Bruce turned on the car's wipers, only to realize that his line of sight was not being obstructed by fog on the windshield. The fog was getting thicker, with visibility rapidly decreasing.
"Stop the car!" Aisha's usually soft-spoken voice hardened with seriousness. She tugged at Bruce's sleeve and said, "Something's not right, stop the car!"
Bruce slowly pressed down on the accelerator, the rage that surged within him began to grow cold.
Without hesitation, Aisha opened the car door and jumped out. She stood next to the car, looking back. Bruce also got out of the car and turned to look at their path.
San Francisco had disappeared.
The vast city which should have been on the horizon was now blanketed by what appeared to be a dense fog. They seemed to be far from the bustling society of civilization.
But they had not been driving for a long time and were still on the outskirts of the city, nowhere near the suburbs. The fog had to be incredibly intense to completely obscure the silhouette of the city.
Suddenly, Bruce turned abruptly. His sharp hair cut through the gathering fog, bringing up droplets of water and dust. His greyish-blue eyes narrowed dramatically as he spotted a shadowy figure at the end of the foggy horizon.
"Who are you?" Bruce took a step forward, eyes fixed intently on the figure ahead. Just as he was about to take another step, Aisha grabbed him.
Bruce lowered his gaze to Aisha, who shook her head while staring at him.
"What is that?" Bruce asked Aisha.
"I don't know." Aisha answered, gripping the corner of Bruce's coat, "But it's not human. This place is extremely dangerous."
Bruce swallowed hard, realizing that Aisha was not joking. The thought of something dangerous enough to warrant her description made him wonder how many times he might die in such a situation.
He stood in place for a moment, opened the car door quickly, hoisted Aisha onto the seat, and then got in himself.
"Don't... don't..."
But it was too late by the time Aisha tried to stop him. Bruce floored the accelerator, and the car sped off.
The rapid motion cut through the fog like a knife, the roar and vibration from the speed seemed to shatter all fear. Bruce could feel his heartbeat syncing with the movement of the tires, blood and gasoline flowing together.
"You need to stop." Aisha said, slightly out of breath, "This is beyond the realm of science. We can't run away."
Squeal—
The shrill, deafening sound of brakes filled the air. Bruce was slammed against the steering wheel, blood pouring from his head. The blood smeared his eyes and blurred his vision.
With a swift move, he pushed open the car door and rushed outside, shouting at the figure that stood, still, at the end of the fog.
"Come on! What do you want to do?! You want to kill me? Then come on!!!"
Stumbling back a few steps, Bruce used the back of his hand to wipe the blood from his face. Clinching his fists, he pounded them against the car roof, bellowing.
"I don't know what you want, I don't know why you're doing this." Bruce leaned against the car door, supporting himself with the side mirror, he said, "Why do some people in this world have everything from birth? Why can't others?"
"We can't choose what we have. If this is fate, then what is happening now? What is stopping me? What are you?"
Bruce's words were somewhat fragmented, but Aisha, who was sitting in the car, understood what he was trying to say. She sat silently for a while, then rummaged through the side compartment to find a pack of tissues. She climbed to the driver's side, wound down the window, and handed the tissues to Bruce.
Bruce's throat clenched repeatedly as he took the tissues and haphazardly wiped his face, opening and closing his mouth to exercise his jaw.
Aisha rested her hands on the car window frame and poked her head out, taking a deep breath before saying, "If we were at my house, I would take you to see a psychiatrist."
"I'm not sick, it's not my fault."
"He would say the same."
"So why is this happening?" Bruce spread his hands in a shrug.
"What do you want?"
"Power, wisdom, or anything else that can save Gotham...that can save my parents." Bruce's voice turned choked with emotion. He lowered his hands and stood still, "Am I asking for too much?"
"What you want is not enough." Aisha averted her gaze, "Batman has these, but Batman can't."
"So, who can?" Bruce leaned into the window frame, his gaze meeting Aisha's, "Tell me, who can save them? God?"
"My dad, because he's not Batman."
Bruce stood still for a while, opened the car door, moved Aisha to the passenger seat, fastened her seatbelt, sat himself in the driver's seat, and slowly started the car again.
In silent determination, Bruce started driving toward the shadowy figure in the fog. He noticed that the figure was standing by the side of the road, silently watching every traveller on the highway.
Just as he was approaching the silhouette, Bruce noticed that two points of light had suddenly come on in the dense fog ahead.
As he got closer, the two shafts of light appeared and disappeared intermittently. It was too late for Bruce to slow down, and a car carrying four passengers passed by on the opposing lane.
At the moment the two cars intersected, they instinctively turned their heads to look indistinctly at each other. However, the fog was too dense to make out each other's faces. Still, they were very certain that they, like themselves, were real people, not physical monsters or illusions.
