Young Writers Society

You're a superhero. Weird, strange things are kind of your thing. You're used to terrifying villains, random magical shenanigans, and the types of events straight out of comic books. But this? This is something totally new—at least, new for you to experience.

Let's back up a little.

Not long before the start of this story, you were following your usual superhero routine. You might have been on a patrol. You might have been fighting a villain. You might have been helping someone cross the street. Whatever it was, it was normal. But then you suddenly found yourself glitching across the multiverse and ending up in a place that looks both familiar and doesn't. You've ended up in New York City, but this NYC looks...off.

And despite your popularity back home, there's absolutely no mention of you anywhere. If you're from a reality where Sony's Into the Spider Verse movie exists, you're starting to suspect that you've been whisked off to another reality. The sudden, painful glitches that vibrate throughout your body only confirm it.

After being here for a miscellaneous amount of time, you find out about a very evil lab that you just know has to be responsible for you ending up here. After all, they're studying quantum physics and the butterfly effect—it's the only thing that makes sense.

That's where this story starts: you, a superhero, sneaking into the lab through whatever way makes the most sense. You're going to find whatever brought you here and get back home, no matter how many dangerous enemies you have to fight.

There's just one catch.

There's other superheroes sneaking around here, too.

When Wren was first whisked away from an awkward, staged fight against Loki, she immediately thought it was Perseus's fault. She couldn't see why they would have wanted her to end up in New York City instead of Ark Haven, but it seemed like the kind of thing they would do to somehow win her over.

But then she saw names of brands she didn't recognize displayed on glowing billboards, and realized that she wasn't just in another city—she was in another city in another reality. It felt like something straight out of a comic book, but that was where Wren got all of her inspiration from. She knew that the first thing she had to do was seek out another hero to help her get back home.

...But this reality didn't have heroes.

At least, not her kind of hero. The only heroes she could find were ones inside the comic shop on the corner of the street she ended up when she was brought to this other reality. The owner of the shop had thought she was trying to get a job there, so he hired her on the spot—Wren didn't even have a chance to protest. He even let her stay in the apartment above the shop, which was a little awkward given that he thought her name was Adrian Black and that she was a college student on a very long spring break.

But two weeks later, she finally had a clue on how to get back home. There was a little blurb on the box TV in the apartment about a mysterious lab that just had to be responsible for all of this.

So now she was sneaking inside, switching Adrian's usually dark clothes or superhero outfit with a lab coat and a completely fake ID tag that she was sure wouldn't pass any close inspection. She even added a pair of black glasses to complete the scientist look. No matter what, she had to look like she fit in here.

(She couldn't look like herself. She was too young. And she couldn't just look like someone who worked here—she wasn't ready to copy someone else yet, even though Loki had been claiming that it was easy to do.)

She wasn't really sure where she was going, but she had gotten past the entrance. Now all she had to do was figure out what room they'd keep something like the particle collider from Into the Spider Verse in.

The portal dumped Nikolai on the top of a skyscraper, behind a billboard. He was mercifully out of sight from the city below, even as he peered around it to see where he was. Somehow, Nikolai was still in New York, and he wasn’t even that far from where he’d been originally. But something was off. This block of the city had been damaged in last week’s alien attack, and the buildings he was looking at were very much intact. And even if they hadn’t been, there was nothing familiar about any of the ads on the billboards below.

Nikolai frowned. He’d seen Sony’s Into the Spider Verse, and he wasn’t happy with the similarities. Ugh. At least he could check inter-dimensional travel off his bucket list.

He grabbed his phone from his pocket and turned it on, hoping to check the superhero group chats and figure out what was going on. Then the screen started to glitch uncontrollably, and then it went black. Frowning, Nikolai turned the phone off and put it in his backpack. The trip here must have fried it. Either that, or his cell service wasn’t cross-dimensional.

Figuring out the source of the portal turned out to be easy enough. There were only so many Super Spooky Labs that existed in New York, and this one had managed to find its way into the news.

Getting into the lab proved to be a little more difficult -- it took a few days to get a disguise and sneak his way in. Though, maybe he should’ve gone for something less convincing. Being called into a scientists meeting hadn’t been part of his plan. Hopefully he could fake his was through this.

