The Conceptual Deck

Chapter 79: The calm

Now properly identified, the stone was quickly put in its box, nestled back with the scepter despite the fact that it was no longer functional. It was pushed away by Coulson, a pair of Shield soldiers escorting him back out of the room. Once the Stone was gone Fury focused back on the group, opening his mouth to speak before Tony cut him off.

"Why are we okay with Fury just having that?" Tony asked, looking confused. "Who knows where it's going to end up?"

"The stone isn't leaving the Helicarrier," Fury explained. "The Helicarrier is one of Shields strongest military assets, it makes no sense to ship the stone away when we can just move the ship. We will be maneuvering the ship out into the open ocean, where our other naval assets, as well as the US Navy can provide extra support. Any incoming threats will likely be focused on the stone."

"Are we sure about that?" Betty asked, getting a surprised look from Tony. "Are we sure that Loki will target it specifically?"

"We don't even know if Loki is going to be the one showing up," Bucky pointed out. "For all we know someone is pulling his strings."

"So we don't put all our eggs in one basket," Steve suggested with a shrug, as if it was simple. "Maker can get us anywhere we need to go. So Shield focuses on the stone, and the rest of us stay ready to go where we are needed."

"Who is 'we'?" Natasha asked.

"Us." Steve answered simply, looking each of us. "All of us, the enhanced squad and whoever else is willing to volunteer. We can hold off whatever they send until the National Guard and Shield can respond. It won't be pretty but we don't have much of a choice."

Natasha simply nodded in response. I had a feeling she hadn't been asking to cast doubt, but rather to let everyone confirm that was what was happening.

We talked more about what we could do, what our plans were. Unfortunately there wasn't much we could do, beyond make plans and prepare. I snagged the UCM that had been printing out Anti-cuffs, though I let Shield keep the cuffs it had already made. I also headed to the warehouse to grab a few more, before traveling to the Void Skipper. I set its cloak to full, making it vanish completely before setting it to follow above me in geosynchronous orbit. I had decided to stay on the Helicarrier, but having the spacecraft as close as possible without spooking everyone seemed like a good idea.

When I was done with that I put together a travel system, one with only a single destination. That if whatever Loki did happened somewhere else, I could travel to the closest location to wherever we were needed, fly the remaining distance and place down a landing pad, where everyone could travel to. I passed out the travel bracers to everyone, binding them as I was going to be doing with everything I would be handing out.

While I was working on that Tony, the genius that he is, took the Tesseract detector a step further and created, with the help of Bruce, a Infinity Stone detector, tuned to the radiation that had been coming off of the Tesseract and what was coming from sealed Mind Stone. At the cost of a mass spectrometer, he handed me a device made to find the most powerful artifacts in the Marvel universe. His device was limited to a few hundred feet, but with a few dozen things from my storage shed I had it working on a global scale. It perfectly tracked us as the Helicarrier left the DC naval base, escorted by a Shield destroyer as well as two US destroyers.

It also tracked a blip in Nepal.

I almost dropped the tablet, standing up from the temporary workshop I had set up in a space inside the Helicarrier, not far from where Tony had apparently been keeping his armor, though he had left by this point. Before I could do anything else a small circle of familiar shimmering orange sparks appeared, opening into a portal. A folded note dropped through, which I caught as it fell beside me.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me." I mumbled to myself, reading through the note.

It was a simple message from the Ancient One, assuring me they would keep the Time Stone safe, and that they would keep it somewhere my tracker couldn't see until later. The note fluttered away into orange sparks once I was done reading it. Sure enough, when I checked the tracking tablet again the second signature was gone.

"She is going to have a lot of explaining to do." I mumbled to myself. "Where the hell did she even get the Time Stone?"

With the scanner now clear save the Mind Stone, I made a scan of the tablet, setting a UCM to copy it twice before handing off the original to Fury. As scary as another stone here on Earth was, I had plenty of time to worry about that after Loki was taken care of.

After the tablet was done I began working on other things, trying my best to prepare for whatever Loki would bring back with him. As I worked I did my best to keep myself from going crazy from anxiety, all the while racking my brain, trying to recall if there was some story line like this in the comics. One particular name kept coming to mind when Infinity Stones were involved, the crazy bastard in love with Death herself.

Thanos.

The idea of him being behind all of this was horrifying to say the least, though just the idea of the stones themselves was pretty terrifying.

