You know, son, I have to say one thing for this plan of mine. For a sloppy, made-on-the-fly piece of !@#$ held together with luck, spit, and wishful thinking, it's actually working out pretty !@#$ well.
(Of course, knowing my luck, as soon as I say something like that the wheels'll go flying off the !@#$ing bus, so maybe I should just stop patting myself on the back, here.)
But let me ask you this, son. Who's got all the pieces of the puzzle sitting in front of him, here at this well-defended location? That would be me.
Who's got the best ever ally to watch my back, being Chinmoku, who owes me big time and isn't about to try and !@#$ me? That would also be me.
And who was lucky enough to have his biggest rival, who could also be the best ally ever where I'm about to go, get his sloppy !@#$ caught trying to get into this camp and arrest yours truly for something I !@#$ing did not, and would never do?
Yes, son. That would be me.
So, to recount? I've got a redoubt that no one's going to mess with. if they do mess with me, I've got a UFO guarded by a psychotic, gun-toting kitty cat, all set for a quick getaway. I've got a kid who can play with dimensions like they're !@#$ing tinkertoys, though he's slowly coming to as of right now. I've got all the information we have on every dimension we know about, though I'm really only interesting in one of them. And I've got Mr. USA, himself, slowly waking up in my tent after what Chinmoku did to him.
(Piece of advice? Do not point a gun at the man. Never a !@#$ing good idea.)
Now, you may have figured out what I don't have, right now. Or rather who. I dropped off Dr. Krwi in Poland, so he and Chinmoku could have a drink and certain, now-unusable talents could be discarded and left for the authorities to find. He did a great job, and I'm seeing to it that the payoff that would have gone to others who proved untrustworthy is going to be split between him, Gosheven, and Chinmoku, but he made it pretty clear that he and I are done. So, off he goes.
Now, I have two other things, here with me. One of them I'm going to refrain from saying anything about, at least for now, because no one has any !@#$ing idea that I have it, much less that it actually exists. But I think it's going to be really !@#$ necessary in a few days, here, so I got it out of my Swiss locker.
Hopefully I will not need it. Knowing my luck, I will.
As for the other thing, I'm working on it a little as I'm making small talk with Simon, and slowly bringing him around. SPYGOD VISION is keeping him awake enough to not wish away Denver, Colorado, but asleep enough to not realize that he could make the whole city just vanish. I figure once he's up and about I'll have enough explaining to do as it is.
(How do you tell someone that you let him sleep in a boobytrapped cryo-chamber for ten years, and no one worked on a way to get him out? I know how I'd feel. And I know what I'd do, too.)
But hopefully this thing I'm working on will help.
What is it? Well, son, I know we've talked about ABWEHR, before. Remember the the night of the Black Pill? All those !@#$ing Nazi Generals who played Russian roulette with their genetic structure just before we rolled into town to cap their stupid, goosestepping !@#$es?
Well, you'll probably remember Wilhelm Ganz, then. Back before he was peddling last-ditch solutions to the cream of the Wehrmacht, he was the guy that was coming up with all those wonderful, cuddly U-Men for the Fatherland. Before and during the War, he found talents, great and small, and got them on board with the Third Reich.
Some he cultivated, some he guided, and some he really worked on. And while some didn't work so well, some turned out to be truly !@#$ing terrifying.
Ask the folks in London, Paris, and Leningrad about that, sometime. I can guarantee you that they have not !@#$ing forgotten what it was like to have living weapons walking down their streets, ripping men, women, and children to pieces and flinging buildings around like cardboard boxes.
All well and good, but just when they thought it couldn't get any better, along comes this one !@#$er who literally shows up out of nowhere, and actually wants to join.
They called him Thor. He wore shining, silver armor and carried a big !@#$ing hammer. The armor could take a tank shell right to the breadbasket without even knocking him over. The hammer could flatten the tank with a good, solid swing. And he could disappear from one place and re-appear in another, taking certain numbers of men, vehicles, and equipment with him.
Yes, this sounds really !@#$ing familiar. But this guy was no God. In fact, I have it on personal authority from the real Thor that he had nothing to do with that wormy little !@#$.
So who was he? Well, he wasn't being entirely dishonest with the Nazis. His name was Thor -- Thor Jonnson, from Iceland.
