Town Car
Enji Todoroki was in the back of his Town Car, consuming the Wall Street Journal as the car crawled through busy midtown traffic. Rain pounded on the tinted windows, it's one hell of a day out there.
His eyes turned, fix coldly on whoever was in the seat next to Enji. It was his new assistant, Reiko, dressed in a purple cheongsam top and black slik pants. Reiko was drumming her fingers nervously on her knee.
Enji's jaw fixed in a tight line. He folded his paper and stared at Reiko.
"Are you going to disappoint me?" Enji said.
Reiko turned, dared to raise her eyes to her boss. Her mouth moves, she was going to try to answer, but decided against it.
Suddenly, both rear doors flew open, pulled smartly by security men in suits, and Enji bolted sharply out of the car. Shoto followed, dreading whatever was to come.
Very high above them, there was a cold black monolithic skyscraper that stood in the middle of Manhattan. Tall, searing red letters atop the building announced its resident- OSCORP.
Far, far down in the street, Reiko and Enji walked from the car, parked at the curb, to the front of the building, immediately covered by a sea of umbrellas carried by minions raced out to meet them.
Down on the sidewalk, Enji turned and barked at Reiko over his shoulder as they headed for the building.
"Walk beside me, not behind." Enji said.
Reiko stepped up her pace to fall in beside her boss. They reached an elevator, one of the two glass ones that cling to the side of the building. The twin elevators were guarded by two more security guys, wires in their ears and sunglasses in the rain.
One set of doors wooshed open as Reiko and Enji approached; they stepped inside.
In the elevator, The doors closed. Reiko turned to her boss.
"Please don't make me do this." Reiko said.
"You wanted to learn. You'll learn." Enji said.
"I'm begging you." Reiko said.
Impatient, Enji reached past him and pushed one of only two silver buttons on the panel next to the door.
"Don't. I just ate." Enji said.
Inside the elevator, a motor started to hum and-on the sidewalk-the elevator moved. But instead of going up, the elevator zipped downward, into and through the sidewalk.
Enji and Reiko's faces were visible through the glass as they descended into the bowels of the building.
In the building, Large red and white horizontal stripes whipped past as the elevator dropped far into the ground beneath the streets of Manhattan.
"I abhor weakness. I don't permit it in myself; I won't tolerate it in you. Running a company is a lot more than handing out paychecks." Enji said.
Suddenly, the elevator stopped and the doors zipped open on a lab.
Lab
There was a massive underground laboratory. Row after row of test tubes, beakers, piles of microcircuitry, half-assembled devices, scribbled formulas, schematics, warning signs. The sheer volume of thought that goes on here was humbling.
A lab worker noticed Enji. He turned and hurried across the floor in the opposite direction, urgently. He passed a thing that looked like an aerodynamically perfected boogie board, with upturned fins on each side, footholds carved into the top of each wing, and a single row of switches down the middle of the center tube, which was a propulsion system of some kind.
While the device hovered over a bench, a technician wore a lightweight, super tight-fitting helmet, eyes protected behind big yellowish-green plastic bulges that made it look like an evil
insect's head. As the Technician turned his head, the device responded, pointing up when he raises his head up, banking to the side with a turn of the head, etc.
The Lab Worker went across the lab. He approached a raised platform, where a man in a long white lab coat worked in front of a large glassed-in room. His arms were plugged into a device of some kind, working delicately with a maze of interlocking chemical tubes and micronic circuitry sealed in a glass-walled isolation tank. Strange gases leaked from the tubes, must be the reason they're behind glass.
The Lab Worker hurried up beside him and whispered in his ear.
"Human Performance Enhancers." Reiko said.
Both men seemed surprised.
"I've been working on the project with him." Reiko said.
"How's it going?" Enji said.
"Nearly there. We tried vapor inhalation with rodent subjects they showed an 800 percent increase in strength. Intellectual capacity increased beyond measurable limits of testing, and maze-solving ability became nearly instantaneous." Reiko said.
"Excellent. Side-effects?" Enji said.
Reiko shrugged. "Propensity toward violence, central nervous system breakdown, domination
obsession, decompensation, insanity, death."
