Felix spent an extra amount of time working. It was three o'clock and everyone else was dismissed, except for Dr. Jane Foster. Jane was Luke's doctor and alongside a couple security guards was responsible for keeping Luke in the building. For Norman, he was an important asset and did not want to risk him leaving. Luke grumbled but he understood.
Felix sat back in his limo, the moonlight shining. He chugged down some drinks: mango juice, fruit punch, and then a small glass of wine. He wanted to get the blood flowing.
'Herbie, have you located Peggy Carter?'
'NEGATIVE.'
In the past year, simply to see if he could do it, he tried to locate her and couldn't. The old woman had lived through the cold war and ever since then had a very specific detail of security that nobody, not even those within SHIELD, were able to identify. There were no physical and digital records, and if the former did exist, Felix did not want to risk going in as Spider-Man to find them. So it didn't come as a surprise that Herbie came up with nothing.
Something was off. That phone call. That anger. That impatience.
The self-driving car rolled out of Oscorp Tower smoothly, slipping into Manhattan traffic with the effortless control of a military-grade AI. Felix sat back in the leather interior, watching the skyline melt by as they moved east toward Lexington Avenue & East 58th Street.
"Rash," he called out.
The symbiote answered like a reflex, a cool sensation pulsing over his spine, his wrist.
"Suit up. We're going through the sewer entrance."
The black mass crept along his body, slick and silent, weaving into the sleek angular shape of the Superior Suit. Red veins of energy flickered to life across the chest. Eyes narrowed.
The car neared an intersection. He forced a red light. The stopped, right above a manhole. The exact spot Felix had programmed for.
Click.
The underside of the limo hissed open. Below, the manhole cover slid aside, revealing the dark, stinking arteries of the New York sewer system.
Without hesitation, Felix dropped down into it and the hatch above him resealed. The car, still carrying his biometric signature and an image of him made from light and nanofiber, drove on. If anyone was watching, they'd never know he'd vanished.
He landed and for anyone that wasn't him, it would have been complete darkness. He felt the wetness underneath him. Looking up was just grease and oil and shit. A classic New York sewer tunnel.
Thwip! A single webbing struck a brick. Thwip! Thwip! Then a second and third brick that were five spaces away. There was an audible click and the bricks in front of him gave way to an elevator. He entered the elevator, waited twenty seconds, and he was back in Daxter Labs.
"Home sweet home," he told himself.
The Fantastic Computer in the middle, the working bench to the right, and an army of robotic Herbies on a twenty-foot tall shelf on the left side. Daxter Labs was constantly changing. The walls and floor were further enforced with another layer of Secondary Adamantium. He added two additional entrances, one in the sewer and one at a nearby paper printing company he was a co-owner of.
The Herbies were currently depowered due to his appearance. Trying to work while they were constructing was impossible for Felix. It was information overload, especially because he could feel it in his bones when they made a mistake. They might have been robots but that didn't meant they were perfect. Nothing was perfect. So whenever Felix arrived, the Herbies quickly finished up whatever they were doing and sat back in their charging stations.
Felix glanced at the inactive Herbies and thanked them. Some of them waved back in turn.
The moon was high and the city was silent. Felix sat in the same chair he always sat in. It was comfy. It was what he needed. One giant monitor and two normal-sized monitors were at his behest.
"Okay, Peggy Carter, Peggy Carter…" He crossed his arms and looked up at the Fantastic Computer. "When was her last recorded meeting?"
"ACCORDING TO SHIELD DATABASES," Herbie said through the intercoms, "DIRECTOR CARTER IS EXEMPT FROM DIGITAL STAMPS FOR MEETINGS."
"Right, I know that, I'm talking about cameras. A meeting at a coffee place, something, anything."
"LOADING, LOADING…"
"I know she uses burner phones whenever she speaks to me. I get that, it's untraceable." The woman was that paranoid, tossing and buying new phones left and right. "But nobody can't just disappear, even her. Especially her."
While the giant monitors siphoned through cameras all over America, Felix focused his attention on the two normal monitors. There, he could type or input or do as he saw fit. Which was why it came as a shock when the monitor started beeping.
"Huh? The Spider-Bots…"
In all capitals, he was being warned of a call that Felicia Hardy was receiving. The Black Cat lived in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Mumbai, India and was acting as the Messenger for the Emporium Auction House. Somebody fixed up her teleportation device. Somebody—the Auction Master—was aiding her.
The call was brief. The person on the other end was Yvan Draskovic who told her, "Come to Room 1007 as soon as possible."
Felicia scoffed. "Are you kidding—"
Beep. The man on the line, Yvan Draskovic, hung up.
Felicia had been watching television before sighing and putting down the phone. She groaned, she got up, and she put on a black dress adequate for the occasion. At this time, the Auction House that was the Fortunov Hotel was still running. Felicia did not drive. When she confirmed her dress was pristine, she smiled in the mirror of her room, reached down into her purse, and disappeared.
Felicia teleported.
