"What were you thinking?!" Rogue shouted with enough force to shake the room. "Recrcuiting Mystique, of all people? Have you lost your damn mind?"
Damn.
He knew she would be mad, but Adonai might have slightly miscalculated the magnitude. He remained seated behind his desk with his hands folded comfortably over his stomach while Rogue continued wearing a path into his expensive carpet. Alison had taken the chair opposite him and looked calmer, although from the disapproving crease between her eyebrows, Adonai knew she was also far from happy.
Tabitha had wisely removed herself from active hostilities and claimed the couch near the wall, where she watched with amusement.
"Before this becomes a public hanging, I'd like the condemned man to remind the court that Mystique swore an oath." Adonai raised both hands when Rogue spun toward him, hoping the universal gesture of peaceful surrender might calm things down. "She literally can't betray me, Rogue. The moment she even thinks to work against me, I will know. Raven herself probably underestimates the sheer absoluteness of what she accepted. I understand why you're worried, especially with everything that's happened between you two, but I've got this covered. I wouldn't have let her anywhere near us if I wasn't sure."
This was precisely why he had created the Book of Covenant in the first place. Adonai would hardly need the damn thing if he planned to recruit only trustworthy people of sterling character. This world was crawling with double agents, shapeshifters, and fucking aliens for all he cared, and Mystique was simply another name on a very long list of dangerous people who could still be useful. Dangerous did not mean untamable.
She had to be handled as gingerly as dynamite. Adonia shrugged. Even dynamite could be exploded harmlessly if the need arose.
"You put too much trust in that damn book." Rogue stopped pacing long enough to plant both hands against his desk, leaning across it until her grey eyes were level with his. "I've known Raven most of my life, Adonai. That woman could find a way out of a locked room with no doors. Putting her hand on your book won't suddenly make Raven stop being Raven."
It would not do to deify people into untouchable monsters. As far as Adonai was concerned, Mystique was another woman with a useful gimmick. A man who built his enemies into insurmountable forces had already surrendered half the battle. That was the mentality of losers.
"You underestimate the rigor of my Nen ability." Adonai chuckled softly and reached across the desk, although Rogue immediately slapped his hand away when he tried to take hers. Fair enough. "The Good Book isn't a lie detector, but it can function as one under the right wording. Any lie, concealed intention, or ulterior motive that qualifies as working against me can trigger it. That's how I knew from the beginning that Valentina de Fontaine kept thinking about ways to threaten me. The Good Book watches and judges every oath-taker from the moment they swore themselves to me."
"What are you trying to say, Adonai?" Alison asked as she shifted forward in her chair, seemingly taking over questioning while Rogue resumed pacing behind her. "If this… Mystique is as dangerous as Rogue says, and I certainly believe Rogue after my less than pleasant introduction to the woman, then surely your Good Book should've been ringing alarm bells every second since she swore herself to you."
"That's the strange part." Adonai ignored Rogue's murderous glare and Alison's attempt to hide her amusement. He drummed his fingers against the desk while remembering that unnerving silence from the ability. "The book gave me no warning whatsoever. I tested her from half a dozen angles, and there was nothing. As far as the Good Book could determine, Mystique was completely sincere in her desire to help me and had no current intention of doing anything that qualified as harming or betraying me."
"Hold on," Tabitha interrupted, finally abandoning her role as silent spectator. "I wanna make sure I understand this correctly. Your magic book considers an ambitious politician more dangerous than a shapeshifting terrorist extraordinaire?"
"I was flabbergasted too." Adonai nodded with amusement.
"Maybe your little book isn't as foolproof as you think." Alison rested her chin against her fingers while considering the problem, and the humor gradually disappeared from her expression. "Rogue says Mystique plans around people, so suppose she planned around herself. Someone could have erased part of her memory, or sealed away whatever her actual objective is before she approached you. Mystique could sincerely believe everything she told you, which would give your book nothing to detect, while another part of the plan waits for the right trigger. I don't know enough about your ability to say whether that would work, but it sounds possible."
Adonai clicked his tongue in grimace. She wasn't wrong.
"Sure, it's possible. But so is the possibility that somebody's secretly controlling your mind and waiting for the perfect moment to make you murder me," he replied. "We could sit here coming up with possibilities all day, Alison. At some point, you've got to work with the information you actually have. I look at the risks, do what I can to minimize them, and make a decision. Could Mystique have pulled something like that? Absolutely. Do I have any reason to believe she actually did? So far, no."
