I hate New York, Colvin thought.

The detective pulled the flaps of his jacket tight across his chest, an instinctive reaction to the cold kiss of a particularly strong gust also traveling down Third Avenue in Manhattan. Stopping to brace himself against the chilled wind, Martin Colvin met resistance on two fronts: one from the strange strength of the city air blowing his way, and the other from an impatient pedestrian who wasted no time in shoulder checking him as he forced his way past on the sidewalk.

Colvin exhaled sharply through his gritted teeth. I really, really hate this place.

Gathering his warmth and his motivation, the detective moved on, loath to be more target practice for annoyed New Yorkers plowing down the streets. He continued to move downtown on Third, putting in a slight hustle to catch the waning moments of a "Walk" sign at the next street crossing. As he walked, his hands returned instinctively to his pockets. His left hand fumbled with a small rectangular piece of paper inside: his parking garage ticket from slightly uptown. He shuddered to think how much the hourly rates would add up during his visit here. He was, after all, on his own now, no police to back him up or reimburse him for price-gouged city parking. All the more motivation to make the trip as quick as possible.

The walk seemed eternal. Skyscrapers and scenery began to blur together for Colvin, his eyes scanning facades quickly in sequence as he walked. His phone said the building he was looking for was supposed to be close, but his lack of success in spotting it was starting to frustrate him.

All this work to get to this forsaken city, only to be foiled by the search for a public building. Truly amazing detective you are, thought Colvin, scolding himself. A few steps later, he allowed himself a small laugh at the absurdity of it all.

"Feels like I'm in a movie," he said, his words ignored by anybody within earshot. Colvin found the realization funny. He had, after all, never idealized any of those grizzled film noir private eyes working in the big cities, swigging whiskey from a bottle under their desk and trading wits with femme fatales. Yet here he was, in New York City itself, chasing down a woman who was absolutely both smart and deadly.

I'll totally need a drink, too, when this is all over with.

From his early days as a rookie beat cop on a small town police department all the way through his time working for the state as a detective, Vermont had been his home. Sure, things had lured him away from time to time, and the offers of big city jobs came and went, but his life and career never strayed very far from his New England habitat.

They don't make many detective movies set up there, he admitted.

He hadn't needed a dramatic career, however, to draw a damsel into his life all those years ago. Though if I had called her a damsel, Colvin thought, she would've kicked my ass.

Clear as day, her image popped into his head, and for a moment he was filled with warmth. Then, reality quickly caught up with him, and he let the memory fade away as his body was left with only a discomforting shiver.

Oh, Kelly, he thought, sighing into the wind. The little things in life we take for granted. Her absence was colder than the city chill.

Caught up in his thoughts, Colvin at first missed the sign at the intersection he was passing through. His brain, finally recognizing the signal that his eyes were feeding it, forced the detective to stop and backtrack several steps to rescan the information. There they were, the words he was looking for:

Empire State University.

That's where she would be. The femme fatale. He had no doubt in his mind. He had traveled all this way on that confidence.

Dr. Talia Walker and the beast within her, that savage She-Hulk, were the endgame, and it was here that he was going to make his move to secure them both.

Not yet, though. As much as he wanted to kick down the door of her new hiding spot and drag Dr. Walker and her destructive alter ego back north in chains, she could not be his first target. He had to play this carefully, not rashly. His naivete to the larger situation surrounding the She-Hulk back in Vermont ended with the doctor's escape and his humiliation. Between shooting the doctor and triggering her change into the monster, and then the high-tech Humvees showing up, the situation had spiraled out of his control. He had screwed up. Therefore, the threat of the She-Hulk was still out in the world.

Who was behind the Humvees? That third party, whoever they were, had interfered in his arrest of Dr. Walker, and they had enough power to erase her and all records of her arrest from the police database, so nobody would miss her when they made their attempt to capture the She-Hulk. Thankfully, it seems they had underestimated the doctor just the same as he had.

