All-Star Ōtsutsuki 35 - Anissa Interlude 2 (Invincible/Naruto OC-SI) (Patreon)

Earth’s communications networks were very, very antiquated by the standards of most galactic polities. For the servitors that had come to ferry her to the edge of the solar system, the real challenge was downgrading their technology to functionally interface with their primitive technology. Mostly so that they could begin the process of carefully, painstakingly, creating her false identity based off of information that had been taken from Nolan’s extensive surveys.

Anissa Farman, a lone child of two deceased parents and self-employed as a… business consultant. That was the rough shape of the identity that they were making, but there was more than just a name and a career. One had to craft the whole life history, though not that much, in the grand scheme of things. A mere twenty-something years old, primarily homeschooled, with what was known as an online college degree and a trust fund left by her parents.

All of it was false but had to be above reproach and bulletproof, to the degree that it could not engender any form of suspicion in the defenders of the planet. Even her actual approach into the world had involved some very surreptitious cloaking techniques to dodge their sensors as she came down in what the natives called Canada. Unlike other parts of the world, it still had vast, empty, open wilderness that was practically untouched by mankind.

Which made it rather ideal for her purposes of settling any odds and ends that she couldn’t bring with her into civilization. Her traditional uniform, for example, was one item. It was replaced with clothing more appropriate for a human female in her age range and supposedly fashionable enough from Nolan’s limited capacity for discerning those things.

Then it was just a matter of trying to figure out her strategy, for actually entering into their society. Everything regarding the false identity was just the mask that she’d wear. But if Anissa was going to actually manage the objectives that Kregg had given to her, she needed something more than another bog-standard civilian lifestyle.

She needed an excuse to get close.

Thankfully, it wasn’t that uncommon for the natives of Earth to develop anomalous powers. Let alone abilities that could tangentially resemble those of a Viltrumite. Provided she limited herself to some degree or perhaps withheld her flight, she might even be able to use merely her superior strength and durability to enter the ranks of the so-called superheroes.

It was the tentative shape of a plan. The real challenge would come in actually putting it into action.

On the chance that she was discovered, there would be no promise of escape. She would have to fight to her last and hope that the empire could avenge her. Potentially she could try to engineer some kind of breakout for Nolan, or if she flew as fast as possible…

But no. Anissa knew that she was chosen because of her capacity for softer applications of force and diplomacy. It was time to actually put these into practice, and see what she could achieve in a short amount of time. The empire could do without one Viltrumite, even if it’d strain them ever so slightly even further.

With all of her clothing, her bags, and her ‘belongings’ manufactured to fit in, Anissa started to trek south. Toward the city of Chicago, with the great, bounding leaps that’d take her there in due time, rather than being caught flying anywhere.

Human society was incredibly strange.

Anissa had the introspection to recognize some of the uncanny sensations it gave off came from how singularly odd it was to be around a Viltrumoid species so different from her own. Their faces, bodies, the way they sounded and talked… it was disorienting. Especially considering the sheer numbers of them.

The first time she stood in a crowd, the woman nearly got absolutely, bewilderingly disoriented from the press of it. She was old enough to have seen Viltrumite society before the Scourge Virus, but it’d been so long, so very long, since there’d been this many Viltrumoid faces next to each other. Frankly, she didn’t quite know how to take it.

It was one thing to see the ring of bodies that were strewn around Viltrum, a reminder of what had been taken from them in cowardice. To see all of these living faces, showing a range of emotions, was a bit bewildering for the first couple of days. Anissa did not flee from the experience, so much so that she sequestered herself to get used to the vast array of peoples.

Compared to fighting for her life, she refused to let something as trite as social contact be the thing that defeated her. So eventually, when Anissa had felt she’d stabilized, she headed out to begin laying the foundations of her infiltration. Of which the woman had no small amount of tools, helped by humanity’s current technological prowess at the time of her subversion.

