Porkum Escapes!

The Invisible Woman moved cautiously, and caution meant slowness. She wasn't sure how Porkum became aware of her presence. Some hidden sensor, perhaps, as she moved through the immaculately clean kitchen area where the bonbons were prepared. Or perhaps he smelled her, since Sue Storm's scent was the one part of her she couldn't make invisible. Yet as she moved from the kitchen into the filth-strewn living area that was Porkum's lair—Sue's own nose wrinkled as she smelled stale and rotting food, open containers of ****, lingering cigar-smoke, and above everything the stench of some large, unwashed mammal and—especially—the eye-stinging smell of his ejaculations.

Sue Storm clamped a hand over her mouth. She had done Johnny Storm's laundry when he was growing up, knew what a healthy young man's sock smelled like when crusty with jizz, buried in among t-shirts and underwear. Stepping into Porkum's lair felt like crawling into one of those socks. She stepped on invisible **** fields above the trash-strewn floor, but every wall was decorated with streaks of dry white crusts. The wall on her right as she entered was one giant flatscreen, illustrated with pictures of herself—and Sue shivered as she saw how thick the dried jizz-stains were on her portraits.

Yet the door to the bathroom hung empty. Sue swore under her breath as she **** herself inside. A pornographic magazine lay on the floor. Something floated in the toilet. The heroine looked away in disgust. He was just here. He had to be.

With an effort, Sue made the walls invisible. That was how she found the hidden door, the tunnel into the sewers. Yet there was no sign of Porkum himself, even when she exerted herself and made several meters of the tunnel invisible. The villain had made a clean getaway.

"Wonderful," she said as she wrinkled her nose and stared at the mounds of trash, the obscene jizz-stains all over her portraits. Her fingers moved a hidden button in her wrist to activate her communicator. "H.E.R.B.I.E.? I need you."

The small robot floated down from the Fantasticar outside.

"Yes, Mrs. Richards?" the robot said.

"Scan everything," she said. Sue Storm wasn't a detective, and she didn't want to bring S.H.I.E.L.D. in on this. Not yet. Not unless she had to. Which she might have to. She left Porkum's room, though the smell of it seemed to cling to her hair and clothes.

"What am I scanning for?" H.E.R.B.I.E. asked.

Sue's temples throbbed. She looked around the kitchen. This whole facility had to cost somebody a small fortune.

"Any evidence of who set up this lair. Where Porkum went. Where he's from. If there's an antidote to his...the biological material I ingested."

H.E.R.B.I.E.'s visual sensors flashed. "That would require a large sample of said biological material."

"Go scrape it off the wall," Sue said as she opened a fridge door—and froze.

There were racks of bonbons in there. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. Sue Storm's wounded leg throbbed. It seems that Porkum had left her a present...