Who: OG Avengers and Portal Team
What: An experiment?
When: Saturday Morning
Where: The Portal/Marvel 616 World
Rating/Warning:. S for SAD, implied character death
Even Tony couldn't believe they were doing this. He had a knot in his gut. It was the same feeling he had when Loki attacked New York and he realized he had to travel through the portal with that bomb. The feeling he had when he realized Pepper had been exposed to extremis. The feeling he had when Wanda once made him hallucinate that his friends had all died because of him.
It was a bad feeling.
But he didn't let it show. He kept it light-hearted and sarcastic, assuring the others it was going to be fine. He had to do this. They didn't realize his theory yet, and for a while, he wanted to keep it that way. But once the portal was open and staring them in the face, he knew better. They should know.
They'd already run the first few probes. No video, but the drone came back safe. The second one was a little less defined. There were ebuildings. The suit came back safe. Okay. The lack of video feeds could be because of the electronic transmission of the portal, but there
was audio that worked. So that was good. He could describe to the others what he saw when he got back.
Taking a breath, fully suited up sans his helmet, he stepped forward, stopped, then turned to the others.
"So, time to come clean," he looked directly at Bruce then Darcy. "There's a reason I'm doing this. Or we have to do this. I have a theory that the people disappearing from our world are going to these other worlds. If we can trace the PONG readings, we might be able to get them back." That meant people like Happy. Peter's friends, Ned and MJ. "It means we can check on those from other worlds disappearing, too. We can make sure they're heading home. It's a theory. But this is the first step in figuring that out." They were nowhere near actually achieving that yet. "I didn't want to get people's hopes up yet. So one step at a time."
He took another breath. "Anyway, wish me luck?" He grinned and activated his helmet before turning to head through the portal.
The first step was easy enough- a sucking sensation he knew from his past trips, and then there they were. Only...this wasn't like vampire world. This was different. He was in a city- what he thought was a city. It was....destroyed. Completely destroyed. Rubble everywhere, an eery darkness in the sky. No stars. Just darkness and a light emanating from somewhere- like through dark clouds.
Through the comms, he uttered. "Uh, guys. I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore." He muttered as he stepped away from the portal to look around. "You getting visuals on this?" There was nothing transmitting in the video feed.
"There's nothing here. Well, looks like there was something-" He stepped on a street sign, looking down. It read 'Broadway'. Then, he started to recognize a few things. This had been New York.
"Shit. It's New York." He should go back. Even with no signs of life, no signs of danger, he had a bad feeling- meanwhile, the portal started to flicker. And Tony squinted up at the sky as he saw something that made him start to panic a little- a purple cloud was engulfing the sky and in the distance, it was literally sucking up the city on the horizon. What the hell?
"I'm heading back!" He turned to go but the portal flickered unstably. The readings were off the chart.
And then, the comms were cut out. And the portal closed.
There was radio silence from then on in.
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