The Worlds React

Written in collaboration with Namichwan

The message hit first as noise.

Screens that had spent five years carrying rolling casualty figures, supply shortages, and (over the last few weeks) Blip-reunion specials suddenly synchronized. From Lagos sidewalk kiosks to Osaka subway cars, from battered relief tents along the Ganges to gleaming Stark-branded billboards in Manhattan, the same naked absurdly well-hung muscular young American man appeared flanked by Wanda Maximoff and Natasha Romanoff, an Avenger the world knew was buried on another planet in order to bring back billions. For a few seconds no one listened to the words. They just stared at THE Black Widow breathing, standing, smiling at the camera like she’d stepped out of an old mission report instead of a grave. Hearts climbed into throats all over the planet. Grief, that most exhausted of human reflexes, tried to rear up for another round and didn’t quite know how.

Then over the next few weeks in response, the talking started.

In apartments and message boards and refugee queues, people scrambled to fit the Phoenix King into boxes they already understood. The exhausted clergy who had spent five years explaining the Snap to their congregations leafed straight to their End Times notes: miracle-worker, global broadcast, promise of pleasure and power, a queen-witch and a super-assassin at his side. In a dozen languages the same phrase surfaced from pulpits and WhatsApp sermons: false messiah. Across towns, the same footage played in damp basements where Thanos-worshippers met, and furious hands slammed fists on tables as their Mad Titan’s “correction” was undone on live TV. On some cracked concrete wall, someone had scrawled “Thanos Was Right” and another party had crossed a line through it and added underneath it, “Mark IS King.” Even the doomsday cults couldn’t decide whether the Phoenix King was ushering in their apocalypse or ruining the one they’d already gotten.

Online, the reaction moved faster than thought. Clips of Mark’s “Hello, world” and his talk of agents of THANOS were cut, looped, memed, translated, and weaponized before the broadcast had even properly finished in half the time zones. For the angry and dispossessed, he handed them a phrase that felt like a diagnosis; overnight, “Agent of THANOS” became the new slur for anyone defending the status quo. Politicians, CEOs, cops, even Avengers-adjacent names were tagged as such in comment storms and call-in shows. For conspiracy forums that had never recovered from learning aliens and gods were real, the idea that someone had changed reality, slimmed females down and softened them for some sinister purpose, shrank their own dicks into pathetic five inch prongs when they should have big thick meaty cocks, slotted perfectly into the blank space where their sanity used to be. The question threads self-propagated: What if this is the wrong timeline? What if we’re already living in the wrong version?

On the ground, in the places where the Blip never really ended, the speech felt less like philosophy and more like a weather front. In half-rebuilt coastal towns and inland tent cities, people who’d spent five years surviving on grit and hunger heard a man talking about pleasure and felt, for the first time, a guilty ache for something more than survival. Some laughed it off. Some muttered that it was just another powered freak angling to rule them. Others, especially the ones who’d come back from dust to find empty houses and no explanation, leaned a little closer to the flickering screen when he spoke about the universe wanting them to feel good, to turn things back to the way they’d used to be, the way they were supposed to be. Those lines stuck. Aid workers would later report that, in some camps, arguments about rations and housing allocations were quietly replaced by arguments about whether the Phoenix King was offering a way out or baiting a trap.

Governments reacted like organisms prodded with a hot iron: instinctive, contradictory, not nearly fast enough. Emergency meetings convened in parliaments and palaces to decide whether the broadcast had been an attack, a miracle, or a hoax. Some state channels cut the feed as soon as Mark Williams called the world “wrong,” only to find shaky phone recordings already spreading faster than they could confiscate devices. Authoritarian regimes labeled it foreign psy-ops and started arresting anyone publicly praising the Phoenix King; in democratic ones, lawmakers went on air to urge “calm and critical thinking,” while their aides secretly begged any surviving Avengers for a read on the situation. None of them had a frame for this that didn’t end with either capitulation or open war against a man who had access to this kind of power potentially.

And in between the cathedrals and cabinet rooms, something quieter began to bud. A handful of hastily made Phoenix pendants sold out on an online marketplace. A street preacher in São Paulo swapped his usual cardboard sign for one that read “THE KING OF FIRE IS COMING” and found his usual trickle of listeners had doubled. A Blip-returned nurse in Naples lit a candle under a printed screenshot of Mark’s face and asked him, out loud, to do for her sister what he’d done for Black Widow. A half-dozen college kids in Berlin booted up a group chat called “Agents of Mark” and started collecting everything they could about him, determined not to be swept away. The world had not yet sorted itself into camps, not really. But the first lines were already being sketched, faint and hot, in living rooms and comment sections and crowded streets, long before anyone in costume weighed in.

