SNST

by Jninja15

Initiation Interlude

“You’re going down, Stoppable!” Chuck Bartowski shouted as he sat flat-footed on a couch, quickly shifted his balance left and right, and mashed buttons furiously on his controller.

“Not if I have anything to say about it!” Ron Stoppable shouted back as he sat forward with intense focus. He occasionally lifted one foot or the other as he twisted his upper body at odd angles while keeping his head level with the TV as he too mashed buttons furiously on his controller.

The two men hoo-ed and ha-ed as their video game avatars jumped around on the screen and occasionally hit each other to whittle down the other’s health bar. Eventually, Ron’s health bar reached zero. “Finish him!” came the announcer’s deep voice, as Chuck’s character came up to Ron’s and ripped his pixelated head off with his spine, little squares of dark red blood flowing out of the headless body dripping from the neck of the severed head. “Scorpion Wins! Fatality!”

Ron tossed his controller aside and covered his face in anguish as Chuck jumped up, spread his arms in a ‘V’ pose, and whooped in victory.

“Yeah~!” Chuck said. “Take that, you Smarty Mart trash! Buy More all the way!”

“Ugh.” Ron groaned.

“I thought you were supposed to be good at martial arts.” Chuck continued to taunt. “What happened to your ‘Mystical Monkey Mojo’?”

“It’s Mystical Monkey *Power* thank you very much.”

“Hey, hey, hey! What the Hell are you two doing?” came another voice behind them, turning both men’s blood to ice. Artie Nielson, Warehouse 13’s custodian, and their current boss. “Please tell me that’s not a copy of Mortal Kombat from the warehouse!”

Chuck managed to play it cool even though he was a nervous wreck on the inside, being caught red-handed playing video games at work. “No, it’s my copy.”

“And on your own Famicom too, I hope.” Artie said almost sarcastically.

“Vinyl’s.”

Artie groaned. “Of course,” he mumbled as he set down the big heavy bag that he carries around with him occasionally. “I wish you two would get over that *stupid* corporate rivalry. Neither of you works at a Smarty Mart or a Buy More. Get over it!”

“Hey, it’s a time-honored tradition that-”

“I don’t care, Chuck. You two are grown adults and work for the Atlesian government now, so act like it.”

“Well, I mean- half the time I work for SHIELD.” Chuck weakly retorted.

“Oh~ yes. You and that little database in your head with all our secrets that SHIELD and the warehouse Regents put together for the sake of - of - something asinine beyond my understanding!” Artie was none too pleased that Chuck was partially SHIELD property as a consultant, complete with a handler, John Casey. I mean, he was still half Warehouse property as a full warehouse agent. Even still, Artie was assigned as Chuck’s warehouse handler but delegated to Ron Stoppable as his partner. Unfortunately, Ron and Chuck seem to hate each other’s guts.

“Hey, guys! I’m back. Did I miss-” a young woman with a short bob of spikey hair of alternating blue and light blue stripes, a pair of enamel white pony ears atop her head, headphones around her neck, and purple-tinted sunglasses on her face entered the room. She saw Artie and began slowly backing out of the room. “I~ think I forgot something I’llberightback-”

“Vinyl!” Artie shouted, stopping the pony faunus girl in her tracks and drawing her back in dejectedly. “Why do you do this?”

“Do what?” Vinyl Scratch asked, attempting to sound innocent.

“Encourage these two’s stupid, petty rivalry?!”

“I only do it when there’s nothing to do. You know how boring it is out here in the middle of nowhere, Atlas. There’s only snow for miles!”

“Be that as it may, you, Ron, and Chuck all need to be ready at a moment’s notice, whenever we get a ping, to snag, bag, and tag an artifact.”

Vinyl groaned. “But ever since we caught MacPherson, there has been literally zero pings. That was a month ago!”

James MacPherson was a former warehouse agent that had caused nothing but trouble for everyone in the warehouse ever since it was revealed he survived the explosion at the prison where he was serving five consecutive life sentences. Mrs. Irene Fredrick, the director and caretaker of Warehouse 13 warned everyone that James was an expert psychological manipulator and always strikes when you least expect him. This held true in every instance and nearly had Chuck and Ron turn on each other on multiple occasions (it wasn’t difficult to start that, but James had preferred to play the long game). Now, James has been put in suspended animation as a bronze statue and imprisoned in the Warehouse’s Bronze Sector, with the rest of the people who would have become worse dictators and despots than those of recorded history. For the rest of eternity.

