Iphigenia is an OC, BTW. One who I hope is not too Mary Sue-ish. This is a tie in to Operation Theta, in which Petra Fury, socially ignorant eight-and-a-half reincarnation of Iphigenia, infiltrates the Red Room. She's basically a foil to her brother, the wing-it-as-I-go Percy Jackson. The split opinions are less independent personalities and more different perspectives on a single situation.
This is what Iphigenia sees.
A father, an altar, and a daughter to be sacrificed for power.
She supposes that in that analogy, she would be the Huntress, taking pity and catching the knife with a golden hind. It would fit, almost. Artemis was her mistress's champion, as she was Her herald.
The guardian of the locale was the Red Skull, Johann Schmidt, former head of HYDRA and superior of Doctor Zola, therefore, he would be amiable to providing assistance, or at least, not compromising her position whilst she was surveilling. After being given a tale with some embellishments to reality, of course. Doctor Zola's protégé—his lieutenant could have plausibly been deployed to the location, and it was only a matter of course for Herr Skull to seek an operative of HYDRA for information. It was fortunate that uniforms with HYDRA's emblem were still present in the Red Room's stock.
Lieutenant had reported to Herr Skull, inflectionless clip denoting weapon-status. Herr Skull had been delighted to hear Doctor Zola's accomplishments, from the Winter Soldier's creation to HYDRA's rebirth. He agreed that it was deliciously ironic for the recovered Captain to be eliminated by his former best friend, now made to serve HYDRA's purpose, and conceded that while it was disgusting that the Captain was ever revived, it had been greatly satisfying for the Captain's true demise to be in defeat, not heroic Pyrrhic victory. It was, as the lieutenant parroted, two birds with one stone, in that not only was the only perfect Super-Soldier's body recovered for research, but that the manner of the Captain's death, ignoble and pointless, was also a great propagandistic and ideological victory for HYDRA.
Herr Skull was very understanding, opined protégé. Knife observed that even spirits stuck as guardians could be starved of companionship. Protégé was compassionate about Herr Skull's predicament, and how he was so very touched by a taste of his former glory. Agent Erinyes felt a perverse sense of satisfaction: it was no more than what a megalomaniacal, slightly omnicidal Nazi with delusions of godhood deserved.
Iphigenia sat by the sidelines, clothes of blue-gray blending in with the ground, wan and fragile and innocuous and unimportant. Unnoticed despite the lack of cover. It was only reasonable. It was dusk. Dusk was dusk, part of the setting, not a character in the act. She sees her own doom played out again, and sees a Will she can not fight being imposed upon the scene. She knows that even when she did not die, the winds still blew, and Troy was still razed. She knows, as she knows the tides of the sea, the currents of the deeps, the waves of the shallows, that it is the father's sacrifice, not the daughter's death, which launched a thousand ships.
The Mad Titan was dangerous enough without the Soul Stone. But the stone was ill-guarded, and it would be beyond her to acquire it through her own sacrifice. For one, she was uncertain if she had a single most valued soul, shattered and mixed as her selves were. The stone's defenses were most certainly not unbreachable. Knife and Lieutenant agreed in that they were designed to be broken. Lieutenant and Dusk pointed out that it was merely a test of resolve, or one of desperation. They all agreed that it was impractical, and horribly theatric.
To allow him the Stone, or not allow him the Stone? From Herr Skull's explanation, and her understanding of her own ill fortune, the Stone, once acquired, would be near-impossible to liberate. And it was folly to allow the Mad Titan to gain another of the Six. The other option would be to stop him from making the sacrifice, and then dealing with the aftermath, with a permanent operative stationed to alert Command of any more attempts at acquisition afterwards. Protégé liked the idea of giving Herr Skull some company. Knife noted the possibility of repeat attempts, and advised elimination of the daughter. Compensating for heroic moralities, and their habit of falling into a rage, Knife suggested a falsified demise. Lieutenant agreed, and, with disgust, remarked, dramatics. Dramatics, she disparaged.
Knife drew a suitable weapon, aimed, and shot. Trio of bullets, center mass. In the presence of body armor, aim for bare skin. Penetration of ICER bullet. Mike Peterson AKA Deathlok, precedent enhanced. Target down.
The father gave a devastated roar, as the daughter's body toppled. His eyes fixed on her. Her location was revealed.
Lieutenant gave a mental sigh. Time for posturing. Librarian had the greatest stores of raw material, while Dusk the largest amount of experience.
