The Avengers of Madagascar
“You’re being attacked by super-powered penguins?”
Captain America tried to keep the skepticism out of his voice but failed miserably. Spider-Man didn’t even attempt to stifle his snickers, while Hawkeye simply smiled. Iron Man’s expression was inscrutable, as usual, but Cap had no doubt that his teammate was laughing behind that golden faceplate.
“Yes, Captain,” Reed Richards sighed as he ushered them down the hall that led to his lab. He had summoned the Avengers to the Baxter Building ten minutes earlier, assuring Cap that the matter was urgent but refusing to say anything more. Now that he had made his declaration the reason for his reticence was clear.
“Believe me, I was as shocked as you are when they first came through the portal,” Reed continued resignedly. “I fully expected to see Sue, Johnny and Ben standing there, right in the places they had been when Doom hit them with his Dimensional Displacement machine. But in their places were four penguins who seem to be other-dimensional analogs of - well, of you.”
They had arrived at the massive metal door of the lab. Given the potentially explosive nature of his typical experiments, Reed had installed plates of six-inch thick vibranium in the walls and doors.
Mister Fantastic began to lean into the retinal scanner, but then hesitated.
“I have to warn you. They’re a little, uh, violent.”
“Wait, we’re supposed to be afraid of some penguins?” It was Hawkeye’s turn to laugh. “You have got to be kiddin’ me.” Cap maintained his poker face, but Peter giggled uncontrollably and Iron Man shook his head.
Reed eyed them wearily for a moment, and then activated the door.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The door swung open on a scene of utter chaos. A chubby, two-foot tall, red-white-and-blue clad form was bounding around the room, doing acrobatic flips as it sprang from counter to counter leaving shattered instruments in its wake. Another swung overhead by a delicate web. Other, discarded weblines were gumming up much of the ceiling and walls. A third, wearing a compact version of the familiar red-and-gold armor, hovered in a corner firing off miniaturized repulsor rays from its flippers at everything in sight.
“What the hell?” Cap exclaimed, just before deflecting a penguin-sized version of his own shield. That was followed up by a repulsor hit from the Iron Penguin, who swooped in swiftly and then flew madly away.
“Eat hot repulsors, baby!” Iron Penguin cackled.
“Jesus Christ!” said Hawkeye, diving inside as the repulsors scorched the floor behind him.
“Evasive maneuvers, boys!” cried the leader of the penguins, who was obviously Captain America in bird form.
“I warned you,” Reed sniffed, expanding his rubbery torso to allow Captain Antarctica’s shield to bounce off him.
“Just what do you want us to do with them, Reed?” Cap asked. He dove at Captain Antarctica, who evaded his grasp by springing away.
“I need you to capture them,” Reed replied. “They have to go back through the portal to their own universe so that my teammates can come home.”
“Okay, Avengers, let’s round up the flock.” Cap threw his shield at his avian counterpart, who again cartwheeled out of the way. Spider-Man aimed a web at the web-slinging bird only to see it swing away with room to spare. Hawkeye fired off a volley of rubber-tipped arrows which fell harmlessly as the birds scattered manically.
“I thought you said there were four of them,” Iron Man said as he rose into the air. The lab was huge and has a vaulted ceiling, allowing for some maneuverability though the armored Avenger was wary of the many suspended cables and devices.
“There are four of them. The other one has been sniping at me from cover all afternoon.”
A cry of “Incoming!” from Cap was all the warning Iron Man got before he looked down to see a round, black object hurling up at him from beneath one of the lab tables. It looked so much like a cartoon bomb that he was shocked just long enough to allow the thing to impact his armor. The explosion was small, but powerful enough to leave a nasty scorch mark on his chest plate.
“Aw, crap!” Iron Man exclaimed. He swooped aside as another toy bomb hurtled at him but didn’t dare respond with repulsor fire. That would have reduced the tiny nuisance to a feathery grease mark on the floor.
“How the hell are we supposed to catch these things?” Hawkeye cursed under his breath as another arrow missed its target by a hair. “They’re too damned fast and crazy.”
“We need to find a way to corral them,” said Captain America. Once again he dove at Captain Antarctica, who responded by sliding across the slick metal floor, ricocheting off the nearest wall and rebounding straight into Cap’s crotch. The Star-Spangled Avenger dropped to his knees with a string of curses, eyes watering. He never would have guessed that a five-pound bird would pack such a wallop.
Taking advantage of the human heroes’ disarray, Captain Antarctica rallied his troops.
