Issue #5 by D. Golightly
Sep 2023 Jubilee
Doctor Doom
The Goblin
Spider-Man
Dr. Strange
Captain America
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"CHAPTER FIVE - JUBILEE"BOOM!
Huffing and panting as she ran for her life, Jubliee leaped over a row of hedges, narrowly avoiding being hit by a stray purple blast of energy. The bolt seared the shrubbery behind her and she felt the heat through her overcoat, checking to see if it had caught fire. This was insanity, she thought. This couldn’t be real. The whole world had been turned upside down. “I must be in some kind of alternate dimension,” she muttered as she peaked over the burnt hedges. Jubilation Lee, the youthful mutant that had become the heart of the X-Men in some ways, saw her friends fighting each other and being rounded up by, of all things, Sentinels. Her recent exploits with the younger crowd of mutants, dubbed Generation X, had removed her from the mansion for a time and she had been eager to get back. But this wasn’t the same place she remembered. Another explosion rocked the grounds as she turned to see a mushroom cloud plume over the south wing of the mansion. This was hell on earth. The mansion had been attacked before, of course. And she had even blown up the microwave more than once when she had first arrived (such was the nature of learning to control literal fireworks that flew out of your palms). But this…this was pure chaos. She was beginning to wish that she had never stepped out of that Uber back at the main gate. A sizzling beam of energy cut through the air over her head, slicing into a tree behind her and cutting it in half. The once mighty oak was now charred and split. Tracing the shot back to its source, her eyes went wide as she saw a 20-foot tall Sentinel step out from behind the pool house, its metal arm extended and charging for another blast. Over her head, at least a dozen people swirled through the air, all trading elemental or energy blasts of their own. She recognized a few, but their outfits were different. Maybe new uniforms had been issued while she was away. BOOM! Behind her, the eastern wall separating the grounds from the county road ripped open, debris showering her. She watched in horror as another Sentinel stepped through the gap, its head swiveling until it locked onto her as a target. Raising its armored hand to center on her, she saw another blast begin to charge in its metallic palm. But she had dealt with Sentinels before, both in the Danger Room and in real life. Her training kicked in, and the momentary horror she had at first felt turned to determination. Power erupted from her fist and as she somersaulted to her left, avoiding the blast from the Sentinel, she unleashed her own pent-up potential. The bursting fireworks launched like rockets from her outstretched arm, at first tearing into the Sentinel’s chest and then exploding, splitting it open down the middle. The Sentinel stumbled on unsteady legs and then crashed down onto the ridges of brick and mortar beside it, immobile. She briefly let a smug look flash across her face, but something snapped her back to attention. Something was suddenly missing from the situation. The grounds were dead silent. The raging turmoil she had stumbled onto mere minutes ago had somehow ceased. Turning around, she saw that it wasn’t due to some overwhelming victory or a tragic triumph, but the collective mutants had simply stopped fighting. And they were staring. At her. She was used to the terrific and terrible noise from her firework powers, so the cacophony of what could only be otherwise attributed to a magnificent Fourth of July celebration hadn’t phased her. But it had caught everyone else’s attention and brought it straight on her. A torrent of black clouds suddenly swirled into being over the raised hand of someone hurtling through the air toward her. Lightning crackled, dancing between the woman’s eyes. Ororo Munroe, the powerful mutant known as Storm, hurdled through the air on a downward trajectory, straight for Jubilee. “Storm!” Jubilee shouted, waving her compatriot over. “What the hell is going on? I step out for a minute and you guys fall apart? Seriously, is Apocalypse mind-warping half of you or…or…HEY!” Jubilee ducked under the slashing lightning strike that zig-zagged out from Storm’s palm, striking the downed Sentinel behind her, although there was no doubt that she had been the original target. She pulled herself back up and started to run. “ohshitohshitohshitohshit…” she rambled as she ran between foliage along the border wall. Lightning lanced out, slapping against the wall, bushes, and ground, causing Jubilee’s escape to stutter several times. A gust of hurricane wind finally pinned her to the wall, her arms akimbo and held in place. Storm lowered in front of her, one arm apparently commanding the torrential winds holding her back and the other charging up with another deadly lightning strike. Except that it wasn’t Storm. Not unless she had gone back to her mohawk, buzzed look from years ago. The leather vest draped around her shoulders was a nice touch, Jubilee had to admit, and she figured that if anyone could bring that look back that it