The stalls, the houses, the perfect air of confusion, and the unknown mixed with humans and aliens all going about their business. Every man for himself, ah how he loved it.

Sakaar.

His favorite place to visit he'd just been talking with the master, strange man, you won't, like himself, meet many like him, but of course, strange nutcases were just what Julius loved, human nature was boring, the fewer people tried to be “normal” the better.
Julius wasn't a big people person, people were, not his type, (well except strange misfits such as himself and the grandmaster) and he Hated small talk, people he had decided, were not worth his time, “normal” wasn't worth his time, so he'd spent his days fighting, training, and helping those who were strange, made no sense, anomalies, at heart the very “Weirdos” all of humanity despises.

And apparently, he'd been noticed, just moments ago he'd been walking through his portal back to New York, earth, 1948, and now, he was, well still in New York, but, it looked to be the 21st century, not the 20th like he'd intended, had someone created a portal, inside his own?
Could someone do that? He hadn't spent that much time at the Kamar-tag learning to be a sorcerer before the sorcerer supreme had told him he couldn’t stay, that he was a “danger” he'd stolen a sling ring and some artifacts, as many books as he could, and fled.
Maybe someone had noticed his constant travel throughout the multiverse, and had decided to take him out?
Either way, he wasn't in the mood to fool about, he'd been fighting long enough to know that trying to figure out why he was here would be playing right into his elusive enemies hands, he had to get home, he could figure this out later, he went to create a portal and warp back to his own dimension and, embarrassingly enough, it took him a few moments before he realized he didn't have his sling ring on,
His ring was gone,
All hope of not playing into the enemy's hands was gone.

Fiddlesticks.

Loud fiery explosions, disco music, the screeching of several human and non human beings with a side helping of sizzling barbeque. The noises that you could pick up on a normal Tuesday in the "Undecided" sector of the Land of the Dead. Or she thought it was Tuesday. Susan had been stuck in a world where time flowed erratically for far too long now. For all she know it wasn't her favorite day of the week, but she liked to think it was. Especially on days like this.

Daphne and Jessica occasionally went exploring around the various hellscapes when they had a bit of extra free time and it was upto her to either be a third wheel and try hard not to be jealous or just grit it out for a few hours...well hosur, the unit they used to measure time down in this dimension. The fact that hosur was an anagram of hours was either a crazy coincidence or whoever came up with was feeling lazy that day. Considering Earth hadn't existed back when this place came into being, it was definitely the former.

Susan got up from the chair that had been laid there for her. It was quite comfortable as far as chairs in that part of hell got but she was tired of sitting down. Deciding to stretch her legs for a bit, she wondered near the door out of the place. It wasn't the most normal of door, for one thing, it swung a full two revolution before it opened, and a giant lever in the center operated a spinning set of plaques that allowed you to control where the door led out to.

Not wanting to go anywhere in particular, she sent the wheel spinning and stepped through before it could stop. In hindsight, that was probably not her smartest move.

She arrived smack in the middle of some alleyway. One sniff of the air and she knew it was most definitely not the underworld. From what she could identify of the area around here, it looked like New York. Kind of. It was like one of those cursed pictures. It was somehow the same place she'd visited a few times earlier and very much not the same places. Remembering the various different New Yorks, the three of them had been taken to while demonstrating dimensional and temporal travel, she quickly concluded this was definitely New York but in a dimension she hadn't been to before.

It may as well be something she'd visited in her training, but the experience had been so new, and their guide had been the literal Celestial of Frost herself. No one could blame her for being a little overwhelmed and forgetting things.

And now here she was, in a world she knew nothing about, and her sister wasn't even with her. This was not going to end well. And to make matters worse, the fact that she was in the land of the living m...

Right on cue, her rather unusual side effects of being reanimated a bit too late came to effect and she sank into the pavement. Well the day was off to a great start. She resisted the urge to scream or cry, she'd done plenty of that the first year of being dead. Now was the time to use the skills she'd been thought. They had planned for this after all. Now if only their guide hadn't been so easy on the eyes...she might actually have remembered those plans.

Doing her best not to freak out, she concentrated enough to make herself either solid or invisible, she'd take either of them at this point. And suddenly she couldn't see her own hands. Invisibility it was.

