This is Sfiery. Here, the Slavic nations are always a superpower.
This is Khabarovsk. This city is very close to the Japanese lands...whether the Slavs here want to be or not.
This is a police station. Here, Danny Rand is cuffed to a chair. He's been brought in...under suspicion of having mass-murdered 300 ninjas.
Naturally, Danny had to. They were all Hand. And the only way to cure the Hand is to mass-murder it. With luck, though, he'll soon get the detectives here to empathize with him.
With the cuff, his fist barely glows with his chi energy. Alas, Danny dares not attempt a breakout. He's trying to convince the cops, after all, that he's INNOCENT, rather than guilty...
As he waits, Danny scratches his hair. It sure is itching a lot lately. It's been a while since Colleen's bought him some shampoo as a love gift...
At last, the hot Japanese detective returns to her desk, and sets Danny free. "You've been cleared," she says to him. "Surveillance footage has failed to confirm that you were there when the 300 ninjas were suddenly, and mysteriously, mass-murdered."
"Thanks, Detective. Now if you don't mind, I've got a company to get back to running." With that, Danny starts to leave...
"Mr. Rand?"
Danny freezes. He dreads what follows...
"Your hair is WAY too long. As much as I sometimes dig guys with lots of hair...you SO need a haircut."
Danny sighs, and makes his exit. He should be more relieved. Alas, he's going to hate what follows. Shit; these days, Rand money can't even invest in a perfect barber. Alas, Danny's been trying to get his company to invest in robotic barbers.
Ray Stevens, he's going to hate this... Hate, hate, hate...
On the surface, this barbershop looks like a scrap metal depot. That's probably because it is. Alas, scrap metal, it seems, is only PART of what goes on in this place...as are haircuts...
In a shop, a Sleeper Mech sharpens some barber tools...with a grindstone. In this instance, his prosthetic arm IS the barber tool he's sharpening...
Meet the Anton Ivanov Sleeper Mech. Normally, he's Superior. Occasionally, he's Ronin. Today, he's a barber. He'd better be. Turns out that today, his customer is the great Danny Rand, boy CEO of Rand Corporation.
He switches his barber prosthetics for actual hands. Next, the types on several computers. He programs his barber prosthetics to cut Mr. Rand's hair in certain ways... Funny; a lot of these tools and software were made by Rand Corporation...
More of it was made by Yashida Corp...
Danny sits in the barber chair, waiting for the procedure to begin. This place depresses him. There's only metal, shadows, and grey decor to look at. If he had parts of his company here, he could offer Capt. Ivanov several upgrades for his barbershop...
Alas, then he'd have to help every barber in the world...which, of course, is more than what he and the board can afford...
From the rafters, warplane models hang. Either Capt. Ivanov is an aviator, or he's a fan. Danny wonders if he's got any UAVs stashed in secret hangars around here...
Danny nearly panics, when what looks like the Crimson Cowl's cowl levitates across the room, and fixes itself around his neck. Danny begs the thing not to strangle him.
He relaxes, when he sees that this bib wasn't made by Hammer Industries. Even so, Danny's already started to lose faith in this barber.
In a glass armoire nearby, the barber keeps an old Red Guardian costume. It looks dieselpunk. Whoever wore it must've fought Capt. America himself a few times... Or the Howling Commandos...
The Sleeper Mech attends to Danny, with a pair of katanas for outer arms. They gleam with their sharpness.
Now Danny's REALLY nervous. He gets even more so when Capt. Ivanov cuffs him to the barber chair; wrists and ankles. The cuffs are robotic, and built into the chair.
Capt. Ivanov smiles, and crosses his katana/outer arms in front of him...as if he were a ninja, or something. "So, Mr. Rand," he says in a Slavic accent, "what will it be? Forgive me if I do not know what the latest fashion in St. Petersburg is. I am not from there."
Capt. Ivanov's a robot. Hence, the Iron Fist's powers of empathy will not work on a Sleeper Mech. This Danny's sure of. In fact, there's a fat chance that Capt. Ivanov is biased against empaths...supernatural or otherwise.
Danny needs not feel bad for the predicament he's in. He's just a simple little Iron Fist. He focuses on his little chi energy, and protects his little Chinatown from the Hand and other foes.
So, he improvises an answer to Capt. Ivanov's question. "Rand's working on a new line of crop dusters," he tells him. "They're UAVs. They can be piloted from the loft of a barn. If you custom-order it, I'm sure we can make a set of crop-dusting UAVs just for you: ones that are USSR red, and bearing the communist pentagram for a roundel...if that's what you still desire."
Capt. Ivanov smiles, and activates a button in one of his arms. From above, nanites fly down, and start buzzing around Danny's head. They're all communism-red. One at a time, they prune all of Danny's many blond hairs...
Either way, the Immortal Iron Fist loses all of his platinum blond hair this time around. Alas, at least he looks, this way, more like how a living weapon should...as the Immortal Iron Fist is a living weapon against the Hand.
