Stan and Quad were mildly surprised at the Duumvirate's home, the angel island with the enormous green hill at its center. They'd heard it was lush but weren't expecting it to be so much better than the one that was more recently built upon.
They were also sort of surprised to find the twins waiting for them as they stepped out. This was the overarching, all-powerful Duumvirate. Why would they go out of their way to greet a couple of kids?
But the big surprise was the kind of questions the twins asked them and Sarah, using the main screen to look at a satellite feed, watching Sarah's operatives swarm the place. Why did the twins care about the normals so much to keep asking rapid-fire questions like how many there were and who was with them and whether or not the kids remembered any of their names?
"Oh my sweet fucking secrecy," Howard said when the questioning was done, running his hands through his hair. Dozens of normals rich enough to afford their own air transportation, parts of families going, some of them telling their friends about where they went. A fucking nightmare. "Did you know that the importance of things is not always the order in which they must be dealt with?"
"The two of you are much more important than this fuckshittery, but we have to deal with it now," William clarified. "Yes, us personally, it's that big of a clusterfuck. Want to watch?"
"No," the boys answered as one. Watching the twins act as Dominator, especially in this situation, might be an enlightening experience but neither of them was up for it. Besides, they still looked somewhat like normals. "Sarah, where's that soap?" Stan asked, and Ruby tossed the bottle in their direction, Quad catching it with his lower right hand. She led them to the elevator down as they overheard the twins start calling up a number of high-powered Illuminati at once, Sarah using a section of the screen to marshal her own forces.
The twins' basement was practically an underground mini-mall, and the kids smiled widely as the door opened, their attention immediately drawn to their right, past the pool. In the electronic moshpit that served as very old-school stress relief for frustrated Dominators, an obviously retroviral servant was loudly jackhammering a metal plate with his feet to the tune of rapid-fire electronic music.
Luke had intended to passively avoid them, dancing vicious sets of something with an average BPM of 800 and semirandomized high-Chaos steps rather than have to look small children in the face, a thing he loathed doing even as a small child. He was nearly finished and the kids obligingly watched the last few seconds of him trying to murder the sensors by stomping on them before he reluctantly turned to them. "Can I be of assistance, Masters?" he asked in an obsequious tone which practically needed a negative answer.
Quad stared at his face. He recognized.. no, it wasn't.. no, wait, if this really was Paul's servant and he didn't have the retrovirus then, and he was older now... "Did you ever have wires pulled out of your body?" he asked.
How the fuck do you know that? Luke pondered his next words between two competing emotions. The first was his intuitive understanding that telling these wonderfully bright, practically celestial sons of the Dominator anything related to that was a foul obscenity, something that they should not even need to consider, let alone comprehend. The second was his thorough wish that everything sacred was to be profaned and everything pure was to be corrupted. "Yes. There are some fucked up people in the world, especially in the Illuminati. You've probably never seen them at Northberg, but when you do see them you probably won't even know they're fucked up." You're looking at one right now, can you tell? "And what these fucked up people do and why is probably better not to know about, even for the sons of the Duumvirate." There. He hadn't told them a thing, but knew of no faster way to get them to tell him to fuck off with that information-limiting normal bullshit and curious enough to search the buried records for themselves.
"Yeah, we know," Stan said instead. "We just got done dealing with one." Luke inquired and they coated themselves with citrus-based cleanser before jumping in the body-temperature water, as they gave him a condensed version, enjoying the look on his face and his proclamations of how badly that guy was disturbed, mentally imbalanced, and inexplicably creative in the worst of ways; they found seats in the pool and scrubbed the awful normal colors out of their hair with the dye remover, turning the water briefly brownish (never again would they put that diarrhea on their heads) while he made a couple of statements relating to the fact that they were massively skillful and lucky to get out of there with all their body parts.
"Aren't you going to wash yourself, servant?" Quad asked, rankling his nose to signify that he could smell him.
Luke wasn't going to say no, even if the kid was trimming the nails of his lower arms with his teeth, so he stripped and stepped in after applying cleanser, leaning back in the seat. "You know, your parents never want me in the tub with them," he said, placing his forefingers close together in front of his face and indicating why with a few brief pops.
