Arcade has kidnapped a number of teenage superhumans, brought them to his Murder World island, and was in the process of forcing them to fight to the death. But, his little A.I. helper urges him to take action, since while they had covered a number of electronic footprints, someone may have noticed the kids are gone: Molly Hayes, of the Runaways! She's gone to the Avengers Academy and Hank Pym, since while she was receiving (fake) texts from them, she doesn't believe her friends Chase and Nico would leave her behind, or their dinosaur Old Lace. Hank agrees to look into it, and with Tigra notices some other kids were gone. They didn't seem suspicious by themselves, but checking with Wolverine and Captain Britain at their respective schools, more kids were gone. Wolvie thought X-23 was just on "walkabout," while the Captain was following his truants' exploits on social media: fake posts created by Arcade. Tigra tries to call Juston Seyfert, the kid with the pet Sentinel, but his mom won't let him talk to her. Doesn't matter, "Juston" was a LMD replacement, he may have already died in Murder World.
With so many kids gone, Hank runs a search on exotic energy signatures from around the time the kids allegedly left, and discovers a recurring teleportation energy. Visiting Maria Hill, she explains what a pain in the ass teleportation is for her, but a lot of supervillains escaped around that same time. That explains that, right? Except they had another teenage hero disappear about the same time: Death Locket. Maria writes it off as "a time travel thing," but Hank isn't convinced. Arcade has an extra push for that, though: one of the Avengers Academy's former students, Mettle, stops by for a visit. 'Mettle' explains he took off with his girlfriend Hazmat, who couldn't come because she was afraid they would make her go back to her parents. Instead, Mettle had been one of the first to die in Murder World, and Arcade used his corpse and iridium skin, to hide a robot decoy. Hank and Tigra are placated...for now.
Arcade's robot helper wonders what the endgame is here, because while he says this is to rebuild his rep; the robot is now convinced this is either an elaborate 'suicide by cape' attempt, or Arcade is somehow delusional enough to think he can get away with it. Arcade blows it up, and then starts a new unit.
I really need to see if I can find trades for this; although like the robot helper I wonder how Arcade wasn't super-murdered after this. And I'm not super-familiar with Molly Hayes, but is she ever wrong? Good instincts in that kid, that probably no one listens to.
1 comment:
Zemo was forming some big villain thing and Arcade marched in, claiming he deserved a seat at the table because look what he pulled. Zemo agreed the technology they utilized was pretty sweet, but hired Arcade's assistant for that and threw Arcade's butt in a cell.
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