sixthiterationlogs | Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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Hello Darkness My Old Friend

WHO: Bruce Banner
WHERE: South Village Fountain
WHEN: 9/17
OPEN TO: Open to all!
WARNINGS: None yet

BUNKER/SOUTH VILLAGE FOUNTAIN

In the tube, Banner was unconscious. Nothing so restful as a simple dream, that would be too kind, instead his mind was restless. It was a waking nightmare, seeing people turn to dust before his eyes, seeing the looks of pain and loss on the few people in the world he still cared about, and the friend he knew best was missing, gone, who knows where. Everything was wrong. And now he was here. His hair was newly short and gray, his figure average and unassuming, and he woke up suddenly to propulsion that he couldn't possibly be ready for.

This wasn't really the first time he woke up somewhere he shouldn't be, in a place he couldn't remember; this was a common situation. It wasn't even the first time he was in the water, struggling to breathe, his limbs wildly flailing. But it was a rare occurrence that this moment of concern didn't follow with the feeling to the tip of his toes of the other presence waiting. Then again, he and the Hulk had issues. Issues not even close to being addressed. It meant he was vulnerable. It meant many things. Banner finally got himself together and swam up, figuring out which way was up, and broke the surface gasping. To where? To here. Where was here?

Exhausted and with a heavy heart, he sat on the edge of the fountain and breathed deeply, running hands through his wet hair. Nothing seemed familiar around there, but hey, it wasn't a planet geared toward trying to kill him or freak him out. So far. Don't jinx it, Banner. He sat there for a long time, he had no idea how long. He was in no hurry to move. The world was too much right then, and whatever this was, it was a few steps above.

The strangest part of everything was the clothing. The extras. Normally he woke up naked. So there was that one small good thing. It took him awhile before he was up and walking, but eventually it happened.

INN

At first he simply walked around. Nothing was familiar. In fact, he was fairly certain it seemed dissimilar from anything he'd known before. Some things were the same, yes, but Banner couldn't see how the Hulk brought him this far. And he was wearing clothes. What the hell was happening now? Was this another trick from Thanos? That made sense. He clearly liked to torture people. When he saw the inn, he paused. He tried to avoid people most of the time. It was too dangerous, he was too dangerous, except now he wasn't at all and that meant people he walked into could in fact be dangerous to him. He tried to reach out to see if the Hulk was still ignoring him.

There was nothing. No touch. No moment of anger or denial. No feeling whatsoever. Nothing. He was the only on home. At first he couldn't figure out what that meant. All these years later, how could it be? All the years trying to get here, and it just happened when he woke up. Stunned and overwhelmed, he could only stumble over to the outside wall of the Inn and lean against it. Not going in, just hovering there, and then he started to crumble down until he was sitting on the ground, staring off into space.

What was he feeling? Relief? Loss? Fear? Confusion? All of it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Bruce was as average as average could get, the type of man that had very little difficulty slipping into a crowd or being forgotten. And he was fine with that. But he simply got used to being surrounded by beautiful people who could also kill people with their pinky. He rolled along with it. He winced at her response, but not because the language bothered him, because he could see that he walked in at the wrong time and put her in an uncomfortable position. He'd been there before, too many times. If he'd been able to slink out without bothering her, he would have.

"No, no, I'm the one who barged in." He moved over to her and gingerly knelt down himself. "Be careful with those, glass shards have a way of sticking into your skin even without much of a prick." Bruce was trying not to do the same, between the two of them they could probably get it done quickly. "I mean, there's a lot about this place and this situation that's worth breaking some things, right?"

He managed to surprise her a second time. This time with decency, something that tended to be in short supply, in Sam's experience. She looked up in complete bewilderment. he was actually coming over to help her? He was apologizing to her?

What the actual...?

Sam shook her head.

The clown rodeo would never stop throwing curve balls at her.

"If I could, sometimes I think I'd smash everything in sight," she admitted. Sam had never thought of herself as an angry person. But once upon a time, she'd thought of herself as an active agent. How things changed. "But that was just fucking wasteful. It's not like I can just go around the corner and buy a dozen beakers every time I need more."

When she looked at him with bewilderment, he didn't know her well enough to guess her thoughts, so he tried to smile. Bruce's smiles were usually small and half-hearted, like he forgot how to do it. He tried though. He was a stranger in her space and she was distraught. The least he could do was try to put her at ease. Without the Hulk crawling under his skin, it felt easier to do that.

