Lady Doom: Sequel to Minion

A/N: Yes! We're back! Did you miss me? I missed you!
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I did not make any sudden movements, nothing that would call attention to myself, as the impostor Doom and his teammates met Magneto and with an obviously insincere and cheerful welcome. “Come—let us show you what I have done for you!” said the pretender, and led them away. I did catch a glimpse of Magneto’s face as they went past. He looked---as if he had guessed an ambush was waiting for him. And as if he were prepared for it.

One of Magneto’s people stayed behind—Polaris, his green-haired adopted daughter, who possessed magnetic powers like his own. Oh, that was an error on the part of the false Doom. How could anyone with even half a brain not see that even if the plan involving that other dimension forever succeeded, Polaris would rescue them? So stupid. But no, villains never see the flaw in their plans. It’s all part of the Laws of Heroics.

I looked down at the page I was working on, where I had written, ‘So his brothers-in-law gathered together the pieces of Ivan’s body, washed them, put them back together in their proper order, sprinkled it with the Water of Death—and the pieces joined up together again. Then they sprinkled him with the Water of Life—and he sprang up from the ground, as lively and healthy as ever.’

People came back to life all the time—that is, the heroes and villains did. When the terrorists flew their planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11, none of the people killed that day came back to life. Not one of them. Some people were subject to the laws of the real world. Some were governed by the Laws of Heroics. I wanted the same natural laws to apply to everyone.

What if I were to kill Magneto? Just to kill him, without asking questions? It might bring this ‘end of the world as we know it’ to an end. It wasn’t as if he’d be dead permanently. Sooner or later, he would come back.

It sounded like a pretty good idea to me. It might hurt for a moment, but he’d get over it.

I unclipped the page from the desk, and tore it in half, then in half again. Then I got out a fresh sheet, and wrote the story the way I thought it should have gone. ‘Once Koshchei was free, he seized Ivan and flew off with him. Then he went to Marya Morevna, and said “I have taken your husband prisoner, and until you surrender to me all your lands and fortune, he shall cut the wood for my fires, and draw water from my well, and all other tasks I shall put him to as well, until his hands and his feet blister from his exertions, and the blisters break and bleed, and he curses the day he ever heard your name.”

“Oh, no!” cried Marya Morevna.’

Then I went on with the story. She was going to rescue Ivan, and kill Koschei forever…

The Fearsome Four returned, in higher spirits than before. “Deal with the Lady Polaris, Valeria. The It shall destroy the dimensional portal before it goes back to its cage—and then, Kristoff, I want you to incinerate every fragment of the mess. I’m going off to draft a speech about the…accident which so tragically took the lives of the House of M…” the impostor tossed over his shoulder as he passed through the Great Hall.

“No.” said Ben Grimm.

“No?!” asked the pretender.

“No more cages. No more filth. I’m part of this team. I want—respect.”

“Respect?” The impostor Doom was outraged. “You’re a monstrosity. We already give you far more respect than you deserve. What I ought to do is thrash you within an inch of your miserable, worthless life.”

The It stood silent, immovable.

The impostor backed down. “Fine. But for your sake, you’d better be housebroken.” He left in one direction, while Ben Grimm shambled off in the other.

That left Valeria and Kristoff, mother and son.

“Hey, Mom, can I help you with Polaris?” Kristoff asked.

“Of course, my sweet prince.” She crooned to him. “Although I know who I wish we were about to dispose of…” I could feel them both looking pointedly at me. I kept writing, in blithe unconcern. Things were about to come to a head. I could feel it.

“The Lady Polaris’s green hair is really pretty.” Kristoff said. “I can’t wait to watch it burn!”

The two of them went off in search of Polaris.

Funny, I didn’t hear the sort of sound I would have expected—the sound of Ben Grimm smashing up a dimensional portal. It should have been very, very loud indeed.

That meant he wasn’t doing it.

That meant the dimensional portal was still intact.

I put my finished pages away in a folder, so they wouldn’t be ruined. It was only a matter of time now—.