"So they become stronger and smarter. But it kills them. Not exactly marketable yet. The other projects?" Enji said.
"All good, individual airborne transports are all tested, they look fine, hallucination orbs are good to go. Manufacture can start in a month, we can deliver to the government by the end of the year. You're going to make another fortune, Enji." Reiko said.
"That's what I'd hoped to hear." Enji said.
"If that's all..." Reiko said.
Osborn acidentally crashed into a control panel against the far wall, rows and rows of switches and levers that were knocked all out of whack. A low hum permeated the lab. The monitors of an adjacent bank of computers Bakugoed formulas and data.
On a workbench, heat spun around the edges of a blue coil and began to warm a gravy-brown liquid. All around the lab, liquids and vapors awakened, crept through a nest of tubes.
Enji struggled to his feet.
Meanwhile, all around him, the liquids and gases started to move faster. To bubble. To his. Tubes swirl with strange gases. Smoke and vapor were leaking out of the connections, the entire system was groaning, something was terribly wrong.
A shrill alarm began to sound. Anyone who was left in the lab, including the Security Guards, turns and raced for the doors, desperate to get the hell out of there.
All over the lab, glass tubes cracked like ice in the springtime. With a great strange sucking sound, the entire works imploded, tubes and gases and liquids and vapors all collapsing inward on each other. There was a moment of horrible silence.
KA-BOOM!
Now it exploded, and everything flew everywhere. Enji, was hurled to the wall and slumped to the floor, unconscious.
The entire glass wall Reiko was standing behind was blown ten feet across the room, and Reiko disappeared under it.
In (what was) the isolation tank, a thick, fat green cloud rolls out and oozes down toward the floor. The vapor had a bizarre property, as it moved past a row of storage cabinets, it revealed
what's inside them, as an x-ray would, and when it moved beyond the cabinets, the doors were opaque again.
The vapor oozed over the unconscious form of Enji Osborn, sprawled out on the floor. It enveloped him bit by bit, and as it did his skeletal form was visible, the very bones under his flesh. The top of his cranium, his eye sockets, his mouth and teeth, the skin becoming momentarily transparent.
He was still breathing, little currents of the fantastic green gas were being sucked up into his nose, rhythmically.
The gas entered his now-visible system, sucking down, through his windpipe, billowing momentarily in his lungs, then gushing out through the cilia as it was distributed into his bloodstream.
Eager, oxygen fed tendrils of the stuff swirl up inside his brain.
In their cages inside the ruined isolation room, chemically enhanced rats screeched and screamed, writhing in the thick gas.
Across the lab, The green gas hovering over Enji Osborn's motionless body finally dissipated, leaving Osborn on the floor, his body no longer transparent.
Suddenly, his eyes popped open. Wide open. His blue eyes had changed color, from their icy azure to a sickly, fluorescent, demonic...green!
Reiko was lying in the middle of the lab under some rubble, somehow unharmed. She struggled to her feet, going first to check on her boss.
Enji grabbed her by the throat and lifted her above his head. "Back to formula?!"
He broke her neck and threw her across the room into the rubble, dead.
Unbeknownst to him, the dead Reiko flickered, then disappeared, an illusion. Kitsune would not be killed so easily.
Xxx
"You awake?" Shoto said.
"Mm..." Reiko said in response.
"I found you in that shambles of a lab. I-I'm so sorry. If I hadn't gotten you that job..." Shoto said.
"It...It's not your fault." Reiko said, sitting up. "See, I'm not even hurt."
"I've been thinking...I really thought you were dead when I heard about the accident." Shoto said. "And I can't really imagine a world without you. So Reiko...will you please go out with me, be my girl?"
Reiko laughed. "It took you long enough to ask Shoto. Of course."
Though even in her joy at finally being noticed by her long time crush, Reiko turned over the events of last night in her brain. Enji, at least, saw her die. If he saw her again, he would surely attempt to finish the job.
Reiko was no superhero. In fact just the idea of donning a suit and doing acts of heroism with her powers appalled her. She was a kitsune, a creature who enjoyed playing tricks on humans and hoarding shiny treasures.
She looked at Shoto as he helped her gather her things. But when it came to protecting the man she loved, was she willing to become Kitsune?