25 [ Gus ] Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

  So, good news. The Fantastic Four didn’t chase us down as we made our way across state lines in stealth mode. While I kept the MODOT invisible and kept using my suit to add to its speed, Lamarr used the thruster on the lowest setting to minimize our energy footprint. But I’m guessing the real reason the Four didn’t catch up to me was because they must have been busy off saving the universe or something equally important.

  After all, they were the Fantastic Four, and it was a day of the week ending in a Y.

  I got a few looks from the beekeepers as we finnaly reached their base and Lamarr piloted the MODAT into a holographic barrier concealing the the cliff side entrance of their hanger. Some money was actually exhanged between the ones who had been betting I would flinch and those who faith in me was proven correct.

  Either that of they just thought it would be too hard to tell if someone in a full faced suit of high tech armor had twitched or not.

  But really, like I would build a suit that couldn’t see through a Hologram. Which made me wonder… what about all the things my tech wouldn’t pick up on?

  I needed to include magic options as well, but why not use everything available to me?

  I focused and slowly began to expand a bubble of force around me, a weak one that just pushed up against the interior of the shipping container that constituted the cabin of the MODOT and gave way with the motions of the AIMless around me, allowing me to monitor their positions without having to see them.

  A sharp motion from Lamarr apparant second in command, the one who put his jacket over her shoulder, as he reached out to flip a switch on the controls in front of her to turn on some headlights ended up bursting the weak bubble. But still, my experiment served as a proof of concept for detecting solid, but unseen, objects around me.

  While the floor of the hanger had been cut fairly smoothly, the walls and ceiling were more rough cut, literally, the whole place looked like it had only recently been dug out with minimal effort for aesthetics while focusing on functionality. Par for the course for this group.

  As the transport settled down, I risked a glance at Lamarr’s chest to read the name Turing on her friend’s jacket.

  I glanced up to find the woman in question giving me a suspicious look, “Did you do something?”

  What the hell… I had my mask on. Do women have special senses for when guys are looking at them?

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked down in thought and bit the side of her lip as she waved one of her hands around in front of her, “Something brushed up against the back of my head and kinda… stuck to it for a moment…”

  Oh. “Scorpion senses I’m guessing? I threw out a sort of force radar to check for unseen hitchhikers.”

  Lamarr blinked, then her eyes lit up. “I didn’t know Dr Storm could do that, or is that something that you can do that she can’t.”

  I had to stop myself from openly telling someone for which I had no real reason to trust all about the limits of my powers. Which I figured were teenage hormones urging me on to try to impress a pretty girl. “I would imagine she has come up with many uses for her powers over the last decade or so that I haven’t thought of yet. Some of which neither of us may be actually useful, or workable. ”

  The woman looked a little frustrated by my nonanswer, “You really lucked out, all my powers let me do is throw down with mid level brute force metas. But then even you augmented what you can do with a suit, the same as me.”

  Turing coughed, in an exuberantly fake way, into his fist. “Girl, maybe shower first. Then flirt with the high and mighty Apex.”

  Lamarr's face flushed with anger as much as embarrassment as she glared at her friend, then turned to look at me. “Turding will show you to a room while I cycle my armor down, we can meet up later for dinner.” Turing gave her a thumbs up, which made her roll her eyes. “Just to eat, nothing…” She shook her head. “I got to go.”

  Blushing she climbed into her armor and marched out the open bay door of the MODOT while Turing stood beside watching her climb down with a smile. “She’s in charge of us. She always has been, so she can’t exactly date anyone in the group. While you’re an outsider. But if you hurt her…” He grimaced.

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  “Well I can’t credibly threaten to beat you up, but I have an entire legion at my beck and call that will mock your name all over the internet. There would be videos made to destroy whatever reputation you’re trying to build.“ He nodded to himself more than me in grim satisfaction. “There would be comical sound effects.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “I’m a guy, if something happens with me and her, it is inevitable that I will screw things up somehow, and often, but never out of malice.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me, then shrugged. “Yeah. I guess that’s the most anyone can hope for. Now let’s find you somewhere to… what? Change out of your armor? Nap? Eat? Not without my girl, you got a date. A trip to the bathroom?”

  I stopped for a moment halfway down the rolling cart with three steps some beekeepers had rolled up to the MODOT. “I think the last, now that you mentioned it.”

