Chaos Red/Issue 5
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Issue 5: Chaos Red vs. Dr. Geist
<-- PREVIOUS ISSUE: Chaos Red Defies Arachnos
The Setup
"I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Creed," Loca stated softly. Her eyes then flared and she added with a really harsh tone, "Now you shake his hand you boorish oaf and let’s get this show on the road!"
Chaos Red looked at Dr. Creed and began to coalesce his thoughts about him. Creed was a freakish looking nerd. He was a chubby thing with thick glasses, wearing a grubby lab coat that had clung to his shoulders for too long. As such, the coat had developed sweat stains under his pits and he smelled like nervous perspiration. At the top of his head was his brain. His brain was literally exposed to the open air, with a strange electronic apparatus attached to it.
Red speculated it was a cerebral enhancer of some kind, probably some crude technology to allow Creed to increase his mental capacities. It was safe to say Red hated Creed immediately. Chaos Red sneered at him and then simply offered, "You paying for this gig of yours or what? Chaos Red don’t work for free."
Loca laughed, and then added, "Maybe we should just kill him Red, he might have some loose change and we can buy a candy bar and celebrate his death."
Then there was a pause and Loca added in a much sweeter tone of voice, "Oh Doctor Creed, please forgive me, we’re so honored to be working with you."
Red rolled his eyes at Loca’s extreme duplicity. The chick was always bouncing from negative to positive, from black to white with each sentence. This meant you never really knew what Loca was thinking. Red was beginning to understand that this was part of Loca’s shtick, to constantly keep everyone around her guessing as to her true intentions and feelings.
"You will be paid for your efforts, gnat," Dr. Creed snapped back with a hiss so sharp that Chaos Red had to take a step backward. "Now fetch me Geist, and bring me his formula."
"What’s the catch Doc?" Red asked. "Where’s he hiding and why do you need agents like Loca and I to do your dirty work?"
Creed sneered again and offered, "I do *not* get my hands dirty with grunt work like this. Not when I have the wealth and influence to hire kids like you to do it for me. It won't be easy, let me warn you now. He’s being guarded by Arachnos, and indeed it is Arachnos who wish to exploit his formula for military purposes."
"We really should kill Creed right here and right now. I have a craving for a candy bar as we speak," Loca added with a smirk.
Loca then began to purr and she touched Creed gingerly on his cheek, a sensation that caused Creed to jolt in shock. A warm smile appeared over his face shortly afterward, as if he was enjoying Loca’s petting. "Oooh Creed, I’m sorry, I’m really just hostile because I find you so attractive," Loca whispered gently.
"Ooooh Loca, if you ever want an intimate evening…" Creed uttered with affection.
"Oh pussycat, tell us how much you’ll pay us for the formula first," Loca asked.
"As much as you want Loca…as much you want…" Creed offered back.
Chaos Red stifled his laughter. This was classic Loca. She was using her telepathic powers now and poor Creed was in her clutches. Red was also smiling at the mention of Arachnos. If agents of Arachnos were guarding Doctor Geist and his formula, he’d welcome the chance to kick some of their tails for the purposes of revenge.
"What does this formula do? Can you find out for me Loca?" Red asked.
"Meh," Loca said, while Creed stood there like a zombie, now utterly in Loca’s control. "It’s just some formula to accelerate the effectiveness of a disease. It’s just stuff to make a zombie-like army with. It’s just typical "evil-genius with suppressed male sexual issues" stuff. You know, "my mother didn’t love me, so now I want dominion over all creatures on Earth", kind of thing. He has a very boring mind, except for a very weird fetish for cowboy boots, from what I can see."
Chaos Red marveled how with just a few flicks of her wrist, she could learn the deepest, darkest secrets of any man. Any man with a weak will that is.
"Okay let’s do the gig, we can kill him after he’s paid us," Chaos Red offered.
Loca nodded in agreement and let Doctor Creed go of her spell. Creed snapped to attention, as if he’d fallen asleep at the wheel for a few seconds and realized suddenly, where he truly was. "Strange," Doctor Creed said. "I think I just fell asleep on my feet. I must be tired. I will retire to my chamber. Meet me back here at midnight with the formula."
Creed walked away, his dirty lab coat swinging in the breeze. He was oblivious to the fact that every dirty secret in his brain had been exposed by Loca’s psionic powers.
"Wow. You’re getting scarier all the time with your power Loca. Have you ever taken complete dominion over a man like that before?" Chaos Red asked.
Loca grinned with an impish smile, that only a woman with a deep and delicious secret can produce. "Oh no, never done that before," she whispered. "But, Red can you come up to my apartment for a while, before we start this mission? There’s something I want to show you."
"Sure," Chaos Red shrugged.
Chaos Red would not remember the next few hours of his life, except that when he awoke he was lying on a dirty mattress with strange scars all over his back, and an extreme desire to clean Loca’s kitchen.
"Wake up sleepy-head," Loca said with a laugh. "Leave the dirty dishes alone for now. We got work to do, I want that formula and then I want Doctor Creed dead…"
The Brawl
Chaos Red and Loca arrived at the Arachnos laboratory where Dr. Geist was allegedly working on his "secret" formula.
