— J. Jonah Jameson?!
I said it out loud before I could stop myself.
The man hovering thirty feet above me was built like someone had taken the concept of authority and given it a body. Broad shoulders. Square jaw. A mustache that had absolutely no business being that magnificent on a superhero. White and red suit. A bold, clean O on the chest.
He descended slowly. Deliberately. The way someone moves when they want you to understand that the speed at which they're moving is a choice.
— J. Jonah Jameson is the Superman of this universe?
I pushed my sunglasses up.
— Okay. Now I actually like this place.
He touched down with the easy weight of someone who'd done it ten thousand times. His eyes moved past me briefly — to the coffee shop, to the hole in the wall, to the Mauler Twin unconscious in the wreckage — and then back to me. Measuring. Cataloguing.
In my entire life I had never been looked at the way this man looked at me in that moment. Not with hostility. Not with fear. With the specific, focused attention of something very old and very dangerous that was trying to decide what I was.
He stepped forward. Extended a hand.
— I don't believe I caught your name. Call me Omni-Man.
— Ah. — I took it. — My name is Mr. Perfect Cell. And I'll go ahead and say upfront that I don't have any pictures of Spider-Man.
We shook.
He noticed. I felt it — the almost imperceptible recalibration behind his eyes the second my grip registered. He didn't show it. Didn't react. Just filed it away behind that mustache and kept going with the composure of a man who had long decided that composure was non-negotiable.
He also didn't get the joke. He looked at me for exactly half a second, decided it wasn't worth the processing power, and moved on.
— My apologies, Mr. Cell—
— Mr. Perfect Cell.
A beat.
— Mr. Perfect Cell. — No inflection. Just acceptance. — I don't believe I've seen your kind before. Is it possible you come from another planet?
There was something underneath the question. Barely detectable — a tightness around the word planet. A fist at his side that wasn't quite closed but was thinking about it. I didn't know what it meant. I filed it anyway.
— No no. — I waved a hand. — Different universe. I ended up here because of an omnipotent bitch with a terrible sense of humor.
Nolan looked at me.
He found that hard to believe. Understandably. I was a green biomechanical entity explaining interdimensional displacement on a Washington D.C. sidewalk next to a destroyed coffee shop.
— I see — he said, with the diplomatic neutrality of someone choosing not to call you a liar to your face. — Well. Welcome to Earth. I imagine all of this must be quite a lot to take in.
— You have no idea — I said.
He held the look for a moment. Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression — not warmth exactly, but a very practiced performance of it.
— Believe it or not, I'm not originally from here either — he said. — I come from a planet called Viltrum. — The fist tightened a fraction. — I don't imagine it exists in your universe.
I thought about it. Genuinely. Turned the word over against every wiki page I'd ever fallen asleep reading.
Nothing.
— Viltrum — I repeated slowly. — Never heard of it. Is that a Krypton parody? Wait — were you sent here as a baby right before your home planet exploded? Because that would be extremely lazy wri—
— No — he said, with a precision that suggested this landed somewhere tender.
I let it go.
We stood there. City sounds filled the space between us. Sirens somewhere. The distant murmur of a crowd forming with the magnetic inevitability that disasters attract. Nolan waiting for me to say something useful. Me trying to figure out why his face was doing something to my memory that I couldn't place.
Then he glanced sideways. Barely. The microscopic tell of someone receiving audio through an earpiece.
—Keep him talking. Thirty seconds.—
I didn't hear it. But I saw the glance.
And the face thing finally clicked.
I moved before I'd made a decision to move — not aggressively, just curiously, which in Cell's body apparently meant crossing the distance between us in no measurable time and ending up approximately three inches from Nolan Grayson's face, close enough to count the silver in his mustache.
To his enormous credit, he did not react.
Externally.
Internally — and I couldn't hear his thoughts obviously, but I could read the absolute stillness that settled over him the way a very controlled person goes still when something has just entered their space faster than they expected — internally, something recalculated.
I was looking at his face very carefully.
— Can I ask you a favor — I said.
He waited. Patient. Controlled. Absolutely not showing any of whatever he was currently deciding.
— Say: Parker, you're fired.
A silence.
— ...Parker — Nolan said, slowly, like a man reading instructions in a language he mostly spoke — you're fired?
I stared at him.
The voice was right. The cadence was right. The mustache was right. But there was something missing — some particular flavor of unhinged journalistic fury, a specific frequency of J.K. Simmons energy that Nolan Grayson, for all his considerable qualities, simply did not carry.
— Hm — I said, mostly to myself. — The voice is there. But something's still missing.
Nolan looked at me with an expression that had developed, beneath its careful neutrality, a very faint quality of what is this creature and what does it want from me.
That was when we both heard them coming.
---
The Guardians arrived loud.