Relaxed, loose-limbed, she strolled across the flat not altar. She was not alone. Red Room operatives were trained to compensate for sub-optimal conditions, including the lack of teammates, allies, resources, preparation, resources, up to and including the air, water, and the kitchen sink, but that did not mean they did not recognize the value in such luxuries. Dusk drew the eye. Another would extract the body.
With the ease of decades of training, she slipped from one self to another between steps. To deceive oneself was the ultimate deception, for it drew others into the illusion, and there was no hidden contradiction. She walked towards the mark, ignoring the body corpse. She felt coolly impassive contemptuous. Her purpose was distraction conversation/monologuing.
"I am almost offended." Said she, as she met the Mad Titan's gaze. Eye contact during conversation attracts attention, and focuses it on the participants, not the environment. The Mad Titan, it seemed, was not immune to mortal foibles. She walked another few steps, to the other side of the cliff, and knelt down. Not as a gesture of submission, but rather, a declaration of power. Indifference to their positions. I am far greater than you can possibly comprehend and have no care for your petty little games. Contemplatively, she looked away, directing his gaze in the opposite direction of the corpse towards the horizon.
"I was the original doomed daughter, sacrificed at the altar." Blood was a universal object of fascination. She pressed a hand to the stone and willed her blood to cut through skin. It spurted out, speedily, as if it were an arterial burst. Enough for a ball. With a stage magician's finesse, she added the waters of the underworld with slight-of-hand. Phlegethon, to illuminate and sustain the bright redness in the fading light, Cocytus, for sorrow, and Acheron, for guilt and pain. Like most infernal weapons, the additions were swords without hilts, cutting both sides, but in this case, empathy, resonance, shared suffering as distasteful as it was would only serve to strengthen her tenuous hold on the Mad Titan's attention, while at the same time clouding his sight and magnifying his pain.
She let the glowing ball warp, tasting familiar bitter sorrow, resentment, and anguish. "I bent my neck for my father's blade so that he could fight a war. Illium fell to a decade of siege, and he won great glory, yet he did not have the decency to even mourn for me. So, when he returned triumphant, mother avenged me. My siblings then took her life in reckoning. My blood, spilt upon an altar, doomed two generations and countless kingdoms and city-states. The whole of the West was plunged into strife, blood flowing in rivers and dyeing Scamander red."
The ball of blood and fire and pain and despair kept moving, for movement draws attention, and she kept her eyes on the strange, chthonic patterns it made. Her manipulations worked. The Mad Titan hadn't even realized that her actions were the equivalent of playing with a loaded gun. In homage to her old master, she seeded the display with subliminal messages, ones of grief and guilt and helpless anger, one of rage at being thwarted, and another to direct his attention to her.
She did not allow him opportunity to speak, instead keeping his thoughts on a passive track. To listen instead of speak and watch instead of think.
"My tribulations now replayed," she laughed, soft and condescending, "inaccurately rendered, with a resisting, recalcitrant daughter, a fool of a father, and no mother to avenge her child. Do you not see how even now, you are still bound to the shuttle and loom of the Weavers? All your struggles have amounted to, little rebel, is a harsher hand. Had you surrendered to their design, perchance your daughter may have lived, even as you took the Stone. I know, for I did not die in Aulis." She had been changing her persona since she had first opened her mouth, shifting from mourning and wan to posturing and dramatic. It did not matter whether what she said was true or not, the point being that the mark believed it.
She stood, catching the mark's gaze, and made manifest a veneer of inhumanity. She stared unblinkingly into the Mad Titan's eyes, head tilted back almost uncomfortably. Lieutenant noted that a perk of being short was that one was so accustomed to a height difference in the other's favor that one had adapted to the disadvantage.
"I wonder, would it have pained you more, if your child had offered her life willingly? Or does it gall you that a mortal man had the ability to raise a far more filial daughter?" She manipulated the concoction of blood and suffering in mimicry of the Aether. Another ridiculous dramatic act.
There was a time limit to how long the Mad Titan would be thus distracted, and even with her crutch, she was nearing it. A final act, the damage from pulling a knife from the wound.
"Be proud," she stage-whispered, "either way, at least one of us has defied destiny." She brought forth all her weariness, all her exhaustion, and all the helpless, impotent rage the House of Night shared against the fool who made Creation and was then derelict in his duty, and let it show.
The unpredictable change unbalanced the mark. In her mind, a secret count reached zero. Extraction complete. If not, then the target was dead.
Dusk was a doorway, a time when veils between worlds were thin. Iphigenia Dusk slipped into unearthly cold.
Comments, Ideas, and constructive criticism appreciated!