to play in the bushes, more dogs joining them, while Darkstar and I entered the main grounds. Laynia led the way, bringing us to a door. We went up some stairs and through hallways with faded paint and pipes along the walls, radiation filling every bit of the air. Downstairs again, then through more halls, twisting and turning as I pulled in every bit of the poison in the air. Funny. Chernobyl’s radiation tasted like aged cheese.

Inside felt like a survival horror game, even with all the lights shining our way. We had one specific goal in mind. We entered the main room. Inside, all the slightly old construction was replaced with ancient and rusted metal and destroyed concrete. The signs of an explosion were clear to see. The ceiling was far above us, with red walkways along the walls and yellow struts next to those. And the radiation had gotten worse. As it was pulled in and concentrated due my absorbing it, it began to take a visible hue of orange. Not sure how that worked, NRG’s powers maybe, but it was odd to pull orange streamers of energy into my suit.

This was the turbine hall. Destroyed equipment lay on the floor in front of us.

“I’ve never been here before,” Laynia whispered. She had a yellow glow about her now.

“You okay?”

“Yes. It is simply… overwhelming.”

I knew what she meant. This place was different from the town. The town, while empty and dead, also felt peaceful. It was done.

This felt different. Aggressive. As though we shouldn’t have been there. But then I took in that taste of aged cheddar radiation, and felt only satisfaction.

“We takeeng care of the elephant een the room?” I asked boisterously.

Laynia looked at me. Then she laughed, the bright and happy sound bouncing in the steel and concrete building. “Yes. Yes, we should.”

We went to the location of one of Chernobyl’s most famous landmarks. The room that had often been called the most dangerous room in the world. They’d clearly never been in a dining room with hungry Avengers.

All humor aside, the place was famous for good reason. I could feel it through my suit of armor, down in my bones. Well, I didn’t really have bones, but you get my meaning. We walked by stalactites formed from radioactive material that had dripped into the halls, the various machines and metal struts melted by insane heat. It was like walking through the body of a rotting machine god.

We soon came upon the Elephant’s Foot. Named for its shape, the big hunk of gray material lay at the end of a hallway. I kneeled down next to it, taking it in. Not just with my eyes, but also with my senses.

“Not as bad as I thought,” I admitted.

“You are kidding, yes?” Laynia said, sounding strained, her body glowing brighter, the gold energy around her now tinged with black. “The radiation from this is insane!”

“Yeah. But not as much as the bomb I ate… Still,” I looked over at her. “I will have to eat eet.”

“Eat it!?” Laynia stared at me as though I’d lost my mind.

“Eet ees too thick for me to reesk simply absorbing the radiation,” I explained. I opened up my armor, revealing my energy form within. “I will eat eet, to be sure that eet ees gone. And I will have to deeg into the earth below to get all of eet.”

“Oh,” she said as I climbed out, surprised. “You are much smaller than I thought.”

“The body armor adds a thousand pounds,” I said with a laugh, standing completely in front of her. The orange-red light I emitted danced on the walls around us, giving everything an eerie light. Not seeing any need for preamble, I got to my knees and pressed my hands against the Elephant’s Foot. “Hopefully no one was hoping for souveneers,” I squeezed and pulled, ripping a large section of the material out. Then I shoved it into my mouth.

Delicious. I crunched down on it with energy jaws, breaking it up in my mouth. I didn’t use my hands for the next part. Now that I’d gained a taste for it, I dived in mouth first, ripping another part and swallowing it, then another, and another, until the large hunk of material was gone, replaced with what was underneath. Then I kept going in, deeper and deeper into the floor as I followed the delectable radiation within.

“This has been such a strange day,” Laynia mumbled behind me, watching in fascination as I got deep into my meal. She was holding something up towards me, but I decided to ignore it to focus on the job.

------

When I finished making the Elephant’s Foot and the radiation that had sunk underneath it into a light snack, Laynia and I took another quick walk around the facility, absorbing radiation as we went. Weirdly, I wasn’t feeling bloated or overloaded or anything. Guess after all this time, Chernobyl just couldn’t come close to the nuclear bomb I’d eaten.

Finally, I hopped back into my suit. Even with the radiation I emitted in my normal form, I still didn’t emit as much as the Elephant’s Foot had. Still, I didn’t feel like putting stress on Laynia if I could help it.

The sad thing was, I wasn’t finished. I could work for three days and complete the job, but there were more radiation zones that could use help as well. But hey, we had officially cleaned out reactor 4 and some other parts. With that done, the workers had a clean zone to work from to do even more work. Which was better in some ways. I’d rather not put every scientist and worker out of a job if I could help it. But I could make that job a hell of a lot safer.

