History
The Richards Family Estate was a large estate located in Central City, California. It consisted of a large mansion surrounded by spacious grounds. It was owned by Nathaniel Richards, a wealthy scientist and inventor, who lived there with his wife Evelyn and their son Reed. The principal household servants were the butler, Giles Peacock, and his wife, Mrs. Peacock, who was the housekeeper and cook. The mansion had at least two sub-basements, and within one of them there was a secure laboratory, equipped with advanced technology, where Nathaniel conducted experiments and invented new devices.
Three years before the rocket flight that would transform Reed and three companions into the Fantastic Four, Nathaniel completed work on the time platform that he had been secretly constructing in his lab. Planning to use it to travel ten years into his future, Nathaniel took steps to ensure that his house would still be there when he arrived, arranging things so that he could not be legally declared dead no matter how long he was missing and creating a self-perpetuating fund that would provide the income needed to pay for the upkeep of the estate and for the salaries for both of the Peacocks. Nathaniel also left Reed several billion dollars. Once he had completed his arrangements, Nathaniel locked himself inside his laboratory and used his time platform. However, instead of traveling forward in time, Nathaniel was shunted sideways into a parallel time-stream, arriving on Earth-6311 on the same day he left Earth-616.
Since Nathaniel had not told anyone about his time platform or what he had planned to do with it, nobody knew where he had gone, and even the Peacocks only knew that he had vanished. Since the time travel machine had been left functioning, a partial ripple effect began causing temporal displacement with increasing frequency as the date to which it had been set approached. This manifested as translucent and intangible "ghosts" that were seen and heard by the Peacocks. However, in none of the thirteen manifestations that occurred over the years did the "ghosts" appear to even notice the Peacocks.
Reed, Susan Storm and her brother Johnny visited the estate shortly before their fateful rocket flight, but the Peacocks did not tell them about the "ghosts" and Reed apparently made no effort to find his father.
About six years after they became the Fantastic Four, Reed, Sue and Johnny visited the estate. They were accompanied by Reed and Sue's young son Franklin, new FF member She-Hulk, and their friends "Alicia Masters" (actually the Skrull Lyja who had secretly replaced the real Alicia) and Wyatt Wingfoot. At this time, Johnny hadn't visited the estate for a half dozen years. During this visit, Peacock finally told Reed about the ghosts that he and his wife had started seeing just after Nathaniel vanished. Based on what Giles told him about the timing of the manifestations, Reed suspected that an operational and functioning time machine was involved and decided to finally take a look at his father's long-sealed lab. After Sue and Johnny used their powers to disarm an explosive self-destruct defense system, Reed and the others entered the lab and found the time platform. Realizing that his father's attempt to travel into his own future might have caused him to instead travel sideways to some "Other-Earth" where he might still be alive, Reed resolved to go after him.[1]
Later, with Peacock operating the controls, Reed, Sue, Johnny, Wyatt and She-Hulk used the time platform to travel to where Reed calculated Nathaniel should have ended up, arriving in the present-day of Earth-6311. However, they soon discovered that Nathaniel had somehow only traveled sideways into that parallel universe and had been there for ten years.[2]Residents
- Giles Peacock
- Mrs. Peacock
- Nathaniel Richards (former)
- Evelyn Richards (former; deceased)
- Reed Richards (former)
Notes
- The original story in Fantastic Four #271 implied that, after his wife died when Reed was seven, Nathaniel Richards had raised Reed on his own with the help of the Peacocks.[3] However, a later retcon revealed that Nathaniel had at some point chosen to leave his family under mysterious circumstances, telling Reed only that he had to go away and would be gone for a long time,[4] but not revealing that he was leaving to become an agent of the secret organization called the Brotherhood of the Shield.[5]
- Although it's not identified as such, the home where the Richards family was shown to be living in 4 #17 and Fantastic Four (Vol. 3) #572 was probably meant to be the Richards Family Estate.
- However, it was definitely not the same place as the smaller house in New York City where Nathaniel was shown leaving without telling "them" the truth in S.H.I.E.L.D. #5. So, if it wasn't Reed who lived in that house, who was it?