Chapter 5
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It was the next day already, noon here soon. Emilia has gone on a shopping spree out of most of her money. She now had an old phone, she forgot smartphones weren't a thing yet. She also got a few more sets of clothes and a pair of shoes. Spending two days outside in indoor slippers was more than enough. Her clothing went from sweatpants and a hoodie to jeans, sweatshirts and a jacket. March was still fairly cold. She now had about 200$ for food but she would need more for a place to sleep tonight. She considered if there was a better way of making money than scamming people. The first thing that came to mind was investing in soon-to-be-famous companies. That had two severe issues, she had no identification, and by this world's standards, she wasn't ever born. The other was that to invest money she would need money. Legal money. Several people reported their savings missing and a no-name girl invested thousands of dollars in cash into a company, now that was not a good look. Getting identifications would be hard too without extensive help from some government agency. She didn't want to risk using telepathy for this, at best they would think the poor office worker was corrupt and at worst they could somehow deduce that she psychically manipulated him. The easiest would be getting the bank information of a wealthy person and making them forget it. They could still report it to the bank but maybe she could have withdrawn enough to go on for a while. Emili decided that for this she would need to include her target being at least morally grey. Her conscience was still there in the background, protesting her stealing hard-earned money from people. She wouldn't mind it if her targets were immoral though. Before that, she decided to head to an Internet Caffe. First, she wanted to use her phone to get information from the internet but this ancient thing could barely be used to make calls and text. That made the Caffe her next target. If that too fails it was time to go medieval and head to a library, with real books. Not that Emili had a problem with books, but she was far too used to having every piece of information she needed in her pocket and downloading books online. She found one as out of the open as one could find in Manhattan. It was somewhat cozy, they charged 5$ an hour to use the computers so she quickly got to researching. First, she looked up the names of her family. Her mother should have had more than a few new articles written about her even in 2007, yet she found nothing. Sadly the same with her father's website, he sold weird trinkets to 'chase away bad spirits' and 'increase karma' and other such stuff. Next, she looked into world history and nations. It was mostly the same with a few outliners. The two she recognized were Sokovia and Latveria. Both were important locations in the marvel universe. There was no mention of Wakanda but they should be still hidden in Africa. Next, she looked into famous Marvel characters that should already be active or known. Captain America was known to be the result of a super solder experiment, there were even before and after photos of him. Howard Stark also had a bunch of articles about him. There were still conspiracy theories about his death floating around. Tony Stark was like most celebrities in her time. He somehow managed a successful company, had time to sleep with hundreds of women per year and make several public appearances at important events and galas. She followed up with a few other people. Hank Pym, Richard Reed, Norman Osborn, Justin Hammer, Wilson Fisk, Victor von Doom, Peggy Carter, and many others. She found several pages about all of them, all considering them real people. She would probably still be shocked when she first met one of them but for now, she accepted her absurd situation. She was in a Marvel universe. Well, that gave her a load of new opportunities and even more dangers and problems. She would need to be careful to survive the coming sequence of apocalyptic storms. On the other hand, these storms all provided opportunities for her. She was a mutant, a fairly weak one for now but she felt she could be so much stronger if she was given time and resources to experiment with her powers. For example, what could a telepath do with the mind stone? Well, that was far too dangerous to get and have but there were many other such artefacts in this world. Next the main threats to her safety. She looked up mutants too. The X-Men were known, and Charles Xavier was an extremely influential person in US politics and intellectual circles. X-Men were looked at as outsiders and weirdoes but not with outright hostility yet. Thank fuck for that. She didn't want to deal with a Sentinel situation, there was also some kind of mental parasite too in comics that made people hate mutants, she barely recalled that detail. The X-Men tended to somehow fuck up massively, ending with the end of humanity. She once again re-affirmed to stay away from them. Her next main threat would be the government. She didn't search for SHIELD or Weapon-X or any other of the secret organizations. Even though there was an obvious lack of random mutants turning up. There were some news reports about them joining Xavier but it was far too few. She guessed the government swooped in to collect awakened mutants they noticed and removed their traces. That didn't bode well. On her