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"Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way...you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions."
- Aristotle
Kate Pryde-Rasputin was concerned. The timestream was hard enough to keep a track of without some super-hero recreating the universe and in effect rewriting history. Widget had managed to catalogue all the various changes and happenings that had arisen as a result of the resolution of the crisis, which was useful as she'd lost contact with Dragon while it was going on and she was fairly certain that he had simply ceased to exist. There was also a timing issue as well.
For some reason, six months had gone by since the collision of two universes, but on the outside of the barrier it was as if time hadn't passed at all, but only in localised areas. In some places it was more a matter of weeks than months though it seemed to be stabilising now. Kate had theorised that it was more a placement issue than anything else, and when Polaris had rebuilt everything she'd not taken the time factor in to account and that with the way time had been battered by events it had needed more care than it had been granted. That said it had taken longer than she would have thought to get back to normal, as if the elasticity of the time stream was waning, and it certainly showed the continued fragility of the timeline around this era and Kate wondered how much more punishment it could take. Could time, a aspect of reality, a fundamental force of nature, be broken? And if it could be broken, could it be fixed?
Time could heal itself, that had been proven before but it needed a chance to recover and if it didn't get it… It wasn't something she wanted to think about and she knew she needed expert help on that problem when it became apparent that it needed more urgent attention, but for now it was holding and she would continue to monitor the situation. In the meantime, there was still something amiss, something that was wrong that she hadn't seen before.
At first she had put it down to the way things had changed, but now it was clear it was more than that. For some reason, if the Barrier fell, the Earth would be doomed and the Martians would win.
"It wasn't like that," she said to herself. "What's changed?" She steepled her fingers in though and then linked her consciousness with that of Widget. She needed to figure out the problem and quickly.
"I was half right," Dragon said as he contacted the others. "The system has been compromised, but it's not a collaborator plot. It looks like it just happens to fall in with that."
"Coincidence?" said Monroe. "I don't like that."
"I'm not fond of it either," Dragon replied. "Best guess is that someone compromised Stark to get to SHIELD, going at Stark's weakest link - Stark/Fujikawa in Japan. It was a terrorist thing more than a Martian one, but I'll bet real money that whoever set it up for the terrorists has sold their services to the Martians. Maybe for their lives, maybe for something more."
"You need us in Japan?" asked Monroe.
"At some point yes. Right now, I'm just nosing around, but…"
"Be ready to move at a moments notice." Elena answered him.
"Got it in one. When are Sam and Jess due back?"
"Soon, we hope," said Monroe. "And our newest recruit is settling in."
"Wonderful," said Pen. "X, I need a tesseract opening. I'll bring the van back, and then head out to Japan from the basement."
"Done, Commander," said the sentient computer that controlled the Arsenal.
"Pen, take Roberto with you," said Elena, suddenly.
"Really?" asked Monroe and Dragon in unison.
"We can find out more by giving him something to do than keeping him here."
"She has a point," Dragon said. "I'm downstairs now. Have him meet me in the basement."
"I'm on my way," said Roberto, who had been standing back, listening to what was being said.
"Sorted," said Dragon and he signed off, as Roberto headed for the garage and Nomad looked at Elena.
"You knew he was there, didn't you?" She nodded.
"We need him on side," she answered. "If he can work with Pen, then maybe we can sort things out. Distrust can be healthy, but we've too much at stake to let it get in the way of things."
"Point," said Jack. "That's good thinking."
"You have a lot of time to reflect when you're in a hospital bed," she said, thinking back to her recovery from the battle with Sabretooth. "Some things simply become less important in the great scheme of things. Now we had better get ready."
"Right." They both knew that Dragon would turn something up and then they'd be going to Japan, more than likely to bail him out of whatever trouble he'd gotten in to. Or started.
"I'm ready," said Roberto as he approached the SHIELD Commander, and Dragon chucked him a small device. "What's this?"
"Image inducer," said Dragon. "A black guy wandering around Japan will raise suspicion. I may as well paint a big red X on your chest." Then he smiled. "Then again you're used to wearing an X of one colour or another."
"You don't like me," said Roberto.
Dragon sighed. "Bob, I don't know you, but I know of you. At least I know what you could become, the things you've done, the things you might do. I'm not happy about a would-be terrorist having access to some of the most powerful weapons around."
DaCosta glowered at him, barely restraining himself. "I'm not a terrorist."
"Not yet, and considering you've been forced on us, I'm not really inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt yet." Dragon wasn't impressed. "Thing is, you're on the team now. You'll have a chance to earn my trust and I can guarantee this - I'll watch your back as closely as I'd watch anyone else working with me."
"Fair enough." Roberto sighed. "Won't you look conspicuous as well?"
