I am a superior being, my body was cloned from the physically greatest warrior race in the Galaxy, the Kree, and then mutated and changed by the strange and powerful Mind Flayer in an attempt to convert me to their telepathic and telekinetic race of mental warriors in the Galaxy. I have the knowledge and lore of thousands of generations of Kree warriors, gleaned from their minds when their bodies eventually fell in battle (or not uncommonly got purged by the Supreme Intellect for daring to question orders). I was the next best thing to a god on this backward turd of a planet. I am a little sick of getting my ass kicked.
Spiderwoman had golden gloves and boots, a spider’s body made of golden diamond shape on her chest, disturbingly large and blank white eyes and black seams on a blood red suit that framed a body that had the curves to distract someone from the fact that it was heavily laden with the coiled muscle of an agility based fighter. Her limbs moved so fast that an unenhanced human could not follow them, and she struck with the precision of a trained martial artist, no, that was not true.
Trained martial artists are sport practitioners. They strike at safe areas that will hurt, stun, incapacitate, but that is not what Spiderwoman was.
She was a killer. Trained by Taskmaster, but without his mutant ability to copy the moves of whomever he saw fight, she had been beaten by him every day since childhood, forced to fight grown men since childhood, enhanced men since adolescence, she had killed before her first menstruation and had always known that should she weaken, pause, or hesitate her own trainers would kill her without hesitation or remorse, and she fought accordingly. She had grown into the strength to toss cars and the speed to outrun them.
I had telepathy, but she moved so fast it was of zero use in the physical fight because her fist, foot, elbow or knee was already striking whatever target I gleaned from her mind before I could read it and start the block. I had telekinesis to slow and weaken her strikes, to speed and empower my own. I had been training to the point that I could lift a metric ton without my telekinesis, but she could lift seven. Thanks to the parallel processing of my tripartite mind and the Mind Flayer powers, I was able to make the most of my Kree implanted conditioning, but that is what I had, conditioning. I had the reflexes and rote responses, I had some experience, but she was a living weapon that had been in more or less constant combat for a decade.
She had her own style, a style that began with her training, incorporated her abilities, and all the experience of the battles she had fought. It melded her instincts, training, and nature into a seamless whole that was entirely hers. I had not. I was a superhuman, but clones with conditioned responses gleaned from a hundred perfect warriors are just fragments of great fighters, they are not themselves great fighters. I was starting on the path she had walked for a decade, and she was at its peak.
She shot a blast of bioelectricity at my legs and I leaped into the air, only to catch a front kick that blasted me back into my car, literally into as I got stuck half way through its frame. She followed up with a flurry of punches I slapped away with hand and tentacle, but I required two limbs to block each of hers because she was that much stronger, and in doing so I let her close enough to ram her knee into my gut and steal my breath.
I lanced a blast of pure psionic force into her mind, buying time to pull myself from the car. I drove illusions of myself into her mind as I wrapped myself in psionic invisibility to stop her mind from seeing me. My Kree body was busy healing and sealing, cutting off the bleeding and reinflating my collapsed lung. I used Telekinesis to hurl concrete and steel street garbage bins, a bike rack, the parking pay meter at her, and she blasted them from the air with kicks and hard blocks so overpowered she put them into the walls of the buildings and vehicles around us, all while dancing through the illusions of me and slowly closing on the reality.
“Who are you, Hydra? I don’t know your powers. Which are you? Some new convert? Or some lab creation.” Spider Woman snarled as she caught the sound of my boot shifting and was on me with a football tackle, arms spread wide enough to catch me even if she could not pinpoint my exact location.
“I am not with Hydra. I am their enemy. I just need them to reach someone I can’t contact openly.” I said as I held her head steady with four tentacles and blasted her with the strongest telekinetic enhanced punch I could muster.
Her head snapped back and she reached up to grab my tentacles and let me experience the true joy of finding out exactly how much electric current her body could generate. The answer is a lot. My body went rigid, and my heart didn’t actually stop, but it shut down my illusions and she saw me as I am.
“ALIEN!” She shouted and hit me center chest with both palm heels to launch me across the street. There were now a dozen car alarms blaring, just a few blocks from a major Hydra base, and I was face naked, tentacles out before the world. I had so many problems I didn’t know where to start.
Except. No sirens. In fact, when I got tossed back, the car alarms themselves grew quiet. Like the air itself was muffling the sound. It is almost like we were having a superhero knock down drag out car destroying fight in the middle of the central business district and attracting no outside attention. How the hell is that possible? Does she have some sort of stealth ability? No, its coming from around us, and moving in, not from her moving out. I am a hard working Kree-Flayer, I do my chores, recycle, am kind to small animals, help the poor, defend the helpless; so why is this planet so determined to give me nothing but problems? I don’t need another problem!
I sprint back in to get inside the range of her lightning, as she can toss them faster than I can dodge them. I toss a manhole cover and a Vespa motor scooter at her. She tossed a Tesla at me.
