Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #5

Mar 10

Mar 10 Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #5

The Bridge, Chapter Five

Having come to the Baxter Building on HAMMER business, Norman Osborn has made the mistake of threatening the Richards children as the Fantastic Four returned home. When Osborn calls their bluff, Sue tries to incapacitate him with an invisible force field, but he still manages to activate his panic button calling in Venom and his troops to the area. However, Reed orders Sue to seal off the room preventing the soldiers from attacking. Mister Fantastic then demands to know what Osborn wants. Deciding that this is a no-win situation, Norman puts his gun away and orders his men to wait outside.

Once alone, Reed tells Norman that he is to leave and never come to his home again. Osborn refuses to stop gloating about winning over them eventually. When Reed turns his back on Norman, Osborn pulls his gun. But before he can shoot Reed in the back he is shot through the shoulder. The Fantastic Four all look on in shock when they see smoke coming from one of Franklin's toy guns. The boy orders Osborn to leave his family alone. Sue instantly begins scolding her son. Osborn then vows to get revenge, but Reed refuses to waver and tells him to leave. When Norman talks about trying to get revenge another time, Mister Fantastic tells him that he will stop.

After Osborn has left, Reed and the others are brought up to speed by the children. When the team asks if Reed discovered what he needed to know, Reed tells them he saw everything. This causes him to think back to moments earlier when he shut down the Bridge and then decided to check to see how many versions of himself have created a similar device. As soon as this is scanned, Reed is suddenly visited by a mysterious group of men. When he decides to omit this fact from the rest of the team, Sue asks him to destroy the Bridge because she thinks it is too dangerous. As Reed disassembles the Bridge he thinks back to the mysterious men he encountered. They understand that he is trying to fix everything and tells him to seek them out, but not to take too long. In the end, Reed decides to reconstruct the Bridge, but hide it from the rest. He thinks about how everything that happened, the Civil War, the Skrull invasion, were all his fault and he is now more determined than ever to fix everything. Reed goes back to his equation room where he has been plotting out a means of solving problems. He comes up to the last equation --- Idea 101: Fix Everything. Reed is now more determined than ever to resolve this, as he firmly believes that there is no problem that can't be solved.