Having the whole building to himself meant that setting a lab had been easy. Jemma and May already brought enough equipment to set a field lab, and he used his supposed pull with Professor Azure to order a few machines, which had been delivered to his roof by a drone. He went to the roof and picked them up, acting as if he didn’t notice the multiple snipers pointing his way.
No one tried to stop him, because even with the battle between Professor Azure and SHIELD was intense, no one tried to intervene with one of his drones in New York, accepting the city as his territory.
The machines were heavy, about a thousand pounds each, but it meant not only he could carry them, but he could juggle them. Super Strength was convenient.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” he said as he entered, and saw Jemma and Skye leaned over a screen, talking. He looked at Skye’s cleavage without shame, which made her smirk, and Jemma blush.
“You are,” Skye responded smugly.
“Luckily, I came bearing gifts,” he said as he pulled the box down and opened it. Jemma didn’t react, as the surface carried no marking, just smooth blue plating. That attitude changed when he passed her the spec sheet, and she started reading, her eyes widening. “I-is this a prank?”
“No, why?” he said. “Professor has some bad qualities, but pranking is not one of them.”
She gulped. “It has to be.”
“Why?” Skye asked, and peered over her shoulder. “Isn’t it just a PCR thermocycler, just better than ours?”
Jemma chuckled, but it was almost hysterical. “Better than ours, yes,” she said, then looked at Skye. “We are SHIELD. Top-tier commercial ones go for a million dollars. We have SHIELD version, at least twenty years ahead of commercial models,” she added, then pointed. “T-this is even better. If every lab can be—“
“Nope,” he interrupted. “Professor doesn’t have a good relationship with SHIELD. He sent it as a favor to me. If it leaves the building, it’ll self-destruct.”
“It’ll explode?” Skye asked, tense.
“Calm down. He promised that it’s just an electrical charge to fry its components. Nothing serious.” He didn’t care about the machine itself, as it had been trivial to improve SHIELD versions and integrate some Chitauri tech, but he didn’t want to do any favors for them, not when they were attacking his bases.
His dummy bases contained nothing in consequence, but it was the principle of the matter.
While Jemma checked the first machine, he went to the roof for the other machines.
When he finished, Jemma was still moving around in a sugar rush.
Skye followed her with her tablet, already running diagnostics on the machines, her expression sharp as she did a security check on equipment she didn't fully trust.
"The mass spectrometer is calibrated," she said. "The protein synthesizer was tested with three reference samples yesterday, and the reads are accurate."
“Perfect. The other scientists are going to be so jealous—“
"No, because they won’t learn," Skye reminded her. “We’re under an information blackout, remember.”
“Right, the super-soldier serum is a tricky subject,” Jemma sighed. “I wish it weren’t. This is not the way to do science.”
Michael chose to answer the question she wasn't asking. "It’s when you’re working for a spy agency,” he reminded her.
She sighed. “Yeah. You’re right.” Then, she noticed he was looking at her. “Why are you looking at me?”
“It’s fun. You have an expressive face, especially for a spy.”
"My face is not—" she started, her eyes wide, then paused, trying to look serious. She failed, which sent Skye into a fit of laughter. "Fine. My face is expressive. Stop staring at it."
"Difficult request."
She blushed. Skye, across the room, snorted loudly enough to make her presence known.
"Michael, leave the poor scientist alone. She's trying to save my life."
He smirked. "Hey. I’m being a good host."
"You're trying to make her drop the equipment she’s carrying because it’s funny … among other things,” she added, her expression playful yet with a warning as he flirted with Jemma.
Jemma missed the implication, her attention already stolen by the latest readings.
He walked up to Skye, and hugged her from behind. “You’re mean,” she whispered.
“I’m not mean. I’m flirting with the beautiful nerd. There’s a difference.”
“Really, in front of me,” she said.
He declared without any hint of shame. “Yes.”
She chuckled, but then her eyes widened slightly. “Hey, why did I have to work a week to even make you notice me while she gets to be flirted with?”
“Because I didn’t save her life, so I didn’t have to worry about whether her attraction is real, or a reaction to be healed after a near-death experience. It means I can flirt with her … unless you’re scared of competition and want me to stop.”
“Of course not,” she replied loudly.
That distracted Jemma from her daze. “Did you say something?”
“Just checking the software,” Shy responded hurriedly, then sent him an angry glare.
He just smirked playfully before he started helping them with the experiments, mostly by using his healing abilities on various cell cultures. But, not for free. Whenever Jemma was distracted by her research, he was teasing Skye.
Even without that, it wouldn’t have been a loss. Jemma was a chatterbox, talking about her current progress, ideas, old cases that might be relevant, various enemies with similar methods … including a lot of confidential details she had seen, the kind that they never put into files because they were too sensitive, meaning even hacking wouldn’t provide him any information about it.
Flirting with two sexy and smart ladies while simultaneously learning about something as useful as super soldier serum was a good way to spend his time.
It also helped him to understand the great gulf between Expert and Master skills better. With Master skill, he was able to reverse-engineer Tony’s armor with ease. Meanwhile, Expert Chemist required a lot of work to allow him decipher the super-soldier serums. Without his healing, they would have required months, maybe years to make something truly useful.
