The "G" Shield

Disclaimer - All the owners have their respective rights. I only own the characters that came from my addled brain (don't worry, I am completely sober).

Outer Space, Midgard Sector, Aboard Helicarrier Omega[August 2015]

–Jack Sullivan–

"So, I like what you've done with the place," he commented as he walked the halls of the Omega Helicarrier, the one that had been designated as the command centre for SWORD, one that was rapidly becoming the agency for the planet. It was not every day that you saw every country on the planet pull their weight and vote for the agency to get nearly unfettered access to anything that came out of the planet.

It also meant that SWORD could not legally interfere in any countries' operations to secure themselves a weapon in the recent new arms race that was the super soldier or the meta human weapons race. So far, he knew that China, America, Russia, Canada, and the Swiss had an entire team of their own, filled with superpowered people. 

Not that he put any thought into them because, well, for example, Russia's team consisted of two people who did have powers but they were not well suited for combat despite the individuals themselves being extremely dangerous, for regular humans, that is.

"Well, we did get the Blank check and most of the work was done for us by SHIELD. I never really thanked you for this, did I?" One of the three commanders of SWORD, the overseers, as their official title, Tina, if he remembered correctly, was her name, responded to his question.

The overseers were the three captains of the Helicarriers and were responsible for, what was essentially a third of the entire fighting power of SWORD individually. It created a centralisation of power into the hands of four people, the fourth being the Director of SWORD but it worked really well because each superpower, the USA, Russia, and China got an overseer of their own and the Director was chosen by yours truly before SWORD was even an agency so that was out of the question.

"Yes, Tina, I made sure that the Helicarriers could be salvaged later on, instead of just destroying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of government money but even I had never thought that it would grow to become this big. I mean, how many operatives do you have, in space, right now?" Well, that was a lie since he did know about SWORD but he knew that SWORD would never become this big, not without his direct interference. 

"About 11,000 people stay full time, across all three Carriers and the shuttle service Ship we have that is constantly ferrying people and resources back and forth between the Carriers and various drop points we have on the planet," Tina rolled her eyes at him, clearly aware of his involvement in the agency at every step of the way.

There were particularly public and large debates that had to be settled by him talking to Tony, recording a video about his thoughts and opinions on the subject and then uploading it to the web using Jarvis' network which had spanned to the world by now, ensuring that even the remotest parts of the remotest nations heard his message and in turn, made sure that their leaders, politicians heard that message.

After that, it was pretty easy to divert funding from mainly useless ventures to SWORD, which was an extremely useful venture. Already, they had discovered and maintained limited contact with the Inhumans living on the Moon. 

Discovered the blue space on the Moon but had backed off after he sent them a warning about a cosmic reality warping alien making that his home, instead recommending them to send in an unmanned drone, which they had done.

"Well, do any of these 11,000 people know how to cook? I am hungry and I am sure that whatever it is that you want to ask of me can be asked over lunch, right?" He'd gleaned her intentions from the beginning when the Director had been overly enthusiastic, which for her was just a tiny bit of increase in speed of talking, and sending an Overseer just to show him around?

Now that was extravagant because there were no other people who could fully take over the job of the Overseer. They were responsible for ingress and egress permissions, food and water requirements for their Helicarrier, negotiation for better supplies and projects along with the personnel required. It would take a full team to do what the Overseers do.

Basically, SWORD was an umbrella organisation with three large Agencies operating in a loose formation, which was something that not one of the countries in the UN budged and since he knew that public opinion about something like individual control of the Helicarriers was not going to be as divisive, he let them be but made sure to impress upon them that if he found any evidence of wrongdoing.

Well, if the Helicarriers can be brought up, they can be brought down as well.

He did shoulder an entire Helicarrier, which was just as heavy as the current one, and that was when he was much weaker. He wagered that he could probably do it without compromising his own safety and for a much longer period with a sustained load.

Tina's smile became a bit strained at his straightforward statement, "Um, yeah. Sure, we can have a bite. I'll just call ahead, give me a moment," 

He continued to look out of one of the many glass viewing places scattered across the Helicarrier while his ears followed Tina as she walked a fair distance away before taking out her phone, dialing something, and then…

His brows furrowed a bit as he realised that he was not just listening to her being silent, no he could hear nothing around her. Not her breathing, not the way her shoes made a slight scraping sound because she was not walking on carpet, nothing.