earth, there would be mass protests about mutant rights or some shit like that, but not this. Americans protested for the rights of cows and chickens in her time, she didn't believe they would do a 180 and call for the death of mutants who were still human. They were stronger than humans and dangerous yes, but so were lions and gorillas. Back to SHIELD, she found mentions of its predecessor being established by Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. It was well hidden but some equally hidden conspiracy theory websites still had information about it. SHIELD was a weird one from her standpoint, they would be suspicious of her, turning up with no personal history and telepathic powers. She might even consider turning herself over to them if it weren't for Hydra. If she played it well she could convince them to let her only do interrogations and stuff, no active fighting. Sadly telepaths were few and far between, and she didn't trust any organization to keep the other's grabby hand off of her. The only things she could trust to protect her were her powers and maybe personal allies. Her greatest weapon would still be secrecy, Hydra can't turn her into a test subject if they didn't know she existed. Her one paid hour would soon run out. She didn't want to look up anything else so she stood up to leave. Now that her attention was returned to her surroundings she overheard a few concerning things said and thought by the other people in the Caffe. "..yeah they were all over the place, even though it was said to be a heart attack," said one. "Maybe he was someone important, for there to be that many secret agents swarming over it," replied another. Even with listening in to their surface thoughts, they didn't seem to know much else, but they were talking about the man Emilia killed. The image was clear in their head, so she has seen it too. Was she caught already? If she left this cafe were a bunch of agents going to jump her? Maybe they would just shoot her, after all, she seemingly killed a person with a glance. They shouldn't know how dangerous she was. But maybe she was overreacting in thinking like that. She left quickly, only releasing a sigh of relief once she was walking through a crowd on the street. When she killed that man she also got a deeper look at his mind and memories, luckily it felt like watching a tv just on near infinite playback rate. Yet she somehow remembered the most important bits. She just now noticed thinking more deeply about that experience. As she focused on that information her mind recalled more and more of it by the second. It was like she had saved it into the hard drive of her brain but only now was she loading into the RAM and reading it. She wasn't even aware before that she had this in her mind. It felt weird but she also welcomed it. Her memory was never her best asset, often forgetting things just days after they lost their use, even if she spent days memorizing them. She briefly considered the most notable aspects of that man's life. He was 48, and fairly rich. His name was Vincent Blackwood and he was working for both Thaddeus Ross and Hydra when she killed him. He acted like a triple agent. Working officially for SHIELD, acting like a double agent for Ross but truly being loyal to Hydra. Well fuck. He was very well trained too, she wouldn't have found this information without turning his mind inside out while he was alive. He seemed to have been trained to fool telepaths, Hydra and Ross were especially careful around Xavier. Well, this seemed like a blessing in disguise. On one hand 2 secret organizations might be hunting her plus a general. Meanwhile on the other hand she now had information. Deeply classified information and an old secret agent's knowledge of the big 'players' in the USA. Luckily the man wasn't on an active mission when he died so if they didn't find any evidence they might just accept he died of a heart attack. Well, this was Marvel so she was happy she got two days before fate started to fuck with her. She refrained from cursing out what might be an Abstract Entity. Another boon she got from delving into old Vincent's knowledge was the location of several hidden caches. It included a bunch of stuff useful for disappearing, plus identification for the man. Using those would be tricky but maybe she could do it with some liberal application of telepathy. But most importantly money, a bunch of it. Not that getting the money was the problem before. But it was always good to have more money. She tried to 'save' these locations separately from the rest. In a sense, this was similar to folders on computers, Instead of having everything recorded in a single big folder she now made a separate folder for this. Her powers turned out to work on herself too, after all, wasn't she directly manipulating her memories now? She walked down the sidewalk with a spring in her steps, happy about discovering a new aspect of her powers. "What have you managed to find out?" asked a black man his subordinate. Said subordinate did his best not to squirm under the pressure of the black man's one-eyed stare. "Sir, he shows symptoms of simultaneous organ failure, his heart, lungs, kidney, liver and nervous system all entered a state of shock before simply stopping to function." said the agent steadily, pausing at the end to take a quick breath before continuing, "He didn't have signs of prior medical conditions that would result