"Rise and shine, little brother!" Kili burst happily into her younger brother's room. He was still a pain in the ass, of course, but that did not make him any less loved, and teasing and trolling him was one of Kili's favorite hobbies.
And barging into his room at seven in the morning while shouting, knowing he loved sleeping in, was the very peak of sisterly trolling, especially when she acted disgustingly cheerful on top of it all. Internally, imitating cartoon villains, she laughed—only to trip over absolutely nothing when she saw the cleaned-up room and nearly fall over.
The room, however, was empty. Completely empty. Kili looked around in confusion.
"Oh, where is he?" Agatha asked, coming over because of the noise. Kili only distinguished the twins by their hair color. Pink was Agatha, blue was Valerie. Shrugging in confusion, Kili looked again at the spotless room and the neatly made bed. She had only ever seen her brother's room look like this on the day he moved into it. Usually it existed in a permanent state of chaos, which he also forbade anyone from cleaning, calling it creative disorder.
"Has anyone seen him today?" she asked Agatha, turning back to her with the first notes of panic in her voice and making a dramatic face.
Agatha understood what she was getting at and involuntarily became nervous too.
"No way," she exhaled.
"But what if!" Kili objected. "Come on, let's check outside!"
Agatha wanted to say that it made no sense, because if Mac had run away, searching around the house was pointless, and if he had not, then it would be the most pathetic escape plan in history.
They ran outside and looked around, searching for something they did not even know themselves.
"Did something happen?" a familiar voice came from the doorway.
Kili turned first.
Mac stood there with wet hair, looking at them with concern.
"You jerk!" she snapped indignantly and stomped past him.
"What?" I froze in bewilderment.
Agatha giggled, then put on a serious face.
"How could you?" she said and walked after Kili.
"What?" I repeated like a parrot, understanding absolutely nothing.
But I smiled when I heard an explosion of female laughter from inside the house.
Little brats, I thought, mentally erasing the word little with a spit-wet finger.
"Did you forget anything? Didn't leave anything behind?" John asked the noisy group of four teenagers. More precisely, the girls were noisy, while his son was unusually thoughtful and quiet.
John did not try to push himself on him. He frankly did not understand how to find the right words for a son who had suddenly become a completely different person. The sisters acted overly cheerful around him, but they too clearly did not yet understand how to build a relationship with him. Besides, John could not imagine how he himself would behave in his place.
Mac nodded, smiling faintly at the simple joke, and John thought with relief, He's thawing out little by little.
Watching the noisy family, I kept turning over one thought in my head: to what extent could I consider this family mine?
I had no internal drama about taking someone else's place. In the end, without me they would have gotten a vegetable for the rest of his life. But there was still some doubt in my soul. I was not quite their son, and they were not quite my parents. I remembered my own family perfectly and loved them. That was the dilemma. And for now, I did not understand how to solve it.
With sisters, though, it was much easier. I had always wanted to have sisters.
The first trip to school was something unbelievably strange. I had graduated from school more than ten years ago, and now there were classmates too. The school building appeared after another turn in the road, an ordinary two-story building with two wings stretching out to either side, and behind it, as far as I could tell, a long gym. There was a wide lawn in front of the school. And so many teenagers, hurrying to class.
An interesting detail, at least for me, was that the family council had decided not to send us to New York schools.
Kili explained that the school here in town was not only much calmer, but also had a better atmosphere than any school in New York. The quality of education, thanks to the nearby metropolis, was still at a decent level.
I said goodbye to John with a handshake and waved farewell to Kili. She was a big girl already, she had college.
On the way to school, I somehow found myself neatly trapped between my sisters. I felt like either a celebrity or some rich golden boy.
"Are you two going to follow me into the bathroom too?" I snorted mockingly, teasing the twins. Of all my new family, I probably liked them the most.
"Would you let us?" they asked, batting their eyes innocently.
"Only for money. Looking costs extra, touching is a separate fee," I replied with a serious face.
They stopped dead, staring at me, unable to tell whether I was joking or whether my mind had seriously gone off the rails.
"Y-you..."
"Pfft—hahahaha!"
I could not hold it in anymore and bolted forward, fleeing from the two furies who had realized they had just been brazenly outplayed on their own turf.
"Stop!"
I failed to escape. My body's endurance was still somewhere below floor level and needed a lot of work. They caught me, and their revenge was terrible. Yeah, they tickled me. Just imagine that—tickling me. How could their consciences allow such a thing?
