Jessica was completely irritated. She was pissed as fuck, there was no understating that, but it was safely stored away in a mental cooler, so what she was left with was major irritation.
She was killing that fucker with the mustache, oh there was no two-three ways about that. He was good as dead even if the pompous bastard seemed to think otherwise. Along with him was that prissy bitch that tried to mindfuck her brain to mush.
Now that neither of them were here, she thought about what she was to do. Trish being safe was a heavy burden off her mind, and the reminder of her fragile safety was also another reason why she had to kill those fuckers.
She looked at the heavily electromagnetic cuffs holding her wrists firm to the metal bracket of the wall. Blasting it with a controlled emp would be the simplest thing had the fuckers not taken her Q-Watch. Thankfully that was not her only option.
The fact that they had taken most of the visible accessories on her, as well as recognizing her under her disguise meant that they had probably been spying on her for quite a long while. God, she hoped that Trish had taken her words serious enough.
Her bracelet, rings and watch were gone, but her earrings and her contact lenses weren't. She guessed that with their knowledge of Isaac, none of them trusted those things as being anything normal, but the fact that they left her earrings meant that they weren't really experienced with Isaac. That or they were simply arrogant bastards.
Either was good for her since she already scanned them with her lenses and found the public identity of Moustache Man. Sebastian Shaw was a pompous name for a posh prick.
Speaking of Isaac… she shook her head. As hopeful as those pair of counts thought, none of this concerned him.
She pushed all those thoughts aside and focused on her earrings, specifically her left one, and a small orb fell to the floor. An EMP grenade.
She activated it with her contacts and smirked as the heavy magnetic cuffs holding her turned dead metal and with a simple flex, broke free from the weak restraints..
A groan of satisfaction left her lips as her shoulders popped when she rolled them. The next second, an overachieving stun baton, Taser Wand, fell through the air and she caught it. She retrieved her Ring of Battle to magically boost her Lin Kuei martial arts and overall combat ability and then downed an Edurus Potion for a direct boost to her defenses and protection from projectiles aka bullets.
Just as she was about to kick the door down, something flew into her head. She would have panicked if not for the timely info dump that it brought with it – Trish had gone to Isaac for an indirect exchange plan. The Reverse Summoning one it seemed.
She thought about it for a few seconds and shook her head, refusing it for now. Trish, as a certified worrywart, would keep on spamming it until she answered which gave her a very short window for her to take care of things here before her sister blew a gasket or summoned herself here.
There was no doubt in her mind that her escape had alerted someone so it stood to chance that she would have her path barred by mutants on payroll. If only she had all her toys with her this would have been a whole lot easier. She had to find where that bastard had stashed them.
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Back in the shop, Trish looked at Isaac gobsmacked, unwilling to believe what she just heard. She smiled.
As polite as a feather, she asked slowly as she held up the scroll. "What did you just say?"
"It's not working because she refused the summons. You should be able to tell instinctually that such is the case." Isaac, God bless his ever polite attitude, replied calmly and earnestly that it left Trish feeling a bit tongue-tied.
"Why?" She croaked out the word filled with the ultimate confusion. Why would her sister refuse the free get-out-of-kidnapping option?
Isaac gave her an apologetic smile. "I truly have no idea. Though I will say this, the response to the summons can not be influenced in any way so she's making that choice of her own free and conscious will, and while I am not one to blindly assume, I'll take that as a sign of her having her situation under control."
"Control?!" Trish felt like she was one second for losing her top despite feeling the calmest she's ever been. She started manually regulating her breathing in a bid to calm herself and do something stupid like jumping through the scroll and strangling Jessica by the neck just to see how much 'in control' she was. "I'm breathing too hard. I'm breathing too hard."
"There's a lounge if you want to… decompress. Just between the aisles and then to your far right."
She nodded, still in the clearest haze of confused hysteria. Yeah, that sounded like a good idea.
Watching her leave, Loki who had been taking his sweet time idly observing smiled to himself as he walked back to the counter.
"Sorry for that." Isaac said as he saddled up to the item spread.
"Nothing of the sort. If anything, it was a nice little experience to witness." Loki said looking down as he ran a soft and unsure finger over the surface of the items laid out.
Right here. Before his very eyes. An assortment of items that would bolster up his ambitions and make them more than the vain boastings the Allfather seemed to think was all he amounted to.
Thor was out there parading a hammer that he bought as if it was some mighty trial he overcame all the while Odin silently enabled him, the same tune the both of them have played for centuries.
His eyes glanced across the items he desired in one way or the other: the heart, the dimension fog, the sword, the book or the mask – and in that specific order.
His greed was there, obviously. He noticed it.
This, however, was not the bumbling cravings of an insatiable stomach but instead the structural wanting of a parched heart. He could forget everything else and find a way to obtain the book or the mask for the obscene amount it would be priced at, but was that wise?
Now in this shop, seeing the means of victory laid out before him without him having to scheme for it, he had taken a few steps back to really think of what was the best way to approach this. The way he'd always done it, loud and glaring, or something more… subtle?
The heart was as good a foundation as any. If everything else failed, it was the perfect safety spot to fall back to.
For the first time in Loki's existence, with visible answers put in front of him, Loki finally understood the nature of his hunger for power.
He looked at Isaac, wondering whether Isaac had understood his nature at a glance and hence why he brought out these exact items.
His mind was so clear that he could also address the defensiveness of his pride, something he was certain he would never have done. It seemed that as far as he was thinking about what to purchase, the clarity that overwhelmed him was so absolute that things like his pride became second to what he really wanted.
This kind of mental dominion was something that mortals would never notice because they lacked the base mental fortitude when compared to beings like him.
