To superpierce, the whole point of finding his "Spirit Animal" for the Druidic magic [Wild Shape], was like becoming an Animagus in Harry Potter; of course, while Harry Potter is basically "black face" to Homo Magi in the DCU, Dungeons & Dragons is actually "culturally acceptable"; that "Goldilocks Zone" between "too serious" and "too fantastical".
The reason he has more than a single transformation, is because [Wild Shape] in D&D lets you turn into more than one kind of animal. There are restrictions, but in the DCU, a spell like this would require a connection to The Red; hence why he was hopped up on magical LSD for his first trip down the rabbit hole. In "The Last Frontier", his deep meditations, both with and without a peace pipe, furthered his connection to The Red because out in Alaska, he was "unburdened" like he would've been in the city, and unlike Kid Flash, he isn't of the belief that "everything HAS TO BE explained by science". Virgil is willing to accept that Magic is its own thing, or at the very least, that Magic & Science "are different dialects of the same language".
That being said, he'll never be as pliable as someone like Beast Boy, whose connection to The Red is far stronger. Bwana Beast, Animal Man, and Vixen channel the power, but Beast Boy bypasses the Law of Conservation of Mass and can even turn into ALIEN animals as long as he has what's essentially another planet's "WiFi Password".
Beast Boy turning into a big alien during Starfire's wedding in Teen Titans comes to mind, and in the comics he has way more potential than the anime/cartoon where he only saw a small handful of alien fauna. But I digress.
To Chainharte, yes, yes he did run into X-23. Spaceman and I have been planning to bring her in since… February 2, 2013 at the absolute earliest.
And why am I able to recall that down to the date? Because the Private Messaging on this site, assuming you're willing to hold onto your material, is great at record keeping. The way we brought her in changed as Young Justice: The Hunter took on a life of its own, but the intent has been there for a very long time. Virgil being a half-clone of Quiet has similarly been in the works since YJTH's earliest planning stages.
And while aesthetically this version of X-23 is the one from X-Men: Evolution, the version of The Facility isn't the one tied to Hydra, but is from the mainstream comics which frames it more as a "Boutique Bioweapons Wholesaler". Also, this version of Laura is a lot less overly sexualized; think the difference between the Wonder Woman we see in Young Justice compared to Justice League.
As for Virgil befriending Wolverine… Debatable. The story has the potential to take on a life of its own so anything I say here and now would potentially be subject to change.
As for Virgil being able to befriend Laura because he's similarly a Designer Clone, she can't smell that he's a Clone, only that he smells "like dogs and earth" which she finds strangely soothing, but because he's a Clone, he'd be able to sympathize with her in a- "Because I'm a clone too." -sort of way. Doubly-so because just like with X-23, not only did they get Virgil's gender "wrong" from the Source DNA, they also threw in some extra DNA instead of making a 1:1 clone.
To Thefallenjedi66, you're the first one to catch that Deadliest Catch reference I snuck in. I've never been huge on the show itself, only ever seeing the crossover with Mythbusters, but I know how incredibly dangerous the job is, and someone like Mercury would likely only know surface-level stuff about far-off places, whereas Emerald would at least attempt to learn about the customs.
To OmegaDelta, The Patriots are gone after Sunny infected their servers with the FOXALIVE virus in the waning stages of the Guns of the Patriots Incident.
As for Outer Heaven, assuming you mean the organization, what happened to them is the same as in the Canon, but the years have been slid back a little bit to help the events of Metal Gear fit into the Young Justice timeline.
If you were referring to Outer Haven, the Kerykeion-class submersible battleship…~
To The Viking Stranger, Virgil both supports and is supported by his "supporting cast" on an emotional level; that road runs both ways.
Virgil and Laura would lean on one another because they can both relate to the fact that they're half-clones of some legendary super-soldier with opposing genders to their Source DNA and have some extra DNA thrown into the mix. Virgil would treat Laura as a little sister figure like he does with Tina and Zatanna, and Laura would largely treat him as someone she can confide in because he's a half-clone "same as her". If she ever does become romantically interested in him, it'll only be after she is much more well-adjusted than she was in that X-Men: Evolution flashback where that music box in the park sent her off into a blood rage. Wherein she possibly killed some small children.
To Blaze1992, his "walk" was less "enthusiastic" and more along the lines of needing to "get away from it all" as he just CHEWED on everything he'd been told. Though he was able to get over the surface-level stuff, he's still shaken up by the fact that he was a Designer Clone "the entire time". Believe me, if he had Accelerated Aging thrown into the mix and Artificial Memories, he would be way more pissed like the Ultimen as seen in Justice League's "Ultimatum". As it is, because he has a "support network" waiting for him to back home, "he'll be okay".
"Will" Harper, after finding out he was a Clone, took it in the worst way possible, and he was entirely justified because he was a one-to-one copy, created explicitly to replace the original Roy. Virgil was a "Designer Clone" not made to replace his Source DNA, but to emulate them, so that's why he was able to get over it. In addition, he lived an entire "ordinary life" before finding out, so that's why he's so well-adjusted.
He's still on the crazy side of things, but let's just say that his sanity is "well within acceptable deviations, for now."
Wink.
To Cousin687, Virgil isn't a stand-in for James Heller. I did have a Young Justice/Prototype story planned once upon a time where Vincent ("Virgil" would be his alias) becomes an Evolved, but I went with the Crysis crossover instead because of how-broken someone with "Ad Hoc Adaptive Evolution, Ad Infinitum" can be.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Alaskan Wilderness
May 17, 17:56 ADT
As adamantium-coated claws began to unsheathe themselves between the knuckles flanking the Facility subject, "Laura's", middle fingers, the young man who smelled like earth and dogs had already exploded forward, practically teleporting into the Facility soldier's midst.
The first to feel his roiling ire was the one to the right, receiving a tomahawk blade to the neck. As the man gurgled on his own blood, the one on the left was rounded upon, a hunting knife spearing through his dominant forearm, loosening the grip on his rifle enough for the young man to wrestle it out of his grip with CQC. The rifle angled up under his chin and blowing the left soldier's head away in a three-shot burst, it was then turned onto the gagging man. That time, the trigger clicked impotently, the young man clicking his tongue before chucking the gun sidelong and catching the man in the face before he could bring his own weapon to bear with the last fumes of his life. Ripping the knife free from the dead man's body, he then chucked it right into the groin of the remaining soldier, a terrified squeal leaving his lips before the young man leapt up and kicked the haft of the tomahawk, biting deeper and spraying blood all over his boots.
And in a flash, less than five seconds, the two Facility soldiers were dead, both in the process of soiling themselves.
*THE LAST FRONTIER*
"From Russia with love, motherfuckers," Virgil muttered in his thickest Russian accent, putting on a show for whoever was on the other end of their comms as he cloned their signal with the iDroid.
Turning around once the progress bar reached 100%, he saw the brunette girl staring at him with a focused gaze, but what really caught his eye were the foot-long silver blades protruding from her knuckles.
His hackles immediately returned to their upright position, the teen leaping back and brandishing his tomahawk and hunting knives both. The mixed-breed girl's eyes widening as she got her claws up into a stance, after several long moment she took a step back, slowly retracting her claws, the corners of her mouth curling upwards into the parody of a smile as though she'd never done so recreationally.
Virgil, after realizing the girl had no desire to fight him, sheathed his own weapons in turn, rolling the soldiers onto their bellies and leaving a little something special behind before motioning for the girl to follow him.
*TWENTY-THREE*
On the quickened hike back to the sled, the two exchanged names. The girl's was Laura, but Virgil answered-
"I'm Vee."