would be Ororo. “You’re one of the incumbents,” Storm muttered with a sneer. She nodded back to the way Jubilee had run, toward the Sentinel wreckage. “Not bad, little girl.” “I’m of the legal drinking age, I’ll have you know,” Jubilee said, fighting against the pressing cyclone. Her arms were pinned against the wall, but she twisted her wrist and opened her hand so that her palm was facing the pseudo-Storm. She said, “I’ve known Storm a long time, and you ain’t her! Eat this!” A flash of energy swirled to life in Jubilee’s palm, quickly condensing into an oblong shape that tried to propel outward…but tried was the operative word, and it failed miserably against the focused concussive force of wind. The compacted charge’s propulsion fizzled and the wind slapped it back against the wall next to Jubilee’s head, nearly burning her dark hair. “You got that right, little firecracker,” the wind-controlling mutant replied with a sneer. “Call me Tempest. And the American was right…you rubes are just too easy. You never even saw us coming, and now the switch has been flipped, and it’s too late for you to do anything about it.” Jubilee briefly pondered what was happening. Some kind of doppelganger situation. Or mind control. Or alien invasion. Or any number of other problems that the X-Men had regrettably encountered before. And who was the American? There was a bigger picture that she wasn’t seeing and the pain spreading through her body was too distracting for her to figure it out. Lightning danced across Tempest’s eyes, flitting between the irises and jumping over the bridge of her nose. Jubilee fought against the pressure of the blasting wind, but it was so tight, so compact and focused, that she felt like her ribs would crack under the assault. She looked left and right for help as Tempest approached, the maelstrom from her hand getting more and more intense as she neared, but there was no one. Nobody from the mansion was coming to rescue her, even if she had any friends left. Tempest shifted her stance and twirled her arms the away from Jubilee and the onrush of wind stopped. For a single second, she thought she was being spared, but the air around her continued to pull away, not more violently, only it was again focused into a single small area – her torso. The wind ripped away from her, and she couldn’t even get a breath pulled in. She dropped to her knees, her ribs bruised at the least, and clutched at her throat, but no matter how hard she tried, there was no air to suck into her lungs. Tempest had created a vacuum by shifting the air pressure. Her fingers playfully pulled in front of her, as if she were beckoning Jubilee to her, but really she was using her mutant abilities to suffocate her. And it looked like she was enjoying it. Jubilee collapsed, the sounds of the battle over the mansion filling her ears. Darkness began to encroach on her until all she saw were the black knee-high boots that kept Tempest towering over her. She blinked and she thought she might have seen her step closer. She blinked again. And then again. And then she couldn’t. The ground trembled and sweet air was available to her once again. Her eyelids ripped back and instead of seeing the black boots of Tempest she saw solid steel greaves. A swath of green cloth swept around the ankles and Jubilee looked up into the masked face of one of the most heinous men the world had ever known. “D…Doom…” she muttered through gasps of fresh air. Things had somehow gone from bad to worse. Doom was a world-class threat. An intergalactic threat. A threat that had ripped apart the timestream several times in his own image. And he was looking down at Jubilee and she could see the tortured blue eyes behind his metal mask, judging her. She summoned her strength and rallied her power into her right hand. She would go out with a fight and melt that wretched armor right onto his flesh. Anything to buy just a little bit of time, one more moment to keep the fight going until the calvary could arrive. Doom looked down at her and tsked. He actually tsked, like she was a toddler. “Save your energy,” his baritone voice said. “Doom has not come for you.” In a flourish, Doctor Doom spun and propelled himself into the air, leaping over an unconscious Tempest, whose prone body was still smoking from the blast that someone had laid her out with. Jubilee watched, stunned, as Doom joined the fray over the mansion. She got to one knee just as Doom lanced twin streams of power from his gauntlets into several of the combatants, knocking them aside like they were just a nuisance. Doom…had saved her? What the hell was going on? You must fall back behind the wall, a scratchy voice said, but it took her a moment to realize that she hadn’t heard the voice with her ears. She had perceived it within her own mind, just like how the Professor used to talk to her. Instantly, adrenaline pumped into her body. She felt compelled to do exactly as the voice prompted her. She stumbled for a moment, gaining her bearings, but she did as told and came back through the hole in the wall that the Sentinel had created. She stopped when she saw who was waiting for her. A man wearing green armor from head