"Oh, I blend in," said Dragon. "It's rare they notice me. I'm just another gaijin."
"You just blend in?" Roberto said, as his fist crashed in to the face of one of the thugs in the bar.
"How the hell was I to know there was a contract on me? I didn't even think the Kokuryu-kai were still active…" He sighed, thinking he probably had, but he couldn't quite place it, as he grabbed someone's head and slammed it repeatedly in to the bar. They were purposely not using their powers for a lower profile, but he wondered what his counterpart had done to annoy these people. The last time he'd been in Japan… "No, it couldn't be that. I sorted that out years ago…"
"DRAGON!" shouted DaCosta and Pen spun, taking the thug he was holding with him and using the body as a shield as bullets were fired.
"Oh, screw this," he said, and powered up his hot knives. Low profile be damned, he decided, because by now the Martians would have gotten word there was an incident in the Japanese Underground and would be coming to investigate at some point. The super heated plasma spikes shot around the room, felling the Japanese assailants before they could react and soon enough the majority were dead and a few were left standing, and they started to get out of there as Pen sighed and wiped the blood away from the corner of his mouth. "Right then, I've had enough of this." He fired another hot knife, which wrapped around the throat of one of the Yakuza and he yanked him over, the knife burning the captive's neck as it pulled him. "Now you tell me what is going on here…" He rattled off his words in Japanese and Pen punched him in the stomach. "In. English."
"You defiled the honour of the Black Dragon Society." Pen sighed and closed his eyes.
"I didn't know she was his daughter," he said. "It wasn't like I planned it, using her to get to him." He looked at Roberto. "Worked out pretty well for me though." The young man spit in his face and Pen hit him again. "Don't do that again, dickhead. Look Kimiko and I had some fun, but that's all it was. Yeah, I stole your ancient artefact, but hey - it was just business. I didn't mean to hurt her feelings, but she was a big girl. She knew what she was doing. Believe me I wasn't her first…"
"But you were her last, and you will marry her!" a voice boomed and Pen Dragon turned to see Roberto slumped on the floor
"Lei Kang."
"You were a fool to return here, Peter Wisdom. Or should we now call you 'Pen Dragon'?"
"Kang, you have no idea who you are messing with. I'm not the man you knew…"
"Neither am I," he said and Pen's eyes went wide as he saw the man's left forearm become shrouded in black energy.
"Darkforce?" he said. "You've darkforce powers? You never had those before."
"This is not darkforce," Lei Kang said and Dragon breathed a sigh of relief. "It is, however, an eldritch energy, not dissimilar to that of the barrier in Europe. The Black Dragon himself has empowered me."
"O-kay then," said Pen. "A mysterious dragon has appeared and given you powers. Why?"
"That is not your concern. First you will marry my daughter and give honour to the son you abandoned, or I will kill your companion."
Dragon's eyes went wide. "Did you just say…" Kang said nothing. "It's going to be one of those days…" He looked to Bob, hoping the guy was playing possum. "Marry your daughter? Yeah… no." He fired his hot knives which Lei Kang blocked with his left arm, absorbing the energy. "Now that trick is really starting to get old…" he muttered as Roberto powered up and felled two of his enemies with a low blow, leaving only a couple of goons as Lei Kang struck at Dragon. Pen dived to the side, moving out of the way as the energy fist struck the bar and smashed the solid woodwork to splinters.
"Dragon, switch!" said Roberto and Dragon took the hint, going for the thugs while Roberto grappled with Lei Kang. Seeing as Pen's powers were having little to no effect on people of late, he decided to do this the old fashioned way and threw down, taking two at once and keeping a third at bay, thinking that this was no coincidence. The communications leak they were investigating had paid off again for their mysterious enemy. The Kokuryu-kai had found them within a few minutes, and for Lei Kang himself to get here so fast. Someone had screwed him over and when he found out exactly who it was that was doing this, he was going to cut off vital parts of their anatomy and feed it to them. He slammed the faces of two of the goons in to the other as his left foot shot out back and kicked another thug in the chest. He could see another at the other side of the room looking to take a shot a Roberto so he grabbed an ashtray and flung it at the man, striking him in the throat and he dropped the gun. Dragon shook his head, he'd been aiming for the gun itself, but that would do just as well. It felt quite good to do that instead of using his hot knives, which he needed to get looked at. He could use them to take out a Tripod, but not to take down a Martian Overseer or a Japanese ganglord? That didn't track. However slamming a solid ashtray in to someone was a nice way of releasing the frustration.
While that was happening Lei Kang and Roberto were trading shots. Kang was a trained martial artist, but what Roberto didn't have in martial arts expertise he made up for in power and other fighting skills taught to him by a variety of tutors. Lei Kang's arm helped him to match the enhanced strength that DaCosta used so it was a pretty even fight and Pen thought it would be pretty cool to watch, but there were other matters that were needed to be sorted, like the imminent arrival of the Martians.