As she slowly trudged back, trying not to glitch her way into a dumpster, she realized something shocking. Those doors were specifically enchanted not to be able to let soulds out to the land of the living. That meant...something had pulled her here. She'd watched enough comic book movies to know what happened next. It was time to put on the detective hat and look for clues. Either that or wait for her sister to raise the alarm and send out a search party. As tempting as that seemed, she knew it wasn't the right thing to do in this situation. She set out to find a clue as to how she might have ended up there.

A few more hours of searching and she was pretty sure she had it down. I mean...that lab could only be more obvious if it was named Evil Inc. Getting inside wasn't particularly hard. Security wasn't exactly designed to stop people like here...all it took was several hours of her trying to get herself to be invisible and intangible at the same time.

And once inside, as long as she kept her distance and didn't sink into the floor randomly, everyone would just see her as another employee. She'd travelled through time enough times to know that particular spell which had been used on her worked perfectly, a little too perfectly, because apparently she had to be present at a scientists meeting. An evil scientists meeting.

Alissa was very confused.

She had been in Central Park, chatting with one of her many squirrel friends (while in squirrel form) when all of a sudden, she was being blasted through a strange tunnel. She had closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she was in Central Park again. She was still a squirrel, but something was different. Central Park looked...off. She knew the park like the back of her paw - er, hand - and something was wrong.

She eventually figured out, after a lot of searching through the city, that something something quantum physics had happened. Alissa wasn't entirely sure when it all meant, but she had found out that there was a lab of some sort that could get her back. She was willing to take whatever risks needed to be taken to get home, especially because she had an AP test the next week, and she wasn't sure how time differences worked through dimensions. So she turned into a mouse and snuck inside the lab.

If Loki was here right now, he would have told her that this was what she got for not practicing infiltrating evil organizations more—and for not doing infiltration in general. It wasn't her fault that Ark Haven hadn't had a serious threat for the majority of the three years she had been its hero. And even though Loki claimed that it was easy to sneak inside Perseus, it wasn't like she was going to practice sneaking in there.

But now she was stuck in a meeting with other, definitely evil scientists, and she was pretty sure the intern (he had to be an intern from how young he looked) who had directed them all towards the meeting room had just closed the door behind him. And while she was pretty sure he wouldn't lock them in, she was also sure she couldn't sneak out with the excuse of having the use the bathroom.

Wren gave a very awkward smile and fiddled with her glasses. At least she had kept those from her usual appearance.

"So...um..." Wren said, looking around the room. It looked like a random laboratory, with a device on a table in the corner that was way too small to be a particle collider. It did have a laser coming out of it, though, so maybe that was important? Wren felt like something like that would be important.

But if that wasn't the reason that they were meeting in the first place, they'd know right away that she didn't belong here if she brought it up!

She leaned up against a nearby counter and rubbed her glasses with her lab coat's sleeve. "Those test results were...interesting? It made me think of the...you know..."

She rubbed the glass a little harder.

"...experiment we did the other day. The one with the quantum mechanics. And quantum physics. Andtheparticlecollider-"

Why did she have to say that? What if it wasn't actually called a particle collider!?!

Susan nodded vigorously as if she understood all of that. The scientist speaking seemed to be a little awkward and unsure, which was normally not what evil scientist sounded like but she didn't question it. She had to say something here to look like she belonged. She spit out the first words that came to mind.

"Ah yes...the quantum tunneling there by the quantum apricots...I meant atoms...you know what I'm talking about. The particle collider was on a roll that day...very close to those tests...about the thing on the thing with that other quantum thing..."

Susan trailed off, pretending to have a sudden bout of coughing. Mentally, she was screaming at herself. Really Susan, Apricots??? Where did that come from?

Ok, good news and bad news,
The good news was that Julius had figured out why he was there, even without his sling ring he still had the rest of his artifacts and it hadn’t taken long.
It seemed some nearby lab has been researching quantum physics and the butterfly effect, agh it was just like a movie, why was superhero life always so cliche’.
Anyway apparently the lab had some major breakthrough recently, it must be connected to his strange dimension warp,
but why had he lost his ring?
The bad news was that he needed to get in the lab if he were to find out anything, and he wasn’t just about to walk into there in sakaarian attire, they’d either try to subdue him for tests, which would undoubtedly result in I many injuries none to him, or they’d try to throw him out and have him arrested either way, he knew it would be hard not to harm innocent lives in the struggle.
Which was why he’d gone with the plan he hated, try and fit in.
So that was where he was now, in a closet, beside the unconscious body of one, Prof. Unstien. Valtersson. Yes he’d picked the one with the impossible to pronounce name to impersonate

Asdfvg, zds hynmkjh,fdyjnbdfghb ,hteryj!.

