"... I don't care how much it fucking costs!" Killian yelled into his phone, his eyes lighting up in the enclosed space of the private office. "Do you understand what is at stake here? If Blonsky and that Crazyshit Sterns figure out what's going before our plans start we're dead. You, me, and probably even your fucking dog could have the Avengers breaking in our front door. So get it done. I don't care how many graves you have to fill!"
The man didn't even bother to put the phone down but instead, he flung it against the wall so hard that it shattered. The room was filled with silence for only a few seconds when the intercom buzzed.
"Mr. Killian? You've got a man outside wanting to talk to you?" His secretary spoke up, sounding plenty confused about the whole deal given there were no appointments. "He says it's about your exploding bowel problem."
…
"My what? Look, just send the man away. I'm not in the mo-"
The door suddenly ripped open as a pair of metallic claws stabbed into the floor, at the other side of the claws, connected by long tentacles that looked like they could barely be hidden by the clothes the man was wearing. They were a loose beige trenchcoat with a black jumpsuit underneath. Everything this man wore came from the trash.
"Hello, Mr. Aldrich Killian," It was a cold mechanical voice, a synthesized one that spoke up rather than the man. "I have come because I have something you require and you can do something for me."
Killian recognized the tentacles from the New York Footage, even if he didn't recognize the man using them.
"Not even the woman herself," Killian sighed, throwing off his expensive tie and jacket while his body began to heat up. "I know that I'm not meant to shoot the messenger but I've got some rage that needs expressing."
The AIM leader leaped forward, his body visibly heating up before the tentacles smacked him into one of the walls. The claws stabbed themselves around the man's neck and into the concrete back wall. Instantly Killian attempted to burn his way out as his entrapment with an eruption of fire from his both.
Rather than melting or even deforming the metal, it merely made it glow from the heat.
"Do you know who I am!"
"I-I-I w-wouldn't resist if I was you," The man managed to stutter out in response. "The thing doesn't like it when you resist."
Killian became rather confused, he strained his neck to glance at the man. His enhanced strength barely allowed him to see the other man's pale quivering face. The leader of AIM felt a rare twinge of pity for the other man, the expression alone felt impossible to fake, even if Killian knew better than that.
"Mr. Killian," The synthetic voice piped in once more. "There is no reason for us to fight. I can help you with stabilizing the Extremis… virus."
(Pat Doyle: Avenger's Compound Brainiac Site 2009 May 28th)
After landing Brainiac's ship here, well the half we had, Stark decided that this compound would make for a decent secondary Avengers base. This was in addition to the first base that made up Avengers Tower. The Compound was going to house things like the Ship or even just Avenger-related experiments… such as the Kandor Project and the staff that would be working on it.
Tony Stark had become fairly generous when something caught his eye.
So he was helping me to finance this little project. It helped that it was an interesting scientific experiment too. The man was also useful in breaking through Brainiac's security. But that had only limited success, which was why we couldn't rely on the tech inside the ship to resize the inhabitants inside any of the bottles.
Brainiac managed to lock that feature out from us, no matter how hard we tried.
Given the proper size of the cities Brainiac had collected seemed to range from Reno to New York State proper, we need to resize people only and leave the cities till we knew where to put them. They couldn't go on Earth.
But that was a future me problem. For now, I was still taking my holiday time from the Bulletin to show and help start up the Kandor Project. Today that involved me and Louise showing Bill Foster around the compound. Me for obvious reasons, Louise because she was a Stark Employee that had been present for the important parts of the Brainiac Attack, so she'd already been aware of the salient details.
This was mainly given the high security this entire operation required otherwise there would be a security or a lab assistant showing the man around.
Speaking of the man, his appearance certainly caught me off guard. He looked exactly like Lawrence Fishburne, only with hair compared to the last time that I saw that actor completely hairless… at least his head had been. Can't speak to any other part of him.
"It had been a while since I've been in such a high-tech lab," Professor Foster commented as he came to his workstation. "Though, I suppose time means that I've never been to one so advanced before."
The man chuckled, his eyes roaming across the other parts of the large laboratory.