Their money functionally wasn’t backed by anything at all. Which seemed silly, and strange to Anissa. The functions of finance weren’t something most Viltrumites took much of an interest in, but she understood the broad strokes that an economy was meant to have some sort of value that was backed by a real resource. In space, there were enough reserves of precious metals and other materials to allow their empire to run more or less without much in the way of interference by the Viltrumites.

Earth, however, by and large had currency that was based solely on the word of their governments. Despite how unstable this seemed, it meant that as long as you had a sufficiently powerful AI, the system could be quietly hacked, and enough odds and ends pilfered for a small fortune to be established. Something that could fit her background, for example.

At the very least, no one asked too many questions past whether or not she could afford it. Once her finances had been shown off, the so-called ‘realtor’ was more than happy to merely hand over the lease posthaste. Then it was just a matter of beginning to build a life and explore her new environment.

After all, due to how she looked, Anissa was just another face in the crowd. Provided she restrained her sense of disgust at times and kept her expression neutral and placid, all she had to do was merely observe and see the difference between observational reports and reality. There were all sorts of things that Nolan had never quite managed to hammer into his reports of Earth, after all.

One of them was the fact that they were a more social species than Viltrumites were. Or perhaps her kin’s own lack of sociability came from how few of them were left. It wasn’t as if she’d been present when their numbers were at their peak. All she knew was that it was bewildering to see in person.

Public displays of affection like kissing between mates, for example. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever had much of an inclination to do the same to her past husbands before they died. Touches and softness toward their young, who were by and large seemingly not left in creches to be raised according to wider human values.

Much of it was very, very strange and furthered the sense of uncanniness that she’d already been struggling with. Though part of it was also from the awkward, unknowable sensations that it made her feel in her chest when she saw them interact in these ways. Just walking around the city of Chicago, teeming with masses of humanity, made it difficult to truly categorize them in one neat and tidy box, like some of the servants of the empire could easily be put into.

Or maybe it was the fact that they looked so much like her that engendered these feelings into Anissa. Food for thought for later. It wasn’t the only thing that struck Anissa as she wandered around to gain a preliminary understanding of her stomping grounds for the future.

What also struck her was that the alien she’d come to study was everywhere. Not personally, though it did seem as if every so often one might find him flying through the sky at high speeds. that even she had to strain to track. More so that his fingerprints were everywhere, over the culture of the city.

In the shops, they sold some sort of facsimile toy of him that human children seemed to be obsessed with. Articles of clothing with him adorning them, worn proudly by people here and there. As if representing their new allegiance.

There was a great deal of construction going on of new buildings all around her. But in the midst of it, she found a stall that was run by a portly, balding, aging human man. It was filled with Taijitu memorabilia. Enough so that she approached, mostly out of a morbid sense of curiosity as to why so much of it was being sold.

Did he receive a cut of the profits…? Nolan had mentioned that a strange form of hero worship wasn’t too uncommon on Earth. She supposed that stranger cargo cults had occurred on worlds the empire controlled. It was useful for their purposes if their lessers worshipped them as gods, seeing as it made them more pliable for their ends.

“Do you mind if I ask some questions?” She asked, as the man looked up from his device that he was reading, blinking at the sudden words.

“Oh? Uh, sure.”

“I’m new to the city, so I was just curious as to why you had so much…” Anissa trailed off, looking for the right words. “Let’s call it reverence for Taijitu.”

He blinked again, scratching at his stubbly jawline. “That’s a deep question. Well, this is mostly a job for me, but if I had to say why so many people like him…it’s because he cares.”

“He cares?” She asked, trying to wrap her mind around what he meant by that. “Can you explain that a little more for me?”

“When Taijitu came to our world, the first thing he did was fight for us. Again, and again, and again,” the man emphasized. “This city, first and foremost. When Omni-Man went crazy, he was there to stop him from destroying the other half of the city to the ground. That means here, there’s not a place in the city that’ll take his money, let alone spit on his name. Not when he saved it, through blood, sweat, and tears.”

There was a genuine sense of devotion there that she could read in his words. Someone who believed what he was saying wholeheartedly. Whatever act that Taijitu was doing to get on their side, she’d concede that it was a genuinely good one. Shaking him from the foundations of this society might perhaps be difficult.

