Because I Am... 3 (Patreon)

As stressful and difficult a job as it was, especially when he could see a mess that he’d have to clean up down the line but couldn’t do anything about it yet, Cecil Stedman couldn’t say that he disliked being the Director of the GDA. It was a job that needed to be done, and while he could see Donald taking over in a decade or two, for the time being Cecil was really the only person on the planet who could both make the ruthless decisions while not using them as a crutch.

Ruthlessness wasn’t being mean, it was looking at a problem, seeing the clear line between it and a solution, and not letting anything interfere with that line. At the moment, there was a potential solution to a problem that had arisen a few years ago.

“Donald, get me everything we have on Vought’s newest show pony,” Cecil ordered as he entered his office. Vought’s supes were a pain in the GDA’s neck most days, but if their latest project was even half as useful as Cecil thought it might be, then he’d be willing to put up with a lot.

“Yes, sir,” Donald replied, and sure enough, by the time that Cecil sat down, the files that the GDA had on Vought’s new supe, Homelander, were on his computer ready to be read.

Starting out with his powers, looked to be a standard flying brick for the most part, but the heat vision and sonic scream were an unusual twist. Based on Vought’s reports on what they’d done to him as he grew up… Cecil felt his eyebrows rise despite himself.

He knew that Vought was corrupt, but really, having a two year old hold still as a cruise missile was flying towards him? That was ignoring everything else they’d done to him as he was growing.

Starting over from the beginning, the first few sentences had Cecil pinching the bridge of his nose to fight off the migraine that wanted to form. Kidnapping and faking the death of one of the Mauler Twins to make use of their expertise in genetic tampering and cloning explained a lot. But really, they couldn’t do things like normal mad scientists trying to create supes, they had to take genetic samples from the Immortal, War Woman, Omni-Man, and Soldier Boy as the ‘parents’?

Sighing, Cecil continued. The kidnapped Mauler had been disposed of once he was finished combining the genetics of the four sources, and the artificial womb had been flooded with Compound V the entire time the resulting embryo was developing. The end result: hovering and with the strength of an Olympic powerlifter the moment he was pulled out of the artificial womb.

From that point on was accelerated education, power testing, and training. Along with discovering the surprise that Vought’s Mauler had left in their pet project. From what Vought’s internal records had said, they had been planning on just waiting for him to reach twenty before rolling him out, the newest face for Vought’s brand. But when he resembled a five year old on his first “birthday”, that forced them to adapt their plan.

Cecil allowed himself a chuckle, he’d remembered Edgar being rather annoyed back then, not that most would be able to tell. Resuming his reading, part of Cecil’s mind worked the angles, thinking of the various ways to keep Homelander from becoming a threat, or to put him down if those efforts failed and he became a threat to Earth.

Homelander’s history was fairly bland, once the early surprises were over and done with, so Cecil moved onto the psychological report. Despite aging four to five times faster than the rest of humanity, from what Vought’s report said he was a remarkably stable individual, especially for a supe who’d been exposed to Compound V.

About the only thing of note was the fact that his internet history resembled that of virtually every teenage male. Which, much as Cecil’s skin crawled as the idea occurred to him, opened up an angle at keeping Homelander on Earth’s side. But given the control issues that most Compound V empowered supes had, particularly those with super strength, odds were better than good that any normal woman would not last long…

Cecil filed the thought away as Donald entered his office, “Sorry sir, but I think you’d be interested in knowing that Vought talked the Guardians into having Homelander visit. He’s currently sparring with Darkwing.”

Suppressing a touch of annoyance, probably not Edgar’s idea, but one of his underlings, Cecil stood. He wanted to get a look at Homelander for himself, and there were some other matters to discuss with the Guardians anyway. As the teleportation engaged, another thought came to Cecil, one of the many that he was going to do, and hate himself for it.

[hr][/hr]

It had taken several weeks of carefully saying just the right things at the right times, and even then a small push in the form of aerosolized pheromones being released into War Woman’s quarters had been required. But, the plan had worked, and War Woman was unknowingly acting as a honeypot for Homelander.

A small part of his mind rated the plan as a seven out of ten in regards to the unfortunate things that he’d done. Hopefully, the two of them wouldn’t find out about their genetic relation, but that was honestly the least distasteful part of this. While Homelander was physically adult, GDA analysis put him at roughly equivalent to twenty one, he was still only five years old.

Pushing aside the disgust he was feeling, Cecil instead returned his focus to the reports on Homelander’s collaboration and training with the Guardians. The results were concerning. His strength, durability, and flight were roughly equal to both the Immortal and War Woman, and his speed was such that, while he couldn’t physically keep up, he could still follow and begin to react to Red Rush.

Aquarius, Martian Man, Green Ghost, and Darkwing could at best inconvenience him one on one. Black Samson, while not on the same level as War Woman and Immortal, could trade blows with Homelander, but he couldn’t win if it became serious. The real issue was that Homelander was getting stronger.