"Oh, nice! Paul made you an electrical!" Quad shouted. He knew at least one of the really little servant kids was an electrical, although she was too young to use her power for cool stuff. Wasn't she a combustive, too?
"Hey! Electrical! Let's see you do something with it!" Stan demanded, causing Luke to bite back a mean retort involving a Raiden-style fatality.
"Do I fucking look like your monkey?" he rhetorically asked instead, which of course got both kids nodding and answering in the affirmative. "Well, I'm not. I'm Paul's monkey." The kids were used to that kind of reply, having had similar short conversations with other kids' servants. They were definitely old enough to get their own, but neither had wanted one when asked; it just seemed like the wrong kind of responsibility. Sure, it was nice being waited on hand and foot, but they could get that from Enforcers and general servants. Having their very own actual person who would do whatever they wanted sounded like a great idea, but neither one wanted to promise that they'd want to keep anyone around except each other (well, except maybe Tetrina for Quad, but that was different..), and giving up a personal servant was just plain bad. So they chose to simply put it off indefinitely, leaning towards 'never'.
And it wasn't a personal servant who walked in just then, carrying two small folded-up bundles of fabric. The boys launched themselves out of the water, and the room reacted, dehumidifying, heating, and circulating the air. They wiped water and a few remaining flecks of dye on towels before unfolding their new clothes and reminding Luke that their aesthetic concepts were alien to his, as the two-armed suit was bright pink to match Stan's hair exactly and the other was bright blue, both with gradients from deep color in the center to white at the extremities, with the only visible stitching a Duumvirate-logo outline on the back, just below the folded-back hood. The fabric was as thick as the twins', better than normal Class III body armor against bullet and fragment penetration, even if that could still break bones. The boys giddily put them on and discovered weapon carriers in the attached coats, retractable blades on nails and fists, the retractable wheel system they had gotten used to, and pockets holding phones pre-programmed with their identities. Excellent. They agreed that they looked a lot like their fathers, and more importantly like real people and not a couple of fucking normals, even if their hair was cut short. The girls wouldn't like that part; they loved playing with Stan's pink hair. (Xavier told him to enjoy it, as he'd really want the attention from girls in half a decade or so.) They were interrupted by Paul's voice over the intercom: "Luke, center room."
"That's my cue," Luke said, making chimpanzee sounds as he left.
"All right, real clothes- check. Now all we need are some..." They left the swimming area and looked to their left, glimpsing a room chock-full of what they had promised to start carrying. "...weapons." Holy shit. Those couldn't all be real, could they? The boys rolled the fifty feet to the room, eyes lighting up at the sheer amount of awesome in it, and discovered a firing range before examining the front-displayed items with deliberate, elaborate care. Some of them were inviting in their excessive size and power (a couple of the bigger guns more closely resembled field artillery than firearms), but the boys refrained from having a shooting jubilee; after all, they were six, not three. They knew what they needed: something they could actually carry around all day.
Which they found hard to find. The warehouse-sized storage room had shelves usually stacked eight to ten high, in an area a good fraction of a football field, with clear super-glass floors showing more above and below. "They probably don't have anything made for us," Quad lamented. All these guns looked sized for large adults; this was the Dominator's room, and he figured he couldn't expect anything to fit their hands well.
"Bullshit, they've even got normal weapons here, you think the Duumvirate uses those?" Stan replied, rolling up and down aisles. This place had one or two of everything, from the simple and time-tested to the highly advanced to the wildly impractical. "What's the order? Bigger stuff up front, normal stuff in the back, two-handers over there, one handers here, I'm guessing it's spread stuff in odd-numbered aisles, or is it.. oh, there they are." The child-sized weapons were helpfully placed on the bottom shelf, so kids wouldn't have to climb to reach them. He almost said something about asking permission to keep the weapons, but closed his mouth in embarrassment. What was the Duumvirate going to do, say the kids couldn't have easily replaceable weapons obviously designed for them?