“YELENA! YELENAAA!”

The banging rattled the thin door of the little rental she’d holed up in. A third-floor walk-up in a gray, peeling block on the outskirts of Kiev, all flickering hallway lights and the smell of cheap cooking oil. Inside, the living room looked like a hangover had exploded: empty vodka bottles on the coffee table, crumpled chip bags and a half-eaten shawarma sliding off a paper plate. Yelena stood in the middle of it barefoot, in an old cropped T-shirt that rode up when she moved and a pair of black athletic shorts clinging to her hips, pale thighs bare to the chilly air. Her hair was a messy blonde snarl, tank top underneath pulling tight across the solid weight of her chest every time she folded her arms.

She yanked the door open and Alexei practically fell inside, big and red-faced and already breathing hard like he’d run the whole way. His eyes flicked over her, taking in the bare legs, the soft outline of tits under rumpled cotton, the tired blear in her green eyes. He smelled like stale beer and bad cologne.

“Alexi, oh my god!”

“YELENA! Did you see?!” he blurted, stomping past her toward the tiny TV jammed on a low IKEA unit. “Did you see the Phoenix man?! Did you see what he DID?!”

“Yes, obviously,” she snapped, shutting the door with a hip and padding after him, the floorboards cool under her toes. “He’s all anyone’s talking about. But-”

On the screen, the global feed had cut to yet another replay. Mark’s broadcast. Maximoff and the probably fake enormously boobed Natasha beside him. In fact, both Avengers were very overly boobed. And between every network logo and chyron there was the same awkward attempt at censorship: thick black bars, fuzzy pixelation… that kept glitching. A crimson shimmer rippled across every edit like static and then the blur thinned, became a translucent red haze. Enough that anyone with eyes could tell the man on screen was completely naked, broad chest bare, heavy lines of muscle and the obscene bulk of his cock not at all hidden by the stubbornly failing censor field. Prime time networks, kids’ channels, even WHiH; no one could make it stick.

“She’s ALIVE!” Alexei jabbed a shaking finger at Natasha’s image as she stepped into frame again, smiling calmly like a ghost that had never died. “My little spider is back! A cosmic miracle! Bohze M-!”

“ALEXI!” Yelena rounded the end of the couch, the hem of her shirt flashing a strip of taut belly as she planted herself between him and the TV. Her face was beyond serious, glaring at her adopted father like one would a sugar laced child, “We buried her. Trust me, I want it more than anyone. But we saw her.”

Even the thickest of beards just couldn’t contain his wide happy smile, “And then the magic man said LIVE! And our Natasha-!”

“Stop!” She repeated, looking ready to slap him, “Do you really want to give yourself this much hope if it turns out it’s not her?! Do you really want to go through it all, AGAIN?!” His face dropped like a kicked puppy, realising the truth behind Yelena’s words. His relief at Natasha’s return had perhaps blinded him, wanting to put the grief far behind him at the first opportunity. It wasn’t the first time he’d mistaken her return–that one porn actress can attest to his bizarre DMs–but to see this new hero literally bring Natasha’s corpse back from the brink seemed so real… Yelena sighed at the whimpering oaf’s long face. She knew she was right, but that level of sadness in front of her wasn’t easily ignored, “...I asked Valentina about this. She says the whole thing took place in a magic world where the witch girl brought back the robot man. Natasha being there… it could just be a trick.”

“A… a trick? A trick on who? Us?”

Yelena clutched at her own arms for comfort, looking back at the TV that still showed Wanda’s enamoured face. “Maybe Nat and this girl were closer than we thought. If I had the power to…” Yelena bit her lip. It wasn’t a healthy train of thought–wondering what you would do with the power to bring back a loved one–but she did feel a strange empathy towards this witch. Intel stated it started as a way to bring back her robot husband that had died in the Thanos war, “...grief makes us do crazy things.”

Alexi just sighed. Still deep down wishing it was real, and Yelena could sense that budding hope within him.

“Val also said that it could have been any other number of things. Faulty LMD, rogue Skrull, a Natasha from the universe this ‘Phoenix King’ claims to come from. We don’t know for sure.”

He nodded, willing to accept that he would not be able to get the answers he seeked like this.

Despite that, Alexi’s face still looked very downtrodden. All the excitement from finding out his daughter was alive had been crushed, and he barely even wanted to look at the TV anymore.

