Nope, Wade’s anecdote didn’t help, but Sally was distracted by Gwen’s leading remark. She fixed her eyes on the blonde. “Will you please stop calling Sue and me ‘old’ or ‘old-timey’?” Her voice held a little exasperation. “Look, I get that we’re from what would be the past in your world, but we’re hardly cavewomen!”

Sally sighed, shook her head and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she looked at Gwen with a softer expression. “I’m sorry for snapping at you, Gwen. This entire debacle has me bummed out, but it’s not fair to take it out on you.”

After an awkward pause, she bit her lip as she pondered Gwen’s question. “My mother is Suzanna Dane. My dad is Arnold…but the Captain America we met said something weird. He said…almost insisted that Magneto is my father.” She looked puzzled, her denial of such a possibility holding firm. “I know we have the same powers, but…that can’t be right…”

"Am I the only one who doesn't know who Magneto is?". Gwen feels out of it - people keep mentioning names she's supposed to know, like when Pete was talking about Scott and Jean's baby.  "The born with powers thing is new to me - there are less of us in my world and it's all accidents or experiments or just tech."

"Really? You don't have mutants on your world?" Wade cracked one eye open and looked over at Gwen. A world without mutants sounded really fucking dull. Mutants rocked. "Mutants are people born with powers. In my universe, they're met with open hostility... while people who get their powers some other way get a free pass. It's bullshit, but that's how it is, for some reason.

"Anyway, Magneto is a mega-powerful leader of mutantkind. He's not the only one, but he's probably the most powerful, and he's definitely the most vocal. Magnetic powers, mostly like yours... except at a power level that would make you brown your britches."

"We could do karaoke at some point, might be fun--but on a world with a more nightlife than this, limbo."  Tigro smiles "Sorry, I do try and talk my way out of situations rather go straight to the break people part, breaking people is far far too easy. I feel I let you down back then, but reasoning or maybe getting some people a therapist would be more helpful than claws and teeth."

"Tigro... the Goblin Queen opened those portals and sent Peter said she stole someone's baby last time, and this time she took a symbiote from someone it was bonded with.

The symbiotes amplify what you put in... she almost destroyed that timeline.

It was way past the going to the breaking things part."
This message was last edited by the player at 15:08, Wed 29 Sept 2021.

“Wait,” Sally said with a thoughtful frown. “I’ve got a hunch that the Goblin Queen was important. That I should know her…”

"Thanks for that Wade.  I'm gonna need to figure these out.  It was already weird at the end since Tony Stark runs a coffee chain in my world.  She-Hulk is a pro wrestler that paints herself green, and did I see Luke Cage?  Is he an actual robot from the future?"

Then Gwen turns back to Sally.

"I didn't get her actual name, but she fought the X-men - I think I heard someone here mention them.  She stole a baby from 'Scott and Jean' and took it through one of those portals."
This message was last edited by the player at 15:09, Wed 29 Sept 2021.

"You'd be surprised at what kind of conspiracy theories people spread about the guy," Danny murmurs, eyes closed as he performs his breathing exercises.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:15, Wed 29 Sept 2021.

"No, he's an actor.  Well and he was Governor of California for a little while.  I'm talking about a movie series he's in, but obviously you don't have 'The Eliminator' in your world."

Danny lets out a low whistle. "Governor Cage? Sweet Christmas."

“He’s got my vote,” Sally said, forcing a smile. She couldn’t fully shake her lousy mood, though. Her thoughts turned back to the Goblin Queen, as she ruminated on her threat, and the Timebroker’s warning before their first mission. “I just can’t help but feel that they’re connected,” she muttered, as she paced the sand.

"In my world," Wade said, his eyes once again closed, "Luke Cage is an escaped convict who ran away to a lost city in Asia. Learned some funky martial arts, and came back calling himself Power Fist."

Wade yawned.

"I'm gonna take a nap until the Timebroker gets around to plunking us down in another disaster-in-the-making. I suggest you all do the same, since you never know when we're next going to get the chance. If anyone's interested, I happen to be extremely cuddly."

