The Lost Akiko/Baroness chapter... (Mostly new material... not a repost)

Early on in Baroness Zemo's career, she teamed up with Akiko Masamune to steal 34 million in gold from the Parodiopolis Federal Reserve bank through a rather unusual method. She then proceeded to double cross Akiko rather severely.

At the time, I felt Akiko needed to save some face (and explain a few points from the story that really weren't her style), so I wrote a follow up from her point of view that showed how she had manipulated the situation to get what she *really* wanted from the whole thing anyway. However, I thought that it was perhaps stepping on the toes of JJJ's story at the time, and I removed it from the board a short time later. JJJ said he had liked it, so I said I'd perhaps repost it after working out some of the things that bugged me about it.

Well, I never did repost it... But I had in fact rewritten quite a bit of it. Finding it now, I figured I may as well post it. The details of Akiko's scheme are mostly the same (and very little has changed towards the ending), but things are a bit less clipped in this version. A bit from JJJ's chapter has been included in the story to help refresh memories of how things went down originally, it being more than a year later.

The attack came from her left side, giving her just the briefest impression of it before the gauntleted fist shot through the space previously occupied by her head. Before she had even regained her balance, she thumbed the trigger ring on her right hand, activating her heavy yet elegant wristwatch’s main function. The armor unfolded from within itself, impossibly (or so it seemed to the naked eye), until her entire form was encased in gleaming silver and pink.

The next blow was deflected rather than dodged, and the one after that intercepted altogether. Grasping her opponent’s forearm, she delivered a powerful thrust to his armpit with her other fist, then took advantage of his shifting weight to lift him bodily over her head and fling him across the dojo.

A second attacker caught her square between the shoulder blades with a particle shot, driving her forward onto her face, and eliciting a grunt of considerable pain. Quickly, the man dropped his own armored form onto her back, managing to secure one arm behind her and placing his knee and all his weight against her slender neck.

Akiko growled at this indignity, and brought her legs up behind her to connect with her opponent’s back. Magnetizing the soles of her feet and amping the power of her suit up by a factor of ten, she latched onto his own armor and ripped her legs back down to the floor, slamming the man’s head and shoulders into the reinforced hardwood. Rolling quickly back to her feet, she grasped his foot and, seeing the first attacker charging back into the fray, swung the second as a crude bludgeoning instrument. The two men met in a rending crash of metal that sent them both skittering to the far corners of the room with an amplified cry of human pain.

“Damn it…” Akiko swore, disengaging her armor which quickly refolded into itself, leaving her standing in a simple lose-fitting exercise suit. “Toshio, Youmi… are you injured?”

Toshio, the man who had become a makeshift club a moment ago, struggled to stand. “It is nothing, mistress… I can continue.”

“Don’t be an idiot” Akiko snapped, seeing that he was obviously favoring his right leg greatly. She gestured to Youmi to help him. “The point of these exercises are to hone my abilities, not to cripple my instructors. You are off the training schedule until you are cleared by my physician. Midori…” she called to her young assistant waiting silently by the door. “Call Dr. Warner and have him see Toshio immediately.” She turned and walked briskly past the young woman, accepting a towel from her on the way out. “That will be all for today, gentlemen. Thank you.”

She was still in a foul mood as she sat at her desk going over the latest batch of reports, both the requested and the urgent, that had proliferated on her blotter while she was working out with her personal trainers. Akiko didn’t like to lose, and she had no doubts that that was exactly what had happened in the dojo. Toshio had caught her unaware, and Akiko had overreacted instead of accepting defeat. As a result, a valuable resource was unavailable to her for the foreseeable future. It did not sit well with her.

“The MRI showed no major ligament damage…” Midori announced as she entered the office, as if reading her mistress’s mind. “Surgery will not be required, though Master Toshio will not be fit for strenuous activity for at least four to six weeks.”