Now, mind you, it was Iceland from an alternate timeline, where a certain race of aliens decided to colonize Earth in the 1700's. The conquered humans put up with it for long enough, and then, by the end of the 19th century, a massive, planetary revolt convinced the invaders that Earth was too much trouble to hang onto. But the humans kept the tech, which included some really kick!@#$ weaponry options, bio-engineering for fitter, healthier slaves, and the potential for perpetual cellular regeneration.
So Thor, being something of a runt back in the Iceland of his world, decides to steal one of the aliens' locked up "treasures," which happens to be a dimensional jumper armor. It doesn't have a whole lot of range, just two or three realities, but one of them is !@#$ing empty, and another one is ours.
So you see how this works? He comes here, all superpowered and shiny and really !@#$ing hard to kill, and says "oh yeah, I'm the Thor, God of Thunder. And you know what? This Hitler guy is right."
(And, yes, son, I suspect if he'd materialized in America, first, he'd have been on our side. But I guess that's what happens when would-be technogods touch down in the wrong countries. Wouldn't be the first time that ever happened, and won't be the last.)
So where was I? Oh, yes. Thor: Nazi Thundergod for Hire. Runty SOB proves his mettle on the Eastern front, smashing Commies for Adolph. He demands food and wine and women and parties, and they roll out the carpet for him since he's so !@#$ing cool. And the other U-Men are getting some of the table scraps, so they don't mind too much.
!@#$, for all they know, he is a God. How could you say otherwise? You know that old saw about sufficiently advanced technology and magic, right? And the higher-up Nazis are happy to have their own God on board for when they roll back the Church and replace it with the crazy, Nazi Viking Blood-Religion they were planning to have, instead, so they aren't going to call bull!@#$, either.
And God only knows what Hitler thought.
Well, the party rolls on until D-Day. That's when us Camp Rogers folks hit the ground and start using U-Men for target practice. That's also when the People's Protectors rally and start pushing back. Caught in the squeeze play, the Ubermenschen start dropping like flies.
So who killed Thor? Ironically enough, he did. He was in a battlefield and trying to escape by opening a dimensional portal, but the jumper had been damaged in the fight and didn't quite operate according to the instruction manual. Instead of teleporting itself, and whatever was in it, somewhere else, it teleported only what was in it.
And from the sounds he was making as he went away, I don't think it was somewhere you should be without a really !@#$ good suit of armor.
Of course, he might not be dead. He did have all these life extension things and cellular repair programs. He might be alive and well and trying to get back here. Or he might be a perpetually-repaired lump of flesh, crushed to man-juice on some alternate Earth with really !@#$ed up physics. This is one of those things that I don't know, and, quite frankly, I'm okay with that.
(For now, anyway.)
But, bottom line? The suit fell down to the ground, and the Allies claimed it. After the war, Direction Noir got their hands on it, and it's been sitting in the basement of their museum of crime fashion for !@#$ knows how long, with no one being ballsy enough to try and figure out how to make it work.
And now it's here, and, if I'm right about a certain thing, I may just have the instruction manual...
Yeah, I thought you might start figuring it out, son. You hang around me, long enough, you can start filling in some blanks, right?
But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, here. Who knows who might be listening?
(And, like I said, the plan is apt to change at any moment...)
Case in point: I didn't really plan to have backup for what happens next, but it looks like fate has intervened in my favor. My other guest is starting to wake the !@#$ up, and I really can't let him sit there on his lonesome for too !@#$ long. He'll start to get all kinds of ideas, and I really don't need them complicating things.
Especially now that he's here to help make certain things a !@#$ of a lot simpler, if he agrees to it. And !@#$ do I hope that he will. Because I have a few errands to run before this plan really kicks into action, and they'll go a lot smoother with the right wingman.
But that means that he and I are going to have to have the mother!@#$er of all talks, right now. And it's not something that I was really all that prepared for. Especially since I think I know what he's going to lay on me, and all I can really say to him in response is that... well...
*sigh*
What do you say? Really? I want to love him. I do. We were friends, once. Brothers in arms. But ever since Berlin he's never loved me back, and I've never gotten a good explanation out of him for that.
Is this where we finally shake hands and make up? Or is he going to insist on arresting me, first, before we go any further? Or...?
...
Well, whatever happens, it happens now. So if you'll excuse me, son, I think we need a little privacy here...?
Thanks.
(SPYGOD is listening to I Want A Lover (Pet Shop Boys) and sharing an Ölvishol Brugghús with an old frenemy)
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