Under the curious gazes of those around us, we all laughed it off.
"I should have a locker somewhere, right?" I asked them, looking at the long rows of student lockers.
"There," Agatha waved vaguely, adjusting her pink bangs. Acting as both breakwater and guide, she led me to a locker with a digital lock. A small one, with a simple four-digit code.
I stared at it, then at the twins, then back at the lock. By the third round they started to get suspicious. On the fourth, Valerie followed my gaze and understood.
"Oh!"
"Uh," I contributed.
"Huh?" Agatha added blankly.
Alright, time to take matters into my own hands.
"I suspect I need to see the custodian?"
"More likely the principal," Agatha answered thoughtfully, and when I gave her a questioning look, she added, "Lopez won't do anything without his permission."
I nodded in understanding.
The girls' lockers were nearby, and they took what they needed, leaving some textbooks behind. A few minutes later I was standing by the principal's office. The large wall clock in the hallway opposite his office already showed ten to nine.
"Shoo, go to class. I'll figure things out here."
"Are you sure? Everything will be alright?" Agatha looked at me with the narrowed eyes of a prosecutor.
I rolled my eyes.
"We're at school. What could possibly happen here?"
Reluctantly, the twins nodded, though they visibly sighed with relief and went off on their own business. Yeah, loving their brother was one thing, but spending the whole day fussing over me like I was a little kid was quite another. They had their own friends and their own lives too.
I waited a few seconds for them to walk off and disappear around the corner. Then I knocked on the most official-looking door I had ever seen. The sign on it, done in a strict style, only emphasized the seriousness.
Was I supposed to wait for permission to enter? Or not? What was the norm in the States? I waved away my doubts and stepped inside—or rather, tried to. Nobody was home.
I ended up standing outside the office until the bell rang. Every now and then I caught curious glances, but no one seemed eager to approach the door. That already suggested a few things. Donovan had a reputation, and that reputation said she kept everyone under an iron grip.
I could see two possibilities. Either she was some unhinged lunatic and people feared her for that, which did not really fit the position of principal, or she was an old-school hardliner with a steel grip. Add in the impeccably neat office door in that severe style, and a picture emerged. A strict person who loved order and imposed it around herself by every available means, maybe with a few excesses.
I should get the discharge papers ready, I would have thought—if I had not already found them at home, neatly stored in an unnamed tie-string folder.
Well, not exactly stored. It had been tucked under the bed, held in place by a strap fixed to the underside. If I had not started cleaning, I never would have found it. Alongside it, I also found some light erotica. Yeah...
The guy had several such stashes, and our tastes definitely did not match. He clearly liked girls in a... manly sort of way. In any case, I gathered up that reading material and threw it out with the rest of the junk. Among the more interesting finds were a taser and a can of pepper spray. Everything worked and was perfectly usable, so I stuffed them into my bag.
I would have taken something more powerful if I could. Besides movies, I loved cartoons too, and the stuff that happened in cartoons was pure insanity. But unfortunately, no luck.
"Mr. Dillon?" a heavy, demanding female voice rang out, clearly expecting an answer.
I turned to face... well, who exactly?
"Sorry, ma'am, would you mind introducing yourself?"
Thin eyebrows shot upward in surprise and silent question, but an answer followed.
"Principal Donovan, young man," she cut in and headed for the door, pulling out her keys as she walked.
"You're exactly who I need!" I exclaimed, surprising her even more.
The conversation with the principal, followed by the conversation with the custodian, took quite a while, so it was only by the end of first period that I finally got access to my locker. The new password would have earned a hacker a Thank You award, because I chose a birthdate—but the twist was that it was my birthdate from my previous world.
I transferred the textbooks I needed and went off in search of my classroom, which according to the schedule should have been in biology.
I knocked and entered after the answering shout, and silence fell over the room. Everyone stared at me.
Under their gaze, I started getting nervous.
Miss Hopkins, a slightly plump woman who looked to be around fifty, wore thick-lensed glasses that made her look a bit comical. She made no hurry to ease the atmosphere.
"What?" I threw back challengingly at the whole class, trying to take them all in at once.
I counted four guys in the room, including myself, and none of them were exactly heroic specimens, along with almost three dozen girls.
After my outburst, the class seemed to come alive. Many looked at me with interest, while a few pointedly looked away.
Had young Maxwell been a bully?
"Take your seat," Hopkins decided to clarify.
I looked at her questioningly. As it turned out, news of my memory loss had spread even more widely than I would have liked.
