Chapter 37 : Hank Glazing & Nerd fantasies... (Patreon)

Disclaimer - I don’t own Marvel/Disney IP. I am just a humble keyboard warrior. Also, the Chaos Gacha was made by Bronz here. I am just dipping my toe in the water, so to speak.

Krakoa

–Mike–

He slowly floated down in front of the main administrative building of Krakoa, right in time for the important meeting he was invited to. Yes, he was still calling it Krakoa because the nation was not yet named. He was never really good at naming stuff, and he thought it would be a fun little exercise to let the country’s name be decided democratically, by a vote.

Sure, the people here could not decide their King, their constitution, the chief bureaucrats, or anything else by a vote, but atleast they could name stuff. Charles had thrown him a dirty look at the proposal, telling him that in the near future, he might have to do something about Charles if he did not change his downright treasonous ways, but for now, Charles was behaving, especially since the people they were rescuing were all in really rough shape, requiring constant care that no mutant faction outside of his country would provide.

Sure, many could, but it was less of a matter of ability and more of will. Most of the people in power in the world these days were far more interested in what makes a mutant tick and if they could have those fantastic powers for themselves, instead of looking for sick and downtrodden mutants to treat out of their own pockets. So, Charles had no choice but to stomach whatever distaste he might have for the island and its current ruling structure, because there was nobody or no place else that Charles could go to to treat over 4000 injured mutants, not to mention house the other 2000 uninjured mutants Magneto’s teams found.

Yes, they were now over 6000 strong, and all this in a matter of weeks. Hell, it had only been a month since he found the island and gained ownership of the island. Speaking of the island, the core of the island was exceptionally happy with all the energy being provided to it. Krakoa seemed like it gained happiness by simply following orders. He was worried about Krakoa not being able to control himself with all these mutants around, but it hadn’t even been an issue.

He could track each and every mutant on the island all the time. Viltrumite, Draconic, Thunderbird, and all other traits came together to make him an absolute powerhouse, not just in terms of power but also mentally. Sure, he would never be able to compete in terms of raw scientific genius with Hank or Tony Stark or Reed Richards, but regular thinking? He would smoke them out of the park because of his thinking speed. 

When he went into that mode, it was as if time itself was paused for him, allowing him to think for days within the span of seconds. It would have been pretty nifty if he had something that could keep up with him. Like, the most work he has done in the past few weeks has literally been manufacturing those Vibranium alloy panels, and then creating a few more buildings, along with demolishing a few of the houses to create more parks. Stuff that barely took him hours, as the energy to power all that came from Ghidorah and not him.

Ghidorah had expressed a strong desire to fly out into space, to recharge, presumably, but he told Ghidorah to hold off on that desire for a while. He was pretty sure that his Mars rover stunt was about to pay dividends, and the only reason he had rejected any efforts on Fury’s end was because he wanted them to sweat a little.

When the time actually came, he wanted to secure some kind of safe passage, like a voluntary deportation scheme for Mutants from all the Western nations, in exchange for getting access to his space transportation abilities, or rather, him not going to the communists. He will still charge them the standard rate, which was going to be exorbitant compared to his input costs, but still much cheaper than it would have been to burn traditional fuel to get rockets into space.

Shaking his head, he dispelled the invisibility field on himself the moment his feet touched the ground, and the reaction was immediate. This close to the administrative building, there were no children, as they were all in the park area, supervised by multiple mutants, but the adults were surprised by his presence as well.

He could tell that there was a healthy dose of fear and wariness mixed in with the surprise, but it was a lot less than when they first arrived and were told that they were now under the rule of a King, instead of a democracy. Part of the fear could be attributed to the example he had to make out of one of Eric’s old buddies, who refused to listen to the rules and demanded better accommodations because he had a flashy fire based mutant power, only for Ghidorah to come swooping down behind him, grab him in the talons before flinging him right into the Fog that surrounded the entire island.

For such a large and apocalyptic creature, Ghidorah sure could be stealthy if it wanted to. Plus, the island helping Ghidorah maintain silence didn’t do any favours to FireBoy, who screamed right up until he was halted by his winds. He didn't go gentle on the boy either, breaking both his arms and legs before throwing him in the hospital wing, with strict instructions to keep him there until his limbs were naturally healed, instead of using any of the medicines available or using any power. 

It was just something that was bound to create fear in the eyes of everyone since he made sure to make it a public spectacle, and after that, he’d heard the initial batch of mutants tell the tale to the later arrivals, but after almost a week and a half’s inactivity with no punishment being doled out, he supposed that people had their fears reduced, which was fine in his opinion.

