Colorado - FSI 38: Thunderbolts 1 |
Thunderbolts 2 |
Thunderbolts Mountain , Colorado
"You ever wonder why we still call ourselves the Thunderbolts, Dr. Chen?" Melissa Gold asked, her body stretched across a short, leather couch. She craned her head back over the armrest so that she could see her companion.
Chen Lu sat at a bank of computers, shifting from side to side on a rolling chair to get from keyboard to keyboard. The Chinese native glowed a radioactive green under his clothing. "No, I don't think about that, Melissa," he said, turning around in the chair. "Why do you ask?"
Melissa sat up, brushing a pink-and-white lock of hair away from her eyes. "Well, it just feels like after the screw-up we made out of the thing with the Grandmaster, there aren't really any Thunderbolts left. Zemo's gone, Erik is unconscious and occupying half a country, and Abe, Conrad, and Donny lost their suits in the Universal Wellspring. I mean, the Thunderbolts saved the world, and now we get back and everyone still wants some Thunderbolts around to save the world the next time they need it. So Stark sticks whoever's left on a team and he still gets what he wants. I don't know. I guess I feel. used ."
Chen nodded. "I have never thought of the team that way. I merely follow orders. As long as the Chinese government wants me here, this is where I will be."
"I wish it was that simple for me," Melissa said, frowning.
"What is your discomfort, Melissa? Do you not like our new leader, or our new teammates? Or is it that you will be working with Moonstone again?" Chen asked, trying to get to the root of his friend's unease.
"A little of all of them," Melissa said, allowing herself a little laugh. "I guess it just seems like a waste. Me and Abe and Erik spent all those years building this team up for our redemption, and I guess it just feels like Osborn and Stark are prepared to tear it all down. I feel like I spent all those years of my life doing nothing."
"Then maybe it is your mindset that needs to change," Chen said. "Maybe the old team was the initial lightning strike, and now we must make way for the thunder to roll."
#1: Rolling Thunder ( Justice and Lightning Part 1)
He watches from the mountains walls, / And like a thunderbolt he falls.
("The Eagle," Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
The lighting in the room was dim, but that didn't matter to Max Dillon. He was a living electrical conduit. He was Electro . If he wanted to brighten the room, all he had to do was think about it.
Max sat alone at a table, idly pointing at a few gnats that had penetrated the building's defenses. One by one, the gnats fell to the bare, cement floor, victims of Electro's high-voltage whims. Here was a man who was beyond doing things for money anymore. He'd been screwed over too many times for that. Oh, sure, money was nice and all, but there were a few things that were a lot harder to buy. Take revenge, for instance.
The door creaked slowly open, and a new face peeked in tentatively. It was that of a man who was pushing thirty. He was well-built, and his black skin seemed darker in the dimness of the room. His name was Calvin Carr, and he often took on the moniker of Chemistro. Upon seeing Max, the man opened the door all the way and stepped inside. "So, this is where we go for the Thunderbolts, right? The guards just kind of pointed and grunted."
"Oh, you'll find Thunderbolts in here," Max said, smiling. It was an unnerving grin that belonged more on the face of a man who was about to get something he had been waiting a long time for, and was just about to get it. "Sit down, Chemistro. Let's talk."
Calvin walked toward Max and pulled out the second chair at the table, but stopped before sitting down. "I know you, man, don't I? Yeah! You're Electro! So they snapped you up for this thing, too?"
"Yeah," Max said reflectively. "They pulled my ass out of that Negative Zone prison after they moved me there from the Raft-you know, where I got sent after I set you and a few dozen other nasties free."
Calvin's eyebrows narrowed. "Hnh. Nobody came back and got you? Man, life bites some times, eh?"
"Sure does," Max said. "Y'see, I've been thinking ever since I saw they brought you back in, Chemistro, what an alchemy gun like yours could do to prison walls, especially if you were just going back in for the one guy- one guy- who pulled your sorry ass out of jail in the first place. Do you follow me?"
"Yeah, but, well." He shrugged. "Nobody ever paid me to do it."
Max stood up and slammed his hands down on the table. Yellow sparks shot randomly outward at the contact. "That's where you're wrong, Chemistro. You already owed that guy. Least you could do is risk your butt for his, right? But no. You didn't. Nobody did. They tell me I only did six months before I got out when I heard about Spider-Man's secret identity. That's six months I can't get back, Chemistro. What are we gonna do about that?"
"I-I don't know," Chemistro said. His right arm inched toward his trench coat, where his alchemy gun was holstered.
