Theo was happy when he heard Peter’s parents decided to quit their jobs to spend more time at home with Peter and the rest of their extended family. They announced it to everyone and the kids a week after the group trip to Coney Island. Theo had never seen Peter so happy and he had spent Monday thru Saturday with him for the past three years.
Theo wanted to help out his family, so when Richard listed their condo in downtown Manhattan for sale. Theo was the one who bought it, he made a cash offer above list price for the condo through a real estate agent. He also paid the closing costs and Richard was told they could stay in the condo as long as they needed if they paid rent. Since the buyer was planning to use it as a rental property.
But finding a new house didn’t take that long, Theo had also made a pretty decent offer to the owners of a house on the same street as his parent's house. It was actually done before he bought Richard's condo. The people who owned the house took the offer and moved out within a week of closing the deal.
Then Theo put the house up for sale and Richard made an offer for it. The deal was closed quickly, then Richard, Ben, and Jacob went through and remodeled a few things and painted everything with help from a contractor friend Ben knew. Richard, Mary and Peter moved into the house after about a month. Which was about three months after Ezekiel had collected samples from everyone.
They then took all the spare money they had and spent that to renovate part of the basement and buy essential equipment they would need to work. It wasn’t the cutting edge stuff they had at their last job, but it was good enough to get started. They were planning to look for some grants and other things to help supplement what was missing.
Moving away from Theo’s family, the new base they had was up and running. It even had a spell ward set up like the other base, so there was only one place to portal into it. Beast, who joined the research team, would at first only spend a few hours a week working with them. But he quickly came to respect and realize how smart all of them were, he ended up changing his personal schedule and now spends at least four hours a day during the week working in the lab with them. And on the weekends he will spend ten hours or more. He also became pretty fast friends with Orochimaru and Tobirama.
During that time Orochimaru and the others had made a lot of progress on their work. Their first goal was to completely sequence the genetic samples they were given by everyone. But with the equipment they had it wasn't that hard to do. The only issue was the samples from Theo himself. They took over two weeks to finish and both Beast and Sarah were stunned at the complexity of the completed genome.
Orochimaru, Kabuto and Tobirama were the opposite, when they saw how simple the genomes they collected from the others were. They honestly thought something wasn't right with the equipment and wanted to double check everything the old fashioned way. They made it through Coulson's complete genome in only a few days and just couldn't believe the difference in genomes between this world and where they came from.
The funniest thing about the whole situation was Orochimaru's attitude. At first he was delighted to see what made humans turn into metahumans. But once he realized how simple their complete genome was, he lost almost all of his interest in metahumans. In his words it was like trying to compare a masterpiece of art to some stick figures your kid made.
The bright side to the whole thing was that Orochimaru and the others had little issues figuring out how the x-gene worked and how to modify it. It still needed a lot of testing before they were done, but their main goal was to make it where any metahuman could turn off their own powers. It wasn't a cure, but for the people who didn't like the side effects of their powers. They would now have an opportunity to live normally when they were switched off. Beast was really excited about this research and was helping to spearhead It.
A different project that was being run by Tsunade, Shizune and Sakura was trying to create a new type of medicine. It would basically heal anything wrong with you and could regrow limbs. They were using the samples taken from Logan and samples the facility had from Laura. It was slow going since they were trying to take the healing effects from their mutations and turn it into some type of retrovirus.
The last project was about cloning, both Sarah and Orochimaru had their own cloning project. Orochimaru was focused on a cloning project using Theo’s genome. While Sarah was trying to figure out how to splice Steve's modified super soldier gnome with other people's. She was actually making very fast breakthroughs and it wasn't that hard, considering people had been trying to replicate the serum itself for years without proper success.
Over that same three month period, Sarah, Laura and Cessily had integrated into the base rather quickly. They were each given rooms and Ezekiel gave them free reign on the budget to get anything they wanted to make the room livable. Sarah's room was relatively plain, a small bookcase, desk with a computer and some other essential things. As well as a few pictures with her and Laura. She even had a picture of her, with her sister, Laura and her niece when they left the base to visit them for a few days.
Cessily’s room was pretty typical for a teenage girl, she had asked for a bunch of clothes, band posters, stereo, computer, TV. She also had pictures of her with her parents. Most of them were from before she had powers, but a few were from afterwards. Cessily was lucky, because the facility hadn't disposed of her family's stuff yet. She mostly took all the pictures her family had, along with a few other things of sentimental value.
Laura was the biggest surprise when it came to what she asked for. Well maybe it wasn't since Laura was currently only thirteen. But she had asked, with encouragement from Sarah, for a large amount of stuffed animals. Her king sized bed was literally half covered in the things. She also asked for a bookshelf filled with books, she had asked for, 'Anything that is fun to read'. So Ezekiel and Sarah picked out a bunch of classic books like, Three Musketeers, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Treasure Island, and The Mark of Zorro to name a few. Laura liked to spend a few hours each day just reading in her bed, snuggled between her stuffed animals.