"Parker! Raise your hand!" barked the surprisingly cute woman.
My eyes widened. No way.
As it turned out later, Parker was not exactly a rare surname.
A blonde girl in the back raised her hand and waved. I walked back and looked at Parker questioningly. She pointed at an empty desk.
I looked at it and apparently my expression changed.
That was not a desk. It was something out of a pink fever dream. There were hearts everywhere, pink marker scribbles, a pair of drawn lips, and a pair of drawn stitched lips.
"What the hell is this nonsense?" I said loudly enough for the whole class to hear, because the silence still had not broken.
"Dillon, sit down!" Hopkins raised her voice, with hysterically threatening notes in it.
Under the annoyed gaze of the teacher, I took my seat.
"Those are your drawings," Parker turned to me and then giggled when she saw the horror on my face.
I would have to clean up my desk later. First I needed to find out whether those masterpieces really were mine.
No one really bothered me in class. In fact, people looked at me rather warily. And with each lesson I grew more baffled, because in every classroom I had MY desk decorated in exactly the same style.
Careful questioning confirmed my worst fears. All of that handiwork was indeed mine.
Seeing how much those artistic horrors made me twitch, people smiled in understanding, and some openly laughed without restraint.
Jessica Phil, the class representative, a gray mouse compared to the other girls, seemed genuinely pleased.
So after classes, I headed decisively for the custodian.
I found him exactly where I had seen him before, in his office—a large room set up as both a small woodworking shop and a storage area.
He gave me a philosophical look, and I could swear there was a faint smell of weed around him. I pretended not to notice.
"Dillon? What do you want?" he asked, looking up at me from the chair back clamped to the workbench.
"I need a bucket, some cleaner, and a few rags."
When he raised an eyebrow in question, I explained:
"I saw my desks today. That is a complete disaster."
With an understanding smirk, Lopez gathered everything I needed in just a couple of minutes.
"You have YOUR own desk in ALL your classrooms," he hinted heavily.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," slipped out of me under the man's understanding look.
And I had every right to despair. I had six classes today, which meant six desks. And how many subjects in total? That many desks to scrub, excluding things like PE.
And I would have to accept that cleaning them all in one day was impossible. Even the six from today were questionable.
Marker was not exactly easy to wash off. I looked doubtfully at the cleaning agent.
Well, we would see.
The twins found me while I was cleaning the first desk. They widened their eyes and watched me with interest for about five minutes, sitting right on top of nearby desks and swinging their legs.
"Were you punished?" Agatha asked, swinging her feet in the air like a little girl.
"No." I shook my head. "Did you see this nightmare? How am I supposed to sit at something like that?"
"We've been telling you that for ages..." they both laughed.
I silently continued scrubbing away another heart, internally cursing the guy who had trashed his own desks like this.
"We have stuff to do today, so we'll get home on our own."
Leaving the desk alone for a moment, I turned to look at my sisters. They had averted their eyes, which was interesting. They were definitely up to something, something not entirely approved of.
"And?" I was not going to ask. If they wanted, they would tell me. Everyone had their own skeletons in the closet, and mine were the biggest of all.
"Dad's picking us up at seven."
John had already told me that in their presence, but apparently they had decided to remind me and ease their consciences that way. Normally, by tradition, I went home with my sisters either on the school bus around three or waited until seven for John. The school closed at seven.
I nodded. I won't get lost, don't worry.
The twins relaxed visibly and brightened up, while I returned to my hard labor. Only the second desk out of six had been restored to its original state, so I still had a lot of work ahead of me.
"Bye," they called and ran off.
I could have demanded replacement desks, and no one would have refused me. But how would that look from the outside? Another tantrum from a whiner? I already had exactly that kind of reputation at school. Why make it even worse for no reason? I would rather work with my hands and earn myself a small plus in reputation, at least in the eyes of part of the class.
Closer to five, Jessica Phil peeked into the classroom.
Our class representative, a gray mouse for now. A bit awkward. But with my experience, I could already see that she would grow into herself by around eighteen. Then she would be beautiful.
By half past six, three desks had been cleaned. They were slightly scratched, but they looked incomparably better than before.
I had even gained one point of endurance while scrubbing them.
Tired but satisfied, I went to return the supplies. I slung my bag over my shoulder so I would not have to come back.
The empty hallways echoed loudly, creating a slightly eerie atmosphere. I reached the custodian's office quickly, but when I heard rustling behind the door, I stopped and listened. Quiet moans and rhythmic soft slaps made it clear I was definitely not expected and most certainly not welcome.
