The forest was quiet, cold, and completely unimpressed with him.
Lucius sat on the fallen log and looked at his hands. Orange light still moved under his skin in slow pulses, the way embers did when a fire thought it was done but had not quite committed to the idea yet.
He had just absorbed a cosmic being's power and killed a civilian. At least, he did not separate the lovers, right? Also, sparing the child was a generous and underappreciated act of goodwill sufficient to elevate him to the rank of a saint.
He had made sure that certain biological functions remained intact afterwards. He had tipped well, which was another act of goodwill.
All things considered, it had been an extremely productive evening, and no one would ever know what exactly happened.
He rolled his wrists, and the orange light answered, shapes forming and dissolving between his fingers like he was doing a magic trick for an audience of pine trees.
Construct Creation was absurdly amazing.
He had read about Phastos in the comics before watching him get butchered in the film. The main difference between them was their ...choices and powers. Both were brilliant engineers. Big glowing constructs that did impressive work. He preferred the film version's power set, naturally. Lucius had watched the scenes where Phastos was tinkering with constructs and creating them without needing any raw materials. genuinely satisfying, and also because Salma Hayek was in the film, and it was worth the runtime.
He needed to think practically.
What could he build that was actually useful right now, in 2008, without looking like he had arrived from a science fiction convention?
His telekinesis was still unreliable. Last week, he had lifted a car and tried to dismantle it, but instead launched it sideways and nearly took out a cyclist. The man had sworn at him in a dialect Lucius could not identify, which was at least educational. His energy blasts worked, but quietly was not a word that applied to them. The last time he had tested one in a controlled environment, which was a quarry six miles outside of town at six in the morning, the discharge had been visible from the road. A woman walking her dog had phoned it in as a meteor. That was flattering but entirely useless.
The point was not that his abilities left evidence. The point was that he had not yet mastered them well enough to leave a tidy to use efficiently. And there was a meaningful difference between the two that he kept reminding himself of, because the alternative was admitting he was still learning, which he preferred not to dwell on.
What he needed right now was something small, controlled, and specific. Something a person could aim with one hand and use in an enclosed space without alerting the whole building and two blocks around it.
He thought about SHIELD.
Fury in his office with his arms folded, watching things through screens, looking like a man who had been personally wronged by the concept of an unsupervised civilian. Hill with her file, patient and flat. The blood samples sitting in a lab somewhere inside the Triskelion, inside a building that had more cameras than a television studio and significantly less entertainment value.
He thought about what he was going to do to them.
He was going to walk back in there on occasion, and every time he did, it would be another frustratingly painful memory for those thieves. He had decided that at some point during the strip club visit, alongside the decision to make Fury specifically and persistently tired. Not dead, just dead tired. The kind of tired that came from having every plan fail in a quiet and unattributable way, where the cameras kept developing faults at inconvenient moments, and three separate assets reported mild memory gaps that the medical team could not explain and quietly filed away.
That sounded genuinely wonderful.
For any of that to work, he needed range on the technopathy. He also needed his telepathy sharper, but that was a separate project. One problem at a time.
He held his right hand out and pulled the energy forward.
The construct formed quickly. His mind laid it out without visible effort, which was the genius-level intellect doing what it did; it was solving a problem he had been annoyed about for the past twenty minutes. The shape settled into something compact and angular that sat naturally in his hand, with a short barrel and a suppressor section built into the muzzle end rather than threaded on afterwards, because he did not want to be the person explaining an unexpected noise at a bad moment.
He aimed at the nearest pine and pressed the trigger.
The discharge made a sound somewhere between a staple gun and a heavy sigh, and the bark punched inward in a clean circle with no fire or ricochet. There was no projectile after all. The energy transferred its force into the wood and dissipated.
He fired twice more and got the same result both times.
He turned the construct over and examined it properly. It was orange, made of triangles, and glowing faintly, which meant it looked like something a well-funded film production had left behind rather than a weapon. No one in 2008 would look at this and think threat. They would think prop, and then they would look at him, and then the situation would become complicated in exactly the way he was trying to avoid.
He let pistolish design dissolve and filed the result under needs more work. The mechanics were sound. The noise was acceptable. The aesthetics was a problem for another night.
He moved on to the second problem.
The technopathy, in its natural state, was not what he needed.
Phastos in the comics did not have the ability at all. The film version had it, but it worked through touch and through his relationship with the Domo. What Lucius needed was range, at least several hundred yards, ideally matching his telekinesis at roughly one and a half miles. As it stood, the signal reached and then degraded the way a cheap radio lost a station when you drove under a bridge, which was fine for someone who built things with their hands and fine for absolutely nothing else.
He needed a device that extended and stabilised the signal. Built from cosmic energy, because at this point, that energy was his bitch through and through.
He raised both hands and let the sphere form slowly between his palms. He was not in a hurry. The orange light gathered, compressed, and began rotating before he had consciously asked it to, which he found mildly interesting. He let it find its own density before he started on the interior. The outer shell came first, smooth and closed with no directional aperture, because this was not a weapon, and he built it differently. He based the overall shape on what he had seen in the film.
The interior was harder to describe. The honest version was that his mind laid out the solution and his hands followed the instructions. A central point where his technopathic intent entered the device, surrounded by a structure that resolved the signal precisely enough to reach a specific system at a distance, surrounded by a diffusion layer that spread the broadcast evenly in every direction, so he was not pointing at things like a television remote and hoping for the best.
The target range was one and a half miles, matching telekinesis.
When the sphere felt finished, he teleported to the tree line outside the Alkali facility to test it properly. His awareness pushed outward through the device and held its resolution past three hundred yards, past four hundred. He found the trail camera on the eastern path at the edge of his current range and reached for it. He wanted to delete the last several hours of footage.
It deleted them without argument.
He sat with that result for a moment and then thought about the Triskelion. The servers will fall under his control, the blood samples stolen from him will be tracked and lastly destroyed whethere they were with Hydra, SHIELD or Essex.
He was going to enjoy this considerably.
The sphere sat between his fingers, small and warm and turning in slow, patient rotations. He pressed it against his chest just below his left pectoral and felt the energy recognise the contact point immediately. The shell softened, and the device moved through the surface layer of him the way heat moved through a wall, gradually and completely, leaving no mark on either side.
It settled into place.
The four-hundred-yard radius extended outward from him fully, steady and available, requiring nothing further to maintain.
He reached for the trail camera once more without moving from his position.
Still there. He told it to run a self-diagnostic, and it ran one immediately, like a very obedient and entirely unaware assistant.
He thought about Fury's face when his systems started behaving badly for no identifiable reason. He thought about the IT staff's expression when camera footage from a specific corridor turned out to be missing with no explanation in the logs. He thought about SHIELD in general, which maintained very organised records and would find sustained, sourceless disorganisation deeply upsetting.
The Triskelion was not going anywhere. Neither was he, and he had a great deal of new power left to test.
He vanished.