Disclaimer - I don’t own anything. Please support the official release.
Chapter 42
Technomancer in MCU
Previously
“Think I went a little bit overboard there?” Alfred asked in a slightly pitying tone of voice.
Frank just sighed at that.
________________________________________________________________
The Asterisk
–Frank Castle–
Removing the thoughts of pity for his team from his mind, he checked his task sheet to mark it as complete, only to see one more task was added to it seemingly at the last moment.
He looked for Alfred to ask him about it but he was nowhere to be found.
“Cheeky Bastard,” he muttered under his breath.
He was very much tired, mentally that is, from all the tasks for the day.
Even seeing the beaten-down faces of his normally upbeat and haughty team didn’t release his heavy exhaustion for the day.
The only thing that he could think of that could save the day was his wife Maria and her legendary pancakes.
That always cheered him up.
No matter the situation.
He sighed for the umpteenth time that day and checked the last item on the list.
He was about to head to the hangar immediately when a tiny voice popped out of his tablet.
It said, “You can check in with Mrs.Castle and then leave for Mr.Throgg’s workshop. Due to his very nature, he will be in his workshop for days at a time if I don’t actively dissuade him from doing so. I think he can wait for an extra hour before your meeting.”
A smile wormed its way onto his face at the thought of seeing his wife.
He then turned around and marched towards the teleportation pads that facilitated transport between the different sections of the base.
Standing on top of one such pad, he said out loud, “Alfred, Home please.”
Mere moments later, a bluish-white light enveloped him and a moment later, he was gone from the pod, leaving the entire training centre empty.
________________________________________________________________
–Maria Castle–
The job that she had taken upon herself was a tiring one but thankfully not a thankless one like her previous job.
Here, people actually appreciated the work she did immensely.
To the point that Ed and even Alfred respected her immensely and complied with all her little demands.
Caring for all the children that the organization found in their rescue missions, enhanced or otherwise found their way into her department in the organisation.
She was aghast at first when she found out that there were no concrete guidelines or frameworks on taking care of the enhanced abandoned or tortured children or teenagers that the agents found.
Bless them but Ed and Alfred really had zero clue about taking care of regular well adjusted children, let alone these troubled ones.
They really were out of their depths when they rescued her family and offered Frank a job.
One that they were in dire need of. Frank really was not in the right headspace whenever he came home from that secret job of his.
Finding out that they were actually going to work for the good side for once and not some shady black ops operations was extremely relieving.
Not to mention the pay and benefits.
Full-fat six-figure salaries for both her and Frank, including pension for both of them.
They were given the option to relocate her kids to the Asterisk for enrollment in the school that she opened but at that point, her kids had grown old enough to form meaningful friendships and she didn’t want to take that away from them.
She and Frank discussed it at length but with a nanite package on them at all times and a six-man unit surveilling them round the clock, she was not at all worried for their safety. She pitied the fool who tried to get to Frank through the kids.
She suspected that Frank had even more security measures in place to make sure that nothing like the dreaded park accident would ever happen again.
Being the Commander did have its perks after all.
Hearing the doors opening, she smiled and turned around, heading towards the living room.
Upon seeing Frank, she smiled and ran into his arms.
They stayed like that for a minute, basking in the temporary peaceful silence that engulfed the room.
After a while, they separated and then Frank went upstairs to freshen up and she returned to the kitchen, to make his meal.
Despite multiple reassurances from both Ed and Alfred, she had been still skeptical about the viability of artificially made food from the matter recofigurators that littered the base.
But after seeing the effects of the special food in person, she was convinced about its various benefits BUT that didn’t mean that she couldn’t make a special meal for her beloved and her kids every now and then.
The base’s food might have every single nutritional value perfectly balanced but nothing could top a mother’s love as the final ingredient in a homemade meal.
“Maria!”, she heard Frank call for her.
“Just a minute,” she yelled back.
Using the handy hard light tech built in the house, she made a grabbing motion towards the pot and ethereal hands appeared around the pot handles and lifted it up.