“I’ll take a t-shirt and one of the ball caps." That ought to dispel confusion as to why she was questioning. “As my thanks for answering.”

“Coming right up, ma’am. And it’s no big deal. Plenty of people are big fans of Taijitu these days. Hope you have a nice trip here.”

“I hope so as well,” she said, giving him a brief, polite smile, and paying for her purchases before going off to rapidly change.

It’d be strange if she didn’t wear what she’d purchased, would it not?

Whatever the truth of the matter was, Anissa could see that the actual function of getting deeper into the confidences of this community might be challenging. But it was confirmation that Taijitu seemed to hold this city as his home. If she was active here on a regular enough basis, perhaps that would give her the avenue to get close.

All she had to do was find out his relevant weaknesses and strengths to better document them. Though, and she’d admit that this was a traitorous thought, the notion of incorporating the strength of these Ōtsutsuki into the mainline Viltrumite bloodline wasn’t an unwelcome one. He was… hardly a homely-looking man, with features that were far softer than most of her kin’s.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be any true hardship at all.

Contrary to what she’d imagined, being a superhero was not particularly easy at all. She tried to sit down and use their archaic information networks to understand what, precisely, was involved in the work. Nolan had made it seem like there was a great deal of fighting that took up the brunt of it.

But wherever she looked, most of the images of Taijitu involved him doing things that… weren’t exactly combat-oriented at all? Footage taken that seemed to be of him playing with children, collecting small pets that had gotten away from their owners, or otherwise interacting with the general populace. To the point where Anissa suspected either she was missing something, Nolan had, or that Taijitu was an outlier in this profession.

Perhaps a mix of all three.

Going to the Global Defense Agency to try and worm her way into their ranks was a poor idea across the board. They knew enough to likely spot her or at least dig into her false identity and out her on the spot. Which meant that a certain level of subterfuge would be required.

A mask would be needed, for starters, to protect the identity that she was crafting here. Or at least to prolong anyone prodding into it. A costume as well, though she had some unmarked suits that lacked the telltale Viltrumite logos that should theoretically work. If colored black or red, then no one should know the difference between it and the other silly garb the primitives of this planet wore.

The more she looked into the whole grand enterprise, it seemed almost like too much work. But she’d committed to this course of action, and the avenues of actually getting close enough to investigate the target of her mission were few and far between. So Anissa did what she could, using the adaptive coloring of her existing outfits and programming in matte black, and red hues alongside her sides.

Finishing off the look with a full, face-obscuring mask, with a visor across her eyes, and it’d likely fit in fine with the other examples of costumes that the global champions of this world used. Effort that took days of backtracking between Chicago and her wilderness stash, but the tedium did have an end when her ‘costume’ was finished.

Now it was just a matter of actually getting out there to do the job. Which was where she ran into more issues.

If there was one thing that she was surprised about, it was the sheer dearth of relevant crime that she could practically stop. Nolan’s reports had made Earth seem like a planet in crisis, where the authorities were decidedly struggling to keep up with the demands of the criminals. To a degree, the planetary news networks would have had their natives believing there were crises around the clock.

Within Chicago, though, she was coming to find that there was a concerning lack of actual incidents for her to intervene in. Bounding from rooftop to rooftop with ease, it took a little bit for her to instinctively clamp down on the instinct to adjust herself midair with her natural flight. But the actual technique wasn’t that unknown, seeing as particularly high-gravity worlds could prove taxing for long-term flight.

Keeping her eyes peeled, however, was making the entire enterprise one of frustration. As far as she could see, the local authorities were doing an exemplary job in maintaining the peace. In her sleek costume, she was briefly concerned if she was ever going to find an opportunity to actually make any kind of mark in the superheroic community.

Anissa was nothing if not patient, however, and it only took a few nights of patrols for her investigations to bear fruit. A human female, alone in an alleyway, being accosted by a human male, menacing her with a weapon. Thieves and brigands were a problem for any society, though to her understanding, the authorities of this planet didn’t cull the offending individuals to improve the world. 

