Disclaimer - I don't, and have never claimed to, own Marvel or its Intellectual Property. This is all just so that I can take my maladaptive daydreaming and turn it into something so that it does not ruin the rest of my day.
DoorMan #100
Red Hearth [April 2008]
–Colin Baxter–
"Take that, Sand Dune," He muttered as he remotely controlled a toy RC car he retrofitted to give it the ability to survive in the harsh terrains of Mars, using his conjured hands to manoeuvre the car, to drift and flip itself, before using it as a practice test to get it oriented properly, using the Magnet spell he had swiped from the library yesterday.
So far, the car has been the unfortunate victim of 20 or more tumbles as he tried to turn it upright using a finely controlled Dimensional Energy spell instead of using the car's inbuilt mechanism, which was to just unload a spring, forcing it to turn upright.
It was surprisingly fun, to do something as utterly mundane as drive a children's toy, whilst turning it into a training exercise.
It also tickled a funny bone in him to imagine the toy veering out of the bubble of the Red Hearth and then people from Earth with their telescopes, including NASA would just freak out of their minds, especially since the tires were magically enchanted to just dig deep in the ground to get proper grip on the ground.
After all, he was not about to ambush the Mars Rover and steal the special tyre NASA developed for the Rover. It would be very troll of him to just vandalise one of the largest developments of mankind.
Shaking his head, another hand shot out of his back as it grabbed the glass of juice and brought the straws to his lips as he took a sip before concentrating back on the tasks at hand, or rather hands.
Heh, he snorted a bit as he thought of how he was going about things. Two hands were currently holding the controller of the RC-toy car and the other two hands were casting the magnet spell, modulating the strength of the magnetic force with his mind, with subtle movement of his hands.
The fact that none of the metallic railings on the roof moved at all, despite him just cranking out the spell, made him really pleased with the quality of work done on everything. It probably also helped that everything was tied together, magically, when the Red Hearth was named and essentially declared to be a single magical unit.
What did not please him, however, was the absolute tsunami of red that flooded his vision when he first cast that spell. It made him scramble back to the door, only for the shield to kick in and stop the onslaught of the red sand, which made him drop the spell entirely.
Fun fact, the Red sand, the one that made most people call the Red Planet, consists of Iron oxide. It is essentially a major component of the sand anyone could see all around the planet and he, being the dumbass that he was, just willy nilly activated the magnet spell, attracting tons of sand towards him.
Now, he knew that he would be getting some sand towards him, which was expected, but he just did not expect the spell to have such high level strength, making him panic for a bit there.
Fine tuning the spell would have taken a little more time and effort. Time and effort that he did not want to expend because he had a cool RC toy on him and he wanted to play, now.
So, in came the second part of the spell. It was a whole book really, on magnet related spells. Enough to turn him into discount Magneto, actually, a really powerful Magneto if he were only using the spells on the non magical side.
Once magic comes into the mixture, there are probably hundreds of spells to ward off any external mystical influence so Magneto would be really useless against magical beings or demons used to fighting off hordes of Sorcerers, Masters and Witches.
Anyway, the second part of the spell was a neat trick. It allowed for, essentially, marking a thing, designating it as a specific pole and then casting the spell, creating a different pole in your hands. It was kind of physics breaking, in the way that it can create a monopole magnet, but then again, all magic was physics breaking, the standard version of physics anyway.
If the speech that the Ancient One gave Stephen Strange is to be believed, Magic is just science that you don't understand yet, then there must be a magical version of physics somewhere, lying around to be discovered.
OR, it was just reality warping with the help of so & so energy.
So, there he was, spending his time happily, doing something that will advance his progress in Sorcery and also doing something that will not bore him to death, when Jin'Ya pinged him.
"They have an update for you."
"Coming,"
He replied and then, very reluctantly and carefully, increased the strength of his spell, which made the car wobble slightly at first and then made it shoot straight at him as he abruptly increased the power of the spell, as a fifth hand shot out of his chest and caught the thing mere inches away from his face.
He smirked. Nice reflexes.
___xx___
Extremis Lab Space, Red Hearth
–Bruce Banner–
When he was first tasked with the current task, it was almost three months ago, and he had been shocked to realise the strongest human he knew, had lost and lost so badly that he had lost both his arms.
He had thought that to be a significant blow to Colin but apparently, if the updates Jin'Ya gave him were to be believed, in mere two months, Colin had brought his overall functioning back to normal levels or even above it in some cases.
Magic, they called it. He called it the manipulation of esoteric energies using some unknown genetic factor. Colin had apparently become even more proficient in the use of magic, using conjurations.
He had not seen them yet and since he was wary of Jin'Ya poking around in his head, which was still a disturbing thing to consent to, he had not had visuals of how Colin had surpassed his previous functionality in any way.
That was until today.
"Wow, makes me wonder why we even bothered with it at all," Maya snarked and even though he would not have said the same thing, the thought did rise in his mind. What use were the two biological arms of Colin if he could somehow conjure not one, not two, but four arms simultaneously and operate them without any visible difficulty?
It really made justifying their effort hard since technically speaking, more arms were always better than one and even more so in the case of Colin since he could now perform magic with two hands and then physically beat anyone who got close with his other two arms.
Colin's Doors, as he called them, were also not affected in any way, according to Jin'Ya, so, once again, he was somewhat baffled as to why he was going to update Colin on the direction of the research they had done in the past months.
No matter how much he thought about it, aside from the aesthetic loss of biological arms, there was not much that Colin had lost in the attack which made him feel a bit resentful because they had to send everything they were working on, on hiatus and move onto the category he thought he would be working on during the ending phase of Extremis.
Limb regeneration.
Jin'Ya spoke suddenly, making both of them jump a bit as the miniature character was very unpredictable in how he would deliver their message. The first time he had spoken directly into their minds, which had disturbed him a lot and fascinated Maya, so much so that he had to undergo a brain scan the next hour, so that Maya could gather data on the brain and if telepathic connections could affect brain chemistry, even temporarily.
He was curious so he agreed to the scan. Turns out, there was no visible effect on the brain.
"I believe you have some updates for Colin?"
He patted his chest and answered, working his fingers on the screen as multiple scenarios, along with possible rejection rates, were displayed on the screen, "Yes, I have devised 6 different treatments, with varying rejection rates and varying time periods."
"Hmm. I've called him. Just explain it to us when he is here. Know this, though, there is no real hurry here. As you can no doubt see, Colin is resilient and has already adapted to the loss of his limbs. No reason to endanger him by sacrificing safety for speed."
He nodded. That was fine.
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