His old friends and old rivals couldn't find the problem. What was he supposed to do now? Victor wanted to restore his magic—desperately, more than anything.
He'd originally kept it a secret that he, too, had been exposed to the cosmic rays. Now that his "martial arts" had been crippled, he couldn't afford to hide it any longer.
He pulled off his gloves, clenched his jaw, and wrenched energy from the sluggish cells inside his body. It took a full three minutes of straining before a faint blue-iron tint appeared on the back of his hand.
Before all this, his palms had been like iron gauntlets, hard as tempered steel. Now, with Cyttorak's crimson chains binding his soul, it felt as though something had been wedged between him and his own power. The abilities were his—he could sense them right there—but they simply wouldn't respond.
He tried steering Mr. Fantastic's thinking: "Look—look at the back of my hand. I was on the station with you. Isn't it possible the cosmic rays affected me too?"
Mr. Fantastic smiled like a friendly next-door neighbor. "You'd already entered the sealed compartment by then. The four of us were directly exposed to cosmic radiation. It's not the same for you—at most you picked up a trace amount. Virtually no effect on the human body. Nothing to worry about."
Hearing the words it's not the same for you nearly made Victor flip the table.
For the moment, all he could do was coax Mr. Fantastic along. For once, he softened his tone: "Just try, Reed. Run one more check for me."
"All right, all right."
Seeing Victor lower himself like that, Reed had no reason to refuse. He'd spent the past few days studying cosmic rays and the changes in all four of them anyway—one more examination was no trouble.
And this time, the examination actually turned up something.
"Vic, there seems to be a strange energy eroding your cells. This energy is using your body as... nourishment, essentially, and it's walling off certain other elements from your cellular structure."
He didn't understand magic, but Mr. Fantastic had still managed to analyze Bella's energy suppression with roughly ninety percent accuracy.
A tremor of excitement crept into Victor's voice: "Can you fix it?"
"...I'm sorry. I'll need to study it further."
One week later, having learned that even Mr. Fantastic couldn't solve the problem afflicting him, Victor Von Doom walked out of the lab.
He didn't return to his company. He no longer had a company.
Von Doom Industries' assets had been auctioned off. His houses, cars, every piece of real estate—all sold. He didn't have a single dollar to his name.
After robbing a few street thugs, he left New York that same day. Left the United States entirely. He was going home to Latveria, where his mother had left him a trove of spellbooks. Magic, science—it didn't matter which. He would exhaust every means available to restore the magic inside him first.
...
The Fantastic Four were born. Victor fled to the Balkans. Aside from those directly involved, the person most devastated by all of it was President Sawyer.
His dream of reelection had shattered, and Charlie's earlier enthusiasm had cooled along with it.
Major cases from the Republican side kept flooding in like water from a burst dam, but with his political ambitions deflated, he couldn't be bothered to throw himself into the work. The LAPD Board of Police Commissioners didn't consist of him alone—everyone could share the load.
Samantha, no longer needing to worry about her husband, immediately rescued her youngest daughter from the clutches of "Big Sister is the prettiest" and "The prettiest one is Big Sister."
With no more distractions on the home front, Bella's graduate studies began.
She'd already read most of the available literature on history and religion, and with Kamar-Taj's extensive library providing her theoretical foundation, this time she chose not to continue in history under Dr. Serizawa. Instead, she picked the discipline that so many Marvel villains were especially fond of pursuing: biology.
In New York ten years from now, if you didn't have a PhD in biology, you'd be too embarrassed to greet anyone you knew on the street.
Whether she admitted it or not, this was a scientific age. Magic had only brought the masses ignorance and backwardness, while science had given human civilization wings.
Artificial sperm, the resurrection of Miss Harmon and Shaw, clones—all of these fell within the domain of biology, fields where magic failed but science succeeded.
In the end Bella would certainly circle back to the mystical path, but that didn't stop her from learning and mastering science in the meantime.
With an introduction from the fish-woman doctor, Dr. Serizawa treated Bella with great warmth. The Japanese professor didn't regard her as a disposable research assistant the way some advisors might—they exchanged ideas as equals, and the atmosphere of their discussions was excellent.
"In 1943, deep in the Pacific, the USS Lawton was attacked by a massive creature. In 1946, President Truman allocated the funding and signed the documents—Monarch was officially established. My father, Eiji Serizawa, joined Monarch that very year..."
Dr. Ishirō Serizawa began recounting Monarch's history for Bella, then laid out his own theory: "What role do the Titans play within Earth's ecosystem? Do they have connections to ancient civilizations? These are questions we need to investigate."
Dr. Serizawa was a busy man. Though in Bella's estimation his busyness amounted to running around in circles, the old professor delivered his vision, handed Bella a lengthy reading list, and promptly dusted himself off and vanished.
Dr. Graham, on the other hand, knew Bella well enough by now. Once the boss left, the two chatted casually for a bit.
Being Dr. Serizawa's graduate student came with one essential requirement: stamina.
The professor was a man who truly could not sit still. He hopped on helicopters and planes as casually as hailing a taxi—morning in the Philippines, lunch in Malaysia, falling asleep in India.
After following her advisor on two full laps around the globe and returning to the United States, Dr. Serizawa asked her: "Miss Bella, Vivienne has mentioned a few things about you. Do you believe ghosts truly exist in this world?"
Bella's eyebrow arched. Asking me whether ghosts exist? That's a ridiculous question—is my Vengeful Ghost Alliance fake?
"I believe... there should be certain phenomena that are extraordinary and can't be explained by science," she answered, as neutral as could be.
"And do you think there are people who can perceive those things?"
"There should be a few exceptional individuals whose senses are extraordinarily acute. I think..." Bella chose her words carefully, and seeing that Dr. Serizawa took the matter seriously, she answered honestly. "Yes, there should be."
"You believe some people can see things that others cannot?"
"'See' is too simple a word for it. It's more of a unique perspective. Many religious texts throughout history have documented such individuals. With the modern world's population being what it is, the appearance of one or two isn't surprising."
One day later, Bella accompanied Dr. Serizawa to a small town in Massachusetts.
There, they met fellow Monarch associates Mark Russell and Emma Russell.
Mrs. Russell had recently awakened an ability that could only be described as Spirit Vision.