She is not helping my inferiority complex any. I have had enough and screamed back at her.
“Of course I’m an alien, I am two different kinds of Alien trying to get SHIELD to listen to the fact that your planet is busy being invaded by some really nasty little green bastards and EVERYONE IS BUSY NOT LISTENING TO ME!” I screamed, and this time I buried her under my flurry of blows. She took their impact and the mental force feeding of my memory of my wonderful attempt to come in from the cold at SHIELD HQ, and the discovery that Nick Fury had been replaced by a Skrull.
Tesla’s burn really well when you toss them and they land point down, but no fire sirens were showing any signs of responding. In fact, even the alarms around me were getting quiet. If I didn’t know better, and this planet wasn’t the equivalent of a third world country, galactically speaking, I would swear we were inside some sort of advanced stealth field. I mean, everyone has them, but Kree are forbidden to bring any new ones in since the Treaty of Asgard, and the ones here are part of facilities that date back farther than the treaty. Shi’ar have them, but they don’t usually use them outside of their tac team insertion shuttles. Chitari don’t bother cloaking anything smaller than a frigate. Pretty much the only people that use them on planets are…….
“You expect me to believe that? Enough with your mind tricks and fairy tales of little green men. I was brainwashed by Hydra as a child, so I know what it feels like to have people messing with my mind, and you know who saved me?” Spider woman said as she grabbed me by the throat and raised me off the ground for a serious tentacle bruising face and fist extravaganza.
I could see figures moving in around us, SHIELD tactical armour on their bodies, but the weapons were too advanced. Energy weapons. Skrull blasters to be exact. Little purple piss pistols we call them, as they shoot these pathetic little plasma pulses in a cute little purple range. They are so much less potent than our standard Kree sidearms, which of course I wasn’t wearing because I was doing dinner and seduction at a Hydra base, and didn’t bring my suspicious alien technology weapons. When you have one problem, you have a problem. When you have two problems, sometimes, if you mix them just right, you can make a solution.
Spider Woman was pounding my head “Nick” punch “bloody” punch “Fury” punch “saved” punch “me!” punch.
Even with my full telekinesis, two arms, four tentacles, all devoted to nothing but blocking, I was bleeding like Smurfs in a blender, and holding on to consciousness by my sapphire talons, but my solution was here.
“Stand down, Spiderwoman. We will take the prisoner.” The Skrull wearing agent Colson’s face was smooth, and had the patronizing “talk down the excited superhuman” SHIELD voice we were all taught down pat. The thing is, Spiderwoman had enhanced senses, could see through my illusions, and had just been told and shown what to look for. Oddly enough, what I needed to get out of this fight intact just walked in and waved hello.
Spiderwoman looked at Agent Colson (the Skrull) and frowned.
“I am not done questioning him, and when I am done with him, I will have questions for Fury before I hand this one over.” She said, beginning to frown, already picking up on inconsistencies in gear, in the strange eerie silence, and inability to see light from the city or sky around us. She might not know what a Skrull blaster looked like, or what a Skrull stealth field looked like, but her little spider senses or widow’s intuition or whatever other bugly form of “hey this shit feels wrong” she had was doing its thing. She had lowered me to the ground and slacked off on my throat, allowing me to ready for the fun to begin.
“You will stand down. Hand the alien over, and keep your mouth shut, or you will find yourself tossed in a holding cell until I forget why I put you there and stop sending food.” Agent Colson grinned, attempting to intimidate her with his best ‘secret police’ style threats. SHIELD never let us talk that way. Sure we acted that way, but we were always, always trained to make it clear we were an arm of law enforcement, and that peoples right were a sacred thing we respected. This made it easier to swallow when we disappeared people, stole and silenced research, and generally played fascist games in the middle of big public democracy. Agent Colson, the real Agent Colson, would never make that mistake.
I grinned, which to a Mind Flayer is waving all four tentacles in an actual wave pattern and I said out loud.
“Spiderwoman, meet, the Skrulls” I said, as I used a Mind Flayers basic brute force Psionic Blast, the equivalent of a mental EMP, overloading all the mental circuits in the Skrulls in SHIELD clothing in front of us. As an attack, it was crude, brute force, and of very limited duration. A targeted attack is capable of killing, or rendering unconscious, with far less power by targeting the effect on the brain centers most relevant to the effect you seek. Psionic Blast on the other hand, like an EMP simply jams all the centers of the conscious brain with conflicting signal. You will shout, you will lose focus, your train of thought, bladder control, and control of your shape shifting.
Jessica Drew, Spiderwoman, joined my one man (Kree-Flayer, Mutant, whatever) war against the Skrull secret invasion in that moment. She let my neck go, and jumped sideways to open space. The Skrull leader, not being the brightest green tomato on the vine, escalated rather than strategized, and screamed out.
“Kill them both!”