"Vee…" the girl rolled on her tongue.
Best to create some sense of professional separation until things settled down.
"So, those were bad guys, right?"
"Sarah says so."
"I see."
Not a lot to go on.
"For now, we should keep moving. No telling how long we have until they put choppers in the air."
"They won't?"
"Why?"
"Because I'll smell them coming from a mile away."
Meta-human. Got it.
"Can you tell me about yourself?"
*TWENTY-THREE*
Elsewhile, back with the two bodies…
"X-23 slipped the net. I repeat, X-23 has slipped the net," one agent in similar arctic camo said into his radio as he and two others came upon the flat-lined agents.
"Prepare the bodies for evac, clean the site."
"Roger," the man said as he grabbed one of the men by the ankles and dragged him away, a metallic sphere rolling out under the first, its safety lever springing open.
*TWENTY-THREE*
*Boom*
"What was that?" Laura blinked from the front of the sled as the echo of an explosion went off in the middling distance.
"Sounds like my booby trap went off," Virgil hummed dismissively.
You don't gallivant around the woods with automatic weapons and no insignias with kill orders unless you were doing something suspicious.
"Do you have any trackers on you?"
"Huh?"
"Do you, have any tracking implants, on your person?"
"No. Sarah deactivated it before we separated."
And that doesn't sound portentious.
"Where did you separate from?"
"The Facility."
'What the fuck did I stumble onto…?' he gawked internally. "Hang tight. I need to make a call."
*TWENTY-THREE*
The Bunker: Communications
May 17, 22:03 EST
" . . . Hey," Grif spoke up.
"Yeah?" Simmons asked back.
"You ever wonder why we're here?"
"We're here because your fat ass got caught sleeping on the job!" Simmons cried.
"I wasn't sleeping, I was meditating!" Grif cried.
"You weren't meditating, you were napping! I know the difference!"
The next moment, Simmons' console chimed.
"Alaska? Who the fuck do we know that's in Alaska?" Grif asked incredulously.
"Shut up, Grif, I'm working," Simmons said putting on the headset. "Establishing Codec link, aaaand… Field asset, please establish your identity for the record."
"Nerd," Grif stage-whispered, Simmons slapping furiously at him.
"This is Special Agent Washington reporting from the Alaskan border."
"We read you loud and clear, Washington. What's the nature of your emergency?"
"I really stepped into the shit. I'm talking shady black ops guys with no insignias and kill-on-sight orders for any hikers, kind of shit."
"Aw dude, did they go out like bitches, or was it slow and painful?" Grif asked eagerly.
"Had to make it quick. There were more on our tail, but I left them a little gift," the youngest of the Freelancers replied. "These guys are either extra-governmental or PMCs, leaning toward PMC. Their weapons were Nanomachine-locked to their users, primary armaments seemed to be M4s, not that mass-produced government shit."
"Do you require extraction?"
"I can give these guys the runaround for a day or so, 'specially after I modded the sled, but the kid I helped, Laura, I got some info from her I need to pass up the ladder."
"Alrighty, then. Just plug it into your iDroid and I'll prepare for a burst transmission."
"Copy that."
After a minute of fiddling about on the other end, a progress bar appeared on-screen. It wasn't for the real-time transmission of the data itself, more for the preparation of the data to be scrambled before it was sent out in a single, untraceable "burst". Without the cipher at FoxCry HQ, anyone who did intercept it would get an unintelligible mess they'd need "half a century" to brute force via supercomputer, leaving Codec as one of the safest means of covert information transmission even now.
The process took several long minutes, potentially hinting at the sheer volume of information being prepared for transmission. Grif on the edge of his seat and stuffing his face, Simmons remained perched over his console, the chime of a successful data transmission into a partitioned server going off.
"Filyss, go over the data in quarantine and see if there are any flagged keywords. Try and figure out who these people are."
"Scanning now," the Freelancer AI replied, a progress bar steadily rising before a long list of earmarked words appeared on the screen, Simmons skimming over them before muttering-
"Son of a bitch…"
"Son of a bitch?" Grif blinked as he leaned in to read before the two cried out-
"SON OF A BITCH!"
*TWENTY-THREE*
Alaskan Wilderness
May 17, 18:10 ADT
Back in Alaska, Laura held onto the dog sled the two of them were pulled by the dozen loyal hounds. Looking over her shoulder, the girl's resting face almost goggled at the fact that they were barely leaving any tracks behind, be it from the sled or the dogs.
Back before she'd mounted up, she saw Vee doing… something to the runners of the dog sled. Looked like he was carving into them with a knife. Before she could voice any concerns, they were off, leaving nary a trail behind them as he let the dogs find their own path, a piece of military hardware in his hand as he muttered under his breath.
Picking up on the fact that whoever he was had friends in high places, she reached into her leather bodysuit and held up the hard drive that Sarah insisted she protect with her life. Information that would bring the Facility low.
The young man accepted the offering, plugging it into his device which she soon recognized as an anachronistic piece of Cold War technology; an iDroid.
Following a chime and more muttering, he then put the iDroid into his coat pocket, passing the hard drive back to her.
Laura almost questioned what the point was, but then realized that as long as she had the physical drive on her person, the Facility couldn't be sure if the information had been passed along or not without examining the contents of the drive. Assuming the method of information transfer left any traces of it being copied if it weren't transferred outright.
Mulling over these thoughts as the hours went by, they soon stopped to both eat and give the sled dogs succor.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Alaskan Wilderness
May 17, 20:21 ADT
"Sorry for running you guys so ragged, but I'm going to need a bit more out of you, okay?" Virgil asked after filling the dogs' bowls, his eyes glancing over his shoulder to ensure they weren't yet being followed.
Though he had a name to put to the faces, there wasn't a doubt in their mind that those Facility guys were cut from the same cloth as Blackwatch; the same Neo Nazi assholes that'd plagued his nightmares more than once these past several months.
Even now, it chewed him up having left Dana behind in that place, but there was work that only she could do, and him getting the Suit away from Blackwatch was of equal paramount. While there had been little possibility of them being able to replicate something so-complex in-house, if Mercer got his hands on it and somehow became even more powerful…
And of course, it wasn't like back then, he'd have ever known his life would spiral so far away from normalcy as it had; not that he was complaining. He'd met amazing people, been to all sorts of places, experienced all sorts of new things, and somewhere along the way he'd even fallen in love.
Or at least what his still-immature self could interpret as such. And while it was true that he'd also developed strong feelings for Gaige, at least within the bounds of the "Accords", they weren't exactingly the same things he felt for Athena. It was unfair to "compare" the two because Athena and Gaige weren't interchangeable; like apples & oranges, cakes & pie, J-Pop & Alt Rock. And that Athena who had every right to be just a bit selfish about that sort of thing was cool with him quote/unquote "pampering" another girl, with wiggle-room for more in the future as long as they passed muster…
Of course, the recent revelation that Emerald had become enamored with him, after a sorts, was still something he was chewing over. He hadn't intended to make her fall for him, and it certainly wasn't his intention to abuse the fact that she was so touch-starved, given her spotty past as a street rat like something out of Aladdin. And of course, there was the whole thing with Gwendolyn asking him to literally fuck her in exchange for her Plus One for the New Years Party…
All things and more he would have to confront as soon as he got out of this mess. And if there was one good thing coming out of it all, it was that Laura wasn't giving off an iota of the sexual energy that girls like Zatanna or - Earth Mother forbid - Gwendolyn directed towards him. She was cute now, but compared to Zatanna who would grow up to be "h-o-t, hot", he guessed that when fully matured, Laura would become handsome in the same way Wonder Woman was. A different kind of beauty, but beautiful, nonetheless.
