Yes, it's pronounced the normal way. Also, a bit of a sneak peek for Ripples' Edolas Arc.

Chapter Twenty Two - Winter, Part One

"What do you think?" I asked.

Tony looked up from his phone and stared at me.

"Well," Tony said. "You look…different."

I raised an eyebrow. "That's kind of the point."

"Still," he muttered, watching me put on the domino mask. "So, you and Virgo finally added magic to it?"

I nodded, securing it in place. "Yeah. And it shouldn't come off, either."

"This is only for the secret identity, right?" Tony asked.

I nodded. "That's why I've changed so much."

The bodysuit was a more muted color of purple than I would've liked, but it was still obviously purple. The boots I was wearing, given to me by Virgo, took off a good three inches of height, by making it compactible inside of the shoes.

"Why are you shorter?" Tony asked. "How are you shorter?"

"The boots are compacted," I said, jumping up and down. "While it's easy enough to adjust to the difference in height at first, it makes fighting a little difficult, so I need to practice before I actually fight them."

"But everything else is an illusion?" Tony asked.

I shrugged. "The one the mask uses to change the shape of my face is. The bodysuit is designed for more protection in a way that makes me look stockier."

Physically, it'd be a lot harder for them to match my new costume up to Elle Rigby. Now I'm 5'5", have a much curvier and buff body, and my face seems stretched out a bit longer. My mask also changes my eye color to brown, and I have my hair brown too, when it's in the ponytail.

"Okay, I'll admit it's kinda impressive," Tony said, circling me. "You really do look different. The height really helps."

I nodded. Height was important. That's why on bank exits, they have a strip that measures how tall you are. So, when the thief runs out the door, the bankers can tell the cops how tall they were. Height and build were one of the first things people notice about people who have hidden their identity. This alone should rule me out almost immediately, in case anyone gets suspicious about similar magic.

I put on the mask and pulled back my hair into a pony tail, changing it to a darker brown. Finally, I zipped up the rest of the suit and pulled up the hood in the back, which clicked into place around my head and the mask so it would stay in place.

"You can barely even see your hair," Tony commented, packing up another box.

I shrugged. "One last piece."

Finally, I requipped a staff that was compacted into about a foot. I clicked it into place and it extended from one foot to three, and then from three to six, before I turned it back down to three.

"Why do you only have it half-way?" Tony asked.

"If I'm in a tricky position," I said, maneuvering buttons on the staff. "I can push the button in the middle of the fight. If my opponent doesn't know my staff extends, I can usually get in a really good hit."

Tony nodded. "So...who's Noir, exactly?"

I looked up from the staff. "Well, it's complicated. But to put it simply…Noir is me."

"…What," Tony asked flatly.

"There's a universe aligned with Fairy Tail," I said. "Called Edolas. There are versions of all of us there, including me. 'Noir' comes from the end of 'Eleanor', and she was kinda…the darker side of me, maybe? So we thought it was fitting, and it's better than just calling her Edo-Elle. That gets kinda annoying."

"Anyway," I continued. "There's no magic in Edolas. Instead, they had magical items." I held up the staff and showed him the side. "The buttons correspond with an element. And I can shift it on or off to redirect the power. There's a certain amount of magic stored in the staff – my own magic, now - and it's already directly loaded to all the elements. By turning off all of them but Venus and Mars…" I flipped the switch over the Dark Grey (Mercury), Green (Earth), Purple (Jupiter), Light Gray (Saturn), Light Blue (Uranus), and Dark Blue (Neptune). "Those are shut off. It would take a few minutes to…warm it up, basically, so I limit the amount of elements I use, but more magic is redirected there."

"What about the Dwarf Planets?" Tony asked.

I showed him a panel on the side that was shut completely. "Even using one spell can make it harder to use any more magic. It slows down how the magic flows through the staff."

"Can you supply it with more magic?" Tony asked.

I nodded, smiling. "And since it's fire and…well, a laser, basically, it might seem like it's not magic."

Tony nodded and passed over a utility belt. "I made you the smoke bombs and stuff."

