15 [ Gus ] Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose
It was Kerwin who sat at the kitchen table across from the sweat soaked teenaged leader of the AIM agents that had attacked his and my sister’s home. The two of them were meeting alone other than myself standing across the room all wrapped up in an invisibility field.
Kerwin had weaponized and armored his prosthetic limbs, but his middle parts and head were still only flesh and blood. I wasn’t about to have a tragic backstory happen to my niece today.
Plus, I can turn invisible. How could I not spy on other people’s conversations?
The girl, who looked to be no more than sixteen, was pretty pale in a ‘spends a lot of time indoors’ kind of way rather than unhealthy looking. In fact, she seemed pretty fit, with healthy curves and visibly developed muscles, which from the look I had gotten at her armored suit, would be an absolute requirement in wearing it.
Her suit was all armor, weapons, and power systems, with no strength augmentation or powered assisted moment systems even weighing in at what had to be several hundred pounds of technology. The girl sipping on the iced tea my brother in law had offered her had been moving the thing around, somewhat nimblely, all with her own strength.
So, a meta human, who stepped things up by also wearing an armored suit loaded up with high, or at least, advanced, tech. That seemed familiar.
She paused after gulping down half of her second glass of iced tea, along with a few half melted ice cubes, and then wiped at her damp lips. “Sorry, but even with all the heat sinks, between the weather and the thermal energy the power systems and Null energy projector puts out, it gets pretty hot in the Death Stalker suit.”
Kerwin gave her an amused look. “Death Stalker?”
The girl shrugged. “Most of the other names for the various types of scorpions are less than intimidating, but I wanted to stick with the motif. It’s a family thing. The next best option was Blue Scorpion, which was a big no thanks.”
She took another sip of her drink. “So… is the other person in the room going to join the conversation?”
Slowly turning her head, she looked… not right at me, but sort of in my direction. My suit ran silent, I was invisible, and I was standing on a force platform so my feet wouldn’t press into the rug beneath me…
Her nostrils flared.
Super senses. I dropped the invisibility. “I wasn’t aware MacDonald Gargan had enhanced senses. So? Daughte? Reversed gender clone, or you just had the same source as his powers.”
The girl's eyes began to race all over my armor. “Daughter... and I was told that he kept his nose plugged up most of the time because his sense of smell was too good. What kind of stealth suite is that? There wasn’t any distortion... Apex right?” She shook her head suddenly and pulled her eyes over to Kerwin. “Wait, what the hell did I walk into here?”
Halfway to standing to her feet, she looked around wildly. Outside the combined sunroom and breakfast nook we could see her men, and women, receiving medical treatment from each other and my sister’s employee. A few of both were also busy prying a few people out of the two vans Lucy had crushed.
The girl relaxed and turned around again to look at me, then Kerwin. “So. Does this guy work for you or something?”
My brother in law laid his hands flat on the table in front of him. “My wife’s younger brother. You smelled him then?”
She shrugged. “More the armor, it smells like he just made it a day or so ago at most.” She gave me a suspicious look. “Did you know we were coming?”
I crossed my arms and shook my head. “No, I prepared this armor so that I could start to do something about the things I was seeing people get away with because they can buy the law. Being able to help defend my sister’s home, and her child, my niece, was just a bonus.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Kerwin cleared his throat. “Now that we’re all caught up, why now? You told me why you targeted Mary, and I would like to hear more about that. But why now?”
She pointed at me. “Because of him. We’ve been planning and preparing to do something, anything, to make our mark. To make a statement, and then he goes and does something. It was enough for us to stop trying to get everything just right, all perfect, and finally do something.”
Holding her hands out in front of her, she shook them in the air a bit as she tried to explain. “We split off from AIM, with their permission since they decided they would rather let people go off on their own like a franchise rather than go renegade. We wanted to do something different, use the high tech we grew up with that most people don’t have to build something for ourselves rather than wait to get hired out.”
She looked up at Kerwin, “Part of that was doing all the things the bad guys always do before they could. Which included kidnaping the genius kid of a former supervillain before anyone else could.”
Shrugging was all she had to say for how that went. “Then we planned to recruit all the costumed goofballs for hire in the part of the country we claimed. Gather up all the super junk left around from Superhero Supervillain fights. We were going to make our own hidden nation, in secret, like a North American Wakanda, rather than just wait around to get hired out as someone’s disposable henchmen or scientists.”
Slouching down in her chair, the girl frowned. “We don’t want to rule the world, or watch it burn, we just want our own piece of it. No masters, no kings, no world conquest, just our own spot in the sun.”
Looking past her, I could see that most of the people she had brought with her were in their late teens like herself, or at the most in their twenties.
“Who are you people?”
She shrugged. “The Aimless. You lock down a bunch of scientists, engineers, and technicians in a secret base, along with all the support staff and even the hired black hats, and things happen.”
After taking another sip of her drink, she looked over at me, “We all grew up on Aim bases. Surrounded by super science, getting evacuated when the heroes or Shield attacked. Some of us are geniuses, some got superpowers of some kind, and all of us are sick of seeing our parents getting used as disposable faceless goons by whoever hired them or the latest ‘Scientist Supreme.’”
She looked back at Kerwin, “We want what you have. A nice home, wealth, even families one day, all the while secretly having everything we need to keep anyone from taking any of it away from us.”
My brother in law began tapping his fingers on the table in front of him as my sister vibrated a panel of force next to his ear. His fingers stopped, “I believe we can work something out Miss Gragan…”
The girl held up her hand. “Lamarr, with two r’s. We decided we liked the old system of taking scientist's names to symbolize our new identities that are separate from the ones we had as kids.”
Kerwin nodded and smiled. “Of course. I and Lucidia are in, in some fashion, but only as support. Getting too involved would be intrusive to what you are trying to build, but we want the options you are trying to make for yourselves for Mary and all the many, many other children we will be having.”
There was an abrupt series of vibrations from the force panel near his ear which he dodged by standing up and beginning to wander around the room. “We can outright give you some money, but more importantly we can offer you a front in the form of a legitimate source of income by establishing a company that provides high tech solutions to civilian problems. A think tank. This will give you a chance to use the advanced technology you have access to, and a place in society you never had growing up.”
He ended his wandering right next to me.
“We also have Apex, someone with many of the same goals as yourself. To make his own mark, to champion his own goals, to gain his own place in the sun. An ally, but one who is still young and fully engaged in an active costumed adventurer life.” He patted me on the back.
What?
“I’ll leave the two of you alone.” He nudged me in the side with his elbow, hard enough for me to feel it through my armor. “I need to check on Mary and then deal with a few other things.”
What?
The girl, Lamarr, stood up and began to circle around me, looking me up and down.
Her once white undersuit, all covered in skin contact patches to monitor her vitals while piloting her Death Strider armor, looked like it had seen better days. And it was rather tight.
Dam. She worked out, a lot.
She crossed her arms, which I noticed also lifted her somewhat large breasts up in a distracting way, as she narrowed her eyes at me.
Deep blue eyes.
What the hell…
Oh god, am I straight now? Is my new body not genetically homosexual? Is this nature over nurture? Do I still like guys? I mean I haven’t met that many since I was reborn. Kerwin is the only one I’ve spent any time around, and he isn’t my type on top of being taken by my sister…
Lamarr set her hand on his hips, “That’s some kind of variation of Von Doom’s suits, and another female Hulk just declared herself Baron Von Doom, with a guy in Doom armor showing up right next to her. Even the new guy in Russian had a Doom styled mask on.”
“So what’s the hell is going on, and why would I ally my people with another would be Supervillain?”