in any of those." The agent paused again, to the visible frustration of his superior. Before he could be berated he quickly continued, "The first to receive the shock seems to be the nervous system, specifically the brain. The shock travelled along it to the rest of the body. The doctor noted that 'It seemed like the brain itself ordered the organ failure'" he finished. Even if the doctor thought it was a ridiculous idea he reported the last part too, these were the kind of things SHIELD dealt with. The black man began to tap his fingers on his desk, his previous frustration lessening after getting provided useful information. "You can leave" he mentioned offhandedly with a wave of his hand. Putting the agent out of his mind already. "Yes, Director," said the man before leaving the Director of SHIELD to his thoughts. Once alone, he searched for a document. It was stated on the front page that it was a level 3 classified document, this level was only granted to agents who have demonstrated their loyalty and competence. It provides access to highly sensitive information and areas of the organization. He quickly opened it and searched through a list, it was the basic list of known supernatural abilities by SHIELD. There were a few exempt from this but those would require higher levels of clearance. Not that it mattered to Him as one of the select few having level 5 clearance on the whole planet. He wrote out a few entries in a notebook. 'Bio-kinesis', 'electro-kinesis', 'chi mastery' and finally 'telepathy' and 'psychokinesis'. He hated dealing with those asshole monks so he put 'chi mastery' to last. Out of the rest, all mutant powers could have achieved this effect but he circled bio-kinesis and telepathy. From the records, those two powers could cause this effect without extensive training. It could have been done by other means, not every weird crime had to be committed by mutants. But then again the only viable option would be a new type of neurotoxin that someone just left in the open like this for a virtual nobody. Yeah, Agent Vincent Blackwood was a SHIELD agent but he was only level 2, and he was known to be working for that ass Ross. He didn't fire him as he might have come in handy when he needed leverage over the general but that was moot now. He gave 30% chance to his neurotoxin idea, 50% to it being done by a mutant and the rest left for it being something entirely different. Well the chances for the mutant part would sink lower if he didn't get a chunky compensation and apology from Xavier in a few days, or a notice that said mutant joined his terrorist boyfriend. At least he worked together with them, even if barely for the sake of coexistence. Fury hated the idea of him having superpowered people under him, training to be combatants. He often advocated for getting rid of him. Unfortunately, he couldn't tell if the telepath had many important friends or was far more liberal with his powers than he admitted. He always feared the latter. For all he knew the disabled bald old man already controlled his country from the shadows. Well, he wouldn't get him. Nick Fury would rather die than be used against his country. He would die screaming and rampaging as much as he could. Knowing that was probably the biggest reason for Xavier's 'compensations' every time one of his child soldier recruits broke the law. He drifted further and further from his original topic. After snapping out of his thoughts he dismissed the previous case. Many agents died while on active duty, Blackwood wouldn't even be in the first 10 to be killed by a newly awakened mutant lashing out. He shouldn't waste more time with this.
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It was the next day already, noon here soon. Emilia has gone on a shopping spree out of most of her money. She now had an old phone, she forgot smartphones weren't a thing yet. She also got a few more sets of clothes and a pair of shoes. Spending two days outside in indoor slippers was more than enough. Her clothing went from sweatpants and a hoodie to jeans, sweatshirts and a jacket. March was still fairly cold. She now had about 200$ for food but she would need more for a place to sleep tonight. She considered if there was a better way of making money than scamming people. The first thing that came to mind was investing in soon-to-be-famous companies. That had two severe issues, she had no identification, and by this world's standards, she wasn't ever born. The other was that to invest money she would need money. Legal money. Several people reported their savings missing and a no-name girl invested thousands of dollars in cash into a company, now that was not a good look. Getting identifications would be hard too without extensive help from some government agency. She didn't want to risk using telepathy for this, at best they would think the poor office worker was corrupt and at worst they could somehow deduce that she psychically manipulated him. The easiest would be getting the bank information of a wealthy person and making them forget it. They could still report it to the bank but maybe she could have withdrawn enough to go on for a while. Emili decided that for this she would need to include her target being at least morally grey. Her conscience was still there in the background, protesting her stealing hard-earned money from people. She wouldn't mind it if her targets were immoral though. Before that, she