A shame, but as an opportunity to actually get involved with her chosen means of infiltration? It would suffice.

Dropping down from below, she pulled on her flight at the very last moment to keep from cracking the pavement beneath her. Instead, she came to a more gentle stop, approaching the entangled duo. “Cease your actions, citizen.”

She tried her best to project the kind of authority that she’d grown used to wielding as a Viltrumite into the command. Only for the man in question to reel toward her, bug-eyed, gaunt, and twitchy. Perhaps on some kind of stimulant or in an altered state. “W-What?”

“I said cease your actions, lest I be forced to cease them for you,” she stated, hands on her hips. “We’ll have to get in contact with the local authorities to take you into custody for threatening this woman.”

The logical thing would have been for him to submit. She was a superheroine, obviously, with some sort of enhanced strength or speed. At least to the degree that any sensible being would have immediately given up on the spot.

Which was why she was shocked when he instead chose violence. It was a sudden burst for him, though it might as well have been a snail’s pace for her, as she watched him rush toward her with a knife. Even as he approached, she didn’t move, as he stabbed it toward her chest in an attempt to harm her.

“Fuck you!” He screamed, shrill and manic, only to find his weapon totally useless in the wake of the attack.

“I’d like you to remember that I gave you the chance to submit peacefully,” Anissa commented, hand blurring as it whipped out and grabbed his wrist.

“W-What?” That was all the time he had before she promptly and unceremoniously applied a modicum of pressure, barely a twitch of her fingers, and broke his wrist.

The drive and desire to do more was… present, but again, she was trying hard to play at this asinine game the Earthlings indulged in. Nor did she need to do much more when the knife fell out of his hand, still in her grip.

“AAAGH!” He yelled, stomping his foot as he tried to wrench himself free. “Y-You crazy bitch!”

“Like I said, I’d given you the option to end this in the most civilized way possible,” she spoke, her voice as cold as ice. “You chose this outcome. Live with the consequences.”

Turning to face the woman, she looked to be somewhere in the range of middle-age, judging by the marks of wear on her features. Brunette, pale, and frankly a little unremarkable across the board. “Are you unharmed, citizen?”

“Yes,” she answered breathlessly, hands shaking. “H-He almost took my purse, a-and I knew I shouldn’t have cut through the alleyway, but—"

“Would you be willing to call the proper authorities?” Anissa asked, cutting through the rambling that she could see coming in. “It’d be best to get this criminal properly secured.”

The man in question was still whining and cursing a great deal as he tried to wrangle himself free. It was hurting him more in the process, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care that much. He’d made this situation of his own accord.

“Right. I can do that,” the woman nodded furiously, taking out her communication device and making the call quickly enough.

It didn’t take more than a few minutes for the local police forces to approach, where her apprehended suspect had more or less tuckered himself out. The uniformed office approached, looking gaugingly at the sweating man in her grasp. “Is that the mugger?”

“Yes,” she confirmed with a nod. “I unfortunately had to break his wrist when subduing him.”

“People have gotten worse from stronger superheroes, so I’m not going to hold it against you,” the man shrugged. “And I’m pretty sure he’s high as a kite, so even odds are whether or not he knows he’s even injured right now.”

“Is that a common issue?”

He looked at her with a darkly amused look. “You must be new. People getting caught up in drugs has always been a problem and likely always will be. Just the trouble with free will, I guess. Whatever, let’s get the cuffs on this guy, and the witness statements.”

The process from there was mostly busywork in her eyes, as they merely asked about the series of events. However, they were more believable than a man who, after a brief check as to his criminal history, was revealed as a long-time offender, with a spree of petty crime going back to his youth. In the end, it was rather open and shut.

“Thank you for your assistance, ma’am,” the officer said, nodding toward her again.

“It was the least I could do to help the citizens of this city,” she assured him, and frankly, she did mean it. It took perhaps a few minutes at most. Tedious, but useful in establishing her cover.

With a nod, he headed back to his patrol vehicle, whereas the woman she’d protected came up nervously. “Again, I have to say… thank you. I’d heard that the city was getting safer, but apparently not so safe as to allow me to take that risk.”