Quad looked at the selection. Although he enjoyed a great deal of snap-shot precision with a quick glance, It was easier to draw a bead from his eyes to his hands for longer shots with his uppers, and so he chose a pair of suitable pistols for those. The little guns fired a number of different rounds, all roughly the size of a .22 with the muzzle energy of a normal 7.62x25; he favored the depleted-uranium, as it had an armor-piercing jacket to make it an 'And the three heavily armored guys behind him' round. The gun's display case marked it nonchambered and caseless, but Quad vaguely recognized the first word and had no idea on the second. He'd never seen a firearm that needed brass that wasn't on a screen somewhere. He ran-rolled to the firing range to test one, loaded it, instinctively looked for the click-clack slider to chamber the first round, realized that's what nonchambered meant, and fired all ten rounds in each pistol directly from the magazine into the thick soft-armor target on the far wall in rapid succession, nearly laser-perfect in accuracy. Of course there was recoil, but eh, so what?
Stan came from behind him, an enormous smile on his face. On his hands were what looked almost like gloves with a steel front and back straps, five-centimeter barrels extending between his middle and ring fingers with the tiniest bit of insulation between them. As he clenched his last three fingers, the straps tightened around his hands; at the forefinger was a trigger. Quad stepped aside as Stan pointed his fists at the target and squeezed, two tiny explosive-tipped bullets obliterating the bullseye. "Huh? Why didn't it.." He looked at the weapons carefully, keeping the barrels pointed away from things he didn't want holes in. "Oh, there it is." The full-auto switch was by the thumb. He gave both a flick and emptied the rest of the 20-round magazines in a bit more than half a second with a BRRRRRAP, deepening the hole and prompting the range to peel back the first target and reveal another. "Woah. Okay. That is almost too fast." Sure, it'd make a few Enforcers dead, but what about the rest? Even he couldn't twitch-aim that fast. He'd keep it to single shot unless he needed to.
Quad looked at him askance. "Isn't that hard to use?"
"No way. This is perfect. It's just what I always wanted, but I never knew it." The only question was, to carry more ammo or not to carry more ammo? These magazines weighed roughly a pound, and Stan decided he could deal with another couple. Quad, on the other hand, wasn't going to carry more magazines of depleted uranium than he had to.
"All right, now I want something with a spread for my lowers."
"Well, you could just carry two, it's not like you have to carry..." Stan trailed off as Quad was giving him a look like he'd suggested an evening of cat rape. "Or maybe a two-hander?" he offered instead. That was an option. There was one particularly inviting anti-Enforcer room eraser, suitably downsized for small hands but still capable of local omnicide. Quad decided he didn't want any weapon he couldn't reliably aim away from his friends. Another mini-shotgun with a sensible choke looked nice, but that was almost small enough for a one-hander anyway, so Quad went for two slightly smaller ones, each with ten shots of depleted-uranium pellets with Barnum-pioneered explosive. He posed holding all four weapons up at once like a blue-and-white quadbracchal version of Rambo, and Stan laughed. A couple of tests with those- a fifth of a meter spread at 50 meters, not bad- and the boys agreed that they were finally armed properly. The only way they'd ever be out of reach of these guns is when they outgrew them.
"Hey, what about the stuff on the other floors?" Stan asked as they were about to leave.
"Up looks like napalm throwers and grenades, and swords, and that kind of stuff," Stan nodded, that's what he thought. "Down- you don't know those? See the lenses at the end? Those are lasers."
"Oh, duh." Lasers were awesome, and both kids had gotten many chances to play with them, usually in a reflection-less room at wattages that wouldn't melt their eyes out. (Blue-light retina damage was something they could regenerate before they would even notice it happened.) The good ones, that could actually burn through targets with a flick of the wrist, were also bulkier than they wanted to carry around all day; microfusion accelerators could only be so small, and radiation shielding only so thin. Their dads had carried around bulkier stuff at age ten, but Stan and Quad just wanted to be armed, not weighed down when running around with their friends.