"She's up to something. I can feel it." Rogue stopped pacing near the window and began biting lightly against the side of her finger, a habit Adonai recognized from every difficult operational problem she handled for him. "I know Raven, Adonai. She always has another motive somewhere, even when she genuinely wants what she says she wants."
Adonai finally rose and crossed the room toward her, approaching slowly enough that she could have moved away if she wanted. Rogue stood where she was, so he slipped his arms around her waist from behind and rested his chin lightly near her shoulder, feeling some of the tension remain stubbornly lodged through her body.
"Of course she's got other motives, Rogue. Everybody does. Having an agenda doesn't automatically make someone my enemy." He gave her waist a gentle squeeze. "The oath makes it impossible for her to knowingly betray me, work against me, or lie about anything it covers. Trust me, I grilled Raven afterward."
He really did. Once the revelation about the four Sinisters had finished ruining his afternoon, Adonai had spent hours, testing her answers against the Good Book and searching for any crack that suggested hidden hostility. Raven clearly wanted something from him, and he had several theories concerning what that something might be, but none had triggered the response he expected from an enemy.
Rogue released a long breath and leaned back against him despite herself, although her hands remained folded tightly beneath her chest. "Your powers aren't the end of everything, Adonai, and you know that. Even you can make the wrong call, and Raven has spent longer manipulating people than any of us have been alive. I trust you with all my heart, but trusting you doesn't mean I have to pretend every gamble you take is safe."
"Fair enough." Adonai turned his head and kissed her cheek, earning no smile, although she was less angry now. "My powers help me keep the risks under control. After that, it's up to me to decide whether whatever I'm getting out of the deal is worth taking those risks."
Alison watched them for a moment before leaning back and crossing her legs. "Okay, but why Mystique? I get that being able to look like anyone you want would make her a great spy, but is she really worth all this trouble?" She glanced toward Rogue. "And I know I'm probably the last person who should question how dangerous she is, considering how easily she handled me. Still, why couldn't you just tell her to get lost?"
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Adonai loosened his arms around Rogue and gave Alison a small shrug.
Alison's eyes immediately narrowed with amusement. "Are you sure your version isn't, 'Keep the mutant who can shapeshift into any woman you want closer, preferably somewhere near your bed?'"
Tabitha snickered from the couch, while Rogue closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.
"Your lack of faith in my judgment has been duly noted." Adonai rolled his eyes. "For the record, I did not recruit a psychotic terrorist while planning how to get her into my bed. It was a calculated risk, and there was an implied threat behind her arrival that made simply rejecting her potentially catastrophic."
Rogue's expression sharpened immediately. She slipped free of his arms and turned around, whatever embarrassment Alison had created disappearing beneath genuine concern.
"What do you mean, an implied threat?" she asked, voice softened as she searched his face. "Adonai, I have years of memories with Raven, good and bad, and maybe some part of me still loves the woman who took me in when nobody else did. That doesn't make me blind to what she is, and I don't want her welcomed into my home with open arms. We agreed we weren't going to build our cause around people like her, so please tell me why you changed your mind. What exactly are you afraid of?"
Adonai sighed, released her waist completely, and walked back toward his desk. He pulled open the lower drawer and searched beneath several folders until his fingers found an old newspaper he had kept for two years, its edges already slightly worn from repeated handling. He carried it toward the sitting area and tossed it onto the low table between Alison and Tabitha. Alison reached for it first, smoothing the folded front page across her knee before reading the headline aloud with growing confusion.
"'Latverian Monarchy Overthrown Following Revolution, Victor von Doom Assumes Control of Balkan State.'" Alison looked up from the yellowing paper and then checked the date printed beneath the masthead. "This is from 2003, Adonai. Why have you been keeping a two-year-old newspaper about some tiny European country on your desk?"
Rogue stepped closer and looked down at the article over Alison's shoulder.
"What does Latveria have to do with Raven? I remember you mentioning the country before because they kept blocking your companies, and they won't even allow your social platforms or local derivatives of them inside their borders." She frowned and tapped the photograph accompanying the article. "What's so special about that? An old corrupt monarchy got replaced by another absolute king who sounds every bit as tyrannical and corrupt."
