Civil War: Front Line #3

Journalist Sally Floyd meets with a group of underground heroes to document their reasons for not registering. They speak for their freedom, their privacy and their regret of being blamed for the mistakes of others.

At the Baxter Building, Ben Urich interviews Reed Richards, who shows him his projections for costumed vigilante troubles, that they will increase rapidly if nothing is done. Urich suggests that he can be wrong; that it is hard to calculate results from public opinion.

Later in the streets, Sally runs into photographer and colleague Geoffy Creswell in a crowd watching a brawl between Thunderclap and Bantam, who is calling Thunderclap out for not registering. In a rash move, Thunderclap "claps" him into a tank of flammable gas, which explodes and Bantam is killed. The journalists watch on in terror; Thunderclap walks away in shame.

Suffering violent abuse from the other inmates, the now-powerless Robert Baldwin meets with his lawyer, Jennifer Walters who has since registration decided to go to work in She-Hulk form. She is working on moving him from there, but he feels that signing to anything means admitting he committed a crime in the first place. To the world he is seen as if he's the sole cause of the Stamford accident and thus a mass murderer - even the prison staff want a piece of him. Luckily his cell mate "Hickey" seems unresponsive to the world, and doesn't threaten him. Jennifer encourages Robert that he has the power to change his situation - he's given a legal compromise that he'll be sentenced only to community service if he will register and work with the government to track other unregistered combatants. He says he'll sign the day hell freezes over.

Detectives Keith Dixon and Donna Altieri investigate an explosion on Joe's Marine Mania, a fish store, which has left dead at least one of the owners. They ask Karen Mason, a frequent customer, if she knows anything about the matter. She tells them she was there that very same day. Earlier, she bought a tetra fish from the owners, Joe and Maria Atlantis, an elderly and gentle couple. She was impressed with Joe's affinity for fish, and wondered about his unrevealed background. That's all she knows.

Unbeknownst to the agents or Karen, later that day, Joe and Maria closed the store and went upstairs, as usual. They both watched a TV news report about a school of whales stranded on a beach near Coronado, California. The whales had been echoing a song, which Joe seemed to notice. He suddenly got up and walked away without saying a word. He entered the bathroom and injected himself with a green serum, revealing his true Atlantean form.