Which was why he would do all he could to make sure Laura didn't wind up on some laboratory slab or whatever it was these Facility nutjobs intended to do to her.
"You…" Laura spoke up, piercing through his musings with the tone of that singular word. "You're like me, aren't you?"
Though she framed it as a question, it was closer to her stating an indelible fact she was absolutely assured of.
"Depends on what you're referring," he said finishing up with the dogs as he took stock of his inventory. Aside from his bow and arrows, he also had…
"You were trained to be a weapon. A different kind of weapon, but still a weapon."
"Maybe…" Virgil admitted, still coming to grips with the whole 'Designer Clone' thing. Though he supposed the only thing it really changed, was that he knew a bit more about where he came from.
And the fact that this Hargreave guy had the means to make "more", meant he wasn't some kind of lynchpin expected to "Luke Skywalker" his way through some future war; because you don't train up soldiers for peacekeeping. You train up soldiers for war.
Of course, unlike Palpatine who could set off the Clone Wars whenever he damn well wanted, even if Obi-Wan did catch him with his pants down and set the whole thing off early, Hargreave had no clue when this future war would happen, only that it would. Hence why he was making clones in real-time, generation by generation. And the fact that they could breed, unlike Snake, also meant that modified DNA could be spread around, at least in part.
Diluted super-soldier DNA, was still super-soldier DNA.
"What about you? What kind of 'weapon' do you want to be?"
" . . . I don't know," the little girl admitted. "Sarah wanted better for me, but I don't even know what 'better' is."
"But you wouldn't be running away from the Facility if you wanted to stay."
" . . . Yeah," she nodded, her attention piqued when she was passed an MRE.
"Chili & Macaroni?"
The handsome girl's stomach growled within her black all-leather outfit, and instead of blushing, she simply drooled a little.
*TWENTY-THREE*
The Bunker: War Room
May 17, 22:34 EST
It was all hands on deck at FoxCry's headquarters as all available Freelancers were summoned to the War Room, either from their beds or their late nights. While the Bludhaven station was considered cushy within the ranks of CryNet, there were still times when a mission had to be seen to ASAP regardless of resting state.
This, was one such time.
"At three past twenty-two-hundred Eastern Standard Time, Special Agent Washington established contact with this girl," Miller stated as she thumbed the clicker, the hologram screen revealing a dossier of one 'Laura Kinney', officially designated X-23. "She doesn't look like much on the surface, but she's a high-tier product from The Facility, a Weapon X branch that curtails to the private client sector for those of you not in the know."
A few of the Freelancers shifted uncomfortably, having confronted such abominations directly or indirectly in the past. Sure, this Laura girl looked normal, but that could all be a façade. For all they knew, she was carrying a germ bomb that only targeted black people. Or only white people. Or everyone but black and white people. Or only black and white people.
With GenTec's ethnically-cleansing bioweapons, anything was fair game.
"Given The Facility has been harassing H&RB more than once over the past few years, doubly-so because the Patriots are no longer around to keep them in line, now that we have some actionable intel on them that correlates with our own, we've been given a unique opportunity to strike back. Maybe even put them down for good," Miller went on to say. "We won't be taking out the best that Weapon X has to offer, but this will be a start. If we can get a DataMiner into their systems…"
"So we know where their homebase is?" Wyoming asked, grooming his mustache.
"We have actionable intel that points in that direction," Miller nodded. "We also have potential insights as to their defending staff, but until we know who is and isn't out in the field tracking X-23, we can't know for certain," she said pulling up more dossiers, all of them marked as Meta-Humans.
"What about Washington? Who will exfiltrate?" CT asked worriedly.
"We have Agent Alaska and the new Asset en route. Once they deal with The Facility's away force in the state, they'll retreat to California where another Agent in the area will coordinate their cross-country exfiltration back to Bludhaven. Washington put on a bit of a show for them, so The Facility will think that 'the Russians' are getting involved, at the most optimistic."
"Well then what're we waiting for? Let's go and kill these fuckers!" South grinned eagerly, Maine chittering in agreement off to the side.
"Hold on a sec, sis. Aren't we forgetting someone?" North inquired.
"Code Talker and any sensitive materials have already been extracted from the field, and the Blackfoot Tribe have been alerted to keep their guard up. C.E.L.L. operatives are also being moved nearby in case there's any blowback, and since The Facility is highly illegal, there won't be any legal recourse as long as we can keep it to a quiet holler."
"So we'll be hitting them from two directions then…" Carolina hummed as she read up on The Facility's meta-powered staff, both sentient and non.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Alaskan Wilderness
May 17, 22:07 ADT
"Estimate of sunrise… 5 minutes after 0500 hours…" Virgil muttered tiredly as he and Laura dogsled through the Alaskan wilderness, deep in Nyx's embrace with only the waxing crescent moon overhead bathing the snowy expanse in a pale light.
Of course, Virgil had to shrug off his own exhaustion because all he'd been doing the past few hours was riding the sled; the dogs were doing all the hard work! And even after modifying the sled by carving rune after rune into the runners and the body to not only muffle their trail but to ease their burden, the dogs were beginning to reach their limits.
Sled dogs weren't meant to run more than a couple hours without a break, and those were the day-to-day variety. If he had a team of professional racing dogs with him, who could cover more than 100 miles a day, that'd be a whole other story, but this was meant to only be a pleasure trip! Something to test his survival skills! Not a run for his life from amoral PMC scumbags who turn little girls into living weapons!
Story of his fucking life…!
*Fshhhhhhhh!*
"A flare! Fuck!" Virgil swore as a brilliant pyrotechnic flame bathed pockets of the surrounding area in golden light.
"They're here…" Laura swore as her eyes snapped open. "Satellites. They must've hijacked a satellite. Or at the very least borrowed one."
"From space? Fuck, I don't have anything to stop that!" Virgil swore as he pulled the dogs to a stop within a copse of trees before severing the ganglines with a muttered word. Swiftly metamorphosing into a pitch-black hound, he conversed with the twelve sled dogs in a language Laura couldn't understand. The Huskies actually nodding in return, a moment later they split off in all directions as pairs, leaving Virgil and Laura alone with the supplies. "Letting them go is the most I can do for them. They'll get home in their own time, or they won't, but for now, we're on our own," Virgil muttered as he grabbed his armaments and miscellaneous magical catalysts.
After loading himself down, he drew his wand and muttered- "Wons dnuom." -, causing a pile of snow to smother the sled, indistinguishable from every other snowy hill nearby. What followed was an invocation of- "Etihw sa wons." -as he twirled his wand overhead, his and Laura's attire magically changing to the same white as the nearby snow, Laura's eyes blinking in amazement.
"Can you smell any of them?" Virgil asked as he helped Laura do up her hair into a bun.
"Their deodorant would've worn off by now if they didn't refresh it," the brunette answered as she pulled a formerly-black, now-white, facemask over her head with minimal armor around the eyes, which were covered in formerly-dark lenses with red pinprick eyes and beige armor like a domino mask.
"Then we change the battleground," Virgil muttered as heh pulled up his iDroid, drinking in the surrounding area before pointing his wand at the flares and muttering- "Nrub tou."
For an instant, the flares burned doubly-bright, but then extinguished all at once, bathing the area in black.
Unironically, this feat was paralleled by Virgil falling to his knees, the cost of snuffing out military-grade pyrotechnics with magic greater than he anticipated.
"Vee?" Laura asked as she caught him.
"I'm… I'm fine…" Virgil panted as he dug into his sling bag and choked down a strip of reindeer jerky, his stamina magically replenishing itself as it hit his stomach.