With a huff, Yelena picked up her rucksack to start packing it with items. Keys, gun, phone, wallet, all the basics. Her sudden quest taking her from the living room to her bedroom, where she promptly got changed out of her resting day clothes.

“Yelena? Where are you going?” asked Alexi, tentatively following her.

By the time he reached her bedroom she was already bursting out of it. The cropped T-shirt now discarded, Yelena was in her full Widow uniform ready to go.

“To know for sure.”

The TV flickered in the Lang kitchen. The mood was… confused.

On the screen, every channel had given up pretending it was showing anything else. This Mark Williams guy stood center frame, calm and naked like this was a lewd TED talk and not a global seizure. Networks had thrown everything they had at his crotch: thick black bar, emergency logo, hyper-aggressive pixellation. Red energy crawled over all of it like digital mold, thinning, bleeding it transparent until the whole obscene length of his cock was visible anyway, relaxed and heavy against his thigh.

Wanda and Natasha flanked him. Wanda in her witchy crimson leotard and boots, pale thighs bare, deep V of fabric framing the full lift of her tits. Natasha in a figure-hugging, leopard-print pencil dress, the fabric straining mightily over the lift of her enormous tits, a delicate gold necklace nestled above a plunging neckline. They stood easy, like this was a press conference and not the world’s weirdest porno newsflash.

“…huh. Did… did he just say the universe is supposed to have buffer super heroes? Because I–look, I work out, alright? I’m compact. Efficient.” The other members of the table all collectively gave him an eyebrow. He punctuated his point by jamming his spoon back into his cereal. “What a jerk.”

Hope stood with her hip against the counter, arms folded under her chest, the neckline of her black tank top framing the tight, high curve of her tits. The TV’s red wash caught in her eyes as she watched Mark’s easy stance, the way Wanda’s hand kept brushing his arm like that was the most natural thing in the world.

“He’s manipulating them. Look at the body language. That whole ‘universe wants you to feel good’ angle? Classic cult recruitment bs.”

“Yo, but like, this guy’s got presence,” Luis said, half-laughing, half-awed. The pixels over Mark’s cock glitched again, went almost sheer, and Luis’ eyes widened. “When he said ‘Hello, world,’ I got chills, man. And then the dick just… broke the censors? That’s some next-level charisma right there.”

“He makes interesting point,” Kurt agreed, nodding slowly, gaze flicking helplessly between Wanda’s cleavage, Natasha’s curves, and the monster cock reality refused to hide.

“Yeah, like… what if there really were secret witches controlling reality?” Dave said, gesturing at Wanda with his pizza slice. “Like, that’s some serious ‘I snap and your whole life changes’ energy. And also, I mean, damn.”

“Guys,” Hope dragged the word out, staring at them like she was reconsidering every life choice that had led her here. “I just said he’s a cult leader and you bite his apple immediately?”

They all shrank a little, three grown men simultaneously trying to look respectful and failing because the screen was right there and three beautiful people were naked or nearly naked on it. Not wanting to fully denote the interesting Phoenix man, but also not wanting to anger the scary lady either.

“…Baba Yaga probably works for Thanos…” Kurt mumbled, making a nervous sign of the cross as the speech rolled toward its end.

On screen, Mark finished with that lazy half-smile. Then Wanda stepped forward, lifting her hands. Scarlet power crackled around her fingers, poured over her own body and Natasha’s like smoke. The camera caught it live as their clothes unraveled, fabric dissolving into red sparks. In a heartbeat both women were completely naked beside him.

Wanda’s pale tits bounced free, full and soft, nipples peaked in the studio light. Natasha’s were smaller (but not at all small) but firm and high, scars and muscle visible along her arms and belly, thighs thick and strong. Every censor-bar, every fuzz layer, every panicked cutaway on every channel got eaten the same way as before: red corruption, thinning to nothing, leaving three perfect bodies and one impossible cock projected into living rooms worldwide.

Luis let out a low, reverent, “Hooooooly shit.”

Kurt’s hand tightened on his mug. “I, uh, think the, ah… broadcast is having very strong visual component,” he muttered.
Dave just stared, then said faintly as he whipped an eye of an imaginary tear, “Them big-ass white titties…”

Hope’s arms clamped tighter against her chest, knuckles going white, heat crawling up from her throat to her cheeks. She tried very hard to focus on angles: this was psychological warfare, humiliation of the old moral order, weaponized intimacy. Her eyes still skated over Wanda’s bare curves, Natasha’s fleshy, scarred beauty, the thick white slab of cock in the middle of them.

