Amazing Adventures of the 1970s: Featuring the Inhumans #1
by Scott Casper
"You Never Saw The Real Me"
May 17, 1971.
Outside Rome, Italy.
No one in Rome had grieved when Count Nefaria had his castle moved, brick by brick, to America seven years ago. And everyone had smiled and whispered things about Nefaria when his luck turned bad across the Atlantic and he suffered a series of defeats at the hands of superheroes. When he returned home, no one hoped he would stay, but all felt powerless to prevent it. This was still Count Nefaria, after all. Worse, he had come home to lick his wounds and, if the analogy held, would be even more dangerous now, like a wounded animal. So everyone avoided, if they could, the villa on the outskirts of Rome that everyone knew to be where Nefaria was staying.
It was a beautiful spring day, early evening, and the sun hung low in a near-cloudless sky over the countryside. The villa sat alone on a hill, surrounded by vineyards, a grove of fig trees, and a high, protective fence. The vineyard and the grove were too soon for harvest, but the flowers were in full bloom in the well-tended gardens between them and the villa. Sheep were grazing on the hillside. It was a model of self-sufficiency and no doubt Nefaria would be dining that night on his own lamb chops with his own wine.
Medusa knew this place well. With a snarl of revulsion playing over her lips, she recalled the nights she had spent as a guest there. Nefaria had long used the villa as a guest house, since most had been afraid to stay at the castle, so close to Nefaria's infamous dungeon. Medusa had stayed here the night before she stole the Castifiore Emeralds for him. Now she walked down the middle of the only road that led in or out of the villa's grounds, her low-heeled boots disturbing the dirt of the road with each long stride. Her long red hair was tensed, falling in curls down to her mid-thigh, and bounced with each step. It was a hot day and she was warm in her tight-fitting, dark blue bodysuit, purple gloves and boots, and dark mask, but it seemed appropriate to her to wear the outfit she had long worn as Europe's most infamous burglar, here, at the end of the long road of redemption.
The gates at the entrance to the villa grounds opened on their own as Medusa approached them. She passed, unmolested, past the guard house inside the gate and was allowed to proceed unescorted to the villa. The villa was two complete stories high, with a half-sized third floor mounted on top. The front entrance had a balcony over it supported by four columns. It was not nearly the size of the old castle, but still as impressive as any millionaire's mansion. Medusa had been surprised by the dearth of guards so far, but she could see a sniper half-concealed in an upstairs window with his rifle trained on her. She could only imagine there had been others since the moment she entered the villa's grounds, if not sooner. Moving under the balcony and pausing before the front doors, she took a deep breath. This was it.
A goon in a suit opened the front door, stepped out, and held it for Medusa, his jacket pulled tight over his shoulder where he had his gun obviously holstered. Medusa pretended not to notice him, purposely walking past him with a regal air of detachment. The foyer had yellow-painted walls and a wood-paneled floor mostly covered in a thick, colorful rug. The rug ran out of the foyer into the front hall on the far side. The front hall was set up much like his old castle's audience hall, with a dais and throne at the rear of the room before the grand staircase, an ornate wooden table before the dais with upholstered chairs all around it, and alternating hanging tapestries and standing suits of armor lining the walls. The exits from the room on this level were partially concealed by hanging yellow drapes. A brass chandelier hung from the high ceiling overhead and gave off an almost unnoticeable electric glow, so bright was the sunlight from the upper floor windows shining down on Count Nefaria.
Nefaria looked to have aged quite well since their last meeting, the white hair concealed at his temples. He wore his customary monocle and ruffled shirt, looking every inch the old-fashioned aristocrat which he wished to remind everyone he was. Nefaria was seated, not upon the throne, but at the table, leaning back in a chair and eating grapes. He observed Medusa enter and reacted with mock surprise, tossing the grapes back into their bowl and standing up with arms extended.
"Well, Medusa! What a welcome surprise!" he exclaimed in Italian. "It has been far too long since you last graced my halls!"
"Luchino," Medusa said with a nod, purposely affording the count the least amount of courtesy by referring to him by his first name only.
Nefaria's face fell, but he caught himself before his features could sneer and restored his calm façade. "Why, whatever is the matter, Madame Medusa? Can you actually be here in need of work?"