"Did you have fun?" I asked him, grinning.

He smiled. "I kinda feel like Q. I like it."

I patted his shoulder. "You want to make a lipstick laser, then go for it. Even if I won't use it, some of the girls joining us later might use it for spy missions. Hell, Macbeth and Erigor might use it, too."

He handed me the coms he made, and I slipped it into my ear. It was surprisingly comfortable.

"Now, I'll be following you every step of the way," Tony said.

He had found a layout of the facility online, which he would use to try and direct me to certain places. In addition to getting Bucky, Tony also asked me to download some of Hydra's information, and to also upload a virus, which I was fine with.

The HYDRA base modeled as a shipping company, and would stow packages in large trucks and ship them out to other locations. Some of those boxes were very big, and Tony is the one who commented that while they might fit Bucky in one of those while he's in cryostasis, other people could fit in there, too.

That's why we were going to download information, too.

AIM might not have started human experimentation yet, but HYDRA has never really been above that. So that was kind of important.

"And you can put the whole tank in your requip space?" Tony asked.

I nodded.

Tony handed me a handful of…more coms?

"Why do you have more coms?" I asked him.

"We still haven't really worked on magic resistant tech," Tony said. "I don't want it to accidentally break around magic. If you don't hear me talking, then you'll need to switch out for another one. I think they'll hold up, but…"

I nodded and requipped most of them to a safe place before slipping the rest into one of the belt's pouches. Magic (like requipping) should be fine on a smaller level, but if it was in the direct way of a spell, or close enough to a powerful blast, it would probably cause some interference.

"Okay," Tony said, backing up. "That's all things on my end. But, uh…how did you get the staff from Noir, and can I play with it later?"

I laughed. "Yeah, you can mess with it. I brought a lot of magically-run items back with me when we left. There was no magic left in Edolas either, so other-me handed it over."

"Got it," Tony said. "Anything else?"

"No, I think that's all," I said softly.

He gave me a look, and slowly nodded, before he reached out and hugged me.

"Be careful," he told me.

"I will," I responded.

Tony cleared his throat and stepped back. "Good luck."

I smiled back. "Time to go."

"Remember to take breaks," he told me.

"I know, Tony. Now go. You have a press conference."

He nodded and left.

"JARVIS?" I asked. "Can you put up a map and point out where we are and our destination in Virginia?"

"Yes, Mrs. Dreyar."

"Okay," I muttered. "Okay, I can do this. Can you bring up pictures of the biggest attractions between them? No distance more than 100 miles, if you can."

He brought up four pictures, before he showed the last one of the facility.

"Alright," I said. "Time to go. Bye, JARVIS!"

"Goodbye, Mrs. Dreyar. Good luck."

I made sure to stick to the shadows.

I would make one jump, hang out in the shadows for a bit, do some kicks and flips and eat a lot of food – even more than usual, considering the amount of teleporting I had to do, and the baby.

At the first rest point, there was a television nearby. I listened to it as I snacked on some grapes. (Fruit for now. Sugar right before the mission).

Tony stood at a podium, overlooking the crowd.

"I've brought you here today for a reason," he started. "And it's a bit of an odd thing to announce, but I am stepping down as CEO of Stark Industries."

There was a large gasp from the reporters and the audience that had gathered around the television.

"I've recently realized I'd prefer to spend much more time inventing than in meetings, signing paperwork, and the like. So I will simply be the head of Research and Development, and I am promoting Pepper Potts to CEO."

Wildly waving hands from the reporters.

"You, kid," Tony said, pointing to a particularly young looking one.

"So, Mr. Stark, you're still going to be designing things for Stark Industries, but you will no longer be CEO? Why did you decide to hand it over to Ms. Potts?"

"Well, I realized that being CEO is time-consuming and boring, and Pepper already did a lot of the work because I would slack off to make stuff instead. We decided to make it official, because Pepper deserves the credit and the paycheck. And because I'm tired of getting yelled at for missing meetings."

The reporters chuckled and another one shouted a question. "Will you still be Iron Man?"

