Chemical engineering, combined with biochemical engineering, gave Lucius a foundation broad enough to start making serious trouble for biological life.
That was the flattering version.
The truer one was that he had enough knowledge to understand where the edges of the problem began and enough arrogance to keep walking into them anyway.
Most of the new entries in his mental catalogue had not come from textbooks he once respected. They had come from his own work. The slightly involuntary research partners helped with that. Some lasted longer than others. Some became useful diagrams in memory. A few became trees. That part depended on how educational the session had been.
He was proud of the work.
The first homo superior he had tested properly carried an X Gene so offensively mundane that he had nearly felt insulted on behalf of the species. Hair growth control. That was the grand evolutionary promise. She could probably save a fortune on hairdressers and never again have to choose between trimming and shaving, which, to be fair, some women might have classed as a superpower. Lucius was not interested in the hairless bits. He cared about the mechanism.
That was where reality stopped being cooperative.
Hair looked simple until one started asking the wrong questions. Follicles were not passive threads growing out of skin. They cycled through growth, regression, and dormancy under the control of stem cell niches, local signalling proteins, hormone response, blood supply, immune interaction, and gene regulation that changed by location on the same body. Add in an X Gene that could apparently push or suppress that entire process on command, and the whole thing turned into a mess of keratin production, follicular reactivation, regional specificity, and cellular timing he could not yet map cleanly. At least he understood enough to see how much he still did not understand.
Hence, what he had been doing for the last month.
He had visited every university worth taking seriously in genetics and medical research. Mostly, he drifted through under invisibility, sometimes with illusions wrapped over any awkward moments and telepathy doing the rest. The good minds helped more than the polite ones. Cell signalling pathways, epigenetic regulation, developmental biology, regenerative medicine, follicular stem cell behaviour, oncogenic risk, immune tolerance, and tissue-specific gene expression all widened the picture. By the end of the month, the X Gene still did not feel tame, but it no longer felt mystical either. It felt like a badly behaved operating system forced into wet meat and then permitted to improvise.
His experiments were improving.
Matter transmutation remained absurdly overpowered, which was one of the few things in the universe behaving as it should. After sales hours ended, he either left the hotel for Alkali Lake to continue research or visited the experts worth raiding for understanding, gently read their minds where possible, and judged whether any of them qualified to be sacrificed for the general advancement of science, his science. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they just get a headache and lose an evening.
Lucius considered that generous.
He was working diligently.
--
Tony Stark was having a bad year and doing his best to make it look expensive.
Palladium poisoning kept getting worse. He could feel it under the skin, in the weakness that crept up in every cell of his body, in the sluggishness that hit him after moments that should have left him energised, and in the dull marrow-deep certainty that the clock had stopped pretending to be abstract. Lucius's potions were helping immensley but they were only slowing the inevitable.
He was smart enough to know what that meant.
So he made preparations.
Pepper became CEO because there was no one else he trusted with the company who would not immediately treat the role like a private buffet. The board hated surprises and got one anyway. Tony handled the hearing in Washington the way he handled anything involving public authority, which was to act like arrogance counted as civic service. He kept partying too hard, drinking too much, and surrounding himself with noise loud enough to drown out the one thought he did not want to hear fully formed.
None of it made him less sick.
He smiled for the cameras. He performed for investors. He played host at the Expo, stood under his own name in giant letters, and acted as if the future belonged to him because if he stopped acting, the sickness might start sounding persuasive.
Rhodey watched the decline with the miserable restraint of a man who knew friendship did not automatically grant the right to save someone from himself. Pepper saw more and said less until the saying became unavoidable. Tony heard both of them and kept choosing momentum because stopping would have meant facing his depleting mortality.
By the time Monaco approached, he was running on ego, habit, and a power source quietly murdering him in the centre of his chest.
-
At Alkali Lake, Colonel Stryker stared at the photographs laid out on his desk and wondered whether the universe had finally grown bored enough to start insulting him through horticulture.
The forests around Alkali Lake had their own order. Lodgepole pine. Engelmann spruce. Aspen in the right stretches. Cold country trees, the correct trees, the ones that belonged.
Palm trees did not belong.
Not in Colorado. Not near the facility. Not standing fully grown in a forest where snow still existed.
He had received the report the night before and sent soldiers at first light. Absurdity, left alone, sometimes became sabotage and sometimes became a message. He did not like either option.
One of the photographs showed a stand of palms rising out of the ground where no such thing should ever have happened naturally. Another showed the surrounding snow and pine line for comparison, as if the world itself had paused to underline the insult.
Stryker picked up the nearest print and looked at it longer than the image deserved.
"Talk."
The soldier opposite him stood straighter.
