𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕠 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕥𝕠𝕣𝕞 | 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧𝐧𝐲 𝐱 𝐅𝐞𝐦!𝐎𝐂

The Baxter Foundation did not look like a place where the future was being built. But inside, the building hummed. Not metaphorically - literally. Generators ten stories underground sent a constant low vibration through the floors. Air recyclers exhaled with a faint sigh that seemed to never end. And somewhere deep in the sublevels, machines worked at frequencies the human ear couldn't quite catch, the soundless pressure making the air feel denser.

Dr. Elara Quinn had been working here for eight months, and she still sometimes caught herself glancing around like an outsider who'd wandered into the wrong room.

Her office was three parts laboratory, one part chaos. Monitors lined one wall, their screens a restless ocean of shifting spectrograms and mathematical models. A corkboard above her desk displayed printed telescope images of nebulae in colors that couldn't possibly exist, their swirling arms caught mid-motion. Under the corkboard sat her prototype - a sleek silver cylinder encased in clear alloy, the inner core pulsing faintly with captured light.

It was designed to filter and contain unstable radiation particles without degrading. It was, in her opinion, the single most important project of her career.

And according to Reed Richards, it was "promising, but in need of field testing."