I watched the It lead Polaris back to the chamber where the equipment that opened the dimensional portal was kept. Shortly thereafter, the House of M emerged. They didn’t look happy…

The Great Hall of Castle Doom erupted into violence as Magneto and his Enforcers retaliated against Doom’s failed attempt to lure them into another dimension and slaughter them there, where the laws of physics were different and Magneto’s powers would not work. The castle’s security forces streamed in from all directions to join the affray, but they were ineffectual against the powers of the mutants, being all too human.

The only forces on Doom’s side who were at all effective were the Invincible Woman and the Inhuman Torch, and they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Magneto and Doom were locked in combat in the middle of the battle, and it was not going well for the ruler of Latveria—not well at all.

Not that I particularly cared if the impostor was killed or not—my moment of sympathy for him was long past. I had another goal now—to kill Magneto, and hopefully turn the world back to normal

I had to do something to distract Magneto. I seized an inkwell off my desk, and visually tracked the blur and the falling bodies that showed where Quicksilver, Magneto’s super-fast son had just been. If I aimed for him and let fly a hundred thousand times, I could never hope to hit him, not at the speeds of which he was capable.

So instead I deliberately threw the inkwell in a direction where he wasn’t. I hit him square on the chin—or rather, he ran right into my missile.

The Heroic Law of Odds: Million to one chances always succeed.

I admit I first encountered that law in the works of Terry Pratchett, but careful observation had proved it to be true.

The ‘thwack’ that was barely audible above the din when the inkpot hit was as nothing to the sound of Quicksilver’s skull hitting the stone floor with a dull ‘thunk’. At the speed he was going before I intervened, his head shattered like a watermelon falling off a speeding truck.

“Pietro!” howled Magneto, breaking off his fight with Doom to rush to his son’s side. He was not the mutant leader now; he was a father. I didn’t waste a moment. I took up my pen, stopped him by the ludicrously easy tactic of stepping on his cape.

As he turned toward me to remonstrate, I grabbed a handful of his silver hair in one hand, and brought my other hand around in an arc that ended when my pen pierced his eye. His electromagnetic powers washed over me, to no avail. I wore nothing metal, and my pen was made in Venice. It was completely impervious to his powers. It was a slender shaft of tinted and shaped glass—that came to a wicked point.

He shrieked in pain, and vitreous humor spurted out over my hand, but I drove the pen in deeper still, until it dug into the brain, and then I dragged it from one end of the eye socket to the other, until I felt the fragile glass snap and splinter.

Magneto gurgled, twitched, and died, sagging suddenly to the flagstones.

All around me, the battle had ground to a sudden, shocked halt. “You—you killed him,” someone said, in disbelief.

“I killed them both.” I said, wearily. The blue-black ink stains on my hand and on Pietro’s face bore witness to my other deed.

Doom pushed his way through the crowd, looked at the corpses, at the stump of pen which I still held in my hand, fragments of brain tissue adhering to it.

“You,” he breathed, in awe and triumph. The breathtakingly handsome face, the perfect, unscarred face of Victor Von Doom turned toward me. “This is your doing. For your services and loyalty, I here create you the Duchess of Brantzia and Keeper of the Citadel.”

“Brantzia is mine!” protested his wife, Valeria, the Invincible Woman, who had fought her way through the press to his side. “And the Citadel is mine!” insisted their adopted son, Kristoff, the Inhuman Torch.

“Bah! They were yours.” growled their leader. “I bestowed them and can reclaim them as I choose. Take care that is not all that you lose.” he said, glaring at them. “And as for that traitor!” he spat, looking at the rock-like, orange skinned It that crouched in the corner, “I shall have it crushed into a million fragments and used to make ornamental garden paths.”

“Now!” he raised his voice, speaking to everyone, Latverians and mutants both. “The House of Magneto is overthrown. Your leader and his heir lie broken and bleeding on my floor. The House of Doom rules over all!”

He turned back to me. “Whatever it is you want, you have but to name it, and it is yours.” He took my hand, and looked searchingly into my eyes. Yep, I had him hooked. He was prepared to divorce Valeria and disown Kristoff on the spot.

