The Director and the Dragon, Part 4

Posted on Tue Dec 2nd, 2025 @ 5:22am by Head Mistress Absynthe "Syn" Drake & Level 10 Minamoto 源 Takashi 孝志

Mission: HYDRA: Another Head Rises
Location: Mutant Academy Near Sedona, Arizona
Timeline: Current, 2300 hours

“お願いします(Please)”, Takashi said to her as he picked up the yunomi with both gloves hands and held it out to her, bowing his head slightly in appreciation. When she refilled it, he gave her a quick “ありがとうございます (Thank you)” and straightened himself out, carefully cradled the steaming yunomi in his lap, letting it cool.

“While I understand your sentiment,” he said in his accented English, looking into her serpentine eyes once more. “The fact still remains that it is my duty to apprehend her for questioning. Even if she is not using her authority as a Marshal, she still is a Marshal. Her superiors understandably believe that as such, her behavior is giving the Marshal Service a bad name. They must make an example of her. They do not want other Marshals to act similarly. Their ranks already had too many of them in the past.”

Looking down at the yunomi briefly, he raised it to his lips with both hands, took a sip and lowered it to his lap once more, then continued. “As it stands, she will likely be stripped of her badge and will likely be brought up on charges.” Before she could get in a word edgewise, he pressed on.

“There are already several other groups trying to apprehend her, and I can assure you they will not be gentle. You know how regular law enforcement can be, especially with power nullification devices.”

“But…” he said, letting the word hang in the air for a moment as he took another sip, this time taking a bit longer, letting the warm tea sit on his tongue to once again appreciate its flavor, then swallowed. “If I were to find her first…” He trailed off, looking at her pointedly, taking another long sip of the tea, letting her draw her own conclusions, the silence speaking volumes as the Japanese expertly did.

Syn gave another soft chuckle at Takashi’s inference as she poured them both another round of steaming tea. “I’m well aware there will be consequences, Director,” she said mildly. “But she seems rather unconcerned with your orders, or her own wellbeing. And I will offer my own resources to defend her if it comes to that. The academy owes her that much.”

Truthfully, people far beyond these walls owed Fractal that much, even if they would never know it. Few understood how close she had come to sacrificing herself, willingly, to end the war with HYDRA. Another secret for the ever-growing list of burdens the light-bearer refused to speak about.

Syn set the teapot down with a quiet clink. The old assassin gave a small shrug. She knew the world would send its worst after an out of bounds mutant. “She’ll do what is morally right, whether we approve of her methods or not. And I’m telling you plainly... we might not reach her in time for anyone to put her on trial. Orders be damned.”

She lifted her cup halfway to her lips, paused in thought, then lowered it with a decisive tap. “OG, convert the command room. I’d rather we work together to find Fractal before someone decides she’s just easier to put down.”

Understood, came the cool, feminine reply. The transformation began instantly. The lights dimmed, shifting from warm gold into a crisp, tactical white-blue. The polished wood of the office walls shimmered beneath layered holographic overlays; transparent grids, tactical readouts, floating biometric scans. The floor beneath them pulsed once as hidden projectors activated, scattering soft beams of green and white light across the room. The large round office reformed into a fully operational command center.

A holographic map unfolded in the air like a blooming flower, expanding to dominate the room. The northeastern seaboard glowed in shades of cool blue, broken by stark red dots marking HYDRA’s confirmed or suspected assets. Data scrolled beside each point; timestamps, structural layouts, incomplete threat assessments, all updating in real time with a soft hum.

Then, with a faint chime, a holographic woman materialized. Delicate, translucent, and shimmering in emerald light. She hovered at waist height, reminiscent of a storybook fairy made of code and light.

I’m OG, she said, folding her luminous hands primly behind her. I run this place. Well, the technical aspect of it, anyway. The holographic image glanced towards Syn. At least this one seems more polite than the Mountain Man.

Syn snorted softly into her tea.