"You bring up my past and it is that past that brought me here," Medusa said in equally fluent Italian, her hands on her hips, "and surely it is no surprise to you that I do not come as a friend It has been over a year since I betrayed the Frightful Four. Since then, I have dedicated myself to finding my every employer of old and destroying them. Even if you have stayed in your villa this whole time, surely word of it has reached you by now."
Count Nefaria only shrugged and smiled. "I had. And I knew you were coming here. The return of the Castafiore Emeralds to their original owner was all over the morning paper. I remember hiring you for that job well. But am I to be surprised each time there is a falling out among thieves?"
Medusa straightened up and dropped her hands straight down to her sides. Her hair began to stir and rustle as if on its own accord. "But I am no longer a thief, for I am no longer the woman I was. I am not Madame Medusa, but remember now that I was and am Princess Medusalith Amaquelin."
Nefaria gave a contemptuous laugh. He turned his back on Medusa and walked to his throne. "A princess?" he asked. "Of what royal family? What country? I am the one of noble blood," he said, turning around and sitting on his throne. "You insult royalty at your peril."
"It does not matter that you believe me," Medusa said, finally walking up to the edge of the table. "Only that you believe you will finally answer for your crimes. All of them."
"You have been away from Rome too long," Nefaria said angrily. "I may have had my setbacks in the U.S., but here, I am invincible. Though, 'here' can be quite subjective," he added, his mood softening again. A momentary scowl gave way to a morbid grin. "I regret I am not actually 'here' at all, but busy elsewhere. So I will have to witness your death remotely."
From his control room, Count Nefaria finished speaking into the microphone and watched Medusa confront his hologram as he pressed the electric ray trigger. The look of malevolent glee on his face was chilling as he watched the bolts of lightning lance down from the chandelier towards Medusa, but that look turned quickly to utter astonishment as the bolts passed right through her. His eyes opened so wide that he lost his monocle and barely noticed it fall onto the control console. The control console was a large metal desk that half-surrounded Nefaria where he sat. It was covered in switches, buttons, and lights within reach of his hands and above them was a bank of viewscreens.
"Did you really think I had never stolen anything from you?" Medusa said in the room below. "Your electro-ray discs are fairly adept at holography and voice projection, but I took it back to my homeland and we made improvements," she said with an obvious mocking tone.
Nefaria growled like an animal and hammered his fists on the control console in frustration. Then he grabbed his microphone in one hand and flipped a switch with the other so he could contact his men in different rooms. "Rocco! Uberto! Scramble your men! Rocco's team, search the villa! Uberto's team, search the grounds! Find Madame Medusa! Now!" He toggled more switches and the view screens before him switched to more and more security cameras throughout the villa. Failing to see Medusa on any of them, he went back to the microphone. "Rocco, start on the east wing. I'm going to start sweeping the other end of the villa with time transcender rays."
He felt more confident when he thought of all the weapons and other defenses concealed in his villa. He casually flipped on the time transcender ray on the first floor, but stopped with renewed alarm when he saw a flashing red light by the switch for the second floor raygun assembly. He switched his viewscreens to the rooms immediately around where the assembly was housed. On one screen, he saw Vincent, his second floor sniper, slumped to the ground, unconscious by an open window. He cursed himself for not having watched her more closely with the camera outside the front door while he was busy making last-moment preparations for Medusa. Obviously, she had gone straight after Vincent and entered the villa that way, leaving a programmed hologram to be escorted in, in her stead.
On the next viewscreen was Medusa herself. This one showed the main hallway. The ceiling track was already open and the time transcender raygun exposed. And there stood Medusa, her living hair wrapped around the raygun and dismantling it. She glanced over to the camera and smiled.
Things were not going well at all. Medusa was much too close now to the stairs to the third floor and Nefaria's third-floor control room. The time transcender ray was his last defense before the stairs. He activated the electrified handrails in the staircase, doubtful that he could be lucky enough for this to stop her now. "Rocco, take every man to the second floor main hallway now!" he yelled into the microphone. He glanced to the exit. Outside this room was a corridor and, at the end of the corridor, a door to the small hangar where his one-man helicopter was waiting. It was starting to look like the time to make a fighting withdrawal, he thought as he hit two more buttons. The first button activated the secondary control panel in the hangar room and the second button caused a panel to pop open on the side of the console and a Beretta Model 93R machine pistol popped out of it. He grabbed it as he stood, paused to brush the white-streaked hair from his eyes and wipe some sweat from his wrinkled brow, and raced for the door.