Why, you may ask?
Food Calorimetry, the act of determining the number of calories per gram of food by burning it, was something he had learned back when he was still in the public school system. It'd always been there in the back of his mind, largely forgotten and never seeing any sort of practical use until he started dipping his toes into Lifestyle Magic.
Something he learned during his pursuits the past few months, was that when the same foods were prepared in two batches -one Mundane and one Magical-, the food prepared with partial or even complete use of Magic, burned more excitedly than that without. A chocolate chip cookie for example burned fairly bright, but its magically-made equivalent was like a tiny Molotov going off in front of him.
The early fruits of his research, which it could be called because he wrote it down like a proper scientist, was magically-dried strips of reindeer meat as calorie-superior field rations. It wasn't a 1:1 preservation of invested Mana as he took it back into himself, but even a 0.5:1 conversion rate was better than nothing at all, since no non-magical ration could help replenish the deficit of energy that came with using magic.
Reason he went with jerky instead of cookies, was because jerky had more staying power in a ruck sack instead of becoming a crumbled mess.
That aside, what it meant, was that he could get on his feet again after making The Facility think they'd gotten a faulty batch of pyrotechnics from their supplier.
"Alright, Laura," Virgil said as he dug into his bag of tricks. "Just stay behind me, and maybe we'll both get out of his alive."
*TWENTY-THREE*
"Team One, switching to thermals."
"Team Two, switching to thermals."
"Team Three, switching to thermals."
"Team Four, switching to thermals."
"Team Five, switching to thermals," the leader of another group of four told their superiors at The Facility after their flares burned out prematurely.
"Field teams, be advised that 'The Russian' is an unknown quantity. Proceed with caution."
"Roger that," the leader of Team Five nodded.
*Fwoowoowoowoo-Thump*
"Grenade!" one of Team Five cried as something round and dark struck the snow in the midst of their formation.
Instead of shrapnel however, what was unleashed was a radial wave of freezing river water that soaked the four of them to the bone. The leader of that squad, first to get up even as he shivered uncontrollably, blinked at the sight of a stone fragment with odd etchings on it before his world exploded into light.
*TWENTY-THREE*
*KATHOOOOM!*
"Control, this is Team Four. Russian is a Meta. Repeat: Russian is a Meta," the leader of that team called in as a bolt of lightning shot between the tree line and struck Team Five's last known position, four sets of vitals flatlining instantly.
"Team Four, we're losing vitals. Status report!" the man heard over comms, whirling around to see that the man at the rear of their formation had an arrow sticking through one ear and out the other like an April Fool's prop, the two in front of their rearguard getting an arrow into the heart under the armpit and another through the nape of their neck before he whipped up his rifle and caught a fourth arrow, only for a fifth to take him in the knee.
*TWENTY THREE*
"Teams Four and Fiver terminated. I repeat. Four and Five have been terminated. Close in but exercise caution. Establish line-of-sight until we know what we're facing."
"Roger."
"Moving in."
As the three remaining teams in the immediate area moved in on Team Four and Five's last known positions, based on the fact that they were eliminated in rapid succession, none noticed the snowy hill that hadn't been there as of the previous orbital scan.
*TWENTY THREE*
"Will this really work?"
-mouthed Laura, after pulling up the bottom of her mask, as she and Virgil sat inside a squat igloo woven with snow and magic, the floor packed down to give them more room, with two rabbit burrow-shaped tunnels serving as ventilation with carved runes in front of each.
"Number one rule in stage magic; misdirection."
-mouthed Virgil in turn.
And compared to extinguishing military-grade pyrotechnics, making an igloo with a few life hacks was a snap.
'Of course, this ruse only lasts as long as it takes for someone to notice the discrepancy…' he thought to himself as he used his iDroid to eavesdrop on their comms and the comm units themselves, the map around them highlighted with little red triangles, their igloo conspicuously absent as of the previous satellite scan. 'If it's eyes-only, that's one thing, but if they have computer-assisted tracking, that's another…'
Drawing out a piece of moose bone and carving tool from his bag of tricks, right as he began to get to work, Laura shimmied behind him and wrapped her limbs around him.
"Uhhhhh…?"
"You're warm," the brunette muttered as she pressed her face into his back like she were the big spoon.
" . . . Yeah, that's fair," Virgil hummed as he pat one of her hands before returning to his thankless task, part of him wondering just when he'd become surrounded by emotionally-damaged girls, while another wondered how-much magic he'd have to whip out on these guys.
Sure, he could use a smattering of Fey-like curses to give them ass' heads, like in the old stories, possibly...! But he wasn't fond of leaving fingerprints lying around; magical or otherwise.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Alaskan Wilderness
May 18, 05:09 ADT
"How the hell did you lose them? We had satellite coverage on the area all night, so we know they're still in there," a woman not wearing the same uniform as the others demanded crossly.
The woman, Kimura, was tall and impressively built not unlike Wonder Woman, her black hair drawn back in dreadlocks, her brown skin bearing a darker red pigmentation from the augmentation procedures The Facility performed on her so she could keep X-23 in line. She was clad in white winter camouflage like those under her command, but with a circular cleavage window for reasons no man or woman below her was brave-enough to inquire about. At the moment she was equipped with a bow gun, a high-powered rifle, and grenades, but she was capable of wielding nearly every weapon in The Facility's arsenal.
The intent was to retrieve X-23 alive, abandon all current plans and instead brainwash her like her source material had been in the original Weapon X program, but as long as the girl's brain was intact, a little collateral damage was within acceptable tolerances.
"No idea, ma'am. That Russian's a crafty one. Might have a castoff from one of the Flash's villains too," one of the soldiers replied.
"Did the Flash ever have a thunder guy?"
"What about the guy with the stick?"
"Nah, if he had some of Weather Wizard's swag, there'd have been storm clouds."
"So how'd he fry Team Five like a toaster in a bathtub?"
"Enough!" the woman demanded. "The good doctor," she spat, "may've disabled the subdermal tracker, and even been smart-enough to check for the one she wasn't told about, but X-23 is in there, and we will get her back. Is that understood?"
"Yes, ma'am!" the men saluted as they resumed their patrols.
"Kimura, this is mission control. Come in."
"I hear you," Kimura said with a finger to her ear.
"We may have found a discrepancy in our orbital surveillance."
"Explain."
"Hngh! *BLURRRGH!* Agh! *BLURRRRT!*" -a new sound cut in.
"Ugh, what the hell? Who left their comms on?!" Kimura demanded as she reflexively plugged her nose, hers and the rest of her men's ears assaulted with the sound every soldier who'd ever choked down a bad MRE knew by heart.
The sound of a man who was soul-shreddingly constipated…!
*TWENTY-THREE*
"Alright, that should buy us a minute, maybe two," Virgil said as he and Laura got ready to abandon their hiding place, his iDroid playing [Soldier with Stomachache] in his breast pocket.
"Why do you even have that recording?" Laura blinked incredulously; something she'd never had cause to do until that exact moment.
"Electronic warfare ammo," Virgil replied with a completely straight face behind his own mask, collapsing their igloo atop the magical catalyst he'd prepared with a sub-spoken word. "Come on. We don't want to be here when my special surprise wakes up."
"You mean the moose bone with the grenade strapped to it?"
"Yeah, that's the one," Virgil nodded, taking Laura by the hand as the collapsed snow bound began to writhe.
*TWENTY-THREE*
*Thud*
*Thud*
*Thud*
*Thud*
*THUD!*
*THUD!*
*THUUUD!*
"What the hell's going on now?" Kimura groaned, her hind-brain wondering whether to punish the idiot who'd left his comms on or if he'd been punished enough.