to toe and a yellow visor over his eyes, hovering a few feet over off the ground on what looked like a purple platform in the shape of a bat. Beside him was someone she did recognize, the webbed wonder called Spider-Man. And just behind them both, cowering behind a tree, was a stocky, bald man who was beckoning her over. You’re safe with us, the bald man’s voice said in her mind. “It’s okay, kiddo,” Spider-Man said. He backflipped and the bottoms of his feet stuck to the trunk of the tree. He stuck a thumb at the armored guy and the baldy. “They’re with me. We need to get you and the rest of the good guys out of here.” Jubilee looked over her shoulder and pointed back at the mansion. “But…but…but…Doom!” Spidey’s hands came up gesturing innocence. “Believe me, I know. Not my call. But when he found out what we were up to we couldn’t keep him out of it. He sort of…took over a little.” “But…Doom!” Jubilee repeated. Her eyes went wider. “He’s tearing the mansion apart!” Spider-Man craned his neck and then relaxed against the tree again. “Actually, he’s tearing the entrants apart. See?” Jubilee turned and sought cover against the brick wall, angling herself to see Doom as he swooped through the air, ripping through the chaotic defenses of various mutants, some of which she recognized. “Entrants?” she asked. Spider-Man leapt off the trunk and clung to the wall beside Jubilee. “Sort of an unofficial term for the inter-dimensional invaders. You see, two years ago an evil Captain America sent alternate versions of us – entrants – to our world to replace us – the incumbents.” BOOM! “You’re taking the decimation of my home pretty casually,” Jubilee said out of the side of her mouth as she watched Doom smash in the face of someone that looked like Iceman, only more bulked up with spikes of ice on his shoulders and hair. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “I don’t mean to be so chill, but baldy is keeping me from entering the fight and panicking.” “Me, too,” the armored guy said. “And you are?” Jubilee asked. He bowed slightly, making his glider buckle in the air. “The phenomenal Goblin, at your service.” “Uh huh. And him?” “The Motivator. He’s like the Watcher, only useful.” “I don’t understand anything you just said.” She turned back to watch Doom plow through…was that Warren? “These…entrants from another dimension…they’re trying to replace us? Kill us? Take over the world?” Spidey ticked off his fingers. “Yes, yes, and yes. In that order. We think.” “If you know all this, and this has been going on for two years, why is this all happening now? They were lying in wait for…what? The perfect moment to strike?” “Not exactly. They were probably going to keep on waiting. And replacing. We’re still trying to figure out their ultimate goal.” “Okay, so then what changed?” She gestured to Doom forming a purple energy shield around himself, effortlessly deflecting assaults from what kind of looked like Sunfire and Havok. He made taking all all of the X-Men, or whoever they were, look like child’s play. “What made all of this happen?” A high-pitched whine overhead interrupted Spider-Man’s next quip. A red corvette with the tires angled downward and bursts of propulsive force rocketed into the fray, slamming into someone that looked remarkably like Cannonball, except that he had healed skin burns covering his face. The pilot of the corvette must have hit the eject button, because a moment after knocking away the entrant Cannoball, a figure was jettisoned into the air. Wearing the red, white, and blue uniform that he had become most recognizable for, Captain America himself tucked his body in tight and somersaulted effortlessly through the air. With practiced precision, Cap slipped his trademark shield off of his back and whipped it at the fake Iceman, who had recovered from Doom’s onslaught. He erected an ice wall to deflect the shield, but the super-solider serum had enhanced Cap’s throw to beyond what Iceman had anticipated and the shield ripped through the ice without a problem, jutting into the doppelganger’s gut. “The short of it is,” Spider-Man said, looking up alongside Jubilee, “is that he got involved.” Cap fell onto the back of the duplicate Archangel as he descended from his ejection from the SHIELD corvette, as if he had planned the complicated multi-pronged attached in the split second since he had arrived on the scene. Gripping Archangel’s wings where the hollow bone protruded from his scapula, one in each hand, Cap first drove his knees into his opponent’s back and then yanked downward with his augmented strength. The bones tore free and Archangel, or whatever he called himself, screamed in pain as both he and Cap dropped from the air like stones. Cap angled the fall so that he was on top, and the pair slammed into the ground. Without missing a beat, Cap trotted over to where his shield had fallen and stomped on the rim so it flipped up into his hand. A quick look left and then right gave him all he needed to see of the raging battle. He turned to look at the hole in the wall where Jubilee and Spider-Man were waiting. “Secure?” Cap called over. Spider-Man nodded and gave a thumbs-up. “We’re good to