Chronos, Chapter 17

Drive came back from Data Recovery today. I'll check and see how much stuff got corrupted, but regular stories should begin again next week.

Chapter 17 – Scheming

I spent the next few hours resting in that bubble of stopped time, and playing with my pets, so that they fully understood their situation. They both had orders to act as they normally did when they were in mixed company, but when alone, or with my followers, they were to address me as Master, and act like the slaves they were. Which brought me to the next thing I needed to know: who were the people in their lives?

Eric Hunter was Skye’s husband. He… was no one of real importance, actually. He was an accountant. In fact, other than the fact that he married his high school sweetheart the day after graduation, his only connection to the super community was the fact that he was the chief financial advisor for the Liberty Belles.

This was not perfect for my plans, but it was far from the worst-case scenario. The man being a central support figure for the Liberty Belles was problematic, but not something I couldn’t work around. The Liberty Belles had been around for a while, long enough that the original members had all either fallen or retired, so while he might be the one making financial calls, there ought to be an organization around him that could step up when he suffered an accident. If not, then the current Belles were too stupid for their own good, and none of them struck me as being particularly stupid. A little too trusting, perhaps, but not stupid.

No, the hero business was just as dangerous for the supporters as it was the heroes themselves. Perhaps more so, depending on the villains a team went up against. There would be some way to hand off their financial dealings.

All the same, he was known, at the very least to the Liberty Belles, and probably to the rest of the heroes in the city. According to Hannah, everyone knew that the two were very much in love, and always had been. That restricted what I could do with him, if I didn’t want to draw attention.

A sudden breakup would be out of character, and people would start looking at what caused it. While they wouldn’t find my manipulations, they would see that something had affected Skye, and might decide to quarantine her. That was unacceptable.

If he died, then there would be an outpouring of support. The only way that wouldn’t cause problems for me is if the death could be completely proven to be an accident. A ‘suicide’ would start people digging, just as much as any whiff of murder. Also unacceptable.

The only way to take him out of the picture without actually taking him out of the picture was to bring him into the fold. Once I initiated my new priestess, I would have her turn him into one of my cultists. That was better, anyway, since having only female cultists might draw attention, as well. Religious orders that solely recruited one gender sent up all kinds of red flags to those who were looking for potential trouble in the brewing. Those red flags would bring people looking into my business, and I did not want that.

So, having this Eric join the ranks of my cultists would be ideal. Once brainwashed by the ‘induction ceremony’, I could easily command him to keep up appearances in public. He would even believe, wholeheartedly, that he still loved Skye. But her body would be mine, and mine alone.

Actually, I could do that with other key figures, as well. That would allow me to expand my influence, with little risk to myself, since I could teach my priestess how to do the ritual. And the uninitiated cultists could bring others in for indoctrination.

What I had envisioned was two separate rituals, that would be easier for my cultists to do on their own. The induction (or indoctrination) ritual would be a low-level mental transformation. Low-power, but impossible to resist or remove if the ritual was completed, and it would only require the smallest bit of arcane knowledge on behalf of my cultists.

Later on, as they proved their usefulness, and showed that they wouldn’t be a liability, the cultists could undergo the second ritual, the initiation ritual. This would give them some limited magical skill and powers, allowing even a kid fresh out of high school to at least go toe to toe with ‘normal’ enemies. They wouldn’t be taking down Lady Liberty, but they could give the street-level vigilantes and gang lords a run for their money.

Other supervillains or even heroes would be shaking their head if they knew how much of my plans involved ritual magics, rather than my own time magic abilities. But there was a reason for it. Other villains got their minions to follow them through greed or fear. The problem with greed and fear was that those impulses only went so far. Someone might offer the greedy person a better deal, and the person living in fear would take any lifeline offered to them. Both were ways that heroes and cops turned supposedly ‘loyal’ lackeys against their organizations, making them informants and using them to bring down the villains at the top.

Since I had no desire to get taken down, myself, I decided to rely on methods of ensuring loyalty that could not be easily broken. If someone wanted to ‘deprogram’ one of my cultists, then it would not be so easy as just removing my changes. They would have to rewrite the person themselves, and they would never know how close to the original person they’d gotten it.

Of course, there were other barriers to any outside forces rewriting my cultists. To the outside, it would look as though my followers had been supremely successful in spreading the faith. They would be indistinguishable from true believers of any other religion. That meant anyone trying to reprogram my followers would believe that they were interfering with the victim’s true religious beliefs. That was something a zealot might do, and zealots with mind control was a scary concept, even I had to admit that.