"I'm still surprised that this place has regular doors and not odd Star Trek ones that slide up," Louise said. This would be the first time that I'd seen my friend in her Stark Security Uniform. It was odd to see her so… plain. It wasn't as flashy nor as high-tech as I expected from a company owned by Tony Stark.
But it was nice at least in the high-security facilities they were given decent body armor. It wasn't Iron Man armor and it didn't look military-grade, but from what Stark told me the chest body armor would survive an anti-material round. They'd be left with broken ribs, but the wearer should survive.
"Sometimes you cut the budget on the small things," Foster replied, dropping a box of folders on his desk. "It would be bad for the bottom line if you wasted money on fancy sliding doors that were easily broken through and the lab ransacked. Believe me, I've seen that happen in a startup I joined after leaving Project Goliath."
We didn't spend a long time in this room, it was merely a joint computer room to run a few simulations or other minor tests. Instead, we took an elevator with a three-part activation process that would take us to. It required two people with separate keycards, then they'd need a retina scan, followed by a vocal match to a password.
"Altas." This was mine.
"Oprah's Son." Was Foster's.
"Those are horrible passwords," Louise piped in. She didn't have security clearance to be in this part of the facility, not without someone else bringing her up. It was more out of safety concerns than it was about keeping her out. Brainiac had a lot of dangerous shit like radiation lamps instead of having light bulbs.
Didn't want someone to enter a room and randomly come out with cancer. So only with qualified scientific personnel were people of Louise's station allowed on the ship. Well, qualified personnel and me, my reaction speed and general durability were enough to make up for what I lacked in scientific knowledge.
"The passwords can be anything," Foster retorted for me. "We could say Wakka, Wakka and it'd be about the same. It just has to be something we can say in the same vocal delivery consistently."
Louise gave me an unamused stare and I knew exactly what she wanted me to do.
"Come on," I sighed as the elevator slowly rose to the top floor. "How likely is it that there'd be someone with as much vocal control as I have?"
"He can't!" Foster exclaimed with a wide grin, grasping what we were discussing instantly. "Well, now you've got to show off!"
I sighed, knowing that I wasn't about to get out of this without showing off this skill of mine.
"Well, now you've got to show off!" I said this, not in Foster's voice. The man I had just copied the words from but instead I used Louises' voice.
"Impressive," Foster nodded at me. "You have precise control over your vocal cords? Did you even need to train to do that?"
"Nope," I said, continuing with Louise's voice. "Just one of the many talents I have naturally."
"The point-" Louise intruded before myself and Foster could start to discuss this in any detail. "-is that anyone could break through the passwords and mimic vocal range with enough training. Hell, maybe they're like Loki and can shapeshift. It's a very weak security measure is all I'm saying."
"Stark's got more security throughout the compound," I started to explain as we crossed the bridge that connected the top floor of the compound to the actual ship. "I mean look at this bridge. Underneath here we've got weight sensors that combine with information from the elevator to ensure that the two match and if it doesn't turrets come out from the wall and target the intruders."
"Would that stop you?"
I shrugged as we finally got onto the ship. This was Foster's first time on the ship and there was an obvious amount of awe the man held. The professor even ran his hand over the alien material that lined Brainiac's ship.
"To think that I'm standing on an alien spaceship," Foster got a tiny bit wispy. "My dad wanted me to be an astronaut when I was young. This will be the closest the two of us have ever gotten to space."
Neither Louise nor meself were sure how to respond to that but thankfully Foster just continued into the ship. It only took a few seconds from there to reach the main feature of the entire ship, at least as far as I'm concerned that was, the room of bottled cities.
"Extraordinary," Foster whispered, this time so in awe that the man couldn't raise his voice. For the first time since arriving at the compound Foster even put his glasses on. "I can't believe my eyes," he knelt to peer better into the bottles. "I can see tiny dots just moving about in the air, on the ground, and I can even see lights on in the buildings."
One would think that giant people looking down on them would cause a panic, but for some of the cities, Brainiac had created a one-way skybox. To those bottles, there wasn't a giant creature looking down at them but instead either a night or a day sky.
