Widget

Widget Widget is a strange little presence in early Excalibur. Most of the time you're looking at this floating mechanical head, but the things it can do are far larger than its appearance suggests. A doorway opens, and suddenly the people standing nearby can be somewhere they never intended to visit. The early introduction involves the Crazy Gang's Tweedledope messing around with the device and discarding it. That gives Widget a very unassuming entrance for something capable of opening routes between realities. There isn't a neat explanation handed to the team so they can immediately understand how to operate it. By Excalibur #10, Kitty and Alistaire Stuart encounter one of its portals in a very direct way. A woman from another world reaches through for Alistaire, and Kitty uses her phasing ability to disrupt the machinery. She stops the immediate danger, but she also knocks Widget out. Neither of them has a comfortable understanding of what they're holding afterward. That interaction gets at the problem with Widget. Being able to open a passage doesn't make the destination safe. It also doesn't mean everyone involved wanted to take the trip. Excalibur has people with extraordinary abilities already, but a route into another reality can put all of them in a situation where the rules have changed. The Cross-Time Caper really expands that side of the book. Widget becomes central to the team's travel through alternate worlds, including the train they use along the way. A journey home can turn into another journey somewhere else, and the cast has to work with whatever situation they find on the other side. There's room for comedy in that because the destinations and circumstances can be so strange. There's also an obvious danger underneath it. When you don't have reliable control over where you're going, getting away from one problem doesn't guarantee you've escaped trouble. You might arrive somewhere worse, or somewhere that looks familiar until you notice what is different. Widget's limited communication adds to the uncertainty. The team has to judge what it is doing through its behavior and the machinery around it. They don't always get a complete explanation before something happens. Kitty's technical ability gives her a way to interact with it, but that still leaves a lot she has to work out. The team still has so much to work out about Widget. The team lives with this small machine that can turn an ordinary trip into an entirely different world, and then has to find its way through whatever follows.