Max shuddered. "Well, let me tell you something now. I gave up six months of my life so that you could spend an extra six months of yours free, along with the fifty-some other bastards who got away. So I gave up six months for a total of something like twenty-five years of all of those people's lives.
"Guess what, Chemistro? The Thunderbolts didn't want you. You're here on a special request. The thing is, you're replaceable. You're a tech-user. They want a Chemistro, they take the tech. Me? I'm pissed off at the man. If I hadn't called you here, you'd be looking at twenty years in the N-Zone, bucko. That'd make you close to fifty when you got out, and the average life span nowadays for men is something like seventy-five. Guess what, Chemistro. I'm gonna cut you some slack. I gave up six months for twenty-five total years, and I'm gonna save us both some time and collect it right now in full."
As Electro finished, he reared back, pulling in his arms, and then thrust his entire upper body forward, channeling electricity directly from his body into Chemistro's. The victim grasped for the alchemy gun, but he was no longer in control of his own body. All of his synapses fired at once, and his limbs flew out of control. "Feel this?" screamed Electro. "This is what it feels like to collect a debt, man! Guilty as charged ! Haha!"
Then Chemistro's howls of pain ceased along with the beating of his heart, and Electro allowed the man's charred corpse to fall to the ground. His heart rate began to slow back to normal. The excitement had passed even though the memory of what he had just done was fresh in his mind.
"Feel better now?" asked the voice of a man in the shadows. Electro didn't know when Norman Osborn had stepped into the room, and he didn't really care.
"Yeah, a little bit, Ozzy," Electro said. "Just gotta keep to the deal. I work for you, and we put away the guys who got away, right?"
"Of course," Osborn said. He walked over to the still-smoking corpse and pulled the alchemy gun from where it still rested unharmed in its smoldering holster. "Nobody will miss Calvin Carr, but we can think of a couple of things to do with this."
"You know, I really don't believe it," Electro said, his voice taking on an almost singsong tone. "Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, has finally gone straight. He works for the government, files papers, and isn't killing Peter Parker."
Osborn's reaction to Electro's taunts was nothing more than a grin. Electro was stricken by how similar the grin was to the Green Goblin mask, and he wondered how much of that mask was sculpted compared to how much of it belonged to the man beneath. "Oh, you know me better than that, Dillon," said Osborn. "Since when has Norman Osborn been completely straight with anyone ?"
42, The Negative Zone
"Welcome to 42, Director Osborn," said a guard's voice. Osborn hardly paid the man any attention whatsoever. "Excuse me, sir," the guard said a little more forcefully. "We're going to have to scan you. We don't want any shapeshifters, Skrull infiltrators, or anything. Plus this will ensure you're not hiding any weaponry in that trench coat of yours. You'll understand, of course."
Osborn grunted his response. "Just get it over with. I have a meeting with the construction supervisor about the Colorado gateway."
There was a light beeping noise as the scan was completed. "Thank you, sir," said the guard. "You just follow the signs to the main office. You can't miss it."
Osborn walked off in the middle of the guard's instructions, settling into a brisk pace that led him toward the largest of the structures in the Negative Zone prison. The complex was a mass of metal and concrete that appeared to be suspended in the middle of open space. The nice thing about the Negative Zone was that open space was actually breathable.
Had anyone been close enough to Osborn, they would have seen him talking to himself, which was standard fare for the man. "You know what to do," he muttered. "In, out, and back inside before the meeting's over. Understand?"
"Got it," said a second voice. Taking advantage of Osborn's isolation, Moonstone slipped from her position phased inside Osborn's trench coat-covered body through the ground and into the prison complex.
Moonstone was not invisible in her phased form, but she had experience in this method of travel. She floated through the roof, poking only her eyes and nose through the ceiling periodically to make sure that she was following the correct path. This took little concentration on her part. Ever since she had reclaimed the moonstones from Baron Zemo, fractured as they were after the Wellspring fiasco, they felt more like another limb than a tool that she was using.
The funny thing about the Negative Zone prison, Moonstone realized, was that the general population section was practically in solitary. There was no walking around or time in the yard. They could still hear each other, and messages could travel by word of mouth, but no one every came into physical contact with the other prisoners. If that was what general population was like, she had a hard idea of imagining how bad solitary confinement was. It didn't matter; she was about to find out anyway.
It didn't take Moonstone long to find the woman she was looking for. She was a petite redhead, tied up to machines with flashing lights and display monitors. Thick metal restrains clamped her arms and legs to the table. She was constantly being watched by the machines. Any abnormalities would send a team of doctors running toward this medi-cell.