"M-Ma'am, was X-23 always this strong?" one of the soldiers gulped as tree after tree in front of them was knocked over, each one closer than the last.
"The Russian must be making his move…" Kimura hummed before she pounded her knuckles together. "Bad move. He's thrown himself right into my lap!" she grinned, her eyes shining with malice.
A shadow stomping towards them through the copse of trees, in the earliest dawn light, the veritable wall of shadow obscured their identity in near totality, the knocked-over trees offering only the barest glimpses at what lay within.
"G-G-G…! G-G-G-G-G!" one of the Facility soldiers stuttered moments later as the thing finally came into the light.
"Cohen, you're coming in choppy. Please repeat."
"GOLEEEEM!" the Facility soldier cried as flashbacks to story time with his grandmother came to the forefront as the hulking behemoth of snow and permafrost loomed over them.
"Huh… Didn't see that coming…" Kimura hummed as the thing stood there. Menacingly!
The thing was ten feet tall, humanoid in shape with a mound-like head, its eye sockets empty and cavernous. It was comprised almost entirely of snow-dappled permafrost, a mantle of frosty snow worn like a poncho over its head and shoulders. If anyone were alive long-enough after the fact to comb through the body cam footage, they'd see that the Permafrost Golem had a silhouette disturbingly similar to that of Dr. Banner aka "The Incredible Hulk".
Albeit, an amateurish recreation of that distinctive physique.
*TWENTY-THREE*
"AGH!"
"AAAAAUGH!"
"KILL IT WITH FIRE!"
"Huh… I'm surprised magic villains don't use golem more…" Virgil hummed as he eavesdropped the chaos unfolding at his and Laura's backs.
Tuning out the sounds of grenades and gunfire, the teen drew three arrows from his quiver, planted two in the snow, and nocked the third. Letting out a long exhale, his mother's Parasite power honing his visual acuity to superhuman levels, his gaze threaded the trees before him, and a moment later, an arrow.
Right as the first arrowhead found home through a human neck, the second arrow had already been loosed. The second soldier falling to his knees with an arrow through his Adam's apple, the third soldier rounded on the trees, raised his rifle, and got an arrow through the eye as his gunshots flew wide.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Elsewhile, The Facility swiftly found out that bullets were less than super-effective against golems. Grenades on the other hand, were able to blast off the crust of ice and permafrost to expose what one genre-savvy soldier identified as the "core".
Kimura, the best-equipped there to handle direct hits from the hulking berserk construct, weathered the blows and wrenched the rune-etched bone free from where the thing's heart would've been.
Any plans to examine the core and possibly repurpose it for the Facility's purposes were swiftly dashed, however, when a live grenade came away from the body as well, going off in the woman's face and showering her with bone and metal fragments.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Inbound Flight
May 18, 05:32 ADT
Elsewhere, as Special Agent Washington and X-23 were breaking through The Facility's on-field cordon, two men were astride one of C.E.L.L.'s light reconnaissance advanced aerial transports on an intercept.
Sitting on one side was a tall, athletically-built man dressed head-to-toe in white winter camo of a different strain from what The Facility's forces were wearing. His attire was thermally insulated, his distinctive equipment being a golden visor going across the eyes, a long-ranged silenced sniper rifle, and two collapsible tomahawks.
Sitting on the other side was a small figure bound neck to toe in a black leather straightjacket, a white winter camo jacket thrown over it, the sleeves of the straightjacket spilling further out, and thick boots on his feet. His face was obscured by a military-grade gas mask placed upon a larger-than-normal head, with a large afro of messy black hair spilling out in all directions.
"Alright, boys, we're approaching the first drop point," their pilot announced through the speaker as the rear door lowered, the winds howling and colored lights illuminating the stocked backpacks.
"Looks like this is my stop," the C.E.L.L. Freelancer, codenamed 'Alaska', said as he got to his feet and equipped his aerial gear. "You remember your mission?"
*Hissssss*Hurrrrr*
"Glad to hear it," Alaska said as he leapt from the craft, skydiving for several moments before pulling the ripcord, a diamond-shaped kite the same color as the sky overhead unfurling to full wingspan, the collapsing handlebars allowing him to more-effectively control his descent.
"Now approaching second drop point," the ship's pilot instructed, a crimson psychokinetic aura making the gas mask-wearing figure's safety harness unbuckle before he rose from his seat and floated out the rear door, descending into the wild blue yonder without a 'chute'.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Elsewhile, Virgil was sniping the Facility's forces with his bow and reclaiming the arrows with magic. The inscribed runes helped to shortchange the cost, and his magic hadn't been idle these past couple months in Alaska, but in the height of battle, it was still proving taxing as he reaped lives like wheat to the scythe.
"Vee, why haven't we broken through, already?" Laura asked, laying prone in the snow as he eyed his next targets.
"If we break through in one direction, everyone will know about it. We just need to cause as much confusion as possible until reinforcements arrive."
"And when will that be?"
"No clue. I'm trying to stay radio silent," he said looking down into his iDroid, no other friendly IFF signals present.
*CRACK!*
"Shit, they saw us! Time for Plan B!" he swore as a nearby tree got shot.
Turning on his heel and throwing Laura over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, he took one of the few remaining Butterfly Kisses from his supply and slapped it against his neck, the skin around his eyes darkening and his latent Parasite powers brimmed to the surface before he exploded into motion, faster than any snowmobile as he hauled ass through the Alaskan wilderness.
*TWENTY-THREE*
"Kimura, we've got a runner!"
"Yeah, I hear ya," the woman replied as she picked the last of the bone fragments out of her hair. "What direction?"
"West by northwest, at a massively accelerated clip. Orbital's gonna have a hard time keeping track of him, but they've got him."
"How fast are we talking?" she asked as she primed a high-tech-looking chromed cylinder.
"Meta-levels of fast. Definitely faster than we can run on foot through the snow."
"Then it's a good thing I'm not walking," she said throwing the cylinder out. Seconds later, a sunset-colored hole in space-time tore itself into the air before depositing a frost-covered shipping crate in front of her, crushing the beacon. Explosive bolts allowing one of the side panels to fall into the snow, she and those around her grabbed some weapons, mounted the snowmobiles, and were off.
The tech was expensive as hell when it wasn't the original brew, impossible to make a profit with in the drug trade, but for clandestine bulk equipment drops, it was almost second to none.
*TWENTY-THREE*
*Sniff*
*Sniff-Sniff*
"They've brought snowmobiles," Laura said holding onto a resting face behind her mask, wondering why some part of her wanted to whoop and holler at the exhilarating speeds she was being carried at.
"Special Agent Washington."
"I hear you," he subvocalized at the voice in his ear.
"We have reinforcements incoming. On my mark, change bearings to North by Northeast."
"Copy."
"Mark."
"Synch."
Changing course into another copse of trees, the Facility soldiers on their trail were swift to follow, bullets whizzing by and clipping his and Laura's bodies by only the barest of margins.
The moment the two vanished into the treeline, a thick cyan-colored mist spilled out, turning that stretch of forest into something from a fantasy novel.
*TWENTY-THREE*
"Pheh. Damn ruskie's just full of tricks, ain't he?" Kimura huffed as she slowed her snowmobile's clips as they weaved between the trees. "Activate thermals," she said slipping a pair of goggles over her eyes. "We're getting that girl back today, or it's all your asses."
"Yes, ma'am!" the men under her command nodded, their thermals doing… not much of anything to peer through the trees, actually…
"What was that?!" one of the soldiers suddenly yelped, firearm raised.