Adonai returned to his desk without answering immediately, poured himself what remained of his whisky, and took a slow swallow before turning toward them.
"Victor von Doom isn't some ordinary corrupt king," Adonia said. "He is a genius. A scientist, an abstract thinker with a brain of the first order. He rules an entire nation as absolutely as I rule my own body, and there is very little in this world that he cannot understand and overcome given enough time. He is patient, proud and has a will that borders on madness. Trust me when I tell you we do not want him as our enemy."
Tabitha rested one arm across the back of the couch and glanced between Adonai and the newspaper. "You're laying it on pretty thick for some dictator in a tiny European country," she said half amused. "He's still one man running a country smaller than some of our states. Whatever he has going for him, there can't be much he could personally do that you wouldn't be able to handle."
Adonai shook his head and took another swallow, feeling none of his usual amusement at the thought of Victor von Doom.
"He's a sorcerer king, Tabitha. My Nen abilities might be useless against his magic, and he is vastly smarter than I am. I don't know whether I could defeat him in a direct confrontation, and I have no desire to find out until I'm prepared enough to make the result predictable."
And that day might never come, Adonai admitted privately. Victor von Doom had been the sort of comic-book genius who regularly stole power from gods, built machines that should have required civilizations to construct. The idea that Nen alone would present some insurmountable mystery to a man like that was ridiculous. Everything Adonai had found suggested this Doom was closer to his comic book counterpart than the movie ones.
Alison gave a nervous little laugh as she looked from the photograph toward Adonai. "If I didn't know you better, I'd think you were scared of him."
"Any sane man would be cautious around Doom." Adonai sniffed and lowered himself against the edge of his desk, keeping the whisky loosely between his fingers. "The man is a lunatic with extraordinary resources and a cartoonish capacity for single-minded obsession. Becoming the object of somebody like that man's ire isn't something enjoyable. I would prefer to leave the sleeping tiger alone until I have a compelling reason to poke it."
Rogue folded her arms again. "I understand why you're worried about Doom, but…What does the king of Latveria have to do with your decision to let Mystique get close to you?"
"Destiny." Adonai placed the whisky beside him and rubbed one hand across his jaw. "Irene Adler is practically a phantom when she wants to disappear, and locating her is a fool's errand. But About a week ago, one of our informants flagged something strange enough to reach my desk, although I originally thought very little of it."
Rogue's brow furrowed as she moved closer. "What did they find?"
"A plane ticket from Berlin to Latveria booked under the name Irene Adler." Adonai watched Rogue's expression change as if put under strain. "Now, sure, it could be a coincidence. There are probably other women out there with the same name. But think about it. A woman who's spent decades staying hidden suddenly books a flight under her real name. Our people just happen to find it, and and her destination happens to be one of the few countries ruled by a man powerful enough to make me hesitate." He pushed away from the desk and began walking slowly toward the windows. "Then, roughly a week later, Raven appears with an offer."
Alison had gone quiet, one hand resting against her chin while her eyes remained on the newspaper. "You think Destiny wanted you to find the ticket? She was telling you that if anything happened to Mystique, she had somewhere to go and someone powerful enough to make retaliation painful?"
"Exactly." Adonai rubbed both hands over his face and briefly stared toward the ceiling. "Maybe I'm being paranoid. Maybe Irene just fancied a trip to Latveria, and the whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with me. But I'm not taking that chance when the alternative is Doctor Doom teaming up with a precognitive who's out for revenge. Harming Raven was out of the question, but simply letting her leave would've been equally stupid because she already knew too much about my abilities."
His hands dropped to his sides. "So I went with option three. Keep Raven close enough to watch her, put her talents to good use, and have a little leverage over Destiny while I figure out what Irene actually wants."
"Keep your friends close but your enemies closer," Alison murmured, repeating his earlier mantra with less amusement this time. "All right, I understand the logic now, even if I still think inviting Mystique into your organization sounds like keeping a live grenade because somebody else might own a cannon."
"All that theory because of a plane ticket?" Tabitha asked, although her teasing tone had returned in an obvious attempt to lighten the room. She picked up the newspaper and waved it once between two fingers. "A plane ticket belonging to someone who happens to have the same name as Destiny, for that matter. Am I really the only person here thinking we've crossed several international borders into Paranoia Land?"