Luis saw the flicker and grinned slowly, eyes never leaving the screen. “You know what I’m thinking?” he said.

“No,” Hope shot back instantly. “And I don’t want to.”

“Nah, nah, listen,” Luis barreled on. “Like, look at that, right? Big dude, boom, got the magic girlfriend, the naked super-spy, giant cock, whole reality bending around him? And I’m just sitting here like… why is he the poster boy? Because if the universe really wants buffer heroes and all that, I’m looking around this kitchen and thinking, maybe it’s missing someone.”

Hope blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you, Hope van Dyne,” he said, pointing his beer bottle at her like a microphone. “Like, you ever think about it? Scottie gets the fancy suit, goes all shrinky-dinky and huge-guy, and he’s cool, sure, love you bro-” he tossed toward the man in question, “-but you? With your whole ‘I will kick your ass in heels and then build a quantum tunnel’ thing? You’d be, like, the perfect tiny little suddenly-big superhero. Pow. Pow.” He mimed something shrinking and then exploding outward with his hands.

Kurt nodded eagerly. “Is true. Very intimidating when you are angry. Like small grenade.”

Dave gestured vaguely at her. “Yeah, like, you got, uh… I dunno, main-character energy. And also very nice… uh…” His eyes flicked down and he went red. “Posture.”

Luis rolled right through it, holding up a phone that he’d somehow been flicking through during this conversation. “Don’t even worry about, like, hero boobs or whatever. Everybody online going crazy about witch-girl tits and super-spy tits, like there’s some minimum tit requirement.” He made a face. “There’s such a thing as too big, you know?”

He glanced at Kurt and Dave, eyes wide, and shook his head hard, silent message loud as a shout: no, there is absolutely not such a thing as too big.

“Point is,” he said, turning back to Hope with a softer grin, “you got the prettiest little titties, okay? You’d look sick in some size-changing suit. Best bad-ass, kick-ass, tiny-little-then-suddenly-huge superheroine? People would lose their minds. Forget Phoenix Cock King up there, I’d watch your broadcast.”

Hope’s brain tripped right over the phrase “prettiest little titties” and faceplanted. Her blush went nuclear, eyes flashing. “Luis,” she hissed, “you cannot say that.”

“What? I am being body positive,” he protested. “And hero positive. I am just saying, world’s all screwed up, some naked young dude with a huge cock is telling everybody what’s what, maybe what we actually need is someone who knows what they’re doing and can go tiny or giant and punch cult leaders in the balls. I look at you, I see that, you know?”

Kurt and Dave both nodded, mumbling agreement, trying not to stare and definitely staring.

Hope opened her mouth, closed it, looked at the TV where this Mark Williams and his witches stood like some obscene holy trinity, then back at Luis and his ridiculous earnest face. The worst part was, under the embarrassment and the anger and the creeping dread, a tiny part of her liked the idea he just blurted out: not about her tits, about the rest of it.

She whirled toward the one person in this apartment who might rescue her from this conversation. “Scott? Little help?” she called.

In the doorway, Scott was half-turned away from the TV, shirtless in soft pajama pants, doing awkward superhero poses. He’d clearly been listening, though. One hand was on his hip, the other flexed, like he couldn’t decide whether to puff his chest or suck his belly in.

“Like, what does he want?” Scott muttered at his own reflection, trying to square his shoulders. “I helped save the world, so what if I took it easy the last few months? Ate some cake, didn’t get a god-cock upgrade. I still count, right?”

Hope stared at him, then at the TV, then at her three idiot dinner guests.

Naked god-king on one side of the glass, would-be hero with a cereal gut on the other, and somewhere in between, a woman who could probably fix half of this if anyone let her.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and wondered, deeply, why she spent time here at all.

-
Humanity’s orbital emissary to the vast galactic spaceways floated quietly above the Earth. The angular tower–surrounded by various rings and roughly the size of New Jersey–was there to protect and serve the people. Various scanners and antennas along its vast surface monitoring threats both on the planet and beyond the stars, manned by the best of the best. In this case meaning: those that the head of the agency could trust.

“Director Fury? There’s a situation developing on Earth,” said one such member. A curly haired man, having approached his one eyed commander in the hangar bay with a stack of papers related to the Westview incident and the subsequent global fallout.

But Nick Fury simply gave a dismissive frown.

“There’s a situation we just finished dealing with up here. Is it urgent enough that it requires me right this second?”