“I thank you for the offer, but there is nothing you can grant or give me that I want.” I said, fighting the impulse to free my hand.

“Are you so sure?” he asked, in a velvety undertone.

“There is something that I want,” came another voice, from the head of the stairs. “And that is that you should let go of my wife’s hand.” All heads turned to look at the imposing masked figure that stood there, his cloak falling about him like two great wings.

Victor came down the Great Stair, as only he could. “You!” fulminated the Doom who stood before me. “Who are you to appear in my armor, in my castle? Why do you not show your face, you craven?”

“Who are you, who calls himself Victor Von Doom?” retorted my Victor. He had the air of authority that the other Doom lacked, the aura of command. He swept across the room toward us. “For I tell you now that I and I alone am Doom, and you, who bowed your neck under the yoke of this offal,” the toe of his boot prodded Magneto, “are nothing but the palest shade of what I am. How many years did you seek to free yourself, you and yours? And in the little time which my wife has spent here among you she vanquished them with less effort than it would take her to swat a fly.”

My Victor turned to me. “Come. Swiftly. Put your arms around my neck.” I did so. He slid an arm around me, boosted me up so I was half sitting on it, then raised his other hand and vaporized a large hole in the roof. The suit’s propulsion field engaged, and we shot up into the sky, leaving a very startled Great Hall full of people below us.

“My dear, I have the answer.” He said, shielding me from the wind with his cloak. “The one behind this is Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch.”

“Magneto’s daughter and Quicksilver’s twin,” I said, identifying her immediately. “She made her father the ruler of the world, using her powers.”

“Yes.” He confirmed it, nodding. “She may again. It is not beyond her powers to resurrect them even now. She is attempting to create her own private world where she and everyone she loves have what they always wanted. Unfortunately, she has imposed it upon our own.”

“There is a problem with that.” I said, as I wiped my hands on my smock. “A lot of the people she didn’t love are dead. Given that she was for many years an Avenger and Janet’s friend, she must be—quite literally—insane.”

“She is.” was his reply. “Nor does she want to be helped, because if she returns to sanity, her two sons will cease to exist.”

We were on a really tough deadline to get things back to normal, too. Our wedding was supposed to be tomorrow.

“Cease to exist?” I asked, as he adjusted the direction in which we flew. “How can that be?”

“They are not precisely real.” Victor said. “Have you ever heard of the Vision?”

“Costumed adventurer, crimson skin, wears a green and yellow costume, and is an android.” I identified him.

“Precisely. He was Wanda Maximoff’s husband. Being an android—fully functional or not, I do not know—he was not capable of siring children. Childless and unhappy, the Scarlet Witch participated in a magical rite which summoned to her empty womb two amorphous fragments of that same substance of which Mephisto, Hell, and all its demons are made. There they took root, and grew. The intensity of her desire and belief imprinted upon them the form they had when they were born—twin boys.”

“Did she know they were really demonic ectoplasm?”

“No. She thought they were hers—hers and her husband’s.”

“What kind of a woman marries an android and then believes she can have children—even with the help of magic? Don’t answer, that’s rhetorical. Where are we going, by the way?”

“To the Citadel. Time is of the essence, and I cannot carry you like this all the way to Genosha, where the Scarlet Witch is now. You would freeze if I were to go any faster.”

“What of the impostors?”

“We shall deal with them there. At the moment, you are rather vulnerable.”

“All right.” I agreed. “What brought Wanda to this state, anyway? What melted down in her life?”

“The Vision belonged to the United States’ federal government. They—ah—repossessed him, on the grounds that he was a security risk. Then someone realized the twins sometimes ceased to exist when she was not thinking about them. They were extremely handsome children—however, they were not normal. They never got dirty—never squabbled—never tore their clothes or cried. No children are as abnormally well-behaved as those two were.”

“Like a pair of dolls, that she could cuddle and dress up and play with, but which she could put back in their box and not worry about when she wanted to do something else…” I said, thinking about it.

“A very apt comparison. Here we are…” He landed us on the roof of the Citadel. “I believe we have about fifteen minutes before the impostor should catch up with us. Come.”