Tapping into the energies of her moonstones, she pulled up an image of the woman's mind. She was no telepath. The moonstones just drew up a crude representation of what the woman's psyche looked like in the caricature-like style of a five-year old child. Instead of a single mind coming up on the display there were three, maybe four images that all blurred together at the edges.
"That won't do," Moonstone muttered to herself. This was hardly her area of expertise, but Osborn wanted the woman on the team, so she would do what she had to do. If telepaths were surgeons, Moonstone was a quack with a sledgehammer going in to fix the same tumor. She mashed the four psyches together like four different colors of Play-Doh until they were near-impossible to separate again. There were some area of the psyches that were more yellow than any of the other three colors, and others that had more red, blue, or green, but otherwise it would have to suffice for the moment.
Without a moment's pause, Moonstone left the wing of the prison to rendezvous with Osborn coming out of his meeting. She didn't spare a second thought on the butcher-job she had just done on the woman's mind. It was a band-aid holding together a double-digit stitches wound.
After all, who really expected Typhoid Mary to keep it together for the entire year?
Thunderbolts Mountain
Andreas von Strucker brought the sword down with a crash, cleaving the watermelon in half. "I understand why leaving knives around for us would be a problem," he muttered, "but they could at least slice the food for us if that's the case. Osborn probably just wants to see us digging into it like animals."
He then sliced one of the two halves in half and repeated the process with one of those halves until he had a manageable slice of watermelon on the kitchen island. Andreas took a bite of the watermelon, unable to truly savor the nourishment it brought to his body. Ever since his sister's death, the world had been a much less enjoyable place. His only reason for joining back up with this incarnation of the Thunderbolts was Norman Osborn's promise to make a clone of Andrea so that the two could be together once more.
When Andreas looked up, he saw the open-mouthed figure of Robbie Baldwin standing in the doorway. As soon as Robbie realized he'd been noticed, he closed his mouth and went to the refrigerator as if that had been his plan the entire time. Each step echoed with a clanking noise. He wore a spiked suit of armor. The larger spikes were visible from the outside. The smaller spikes afflicted the wearer. There was a spike for every life that had been lost in the explosion in Stamford , Connecticut , which Robbie and his friends had been partially responsible for. In this costume he called himself Penance, a far cry from his lighthearted former codename Speedball.
"So.neo-Nazi?" said Andreas, eyeing Robbie's shaven head with a level of amusement. "I rather think I know a thing or two about the real deal."
Robbie stared at Andreas blankly for a moment. "No. The hair wouldn't fit inside my helmet." He turned back to the inside of the fridge, digging for some kind of nourishment.
"Watermelon?" Andreas asked, holding out a slice. Robbie looked at it as if it might be poisoned, then accepted it. He only nibbled at it for a moment. "So, how does a boy like you get into this nasty business?"
"Easy enough," Robbie said. "Just killed a few hundred people, made me perfect for the job." He took a second bite of the watermelon, now convinced that there wasn't anything wrong with it.
Andreas was stricken by this, the shock registering on his normally stoic face. "Well, then, I think you'll fit in just fine," he admonished, and the two continued eating their watermelon in silence.
Aladdin, Wyoming
"Thunderbolts, move!" shouted Moonstone, directing the field team. "You have your orders!"
"Finally," Songbird muttered, taking off into the air over the line of what seemed to be empty buildings. Glowing, pink wings emerged from her hard-sound harness. "We could have been in and out if we hadn't waited for the cameras to show up."
"Melissa? Your communicator's on. Just thought I'd let you know," said Moonstone, rising into the air on the power of her moonstones. "Don't embarrass me, any of you. This is Vermin we're talking about."
"I smell a rat!" shouted Electro. He laughed snidely. The villain wore his green outfit without the five-pointed yellow mask. It had been Osborn's idea so that the public might not immediately associate him with the prison-breaking villain they had all seen on television.
Moonstone rolled her eyes. "Swordsman, Radioactive Man! He's supposed to be in the basement of the third house, according to the eyewitness. Go in and smoke him out! Penance, Electro, be prepared to cut off any possible escape routes! Songbird-just give us aerial or something."
Swordsman was the first into the house. He navigated his way through the decrepit living room and kitchen and into the basement. There was a smell of decay that wafted out of the doorway, and Swordsman recognized the subtle difference that told him this was not the smell of dying plant life. This was the smell of rotting meat.
Deep lines had been gouged out of the basement door and walls. Swordsman saw the trail of blood drops that led down the wooden staircase. He held his sword ready at his side, prepared to meet the crazed villain's assault. The stairs creaked under his weight. He was surprised that the rotting wood held his weight. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned to the left and right, hiding his disgust at the stench. He knew that the pools of liquid the stagnated at in the corners were not puddles of water. Charging his sword with bright, crackling energy, he waved the weapon in an arc. It lit the basement like the beam of a flashlight.