He was not going to be the type to rule with fear. Fear was a necessary component, yes, but most of the draw towards his nation was going to be its excellent living conditions and benefits.

Either way, he nodded at the ones who waved at him, and walked up the stairs to the currently most important building on Krakoa. With the help of Beast, who was also an architectural nerd of some sort, they had designed a circular city/town, with multiple rings demarcating different zones.

This administrative building was smack dab in the middle of the city, supposed to house all the bureaucrats and offices. Creating utilities was a simple task when holes could be thought into existence, and wires along with conduits could be manipulated with a thought, resulting in a laughably easy installation for all utilities that would have been usually provided by a municipality. Fibre was installed everywhere as well, but computers were not really common anywhere, and they still did not have a hard line connection to the internet. Hank has been a godsend in that regard. 

The man had so many nerd habits it wasn’t even funny. 

He was brought out of his glazing for Hank’s magnificent brain and his many hobbies, by the sound of the doors opening on their own. He noticed it was done because of the facial recognition system installed by, once again, Hank, who seemed to be working 24/7 since he was given free rein over all the tech installation on the island.

There was a large lobby, along with multiple rooms/offices on both sides of the lobby. Most of them were empty, as the few offices that were claimed by some mutants had their owners either in the meeting he was about to attend or were running around Krakoa on the E-bikes built for them. It was child’s play to get a high capacity Li-ion battery installed in electric bikes, and manufacture them en masse, on top of creating replicable battery hubs everywhere, for quick swap facilities. After all, the issue of pollution and E-waste was rendered moot as soon as his abilities came into play. What was pollution in the face of matter manipulation?

He flew the rest of the way to the giant meeting hall, supposed to be used only for departmental head meetings. Right now, there are only three of them. Charles, Eric, and himself, with the majority of the work being done by the two of them.

Charles and Eric stopped speaking as soon as he entered the hall. At the same time, he sensed Storm arriving with yet another shipment full of rescued people, even though calling it a shipment felt like he was trafficking people. He couldn't sense any more information about them until they touched the ground, though, so he put his focus on the task at hand, namely a meeting called by the two of them.

“Good morning, Mr.Mike,” Charles greeted him. Eric just nodded. He nodded back and sat down on his throne, which was just white stone and, as such, seriously uncomfortable. He really should have put some thought into blindly fulfilling all of Hank’s requests for buildings and building planning. It would seem that Hank had really fulfilled his nerd fantasies, even if he was never going to have to sit on those hard ass marble thrones that only looked badass but served no purpose whatsoever.

Moving on from it, since he was not going to use this place ever again, he asked Charles, “So, what do you have for me?”

Charles began, “I assume you have read all the reports provided to you about the number of–”

“6,373 mutants currently on the island. 213 will be added from the lot that arrived with Storm right now, provided everyone survives. Most of them came with some form of injuries. The 600 kids are being taken care of properly. Kitchens are running properly. Work has begun on the utilities and more. What else?”

Charles and Eric exchanged looks before slipping a file towards him. “This.” It was an actual paper file, which was rare since Hank had done a lot of work in making sure that atleast all the admin work was done digitally, with all the assorted spyware embedded

“What’s this?”

“That is our proposal to be sent to the UN, for legitimacy of the nation.”

He didn’t touch the file as he asked them, “And what have you said inside that?”

“In exchange for proper recognition and rights for our people, we will open up–”

“Nope.” He stopped Charles right there. He was not going to open up anything. Markets were not going to open up. Borders were not going to open up. Citizenship was not going to open up.

Nothing was going to open up.

“I don’t think you understand the advantage we have here, Charles. The moment we send a proposal, it is going to be taken as a sign of weakness, and we will be dealing with exploitation attempts. They won’t be successful, but optics matter.”

“But you are not doing anything about Fury’s attempts to contact you either.” Eric countered.

He smoothly leaned back, noted the hardness and non-existent back support before replying, “And who is Fury?”

Eric and Charles exchanged confused glances as he continued, “Fury is the head of SHIELD, a position of importance, no doubt, but only to people who actually know what SHIELD is and what it does. To the regular man and woman? Fury is just some decorated military officer, nothing more. We are not some temp project that has to be hidden from the rest of the world to be dealing with Fury.”

“We are a nation, and to be a nation, other nations have to come forward and recognise us. Until that happens, we will not be accepting any proposal, any communication attempt, or even any meeting. We will talk only to peers, and Fury is not one of them, even if the man has more power than many world leaders.”