Akiko scowled and turned to look out her office window at the bustling Hong Kong skyline without answering. This city was affecting her mood as much as anything. This wasn’t home to her, and she resented being forced to preside over the mudane side of the business, locked here by petty, unimaginative Yakuza politics…

“He should have been more careful” Midori judged disdainfully. “Perhaps next time he will not let such a slip happen again.”

Perhaps next time Akiko would not cheat and alter the parameters of her armor to far outmatch her opponent’s. It was an exercise in soothing her ego that accomplished nothing, proving only the limits of her self control. After all, she had no need to prove her power… That was a behavior more suited to an impotent pustule like Flask than to herself. She shook her head to clear it of such distasteful comparisons. “What other business do we have today?” she asked, eager to move on.

Midori coughed delicately. “The… ah… gentlemen from that Seattle based organization are here in person to once more demonstrate their services to the organization…”

Akiko rolled her eyes. “The ‘Ass Raping Ninjas’ seriously expect me to give them work?”

“Apparently they were offered employment by your cousin.”

The pink suited crime lord twisted her face in disgust. “Yes, that seems about his level.” Whether it was an effort to heap embarrassment onto her operations or if he could truly take such an unfortunately named organization seriously, Akiko neither knew nor cared. The younger Masamune was quickly gaining favor with the Yakuza lords here in the East, and had none too subtly been seeding his people into various levels of her own organization. A barbaric little man with twisted ideals of traditionalism… His self-mutilated followers supposedly demonstrated their loyalty by dismembering their digits to atone for mistakes… (As if competence is improved by removing one’s manual dexterity bit by bit). Again, the kind of brutal gesture Flask would respect. Something clearly would need to be done... She sighed wearily at the growing number of distasteful tasks ahead of her. “What else?”

“That Dewdrop woman is in town, having successfully completed her… grand heist.” Akiko could practically hear the girl’s eyeballs rolling with the delivery of this news. “She’s requesting you meet up for lunch.”

Akiko, however, turned from the Hong Kong skyline, her demeanor brightening noticeable. A smile played across her lips as a number of opportunities occurred to her. “Ah! How delightful… Little Beth has come through after all. Just the sort of thing to turn this morning around.”

“Of course.” The Baroness dropped her air of nonchalance and adopted a cold, harsh voice. “You thought you could cut yourself in for 50% of MY take, just for providing a few bullyboys, a truck and an airplane? Well, darling, I keep my word, you got half the gold. I’m so sorry that you forgot to ask me about the rated life of my Phenomenal Friction spray, but we all make mistakes.”

“It won’t take very long for the Hong Kong police to start snooping around a warehouse full of bumper-car gold bars, Beth, and I’m afraid my hospitality has come to an end. I’m sure they’ll treat you very nicely before turning you over to the FBI. Say hello to Martha Stewart when you meet her in prison.”

“It’s your warehouse, your plane and your gold, dear. You still have a chance to keep them all and avoid being on the run from every police force in Interpol, but you’ll need to make a deal with me quickly.”

“And what would that deal be?”

“You keep the gold, but you wire all but 10% of its value to this account in the Caymans, Akiko.” She handed a card to her lunchmate. “Then I tell your lunkheads how to move the bars.”

Akiko snarled.

“Come on, dearie, you still make $3.4 million on this deal. And we can finish lunch…”

Midori stood by in shocked outrage as the obnoxious German-American fended off the incompetent “Ass-Raping Ninjas” with barely an effort (though the force field enveloping her body had more to do with it than the ninja’s abilities) and made her exit with a self-congratulatory smirk. The young assistant very nearly leapt to attack the pretentious Dewdrop woman herself, incensed as she was… not about the apparent success of the would-be supervillainess’s efforts to extort Midori’s mistress, but rather at the insolence at which she dared to address Ms. Masamune.

The crime lord herself, however, merely returned to her plate with an amused chuckle and resumed her lunch.

Midori prepared to call in the tactical response team on stand-by a block away. “Shall I have the Dewdrop woman vaporized, or would you care to have her taken alive?”