They considered going into the arcade, but they had plenty of that stuff at Northberg and wanted to go explore the island instead. As the elevator doors opened to ground floor, they heard someone angry shouting about things they didn't comprehend. What was 'implied responsibility'? Either you were responsible or you weren't. What was that stuff about 'vassal authority'? A vassal was another name for a servant and could have no authority, by definition. He seemed to be speaking English, but the words made so incredibly little sense put together that it made Quad's head hurt. Was this guy really whining about having to do something for secrecy's sake? Everybody did things for secrecy's sake, that was how it worked. They'd dressed up like a pair of normals for it, and an adult was crying over having to order a few servants to cover something up? They walked around to see him talk, and he was a pudgy, scowling man, white face made of stretched lines and hate, obviously fake hair on his head. They also noticed the variety of other faces on the screen: generally annoyed ones, most old, only one engineered in the group, with a few inaudibly talking to other people off-screen and one resting his whole face on his hand as if he were trying to sleep. The kids had seen adults at work before. This didn't look like work, possibly because of the asshole yelling at them.
There was, however, one thing that was very clear.
"Nobody likes you, you keep talking about crap when there's important secrecy stuff at stake, and everyone else is trying to fix this and you're not, so why don't you just shut your fat blowjob mouth?" Stan yelled at him mid-tirade. More than one of the people on the screen broke up laughing. The twins successfully suppressed the urge as this was still serious business.
His face did something the kids haven't seen anyone's face do before. First it flushed to red, then grew purple. They could see his lower teeth, straight and perfectly even, sticking out like a monster's. "Listen to me closely, you blank freaks, and make sure your rugrats listen too. This organization is held together only by the good graces of the people who are in it. Maybe you don't care about things like that, sitting on that island, but we do. And we determine what is and isn't a problem for secrecy. And I would recommend not overstepping your bounds unless you want more problems." The kids' eyes went wide. He couldn't have said what he just said. Nobody said things like that in Northberg. Even the most enraged, screaming four-year-old wouldn't say something like that. Even the cautionary tales featured on the Northberg kids' screens never had anyone saying anything like that. This shit-eating cocksucking motherfucking goatblowing rectocranial retarded douchebag (and Northberg six-year-olds had many, many more words for people like him) had just taught the boys what it really meant to be profane.
And then- hesitantly- the faces on the screen began to change to apologetic ones, because the twins' faces changed that way. "I apologize for that outburst. Our requests of you are simply meant as suggestions. If you feel that us asking these things is beyond our authority, we apologize for wasting your time," William said. Stan and Quad looked at each other, unsure how or if to react. What the fuck?!
The man clicked off, satisfied, and the faces changed again, this time to everything from exasperation to rage. The twins clenched bladed fists in frustration. The man who had one hand over his face put two there. The kids had no idea what the gesture meant.
"Dominator," Donald offered tentatively, "you may wish to reconsider a refinement of your recruitment criteria."
William gave him a No shit look as Howard said "Thank you Donald, I came to the same conclusion." with face-melting sarcasm. This wasn't a terribly recent Illuminatus, having been in for four years. The twins took him for one more guy who started off well and ended up being driven mad by petty, self-centered powerlust. They'd use this experience to try to screen future problems out, but he wasn't anywhere near the first to make stupid threats and probably wouldn't be the last.
The kids were utterly confused. Wasn't he just.. didn't they just say...? "They were just humoring him," Paul whispered next to them. Both of them wondered why he used the word 'humor' as this wasn't funny in the slightest, but figured it out through context. They understood the concept of pretense quite well.
And now the adults were talking about how they really didn't need an additional issue in the face of their existing problems, and Stan saw clearly how he could help. "We can kill him for you!" Stan exclaimed brightly to various degrees of amusement and horror, mostly amusement.