OG smirked, then looked back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director with a respectful dip of her head. This is what we know. Sparkles isn’t easy to track on a good day, and the fact that she’s got Julius onboard and actively blocking our efforts has me concerned.

The S.H.I.E.L.D. Director quickly finished the tea, gently placing the yunomi upon the nearby table with both hands, then stood abruptly as the display blossomed to life. To OG, he bowed his head and shoulders in greeting, though he surmised that she had been listening the whole time. He had suspected the Headmaster had such a command center at her disposal; his electromagnetic sight clearly showing the large influx of power that fed to the top of this tower. He took it all in stride, visibly displaying that in his body language.

“And I take it Julius,” he said casually as the holographic image settled on the western United States, looking from the map to OG and back. “Is the onboard AI within her suit? She must have ordered him to disconnect the tracking algorithm implanted within. She also likely has him scrambling all inbound and outbound signals to avoid any passive communication to avoid pinging any uplinks to a satellite or nearby comms towers.”

He walked up the few steps from the recessed sitting area into the holographic image, his gloved hands instinctively resting upon his daisho, studying it from a closer angle. He took mental note of the known and/or suspected HYDRA facilities, OG labeling them as the image focused on a closeup of those areas. After a few moments of studying the image, he turned to look at Syn expectantly.

“If you would allow me to uplink some of my findings,” he said to the petite dragon woman in his accented English. “I can add some data points that we have found using some of my calculations and investigations.” He raised his hands from his daisho, turning his wrist to face him. A small holographic display appeared hovering just above it, an eldritch blue S.H.I.E.L.D. logo quickly changing to a compact access screen, awaiting input.

OG cast a sidelong glance at Syn, one digital eyebrow arching in faux skepticism as the tiny dragon woman set down her cup. Syn rose with quiet grace and stepped to the center of the glowing platform beside Takashi. Her command center’s true heart.

“Allow limited access to current operations concerning Fractal,” she instructed. “Julius is the AI. Though, that particular nanosuit is genetically bound to her. Not everyone can be bound to one, even if they agree to the attempt. Imagine that voice in your head being very real. The... AI, is a sentient alien, technological parasite. Technically. It’s far more complicated than that, but that’s the easiest way to quickly explain it. It normally allows us to track position, bio readings. It offers armored protection, accelerated movement. It does have the drawback that they are encouraged towards creative thought as well as the technical.”

OG inclined her luminous head. One delicate hand lifted, and the surrounding displays responded instantly, expanding their data streams outward like petals of light. Her voice, clear, feminine, tinged with that unmistakable digital resonance, filled the room through the layered surround-sound array.

Any information you’re willing to share, she said, would greatly improve predictive accuracy.

Despite the gentle polish of her academy’s exterior, this chamber revealed far more than academic administration. The laser-optic displays were capable of managing not only the flow of a campus and its adjacent city, but logistical networks far larger, potentially military-scale, if Syn ever chose to lean that way.

Nothing in the visible architecture advertised such potential power, however. Her security measures were subtle, almost understated. Layers of caution woven into convenience, hidden beneath the appearance of a progressive educational facility.

But Syn had lived long enough to know what mobs were capable of, long before they had drones, satellites, or global surveillance. She remembered torches. She remembered pitchforks. She remembered fear.

And she remembered what it meant to be hunted.

Long ago, she had sought out S.H.I.E.L.D. herself, preferring transparency over suspicion, and diplomacy over the inevitable conclusion of the paranoid mind. She was old for a reason. And every inch of this command center, every sensor and shielded server core, whispered that truth.

Takashi nodded at the pair in thanks and used his gloved right hand to search for a file then grabbed what appeared to be a holographic representation of a glowing blue ball, presumably the data packet, then motioned with his fingers to ‘flick’ it toward the large holographic map. When the ‘ball’ left his holographic display area, it popped up within the confines of the holographic map, then seemed to unfold.

As the data was immediately downloaded onto the academy servers, small blue dots began to pop up on the large map; many were overlapping the glowing red spots turning them purple, others shining a clear eldritch blue, signifying new points on the map. As they appeared, Takashi spoke.