She just turned around and entered the living room and the pot followed her. With another swishing motion, the pot was deposited on the dining table.
Another one of the things that was made extinct by the handy dandy hard light tech of the base.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
There was no specialised furniture in most of the houses on the base.
Why have a single fixed structure that would take up space when it is not being used when you can just conjure it up?
And despite it being hard light, Alfred had made mind-boggling advancements in that field, making it so that any piece of hard light could even mimic the feel of a cushion.
These days, the only piece of real furniture anybody had in their houses were their beds and even those might be on their way out the door as she had read in the Nerd Magazine that they had made advancements in the bed comfort area as well.
“Honey? Honey? HONEY?”, Frank’s shouting brought her out of her daze.
He was looking concerned.
She smiled a brittle smile, hoping to alleviate his worries, “Don’t worry, it's nothing.”
“Look, I made your favourite, spaghetti with hotdogs. Don’t worry, I won’t tell you team members that the hard hat Commander’s favourite dish is Spaghetti with little pieces of Hot Dog cut into them,” she said with false cheer, hoping to deflect the issue.
But Frank did not budge, “What’s worrying you, honey? Talk to me, alright? Maybe I can help.”
She took a deep breath and said, ‘Look, we can talk about this later. The issue is already being solved, you don’t need to worry about it. I just need a break from all of that. So, let’s just enjoy our meal, shall we?”
He just nodded, still concerned but willing to let it go if she said so.
She seated herself and served the food.
“So, what’s the last-moment task now?” she said after chewing a mouthful of the absolutely disgusting concoction that only Frank liked in the whole family.
He smiled and said, “Nothing unusual. Just have to visit Throgg’s workshop for some work.”
She made a face at that and said, “That man? He is absolutely incorrigible. Do you know what he told the children when we had the whole meet people from new professions every day of the month?”
Frank nodded at her indulgently.
“He had the audacity to tell them to be always on the lookout for betrayal and never trust anybody, not even their left hand, and then against all my expectations, he made it even worse by pulling out a hologram of the demons from Muspelheim and telling them gruesome details of his battle. You know what the worst part was?”
Frank made a go-on gesture towards her.
“It was the fact that most of them looked really interested in that and were asking him more details on how to protect themselves from betrayal. It was heartbreaking to watch. The fact that these small children, some of them even younger than our kids, were made to always watch over their bacs for themselves. Never trusting anyone but themselves. Right then, I kicked him out and vowed to make sure to create an environment for them where they wouldn’t ever need to look over their shoulders for betrayal.”
By the end of her tirade, she had tears in her eyes and was ugly smiling, in an effort not to ruin the first dinner they had had in weeks.
Both of their busy schedules, mixed with spending time with the kids, they never really got any alone time together.
Frank immediately got up from his seat and hugged her, consoling her, “Hey! Hey, Don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen to them now, you of all people should know that. Even Odin would have to go through me before he could even touch any of those kids. So, cheer up alright. It’s going to be alright.”
She smiled up at him.
“Now, I know for a fact that in the last order you made to Alfred, it had both of our favorite ice cream. I’ll go take that out, why don’t you go out and put on a movie.”
She nodded.
________________________________________________________________
–Frank Castle–
As soon as she left, his face turned dark.
The very air around him cooled slightly.
“Alfred?”, he called out in a bone-chilling tone of voice, not mad at Alfred but whoever was behind Maria crying.
“I know you are listening. Throgg’s year-old lecture won’t make her cry like this. What happened today?” he asked while taking the ice cream out of the fridge.
“I’m afraid you won’t be liking it, Commander. I calculate a 99.7% chance of you going absolutely ballistic and taking out the perpetrators with extreme prejudice.” Alfred replied.
“I am the commanding officer of all military forces present on the base. That includes you as well, Alfred. I command you, tell me.” he commanded Alfred.
“It's the African warlords again. They somehow got their hands on a vampire and one who was a mystic before he turned as well.” Alfred replied.
“Vampire? How is that possible? I thought we dealt with all of them when I went out on my cleaning trip.” Frank responded darkly, gritting his teeth at his apparent failure to clean up some pests.