Grigory was outside with the puppies when Laynia and I showed up. He was petting them while letting out little happy coos, the puppies grinning at him happily, my red furred one sticking her tiny tongue out with joy. When he noticed us, he coughed, rising up. My puppy came yipping up to me, while Laynia’s went towards her.

“You’re done?” he looked almost skeptical.

“Reactor 4 is officially clean,” I said proudly, lifting my puppy up. She licked at my faceplate, apparently unafraid of it.

“You were only gone for an hour!” Grigory said with shock.

“He’s not lying,” Laynia said with a bright smile. She shifted her puppy so that it was in the crook of her arm and reached into her pocket. “Look!”

To my shock, she took out a smartphone. A smartphone that looked like it had been made by the same guys that built military bunkers. It was covered in two millimeter thick steel that shone a familiar red in the light. She opened it like a laptop to reveal it was a screen with a physical keyboard attached to the side. After some quick taps, she brought it up to reveal video.

“Galina hardened the camera against radiation and other things, so that I could take pictures and video,” Laynia said in that My Little Pony voice of hers.

On the phone, Grigory and I watched my orange-red form devour the Elephant’s Foot. It was kinda surreal, seeing my legs disappear into a hole while the sound of chomping came from the screen.

“You ATE the Elephant’s Foot!?” Grigory asked, stunned. Before I could answer, he took another look at the screen. “And that is what you look like under the armor?”

“Well, I’m actually dangerously radioactive outside of it,” I placed my puppy on my helmet. She curled up on the flat surface, and soon I could hear a puppy snoring through my armor. “So I stay in it unless something really crazy happens.”

Grigory gave me a look. A very contemplative look. “Really?” he raised his geiger counter to point at me. “Can you show me?”

“...Noooo?” I said slowly. “Because you might get too many rads. And the puppies would as well. But here, I got you something. Careful, it’s heavy,” I reached behind me and pulled out a chunk of something, passing it over to Grigory. He took a hold of it while wincing at the surprising weight of the object, blinking down at it.

“What is this?” he lifted the rock-like chunk carefully in his hand. It was around the size of a tennis ball, and as I said, surprisingly heavy for its size.

“A piece of the foot.”

He staggered, staring at me in shock while dropping the chunk.

“Don’t worry, it’s inert.”

“...Crazy American,” he mumbled, staring suspiciously at the chunk.

“I thought you guys might want to research it. That piece was near the bottom of where the molten parts of the foot were leaking to. Didn’t reach anything important, thankfully,” I said with a smile that he couldn’t see under my armor.

Grigory’s scientific instincts seemed to take over. When he pointed his geiger counter at the chunk and got literally nothing on the numbers, he seemed more excited. “Amazing. One of the most dangerous things on Earth. Turned to this,” he put on a pair of gloves and lifted the piece of formerly radioactive material, placing it in a canister he got from his satchel.

Then he took another look at me. “You say that your armor is keeping your radioactive form from effecting the world around you?”

“That’s right.”

Grigory shuffled a bit. “I don’t suppose one of our scientists can take a scan of it?”

I didn’t reply for a while.

“Please,” Grigory said with some desperation. “It’s not for a military application. There is a man in a lab, a Russian soldier. He was in there,” Grigory looked over at the Sarcophagus, the foreboding and massive structure still looming in the distance. “When the explosion happened, he was at the center-”

“Grigory-” Laynia said, eyes wide.

“Yes, I know, it is classified,” Grigory said. “But this is important! He was 18 when we found him. And the radiation did something. It didn’t kill him. But it made him something like you,” he waved at my NRG form. “A man of pure radiation. And we can only contain him within a room of pure lead. H-He hasn’t left that room in almost thirty years,” Grigory stepped towards me. “He is a good man, Mr. Dial. He only wanted to be a soldier. And now he can never see the sun again. If we can make him a suit, like yours-”

“Dude, stop,” I raised a hand, shaking my head. For a moment, he looked depressed, likely thinking I was going to say no. “I’m okay with helping, comrade,” damnit NRG, why do you have to turn my words into Russian cliches. “As long as you share what you learn with BRIDGE, our current agreement will cover thees. Eet ees no problem!”

Grigory’s face lit up. “Truly! Oh, thank you!”

He hugged my unmoving form, then backed away when he realized what he’d done. “U-Uh, thank you,” Grigory coughed into his hand, while Laynia giggled.

“Come on,” Laynia pulled at my arm. “Let’s see what the other scientists will think of all this.”

We walked along peacefully for a moment. Grigory’s happiness faded a bit when he noticed something.

“Are you… keeping those puppies?”

Laynia and I carefully did not look at him.

“Ah. I see.”

Hopefully Jen doesn’t mind me taking care of a dog.