19 [ Gus ] The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.
Tearing my eyes away from the sweaty, and shapely teenage girl glaring at me with her arms crossed, I turned around to stare out of my sister’s living room windows at the junior league AIM agents pulling the last of their fellow beekeepers out of the crushed vans.
So how do I explain all the junior league Doom’s running around?
With the truth? I mean, the last thing I would want to tell someone raised by mad scientists was that I was somebody’s lab experiment. But from what she said some of the people in her group are in the same boat as me. Hell, even she was the result of an experiment to see how the Scorpion’s powers would carry over to a child.
Gargan had scorpion DNA bonded to his, his daughter could have easily ended up with pinchers or extra eyes.
Lamarr cleared her throat behind me. “The truth would be easier than whatever story you’re trying to come up with.”
I turned my head to look back at her. “It’s not just my story. Anything I say to you is also going to reveal things about my sister that she may not be ready to share. I don’t do betrayals. Not of my family, and preferably not of anyone else.”
She blinked and almost uncrossed her arms before shaking her head. “Alright, then what can you tell me.”
I turned to her and raised my hand up in front of me as I looked down at the gauntlet covering it. “I have been given a… rather heavily edited copy of all of Doctor Doom’s knowledge. All the science, some of the sorcery, and other talents. But very little of his personal knowledge. I am who I choose to be, I am not his creature.”
Walking past her, I pulled my helmet off and set it on the breakfast bar before turning towards her and brushing a fingertip along one side of my face. “There is no compulsion to hide my face, just one to go and take the throne of Latvia, which I found shockingly easy to dismiss. Iris can have it.”
The daughter of the Scorpion had dropped her arms in surprise when I had removed my helmet, and she had looked deep into my eyes as I spoke. At first in surprise, then in suspicion. “So you’re claiming to be an experiment, like me? Seems like you might be trying to play me.”
I raised my hands up at her and shook them in denial, “No! I’m hoping for an ally here, the last thing I want to do is try to play you. The experiment part was Doom trying to set us all, my sibling and me, up against each other to find out which of us was the worthy heir. Making us like this…” I gestured at myself. “We were all proven technology.”
She walked up, getting right in my face as she looked up at me. Up close, well she didn’t smell all that great after sweating in her combat suit but she did somehow have something elusive about her that I could only term the scent of a woman.
And at nose height to me standing that close she was giving me a pretty good look down the front of her unitard. Something in my previous life I had never thought I would enjoy.
Lamarr grinned a little at my efforts to maintain eye contact with her before she poked me in the guts with one finger hard enough to rock me back against the breakfast bar. I hoped she just thought she was intimidating me with her strength and not because I was getting so thrown off by having a very fit young woman standing so close to me.
“Okay, so you’re not a clone. But the Green one, Iris, has powers, and I’m guessing so do you. Your sister has been around for a while… so I'm guessing you’re Doom's natural born children. Bred from highly intelligent, healthy mothers who already had at least one kid that tested out as a genius and then he modified all of you to have superpowers.”
She frowned and took a step back, looking me up and down. “So you have to be able to do something other than what your suit does? ...that wasn’t a stealth field, was it Blondie? There aren't any emitters on that armor. That was invisibility.”
Her eyes widened. “What the hell was he thinking?”
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Turning and walking away from me she pressed her hands up against her forehead before running them through her short spiked hair. “The first big move we try, and I run into a bastard child of the Fantastic Four.” She spun around and pointed at me accusingly. “Please tell me they aren't on the way here?”
I froze in place. “I… I hope not.” Rubbing my hand against my chin, I turned and slipped my helmet on, the automatic clasps locking it on. “If you picked up on the fact I based my armor on Doom’s designs this quickly, then Richards…”
She nodded quickly. “Will spot it in an instant. It all comes down to how long before he gets a look at you, but the guy has to be pretty busy, too busy to immediately pay attention to yet another debutant's debut, so we got a window here to go to ground.” Lamarr turned to walk outside, heading for her armor.
Debutant? We? I followed her out.