We went down the stairs. “When did Wanda find out about her sons’ true nature--or did she?”

“A year ago or so. She was devastated—she went quite mad for a time. Finally, in a misguided effort to be compassionate, Dame Agatha, her mentor in witchcraft, and Franklin Richards’s nanny, took away the memory of her children entirely.”

“That was a terrible idea. That sort of fix never works—and it isn’t as if Wanda was the only person who has ever lost people she loved—even if they were only figments of her imagination in the first place. It’s part of being human. You deal with your loss—you grieve, you move on, you grow.”

“I agree with you. Agatha’s poor decision led to the murder, by Wanda Maximoff, of several of the Avengers, about six months ago—when they observed she was descending once more into madness. Since then, she has been kept drugged—and in the care of Professor Xavier.”

“Another error. Where did Wanda get the power to do all of this, anyway?” I asked. “I thought her power was to cast hexes and make things go wrong—little pockets of localized bad luck. Sort of a human personification of Murphy’s Law.”

“It was, but she found that she could affect probability on a larger scale than that. This way.” We went in through a double door into a high-security area, where I had never been before.

“I do mean to fly us to Genosha in a vehicle, but you will require greater protections than that.” He opened a vault as I watched. Inside—were several spare suits of his armor.

“You don’t mean…?”

“Yes.” he said, in all seriousness. “You are going to wear one of my suits. Start changing into this—.” He handed me a set of—silk long johns? “You will need to use the bathroom first. I’m afraid the—arrangements in the suit are not unisex.”

I’m afraid I gaped at him for a moment in simple mute astonishment, while he went on: “There is no time in which to re-tool it to fit you, but I believe that I can improvise some padding to keep the torso in place. Make haste. The bathroom is there.” He pointed.

“But—.” I began.

“Go!” He commanded, and called after me. “Tie your hair back securely while you are at it!”

I went. The voice he was using said he was not going to put up with any arguing, so I ran a quick cost-benefits analysis in my head, and decided to go along with it.

The garments he had given me were not unlike long-johns, but instead of silk, they were the ever-popular unstable molecules, which happily stretched or shrank to fit the individual wearer. They were nearly indestructible, and clung nicely to abdominal muscles, which meant that the costumed adventurer community as a whole tended to use it almost exclusively. I would have liked to see Victor wearing those long-johns much more that I liked seeing myself in them…But this was not the time to think about that.

On my return, I found Victor making adjustments to the mask of the armor he was proposing I should wear. He looked up. “Good. Have you got your clothes? Bring them here, and yourself as well. The boots are there—.” He gestured at a pair of metal footgear. “You look stricken, my dear. Is something the matter?”

“Um. Yes. Victor, I just don’t know about this…”

“I, however, do. It should come as no surprise to you—is there enough padding in the toes?—that I took care to monitor what was going on even while I was spell-casting. You have made yourself some rancorous enemies today. Stand up.” He began fitting the greaves of the armor around my calves as he spoke.

“You are intelligent, resourceful, and ingenious—none of which will deflect one well-placed fireball. They are on their way here even now. If you are armored and armed, the fight is three against two—and those two, you and I, are smarter than the three of them put together. Bend your knee.” I complied.

“If you are not—the fight is three against one, and I would be hindered by the need to protect you.” he said. I was armored up to the waist by that time. “Take a few steps.”

I did. Rather than weighing a ton, as I had expected, wearing the armor was—like the first time I drove a car with power steering, after years of wrestling the wheel by brute force. It was unexpectedly easy and light—but when I made too sudden of a move, I overcompensated and lost my balance.

“Careful. Now the padding—your clothes.” He started wrapping them around my midsection. A pair of sport shoulder pads completed it. He took the front and back plates and had me hold the front in place while he fastened them together.

“There. Not quite the ‘steel bustier’ you once mentioned with dismay, but it will serve. You played the lot of them as Mozart must have played the harpsichord—like a virtuoso. Your left arm, please. They will be after your head. Now, the suit’s systems will do a lot of the work for you—but not all of it. Avoid moving too fast. The readouts for the computer in it are the lenses in the mask. The letters are transparent. The weaponry controls are in the gauntlets--.” He gave me the gloves.

