Kingdom of Heroes (24 page)

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WARNING: APPENDAGE DAMAGE NONREPAIRABLE

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SKIP APPENDAGE REPAIR Y/N

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TIME REMAINING UNTIL SYSTEM FULLY OPERATIONAL: 4H00M00S

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TIME REMAINING: 3H59M59S

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TIME REMAINING: 3H59M58S

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ACCESS FILE: SELF DEFENSE PROTOCOLS

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FILE LOCATED: OPEN FILE

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SEARCH WITHIN FILE: AGENT AMERICA

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OPEN DOCUMENT: AGENT AMERICA

Agent America: real name Bruce Rogers. Usually called The Agent a.k.a. The Supreme Chancellor of The United States of America. Home location: He’s not hard to find. There’s a tower, the largest in Metro City, known as The Agent’s Tower. He can be found there along with his couple hundred heavily armed security guards. The building itself is a fortress. There are a hundred floors, most of which are either living quarters for the security team or detention centers filled with cells where The Agent holds his occasional visitor. The building only has a single elevator, and there are no stairs at all, meaning that accessing any floor above the first requires going through the bottom level, which is almost always guarded by a hundred or so of The Agent’s troops.

The only way to access Roger’s penthouse without going through all of his guards would be to fly directly to the top and crash through that damn giant window of his, the one he uses to look out at all of the mere mortals in the world. But going straight to the top means you will just run into The Agent that much sooner, and therein lies the catch.

Strengths: The Agent is the pure embodiment of strength. His power level has consistently been measured between a 9.5 and 10, marking him as one of the, if not the strongest person on the face of the planet. Aside from the super strength, The Agent’s skin is virtually impenetrable. I have personally seen bullets bounce off of him as if they were wadded up pieces of notebook paper thrown by an asthmatic child. In other words, as if they were nothing. Knives, bombs, fire, missiles, I have witnessed him survive all of this and more without taking the slightest of scratches. Short of a nuclear bomb dropped directly onto his head, I have no idea what it would take to cause him any kind of physical harm. To be honest, I think he would probably survive the nuclear bomb.

Weaknesses: There is only one that I know of, and sadly, it is one of the few abilities I cannot build a weapon to reproduce. Psychic attack. There was a reason The Agent feared Quincy all those years. Rogers knew that his own mind was the only true vulnerability he had. A telepath, if they could get through The Agent’s anti-telepathy training, could conceivably force The Agent to act against his will, control his thoughts, erase his memories, and all of the other tricks psychics are capable of doing. But the real value to being in his mind would to pull the one trick telepaths usually miss out on: the ability to turn a supers’ powers completely off.

I’ve been told by more than one telepath (mind you, these were extremely powerful telepaths) that when they are inside a supers’ mind they can almost see a switch, and if they pull this switch, they can temporarily turn off someone’s powers. I see it more that they create a psychic block that prevents the super from using his power, but that’s just me. If somehow a psychic could invade The Agent’s mind and turn off his powers, even for just the slightest of moments, he would effectively be a normal and as vulnerable to harm as any other person on the face of the planet. Understand, The Agent knows his weakness, and he knows it well.

To protect himself, he had his entire penthouse, ceiling to floor, lined with the same material as my telepathic blocking patches. As long as he is in that building, as long as he is on that top floor and surrounded by those walls, he is completely protected from any type of psychic attack. To that end, he will not be caught outside of his penthouse without one of my psychic patches placed firmly on the back of his neck, but as is the case with some people, the patches are prone to giving him a massive headache that tends to last for several days after the patches are removed; therefore, he only leaves the safety of his apartment when he has to, and anymore, these times are few and far between.

Plan of action: The only really feasible plan would be to somehow outfit the armor with psychic abilities (something I was never able to do over the years) and then somehow get The Agent outside of his penthouse without a psychic patch attached to his skin. Not impossible, but highly improbable. Despite the seemingly hopelessness of trying to take on The Agent, I do have a solution, though it in and of itself is not the best of solutions.

Back during the war, the old government had designed a cure for gene virus enhanced individuals, a cure that would take away any and all of our abilities. In some cases, the cure was permanent; in others, it was only temporary. After the war was won, we shut down all of the manufacturing equipment used to make it, and we destroyed every case of the cure the old government was stockpiling to use against us, all except for one, one single container, one single sample. The Agent insisted on keeping it; I was never sure if he kept it as a memento or to keep The Seven in line, leaving us always knowing he could use it on one of us if he had the need.

This last sample of the cure (an airborne form found in a small canister of gas) is kept in The Agent’s depository. Located at the old military base that used to be Fort Knox, the sample is stored in the massively secured building where the old government used to keep the gold reserve. It’s said The Agent has turned the depository into his own personal museum, and the building houses his own private collection of artifacts from pre-war and post, mostly containing mementos from the various villains and heroes he fought and defeated over the years.

Now getting into the depository won’t be any easier than getting into The Agent’s penthouse. The depository houses at least two hundred guards, along with various other forms of protection, and The Agent’s private vault, where he keeps all of these valuables including the cure, is located on the fourth sub-basement some forty feet below the upper level. It will not be easy, and even with all the protection and armaments provided by this suit, I can honestly say it won’t be fun either.

But, if by some circumstance or just out of pure luck, you were able to retrieve the cure and use it on Rogers, the single application would be enough to render him powerless for at least a few minutes, giving you enough time to place a few bullets in his head. It is, as far as I can see, the only way to defeat him.

