The Sage of the Mind

Disclaimer - The rights of the respective characters are with their respective owners. I don’t mean to violate their intellectual property rights and thus, only my original characters are my IP. 

The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 51 [August 2010]

–Axle Riddle–

Welp, there goes his expectations of Tony Stark not doing anything reckless out the window.

Axle watched as Tony Stark entered the F1 Car and still took part in the Grand Prix, despite his mind not being addled by the increasingly tainted blood he was carrying around in his body.

He sighed as they telecasted the fight Tony had with Vanko. Vanko was still sporting that beat up suit with the whips. He winced as one of the whips sheared the very expensive Rolls Royce Phantom in half while Tony suited up with his very portable, probably lightweight suit.

It was kind of awesome to watch on TV, watching something that would only be CGI in his previous world. Then, he witnessed the somewhat anticlimactic battle, mostly because he knew what the end result of that was going to be.

The Hulk brothers in the base were not cursed with the same knowledge so they were on their toes, watching as the battle between good and evil culminated in the victory for the good. He rolled his eyes as he watched Randall cheer when the camera panned around to show Tony Stark’s Iron Man looking around with his stoic faceplate, with Vanko lying at his feet with the knock-off Arc Reactor crushed.

“Alright boys! The good news is that Stark Survived. Bad news, this means that the Expo will happen and the attack is now even more likely to happen in the Expo. So, chop chop!” He said as the hulks began their training on the now vastly bigger floor that he had carved out for them underground.

Randall was not being trained because he was going to be the “Guy in the chair” in his own words, the one who would type on the keyboard and counter hack the hack that the bad guys would do.

“I assume you want some samples from the fight?” He asked, with his voice lowered down. After training it, he could now make it so that the source of voice could be manipulated and he was now projecting his voice from just behind Randall.

“Jeez! Stop doing that,” Randall said as he continued to work on some sort of schematics in front of him. 

“Don't worry about the hack part. With Bruce assisting me, we can defeat whoever it is on the other side. Shouldn’t be much of a problem. The problem is on your side, you do know that, right?” Randall said nonchalantly as he continued to work on his computer. Pesky things like eye fatigue and blue light radiation not mattering to someone who could take bullets to the face and not even flinch.

He did know. They had conducted some tests, in conjunction with Bruce, and to his shame, they had found that at a given time, he could only “pilot” two hulks by swinging them around in the air, to help Tony against the small army of drones that Vanko was going to throw at them.

Vanko, in his huge suit, should not be much of a problem for the Hulks because while the suit was significantly bulkier than other renditions, well, he could just throw one of the Hulks up and up in the air, and then simply…drop them, making for a truly devastating bullet that would turn Vanko into little more than pulp.

As for the part that came after Vanko’s death, his little kill switch of every Arc Reactor exploding would be taken care of by him with ease. He might not be able to lift all the hulks in the air at the same time, dozens of lightweight Arc Reactors were another thing altogether.

“Alright, we have less than a week. Let’s make sure that it doesn’t come to the point of Bruce getting “stressed” out if you know what I mean,” He whispered to Randall whose body went stiff as he shivered minutely the moment he mentioned Bruce stressing out.

And for good reason. 

Randall, with his big head, had advanced by leaps and bounds as he learned all there was about hacking, and after getting curious about this Bruce person and how they were to be around tiptoes around that person, on the Invisible Man’s orders, Randall had gotten curious and ended up hacking into some Military contractor’s databases.

It was apparently much easier to do that than trying to hack into the Army’s databases, which could also be done, according to him.

There, the brothers finally saw the footage of The Hulk and just how much stronger he was compared to all of them. Sure, they were almost untenable when it came to the perspective of a normal human but the gulf between the brothers and the OG Hulk was just as much if not wider than the gulf between the brothers and normal humans.

From then on, Randall began treating Bruce with reverence during all of their talks. It was kind of a win-win in his books. Bruce got someone academically inclined, aside from Betty to talk to. And Randall understood who and what Bruce was and conducted their interactions civilly. This meant that none of the other brothers ever got into a direct conversation with Bruce without supervision.

‘Alright, have you decided on which two will be the ones who will be in the air? So that we can begin creating plating of armour and weapons for them,” He asked Randall because while the Russian Billionaire had essentially unlimited funds and connections, even they took time to reach Manhattan because of the increased scrutiny around the entire area due to his presence.

“I will give you the list by the end of the day. Now, will you please give me some peace and quiet so that I can work?” Randall sassed at him and was’ that a change in their behaviour from before. They used to quiet down and stiffen whenever he declared his presence but, at least for Randall, it doesn't quite do the trick anymore. He is not scared of the Invisible Man anymore.

Speaking of the Russian Billionaire, he was quite a useful little fellow and while the extent of their conversation never exceeded past him creating a list and putting it into his hands, he should probably look into him a bit. He never really had the need to look into the Billionaire, especially since he never really tripped on anything.

He lived in a penthouse suite, sure but so did all the other billionaires. Private security was made redundant by yours truly so most ultra rich people didn’t have an entire convoy surrounding them as they walked through the streets. Now they looked like regular people in regular clothing walking around the city, going to regular places in regular subway trains.

The Russian Billionaire frequented a deli that he liked, had a favourite pizza place, a favourite coffee place. He went to all those places using the subway system, which was very clean these days.

Courtesy of yours truly.

He was sure that the cleaners of the Subway system worked very hard but he was also sure that they were, as was common in most parts of the world, understaffed, underpaid, and overworked.

So, he did one more good deed in his name. All the trains that entered Manhattan were cleaned thoroughly by him. Not a single speck of vomit, dust, food, etc. was kept in those trains as they passed his area. He also made sure that the Mayor got a stern warning from him about the cleaners.

If they suddenly found themselves out of a job, well, he didn’t know what he would do but the Mayor would certainly find himself living in the same filth that he would clean from the subways every day.

He could see the Russian Billionaire in Central Park on his afternoon run. So, he wrote down on the special notebook that he kept in his wardrobe, that he would get a list of items in the evening that needed to be delivered expeditiously.

He continued to work on his range, in the meantime. He wanted to at least be able to lift and fling around three hulks before the expo. He had 15 days for that to happen and he had a hunch that he was going to need all the power he could bring to bear if he wanted to finish the Stark Expo without even a single injury, let alone any casualty.

He would have even kept Vanko alive if not for the fact that he would only be busted out of whatever prison they put him in, and then made to create cheap half working Arc Reactors to be sold to the world.

Now, he was not some paragon of capitalism and intellectual property rights but he knew that Stark’s Arc Reactors were eventually going to be distributed to the rest of the world, but for projects that were exclusively nonmilitary.

Vanko’s reactors, if he made any, would first find themselves in the hands of bad people before the good. So, Vanko dies.

Nonnegotiable and he was going to die anyway, what with the Bulky armour not having the same reinforcement for the user that Stark’s suits did. The Hulks would take care of it and if not them, then he didn’t need much force to make sure that one suffered from a heart attack as well as vein bursting in their brain.

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