"Hey, watch where you point that thing, you idiot!"
"AH! HOW'D IT GET SO CLOSE!"
And the next moment there was gunfire.
*TWENTY-THREE*
When Virgil made to rendezvous with his reinforcements, he hardly expected for it to be preceded by telepathic contact of the benevolent variety.
Doubly-so when he realized just who was there to meet them.
Anyone who'd ever met the man could immediately tell it was Edgar Cizko behind the gas mask and leather strait jacket. However, the air he carried himself with as he floated mere feet above the snow was a marked difference from the Dr. Psycho shown in that infamous YouTube video where he threw hands with Wonder Woman.
And if the man's apparent rebranding was even remotely what Virgil thought it was, he was debating whether it was ironic or candid.
'Hello there, Washburn. Or do you prefer 'Washington' while you're working?'
'Oh… So you were told, then…' Virgil thought back as he felt Dr. Psycho's words gliding across his mind like a silk ribbon.
Part of him wondered if all telepathic communication felt like that, or if it was only because someone as sweet and wholesome as M'gann had whet his teeth on the concept.
'I would've figured it out eventually. They probably told me as a trust-building measure,' Dr. Psycho, now Psycho Mantis, returned.
'And… how exactly do you feel about that?'
'I think it was an indictment of the American higher education system that you were able to make that breakthrough when so many so-called "psychologists" tried and failed to help me through my issues,' the floating man replied. 'Honestly, your words were like the first knot on a tangle of Christmas lights. Once that was undone, the rest was easy. Almost startlingly so.'
'Well… Glad to hear it,' Virgil hummed awkwardly. 'Really, I'm glad to have someone like you in my corner.'
'Honestly, I'm just happy my expertise is being appreciated,' Psycho Mantis returned with a nod of his head before turning his masked gaze toward the sound of snowmobiles.
'What are you making them see?' Virgil asked, taking a wild guess at what the man was doing.
'Enough.'
'Well that isn't cryptic at all…'
" . . . I feel like I'm missing out on something," Laura hummed off to the side as the two men in winter gear nonverbally conversed.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Kimura's assigned soldiers had been all but useless, the lot of them going stark raving mad as they shot at monsters that weren't actually there.
Riding through the copse of trees and breaking through to a large clearing, an evil smile pulled at Kimura's features as she beheld her quarry and the one who had been helping in her flight.
He was little older than X-23 herself, clad in all black, possibly from one of The Facility's rival companies overseas.
There was little need to take him alive, but she was sure the eggheads back at the lab would appreciate her dragging enough back they could reprogram. And even if he died in transit, they could just reverse-engineer whatever gave him his meta-abilities, turn them to The Facility's own purposes.
"Laura! Run!" the Russian agent ordered in passable English as he brandished a P90.
X-23 scrambling across the snowy ground, a panicked expression momentarily visible on her unmasked face, Kimura smirked wickedly as she strolled through the hail of 28mm cartridges. The fear in the Russian agent's eyes growing as she closed the distance between them, when she smacked his SMG out of his hands, he retaliated with an overhead knife strike to her left tit, her mammary jiggling as the knife bounced off.
"How cute~" she sneered before striking him across the face with a mighty blow, scattering teeth and blood across the snow.
*TWENTY-THREE*
"It's so weird looking at this from the outside," Virgil hummed as Kimura pinned a nonexistent enemy to the ground with her knee, beating aforementioned nonexistent enemy within an inch of his life.
"It's weirder from the inside looking out," Dr. Psycho hummed, crimson eldritch energies forming a tether between his and Kimura's heads.
"So she isn't questioning… anything she's seeing?" Laura asked, having picked up on what was going on fairly quickly.
"The more up-their-own-ass a person is, the more vulnerable they are to psychic attacks," Dr. Psycho waved off. "Of course, it also helps that her own mind is being co-opted to make the illusion."
"So like… instead of putting something you've seen but she hasn't in her own head, you're using what she expects from her own head, in front of her eyes…?" Virgil groused, not sure he was finding the right words.
"More or less," Dr. Psycho shrugged. "It's like what those sham psychics do on TV, letting the other guy fill in the blanks."
"You know…" Laura hummed as Kimura finished wailing on 'the Russian' and moved onto 'X-23' herself. "I always thought she'd be stronger than that. Against PK, I mean."
"Like I said, being up your own ass, and having a lot of willpower, aren't interchangeable," Dr. Psycho hummed as Kimura imagined herself ripping Laura's Adamantium talons out, and then proceeded to beat her within an inch of her life.
After about a minute of spectating what was probably quite graphic from the other side, the ice of the frozen-over lake Kimura had been lured onto finally gave way, the physically-invulnerable woman crashing below the ice, flailing frantically out of the water before she began to sink out of view.
"So… wait, that's it? She's just… gone?" Laura blinked at the anticlimactic conclusion.
"Yup," Dr. Psycho hummed as the woman's muscles locked up and hypothermia set in. "Honestly, it was almost too easy. Barely had to lift a finger," he said waggling his pinkie. "Do you wanna see her off, orrrr…?"
" . . . I need to see the body. I need to be sure," Laura said as she crossed her arms and hugged herself, a hand coming to rest on her shoulder causing her to look up at Virgil, baleful crimson eyes meeting steely jade.
"I'll go with you. I'd rather confirm the kill too," Virgil nodded as he waved his hand, the Ring-Wand under his glove thrumming with power and hardening the ice on their path with a subvocalized incantation. Something that was very easy because it was already so-cold.
The two spent a somber minute walking out onto the ice, Laura holding onto Virgil's hand like a lifeline both for the emotional support, and because the ice was still slippery beneath their boots.
When they arrived at the hole that Kimura fell through, the two slowly tip-toed forward, looking for the body-
*Splash!*
"Son of a bitch!" Virgil swore as a soggy hand shot up to grab his and Laura's ankles, one apiece, the feral woman, now practically blue-skinned, pulling herself out of the water with a manic gleam in her eye.
"I g-g-g-g-got you n-n-n-n-now-"
"NOT TODAY, BITCH!" Virgil howled as something in Laura's expression made him explode into a primal fury, his crimson eyes turning reptilian gold with slits. Dark-green scales creeping up his wrists from under his fingernails and supplanting the gloves he wore, the next moment he hooked his thumbs into Kimura's open mouth and pushed her down.
The woman's eyes wide with panic, right as she began to bite into the scaly opposable digits letting icy water in, Laura dove in with a vengeful fury in her eyes. Every torture and indignity she'd ever experienced at the woman's hands coming to the forefront of her mind, a single metallic claw shot out between her middle and ring fingers with a distinctive *SNIKT!*
"Well, if that isn't a wholesome family bonding moment, I don't know what is~" Dr. Psycho sighed wistfully as he watched the young girl scoop Kimura's eye out of her head before the two began to co-drown the woman in earnest.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Nine long minutes later, and Kimura was well and truly dead.
A morbid part of Virgil was curious to see how-effective Kimura's "invulnerable skin" was post-mortem. What little remained of his sanity, however, reminded him that that was "serial killer skinsuit territory", and that his time and energy would be better-suited disposing of the body wholesale.
So, while Laura was scooping out Kimura's other eye to "make things easier for the fish" as she framed it, Virgil used a bit of Earth Magic to reshape a nearby boulder into a pair of cement shoes and rolled the woman back into the water. Once she was well and truly lost under the chilled water, a smidge of Ice Magic making the lake nice and frosty in her wake, the two of them and the new Psycho Mantis made their way to where the other Facility soldiers had killed one another thinking they were being attacked by Bigfoot's cousin, the Himalayan Yeti.
