There was always something creepy about hospitals. Something about the smell of chemicals, the way people's anxiety filled the air. It all came together to make me really uncomfortable as a child. Now as an adult, hospitals were far more than creepy. I found them depressing, personal experience over the years meant that if I needed to go to one something bad had happened.
I waited outside a private examination room, my coat in my hands so I could play with the buttons while I waited with Ben. Doris was being looked over by a doctor in the room behind us. Apparently, Doris had been suffering from some minor memory problems all week only to have collapsed due to having a seizure before she could get to her doctor's appointment. On the ride to the hospital, that was when Ben had called me, so I rushed over to him. Already she'd be stabilized by the time I arrived, in fact, had been fine during the ambulance ride there.
Now, we were in the next day, still waiting for some news. Due to how slow medical examinations took to get results from the data at times, we'd be waiting for a long time.
Ben's face was in his hands. His rough wrinkles across his brow were squashed and shifted while the man rubbed his face. There was weight on his shoulders that wasn't typically there. I was tempted to give the man some reassuring words, but this wasn't in my wheelhouse.
Instead, I tried to give my silent support to him. Words could easily backfire after all. There were a lot of things that I couldn't promise even with my incredible powers, Doris being okay was one of those things.
There was a deep sigh from Ben as he leaned back into his chair.
"Micheal told me about firing you," Ben started up, no doubt trying to distract himself from worrying about Doris. "I was against it. But there wasn't a lot I could do. Offered to quit… but it's looking like I can't afford to lose this job. Or at least, I mightn't be able to."
I nodded while I numbly stared at my hands. To be honest, I wouldn't have let him quit his job, not since he accepted his promotion. There was a coming Credit Crunch to consider, after all, he would have a lot harder time finding a new job than I would in the coming months.
Who wouldn't hire a Superman? It's like not wanting to hire a metaphorical 'I win button'. The worst place I could end up is working for Stark.
"It's fine, I have more freedom to move about right now, without worrying about anyone else's reputation. And without needing to worry about investors or a board or whatever runs the Bulletin's fiances, I can get straight into the meat of things. I have a few leads already."
Leaning into the topic, I used my powers to ensure that we weren't being watched or listened in on, so the plan to distract his worry was ago.
Those leads mostly being very basic aspects of the Mandarin's terror attacks so far. It was very easy to put the deaths of those soldiers over here with the attack on that base. Both used the same style of bomb, something with a lot of heat but no discernable source. At first, the reports suggested Suicide Bombs, but the men's personal files didn't line up with that conclusion, not entirely.
How did I get those files?
I didn't. My 'X-Ray' vision was so good that even in draws and covering each other, I could read their physical files easily enough from a fly-by of their bases. Something I could do so fast now they never made mention of me invading their airspace. Though you'd think that they'd digitized these files by now, it was still 2009. They still relied on physical files, the digital ones were merely backups.
Not sure if that was the other way around now that I thought of it.
It also made the information legally… black to use if I ever mentioned this as my source in a piece. I illegally invaded the privacy and the security measures of the US Government without really thinking about if this was even information I should've been allowed access to.
So I didn't mention this aspect to Ben while regaling him of my next few points.
There were a few men reported to have some mental trauma from their injuries that would cause such attempts on their lives. But most had been well on their way to recovery, a few didn't have any such trauma on their files at all. I couldn't see around a half-dozen people going and being subverted by the Mandarin.
So that left me with a few options.
First, was that none of the men knew they had bombs implanted in them. Something that would explain how a few blew up only their families rather than something more strategic. But that wouldn't explain the times they did hit perfectly sensible terrorist locations without targetting their loved ones. The second option was that the men did know but some were interrupted by their families and lost track of time. This was a rather weak option, something dismissed mostly. it was possible for that to happen once, but at least three times?
No. That would be insane. It would require divine intervention.
It was Ben that brought up the third option;
"With the locations, it could be that the first time was an accident. Something that once the Mandarin noticed how cleanly it made an invisible suicide bomb, he decided to make use of it for that function primarily afterward."
I nodded.
"Of course, that also means that whatever causes them to explode, the explosion wasn't the purpose but an unseen side effect. Meaning that this could be a discarded project that Mandarin managed to grab. That's a good angle to look into… thanks, Ben."
I left out the saying that I'd already considered that possibility because. One just needed to think about the situation for a bit to consider it. It was just to look at the state of my mentor in Journalism, it was clear that saying such a thing so bluntly would be bad for his mental health.
I quieted the conversation as I heard the footsteps of Doris and her doctor coming out of the room. This was a stressful enough situation for the woman, I really didn't need to bring up the possibility that people around her would explode at any moment.
"Mr. Urich, if I can have a moment of your time before you leave," The doctor called him over from the door, as Doris quickly took his place sitting next to me. "We'll just be a moment."
Doris took one of my hands, poking at it with her index finger while giving me a smile..
"Ben's going to need to take some of his sick days," There was this sense of noble annoyance from the woman. Like the visit to the hospital and the time Ben would need to take off work were more inconvenient to her than it was worrying.