“You shouldn’t be so lax about that.” Artie chided. “And you two shouldn’t be playing video games in the warehouse. If you’re going to do it anywhere, you should be doing it at Leena’s.”

“Speaking of which.” Vinyl said. “Who won?”

Ron, who had not moved from his slump on the couch, raised an arm to point at Chuck, while Chuck pointed his thumbs at himself with a fish-eating grin on his face and began narrating the final moments of the match.

Once Chuck got to the part where he finished Ron off with a fatality and mimicked the announcer’s voice to cap it off, an explosion went off inside the warehouse, and alarms began to ring.

“What the heck was that?” Ron shouted as he jumped up from the couch and went to the window that overlooked the greater part of the warehouse.

The warehouse was deceptively small on the outside; the inside was so big that you could have a pair of fighter jets duke it out in a dog fight, it would be a tight fit and only two fighters, but it looked possible. And from roughly the middle of the warehouse, a column of smoke was rising toward the ceiling.

Artie and Vinyl scrambled toward the computers to pull up security cameras in that area.

Four intruders split into two groups, most in comic book supervillain-like outfits. In the first group, there was a man whose upper half of his mask was white and the rest of his spandex bodysuit was black, and a man who looked like a mutated shark monster in an orange suit with a jagged blue stripe down his chest. A man dressed in a fine suit in the second group, but his head was engulfed in a black fog with glowing yellow eyes piercing through. The other was wearing a black trenchcoat, shirt, and pants but had severed mannequin-like hands holding onto him, three on each arm, one on each shoulder, two around his neck, and one grasping his face.

Chuck looked at the computer screens, and when he got a good look at all of the intruders, his eyes began to glaze over, his jaw slackened, and his eyelids fluttered. The Intersect, the collaborative database of SHIELD and the Warehouse, had some files to show Chuck. Random images flashed through Chuck’s mind, zooming in one to another before they became detailed documents.

> Accessing: SHIELD database

> Accessing: Parahuman Response Team (PRT) Profile

>

> Subject name: Tomura Shigaraki

>

> Power classification: Striker 6

>

> > Power description: “Decay” Can disintegrate whatever he touches when all five fingers are in complete contact. Affects both organic and inorganic material. This effect spreads quickly. It is advised not to engage in close contact with the subject unless absolutely necessary.

>

>

>

More information on Tomura Shigaraki flashed before Chuck’s mind, and details on his current partner in crime, Kurogiri, and the other half of the invaders, Tigershark and Twice.

Artie noticed Chuck lose focus for a moment and walked up to him. “Did you have a flash, Chuck?”

“Ah. Yeah,” Chuck said, shaking his head and coming back to the present. “Handyman there is Tomura Shigaraki, leader of the League of Villains. They must have teleported into the warehouse with Kurogiri, the black mist in the nice suit. All he would need are the coordinates, and he could portal in any time he wants.”

“Damn it!” Artie cursed. “How does someone like them know where the warehouse is?”

“Um, guys?” Vinyl said. “I think Shigamaki and Tomokiri are heading to the bronze sector.”

“MacPherson,” Artie whispered. “It must have been MacPherson that led them here. But why is he working with the League of Villains?”

Artie may have had the habit of talking to himself like this, but the Intersect gave Chuck the ability to piece together disparate pieces of information into an accurate picture, so Artie was asking Chuck as much as he was asking himself. However, Chuck was at as much a loss as Artie. Neither had enough information to know what was going on. What they did know was that there were dangerous people in the warehouse, and they must be stopped.

Tomura and Kurogiri stood in front of the bronzing station as James MacPherson was being debronzed. Tomura was tapping his foot impatiently.

“Ah, good to see you kept our appointment, Shigaraki, Kurogiri,” James said as he rubbed his wrists where he had been manacled when he was initially bronzed.

“Where is she?” Tomura said simply.