The curly haired man gulped, having just noticed the company that Nick Fury was talking with and feeling vastly out of his depth. Taking an extra moment to register what he was even seeing before answering, “Not… necessarily?”

“Then don’t ‘necessarily’ bother me with it, I’ll pick it up in a minute,” he sternly advised, sending his subordinate fleeing before finally addressing his guests, “Sorry about that. So you have her? She’s not going anywhere?”

Peter Quill gave a confident thumbs up, placing his other gloved hand upon her head to demonstrate, “One smoking hot redhead, primed and ready for transport.”

Fury raised his good eyebrow, not feeling quite as confident in the so-called-leader’s attitude. Though the bug lady next to him with her hand on the redhead’s face repeating “Sleep.” did alleviate tension.

Either way, at least this redhead would be out of his figurative hair.

The Guardians of the Galaxy had arrived at his base this morning after a request for an audience two days ago. An eclectic group of aliens that acted as sort of space Avengers bounty hunters. Saving planets for pay was a decent way to make a living, even if Fury was always creeped out by the gigantic decapitated celestial head they called a home. Rocket and Nebula had been imperative figures during the Blip for maintaining relations between Earth and the Space nations while Fury and the rest of the universe had been MIA.

All this to say, he trusted them… which is why it was a surprise when they arrived and the dog had told him he was being psychically controlled by his own prisoner.

Things had escalated quickly, a fight between seemingly controlled agents and the Guardians kicking off while his prisoner easily walked out her own confines with little care. He had enough training to resist her now that he knew something was off, but he wasn’t able to help in the fight. Luckily, the Guardians needed no such assistance. Between Mantis and Cosmo–not to mention multiple psychic protections in Nebula and Rocket’s cybernetic biologies–Jean Grey had little chance to win the fight. Drax and Groot barrelling through the agents while the others fought the psychic. It was a tough battle, but a well aimed psychic arrow from Kraglin through her shoulder made Jean lose concentration long enough for Mantis to subdue her mind.

Turns out she’d never been locked up at all. The woman they’d picked up on Contraxia had faked being captured to gain access to his base. Apparently waiting for news about her ‘master’ while psychically controlling everyone to treat her like a queen, right down to kissing her feet (among other things). Maria Hill still wasn’t fully in her right mind, seemingly having the most amount of physical contact with the mind controller.

It was all such an embarrassing headache.

“I appreciate it guys. Don’t know how much deprogramming I’m going to have to do after this mess…” Fury admitted, scratching the back of his head while admiring the wreckage around them.

“Cosmo did good?” asked the dog, psychically.

“Yes, you will be receiving the utmost and thorough petting,” said Nebula, shooting a look over at Quill who rolled his eyes knowing he would be the one on pet duty again.

“Yes! Yes! Cosmo is good dog!”

Rocket–who was currently sat on a box–spat out his ‘Earth’ gum in annoyance, “Don’t hurt yourself by patting your back too hard. If these humans had flarking base level psychic protection they’d have noticed this broad messing with them sooner.”

Fury crossed his arms at the blatant disrespect, “Excuse me for not knowing she’d implanted ‘psychic proof glass’ into my memories.”

“I am Groot.”

The whole crew tried to hide their mocking laughter to not hurt Nick’s feelings. Except Drax. He belly laughed loud and proud while pointing directly at him.

“What?” he asked, “What did the damn tree say?”

“Nothing you’d want to hear, Director Fury,” said Quill, repeating his thumbs up while slowly guiding his team towards his parked ship, The Bowie. Mantis still held onto Jean while Drax carried her limp body, “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure she’s secure. The Collector left a bunch of his crap on Knowhere. Guy was a creep, but he knew how to make a prison worth a damn. Oh, and love the new base, dude! Still has that fresh military smell!”

Even though he was already back in his ship, he noticed that one of his team was still standing there by Fury. An annoyed look on her face as she waited for him to return.

“Quill.” hissed Nebula, tapping her foot in frustration while gesturing towards Nick, “Did you forget the reason we came here?”

Fury nodded, “I’d like to know that too.”

“Oh! Right!” he replied, rushing back down the landing strip to mention one last thing, “Yeah, no biggie, Fury, we just sort of tracked a big fiery **** bird the size of a planet heading towards this… general direction.”

“You what?!”

Quill raised his hands, “Don’t worry! It’s a good few months away, we just wanted everyone to get a head start on the situation. We’ll deal with the redhead first and be back later with the full details. K?”