VIRUS ALERT!!! or Who Wants To Be a Hero?

While everyone else was fighting for their lives, or so they thought, Dr. Möbius was sitting rather calmly at a beach-side cafe. While the baristas had fled, they'd left the equipment behind... so Möbius made himself a cup of coffee and took a seat at an outdoor table with an attached umbrella. He was sitting with his tablet-style computer, flicking through various camera feeds from his Möbots and checking in on who was and wasn't fighting back.

"Let's see, the woman with the wings is flying around, good tactical use of her ability to fly. There's a woman with sonic screams? That's a cool power. Are those... oh, those ribbons can do some interesting things! And is that Madison? Good to see she's still doing well."

Rather quickly, Möbius added Madison to the list of people that his Möbots would have to go easy on. She was far too nice to deserve a bullet in her skull. Right after he did this, one of the Möbots flashed an alert that it was being horribly damaged. Its feed showed a man who looked like he belonged on the set of a wizard movie turn into a fusion of beast and man before ripping the Möbot limb from limb.

"Holy hell, that guy can turn into a werewolf?! Oh, he's definitely going on the list..."

Möbius tipped and tapped on the screen, adding a still image of the man that had morphed to a file labelled 'Possible team-members'.

"So cool..."

Right after he said this, the radio Möbius had stolen came on and spoke to him. The voice was somewhat familiar, thanks to a bombardment of political ads that he had seen while spending time in California...

"Senator Matthew Quence? You're a part of this little sham movement? I guess that explains how they keep getting their pea-shooters and other toys... Bigotry makes for strange bedfellows, eh? I mean, let's be honest, the people you're working with would probably be shooting up your family's church or tearing up some minority neighborhood if they didn't have people with third arms and blue skin to go after."

Doctor Möbius hadn't had anything to do with the loss of the STRIFE Council in Afghanistan, he'd just blown up the nerve center for the grunts on the Ashford Island. The STRIFE Council had been lost in an unrelated, but serendipitous, assault presumably launched by the new, religiously zealous Afghan government, or some other anti-US group that didn't like a group with Western backing muscling in on their territory.

"Also, if STRIFE's best and brightest are these boot-camp dropouts, I'm not going to lose too much sleep tonight. In fact, I think I'll finish wiping out your assets on the island before I get back on my submarine. I already did what I came here to do, so killing every single one of your baby bigots will just be a fun little bonus! Unless, of course, you back down from the fight you started for no good reason and get away from my new weapons-testing site! If you do, I'll let you terrorize civilians in some Third World country without interference, as a little treat. Sound good?"

Just on a whim, Möbius started checking on his little computer for public info on Matthew Quence. The homes that he maintained in California, D.C. and other states were all public information. Quence might have had some secret hideaway or apartment he didn't want the media or his wife to know about, but Möbius could look for that later. For now, the homes in California and D.C. were enough. Once he got the first set of payments from Teddy, he could slip some dollars into the hands of staffers and maids here and there and see if he could get some documents or voice recordings linking Quence to STRIFE. It could make for good blackmail material, or intel on how to keep them off his back. That would be a fun side-project for later.

"Anyways, Senator, it's been fun, but I have more important matters to attend to than you and the guys shouting recycled white-supremacist slogans. If you don't want your pet project smashed, run and hide. If you're fine with losing it, don't. I honestly don't care. STRIFE isn't a threat to me, you aren't a threat to me, and continuing to explain to you how stupid, shortsighted, and impotent you and your organization are is a waste of my breath. Ta-ta for now!"

With that, Doctor Möbius set the radio he'd stolen down on the table and got back to work. He would let Quence shout and rant and threaten him if he wanted, but it would be a sort of background noise that he could safely ignore for the moment. He had more Oddities and locations to scout out. Future crime sprees and terror attacks needed to be held somewhere, and he needed to do more rounds of "testing" to figure out who would make for a good superhero. This first round had been informative, showing who had showy or flashy or combat-ready powers, but he'd need to test for other factors later. He also had to start pulling his Möbots back to the beach. A quick check of his screen showed Möbius that he'd lost a little over a tenth of the Möbots that he had brought with him for the assault. He'd be able to build more later, and maybe get some living staff, but at the moment he had a rather limited supply of machines that he would have to fix himself. Even if they were proving to be more durable than he'd expected, a pair of them had somehow tanked an electrical attack that was equivalent to a lightning strike, and a handful of others were somehow resisting being completely bashed to bits by swinging ribbons and bats.