There was something odd about this situation, and it took Anissa longer than she’d liked to realize what it was. It was perhaps the fact that this woman, this weakling, was genuinely thankful. Sincere, in a way that the Viltrumite had rarely ever encountered. Her underlings had fawned and played at obsequiousness to try and please her, but that had been performative. Even she wasn’t so oblique as to miss that.

Whereas this genuinely seemed to be coming from the heart. She didn’t know how to feel about the odd sensation that engendered within her. Awkward, perhaps, which was a rather new and unfamiliar feeling as well.

“It was no hardship,” Anissa assured her. “And please, for your sake try not to repeat the action again.” 

That was suitably superheroic to say, right? Most of the illustrated media regarding superheroes Nolan had shared seemed to lean toward a certain level of overly servile behavior, which… frankly, Anissa didn’t think she could replicate. Aping the basic mannerisms shouldn’t be beyond her, though.

The woman nodded, smiling. “God bless you. I’m definitely just taking an Uber next time…” With that done, she ambled off, receiving a ride from another officer back to her home.

Anissa found that her job was done at that point, leaping back up to the rooftops, and taking the moment to surveil the city. Not for the first time, she bemoaned how difficult it’d be to find hotspots of trouble while trying to stick to one city. Let alone without her powers of flight. But if nothing else, standing on the edge of a tall skyscraper, she could at least feel some satisfaction in making a small amount of forward progress.

“That was some good work. You actually handled that fairly well.”

The voice came from beside her, and she practically reeled on the spot, twisting to face them as fast as humanly possible. With her hands up in a defensive position, she spotted him, just hovering a few scant feet away. Anissa hadn’t heard anything, but to be fair, she had also known he could create localized wormholes of some kind.

To think they were that stealthy…

“Woah, woah, woah!” Taijitu spoke, raising his hands up. “Let’s calm down! Sorry, it was my bad for spooking you. I should probably stop teleporting right up on people…”

“It’s… fine,” she conceded, lowering her hands slowly, all while she watched him carefully. “I was merely startled.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to figure out that I shouldn’t just pop in on people. But teleportation’s handy like that. When you get it, you wanna use it for everything.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it…”

“I’m rambling, aren’t I?” Taijitu admitted. “Sorry.”

“No, I just didn’t expect to meet someone so powerful on my first real patrol.”

“Haven’t you been building-hopping for a few nights now?” He asked, arching a brow her way.

Immediately, Anissa felt her pulse spike. “How did you know that?”

With an impish, almost childish smile, Taijitu tapped the side of his face, pointing to his eyes. “I’ve got good eyesight. I saw you looking around for crime to stop, but either me or my clones are usually on top of that in Chicago,” he admitted. “I’d apologize, yet it feels a little silly to feel bad about making the city safer.”

Small wonder why she was struggling to find any criminals around here! Stupid! She frowned underneath her mask. “Then it seems like my efforts were ultimately never going to bear any fruit.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he shot back. “You made sure that woman got home to her kids and handled her attacker accordingly. I’d say be a little gentler with him, but he’s alive, and I doubt anyone’s gonna have much in the way of sympathy for rapists.”

Typically, she would have slew him on the spot. But ultimately, that sort of thing seemed to be frowned upon by the law enforcement of this world. She’d merely have to rely on their decision-making processes to handle the situation for her. 

“Again, my experience with this sort of… superheroism is limited. Your judgement is one I’ll defer to.”

“Got a name yet?”

She opened her mouth to speak before stopping on the spot. Frustratingly enough, she did not in fact choose a name for herself. An egregious lapse in judgment, but one that she could rectify now. What would be a good word that would work for the purposes of inspiring these inferior creatures…

“Defender. I wish to be known as Defender.”

“Defender, huh? It’s as good as any of the other names I’ve heard. Let me be the first to introduce you to this line of work.” He paused. “Then I guess to see if you need help? It feels a little awkward to ask the question, but I know what it’s like to be the new guy on the block. You’ve got a bit of my sympathy.”

