I woke up in the morning in that tall bed with hangings the color of the sea, and rather than disorientation or confusion, I remembered everything clearly and in great detail. What was going to happen now? I sat up and gave myself the once-over. I was just fine, physically, perhaps a little sore but not badly. Doom had left marks where he gripped me, but they were slight, and just below the surface. I couldn't even call them bruises.
I drew the bed curtains and stepped down. If the room had been lovely the night before, it was breathtaking now. I drew the sheers back from the floor–to–ceiling windows that made up two-thirds of the outer wall. The windows were twice my height; the room's proportions were lofty.
The view was even more so. I was looking towards the mountains in back of the castle, and their noble blue-grey heights rose cleanly and magnificently out of the forest to the sky. Of course it is hard to look anywhere in Latveria and not see mountains. It is an extremely mountainous country, and the joke is that there are more square meters on the vertical than there are horizontal.
Latveria is a very small country, and while we do produce several very fine beers and the cameo glass factory turns out works of art in the same way that it has done for two centuries, these things do not pay for new roads and competitive schools and state-of-the-art medical facilities, nor are they the reason why tiny little Latveria is anything like a global power. There is only one reason why Latveria is a first world country in the middle of the former Soviet Block, and only one reason why the United Nations takes any notice of us, and that reason goes about in full armor in a dark green cape. Doom.
Latveria is also an extremely cold country, although for the last three years the snow cap on the top of Mount Doom, our highest peak, has melted away entirely. It was not an unexpected event—the great melt had been predicted and charted sometime before, but it was still a distressing problem. I was up on top the mountain some weeks before the first occasion, when Doctor Doom went up to see for himself exactly what it looked like.
It is possible to project all sorts of expressions on to the metal face that Doom shows to the world. Like a Kabuki theater mask, the play of light on its polished shell seems to convey emotion—viewed from one direction, he seems to smile, from another, to frown. But the mask itself never alters. The danger lies in reading too much into that seeming.
But that day, I had no trouble believing that what seemed to show was exactly how he felt. It seemed to be scowling. "That their infernal pollutions should reach out to corrupt Doom's homelands!" he bellowed at the sky.
Talking about himself in the third person is a very bad sign. After that he starts gesticulating as well, and then he pulls out the weapons of mass destruction and takes aim. That always spells trouble.
"Well, my lord," I commented. "The consolation is that we are sufficiently elevated that even if all the polar ice does melt and the mass flooding does occur, we'll be well out of range. And once we have fifteen more frost-free nights per growing season, we'll be able to raise tomatoes out of doors. We won't have to import them anymore."
Von Gretznau, another of Doom's aides, glared at me. "I hardly think you appreciate the seriousness of the situation, girl."
"You hardly think at all." rumbled Doom. "Black humor is one of the few rational responses to the situation. I see that I am going to have to do something about this."
He'd been distracted out of the third person; that was good.
What he did about it, however, was something even better. By the end of the year, Latveria had stopped using fossil fuels entirely, the first country on earth to do so, turning instead to a variety of clean, affordable, renewable energy sources. It is no longer legal to bring into, or drive, a gasoline powered vehicle in Latveria; they are stopped at the border.
Once Latveria set the example, (and once Doom made the technology available) the rest of Europe began to follow suit. Germany was next; Sweden followed.
In the meantime, America continues to pollute away, and is embroiled in a war over oil—again.
I turned away from the windows and looked around the room once more.
There were two bedside tables. I had not noticed it before, but the one to the left had a note and a ring box on it.
The note read: 'Good morning. I trust you slept well. The formal announcement of our marriage will be made from the audience balcony at eleven. I will expect you at a quarter before. The servants are at your disposal. V. v. D.'
I looked at a clock on the mantle across the room. Not quite nine—that did not give me a lot of time. I called down for breakfast.
While I waited, I opened the ring box. Green is Doom's favorite color, and it was a good thing that I liked it, because the ring in that box was set with an extremely large square emerald, set in heavy gold scrollwork with diamonds all around it.
Another aspect of Doom's personality is a ferocious—nearly insane—competitiveness. It went without saying that this ring would be larger and more expensive than the one Reed Richards gave Sue Storm back when they got engaged, but Richards is not the only competition out there. The media had devoted a lot of coverage to the ring that Donald Trump gave his latest fiancée, so of course the ring Doom gave his bride had to be much rarer, more expensive, and more original. Fine emeralds, especially large ones, are much rarer than large diamonds. Of course it fit perfectly.
It was easier to think about 'Doom's bride' in the abstract, as if she were someone more appropriate than I was, in terms of power, fame, or rank—one of the X-men women, for example, or—Gisele Bundchen, or a scion of nobility, if there were any marriageable princesses about. I have no super powers, and although I was featured in the 'Sixty Minutes' feature on Latveria last year, I can't be called famous, and my mother taught school. No titles or noble blood ran in my family.
However, there was my intelligence, which must be less than his, or he would feel threatened by it, yet not so much less that he despises my intellect. That must be part of the attraction I had for him.
As for the rest—I remember very well the first time somebody objective called me beautiful. My mother said I was—so did Bisitra, the dressmaker down in Doomstadt. By objective, I mean someone male, and what was more, he didn't know I could hear him, or understand him if I did.
Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, was sitting in the window overlooking the courtyard garden. I was down in the garden, which was undergoing an archeological dig, looking at the sword hilt from the 13th century that had just been dug up. (The Fantastic Four are always in and out of Latveria for one reason or another.) I could hear him clearly when he said, "Look at her. The librarian type, in the skirt and blouse. These super villain guys always have babes like that around. I don't know where they find them."
I took a surreptitious look around the courtyard to see who he meant. Livia, the only woman around who could be called a babe by any standards, was wearing a wide hat and heavy coverall. She was besmirched to the eyeballs in dust as well, and was standing waist-deep in a trench. Then there was Professor Auerbach, who was a grandmother, and besides wearing a coverall as well, her figure was showing the effects of seven decades of gravity.
"She isn't showing off a lot." remarked Ben Grimm, the Thing. "No leg above the knee, and her top's buttoned up to just this side of stuffy."
The only person in the courtyard in a skirt and blouse was me.
"You don't have to see all the skin to know it's prime. She has a sweet ass on her—."
"Hey!" interjected Sue Storm Richards. "That's enough of that kind of talk. She might speak English, you know."
"You think so?" asked the Torch, hopefully. "Maybe I could ask her down to the inn for a beer—or better still, some of that wicked plum brandy they make here. That stuff has got to be 180 proof."
"Come away from the window." urged his sister. "Honestly, Johnny, I can't take you anywhere…"
I was in a mild state of shock. I wasn't a babe. I was overweight—or I had been, because I had stopped eating an entire bag of Hershey's Kisses with lunch once I got my job, which undoubtedly had had something to do with it.
Then the first assignment I got after entering the service of Doom was to work with the Red Cross in coordinating the Serbian refugees who were flooding in from the southwest. I spent six months working with women, many of them pregnant, who were the victims of repeated rape, and with children who were suffering from malnutrition, body lice, and intestinal parasites. It just wasn't possible to have much appetite after that, and half the time I gave my lunch away to some child with skin that was stretched too tight over his bones.
But that didn't make me a babe. I still had the same face, which was a shapeless as a pudding, an ugly, awkward nose, and a small chest… I turned to see my reflection in one of the windows—and almost didn't recognize myself.
I had cheekbones now; when had that happened? My nose was still the same, but my chest was now in much better proportion to the rest of me. The other differences were harder to define.
Was this something Doom had done to me? He was known for occasionally using his minions as guinea pigs, to bring out some latent super power in them—but I had asked for, and got, his word that he wouldn't do anything like that to me…
I went up to my room, got out an old photo album, and looked at myself from sixteen years in the past, when I was I was seven, the last time I had been happy as a child. No, my face was still my face. I was older and larger, but not substantially different. I just hid my ears now so they didn't stick out like jug handles, that was all.
It wasn't enough. The belief in my own unattractiveness wasn't going to evaporate just like that. So I did something a bit childish and naive—I went off to ask someone.
As Susan Richards left the guest suite, I cleared my throat. "Oh—hello." she said. "Did Doom send you for something?" she asked.
"No—I—I overheard what your brother said earlier."
Her face changed—she winced. "Oh, that. I'm sorry. It was a rude thing for him to say—Julia? Is that your name?"
"Joviana, actually. No, I wasn't offended. What I meant to do was ask you—did he mean it when he called me a babe? Don't worry, I'm not interested in him." I added hastily. "He's not nearly mature enough for me and in any case, it would be so unsuitable for me to get involved with him. I only wanted to know—am I beautiful?"
My voice broke on the last word, as the insults and jeers of hundreds of playground hours clogged my throat.
"Um—well—Why are you asking me?" she inquired, sensibly enough.
"Because you're beautiful, so you should know. And you're honest and kind."
"Thank you. Yes—you are. In an unconventional way, I mean. You definitely don't look American. And you act like a beautiful woman. I don't mean you act proud or stuck up, but I saw you on 'Sixty Minutes', and you stand up straight, you have confidence and poise, and you're obviously happy about who you are and what you do—for some reason." she ended, with a dubious tone in her voice.
"You think so? You don't think I should have something done about my nose? I've always hated it."
"No—I wouldn't, if I were you. It makes your face interesting, and your chin would be out of proportion if your nose was any different."
"Thank you…" I wandered off, deep in thought.
"Glad I could help." She smiled, and went down the hall.
I wasn't sure that what she had said about my looks added up to beauty, but it certainly seemed to indicate that I was at least attractive, which I had never felt as though I was, and it made me happy.
That evening, Doom said to me, "I would not attach too much importance to what John Storm said about you." Anything that is said in the castle gets back to him very swiftly.
That squashed my new-sprouted self-esteem very quickly and thoroughly, until he added, somewhat obscurely, "It takes little wit to recognize a diamond once it has been cut and polished. Your bone structure was always good. When you were overweight it was not obvious—but it was there."
I decided that was a back-handed compliment. "Thank you, my lord."
In retrospect…
I shook myself out of my reminiscence, and called my mother.
A/N: Although I have found nothing on the FF site that forbids the answering of reviews as yet, the rumor prevents me from answering. Rest assured, I live for feedback. Please review.