Nick Fury can't work without his double-double.

Yesterday, to welcome Axler back to the land of the awake and to give me a small hurrah before finals set in, Jago, Axler, Ninja and I sat down to play HeroClix. This is a game in which you control a group of superheroes or supervillains - or in Jago's case, superheroes AND supervillains - and engage in a free-for all the likes of which only a comic nerd could imagine.

The first time we played HC was over a year ago, with a few other guys, and Axler wasn't that interested in it, so he played one SWAT team guy, walking down the street, with a giant super-powered battle royale going on all around him. About half-way through the game, we had come to the conclusion that this SWAT guy was just on his way to the corner store to get milk, and that three of the teams wanted to destroy him, for reasons unknown, so the other three needed to keep him safe as he went about his grocery shopping. The game got much more fun after that.

So last night, the four of us enacted the best crossover never to grace the printed page. A team of elite government agents team up with Hellboy and other operatives from the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, to discover the mysterious goings-on in the heart of the city. They've been up late two nights in a row; they're cold, cranky and underfed; they need coffee. Nick Fury, team commander, pours himself a cup of reheated black sludge, then pauses. No sugar. No cream. He mobilizes the squad. It's time for a milk run.

The trip to the 7-11 isn't going to be an easy one for our heroes. Not one block from the convenience store waits The Joker and his comrades, fresh off a beating courtesy of Batman, and a rag-tag group of heroes and villains under the mental control of the sinister Gorilla Grodd. Our agents press forward, inching towards the milk, but in the end, it was too much for them. The cream, sugar, and day-old pastries never made it back to the base. For our brave heroes, this night ends only in tragedy. Black, bitter tragedy.

We may not be the coolest people on our block, at least we have fun.