“These are identified HYDRA locations. It appears that we found similar compounds or other HYDRA locations,” he began, his sonorous Japanese accented English explaining the different types of locations he and S.H.I.E.L.D. had found as each type of location and their brief descriptions appeared. “Drug manufacturers, weapons caches and materiel, small data centers, other various miscellaneous sites, and compounds such as where Bethany and I first met.”

He waved his hand within the large map to indicate the next item on his data packet, the sites that Bethany had already hit, turning purple as his data overlapped with theirs. “As you can see, these are all of the sites she has already attacked.” After they all turned purple, Takashi raised his gloved right hand, palm up, to bring up a menu, used two fingers to select an item among the list of options, then used two fingers to select an option, listed as ‘M.S.D.’

As the algorithm loaded, a rainbow colored miasma highlighted all of the sites Bethany had attacked. After another moment, a glowing, dotted blue line seemed to connect all of the sites of Bethany’s attacks, following what appeared to be a random, but generally Northwestern trajectory. Here he held up his right hand, palm facing outward to pause the continued display of his aggregate data.

“Since my return to Terra,” the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director said, turning to face her, meeting her serpentine gaze with his own. “After my elevation to the position of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director, I have endeavored to combine S.H.I.E.L.D.’s advanced technology and merge it with the advanced knowledge and technologies I gained from several species I encountered on my travels across the cosmos. This allowed me to implement certain tracking algorithms and methods that would not have been possible with what we had previously.”

Turning away from her to face the holographic map once more, he motioned with his open right hand using a ‘pushing’ motion to continue the operation of his program. Slowly, several smaller rainbow hued spats appeared; some along the dotted blue lines path, others not. Holding up his hand to stop the program once more, he turned to face the headmistress again, this time with a small upward curve of the right side of his mouth.

“Using this new technology," Takashi said, a slight bit of what could possibly pass as mild excitement in the usually unflappably stoic man. “I managed to create an algorithm that was able to detect multi-spectral energy flares far beyond anything we had here on Terra. Usually our sensors are unable to differentiate between the electromagnetic energy being cast off Sol and the various energy sources we have powering our technology.”

As you know, as electrons become charged, they accelerate and thus pass through the various quantized energy transitions of their superpositions within the atom. In this way, the type of energy detected can be determined. An oscillating or accelerating charge creates a self-propagating wave of electric and magnetic fields that travel at the speed of light. Then, when the charged electron moves from its higher to lower superposition, it sheds the excess energy by emitting photons. At the quantum level, this energy of the photon determines its frequency and thus, where it falls on the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Also, I managed to tweak the sensors’ sensitivity to pick up these minute electromagnetic fluctuations at the quantum level, based on my own powers. That in turn, allowed me to pinpoint the exact types of energy being created by extremely specific biological sources. The way these photons are produced by a biological source, allowed me to separate her specific biosignature from the ambient environment!” He looked at her expectantly, hoping he did not get overly technical. He had a tendency of doing so when he spoke about something he found technologically interesting.

Both Syn and OG listened as Takashi’s newly provided data parsed itself into their system, seamlessly folding into the existing network of information. The command center responded instantly, Fractal’s trail highlighted in shimmering color that matched the faint glitter her powers left behind.

How’s that working out for you? OG’s voice lilted through the speakers, her tone perfectly poised between faux innocence and razor sarcasm. Most would have muttered that question under their breath. OG broadcast it without an ounce of hesitation. If you had found her, Director, you wouldn’t be standing here.

A digital shrug rippled through her avatar. She hates what she is. She only uses her abilities when absolutely necessary. Nine times out of ten, she’d rather knock someone out cold. Or put a bullet through them. So unless you’re telling us you can track a powered-down, survivalist mutant who doesn’t want to be tracked… you’re seeing the same gaps we are.

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TBC
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Absynthe Drake
“Wyrmwood”
Headmistress - Drake Academy

Minamoto Takashi 源孝志
“Hypernova 極超新星”
Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

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