“Fine,” Eric replied, sounding faintly amused and satisfied about the whole thing, which meant that this idea must have originated from the brilliant mind of Charles Xavier, “but that still does not solve our problems. People have started getting smarter. We can no longer easily track down any mutant only prisons or settlements easily. Digging deeper leads to them running away, leaving behind only a few mutants, and that too with kill protocols engaged, so we have had to send in more personnel for every trip to secure everything."

Yeah, that was a problem, but it was one that he had foreseen long ago. If the people invested in mutant business knew that their bigger operations were being hit, the next best thing would be to maintain much smaller cells, and keep death protocols on hand, so the attacking mutants would be forced to prioritise between rescuing mutants or attacking the traffickers.

So far, they have had to reduce the frequency of shipments because of the increased personnel demand, but that was fine, they were running out of large targets anyway.

They were going to have to create a stable entry point into the country anyway, for the rest of the world to come in and see what their country was like, before he could even begin talks of creating a global program for mutants to come here and gain citizenship and denounce their previous citizenship. 

No double citizenship nonsense here. 

It might sound a bit extra, but it was his country, and as such, his rules.

“We will continue working the way we are until someone approaches us, and then we will move forward with opening up the country. For now, we will remain closed, and quietly build our population.”

Eric snorted, “Quiet, he says. If you haven't noticed, our operations are always being tailed by multiple jets, and they only move away at the last moment, when we enter the Fog.”

He waved off the man’s concerns. “Oh, I am more than aware of them. Don’t worry about them. You guys can take care of yourselves, and the whole reason we built those evacuation pods was to make sure that you were not stuck fighting two battles at once. If it looks like they are coming too close, just drop the pods and fly back to the Fog. I will take care of the rest.”

Charles interjected here, "Hopefully, things don’t reach that level.”

He nodded, “Alright, let’s move on to the other topics. I was told that you are short on specialised manpower? What do you want?”

___xx__

After that meeting, the influx of people dropped to less than 100 a week, which was a respectable number, but just not enough to create a nation. The island could comfortably house millions on the surface itself, not to mention the island’s ability to just increase its size in any manner.

All he needed was energy for it, and so far, Ghidorah’s natural recharging was more than enough, not to mention he was a giant powerhouse as well, so energy requirements were fulfilled for now, but in the future, he would love to have like a giant Arc Reactor or two embedded into the island itself.

Electricity was being provided by the island for now, which was a negligible expense considering the number of people and what little appliances they had in each house. Ventilation alone should have been the biggest power draw, considering the temperatures just outside the Fog, but since they had island wide temperature control, AC was totally unnecessary.

After that meeting, neither Charles nor Eric raised the topic of approaching the outside world again, even when SHIELD’s communication attempts got more and more insistent, to the point that they even had a team of their own waiting for Storm and Magneto, with the mutants already rescued, requesting a conversation with him.

As was protocol, Storm and Magneto thanked them for their work, rejected their request, and flew away with the mutants. After that, Fury stopped trying to talk to him, which just made him smile, as it meant that Fury understood what was happening.

And just like he expected, a week later, there was a worldwide broadcast from the United Nations about a hearing, where he was invited in a personal capacity. Not his nation, not his people, but Mike. Which was fine.

He knew this was just another attempt by the world powers to stop him from creating his own nation. He was curious as to what they thought they could do about his island, especially since he was going to make sure that anything that even thought of approaching his island was turned to dust, but he supposed that he would just have to wait and see.

No one ever said that they were surprised by humanity’s capacity for sheer stupidity.

____xx___

“Are you sure it will work?”

“Sir, he will either have to recall that monster to save him, or die, as the monster was keeping the island secured. We have tested the boy’s powers. They work on all mutants. As soon as the bastard is in range, the boy’s powers will disable the mutie’s powers, and we will move in to capture him.”

“If he has the…monster with him?”

“Then, we can stoke the flames about the man bringing a world ending monster to New York, and then move to destroy that island of his.”

“I assume you will take care of Xavier and Magneto using the boy’s blood?”

“Yes, sir. The Bastard’s skin might be impenetrable, but Xavier and Magneto can be injected just like everyone else.”

“Hmmm. Be careful. We have no idea what the bastard can actually do.”

“Leave it to me, sir. I will make sure, one way or another, the bastard will not be able to create a country for muties. Who does the freak think he is?”

“Hmm. Dismissed.”

Word Count - 3036