"Ugh, what a mess," Virgil said as he rolled over one of the bodies. "The hell'd you put in their heads?"
"Just a bit of an illusion," Dr. Psycho waved off. "They're no Wonder Woman, but they were definitely tougher nuts to crack then that Kimura chick. Course, I can't figure out why giving her super-tough skin made her mental walls like a sieve, but my money's on some kind of painful torture before or during the procedure."
"Not a great tradeoff, in my opinion," Virgil hummed as he checked their firearms, all nanomachine locked. "So, what's our next play?"
"Got a guy by the name of Alaska putting a boot up the ass of the Facility's away team," Dr. Psycho replied. "Wanna steal a snowmobile, see how he's doin'?"
*Sniff*Sniff* "I think we've tied up our loose ends over here," Laura hummed after sampling the air.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Alaskan Wilderness
May 18, 07:13 ADT
The only showing of power Virgil had ever seen from Dr. Psycho prior to now was that infamous video where he threw hands with Wonder Woman. That he could use his own Psychokinesis to fly, to keep up with a snowmobile, wasn't completely impossible in his estimation because the original Psycho Mantis could similarly fly, though none of Snake's after-action reports hinted at any kind of "speed feat"; just a whole lot of mind-fuckery and insane ramblings.
Of course, given everything the Russians did to him in the pursuit of psychokinetic super-soldiers, it was a miracle the Third Child was even partially lucid.
As soon as they arrived at the Facility's forward operating camp, courtesy of one of the dead soldier's electronic maps, they were greeted to the sight of numerous soldiers sniped from mid-range, another running from cover right at that moment only to get a thrown tomahawk into the upper back. As soon as he hit the ground, another bullet caught him behind the ear, blowing his head open like a ripe melon.
'Well… Someone's been busy,' Virgil thought from the treeline as the three of them looked down at the carnage. 'Psycho Mantis, there anyone else down there, or did Alaska get them all?'
'I mean, not that I'd be able to sus out any literal robots, but I thiiink he got them all,' the floating man replied as he gave the area a once-over.
"Alaska," Virgil subvocalized. "Can I get a status report?"
"The Facility FOB has been cleared." *click* "And I just stopped them from wiping their computers. Not that there's a whole lot to data mine we don't already have."
"Well, every bit helps," Virgil said looking at his comms. "I don't see any IDs you haven't already confirmed KIA. I assume it's safe to come down?"
"It's just us out here. Unless your little friend thinks different?"
"Laura, we have anyone else out here?"
"Anyone alive, you mean?" the stoic girl asked.
"That was the implication."
"Then no, it's just you, me, the floating guy, and the other guy with the tomahawks."
*TWENTY-THREE*
"Euugh. Smells like feces and dead people," Dr. Psycho groaned as they approached.
"Well, people shit when they die, sooo…" Virgil quipped.
"I hardly notice anymore."
" . . . "
After an awkward silence Virgil put his arms around Laura, the girl stiffening for a moment before she slowly reciprocated, burying her masked face into the chest of his Lighter Suit and holding tight.
"Awww. How nice," Dr. Psycho cooed.
"So, this is her?" Alaska asked as he came forward, his arctic camo spattered minimally with blood from where he was double-tapping.
Laura didn't hide behind Virgil, but her gloved hand definitely held tightly to his.
"Your luck is either very good, or very bad," Alaska hummed as he looked around. "It takes something really… special to step into it the way you have."
"Tell me about it…"
Laura's hand flinching against his own and the girl ripping off her mask, as she whipped her head about, nostrils flaring, everyone immediately went on edge.
"What is it?" Virgil asked as the other shoe dropped.
"Not sure. The smell is… inconsistent…" Laura answered unsurely.
Several hair-raising instants later, their party of four was upgraded to five.
He was an athletic black man, his facial hair short cropped, his eyes shielded by a pair of gold-rimmed aviators. He was clad in a knockoff Sneaking Suit colored black, a white winter camo jacket, and for some reason a tan-colored Stetson with a flashy plumed decoration on the front.
He didn't appear in a way that was heralded by a flashy burst of light or sound, he was just… there.
Hsup!
Throwing out his hand with a wordless incantation, Virgil felt a sliver of magic leave him as a blast of kinetic force was lobbed at the party crasher.
It'd have hardly done a thing against someone like Brick, or Maine, but against a normal-sized man who wasn't prepared for it, the Jedi-like forceful push did its job in stopping the man from getting his hands on Laura. An automatic win condition for a teleporter.
"Protect the girl!" Virgil ordered as he held Laura behind him with his off hand, Alaska and Psycho Mantis forming a triangle around her as the man -Kestrel as Virgil would soon learn- vanished from sight.
'Teleporters. Pain in the ass,' Dr. Psycho grumbled.
'Psycho Mantis 1 could also teleport.'
'Yeah, but I haven't started practicing.'
The next moment Kestrel appeared to Alaska's right, the man whipping out his rifle and firing a round, only to hit air.
'Oh, and just a heads-up, but I think this prick's been brain-scrubbed.'
'What, like Kimura?'
'Nah. Kimura drank the Kool-aid. This guy got waterboarded. With the Kool-aid,' Dr. Psycho thought as Kestrel came at him mid-swing with carbon fiber brass knuckles, only to bounce off the man's telekinetic shield.
"Filyss, I need info on this guy!" Virgil subvocalized as the three of them continued to repel the teleporter's advances.
"John Wraith. Codename: Kestrel. Has the psionic ability to phase-jump at will from any point in space to another with an exceptionally high range. He appears and disappears in a fashion that leaves no flashy burst of light or sound."
"Weaknesses! I need weaknesses!"
"His phase-jumping is vulnerable to electromagnetic fields."
"Hard way it is!"
Kestrel materializing in mid-air above them and diving straight for Laura's unguarded head once all other routes failed-
"ROHPSOHP!"
An explosion of light like a stun grenade erupting from the tip of Virgil's wand, Kestrel let out a startled cry. Virgil pulling Laura into his arms and leaping away right as the man passed through the space she occupied, the teleporter landed arm and then face-first with a resounding *THUD!*
"PSYCHO! ZAP HIM!"
*TWENTY-THREE*
"Well that was… anticlimactic…" Alaska hummed as Psycho Mantis retrieved his psychic tendrils from Kestrel's mind, the man now sleeping soundly after several minutes of crying in agony.
"Well, better that then having to chase a teleporter back to home base," Virgil deadpanned, he and Laura helping themselves to some MREs from Kimura's prefab. C.E.L.L. would send a forensics team by later to secure what The Facility failed to retrieve, but there was no reason not to help themselves to a nice meal.
Also, there was no greater show of dominance over a dead person you killed yourself, than by taking a shit in their private toilet.
"So…" he went on as Laura adjusted the man on Kimura's cot, crossing his arms over his chest. "He gonna be okay after you de-programmed him?"
"I mean he certainly isn't going to be walking home anytime soon," Dr. Psycho shrugged, helping himself to a quality MRE as well. "Those Facility fuckwits really did a number on him, what with all the drugs and the electrodes and the light torture. The more-severe the brainwashing, the less complex one's thoughts become. True masters of brainwashing can make their control subtle, make the victim think they want to do something, but military-grade brainwashing basically treats them like robots."
"So if it were the real John Wraith we'd been up against instead of The Facility's lobotomized flying monkey, that fight would've been a lot harder?" Virgil asked.
"In as many words," Dr. Psycho shrugged. "As it stands, he'll probably have to spend a while at Sanctuary before he can be turned on his old friends. And make no mistake; he definitely wants to pay them back for their... tender mercies."