He had things he could exchange for the heart but had none of them on him. One of them was Jarnbjorn, the war axe Thor had used before Mjolnir and one he thought he had lost – which he really did, but Loki found it and never gave it back. Jarnbjorn would make the perfect exchange and the trade of it would let him know just how fair Isaac, the Merchant, claimed to be.
"These two," he pointed at the heart and the cask of mist, "put them on my tab. I'll be back in 24hrs."
"An open tab for Sir Loki coming right up. I'll be dutifully waiting your return." Isaac's response placated Loki well. His pride was soothed from seeing that Isaac, without even a single purchase, saw his importance as a valued customer. This would be a fruitful relationship.
He sauntered out of the shop with the same relaxed confidence he came in with, complimented even further by a satisfied heart. The Divine Lie had seen the truth, and truly, it felt too good to be true.
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....
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Jessica cursed under her breath as she finally put the blob down. The jelly fucker did not enjoy being tickled by her little fairy wand. So far she had put three of the mutants who had abducted her to the ground. The only thing she had gotten from them, which also doubled as the only things she needed from them, was confirmation of her sister's safety, Shaw's location and the location of her things – which also doubled as Shaw's location.
They were in a private building more than somewhere like an abandoned underground complex as she had feared. She didn't have to worry much about guns because… well the fuckers were mutants. Made sense because the public would never allow Shaw's company to grow to the heights it had if they knew he was a mutant.
She took the stairs and followed it to the top, like Jelly had told her while she was electrocuting him, and then took the hallway to the left straight down until she came to the posh white-gold door.
Her little tour around the building had made her burn through quite a bit of the emergency stash hidden in her earrings, just because Shaw had taken her things. She was getting recuperated one way or the other, even if she had to rob his cold corpse for it.
Her Potion of Giant strength and Oil of Slipperiness was still in effect so all she drank was another Edurus Potion before kicking the door down.
The prick was in there, suit, mustache and all, with one hand behind his back while he sipped his alcohol. She did not appreciate the fact that her contacts had scanned the bottle and pinged her eyes the price.
"You should have escaped when you had the chance, Ms. Jones. You'll find no escape route here." He said pretentiously as he savored the taste of the alcohol.
The ping from the summoning scroll was still there so that was a way out in case Shaw turned out to be more than she could handle alone.
"Wasn't really looking to escape. You owe me money, remember?"
She rolled her eyes when he chuckled. She looked around the room suspiciously when she found the lacking presence of his coconspirator.
"I'll give you one last chance: work for me and I'll see to it that you possess anything you will ever want."
Did he just…. After threatening…. She was never one for calm thoughts and calmer actions so she was wholly unsurprised when she found herself almost sliding towards him and punching his face in with her full strength.
She frowned. The feedback was weird. Seeing him pulling himself out of the bar he had crashed into with no hint of injury in his face made her frown. Of course he was a mutant.
"Hm, that was more than I expected you were capable of." He said with a hint of ridicule.
She didn't care about what he had to say as a thrown bottle broke against his face. He grunted in displeasure but that was before a chair anointed his head. She grabbed him by the scruff of his neck but he grabbed her wrists and tried to pry her fingers open.
She headbutted him and once more felt the weird sinking contact. He didn't even react and when she tried an uppercut, he simply caught her arm, the strength in it more solid than before. He punched her for the first time but her defenses ate away the strength of the impact and seeing his slightly confused blink made she quickly realize what was happening.
He had something that was shielding him from the damage like her. It was eating away the brunt of her attack and leaving him with pea shots.
Their fight continued for a few minutes and at first she suspected but the subsequent hits he managed to land told her clearly that his strength was steadily increasing as the fight went on.
Was it something he bought from Isaac? Probably, she didn't know. Whatever it was, she couldn't let the fight continue for longer… not like she had any intentions of such.
She still had the upper hand, that was plain to see, as was the pissed frown on his face. She retrieved her Taser Wand from her earrings.
Oil of Slipperiness made her movements as sleek as a snake's and her reflexes as sharp as a cat's and Shaw had neither of those, nor was he a Master of Lin Kuei's martial arts. She checked his chin, feeling the disparity in the impact once again, cut off his ankles – again – and hit him square in the chest with her stun baton and blasted five hundred thousand volts into him, which he was easily absorbing.
He smirked and like every pompous prick, opened his mouth to say some bullshit, and with lightning fast reflexes, she smashed a vial of dark green liquid against his open mouth and watched as he froze and collapsed dramatically.
Draught of Living Death – a potion she bought from Isaac that completely knocks out anyone with a few drops and leaves them in a near death state: a portable handheld coma shot.
"That took shorter than I expected." She spun around and sent a knife flying at the voice that spoke behind her.
The woman, Shaw's partner, smiled at her while the knife floated harmlessly in front of her. She waved her hand and Jessica's eyes narrowed as her things – watch, ring, bracelet and two hundred bucks – floated her way.
"You think this is enough to stop me from killing you?" Cold hate swarm in her eyes but the woman only laughed.
"Oh dear, this is payment for leaving you with an avenue to escape, and also for taking care of him for me. You don't think it's convenient that everything else was taken except that spatial artifact?"
She scoffed. "So you're what? Paying me with my own things?"
"After having you do my dirty work, yes." There was a black glow that crossed her eyes as she smiled as Jessica and that unnerved her greatly. "Don't be foolish, dear. Take your things and go."
She walked past her and against everything hateful thought in her head, Jessica didn't attack her. Whether it was her combat instincts as a master martial artist or an effect from some of the potions she'd ingested, her stomach curled at the thought of actually trying to fight the woman who was now kneeling against Shaw with her hands on his chest.
The room grew cold and Jessica immediately took that as her last cue to get out of there and answered the blaring summons.
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