Felix cupped his face, elbow near the keyboard. Not a surprise, he had notes on previous teleporations. Sometimes they were to check up on the merchandise and other times to steal jewellery from stupid men. Felicia had free reign most of the time.
"Hrm…"
The Auction Master had the resources and intellect to run a business of this magnitude, to call upon the richest men on Earth, consistently collect the broken fragments of Creature Z, use Latveria's ambassador as a messenger, and then hire Felicia as an enforcer. With her skills and bad luck powers, even a death squad couldn't catch her.
"It is interesting to note that Felicia's powers aren't as effective as on the spider-bots. They experienced some bad luck and one of the bots even lost power, but it wasn't as bad as when I confronted her. It must mean that her powers work largely on living organisms, not objects, and that she has to have awareness. So bullets from a person, for example, won't work but if the bullets came from a machine, assuming that she isn't aware of the machine, she might get hit."
Her bad luck powers were universal yet ultimately meant to be used against other people and with awareness. Those were the two cruxes of her black cat fortune powers. Oh, and if something is impossible, such as escaping from Felix or surviving a nuke, her powers also failed.
Felix didn't have a spider-bot attached to Felicia this time. She was too fast and in her thigh-revealing dress, she would feel it, unlike with her thick bullet-proof Black Cat costume. Fortunately, he didn't need to.
"Sorry, cat, but it won't be easy this time. I have spider-bots all over the Fortunov Hotel."
As mentioned before, the auction itself meant nothing. It was the Auction Master, the puppeteer who could easily replicate this operation elsewhere. The Auction Master was who Felix needed. If he informed the FBI or SHIELD about this, he'd lose precious evidence. For now, without knowing where Director Carter was, this was a good use of his time.
Fortunov Hotel was primarily of Latverian architecture. It was almost medieval in outward appearance, tall and narrow, composed of pale gray stone with sharp buttresses and archaic trim. It was twelve stories tall, capped with a clock tower. The modern upgrades had all been done discreetly: reinforced elevator shafts, security keypads disguised as ornate fixtures, updated fire codes woven into the walls behind false panels. The floors above ten had walls that muffled thermal vision.
The inside was less cold but equally strange: crimson carpets and dark walnut walls, sconces with faux candlelight lining every corridor. The lobby was small, intentionally unwelcoming. A single, antique reception desk sat between two black columns. Very rarely was this hotel busy since it was largely meant for Latverian delegates and their allies. Today was one of the days where the hotel lacked people.
Twelve stories high with stairs and rooms and elevators, it might have been impossible to track her down, if not for the twenty-eight spider-bots Felix had placed inside in advance. Felix zoomed in on the main stairwell camera feed.
"She's teleported here, huh?" Felix noted aloud. Herbie displayed tracking lines and timestamps beside the feed. It was 4:00 a.m in New York while in New Delhi it was 1:30 p.m.
The spider-bots in the stairwell gave a continuous stream of angles; boots tapping wood, a flash of thigh, the sway of her slim black dress. Felicia's heels made no sound as she ascended. She seemed nervous though.
"Is this an emergency, I wonder?" Felix said out loud. "Did the ambassador call her on the Auction Master's behalf?"
The monitors brought up thermal overlays from nearby floors. Various figures were scattered across the hotel; bodyguards, elite attendees, one or two hitmen lying low under aliases. He saw the ambassador of Sokovia getting her cheeks clapped by a famous Indian celebrity. All sorts of secrets and scandals, and the biggest of them all was harbouring war criminals from Sokovia.
Following a fight for independence led by General Alois Denz, the nation of Sokovia fell to dictator General Kamil Novoty, also known as "the Butcher". The United Nations and America declared him the unrightful ruler . General Novoty himself was supported and allied with Latveria and India. Tensions brewed and General Novoty grew in power. He sent many convicted war criminals to this hotel while telling his own country that they were executed. A complete lie in order to gain legitimacy. A trifecta of geographic powers were swirling and expanding.
Geopolitics had changed and evolved since the cold war. The fluctuations in power were constant and neverending. Oscorp and Osborn were competitive for that reason. There was Latveria and its slow corruption of Europe, which especially threatened Russia. There was Wakanda with its immense technology, which threatened all equally.
Everywhere at every second of time, there was espionage. There was conflict. There was illegality. Sometimes, the omniscience of evil overwhelmed him.
"Dammit." Felix sighed. "Out of all the floors, she's going to the tenth floor."
On every wall above the tenth floor, the heat signatures disappeared. Felix casually ordered, "Turn off thermal vision. Focus closest spider-bots on tracking her down physically."
There were a total of twenty-eight spider-bots through the hotel. Half were underground to observe the actual auction while the other half were sprinkled through the twelve stories of rooms.
Feed from a spider-bot panned up from a low crawlspace vent, locking on Felicia's heels as she opened the door to the tenth floor hallway. It took a beat because there were key card scanners at every door. In the hall, the white-haired thief didn't knock on the first door or the second. It was the third door down, Room 1007, where she stopped. She checked her reflection in a decorative mirror, smoothed the lines of her dress and then she raised her hand and knocked.
