Marvel Reborn: Gems Of Infinite Potential

I was in the Kilgrave lab on Mars with Natasha and the labs two primary scientists, Albert and Louise, standing by my side. In my hand was a clear vial with a purplish-red liquid inside, while Natasha was examining a perfume bottle.

"And you are sure this works?" I asked the two of them.

"Yes, we've managed to isolate the virus that Kevin's body produces. The perfume interacts with the wearer's natural scent to produce a unique chemical tag that interacts with the virus and triggers it. One whiff of the perfume and anyone dosed with the liquid will be under the perfume wearer's complete control for twelve hours. Black Widow has worked with us to test it, and it has functioned perfectly in all human trials," Albert explained as I held the first concrete fruits of two years of labor and nearly seventy million dollars in funding. "Although I would like it noted that we have no testing data involving enhanced individuals, so we can't guarantee performance with regards to them."

"Application method?" I asked.

Louise indicated an assortment of items on the table; small pills, a liquid, what looked like gas grenades, and even some things that looked like band-aids.

I picked one up. "What are these?"

"DMSO slap patches. Put one of those band-aids on someone's skin, and the virus will be in their bloodstream within seconds and into their brain within a few minutes," she explained.

"Ah. Interesting. How long before the gas becomes inert? And can it be absorbed through the skin, or does it require inhalation?" I continued with the questions, checking to make sure that the memos I had received had been accurate.

"Ten minutes and just skin contact, but it is both colorless and odorless in the needed concentrations," she offered.

"Very nice, good work. How are we coming on the vaccine research?" I queried, thinking that it was a pity it was still incomplete, as, including it, those gas grenades would be very useful.

Albert cleared his throat. "At least another ten months. This virus is like nothing I have ever seen before. It is blood-borne until it passes into the brain, where it infects those parts of the brain responsible for motor function and creates what appears to be an entirely new structure that connects virtually every part of the brain. When an order is given, the new structure seems to hijack the host's brain to interpret it and then sends the needed commands down the nervous system.

"We are looking at two potential approaches to a vaccine: one that will kill the virus in the blood and the other that will destroy it in the brain. Both look to be viable, but neither is ready for human trials yet. That the virus doesn't work on anything but humans is seriously slowing down our research."

I nodded. "Keep working on it and write a memo stating how many you think you need. The world has plenty of criminals it would be better off without. Where are we on the genetic mapping?"

"The virus is fully mapped, and we have a full DNA record for Kevin, but isolating what gene combination caused him to produce the virus is very slow-going. At least five more years, unless we make some kind of major breakthrough," Louise answered.

I thought over some of my future plans for a bit, thinking about the practicalities of speeding some of them up. "What would the time table look like if your computer processing power increased by several orders of magnitude?"

"If it increases to the point where we can efficiently model the entire gene-map and compute what the results of given changes would be on the body, then it would shave years off of that prediction. Between Dr. Hansen's team and our own people, we have a pretty good grasp on accurately modeling the macro-scale effects of DNA changes. But even with the supercomputers running perfectly, it still takes days to complete the model for each gene-map. Speed up that process, and pretty much everything we are doing will have its completion dates moved forward significantly," she explained.

I took a moment to think it over and then gave a decisive nod. "Make the long-duration-tailored Kilgrave virus your top priority. I have someone in mind with exotic technology that will solve the computing problem, but there is no chance he works with us of his own volition."

"We'll need the DNA sample fairly soon, then. We can have it at the point where individual tailoring is needed in a month or so," Albert answered.

"Then we know what Natasha's next mission will be. But for now, the two of us are off to work," I said, before Natasha and I left the lab.

As we walked towards the gym, I said, "I'm thinking that you meet up with Klaue tonight, and while he is out, I open a portal into his bedroom and dose his drinks with Kilgrave. Then you bring him back, get him to have a drink, and he is under your thrall. Just have him take you to the vibranium vault and take a few pictures for me, before heading back to his room. I'll empty the vault, we drain his accounts, and then we kill him before I bring in a few thousand pounds of C4 and blow the place sky high."

"It should work, but why kill him before we blow him up?" Natasha asked.

"Because Wakanda really wants his head, and I might need a future favor from them, so kill him and preserve his head in cold storage for future use." I explained, before asking about Natasha's primary project. "How are the plans for the Black Thorn coming?"