Still, his lack of knowledge about the mysterious interference had been causing him more unrest recently than the She-Hulk. At least he knew enough about the scientist and her monster to predict their next steps, but he couldn't say the same about whoever was behind the attack outside her lab in Vermont.

That was hopefully about to change though. He had found another lead, a lead that would potentially give answers to several question marks. Who are they? How much do they know about me? What were they attempting with the She-Hulk?

Colvin shuffled his hand around deep in his coat pocket, before his thumb and forefinger found the familiar sensation of the glass vial against their touch. Pulling it out into the sunlight, the detective studied the small tube with the purple liquid that he had confiscated from Dr. Walker's lab. This is where this whole journey started. This is the key.

"Nanobots?" asked Geoff, his tone betraying his mind's unfamiliarity with the term.

"That's right," Talia answered. She sat patiently in a diagnostic chair, waiting for the sensors to pass over her body. Those tiny little things started quite the domino effect, haven't they.

Geoff studied the small vial containing the purple liquid, placing his face as close as possible to the glass container to the point where his nose pressed against it lightly. His eyes scanned the contents up and down, almost as if he was trying to find the microscopic technology with his naked eye. With no luck, he shook the contents one last time and placed it in a rack on a nearby table.

"It's pretty wild," said Geoff. "I can't believe all that data you've shown me came out of that tiny tube. I didn't think anything could be worth Talia Walker turning herself into a master thief, but I consider myself corrected."

"Talia Walker: Master Thief. I like the sound of it," snarked Rachel from her seat across the room, where she was doing her best to stay out of the way of the two scientists. Her eyes peeked over the top of a recent copy of the Daily Bugle, emblazoned with the headline LIZARD-MAN STALKS BRONX." You're a woman of many talents, Tal."

The scientist shook her head, both at Rachel reading the infamous New York tabloid and at the nickname she and Geoff were attempting to label her with. "Not quite master level," she said, her mouth contorting into a grimace.

She thought back to that night at Buscema Lab, burgling the nanobots from their research lab. Things had eventually gone south during her escape, spurring forth a transformation into the creature - all of which was the catalyst for the detective, Martin Colvin, to latch himself onto her trail.

Geoff shrugged. "Sometimes we get favorable outcomes in spite of the consistency of our methods. You got the vials after all, according to plan or not." He casually picked up a tablet that had been resting on that lab station and began to swipe his finger across pages of the nanobot data that Talia had shared with him.

"According to plan is definitely the opposite of my life at the moment," Talia sighed.

"Well, that's what you have me for," said Geoff, refusing to miss a beat even while distracted by the tablet. "And though you may not want to admit it, your green side seemed to be a big help that night."

I wouldn't have even needed to be there if my green side didn't exist in the first place, she thought. Sensing her annoyance growing, she shook the memories of that night from her mind. The scans were still running, and she needed more distractions to keep her from thinking of less favorable things.

The focus of her vision readjusted from the scanning chair to her surrounding: the genetics lab at Empire State University. Geoff's domain. This had been one of the many labs she had practically lived in during her time as a research scientist, where she, Geoff, and their combined team of genetics and gamma scientists ran experiments trying to unlock the secrets behind degenerative disease and muscle restoration. It had been some time since she had laid eyes upon these walls, these tools, and all that they represented.

Almost everything looked the same. Almost.

"Where is everybody?" Talia asked, continuing to look around the space. The labs, during their research, were generally flushed with assistants and other students. Now, their words were echoing across vast, empty lab space - space she dearly lacked in Vermont - in which only the three of them were occupying.

Geoffrey's expression turned stone-like. "Our research grants expired after you left for Vermont. No money to keep a large staff full-time. It's enough of a miracle I can keep these machines running with the university funding I still have."

Talia turned her attention to Geoff. "Expired? They didn't renew the grants?"

Geoff kept his gaze on the tablet. "Not without you they wouldn't."

A loud beep suddenly filled the air, cutting through the tension in the air. Geoff placed the tablet down and tapped a few buttons at the console where he was hovering. His face drew a frown. "Are you sure this is the right frequency?"

