To become a Plumber was to accept certain realities. Danger was one of them, long hours another, and the possibility of dying somewhere far from home ranked fairly high on the list as well.
What the man who would soon come to be known as Professor Haywire had not accepted, because it had never even occurred to him as a possibility, was becoming stranded in an entirely different universe during his first official assignment.
Yet that was exactly what happened.
One moment he had been pursuing a suspect through the null void. The next, he had found himself on a planet whose inhabitants called it Earth Bet, staring at a night sky that looked right and wrong at the same time.
At first, he assumed rescue would arrive. The Plumbers were many things, but they did not abandon their own. And so, he spent the first few weeks expecting to see a familiar portal tear open somewhere nearby. When that didn't happen, the first few months were spent trying to establish contact himself. And by the end of the first year, he had stopped expecting either.
That realization of his failure was far worse than the initial shock. After all, a bad situation could be endured, and though isolation was harder, the thought that his family would never know what happened to him was harder still.
There were days when he found himself staring at old photographs for hours, days when he caught himself calculating how old his children would be now, and days when he wondered whether they still believed he was alive.
Those were the worst days.
Eventually, however, life moved forward because it always did. He started taking whatever work he could find, using his skills for the occasional repair jobs, consultation, and engineering contracts when he was lucky enough to get them. Nothing glamorous or even permanent, just enough to survive. Earth Bet had no shortage of problems, and solving problems was one of the few things he still knew how to do.
Years passed, then more years passed. The desperation never truly disappeared. It simply became routine.
By then he had accumulated enough notebooks to fill entire shelves. Equations covered walls, theoretical models piled atop older theoretical models, and every possible approach to dimensional travel had been examined, revised, discarded, and revisited.
Nothing worked. Nothing even came close. Earth Bet’s dimensional framework was unlike anything he had encountered before. Entire alternate worlds seemed to exist in configurations that violated assumptions he had spent decades accepting as fact.
But somewhere inside that mess was a path home. He just couldn’t find it.
The headaches started small.
He told himself they were due to stress, then lack of sleep, then too much coffee. By the time he admitted something might actually be wrong, they had already become part of his daily routine. So he eventually stopped bothering. There were more important things to worry about. Like going home, for instance.
The day it happened began exactly like every other.
He sat alone in his office, surrounded by stacks of papers and half-finished tech prototypes. A cup of cold coffee sat forgotten beside him while he worked through another sequence of calculations.
The headache was particularly bad that morning as his vision blurred every few minutes, and blood dripped from his nose onto the pages in front of him.
He ignored it.
He had ignored worse.
His main focus was the fact that the equations weren’t working again. And as if that was the cue, something inside him cracked. The pain spiked, and for one brief instant it felt as though someone had driven a knife directly through the center of his skull.
Then everything went black.
When awareness returned, and he opened his eyes, the equations spread across his desk looked different. No. That wasn’t right. They looked exactly the same.
He was different.
He stared at them for several long moments, and understanding arrived with terrifying speed. He didn’t know how he knew, just that he simply did. The same way a man knew how to breathe, or walk, or blink.
His hands started shaking. And slowly, very slowly, he began to smile.
For the first time since arriving on Earth Bet, he could see a path forward.
The money disappeared quickly as prototype after prototype consumed resources faster than he could acquire them. Soon every dollar he possessed had vanished, and then every legal source of income vanished as well.
The experiments continued regardless. They had to. He was closer than he had ever been. Close enough to taste it. Close enough that abandoning the work became impossible.
The first robbery was easy to justify.
He spent nearly an hour sitting in the parked vehicle across the street beforehand, convincing himself not to do it. Then he spent another hour convincing himself that he had no choice, that the materials were necessary.
Thankfully, no one got hurt, and even the target was insured.
He repeated those facts the entire drive home. Strangely, he slept better that night than he had in weeks.
The second robbery was easier. The third, easier still. After that, the justifications began arriving automatically. Years of desperation had already done most of the work.
He told himself he was borrowing, then he told himself he was surviving. Eventually he stopped telling himself anything at all.
The experiments were all that mattered. Everything else became secondary.
The first contact with alternate versions of himself nearly gave him a heart attack. One moment the portal was empty. The next, another man stood on the opposite side staring back at him. He had the same face, voice, and even the same stunned expression.
Neither spoke for nearly a minute.
The second meeting ended in an argument that lasted three hours.
The third ended with blueprints spread across a table and three versions of the same man attempting to solve the same problem from different directions.
Progress accelerated rapidly after that, and so did the costs. Facilities were raided and tinkertech research was stolen.
Heroes began investigating, then fighting, then dying. Looking back, he couldn’t point to a specific moment when things went wrong. There wasn’t some dramatic line he crossed, only a long series of decisions that had seemed reasonable at the time.
One day he found himself reviewing security footage after a raid and realized he cared more about the damaged equipment than the terrified young hero who had confronted him.
The realization should have bothered him. It just didn’t bother him enough, at least not compared to the possibility of finally going home.
The damage spread further than he realized, much further, because he had made a mistake. A fundamental one. He assumed Earth Bet operated according to the same rules as the universe he was born in.
It didn’t.
He was never supposed to gain powers, and because he did, every action made ripples in the timestream.
At first, it went unnoticed. After all, the entities had cut the universe off from the main timeline, ensuring that any action taking place there wouldn't be noticed by beings operating outside of space and time. But the damages had accumulated, and by the time he had realized what he had done in his pursuit, it was already too late.
The man known as Professor Haywire was erased from reality, and somewhere very far away, a man carrying a pocket watch was alerted to this universe.