The Sage of the Mind

Disclaimer - The rights of the respective characters are with their respective owners. I don’t mean to violate their intellectual property rights and thus, only my original characters are my IP. 

The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 62 [October 2010]

–Axle Riddle–

“So, you mean to say that if we didn’t pull Baby Bruce out of there in 2 more months, the chances of Betty surviving would drop sharply?” He asked Bruce who looked heartbroken at the news. Bruce and Randall had been hard at work the past month, taking notes and resources from SHIELD and whats-his-face Billionaire to build anything that could help BEtty survive.

Fury had pulled in all the resources he could. Axle was somewhat surprised in the beginning when Fury didn’t make any unreasonable, or any demands really when he agreed to help Banner. He brought in the best people from his organisation and from outside his organisation.

Helen Cho. He didn’t expect her to be here considering her field was not really pregnancy related but she was apparently a licensed doctor and had some interesting ideas for making sure that Betty made it out of the experience.

Tony Stark had been called in as well but the man took one look at the setup, talked a bit with Bruce, and had immediately flown back to bring something. As it turned out, Tony had been hard at work, Tony was the one who built most of the equipment that was being used in one of the warehouses he had taken over, for the express purpose of fortifying it for Betty’s pregnancy.

So far, combining the geniuses of all these three people, they had built machines and procedures that could work but nothing concrete at all. The baby was growing exponentially, estimated to pop out of Betty at just 5 months old, fully formed.

The problem was not the baby’s size or anything, it was going to be normal sized, at 5 months anyway. The problem was the gamma radiation. Betty was being constantly subjected to it from inside for months. 

He had still now shown Tony the subterranean Lair but the warehouse had a direct underground line built straight to the Highway tunnel. From the tunnel, they had a direct line to the Lair as well.

When he first showed Tony the huge tunnel he had built underground, his reaction was expected. After all, the man regularly hacked sensitive databases and his tunnel was hardly a secret so Tony knew about it but once he scanned the entire thing and realised the precision with which he had built a miles long tunnel without any outside help, he had been dumbfounded, not at the tunnel but the potential applications of his power.

“What does Betty have to say about this?” he asked Bruce who slumped even further.

“She wants to keep the baby, even if it does cost her own life,” Bruce whispered. Welp, that complicated things.

“A C-Section? We have world class surgeons in New York,” he offered, even though he had a hunch why that would not be feasible in Betty’s case.

“Wouldn’t work. The issue is not the baby, it would be irradiated tissue in Betty’s body. We need something to purge all that radiation and nothing has been found that could absorb the radiation from inside Betty,” Bruce said, frustrated at his failures.

“What about Vibranium?” He was just pulling at straws here, his limited mental capacity unable to think of anything else that could help.

Bruce’s neck snapped up as his face, along with Randall's, gained that thoughtful look when they were doing some intense thinking.

“Micro fibers woven from Vibranium, carefully injected into various parts around Betty might help slow down the radiation poisoning,” Randall said out loud.

“And once the baby is delivered, they could absorb the remaining radiation, leaving Betty’s cells slightly damaged but nothing that can be immediately fatal,” Bruce replied in turn.

Oh. So Vibranium could work then. But….

“But where would we even get Vibranium? That stuff was the rarest metal on the planet,” Bruce whispered in defeat.

“Oh, don’t you worry about that, Brucie bear. What am I here for then, huh? We SCIENCE! Bros gotta stick together, you know. I’ll make a couple of calls and get us the Vibranium we need. If we weave it thin enough, we might be able to get by with a couple hundred grams as well. If the properties of Vibranium are as miraculous as I know they are, we can even siphon off the radiation from Betty accordingly,” Tony said as he swooped in on the two geniuses discussing things with Axle.

“Oh. Heya Invisible Man. Kinda creepy of you to listen in on our conversation, don't you think?” Tony snarked at him as he looked straight up.

“Oh, like you haven't been trying to listen in with all the bugs you dropped around the place, Stark? You do realise why I didn't take you to the real base then?” He snarked back, his mind working in the background as he realised that the Vibranium plan might actually work.

…If they could utilise it properly. He had no doubt that Tony would be able to source the Vibranium, especially since they needed so little of it but he should be able to use it properly.

Howard Stark had no other way of using the Vibranium so he built a shield with it, not understanding the miraculous properties of the cosmic metal. In fact, he had a hunch that the only reason Captain was allowed to keep the shield by the Wakandans was due to the fact that it was nothing but an over glorified frisbee, capable of devastating acts in the right hands but a frisbee nonetheless.

The only other people on the planet who knew best how to use Vibranium were Wakandans and lucky for him, for some reason probably related to him, Wakanda had opened a new embassy in New York, a little further away from Manhattan. 

Now he was sure that it should have been at least a little suspicious that a tiny African country, which was poor by all measures, should not have been able to afford an embassy in New York of all places, especially with all the real estate inflation that had occurred ever since he became active in the area. And yet, there it was the Wakanda Embassy.

It was completely normal, as far as he could sense. Sure, it had all the digital doodads and everything but it was nowhere near as advanced as Wakanda could be. It made sense because they wouldn’t want the outside world to know but he had a hunch that Wakanda specifically kept this place clean to avoid his gaze.

Well, if this idea of Tony was going to work, he needed additional information about Vibranium and how to better use it in this scenario. 

Now all that was left was to approach the Wakandas and see if they were willing to help him out or if they were going to prove their stereotype that had formed in Fanon over the years.

He just hoped that T’Chaka didn’t dismiss him outright. After all, he was landlocked to an area that was halfway across the world from Wakanda. 

He would not be a threat anytime soon. But he didn’t really have to go to Wakanda to threaten them, now did he?

Information was just as deadly as physical force these days.

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