"Yes," answered Talia, his question revealing the result of the scan. "Double-check if you want to. It's in the data I gave you as well."

Geoff picked up the tablet and checked for himself, to Talia's slight annoyance. The frown did not vanish once he finished.

"Right frequency. No sign of nanobots in you," he responded.

Talia slid off the chair, straightening her shirt as she walked over to Geoff's console. "It's as I feared," she said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her thumb. "The creature's immune system finally destroyed them after so many changes. Or…"

She took the tube from its rack, cradling it and its contents with the utmost delicacy in her palm for a few moments before wrapping her fingers around it in a tight grip. "The first batch I used, they vanished without a trace early on, only to return without issue later. I wonder if that could be it again."

"Vanished?" asked Geoff, incredulous. "You mean just like disappeared? How?"

"Your guess is as good as mine." She loosened her grip on the nanobot vial, letting her eyes be drawn back to the vibrant liquid as she placed the vial delicately into a holder on a nearby lab station. "Though there's a lot about what happens in my body during its metamorphosis that I don't understand."

Geoff sat for a moment, churning a silent thought in his head as he looked down at the nanobot tube. "How many of these nanobots did you get?"

"Three," said Talia, "including the one right next to you. I used one of them to obtain the data you've been studying..." She hesitated, her mind flashing back to being chained up in her lab. "Though not without issue."

A wave of guilt washed through her body as she looked over to Rachel, who was continuing to distract herself with the tabloid, pretending not to be listening to their conversation. She noticed her friend flinch slightly at the mention of that day in the lab, where Talia had made her trigger the metamorphosis for the nanobot experiment - a mistake that left her dealing with an escaped and enraged creature. And now I've dragged you into yet another escapade.

"The third?" prompted Geoff.

"Left behind in Vermont. Could be anybody's now. Including those weird Humvees that Rachel was describing."

"Hmm," Geoff nodded. He raised an eyebrow, picking up the lone nanobot vial once more. "Guess we'll just have to make this one count."

Talia lifted her brow in curiosity. "Tell me what you're thinking, Geoff."

An excited smirk stretched across his face. "We know the trigger for your changes into the creature, right? As you've mentioned: Anger, pain, emotional stress."

Talia nodded cautiously. "Right."

"I've been studying your data for the last few days while you've been resting at my apartment. I've analyzed every line countless times, and have watched every video clip you've captured of your transformations at least twice." Geoff picked up the tablet and flicked his finger across the touchscreen, moving to a section of data he had highlighted. "Here's the part of your original nanobot scan where the transformation was triggered, by pain of your electrical shock. The data is consistent with your description: flare ups in your pain receptors, followed by your peripheral nerves, which of course had predictable results in your brain: stimulating your thalamus, somatosensory cortex, frontal cortex, and limbic system."

"Sensation, thought, and emotional centers," confirmed Talia, mainly for the benefit of Rachel, who she saw out of the corner of her eye listening to Geoff as well.

"Yes. And when those were affected, it triggered the activation of your adrenal gland as a defense mechanism, as the data shows here. That's when everything starts going into overdrive." Geoff shuffled his feet, moving himself next to Talia, erasing the small space between them and pressing his shoulder to her own. Caught off guard, Talia shifted her balance before the tablet was held in front of her face, displaying a section where Geoff had highlighted a bunch of numbers and sequences. "Do you remember your algebra?"

Talia lifted an eyebrow.

Geoff snickered. "Of course you do. Well, consider this equation: The adrenaline, a, mixing with your blood cells, b, with the x-factor of gamma irradiation all create an equation. And the sum of all those parts is your DNA literally being rewritten."

Reaching out to one of the monitors at the lab station they were standing at, Geoff punched a few buttons, which maximized a video from a list into a full screen presentation. As the digital recording began to play, Talia recognized her own image standing naked on a platform amid lab equipment, her wrists handcuffed. This was her lab recording from the first nanobot experiment back in Vermont.

Geoff used the arrow keys at the nearby keyboard to scrub through the video, fast-forwarding through the imagery of her doubling over in pain from the shocks she had asked Rachel to deliver. When it got to the section he wanted, Geoff hit play.