"I will be Iron Man for as long as I can, for as long as the world needs me," Tony stated.

Some of the reporters cheered.

"I will now pass this over to Pepper Potts…"

I smiled and teleported to the next stop.

I repeated this a few times and tried not to think of what was weighing on my mind. Because it wasn't Bucky, and it wasn't Tony; it was Laxus, who had yet to Astral Project.

Virgo had appeared this morning to make sure my costume was complete, (and to help tidy the house, which would've been nice before we had went through Howard's shit) and I asked her to ask Lucy to Astral Project to Laxus and tell him to visit me.

Virgo relayed the message and Lucy said she would tonight.

I had hoped that Macbeth and Erigor would stop at Laxus's on the way back to their bodies, but maybe they hadn't last night. Maybe something about HYDRA came up or something.

But it was weird that Laxus hadn't visited yet, and I'm definitely not going to Astral Project if I'm pregnant, so he needs to contact me.

The thing is, I didn't really know what to say to him.

We weren't trying for a baby; after what I told him of the Fairy Tail timeline, we both decided that we should have children after everything calms down.

This was completely unexpected.

But we'd come to that when he arrived, I guess.

A few more jumps and I ended up near the facility. I was busy stretching and practicing kicking when my com chirped.

"Elle?" Tony asked.

"Hey, I saw the speech. Good job."

"Thanks," he said. "It feels like there's a weight off my chest now that I've done that."

"Well, being CEO is a heavy responsibility," I said to him. "This took a lot of things you had to do off your plate, and we still have a lot to do."

"You've got a point," Tony said. "Plus, you know, the secret missions and stuff."

"Yeah, that too," I responded. "You gonna be my guy in the chair?"

"Guy in the chair?" Tony snorted.

"Yeah, you're in front of a bunch of computers helping me do shit."

"Well, you're not wrong," Tony agreed.

"You seeing what I'm seeing?" The mask is meant to transmit my visuals.

"Yeah," Tony said. "Let's do this."

"Well, this brings back memories," I muttered.

"What, you go climbing through vents before?" Tony asked.

"Yeah. When I grabbed Macbeth, Erik, Orga and a few other kids," I explained as I moved forward. "I saved them from some crazy psychos. This was right before my Afghanistan, actually. It was a lot easier to do this when I was thirteen."

"Well, yeah, that was seven years ago," Tony snorted. "You were probably much smaller."

I groaned. "God, I was tiny. I didn't get my growth spurt until after that happened, so I was actually like…the size of a ten year old. At least these vents are a little bigger."

I could practically see Tony roll his eyes at me. "You're sure it's okay to talk so freely?" he asked.

"Redirecting sound vibrations," I reminded him. "But thank you for worrying."

He grumbled. I kept crawling.

"Alright, you should take a left here," Tony said. "And you're approaching the tech room."

"Alright," I said. "Do you want them to know we stole information and uploaded a virus?"

"I'd prefer that that's still a secret," Tony admitted.

"Got it," I muttered. "I'll use breaking out Bucky as a distraction for stealing and destroying their files."

Here's the thing. If possible, I didn't want to use any magic, only the stuff I had pre-charged onto Noir's staff. You see, as Tony and I messed around, we realized that magic can register on more than a few different types of scans – usually almost all of them, actually, including the light spectrum, since you can usually see magic. So if I can get through this without actually using my magic, and just using what's already pre-set in the staff, I'll have a much better time convincing these people that I don't have magic, and that it's all tricks (like with what I planned with Macbeth and Erigor).

Redirecting sound vibrations is one of those things that doesn't really register. Since there's already a small level of magic (or Ethernano, back in Fiore) in the air, it wouldn't really create an effect; same as requipping, generally. Just a small disruption, like if there's bubbles in a special goo and I just poked at a few of the bubbles. Things that can happen naturally.

But any of my stronger magic, like full-out spells, would register.

This means that I couldn't just use Pluto to peek my head through the vents and the ceiling to see if anyone was in the room.

Though I probably wouldn't because Pluto usually sucks.