"No, I'll handle that because he just threatened a secrecy breach," Sarah said. "Killing him might not be the hard part." Quad and Stan figured that his assassination might involve pretending to be normals again and a great much waiting besides, so they didn't protest. She transferred her end of the screen to her phone, opening up screen real estate and conversational breathing room, and rushed upstairs while the rest of the Illuminati understood that he would be dealt with and returned to the original problem. The kids watched for about ten seconds before getting bored. They understood a good deal of the principles in play, but couldn't follow all the minor, brief territorial squabbles over who was responsible for what and didn't know why they were arguing or why the twins were letting them argue like that. So they each grabbed a small slice of ham from the kitchen and went outside instead, putting their hoods up against the light drizzle.
Stan expressed his confusion as the door closed behind him. "If this is such a big secrecy deal, why are they each doing their own thing and why's Dad letting them?" he asked between bites. This pig was seasoned right.
"Yeah, it's weird, each one.. I think I get it. They all want to help out too, because if they help out it means that they're.. accepted as having a place, an ownership, in whatever they help out in." He took a bite and chewed while he thought. Wasn't that how it worked? Definitely, it wouldn't make any sense at all otherwise. "They're showing themselves to be responsible, and Dad lets them because it means that they're going to do everything they can," Quad concluded. Even if they weren't fully cooperating with intermingled forces.
"So it's just like we wanted to do. They're just like us, only they can't admit it," Stan said, starting to laugh.
"Yeah, that's exactly it," Quad said, joining in the laughter. "We're not the kids, Stan- they are!" Their loud laughter attracted the attention of the local canines.
Seeing four strange dogs of various colors rush towards them very fast took the boys by surprise and their hands intuitively flicked to their newly-gained weapons. "Wait," Stan said. The front dog didn't look like it was going to try to hurt them, and it was giving playful barks and jumping in the air, running around them, the other dogs following. Quad sighed in relief. These were their dads', definitely, didn't anyone ever tell them not to start rushing at people like that? At least they were friendly, even to strangers.
But the boys could not be strangers to these dogs, and all four basked in their masters' kids' smell, sniffing repeatedly to enjoy it further, having recognized them the moment trace molecules had reached their keen noses, understanding them far better than words would convey. Chocolate, Negro, and Magma did not quite remember Stan's mother, not being retroviral on the twins' eleventh birthday; Fido had an immediate memory of the deep-scent underlying the very faint perfume of a certain girl so many years ago.
The boys had no idea of this, simply seeing engineered animals. They tossed their last scraps of ham, and the dogs chomped it out of the air. Quad looked in Fido's eyes and at his body. Fido was roughly one and a half times the size of Quad, the other dogs nearly as large. "I wonder if I can ride you?" he asked. Fido understood one meaning of the word 'ride' and that was in the context of going on a trip, so he barked in assent, puzzled as Quad gently started climbing on him, lower arms around his chest and uppers around the thick muscles on his lower neck. Oh, that's what the kid must have meant. Master's son was going to go for a ride, because Fido was going to take him on one. Stan wasn't going to let Quad have all the fun and so climbed on Magma the same way.
And then the dogs were running, under and between trees, easily twice as fast as the kids could possibly run, the drizzle turning into a wet coating on their hooded faces as their mounts zipped over and around obstacles, the undulating cheetah-like spines of the engineered dogs contrasting with the constant hammering of feet on wet ground, Stan pulling ahead, Magma splattering Quad and Fido with mud, the other unladen dogs simply running around the kids, pigs scattering away from the speeding canines. After a circuit of the island, over rocks and fallen branches, the dogs stopped at a tall tree, panting, the laughing kids dismounting. Fido shook himself and Quad did the same, Stan hiding behind the tree to evade the flying mud.
Quad gave Fido a long, loving pet with all four hands, looked up at the high, dripping branches, and pulled himself up onto one. He'd heard somewhere that their dads liked to do this when they were younger.
"You really want to climb another tree?!" Stan asked incredulously.
"Sure, why not? It'll be better than last time." It was quite nice not getting bark or sap on one's skin, and very very nice indeed to enjoy it without being chased by Enforcers intent on one's death.