Louise wasn't long joining the man peering into many of the bottles with a similar level of awe. Of course, I didn't need to get close to the bottles to peer inside, my Kryptonian eyesight granted me not just that power but also the ability to accurately see the inhabitants as more than simply little dots.
In one bottle there was a race of rocky folk between the size of an average human and the Hulk. In another was a race of insect people, their buildings somewhere between a spider's web and a beehive. There were dozens more, some so close to humans that I'd mistake them at a glance, others so wildly different that they wouldn't look out of place as a form Ben 10 would take.
But none of those interested me, at least not right now. It was The Bottled City of Kandor that caught my attention.
They were the most advanced city amongst the lot. So much so that they had developed tech to monitor the area just outside of their bottle despite Brainiac's attempts to stop them. It wasn't very far, and they couldn't get a signal to communicate outside of their bottle.
But they could see me and I could see them.
They'd started to create signs and the like to attempt visual communication. But sadly for them, while I'd… started… to recall… my school days in Argo City, I hadn't been able to practice reading our language? Wait… that doesn't make sense? I didn't go to school in any Kryptonian city.
I went to Catholic School on Earth, from preschool to secondary level education. I somehow didn't even think about the issues with these memories before now, while I could've done both with some different memories, that can't be the case given how far these new memories went. It went as far as my first year in secondary school.
I remembered transferring to Atomic Town's Dru-Zod High School. A place with a very unfortunate name really, but that I couldn't have gone to… because I'm not a Kryptonian or at least I wasn't born one
It was as if there had been something or someone blocking my thoughts till now, stopping me from even realizing that I was a normal guy before coming to this world. It was probably a good idea if I kept a diary in several forms, just in case this happens again.
This was beyond worrying, this meant that…
"So these are the Kandorians?" Foster's voice woke me up from my odd daydreams about enjoying time with my people. "I can imagine that you're overwhelmed at the moment. Seeing more of your kind after having thought that you were the last for so long."
It was sadly something that SHIELD couldn't hide from the people directly as part of this project, given that once even a single Kandorian would share all my powers freed. So Cross, Van Dyne, and Foster were all told the truth.
"It's a lot to take in," I replied, crossing my arms. "Frankly, I'm just excited to be able to meet with anyone from Krypton. You have no idea how much was lost, so many stories, so many cultural events that I can't even remember. I don't even remember what we'd leave out for Santa? You know that was important."
"..." I could feel the blank stares and I could tell before Louise started that there was going to be a comment.
"... You had Santa on Krypton?"
"Yeah, strangely he's universally known… Nah, I'm joking."
We didn't spend much time just standing around after that. Instead, we walked some ways out from the bottles, across to a series of tables holding Stark Designed Computer Desktops that were connected to the ship's own computer. But they were strictly a closed computer system, there was no manner for any one of them to be connected to the outside world.
"Okay, so these computers are not connected to the outside world," I explained, more for Louise's benefit than Foster's. "There are to be no devices with wifi into this ship, even onto the compound ground-"
"-I was briefed on this." She interrupted me dryly.
"We don't want a Brainiac part to ever leave the area. There's no telling what the guy's cooked up here and what it would do to the world if it was given the chance. Every bit of data stays here. If we want to move it to a computer off-site, I'll personally transcribe the entire thing on paper."
"In machine code too?" Foster joked something I pretended to let go right over my head as I responded;
"I'd put it on punch cards if that is what would keep Brainiac programs from wreaking havoc across the globe. As long as someone works here, the US Government will be the third entity they answer to after me."
"What's the first entity they'll answer to?" Louise asked.
"Once it would be the IRS, but now it's Twitter."
"Oh, fuck off, your not funny."
Author's Note: Hello, took me a tiny bit longer than I wanted and not entirely sure what the hell I was going on during the end there. I mean I understand the scene, just not sure where my sense of humor was going there. Originally I was going to further with the weird santa tangent, but like it felt really weird once I read it back to me.
Anyway, before anyone accuses me of adding more plot lines, I've not introduced any further ones from the last chapter before this. Just added characters that make up those elements. Everything in this arc is tied into one goal the villain has in this plan of theirs.Last edited: Jan 26, 2022136