Providence
June 29, 22:26
Being the quote, warden of this prison, unquote, I had the ability to usher myself in at any time I so damn pleased. The wall I just passed through landed me directly in Shiva's cell, only to find her awake and meditating.
One step, two steps, I walked in her direction and stopped precisely a meter away. She kept her eyes closed and remained on the ground, but she was the first to speak.
"Where is Cassandra?"
"You don't ask the questions," I clenched my fists harder and responded. Things became silent after that and I asked the question that had been on my mind since I discovered the news of Cassandra.
"Why?" I asked, my voice modulated.
Shiva smirked and stood up. She looked me up and down, her eyes restrained yet shining, like she could see through me and understand the double meaning behind the question.
"Greatness looks like madness to—"
BAM!
Lady Shiva, unrivalled in the realm of combat with the flesh, failed the test of my fist. She flew back and slammed into the wall at her rear, her eyes wide and chest caved in as she rebounded off of it.
"You know what I just realised?" I went forward and crouched next to her, the sight of her wheezing oddly therapeutic. "Nothing you say will be enough. Not for me, and not for Cassandra. No reason you give me for doing what you did to your own daughter will satisfy the side of me that wants to understand why people like you do what you do."
I tapped my watch a few times and stood up, stepping back. A panel on the ceiling slid away and a nozzle poked its head out. Emerald green gas shot down toward the dying woman, and I continued.
"Here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna raise Cassandra. I'm gonna give her her voice back and make sure she grows up happy, with friends and an actual family that loves her. She'll become the opposite of what you wanted her to be. A well adjusted young woman of admirable personality and goals. I'll make sure of it. And as for you," I paused and watched her struggle to get up.
The shock of having your sternum biting into your body was not so easily overcome. Even for someone as hardy as she was.
"You will never see her again," I felt myself get heated and my voice rose an octave, but I didn't stop. "You will live the rest of your days here, knowing, that your precious assassin, your precious weapon, is being unmade, reforged, into something that goes against everything you stand for. Why, I might just provide some screens so you can watch the process yourself.
Now get up. We have a fight to finish."
Action: Take someone under your wing.
Reward: The Joy of Teaching (100)
.
.
.
.
Happy Harbor
July 2, 16:17
Weeks ago when Captain Atom finished distilling his piloting knowledge into the VR device I sent him, I was on a date, so Mike had taken up the task of updating the training simulation with the data.
Today, I was fully present and available, so Wonder Woman's message had reached me directly. And so did Grace's. Hers were an album of images showing off her new bracelets, her favourite wraps nowhere in sight.
At this point, I couldn't get exasperated anymore. She never sent one message or one image. It was always an album, either of images and/or videos. Some of the videos, I was sure she just set the camera to record and went about her day.
Of course, a busy man like me hadn't watched any of the long ones past the one minute mark. And I wasn't going to start now. However these bracelets of hers… it obviously alluded to her receiving training and gifts from the Amazons.
What little I'd gleaned about her personality told me she was allergic to the concept of dodging and blocking. So either she was fighting her wild side and staying obedient or she was truly loving them.
Either way, that's where my interest died. I shook my head to clear my thoughts and dismissed the window with her messages, enlarging Wonder Woman's and downloading the large file she sent.
When the bar was seconds away from filling completely, I swung my chair and looked about the lab. Where did I put my— I caught the VR goggles Mike tossed at me. Smirking, I gave him a nod and thumbs up and swiveled back into place.
The headset settled on a clear part of the station and I hooked a tiny flashdrive-esque device to it. Eyes back on the screen and fingers back on the holo keyboard, a few well placed thoughts opened the relevant windows and apps I got to work.
I wouldn't call what I was doing easy—at least from the perspective of game designers—but it wasn't hard either. What I was doing was really a simple update, basically filling an empty, prepared slot of the simulator with Wonder Woman's data.
It didn't get any more complicated than that. Personally, it is what came after that I considered difficult. Mainly because it was boring and repetitive.
I had to run an uncountable number of tests on all sorts of things to make sure the sim ran smoothly. If I didn't do this, bugs and glitches would inevitably pop up from the ether. Programs were annoying that way, birthing the damned things from god knows where.