"I could take some to help out," I offered. Truthfully, a normal man wouldn't have the time. But given how fast I could move across the world. Helping the two with some groceries and some cleaning around their apartment was more than in my power. It wouldn't be a stain.
"Oh, no. I've seen the news," Doris rebutted. "You've got too much to deal with other than to help out around my home. Been married to Ben for two decades at this point, I've seen what it takes for you to drive into investigations. Just focus on the job for now, let us worry about us.
"If you're sure?"
The pair had done a lot for me since I arrived on this continent. It didn't feel right to not lend them a hand wherever or whenever they needed it. Felt contrary to how I was raised. I stared at the woman, but all she did was smile politely at me with a raised brow. I shrugged, chuckling slightly as Ben returned to the hall, Doris quickly stood up to loop her arm into his. I blinked at this sudden move, but Ben just gave his wife a soft smile.
"Come on now, can't stand sitting in a hospital when we could be somewhere else."
I got up, putting my red coat on as I followed the two out. Learning what is wrong with Doris would take a few days of the doctors going over the test results. And whatever the doctor told Ben, the man could tell me himself if felt like too… or Doris would.
Either way, I'd learn eventually.
Before Doris entered the car, I could feel my ears perk up, recognizing the same trick the Mandarin had used on me yesterday, and my right eye twitched slightly as an annoying voice piped into my ear.
"Hello? Blue? Pat? Pat the Baker? Blueman Group? Can you hear me?"
"Stark? What the fuck?"
Ben and Doris glanced back at me, but I'd used super-speed to quickly bring out my phone before their eyes focused. It would look like I'd merely answered a phone without them noticing rather than talking into the open air.
"So don't bother responding out loud. I can't hear you. Heard from a friend on the Bulletin's board about letting you go. Sorry to hear that. I know how much it seemed to mean to you."
I waved at the married pair to move on without me, mouthing to them that we'd met up later.
"If you're wondering about how I figured this trick out. I've been messing around with frequencies and monitoring the Mandarins' dealings myself. The Ten Rings were one-half of my kidnapping team and I'm a petty enough man for revenge schemes. So when my equipment caught the private version of that public broadcast. It didn't take a lot to figure out that they sent an audio broadcast only you'd hear, it did take a bit to figure out how. So swing on by Avenger Tower. I've a few suggestions on how to find these lunatics."
I didn't understand a lot of what he'd just said. Which meant that I'd probably need to listen to the man in person.
(Louise O'Reilly: Avenger's Compound Brainiac Site)
She didn't have much to do during the dayshift. Louise wasn't a scientist, not a test subject nor in any position within the project that did any mentally tasking work. Her job was to walk around the compound for a few hours. Maybe some days stand outside the lab for about a half-hour before swapping with another guard. It was boring work, worse than even paperwork.
Not that she didn't have to type up daily reports of the security features. It was a backup to the computer's account of the day, making sure that the two matched. This meant that if the reports didn't match there would be some investigation into why. Louise had expected there to be some trouble working for Stark. Some minor excitement she could at least gossip over with other works. But since being transferred over to this location, there wasn't a lot of gossiping other than between the researchers over the Bottled Cities.
This meant that the young woman had a lot of time to think about things.
Mostly how embarrassed she still felt over the dinner part. There wasn't any real reason for her to be embarrassed. Pat didn't take any real heed of her mother's comment as far as Louise could recall besides surprise. Part of her felt like a young preteen again. Her mother revealing her crush on a friend, or telling a friend she hadn't a crush on them that she did was just a perfect snapshot of her preteen male friendships.
It was something she hadn't needed to deal with since she was sixteen and instead her father disliked her boyfriends rather than find them cute.
She wondered what Pat had been thinking about the idea. Wondered if there was a possible romantic relationship? Such a thing had crossed her mind, though Louise hadn't pursed it in the light of how uninterested Pat appeared to have been in the other sex at all. Though, Louise considered maybe being an alien meant he wasn't attracted to humans in general sexually. Would be odd given Kryptonians apparently looked exactly like humans... and Asgardians too...
It was food for thought. At least till she worked up the courage to be blunt with him about the whole affair.
Louise would rather keep their friendship than accidentally string one another along, like two puppies chasing each other's tails.
It was at that point in her train of thought that she entered the main compound once more. The rows of bottled cities were still a mesmerizing sight even after a few weeks of glancing at them. Especially now that they had put up equipment so people without super-powered eyeballs could observe the people inside whenever they were on the 'streets'. It helped ease the boredom of her day to just linger in the room whenever the patrol let her.
She exchanged a few greetings with Cross and Foster discussing their continued progress in understanding the tech Brainiac used to sink and enlarge someone. There were a lot of terms, even some excited wonder about the lack of something. But all of it went over Louise's head. She'd finished high school, not finishedto MIT or even some knock off Caltech.
Can't expect her to understand lingo designed for the most advanced minds in the world.