decided to head to an Internet Caffe. First, she wanted to use her phone to get information from the internet but this ancient thing could barely be used to make calls and text. That made the Caffe her next target. If that too fails it was time to go medieval and head to a library, with real books. Not that Emili had a problem with books, but she was far too used to having every piece of information she needed in her pocket and downloading books online. She found one as out of the open as one could find in Manhattan. It was somewhat cozy, they charged 5$ an hour to use the computers so she quickly got to researching. First, she looked up the names of her family. Her mother should have had more than a few new articles written about her even in 2007, yet she found nothing. Sadly the same with her father's website, he sold weird trinkets to 'chase away bad spirits' and 'increase karma' and other such stuff. Next, she looked into world history and nations. It was mostly the same with a few outliners. The two she recognized were Sokovia and Latveria. Both were important locations in the marvel universe. There was no mention of Wakanda but they should be still hidden in Africa. Next, she looked into famous Marvel characters that should already be active or known. Captain America was known to be the result of a super solder experiment, there were even before and after photos of him. Howard Stark also had a bunch of articles about him. There were still conspiracy theories about his death floating around. Tony Stark was like most celebrities in her time. He somehow managed a successful company, had time to sleep with hundreds of women per year and make several public appearances at important events and galas. She followed up with a few other people. Hank Pym, Richard Reed, Norman Osborn, Justin Hammer, Wilson Fisk, Victor von Doom, Peggy Carter, and many others. She found several pages about all of them, all considering them real people. She would probably still be shocked when she first met one of them but for now, she accepted her absurd situation. She was in a Marvel universe. Well, that gave her a load of new opportunities and even more dangers and problems. She would need to be careful to survive the coming sequence of apocalyptic storms. On the other hand, these storms all provided opportunities for her. She was a mutant, a fairly weak one for now but she felt she could be so much stronger if she was given time and resources to experiment with her powers. For example, what could a telepath do with the mind stone? Well, that was far too dangerous to get and have but there were many other such artefacts in this world. Next the main threats to her safety. She looked up mutants too. The X-Men were known, and Charles Xavier was an extremely influential person in US politics and intellectual circles. X-Men were looked at as outsiders and weirdoes but not with outright hostility yet. Thank fuck for that. She didn't want to deal with a Sentinel situation, there was also some kind of mental parasite too in comics that made people hate mutants, she barely recalled that detail. The X-Men tended to somehow fuck up massively, ending with the end of humanity. She once again re-affirmed to stay away from them. Her next main threat would be the government. She didn't search for SHIELD or Weapon-X or any other of the secret organizations. Even though there was an obvious lack of random mutants turning up. There were some news reports about them joining Xavier but it was far too few. She guessed the government swooped in to collect awakened mutants they noticed and removed their traces. That didn't bode well. On her earth, there would be mass protests about mutant rights or some shit like that, but not this. Americans protested for the rights of cows and chickens in her time, she didn't believe they would do a 180 and call for the death of mutants who were still human. They were stronger than humans and dangerous yes, but so were lions and gorillas. Back to SHIELD, she found mentions of its predecessor being established by Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. It was well hidden but some equally hidden conspiracy theory websites still had information about it. SHIELD was a weird one from her standpoint, they would be suspicious of her, turning up with no personal history and telepathic powers. She might even consider turning herself over to them if it weren't for Hydra. If she played it well she could convince them to let her only do interrogations and stuff, no active fighting. Sadly telepaths were few and far between, and she didn't trust any organization to keep the other's grabby hand off of her. The only things she could trust to protect her were her powers and maybe personal allies. Her greatest weapon would still be secrecy, Hydra can't turn her into a test subject if they didn't know she existed. Her one paid hour would soon run out. She didn't want to look up anything else so she stood up to leave. Now that her attention was returned to her surroundings she overheard a few concerning things said and thought by the other people in the Caffe. "..yeah they were all over the place, even though it was said to be a heart attack," said one. "Maybe he was someone important, for there to be that many secret agents swarming over it," replied another. Even with listening in to their surface thoughts, they didn't seem to know much else, but they were talking about the man Emilia