The Marvels

Ep. 27 | Oh, Merde

Juggernaut was pretty sure that his whiteboard was making the intelligence team nervous. Either they were sick of the eyesore, or they were scared that it was a passive-aggressive sign that he was mad at them for their lack of progress. He wasn't, so he moved it. They needed every ounce of concentration they could get.

He would've moved it into the Marvel meeting room, but he didn't want the others to see it and question his highly questionable thought process. Instead, he rolled the whiteboard into his own room and shoved it against a wall. Now he could glare at it even on the off hours, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

He sat cross-legged on the edge of his bed, mentally crossing names off a list while flipping through items on his pager. He'd started to look over every mission dispatch received, even if they weren't for the Marvels, just in case anything seemed off. Precautionary or paranoid, he'd let Michael decide. He had way too much to do already and this only added on to that, and nothing suspicious had come up yet, but it was better than risking another warehouse incident.

When he was done with this hour's information, he glanced at the whiteboard, at the picture of Speed that Lady Marvel had tacked on as a joke. It had been a while, but no one had died since then, so Juggernaut hoped that the murderer had been scared off. A copycat killing might be flattering, but a highly-publicized copycat killing of a speedster? That wasn't flattery—that was a threat, and he was glad the murderer seemed to have gotten the message, even if they would never know who it was from. Now it was just a matter of finding them before they got bold again.

Juggernaut frowned when the next hour's assignments popped up on his watch, not ready to jump from murders to filtering through missions. There was too much to think about, and the investigation was moving so slowly. The general consensus was this: no one saw anyone do anything. The body just showed up at the docks, the body was just found hanging in the alley, and the body just happened to be tied to propane. He hadn't gotten around to talking to anyone yet, but once he did, he knew things would go faster. He wasn't the LAPD, and he wasn't Celestro's human detectives. If he asked a question, he'd get an answer or someone would lose a limb—depending on the virtues of the person, of course. He wouldn't hurt the owners of the sushi restaurant next to Fairy's alley, but he'd take out Silvera's eye (which Echo suggested) if he didn't cooperate.

There was a knock from the hallway, followed by a tentative, "Sir?"

"Come in," he said.

Emika opened the door. "Dr. Leitner finished a new lens, and he wants you to come try it."

"I'm in the middle of something," he said distractedly, not lifting his eyes from his watch. "Can we do that later?"

Emika shuffled her feet and looked at the schedules on her tablet. "I'd push it back," she said with an awkward cough, "but you have the charity benefit, the address for CNN, the LAPD correspondence, the—"

"Alright, alright," he interrupted. "I'm coming."

Juggernaut followed her to the elevator, irritated. He liked staying busy, but lately, there was too much to do. It was all because of the stupid anniversary and all the bells and whistles that came with it. Well, that and the murders, but he was fine dealing with the murders. Preferred them, even.

Leitner, his over-eager lab technicians, and two nervous interns were waiting in Testing Room Two, the widely-unknown sibling of Testing Room One. One was where potential recruits were given the super-steroid to have their powers tested, and Two was a larger, fortified room for analyzing experiments. Propped up against a wall was a new, unscarred metal target, thicker than the last one. Leitner was holding a small tray with the latest prototype of his long-term project: contact lenses that would change the color of Juggernaut's lasers.