Chapter 8

“Here,” Mechelle handed me an old favorite drink of mine. Sea-salt caramel milkshake, in a tall glass with a straw poking out of the frothy top of it. Terribly sugary and fattening, so she usually gave me ‘that look’ when I drank one. It was her usual natural blank face that she showed whenever she wasn’t acting in front of others. But I had started to get good at reading them.

The face she showed when I reached for unhealthy food or another energy drink? That was her ‘you know better and you can do better’.

There was also, ‘you need exercise, a healthy body, a healthy mind’. And, ‘don’t pretend you don’t know people's names just to poke their egos, I don’t care that Ron Swanson did it’.

Don’t ask me how a literal blank expression did that much. Just know that I’m a genius and therefore always right.

Anyways, today she let me have the milkshake. I took it gratefully, while Colin and her took beers. We were in my kitchens, set aside from the main labs where Colin and I worked. I sat against it, while Colin was on a chair. Mechelle moved to sit atop the table, something which surprised me, but that I didn’t object to.

Colin and Mechelle didn’t say anything. They just waited.

“I’m going to need to allow some horrid things to happen,” I said at last.

Still nothing.

“That was obvious from the start of course. In order to actually take down Vought, I can’t beat them without smashing them apart. Small skirmishes, pretending to be a normal enemy. Then turn the whole company and structure to ashes.”

I sipped my drink briefly. “But starting off so slow… well, it's leading to a lot of innocent people getting hurt.”

Colin sighed. “It is necessary, Julian. We can’t stand up to Vought. Not yet. Politically, financially, and even in terms of power. I’m certain I’ve had nightmares about Black Noir walking in and killing us all.”

“For now, we’ll need to allow it,” Mechelle pointed out. “But one day, we can stop them.”

I huffed a bit at that. “Yeah… Colin, have we got the pharma branch ready to go?”

“I-”

“Shouldn’t you be asking me that?”

Colin and I looked at Mechelle. She was emotionless, but still looked at me in particular.

“I, uh, meant the technological side of things. I know you have the business side handled, Mechelle. You’ve been kicking ass.”

Somehow, despite not shifting in emotion, she still seemed to preen under the praise.

“But we should make sure we have the tech to live up to any promises we give out. What can we do?” I asked him.

Colin frowned. “Well… the prosthetics we’ve developed don’t have anywhere near the ability to sense things as you wished. There’s some sort of lag that we haven’t been able to account for. Takes a second for people to feel heat and pressure. Mechelle and I are fully robotic, so we don’t have that issue, but sending artificial sensation to organic nerves doesn’t seem to work efficiently. Not without sacrificing accuracy.”

“We’ll need more advanced software,” I noted slowly. “Okay. Do we need anything else?”

“Not on the legal side of things,” Mechelle said. “Originally, I would say yes. But we are in luck. Vought is a pharmaceutical company. In some ways, it is the pharmaceutical company, selling more than just Compound V. They used a lot of their influence to lobby for easier regulations.”

Well. Explained a few things. Like the opioid crisis still being a thing.

“In the end, it was relatively easy to put together the correct licenses.”

“And I do have a few doctorates in medical and surgical fields,” Colin shrugged. “Well, false ones, but I have thousands of hours of medical expertise in my files.”

I smiled. I was feeling better, now that we had a plan to help someone. I forced myself to focus though. “Right now though… Gordon.”

“Ah, our future guest,” Colin frowned. “I’m a bit worried about having him hear. A young man whose primary power is that he shuts down electronics? In a tech company's headquarters?”

“He won’t be here. We’ll keep him under until we can send him to the island. Better he be out on a tropical island when he wakes, instead of that damned asylum.”

“The building permits are finished by the way,” Mechelle said. Her usual stoic attitude cracked a bit. “It was insanely hard to hire companies willing to build on a tropical island however. Are you sure we can’t just build the public building ourselves like the Eggman Base?”

