Chapter 211: Acquisition

16th March 2012, New York City

(Jasmine Sayre POV)

I open a drawer and give him a necklace. It wasn’t just a necklace though, it was a dog tag, specifically, Bucky’s own. He looked at me gaping, “Where did you find this?”

I chuckled, “Believe it or not, I stole it from Captain America’s exhibit in a museum here in New York. I snuck in last night and left a replica there. But I didn’t give you that just for nostalgia’s sake, I added a spell to it. I want you to put it on and pinch the tag.”

Bucky followed my orders, and gasped as he turned invisible. He pinched the tag again and returned to view, “This is awesome.”

I snorted, “This is what you’re going to be using to bypass the security cameras. You’re going to pick the locks, sneak in and just leave the rocks in the bunker. The moment you leave, call me, so that I activate them properly. With this, we will have made our first step in destroying Hydra permanently.”

The very next day, I drove to my company, waiting for my meeting with Pierce. Bucky had already gone there during the morning, acting as one of the guards, who was asleep in his bed thanks to a sleeping pill given to him by Barnes. Truth be told, if I wasn’t paying attention, it would be easy for me to not notice anything weird happening, and if I didn’t use my telepathy, of course.

I walked into the company building and waited for the elevator to get me to the meeting. I looked around and saw that almost everyone in the building was wearing black, mourning the loss of Morgan Evanshade. It was weird, in a way, to see people mourning your loss, especially people that I practically never interacted with. I could understand the readers mourning the loss of the authors who wrote their favorite books, but I never would have expected so many people to mourn my death.

This started as an easy way for me to make money; writing stories that I barely remembered from my old life, was an easy way to fake some sort of literary genius and make easy sales. I started this before I went back in time, as a way to secure my financial stability as a child. What a fool I was back then. I had thought that stealing the memories of a scientist made me an expert, I had thought that I was a genius of the highest caliber, pretty much copying scraps of knowledge from the minds of educators. I had never assimilated it and it showed. It gives me a great head start especially when I started making programs and websites, but when I tried making Alfred, a virtual intelligence to help me, I would have never even come close to making something like him with the way I was. There’s a lot of things that I didn’t take into account when it came to something this complicated. I now know that my future self, had used her telepathy to slowly influence me into making the right choices, writing the correct code, without me even realizing it. Alfred was as much a creation of the past as the future.

For a telepath to just copy an entire database of memories was frankly very dangerous and impractical. You needed to relive the memories to incorporate them into your own mind, but that’s not the worst part. You needed to have the skill to watch the memories as a spectator, and not as the persons themselves. You needed to separate their feelings, and only watch through their eyes, listen through their ears, smell through their nose, and watch every memory, learning from them, one by one. It was a slow process. Yes, it was faster than learning the hard way because times passes differently in your mind. It would be easy to assimilate an entire personality when doing something like this, something that my past self never even considered, and would have caused severe damage if my future self didn’t put bindings on every one of the personalities, I absorbed. Thank God that this was easily caught during my study of the mind arts in Atlantis, and I was able to resolve them after centuries of work.

And that’s not mentioning the fact that my future self, made sure to protect me from anyone noticing my frankly liberal use of telepathy. I was good, a prodigy even, but if someone with the skill of the Ancient One had found me, there’s little I could have done at the time to protect myself.

Fuck, I really was an overconfident mess when I was younger. But I will admit that writing my books was a good idea, even if they’re not my own ideas, as they had inspired many other writers and artists, creating a rise of the impact of the arts. I, at least, was happy with the results of my greed when I was a child.

It was a sad thing, watching as the world tried to deal with someone as established in the entertainment industry as Morgan Evanshade pass away. She was the writer, the storyteller, it was an honor, in a way, for me to be her. She had impacted the world in a very significant manner. It was more than that, her books, their ideas, their values, taught children and adults all around the globe how to behave. She had unknowingly shaped the lives of millions if not billions of people. It was humbling in a way, to have changed the world so much in a single lifetime.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

But everything comes to an end, and Morgan Evanshade wasn’t needed anymore. I chose to keep that persona dead because with the coming crisis, I won’t have time to keep writing books. The reserves I had made were almost over, and this was an opportunity to leave behind the persona of Morgan Evanshade without retiring, which could have caused complications down the line.