He pointed at Danny, and added, "Not you."

To Tigro, he further added, "Maybe you, if I get to be the big spoon."

Gwen pointed out that Goblin Queen kidnapped Scott & Jean’s baby. The Timebroker warned Sally that Alex fell into the clutches of “his brother’s ex”, but pointedly avoided any mention of Jean. It dawned on Sally that the woman they’d just fought uncannily resembled Jean Grey. Much more so than Sally resembled  her alleged “twin”, Lorna!

Sally gasped. “Oh my God.

The Goblin Queen. She’s the woman the Timebroker warned me about!”

Something Gwen had said clicked amidst a lot of other people, places, and things that meant nothing to her.

"Scott and Jean...like Scott Summers and Jean Grey?"   And then:

"Oh Jesus," whispered Sue, as she too realized the Goblin Queen had looked familiar.  And wondering how she had not earlier thought of it. Except that her attention had been diverted toward the minions...

A memory assailed Susan -- one she loathed:

A once compassionate activist gone full out anarchist.   Ally become assassin.  Withering, white-hot plasma, cascading over and around her force field, as she recognized that it would fall to her to put an end to that rampage...

She bit her lip.   Attention then diverting to Sally; recollecting that chat she'd had with the Broker about her own world, and several of the people she was close to.

"What did he tell you she was going to do-?" she asked, unable to remember exactly had been said, but pretty sure they all needed to be reminded.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the player at 22:38, Wed 29 Sept 2021.

The Timebroker has always existed here.

"Oh, our eXiles, congratulations, congratulations! Your first mission was a huge success! We cannot overstate our satisfaction. In the corrected timeline, the Spider-Man does not kill..." he starts counting on his fingers."... Bullseye, Wilson Fisk, Tony Stark, Norman Osborn, Harry Osborn, Reed Richards, Thor Odinson, or himself. This prevents the Web of Life from being corrupted by murder, and it passes through the line of his successors uncorrupted until the recycling of the timeline in 2107."

"Ooooh, we just wish we could pinch your cute widdle cheeks!"

Before Sally could answer Sue, the Timebroker interrupted them. “What about the Goblin Queen?” Sally faced their hosts with hands on her hips and a withering stare. “Did you know that she would invade that world with her own ‘incursion’? Is that woman the one who corrupts Alex back in my world?!”

The Timebroker tuts. "All of this talk about 'did you know' this and 'did you know' that is so very linear of you. You're going to have to outgrow it eventually. What we know from our perspective outside the progression of normative time is practically unlimited, but what we're capable of expressing within the confines of a linear narrative is sadly quite limited-- and what we're willing to tell you when we estimate a high probability of compromising your mission, and thus your second chance is even more limited than that."

He looks around at everyone, and then straightens his tie. And then pauses. And then continues, "She's not exactly the woman who led your sweet Mister Summers down the wrong path in your timeline-- merely a cognate of her, like the 'Lorna Dane' of that timeline was to you. She was alw--"

A shooting star has always existed far above the desert. In an instant, it collides with the desert in a blinding flash of light and heat and a defeaning roar.

When the stars clear from everyone's eyes, and the ringing in their ears subsides, the Timebroker is staring at Sally expectantly.

"Well, does that help?"

Gwen ignores the crash for now.  She directs her attention to the Timebroker.  Figuring out whatever that was and who Scott and Jean are can wait until later.

"So, if MJ is so important in that other timeline, why is it ok to just leave her in an exploding building in mine?

Can't you pop me over to my timeline just before the explosion for a few minutes so I can get her to safety?  It's not like I could stop you from bringing me back.  ...and that's fine?  Fixing these worlds is the right thing to do.  You don't need to blackmail me."

"Well, so much for that nap," Wade said, getting up and brushing the sand off his ass. "Where the hell is Chicken Little when you need him?"

He approached the crater with the same level of caution he applied to all other situations... which was to say very little at all.

"I admire your focus," he said to Gwen as he passed.