"Oh."
Felicia seemed surprised. The door went ajar. It was already open. So she went inside. Felix had two spider-bots follow her.
The lighting was dim, too dim for a place that claimed to be a hotel suite. Her pupils adjusted instantly.
Then her face went pale.
Laid out across the crimson rug, just beyond the threshold, was an elderly woman in a white suit, her face slack with death. Her silver hair was streaked with blood, and over one hollow eye socket sat a black eyepatch. The skin around her mouth was gray, her lips parted slightly, as if her last word had been caught in her throat.
Felicia's breath caught. She had no idea who the woman was.
But watching from the security of his underground lab, Felix did.
"...Director Carter."
Peggy Carter.
Former leader of SHIELD. The woman who had challenged Norman Osborn face-to-face only days ago. The one who had not shown up for their final meeting. She hadn't been late.
She had been dead.
"No," Felix muttered. "No, no, no."
Inside the room, Felicia instinctively stepped back. Her hand reached for the doorknob, panic rising in her chest. But the door slammed shut before she could reach it.
Click.
She spun. It was locked.
There had been a string, a wire tied to the top hinge, designed to snap shut as soon as the door opened. A trap.
"Shit," Felicia hissed.
She pulled on the knob, tried to scan for her teleportation device, but it was pointless to press the button. The cooldown hadn't finished. Two more minutes. Two minutes too long.
Felicia turned around.
The room was spacious but stifling. A heavy fireplace sat dead across from the door, its mantle decorated with empty wine glasses and half-burned candles. Velvet curtains hung on both sides of the broken window, one of them flapping lazily in the evening breeze.
To the right, a small dining table lay overturned, the remnants of a meal strewn across the ground. Plates were shattered and wine had soaked into the carpet. A suitcase had been split open nearby, revealing scattered men's clothing.
And at the very back of the room, past a long mirrored dresser, was the bed.
On it lay King T'Challa of Wakanda.
Naked and bloodied and…and breathing.
His dark skin was smeared with dried blood and equally as fetching as his strange nudity. But his chest was rising in shallow breaths, barely conscious.
Felicia stared. Between the nude king and the dead old woman.
"What the fuck is going on?"
A question uttered by both the Black Cat and the Spider-Man.
Footsteps echoed from behind the door. Felicia turned her head just as the doorknob clicked again. Felicia dashed toward the broken window, eyes scanning for escape, but she paused. The drop was steep, twelve stories, and there were no safe ledges. Her teleportation device was still counting down.
The door burst open.
Armed guards rushed in, assault rifles raised and laser sights trained directly on her chest. Their uniforms bore no insignia, black-on-black body armor with sleek helmets, no faces visible. These were a Latverian death squad. The best of the best.
Felicia raised her hands, slowly. She tried to laugh it off. "Welcome, gentlemen. This…isn't how it looks." She didn't move or breathe until she saw him enter. She let out a sigh of relief.
Ambassador Yvan Draskovic had entered behind them.
Dressed in a tailored navy suit, the Latveria-India Ambassador stepped calmly into the room, eyes surveying the scene with no shock or concern. If anything, he looked... pleased. He raised one hand.
"Stand down."
The guards lowered their weapons.
Felicia blinked. "Yvan. You set me up."
"No," Yvan said with a faint smile. "I brought you here. There is a difference."
She lowered her arms slowly, heart still hammering. "What is this? What happened to her? What happened to him? That's the king of Wakanda. Is…"
Was he dead? No. That much Felix was sure of. Which…didn't make sense. He was a super soldier, the effort needed to knock him out was near impossible for a normal person or poison.
What in the world happened here?
Ambassador Yvan didn't answer. He walked over to the fireplace, plucked something off the mantle—a small black box—and turned to her.
"Take this."
Yvan opened it and tossed her a diamond necklace, glinting with pale violet stones set in Wakandan lattice work. It was priceless.
Felicia caught it mid-air, breathless. Her senses suddenly ceased with the overbearing scent of death. She stared at the diamond, addicted. "What is this for?"
"Payment. For your part in the plan."
"Payment? Ha, if you wanted me to do something, you should have just said so." Felicia seemed oh-so relieved, one hand on her hip and one hand holding up the necklace. Everything seemed to make sense to her. "So, what's my role here?"
Yvan smiled. "It's pretty simple really. Your job is to…" He casually walked up to the smiling woman and jabbed a taser baton into her side. "Be my fall girl."
CRACK!
The electricity surged into her ribs. Her legs buckled. The necklace fell to the floor with a soft clink. Felicia Hardy collapsed, unconscious.
Yvan stood over her, composed.
"The Wakandans will be here soon. Let's go."
Felix watched the screen as it fell into silence. The spider-bot was yet to be detected. Consuming were thoughts were theories and conspiracy and utter confusion.
'I don't get it. I don't get it. What the hell is going on!?'