go, Cap. You sure you don’t want us to lend a hand?” Cap pivoted on his right foot and tossed his shield like a discus at someone who looked like Janet van Dyne, only her hair was wild and stringy. “Stick to the plan,” Cap responded. “Doom and I will meet you at the rendezvous.” Spidey nodded. “That’s our queue then. Let’s go.” He turned to leave, but Jubilee grabbed his bicep to stop him. “Wait!” she exclaimed. “We can’t just leave! What about the X-Men? The incumbent ones I mean!” “Cap’s right,” the Goblin said. “We have to stay on mission. Time to leave.” “What mission? All I see is chaos!” “Jubilee,” Spider-Man said as soothingly as he could. “Right now, you’re the mission. We have to get you to safety. Cap’s plan depends on it.” “You were sent here to get me?” “You better believe it, kiddo. Also, Cap was here earlier and…well, let’s just say that he hates to leave things unfinished.” “But…but…Doom!” Jubilee said as Spider-Man pulled her back from the wall. “Yeah,” Spidey said with a sigh. “When he caught wind of everything, he sort of interjected himself.” “That’s putting it mildly,” the Goblin added under his breath. Jubilee ripped her arm away from Spider-Man and stepped back toward the hole in the bordering wall. Doom’s hands bent in awkward ways, forging a web of orange arcane energy that quickly erupted into a cocoon around several of the fake X-Men. She had forgotten that Doom was a powerful sorcerer in his own right. “We can’t just—” She felt a calming presence in her head. She suddenly realized that placing her trust in Spider-Man, who she had known for a few years now, was the right thing to do. She felt compelled to turn away from the fight and go with these men, even though she also felt the need to try and save her home. As she stepped back with Spider-Man and the Goblin, the stocky bald man winced at her. “Oh,” she said and tapped her temple. “You’re in here, aren’t you? You want me to go, too.” “The Motivator is on our side,” the Goblin said. “I worked with him once when Adam Warlock assembled the Infinity Stones, making this sort of gauntlet thing. He’d good people.” And oddly enough, that was enough for Jubilee. Maybe it was the absurdity of the situation. Maybe it was the Motivator. Maybe it was Spider-Man’s influence. Or maybe she just needed to be away from watching her friends, people she had trusted completely for the majority of her life, be decimated by Captain America and Doctor Doom, who were fighting side by side. Spider-Man tapped his ear and said, “Ready and willing, doc.” A shimmering portal that sparked around the wobbling edges slowly grew in shape and size just a few feet away from them. The Goblin guided his glider through as soon as it was big enough and then the Motivator and Spider-Man stepped through. Taking one last look at the smoking mansion and people wearing her friends’ faces, Jubilee took in a deep breath and stepped through. The portal snapped shut behind her and she saw that she was now standing in the grand foyer of an impressive brownstone home. A man in a loose blue shirt and flowing red cape stepped down the sprawling staircase, sipping a cup of tea as he approached. He nodded to each of the men that had come through before her, and then stopped at the base of the stairs and bowed slightly to Jubilee. “Welcome to the Sanctum Sanctorum,” Doctor Strange said. “We have a lot of work to do and we have to move quickly. But first…care for some tea?” # # # # # # # # # # “You want me to do what?” Jubilee asked. Captain America slipped his cowl back off of his face, revealing blonde hair and stunning blue eyes that seemed to pierce into her soul. She had been close to Cap before, but he had never looked directly at her before. She would have remembered that chiseled jaw, those perfect cheek bones, those lips that were just begging-- “Are you okay?” Cap asked. Jubilee shook her head. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. I think that little bald dude was still in my head.” Cap tossed a look at the Motivator, who was silently drinking tea in the lounge, facing away from them. “Right,” Cap said. “As I was saying, we need you to cause a big distraction so we can get into where we think all of this chaos is coming from.” “The Baxter Building?” Jubilee asked as she followed Cap into the parlor. Some imaging and other computer equipment had been haphazardly set up, with someone wearing a skull mask sitting at the console. “Yes and no,” Cap replied. He pointed to the holographic representation of New York City hovering over the imaging device. “A second building has merged with this reality, sitting on top of the Baxter Building. All of our readings from the entrants we trust, like the Goblin and Taskmaster here, align with the readings we’re getting from that…Watchtower.” The hologram zoomed into the Baxter Building, and there was indeed a new extension added directly on top of the famous landmark. The architectural design was wildly different, with spirals and sharp protrusions jutting out on both sides of what Cap had called the Watchtower. It easily added another thirty stories to the Baxter Building. “Each dimension has its own vibrational frequency,” Cap