killed. The image was clear in their head, so she has seen it too. Was she caught already? If she left this cafe were a bunch of agents going to jump her? Maybe they would just shoot her, after all, she seemingly killed a person with a glance. They shouldn't know how dangerous she was. But maybe she was overreacting in thinking like that. She left quickly, only releasing a sigh of relief once she was walking through a crowd on the street. When she killed that man she also got a deeper look at his mind and memories, luckily it felt like watching a tv just on near infinite playback rate. Yet she somehow remembered the most important bits. She just now noticed thinking more deeply about that experience. As she focused on that information her mind recalled more and more of it by the second. It was like she had saved it into the hard drive of her brain but only now was she loading into the RAM and reading it. She wasn't even aware before that she had this in her mind. It felt weird but she also welcomed it. Her memory was never her best asset, often forgetting things just days after they lost their use, even if she spent days memorizing them. She briefly considered the most notable aspects of that man's life. He was 48, and fairly rich. His name was Vincent Blackwood and he was working for both Thaddeus Ross and Hydra when she killed him. He acted like a triple agent. Working officially for SHIELD, acting like a double agent for Ross but truly being loyal to Hydra. Well fuck. He was very well trained too, she wouldn't have found this information without turning his mind inside out while he was alive. He seemed to have been trained to fool telepaths, Hydra and Ross were especially careful around Xavier. Well, this seemed like a blessing in disguise. On one hand 2 secret organizations might be hunting her plus a general. Meanwhile on the other hand she now had information. Deeply classified information and an old secret agent's knowledge of the big 'players' in the USA. Luckily the man wasn't on an active mission when he died so if they didn't find any evidence they might just accept he died of a heart attack. Well, this was Marvel so she was happy she got two days before fate started to fuck with her. She refrained from cursing out what might be an Abstract Entity. Another boon she got from delving into old Vincent's knowledge was the location of several hidden caches. It included a bunch of stuff useful for disappearing, plus identification for the man. Using those would be tricky but maybe she could do it with some liberal application of telepathy. But most importantly money, a bunch of it. Not that getting the money was the problem before. But it was always good to have more money. She tried to 'save' these locations separately from the rest. In a sense, this was similar to folders on computers, Instead of having everything recorded in a single big folder she now made a separate folder for this. Her powers turned out to work on herself too, after all, wasn't she directly manipulating her memories now? She walked down the sidewalk with a spring in her steps, happy about discovering a new aspect of her powers. "What have you managed to find out?" asked a black man his subordinate. Said subordinate did his best not to squirm under the pressure of the black man's one-eyed stare. "Sir, he shows symptoms of simultaneous organ failure, his heart, lungs, kidney, liver and nervous system all entered a state of shock before simply stopping to function." said the agent steadily, pausing at the end to take a quick breath before continuing, "He didn't have signs of prior medical conditions that would result in any of those." The agent paused again, to the visible frustration of his superior. Before he could be berated he quickly continued, "The first to receive the shock seems to be the nervous system, specifically the brain. The shock travelled along it to the rest of the body. The doctor noted that 'It seemed like the brain itself ordered the organ failure'" he finished. Even if the doctor thought it was a ridiculous idea he reported the last part too, these were the kind of things SHIELD dealt with. The black man began to tap his fingers on his desk, his previous frustration lessening after getting provided useful information. "You can leave" he mentioned offhandedly with a wave of his hand. Putting the agent out of his mind already. "Yes, Director," said the man before leaving the Director of SHIELD to his thoughts. Once alone, he searched for a document. It was stated on the front page that it was a level 3 classified document, this level was only granted to agents who have demonstrated their loyalty and competence. It provides access to highly sensitive information and areas of the organization. He quickly opened it and searched through a list, it was the basic list of known supernatural abilities by SHIELD. There were a few exempt from this but those would require higher levels of clearance. Not that it mattered to Him as one of the select few having level 5 clearance on the whole planet. He wrote out a few entries in a notebook. 