"Oh god!" the Talia in the video shouted, her arms quaking. "Oh GOD Rachel, it's coming!" The eyes of her digital doppelganger were now displaying the sight she feared every day: glowing green eyes. "The change, it's COMING!"

The present day Talia looked away from her past self as the video replayed imagery of her body losing its humanity; an experience she had no desire to watch as she could still relive it vividly in her mind. Geoff, his attention divided between the video and the nanobot data on the tablet, didn't seem to take notice.

"Now, I was able to spot several of the factors contributing to the physical changes your body is going through," he said. "For example, look at all the hormones that are running wild at this part of your metamorphosis." Geoff reached out and slapped the space bar of the console's keyboard, pausing the video and freezing the image of the transforming Talia in time, her body caught halfway between human and monster. "These levels of somatotropin, progesterone, and estrogen, to name a few, are far beyond anything I've seen in a human," he said. He reached his hand out and began to gesture to the different sections of Talia's body on the screen, almost joyfully. "Such abnormal levels could at least partially explain rapid growth in your height, muscles, breasts, nails, you name it."

He hit the spacebar again, letting the video play once again, his eyes glued to the emerging creature. "What doesn't make sense, however," Geoff continued, once more gesturing to the monitor, "is how you're metabolizing that much energy from your body that quickly to explain where all the mass is coming from."

Rachel had walked over to Talia as the video was playing and placed her hands on her shoulders, rubbing them slightly in an attempt to ease her friend's discomfort. "That's what Talia was telling me back in Vermont," she said. "Mass is gained through eating and working out, right? Like those meatheads who slam protein powder and grunt at the gym."

"Right," mumbled Geoff, not making eye contact with Rachel. "More or less."

"Well, Tal here isn't powerlifting at the gym or knocking back fitness shakes," Rachel continued. "Especially not in the time between her getting angry and our pal the She-Hulk paying a visit."

"Any thoughts on that, Geoff?" asked Talia, placing her hand on Rachel's, squeezing back.

"So," Geoff started, looking over to Talia, "this is where that algebraic equation comes back into play. We know the end result of what happens to your body, and an idea of what is happening to get it there, but to get the full answer we now have to solve for the variable of what exactly that gamma radiation did to you internally, and how exactly you're breaking the laws of physics."

He shook his head once more as his lips betrayed another smirk. "I admit, at first I chalked it up to the possibility that you could be one of those mutants like the ones they used to mention in the Daily Bugle. But honestly I think those so-called mutants are as real as that lizard thing on the front of Rachel's absurd paper."

"It's not the whole answer, but here's the lead I have so far." Geoff pulled the tablet to his chest and quickly swiped through more of the nanobot data. "Another hormone in overdrive in your body all this time is your cortisol, which, as the body's stress hormone, acts almost like an alarm system. This is your brain's way of putting focus on certain internal systems while shutting down other bodily functions. I think this, in part, contributes to your loss of mental control, but also what could be leading the charge in your changing body's metabolism."

"Yes," Talia said, feeling a spark light within her brain. "Something has to be leading, guiding the metamorphosis from start to finish, like any physical change."

"Exactly!" Geoff smirked, picking up on Talia's increased energy. "I'm thinking, if we can tune these nanobots to try to follow that metabolizing process, with your help on the gamma side, we might be able to find out the extent at which all of these factors - hormones, adrenaline, gamma, and the like - are driving your transformations. The key is focusing on the systems that have been modified by your gamma exposure."

Talia's scientist mode was in full swing. "Gamma signatures. The nanobots can recognize wavelengths. If I can program them to focus on only the areas that achieve that dense gamma radiation signature, then we can focus on suppressing the areas that flare up during my transformations."

Geoff smirked. "And once we know that…"

Talia could feel her heart beating against her chest in excitement. "We can use that info to block what not only causes me to change, but the physical process!"

Rachel, holding onto her friend for support noticed Talia's eyes were lit up. Not with gamma, as was often the sight these days, but something much rarer: Hope.