"Is anyone in the room?" I asked Tony.

"Let's…see," Tony muttered, doings something. I heard corresponding beeps as he did something on his computer.

All of a sudden, the lenses that covered the eye holes of the mask flickered, and I was looking around in infrared.

"Holy shit, that's awesome," I whispered in awe.

"Thank you, thank you very much," Tony said, emanating Elvis. "If you hit the button next to your left eye, you can change it manually."

I raised my hand to a part between my left eye and my ear, pressing the button. The light flickered to ultraviolet.

"So cool," I hissed, pressing the button again and again until I came back to infrared.

I looked back down with my new heat-vision. "There's one person in the room," I told Tony. "Any chance you could cause something in the other side of the building that would alert them so they can leave?"

"Give me a sec…" Tony said, stretching out his words. "…Got it!"

I heard him typing, and within a few seconds, someone else ran into the room. I strained my ears, trying to hear what they were saying. Here's the thing – it's easy to deflect sound vibrations, but it's harder to direct them somewhere, particularly back to me. It's not something I'm the best at, even when I'm in the room and have a direct line to the conversation. Trying it in the vents was stupid, and I gave up almost immediately. It was just a waste of energy, and I wasn't getting anywhere like this.

It didn't really matter, anyway. The person sitting down got up and quickly hurried after the new person.

"Alright," Tony said. "You've probably got a few minutes. Depends on how competent that guy was. Whoever they are, they're smarter than the rest of those noobs, but still slow on their computer programming. I'm keeping an eye on them in another room, I'll give you a warning if they start to come back. And you're good to go with their cameras."

"Are you already in their system?" I asked, as I distantly remembered that Tony could also see what I was seeing. I moved aside the vent plating and swung into the room, with my mask flickering back to regular color vision. "Also, did you say noobs?"

"Kinda," Tony said. "As for what I can see…It's like going on a website. I can see their page and presentation, but I can't really make an account and change things, much less rewrite the entire webpages code….and no."

"You did," I said gleefully, moving forward to the computer.

Luckily, I was wearing gloves (just in case) but they didn't feel like gloves. Tony said that since they weren't there to specifically prevent cold, just DNA trails, they could be a lot thinner.

"Well, they are," Tony muttered.

I snorted, taking out the first USB and plugging it into the computer. This wasn't the biggest tech room – there was only a handful of computers, but it was obviously the 'mainframe' or whatever (I don't know a lot about computers, okay?). But in my mind, it was kinda like how on the helicarrier, Fury had a station in the middle with like… four screens, and a bunch of other people were on their own computers doing research. And this is just Fury's computer.

The screen blinked three times before a loading bar showed.

"Oh my god, Tony, really?" I asked.

"Elle, it's 2010. I don't know what it's like in the future, but no matter how amazing I am, I still can't make things download instantly." His voice sounded even more annoyed than I was.

It also didn't matter. The loading bar was already full, and the screen blinked three times again.

"You can remove it," Tony said.

I took out the flashdrive and switched it for the red one (the one with the virus). And yeah, you can make fun of the fact that I asked Tony to color-code them, but everything works better with color coding (I mean, unless you're colorblind). And I didn't want to upload the virus before we got the information, that would just suck.

"Congratulations," I said, as the screen blinked again, with a new loading bar for uploading. "Your downloading and uploading speed is still faster than it is in 2017."

"That's when you died?" Tony asked.

"More or less."

"How can it be more or less?" Tony demanded.

The uploading finished and the screen blinked again. I took out the flash drive maneuvered the chair back into its previous position.

"More it a bit to the left," Tony commented. I adjusted the chair and used it to spring back into the vents, shutting the opening behind me. "Elle. More or less?"

"Okay," I said, as I continued through the shafts. "So I died May 1st, 2017, right? Every once in awhile, though, I'd end up back in the library-"

"Library?" Tony cut me off.

"That's where I ended up when I died. God's basically a librarian, and our souls are recorded in books. Or something. Anyway, I ended up back there a few more times and she would give me some more information. That was kinda nice. I found out a lot more by then."