Akiko dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “One moment.” She turned to the representative of the Ninjas, who was sheepishly collecting his attack squad from under assorted tables in the restaurant’s private dining room. “You may tell your superiors that you were given an opportunity to fully demonstrate your potential value to my operations. I’d advise them not to wait by the phone for my call.” She went back to her salad as the men sheepishly collected themselves and, after bowing, filed out the door. “They did add a little something to the show” she said to Midori after they had left. “I find that Westerners are so disappointed if we don’t resort to ninjas. Now, tell me about the gold.”

The young woman blinked in surprise, her thumb on the call button of her cellular phone. “Yes… the gold” she managed before she could shame herself by questioning her mistress’s order. “The hand-over of the gold to the Chinese authorities went smoothly… they offered their thanks for our assistance in the matter, and assurances that it would not be forgotten.”

The woman in pink nodded absently. “Yes, yes… I’m sure they’ll get as much political mileage out of the embarrassment to the American authorities as possible.” The daring heist was already worldwide news, what with leak of the suspected involvement of a new Zemo, of all things. The Chinese government’s recovery of American Federal Reserve gold would play for weeks in the state controlled news, especially with the nation suffering from serious ‘hero-envy’ as the axis of super-powered might was unequivocally centered in Parodiopolis, not so coincidentally site of the heist itself. “I’m quite sure it won’t be forgotten, as I’ve taken pains to express our desire to see the Chinese Government accept Avis Amalgamated’s bid on the particle accelerator contract… Not to mention the deal to make that horrific energy drink of theirs the sole foreign entry in that market. Let me know when it goes through.”

The girl nodded again. “And your cousin’s men?”

Akiko frowned in distaste. “They were apprehended with the gold?”

“Yes, Ms. Masamune.”

“Let the Chinese deal with them as they see fit. The family will see it as an embarrassment, and my dear cousin’s absence will be explained. Barbaric little man… one potential resource I’ll be glad to be rid of. He should be well over the Pacific by now, I should think...” she noted, checking her watch. “Get me a direct line to the pilot of his private jet when we’re done here. Reports were already circulating that he was in league with this new amateur Baroness… how dreadfully embarrassing for him. No wonder he vanished as it all fell apart.” She took a sip of wine. “Oh, and arrange to have the rest of those self-mutilated followers that he’s been worming into all levels of my organization returned from wherever he dragged them up. Hopefully it wasn’t the Hong Kong office typists pool.”

The girl nodded and made to leave, then paused at the door.

Akiko waited patiently for her to ask the question that had been on her mind.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am…” she finally began, turning around. “But why did you bother to give in to that Dewdrop woman’s blackmail if you had no intention of keeping the gold?”

The pink garbed crime boss regarded the young assistant with a bemused smile. “You mean aside from our payoff from the $12 billion dollar Avis deal?” She laughed. “It was time to end my association with young Miss Dewdrop… but she is a Zemo… there’s little doubt about that now. And I do suspect she’s acquired the Zemo temperament. Tenacious bunch, those Germans.” She shook her head. “In my experience, those looking to prove something only let go after they’ve done so.” She returned to her salad. “What was it that American actor said, when he was accused of associating with prostitutes instead of relying on his own charms?”

The girl looked at her blankly.

“I don’t pay them for the sex… I pay them to leave afterwards.”

“I… see. But why not…” She held up her cel phone.

Akiko smiled, taking a sip of her water. “My dear child, that Dewdrop woman has potential… and wasting a potential resource is the only real crime in this world. I mean... a lubricated bank heist, and holding the antidote over me?" she shook her head. "Audacity like that needs to be nurtured just so. I believe she signals the beginning of some very interesting times for Parodiopolis…" she smiled fondly. "...And I do so love that town.”

*Excerpt taken from The Baroness chapter 6b: Who says I’m a totally lame villain?

Post By Visionary Wed Dec 21, 2005 at 12:03:03 am EST	Subject The Lost Akiko/Baroness chapter... (Mostly new material... not a repost)

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