"I guess that answers the question of whether there's a corner store around here. Luckily I wasn't really expecting a Whole Foods." This place was very clearly not modern. The wristband seemed like the most sophisticated part, outside of whatever brought them there in the first place. So far. He hadn't explored. He kept smiling, because his dry humor wasn't always evident. "I've only been here a little while and I can understand wanting to break a few things. Maybe we can find a punching bag for that."

Steve could probably help with that. But Steve wasn't there. Or was he? He had no idea. It wouldn't be the first time Bruce thought what would Steve do as a good instinct. "Is it just this place, or ... um. Are you okay?"

The Whole Foods reference elicited an unexpected smile. Sam hadn't had reason to smile in a long time and it showed. There was a rusty quality to it. From disuse, maybe. But if there was one thing Sam could always appreciate, it was inappropriately-timed sarcasm. She lived on the knife's edge of it. And that had happened long before the clown rodeo happened.

"No one's ever really okay here," she said. "There are only two baseline emotions. Abject horror and depressingly long stretches of boredom. Everything in between is just a transition from one to the other."

She paused.

And in a moment of surprising honesty, she added, "Except for loneliness. But that's not really an emotion so much as a state of being."

Wow. She didn't know where that had come from.

Reaching out to swipe a piece of glass before he could get it, her fingers brushed his skin. Oh. Right. That's where it came from. A complete lack of human contact.

She sighed and shook her head. "You're new, aren't you?"

Bruce ordinarily made jokes to make someone else smile, so it gave him a warm feeling in his belly every time it succeeded. He listened quietly and attentively to what she said, a flicker of empathy and understanding in his warm brown eyes when she mentioned loneliness.

"That, um, sounds a lot like my every day life." He didn't know what okay was like. Okay was a state of being when something wasn't wrong, and yeah, no chance of that. Horror came along with occasionally being a killer rage monster. "Less so the boredom, so that'll be interesting." Bruce could live with boredom, but he also suspected that wouldn't be a problem of his. After all, this was a new world with new animals and locations and people and a huge, huge mystery to solve.

Her touch was unexpected, but he didn't shy away from it like usual, because it was clearly an accident. "I know that about loneliness well. Turns you hollow. But if it helps, it sounds like here's more than just you and me stuck. Other people are going through something similar. There's always that." Bruce often told people he was not the kind of doctor to be good at therapy or helping other people through problems, but he had his moments. It was the trait that drew him to taking care of people while on the run. Kept him human. "I just got here, I'm Bruce."

It was easy to feel alone in a crowd. Especially all the underwear models who had a shared history and homeland, like they did in this hellhole. But he was clearly trying to be nice, so Sam swallowed the thought. “Sam,” she said instead. “Resident dumpster fire.”

She started to reach out, to offer her hand for a shake, but realized it was shimmering with broken glass. So it turned into an uncomfortable wave instead. Better to look weird than to risk getting her shitty blood on a poor newbie. Especially one who didn’t seem to totally suck.

“And if this place sounds like your everyday life, then you must come from one hell of a world.”

A pause.

“Oh. Have you gotten The Talk yet?” She used airquotes, even though she hated airquotes. “Multiverse and Einstein-Rosen bridges and all that?”

"Nice to meet you, Sam Resident Dumpster Fire." That was a dad joke if he ever heard one, but well, despite never having the ability to have a father, Bruce had a very soft spot for kids and younger people. Which as an old soul, meant more of the world with every year that passed. "I'm usually the resident dumpster fire so we might be related." Except for the fact they looked nothing alike. She was a young attractive woman and he was turning slowly into what he remembered from his grandfather's photographs.

"I do come from one of those, yes. Did you get any cuts?" The one and only time Bruce was really comfortable with touch was when it came to medical reasons. He reached out with a gentle hand to take hers and look closely for the glass. He'd done this before, there'd been plenty of broken things in his childhood to get cut on. "I'm a doctor," he followed it up with, conscious how odd it would be to just take her hand like that. "Sort of." And conscientious enough not to fake being a full MD when he was a lesser level.

Wormholes and multiverse. That probably was the closest thing to making sense. "No, I haven't heard that, but that makes more sense than this being an odd afterlife or someone deciding to kidnap me randomly." Bruce could think of more than a few reasons they'd want to do that, but none that involved him powerless. "It's always been theoretically possible for that to exist, but everything is a theory until its proven, and here we are."

