13 February 2008
Lucius had spent night after night chasing the ghost of Nathaniel Essex and had found nothing but damp basements, empty corridors, and his own patience wearing thin. Manhattan had plenty of abandoned buildings that looked promising from the outside and smelled like disappointment inside. Essex was not there. No vents humming behind fresh concrete. No sterile lights bleeding through cracked doors. No men in lab coats pretending to be maintenance.
The fucker was nowhere to be found.
That meant Lucius needed a different supply chain.
He sat in his armchair with the curtains drawn and the television off, because silence made thinking easier. Bob waited in his inventory, heavy as a stone in his chest, and the new arrays it offered had started to feel like a dare rather than a gift. Array of Convergence sat in the back of his mind like a promise, but he wanted stock before he fused everything into his soul in an undetectable package.
He turned the problem over until the answer surfaced from memory.
Alkali Lake.
A facility buried under Canadian snow and Stryker's arrogance. A place that had collected mutants like trophies and filed them under projects instead of names. He remembered the rescue, remembered the line-up of powers, and remembered, with a quiet, practical warmth, the severed head of a butchered Deadpool stuffed with additional abilities like a joke nobody laughed at.
It was a shopping trolley already packed, paid for, and waiting by the exit.
The timeline was awkward. The film events belonged to 2009, and he was still sitting in 2008, but he had long since stopped respecting the timeline of canon as a schedule. Mutants and SHIELD were co-existing here. If the facility existed, there would be people in it. If there were people in it, there would be powers.
He stood and stretched.
He had arranged what he needed, which was nothing. He was a teleporting, invisible, telekinetic wizard who brewed miracles out of aggressive fruits. He was also not a hero, and he was not interested in being a villain either. Those were labels for people who wanted to belong to a story.
This universe was fictional to him.
That fact did not absolve him. It simply made the choice easier.
He walked into his sanctuary, his pitch-black bedroom, and let the darkness swallow him. He turned invisible out of habit, then teleported.
Canada arrived in cold steps.
Teleportation was not a straight line, at least not for him, especially when he was not sure where to jump exactly. It was a series of stops. Nebraska, then Montana, then Washington, then a damp breath of Vancouver, and from there the long push northeast towards Alberta. He used flight between jumps when he could, skimming above treelines and rivers, practising control.
In less than two hours, Alkali Lake sat beneath him.
Snow blanketed the world in dull white and made the edges of everything sharp. The lake itself was dark, still, and indifferent. The facility crouched nearby, half-buried into the landscape as it had grown there. Concrete, steel, floodlights, and the sort of perimeter fencing that suggested the builders expected trouble and enjoyed it.
From above, it looked like a military research outpost pretending to be a weather station. Guard towers at angles that covered blind spots. A central building with a flat roof and vents that exhaled heat into the freezing air. Service roads kept clear by tyre tracks. Generators humming somewhere deep.
It was intact and very much alive.
Lucius held his position in the air and studied it for a full minute. Alarms triggered by motion were common. Alarms triggered by pressure were annoying.
He moved under invisibility and silence. No touching the fence. No walking through the front gate like he owned the place.
He drifted closer until he could see two guards stationed near a secondary entrance, their breath fogging under their scarves. They looked bored.
Lucius drew a Somnus Draught from his inventory and wrapped a force field tightly around his head. He did not trust airborne mist near his own lungs, not when he was alone in a forest with nobody to laugh at him except whatever entity enjoyed sending him messages.
He uncorked the vial and let the shimmering mist flow out in a thin line.
The first guard blinked, swayed, and collapsed as if his bones had decided to retire.
The second guard stepped closer, irritation rising in his posture. He crouched, checked his colleague's face, then inhaled sharply as if the cold had grabbed his nuts.
His eyes rolled back.
He hit the ground with a quiet thud.
Lucius waited for a shout, a radio call, a security light swinging wildly.
Nothing.