For once, SHIELD was actually being useful.
&&&
He spent a lot of time with Jemma and Skye, but he didn’t spend all of his time. At the same time, Phil and the rest of his team were researching GH-325, the drug they had used on Skye, and he had access to their top-secret records.
Their findings had revealed that anyone who had taken the medicine had gotten crazy in the same way, creating the exact same drawing. It was interesting, but luckily, having multiple supercomputers for data processing, as well as the ability to access most public spaces, meant he soon found multiple traces, including one that had been drawn to the back of a painting.
As for acquiring them, it was easy. A quick teleportation through his gates, followed by a short flight, and he found multiple half-complete drawings, which he combined.
Once complete, he figured out what those drawings implied quite easily. Ironically, one of his lesser-used skills, Architecture, allowed him to recognize it as some kind of large-scale plan.
Once that realization was in place, Expert Fine Arts and Expert Math combined meant the rest was trivial. A few more hacks, and soon, he had a location.
Castillo San Cristóbal. More accurately, whatever was underneath.
Infiltrating it had been easy. There had been some interesting countermeasures, like some directional, very sophisticated EMP tech, but he was able to develop equally sophisticated countermeasures and send a few drones.
The city tried to hack his drones, which was interesting for what seemed to be an ancient city. That also tempted him to visit it directly, but he decided that trying to poke into an unknown city blindly was too risky even for him.
He didn’t know what could be there; and how risky it could be, especially since once he started to dig, he realized it was alien in nature. Meaning, he truly had no context of what he might be found.
He took it slow … and it would have been far slower, if his Computer Tinker didn’t allow him to reverse-engineer computational tech quickly. With it, he managed to decipher their coding language from a few peripheral computational devices and scrap code his devices captured.
And, once he got familiar with the city, hacking turned even easier … and it was a good thing … very, very good.
He didn’t expect the city to belong to an interstellar alien empire.
Kree, to be particular.
The worst, the facility was capable of communicating with the empire in question if the systems were ever triggered, meaning if he had been less careful, he might have triggered another alien invasion.
Luckily.
Admittedly, he didn’t know what the alien reaction would be, because digging through the databants revealed that the facility didn’t belong to the empire. It belonged to a rogue faction within the empire, using it for illegal experiments that were against their laws, and discovery meant death.
That made him hopeful for a moment. After all, any alien empire that punished experimenting on ‘lesser’ races couldn’t be that bad.
Then, he found out exactly which laws were being violated.
Racial purity laws.
He dug deeper, which revealed a different picture than he had expected.
“Nazis. Blue, intergalactic space Nazis,” he muttered as he tried to piece together their culture. Admittedly, it was a pessimistic read of their culture, but constant references to ongoing, planet-shattering wars and racial purity didn’t seem promising.
“Five thousand years is a long time. Hopefully they changed,” he muttered, but that didn’t prevent him from first dismantling all communication systems, then all the computer systems, replacing them with fake damaged ones to trick the future visitors.
Once that was done, he processed all the data, which included the nature of their experiments, how they used some implanted alien genes, and how they activated them with a high-energy material called Terrigen crystal.
He suspected his use of Fire Bending worked the same way … only better, with no side effects their experimental notes carried.
“Well, that was a nice find,” he said once the drones had scoured the base a dozen times, and made sure to remove anything problematic in the process. He didn’t hide the fact that the city was alien, but he left no tech that could be leveraged.
After all, five thousand years was a long time.
[Feat Achieved! This doesn’t belong in a Museum! Pull off an archaeological heist with significant cultural implications and leaving behind a prank
+1x Gold Random Gacha ticket]
The reward was amusing.
[Shadow Chains]
{Rare Ability: Allows you to create and control chains of shadow weaved from your own, once they snare an enemy they quickly start exhausting their energy.}
“Wow, it’s like custom made for Shadow Blade,” he muttered, amused by the name, though he wasn’t sure whether it was better to be used for the thief persona, or to be saved for upcoming Warlock personal.
It fit the evil theme well enough.
Also, his ability slots just became six, which was always convenient.
&&&
Discovery of the city had consumed most of his free time the following two weeks, so much that he had limited himself to merely teasing Jemma, and focusing on actual work. He didn’t want to work.
He was supposed to be lazy, decadent villain enjoying life, but for some reason, he was the only one that seemed to care about the risk of actual alien invasion, and the others were happy spending their time in petty local fights.
The hidden Kree city database wasn’t full of tech, but that didn’t mean that was completely lacking. Two of them, in particular, had been very useful. Spaceship designs, and a map of wormholes that could be used to traverse space.
Which meant he had just added another critical tool to his kit. He immediately prioritized the production of three types of equipment.
Space fighters were the first item. It was a combination of Chitauri, Kree, and human technology. The result was fighters capable of performing far better than the old Kree designs.
Especially since his human tech not only included Tony’s tech, but also a lot of unique designs SHIELD had in its database. SHIELD was happy to lock every piece of human ingenuity despite knowing about the alien threat, but he was not.