'Bio-kinesis', 'electro-kinesis', 'chi mastery' and finally 'telepathy' and 'psychokinesis'. He hated dealing with those asshole monks so he put 'chi mastery' to last. Out of the rest, all mutant powers could have achieved this effect but he circled bio-kinesis and telepathy. From the records, those two powers could cause this effect without extensive training. It could have been done by other means, not every weird crime had to be committed by mutants. But then again the only viable option would be a new type of neurotoxin that someone just left in the open like this for a virtual nobody. Yeah, Agent Vincent Blackwood was a SHIELD agent but he was only level 2, and he was known to be working for that ass Ross. He didn't fire him as he might have come in handy when he needed leverage over the general but that was moot now. He gave 30% chance to his neurotoxin idea, 50% to it being done by a mutant and the rest left for it being something entirely different. Well the chances for the mutant part would sink lower if he didn't get a chunky compensation and apology from Xavier in a few days, or a notice that said mutant joined his terrorist boyfriend. At least he worked together with them, even if barely for the sake of coexistence. Fury hated the idea of him having superpowered people under him, training to be combatants. He often advocated for getting rid of him. Unfortunately, he couldn't tell if the telepath had many important friends or was far more liberal with his powers than he admitted. He always feared the latter. For all he knew the disabled bald old man already controlled his country from the shadows. Well, he wouldn't get him. Nick Fury would rather die than be used against his country. He would die screaming and rampaging as much as he could. Knowing that was probably the biggest reason for Xavier's 'compensations' every time one of his child soldier recruits broke the law. He drifted further and further from his original topic. After snapping out of his thoughts he dismissed the previous case. Many agents died while on active duty, Blackwood wouldn't even be in the first 10 to be killed by a newly awakened mutant lashing out. He shouldn't waste more time with this.
It was the next day already, noon here soon. Emilia has gone on a shopping spree out of most of her money. She now had an old phone, she forgot smartphones weren't a thing yet. She also got a few more sets of clothes and a pair of shoes. Spending two days outside in indoor slippers was more than enough. Her clothing went from sweatpants and a hoodie to jeans, sweatshirts and a jacket. March was still fairly cold. She now had about 200$ for food but she would need more for a place to sleep tonight. She considered if there was a better way of making money than scamming people. The first thing that came to mind was investing in soon-to-be-famous companies. That had two severe issues, she had no identification, and by this world's standards, she wasn't ever born. The other was that to invest money she would need money. Legal money. Several people reported their savings missing and a no-name girl invested thousands of dollars in cash into a company, now that was not a good look. Getting identifications would be hard too without extensive help from some government agency. She didn't want to risk using telepathy for this, at best they would think the poor office worker was corrupt and at worst they could somehow deduce that she psychically manipulated him. The easiest would be getting the bank information of a wealthy person and making them forget it. They could still report it to the bank but maybe she could have withdrawn enough to go on for a while. Emili decided that for this she would need to include her target being at least morally grey. Her conscience was still there in the background, protesting her stealing hard-earned money from people. She wouldn't mind it if her targets were immoral though. Before that, she decided to head to an Internet Caffe. First, she wanted to use her phone to get information from the internet but this ancient thing could barely be used to make calls and text. That made the Caffe her next target. If that too fails it was time to go medieval and head to a library, with real books. Not that Emili had a problem with books, but she was far too used to having every piece of information she needed in her pocket and downloading books online. She found one as out of the open as one could find in Manhattan. It was somewhat cozy, they charged 5$ an hour to use the computers so she quickly got to researching. First, she looked up the names of her family. Her mother should have had more than a few new articles written about her even in 2007, yet she found nothing. Sadly the same with her father's website, he sold weird trinkets to 'chase away bad spirits' and 'increase karma' and other such stuff. Next, she looked into world history and nations. It was mostly the same with a few outliners. The two she recognized were Sokovia and Latveria. Both were important locations in the marvel universe. There was no mention of Wakanda but they should be still hidden in Africa. Next, she looked into famous Marvel characters that should already be active or known. Captain America was known to be the result of a super solder experiment, there were even before and after photos of him. Howard Stark also had a bunch of articles about him. There were still conspiracy theories about his death floating around. Tony Stark was like most celebrities in her time. He somehow managed a successful company, had time to sleep with hundreds of women per year and make several public appearances at important events and galas. She followed up with a few other people. Hank Pym, Richard Reed, Norman Osborn, Justin Hammer, Wilson Fisk, Victor von Doom, Peggy