It was an old plan. On the island, there would be two bases. One, nice and visible on the surface, would be a place for miners and researchers to live, work, and build within as they got all the rare earth metals a mad scientist could ever want. The other would be Eggman’s Base. A secret underground fortress, surrounded by hardened concrete and a layer of steel, on the other side of the island stretching out under the ocean, far from any legitimate mining. It was risky, making an underground base near a place where people would be mining, but the legal seismic activity would hide the illegal variety.

“Better to have it built by real people,” I said with a shrug. “We’ll hire employees from everywhere after all. Not just to provide ample work, but to have eyes on us. As long as our employees see us being moral, they can vouch that we have nothing to do with the dastardly Eggman and his genius plots.”

“Genius, huh?” Colin’s sarcasm was noted and ignored.

“On that note, our employee search has been interesting. I’ll need to do some personal visits for a few of them. And some unions are refusing to work with us. I have a plan for that, however,” Mechelle said.

Colin sipped his own drink, a Scottish drink he’d apparently fallen in love with, before speaking. “I also have a project in the running. Some underwater gear and Badniks. Do you mind if I take some time for that?.”

“Not a problem,” I agreed immediately. “I’m gonna work on you two in the meantime. Those fusion cores powering you are amateur hour at best, and I don’t like that your overall software isn’t as efficient as it could be, especially in terms of storage space. And I still need to get you experience, Colin.”

Colin looked oddly happy as he nodded, walking off.

I followed.

We’d had a busy day, but no good super-genius got anything done by sitting around.

Except Doctor Doom. How that guy could sit on a throne so much and still make the things he did boggled my mind.

------

Madelyn Stillwell

“What in the fuck was that!?” Homelander snapped as he entered Madelyn Stillwell’s office. She looked over at him, and forced herself not to laugh.

“Is that… glitter?”

“Yes it’s fucking glitter!!!”

Homelander looked fucking ridiculous. It wasn’t just the fact the eagle on his right shoulder was gone, the patch of melted suit on his left leg, or the cape burned away up to the middle of his back. It was the gold, green, and blue glitter covering him from head to toe. Even his hair, usually so perfect, had been covered in a strange fluid that made the glitter stick to it. He looked like a sparkly porn star.

“What happened?” Madelyn asked, controlling her laughter easily when he gave her a death glare.

“What happened?” he asked incredulously. He laughed, a bitter and sarcastic laugh while walking into her office and pacing in front of her desk. “Oh, I don’t know. We go to a stupid fucking press junket, to talk about how ‘the Seven are getting a new member!’ La de fucking da! And then, some motherfucker!”

He grabbed a small table next to one of the couches in the center of her office and tossed it at the wall. As it shattered apart and left a large dent in the drywall, Madelyn held back the fear she felt with the barest amount of control.

“Comes in, attacking all of us with robots. Useless chunks of metal!”

“Homelander. I know all that. I’m talking about the glitter.”

He calmed. But only just. “Ohhhh, yeah, why I look like a fucking gay wedding? Because those robots, after I took out most of them by the way, exploded! With rainbow showers of glitter! All over us. We looked ridiculous out there, Madelyn!”

Madelyn nodded. “Okay. Well, I didn’t know about the last part. But we’re working on the rest of it.”

“Who was it?” Homelander demanded, clenching his fists. “That… Eggman?. What a stupid fucking name.?”

“We don’t know yet,” Madelyn said, circling around her desk to stand in front of him. “So far, we haven’t gotten any pickups on facial recognition. And his technology is-”

“Stupid kiddie bullshit-”

“More advanced than anything we’ve ever seen,” when Homelander gaped at her, Madelyn sighed. “Autonomous robots, drones, capable of firing plasma weaponry, moving fast enough to force A-Train to dodge, digging through the earth at insane speeds, even bruising Queen Maeve and Translucent. Not to mention full-on holograms. It’s not just impressive, it’s something out of our wheelhouse entirely.”