Fortunately, coding came to me like breathing. With the ability to code with my fingers and mere thoughts, I finished the sim update in no time. Still didn't beat Mike's time though.
Momentarily holding back from wearing the headset and diving into things, I typed up a quick message and sent it to the team group chat.
"Guys. WW swordfighting sim done. Big update incoming. Check your goggles."
I hit send and turned to my own pair, only for a message to come in and interrupt the attempted dive. The boys never replied that quickly… well, except Wally when he knew I'd gone or was about to go on a date.
'So who could it be?' I thought and opened it. It was from S.T.A.R. Labs. They'd managed to isolate the changes Kobra-Venom made to the DNA of the recipients.
It must've been tough work, but I didn't expect anything less from the group of geniuses assigned to this planet's version of the "any and everything weird" science division.
VR Wonder Woman temporarily out of mind, I read through what they'd sent, nodding. With this, we could now identify the KVed brutes. Well, the rest of them anyway.
Like the idiots they were, a few of them had injected themselves in full view of other people who knew them. Idiots. Even on another earth in another universe, the average criminal was dumber than a fucking rock.
And like the resulting fallout of every stupid decision taken by one of them, it affected people who were somewhere far away minding their own businesses.
The original plan had been to try the Wonder Woman sim, play for about two hours, and then get ready for date six with Felicity. We had decided to make the weekly dates a staple thing.
Mainly as a challenge to see who'd be the first to cancel and also as a way of getting as many of them in before the inevitable future of unending work arrived.
Batman and Green Arrow or should I say WayneTech and Queen Consolidated had partnered with Rath Internal to produce the Medscanners. Per the agreements, WayneTech had the right to handle manufacturing and distribution in Europe and Africa and Queen would handle Asia and Middle East.
That left all of North America for Rath International. The actual product was over a year, almost two years away from hitting the market, but I couldn't help but make estimates for the kind of returns I'd be making on top of all the money I currently had.
Ra's al Ghul was stupidly fucking rich. I'll just leave it at that.
Calling on what little willpower I possessed, I left my station and found my suit. Now that we could identify the Kobra brutes, someone needed to get their DNA, and that someone was no other than me.
Because I wasn't telling Batman to do it. Were you?
Jokes aside, this was Belle Reve. I wanted to see it and bug the hell out of it. Seriously, without Mike how would I keep track of all the people and places I was monitoring? I made a mental note to do something nice for him and donned my suit.
First though, I changed the color scheme. The all black was cool for a while, but it was time for a new look. I was a publicly recognised hero now. I was Spider-Man.
.
.
.
.
Belle Reve Parish
July 2, 16:31
The Belle Reve Penitentiary's inmates were all of the villainous kind, some superpowered, some not. Despite this difference, I expected a majority, if not all of them, to react with hostility once they laid eyes on me.
After all, incarceration didn't mean they'd been cut off from the rest of civilization in every sense, even though a few of them definitely deserved it.
By now, I expected word of me to have travelled even past these Superman resistant walls. So I wasn't bracing myself per say, just gearing up for the experience, wondering if it'd be any different from that of hardcore racists.
My expectations were shattered yet also met at the same time, by none other than prison's a bit too no nonsense warden, Amanda Waller.
Heavy, wide, and short with her hair in a pony tail, the plainly adversarial woman met me at the checkpoint where I was getting processed. She had a contingent of guards in non-standard prison officer gear with her, their faces hidden behind opaque helmets.
"You missed the appointed time."
"Sorry," I said, cycling through multiple responses in a split second, deciding there was nothing more disarming than that.
She narrowed her eyes, the coldness in her expression unchanged. "Visitation hours are over. While you were being tardy, we did your job and obtained the DNA of the freaks."
"All two hundred and thirteen of them?"
"Yes," she answered and waved. Two of the guards behind her stepped forward with cases and stopped in front of me. The ionic scanners in my mask easily pierced through and confirmed her words, but I opened one of them just to keep up appearances.