With a grunt, I left the cleaning supplies by the door and headed for the exit.
There were only about ten meters left to the front doors when one of them practically exploded. Splinters flew thick through the hallway. I instinctively threw my arms over my head—and just in time, because something sharp stabbed into my hand. The sharp, sudden pain finally got me moving.
Clouds of dust made it hard to see what was going on, but doors did not just explode on their own. At least not in a normal world.
A heavy silhouette of some sort of animal, though? That could definitely do it.
So I spun around and bolted back down the corridor as fast as I could.
The heavy breathing behind me encouraged me even more.
My own breathing turned just as heavy after ten meters. My endurance was absolutely terrible.
At the corner, my pursuer skidded, and driven by curiosity, I glanced back. The corridor was straight, I would not trip.
For fuck's sake, what are you even?
The image burned itself into my memory. A huge beast nearly a meter tall, hairless, massively muscled, red-eyed, looking like a Doberman that had eaten a steroid-pumped bodybuilder.
If only I had a couple seconds to catch my breath and pull out the taser, then you and I could have a real conversation.
"For fuck's sake, for fuck's sake," I muttered as I ran down the corridor.
Give me a little more head start and I could have escaped. But then the voice of our class rep sounded from behind, and the dog thing slammed to a halt so hard that even from several meters away I could hear its claws scraping the floor.
It was hard not to recognize the voice of a girl from our class. Jessica's voice had certain distinct notes.
A whole stampede of thoughts ran through my head before I made a decision, though in reality it took only a single instant.
I spun sharply and crouched slightly forward so I would not fall flat on my face. I slid for about half a meter, killing my speed. In one fluid motion I threw off my backpack, yanked the taser out of it—I had even hesitated about bringing it—and tossed the bag aside. Then, gripping the taser, I charged forward, intending to ram the dog just as it was lining itself up for Jessica.
The lack of oxygen had already made me feel pretty awful, and one thought kept circling in my head nonstop: Why am I not scared? Still, I squeezed out a little more speed.
Jessica stared in horror at this complete nightmare, too terrified to move.
Run, you idiot! I wanted to shout, but only a hoarse rasp came out. My throat was dry.
The dog jumped, aiming for the girl's throat, and in that same instant I slammed into it with the taser already switched on. My weight was only enough to knock it off course, and the two of us crashed together into the classroom where Jessica stood frozen in the doorway.
The dog was half-growling, half-whining because of the sparking taser pressed into its side. Jessica was screaming loudly enough to deafen everyone around us. I was yelling too, from the pain and the current jolting through me. The bastard had managed to sink its teeth into my arm, which meant part of the taser's charge was going into me as well.
It hurt like hell. The taser would probably have fallen out of my hand if my arm muscles had not seized in a cramp from the electricity. It turned into one giant infernal closed circuit, with the screaming class rep providing backup vocals.
"What the hell is going on here!" Donovan burst into the room, adjusting her skirt. Behind her stood Lopez, armed with a mop.
Though I only caught all of that in fragments, because the electricity was still pounding through me, the dog was whining, and Jessica kept screaming.
"Just die, you bitch," I growled through clenched teeth.
The dog jerked one more time, let out an especially piercing whine, and went still—but did not loosen its jaws.
Some symbols flashed in the corner of my vision.
Fortunately, Donovan was not a stupid woman. She figured things out quickly and used the mop—snatched from the custodian—to push my hand away from the animal's side. Her next action was to slap Jessica across the face, which immediately shut her up.
The jolting stopped. I rolled weakly onto my back.
"Thanks," I rasped, trying to catch my breath as I looked up at Donovan. I did not even try to get up.
"What! Is! That!" she demanded of the empty air, punctuating the question with some very colorful profanity.
The question hung in the silence, because no one knew and no one seemed eager to answer.
In fact, nobody understood what kind of beast it was or where it had come from.
Now that it was lying still, I could see surgical scars on it. Someone had definitely worked on this dog. It smelled like highly illegal experiments—or at the very least, extremely dangerous ones.
"You alright?" I turned to Jessica, who was staring in a daze at the creature that had nearly killed her.
"Where did that come from?" she sobbed, finally processing it.
"This is Marvel, baby," I let out a nervous laugh under their confused looks.
Then my attention was drawn to a rather narrow collar, on which the Oscorp logo was clearly visible.
Canon had arrived without warning.