Mr. Epitome Super Villain Special Part One


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killer shrike
Wed Jul 09, 2003 at 04:07:55 pm EST
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Mr. Epitome Super Villain Special

“Who is…. The Mind’s Eye?”

Ten years ago, the Plesetsk Cosmodrome Launch Facility, 400 miles northeast of St. Petersburg:

Nadezhda Prokofiev looked in awe at the massive gantry that dominated the installation. If today was a regular launch day, the towering steel structure would be propping up a Start-1 booster rocket, designed to deliver its payload into orbit. Today was not ordinary. For it would be young Nadezhda Prokofiev making the journey to space, without use of a rocket, shuttle, or any machine built by man.
The Strategic Missile Forces car passed the military checkpoint and came to a halt outside one of Plesetsk’s labs. Nadezhda was ushered by her KGB handlers inside.
The building had been refitted. Gone were the tools the engineers would use to repair and monitor the systems required to launch sophisticated technology out of the atmosphere. In their stead were the machinery needed by the KGB’s Esper Division to keep their agents’ bodies alive while their minds were elsewhere.
Nadezhda was one such agent. Her psychic abilities had been diagnosed when she was only four years old. The KGB took her from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk and moved her to Moscow, where she was personally trained by the Soviet spymaster, Gregor Vassilych. This was when Vassilych was at the height of his power within the Soviet Union’s espionage agency as he fought a brave rear guard action against their country’s greatest enemy. Not that it mattered. Dr. Vassilych had told her over the nearly two decades they worked together that Eastern communism would fail, that Western capitalism would triumph, and Mother Russia would soon be exposed to the world as a hollow shell of a superpower.
That it took another 20 years to occur was Vassilych’s greatest accomplishment. His reward was a demotion within the KGB to where now he worked with the various Soviet space agencies in an attempt to stay ahead of his old rival in at least one regard. That was why he and Nadezhda Prokofiev were at Plesetsk today: to attempt the first non-corporeal space flight in human history.
“Do you feel proud, Nadya?” the tall, rapier-thin Vassilych had asked her as the Esper Division’s medical staff restrained her body in her hospital bed.
“Yes, sir. I do.”
Vassilych smoothed the mustache that made him look to Nadya like Vincent Price. When she had told him of the similarity five years ago he laughed, and later gave her a copy of “The Raven” movie poster signed by famed film star. The gift still hung in her Moscow apartment.
“It will be a pleasant to publicize one of your missions. You will be on the cover of both “Time” and “Newsweek” for what you will do here today.”
Nadezhda smiled. Hopefully her hair would grow back by then. She was not a vain woman, but her nearly bone-white tresses did make her feel special.
The technicians interrupted their conversation, “Sir, we need to fit Miss Prokofiev for her helmet,” one especially brave man whispered.
“Very well,” Vassilych hissed and moved away as the bulky apparatus was affixed to her head and shoulders. The device would beam a virtual astronomic chart into her brain, allowing Nadezhda to navigate her way to the mission’s ultimate destination: Alpha Centuri.
The headgear weighed heavily on the tiny woman, straining her neck. Worse sensations came when they inserted her intravenous tube and catheter. Soon though, she would be able to abandon those pains and countless others. Nadezhda would become pure thought, unbound by time and space.
The helmet whirred to life as the automated needle found the ventral horn on Nadya’s spinal cord and injected into it the psychoactive chemicals that would enhance her mental abilities.
Within a heartbeat Nadya noticed the change. Stray thoughts from nearby workers crept into her head. Gregor Vassilych was closed to her as always. If she chose to waste time she could have tested his defenses, but the drug only boosted her powers for so long. It was time to depart.
Nadezhda projected her consciousness from her body. She circled the Earth a few times, pausing to linger at places she had always wished to physically visit (the Taj Mahal, Fiji, Paradopolis) then streaked upward, out of the atmosphere, past the Moon, Mars, and soon out of the solar system. Nadezhda Prokofiev was now the first astralnaut in human history.
She tried to follow the star chart broadcast directly into her mind, but soon found herself lost. Not that it mattered. Retracing her path was simple enough, thanks to the ethereal cord that linked Nadya to her body. And the Soviet scientists did not expect too much hard data to be retrieved from this maiden jaunt. There would be time for detailed observations later.
Nadya zoomed through an enormous red sun and was surprised by what waited her on the other side: a man-shaped object suspended in space. It was huge, but the woman had just crossed thousands of light years by mere force of will, so the armored figure did not impress her. It reminded Nadezhda of one the toy robots her brother collected. She attempted to communicate with it telepathically.
“Hello? Can you hear me? Do you understand me?”
The reply, though untranslatable, ripped through Nadezhda’s astral form, reducing her psyche to its component thoughts. Then those thoughts were recombined and sent screaming backwards to their small but pivotal home world.
The space god’s act had changed Nadya. She could tell that the instant she returned to her body. Her telepathic abilities were at an all new level, beyond even what the drugs had done. She had to temporarily shut them down to stop the constant barrage of thoughts emanating from as far away as Siberia. Even Gregor Vassilych was now an open book. She had seen his frustrations and regrets. More importantly, she saw his desires.
They were laudable desires. Nadya decided she wanted them too.
Later, after the scientists ran thorough examinations on Nadezhda (the results of which were wiped from the men’s memories), she went to find Vassilych.
He was hunched over a desk in a temporary office set up for him, putting the finishing touches on his report explaining the mission’s apparent failure. An unfiltered cigarette burned low in his mouth.
“Dr. Vassilych, you look unhappy,” she announced.
The fifty-something man looked at his prized agent and smirked, “Well, I am writing a report that will probably get me sacked, so I am not in the best of moods.”
Nadya shrugged, “You should quit.”
“And what would I do with my time, Nadya? Feed the birds? Or perhaps get a job sweeping Red Square,” he went back to his work.
“I was thinking,” she reached out with her mind and crumpled the report into a tiny ball before throwing it into the trash, “that you could do what you do best. Except this time you could make yourself very rich as well.”
Dr. Vassilych looked surprised, “You have never displayed telekinetic powers before, Nadya. Did the drugs-?”
“Oh no, Gregor, it was not the drugs,” it sounded so odd, saying her mentor’s first name, “It was something else. Come, I want to show you something.”
Nadya walked outside. After donning his great coat and hat, Vassilych accompanied her.
It was well after midnight. Other than the occasional sentry the base seemed deserted. Nadya began to speak directly into the spymaster’s mind.
“I know of your plans, Gregor Vassilych. You are right; it is a waste of time to be here. With your contacts throughout the world you could be building an empire instead of serving one that is all but dead.”
“My psychic shields should prevent you from doing this, Nadya.”
“Whoever taught you those exercises never encountered any one like me. You are not as upset as I would have expected from someone so proud,” she commented.
Dr. Vassilych lit another cigarette, “Pride is a costly emotion. I have been able to destroy many an enemy because they were too proud.”
“And you miss it. So let’s start again,” Nadya looked at the gantry that so impressed her when they first came to Plesetsk. Now it was nothing. She concentrated and willed the structure to collapse, as if it had been pressed from above by a powerful weight.
Gregor Vassilych was shocked for a moment. Then he smiled. Speaking aloud, he said, “We will have to be more subtle than that if we go to work for ourselves.”
“If?” Nadya gave her mentor a sidelong glance.
“When,” Gregor bent down and took Nadya’s bare hand. He gently pressed his lips against it, “My dear, you have just saved this old man from putting a bullet in his head. Now let’s see what kind of mischief we can cause.”
*****

Next, in honor of Villains Week: “Who is….Musk Ox?”






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