I held up one plastic container to the light and remarked. "It can't have been easy. Surely the idiots must've put up a fight."
"They did," and I felt like cleaning my ears because was that satisfaction I could hear? "But a little discipline straightened them out."
"Discipline," I smiled and shut the cases, taking them both. It took everything to not shake my head and call her on her bullshit. Discipline my ass.
"Thanks for these. You didn't have to but eh, whatever. Now I know you said visiting hours were over, but—"
"Good day hero."
Without giving me a chance to respond and plead my case, Waller turned around with her entourage and walked beyond the doors back into the prison.
"Really?" I held both arms wide. "Not even gonna let me finish?"
No answer. Breaking in it is then.
I returned to the Zephyr with my gifts in hand, cloaked it and then myself before descending on the prison once again. Scans of the facility and the cell of my target committed to memory, I used the matter phase shifter, multiple of them in fact and ushered myself back in.
Keeping my feet above ground, sometimes even crawling on the ceilings and walls, I bugged the rooms and locations I'd singled out as hotspots like the common areas and Waller's office.
That one was a particularly difficult one, but I achieved my goal nonetheless.
My next stop was the female wing, the cell block housing one Jade Nguyen to be specific. Another phase shifter paved the way for me and I stepped into the tiny, gray cell, suddenly self-conscious about how this looked.
The bright orange prison suits automatically drew my attention due to the dull nature of the cell. Jade was on the floor doing sit-ups while her cell mate sat in the corner most section of her bed, nearly blending into the dark.
Once again reminding myself not to do this ever again, I shot Jade's cellmate with a fast acting sedative. Jade, seemingly noticing this, stopped and sat up, her eyes narrowing.
Her friend nodded off, head drooping to the side. That's when I revealed myself, earning the look I'd expected to receive when I arrived.
"You," said Cheshire.
"Me."
"You must be good if you can get in here, but not very smart. You silenced her and left me. What if I shout and call the guards?"
I was about to tell her that I'd deployed a muffler, that she could shout on top of her voice and no one would hear. However my presence here was already pushing it, so I said something else.
"Let me worry about that."
"Hmm. Well," she stood up, eyes on me the whole time. "You didn't go through all this trouble to be a pervert. Or did you? Please say yes. It'll be more interesting than whatever you hero types always have to say."
"No."
"You're no fun."
"You," I paused and exhaled audibly. "You're getting a life sentence. Do you know that?"
Her playful, cat-like demeanor cracked a bit before returning to normal.
"I guess not. You're staying behind bars, in this… place, for the rest of your life. You'll grow old and die here. And I'll make sure of it. I'll have to, because I'm a hero and you're a villain. If you try to escape or somehow succeed, I'll make sure to bring you back."
The playfulness in her tone was gone entirely. "You came here to gloat? Is that it?"
"No. I came to make you an offer. Right now, we're on opposite sides. If you do a bad thing, I'm supposed to stop you. But what if we weren't on different sides?"
She lifted an eyebrow and chuckled. The chuckle devolved into a full belly laugh before she got a hold of herself and noticed I hadn't moved or said anything else.
"Y-you're serious. You want me to be a hero?"
"Hero. Good guy. Protector of the planet you also fucking live on. Whatever you wanna call it."
"You are out of your mind," she scoffed and looked away. "You have no idea…"
"It's either that or turning to dust in this place."
There was visible struggle in her expression. Just a little bit more would tip her over the edge. And I had just the thing.
"Your mother is getting released soon isn't she?"
She clenched her fists and readied herself, her demeanor and stance becoming defensive and bordering on the offensive in an instant.
"Tread. Carefully," she boldly enunciated.
"If I gave her her legs back, would you be willing to try?"
"...."
"...I'm listening."
Name: The Joy of Teaching
Description: You are a brilliant, talented and motivated teacher. Your students will learn and improve at least five times faster than they normally would, and will fully comprehend and retain anything you teach them. You are also excellent at relating to children and teens, you know how to get them to open up to you, and truly excel at getting them to obey you.
Cost: 100 CP
Source: Complete Companion
*********************
1-10 advanced chapters on: https://patreon.com/MasterReigen