"It's not paranoia if they're out to get you." Adonai picked up his whisky again and rotated the remaining amber liquid around the bottom. "If I'm wrong, then wonderful - the worst consequence is that I acquired a competent mutant whose loyalty is magically enforced. If I'm right, I avoided playing a blind hand against two people who could ruin my plans." He finished the whisky and set the empty glass aside. "Besides, I have another use for her. My enemies are multiplying faster than my friends, and Raven can help reduce the number of future problems."
Rogue studied him for several seconds. "You already have a job planned for her?"
Oh, he had plenty of jobs for her. The world was infested with secret organizations and shadow societies lurking in every corner, from Hydra, the Hand and the Hellfire Club to the Universal Bank, Doom and a list that seemed to stretch forever. Adonai needed competent people on his side to infiltrate them, watch them and deal with them when they inevitably became a problem. Operatives of Natasha and Raven's caliber were hardly a dime a dozen, and when the opportunity came to recruit one, you fucking took it.
"I wanted Natasha on this, but it's been over a month and she still hasn't contacted me. I need a backup plan, and if Black Widow refuses my offer, I'll take the upgrade." Adonai turned back toward the others. "I want Raven to infiltrate Hydra. I want her to identify as many independent heads and cells of that damned organization as possible, then find the Diviner before they do."
Alison blinked and glanced toward Rogue, receiving no answer there. "The Diviner? What's that?"
Adonai remembered only fragments. Hydra's various heads had coveted the damned thing, and who could blame them? The Kree had crossed the stars, found the hairless apes calling themselves humanity, experimented upon some of them, and eventually left artifacts behind capable of awakening what their experiments had planted in human bloodlines.
Somebody was inevitably going to find those relics and ask the obvious question: Can I use this to manufacture my own superpowered army? The movies had treated Hydra as a problem that could be decapitated, while the events he half-remembered from Agents of Shield had shown how many heads remained after that supposed victory. Leaving Kree technology within their reach seemed criminally stupid.
"It's an alien artifact capable of awakening dormant abilities in humans carrying a particular altered gene." Adonai moved back toward his desk and rested his palms against its edge. "In practical terms, it can give certain people superpowers. I would prefer that Hydra never gets the opportunity to experiment with it."
Rogue raised an eyebrow and finally sat down beside Alison. "Like mutants?"
Adonai shook his head. "They're called Inhumans. Their biology works differently from ours, although the difference is academic when for all intent and purpose it functions the same as mutation. Hydra acquiring technology that could help them create or recruit an army of enhanced humans is a risk I refuse to ignore." He gestured toward the newspaper and then toward the wider world beyond his office. "But Hydra is too compartmentalized. Attacking one branch wouldn't achieve anything, so sending someone capable of changing identities as easily as clothing gives us a way inside without announcing ourselves."
Rogue's eyes widened slightly as another part of the plan clicked into place. "You told me Hydra hates mutants. They consider us Untermenschen, which means even if Raven somehow escaped your book, there's almost no chance she'd join them. She'd be surrounded by people who would kill her the moment they learned what she was."
Adonai smiled and pointed toward her, pleased that she had finally reached the same conclusion.
"Now you understand. Raven isn't getting a chair in my inner circle. She has to prove herself first, and I can arrange that proof somewhere far away from anything she could seriously damage." He crossed the room again and stopped beside Rogue, resting one hand gently on her shoulder. "If she spends that probation dealing with another headache before Hydra becomes dangerous enough to demand my personal attention, then I solve two problems at once. She stays where I can monitor her, Destiny has no reason to seek revenge, and Hydra gets a shapeshifting nightmare crawling through its walls."
[A Few days Later]
The door to Adonai's office opened hard enough to strike the stopper with a sharp wooden crack, and Douglas Ramsey came through it carrying a thick folder and a laptop. Adonai glanced up from the acquisition proposal he had been reading and found the young man standing several feet inside the room, breathing slightly harder than usual and his normally composed face carrying an expression Adonai had rarely seen on him.
Tabitha looked up from the sofa near the windows as well, lowering the magazine she had been lazily reading while Douglas marched toward the desk without bothering to apologize for the entrance.
"Doug, my man, you look like you just saw a ghost." Adonai placed his pen beside the report and leaned back, giving Ramsey his complete attention. "What's up? Find anything interesting?"
