She was bored.
You wouldn't think so, given what had happened not too long ago. The streets of New York weren't even cleared from the debris of Brainiac's drones. Which was more to do with the exact demands that Pat and Thor had about destroying any piece of Brainiac's technology that had been left on Earth.
None of it was allowed to be even studied, such was the danger that the two felt Brainiac posed. So even the scraps of metal were taken by Asgard… beaming them up and doing whatever they did to destroy it after the scraps were collected in piles.
There wasn't a lot on her plate, everyone that had been working in the Stark Tower was given mandatory leave that they had to take for both insurance and basic human decency. With the way that the building had been taken over and used as a starting point for an alien invasion, it was a given that they'd get a break.
And that was just the people that hadn't personally taken part in trying to defend the place as Louise had. She was getting bonuses, and some NDAs and insurance waivers to sign too… Stark mightn't have been an evil corporate man but he had been working in that sorta business for far too long to let anyone have an excuse to sue him.
So they were all given a month's paid leave and told to relax. Of course, that was easier for some people than others. As a young woman that only recently entered adulthood and having started the job not too long ago, Louise was still living at home with her parents.
Which meant that her heroic deeds had been taken rather poorly by her parents. There was a heated debate between them over this, her Pop was the most disapproving of her actions while her mother was merely horrified but both of them were against her helping against the alien invasion.
The conversation had been tense;
"Look I get that you're mad-" she had tried after her Pop had managed to get her on the back foot when he pointed out how she had been more in the way during the invasion rather than help given the lack of training. "-that I didn't call you to say that I was ok but-"
"Louise," Pop had interrupted her with a confused expression on his face. "The phones were down for the invasion. We're mad that you decided the safest place to stay was the main point of the invasion and doing so while not even around Doyle. What were you thinking? That you were suddenly Bruce Willis and the aliens were some wacky cartoon terrorists?"
Of course, that hadn't been the end of their conversation, but there wasn't anything more that had been added rather than continued yelling and retorting the same points over and over again. From both sides, Louise would admit to herself alone.
And it wasn't like the redhead couldn't understand where they were coming from.
It had become dangerous to be a friend of Patt. If her parents didn't care that Louise had risked her life more than once helping her newest friend then she'd be the one upset.
But in the end, while her Pops could try and order her to stop working for Stark, and to hang around the guy routinely investigating military mishaps and stopping alien invasions less. Louise wasn't the type to take orders like that.
The girl was far too spoiled in that regard.
The more she was told to stop, the more time the young woman would spend with the young superhero. If that was something Pat had time for currently, on top of doing his superhero thing, stopping bank robbers, saving people from car crashes or fires, he had taken unpaid leave from his job on the Bulletin and started to work on a secret project with Stark.
Something that her friend had become increasingly annoyed about, so much that he was going to the man's house personally.
Apparently, some recluse of a scientist wasn't cooperating with their project, ignoring their calls/emails/letters, and Stark's own attempts to deal with the issue was failing hard. Guy lived somewhere in San Francisco and used to work with SHIELD before leaving and starting his company, but had been ousted a number of years ago.
The man was a master of theoretical physics, among other fields, that would be key to his eventual plans for the bottled city of Kandor.
The young O'Reilly wasn't sure if Pat should've been revealing information that SHIELD had put on a security level so high that Louise wasn't sure it had been inscribed in fear of leaking. But Doyle was a lax man when it came to those sorts of things with his close friends.
But so far, the only people outside the direct involvement with the project that knew were herself, and Fury. As far as Louise knew at least, it was hard to say given she wasn't involved in the project at all.
With all this free time, she decided to spring on down with Pat on his trip down to San Francisco. A quick hop and a day out of New York were just what the young woman needed to break the dull boredom that she'd found herself. They would visit this scientist, Pat would appeal to his better nature, then they'd go out and have lunch and see the sights.
She waited for Pat to arrive just outside her house.
But then Pat did something odd, he walked towards her from the corner of the street. He didn't blur into place next to her, didn't drop from the sky without warning. He just leisurely walked forward with his hands in his pockets, somehow not being swarmed by a legion of fans he'd gained since the public reveal of his superpowers.