If James was offended by the terse response, he didn’t show it. He simply motioned a hand down an isle of bronze statues and led the way.

Chuck and Artie made their way through the bronze sector, their teslas drawn and charged. This sector creeped Chuck out the first time he had to walk through it when they bronzed MacPherson. Now that he was on the lookout for anyone that could jump out at him from behind, one of these statues of frozen people was even more unnerving. It didn’t help that all the statues were covered in saran wrap and held the same pose, hands held above their head shoulder-width apart. Chuck was both curious and afraid to know if everyone in the bronze sector had been frozen with a calm face like MacPherson or if their faces were contorted in agony. He’d been told it was a painless process, but he could not imagine that anyone would go through that without wanting to scream their lungs out.

Chuck heard something clatter and thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned and immediately shot his telsa at a bronze statue. Chuck sighed in relief when he saw a rat skitter away from the blast, untouched by the arcing lightning.

Artie leaned toward Chuck. “Look, I know Vinyl increased the charges on the teslas, but that doesn’t mean you should be shooting random bronze statues now.”

Chuck laughed nervously, “Yeah, right. Sorry.”

“Still skittish, are we, Charles?” MacPherson interrupted, gaining the attention of both agents, their weapons now trained on him.

“Surrender MacPherson,” Chuck said. “You can’t win.”

James tilted his head. “And why not, Charles?”

Chuck’s mouth opened and closed like a fish. “Y-you’re on our home turf.”

“This used to be my home turf too, you know?”

“Well, things have changed since you’ve been- fired.”

MacPherson gave a snort.

“Chuck,” Artie said in a low tone. “Shut up.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say to one of your fellow agents,” James said.

“You shut up too, and surrender now before I decide to convince Casey to break both your legs before we bronze you again.”

Chuck winced, knowing Casey would be all too eager to do just that and imagine it was Chuck’s legs.

“Resorting to violence now, are we?” MacPherson said smugly. “I thought you were above that as a warehouse agent.”

“Yeah, well, Casey is SHIELD, so...”

MacPherson shrugged. “Touche. Well, in any case, you’re too late, as always. I got what I needed, and I’ll be making my way out of here with my compatriots.”

“The League of Villains?” Artie asked. “Why would you go to them to help you with this?”

“Well, actually, they approached me- wanting something from me. And- considering where it was stored and the resources they had- I figured I could get what I wanted, and they could get me out real easy. It was a rather simple task to find what they wanted.”

“And what would that be?” Artie was getting impatient.

James touched the tip of his nose. “Ah, that would be spoiling the mystery, now wouldn’t it? But I guess I should play fair and give you a hint. It’s not a what. It’s a who.”

“And I don’t suppose you could just tell us who this is?” Chuck offered hopefully.

James glanced at Chuck. “That would ruin the spirit of the game.”

Artie had gotten fed up with James being cryptic and shot him. The lightning from the tesla struck MacPherson, causing him to spasm and fall onto his back and melt into a puddle of grey goo.

Both Chuck and Artie looked at the puddle in shock.

“I thought these things couldn’t melt your face off, let alone your entire body!” Chuck shouted.

Artie half-heartedly shrugged. “Heh, well vaporize, yes. Melt? No.” he then looked at the side of his weapon. “At least not at this setting.”

“Vaporize?!”

Artie ignored Chuck’s complaint and went to inspect the liquified body of MacPherson. “Somethings not right. Even if the chemical in his blood reacted with the painite in the warehouse, there wouldn’t be this much remains. The acid would have eaten everything, not leave a pile of goo.”

Chuck begrudgingly got a closer look at the grey pool, then scowled. “He must have been a duplicate.”

“A what?”

“Twice. He has a- a quirk that allows him to create clones of other people, and when they die, they turn into this.”

“So MacPherson might not even be in the warehouse at this point?”

“Considering what he said, he probably isn’t, and hopefully, neither is any of his other friends.”

After a few minutes of cleaning up a few duplicates of Twice and Tigershark, Chuck and Ron set about investigating who MacPherson took. They looked at the computer log for the bronzer and saw two instances of debronzing, the first was obviously MacPherson, but the second name shook the two.

Luna Dragneel. Sister of Celestia Dragneel.