He took their guns with brisk efficiency and checked the magazines. He did not know these weapons by muscle memory yet. He could fire a gun, but he preferred to understand what he was holding.
He teleported both men into the woods south of the facility, far enough that their disappearance would look like a mystery rather than a breach.
Snow crunched under his boots as he landed beside them. He cleared a large enough space for the array, took chalk from his inventory and drew a sacrificial array with practised speed. The lines went down clean, bright against the white ground. He dragged the first guard into the centre and spoke the word with his intention clear on the bastard's weapons mastery, if he had any.
"Sacrifice."
The world warped for a heartbeat.
The guard dismantled in silence.
Lucius did enjoy the process when he was cleaning pests. He enjoyed the outcome. His focus was on knowledge this time, a practical theft, and he felt the flow of information settle into his mind like a harsh lesson.
Grip, stance, trigger discipline, maintenance and how to fix jams in addition to magazine seating and Sight alignment. He repeated it with the second guard and added a little more.
Radio codes. Standard patrol routes. Which doors were routinely checked, and which were checked only on paper.
Four minutes later, the snow looked untouched again. He erased the chalk lines with telekinesis. He would have drawn the circle with it as well, but mastery was not there yet; he returned to the facility.
He teleported behind the outer gate and moved in.
Inside, he slipped between buildings without touching cameras, then found a service entrance that looked less protected than it deserved. The keycard reader glowed. The door was heavy. He did not bother with it. He teleported through.
The interior was a corridor of fluorescent light and beige paint, the kind of place designed to feel forgettable. The floor was polished enough to reflect shoes. The air had a chemical tang that reminded him of university labs and poor ventilation. Signs were minimal, as if they hoped that not naming things would make them less illegal.
Lucius followed the logic of facilities like this. Admin near the surface. Research deeper. Containment deepest, where screams were less likely to carry.
He moved through intersections and stairwells, taking short jumps to avoid motion-based alarms. He stayed invisible and flew, keeping his feet above the ground. He listened for footsteps, for voices, for the soft hum of surveillance.
A pair of technicians passed him in a corridor, chatting about shift changes and coffee. Their laughter sounded natural, butchering Mutants was nothing noteworthy for them. They moved as if nothing was wrong.
Lucius smiled invisibly and watched them go. He did not need to kill everyone.
He needed stock.
He found the containment wing by the sound first. The steady thrum of something pumping air, cooling systems running, and a faint electric crackle that made the hair on his arms rise.
He teleported into a viewing corridor and looked through reinforced glass to the cells below.
Steel doors with small windows. Thick restraints are mounted to the walls. Sedation lines and IV stands. Every design choice screamed control.
He moved along the corridor until he saw them.
Two teenagers in separate cells, both restrained and collared, both awake enough to look furious. Twins, with the same sharp cheekbones and the same eyes that promised violence when given the chance. Telepathic and telekinetic potential, if his memory was not lying.
A speedster sat in another cell, following the same accessory trend as the twins, pacing in the small cell like a caged animal, trying to convince himself he still had edges.
And in the last cell, a man convulsed faintly, electricity discharging in irregular snaps that left scorch marks on the metal around him. Even sedated, the power leaked out. This one has no collar, though. Maybe this way, he was hurting himself, which would make the guards have some fun.
Lucius watched for a moment.
It was almost embarrassing how easy this was.
He took out Somnus again, kept the force field around his head, and moved from cell to cell. He did not open the doors. He did not touch the locks. He teleported into each cell, uncorked the vial, and guided the mist close enough to be inhaled.
The first twin slumped within seconds.
The second tried to fight it, breathing shallow, eyes wide, then collapsed anyway.
The speedster made it two steps before his legs stopped obeying him.
The electric mutant convulsed once, power arcing, then went limp.
Lucius teleported them out one by one to the woods. He placed them in the snow like discarded cargo and left them unconscious.
He returned to the facility and moved to the administrative section with a new purpose.
