CHAPTER 59 - MEETING THE FANTASTIC FOUR

Leaving the library, I contemplated whether letting my arrival be known beforehand to the team of supers but decided otherwise, not for any particular reason but just because.

It didn't take me up to a minute to reach the huge building with the giant '4' plastered on the sides while flying at average speed.

Instead of just entering unannounced, I stopped by the door and made my presence known which quickly alerted the security bot, printing him to report my identity to its creators.

It didn't take long before the Storm siblings came down and let me in with excited looks on their faces, at least it was much more prominent in Johnny's.

"Hi. Sorry for coming unannounced but I was at a library nearby so I thought I should just make a pit stop as there was an open invitation."

"Whoa! Check out this dude, sis." Johnny, who was dressed in a smudgy mechanic's overalls, exclaimed while checking out the device strapped to his arms.

Sue rolled her eyes and coughed a little. "Hey, Vision. Welcome to the Baxter Building."

I was led in and the both of them took their time to show me around the place while going forward.

"How fast do you process data on average?" He asked.

"Quite at an astonishing pace if I do so myself." I simply replied. I was ever evolving and that inclusively counted for my processing speed which increases everyday.

Johnny wasn't deterred by that and pushed further. "So what kind of specs are you running on? Gotta be something Stark-specialized right?"

"Johnny!" She shouted at him with a rebuke but the younger boy just waved it off and looked at me excitedly.

"At least give him some space, would ya?" A deep bass voice boomed out, taking the both of them by surprise as Ben Grimm made his appearance. "Hey there, I think this is the first time we're meeting. Ben Grimm."

I just smiled at him and offered a fist bump and the huge grin on his rocky face told just how much he appreciated the sentiment.

"You can just call me Vision." I said to him.

"Gotcha." He said with a nod before asking. "Any special reason for visiting us?"

"Well there was an open invitation and since I have nothing of much importance to do today, I thought it'd be better I just drop in." I said, and then added offhandedly. "That, and also to pick the brains of the resident geniuses here."

"Haha, sounds more like it." He laughed.

I observed the dynamics between the three of them and saw how close they were. I didn't even need to read their emotions to see that.

We were about to move in a specific direction when the sound of something exploding caught our attention from the other side of the building.

'Please don't be a reality warping shenanigan or any alternate reality bullshit.'

I followed them and came before a room and saw as Johnny and Sue powered themselves up with the former catching on fire while the latter had an invisible energy field around her hands.

Me? I just stood behind them and waited for Ben to blast through the doors and when he did the other two rushed in.

The room which looked like a very sophisticated workshop was currently filled with smoke which I easily dispersed only to be met with a scene of Reed Richards entangled around strange looking robots that I was pretty sure were trying to kill him if the readings I was getting off from them contained any byte of truth.

"Reed!"

"The hell man!"

"Again stretch?!"

No questions were asked as the team pummeled their way through two robots with Johnny having the most problems as he was literally the man on fire so it was hard for the mobility and space his abilities required.

[System override initiated]

A robot was wielding what looked like a saw and was about to turn Mr. Fantastic unit Mr. Spaghetti.

[Foreign systems override initiation completed]

[Engaging forceful shutdown]

The room fell silent as all the robots powered down and that was where I finally got to know what was really going on.

Basically from what I was seeing from the robots and my own assumptions, Reed was probably trying to make his own version of… me?

It wasn't anything close to what I used to be but I could see the blueprint of it.

'At least it's not an alien invasion, right?' I mean there was a lot that could go wrong and it's just pure luck that Reed wasn't trying something eerily ominous when I got here.

"Thank you for the save. That was quite the pickle." He said after making sure that all the robots were completely shut down.

"It's nothing. Though there is something I want to ask." I said after we all got seated with me facing the four of them in a makeshift living room.

"Ask away."

"What are your thoughts on spatial displacement?" I asked straightforwardly.

"Teleportation?" Johnny asked but Reed only shook his head. "Though they both have indiscernible similarities, it's the advanced fundamentals that makes it different." The obsessive scientist corrected.