"I guess so!" Stan exclaimed in Latin, and followed him up. Quad almost used his blades to aid his climb before remembering that this was the Duumvirate's tree and he didn't want to damage it. They sat on the highest branches that would support them, looking out at the small expanse of land and large, large expanse of sea in front of them. They saw a jet-helicopter elevate itself from the ground and blast off; they waved to whoever was in it. Probably just Quad's mom and her servant if she was on a mission to kill whoever that fat guy was. Quad did an upside-down hang with his lower arms on the tallest branch that could hold him, letting some wet grime drip out of his dirt-rejecting suit as the wind rocked him back and forth. "I wonder if they'll let us live here?" Stan asked wistfully. He could get used to this.
Quad was startled by the question. "Are you serious? I'm going back to Northberg. I don't want to be.. living with parents." The idea was something of a foulness to most of the Northberg kids.
"Back to Tetrina, you mean," Stan replied, holding on with one hand as he sat on the branch, relaxed.
"Oh come on, she's not even.." He trailed off and Stan laughed. "So what about you? Aren't you the one getting surrounded by girls? Do you want to be.." What was that word? Insulate was wrong, it was.. "isolated?"
"I.. yeah, you're right." Stan understood the word as being stuck on an island. Which, after all, this was. "And we are going to come home as fucking heroes." Not the shitty comic-book kind, either.
"No shit. They will take one look at us and go 'What the fuck...'" They laughed.
"Having fun?" came their dads' voice from below, who climbed up to sit on the middle branches, their size forbidding them to put their full weight on anything thinner. They'd finally reached their maximum about last month. The Operator, American by birth, had listed it as as 7'2" and 350 lbs, depending on what they'd done recently and who they'd last eaten; the kids estimated their height at two and a quarter meters and, were they to try to lift and carry one (they could do it together, with effort and leverage), would estimate them at about a hundred and sixty kilos each. The tree would be growing a very long time before the twins could climb back to the height they reached as ten-year-olds.
"Yeah! Hey Dad, we got some weapons from the basement," Stan yelled down.
The twins looked at each other, smiling. They'd wondered why the servants provided them with variants of every weapon known to normals and a great many that were not, even ones they couldn't possibly use. It was suitably ostentatious and awe-inspiring, so they never questioned it. "Good, hope you never need 'em," Howard called back up.
Quad laughed. "Don't you mean never need them after today?" he asked, scrambling down to sit just above them, Stan following.
"But that's the fun part," William replied. "In emergencies, you never know you need something until you need it. Then you're prepared for something like that emergency, and not something different."
"And before you ask, you can't be prepared for them all," Howard added. The kids chuckled at him; of course they knew that. "Now that we got all that secrecy shit out of the way, what, exactly, happened in there?"
The kids tripped over each other trying to tell the story, and the twins had them starting from the beginning, thinking about how they'd tell this to their Northberg friends. "I've got a better idea, let's tell everyone at once," Stan said, pulling out his phone. Quad did as well, and it took the boys roughly three seconds to figure out how to use them. Quad, hanging upside-down, called Tetrina; Stan, for shits and giggles, called Skyler.
"Hey Quad!" Tetrina's high voice came from the phone, and she was clearly confused. "Your phone's upside-down.. I mean the background's.. you're upside down!" she figured out.
"Yeah, he usually is!" Stan called back, Quad responding with two left middle fingers. "Okay, we've got a big story to tell you guys..."
"And they're not making it up, either," William said, nodding at the inevitable reactions of the Northberg kids on hearing the voice of their Dominator. "Go on. From the beginning. Slowly, in clear, detailed words that everybody can understand." It took them almost a half hour, in between answering the various questions, about the way everything looked, smelled, how Bruce acted and what he did. Everyone, particularly the twins, expressed gladness that the boys walked out of that with their flesh still attached to their bones. Skyler, in his quest for adult wisdom, asked about secrecy; the twins were more than happy to tell them all about the massive clusterfuck until a lot of them couldn't follow it anymore. Then Tetrina asked when they were coming home, and there could be no other answer but 'very soon'. They ate a scrumptious meal of pork, buttered toast, and lemonade before a Northberg jet arrived and Quad flew them home, Stan dozing off in the back seat.