"Sanctuary?"
"A private mental health community in the ass end of Kansas," Psycho answered. "Nice-enough place compared to The Slab; if you can ignore the sound of banjoes playing on the way in."
"I don't know if you're being literal or not…"
"Nah, that's hyperbole. But you walk far-enough up the road and you will catch someone playing the banjo on their old farmhouse porch."
"Well, I'll probably need something like that myself before too long," Virgil chuckled laconically. "What about Laura? Does she have any sleeper-agent type nonsense in there?"
"I can check. If she wants."
" . . . Okay," the stoic girl nodded after a moment, but only after sidling next to Virgil and holding tightly to his hand.
The former supervillain nodding, his wild, frizzy hair glowed baleful crimson before a psionic tendril shot through the air and connected his thoughts to hers. Laura let out a pained gasp, her Adamantium sliding in and out of her hands -and surprisingly, feet- at random intervals, but even as the new Psycho Mantis was riffling through her thoughts, she was mindful-enough not to hurt the only other person she knew who felt "like her".
"Well, there's no KGB-style trigger phrase nonsense, but there is something in here called 'trigger scent'," Dr. Psycho hummed a while in.
"Filyss, was there anything like that in Laura's hard drive?"
"Trigger 42, as The Facility labeled it, is a chemical agent designed to whip X-23 into a berserk frenzy. She was tortured into reacting to it via a combination of waterboarding and electric shock therapy, so that whenever she smelled it, she would instinctively attack whatever it was applied to, regardless of whether she wanted to or not."
"When I smell it, everything goes black… And when I wake up, everyone's dead…" Laura shuddered.
"Is there anything you can do for her?" Virgil asked desperately as he gripped the girl's hand.
Laura looked like she'd wanted to cry, but that the tears had long been beaten out of her.
With someone like Kimura in her life, that was a distinct possibility.
"Well, I can erase the psychic imprint the torture left behind it well-enough," Dr. Psycho hummed, drumming a finger on his arm, "but what a lot of people don't seem to get is that memories are psychic and physical; or rather, chemical. Even if I erase the actual memory of what happened, the chemical response inside her neurons will still be there."
"So you'd have to pull both so Laura could flip The Facility the bird if they ever want to try, it'll just hurt like hell?"
"I mean, I'd only have to pull a few braincells, but yeah, it would hurt like a bitch."
"Is that even possible?" Alaska asked.
"Hey, the original Psycho Mantis pulled vocal chord parasites out of Eli's throat without killing him, when he was ten. Get me a CT scan when she's huffed up a fume or two, and I can either pull it out the old-fashioned way, or you can just use some medical nanotech to do the job. Either way, it isn't something I can do here."
"Then the sooner we can get the fuck out of here, the better."
"Fine, but I wanna take a dump in that bitch's toilet first."
"I'd also like a go," Laura added with a raised hand.
"Real interesting friends you've got there," Alaska hummed.
Virgil for his part could only sigh.
*TWENTY-THREE*
Outbound Flight
May 18, 08:24 ADT
An hour or so later, Virgil and Laura found themselves on the same light reconnaissance advanced aerial transport that Alaska and Psycho Mantis had used coming in. It was an incredible piece of hardware from the outside with a hybrid-wing design, similarly capable to modern VTOL aircraft, but all Virgil cared for at the moment was that its stealth hardware would let the lot of them get out of the state before The Facility caught wise.
Well, obviously they'd already caught wise to the fact that things turned completely pear-shaped given Kestrel's body cam went dark, but if they could get away from whatever spy satellite they'd co-opted to observe them from on high, that was a whole other thing.
"So, did you enjoy your working vacation?" Miller asked after an abridged debriefing.
"I did, but I've got a lot to grapple with when I get back."
"Yeah… Finding out you're a clone is always an ugly affair."
"Sure, that's what I'm talking about," he said rolling his eyes.
"So… What do you plan to do with the kid?" she asked, and Laura shifted a little in her chair.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, are you going to have her join your 'Interlopers'?"
"How about we put The Facility six feet under, and then worry about her teen employment?"
"Fair enough," the woman replied. "I'll leave you to your thoughts. Happy flying."
And then the iDroid cut off.
"So…" Dr. Psycho said as he rubbed moisturizer into his face. "I hear you've been helping supervillains go straight. That just gonna be your thing or what?"
"That's 'Washington's' thing. If I ever showed up looking like this," Virgil said jabbing a thumb at his face, "I'd get laughed right out of the room."
"And a damned good disguise it was. You really carried yourself like an old guy."
"Thanks," he deadpanned.
"Still, what're the odds? A half-clone getting rescued by another half-clone?"
"So you are like me…" Laura hummed.
Her face was stoic, but her eyes glittered excitedly.
"Yup… And neither of us are the right gender," he chuckled laconically, considering Laura was cloned from a hairy Canadian who'd allegedly been in both World Wars. And also possibly the Civil War.
"If your gene donor still out there?"
" . . . No. She died saving the world."
"Oh… I'm sorry," Laura said sadly.
"Nothing to be sorry about," Virgil said hugging her around the shoulder. "At least yours is still around. Maybe someday you can introduce us."
" . . . Would he even want to meet me?" she asked, turning somber.
"In all fairness, he'll probably be more-angry at The Facility than you," Alaska hummed.
"Unless he's just really petty," Dr. Psycho hummed, Alaska shooting him a cross look from inside his helmet. "What? It's a possibility."
"Time and place, man," Virgil sighed.
"Interlopers."
"What?" Virgil blinked Laura's way.
"Your handler. She said you had a team? The Interlopers?"
"Oh… Yeah, that."
He'd finally hammered down the name he wanted to go with a month or so into his training trip, but he didn't think it'd have been so fitting.
"Can I join?"
"Laura, I don't want you to feel like you owe me."
"Even if I didn't want to join you because of that, us Halfas gotta stick together," she said with a cutely determined expression on her stoic face.
"Halfa? What, like 'half a clone'?"
"It's catchy," Alaska chirped.
" . . . How about we let the dust settle first."
"Why? I'll be wearing a mask," she pouted. "Maybe not this mask," she said staring down into said mask. "But as long as I'm not wearing my underwear on the outside of my pants and pandering to gender roles, I doubt The Facility will be able to find me."
"Does sociology in women's studies also come standard at The Facility?" Dr. Psycho blinked.
Laura for her part just shrugged.
"Let's at least let the dust settle a little," Virgil conceded.
Sure, Laura Kinney aka "X-23" was cloned from the DNA of one of the world's best killing machines, but six metal claws, even if one was in each foot, was still a very distinctive fighting style, and all it took was one witness, or one picture leaking out to let The Facility know where their runaway wound up.
Then again, the Freelancers might burn that fucker to the ground before he got back to Bludhaven for all he knew.
Thoughts for another day...
*AN*
SO! I was able to get in one last update before Christmas, got to debut Psycho Mantis II, show off a little of what all Virgil's training has borne, and even formally announce the name of Virgil's own spec-ops team. I imagine about now he'd be comparable to The Team's members "on average" in their earliest stages, but not in a straight fight.
Then again, the entire premise of guys like Batman, John Constantine, Iron Man, and et cetera punching above their weight class, is that they never "fight fair"; they always slant things in their favor either with quote/unquote "prep time", flat-out cheating (like the time Constantine sold his capital-s Soul to THREE Demons who proceeded to kill one another off), or just using superior technology like when Tony made a suit of literal steam-powered armor to stop an electric villain.
But yeah! Happy holidays, and a happier new year! I am tired as hell but really wanted this to be in some people's inboxes come Christmas morning.