"Ooo, Madison and that ribbon girl have good chemistry. Maybe Madison should be on the team, too. Oooo! She could get gadgets and use martial arts or a super-strong bat... I'll design her a suit, just in case."

He had the last of the battling Möbots follow after their targets, to get some last-minute data. The Möbots that could function but couldn't run or move quick were ordered to start returning to the beach area. Those that could move fine and weren't in a combat zone were to recover any Möbots that were repairable and drag them to the docks where a few abandoned yachts and speedboats were waiting. Any that weren't functional still had a black-box of sorts broadcasting their location, he'd blast them with cruise missiles so nobody could try to reverse engineer his proprietary designs. He couldn't have that British bastard, Quence's tech company, or the Ashfords figuring out how he'd solved the problems of balancing bipedal bots and advanced AI. He also didn't want anyone tracing the steel he'd used for the chassis back to that abandoned steel mill he'd purchased very cheap in Cleveland under an assumed name.

"Kind off. I know Lynn well"

"Good; she said she was sending someone over," Dana replied, walking over from behind the wall corner. "Dana Winchester; as you can see, we've had," pausing as she pointed to the two now-dead Mobots, "a spot of trouble here. I'm not an engineer but I would love to see what's underneath these bloody things," pausing once again as both her and Alice heard Lynn come running up to them. "Easy, easy," Dana said.

Alice Seraphim
Lynn Carpenter

Alice was now able to leave her cover and walk towards Dana when Lynn came running up. Then Dana introduced herself. "Pleased to meet you Dana. I'm Alice Seraphim of the Security Services" she said and then listened to what Lynn and Dana had to say.

Both ideas had merit but the campus needed to be cleared of invaders first before a recovery operation could start. "I agree with Lynn on this one. Also let’s see if this gentleman can help us too. Lead the way Lynn" she added. "Perhaps the Robotics and AI professor is the one to take a look. We still have a battle to fight" she gently said to Dana.

She sounded calm but this was Alice's first battle. Everything prior to this was police work and the risks that came with it. Only now was her heart and mind calming. She took this chance to check her ammo supply and frowned. Even with looting the two fallen robots guns for magazines it wasn't going to enough for another prolonged round of fighting. These were partial mags and it did seem the robots had the programming to do a tactical mag change. These mags went into her suit jacket pockets for now.

Dana Winchester
Lynn Carpenter

Once Francis was on the roof they were safer and harder to target at times. David was more used to stress by now given he'd been in ARI when strife attacked there. He was finding this easier and staying calm helped him too. After a bit of roof hoping when buildings were close enough together he got another look around.

Spotting another gunned down group of strife fanatics he pointed this out. They even had a burning van. The robots had long moved on from here so he said "I ran into something like this earlier on while I was on the ground. It's strife fighters and it had to be those robots. I doubt the Security Services would be this messy about things. So why fight them?" he posed. The unspoken question being 'why aren't they trying to kill our kind?'

Given what he'd picked out from the rant when this madness started Dr Mobius hadn't named them as an enemy. So did strife start it? Quite possibly given the logical and calm way his mind worked.

Francis Dominic

Even without Mallory's ribbons it was clear the robots attention was still on them. Mallory holding them with the ribbons restricted their movements which made it possible to play a deadly game of whack a mole. They could still be shot by the strange looking guns but so far they hadn't as Mallory was keeping them out of their way of firing arcs. She hoped there was others who could keep up the defence while they were doing this near the running track.

They could only have done this together as a perfectly matched pair as Madison kept up her rampage on the shook up robots. "Same here sweetie but once this is over we deserve date time" she mused smiling back before she switched targets again. This one got to fire its gun and the electricity blast missed Madison as she ducked low on her way in. She smashed the gun out of its hand on this swing and things were looking up. She couldn't be sure how long it would be until this was over but while she was feeling a little tired she'd kept going.

Mallory Nottingham

Walking alongside both Lynn Carpenter and Alice Seraphim, Dana surveyed the damage along the way, noting the bodies strewn here and there - victims of a cruel attack. A couple of times she had to fire off an electrical bolt, though not before warning the others; together they seemed to make an impromptu team of sorts.