Geoff smiled. "See? Still a great team."

Talia allowed herself a small feeling of relief. Geoff, as her gut had told her, knew his stuff. Maybe I should've stayed in New York, let him help in the first place.

That line of thought didn't last long before Geoff's voice interrupted. "There's one tiny little thing, however." He motioned toward the video screen, where a now-frozen image of the roaring, green creature occupied the frame, looking as if her digital echo were capable of breaking through the screen still at any moment.

Talia's enthusiasm melted. She didn't need to be a mutant to read his mind. "You'll need me to change into the creature."

Her old colleague nodded.

Silence filled the room, and the doctor felt both Geoff and Rachel's gaze weighing upon her. She turned away, not waiting to meet their gazes. As she did, another feeling, inside her very being, also began to stir inside of her.

Was the beast listening, even unconsciously? Stirring at the chance to get out once more?

"Listen," Geoffrey said, recognizing the darkness that had swept upon Talia once more. "We don't need to do it now." He walked over to the work area and grabbed the nanobot vial. "In fact, I actually want to let the nanobots get some control scans of you, regular old Talia Walker. The more info we have on both Talia the human and Talia the creature, the easier it will be to solve this equation."

Talia broke away from Rachel and walked silently to the chair which had been scanning her minutes earlier. Emotion absent from her face, the scientist rolled up the sleeve of her right arm, exposing her olive skin. "Why don't we get started then. The sooner Talia the creature is gone from the equation, after all, the better."

Colvin rubbed his eyes. He was unsure if it was the harsh glare of the computer screen that had startled his vision, or the monotony of the information displayed upon it.

He looked around the Empire State University library, where students, faculty, and researchers alike were spread out focusing on their own studies. Being in this setting almost made him feel like a young man again. Simpler times. Before monsters and mayhem.

The detective hit the print button, and slowly raised himself up. His aching muscles chose then to remind him he was not in fact a young man anymore, and that sitting in a chair for that long came with many more consequences at his age. Regardless, he commanded his muscles to move him over to the printer.

As the printed pages glided out of the laser printer, Colvin glanced over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching. Bad habit from his career choice. He didn't like doing his research so publicly, but getting access to the records he was after could only be done at the university itself. Once he had hard copies of the data he needed, he could find comfort in a more private spot.

Colvin slid the printed pages out of the retrieval tray and walked back over to his computer. More content with the information in physical form that digital, he logged off the computer and retreated to one of the isolated study rooms, nodding at the librarian who had kindly pointed him in the right direction.

The hard wood chair in the room greeted him harshly as he sat down, its lack of comfort another little reminder of how out of place he felt here. He quickly moved past that feeling, refocusing on the matter at hand. His eyes focused more easily on the glareless paper in his grasp.

Annual funding sources for Empire State University research departments, read the paper. His eyes scanned the list of underwriters for both the gamma and genetics departments, which he knew Dr. Walker had worked under during her time there. There were many different company names, grant programs, and the like, but there was one he was looking for.

"Man, if I had this much money to work with," Colvin scoffed, flipping through generous amounts of money inscribed within the data columns, "I'd just…"

He stopped. There it was, the words he had been looking for, right on the page. He quickly fished into his bag and pulled out another stack of papers, flipping through them until he found several more lists. He lay them all side by side on the table, impatiently kicking the hard wood chair back so he could stand on his own two feet as he scanned the paper lists side by side.

There they were: the same name on all three lists. Unmistakable.

This company had provided funding for Buscema Labs, which had made the nanobots that Dr. Walker had stolen. This same company had funded an armored vehicle company that specialized in military-grade Humvees, the same type of vehicle that conveniently showed up days after she had stolen those nanobots. And now funding for Empire State University's muscle restoration research, the same place where Dr. Walker had inadvertently started the work that had led to the creation of the creature known as the She-Hulk.

Colvin took a deep breath, nervously grasping the vial of nanobots in his pocket. What was the secret of the company known as Advanced Idea Mechanics?