Plus, it made Hydra confident about the success of their little mission. The Winter Soldier might have disappeared, but at least his objective was complete. They’re probably scared that he might have been captured on his way back or something. As far as they’re concerned all communications went dark the minute the Winter Soldier entered the parking lot. There were no cameras, no security footage, no radio, no electronics, nothing. It was a ward I added to every single portal to my mansion, preventing anyone from getting any footage if they somehow trespass, and also with how connected the world was, people will avoid a place like this if they accidentally stumble about. Of course, no one could activate the portal accidentally, and if they do, they’ll be subjected to the wards on the manor which are very subjective. Long story short, as far as Hydra knows, their asset went inside, planning on terminating his target, but he never came out.

I removed the wards and the portal after I captured Barnes, as to allow the police to investigate the crime scene. But they would find nothing other than a freak engine explosion to explain my death. If I was honest with myself, I wasn’t bothered with the attack. Hydra obviously wanted to buy my company, and with it, a better control over the media. They didn’t try to kill the Morrigan, foolish as it may be, and I didn’t take offense to them trying to kill my previous persona, assassinations happen all the time, and a lot of people tried to kill me before.

The truth was, that I was bored. I couldn’t start preparing for the coming conflict without resolving my Death sense problem, so that it wouldn’t overwhelm me too much. I had planned on doing so during the full moon next week, so I had to do something to keep my mind off the sense. It was like a constant buzzing, distracting me, telling me how to kill everything around me. It was especially disturbing whenever I was near my loved ones. Seeing ways to kill Selene, Wanda, Rose or even Jean, whenever I was near them was starting to affect me, and I needed a distraction, to keep busy. And destroying an evil organization in a week, without me going full Morrigan and hunting them down agent by agent, seemed like a good challenge.

So, I chose to use the opportunity that was presented in front of me. I was going to destroy SHIELD and Hydra at the same time, two international organizations with high tech weaponry and an even more impressive budget.

Finding James Barnes was a treasure; he was the scalpel that I was going to use to cut apart his former master. He had already completely killed Arnim Zola and set a trap for the Hydra agents that will probably check on him when things go to shit.

He completed his mission perfectly and wasn’t noticed by even a single security camera. With that, I let him get ready for the next mission, killing the head of the snake.

As for now, I walked towards the meeting room, as Jasmine Sayre, Morgan Evanshade’s niece and named heir to all her possessions in her will. I was immediately greeted by ‘Morgan Evanshade’s’ attorneys, and I sat down waiting for Pierce’s arrival. The man wasn’t far behind. I watched through Bucky’s eyes, using my telepathy, to see him recognize Pierce’s presence, and walk towards him to look for the invitation. He used the small needle I gave him to surreptitiously prick him as he shook his hand. There was a numbing charm on the needle, meaning that the man didn’t even feel a thing, and after seeing the invitation to the meeting, he gave the Secretary of the World Security Council directions to the meeting room.

This was it; Alexander Pierce was a dead man walking. The truth was that all the needle contained was a small serum. Barely any poison would be enough to kill him with this little volume of it, which is why I didn’t use a poison at all. I enchanted a small serum that’ll completely integrate itself into his blood, with no traces. The serum would force the cholesterol in his blood to gravitate near a single point. After five days, he will end up having a heart attack, seemingly from natural causes, which will kill him.

It was a dirty little assassination trick, but it works, and no one would even suspect anything and if they did, they would have no way of knowing how this happened.

With that, Hydra’s fall will be inevitable. I have Alfred ready, having spent that last few days searching for the assets that are solely Hydra’s not SHIELD's, in all the countries. He isolated them, found the accounts and was ready to corrupt the data, to destroy any traces of their existence at a moment’s notice.

When Pierce inevitably dies, Hydra's high command will start to fight for his role, both in SHIELD and in Hydra. While they do this, the main funds of the organization will disappear, which means that their soldiers will not be getting paid, removing their armed forces. The only money left will be the physical stuff, that’s hidden in various caches. It wouldn’t be even a fraction of their previous fortunes. But with this, the organization will start to fragment into multiple factions led by whoever finds the money first. With that done, it will be easy to find every faction and kill them one by one, alongside the high command. This will be Barnes’ job in the termination of Hydra.

While I was daydreaming about Hydra’s inevitable demise, Pierce walked into the room in an overly expensive suit, like he owned the place, and he sat down in front of me.

I could see his eyes widen in recognition and horror when he looked at me. Pierce had no idea who Morgan Evanshade named as her heir. The letter with the meeting was sent to her attorneys. He had no clue that Jasmine Sayre was her niece, or that she was the one who inherited the empire that is Marvel Media. Looking at him now, I stifled a chuckle; Nick Fury must have told him about our little conversation a few years ago, where I scared the crap out of him, Barton, and Romanoff.

The man couldn’t help himself and cried out, “You?”