King Brain/Kings Ransom
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
With his newfound intelligence it wasn’t long before the self-styled King Brain lusted after more knowledge and more secrets.
King Brain quickly recruited a small but dangerous team of mercenaries who he outfitted with the latest stolen technology. He called his gang the “Intelligencia”, and used infiltration techniques to subvert larger criminal organisations or provided small scale specialist support to select villains.
Leveraging these resources the Intelligencia managed to gain access to the Paragon City teleportation grid, and set up a wide array of taps to monitor the information gathered as heroes were rescued from defeat. Matching the hero IDs with the types of damage sustained, King Brain compiled a database of the major weaknesses of most of paragon’s heroes.
Taking the initiative, he calculated the most likely foils to his fiendish plan would come from Positron and Sargent Redd. He targeted both in a pro-active strike, using stolen Malta sapper rifles to try and depower the heroes and keep them out of his way.
The strike against Positron worked, but he managed to warn Sgt. Redd and turn the tables on King Brain. The invulnerable Sarge waded through the ranks of the Intelligencia, surviving the traps they set for him and putting most of them away under lock and key (not to mention medical attention). He confronted King Brain after he managed to sabotage the main info gathering operation (with help from Positron to figure out the evil scheme) and then taking after the fleeing mastermind. King Brain retreated to a submarine dock, where he negotiated with Lord Recluse to sell the salvaged partial database of weaknesses to Arachnos to aid in assassinations. Luckily for Paragon the Sarge managed to catch up with him and defeat him before the data transfer could be initiated.
King Brain was beaten into submission, along with his accomplice, Dr. Eva Lone. The pair were sent to the Zig, but King Brain had already foreseen this eventuality and was on the loose again minutes before his transport was due to reach the Zig.
With the Intelligencia scattered and badly depleted, King Brain resorted to kidnapping an office block and hooking up the employees to nerve control systems and unstable portable reactors. These press-ganged pawns were used as bait, and King Brain issued a demand that Sgt. Redd be sent to negotiate with him, threatening to detonate the reactors if any other hero set foot in the building.
The Psyentist, a hero who had already clashed with the Intelligencia, contacted Redd and arranged to help him telepathically as he set foot in King Brain’s trap. She injected him with a tracker to help keep tabs on him, and then reluctantly sent him to face King Brain. His pawns blasted the Sarge with dangerous beams of radiation as the psyentist guided him to find and disable to psionic transmitters King Brain was using to nerve-control the office workers. Knowing he couldn’t use his superstrength against them, the Sarge endured blistering burns as he fought his way deeper into the building.
A freed office worker warned of an unusual bomb that had been set up down in the sewers beneath the building. Racing to investigate, Redd managed to carefully fend off the hostages without harming them and reach the bomb. The bomb, however, was a tailored nanovirus, designed not for general demolition but specifically to latch onto Redd and destroy him from the inside out. As the deadly cloud enveloped Redd, King Brain released the hostages, confident of his revenge.
A weakened Redd returned the the Psyentist, who pledged to find a cure. She set off to one of the remaining Intelligencia labs where King Brain could have stored enough nanotech growth medium to engineer the virus. He had anticipated her move, however, and had instructed the villainous Braincell to guard the lab with an army of newly manufactured Psi-borgs. The Psyentist was quickly overwhelmed and taken captive. The Sarge however had decided to follow her, despite her insistence he was too weak to fight. He gritted his teeth and battled the Psi-borgs, and rescued the Psyentist from Braincell before he could harm her.
Together they pieced together the clues to how the nanovirus was engineered, bypassed the deadly traps in the lab, and secured a sample of the virus the template it was created from. The Psyentist returned to the lab to create an anti-viral nanostrain, but Redd collapsed. The strain of fighting had caused an acceleration of the nanovirus, and it had passed the critical mass. He was dying, and too far gone for the anti-viral to save his life.
Thinking fast, the Psyentist contacted her time travelling friend Holsten Armitage. Together they devised a brilliant last-ditch plan to save Redd. They dosed him with the anti-viral compound and shrunk him. Holsten used his time travel equipment to teleport the minuscule Sarge into the needle the Psyentist had used to inject the tracker into him.
The Sarge, now inside his own blood stream in the past, navigated his body in a race against time. As he reached position, the nanovirus bomb was activated and the infection began. The tiny Sarge was a walking anti-viral factory, and battled the replicating nanovirus until the infection was subdued. With his life saved, the Sarge was able to help the Psyentist pin down where King Brain was hiding and defeat the supergenius and his henchmen.
King Brain was sent to the Zig again, and the Intellgencia went underground, their plans seemingly brought to an end. Languishing in jail, King Brain lamented over the folly of seeking revenge, and swore in future to focus on his original goal of accumulating more power and knowledge. Somewhere in the cosmos, events began to unfold that would bring him within reach of the power he sought.