“Don’t let ‘em catch you, boys!” he shouted. “They’re obviously working for that deranged marine mammal, Dr. Blowhole.”
“Doesn’t Dr. Blowhole use lobsters to do his dirty work, Skipper?” asked Spider-Penguin, who for some reason had a British accent. He had managed to cover Spider-Man’s face in webbing and was now riding on the web-slinger’s shoulders, raining stinging flipper-slaps on the back of the human’s head as he tried to get rid of the mess without removing his mask.
“He’s finally recruited the humans to help in his evil schemes,” the penguin leader replied. “Our fishy nemesis is moving up the food chain. Next he’ll use leopard seals or even orcas.”
The other penguins gasped in horror.
“Not orcas!” Iron Penguin sounded terrified.
“Yes, orcas. Land orcas.”
“Lorkas?” quavered Spider-Penguin. “”That’s even scarier than the Skorka!”
“Skorka!” The fourth penguin finally popped from under a table. He was decked out in purple and black like a mini-Hawkeye. Letting out a loud gagging noise he vomited up a flamethrower and let loose a stream of fiery mayhem. The sight was so surprising that Iron Man and Hawkeye almost found themselves engulfed in flames before they dodged out of the way.
“What the hell are they talking about?” Iron Man asked, aiming a moderately-powered repulsor ray over the crazed arsonist’s head.
“What I want to know is, how can we understand them?” Spider-Man said. He had finally managed to dislodge his unwanted passenger, but not to catch the bird.
“Who cares? Just catch them!” said Hawkeye.
Captain America dodged a swooping attack by Iron Penguin and made a swift assessment of the enemy’s positions.
“Iron Man, see if you can force Iron penguin to the ground. Hawkeye, I need you to drop some flash-bangs around them to help me corner them.”
Iron Penguin darted erratically through the air with Iron Man in hot pursuit. The human Avenger’s slightly superior speed allowed him to finally catch up to his counterpart and swat him from the sky.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” cried the Golden Penguin with every bounce. He was swiftly webbed to the ground by Spider-Man.
“Kowalski!” screamed Captain Antarctica.
The penguin’s skipper launched himself into another headlong slide and started bouncing off the wall again. Still smarting from his penguin foe’s crotch shot, Captain America warily vaulted out of his path. Carefully calculating the angles, Cap hurled his shield at the far wall. On its ricochet it ended up right in front of Captain Antarctica in mid-bounce and he smacked into it. The heroic bird landed stunned at Cap’s feet and was swiftly scooped up and webbed to his fallen comrade.
“Skipper! Nao!” The rough voice of Hawkeye’s birdy doppelganger rang out, followed by a series of wretches. A machete, a chainsaw, two pairs of nunchaku and a dozen throwing stars flew at the Avengers from under the table in short order. While the mad bird was busy trying to barf up more weapons Hawkeye shot an arrow at him. Cap was relieved - and a little stunned - to see the arrow’s tip sprout a boxing glove the instant before it hit the tiny terror’s beak. He was down for the count.
With the other penguins out of the way, Spider-Man swiftly snagged Spider-Penguin by his webbed foot and slung him down next to his teammates. A little more webbing put an end to his half-hearted struggle.
“Okay.” Captain America let out a sigh of relief. Their tiny counterparts had put up one helluva fight against tremendous odds, just like human Avengers. “What next, Reed?”
“Yeah, what next you madmen?” Captain Antarctica had awoken madder than a wet hen. “Are you going to torture us for information? Or are you planning to send us back to the Hoboken Zoo? That’s it, isn’t it? Well, you can tell your evil master Blowhole that it won’t work. I will die before I go back to that hell hole. I will slit my own throat with a rusty knife first.” The leader of Avengers of Madagascar’s voice became ever more frantic. “Rico! Rusty knife! ASAP!”
“Whoa, there, little fella!” Captain America crouched down next to the angry bird and laid a soothing hand on him, only to hastily remove it when he was pecked. It was hard enough that he could feel it through his glove. He had no idea penguin beaks were so sharp. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“You bet your boots you’re not! I’ll get loose and when I do -“
“Jesus, can we slap some webbing on his beak?” Hawkeye asked, exasperated.
“Look, uh, Penguin Avengers,” Reed began, “we just want to send you back to your own universe, that’s all. You can go back to your lives peacefully if you’ll just give me a few minutes to get things ready.”