And that was part of why I was doing this. There was no way that I could make myself strong enough that I would be able to defeat all comers, forever. There would always be someone who could hard-counter me, and there was always the chance that someone could come along that could overpower me. The enemy only had to get lucky once, after all.

So, absolutely assured victory was impossible. However, that did not mean that I was helpless. Instead, I was pursuing the path of madness. Or, rather, MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.

I could not keep someone from gaining the ability to defeat me. However, I could make the task of defeating me so arduous and painful that it would break those who tried it. So long as I did not drive people to the point where they believed losing everything that they held dear was worth it in order to defeat me, then I effectively bound their hands.

I was well aware that my thinking was not ‘normal’, compared to the average super. Whether they were a hero or villain, most supers typically focused their attentions on winning the fight. I, on the other hand, was more focused on not losing. If I made sure I didn’t lose, eventually opportunities would open themselves for me. And, in order to avoid losing, I had to manage how much force could be brought against me at any one time, by making the only truly effective attacks on my power base be those that would be morally repugnant to the heroes, and would draw down too much heat for a villain’s liking.

I sighed, bringing myself back from the tangent I’d gone down. I could think about the grand strategy of my future moves once I had the present secured. Skye’s husband would be an excellent pawn to help build up my organization. But Hannah also had someone in her life, and that person would be far more problematic to deal with.

Hannah’s lover was the supervillain Bronze, a name I knew. Bronze was gifted with enhanced strength and physical abilities, basically like something out of a Homeric epic. And that was before he transformed into his entire body into magically reinforced bronze, granting him even further enhancements, as well as extra durability! He mostly went in for protection and enforcement jobs, including some bodyguard work, and he was the Carlotti family’s preferred hitter for taking out members of rival syndicates.

Fighting him would be a question of who moved first. If I could control the battlefield, picking the time and place of our encounter, then I could take him down, I was certain. However, if he managed to get the drop on me, or the fates smiled on him, then he could easily wrap me up like a pretzel, and there wouldn’t be much I could do about it.

But that was just in the first few moments. The longer the fight went, the more it would favor me. Bronze didn’t have any magic abilities, which meant that he couldn’t prevent me from stopping time to rest and heal, if I needed to. On the other hand, Bronze wasn’t an idiot, like most muscle-type supers were. He was a cold, cunning tactician, when he wanted to be, and I wouldn’t count on him not having something to lock down magic in an area. Especially not if I gave him some reason to come after me, specifically. He wasn’t the kind of fool who would rush in without preparing something to ruin my day.

The most important part of being a successful villain, especially in a city so full of heroes as Liberty City, was to have a keen understanding of your own weaknesses, and acknowledge, if only to yourself, all the ways that you could be beaten. Oh, you might have a pretty good run by going with supreme confidence and just making other people play your game. But eventually you’ll slip up, or someone will just outplay you, and you’ll end up dead, or in prison.

The same was true for the heroes, too. Overconfidence has always been the bane of the powerful, no matter what side of the law they were on. You start thinking you can never be beaten, and eventually the universe will prove you wrong.

Bronze was a threat, if only because I was stealing his girl. I needed to find a way to neutralize that threat, preferably before Bronze realized that he was a threat. After all, why wait for someone to become a problem when you can end them before they start messing around?

Fortunately, Hannah had the information I needed to make the perfect trap. Bronze’s primary nemesis was the superhero Speedfreak from the Protectors. As the name suggested, he was a speedster. He and Bronze countered each other’s powers well, which made them natural rivals, in a way.

This actually provided an opportunity to get two birds with one stone. If I could arrange for Bronze and Speedfreak to fight each other somewhere rife with hazards, like a construction site, then I could interfere with the match. If Speedfreak started losing, he would call for backup. I just had to make sure that he died before that backup got there, and then Bronze would take the rap. He’d be lucky to just be forced to flee town to avoid the heroes hunting someone who had killed one of their own. Certainly, he wouldn’t have any time to worry about his girlfriend, and it would provide a clean break for her to ‘move on’, in everyone’s eyes.

I just needed to find some reason to make Bronze go out on a job, and then clue in the Protectors about the job. Speedfreak would show up for certain, and then the two would fight, because they were like water and oil. They fought every time they met, without exception. And then I would make sure that things went according to my design.

I let the girls go home, after reinforcing my orders in multiple ways, to cut out any loopholes they might have found. They would act normally, and not remember anything that happened while they were away from me, and they couldn’t speak of what happened, write it, sign it, or communicate it in any way. To anyone else, it would look like nothing had changed.

I needed to head home. Dinner and a nice soak in the hot tub would help me think. If I was going to get rid of Bronze, then I needed a plan that was more substantial than just trying to goad the two into a fight, especially if I wanted them to really start going at it.