Homelander sobered. Quickly. “A supe?”

“If he is, it’s not one we know of. And enhanced intelligence or control of technology is just not something we’ve ever really looked for in our supers.”

Mostly because that sort of power was a bit too much. Homelander was bad enough. Someone who could turn Vought’s technological advantages, their information network, the crime analytics program, against them, or someone as superhumanly intelligent as Homelander was superhumanly powerful, would be a disaster. Frederick Vought’s brilliance had changed the world. Someone smarter might end it.

Except, that now said smarter person had appeared it seemed like.

“What about Tek Knight?” Homelander asked seriously. “This supe tech bullshit is supposed to be his thing, right?”

“Once we get the chance, we’ll get him to look at the remains of the robots we were able to get our hands on before the police and FBI got them,” Madelyn placed a hand on Homelander’s shoulder, smiling. “Don’t worry about it. We’re going to get this all cleaned up. In fact… this might be to our benefit. Having a… supervillain, around.”

Homelander froze. Then he smiled. A slow, long smile. Madelyn carefully controlled her reaction to that, the fear that shot through her. “Heh. A supervillain… I didn’t think of that.”

Of course not, he’d been too enraged about this Eggman making a fool out of him to consider the long-term benefits.

Homelander chuckled. “A supervillain. So that’s what we’re going with?”

“Ohhh, yes. In a way, this is perfect. If this guy keeps showing up, the government is going to start looking for ways to fight him. And who better than the heroes who beat him the first time?” Madelyn placed a hand on his face, smiling as she stroked his cheek. “Whoever this guy is, he’s going to end up being very useful for us. Our marketing team will get started on making him public enemy number 1. I’m sure we’ll have him taken care of soon enough, but for the time being?”

“He’ll be a good little villain for us,” Homelander looked pleased. Thank god. Because when he looked angry, people sometimes died.

Madelyn sighed in relief. Hopefully, this would all blow over soon enough. They’d track down Eggman, shut him down, and make the Seven look good in the process. For now, the marketing team would do their best work to have that fiasco at the baseball stadium look more like heroes at work, rather than chickens with their heads taken off.

After all, it was easy to pass the blame off to the guy who made a spectacle of himself.

In the meantime, she’d reach out to the rest of Vought and see if there was someone who could work as a counter to Eggman. There was some guy she had heard about that could fire EMP’s? Those shut down electronics, right? Might be worth getting them in action...

------

Billy Butcher

Butcher chuckled as he watched a video clip, sipping at a bottle of beer in the cheap motel. On the laptop in front of him, A-Train got run over by a fucking ladybug bot. Translucent got flipped over when a drillbot slammed into him (though it was hard to tell when he was invisible). The Deep even got knocked so hard on his ass that he wasn’t even seen doing any fighting!

Granted, the news shots he was watching were from the internet, buggers with cell phones uploading clips before Vought could take them down rather than the sanitized bullshit on the news channels.

Then a big bee shot off one of Homelander’s eagles. The look on his face!

“Fucking diabolical!” Butcher laughed, leaning back in his seat. “Ah, man, look at their stupid fucking faces. Ha!”

He shook his head as he enjoyed the sight of the ‘heroes’ getting embarrassed by a bunch of robots. The video changed focus to the large blue hologram in the center of the stadium.

It was dancing. A giant fat man with a huge mustache, swinging his hips to the song playing in the stadium.

Evil grows in the dark

Where the sun, it never shines

Evil grows in cracks and holes

“Man’s got a knack for presentation, I’ll give the bastard that,” Butcher chuckled. He narrowed his eyes a bit. Still though. That was some advanced shit. Stupid looking. But advanced. Might be nice to get some of those toys…

Then… a laser shot from Homelander’s eyes. It went through one of the bee robots. And hit a cop on the other side. Sending him flying, the poor copper screaming as his body turned into a bloody crisp. Homelander didn’t even notice until the hologram stopped dancing.