Medusa could hear the sound of men rushing towards her in the hallway below, but she smiled when she also heard the time transcender ray – which she had not dismantled, but only set on delay – whirled into action and ran down its track through the second floor, bathing Nefaria's goons in the paralyzing glow that had been meant for her. Her greatest weapon was understanding how Nefaria's mind worked and her intuition told her that the metal rails in the staircase where an obvious trap. Just in case the stairs were trapped as well, she willed her hair to expand and push out against the walls to either side of her. Her tresses punched through the plaster walls like tissue paper, grasped the wooden frame and lead pipework on the other side, and supported her weight as she used her hair to lift her feet off the ground. In this manner she ascended the stairs, one hole-through-the-wall at a time.
Wary that Nefaria had more waiting for her, she let her hair go first around the corner at the top of the stairs, like a red tentacle feeling its way through the air – and was greeted by a hail of bullets from an automatic weapon. Spreading her hair apart, the tentacle-like tress became a thousand targets a hairsbreadth in width. The hail of bullets slowed in its intensity, with brief moments of silence interspersed between shots until there was nothing but silence. Medusa frowned, trying to guess if the way was safe. Unwilling to put even her hair back at risk, she pulled the electro-ray disc from her belt, held it facing the top of the stairs, and pressed a button. Her preprogrammed holographic doppleganger flickered into existence and began walking forward. Nothing happened. Then Medusa heard the whine of an engine starting up and realized she had delayed too long. She turned off the electro-ray disc as she tucked it back into her belt leaped into the corridor, and sprinted down the length of it. She passed an open door on her right, as the room looked small and empty. The noise, growing in intensity as she ran, was clearly coming from a second open doorway at the end of the hall. Her hair was billowing out on all sides as she ran. Her gloved hand caught the door sill and she took her first glimpse around into the room – and then turn and ran back as the grenade hit the door.
The grenade, thrown from within the room, bounced into the hallway and clattered to the ground at least five feet behind Medusa as she ran away from it. Behind her, she tensed her hair and braced for impact. Her preparations kept her alive as the grenade exploded behind her, ripped through the hallway, and tossed shrapnel into her hair. Her hair caught the shrapnel and absorbed most of the force of the explosion, but she was still cut up and thrown to the floor. Her head rang and her vision blurred. She heard more noises coming from the room behind her, but it was all distorted, like hearing underwater.
And then Black Bolt walked up to her. He came from the end of the corridor at the top of the stairs, walking with the regal bearing Medusa could not possibly imagine him walking without. His face, even mostly concealed behind his royal mask, should have been handsome and attractive to her, but instead his scowl looked ugly and fearful. She knew it was not Nefaria who made him scowl, either.
"My love!" Medusa tried to cry out, but the words were hard to force out of her mouth. "Don't look at me like that! I'm doing this for you! So you can have a queen by your side who will bring you no shame! Please, just give me a little more time. Time to set things right."
As Medusa knelt on the floor, she felt water falling on her and looked up to see the villa's automatic sprinklers had activated. When she looked back to Black Bolt, he had disappeared. Her head felt clearer and she was aware that she was holding the electro-ray disc again. Had the explosion injured her and made her hallucinate? Or had she unconsciously activated his holographic image? She would never know the answer to that, but she did know that Nefaria was still loose. She rose to her feet, waited for a moment's dizziness to pass, and turned back to the charred and smoking corner of the hallway. She spread out her hair above her like an umbrella to keep the water from drenching the rest of her.
From the brief glimpse she had of the room's interior, she knew about the helicopter. She had not divined how it would exit the room, but she quickly learned that, in her absence, the outer wall of the room had slid open like a garage door. Stepping into the hangar, she could hear the roaring whine of the helicopter somewhere nearby outside. She crossed the room and stepped in front of the doorway open to the clear blue sky outside - or it was until the mini-helicopter dropped back into view, with Count Nefaria at the control stick.
