The Further Adventures of Marvel Boy
Unknown to me, my "adventure" started off with the Marvel Disappearance three years ago. Until I got my birthday present a week ago, I knew about as much as anyone did about the incident.
I was fifteen years old at the time when it happened. Like most of the world, I was looking forward to Avengers: Endgame coming out. The studio folk decide they were going to make the premiere a production that would border on being a spectacle. Everyone who had ever appeared in a television show or movie that was related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe was there. This included all the X-Men stars, everyone from previous Marvel based movies...you name it, if the studio could get them there, they were there. This included actors and actresses who were being considered for the New Warriors TV Show, which was at the time a "concept being considered," or something like that. Pam Anderson was there from that Stan Lee TV show from fifteen years back. David Hasselhoff was there, since he had played Nick Fury for a TV movie. I think they had even managed to fly in a few people who were the subject of episodes of Stan Lee's Superhumans.
Like I said, everyone was there.
So, as everyone knows, the Disappearance happened when all the actresses who were in "that scene" posed together in their various gowns and dresses. You know what scene I'm talking about. The scene that was supposed to be the "girl power" scene of the movie Avengers: Endgame, and ended up getting edited out because of the Disappearance. And which, of course, was almost immediately everywhere on the internet when the scene got edited out.
And, as everyone knows, at that very moment, all sorts of lights started flashing all over the place, and then everything went dark.
When the lights came back on, the first thing everyone noticed was that three of the women posing for the group shot had disappeared. Evangeline Lilly, Zoe Saldana and Pom Klementieff were gone.
And wherever they had disappeared to, they had left their clothing behind. All their clothing, including jewelry and underwear.
They weren't the only ones who had disappeared, but they were the three everyone immediately noticed.
Well, as everyone remembers, when people looked around and saw the woman they were talking to had disappeared, there was a general panic. Because bad things aren't supposed to happen to A-Listers at events like these.
So once they got everybody calmed down and patched up, they started trying to figure out who had disappeared. If everyone had remained calmed down, they would have known who had disappeared earlier. Not that it would have made any difference.
And as you probably remember, there was no rhyme or reason on who disappeared. The youngest were in their twenties, but one actress in her seventies disappeared as well. The only two things they had in common were the fact they were all women, and they all left their clothes and jewelry behind when they disappeared to wherever they disappeared to.
Well, three things actually. Every woman who disappeared had appeared in some Marvel production. It might have been a cameo role in a pilot that never aired, if the actress disappeared, she had been in a Marvel production.
Okay, it was mean, but I know me and my friends weren't the only ones making jokes about naked septuagenarians running around.
There were lots of rumors going around about how the women had been disappeared, and why they had disappeared. Sexual slavery was the most interesting theory, but me and my friends immediately discounted that possibility. Seriously, if you wanted sex slaves, why do you leave Elizabeth Olsen behind and kidnap a seventy year old woman, even if she had been a Playboy Playmate a half a century ago.
The how was even weirder. Everything from alien abductions to time stop technology was suggested, but nobody could figure out how it was done.
Three years later, no one was any closer to the truth.
Well, almost no one. Me, I found out the truth.
It was my eighteenth birthday, and I had a great time hanging out with my friends and family. Yep, I had a great time with my family. What can I say, I enjoy hanging out with my family. Anyway, I got a great bunch of presents and one really weird one from my Uncle Joe.
So, you know that uncle you always read about in stories like this, who is the black sheep in the family, but who's traveled all over the world and always gets you the coolest presents? That wasn't Uncle Joe. Don't get me wrong, Uncle Joe was a nice enough guy. He was a stage magician who was good, but not good enough to get beyond playing magic clubs and such. At least he wasn't having to do kids' parties.
Uncle Joe always gave interesting gifts, but not great ones. My room was wallpapered with vintage posters advertising magicians from the first half of the twentieth centuries. I have all sorts of ring tricks and other trinkets in my room as well. I mean, they're interesting and all, but they're not the sort of thing that you look forward to receiving on your birthday.
So when I got an envelope from Uncle Joe with a key to a storage closet at the local storage business, I politely said thank you and promised Uncle Joe I would go "open" my present alone.
Okay, listen, I do appreciate my Uncle, and I thought it was kind of cool, him trying to add an air of mystery to his birthday present to me, but I wasn't too overexcited. I knew it was just going to be another poster, or maybe some kind of low level illusionist trick, or something like that.
So that weekend, a gaming session I had planned with my friends fell through, and I decided to check out locker my uncle had given me a key to. When I got to the storage units, the guy in front told me that the key was to one of the smallest units in the complex, no bigger than a broom closet. In addition, I had to walk through a long labyrinth to get to it.
I just hoped whatever was in the closet wasn't going to have to be something I would have to drag all the way back outside.
So I got to the closet, opened it up, and found...
Another poster.
Insert dramatic sigh.
The poster was hanging on the far side of the closet. It was a faded brown, with a classic style magician depicted on it. The magician in question was waving his wand over a glass dome, under which were a small collection of tiny magician's assistants. You know the kind, the ones who are skimpily clad in sequined costumes that are meant to distract you while the magic trick is being pulled off.
With another dramatic sigh, I stepped in the closet to pull the poster down.
As soon as I touched the poster, the world around me disappeared.
I mean everything disappeared. I don't know how long I was in the blackness, but when the light finally came back on, I knew I wasn't in the broom closet anymore.
I was in some really big underground room. I think it was underground, as the walls were rocky. The light emanating from the ceiling was coming from these pearly white fixtures, and looked like natural daylight.
But the big thing in the room was this really, really REALLY long table in the center of the room. There was this light blue arau over the table. Inside the aura were all these little model buildings. Like the ones you see scaled down for train sets and such. As I walked over to the table, I saw that the little model town had little model people walking around, all of them looking to be about fifteen centimeters tall.
Except these model people looked real. As if someone had taken real human beings and somehow shrunk them down. Which was impossible, of course. But that's sure what it looked like.
And there was something else about these tiny model people. They were all tiny female model people.
Tiny beautiful female model people.
Tiny nude beautiful female model people.
I just stared at all these beautiful tiny nude women walking around, talking with each other, doing other activities, as if they didn't have a care in the world. And without exception, all the women I could see were young, fit and with long hair reaching down to their waist. I didn't think about it at the time, but none of them had tattoos, and each one had a strip between their legs. Not a patch, or completely shaved, but a strip of shaped hair between their legs.
They seemed oblivious to my presence. Then one of them spotted me.
She started shouting (or at least I thought she was shouting) and pointing at me. Pretty soon, all the tiny women were looking up at me.
None of them seemed scared, though. They were all waving at me, and looked to be shouting something, but I couldn't tell what.
As I just stared (and drooled) at the crowd of beautiful tiny naked women, I spotted a face in the crowd I suddenly recognized: Milana Vayntrub.
In retrospect, there were probably other faces in the crowd I should have recognized. But in my defense, not all the ladies were there, not all of them were actresses I would have recognized, and I wasn't really looking at faces.
Anyway, I remembered Milana had been slated to play Squirrel Girl in a new Marvel television show, before she disappeared. I think she did other shows and movies, but I mainly recognized her from the commercials she did for a phone company. Or maybe it was an insurance company. I can't remember.
As soon as Milana noticed I was staring right at her, she started bouncing up and down (which definitely got my attention), then pointed at me.
I suddenly realized she was she wasn't pointing at me, but pointing behind me.
I turned around and saw what looked like three roulette wheels, a small one inside a medium one inside a large one.
I turned back and looked down at Milana, and pointed at the wheels. She grinned and nodded.
I turned back and stared at the wheels, wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do.