"We found them in a section east of the service perimeter, sir. No vehicle tracks. No sign of planting equipment. No burn marks, excavation or conventional disturbance. They appear mature."
"Appear?"
The man hesitated for exactly the wrong amount of time.
"They are mature, sir."
Stryker set the photo down.
He did not believe in miracles. He believed in security failures, mutant interference, classified programmes, and men making bad decisions in secret. The palm trees pointed in only one direction he found useful.
Someone had been messing with his facility again.
Maybe not inside it, but near enough to leave a joke standing in the forest.
"Increase the perimeter sweeps. Double the night patrols outside the east line. Any anomaly gets logged, photographed, and reported to me."
"Yes, sir."
"And send one of the samples to a lab I trust. I want an age estimate, tissue profile, and any sign that these things were altered rather than grown."
The soldier nodded and withdrew.
Stryker looked once more at the photographs.
Palm trees.
There were messages, and then there was mockery.
He was beginning to suspect the latter.
-
Fury was already fuming by the time Romanoff walked into the office.
He had approved the Stark Industries insertion because he wanted eyes back inside the building, leverage near Tony. He personally knew his father and wanted to at least keep a close eye on the young genius, and one clean path to whatever Stark was building next. The application had been processed thoroughly. The identity was sound. The background was built to survive inspection. SHIELD already had agents' presence inside Stark's ecosystem in smaller capacities, and that should have made the move easier.
Instead, Romanoff had been rejected before the plan even touched furniture.
Worse, the other moles had been removed as well.
Romanoff closed the office door behind her and took in Fury's mood with one glance.
He did not waste time.
"Explain."
Romanoff stayed standing.
"There isn't much to explain. Potts knew before I set foot properly inside the building."
Fury's good eye narrowed.
"How?"
"She did not say." Natasha's voice stayed level. "The rejection came fast, direct, and clean. No interview, no soft delay, no interest in cover conversation. Stark was there too."
Fury leaned back by an inch.
"What did he say?"
Natasha's mouth flattened slightly.
"He called me Ms Romanoff."
That landed.
Fury did not move.
Natasha continued.
"He smiled while he did it, which I found unhelpful. Then he said SHIELD should appreciate the regards from Noctis, and that you, specifically, should stop sending people into rooms you no longer control."
Fury's jaw tightened.
Coulson, seated off to the side with a file in hand, said nothing because there are points in a man's day when surviving the meeting is the only useful contribution left.
Natasha went on.
"The existing assets were removed. Quietly, but thoroughly. Potts has either done a full internal sweep or Stark has handed her enough to do it properly. Either way, they are treating us as hostile."
Fury looked at Coulson.
"That would be because we are."
Coulson kept his tone mild.
"In fairness, sir, our public reputation with Stark-connected entities has taken a few blows."
Fury did not enjoy fairness.
Romanoff folded her hands behind her back.
"Potts was calm the whole time. Stark wasn't angry either."
Fury stood and moved to the window, more for motion than for the view. From there, he could see enough of the Triskelion to resent the architecture again.
"Noctis."
Natasha said nothing. The name sat in the room like a recurring infection.
Fury turned back.
"Stark and Potts are now acting on information that damned bastard provided.
Coulson closed the file.
"That sounds like the sort of sentence that leads to another bad plan."
Fury gave him a look.
"That sounds like a warning."
Coulson accepted the correction.
Romanoff, to her credit, did not bother defending the failed insertion. She had seen the same thing Fury had. The ground had shifted. Stark Tower was no longer a soft target for bureaucratic pressure and false smiles.
The new variables were money, paranoia, Noctis, and Tony Stark's increasingly unreliable habits.
None of them improved the problem.
Fury returned to the desk and planted both hands on it.
"Noctis strips us out of Stark's company. He humiliates us in public. He sells strength in bottles to the military while turning our internal planning into comedy. And now he is tightening his relationship with Stark enough that Romanoff gets rejected before the role even starts."
He looked at Natasha.
"Did Stark seem compromised?"
"No."
"Influenced?"
"Yes."
That answer at least had the virtue of honesty.
Natasha lifted one shoulder slightly.
"Not controlled. Just informed, warned, and encouraged in exactly the wrong direction for us."
Fury let out one slow breath.
That was worse in some ways. Control could be broken. Loyalty purchased under pressure could crack. Genuine alignment born of saved lives, shared irritation, and mutual usefulness had more spine to it.
He hated that almost as much as he hated being right.
"Get me everything we have on the financial relationship between Stark and Noctis. Everything means everything. Meetings, calls, third parties, money movement and secondary market activity."
Coulson rose with the file in hand. Romanoff turned to leave.
Fury remained alone in the office and stared at the closed door.
Then he muttered one short sentence to the room.
"I am going to need a bigger contingency fund."