Disclaimer - I don't, and have never claimed to, own Marvel or its Intellectual Property. This is all just so that I can take my maladaptive daydreaming and turn it into something so that it does not ruin the rest of my day.
DoorMan #104
Red Hearth[April 2008]
–Colin Baxter–
He sipped on his orange juice, idly watching the TV, from his room on the Red Hearth, smirking as Tony did the exact same thing as he did in Cannon, shutting down the Weapons Division of Stark Industries.
To think that if things had not gone horribly wrong, he would be an intern at Stark Industries when this all went down, instead of being stuck in the Red Hearth, his civilian identity unofficially on a long term vacation to Thailand, with most of his dividends from his portfolios handled by a trust that was run by someone who was affiliated with Kamar Taj.
Colin Baxter, as the world knew him, had dropped out of the dark web, and the only one, outside of his close circle, who knew exactly what had happened was in Wakanda. Speaking of Wakanda, he wondered what exactly happened to Shuri and her plans to reintegrate Wakanda with the rest of the world.
He debated sending her a message before thinking better of it. The further he stayed from someone who was very heavily influenced by an Egyptian God, the better. It never worked out for anyone involved to get close to an Egyptian God.
He noted that Tony was the same as before, brash and blunt, as Tony chewed on his cheeseburger while leaving behind the cacophony of questions that had erupted after his announcement, to poor Obadiah.
Honestly, he wondered how Obadian was going to retaliate now. He had already collected the scraps that Tony left behind, to study and also to keep them out of Stane's hands. That left Stane very few options in terms of killing the Golden Goose that was Stark, because he would have no suit left to reengineer after Stark was killed.
On the other hand, killing Stane was a major milestone in Tony's character development but he was not going to do something as egregious as purposefully engineering a moment like that. If it happened, it happened and if not, then Stane could be sent to jail by Coulson whenever he arrived in Tony's life.
His eyes lit up in mischief as he thought of something stupid and fun he could do. Tasking the hacked satellites to ping him the specific parameters were met, he leaned back and sighed, looking at the TV, showing a reporter already doing a segment about Stark Industries and its apparent fall from grace, all the while two of his hands worked in the background, working on some more advanced spells.
Looking back, he saw the two glowing spinning balls, barely containing the ball of red in between. He grinned when the balls held steady, despite him not paying his complete attention to them.
With a thought, the red in between the balls was switched with a deep blue, then with a spinning white, then with yellow and then he cycled them with startling ease.
Once that was done, he mentally commended them to dissipate and contrary to what one might have thought, dispelling spells did not mean that one had to stop supplying Dimensional Energy to the spell.
On the contrary, the energy required to dissipate the spell safely required more skill and energy than simply letting it explode in one's face. So, it took some time, since this was his first time doing it in a room where its explosion would have some very real consequences, as the elements in the spinning balls disappeared, followed by the balls losing their spins before dissipating into thin air as well.
"Holy shit," he breathed out loud, watching the smoke coming out of his conjured hands, awe in his eyes. He just recreated the Rasengan, and not just the Rasengan, but Rasengan with the elements from his Doors in them.
Now, that part was still untested in terms of the damage done but he could imagine the versatility of the Rasengans now. He stood up, chair spinning back, as he got out of his room and jumped into the elevator, while mentally informing Jin'Ya that he needed some supervised tests in the ritual room, to which Jin'Ya lazily agreed.
The elevator opened up super fast, courtesy of technology, no magical enchantments used there, aside from some safety and bubble creating ones, and he was about to jump forward, only to come face to face with Bruce.
Bruce, looking at his crazy smiling face, was probably a little confused but he had no patience for that so he hopped into the elevator, canceled Bruce's selection for the kitchen floor and swiped in his finger to get to the lower levels, his energy signature allowing the button to be selected, another enchantment that interfaced quite well with electronic authentication systems.
Something he would no doubt proliferate to allies in the future, after some field testing, as the tech was probably capable of differentiating between Skrulls, as well, since it targeted the energy coming from the soul instead of just biology and genetics.
"Good timing! Come on, I would kike to show you something," He dragged Bruce along and wow, was there some heft to him, nothing like the weak ass human he was when they first met, back in Canadian Snow.
"W-What? Where are we going?" Bruce asked and he waved him off. "It's better to just show you. Also, I see that someone has been hitting the gym. Nice strength you got there."
Bruce smiled nervously, "Yes, I have strong data now. According to historical records, even untransformed, I can lift more than Captain America and run as fast as him. I have also recorded some reverse aging on my organs as well as my face."
He grinned, "So, an all around improvement in quality of life then? I am so glad we could figure that out. Also, a very productive outlet for stress relief, am I right?"
Bruce nodded, "Yes. Very. Multiple minor breakthroughs came to me in the middle of lifting heavy weights in high G environments."
"Oh yeah, I've gone up to 10G once but could not properly exercise in that, so I settled on 5G. How high do you go?"
Bruce smiled, "I can do all exercises at 7G and the highest I went, out of curiosity, was 15G and then I blacked out."
"Let me guess, the Hulk came out? Thinking it was some threat?"
Bruce sighed, "Yeah," Then he perked up, "But the weird part came after that. Hulk did not rage or rampage, all he did was walk up to the panel and set the settings to 50G and began working out. Great work on that room's overall integrity though, nothing was broken after Hulk set the gravity to normal and let me come out."
"Huh, interesting."
Then, the elevator dinged and opened up on the ritual room floor, with Jin'Ya already waiting for them. Since JIn'Ya was the official Guardian of the Red Hearth, having been recognised as such in the wards, he could travel freely through the entire place. That was on top of his already existing ability of phasing through matter.
"Let me show you my newest piece," he declared and moved to enter the ritual room while Bruce followed Jin'Ya to the observation deck, a room built by Jin'Ya to safely observe the whole thing without entering the ritual room itself. Usually, Jin'Ya would just come in, and stay just outside the ritual circles but for squishy humans like Bruce, who was not really squishy anymore, it was better to stay outside and observe.
Entering the ritual circle, he activated the standard ritual flow for isolation and once that was done, conjured two hands, and focused as the conjured hands rippled with concentric circles that then began overlapping on top of themselves, eventually creating a small ball of Dimensional Energy.
"Observe." He said, as the Ball stabilised, then he opened the least destructive thing he had in his arsenal of Doors, the Chi door, right in the middle of that spinning ball, giving it a golden look. He compressed the energy, which took time, about half a minute, before he stopped and looked at it, which looked so beautiful up close, before simply chucking it at the far end of the ritual circle, not before leaping out of the ritual circle as well.
The blast was blinding in its intensity. The ritual room shook but the circle held, holding back a storm of golden energy, crackling with such intensity he could feel it on his face, mere inches away from the boundary of the ritual circle.
"What was that?" Jin'Ya asked him, intrigued.
"That," He breathed out, standing up properly before dusting off imaginary dirt from his clothes before turning to look at the mirroring enchantment and said with his arms spread apart, the backdrop of the golden explosion right behind him, "--Was an…EXPLOSION!"
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