“And then we can get some peace and quiet,” Iron Man muttered. He had been scanning Iron Penguin’s armor, wondering how the bird had managed to create it without fingers to work his tools. Maybe he could whip up a suit like that for Red Wing, the Falcon’s companion. Though why he would do so, other than for the sheer hell of it, he didn’t know.
“Ah, Skipper, I’m beginning to understand,” said the genius penguin. “Apparently, that machine Dr. Blowhole zapped us with sent us to another universe, where the Avengers of Madagascar are a bunch of costumed humans. It’s absolutely brilliant! Curse you, Blowhole! Why do you always get the good tech?” With that, Iron Penguin began banging his head on the metal floor, giving rise to a series of ringing clangs.
“Uh, yeah.” Cap backed away from the grumbling birds and went to look over Reed’s shoulder. The leader of the Fantastic Four was at the controls of Doom’s machine, working a series of buttons. “How long before you can send them back? They seem to be getting agitated again.”
“Yeah, we really don’t want those guys getting loose,” Spider-Man said. He was still smarting from Spider-Penguin’s flippers.
“It’s all set,” Reed announced. He stretched out his neck until his head hovered over the struggling avian Avengers.
“Wow!” rasped the purple-clad Hawkeye counterpart. “Dassa long neck!”
“I’m about to start the machine,” Richards told the birds. “It won’t harm you, but you’ll probably feel a little funny during the trip.”
“You’ll feel funny when I get this web off me…” Captain Antarctica obviously didn’t know the meaning of the word surrender.
Reed sighed and retracted his head back to the machine. He pushed a button and the machine shot a beam of blue-white energy at the prone penguins. They immediately winked out of this universe and, presumably back into their own.
“Well, that was… weird,” Iron Man said. “I hope they made it back to wherever they came from.”
“I hope we never have to deal with them again,” Hawkeye groused. “How did the one dressed like me keep barfing up weapons? Makes me wanna barf myself just thinking about it.”
Spider-Man laughed. “Weren’t you a circus geek? That should be old hat for you.”
Hawkeye glared at his teammates. Cap hid his smirk by turning to Reed.
“How do you plan to get the rest of the FF back, Reed? Do you think the machine can retrieve them?”
“I’m certain that it can, Cap. It’s just a matter of training it on the particular universe that Doom sent them to.”
“But there are an infinite number of alternate universes,” Spider-Man chimed in. “How can you be sure you’ve settled on the right one?”
“He’s got a point there. The first time you tried you got it wrong. You can end up making thousands of attempts before finding them.” Iron Man refrained from adding, ‘If you ever do,’ when he saw the look on Reed’s face.
“This time I’ve calibrated it to seek out the specific energy patterns given off by cosmic ray-induced powers,” Reed said. “That should allow it to zero in on Sue, Johnny and Ben, wherever they are.”
“But what if -“
Spider-Man’s question hung in the air unfinished as Reed fired up the machine again.
The same blue-white energy that had banished the penguins crackled in the air again, momentarily blinding the assembled heroes. When they could see again there were three figures standing before them.
The gorgeous Tigress blinked her enormous green eyes at the humans, and then dropped into a crouch. Captain America wondered for a second how she managed to walk on two legs, but then dismissed the thought. What mattered more was the fact that she looked deadly and determined.
“Po! Master Monkey! We have been kidnapped by Tai Lung again!”
“Oh, not again!” The closest of her companions, a giant (really giant) panda with rocky black-and-white skin where his fur should have been, lumbered clumsily to his feet. “Why does he always attack at lunchtime? I was gonna have dumplings!”
“You eat dumplings at every meal,” said the third being, a large monkey with brown fur.
“Reed,” Cap began wearily, but the Tigress cut him off.
“Master Monkey! Master Po! Attack!” With that she disappeared. The monkey burst into flames, flew overhead and began raining fireballs down on the assembled human heroes. The rocky panda took two steps, tripped over his own feet and managed to bowl Iron Man over, pinning his armored form to the ground.
“God, I hope he’s not flinging flaming poop at us,” Hawkeye said, notching up an arrow filled with flame-retardant foam.
“Reed, get that damned machine ready - ooh!” Captain America doubled over as an invisible tiger paw caught him in the midsection, forcing the air from his lungs.
“I’m working on it!” Reed shouted frantically. “You have to catch them for me!”
“Not again!” moaned Spider-Man, swinging above the renewed chaos. The next time Reed called Avengers Mansion for help he’d be lucky if they didn’t come over and join whatever crazed dictator or otherworldly menace was beating his ass. The one upside was that he owed them now. Big time.