If there are some experiments on Mutant Genetics, Essex will be around it, if not in the centre of it. And if he was not here physically, he might still be here on letters, on memos, on old reports that men like Stryker would keep because men like him never trusted anyone without leverage.
Lucius found an office marked only with a number and a lock that looked too expensive. He teleported inside.
Files lined the shelves. A desk sat too neatly. A photograph faced down as if the owner did not want to see his own family while doing what he did.
Lucius opened drawers and skimmed folders with quick eyes. Project names. Transport orders. Lists of sedatives. Then he found what he wanted. Reports and Correspondence.
Stryker's name appeared often. Essex appeared less, but when it did, it was precise, clinical, and arrogant. There were notes about genetic samples, about acquisition, and about viability. There were also addresses.
Lucius pulled a guard's phone from his inventory, snapped photos, and checked that the images were clear. He did it twice for insurance, then slid the phone away.
He did not find Stryker's son or the butchered Deadpool. Unfortunate, but not a failure. At least he had addresses.
He teleported back to the woods, redrew the sacrificial array.
He started with the twins.
The first dismantled in silence. Lucius felt a rush of mental pressure settle behind his eyes. The second followed, and the pressure sharpened into a shape he recognised.
Telepathy, and the nice part was that as soon as he sacrificed the second one, the power and the range he gained from the first had at least tripled.
He moved to the speedster next. The body dissolved and left behind a humming awareness of time and motion. His reflexes sharpened in a way that made the cold air feel slower.
Last was the electric mutant.
Even unconscious, the man discharged blue arcs from time to time. Arcs snapped against the snow, leaving small black scars. Lucius watched with narrowed eyes, then spoke the word.
"Sacrifice."
The dismantling stuttered for a fraction of a second, as if the power resisted. Then it went anyway.
Electricity flooded Lucius' awareness like a bad decision.
He blinked hard.
He took the phone out again and examined the addresses, the names, the hints Essex had left behind. Once he had what he needed, he willed electricity to his hand holding the device.
The charge leapt out.
It was not subtle. It was not controlled. It crackled and spat and turned the phone into a smoking lump within seconds.
Lucius grinned.
He kept the guns, the ammunition, and the cash he had pulled from the guards. He dropped everything else into the lake. Then he folded space and returned to Queens.
His bedroom swallowed him in darkness.
He stood still, listening.
No footsteps. No breathing beyond his own. No new hum of equipment.
He let invisibility and telekinesis drop and waited, just in case the electricity had a habit of leaking from him as it had leaked from the man he had taken it from.
Nothing discharged.
Relief settled in his chest.
"So why were you sparking like a faulty toaster?" he muttered, and then shrugged at the idea that Stryker might have altered diets, sedatives, or implants to make the captives unstable.
Tragic loss for the Homo Superior community, he told himself with the sincerity of a man paying lip service to a concept he did not respect. May their souls rest in peace.
Lucius moved into the sitting room, pulled a large book from the shelf, and sat down. He opened it on his lap, then drew Bob from his inventory and tucked the grimoire between pages as if it were a bookmark.
He opened Bob to the first page and watched the ink adjust.
Name: Lucius Noctis
Race: Homo Superior
Class: Wizard
Affinity: Alchemy, Rituals
Racial Skills
- Rapid Healing
- Mental Shields
- Teleportation
- Telekinesis
* Flight
* Force Field Generation
* Energy Blasts
* Molecular Manipulation
- Telepathy
* Telepathic Projection
* Mental Confusion
* Psychic Communication
* Mind Reading
- Superhuman Speed
* Accelerated Reflexes
- Electrokinesis
* Discharge Attacks
* Electromagnetic Manipulation
Class Skills
- Veil of Fate
- Blessed Brewing
- Sacrificial Array
- Array of Convergence
The Array of Convergence sat at the end like a hooker winking at him.
Lucius smiled. He was ready now.