Sam, on the other hand, kind of craved touch. She suspected it had something to do with three years living among the Kindred. On the whole, they were not a terribly touch-y group. Sam used to scandalize half of the clan, when she crossed a room to give Avery a big hug. They didn't understand why anyone would do that, and always chalked it up to the fact that she was still within the span of her mortal life.

They'd lost the capacity to understand the need for affection, for love.

Not Sam. No. She was a...special case. In more than one way.

Fortunately, her hands were glassy, but she'd managed to avoid getting cut. She didn't pull away. Even if she had no idea what the fuck a 'sort of' doctor was. Something her parents would have wanted her to major in, maybe.

"Trust me," she said. "The theory's been blown out of the water. I've been doing field research for over a year. As far as I can tell, there are over thirty different universes represented here. I've got notes, if you want to see. I guess I'm a 'sort of' doctor too. PhD, though. No MD."

Edited 2018-09-20 00:23 (UTC)

Touch was a complicated subject for him, which came back to a bad childhood, and a long time where he was scared of how he could hurt others if they got too close. It was better to stay out of their way. Then it was about not standing out, and people remembered touch. Sometimes they remembered the simple ones, like now, and it could get him caught. That was in the past now. Bruce really should try this normal human interaction thing more. So far, it was going okay. The ceiling hadn't caved in and she wasn't offended by him. He realized a few seconds too long that he was still holding her hand, and satisfied no glass was in, he let it go.

His eyes brightened at the offer. "Yeah, wow, a year? If it's been a year, another pair of eyes might be helpful." Bruce did want to figure out what was happening, because this was clearly just the start. He doubted what was going on was as simple as kidnapping people and leaving them in one place. She already indicated otherwise. "Me too, the medical part is more honorary than literal. I lived in third world countries for awhile, and anyone even moderately comfortable in medicine could save lives." It was emergency care more than sophisticated, and it was the least he could do. Those were pretty good times for Bruce. He felt like he was staying out of everyone's way and also helping. It didn't last.

"So I should call you Dr. Resident Dumpster Fire."

"Wouldn't be the strangest thing I've ever been called," Sam said, the corners of her eyes crinkling a little at the notion. Back home, she'd earned the titles 'Galatea of the Ordo Dracul' and 'The Blue Bitch' and, who could forget, 'The Great Experiment.' And she was pretty sure a few residents of the village were still thinking of her as 'Twilight Sparkle' after the whole network incident. All things considered, 'Dr. Resident Dumpster Fire' wasn't so bad. Her parents would have at least enjoyed the 'Dr.' part of it.

She walked over to the trash can, dumping out the remaining glass. It sounded like windchimes in the wind. She nodded over to her notebook, sitting on the counter. The paper was coarse, homemade. Jude had given it to her, shortly before disappearing from the scene. "Take a look," she said. "The first couple of pages are on the multiverse."

Sam had drawn out several diagrams, trying to sum up everything she'd learned. There were twisted threads, labeled as Universe A, Universe B, and Universe C, all knotted together at a central point, with dotted lines indicating shared histories and jagged lines on points of divergence. Additionally, she'd jotted notes on theoretical means of powering some kind of artificial wormhole. And then, of course, there was The List, topped with the words 'Same world (?)' followed by names:

~~Bucky Barnes~~ Fucky Darns
~~Sexy British Lady~~ Peggy?
Second-Rate Guy
~~Dad Jokes~~ Clint
Danny
Claire
Mayor Hotdog
Tony

Bruce took her direction and went to the notebook. Scientists were usually very collaborative, the good kinds, but he knew that sharing notes was part of the job and also a sign of respect. Something he was always grateful for. He pensively looked over what she wrote, seeing the connections although she'd have to explain to him which universe was which. So whatever was going on, it garnered several universes, multiple people from each, and to what end. They probably had to figure out what the purpose was if they were going to reverse it, which he assumed people wanted to do.

He saw the first name and couldn't help but chuckle. "I'm pretty sure Barnes wouldn't appreciate that." Sexy British Peggy didn't ring a bell yet, but he tapped Clint and Tony. Those were the only names he recognized, but he was relieved to see them at all. "This must be my world. Tony's my best friend, and Clint was my teammate." Clint apparently retired and Bruce left earth entirely, so teammates they were no longer. And the team also was destroyed, so there was that. "I don't know the others, but I'm, um, not really a social butterfly, so."