“Mmmhm hm hm hm”
He had to bit his tongue and (as quietly as possible) stomp his feet to stop from screaming, it was the second time that had happened, his whole body “glitching” all over, it didn’t hurt all that much but it was shocking every time.

“Yes your late but no worries, the meeting just started” there was a voice and the sound of feet outside the door ‘come this way”

Oop he’d better follow whoever that was, likely the “meeting’ would have some good information,
he opened the closet a crack and peeked out, ah that must be the people that had just had their little “chat” outside his closet, a tall woman in a lab suite like his, or Prof Unstien’s own,
beside and a little in front of her, walked a young man, or perhaps a teenager, likely an intern.
Julius checked to see that his bracelet of inconspicuousitie (he was working on a better name) was on and then walked after them, the bracelet stopped them from caring if they noticed him and he was able to slip in the door behind them and take a look around.

All around him stood more scientists, all in the same type of lab coats, well it looked like he belonged, that was for sure.
On a stand sat, or perhaps it was built into it, two large things, the best way to describe them was tubes, one was longer than the other and out of it shot a tiny laser which went right into the other, which had a far larger circumference than the other, interesting to say the least.

Looking around Julius saw what he guessed to be about 15 other scientists, as he continued to scan the room his gaze fell on a very nervous looking one, off to the right, and his ear started to prickle and throb, huh his earring of deceit, he’d almost forgot he still had it on, lately, he’d taken it off whenever he went to sakaar, what with Loki and all his deception happaning at such a constant rate.

But that meant that he, the nervous scientist, was being, at least untruthful about something.

"Those test results were...interesting? It made me think of the...you know..."

he rubbed his glasses as she spoke

"...experiment we did the other day. The one with the quantum mechanics. And quantum physics. Andtheparticlecollider-"

he, looked as though he immediately regretted those words, and they sounded very unrehearsed and cliche’
Well, he was obviously not a scientist, or from around here, to be sure, and if he had sneaked in here it was likely because he was trying to figure out what they were up to, like him, could he be a superhero too?
Well whatever he was trying to do he wasn’t that good at it, maybe he could pull off a good looking illusion or two, but he wasn’t all that good of an actor, well in his hard-to-impress opinion he was certainly fooling the others, he’d have to look into him, maybe (if he was friendly) take him to sakaar, he could certainly stand to learn a thing or two from Loki.

Wait another scientist, also looking nervous and unsure, though not hiding something it seemed as the earring hadn’t throbbed, was standing up, presumably to say something, he droned on for a bit before stopping and letting another scientist speak, this one interestingly made the earring throb too,

"Ah yes...the quantum tunneling there by the quantum apricots...I meant atoms...you know what I'm talking about. The particle collider was on a roll that day...very close to those tests...about the thing on the thing with that other quantum thing..."

Hmm also acting, strange, he’d have to look into her.
He was pondering who these two could be when suddenly all eyes in the room turned to him, oh no he was supposed to give his opinion or something, great after hed just judged the two pretenders (allbeit mentaly and not aloud) he was gonna have to do better.

“Well I believe, it's a very plausible theory” ok good start he hadn’t rambled on about quantum physics yet, and luckily he did know a thing or two about the multiverse
“But I have to say it still has a few holes, like the ones me and,” he glanced around the room before finding someone who was smirking and gave a thumbs up like he knew Prof. Unstien personally “me and dr. charleston were discussing the other day, dr. why don't you explain?”
All eyes turned away and looked at the dr.

fwo

Alissa skittered through the air vents, sniffing the air and scratching her tail. It was cold, and she shivered. She eventually came to a grate and sniffed at three scientists, all of whom looked very confused. She squeezed through the holes in the grate, turning into a spider. She crawled along the ceiling and dropped down onto the floor. She turned into a kitten and hopped onto the table.