As they got closer to the engineering sciences builder, Dana caught sight of the individual in question - the "tall British dude" Lynn had spoken of--

"Father!" Dana shouted, taking off at a full run, yelling several times towards David Winchester and almost having to stop and pinch herself - what was her father doing here? Panting for breath a few times, she made it over to where he was standing and gave him probably the happiest hug one could imagine a daughter giving their father under circumstances such as these. "Father, what are you doing here?" she asked, not wanting to let go, not caring if either Lynn or Alice saw her like this, not even after everyone seemed to stop after, e4lsewhere around the Island, any remaining Mobots were destroyed by laser beams.

Even after all that, Dana could not believe she'd ever run into her father of all people on Ashford Island.

The crewmembers of the ISS, who knew full well that you couldn't just permanently or easily disconnect an individual from the various networks and pieces that made up the Internet unless they had a stable connection via wire, just tapped at buttons when they were told to cut Möbius off from "the world wide web". They knew what happened if they told Matthew Quence something he didn't like. Gunshots, fists, or being spaced out the airlock were all on the table, like what happened to the men and women of various space agencies that were supposed to be on the ISS at that moment, on peaceful scientific missions. The astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts of the world who had said "no" had burned up in the atmosphere, and would not be missed for a few months.

So, the remaining crew, all STRIFE saboteurs that were personally loyal to the insane Quence, pushed buttons and told him they had done what he asked. It was easier that way.

Meanwhile, on the ground, Doctor Möbius looked up as flickering bits of green showed themselves at seemingly random points in the air. These were the interruptions of dust and debris reflecting bits of light, showing the location of the beams that melted each and every one of the Möbots he had on land into slag. It was a familiar beam, though it had only existed for the briefest of moments...

"That was my prototype. THAT WAS MY PROTOTYPE! WHERE IN THE HELL DID YOU GET THAT, YOU BASTARD?!"

Möbius was beyond furious. This thing that Quence had used was a design that Möbius had made for the purpose of defending people from nuclear annihilation and freak asteroids. The beam was powerful enough to melt through the outer skin of ICBMs and destroy the mechanisms that allowed them to release their MIRVs and create the chain of explosions that led to the fusion of atoms. It was also powerful enough to cut solid pieces of rock into chunks and quarters, rendering a dino-killer into a swarm of fist-sized rocks that might destroy satellites, but which would burn up in the atmosphere harmlessly. However, while the prototype had been effective and had easily done its job, it was big. And getting big things into space was hard. So the Pentagon had shelved it, putting the prototype in storage in a facility that Möbius had never been shown while urging him to finish up on those railguns, so they would have something to roll out whenever someone else got a half-decent design.

What had been meant to protect humanity was now a weapon in the hands of a mad-man. A stolen piece of Doctor Möbius' work being used to threaten him and hold the world hostage.

As months of careful planning and work were undone in a single instant by a man that, for some reason, commanded more powerful weaponry than the President of the United States of America did... A man that proceeded to gloat about how much he wielded, and something about God and China, Doctor  Möbius made a silent vow. He would dismantle STRIFE piece by piece, taking what he wanted while destroying the rest. Every piece of political power that Matthew Quence wielded, every person he employed, every machine and weapon he held, every home and safe place that he had sheltered would be taken from him. And once he had nobody and nothing left, when he was reduce to a naked, scared, soft little man? Then, and only then, would Doctor Möbius kill Senator Matthew Quence.

Because at that moment, Matthew Quence was no different from the Ashfords and Winchesters of the world. He was a stupid, shortsighted, little man who was ruled by fear and greed, and who took the labor and creations of others to make himself more comfortable.

Before any of that sweet, cold revenge could be served, however, Doctor Möbius had to ensure he survived the day. So, he tapped a button on the side of that strange, metallic backpack he had been wearing... Which caused a pole to rise up from the center. From that pole, blades grew and unfolded like a strange metal flower. He also had a pair of joysticks stick out from around the sides, which he grabbed. It was... some sort of miniature helicopter that spun and spun and then lifted him off the ground toward the submarine.

He said nothing as he headed back to his current base of operations, allowing Quence to get the last word and the true heroes of the day to be left confused and wondering where he went. Discretion was the better part of valor, and taunting a mad man who was willing to start fights that he had no stake in, then end them with a superweapon for petty reasons, was not very discrete.



[In other words, Doctor Möbius is leaving the thread. He has been temporarily defeated and needs time to rebuild his forces! If anyone wants to get a last post in, try and do so in the next two days or so. See you all for the next daring and dangerous crime of the dastardly Doctor Möbius!]