"Turn right," Tony said, and I automatically followed his directions. "Uh-"

"WHAT THE-"

I fell forward and threw out my hands and knees, bracing myself against the wall and sliding down. It turned into a quick fall to a slow slide until I came to a halt. There was silence other than the squeak of my gloves and bodysuit against the wall.

Pause.

"Thanks for the warning," I grumbled.

"Sorry," Tony winced. "The shaft drops off the map, I didn't realize until it was too late."

"Not cool, Tony," I hissed, straightening out.

"That's the only drop you'll approach," Tony warned.

"Still not cool," I replied. "Now where?"

Tony paused. "Do you want to magically appear in Barnes' room, or do you want to appear down the hall and break into the room?"

"Down the hall," I answered immediately. "I live for terrifying HYDRA agents. Bring on the drama."

"Then take a right, and you should be good," Tony replied, sounding like he was trying to stifle laughter. "I'm comparing the electricity output with the new information from the download and I'm pretty sure he's at the end of that hall."

"You already got the downloaded information?" I asked him, surprised.

"Yeah, most of it's wireless," Tony answered. "JARVIS is sifting through it right now."

"Huh," I muttered, continuing forward. I made the right and approached the corner. There was another vent grille on the bottom. "This is the beginning of the hall?" I asked.

"And Barnes is on the end," Tony said, nervously. "You ready?"

"If you are," I said, smiling. I tapped the button on the left side of my mask again, flashing to infrared. Two people were on the other end of the hallway, slowly approaching me under the vent.

I grinned and reset to regular vision, counting down. Three, two…

One.

I dropped down from the vent, swinging forward and kicking both men in the face.

Hahahahahaha.

They were not expecting that.

Before either could recover, I had already twirled Noir's staff and hit them both in the face, one with each end. They both hit the ground.

Silence.

"You didn't even use magic," Tony snorted.

"To be fair, they still think they're completely secret," I told him, moving towards the doors and kicking them open.

Time to get this party started.

There were a handful of Hydra agents in the room, who all looked up as the doors banged into the wall. Three of them were scientists. Three more were Hydra agents.

"Who the hell are you?" one of the scientists asked.

"Dead," another agent said, pulling out a gun and shooting it.

I used Noir's staff to knock it off its course.

"Holy shit, you can DO THAT?" Tony shouted in my ear.

"I'm The Avenger," I said. "And HYDRA will fall."

Yes, that is the name I'm using for my secret identity. Did I pick that name to fuck with Fury?

Abso-fucking-lutely.

With that, I threw three smoke bombs on the floor and switched my mask to infrared, so I could see where they were.

I swept through the smoke and whacked two agents with my staff. The third one climbed onto a desk and jumped down on me from above, holding my staff in place. I ignited the side closest to him, and flames burst out of it, causing the man to back off and try and pat himself down. I banged him on the head and he fell unconscious.

To my surprise, one of the scientists threw a clipboard at me and used the few seconds it took me to knock it away in order to grab a gun.

He froze, unable to pull the trigger, as I held my staff right at his eye.

"I'll be honest," I said, very casually. "I'm not sure which end that is. Which means it can either be fire, or a laser, basically. Either one, though, will still end up seriously wounding you at this range, at the very least. Put down the gun."

The scientist lowered to the floor slowly, my staff following his eye during his descent. He put down the gun and kicked it over.

"Good," I said, smiling. The other two scientists were still frozen, their hands in the air.

"Now," I said. "Here's the thing. And make sure the others know this, too. I've marked you all. This is your final warning. I'm giving you all a second chance. Move on from HYDRA, be a good person – and you'll be left alone. Keep working for HYDRA; and you won't be so lucky next time."

I threw down some more smoke bombs, waiting for them to obscure the entirety of the Winter Soldier's tank before I requipped it away.

Alarms started going off, and I turned to the far wall and quickly carved HYDRA WILL FALL with the staff's Venus. Then I switched to Mars and destroyed the other wall in a series of explosions before I took off running, leaving the building up in flames.