  The bathroom fixtures looked to have been salvaged from an industrial site but had metal panels bolted onto the doors of the stalls to cover up the peek a boo gaps so common in the US. I had to use the stall since they hadn’t bothered to install any urinals, which would have been more suited to my current needs.

  Turing, waiting near the open doorway of the storage container standing off to the side of a wide, rough cut tunnel leading out of the hanger kept up a constant patter of small talk as he waited for me. Not leaving me alone for even a moment to wander around unsupervised.

  “Currie said we should just start off with unisex bathrooms, and all the boss said was ‘Yeah, that sounds like a lot less work than setting two sets or everywhere. Currie also put up the privacy panels, but it was another two days before Lamarr found out that Currie had put together a team and raided a low income high school to strip out their bathrooms so that they would have to install all new fixtures before the end of the summer break. AIM had brewed that girl up in a tube and she was supposed to develop into a supergenius but instead, it's more like she just thinks differently, than is book smart. But man does she get stuff done. Just not in the way anyone expects her to.”

  As I set down my gauntlets on the side of the sink I considered the idea of retractable gloves as I washed my hands. It was either that or try to go with cold metal fingertips.

  Big form fitting suits of armor made going to the bathroom inconvenient unless you wanted tubes up every hole down below, who would have guessed?

  Tilting my head up to put Turing reflection in my line of sight, without looking directly at him, I began pushing for more information. “So just how many people do you have here?”

  He grinned. “Well that all depends on what you count as people. Between alien hybrids, metas, bioforms, uplifts, robots, digitals, and transdimensionals we got plenty of various sentients. As well as semi sentiants and a few beings I consider friends without really being able to fully classify them.”

  I dried off my hands in a device that dehydrated the water coating my skin, while somehow still leaving them feeling damp compared to using an eco unfriendly sheet of paper. “Very informative.” I left the part of it not being what I asked unsaid.

  Turing grinned at me again, then nodded off into the distance. “So… I’m guessing Lamarr is freaking out over what she's going to wear when she sits down to eat something with you. And I’m guessing that is going to take some time... Want to see our giant robots?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  Out of date, crudely repaired, and running a gambit of anywhere from goofy looking Kirby looking sixties designs to overly complex Liefeld inspired nineties designs.

  But all of it was cool as hell.

  The part of the base Turing let me to, in a roundabout way obviously circumventing things he didn’t want me to see, was older than the hanger with smooth walls covered in painted, if worn, panels, and filled with portable power systems and diagnostic machines that looked to have been readapted from junkyards.

  The names or the bots, who built them, how well they performed going toe to toe with various famous and long forgotten heroes… all of that information was in my head thanks to Daddy dearest.

  Walking around I identified each robot out load, much to the delight of the gaggle of AIMless technicians who had been down here doing various work on restoring the bots to functionality, and I had to restrain myself from joining them by digging in elbows deep to a pile of Doombot’s innards.

  Instead, I froze in place as I recognized a particular broken looking stack of shattered parts.

  “The Doomsday Man. Kree technology. It bonded to my brother in law, against his will, and severed all four of his limbs to better use him to replace something that had been damaged in it.” I turned and locked eyes with Turing. “I won’t even ask why you have it, but how did you get it?”

  Turing shrugged. “Government auction. Currie got our hackers to transfer a bunch of forgotten stuff to the sell list somehow. We did utterly gut all the control mechanisms, but it’s Kree tech, so we figured we could learn or repurpose something from it.”

  I stared at him. “You know how this works. You have this, and we're going to drag Korman into your group. It’s pretty much guaranteed that he would somehow end up bonded to it again, go mad, and get into a fight with some superhero, or me, after tearing his way through a bunch of bystanders, most likely your own people.”

  The man started to object, then paused, frozen in place with one finger upraised before he slowly lowered it as he thought it over. “Yeah, I can see it now. That is exactly how it would happen. I’ll get my guys to throw it into an atomic furnace.”

  “No, not good enough with Kree tech. Something inimical would survive.” Holding up my hand with my fingers outstretched, I slowly, and overdramaticly closed my hand into a fist as I crushed the remains of the Doomsday man into several separate spheres with the sound of torchered metal.

  “You said we had some time. Take me to a lab. We’re sending this crap to a few dozen different locations in the negative zone.”

  I can’t stop everything that will come at my family, not now after have become part of my story, but I can at least stop any obvious red flags as they pop up.

  And show off just what all I could do with the support of the AIMless.