Project: Magnus

Build­ings all around where I sit have col­lapsed and the streets are lit­tered with aban­doned cars and debris from the bat­tle. From the repots I'm get­ting over my head­set we held the city but at a steep price. Cam­bridge is pretty much lev­eled, and the North End is gone. No one has any idea how. It wasn't lev­eled or destroyed, it just isn't there. Some­one said it just dis­ap­peared in a flash of light.

It's amaz­ing what passes through your mind some­times. As I sit on my knees feel­ing the pain of my dis­lo­cated right shoul­der and bro­ken fore­arm I remem­ber the last time I felt pain like this. The day I went through the trans­for­ma­tion process.

It hurts. They didn't know that at first, though in hind­sight it should have been obvi­ous. The first test sub­ject died from the pain before they fig­ured it out. The sec­ond went mad before they were able to get the pain and anes­the­sia lev­els right. Even then you feel it and it's still the worse pain you've ever felt in your life. The process causes your bones to re-​​knit them­selves so that they become stronger. Your mus­cles are restruc­tured as mil­lions of new fibers are cre­ated and your skin is reworked so that it's denser and vir­tu­ally impen­e­tra­ble. In essence every cell in your body is trans­formed. In minutes.

All this passes through my mind in an instant. Even now the mem­ory is still enough to make me catch my breath. Which the titan of a man in front of me appar­ently took as a sign of pain or weak­ness because he started laugh­ing. Frankly it's rather annoying.

I raise my head and look at titan boy. He's at least 8 feet tall and built like a young Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger. I have no way of know­ing if was like that before or if the process did this to him. Either way, he's big. The process is also what gives us our pow­ers. Every per­son is dif­fer­ent so we never know what we will end up with. Some pow­ers are, for lack of a bet­ter way of say­ing it, use­less. Hav­ing the abil­ity to grow plants well doesn't really help. Pow­ers can range any­where from telekine­sis to super speed, although not on the level of the Flash, to a super genius. And every­thing in between. I was gifted with telekine­sis. A rather strong form of it too. Where as most have trou­ble mov­ing any­thing larger than a mid-​​sized SUV, I can bring down build­ings. I've men­tioned that the process reengi­neers every cell and makes us stronger and our skin denser. Any­thing short of an armor pierc­ing shell will basi­cally bounce off. It hurts like hell, but only for a sec­ond. It's the equiv­a­lent of being smacked with a ruler for normals.

With that said, physics is still physics. If I hit him with some­thing big enough, and with enough momen­tum, it won't stop him, but might put him down long enough to get away. Instinc­tively I reach out and grab whats left of the side of a 7 story build­ing behind me. He sees the wall start to shake, places his hands on his hips and starts laugh­ing even louder. Not exactly the response I expected but he's start­ing to piss me off so I don't bother restrain­ing myself and fling it at him with every­thing I've got.

The impact is tremen­dous, I feel it from where I'm sit­ting sev­eral hun­dred yards away. It's enough that a cou­ple unsta­ble struc­tures near us start to col­lapse and fall into them­selves in response. I head the crack­ling and tin­kling of small stones falling back to earth after the impact sent them sky­ward. I strug­gle to stand, when a tremor shakes the area and knocks me back on my ass. Trou­ble is it doesn't feel like a nor­mal tremor, nor does it come at the right time. There was too much time after the impact for the two to be related.

That's when I real­ize the crack­ing sounds I heard ear­lier weren't stones. Now that the dust has set­tled I see him kneel­ing on the ground with his left fist on the ground. He has caused the tremor by pound­ing the earth. And he has a force­field sur­round­ing him. That's new.

He grins and picks up the burnt out remains of a car next to him and heaves it at me. Can't dodge with my arm and shoul­der so I push myself up and over using my gift, som­er­sault­ing badly over the car. I land wrong caus­ing pain to flair in my shoul­der and wrench my ankle. No dam­age is done but it puts me off bal­ance long enough for him to uproot a light pole and swing at me. I can't recover in time and the impact throws me across the street. When I land the impact shat­ters my head­set, how­ever my only thoughts are that I'm glad he doesn't play for the Yan­kees and that he's left handed.

He launches him­self into the air directly at me. It's one hell of a leap, but based on the dis­play so far noth­ing for some­one with his strength. As he's in the air I real­ize where we are and using my power grab him in mid air and slam him into a con­crete build­ing in the cen­ter of the street. It's the build­ing where the Red Line goes back under­ground so I put every­thing I have into forc­ing him as far down as I can and pil­ing debris on top.

It won't hold him for­ever but should long enough for me to get away.

I go north, plan­ning to cross over the Charles at the museum head­ing for the Gar­den where our HQ is set up. They need to know that the game has changed.