"I may have found something potentially catastrophic, so yes, I suppose you can call it interesting." Douglas dropped the folder onto the desk with a heavy slap and remained standing. "I've spent the last four days trying to convince myself I'm connecting things that have nothing to do with each other, but every time I think I've got it wrong, I find something else that makes it worse."
Douglas could be excitable when presented with an interesting puzzle, but he rarely lost his cool. Adonai gestured toward one of the chairs before turning toward Tabitha, who had already abandoned her magazine and was watching Douglas with growing curiosity.
"Take a seat and start from the beginning. Tabby, would you grab us something to drink? Coffee for Doug, please, he looks like he needs it."
"Sure." Tabitha studied Douglas's haggard appearance for another second before pushing herself off the sofa. "And the usual midday martini for you, I take it?"
"You know me so well."
Tabitha headed toward the adjoining kitchenette. She disappeared through the doorway while Douglas pulled the chair closer, opened his Laptop and spread several sheets across Adonai's desk. Adonai rested his forearms against the desk and waited while Douglas arranged the papers into whatever order existed inside that remarkable head of his.
"Okay, so you remember when you asked me to look into the people trying to tear your companies apart?" Douglas asked, sliding several corporate records toward him.
Adonai nodded, leaning back. "What did you find?"
"I found the securities fraud," Douglas said, turning the laptop toward him. "At least, I think some of this probably qualifies. The problem is that I kept following their relationships backward, and whatever they're doing appears to have started years before any of them decided you were a problem."
Adonai was not surprised. "How many years are we talking about here? If this predates their little coalition against me, then we're looking at an existing arrangement they decided to redirect toward us."
"These companies have been cooperating through intermediaries, shared investments and financial institutions since at least 2002, probably earlier, and some of the money flows make absolutely no sense if you examine each company separately." Douglas opened several files. "I started by looking for how they were coordinating against us, and eventually I realized I was looking at one small part of something much larger."
Adonai nodded slowly and motioned for him to continue. "Hardly surprising. Rich men cooperating to become richer is generally a safe bet. What makes this catastrophic?"
Douglas pulled another page free and placed it over the others.
"Housing." He tapped several figures with his index finger and waited until Adonai followed. "The banks connected to these people are throwing money at mortgages, and they're getting less and less careful about who they lend to. Meanwhile, house prices just keep going up. Roxxon subsidiaries are financing developments in places where lenders are approving mortgages like there's no tomorrow. Funds connected to Shaw are buying securities made up of those mortgages, and other companies in the same network are insuring them, selling them off, or borrowing against them."
Tabitha returned carrying two coffees and a martini, placing everything on the desk before settling onto its corner. Douglas thanked her absently and took the cup without drinking from it. Adonai studied the charts while something old and unpleasant stirred at the back of his memory.
Housing prices climbing beyond wages, increasingly reckless mortgages, banks bundling debt together and selling it onward, institutions behaving as though property values would forever grow. He had watched documentaries about this story, and lived in a world permanently shaped by what came afterward.
"How bad are the mortgages?" Adonai asked.
"Pretty fucking bad, actually. Banks are giving loans to people who would've been turned down a few years ago, but since house prices keep going up, nobody seems to care." He pointed at another chart. "Think about it. Someone takes out a mortgage they can barely afford. The lender collects its fees and sells the loan. Then somebody else bundles thousands of those mortgages together and sells them as an investment. By the time the whole thing reaches the next buyer, the product's so complicated that half the people buying it probably couldn't tell you whose debt they're holding."
"And everyone gets paid while the house price keeps climbing," Adonai murmured.
"Exactly," Douglas said. "Everybody has an incentive to keep feeding it. The problem is that the entire thing depends on housing prices continuing upward and borrowers continuing to pay."
Fuck.
Of course it was happening here too. Adonai had spent so much time accounting for mutants, aliens, secret societies and corporations casually producing technology decades ahead of schedule that he had almost forgotten the perfectly ordinary catastrophe waiting for its turn on the calendar.
And naturally, this version looked poised to be even worse than the one he remembered, because ordinary human greed was insufficient for this universe. Here, literal fucking supervillains were deliberately helping stack the house of cards higher so they could gorge themselves on the wreckage when it finally collapsed.
Douglas leaned forward and dragged another sheet from beneath the first. "The part that worries me is the behavior around the edges. Some of these people are feeding the expansion while taking positions that would protect them if sections of it collapse. I can't prove a central conspiracy from financial records, but I can prove repeated coordination between institutions that publicly present themselves as competitors, and the pattern keeps appearing around housing, credit and commodities."