The disguise he had was a pair of glasses and a hat. Not sunglasses, but just a regular pair of glasses. She wasn't sure how he managed to see perfectly fine with the lenses intact but she easily guessed it was an alien thing. Then he'd drawn up his hair under a dark grey cap, hiding another distinctive feature. The next thing of note was that he was wearing a regular t-shirt rather than the shirts or hoodies he'd preferred and for a pair of three-quarter length shorts.
"Going around in stealth mode, Pat?" Louise remarked with a glance toward his odd choice of footwear. A pair of sandals with socks. "What hell is he on to wear this?"
It wasn't as if he was wearing anything notable, but it wasn't a particularly good look on him.
"And yet not a young fan in sight," Doyle shrugged, his smile smaller than usual. "Just the way the rich and famous like it."
"You're not rich."
"Well, one out of two ain't bad."
Louise scoffed before letting out a laugh at the goofy smug expression that Pat wore as if he himself was holding himself back from bursting out laughing. Not that she thought it was that funny, just that it was good to see the guy enjoy himself after he sulked over what she could only assume to be either the Kandorians remaining tiny or their current inability to communicate with them.
The two of them went silent for a few moments, an awkward air started to develop before Louise became fed up.
"So we're going or are you just going to stand around till someone finally notices that an Avenger is standing outside my house?"
Instead of actually responding to her question Pat started to walk down the street, forcing her to follow along with his long struts. Pat seemed to hunch his back over slightly as they walked, not part of an act but rather it felt like there was some large weight metaphorically weighing his spine down.
As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, Louise managed to spot the bags that had started to develop under there. It was more than a little disconcerting to the O'Reilly girl, seeing Doyle of all people tired. It was like the sun dimming.
Just unnatural.
"I'm thinking we'll take the bus," Pat yawned, his hands going to his hips as adjusted his back to normal, a small crack coming from it as he let out a sigh of relief. "It's been ages since I've been on a bus."
Louise couldn't help the groan that escaped from her lips at that declaration. The trip from here to San Francisco would take forty hours, maybe thirty, if they had a magical car that could go through traffic. While taking the bus, could take as many as three days. And that was without thinking about being on a bus full of people that could recognize him, going through places with many more people that could also recognize him.
It was a media frenzy writing to happen.
"We're not going on the bus," She pinched her arm to stop herself from delivering harsher words than those. "Not only will we be taking up a space that we don't need, and potentially taking someone else's, but I have other people I want to hang out with."
Since that lunch with her friend, Becca, a few weeks ago, the young girl had made sure to meet up with her other friends more often, to make time away from the flying alien. Pat could be a hoot to be around, but Louise needed to keep from being consumed by all things Doyle.
"Oh, I understand," Pat exclaimed while dramatically palming his forehead in mock surprise. Well, Louise presumed it was a mock surprise. It could be hard to tell with Doyle given his inability to sound sarcastic. "You're bored of me now that I'm not developing new powers at the drop of a hat."
She gave him the most 'I'm not amused' stare that Louise could give out at the moment. Eventually, he sighed before throwing his cap over to her, his ever-growing hair dropping down to the back of his neck like a rug being thrown over a wall to be beaten.
"Fine, fine, we'll fly there," She put away the cap into her handbag as Pat pointed his index finger towards her while monologuing. "But don't blame me if we get there and there's already enough of those vultures to count as a committee."
Louise blinked in the confused manner that few could mimic, causing Pat to roll his eyes.
"That's what a sitting group of vultures are called, a 'committee', and a 'venue' or even a 'volt'" he explained, rubbing his cheek with that formerly pointed index finger. "They also called a kettle when they ride thermals."
"None of this relevant unless we happened to be attacked by a super vultures on the way and the only to stop them is accurately call out their group names… according to humans.."
It was then that there was a loud interruption to their usual routine… which was Pat saying something nearly random and her needing it explained to her… as a siren started up in the distance. It was soon joined by more. First, it started with a police siren, then fire sirens before finally, the sound of an ambulance rang out to join them.
Louise glanced at him, expecting him to blur into action only to find that he was already gone, his glasses in her hands even.
"Now that-" she glanced up into the air as she could now see the smoke in the distance starting to rise above the buildings. "-was just rude."
It seemed that their trip would be held back by a few minutes.
(Moments Earlier)
There wasn't time to think about the situation given who he pissed off. Instead, he lit a match and threw it into a trash can as he ran out of the building… Well, that would be a lie. He didn't just light a match, he lit about six of them before throwing each into different trash cans. It wasn't sure to work with all of them, but many had plenty of paper bags and wrappers that would go up easily.
