System Supervillain, Chapter 193 (Patreon)

Chapter 193 – Cleaning Up

A month after the Guild issued the Unified Action decree against the Superhuman Defense Initiative, the organization did not exist anymore. Getting every major hero and villain world-wide to cooperate on things made for a very quick resolution, as one might expect. Of course, that isn’t to say that all those who were part of the SDI were dead. Some heroes captured the maintenance workers, or the men and women working in the factories that produced SDI goods. Most of the money men in the shell companies that SDI hid behind were arrested, as well, to help detangle the financial snarl left behind by all the companies.

Not everyone was that lucky, of course. The scientists, troopers, and executives? They died, for the most part. That said, they were considered the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were captured and sent to different black site facilities, where they got to be test subjects instead of researchers.

As more SDI facilities around the world were uncovered, raided, and destroyed, the larger picture came into focus. The SDI was not comprised entirely of monsters, like the ones who suggested and approved Project Chlorine. Most of them were simply fanatics, who had been radicalized because they lost friends and family to fighting between heroes and villains. Others were envious of the supers, and couldn’t accept that someone else had powers when they didn’t, which led to them wanting to tear down everyone else to bring them to their level. It was sad, and more than a bit pathetic, but it was very human, just like all groups who based their identities off fear of the other.

People also found out that the three projects we discovered were not the only ones that the SDI had been cooking up. Those were primarily the work of the North American division, after all. The divisions in other parts of the world had their own little projects that they were using to ‘contain the superhuman menace’. Most were research and development projects for designing new weapons and armor for their troopers, which wasn’t really a surprise. However, that isn’t to say that there weren’t some surprises.

Running down the list of divisions, which were separated into continents, we already uncovered North America’s contributions to the SDI. Antarctica was blessedly free of the organization, beyond a single outpost from the South American division, Elephant Island, a little island southeast of the southern tip of South America. They were using that outpost to experiment on genetically-tailored infectious diseases, trying to create a set of plagues, each one tailored to a different type of superhumans. The goal was to have the plagues lie dormant in pure humans, who would be carriers, but it would infect and potentially kill any superhumans who didn’t have protections against disease. It was simultaneously both better and worse than Project Chlorine, since it would indiscriminately affect children who just happened to be near human carriers, but at least it was honest about what it was, instead of being hidden behind deliberate medical malpractice.

Those scientists did not survive Demonia Azul when she discovered their outpost.

In Berlin, the European Headquarters revealed that they had been working on understanding the genetics of superhumans. Their research was, specifically, on retroviruses. The idea was to find a way to permanently ‘depower’ superhumans, without invasive procedures. Their research had been slowed, however, because the inherent mutability of superhuman DNA meant that the retroviral agents needed to combat it were prone to mutation, as well. They had, indeed, been able to permanently depower one initial test subject, but others had either been unaffected, or they’d gotten super-cancer. Some subjects suddenly expressed new powers. And, in one instance, exposure to the retrovirus caused a pure human to spontaneously develop superpowers, though the unstable nature of the power led to the man’s death shortly afterwards.

The Guild transferred all that research to the Physicians, so that they could study the retrovirus, and see whether it could be stabilized. Not for its intended purpose, but because tailored injections that could grant or remove powers safely had long been a dream of super-scientists around the world. There were, after all, some powers that were simply too dangerous to leave unchecked.

A prime example of this would be the ‘villain’ Deathmark, who had a passive, uncontrolled aura that drained the life force of everything around him. That alone wasn’t an issue. The issue was that his aura spread out in a radius of ten kilometers. He was labeled a villain not because of anything he did, but because he was simply too dangerous to be near. He lived deep in the Sahara, near the borders of Mali, Algeria, and Niger, in self-imposed exile, so that he did not accidentally hurt anyone. A shot that depowered him safely would be a blessing.

Setbacks in Tokyo and Berlin caused the Asian Headquarters of the SDI to get moved to Myanmar, near Pathein. They were just getting back on their feet when the decree came down, but their project was primarily technological. Project Suppression was basically what the name suggested. They wanted to create a network of area suppression devices, which would effectively suppress superhuman abilities within the area. If they could get it to work, the field wouldn’t eliminate supers entirely, but most street-level supers would be reduced to pure human levels, and even more powerful supers might be weak enough that the SDI troopers could take them on. With the System in place, they were working on ways to reduce the point cost, so that they could roll the network out and blanket entire regions before anyone knew what they were doing.

