#hohopen

Now, he had the ability to make that wish come true.

The fact that it had come with being randomly transported into someone else’s body was a little weird, but honestly, flying made up for the whole thing. He’d spent the past half hour making lazy loops and circuits in among the buildings of New York City, and honestly, he’d be content to never come down again.

Considering that he was now having a little trouble figuring out how, exactly, to get down, that was probably a good thing.

He finally decided that it was time to come up with plan B. If he couldn’t get down to work, that was fine. He could just land on top of a building and walk down. The fact that he picked a building with a firmly padlocked roof access was a little unfortunate. More unfortunate was the fact that apparently Rich didn’t habitually carry lock picks. He was in the process of improvising with a couple discarded safety pins he’d found after a few minutes of searching when he heard footsteps and spun quickly.

He already knows how the public will react, he doesn't need to stick around to be subject to it in any kind of physical way. He takes off first thing in the morning, heads for a small village on the border between Germany and France where he knows he won’t get too many questions as long as he speaks the language. He keeps his hood up, reads through three novels before midday and tries not too look over his shoulder too often--for all he knows, Magneto himself could have done something to reveal Pietro’s connection to the Brotherhood. He moves again after an older woman rests a hand on his shoulder, asks him if he’s in some kind of danger--he moves from a small town near the fjords to an English village with more sheep than people.

All of the running is a temporary solution to a larger problem, but it’s the only thing that is capable of speaking some comfort to his mind. He had thought he was past this point in his life, past being afraid that his father was going to find him eventually, past running from place to place to avoid the hatred of other people--he should have known that everything revolved in a circular pattern. He ends up back in the city a few hours after nightfall, slouched at a table in the back of the main room of some hole in the wall bar--even though he is incapable of getting drunk. He sees a familiar face approach, throws back a shot that really doesn’t taste like anything. “Should I be comforted by the lack of a pitchfork? Or are the rest of the villagers just lagging?” He drawls, raises an eyebrow.

To say that Diana was appalled would be an understatement.

She was well acquainted with the fact that here in the world outside Themyscira, men and women were treated differently. Extremely differently. Before now, however, she’d never had anyone expect her to be complicit in that disparity. She was somewhat appalled by just how frequently she’d heard someone murmur a crude joke, or point out someone that she was evidently expected to objectify.

With a confidence in her voice that she didn’t feel, she murmured to the man who had settled in the seat across the table from her “If I ever hear you say something like that about a woman again, I will be obligated to punch you. Please leave.” She had so far avoided saying as much to Steve, but she was deeply concerned over how fragile he was. She certainly didn’t want to pick a fight while she was inhabiting his body, but that didn’t mean she could let bad behavior slide. Thankfully, he listened to her, and she must have finally managed a convincingly menacing look, because he left with commendable speed. 

The reporter cut Bruce off, and he wanted to groan, loudly. He’d been stuck like this for the better part of twenty minutes now, and while he’d understand it, probably, if he’d actually had the opportunity to answer any of the questions the woman was asking, she kept cutting him off before he could get more than a few words in. He’d honestly tuned out her monologue, since whatever it was that she wanted to know, he was fairly confident that he couldn’t tell her.

Another opening. “Look, could you just let-” This time, he did groan, as she started to talk right over top of her again. If he was actually Tony, he’d probably be out-competing her for attention right now, but he wasn’t Tony, which was the exact point that he was failing to get across right now.

Elektra certainly wasn’t despised by the Avengers (at least not collectively) and she had an in with Natasha that afforded her certain information, but there would be nothing quite as self-serving as spending at least one day in their HQ herself, to see what she might read or overhear or squeeze out of someone. Just as she was about to cross the street to the obnoxiously modern building, a man she’d never seen before popped out in a poorly constructed costume, wielding what appeared to be some kind of ray gun. “Face me, Captain America, or I’ll shoot!” He threatened as he aimed the weapon at a group of people waiting for the bus.

“Ugh,” she scoffed aloud, not as quietly as she should have. “Don’t make me break your legs. Those people you’re threatening will take photos and post them on social media.” Elektra glanced around to see if anyone else was interested in assisting with this situation and her eyes landed on someone who, at the very least, was watching her carefully. “Would you like to jump in here or shall I do all the work?”

He struggles with a man who thinks he’s drowning, webs a woman to a wall when she sees the symbiote’s teeth and thinks he’s a dog that going to attack her, but he’s not fast enough to stop a small mob from forming in the middle of the street. He ducks into an alley and lets the symbiote rescind, baring his face for the moment. It’s dangerous, and he can already feel a modicum of panic welling up inside of him, but he needs a second to breathe. “Do you think our venom could counteract whatever is in the air?” He asks, but the symbiote’s answer is drowned out by the sudden appearance of another person. 

“Let me guess,” He drawls as the symbiote covers him again, bares its teeth. “You're afraid of spiders.” 

A visit to the moon doesn’t really reveal anything, but at the very least it gives the Worldmind something that it can work with--a faint trace of something that it can’t identify nessecarily, but might be able to track. It tells him that he should head back to Earth, back to the city--but he’s been working his way around for hours now, and it’s pretty much amounted to him chasing his tail in circles. Whoever is responsible is either something that the Worldmind, one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world, has never come across--or really good at covering their tracks. 

He decides to cut his losses and grab one of those enormous slices of greasy pizza that only New York City has to offer, review what he saw on the moon and consider what he might have missed--his intense concentration isn't something that he really considers until he blinks his eyes a couple of minutes later and sees someone approaching him. “Sorry--I didn’t mean to stare. Been a weird couple of weeks.” It had been a weird couple of months, where Rich was concerned. Resurrection compounded with the mysteries of the cosmos.