Multiversal Marauders - A Marvel Fic

Part One - Chapters 1-9

PROLOGUE

"N-No, goddamnit! Do not put me on hold again - no - I-I'm sorry sir, it just feels like you aren't taking me seriously! Please. I don't know who to put me through but I...I need to talk to someone who can investigate this for me. I'll wait as long as I must but I'm not hanging up this phone until I know somebody is going to see to me, Dr. Finnegan is a danger!"

Ramona whimpered, her fingers clutching the phone so desperately against her face that her dainty knuckles were beginning to turn white, prompting her to wince a little and loosen up upon hearing the sound of hold music again. NYPD were really quite terrible to people with an emergency! A chaste sigh escaped her lips, putting the phone on speaker and setting it on the bed as she rushed to finish packing her bags; haphazardly gathering clothes, necessities and more - intent on going somewhere that wasn't her artsy loft-style MacDougal Street apartment within Greenwich Village of Manhattan. Deep set circles lined the underneath of her eyelids, and her usually luscious, perfectly styled rich red hair pulled up into a messy bun that had started to sag a bit from her erratic motions. Clearly, she was afraid, and more apparent than that - she was running from something.

Ramona O'Leary was currently a twenty-year-old botanical prodigy and an immigrant from Ireland; where she was deemed a child genius and the first individual in her home country to graduate college at 18 with PHDs from the Double Major programme she subjected herself to. But before she was ever any of those things, she was just a small child born to one of the last known isolated druidic communes of Ireland. A direct descendant of Druids, she was raised with a natural affinity for all things nature, and a believed deeper understanding of the planet they inhabited. But when she was just three, she began showing the ability to communicate, manipulate, and even alter the world around them, including crops, plants, wildlife and more. As a result, her superstitious family and miniscule community saw her as an omen, or perhaps not even human at all. They punished her by refusing food, keeping her confined to excessively small quarters and far more unspeakable things. They believed they could purge whatever was unnaturally ailing her from her system, but of course, this failed terribly. And for the first time in many years, they sent one of their strongest out to take and cast her from their commune while she slumbered; leaving her on the door of the first building they found within the next closest town.

Luckily for Ramona, it was a schoolyard, and she was found the following morning by a teacher who immediately took the terrified and confused young girl to an orphanage, where she came to spend most of her early childhood. For many years Ramona was an antisocial and non-verbal girl, traumatised from being seemingly shoved from all she knew and thrust into a new dynamic that confused her. Children viciously bullied her, teachers found themselves intimidated by her or scolded her for going too far ahead in lessons, and many potential adopters never looked her way, finding her strange and usual. Incidents would often occur with other children that led to her injuring them in unusual ways with things like plants, rocks, and other assorted nature - which would lead to further punishments. Yet despite this all she was incredibly intelligent, and far more adept at tending to the plants and gardens on the orphanage grounds than even the adults who were paid to do so; prompting them to prosper and yield past anything they could have previously. As a result, she garnered the attention of the individual who had opened and funded the orphanage in the first place.

That man was Donovan Byrne, a chief Environmental Engineer for Greenpeace and a philanthropist who sought to help whoever he could, whenever he could. Unmarried, no siblings, two deceased parents, and no child to live out his legacy; he was pointed in her direction by the staff who ran the orphanage for him when they discovered her affinities, and he spent much time getting to know the girl and having her open up. The first person to show her true kindness and understanding, he eventually petitioned to adopt the girl and succeeded, and from ten years of age and on, she lived with him. From there, their life thrived. She travelled the world with him, discovered so much beyond their home, and all the while, excelled in her education. So much so that, after passing aptitude tests and proving herself past the intelligence of common high schoolers, she was a child admission into college at just the age of thirteen and went on to become the prodigy that all in her surrounding fields had heard of to this day. He was her dearest friend, her biggest fan, and her sole inspiration to follow in his footsteps. So, just days after her nineteenth birthday at her college graduation, she gave a speech where she thanked him for the life he had given her and vowed to go on and work under him for Greenpeace upon receiving her two degrees in Botany and Environmental Sciences.