Sally leaned toward the Timebroker, interested in hearing his explanation. At least until a random shooting star decimated a sizable chunk of desert near them. “No,” Sally said impatiently. “Couldn’t hear you over the meteorite crashing nearby. What convenient timing!

You don’t want to give us any real answers, though, do you? You’re just a puppetmaster making us dance on his strings. No better than a Cosmic Tricky Dick Nixon.”

"Somehow I'll live with that," Danny had muttered in reply to Wade. Then, finding he disliked the thought of any one of them going off alone, he jogged to follow the mercenary.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:05, Thu 30 Sept 2021.

This was making Sue's head hurt...

During her life, she had studied the sciences as well as a number of Eastern philosophies.  And believed those disciplines intersected in the things that mattered most, if you cared to look for their junctures.

She had at no point ever thought 'I've got it!' as regards the nature of reality, and the cosmos. But she'd had a fuzzy, abstract concept -- one which brought her peace. Made her feel a part of a blessed whole.  Even when the world seemed to be going to hell on a Honda.

Some of what the Broker said resonated with her -- and some of it -- it was like  -- what?   She recollected another broker -- one who worked in real estate - who tried his damnedest to get she and Reed into a particular mortgage.   And the recruiter her brother had parroted, while he'd been convinced (for a very short time) that he wanted to go fight in the war.

And Reed...who'd come close to persuading her into a different perspective, more than once.

It sure felt like someone was deceiving them.

The last thing they’d known was the explosion.   The factory had detonated as expected … well, They had expected the detonation; but not an explosion as it had come.   Big and more fierce than They had been prepared.

The next thing They knew, they were hurling through … space? … towards a land that hadn’t equated to the city They’d been in.


When the stars clear from everyone's eyes, and the ringing in their ears subsided, what was left in the resulting crater was a skeleton.
Whomever, or whatever it had been, looked disintegrated.

But then, the skeleton twitched.   It flinched.   Then it began the process for rising from the earth:  getting up from where it had landed face down deep in the earth.

"It's not your fault that you don't understand, but to be honest it is getting really annoying. Mary Jane Watson is critical to the vast majority of timelines she exists in. Saving the Mary Jane in that timeline was critical to your mission in that timeline. The Mary Jane Watson you care for-- she is critical to your timeline as well, but she is not critical to your mission from your current chronological perspective. We are going to save her. We are already in the process of saving her. We have already saved her."

"We are observing Mary Jane Watson from a countless number of futures. There is no future when her rescue is not successful."



"No. We've determined that this is mathematically sub-optimal to your mission performance-- including your mission performance in every potentiality in which you participate in the mission to rescue Mary Jane, which is currently 96.7% of all potentialities proceeding from this point. We would offer to demonstrate, but compromising your irrational belief in 'free will' would also be suboptimal for mission performance. Please continue subscribing to your theory that we are 'deceiving' and 'coercing' you into doing what you consider 'the right thing'."



The Timebroker turns to address Sally, using both hands to make exagerrated finger quote gestures on either side of his head. "Yes. 'We are not a crook.'" The impression is uncanny.

He smooths his vest and straightens his tie. "The Madelyne Pryor you just encountered is very similiar to the one your Alex Summers encountered. She's a genetic duplicate of Jean Grey designed and created specifically to manipulate Scott Summers and give birth to an even more persistently irritating chronological deviant. You'll be dealing with both of them quite a bit."

"As for the incursion... yes. The portal to Hell wasn't actually significant, but we knew that she was going to lure the Thunderbolts into a trap, steal the much more dangerous Carnage symbiote-- who is also a royal pain in our ass-- and set off a chain of events that turns the Spider-Man into a murderous supernatural predator."

"That's why we sent you."

"Oh, hell no," Wade said as the skeleton began to rise from the ground.

He burst into flame, and Wade's flesh boiled away to leave Funnybone behind. The flaming skeleton took an aggressive stance, hellfire dripping from the chain now in his hands.

"Who are you?" he demanded, "and how dare you steal my schtick?"