Anissa couldn’t help but stare. Surely, it wasn’t going to be that easy? All of this time, she’d deliberated on how she was going to get into his good graces, and now he was merely opening the door for her?! The woman almost refused on the spot until she got the better of her own pride.

For the Viltrumite empire, she needed to get this information from him. So for the moment, she could play the fawning protege. Anissa may have continued her rounds if her own private, specific Viltrumite communicator wasn’t going off.

That required attention, since it meant the weak Quantum Entanglement device had a message. Larger setups and beacons could blast out real-time conversations across vast distances, but the handheld device she possessed was mostly for short, simple text messages between herself and relevant parties.

Chiefly Kregg, and presumably the Grand Regent, if he was following her mission at all closely. It meant that she needed to inspect what the actual message was as soon as possible. Making her way back home as swiftly as she could, and then ensuring she was thoroughly alone, Anissa opened up the pack on her waist and reached for the small, hand-sized device.

With a mild amount of fiddling, it projected holographic text before her eyes. Granted, not words she personally would have expected that evening.

New orders. Priority of mission maximized. Subject ‘Taijitu’ given the strongest possible danger rating on behalf of Viltrumite High Command. Three Viltrumites are confirmed to be slain by his hand. Extreme caution warranted.

Like ice running down her back, Anissa stared at the alert in her hands for what felt like ages. It was one thing to be facing a threat that could contend with one of her kind at once. Manageable, and it had been Nolan’s job to largely catalog entities such as that in the past. Three at once, though…

That was a Regent-level organism. Her initial confidence regarding the success of her mission didn’t feel so strong anymore.

Genji

I’m almost certain I’m looking at a Viltrumite infiltrator, and frankly, it’s taking everything I have not to immediately punt punch her into the horizon. Why? When? For how long? There are too many questions swirling around me, and to be totally honest, I was hesitant to totally engage here.

It was a suspicion, but one well-founded by the truly enormous levels of physical energy she had. Adding in the fact that I was fairly sure she was slowing herself through flight just before landing with her bounding leaps away, and I was growing more sure about the supposition. The whole thing might have been paranoia, but I’d been given grounding for that sort of paranoia too.

There was more than just typical subterfuge going on here. Which meant that it was time to call someone with more experience than I had in the art, the moment I was away from Defender. Cecil, God bless the man, never seemed to be asleep. Ideal for my purposes.

“Taijitu. What’s the occasion?”

“I’m pretty sure I just talked to a disguised Viltrumite,” I spoke, my eyes tracking her as she moved with an incredible alacrity and great, bounding leaps. “So I’m trying to get some advisement on what exactly I need to do here.”

A long, drawn-out sigh escaped him. “... You’ve barely been back for a couple of days, and this is what you stumble on?!”

“I am, if nothing else, an overachiever.”

“Come in, and don’t take your goddamn eyes off of her for a second!”

“Way ahead of you there, Cecil. Way ahead of you.”

For better or worse, I found myself heading back to the GDA HQ so that the two of us could try to find a way out of this Gordian Knot. Before I’d left, a singular possible Viltrumite running around on Earth would have left a pit in my stomach. Now, it was a patently surmountable threat.

The real question was how we wanted to handle this specific situation if my gut instinct proved to be right.

Author’s Notes

It’s interesting trying to write this weirdo attempting to be human and failing at the task. Or succeeding, if not in the ways that she intended. Important to note, EVERY VILTRUMITE who spent even a year on Earth folded irrevocably. Like, Nolan is the outlier for how much of a goddamn freak he is for holding out.

Anissa isn’t here to reproduce too, but she’s got pretty specific standards for what she looks for in a mate. IE, being pretty strong. In other ways, writing this perspective from someone who is ultimately going to be the romantic lead is also difficult.

The Viltrumites are not aware of his eyesight or how bullshit it is; otherwise, they likely would have never tried this plan to begin with. Isn’t it fun when competing factions have unequal levels of information gathering?

Anyway, lemme know what you guys thought.