"How far does the cooperation extend?" Adonai asked. "Forget proving criminal conspiracy for a moment. Give me the pattern you actually believe you're seeing."
Douglas exhaled through his nose and pushed his untouched coffee aside. "I think several major players know the housing market is becoming unsustainable, and some of them are helping it continue anyway. Accelerating it. Nobody leaves a memorandum saying let's create a financial disaster, obviously, but the same group keeps appearing around every part of the machine."
He paused and pulled a pen from Adonai's desk, drawing a rough tower of rectangles across an empty sheet. "Imagine a house of cards where every level supports the next one. Everybody gets paid while the tower grows. The problem comes when enough cards near the bottom start bending, because leverage means the weight above them is enormous."
"And these people keep adding floors…" Adonai murmured.
Adonai stared at the crude tower Douglas had drawn. He could reconcile it easily enough. Greed explained plenty by itself, especially when individual institutions expected someone else to be holding the poisoned assets when the music stopped.
A recession could destroy smaller competitors, force desperate governments into favorable arrangements and transfer enormous quantities of property toward anyone liquid enough to buy after the collapse.
Tabitha had stopped looking bored somewhere during the explanation. "Okay, I'm going to represent the financially illiterate portion of the room here. What happens if house prices stop going up?"
Douglas looked toward her.
"The machine begins eating itself." Douglas looked directly at Adonai now, frustration entering his voice. "Potentially millions affected directly, and far more indirectly. Families lose their homes, and unemployment will spread faster than dirt on white shirts…That's why I came running here. If these people understand what they're building and they're deliberately keeping it alive because they think they can profit from the collapse, then they're gambling with everybody else's lives. These bastards could walk away richer while ordinary people spend years repairing damage they never caused."
"That's usually the case," Adonai said carefully, "have you figured out when things become dangerous?"
"Sort of. There are too many variables for an exact date, but based on when these mortgages reset and how quickly the exposure's growing, things could start getting really ugly around 2007." Douglas hesitated, then turned the laptop again. "And the projections for 2008 are even worse."
Adonai heard him, although part of his mind was on a future he remembered from another life. Lehman Brothers. Bear Stearns. Subprime mortgages. Mortgage-backed securities. Government bailouts. Entire neighborhoods covered in foreclosure signs while executives walked away from ruined institutions with fortunes intact.
"Adonai, are you listening to me?" Douglas asked, leaning forward sharply. "This is huge. If the exposure is anywhere near what I think it could become, we're talking about people losing everything they've worked their whole lives for. We could be looking at the worst recession since the Great Depression."
Adonai blinked and returned his attention to him. "I'm listening."
Adonai rose from his chair and walked toward the windows. Manhattan stretched beneath the glass in glittering towers of steel, each building filled with thousands of people conducting ordinary business beneath institutions whose decisions could reach into homes they would never see.
"Start mapping every institution connected to this," Adonai said, keeping his eyes on the city. "I want everyone involved tracked and every intermediary you can trace without exposing us. Follow ownership, shared directors, unusual positions and movements of capital. Try to determine their exact strategy."
Tabitha pushed herself away from the desk. "And what are you going to do if Doug proves it? You can't exactly punch a housing bubble."
Adonai looked at the crude house of cards Douglas had drawn and felt an old date settle heavily inside his mind. Three years until 2008, assuming history retained its schedule, and three years was an eternity when one knew where the avalanche would begin.
"I'm going to prepare," Adonai said quietly, folding Douglas's drawing once and slipping it back into the folder. "They can keep building their beautiful little house of cards for now. When the first card falls, I am goin–"
The telephone rang. Adonai stared at it with immediate annoyance.
He picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
There was a brief silence on the other end, followed by a woman's familiar voice.
"Adonai, it's Natasha. Can we talk?"
AN: I keep saying the pacing will be faster, but again and again I get lost in the details. I promise things will move faster from here, though. A couple of old characters will be making a return, it's about time Emma and the rest of the Hellfire Club were introduced, and Doctor Doom is here. I've honestly never seen him used in a fanfic before, at least not as an antagonist.
As always, advanced chapters are available on my Patreon. If you want to read ahead, vote on which story gets updated each week, or simply support my writing so I can focus more on it, you can check it out here:/abeltargaryen?