I put them on, as he fit the cowl and back of the helmet in place. They were made of a lot of interlocking plates, to give the head and neck mobility.

Unfortunately, since I was about three inches shorter than he was, the shoulders of the armor were somewhere up around my ears. I was glad I could not see myself. And my hair, which was bunched up around the back of my neck, made me itch. Actually, knowing there was no way I could scratch myself made me itch all over. I wondered how Victor could bear it.

“Keep in mind that the system is live. Oh, and there is a bomb in the breastplate.” He threw one of his green over tunics over the armor, and fastened the cape around my shoulders.

“A bomb in the breastplate!” I exclaimed.

“Yes. In case anyone should be so foolish as to try to peel the armor off me—in this case, you. Don’t worry—it’s shaped to detonate outward, at the one who is doing the peeling. Even should it go off, it won’t hurt you—the anti-shock devices are excellent. You’ll hardly feel a thing. It won’t leave so much as a mark on your skin.”

“How many times have you had the bomb go off while you were wearing the suit?” I asked

“In combat? Four…I have disabled the lock on this faceplate—normally the only way to remove it is with the key I have in this ring—.” He showed me the ring, worn under his glove. “You might need to remove it on your own, however.”

“Thank you…” I said, as he slid the mask that was a twin of his own over my face—and as it clicked into place, the suit came alive around me.

Right on cue, there was a tremendous booming sound. The impostors had arrived.

They had made an impressive hole in the outer wall of the Citadel. I could only hope it wasn’t a retaining wall, but I was afraid it was.

“Which one of them is which?” asked Kristoff.

“Does it matter?” Valeria responded.

“Surrender now, and I promise you a quick and merciful death. Resist—and a merciful death is the last thing you will have.” vowed the impostor. I had not seen him when he was using his Mr. Fantastic-like powers before. His right arm ended in a sledgehammer shape, and instead of Reed Richards’ ordinary Caucasian skin-tone, his skin had the cold, liquid sheen of mercury. Metal skin—that struck a chord somewhere in my head, but where?

“You weary and disgust me.” replied Victor. “Although you are but a mere puppet, I shall enjoy obliterating you.”

“Let it begin, then. Valeria—Kristoff—Deal with that one. Leave this one to me.” The pretender said, and so it began.

It was clear from the start that Victor was by far the better fighter. He had often fought Reed Richards hand to hand, and studied how to fight someone with stretching powers. The impostor was not as familiar with fighting someone in such a sophisticated and versatile suit of armor. He might shape his limbs into swords, spikes or hammers, but his blows rained down ineffectually. His magic could find no purchase.

I, on the other hand, was not doing so well. The suit was giving me trouble. Left to my own devices, I would have turned and fled—to lure the Invincible Woman and the Inhuman Torch into the bowels of the Citadel, where I would have come up with something. In the suit, however, I was clumsy, awkward, disoriented by the computer readouts that flashed in my eyes. I could aim and fire the energy weapons, but I rarely hit either of them.

If I had an hour to familiarize myself with the suit—but I didn’t. But if I could use my obvious bumbling to my advantage—. I staggered exaggeratedly into the wall, fired in Kristoff’s direction—and missed, vaporizing an area of the wall behind him.

“Look at how clumsy she is, Mother! This will be easy.”

“Save some for me, Darling!”

I aimed and fired again—once again missing Kristoff. “You sure aren’t as good with weapons as you are with lies!” he taunted me.

He just didn’t know what I was aiming at. I fired again—and an enormous chunk of the Citadel above him collapsed on his head.

“Kristoff!” Valeria flew to his side, and used her powers to lift the stone off him. Once she was sure he was all right, she turned to me. “Let’s see how well you breathe with one of my invisible force fields cutting off your air!”

I put my hands up to my head, feeling a solid bubble around it. The air quickly grew stuffy. The readouts in the lenses flashed at me, “Ambient oxygen levels dropping. CO² levels rising above acceptable. Switching to life-support.” The external air vents snapped shut, and fresh air flooded my helmet. Damn, but Victor did good work! He thought of everything.