He created two variants. The first variant was the automated, unhackable system, one that he didn’t want to reveal unless the situation was truly dire. He knew that the moment he revealed that he could deploy thousands of mechs and spacefighters that required no drivers, he would become the greatest threat in the world.
It was why the second variant, he actually designed to accommodate pilots, with control schemes similar enough to fighter jets that in an emergency, fighter pilots could use them with some software assistance.
That variant would be acceptable for the government … barely.
The second thing he prepared was a huge vat of super-soldier serum, perfectly safe for human consumption. Accessing Kree research turned him into one of the leading experts on the subject, especially since Jemma was always ready to answer his ‘stupid’ questions, which allowed him to fill in the blanks.
It helped that, unlike most of the research, he didn’t try to match Captain America’s specs, focusing on enhanced reflexes and endurance without the ability to rip car doors with ease. That way, it could be deployed en masse without destroying the social order in the process.
An actual, long range spaceship was the third item, of which he made sure to build purely as Kree tech, because he didn’t actually need to travel with it. Not when he could actually bind a Gate to the spaceship and send him toward his targets.
Though, he was impressed by himself that he was able to build one merely in days rather than years, his production capabilities and Tinker abilities combined to a perfect level. Admittedly, the spaceship he built was essentially junk, unable to survive even the weakest adversary.
Since it was an unmanned one, allowing him to cut corners with ease.
His first target was Pluto.
For anyone else, Pluto would have been a horrible target for colonization, mostly due to distance. The distance between Earth and Mars was about 0.5 AU when their orbits were closest, which was about two hundred times the distance between Earth and Moon. Meanwhile, Pluto was about 30 AU away.
It was inconvenient … for anyone that couldn’t establish permanent teleportation gates that allowed instant transfer, not only allowing him to send the necessary equipment but also keeping a direct communication channel open.
Still, to be on the safe side, he had adopted a completely new aesthetic for the Pluto base, deep green colors and weird angles, the kind of thing that screamed Alien at first glance.
He couldn’t directly send information through gates, but essentially shuttling a data cache back every ten seconds worked well enough for most decision-making, so there was no risk of his communication attempts being caught either.
Five seconds of lag was perfectly acceptable for a distance of six light-hours.
Gate Creation ability was broken.
After he opened a gate on Pluto, he sent the spaceship to the nearest wormhole, which was a good test whether gates had a distance limit between gates.
The answer turned out to be, somewhat. Farther the gate was, the more energy it took from him to establish. The equation was linear. Unfortunately, with the greatness of the interstellar distance considered, even the linear growth was unbearable.
Pluto was six light hours away, and the nearest star was four light years away, which meant a difference of five thousand times.
Space was ridiculously large.
He eventually needed to order the spaceship to return, as it had hit its limits.
He sighed even as he started working on the gates, trying to resolve it through science or magic, trying to decipher the mechanics, but failed. Teleportation, especially the controlled kind Gates allowed, was too complicated for him to resolve easily.
He was good, but not that good.
Not yet, at least.
“Too bad I can’t call Thor and ask him for books on their travel magitech,” he muttered. From the limited exposure he had, he could see that Asgardians had been mixing technology and magic in pretty ingenious ways. Too bad they didn’t look like they would happily share their secrets.
Thor would have tried to do, but the snippets he had heard about Odin meant it would have probably ended up in another exile for Thor.
It wasn’t the only thing weird about Asgard. They were a major galactic power, yet they had only one city, a relatively small one at that. He didn’t know their size, but he knew that their numbers were limited. As in, well below a million, but the exact numbers, he wasn’t sure.
“Well, since I can’t do that,” he said, and started writing a message to Jane, one that had a theoretical situation about Einstein-Rosen bridges, and his solution. He framed it as a cute romantic gesture, a good friend trying to understand her work.
She called back five minutes later, but he had a feeling that she had spent that time hurriedly changing and applying her makeup. There was no chance Jane would be working while wearing those tight jeans, or that top with deep cleavage.
He wasn’t complaining.
“I missed you,” she said as she popped onto his screen.
“I missed you as well,” he responded. “But…”
“SHIELD,” she spat out, annoyed.
“SHIELD,” he responded. “But don’t worry. Things are getting better, and soon, I’ll have a way to meet face to face again.”
“Really?” she said.
“Yeah. Professor implied that he has a way to reduce the travel time quite a bit. As long as I figure out how to solve his latest health problem, he’ll give me as payment, as well as protection while I travel.”
“That’s amazing,” Jane said, her smile widening. Then, they started talking about the solution he sent, which was rather rough. She caught all his intentional mistakes, and also highlighted several issues that actually deepened his understanding.
She was sexy while teaching. Which was why, when they finished their science talk and she assigned him more homework. It had been fun, especially since halfway into the impromptu lecture, he convinced her to undress.
Wearing glasses and nothing else, she was spectacularly sexy. It wasn’t as good as Jane treating his body like a toy, trying to break her previous high score, but it was still fun.
It got even more entertaining when Darcy arrived.
It was a fun break.