She looked at the girl closest to her. "Mrow?" she chirped.

Nikolai was content to fade into the background of the meeting. It was easy enough to do -- a few well-placed nods and smiles, and this was turning out to be one of the more simple infiltrations he'd done.

And then the cat dropped from the ceiling.

Nikolai was lucky enough to have a split-seconds' warning, courtesy of his annoyingly unpredictable future-sight. He blinked as the vision faded, then scooted back in his chair before the cat dropped down. He didn't know why the cat was here, but he didn't need to in order to avoid its claws -- Nikolai had started out rescuing cats from trees, and he knew how much damage these adorable creatures could do.

Wren jumped when the kitten fell from the ceiling.

She knew she should have had better reflexes, but that definitely wasn't something she'd ever expect. She frantically glanced at the other scientists in the room, trying to see if they had an explanation for why the kitten was there. They weren't going to do experiments on it, right? Wren could theoretically pretend to be evil, but she couldn't pretend to be evil enough to hurt an animal.

She looked back at the kitten.

But that still didn't explain how it had gotten here. When Wren looked up from the spot that the kitten had appeared underneath, she didn't see any kitten-sized holes. She didn't see any holes.

So maybe it was a phase-shifting cat? Maybe it could somehow go through solid objects like ceilings and floors? Or if not that, maybe it was a shapeshifting cat? Loki had always hinted at his friend being able to change sizes to look more like a normal snake, so maybe this kitten could go from small to large? But that still didn't explain how it had suddenly appeared...

Susan almost screamed when the kitten dropped out of nowhere. Out of the things she'd expect to run into an evil scientists meeting, a kitten falling out of the ceiling was definitely not on that particularly list.

The kitten the proceeded to Meow and all thoughts about how weird it was vanished.

"Aww, where did you come from?" cooed Susan, moving towards the kitten and picking it up. Or at least that's what she wanted to do. Her hand ended up moving right through the kitten and into the table and she suddenly lost her balance, falling completely through the table. Her powers had chosen the worst possible time to malfunction.

uhh, things were getting weird, something fell through the roof there was some kind of confusion which dr. charleston used to get out of the spotlight and make his way over to Julius
"Hey what's up? you seem confused"
Julius turned to him and composing his face to look calm, and totally in control like he knew what was going on
"oh uh ya it's just..my cat got out last night and I spent a while looking for him and then some door-to-door sales guy kept me up another half hour trying to sell me a, a, a vacu- a roof fan, and so I didn't get a ton of sleep last night and I've just been really out of it"
he smiled and tried to look apologizing when all he really wanted to do was punch this guy in his face until he got that silly look out of his face.

"oh, well ok, uh well do you have the notes from yesterday?"

whoa this was going amazingly, Julius thought maybe he should try improv more often

"oooh, the notes! ah, ya about those......"

hgbagjhbdaf, thump

"oh, ya don't worry 'bout the notes lets just see what the commotions about"

Walking over to the ring of onlooking scientists Julius saw three things.
There was a kitten lying there, evidently, it was what had fallen through the roof,
There was a scientist tallying on the floor as well, it was the one who was hiding something……
And strangest of all there was the scientist who had mentioned apricots, halfway through the table?

Ok he didn't want to make a scene and he had a feeling if the cat left the center of attention everyone would disperse, so he scooped up the kitten on its hind legs, and crouched down to grab the table phasing scientist, his hand went right through
“Bracketbars,” he said under his breath “ah, I must have something-” he felt around inside the pockets of his lab coat and pulled out something that looked like a strange glove “merdinas matter gauntlet, hope this works”
He put his hand in the gauntlet and waved it over the scientist's strange glow went around him and then Julius was able to lift the gauntlet with the scientist floating in its purple glow and bring him and the cat over to a corner of the room.

“Ok first off,” he put the kitten down and made sure his bracelet of inconspicuously was on properly, good “WHAT ARE YOU DOING! Your obviously superheroes, yes kittie I can tell you're probably shapeshifting or something, and maybe you're trying to figure out what's going on too
So who are you?”

Alissa glared at the man who rudely scooped her up and hissed. "Hshhhhhhh!" she nipped his hand, causing him to drop her. She turned into human form and blew her hair out of her face. "I'm Alissa, and I don't like being picked up."