I shook my head to keep from sinking any deeper into my anxiety, instead focusing on what I could do to prepare. I put together a more comprehensive load out for Clint and Natasha, loading them up with new mystically enhanced armor, a powerful healing amulet that wasn't just a copy of my own, silent running footwear, shield deploying vambraces, helmets similar to Steve's and some stamina boosting jewelry. Ema gave them both durability enhancing tattoos on par with my own as well. When I was done with them I created another squad of enhanced soldiers for Shield at Fury's request, passing out communication buds to everyone who was going to be a part of the quick reaction force.

I was rushing to get as many things done as possible, including the finishing touches on my first attempt to help people on a larger scale. While it had started as a more subtle idea, the finished product was remotely adjustable, which would allow me to crank up its effects in times of emergency. I was calling them nurse stones for now.

Essentially the device started as a quintuple stacked wardstone, basically stacking them together until diminishing returns turned into no returns. From there it got more and more complicated, but the result was a ward stone that would help people recover, heal and stay healed in a certain radius, a single mile by default. Instead of spontaneously healing people however, it would help people get better on their own. Treatments would be slightly more effective, pain slightly less debilitating. Germs were slightly less likely to spread, while infections were slightly less likely to develop, and if they did the body was just a bit better at fighting it off. Even things like defibrillators would be slightly more effective. It would not heal a person directly, meaning that a surgeon could cut someone open, remove their appendix and not only would they not grow it back, but the incision wouldn't heal up mid surgery.

At first the effects were minor, a barely noticeable statistical bump. But over the span of months the effect would increase, improving almost every aspect of the healing and recovery process. The radius of the nurse stone would also increase, spreading further and further around the hospital. Eventually the idea was to spread the nurse stones over the entire planet, a monumental task, but one that I could definitely eventually achieve with enough time. The nurse stones aid field would eventually merge together, leaving the entire planet in better health.

Thankfully they were almost finished, having gotten most of the work done while I was "taking it easy" after finishing the four new Sanctums. My last addition was working to increase its effectiveness with children. Now, if the overall effect was a nebulous one percent, the effect on kids would be around two. The nurse stones could also be cranked up on a case by case basis, meaning I could turn it up to a nebulous fifty percent when a disaster happened, cutting the death tolls for those disasters by a significant margin.

Unfortunately, I hadn't even started working on the secondary idea, a global shield system that would protect the Earth from physical attacks. Not that it would do anything since Loki had the Space Stone, which was essentially a ticket to anywhere at any time.

Over the next twenty seven hours Ema distributed the incredibly complicated device to a massive number of hospitals, focusing on cities with the highest populations first, eventually including smaller hospitals and doctors offices. She worked out of the warehouse, almost all of my UCM's churning out the nurse stones.

While Ema was doing her best to get as many cities as possible ready for a potential disaster, I continued working. I enhanced Natasha's guns further, making sure she would have some extra stopping power. I also bound Ema's old bow to Clint as he needed it much more than she did, and somewhere along the way she had shifted to a much more visceral and melee focused fighting style. I warned him not to activate its special lightning bolt before he needed it as it would take time to recharge.

With her long range weapon now passed on to Clint, I quickly put together a back up ranged option for my partner, stacking a half dozen 1911A's into one pistol, mixing in the usual enhancements and compacting it into a ring. I added in a blast from my own revolvers to up the damage as well. It was a bit nerve racking handing out a fully upgraded pistol that wasn't bonded to someone, but I figured if there was anyone I could trust it with it would be Ema.

Eventually, when the Helicarrier was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by a bunch of other warships, Natasha came down to my temporary workshop carrying two plates of food.

"Maker, it's one in the morning." She said as she put down the plates of food, some sort of cafeteria approximation of chicken parmesan. "You need to eat, and get some sleep."

I let out a sigh, rubbing my forehead and nodding.

"Yeah yeah you're right," I admitted. "I was spinning my wheels anyway, trying to think of useful things that I could make quickly. Ema would have stopped me at this point but she is off taking care of some things."

I grabbed some chairs from the storage shed and pushed them out by the workstation, the redhead super spy sitting down with a smile.

"You're not used to this, are you?" She asked, though it felt more like a statement.

"Not used to what?"

"Knowing something big is coming but not having a way to stop it."

"...No, very much not," I admitted after a pause. "Before the Deck I didn't have to think about stuff like this. I was just like everyone else, those kinds of big threats didn't happen to me, they were someone else's problem. Since then, I've been able to muscle through or just build a solution to everything."