Sam looked over at him, several expressions passing over her face at once. Horror. Confusion. Recognition. All of it quickly summed up with an ever-so-eloquent, "What the fuck?"

She brushed her hands off against each other and walked over to him, staring down at the page with a bit of resignation in the slump of her shoulders. "Another lab rat from that world? I swear, our Overlords play favorites." Which was...fine. In some sense. Sam wouldn't wish this place on her friends. And wouldn't wish her enemies on the place. But it was hard to ignore the fact how isolating the whole thing could be. She never saw Avery or Grace or Star or anyone she knew. Whereas it seemed like every last one of Fucky's merest acquaintances showed up without warning or ceremony.

...she probably needed to stop calling him that in her head.

"So you're from the world with all the superheroes?" she said, planting a hand on her hip and leaning against the countertop. "Please tell me you're not a supervillain or something. I'm not sure we have the capacity for it."

That was not what he expected, he was taken a little aback. "I guess they are. I'm not sure that spells out good things for us." He scratched his chin, it had been on the verge of getting bristle. A few days without a razor and it would fill out. "Our world is interesting on the outside, I can see it. It's always in a threat." He was relieved to see those names, but could tell it was making her distraught again.

The truth was, Bruce wanted to say he was. The Hulk was responsible for more deaths than several supervillains out there. But he figured what made a difference could be intentions. The Hulk never intended to hurt people, even people who were trying to hurt him. It was self defense. "I'm not, I was one of the Avengers, when the Avengers still existed. Our purpose was to stop the supervillains. Unfortunately, uh, we failed big time." His shoulders slumped and he rubbed one of his eyes, and this was an understatement. They failed beyond reckoning.

"The Avengers," she repeated. Probably not the British show from the 1960s that her adoptive parents seemed to love. But she got the gist. A group of super friends. Which meant that there was something 'super' about her new friend here. But after her experiences with Second-Rate Guy, she decided she couldn't come out and ask. "Well, that's fancy," she continued. "My group never even had a name."

Then again, they'd always had a name. But that was before they'd gotten into the business of saving--or rather, failing to save--the world.

"You guys don't exist in my universe. And our world ended in 2014. So in terms of failure, I think my world wins. I'm not sure it's really failure our Overlords are interested in."

Now there was an unexpected, new thought.

What if it was the effort they cared about?

"Yeah, it's a strange name. Tony came up with it. I'm not sure I'd ever say we're out for vengeance, but The Reactionaries doesn't sound great either. The Defenders might be a good one." They were defenders, but they also lost and usually had to react in order to win. "I think it was part of the marketing, we needed to have some kind of title." They were existing in the real world and out in the public, and Tony was an expert on the PR side of things. Or Pepper was. Either way, they all accepted the team title and went with it.

He felt for her in that moment, understanding the sense of loss and guilt that came with failing to do something important. "I'm sorry about your world. We were trying to defeat this man named Thanos, he believed killing half the universe's population was the way to achieve world peace. We didn't stop him, and now I don't even know what number of lifeforms were snuffed out. Beyond trillions." Bruce wasn't really sure if he could emotionally deal with it. He felt numb about it. Like it happened to someone else, that he was looking through blank eyes as people around him dropped into dust. "We saw our people die, unable to stop them from disappearing. Bucky was one of the first." At least one of the first that Bruce saw. He saw Steve's face.

"What happened with yours? Unless that's a very intrusive question."

Well. That was...a lot of information. A lifelong Star Wars fan, not to mention vampire, Sam liked to think of herself as being pretty good at following complicated and convoluted plotlines. But Bruce definitely threw a curveball at her there. She had to press her lips together for a moment to take it all in.

"Okay," she said, after a few seconds of silence, nodding her head once. "I have, like, a million questions." Beyond trillions, possibly.

What had happened to her world had been bad. The Rain of Fire had been...bad.

But literally killing half of the universe's population? In light of the fact that she knew extraterrestrials were science fact in their universe, that was just...staggering.

"I'm gonna need you to back up the bus a second, here. Let's start with this Thanos guy. What's his deal?"

