So, in the last chapter, our anti-heroes (Redeye, Pretty Boy Chip, Marsha, Junior, Raider, Nemesis, and Pops) left Pretty Boy in a warehouse and were joined by Raider AKA Walter Wilson, the Deadpool from another dimension. After Pretty Boy got free from the warehouse, tracked down all of the Deadpools, and wreaked not-so-pretty vengeance on Chip, Junior, Raider, and Pops (whom he judged to be responsible for his abandonment) things were pretty much back to normal.
Then, one day, Chip called Nemesis up on the phone and asked her to meet up with him in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. So Nemesis and Marsha, who happened to be having a girl fun day with Nemesis at the time, borrowed (okay, stole) Iron Man's state-of-the-art, twice-the-speed-of-sound, super-fancy helicopter. They used the thing-a-ma-jig to track Chip's cell phone signal, and set down beside him.
"Hey, guys, sweet ride. Can I have it?" Chip said as soon as they got out.
"No, we need to return it to Tony when we're done," replied Nemesis. She looked around. It was early winter, so there was lots of snow, but here and there a scraggly tree or shrub broke through. The sun glared off the snow, blinding her slightly. After her eyes adjusted, she could see strewn rubble, and a jagged cave entrance.
"Hey," Marsha protested. "I want to keep it. I don't have a moral code that says I can't steal. Heck, I'm a mercenary." She snorted.
"Yes, yes, sooooo funny. We know your alias is Mercenary." Nemesis turned to Chip. "Wassup?"
Chip scratched his neck. "Well, one day Pops disappeared, and didn't come back for like, two weeks, so I tried to see if I could reach him somehow. But his cell was offline- no surprise there- and he didn't respond to my emails either." He frowned. "But that's not really unusual, 'cause he's kind of paranoid and changes his password often and forgets it even more often. But I tweeted him and he didn't tweet back, which is really unusual.
"So I tracked him down using the tracking device in his costume-"
"Whoa, whoa, wait a second," Marsha interrupted. "Why didn't you just do that first?"
"Uh…um…cause I forgot," Chip mumbled.
Nemesis raised an eyebrow. "And what made you remember?"
"I…uh…actually lost my memory for a while, and then I got it back and I remembered!"
Nemesis and Marsha looked at each other and rolled their eyes. "What really happened?" Marsha asked.
"Uh, well, I asked Redeye for help, actually, and he reminded me," mumbled Chip.
Nemesis laughed. "Yes, Redeye is the only one of you that's got any sense- no offense, Marsha, since you're one of them now-"
"None taken, I am rather senseless," replied Marsha.
"- and it figures you'd be embarrassed to admit it. Boys," she ended, shaking her head.
"Hey! I have sense too!" Chip insisted. "Look how much!" He reached into a pouch and pulled out a handful of cents…er-…pennies.
"You've got sense (scents), yes- but a different kind," replied Marsha, holding her nose and leaning away from him theatrically.
Nemesis sighed. "Okay, you two. Back to business." She turned to Chip. "You traced Pops tracker, then, and I assume it lead you here?"
"You assume too much," Chip said in a pompous voice. "No actually, you do. Turns out Pops left a suit in a bathroom garbage in Bangkok, Thailand. Weirdo. Anyways, I asked the hotel manager where the crazy guy from room fifteen went after he left, and he didn't know."
"Then do I care?" inquired Marsha.
"Well, I dunno. So then I was kinda stuck, and I had this weird suspicion, kind of like a combo of back tingles, and goosebumps, and a song stuck in your head-"
"GET TO THE POINT!" exploded Nemesis.
"Okay, sheesh. So I went to Wolverine and asked him where the Weapon X lab was…" Chip trailed off, looking in to the distance.
Marsha tapped her foot impatiently. "And?"
Chip snapped back to reality. "Wolvie went kind of psycho when I asked that so I got the hell out of there. So I called, uh, Redeye, and asked him if he knew. And he did. And here we are."