As soon as Lamarr laid her hands on her headset she began speaking into the microphone, “Heads up, we may have the F4 inbound, gather everyone up and prepare for evac. I will be bringing in MODAT for pickup.”
Climbing into her suit, she glanced over at me, “Can you stealth somthing the size of an RV?”
“...Yes?”
She gave me a relieved smile, which did all sorts of things to me. “Good, then we got an exit plan. Follow me.”
With that, she turned her suit and began bounding dozens of feet at a time across the landscape heading off into the desert, while I hesitated until I heard my sister’s voice from a vibrating panel of force next to my head.
“Go ahead Gus. She wants you to chase her, even if she doesn't know yet that’s what she wants. Enjoy your little play date, and we can talk later.”
I coated myself in an invisibility sheath and launched myself into the air on a pillar of force to begin to catch up with the Deathstalker armor, which had stopped to look back in the direction of my sister’s ranch.
Dropping the invisibility as I hovered next to her, I held out my hand. “We can see each other if we are in contact when I cloak us.”
Hey, look at me Mom. Holding hands with a girl as we go for a walk. Of course, I don’t think my mother from my last life had ever pictured me doing this with the girl and me both wearing suits of high tech armor, but she did always tell me to wear protection.
Setting a force platform under her feet and locking it to move with me, I lifted the two of us up. She resettled her feet and looked around before nodding at me. Then I just followed her pointing finger out to our destination.
It turned out that MODOT stood for Modified Ordinance Designed Only for Transport, and consisted of a MODAK hover chair rebuilt around a steel storage container that had holographic emitters, sensors, and other tech crudely bolted onto it.
Lemarr held her hand out to it as if proudly showing off something fantastic. “Our chariot awaits.”
The interior of the thing had a certain rough and ready charm… which offended the high standards Von Doom had programmed into my head. But despite not looking all pretty and cutting edge technology, it worked and sorry Vic, that's what matters.
Inside the thing, I took a look around as Lamarr secured her armor in a framework set dead center of the unit, and climbed out. She sort of gave me a side eyed look as if expecting me to say something.
So I did. “At the risk of offending you. This pretty much exemplifies the concept of perfection is the enemy of good enough.”
She laughed, and I gave myself a mental thumbs up. I made her laugh. On purpose.
“Yeah, we got set up in an old AIM base over in Nevada that Stark trashed but never bothered to report to anyone. The place was being used to house out of date tech no one in AIM wanted to take responsibility for selling on the cheap, or junking. It also ended up as a dumping ground for a bunch of broken stuff no one had ever gotten around to fixing and was getting in the way.”
Lamarr shrugged, which did interesting things to her chest, as she sat down at the control. “We work with what we got.”
“Story of my life.”
I didn’t get a laugh at that one, more of a grimacing smile. But decided that I would still count it as another win.
The hover mode of the MODOK chair was able to get the thing up in the air, and using my suit to push it along through the air was more stealthy than the energy turbine on the bottom of the throne that was the main propulsion. Wrapping the ship up in an invisibility field was a bit of a strain, but after locking my suit in place braced up against the internal framework of the vehicle to let it do the work mean that pushing the thing along didn’t take any real effort on my part.
Settling down at the ranch, some of my sister’s staff helped carry the injured AIMLESS into the transport before I put the thing under another invisibility field and we prepared to leave.
But not before a frowning guy in a beekeeper suit forced Lamarr to put on a jacket on over her skintight combat unitard. “Dam girl, you’re showing off all your assets in that outfit. We talked about this.”
Lamarr protested, until her friend jerked his head over at me, at which point the muscular woman blushed, turned her head, and shouted out. “Liftoff in five, everyone get secured. Apex, stealth us, and prepare to take us out.”
I nodded at the back of her head. “I would love to take you out.”
She flinched, and I could see the back of her neck going red, as I felt my face do the same. What the hell did I just say?
Her friend nearly fell over laughing and gave me a double thumbs up. “Smooth dude.”
It was going to be a long trip to Nevada.
