1st story:
A bar in New York City, where a man is thrown outside through a window. “You want to tell me again?” the perpetrator asks him. He gets out of prison and the other man tells him he “ lost” his cut of their last job? Come on, Kangaroo, the victim begs. He didn’t give him a… Don’t speak to him like he knows him! Kangaroo hisses. He only wants one thing! Brutally, he kicks the other man in the stomach and orders him to give him what he owes him. Or he will beat him to death!
Wow, that ain’t nice at all, a voice calls from above. Spider-Man stands on the roof. And he thinks an apology of some sort is due… to all of them really. They’ll wait.
He thought Spider-Man was dead, Kangaroo remarks. Yeah, man, that is in terrible taste, the victim adds. Kangaroo tries to hit “Spider-Man,” but he dodges the blow, elegantly somersaults over him and touches his stomach, hitting him with something that seems like venom. What did he do to him? Kangaroo demands. He told him last time he saw him, he’d kill Spidey if he saw him again! He has him mistaken for… Spidey begins. Kangaroo throws him into the air and Spider-Man crashes through a shop window.
She thought he died, a woman remarks. That’s in terrible taste, her companion adds. Spider-Man limps out. Does everyone in this city have powers? he complains. Did he actually call himself the “Kangaroo?”
A moment later, the Kangaroo jumps at him and hits him in the face. Spidey feels a buzzing moments before Kangaroo grabs a car and is about to throw it down on him. Spider-Man hits him and Kangaroo drops the car on himself. Spidey apologizes to the crowd for the mess and asks if anyone called the police. In reply, he is told that his outfit is in bad taste. Spidey crawls up a wall and the crowd wonder how Spider-Man is alive.
Hurt, he returns to his home. Alone, the African-American teenager takes off his mask. Maybe the costume is in bad taste, he admits.
2nd story:
The Negative Zone, some time ago. Where the heroes of Earth defeated Reed Richards after he went mad.
Richards floats there, recalling how the heroes vanquished him. No, he decides and uses technology to get air first, then find the way home.
Returning to a flying fortress, he begins to work, convinced that the world has it wrong. After some work, he figures he can get home. But there’s no one there for him. His friends all hate him now. He generates the power, only to see it is not enough and silently apologizes to Ben Grimm. He faces death.
If he could go home, he could save everyone, but now that’s not happening. The computer can’t target a location from an almost infinite number of variables. It doesn’t have enough processing power. Not enough brains.
He sees corpses floating around and has an idea. He connects the corpses to the computer. The targeting system works and he teleports to land in a lush forest. He’s going to solve everything, Reed tells himself.
Now, wearing a metallic helmet, Reed stands in a futuristic citadel. They’ll begin here with him and them, he announces. They are going to have a new focus for his ongoing and never ending education. These experiments will start with survival and end on a millennial tomorrow. His rules are simple: In the dome, it’s ‘evolve or become extinct’. Welcome, children, he tells a group of youngsters dressed in white. Welcome to tomorrow. He’s sorry. Most of them are not going to make it.
3rd story:
Washington DC:
Valerie Cooper, special advisor to the president on superhuman and mutant affairs, sits in a café with her friend, Brett, a foreign affairs correspondent. Of course she has met him, Val announces. How has Brett not met him in her job? He doesn’t like to do interviews, Brett replies. Hinny saw him once. Guy threw the shield at him, trashed the camera. She’s making that up, Val replies and raves about her pistachio ice cream.
So is this why they are here? She wants an interview with Captain America? He’s not gonna want to talk about the Spider-kid thing. She was in Vancouver over the weekend, Brett replies. Can you believe they film all those TV shows there? Val muses. It doesn’t look anything like New York!
Brett continues there was an old man living there, burn victim. Really ghastly. Just got diagnosed with terminal cancer, said he wanted to get his story out before he passed. Said he’s tired of lying to the grandkids. This some kind of human interest thing? Val asks.
Brett continues he is also a mutant. And he spent a bunch of years locked in a government research facility, getting experimented on. Black Helicopters, Val scoffs. She knows that saying comes from the fact there actually were black helicopters, right? Brett asks. Val tells her it was like the Wild West then. Everyone was poking and prodding mutants. But the time span on this stuff is way earlier, Brett points out.
So is she running this? Val scoffs. Cold War era mutant thing? And she wonders why her demos are aging… Besides, how does she know he isn’t nuts? He got any souvenirs left over from his time in Area 51b? He doesn’t need to, Brett replies. The guy has the most incredible psychic gift. He can share his memories with you. Take you back with him. He’s pretty old and weak, but he could do it for a couple of seconds at a time. And what she saw was enough to make Amanpour curl up in a ball.
Sad, but she doesn’t understand. What they are doing now is not like that, Val explains. Davis did one of those tours. They’ve got spas on site. Human Rights Watch is in and out every week. If she wants to do a compare and contrast on it--
Maybe Brett replies. Anyway, he could do it for a few seconds. But when she was there she saw a map and got a fix on the location. Then they did Sat search and, sure enough, you can see what the place was. So she did a Freedom of Information on it.
Come on, Val scoffs. Anything like that is bound be deep classified. Brett reveals the statute hit four years ago and some desk jockey forgot to close it back up. Can she believe the luck? Public record, the whole file is waiting for her back on her desk. She hasn’t gotten the chance to look through it yet.
Val says nothing. Suddenly, she announces she’s allergic to pistachio. She should probably go to a hospital, Brett suggests, unsurprised. How long will it take to go through the file? she asks. Two hours tops, Brett tells her. Val congratulates her and leaves.
Val immediately calls her superiors. They need the network no later than eight. Phil is going to have to work something up …“what began as a noble experiment”, “words cannot express full responsibility”, “violence is not the answer…”
They are three hours away from half the country going up in flames. They’re gonna be riots coast to coast and that’s not even touching the international response. The entire world’s about to find out the United States government created mutants!