Carter, and many others. She found several pages about all of them, all considering them real people. She would probably still be shocked when she first met one of them but for now, she accepted her absurd situation. She was in a Marvel universe. Well, that gave her a load of new opportunities and even more dangers and problems. She would need to be careful to survive the coming sequence of apocalyptic storms. On the other hand, these storms all provided opportunities for her. She was a mutant, a fairly weak one for now but she felt she could be so much stronger if she was given time and resources to experiment with her powers. For example, what could a telepath do with the mind stone? Well, that was far too dangerous to get and have but there were many other such artefacts in this world. Next the main threats to her safety. She looked up mutants too. The X-Men were known, and Charles Xavier was an extremely influential person in US politics and intellectual circles. X-Men were looked at as outsiders and weirdoes but not with outright hostility yet. Thank fuck for that. She didn't want to deal with a Sentinel situation, there was also some kind of mental parasite too in comics that made people hate mutants, she barely recalled that detail. The X-Men tended to somehow fuck up massively, ending with the end of humanity. She once again re-affirmed to stay away from them. Her next main threat would be the government. She didn't search for SHIELD or Weapon-X or any other of the secret organizations. Even though there was an obvious lack of random mutants turning up. There were some news reports about them joining Xavier but it was far too few. She guessed the government swooped in to collect awakened mutants they noticed and removed their traces. That didn't bode well. On her earth, there would be mass protests about mutant rights or some shit like that, but not this. Americans protested for the rights of cows and chickens in her time, she didn't believe they would do a 180 and call for the death of mutants who were still human. They were stronger than humans and dangerous yes, but so were lions and gorillas. Back to SHIELD, she found mentions of its predecessor being established by Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. It was well hidden but some equally hidden conspiracy theory websites still had information about it. SHIELD was a weird one from her standpoint, they would be suspicious of her, turning up with no personal history and telepathic powers. She might even consider turning herself over to them if it weren't for Hydra. If she played it well she could convince them to let her only do interrogations and stuff, no active fighting. Sadly telepaths were few and far between, and she didn't trust any organization to keep the other's grabby hand off of her. The only things she could trust to protect her were her powers and maybe personal allies. Her greatest weapon would still be secrecy, Hydra can't turn her into a test subject if they didn't know she existed. Her one paid hour would soon run out. She didn't want to look up anything else so she stood up to leave. Now that her attention was returned to her surroundings she overheard a few concerning things said and thought by the other people in the Caffe. "..yeah they were all over the place, even though it was said to be a heart attack," said one. "Maybe he was someone important, for there to be that many secret agents swarming over it," replied another. Even with listening in to their surface thoughts, they didn't seem to know much else, but they were talking about the man Emilia killed. The image was clear in their head, so she has seen it too. Was she caught already? If she left this cafe were a bunch of agents going to jump her? Maybe they would just shoot her, after all, she seemingly killed a person with a glance. They shouldn't know how dangerous she was. But maybe she was overreacting in thinking like that. She left quickly, only releasing a sigh of relief once she was walking through a crowd on the street. When she killed that man she also got a deeper look at his mind and memories, luckily it felt like watching a tv just on near infinite playback rate. Yet she somehow remembered the most important bits. She just now noticed thinking more deeply about that experience. As she focused on that information her mind recalled more and more of it by the second. It was like she had saved it into the hard drive of her brain but only now was she loading into the RAM and reading it. She wasn't even aware before that she had this in her mind. It felt weird but she also welcomed it. Her memory was never her best asset, often forgetting things just days after they lost their use, even if she spent days memorizing them. She briefly considered the most notable aspects of that man's life. He was 48, and fairly rich. His name was Vincent Blackwood and he was working for both Thaddeus Ross and Hydra when she killed him. He acted like a triple agent. Working officially for SHIELD, acting like a double agent for Ross but truly being loyal to Hydra. Well fuck. He was very well trained too, she wouldn't have found this information without turning his mind inside out while he was alive. He seemed to have been trained to fool telepaths, Hydra and Ross were especially careful around Xavier. Well, this seemed like a blessing in disguise. On one hand 2 secret organizations might be hunting her plus a general. Meanwhile on