Was it a disruption of time and space?
Coulson watched the car that passed them incredulously. He vaguely saw the gray-blue eyes of the young man driving, but the dense fog obscured a clear view of his features.
However, the existence of other humans in this mysterious space was shocking enough.
Approximately ten minutes prior, while Coulson was researching the origins of the mysterious Dr. Sophop, they noticed the fog rolling in outside their window.
Seeing an excellent opportunity to observe any anomalies around Niagara Falls, Coulson's team immediately grabbed their gear, got into the car, and planned to drive overnight to Niagara Falls for monitoring.
Yet as they drove on, they found that they had travelled over a hundred kilometers and still hadn't seen a trace of Niagara Falls. The road was enshrouded in dense fog.
After driving some more, they observed changes. Although the silhouette was still standing at the end of the dense fog, there were two blinking pillars of light beside it.
After the car lights flashed twice, Coulson found himself passing another car, whose driver, like them, was human>.
"Is there any signal on the navigation? What about the monitoring equipment?" Coulson turned to look at the two scientists in the back seat.
Fitz frowned and said, "The satellite signal was cut off, which is not normal. We're using S.H.I.E.L.D.'s positioning satellites, which have high security levels and are unlikely to be blocked by external forces."
"The readings on the monitoring equipment are strange." Fitz looked down at a gauge and said, "There's a strange magnetic field here that can interfere with the operation of all electronic devices."
"If a plane were to pass through here, would it crash?" Coulson immediately thought of the more practical problem.
"It's hard to say, have you forgotten? We thought we'd driven over 200 kilometers, but in reality, we hadn't actually gone that far. We thought we were injured, but we weren't, actually."
"It seems he didn't intend to harm us." Simmons began, shuffling through the files in his hands and continued, "I suppose that's the only good news so far."
"Do you think this is an independent space?"
"I'm afraid it appears to be so." Fitz lifted his head to look at Coulson, "If this is not an independent space, it's impossible to explain why the distance we drove doesn't match up to the reality."
"The most plausible conjecture about this mysterious fog is that it represents the portal to and from an alternate space. Whenever we encounter dense fog, we temporarily enter this mysterious space and then leave it through the fog."
"The time and space in the Foggy Space are inconsistent with those outside. The exit point may not necessarily be at a location relative to the distance travelled, causing the phenomenon where we feel like we've been driving in the fog for a significant amount of time, and when we leave the fog, we're not at the destination corresponding to the mileage."
Coulson thought for a moment and felt that Fitz's explanation made sense. The myth of alternate spaces had been around for a while, such as the most famous Bermuda Triangle. Many people believe it is the entrance to an alternate dimension, and that's why so many disappearances occur there.
The most famous legend associated with the Bermuda Triangle involves an entire ship of people disappearing for thirty years, only to reappear with adults still adults, children still children, as if time had no effect on them. A plane flies in, only to appear over a completely different area not on its planned flight path.
As far as Coulson knows, those rumors are all false, but S.H.I.E.L.D. has indeed encountered some authentic time-space disruption incidents, all of which share the same basic features.
"So, for now, let's name this alternate space the 'Fog Realm'. Now we know, all the appearances of the dense fog may potentially lead to the same mysterious space, and humans who accidentally enter the Fog Realm may encounter each other in this confluence of time and space."
"What would have happened if we had stopped?" May asked.
"Stopping takes time, and by the time the car would have stopped, chances are we'd only see dense fog again." Coulson sighed, refuting May's naive notion.
"Could there be people who walked into it?" Simmons proposed another bold idea, saying, "If someone were to walk into the Fog Realm without any means of transportation, and then meet another person who was also walking forward, wouldn't they be able to communicate?"
"Perhaps, but what would be the point?" Fitz tilted his head and replied before realizing something, "If time is disordered in the Fog Realm, then we might encounter people from the past or the future."
The car ran out of gas.
Bruce rolled down the window and got out once more. Looking left and right, he fiddled with his phone, only to find no signal. He could only lean against the car and sigh.
Aisha got out of the car again and came to Bruce's side. She tugged on his clothes and asked, "Do you see that? Is there a person over there?"
"Of course there's a person over there. He's been standing there for half the day." Bruce responded irritably, thinking that Aisha was referring to the silhouette in the fog at the edge of their vision. Since they had started driving, that silhouette had been standing at a distance, and still was.
"No, he's coming towards us."
Bruce was startled and quickly turned to look in the direction Aisha pointed. Indeed, there was a silhouette who was rapidly approaching them.
Bruce immediately took a few steps backwards, looking somewhat horrified. He thought it was the monster in the fog coming towards him.
However, emerging from the fog was a young man in a hoodie.
"Hello, could you please tell me where we are? How far are we from the Livermore National Laboratory?"