Bruce actually half-laughed when she said she had a million questions, because yes, he completely understood why. He was still trying to figure it all out himself. "Thanos is an alien. He goes to planets, kills half of the population at random, and moves on. I don't know why he decided this was the right thing to do, but he believes it." He did wonder where Thanos came from, what motivated him, but not enough to dwell. Their only job was to stop him, and they failed. He remembered the look in Thanos' eyes. The determination. The certainty. It was the worst kind of crazy.

"And having that drive and an army, multiple armies, is bad enough, but there were these stones. The Infinity stones. They're made of pure cosmic energy, each one representing an aspect of life." It sounded ridiculous when he said it out loud, but he already told the story more than once, and he'd seen it to be true, he knew it. "When he got all of them, he had more power in the universe than any being, so all he had to do was snap his fingers and make his dream into a reality." His eyes were haunted by the memory of that snap. It echoed in his ears. "And then they were gone, just like that."

Sam grabbed her notebook with all the desperation of a drowning man clinging to a buoy. She started to jot down notes as fast as possible, but there was so much information that she resorted to a certain shorthand.

Alien guy. Sith tendencies. Clone armies. Assembles stones. Becomes Captain Planet. Kills half of everyone.

She'd have to work on nuance some other time. Anyone else reading the notes would think she was crazy. And they'd probably be right. But at least Sam understood her own crazy, at this point. Or tried to. Admittedly, their Overlords liked to test that.

"And that's the last thing you remember from your world?" she asked, without looking up. "This guy going on his Donkey Kong rampage." She didn't mean to belittle the cost. But black humor was pretty much Sam's only defense mechanism. She'd made more than her fair share of jokes about the Rain of Fire.

Not that Avery or anyone else ever got them.

"That is..." She finally looked up, blue eyes filled with genuine sympathy, something as rare as a unicorn when it came to Sam. "...awful." There really wasn't anything better to describe it. Mere words failed and she was no poet. "That is fucking awful."

Bruce didn't mind black humor. He took it for what it was. "Yeah, we had no idea what to do next. We mostly were just all standing there, dealing with the losses, wondering what to do next. And now I'm here." To process grief on that level was probably impossible. Once they got back to civilization, they would just see constant devastation, and struggle for the world to right itself. If it could. If this wasn't the start of a civil breakdown and people acting their worst in desperation.

He nodded, feeling emotion well up in his stomach, in his throat, making it tighten. He had so much less to lose than the others, but Bruce was someone whose purpose used to be to better humanity through scientific discovery. So he cared, every life lost was too high a price. "It was. He won. We usually do manage to stop the bad guy. Not perfectly, loss is always a part, small failures that still matter, and I think we believed we still had a chance." Against all odds. They won against bad odds before. It was bound for their luck to run out.

"I don't know yet, if his snap was for all life in the universe, or sentient beings. Did it wipe out half of the animals, half of the plants? If so, more people will die, resources aren't infinity. And with the population cut in half, that half could be the people who make the world function." Bruce shook his head, rubbing fingers through short hair. "How he thought this was helping just goes to show his madness, and his inability to understand the consequences. He left planets and that was it."

The sad part was that Sam could almost understand this guy's logic. Not that she agreed with it, of course. She absolutely emphatically didn't. No one who survived the Rain of Fire, who had lost relatives in the Holocaust, could ever possibly condone the slaughter of half of all life. But she could understand it.

Kindred logic, really. Maybe even Predator logic, a fact that she hated.

But Bruce had said it himself. Resources were finite. That's where the logic lay. Cutting down half of the population cut down half of the drain on those resources.

Sam felt a sour taste in her mouth.

She crossed the room, grabbing one of the bottles of murky vodka she'd been stockpiling. "Here," she said, walking back to offer it to Bruce. "Sounds like you could use this."

Thanos was far from logical, although Bruce could the feeling from his short time meeting him that he arrogantly thought he had the entire galaxy figured out. He knew men like that in his life, just not someone this level of power and cruelty. He might think it was necessity, but there was a part of him that enjoyed it, or so Bruce felt. No one who actually cared and carried the weight of his violence would continue it, unless it was a part of their core. He regretted and grieved over every death on his head, and avoided creating more. Thanos was a monster, and they couldn't beat him. He was too powerful and his certainty was too pure.