the other hand she now had information. Deeply classified information and an old secret agent's knowledge of the big 'players' in the USA. Luckily the man wasn't on an active mission when he died so if they didn't find any evidence they might just accept he died of a heart attack. Well, this was Marvel so she was happy she got two days before fate started to fuck with her. She refrained from cursing out what might be an Abstract Entity. Another boon she got from delving into old Vincent's knowledge was the location of several hidden caches. It included a bunch of stuff useful for disappearing, plus identification for the man. Using those would be tricky but maybe she could do it with some liberal application of telepathy. But most importantly money, a bunch of it. Not that getting the money was the problem before. But it was always good to have more money. She tried to 'save' these locations separately from the rest. In a sense, this was similar to folders on computers, Instead of having everything recorded in a single big folder she now made a separate folder for this. Her powers turned out to work on herself too, after all, wasn't she directly manipulating her memories now? She walked down the sidewalk with a spring in her steps, happy about discovering a new aspect of her powers. "What have you managed to find out?" asked a black man his subordinate. Said subordinate did his best not to squirm under the pressure of the black man's one-eyed stare. "Sir, he shows symptoms of simultaneous organ failure, his heart, lungs, kidney, liver and nervous system all entered a state of shock before simply stopping to function." said the agent steadily, pausing at the end to take a quick breath before continuing, "He didn't have signs of prior medical conditions that would result in any of those." The agent paused again, to the visible frustration of his superior. Before he could be berated he quickly continued, "The first to receive the shock seems to be the nervous system, specifically the brain. The shock travelled along it to the rest of the body. The doctor noted that 'It seemed like the brain itself ordered the organ failure'" he finished. Even if the doctor thought it was a ridiculous idea he reported the last part too, these were the kind of things SHIELD dealt with. The black man began to tap his fingers on his desk, his previous frustration lessening after getting provided useful information. "You can leave" he mentioned offhandedly with a wave of his hand. Putting the agent out of his mind already. "Yes, Director," said the man before leaving the Director of SHIELD to his thoughts. Once alone, he searched for a document. It was stated on the front page that it was a level 3 classified document, this level was only granted to agents who have demonstrated their loyalty and competence. It provides access to highly sensitive information and areas of the organization. He quickly opened it and searched through a list, it was the basic list of known supernatural abilities by SHIELD. There were a few exempt from this but those would require higher levels of clearance. Not that it mattered to Him as one of the select few having level 5 clearance on the whole planet. He wrote out a few entries in a notebook. 'Bio-kinesis', 'electro-kinesis', 'chi mastery' and finally 'telepathy' and 'psychokinesis'. He hated dealing with those asshole monks so he put 'chi mastery' to last. Out of the rest, all mutant powers could have achieved this effect but he circled bio-kinesis and telepathy. From the records, those two powers could cause this effect without extensive training. It could have been done by other means, not every weird crime had to be committed by mutants. But then again the only viable option would be a new type of neurotoxin that someone just left in the open like this for a virtual nobody. Yeah, Agent Vincent Blackwood was a SHIELD agent but he was only level 2, and he was known to be working for that ass Ross. He didn't fire him as he might have come in handy when he needed leverage over the general but that was moot now. He gave 30% chance to his neurotoxin idea, 50% to it being done by a mutant and the rest left for it being something entirely different. Well the chances for the mutant part would sink lower if he didn't get a chunky compensation and apology from Xavier in a few days, or a notice that said mutant joined his terrorist boyfriend. At least he worked together with them, even if barely for the sake of coexistence. Fury hated the idea of him having superpowered people under him, training to be combatants. He often advocated for getting rid of him. Unfortunately, he couldn't tell if the telepath had many important friends or was far more liberal with his powers than he admitted. He always feared the latter. For all he knew the disabled bald old man already controlled his country from the shadows. Well, he wouldn't get him. Nick Fury would rather die than be used against his country. He would die screaming and rampaging as much as he could. Knowing that was probably the biggest reason for Xavier's 'compensations' every time one of his child soldier recruits broke the law. He drifted further and further from his original topic. After snapping out of his thoughts he dismissed the previous case. Many agents died while on active duty, Blackwood wouldn't even be in the first 10 to be killed by a newly awakened mutant lashing out. He shouldn't waste more time with this.