The two of them stood in front of a round, black door with a red spider symbol in the center. Arachnos seemed to obsessively put their brand logo on everything. Sometimes Chaos Red wondered whether Arachnos was just a marketing firm that had developed ambitions of world domination.
He sometimes thought Earth was already under the dictatorship of marketing companies. He saw Crocodile sandals and reality television as evidence that his theory was correct.
"Okay good luck with this sugar, I’ll see you around," Loca said as they were about to enter the door.
"You’re not coming in with me, Loca?" Chaos Red asked confused.
Loca snapped back in a violent way, "Nope got other business to attend to. Now leave me alone! Get away from me! Christ, you really bother me sometimes!"
Chaos Red chalked this up to Loca’s incessant mood swings. So he just shrugged and entered the laboratory by himself.
It was a typical laboratory for the Arachnos organization. It featured black walks, steel grates along the floor and strange orange and black computer equipment along the edges of the wall. The equipment would buzz and warble from time to time, as if the computer’s data transmissions were songbirds announcing their desire to mate.
It was spotlessly clean, and Chaos Red noted how Arachnos was always obsessed with color, style and cleanliness. "Repressed homosexuality," Chaos Red deduced. "That’s at the heart of all fascists I think."
Red walked cautiously ahead, and it was not long before he could see Doctor Geist on a metal platform tinkering with his experiments. Geist was short, stocky and was dressed like a prototypical super-villain. His skin-tight costume was adorned in strange array of azure and aquamarine gemstones, and his hair was spiked into a sharp, white-man’s afro. The kind of haircut you’d expect to see on a Yu-Gi-Oh card, rather than a living adult male.
Next to Geist, was his body guard, a rather large Arachnos thug, dressed in full military garb and wielding one of those nasty energy maces that soldiers of his rank always carried.
Red surveyed the scene as best he could without being spotted. Then he activated the electrical energy in his tattoos and let the lightning arcs careen back and forth over his chest. Red loved electricity, it made him feel alive and his whole body was now surging with charged ions.
"Better than an espresso," Red grinned as the energy danced in his body and pushed his heart rate to dangerous heights.
However, the pops and sizzle of Red’s electrical field immediately caught the attention of the Arachnos thug.
"Chaos Red! How nice that I get to arrest you for the second time. What’s the matter? Did you enjoy lying in your own urine, and want some more? Maybe this time, if I beat you hard enough, I can make you crap your pants," the soldier threatened with twisted delight.
Chaos Red moaned when he made the realization: "This is the same soldier that had beaten me on the street just a few nights before. It was only through some hard core drugs…err..inspirations…that Chaos Red was able to recover from his last beating.
The solider ran after Chaos Red in eager delight. Chaos Red anticipating the attack emitted a pulse of electrical energy just as soon as the soldier was in range. The red lightning popped out of his fist and struck the soldier in the chin and burned the skin along his neck. The smell of the burning flesh and the black scar tissue forming under the soldier’s chin forced the thug to his knees.
While the soldier reeled in pain, and clutched his neck as it sizzled and crackled under the electrical charge, Chaos Red then raised his fist high above his head. Lightning sparks danced from one hand to the other, as he lifted his fists as high as his arms would stretch. Red then jumped up and brought the arc between his fists crashing down onto the solider’s skull.
There was the sharp sound of bone splintering, as the electricity pierced the soldier’s helmet and split his head like an apple hit with a hammer. The lightning then danced around the innards of his brain, frying his cortex and cerebral membrane. Within mere moments, the solider was as limp as a fish with foul-smelling smoke emitting out of his skull like a chimney.
"One down, one more to go," Chaos Red grinned and he stared at Doctor Geist.
Geist however, was waiting for him. A super-villain in his own right, Geist activated a small fusion chamber at the center of his belt buckle. The helium 3 inside of it began to accelerate at fantastic speeds, and when the atoms collided, Geist directed the fusion power into a single and deadly stream from his power gloves.
Zot!
The energy beam struck Chaos Red like a truck smacking a possum. Red not only buckled, his feet were lifted off the ground and he was carried ten feet back into the computer console. He was now covered in plasma gas, and computer chips and Geist was readying another charge.
Chaos Red jumped to his feed with outstanding speed and agility. His electrical shields had once again saved him from any permanent damage. He then wasted no time and socked Geist in the jaw with an uppercut that could crack concrete. As Geist jerked backward from the blow, Red tripped him causing him to fall.
Red then stuck his boot on Geist’s neck, and released full a stream of lightning. The arc landed squarely in Geist’s throat and the sting of the lightning shredded Geist’s vocal chords and burnt his tongue into a tiny stub of charcoal.
It was vicious mutilation - the kind of ugly violence that Chaos Red adored.
"No rules, no mercy," Chaos Red beamed as a defeated Geist lay there clutching his throat in agony. "Don’t worry with a little surgery, maybe you’ll be able to squeak like a little girl. And who knows? Maybe they’ll give you ice cream at the hospital!"
Chaos Red grabbed a stack of Blu-Ray disks stacked up next to the computer console, and walked away, while Doctor Geist helplessly writhed in pain, never able to speak again...