"They're coming, but we still need the drug supply. Without a steady and secure supply, taking over the drug trade carries too much risk of exposure. I've completed preliminary selection for the kill teams, and I think we can question them under the Kilgrave virus to weed out any spies or dishonest applicants. Distribution shouldn't be an issue once the kill teams get to work. Assuming that we have a supply, the street gangs and syndicates will buy from us because we will be the only game in town. Laundering the projected profits is going to be difficult though," she explained, discussing our plan to take over the drug trade first in the US, but eventually in most of the first world. Stopping the flow of drugs was impossible so long as the demand existed, so I would prefer to control it instead of letting everyone else get the money and influence.

I sighed slightly. "My idea for buying gold in Africa for cash and then moving the gold into Europe won't work then?"

"It will for a percentage of the take, but we are looking at tens of billions per year in hard cash, perhaps more. Short of the willing help of a national government with a major economy to launder it through, we are looking at close to a decade to build up the front companies and identities. It would be easier to use electronic transfers, but the security concerns make that nonviable."

I hummed. "Well, let's keep working on it. If our next acquisition goes well, then we should be able to divert the needed scientific knowledge to the synthetic drug production. Who knew it was so hard to produce commercial quantities of synthetic cocaine?"

We had reached the gym and headed towards the training mats for our daily session of Natasha beating the shit out of me in a spar. She asked, "Whose the target?" even as her right fist came rocketing towards my head.

I diverted it with my arm while moving to lock her leg and punch her in the stomach. "Hank Pym. He's a super genius who developed a formula for what he calls Pym Particles, and those let you reduce the distance between atoms in an object along with doing weird things to mass. In simple terms, with them, you can shrink an entire office building into a carry-on and stick it in the plane's overhead bin without issue. The man and his wife were heroes working with SHIELD back in the day, but she sacrificed her life to stop an ICBM headed for the US, and then he retired."

Natasha reversed the leg lock, dropped me onto the ground, and had her fist about to punch through my trachea in an instant before she said, "Seems interesting, although I'm not exactly sure of the use. I assume you have a more complete briefing package put together?"

I got back to my feet. "I'll get one completed in the next day or so. And yeah, I think his tech is going to really complement your abilities." With that, we readied ourselves to continue sparring for nearly two hours.

We ended up delaying until the next day, but as the sunset off the Venezuelan coast, Ulysses Klaue's current base of operations, Natasha was eating dinner with him on his boat. I quickly popped into his bedroom and dropped a Kilgrave virus into all of the drinks on his private bar, before returning to Mars and waiting by the nearly microscopic portal I opened up under his bed so that I could hear what transpired in the room.

It was almost two hours later that they entered. A few minutes of idle conversation between the Widow and her mark passed, and she said, "I've got him."

I opened a portal over the bed and pushed through a hidden camera for her to use.

A moment later, she said, "Change of plans. He has the vault wired with surveillance video that he can access from his computer here. Come look at the screen, and you can port right in."

I did just that, and after ascertaining that the vault cameras could only be viewed from this station, I opened a portal and walked through. I quickly started emptying the vault, for the four hundred and seventy-nine pounds of vibranium present in it had a market price of around 2.2 billion dollars. Not that I was going to sell so much as a gram of this precious metal. In a handful of minutes, I had the vault emptied and was back in Klaue's room.

Natasha was at the computer, and so I asked, "How's it going? Vault's empty."

She was quiet for about thirty seconds. "So are his accounts, almost seven hundred million, all told."

I opened a portal to the armory on Mars. "Start moving the explosives then, while I deal with Klaue."

With that, I cast a spell to create a glowing orange blade and chopped off his head in a single swing. The blade cauterized the cut so rapidly that not even a drop of blood spilled.

As I dismissed my blade and helped Natasha with the C4, I thought back to the early days of my magic training. I had found it odd that Sorcerers fought mostly with magically created blades, as opposed to fireballs and the like, but the explanation provided made sense. When you threw a fireball, you needed to create the stable spell structure, fill it with the d.e.s.i.r.ed energy, and direct it to the target. At which point it would explode and release all of that energy at once. If, however, you created a whip and filled the structure with that same amount of energy, then it would easily burn through whatever it contacted while the spell structure would stay intact, and no energy would be wasted on the environment. It was simply much more energy efficient.

With the timers set for thirty seconds we returned to Mars, the news reports the next morning made mention of a massive explosion on a ship off the Venezuelan coast. It was suspected to be smuggling weapons.