"Moonstone?" he radioed in. "He's not in he-urk!" Swordsman's voice broke off as something dropped onto him from above.
"Swordsman's down!" shouted Moonstone over the com-link. "Radioactive Man, pull his ass out of the fire!"
Radioactive Man was at the top of the stairs in seconds. He wore a bulky, yellow fallout suit that hindered his movements more than anything, and struggled not to trip on the way down. As he thundered down the stairs, the wood splintered beneath his feet, sending him tumbling to the concrete floor below. In the green glow that came from his body, R-Man saw Vermin on top of Swordsman. The fur-covered, rat-like villain hissed at the sight of a second intruder to its lair. Swordsman thrashed beneath Vermin's weight, but he had no leverage. His sword lay halfway across the basement, out of reach.
Radioactive Man pointed his hands at Vermin, bombarding him with microwaves in an attempt to set its fur on fire or boil him enough to put him out of commission. Either method would suffice, as far as Lu was concerned.
At the first notice of a change in the atmosphere, Vermin quite literally went feral. The beast leapt from Swordsman's chest and launched itself into Radioactive Man's face, its razor sharp claws outstretched. Lu brought his hands up to protect his face, but Vermin was faster. Its claws ripped through Radioactive Man's facemask and ripped trails across the skin underneath. "The basement is currently radioactively compromised, Moonstone," reported Lu through his pain. "It will remain so until this wound scabs over. I will attempt to, as you said, 'smoke Vermin out' so that he can be dealt with until I have my body under control."
Swordsman chose that moment to fire off a lance of energy from his sword. The first wild blast sent Vermin scampering for the stairs. The second hit a one of the already-weak support columns that kept the house above from caving into the basement. "Oh, sh-!"
From outside, Songbird saw the house begin to fold in on itself. "Moonstone, we have a problem."
"Thank you for the insight, Songbird," said Moonstone, "but it's just as obvious from ground level that Andreas' temper got the better of him. Electro and Penance! It is your job to make sure Vermin does not escape the premises! This is your baptism of fire, and I'll suffer an eternity of chastity before I let you screw this up!"
Penance saw Vermin emerge from the dust and moved himself to cut off the villain's potential escape routes. The man lost deep within the monster may not have had any control over its alter-ego's crimes, but it had killed nonetheless. In that way, Robbie and Vermin were the same. Both were paying for crimes that the man underneath had little control over. And, in recognizing that similarity, Robbie felt hatred for the other man because he would be allowed to suffer in the solace of his own mind. Focusing on that pain, Robbie tapped into the power built up within his body, firing a rage-powered beam of kinetic energy at Vermin. The blast caught the rat-man head-on, partially demolishing one of the other houses. Unfortunately, caught in Newton 's laws, Penance was repelled backwards due to sheer inexperience with his new power set. His head was knocked around in his torturous helmet as he crashed into one of the news vans. He was out of the fight for now.
Vermin landed catlike on his feet, unaware of Electro's presence. "So, fate and Osborn deliver me another gift, eh, Vermin? You were one of the Raft escapees, and I've been waiting to do this for a long time now, yes I have. I've always wanted to know what fried rat smells like, and, well, you know what they say about wish fulfillment."
Moonstone heard all of this over the com-link. While it was her preferred solution, she also knew that the world was watching them. Why Osborn had such a loose cannon on the team was beyond her, but the power to rein him in was not. "Moonstone to Zeus, fire nanochain number 3532876 immediately."
A voice responded from the tech-station held on the Thunderbolts' aircraft. "Can we get a verification on thi-"
"Oh, for the love of god, just do it!" she snapped.
Electro held his hands out above the hissing Vermin. Yellow energy crackled from fingertip to fingertip as he prepared to land his death-sentence palms down on the cowering rodent. Then, in a movement reminiscent of a children's toy running out of batteries, Electro twitched as his entire electrical current short-circuited. He fell to the ground, his body moving involuntarily.
"Can I make a suggestion, Moonstone?" asked Songbird, still hovering on pink wings high above the scene.
"You can," Moonstone said through gritted teeth. "Whether I listen depends on a variety of factors, least of which is if I hit P.M.S. some time in the next five minutes."
"Scare him toward me," Songbird said. "I can snare him in a cage of solid sound and put him to sleep with a lullaby hum, or at least calm him down until we get him into the Zeus. I think at this point it's the only thing that can save this ship's maiden voyage."