Not because they were being careless — they were actually moving with real coordination, reading the perimeter, fanning out the way a team does when it's been doing this long enough to stop thinking about it. But there were several of them, and several superheroes arriving simultaneously at a destroyed coffee shop on a city block that was rapidly filling with onlookers has a certain unavoidable energy to it.
They landed. They looked at the scene. They looked at me.
They looked at Nolan, who gave them nothing, which apparently was normal for him because nobody seemed surprised by it.
War Woman was the first one to break from the group. She walked toward me directly, which I appreciated — no posturing, no semicircle formation, just a woman who had decided she had something to say and was going to go say it. She looked at the coffee shop. At the crater where the Mauler Twin was currently being surrounded by what I assumed were GDA agents pouring through the hole in the wall. At me.
— You stopped him from reaching the White House. — she said.
— Tried to — I said. — The execution was rougher than I intended. I'm still learning some things.
— You moved him through three structures.
— Yeah. About that — I actually am sorry about the Damage. That wasn't planned.
She looked at me for a moment. Then extended a hand.
— War Woman. The assist was appreciated, unplanned or not.
— Mr. Perfect Cell.
The corner of her mouth moved.
Dark Wing came next. He drifted in on his board and landed with the practiced precision of someone who had turned arriving dramatically into a fine art, looked me up and down with eyes that were doing a lot of quiet, rapid work, and said:
— You look like you're still getting used to your abilities.
— Recently came into them, yeah.
— How recently?
I thought about the portal. The tumbling. The accidental ki blast screaming into the dimensional void. The crater. The coffee cup I'd brushed off my shoulder.
— Very — I said.
He nodded once. Filed it. Didn't push. Which told me he was smarter than the aesthetic suggested, and the aesthetic already suggested Batman Level of smart.
Aquarius drifted closer with the unhurried movement of someone whose natural environment involved not rushing. He looked at me with the particular curiosity of a being who had presumably made peace with the fact that the universe was strange.
— So you're from a different Universe?
— Yeah.
He gestured at me, a slow wave that seemed to encompass the whole situation.
— And where you're from — everyone looks like...
— God, no. — I shook my head. — I'm a unique case. Biomechanical Android. It's a long story.
He accepted this with approximately the same energy as someone being told the restaurant was out of a menu item. Processed it. Moved on. I respected that about him.
The Martian said nothing but looked at me with large, patient eyes that I got the feeling missed very little. The Green Ghost was hovering slightly off the ground and trying to look like she was paying attention to the perimeter rather than to me, and mostly failing. Red Rush was the only one moving, doing a slow loop of the block that probably looked casual and wasn't.
Immortal didn't come closer.
He stood at the edge of the group with his arms crossed and his jaw set and his eyes doing the steady, unbroken work of someone who had lived long enough to know that things that seemed fine often weren't. He wasn't hostile. He wasn't performing anything. He was just — watching. With the particular quality of a man who had been wrong about something catastrophically before and had decided never to be wrong that way again.
After a minute he stepped over to Nolan. Quiet. Private.
— What's your read — he said.
Nolan didn't look at him. His eyes were still on me.
— I don't have one yet — he said.
Immortal looked at him. Something moved in his face that wasn't agreement but accepted it anyway.
Then the air shifted.
A Man appeared out of thin air.
He looked at me the way, I would come to understand, Cecil Stedman looked at everything — like a variable already being calculated.
He extended a hand.
— Cecil Stedman. Director of the GDA.
— Mr. Perfect Cell. — I shook it. — I guess you're the Nick Fury of this universe.
He looked at me with eyes that didn't blink quite as often as they should.
— I'm not familiar with that name.
— Nick Fury — I said. — Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. Runs a covert government organization that monitors and coordinates enhanced individuals. Manages threats that conventional military infrastructure isn't built to handle. Eyepatch. Bad attitude. Tremendous commitment to secrecy.
Cecil absorbed this the way a very good machine absorbs new data — completely, immediately, without any of it showing on the surface.
— The GDA operates on a comparable mandate — he said..
— Thought so. Amanda Waller energy too, now that I look at you.
— Also not familiar.
— She's the—
— Mr. Perfect Cell. — He said it with the patience of a man closing a parenthesis. — I'd like to continue this conversation somewhere significantly less exposed.
I looked around.
The crowd had more than doubled since I'd stepped out of the coffee shop. Phones everywhere. A news drone making lazy circles overhead with the professional persistence of a seagull near food. Somebody on a rooftop across the street with what looked like an actual camera setup. A child near the perimeter tape who had apparently materialized through sheer force of curiosity and was staring at me with huge, unbothered eyes.
I looked at Cecil.
— Yeah — I said. — That's fair.
I gestured at the street ahead of us.
— Lead the way.