"I don't know if that's the real you or not, Medusa," Nefaria's voice crackled over a loudspeaker in the room, "but I suspect you're close by."
Medusa looked around, just in case, but she was fairly sure the real Nefaria was the one she saw piloting the helicopter.
"I've always loved this villa," Nefaria said with a sigh. "It will be a shame to lose it, but buildings are easier to repair than reputations, are they not?" With that, the transmission from the helicopter ended because Nefaria was busy firing the payload of the copter's under-mounted, multiple rocket launcher straight at the hangar.
Rather than dodge, Medusa made a running leap out the window straight towards the oncoming salvo of rockets. Her hair spread out in thick curls. As each rocket approached her, she snared it with her curls and pushed it towards the ground. She was trading both their momentum and altitude for hers and she was climbing forward and upward with each rocket she pulled down. She was soon out of rockets, but she lashed out her hair like a whip as far as it could reach and it wrapped around the closer runner of the helicopter.
"Oh no," Count Nefaria said.
Medusa swayed back and forth as Nefaria banked the copter first one way and then the other, trying to shake her loose, but in a moment Medusa's hair had pulled her up within arm's reach of the runner. There was no look of satisfaction on her face. She was soaking wet, hurt all over, and raging with anger. She climbed up the side of the copter, anchored to it by her hair, as it tilted hard to the right in one last vain effort to shake her loose. She willed some of her hair that was not anchoring her into a shape like a crude fist and used it to punch right through the window of the copter.
Nefaria, cut on his face by broken glass, kept one hand on the control stick and kept the copter circling around the column of black smoke that rose up from all those rockets. With his other hand he took aim with his machine pistol, "I'll kill you, you-" he screeched. He spat his words like a wild man; gone was all trace of his veneer of sophistication. But before he could utter another word or pull the trigger, wet strands of hair lashed across his face like a cat o' nine tails and more hair snared around his gun hand and jerked him off his aim.
Medusa forced the locked door open with her strong right arm and stole into the tiny cabin. More of her hair snaked forward, grappled with Nefaria's gun hand, and pinned it to the opposite window of the cabin.
Nefaria himself was half-buried in Medusa's red hair, helpless, but still managed to compose himself enough to say with some of his old smoothness, "You think I don't know what you're after? What this is really all about? You hero-types all make me sick because you pretend to be so altruistic, but you're really just doing this for yourself. You want to bring me down to make you feel better. Well, I'll bring us down for you!" he said and he mustered his strength to lunge into the control stick.
The helicopter took a nose dive. Medusa was thrown off-balance and had to catch herself. Nefaria used the diversion to recover his gun hand and swung the machine pistol towards Medusa again. Medusa had maybe ten strands of hair left around that arm. It was enough to overpower him. She pushed his arm up as he fired and bullets ripped through the roof of the cabin. One bullet ricocheted off the propeller blades and came back into the cabin. Ir ricocheted some more before it went through the back of Nefaria's chair. Nefaria froze up with an ugly stare stuck on his face. Medusa glanced out the windshield and saw the ground coming up much too fast. Less than a second before the copter struck the ground, Medusa threw herself through the open doorway and, in midair, wrapped her hair all around her body like a cocoon. The big red ball of hair bounced and rolled at a horrible speed down the hill from where the copter crashed. Inside, Medusa could only feel the shocks and the bruising, and hear the explosion from the helicopter only muffled through her thick hair, but saw nothing of the crash or Uberto and the rest of Nefaria's goons she unknowingly bowled right through and scattered in her wake.
Finally, she came to a stop at the fence around the estate. She tensed her hair, drew it in shorter, and let it flow behind her once more. She had cut a swath through the vineyards straight out to the fence. Looking up at the villa on the hill, she could see the whole wing of it that housed the open hangar was belching smoke and fire like a stone dragon. A smaller column of smoke and flame was rising from behind the hill, where she could only presume Count Nefaria had paid the ultimate price for his crimes.
Medusa grabbed hold of the fence, leaning on it for strength, for what strength she still had in her she reserved for holding up her head high. "You never saw the real me," she said defiantly as her last words to Count Nefaria.
NEXT: Medusa still has issues to work out before she returns to the rest of the Inhumans – like who is trying to kill her next! Find out next month in "You or Me."