The Skrulls opened fire, and at last I got to indulge in a little racial superiority that did not end in my ass getting kicked. My Telekinesis was enough to bend the Skrull blasters purple piss bolts to blow the hell out of my own Hyundai and the wreckage of the other fine vehicles in the parking lot, and around Spiderwoman and myself.
Her own bio-electric blasts connected to one Skrull as she leaped over a stream of incoming bolts, bounced off a half severed light pole and rocketed herself into the crowd of Skrulls. I picked up one cement parking stall divider with my hands, and two with my telekinesis and went bowling for Aliens. Screams and bright green blood was my response, then I was among them too.
Skrulls make a big deal on this planet about being superhuman. Super than which humans? Spiderwoman was going through them like a threshing machine through a grain field, and I was shattering arms, legs, ribs, skulls with every punch. I may not be proud of what the Kree race policy had turned us into, and I may disagree with our expansionist, colonialist policies, but when we met the Skrull Empire in battle, Kree wiped them from the field and trampled them under our well polished jack boots by virtue of our superiority at every single form of honest violence.
While Spiderwoman and I had taken the better part of fifteen minutes to pummel ourselves into scrap meat, it took the two of us less than forty five seconds from first trigger pull to last whimper to turn a platoon of twenty four Skrull tactical agents into sixteen corpses, four crippled, and four incapacitated. It is possible she was responsible for all eight that are alive. I was having a very bad night, and Kree indoctrination and battle memory both left me willing to subscribe to the “only good Skrull” philosophy as long as purple piss bolts were being shot at my unarmed blue ass.
I am a work in progress.
Standing, dripping blue blood and red blood from our respective mouths, and green blood from our fists, boots and in my case, tentacles, we faced each other in wary consideration.
“Skrull shapeshifters, aliens. They are invading earth, and have infiltrated SHIELD. What has that got to do with you working with Hydra?” Spiderwoman asked me, tensed and ready to strike at the first sign of aggression.
I dropped the Skrull arm in my hand. Ripping it off seemed like a better idea then than it did right now, and tried hard to look inoffensive.
“Look at me. I AM an alien. Once I burned myself at SHIELD HQ finding out Nick Fury was a Skrull, any attempt I make to approach SHIELD openly is going to end up with me strapped to a chair screaming in some lab as they try to figure out what makes me tick, and how they can weaponize it. I am here to fight for earth, fight for humanity. I am not ready to die while you stupid primitives poke me with sticks to see why the sky is blue.” I said, spreading my hands, in a gesture that would have been more reasonable if my claws were not dripping with bits of green flesh. What can I say, Kree breed noble warrior heroes, and Mind Flayers breed amoral predators. We don’t do diplomats.
“I knew if I infiltrated Hydra I could find high level SHIELD deep cover operatives who had the resources and backing to run their own investigation into SHIELDS infiltration by Skrulls, nice tight teams outside of central control, and without the resources to take me and turn me into a lab rat. After infiltrating Invictus Life I got attached to the people and their work, so now I have to find a way to use Hydra’s attack on Invictus to take one of the Hydra agent’s place, while not letting them hurt the decent people there.” I admitted.
“You expect me to believe that you imitated Ronald Sung and went through Hydra conditioning, and betrayed everyone in Invictus Labs to those animals in Hydra, just to meet with SHIELD? What kind of idiot would do that?” Spiderwoman snarled.
Feed me a straight line, I dare you. I bowed to her, with a flourish of both hand and tentacles.
“Geralt Lovecraft, esquire. Born Kree, turned Mind Flayer, adopted Mutant, and secret defender of mankind from alien invaders of all races. At your service.” I struck a hero pose, and stuck out my manly chest, covered with bruises from her very womanly and uncomfortably stronger, fists.
Spiderwoman came out of her crouch slowly, and asked softly, every sense focused on me and pheromones that were SERIOUSLY starting to get my big blue brother into embarrassing boner status flooding the air as she focused her every ability to ensure I answered truthfully.
“Can anyone vouch for you? Prove you are telling the truth.” She asked, wanting to believe me, considering the weeping, moaning, bleeding green aliens at our feet.
“Emma Frost, the White Queen can verify everything I say is true.” I said proudly. If she wanted an authority she could trust I couldn’t mind bend to make them agree, Emma was it.
“Emma Frost is your employer?” Spiderwoman asked in obvious confusion.
“Therapist. Emma Frost is my therapist, and possible future mother-in-law.” I admitted.
“The White Queen is your THERAPIST?” Spiderwoman started laughing, then staggered sideways into me. She laughed so long and hard she leaned on my chest, pounding it with her hand as she laughed until she could almost not breathe. I personally didn’t think it was that funny.
“Everyone needs a therapist. I mean, nights like tonight aren’t good for you.” I said piously, which just made Spiderwoman laugh so hard she fell on her bum and laughed harder.
I went to call Emma. She might want to have some of the living Skrull for interrogation. Plus, Magik always was looking for new things to feed her fiends in Limbo, and Skrull were basically a meaty salad option.
Tyftc