It shouldn't be such a nice day

We buried my father today. A man con­sid­ered by many as the bright­est mind that ever lived. Oth­ers called him the har­bin­ger of doom. Appar­ently that's the way it works with men who are super geniuses. If his death had been nat­ural I might not hate the sun­shine and cool breezes blow­ing around me as I stand here on the bal­cony over­look­ing the grave­yard where his body now lies.

My girl­friend is with me and has been try­ing to con­sole me all after­noon. Unfor­tu­nately this is one of those sit­u­a­tions where unless you've expe­ri­enced it, you can't even begin to under­stand what it's like. She kept remind­ing me that her father was killed when she was 12, and while that is true, her father wasn't killed by a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion that was cre­ated specif­i­cally to destroy his work. She can't under­stand that because of his work in genet­ics and biol­ogy, and because of the pow­ers he gave me and oth­ers like me, he was tar­geted from the beginning.

I don't blame her. I can't. Of the 10 bil­lion peo­ple liv­ing on this planet and the moon only 15, the ones dad chose for the Ich­a­bod project, would even begin to have an idea of what it felt like. Of those, only five had a par­ent in the project. Then of course only I was lucky enough to have the man that started it all, the man that dis­cov­ered how to give ordi­nary peo­ple what amounted to super pow­ers, as a father.

Right now she is in the other room try­ing to absorb every­thing I told her. In this case I can imag­ine what she is going through. I went through some­thing sim­i­lar 5 years ago when dad told me all about the Ich­a­bod idea. He told me about how he had worked out how to alter a per­sons phys­i­ol­ogy and bio­chem­istry to give them super human abilities.

He had got­ten FDA approval to begin test­ing on humans, and wanted to know if I would be will­ing to be part of the trials.

That's when every­thing went to hell. A group call­ing them­selves 'The Asgard' broke into the lab in Boston, stole all the serum and notes and research and blew up the lab. Injur­ing my dad in the process. They began to exper­i­ment on them­selves. No one is sure where their sci­en­tist came from, or if they even had one, but sud­denly they began to acquire abil­i­ties that were unsta­ble and dan­ger­ous. Well, more dan­ger­ous. Espe­cially in their hands.

Dad went into self-​​imposed exile to recover from his injuries. The worst of which was a shat­tered spine which left him unable to walk. 'Very Pro­fes­sor X' I always said, teas­ing him about it. At least it made him smile.

When he recov­ered to the point he could work again he ded­i­cated him­self to devel­op­ing a serum that would counter the orig­i­nal drug, hold­ing him­self respon­si­ble for all the death and dam­aged caused by Asgard.

Then a year ago they changed course. Some said that the lead­er­ship within Asgard changed, that there had been a coup of some kind and that was why the change of phi­los­o­phy. Oth­ers said it was because they had found out about dad's lit­tle fail safe. That those given the treat­ment became ster­ile and could not pro­duce off­spring. He had said it was to pre­vent the pow­ers from get­ting out of con­trol and evolv­ing into god knew what.

Either way they went from com­mit­ting crimes like theft and extor­tion to ter­ror­iz­ing the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. I'm con­vinced that they did it inten­tion­ally, know­ing dad would do some­thing and it would bring him out of exile.

And they were right. He came out of seclu­sion and, with the help of the gov­ern­ment, formed the super-​​human group he dubbed 'League'. He kind of named it after the 'League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men', but also, as a pri­vate joke, because the train­ing part of the pro­gram would be called 'The Minors'. He did love his baseball.

Because I was his son I was recruited to join. Train­ing was bru­tal. Not only did we get train­ing in using our pow­ers but we went through the stan­dard Marine basic train­ing. Only it was accel­er­ated because no one felt we had a lot of time to fig­ure it out.

We held our own the first time we face Asgard. No one died and no one got seri­ously injured. How­ever in retal­i­a­tion they attacked and lev­eled Atlanta. Sher­man would have been proud, and prob­a­bly a lit­tle embar­rassed. That was six months ago. They are still search­ing for miss­ing peo­ple. They announced a cou­ple weeks ago that they were tar­get­ing Boston next since that was where it all began and where League had setup it's headquarters.

When the announce­ment hit the news dad jumped on a plane from LA, where he had been work­ing to setup a west coast divi­sion, and headed back to Boston. They attacked his plane some­where over Kansas and brought it down. They pulled my father from the plane, tor­tured him for fun then fin­ished the job they started back when they first attacked the lab. I'm told he died quickly once they decided to kill him. Small consultation.

Steph came out after a cou­ple hours and is stand­ing next to me. We stay like that, nei­ther of us talk­ing for sev­eral min­utes until the sirens start­ing going off, announc­ing Asgards arrival in Boston, and my sig­nal that it was time to met the rest of the team.

I really wish it wasn't such a nice day.