That approach was almost respectable, from my point of view. At the very least, it wasn’t heinously evil, like some of the other projects different divisions had been working on. It was a method for containment, not genocide. Needless to say, many researchers from that group found themselves ‘drafted’ to companies who helped develop and refine technology for super-prisons.

The African Headquarters was located under Lake Kivu,between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I actually recognized that base, since it had formerly been one of Doctor Ubuntu’s lairs. I had cleared it out years ago, and apparently the SDI moved in after I was done. I guess they were into recycling.

Their big project marked the African HQ as the ‘heretics’ of the SDI. While most of the organization was all about tamping down, containing, or eliminating superhumans, the African division came at it from a different direction. Project Even Keel was ‘Human Advancement Project’, designed to augment baseline humanity, increasing their abilities until everyone had some level of superpower, while eliminating some of the randomness that came with normal supers. To quote an old movie, “when everyone’s super, no one will be.” It was a fairly interesting idea, and one that would have upset a lot of people, if it ever became widely known.

And then, there was Australia.

Honestly, I don’t know what everyone expected out of the branch of the SDI that actively chose to set up shop in the middle of Australia. Not even the ‘normal’ parts of Australia. The facility was set up by Lake Mackay, a saltwater lake straddling the line between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and basically marked the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. Because being in the middle of the outback wasn’t enough, they needed to be by the desert part of the outback, with no drinkable water in sight.

Like the rest of the world, the SDI apparently used Australia as a quarantine bunker to hold all their scientists who were too dangerous or too crazy to be allowed around normal people. The scientists in the Antarctica outpost working on plagues? They chose the place specifically, so their work wouldn’t be a danger. The people in the Lake Mackay facility were sent there because no one else wanted to be within five hundred kilometers of them.

The problem was that crazy scientists, left with only a minimum of adult supervision, were a problem grew exponentially based on the number of scientists, how smart they were, how insane they were, and how much budget they had. This was amplified by the fact that their proximity to research subjects that would normally have to be shipped across oceans left more budget for crazy shit. Which is how their ‘perimeter security’ came to be a nest of genetically modified serpents with the venom of the inland taipan, the size of an anaconda, the temperament of an eastern brown snake, and a stomach that could eat steel. Basically, anyone or anything that approached the base in anything but a vehicle specially marked with ‘control’ symbols that the snakes had been trained to recognize as friendly? They became snake food, and the lucky ones would be dead before getting eaten. And the damn snakes were capable of breeding.

That, however, was just what the bored scientists whipped up in their spare time, apparently. A side project that turned into something useful, while being a solid reminder of WHY the scientists in the Australia HQ were sent there. It wasn’t the actual project that they were working on, to advance the SDI’s goals in the wider world. No, that project made their ‘security system’ look positively sane in comparison.

Of course, I only found out about this after Soulcaller, an Australian hero with Aboriginal roots, and Taipan, a serpent-themed villainess who specialized in martial arts and poison attacks, fought their way through the snakes, opening the way for a larger group of Australian supers to crack the base open. If it was just mad scientists making giant monster snakes, then it wouldn’t have been a problem. Unfortunately, what the Australian supers found in that base made them quickly call for help from the Guild, and the Guild immediately decided that the best person to bring in on this was a Local Administrator.

Why me, and not a science type? Because some mad genius decided to mix science and eldritch magic in ways that were as inspired as they were insane. Simply trying to read the documentation gave one scientist an aneurysm, one of them began speaking solely in a language that the System identified as Linear A, and a third found his organs and skin inverted, literally turning him inside out, while leaving him (unfortunately) alive and aware. The fourth became a tentacle monster, which was awkward for everyone since his body’s instincts and pheromones were geared for dealing with women, to the point that the flesh recoiled from the touch of a man, but the man was as gay as could be, and got physically ill at the idea of doing anything ‘like that’ with a woman. Like I said, awkward for everyone.

Thankfully, getting those four scientists back to normal wasn’t my problem. No, Devastation got called in because the damn mad scientists the SDI had thrown down here had been actively experimenting on things when the facility was overrun, and no one could figure out how to turn off the machines without ripping holes in reality. Turning the machines off without the proper sequence was too dangerous. Leaving them running without proper supervision and maintenance was too dangerous. The people who knew how to deal with the machines had all either died during the assault, or through themselves into the portal at the bottom of the facility, meaning no one knew what to do.

And yes, I said portal. Because the grand idea the insane scientists had was to go poking their heads into other realities, and steal technology from them that could be reverse-engineered and replicated so the SDI could better combat superhumans. Except they didn’t exactly know how to control the portal, which randomly shifted dimensions it was connected to. Which was… concerning, shall we say.