And unless the guys chasing him were morons, they'd try and stop each one before going after him.
"Easy job, he said," The man mumbled to himself, chastising someone else by re-using, and therefore mocking, their words. "There wasn't anything that could go wrong, he said. Union Allied Construction keeps money in an easy-to-reach vault, he said. Guards leave the vault room open for ten minutes, he said… fuck that guy."
Obviously, none of those statements he'd been told were true. All he'd gotten from the venture was a nice bulky folder. Not the hard cash as he'd been promised. This was the last time that Luke Carlyle listened to some old dude with a phony accent.
When he finally burst through the back exit, the fire exit to be exact, Luke ran as if he expected that the Hounds of Hell were chasing him themselves. His feet didn't so much meet the ground as they slammed against the asphalt in loud clangs.
He leaped into a car before speeding off into the empty-sh streets. He made sure to take streets that the emergency responders shouldn't take according to his prior research, something that was useful if you didn't want the police to pull you over. It was only after twenty minutes of driving in silence without any sign of pursuit that the young man hit the call button on the phone attached to the dash.
"You fucker!" Luke shouted as soon as the phone was answered. "You told me that there would be CASH! Not just ya damn folders! You'll be lucky if I don't burn this shit up."
"Relax," his employer's voice came out of the phone with a low whispery manner that implied that wherever they were, they didn't want someone to overhear them while also being scrambled by a distortion that would stop anyone on this side of the call recognizing the voice. "Relax, I made a simple mistake. I'll pay out of hand for the documents out of hand then, nothing to get mad about."
"Well, J-"
"No, no names," The other man quickly interrupted him, his voice radiating fear. "We don't know who might overhear things. Now, quickly get to the drop location. There will be a thousand in a blue bag waiting for you."
Things were quiet after that till he came into a large parking lot, leaving his current car in the middle of it and swapping over to a different nondescript black car. Within a few seconds, he sped off further away from the area before he ended up outside an apartment building.
Soon he'd left his package, and took the one that had been left for him back to his car. Luke only took off once more when he'd checked the content to see if it was as advertised. Which was why he threw it out of the car and boosted away as quickly as possible. Rather than money, it was full of cards. Packages of playing cards filled it to the brim, so much so that the bag had felt heavy enough that many other people would've believed that it had been money as well. At least that was what Luke told himself.
He wasn't an experienced thief, in fact, this was the first time that he'd ever gone into a place and stolen in his life. What he was known for, and his crime of preference was arson. He was very good at burning things. As his escape from the Union Allied building proved, Luke was better at burning things than he was at sneaking. And such a factor was about to hit him right in the ass as his car was suddenly jostled by another vehicle ramming into the back of his car.
It was a black sedan and the ram that came after the first one caused Luke to swerve as he hit the breaks. When Luke glanced out the side of his car, he noticed the bumper had fallen off some ways down the street, while the front lights of the sedan were smashed in from the impact.
Quickly, Luke reached his gun under the dashboard but decided against it and instead shifted the gears to take off once more in the car. Only to find that two more sedans were now blocking his way forward. This time he took out the gun, a Smith and Wesson 442 Revolver, and booked himself down a nearby alley. It was a small five-shot handgun that Luke only carried for self-defense over any real desire to use it. Fire was his thing, not firearms.
Sadly for the young arsonist, the alley ended very quickly in a dead end. Luke dropped to the ground by the large bins, leaning his back against one in an attempt to either hide or to keep cover if the approaching men were to draw out their own guns.
Luke shivered as one of the men let loose a round, the sound of sirens in the distance barely heard under the roar.
"Come out now, Mister Carlyle," One of them spoke up, the fact that they knew his name sending waves of terror down the young man's spine. "If you do that then no one needs to get hurt. We just want to have a few words."
The young man knew that there wasn't any way out of here that didn't involve going through what he counted as six men who were probably better armed than Luke was. But he also knew that hiding in the corner wasn't going to get him out of this situation.
It would take action.
"I'm coming out!" He yelled while slowly standing to his feet and holding his arms up in the air. "Just don't hurt me."