Natasha nodded, finishing a bite of her food before responding.

"It doesn't get any easier, at least not while staying sane." She admitted. "But you can learn to deal with it with time, learn healthy ways to cope."

"Really? Any suggestions."

"Focus on the fact that you're doing everything you reasonably can, that someone else is responsible for the bad things, not you, and that you can't solve every problem. Even with a magic deck of cards."

I smirked and nodded, chewing a mouthful of pasta. It wasn't actually that bad, but I think I was getting a bit spoiled by Alfred.

"I'm glad you and Clint agreed to carry more gear, and the durability tattoo's," I commented.

"I'm glad Clint agreed as well, he was the one I was waiting for," Natasha explained with a shrug. "We have been working together for so long, I couldn't leave him behind like that."

"I guess that means you wouldn't accept it if I offered you a powered suit?" I guessed.

"No, and not just for that reason," She said, shaking her head. "Part of my skill set is blending in. I need to be able to blend into a crowd in seconds. Which is why your mask is so useful."

As she explained herself her face was subtly shifting in shape, slow enough that I wasn't sure it was happening at first. Her voice slowly changed as well, shifting to a slightly deeper one that sounded like she smoked heavily. When she was done she looked completely different, especially when her hair shifted in a flash to black with purple highlights. She also suddenly had piercings on her nose and lip.

"Woah, wait, how are you doing the piercings?" I asked, moving my head around to get a closer look.

"Wait you didn't mean for it to do that?" She said, wide eyed and shocked. "It doesn't feel like real metal but it looks like it."

"No, I had no idea it could do that," I admitted, focusing on my own mask, a piercing slowly forming on my lip. "Holy crap, yeah I had no idea."

"I'm not sure if I should be proud I figured that out when its own maker didn't know, or worried that you're surprised by it."

"Here, let me see it." I said, holding out my hand. "I know I triple checked it to make sure it wasn't different from mine, but I can check again if it makes you feel better."

Her face turned into her mask as she pulled it off, handing it to me. I carded it, examining its concepts before shaking my head and passing it back.

"Yeah, it's the same as mine as far as I can remember. Nothing stands out as new or anything. It's probably the strong transformation concept connecting with the other materials and the makeup for coloring. Still, nice find."

"Thanks," she said simply, putting the mask back on, her face already back to its normal look as the mask shifts away.

"You know, if you get me a bunch of clothes that are specifically designed to shift and change, like quick change magician clothes, I could probably make you an outfit that changes on command, just like the mask." I offered, taping my face. "I'll probably need a couple dozen bolts of cloth as well maybe some clothes modifying kits?"

Natasha's eyes went wide, opening her mouth to say something before the world caught up with her and she nodded.

"On the other side of this I'll see what we can put together," She said with a shrug. "Those types of clothes are usually easy to identify when you know what you're looking for."

"So are full facial masks, but no one could point out ours." I responded with a smile. "Either way, I'll make one for you. Just don't forget because there is no way in hell I'll remember, not with out Ema here to take down a note."

"You depend on her a lot." Natasha pointed out. "Who is she exactly? I mean not literally but"

I opened my mouth to answer before I realized that Natasha had no idea who Ema was under her exosuit. The only people who did were Tony and Pepper, and I couldn't just blurt that out without asking her first.

"She is my partner, but I can't really go into detail without her permission," I answered.

"Your partner, but you're not" she said, trailing off before lifting her eyebrow.

"Oh, no, she has a boyfriend," I explained, shaking my head. "No, we are just close, nothing like that."

"Oh." She responded, before giving me a sultry smirk and standing. "Good."

My brain froze as she grabbed our now clean empty plates, stacking them and walking back the way she came from. My brain was stuck at the very clear implications of what she just said.

"Get some sleep!" She called back, looking over her shoulder with the smirk still on her lips.

I watched as she stepped out of view, leaving me alone in my temporary workshop. It was at least a minute before my brain was working well enough for me to pack everything up and card my storage shed. Eventually I managed to get someone to direct me to a bed, the random Shield agent leading me to some sort of bedroom, probably one designed for important passengers given how important space was on an aircraft carrier.

I made a short call to Ema, explaining that I was heading to bed, and what I had managed to accomplish. After that was done I laid back in the decently comfortable bed, staring at the metal ceiling. It took a little while, but eventually I drifted off to sleep.

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