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As for integrating with other people, Cessily made friends with the other kids rather quickly. Laura on the other hand was still having issues. Possibly as a way to help herself cope with the recent loss of her parents, Cessily had taken on the role and acted as an older sister to Laura. It was helping a lot to bring Laura out of her shell. Laura has even started interacting more often with the other kids, without the need for one of them to initiate the interaction first.
Speaking of the kids, they actually had a pretty good routine setup. They would have some type of structured classes a few hours a day along with their kitchen duty. Jarvis had all of the kids helping in the kitchen, they would all help to prepare and serve food. Afterwards the kids would clean up everything. A few of the kids he was also teaching how to properly cook.
The schooling for the kids was a lot more relaxed since there were only a handful of kids, and they all ranged widely in age. But for at least three hours each week day, they would have a tutor/teacher. Their teachers were a rotation of Hank, Bill, Steve, Peggy, Jarvis, Sarah, Coulson and Eric Koenig. Jarvis and Steve were the only ones to see the kids almost every day though, since one they helped out in the kitchen and the other trained them in physical fitness.
Each one of them had their own specific courses and needed to do a certain amount of coursework each week to be considered passing. But honestly it was a lot better than normal school and all of them would normally complete their weekly assignments by Monday or Tuesday at the latest. They would spend the rest of the week either hanging out together in the rec room or doing their own thing when not helping out in the kitchen.
The rec room was another area that Ezekiel had made, much to the annoyance of Fury. It was placed close to the theater room Ezekiel had made and was designed for recreation and relaxation. But it was still a work in progress. The main areas were complete, the first area had pool tables, air hockey, foosball, shuffleboard, and ping pong tables. As well as a bunch of arcades, pinball machines along with some TV’s set up to some gaming consoles and bean bag chairs.
Another section was called the library. It was actually sound proofed so it was always quiet inside and it was filled with books on anything you could think of and was sorted like a normal library. The library was actually one of the first things that was completed, since Ezekiel had all of those school books, but they also purchased a bunch of other books for it. The room was completed with a bunch of comfortable chairs, couches and bean bag chairs that people could use to read in.
The only other completed section was the swimming pool. It had a sauna as well as a couple Jacuzzis and some tubs for ice baths. Ezekiel was still in the process of having a bowling alley installed. The process was taking a while because they technically had to do everything themselves. They couldn't just hire someone to come build this stuff for them. Ezekiel ended up using his clones to do all the work. Some of it was easy like the pool was mostly made using earth jutsu. Then they just needed to plaster it, as well as run all of the infrastructure for it.
The bowling alley on the other hand needed to be built a certain way. So some of his clones were researching how to build it properly. Another thing that was planned, but was to be built in the gym area, was a giant climbing wall. That was going to be made using earth jutsu, but currently it wasn’t a priority like the bowling alley was.
As for what was happening in the outside world, after Magneto’s speech to the world three months ago. It seems like overall it was about the same as before, while some people came out to support metahumans a little more. Just as many people came out against metahumans and were very vocal about it. One of the things the anti-metahuman people would do is target anyone who was vocal about being pro-metahumant. So anyone who was pro-metahuman would only post online anonymously for fear of being targeted. Ezekiel with his program was doing what he could to help, but he only removed stuff when people threatened violence on other people or metahumans.
While he could have done a lot more, he knew there would be even more negative backlash towards metahumans if he just completely removed or stopped all of the people posting metahuman hate stuff. He did go out of his way to shut down some of the more zealous/rabid metahuman haters. He would target them and completely ruin their computers. If they got a new one, or used a friend's computer to post their hate filled propaganda, those would be ruined also. Hopefully those people would get the point and stop with their hate filled bullshit, before Ezekiel decided to really go after them and ruin not just their computers, but also their lives.
But on a positive note, the video Kurt had uploaded had almost two million views. Kitty wanted him to take it down at first, but Kurt argued it was showing a lot of people that metahumans were just as normal as they were. So Kitty finally relented and allowed him to keep the video up. But that wasn’t all, Kitty and Kurt had uploaded a few more videos to the channel. They were pretty much prank videos and each one so far was a hit with a few hundred thousand views each.
One very positive note that happened was that Hydra had taken the bait Ezekiel. The encrypted phone software Ezekiel designed for S.H.I.E.L.D. was finally put into use by Hydra. While it looked like they had some people go over it and change a few things about it, the overall encryption wasn’t touched, so Ezekiel was already building a list of Hydra agents. The only down side was it was taking a while to spread it out to everyone in Hydra, but certain key people in S.H.I.E.L.D. were already using it, people like Alexander Pierce, John Garrett and an up and coming agent Jasper Sitwell.
Hopefully it would spread to the members outside of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Ezekiel would finally be able to find where Vasily Karpov was at along with Bucky. While Ezekiel had spent a lot of time trying to find Vasily Karpov and the base he was stationed at. It seemed like the Soviet Union had no records of it on any of their secure servers. There were probably paper records of it, but Ezekiel didn’t have access to that. He did try to bribe a few people to find it for him, he was never specific in what he wanted but just asked for any files pertaining to secret facilities built during the Soviet Union era.
He had to hand it to the new government, they were amazing at finding anyone selling secrets. Everyone Ezekiel found and hired were caught before they could send him any information, so he gave up after his third attempt.