“Need I remind you, any and all missions on the African continent are to be ceased as we wait for Wakanda to take their stage on the global stage and wrest back control of the entire African Continent from the various parties that have sliced it up among themselves. It is an express order from Ed himself and no insubordination in that regard will be allowed, you know it as well as I do.”
He took deep breaths, calming down slightly.
“What is their connection to Maria’s department?” he asked Alfred.
“The vampire was using them to conduct experiments on the local children. He had heard of our massacre and had gone into hiding. He had a lair in Kenya where he chanced upon some warlord who was all too willing to fall into the usual bait of immortality. Upon converting the warlord, he had him make his entire tribe offer all of their children as sacrifices. He was apparently making a mystic virus, one that could infect children with high magical potential and then use it as a phylactery to reincarnate himself into a human body with high potential to escape our purges.”
He clenched his fists at that.
“What happened to him?”
“Who, the vampire? Oh, he is dust now, as is his entire operation. The unfortunate thing was he had turned the entire tribe into his mindless thralls, sparing only the children for his experiments.”
He closed his eyes at that tragic news.
Only the first-generation elders could turn humans into vampires. The ones that still retained their sanity, albeit with a newfound hunger for blood.
The second generation ones can turn one or maybe two humans into vampires, but that too only if they are very old and strong. The rest of their infected turn into mindless thralls, only capable of following basic orders, basically nothing more than zombies.
Despite Alfred’s best efforts, they had yet to find a cure for the mindless thralls.
It was as if the moment they were turned, their souls left their bodies, and their brains were chemically remolded to follow the vampire’s orders. It was a very permanent procedure.
“So, the kids? Did all of them make it out of there alive?” he asked Alfred.
Alfred’s hologram popped up in front of him and he sadly shook his head.
The ceramic cups creaked in his hands from how hard he was clenching his knuckles.
“Frank, Honey? What’s taking so long? They are at the door-side.” Maria shouted from the living room.
“Coming, honey,” he shouted back.
“If no missions are allowed, how did the kids come into our custody?” he asked Alfred as he took out spoons from the drawers.
“It was N’Jadaka.”
He looked up in surprise at that, he didn’t expect to hear from his former teammate for a long time after he finally got into his home country.
“He has begun undertaking personal missions around Wakanda to cleanse the supernatural areas and by happenstance, came onto their operation. Safe to say, he cleaned it up within moments but after seeing the children, he had no choice but to call us. He knew nobody in Wakanda had the expertise to deal with enhanced children.” Alfred said.
He snapped his neck towards Alfred at that.
“Enhanced? Does this mean that the vampire was successful?”
Alfred nodded, “Sadly, yes. The reason Mrs.Castle is so sad is that that kid is aware of what is happening to him. He has basically given up all hope and only takes the bare minimum of nutrient-rich blood for the caretakers and doesn’t mingle with any of the other kids, not even his own brother, who was rescued along with him. He has started to distance himself from his last remaining family in hopes of protecting him from himself.”
He nodded to himself, “I see. Add a meeting with Ed to my schedule whenever he is available.”
“Very well.”
He then took a deep breath, made a slightly smiling face, and went to the living room with the ice cream.
The sight of Maria being huddled up in blankets with the firewood lit up and probably some cheesy rom-com on the TV was like a balm to his soul.
He gave her the cup of ice cream and huddled up under the blanket, cuddling her.
Kissing her forehead, he took a bit out of his cup of ice cream.
He would make sure that every last one of those vampire pests was hunted down like the vermins they were.
Soon, Maria fell asleep.
She must have been exhausted from the mental stress of keeping a happy face at the nursery despite being so heartbroken from the inside.
Carefully extricating himself from her iron hold, he wore his uniform and took out his tablet, and called for his escort to Throgg’s workshop.
It was a good thing he had work to do, he couldn’t exactly sleep now, could he?
________________________________________________________________
Word Count - 2593
If you guys would like to support or just want to read ahead, you can head on to my patreon.
________________________________________________________________