Luke suddenly rolled to the ground as two of the men let out two rounds from their pistols when they spotted him. Mid-roll the young pyro fired back, but while their shots would've hit if Luke had stayed still, he would've only hit them if the men were leaping into the shots.
Before the young man could get back to his feet, he was tackled hard enough for his revolver to fly out of his hand and under the dumpster. Luke attempted to kick, to punch his way out of the man's grip but soon found himself dragged to his feet and put into a full nelson.
"Now, you better stop struggling," The throaty voice of the man holding him warned, his arms pushing Luke's head closer to his collarbone till he struggled to breathe. "It'll only make things more painful for you in the long run."
"What? Stop joking," Luke wheezed while he kicked off against the ground in an attempt to escape but the lack of breath kept the man from giving it much strength. "Come on, I'll pay you whatever you want! Just let me go!"
One of the other men slapped him across the face with their pistol, busting his nose apart in a spray of red. It was probably a bigger spray than any of the men had expected because they all grimaced as it soon covered the white shirts they were wearing inside their black suit jackets.
It was then that something truly unexpected happened.
A claw erupted out from the four of them, the middle of their chests blasting out enough blood that Luke could only see through the veil of red. He couldn't see this creature but through the red murk, there were the spinning claws of four tentacles sticking out from the bodies before him. The man holding him threw him forward, attempting to use Luke to grab enough time to flee from whatever this creature was.
"Oh shit!" Luke screamed, his hands coming up in an attempt to grab the claws and keep them from skewering him. His fears proved to be for nothing as instead, one of the claws opened up and became flat, catching him before he could so much as fall to the ground.
The young man found himself taken to the ground softly as the remainder of his assailants found themselves without heads soon. Luke wiped away the blood from his eyes and was soon left shaking in terror at the sight before him. There was a large cloak covering their body, it had tentacles tearing their way out of the back, while there were blotches of dried blood meeting with the moist counterpart of its victims. Out of the sleeves were limbs that dangled loosely.
Luke watched the final death with unblinking eyes as the man's head was removed from his body as if it was a vegetable being pulled from the ground. The gory sight of muscle and bones splitting from each other caused a visceral reaction from the young man.
He vomited his lunch all over the ground.
"Are you okay?" The creature's voice was high-pitched and distorted. Something much like Google Speech, but the sentences were less robotic, with more solid pronunciations. Luke scurried back till he hit a wall as the main body of the creature dangled in the air while it orientated to face him.
"W-w-what are you?" He stuttered his hands barely managing to draw his revolver level with the only source of meat on the creature before him.
"I was searching...for you."
"That's not an answer to my question," he whimpered in confusion.
"My current host… is unsuitable," The creature leaned down, a brief glimpse of rotting face went by in an instant before the gleaming red eye of a machine filled his vision. "... they are rotting away. So a new compatible... host was needed. You were… the only one I found."
"Please, I have a famil-" Luke started to beg but the creature claw stabbed into the ground with a clang, interrupting him and causing him to let loose a bullet into the soft rotting flesh of the woman that the machine was attached to.
"You… do not… " It countered mechanically. "I have… studied you enough… to know that you have nothing."
The young man found himself silent, his breathing the only thing filling up attention. This machine was right, after all, Luke had no siblings and even his parents had died a number of years ago after they had attempted to scam the wrong people
"Do not worry… " It shifted the timbre of its voice, towards a familiar phony Irish Accent coming and with each second the voice became more human. "... as with… the last human… I worked with. You will be richly rewarded."
Luke Carlyle screamed as the machine launched itself forward, ripping itself from the very spine of its former host with a bone-filled crack. He didn't see what the machine's true body looked like as the tentacles held him face down on the bloody ground.
And that was when pain for this young man started. His screams filled the air for long enough that the nearby sirens had long stopped. But by the time that anyone noticed, Luke Carlyle had disappeared.
Author's Note: I had originally planned on this chapter being giant 30k words long. But as I started to write on, I decided that I just hadn't created this story to have chapters that big. It would kill whatever level of pacing I had in this thing.
I'll still at least do 30k words of this arc before even attempting to jump up to another story.
I'd like to thank my beta. Can't recall if they like being named, I've had one that never wanted to be named. They're a great help with catching some of my little mistakes, and some of my factual ones, lol.
On a final note for this, don't forget that I've got a Ko-fi account. So if you like what I do and you want to support me check it out, every little helps me out.