If you want to read ahead by 20+ chapters from here you can visit my Patre-on.
[P] [A] [T] [R] [E] [O] [N]
[email protected]/Yggdrasil_Loki
….
A straight-up shitshow.
Not that their lives were some nonstop misery-fest (though Kimura's kid years were a grinder).
Nah, more like they wallowed in the muck by choice, churning out horrors not 'cause they had to, but 'cause they could.
Their arcs tracked close to the comics I'd skimmed, MCU tweaks aside. Kimura? Trailer-trash spawn from a bottle-soaked hellhole, bullied into a feral street rat.
Powers kicked in, and boom, victim flips to villain overnight.
All those schoolyard scars, the poverty grind, parental ghosts? Bloomed into a revenge bonfire.
She could've been a lab specimen herself, super strength, skin like Kevlar, but nah, too useful as a attack dog.
Sharp enough not to be a total meathead, but her baggage capped her at gutter-level dreams.
Passions? Cash and cruelty.
Money she didn't even crave that hard, but she'd chase it anyway, diving into the shittiest gigs for a fat stack.
Power? Ideals? Pfft, keep her stocked with playthings, and she'd heel like a dream, tail-wag happy to rip throats on command.
Why waste a mutant who loves brainstorming ways to leash or erase her own kind? Rice? Eerily similar vibe, but flipped script.
Golden childhood, silver-spoon setup, old money, society clout. Grew up a trust-fund prodigy, Gates or Musk knockoff vibes.
But underneath? Born rat with a sadist's itch. Solid organizer, networked like a pro, silver-tongued enough to snow funders and play the visionary. Truth? Mediocre hack at best.
Echoed Stryker hard, both puffed as ground breaking geniuses, but really? Just pimps for other folks' breakthroughs, vanishing the help after.
They excelled at corralling talent to do the grunt, then poof, loose ends tied. X-23? Rice hovered like a bad smell, but his "contributions" were zilch beyond Uncle Sam's checkbook.
The real engine? Dr. Sarah Kinney. Fresh-faced firebrand back in the day, gene-mutator whiz kid full of spark. Eleven years on? Idealism's a corpse. She'd wised up to the viper pit she crawled into.
How'd I clock that from his head? Easy, people leak. The wide-eyed newbies buzzing with career highs? Worlds apart from the ones clocking that their boss could erase 'em on a whim, no cop in sight who'd touch it.
Sarah'd had ample "demonstrations" to drive it home.
Base wasn't a cartoon slaughterhouse, no daily vivisections or backstabbing shootouts, thank fuck, but slips happened.
And she knew damn well what X-23 was prepping for. Got front-row seats to Rice's "curriculum" rollout, too.
I'd chat with Kinney later; right now, Rice's other baby had my focus, the mutant plague project.
Same bunker, humming along nice. Vamp lore? He knew scraps: Blade iced 'em all, after bloodsuckers sicced global intel on his ass for a decade-plus.
But the virus sample? Dropped from on high, pristine as a lab diamond, bundled with deep dives on vamp genetics, turning norms, the works.
Current grind: dissecting it, tweaking a mutant-only strain that spared baselines. Glimmers of hope, sure, but seven-eight years minimum? Dream on.
I'd bet twenty, easy, realistic for this black-budget voodoo.
Funding flowed like wine, top-brass blessings galore, but Rice's crew? Skeleton shift, no Stark- or Banner-level brains. And if the suits scored a real phenom?
Fat chance they'd chain 'em to this clown. Nah, spin up a solo lab, Stryker Scientific-style. First to the finish line wins the cookie.
….
Once I'd scraped every last dirty secret from those human skulls, I let the ex-base honcho go, straight to whatever afterlife awaited scum like him, and ducked into the bathroom.
Fished Kimura out of the sink, probed her gray matter for any spark of life. Nada. On a whim, I conjured a dagger and poked her skin; interesting tidbit, death had shut down her natural armor plating.
Handy for me; I needed tissue samples anyway. A couple minutes later, the woman's head (and let me tell you, nothing like the sultry bombshell from the comics, more like a grizzled battle-ax with a face that could curdle milk) was separated from her body.
My little subspace pocket got a new addition: a chilled briefcase stocked with everything from blood vials to spinal fluid chunks.
Dumped the remains in the tub, yanked the curtain shut, then gave my hands a proper scrub, splashed my face, and fixed a few stray hairs that'd escaped my 'do.
Time for the main event: wholesale slaughter.
Unlike Stryker's hush-hush dam bunker, where I'd strolled in, snagged the adamantium, Jason's "potion" stash, and ghosted out without a fuss, this crew was rotten to the core. No mercy.
The colonel might've been a die-hard racist, but sadism wasn't his jam, he played it clean when he could. Rice? Different breed entirely.
Using innocent captives to train X-23 in the fine art of murder? Par for the course.
"Eh, a couple Mexicans vanish from the next town over, who's counting?" Forget humanity; hell, as the big bad in a couple flicks from this cursed cinematic universe, I'd barely racked up any Earthling kills.
Gotta fix that, or what kind of evil god am I?
That last thought froze me mid-step, something off about it… Truth was, I'd noticed ages ago that since sliding into this body, I hadn't once mentally dropped my old name.
But "Loki"? That stuck like glue, and damn if I didn't like it. The further I went, the more I dug the stuff I'd bolted from Asgard to avoid.
Associating with this charming screw-up of a rogue? It felt right.
Even chatting with Xavier about "past" bits, I'd catch myself owning them like they were mine, only reeling back after the fact, if at all.
Yet when I deliberately poked Loki's memories, they stayed distinctly his. Red flag, if I stopped to think…
Maybe I'd been too harsh on the body's previous (or was it?) owner…
Scary to admit, yeah. But on the flip? Being a full-on god beat the hell out of some freak hybrid: a pathetic human scrap fused to a frost-giant runt's shell. (Never deluded myself otherwise.)
Still, it opened a Pandora's box of headaches.
Like: What's a "personality," anyway? Bundle of traits, experiences, morals? Then yeah, my old self warping toward Loki's made sense, quarter-century mortal scraps versus a god's millennium-plus? No contest.
Or the kicker: Why'd I see myself as me, not Loki with "future knowledge" tacked on, plus human baggage from another universe? Chew on that one…
….
Bonus Chapter on every 500 power stones;
If you want to read ahead by 20+ chapters from here you can visit my Patre-on.
[P] [A] [T] [R] [E] [O] [N]
[email protected]/Yggdrasil_Loki