Nemesis frowned thoughtfully. "Why couldn't you just tell us that in the first place? Never mind. So this is the Weapon X lab, huh? Lets go inside."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" cried Chip grabbing her. "If that's all I had to do, do ya think I would have called you? There are traps, explosives, and some crazy psycho girl with a machine gun!" His voice rose up hysterically.
Marsha gave him a Look*.(* For those who do not know, a Look is when you tilt your head slightly down and to the side, with one eyebrow raised, looking at whomever just did something to deserve a Look) "Do not," she said, speaking slowly, "tell me that you are afraid of a girl."
"With a machine gun!"
"You have a healing factor!"
"She's creepy! And a girl!"
Marsha shook her head and walked to the cave. "Come on, Chip. We'll protect you from the big, bad, scary girl."
Chip followed, muttering under his breath. Nemesis took the rear.
Inside, everything was destroyed. Tunnels strewn with rubble led in several directions. Marsha started walking along one that led slightly to the left.
"How do you know to go this way?" Chip whispered. Somehow, it just seemed like a whispering moment.
"Voices, also the smell of food, duh."
Now that she mentioned it, Nemesis and Chip could hear indistinct voices echoing down the tunnel and smell a stew simmering. Chip's stomach rumbled. Nemesis punched him in the kidney. He started to turn, but Nemesis pushed him forward.
Gradually, the voices became clearer, the smell stronger, and the light (from a fire, judging by the way it flickered) brighter. Then the tunnel ended, leaving Marsha, Chip, and Nemesis standing at the entrance to the room, looking at a girl stirring a pot of soup over a fire. She wore a black bodysuit with lots of pouches all over. She wore a red armband around her left bicep.
"Yes, I think so…no, arsenic is a poison, not a spice! ... It was your fault, you told me to kill him…"
"Uh, hello?" Marsha said.
The girl jumped and turned, a long knife appearing in her hand. "Who are you?"
"Wait a second," Chip said, ignoring her. "That's Pops' favorite knife! Where is he?"
The girl stopped and narrowed her eyes at them for a long second. Then she shrugged. "Who's Pops?"
"I am," said a voice behind Chip. They all jumped and turned. There stood Pops, perfectly unharmed, looking bored.
"Pops, you're okay!"
"Of course I'm okay, why wouldn't I be?" Pops frowned. And that's when they all realized- he had his mask off. Marsha and Nemesis tactfully decided not to ask him about it. Chip had no such qualms.
"Pops, your mask!" Pops scowled so fiercely that Chip decided to drop it. "Um, well, you disappeared for two weeks! And didn't answer your tweets! So I thought something was wrong and tried to find you."
"Has it really been that long?" Chip nodded really fast. Up-down-up-down-up-down. "Alright, come in. I assume you've met Tade?" Chip shook his head really fast. Left-right-left-right-left-right. "Well every body, meet Tade. Tade, this is Marsha, Chip, and Andy."
"Andy" rolled her eyes. They moved around the fire and sat down. Tade continued stirring the stew. Marsha spoke up. "So who is Tade? What is she doing her? When did you find her? Where is she from? And why did you leave?" She directed the last question at Pops.
Pops leaned back, his hand running absently over his scarred scalp and face. "Tade is my clone – yes, I know she's a girl. Wolvie has that girl clone, too, though…what's-her-name – X-23, or Laura. Tade is my equivalent of Laura. She's T-23, actually. So I named her Tade, like Wade with a T."
Tade spoke up suddenly. "You know, they actually assign the letter at the beginning of our names randomly? X's luck she got the cool-sounding letter, and the one that coincides with the project name."
"'Our names'?" asked Nemesis. "You mean there's more than you and Laura?"
"Of course! There's a girl Sabretooth – H-23 – and Maverick/Agent Zero – D-23 – and probably others, but I never met them."
"Won't Wolvie be mad when he finds out there's another Sabretooth?" They all laughed.
(Mental Camera zooms out. Shows all of them sitting around a fire, with Tade serving out stew. The end.)