explained. “At least that’s how it’s been watered down for me. From what we can tell, this Watchtower has been brought here from the other invading dimension.” “You recognize it?” Jubilee asked Taskmaster. He shrugged in response, not bothering to look up from the console where he was typing away. “No, but that doesn’t mean much. The Great American operated on a global scale, toppling governments to set up his own twisted regime.” “There’s another you,” Jubilee said to Cap, “in there.” She recalled Cap’s arrival at the mansion just a few hours ago, and how he and Doom had ripped through the collective abilities of the X-Men. Cap nodded. “Taskmaster, Titania, and the Goblin have brought me up to speed on my counterpart. He’s a vicious general who has all of my strengths and none of my scruples. We need to get in there and stop him. Once the cat was out of the bag back at the X-mansion, and I managed to get away, the kids gloves were off. The American has put the order out to contain everyone. We think he’s operating under some kind of twisted code, sort of a battlefield playbook, and the mansion was the final phase.” “We’ve intercepted communiques for the XSE, Department H, the Commission on Superhuman Activities, and even Congress,” Taskmaster said. “All of the red-tape legislation binding heroes over the last two years? That was him, too.” Jubilee thought she remembered something about Tony Stark being asked to testify at a Congressional hearing earlier in the year. She had also been copied on a few emails from Hank McCoy about their Commission liaison that seemed a little out of character, asking for updating location and movement info that he could have gotten with Cerebro instead of asking directly. “So, what…I’m going to distract the bad guys while you bust into the Watchtower?” Jubilee asked. Just then, the sparking portal ripped open in the middle of the foyer once again, only this time the sparks twirled in the opposite direction and had a green hue instead of orange. As the aperture opened, Doom stepped through, bringing an uncomfortable silence with him. The armored and caped man stepped through the foyer as if the others present were beneath his notice. He reached for a teacup from the tray sitting next to Spider-Man, who didn’t so much as flinch as he just shifted over slightly. “We need more than just a distraction, Jubilee,” Cap said after a set of heartbeats. “We need every eye in New York City looking at you.” Jubilee balanced a burning length of plasma on the tip of one finger. “I’ve gotten pretty good over the years, but you’re obviously talking on a much larger scale than giving a Sentinel a hotfoot.” “I told you this was a mistake,” Doom said, making Jubilee jump. She hadn’t noticed him cross the foyer into the parlor behind her. He sipped his tea through his metal facemask. “This child is not up to the task. For what you have planned, Rogers, her limited abilities will not suffice. As I’ve stated multiple times—” “For the last time, Victor,” Cap interjected, “we are not detonating a bomb in New Jersey.” With a swift about-face, Doom retracted his presence from the parlor, sipping his tea in a most disgruntled fashion. “I cannot believe you’re brought Doom into this,” Jubilee said. “He’s probably the most dangerous man alive.” “All the more reason to keep him close,” Cap said. “He’s really just irritated that the only solution we have is what’s in the Baxter Building, and that Reed Richards came up with it.” “Ah,” Jubilee said, nodding. “That explains it. So…what do I have to do?” “You have the privilege,” said a new voice behind her, “of working side by side…with me.” Jubilee turned around and couldn’t stop herself from gasping. She felt silly doing it, but her shock at seeing the gaudy dressed man step into parlor has surprised her. She took a step back and bumped into Captain America’s chest. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jubilee said. “Fabian Cortez? Do you have any idea who this man is?” “I see my reputation precedes me,” Fabian said with a bow and a flourish of his purple cape. “Like Doom,” Cap responded as he gently placed a hand on Jubilee’s shoulder, “he’s an ally.” “He’s a terrorist.” Fabian stepped back and clutched his fist to his chest to feign being wounded. His ponytail swirled behind him as he shook his head from left to right. “I am hurt, child,” Fabian said. “I stand as much to lose as you in this global battle. Perhaps even more.” She flicked a finger at Fabian, but turned to face Cap as she said, “Which one is he? Entrant or incumbent? Why are we trusting him?” To Jubilee, this was the man that had threatened the entire planet with a specific focus on the mutant population several times over. He was powerful in his own right, able to boost the abilities of others, which he somehow also twisting into power detection as well. With the right army behind him, he was a true force of nature. “He’s an incumbent, and we’re trusting him,” Captain America said, “because if we don’t, then our world will be taken by a madman.” Jubilee sighed and eyed Fabian, who winked at her. She was beginning to think that she should never have gotten out of that Uber. TO BE CONCLUDED! |