No matter how capable Bella and Natasha were, right now they were completely useless.
"Hey—it's been over an hour. Nothing's going wrong in there, is it?" Natasha was genuinely anxious. The casual nonchalance she usually wore was gone, replaced by something rawer. After all, her mother was in that delivery room—the woman who had been her anchor through the years.
Bella almost laughed. She lowered her voice: "It's not her first time. She'll be fine."
Natasha thought about it and decided that was fair. Counting herself and the brother she no longer kept in touch with, Samantha was now delivering her third child.
After sitting quietly for a while, she asked again: "Don't the doctors at Weyland have better skills? What if we called a medical team over from there to assist?"
Bella gave her a strange look.
There really was a world of difference between the Natasha of today and the Black Widow of the future.
She patiently explained: "Weyland's doctors specialize in engineered bioviruses and cloned organs... Relax—I already divined it. Both the baby and Samantha will be fine. Trust the magic."
"Then why is it taking so long? Shouldn't it be going smoothly?"
That was squarely in Bella's blind spot. Neither the Bible nor the Diamond Sutra had covered obstetrics—how was she supposed to know why it took this long?
The best medical team in San Francisco was already in that delivery room. Every doctor and nurse was a seasoned veteran, years of experience, every condition optimized. Bella genuinely had no idea how to help further.
Does anyone in the Marvel universe have a superpower related to midwifery? Not that I've ever heard of.
"Just wait. I think we'll hear something soon." She patted Natasha on the shoulder.
Both of them were formidable women—skilled in a hundred ways—but this was something neither of them could lift a finger to help with.
Samantha had insisted on a natural birth. Apparently, during natural labor, the mother's body produced a specific immune antibody that transferred to the baby, giving the newborn stronger resistance afterward. She had been absolutely firm on it.
So the whole family waited anxiously outside.
Charlie was getting on in years. Between caring for a pregnant wife, setting up the nursery, and keeping up with work, he'd been running on fumes for weeks. He kept dozing off and jolting awake.
Bella and Natasha were wide awake, but sitting around doing nothing was its own kind of torture. Reading, gaming, scrolling their phones—none of it felt right. Doing anything felt wrong. The two of them sat stiffly, occasionally getting up just to pace.
Bella's bond with Samantha wasn't as deep as Natasha's, and after two hours of waiting, she quietly slipped into a meditative state. From the outside, she looked perfectly upright, eyes open—but look closely and there was nothing behind those eyes, blank as someone staring into empty air.
She was hovering in that drowsy in-between when someone shoved her—hard.
She snapped alert and looked around. Natasha's head was resting on her shoulder. The girl had fallen asleep.
If it wasn't Natasha pushing me, then who was it?
Before she could think further, the floor lurched beneath her feet. A violent, sweeping lurch.
The hallway lights swayed wildly. The water cups they'd set aside clattered against each other. The floor itself rolled like ocean swells, buckling and surging.
"Natasha! Wake up—earthquake!" Bella shook Natasha awake, then turned to rouse Charlie.
All three of them were on the fifth floor. That height didn't scare Bella—she could jump from here without any equipment and land clean, and she could bring one person down, or two. But what about Samantha, mid-delivery? What about the baby?
She clenched her fists. Her mind moved fast. Eagle Vision and her sixth sense both kicked in at full power. If a strong quake hit, she was going to have to make choices—and fast. Her expression sharpened to a razor's edge.
The freshly-woken Natasha had already reached the same conclusion. What do we do?
Charlie was still groggy, not yet fully aware of what was happening.
The three of them braced for the worst—but the catastrophic quake they'd feared never came. A brief panic rippled through the hospital's doctors, nurses, and patients, and then everyone gradually returned to their rooms.
Bella, who'd been mentally running crisis scenarios, let out a quiet breath.
"It's a major quake in Nevada—magnitude 7.1. Hoover Dam is severely damaged. The surrounding cities—Lake Havasu City, Needles, Blythe—all hit." Natasha had already pulled first-hand information from official channels.
"Nevada..." Bella went quiet. Every city Natasha had named was in southern Nevada—not far at all in a straight line from San Francisco. Geographically, they all sat along the San Andreas Fault, one of the most seismically active zones on the continent.
A knot of unease settled in her chest. She remembered the 1964 Alaska earthquake, magnitude 9.1—the energy it released had been equivalent to ten million Hiroshima bombs. Against something like that, magic was essentially useless.
Unless you had power on the scale of the Scarlet Witch—someone who could rewrite the rules themselves. But at that point it wasn't really magic anymore.
She'd run her divination twice. The baby's birth had come up fairly normal. But the broader environment? That reading had been grim.
Bella stopped caring about appearances. She grabbed a nearby nurse who was visibly shaken and, ignoring Charlie's puzzled look, pointed at the delivery room door.
"Go tell Dr. Brown inside—I'll add a hundred thousand dollars as a bonus. I need them to speed things up. He knows who I am. Go. Now."
High rewards got results. Even though the doctors and nurses inside had been rattled by the sudden quake, the sight of that bonus lit a fire under all of them. The whole team swarmed around Samantha like a well-oiled machine. Thirty-five minutes later, a healthy baby girl arrived—mother and daughter both safe.
Charlie stared at his daughter—the newborn named Kitty Pryde—his eyes brimming with emotion. Bella and Natasha, those two gloriously awkward elder sisters, peered through the window from a distance for a quick look at their new little sibling.
The baby was wrinkled.
Newborns really weren't cute at all.
"Our standing in this family has officially dropped," Natasha said with a laugh.
Bella played along: "I know. By the time we get kicked out, I'll need to crash at your place. You won't turn me away, will you?"
"That depends entirely on your behavior."
Nevada. Hoover Dam.
Few people knew that deep beneath Hoover Dam, there was a secret research facility.
Sector Seven.
Back in 1935, during an expedition in the Arctic, they had excavated a bizarre life-form encased in solid ice. The official classified designation was Non-Biological Extraterrestrial—and the entity itself had been assigned the code name NBE-1.
The earthquake that had blanketed most of Nevada sent huge cracks racing through the ice surrounding NBE-1. Personnel scrambled to bring in equipment and reseal the damaged areas—but no one realized that in those brief, unguarded moments, a signal had already pulsed outward into the depths of space.
Cybertronian technology dwarfed anything humanity had ever built. In less than a day, light-years away in a distant star system, Starscream picked up the transmission.
Ten thousand years. His leader had been missing for ten thousand years. And still Starscream didn't dare defy him. The moment Megatron's signal came through, he responded immediately.