“Really, you absolute ignoramus?” the hologram said, staring at Homelander. “I warned you about this exact thing.”

The hologram continued. And Homelander didn’t show a hint of shame.

Butcher’s amusement evaporated in an instant. Of course… Of fucking course...

------

General Nathan Bradley

“Exploded into confetti!?” General Bradley shouted into his phone. He pulled back the phone to stare at it in disbelief.

“Y-Yes sir,” the voice on the other end said. “We were gathering the remains and they blew up next to Homelander, A-Train, and the Deep… We still have a few pieces, but nothing concrete.”

Bradley rubbed his face with his other hand and sighed. Well, that made some sense. Asset denial was standard practice in the military after all. This Eggman may have been a rampaging moron, but his technology was advanced. Those bees and the digging robots were the top ones. The stupid crabs and ladybugs…

God, ladybugs of all things.

Well, flying robots that could fire lasers and robots that could infiltrate a place by digging through the earth? Those were dream technologies on their own.

“All right, well, get that shit out to DARPA. Maybe those eggheads can pull something together out of that mess.”

Bradley hung up and sighed. Bee bots and ladybugs and exploding confetti.

Actually… speaking of robots.

Bradley brought up a file on his computer. The testing on the IM guns and Big Foot model mech was currently underway. It would be sometime before they would actually start putting them out to the troops, but the testing was very promising.

The IM’s were surviving a whole lot of stress tests. And overall, every spec of the weapons outperformed their contemporaries in range (up to 1000 yards effective range!), simplicity, robustness, even things as simple as weight.

They weren’t perfect. The magazines sometimes got stuck when trying to reload them, requiring a quick hit to the side to remove them. And the grips were too smooth, some of the soldiers were wrapping them up with duct tape to give them extra grip. A pair of small defects he’d bring up to Ivo.

Bradley was almost relieved by it. If they had been too perfect he would have been almost suspicious.

And then there was the Big Foot… god, the Big Foot.

It was new. Sure, there had been ideas along the lines of it before, but modern technology didn’t have a way to make anything like it until now.

The Big Foot, however, solved many of the old problems.

It was agile and quick for it’s size, able to roll itself back to its feet if needed, could navigate unsteady terrain fairly easily, and could run at speeds just a bit slower than the fastest tank they had.

It was cheap for it’s make, about the same as a M1-Abrams.

It had several different weapons roles it could fulfill, and was constructed to be able to easily handle the recoil of every weapon, sometimes even while moving.

It’s legs were tough as hell. Bradley could tell that Ivo had invested a lot of time and energy making sure no one could take it out just by aiming a rpg at the legs. And when they removed one leg manually, the Big Foot had been able to hop on one foot. Stupid looking, but it was still moving, and managed to cover a good bit of distance that way.

And when the pilot wanted it to be, it was quiet. Eerily so. Some of the eggheads had looked under the hood and found dozens of ‘muscles’ under the armor plating. They had a current running through them when the thing moved, the green false muscles pumping with electricity.

Ah. And the power sources. That was… interesting. Hidden under the armor, they were on either side of the cockpit, each covered with a decal of a cute squirrel, which was a strange detail. Underneath that, where the intakes could be seen, a pair of engines about the size of a mini-fridge, each with around 800-1000 kw output on average, and possibly half again that at peak, according to his engineers. More efficient than the versions currently used in the… in the M1 Abrams…

Goddamn the M1-Abrams. It was a good tank. A solid tank. But Congress just kept on buying them! The current strategic thought process for the military was lighter, faster, more streamlined. Having big tanks would always be a necessity, but they didn’t fit the current way wars were engaged. At least they didn’t need to spend so much money on new ones.

Actually… didn’t Ivotech have a service for something related to that? Something about rebuilding weapons and vehicles, or turning them into other things? Or buying them? Hmm…

He decided to look into that later.