He glanced up at the offer and hesitated only a few moments before taking it. "Thanks. I don't usually drink, but I think this is as good a time as any to start." Bruce understood the instinct to drown in sorrows, honestly. It seemed simpler than the feeling that was pressing down on his chest. Survivor's guilt, he intellectually understood, as well as a mountain of worse. He felt bad simply drinking from her bottle, it was clearly hers, so he got up and puttered around the kitchen briefly to get a glass. And since it seemed rude not to share it with her, he brought her back another one. This one hopefully not to break.

"Maybe that's why we're here, part of it at least. The people from my world, they're fighters, they've seen tragedy and survived it. It sounds like you're one too. So the people in charge, they could want the type of people who could struggle past what is thrown at them." The liquor was intense on his tongue, but he swallowed it down in moderation.

"I don't know about a fighter," Sam said, quietly picking up her glass and pouring the vodka into his. "More like a survivor." And an experiment. But that wasn't a good opening for someone you'd just met, she supposed. "Although it's crossed my mind from time to time that the Overlords graciously hosting us might be trying to build some kind of army."

A thought that really led to more questions than answers. But Sam had no shortage of time on her hands to come up with increasingly worst-case scenarios.

"My world was ended by decidedly terrestrial means." She sighed, resting her chin in her palm. "And not quite as neat and tidy as a snap and fifty-fifty odds. We call it the Rain of Fire. My brother came up with the name. After the Creedence Clearwater Revival song."

Avery wasn't exactly known for being up on pop culture, so it was always quite memorable when he managed to get one right.

"A group of assholes--we call them Predators, they call themselves Titans--caused a sweeping communications blackout coupled with sending every single orbiting body around the earth crashing down into the most populous cities. LA got hit with bits of space station. People died...horribly."

"I'm not at all a fighter. I just recently got into one of the only real fights of my life, and I was in a super suit at the time, and I still almost died." It was not great, honestly, and if those were the people they needed in this place, well, it was going to be a tough learning curve. But Bruce did survive. So maybe it was doable. "To build an army they would need to give us reason to follow them. Maybe in exchange for sending us home?" Nothing was outside of the realm of possibility now. And it would be a good incentive for people who wanted to find their family and friends again. But he suspected there were plenty who wouldn't be willing to fight for their captors no matter what.

He looked surprised, his eyebrows lifting. "You look a little young to know Creedence Clearwater Revival. Unless their music has had a comeback." Which wouldn't be that unusual, old bands did it occasionally. He'd been gone from earth too long to know, but then again, they were clearly from different earths. Of course he realized how stupid it was to react to that particular part when she explained the rest. A calamity, a vicious one from the sound of it. Gruesome violence, and for what? There was no reason he could think of that would ever be worth it.

"I'm sorry. That's terrible." He drank a little more, it was still intense, but it was a good distraction too. "There's a saying that every villain thinks they're the hero. Or that they're doing the right thing, somehow. It might be why they wanted to be seen as Titans." It sounded like on multiple verses, people would always find a way to destroy each other and behave badly. Bruce sighed. "Is that when you found yourself here? Maybe that's part of the answers. They take us from defining moments or tragedies in our time."

Sam smiled absently. "I was adopted by an older couple. Guess I developed their taste in music. And anyway, I'm older than I look." And, honestly, good music was good music. Just like good art was still good art. Titian had died a gazillion years before Sam had even been cooked up in the lab. His work was still pretty dope. To say nothing of Leonardo and the other Ninja Turtles.

"And no," she added. "That wasn't when I got whooshed here." She paused. "And 'whoosh' is the scientific term."

She refilled his glass. Not because she thought he needed more of her rat poison, or anything. More of a stalling technique, as she debated how much she wanted to share.

Well. What the hell? What did she have left to hide?

"No, it was about six months after the Rain of Fire. The last vestiges of...well. We were planning a full-frontal assault on the Predators. Ironically, that also involved super suits..."

He really should know better than to assume ages from looks alone. Thor was over a thousand years old and still looked twenty years younger than him. She could very well be an alien, or something else, he shouldn't assume everyone was human. Bruce took the liquor from her, and he knew this was going to be a very short amount of effort before he started to feel it. It tasted like how he was always certain intense liquor would, and he had no metabolism anymore. He was honestly okay with this.

"I'm a scientist, I approve of whoosh, I'll back you up, Doctor." He waited to see if she was going to open up at all, because it was up to her and he wouldn't push outside of how much he'd done already. Bruce listened and nodded when she began to speak, a very active listener, leaning forward, his full attention on hr.

"Super suits are always useful. How did it go?"

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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