9 [ H Series ] Horus. My father’s house has many rooms.
Me and my new sister walked across the metal framework bridge crossing the gap between the end of the bridge and the doorway that had been burned through the draw bridge revealing the metal core underneath the aged wooden exterior.
I wasn’t sure if they had never figured out how to lower it, or had just decided that after cutting a doorway through it they were better off not trying to patch the structure up well enough to allow people to walk over it again safely.
After crossing the courtyard Iris paused at the entrance of the main keep to look around inside, I realized that even in the thick soles of my suit, my ‘little’ sister was a good four inches taller than me and I lifted myself a little into the air.
Not enough to be taller than her, I wasn’t that insecure, but enough to be eye to eye with her.
Which proved to be a wasted effort as my first look inside the castle literally floored me.
There was… a lot to see.
The bare stone walls had been polished to a smooth reflective surface, while the flat stone floors had a rougher surface, but the place still looked like what it was, a medieval castle.
Sure, there were some nice carpets, which someone had rolled out thick semi-transparent plastic matting over to help preserve them from the constant traffic, and there was fine antique furniture along the walls, as well as framed painting and even tapestries, but it wasn’t that.
It was the things that only I could see…
Well, me and presumably my gene donor.
Monica Rambeau. Once Captain Marvel, then Photon, currently going by Spectrum.
While I would still like a gene test to confirm it, our powers matched, and you know, the whole being black part. With Doom being white I only had a small pool of possible mothers for consideration.
At least this gave me plenty of used code names to pick from if I had decided to go superhero. But I wasn’t.
I would be a king in Africa, like T’Challa, and my name was and will be Horus.
But first, I needed to understand what I was seeing.
Iris tapped me on the shoulder and frowned at the feel of what looked like a high tech armor plating but gave away under her touch, but she shook her head in dismissal of the incongruity, “Hey Bro, what’s up? You’ve been standing there just looking around for a while now?”
She seemed honestly curious, so I explained.
“There are many energy fields in here, as well as more than one castle, there is some sort of spacial folding happening here.”
Her green face lit up as she let out a squeal and clapped her hands together with a near thunderclap. “Oops, sorry. So you can see all that with your visor? Do you think I might be able to get all of that into a set of contact lenses, or even glasses? I was in a rush, so I didn’t have much time to look into Doompedia, or fabricate anything. And hey! How did you do a whole suit and get here like, twenty minutes behind me, even if you popped out in Egypt, that’s just as far as Switzerland!”
I held both hands up in surrender. “Please, please let me have the chance to answer those in some sort of order…”
She crossed her arms, nodded at me, and then began tapping her foot, very deliberately in fact as I could see her fighting back a smirk.
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Sighing, I tapped at the same shoulder guard as she had. “It’s fake. Almost entirely Unstable Molecular material, my power set means that I can’t take anything with me when I transform into energy, such as light, which is how I got here so fast.”
She nearly began dancing in place as she reached forward to clasp both of my hands in hers, squealing. “Eeeeee! Monica Rambaua, Photon, that’s so cool. I mean it sucks that you can’t carry anything around with you, maybe you could make some robot sidekicks and have them be caddies and a secretary, you can name them after the other Egyptian gods! Eeeeeeee! You can have a theme!”
Oh no. She’s an enthusiast.
“Yes, yes, those are all good ideas…” And actually, they were. I could get around pretty quickly, at the speed of light in fact, but I couldn’t be everywhere. And it wasn’t like there were a lot of other Metahumans in Africa. “Really good ideas. But perhaps we can focus on Castle Doom or Castles Doom…”
My sister nodded while fighting off another broad smile, and then looked thoughtful. “So old Vic folded up space so he had plenty of room in here and a sort of maze for anyone trying to find anything, but I think it may be more.” She looked me in the eye. “Are they all different versions of the same castle or do they vary? The stonework, the basic material, the decorations?”
I looked around, slowly working through the different bandwidths of the spectrum of energy. It did in fact seem as if several different castles were all in the same space, almost as if…
“It’s all the different artists, isn’t it? Each look from each of the people who have drawn the castle all incorporated into reality in this world. All canonized.”
Iris inhaled sharply, and her eyes watered. “Kyle?”
My breath stopped. “We knew each other… from Earth... err, the Source Earth.”
Well, what else could I call it? Real Earth. This Earth is real. I didn’t want to continumnist.
She nodded. “I can’t… I don’t remember my name, but I remember calling yours when I saw the blast start to flip over your wheelchair, and then it caught up to me…”
Crossing her arms again, she wrapped her hands around her elbows and shivered. I stepped up and hugged her. She leaned down into my shoulder.
After a moment, I whispered into her ear, “This is really awkward.”
“I don’t remember your name, but I think I had a crush on you, but now we’re related… but I’m seventeen again so I’m getting a stiffy.”
She snorted and pushed me away gently, only sending me stumbling back three steps. “Perv… don’t talk like that in your Chadwick voice.” Giving me a big smile she sniffled. “I’m so glad to see you on your feet.”
I nodded and decided not to mention her tears. “Worth dying for. But you?”
Shrugging, she wiped away her tears. “Dying sucked, or at least I’m guessing we died. But getting reborn, years younger, in great shape, with superpowers… and a title of nobility. Not too shabby.”
She froze in place. “Uh, maybe we shouldn’t have been having this talk with SHIELD probably listening in?”
I waved that away. “Sound waves are within my spectrum… well that sounds weird, let’s say I have powers over sound and light. No one has been able to hear us or see your lips move from the moment we came into conversational distance. Not even if they were bouncing a laser off my mask.”
Pointing over to where a tiny microphone was mounted on the wall, I gave it a nod. “But I think it’s time to be heard.”
Allowing the sound of my voice to carry outwards again, I announced out loud. “Castle Doomstadt. The Heir protocols have been activated and a claimant to the throne has arrived.”
There was the soft sound of a bell, and reality shuffled around us until we stood in what looked to be the oldest and most brutally decorated version of the Castle.
With our father standing there before us, his arms outstretched in welcome…
At least until Iris impaled the Doombot through its head with her fist.
As she shook its remains off of her fist in a tumble of electronics she sighed. As I looked down at what looked to be one of the first generation units of the Life Modle Decoys Doom had built I slowly shook my head. “How did you know it wasn’t him, I know how I could, but…” I waved my hand at her and then at me.
“Hulk. Guy with broad spectrum super senses.”
She shrugged and dusted her hand off. “He looked like an old version of Doom, but I didn’t know for sure, not really. But I figured punching him in the face at first sight is always going to be the right thing to do.” She kicked the chassis of the bot down the hall. “The prick deserved it for so many things he’s done, but for me, it’s most of all that I highly doubt that Jennifer Walters consented to me being made.”
She pursed her lip in thought, “I’m also pretty sure I saw him standing right in the center of the explosion too.”
She turned to look at me, the look on her face ice cold.
“I think he killed us. Us and a lot of other people. Including people we knew.”
I stood frozen, then sighed. “Then he is in our world, one where most of his science, and none of his magic works. I think we should do everything we can to make sure he’s stuck there. Perhaps even to go so far as to collect the others and get them involved.”
After a moment, she nodded.