I straightened up, and advanced on Valeria. “Not had enough yet? I know I haven’t. Here!” She stopped me in my tracks with another force field. “You were playing up to him, I know it.”

She hissed in my face. “Nasty piece that you are. Feel this? I’m putting one of my force fields inside your armor, and I’m going to expand it until it bursts like a grape. Then I’ll let my son cook you on the half-shell—!”

“No—!” I cried. “It’s dangerous—.”

“Screw that!” she spat. Well, I had tried.

The bomb in my chest plate went off. The explosion knocked me flat on my back, but as Victor had said, it didn’t hurt, and the shock absorbers were excellent. I got to my feet and took a few tentative steps forward, to where Valeria lay, flat on hers.

She was dying. I could tell. There was a hole in her midsection that went all the way back to her spinal column. As I watched, she twitched, gurgled, and died. The glamour died with her. She made a pathetically ugly corpse. I felt ill.

“Mother!” cried Kristoff, horrified. He struggled to his feet, pointed at me, and said, “I’ll roast you alive for this!” Tears boiled away on his face as fast as he shed them, as he went nova at me.

I staggered back, pinned against the wall by the force of the flames he sent at me in a steady stream. It took a long time for the armor to heat up, the readouts keeping me informed of the rising external temperature. I did not start to sweat until the suit began to glow a dull red—and then I heard Victor say three terrible words in an arcane language.

Then Kristoff started to scream, because Victor had not taken away his power—only his invulnerability to it. The smell of cooking meat was strong.

“Suffer as you have made others suffer.” Victor said to him, as he died.

There was a brief silence, punctuated only by the pings of cooling metal, as my suit recovered from the heat Kristoff had thrown at it.

“It is done.” Victor said. “I promised you would get your blows in before he died. This way—.”

The impostor had been stretched to his limit, or perhaps beyond. Looking at what Victor had done to him was like looking at a lot of silver ‘Silly String’—the foamy plastic that came in aerosol can which firmed up when it came into contact with the air. He was all over the place—knotted and tangled around pillars, trailing on the floor.

“His head is over here.” Victor led me to him.

The eyelids of the impostor flickered at our approach. “Kill me.” he pleaded.

“In a moment.” Victor promised him, and to me, “My dear—?”, gesturing at the impostor’s head.

I took a deep breath. Cruelty did not come naturally to me. Mischief did, but not cruelty. I didn’t want to become the sort of person to whom cruelty came naturally. Whatever I did here, today, to this Doom, impostor though he was—would be the first step in that direction.

Then an insight clicked into place. “Ave Doom, Rex Mundi.” I said.

“Receiving orders.” The impostor said, automatically, as he had been programmed to do. “What?” he asked, startled at his own pronouncement.

“Hah!” Victor slapped the pillar next to him. “Priceless!”

“Remember your activation.” I told the Doombot.

“Unit 23, inception date….” It reeled off its vital statistics.

“You said your wife and your son were not who you thought they were. Well, you weren’t who you thought you were either.” I said. “Complete data purge and memwipe.”

It fought the command for a fraction of a second. “As you so order…” The glow in its eyes faded and went out.

“How could you tell?” asked Victor. “It performed magics—which it should not have been able to do. That fact alone blinded me.”

“I don’t know how or why it could do magic, but there was the fact that not only did he and Valeria have no biological children, but he had never had his sperm analyzed. Then, you mentioned that the Vision, Wanda’s husband, was an android. And the way his skin changed when he stretched reminded me of the second Terminator movie, and the CGI assassin. In the end, though—I think it came down to this: Valeria aside, how could any human being who grew up within Boris’ sphere of influence not be deeply affected by his genuine goodness—or his sense of honor?”

“I see. We are done here—you already have reclaimed your ring, and these creatures are disposed of. Now for Genosha—and the Scarlet Witch.” Victor said.

“Hold!” a strange voice came from above us. “You are summoned!”

With that, the Silver Surfer glided down from the sky on his board.
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A/N: Next chapter, things get cosmic!