On a personal note, I want to speak directly to the man who has stolen this suit and is currently reading these files. With the defenses I had in place, I always knew there would only ever be one person capable of hijacking this suit, and of course, here you are.

Adam, for many years, I suspected the blocks Quincy placed in your mind would never hold. Whether the real memories were triggered by an outside source or the blocks just wore away with time, I always knew you would find your way here; I always knew you would come seeking your rightful vengeance.

As a matter of fact, whether I realized it consciously at the time or not, I designed this specific piece of armor and all of these protocols with you in mind, always knowing that when you came back you would need a vehicle for your revenge. What we did to you was wrong, and to this day, I still have no excuse other than to say that we felt we were doing what we had to do. Without you, the manufacturing process for the cure would have never been shut down, and the war would have most definitely gone in a different direction. You won the war for us, and whether you meant to or not, you helped to create the world we live in today.

All I can say is that I hope this affords you some measure of peace, and if I didn’t say it before you killed me, then let me say it now: I am so sorry for what we did, and I pray someday, somehow, you can find it in your heart to forgive us. God knows, I never could.

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Journal Entry

[Found on page 37]

Note: The following is a press release/newspaper article published in every major newspaper in the country approximately one year after the war and a few months after The Seven and their governors assumed control of all news organizations, radio broadcasts, and television stations.

The Seven have announced today a new testing program for all children born within the United Sates. Beginning at age six and until age fifteen, all children will be required to participate in an annual procedure to determine whether they are or will be affected by the gene virus, and whether they have been granted any special abilities from either their exposure to the virus or an inherited exposure.

Any children deemed to have abilities that are either unstable or uncontrollable will be taken into custody for further evaluation and training. The tests will also determine whether the children will be designated as a normal or a super, thereby affecting their lifelong classification.

Any parent or guardian who is deemed to knowingly keep their children from the testing process will be subject to arrest and trial with their local tribunal. Further information, such as testing dates and locations, will be shared at a later date.

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The Detective opened his eyes. He looked around, slowly awakening to where he was and what was going on. The ground around him was covered in blood and bits of flesh, the still melting remains of The Ice Queen. He rubbed his face, trying desperately to wake up from the fog that overwhelmed him, but absolute coherency wasn’t coming as quickly as he wanted.

He rubbed the back of his head; he was bleeding from where the Iron Knight had rammed his skull into the tree. It hurt. His adrenaline was down, and he could feel everything: his head, his shoulder, his ribs, his legs. Everything hurt, and he didn’t like.

“I am seriously having a bad day,” he said to himself as he tried to stand up only to slide back down.

He looked up to the sky, wondering what time it was. The bright sun had been replaced by dark, ominous clouds. A storm cooked in the distance; he could hear light bits of thunder rumbling from miles away. The storm was at least one, maybe even two, hours off, but he could still hear it closing in. He sniffed the air. Past the horrid aroma of decaying flesh, he smelled smoke. He looked over his left shoulder to see black smoke billowing in the sky above where the Quincy Estate had once been. By now, he figured, there probably wasn’t much of it left.

He tried to stand again. It was slow, but he eventually made his way to his feet. The tree beside him and a nice breeze blowing against his back seemed to be the only things managing to hold him up. He looked up into the tree; strands of white hair and pieces of bone with flesh still attached were stuck to several of the branches. He turned away from them, not wanting the images tattooed inside his mind. God knew, he had enough bad thoughts trapped in there as it was.

He took a step away from the tree, and it hurt. But at least, he thought to himself, he didn’t fall over. There had to be a silver lining in there somewhere. He walked, gingerly, slowly, towards the center of the clearing, toward the largest smear of blood that had once been The Ice Queen. The closer he got, the stronger the stench of death became, but there was something else, something lingering, something that probably shouldn’t have remained, but did: the slightest scent of strawberries.

He bent down to retrieve his coat. The scent, and the memories it produced, put the smallest of smiles on his face. The pain he felt as he stood back up, though, quickly erased it.

He hurt everywhere. From his head to his legs, every part of him was enveloped in pain. And somewhere deep inside, in a place he didn’t like to go to for any reason ever, he felt something else. The pain he could deal with; the pain he could eventually get used to, but this, this was something that he would have to try and bury. Not that it would work; it never did. And this time, this time it was worse. It was right there on the surface, forcing him to feel it for reasons he couldn’t understand. One little goddamn emotion overriding all the physical pain his body could produce.

Sadness. For some reason he couldn’t understand, he was sad. As he looked around at the bloody grass, the bits and pieces of blood and bone that had once been a woman, sadness overwhelmed him. But why, he silently asked himself. Who was she? One of The Seven, a member of the corrupt government that had driven the country to the brink of despair, why would he feel anything for her? She had most likely betrayed him. He thought so; Adam, the disembodied entity within the Iron Knight armor, had pretty much told him so. She had probably been using him for one of The Agent’s nefarious schemes, so why should he, for a moment, feel sadness toward a woman who probably didn’t give two shits about him.

But he felt it nonetheless. There was, deep inside of him, a heartfelt pang of regret that he couldn’t save her when she needed him to; he couldn’t save her just as he had been unable to save the rest. His life seemed made up of all of those he couldn’t save, all of those he was always just a little too late to help.