"We don't have time for this," Dragon muttered, and flicked his PPG and got his gun from the ring and put a bullet in Lie Kang's normal shoulder. "Guys, we can fight later, right now the Martians are coming…"
"Too late, Terran," said an oily voice. "The Martians are here." There were four Skorpsmen in the room. "Surrender now."
"Yeah," said Dragon, as if he were considering it. "No." He and Roberto fired their respective long range powers at the enemy felling them quickly.
"That was too easy," said Roberto.
"They weren't expecting us," Dragon said, with a sigh. "They will be now. As much as I hate this idea, we're gonna have to go with Lei Kang."
"You got my daughter pregnant, tried to destroy my clan, and have now shot me and crippled my men," said Kang, with bitter rage flecking spittle between gritted teeth. "Why should I help you?"
"How else do you think you're getting out of here without our help?" said Dragon. "We'll deal with the rest of this later." Including which arsehole set me up, Dragon though with bitterness. There weren't that many people who knew where they were going, but they knew enough to set the Kokuryu-kai on their trail. There was a traitor in the Resistance somewhere and Dragon had been doing this long enough to know that it was liable to be the last person they expected.
He hated meetings like that, however he knew they were necessary. Luckily it also gave him an advantage to know what was going on and it furthered his own plans greatly. There had been some minor setbacks of late, and he knew that some of them were in part due to the appearance of Pen Dragon. He didn't know how he had gotten past the Barrier, but he had and that was not something he liked to think about, for if Dragon could get through, then maybe he could as well, and if he could see what was going on then his whole plan was in ruins and he would never achieve mastery of this world. He knew the Martians were working on something special, something that would take out the greatest threat they would face.
He knew that, because he had given it to them, through the contacts he had made through the cult that worshipped his alter-ego. It was strange to see how people had given up their faith and started to regress to their beliefs in other deities. Now he knew roughly how the ideals of where he had come from began - some cataclysmic event had occurred and turned their faiths away from the gods they could not see to those that were more evident, such as the Norse and Greek deities. All this made possible, thanks to a simple, green haired woman, who had been given so much power that she had not been able to comprehend what she was truly doing. He had to commend her for what she had done, what she had recovered, but there were little slips here and there, mistakes that she had made for she had not known everything. That was the trouble with remaking reality - you had to have precise control.
He entered his quarters while the meeting took a recess, to see his wife sleeping soundly, next to their son, and he smiled. She didn't even know that he wasn't the man she married, that the subtle differences she put down to them being at war were more profound than she would ever realise. Twice he had been denied his destiny, an irony not lost on him. There would not be a third time, and if his people had done their work correctly Pen Dragon would either be captured or dead and unable to interfere and the power of the Armoury would be his once more. He ran his hands through her red hair, feeling the softness of it, admiring her beauty and thinking that he certainly had exquisite taste in women.
"Things are never quite what they seem. There's a world out there you'll never know, that I'll never know. The choices we make are our own, the consequences out of our hands, but we all find our own way to the destination that awaits and occasionally the paths cross." His words were whispered so as not to wake her, or their child. In his own way, he loved them both, though he wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice either of them, should the need arise.
"Your presence is required back at the council meeting," said the Vision, his face appearing on the screen, his voice soft so as not to wake her.
He nodded and the Vision vanished, leaving him all alone once more. "It's then things get interesting." He wandered back to the room, where he met several of the other members of the council and he looked over to where Samantha Hasard and Jessica Drew were sat. He could see they were in contact with someone and he supposed it would be their team. His eyes narrowed slightly as he wondered what was being said. Then Forge lightly placed his hand on Jessica's shoulder and she nodded to Samantha.
"Understood," said Hasard as she finished speaking. Perhaps, he imagined, it was with Elena back at the Arsenal. "We'll be careful." He assumed that things had gone as he had planned in Japan and he repressed a smile and wandered over to the coffee that was placed near them, listening in to their conversation with Forge who was enquiring if everything was okay."Bit of trouble in Japan," said Drew. "Seems like Pen and Roberto have handled it well, but they're no closer to finding who has been giving away details or who set up Stark/Fujikawa to supply the dodgy systems to SHIELD." The inward smile died. He had hoped it wouldn't be that easy for either Dragon or DaCosta, however that was something for another time. "That said, it seems some personal issues have raised their head."
"It'll be interesting to see what happens," Hasard said and he couldn't agree more. He still had an opportunity to come out on top yet, and as he took his place at the table he felt a little more relaxed. His time would come soon enough.