Still, Louise figured if the duo were this excited it probably meant good things about getting either one of their people into a bottle or getting the people out of the bottle. Though even if they had figured out the second, Pat explained that it would take years, maybe even decades to find places to release them.
He didn't like the idea of every single Kandorian having his array of powers.
"Laws of averages, Lou. Even if there's only one criminal amongst them per ten thousand people, that's still one person that rivals what I can do."
Almost as if to punish her wondering mind as Louise moved to leave the room from the opposite side she'd come from, the young woman literally ran into van Dyne. Who had been very busy arguing on the phone with someone in a particularly mad tone, so was distracted herself. While not a small woman, van Dyne was not the usually tall O'Reilly girl, who stood about a foot taller than the woman.
So van Dyne fell on her ass.
"Sorry, Dr. van Dyne," Louise cringed as she helped the older woman back onto her feet. The doctor didn't respond to this at first, instead, the woman continued her call with a sigh;
"Dad, shut up," The growl in the woman's voice made the entire exercise even more awkward for the O'Reilly woman. Louise couldn't imagine the phone call that would get her talking to her Pops like that. "I'll call you back some other time. I got important work."
With a slide of her finger van Dyne ended the call and then turned back to Louise with a forced smile.
"It's okay… miss… " The Doctor glanced at Louise's nametag. "Miss O'Reilly. I should've been watching where I was going. Sometimes when I get on the phone the rest of the world just fades away."
Louise supposed that she'd stop paying to the world too if she got caught up in such a conversation. Certainly, Louise recalled being angrier than van Dyne had been with her father. But never at someone in a conversation. At Doc Ock? Sure. But that wasn't a conversation over the phone.
And that bitch deserved much worse than mere anger.
A full clip at least.
"It's okay, miss. It's supposed to be my job to be on guard in this place. Not the job of one of the researchers… slash financial backers. So, I'm sorry it won't happen again. Ma'am."
With that Louise left the room. It wasn't the young woman who needed to be in the room. The place had guards assigned to it outside of patrols, both outside the room and inside. On top of that, Pat told her that van Dyne apparently had enough combat training to be considered good by normal people's standards.
Honestly, from what Louise understood. The guards inside of the room were safer than the ones in the command center with that woman inside.
Maybe that was why Louise couldn't help but flinch at the sight of van Dyne being so angry? Still, Louise didn't let these thoughts stop her from continuing her patrol through the facility. But what did was the odd sound… of metal against metal. Instantly Louise activated her comms unit and took out her gun, a standard 9mm that Stark apparently planned on replacing with something more nonlethal, but still good against armor.
"This O'Reilly, hearing some odd noises. Send some backup to this location… over."
She waited for a response but found the other side of the radio was nothing but static. Rather than being a moron and walking towards the potentially deadly source of the noise, Louise turned around and to the closest backup inside the ship.
She must have looked spooked because as soon as she entered the room they all turned to face her with frowns. It didn't take more than a second to realize this was due to everyone knowing the route should've taken back out of the ship without coming to this room a second time
"We might have a situation," Louise told the other two guards. "I've heard some disturbing noise and the radios are down. So there's no contract with the command center."
The two men glanced at each other quickly before the smaller of the two, someone even smaller than van Dyne's 5'5, replied to her.
"Do you want us to check out for you? I'm sure it's just a draft that snuck its way in here."
There was something about the smile on this small security guard that annoyed Louise. She wasn't sure if the man was being condescending because she was a woman or because Louise was barely out of high school. But either way, it was dumb.
"No, you mook," The O'Reilly woman glared at him. "We secure this room till we can contact reinforcements. What makes you think any of us could stop some awakening Brainiac Trap?"
"Oh come on, I get that the scary noise has spooked ya. But the command post is probably just having a malf-"
"Ok… ok. Shut up now. In case, you haven't noticed the guards outside are gone," Something Louise had noticed on the way back in that truly worried her."Now shut up and be on guard or I'll literally shove my foot so far up your asshole it comes out of your mouth! Got that!"
As Louise took a breath to calm her racing heart. She took out her phone to call Pat but found the signal bars to be completely gone and the wifi also disconnected.
"Something the matter, O'Reilly?" Dr. Foster came over to her, an expression of worry only tingeing the edge of his face.
As Louise was about to explain the situation, the lights went out.
Author's Note: 2 months isn't that long ago. Sorry about the delay; I have been busy with a super duper-long project that is soaking up so much time that I'm dying of creative juices. There's still so much to do with it, but I've so little time left to complete it before it stops being relative. Still, great news to keep in mind. The next two arcs are completely planned on paper.
So there's more constructing than creating being done here.
In the chapter itself. We never do learn what is wrong with Doris in Daredevil, she's not a character really. There are hints, but what those mean is never confirmed. So I'm keeping it close to the vest so far. But eventually, it will reveal itself in this story too. We also start a rather important section of the arc with Louise's perspective here. Poor girl.
Aliens are just attracted to her like metal to a magnetic... they've even got tentacles.