It was subtle, and if Cecil hadn’t been keeping such a careful eye on him, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. But there were signs that Homelander’s limits now were greater than they were when Vought unveiled him. So while it was distasteful, the honeypot plan was the best way to keep him in check until a more permanent solution could be found should it become necessary.

But, setting Homelander aside, Cecil pulled up the data on Vought’s upcoming publicity stunt. They’d decided that they weren’t happy with their current setup with the various corporate supes and decided to shake things up a bit. By forming a team, Vought’s version of the Guardians of the Globe.

Truthfully, ‘The Seven’ was far from the dumbest name for a team that Cecil had seen. It was some of the members that Vought was considering that boded poorly. Homelander was by far the most interested in actual hero work, followed by Queen Maeve, real name Margaret Shaw. The rest… Black Noir was Edgar’s cleaner, Mister Marathon was likely to run if the Seven faced a serious problem, Translucent and The Deep were both deviants, and Lamplighter was on the GDA’s watchlist.

Letting out a sigh, Cecil closed the file and turned to Donald, who was frowning at a screen. Turning to face him, Donald asked, “Sir, are we going to be doing anything about…”

“Not for now,” Cecil answered, standing up. It was time to visit the R&D Labs, but he was more than capable of walking and talking. “Despite the issues that almost all of Vought’s supes have, they’re not enough of a threat for us to clean them up. Until that happens, we’re going to keep a very close eye on them, and Edgar knows that.”

[hr][/hr]

I’d like to think I did a good job keeping my face friendly as I interacted with the other supes who are soon to be my teammates. But I was getting creep vibes from half of them, and psycho vibes from one. At least Maeve seemed to have her head on straight, without any screws loose. I remember bits and pieces of most of them from the few parts of the show I could remember, and they were doing little to dissuade those memories.

The biggest difference from the flashes of memories was Maeve, she seemed less bitter. Given how this was a younger Maeve who hadn’t spent decades working along a psycho Homelander, that was understandable. The Deep and Translucent both had something about them that made my skin crawl. Whatever it was that unnerved me about The Deep I wasn’t sure, none of my memories of the show really feature him, and my main memory featuring Translucent was his death via an explosive shoved up his ass.

I’d never heard of Mister Marathon, but interacting with him was odd. I couldn’t easily pin him down, not in a fight, but I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Black Noir made me a bit nervous, not that I could say why. Lamplighter had a look in his eyes… it was something I’d occasionally seen with the various heroes I interacted with, the ones that had seen some shit.

Regardless, the team hadn’t even been announced to the public, and I was already considering telling Vought to shove it and begging the Guardians of the Globe to help me set up a civilian identity. I fought back the urge to give a bitter chuckle; I’d been playing around with the idea ever since I first started regularly training with them, but I’d kept finding some excuse or another not to.

Sighing, I lay back on my bed, staring up at the ceiling of my room in one of the countless Vought towers. I knew why I’d kept waffling on asking the Guardians to help me pull away from Vought: fear. Not that I’d get hurt, or killed, or anything like that. The spars we had where I actually bled were by far the most fun I’d had in both lives.

No, it was fear for how they’d react when they learned my actual age. Even setting aside how Holly and I had become intimate, during which she showed that she was far more flexible than I’d realized, I respected them and liked how I was treated by them. Vought employees tended to treat me like a cornered animal, ready to snap and lash out at anyone who got too close (which, given what I knew about Comp V, was admittedly a valid survival tactic for those who worked with Vought supes).

Among the Guardians of the Globe, I wasn’t a ticking time bomb, I wasn’t an asset, I wasn’t an investment. I was a peer. I was one of them, and I didn’t want to lose that. It was cowardly, but I was terrified that if they found out I was five they’d start treating me like a child, and that I’d lose that camaraderie that we’d been building up.

“Homelander?” a woman’s voice pulled me from my ruminations. I glanced at the open door, and let out a slightly harsher breath through my nose.

Madelyn Stillwell, the ‘Senior Vice President of Hero Management’ for Vought International, and one of the few humans I’d had anything approaching regular interactions with prior to my debut. The patriotic getup and name ‘Homelander’ were both her ideas.

“Yes?” I asked, sitting up.

“It’s about your meetings with the Guardians,” she said, entering my room and closing the door behind her.

I raised an eyebrow, something about her tone carrying an odd note to it. I asked, “What about them?”

“Mister Edgar wants them to stop,” she answered bluntly, sitting down on the foot of my bed.

My other eyebrow joined the first, “I thought having the up and coming leader of Vought’s superhero team working closely with the Guardians of the Globe was decided to be good publicity? Did that change?”

“Mr. Edgar is merely… concerned, that you will be unable to find time between your duties with Vought and your visits to the Guardians,” she evaded.

Translation: Stan Edgar didn’t want me jumping ship and was concerned that I was getting too close with ‘the enemy’ so to speak. The discussion went back and forth, neither of us willing to budge. I eventually went for a fly to clear my head.

Which was when I stumbled upon a freeway with pink glowing energy constructs, several crashed cars, and some heavily mutated wackos attacking a redheaded girl.