"There's just one flaw in your plan," Moonstone said. "You want me to scare him?"
"I don't know! Wipe off your makeup or something!" spat Songbird. "Blast the ground at his feet and direct him toward me already!"
Moonstone bitterly did as Songbird suggested, watching as the other heroine descended from the sky. She noted the irony that Songbird was attempting to fashion a solid-sound birdcage for a rodent. Vermin fled against the fire Moonstone dropped the trailed it. As it neared the cage, she strafed a trail along either side of it that left Vermin no other choice but to leap inside. Songbird sealed the cage shut. Nodding to Moonstone, she hovered back toward where the Zeus was parked in the distance on a flat stretch of roadway.
As she watched Songbird grow smaller and smaller, Moonstone saw the reporters emerging from their news vans. She pushed her hair back and put on a bright smile to prepare for their questions.
"Excuse me, Brian Voight out of Cheyenne ! For the Thunderbolts' first mission, one wouldn't think Vermin would cause so much trouble. What went wrong?"
Moonstone laughed. "Nothing went wrong, Mr. Voight. Since his most recent escape, it appears Vermin has manifested some kind of latent psychic abilities, possibly mutant in nature belonging to his human side, which disoriented the Swordsman and caused Electro to fall asleep. We were not prepared for such a development, and as such, it took us by surprise. That said, I can hardly imagine the kinds of havoc that kind of power could have caused if the Thunderbolts had left it unchecked."
"So you're saying that Vermin-that he somehow developed new abilities since-"
"Not 'he,' Mr. Voight," Moonstone corrected gently. "This creature was an 'it.' We cannot forget that we were dealing with a monster here today."
Thunderbolts Mountain
"What the hell was that, Osborn!" shouted Electro, slamming his fist down on the director's desk. Osborn winced as a palm-shaped singe was left in the wood. "I'm supposed to be able to do what I want to the freaks that left me to rot-and you let Moonstone take that from me!"
"I didn't do anything of the sort," Osborn responded, drumming his fingers impatiently. "You were about to jeopardize your team's first mission on a revenge trip! That violates your contract, and I hate to tell you this, Max, but the piece of paper with your signature on it means more than the one I signed dictating your terms. Am I clear?"
"As mud," Electro said. "This better not happen again."
"Oh, I doubt it will," Osborn said. "You're dismissed." He watched as Electro stormed out the door. His handlers joined him outside, preparing to escort him back to his quarters.
Pressing the button on his intercom, Osborn said, "Are we done for the day, Myra ?"
"Yes sir," said the woman on the other end. "Would you like me to send in your mail now, or would you like to take a break before going over that?"
"Send it in. I'll get to it after that break," Osborn said. He was about to hang up when he had one more thought. "Oh, and Myra ? Can you put a tag on unusual traces of mobile electromagnetic energy? I have a feeling that if we find what I'm looking for, I may be able to put Mr. Dillon back in his place, not that you know what I'm talking about."
"That's why you hired me, sir. I'll get right on it."
"Thank you, Myra ."
Norman kicked his feet up on his desk, popped his daily pills, and reached into his attaché case, feeling the rubbery mask inside. He smiled as he rubbed its familiar curves. Sometimes nostalgia could be a kick in the pants.
"I just want you all to know that you made a real cock-up of yesterday's mission," Moonstone said. The entire team lounged in a small auditorium, where they were expected to review the footage of every mission like a football team. "Had it not been for some last minute strategizing, we would have been decommissioned and sent to 42. Be glad that didn't happen."
"With all due respect, we don't function as a team," Songbird began. "We need to-"
"What we need is to change things up a little bit," said Norman Osborn from the doorway at the back of the room, taking even Moonstone by surprise. "It's obvious that there haven't been enough changes from the old team that old grudges and patterns are still in place, and screwing up the missions. That's why I'm here to introduce you to one of your new members."
He stepped aside to reveal a petite redheaded woman clad in leather and fishnets. Songbird gasped. "I'm assuming you're all familiar with Typhoid Mary?"
There was an awkward silence in the room that was broken by an animalistic scream of rage from Electro. "You're another one! 'M gonna kill you!" Then he keeled over on his side.
Osborn looked up innocently from his nanochain remote. "Oh, dear. My finger must have slipped. That settles it, then."
"Wait, you said 'one' of our new members," said Songbird, stepping outside the chain of command for the umpteenth time. "Who else?"
"Hm?" asked Osborn, turning to look over his shoulder. "Right. Your other new member is the Green Goblin." Then, without missing a beat, he stepped out of the room.
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