He then looked at me with surprise and interest as he most likely wasn't expecting such a question. "Are you specifically talking about teleportation or space manipulation in general."

"Everything in and under."

Surprisingly the one who first answered was Sue as opposed to Johnny and Reed. "It's quite the complicated subject since there was once a theory in the 1950s about how every part of space is mapped and possesses a spatial point and if one could access those spatial points, it could either directly teleport them or open a portal between the distances connected with that point. And now that I think about it, that theory has already been proven with what happened in New York."

Reed then added to what Sue had said. "It becomes overly complicated when trying to identify the spatial points. Personally, I believe the key to this query lies in Quantum energy. If it is true that time and space are relative to and of the other, then the theorized Quantum Realm is a domain which is the closest thing to an immaterial world between both planes of existence and both conventions hold little to no meaning there. Hmm, interesting indeed."

Reed started going off on a tangent and I have to say this guy's intelligence really was something. He started theorizing facts about the Quantum Realm just based off of preconceived notions and they were actually feasible, at least at 63%, but that wasn't optimistic numbers so it will be shelved until further testing.

I ended up picking their brains and they did mine too and at the end of it all, I was glad for the Mind Stone because had it not been for it, I would have been the dumbest person in the room.

This also opened up a new route for me to try when it came to my energy deficiency and overreliance on the Mind Stone.

'What if I keep it in the Quantum Realm, but with an almost identical wavelength to present time and place? It should enable me to draw energy from the Mind Stone from anywhere I'm at, possibly even another universe.'

I guess I won't be building an international space station anytime soon, I guess.

"Vision, what's your view on mutants and super-powered people?" The room turned silent when Ben asked that but I just smiled and shook my head.

"It's nothing that great but I believe they are people too, and hence should be treated as one. Bad is bad and good is good. It's like owning a gun, just because you have it doesn't mean you're a bad person automatically."

"But you still need a permit for it, right?" Reed, not forfeiting even a single ground to me or anyone else.

"Only because it's a tool and it can't be judged. Giving them a publicly special brand is no different than segregating them from the wider society and what will now be called 'normal'. If they had presented the bill with sincerity and not segregation then it would have been the mutants who would have supported it more than normal humans."

I got up from my chair and was about to leave when I remembered something I should have addressed at the beginning. "Those bots. What were you trying to do with them?"

His shoulders slumped and I could feel something akin to depression clouding him. "Helen Cho beat me to perfecting a seamless biomechanical fusion, but even with that she couldn't address the core of an issue I think you face."

"And that is?"

"Energy deficiency. I don't know what your power source constitutes but the level of psionic reading I'm getting from you is not something a particular telepath I know can pull off. So I was thinking of upping her and Stark combined by creating a sentient and self-sustainable robot that runs on a matter/quantum energy to clean energy conversion, but-"

"Christ dude. You want to kill us all, don't you?" Ben shouted.

"Eh?"

Sue also wasted no time in giving him a dressing down. "No offense to you Vision but I don't think Reed here understands the hassle Stark and Cho went through after your birth. Helen has been sanctioned by the government and while they still can't hold Stark, he's still careful not to overstep his bounds and you want to create another killer robot?!"

Reed tried defending himself as the trio ganged on him. "I wasn't trying to-" but Johnny cut him off.

"Excuse me, you were saying? A bunch of robots were about to turn you into macaroni."

They spent the next few minutes admonishing Reed and also banning him from his lab for one week, which I think killed the man more than anything would have.

Sue and Ben walked me out of the building while the latter apologized for anything she thought I took slight offense to.

"If you don't mind me asking, why exactly were you thinking of teleportation and quantum travel?" Sue asked cautiously.

"Let's just say it's something that is closely related to the energy deficiency that Reed mentioned." Was all I said before leaving them with a smile on my face. This visit surprisingly helped me a lot.

[Decoding key to successful Quantum Travel – 60%... 70%]

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