Curious, he turned around and saw her holding an extremely futuristic looking phone that projected a subtle blue screen all around her face.

Damn, they really did get quite the advanced tech goodies when he took a standard issue tech tree from Xandar, gave it to Tony, and then told him to disseminate the tech once he was sure that he could build something more advanced and once it was safe to do so.

Tina spoke furiously with someone on the phone before giving him a nervous smile and then turning around once again, probably afraid that he might try and lip read or something. He wasn't sure what they wanted because he knew that all three of the Overseers were not really bad people, Tony had made sure of that by going through each of the candidates' backgrounds thoroughly, and he even enlisted the help of some of the Masters who were really good at information gathering by the way of rituals.

Yup, those kinds of rituals existed as well. A Really simple one was a sacrificial ritual, which sounded wrong but the only sacrifice was some chalk, some dimensional energy, some CHI, and a hair of the person whose morality needed to be discerned.

He was not strong enough to get answers about his morality but he did use that ritual as a benchmark and recommended, which was basically chose, three Overseers who kinda had grey spots in their morality but the overwhelming majority of which was green and light yellow.

Green was good.

Yellow was sorta good, like it benefits them in some way to be good, so good.

Grey was negative, but decidedly human feelings like hate, envy, resentment, bitterness, anger, etc.

Black, now that was something to worry about because it actually represented something that resulted in the very psyche of the person being damaged, either due to something happening to them or something they did, it mattered not.

Just like he couldn't approve of someone who was 100% good and did not know that one had to bend in life sometimes to get things done, he could not approve of someone who had even a splotch of black in their morality.

Their director was the same but she had a much larger splotch of grey, which was fine because he knew her personally. Altogether, he didn't think there was anything that these four could do that would upset him and he didn't know why they were approaching him in the first place.

He was actually here to invite any one of the senior staffs and his team to gravel with him to Asgard, as an official envoy from Midgard, but then he was saddled with Tina who continued to make small talk with him.

As one can infer, he had always been very much involved with SWORD, from day one because it was essentially only him that had been propping up the entire organisation, in the beginning at least. Nowadays that organisation itself had grown strong enough to hold its own against the world, not that all the agents were absolutely loyal to SWORD with the ability to disregard or suppress any of their biases towards their home nations.

So, he was surprised when Tina didn't say anything, just flashed him a nervous smile and then led him to the cafeteria, which was staffed by just a single person who seemed to be the supervisor. Everything was automated here.

He couldn't help but ask, "If you guys have automated everything, why do you need 4000 damn people on a single ship?" 

"Uh, that is because the frequency of supply runs done by our ships and the number of ships keeps on increasing. We have not yet reached the level where we can reliably deploy any automated system to get some of the newer systems running. Stark is not looking to sell them and for now, the rest of the world wishes to have men in space so that's what we are doing," Tina explained as their food arrived.

Absolutely loaded Hamburger with Cheesy fries.

Ah, the automation machines managed to make even something like that look sterile enough. WIth the meat, the multiple veggies and the sauces being so uniform throughout the burger that hefting the whole thing in one hand didn't even make any veggies or sauce spill.

Disappointing.

His eyes lit up as he took one bite of it. Tasted good enough though.

"Yes?" He finally asked Tina who hadn't even taken a bite out of her food.

"You see. Mr.Sullivan, while I wholeheartedly agree that we should not be sharing technology with our parent countries, the UN passed a secret vote a while back, ordering us to reveal "strategically advantageous" technology to the countries in a phased manner," 

Oh. So, that was what she wanted to talk about. They must not know that Jarvis is everywhere now and this was one of the first things that he was informed about. So, Tina was understandably surprised when his reaction was just, "Okay."

"Uh, wh-what? You are Okay with this?" Tina stammered, which was odd because they should know he was not really concerned with technology sharing, in fact he vividly remember telling Tony to get Earth as a whole up to speed, not just Stark Industries or the USA who had just waved him off at the time and assured him that it would be done.

"Yeah, I knew that the greedy politicians would not be able to keep their hands off it but I am sure that it was not all encompassing. You can choose what to give and what to keep, right?" 

Tina nodded at that, deflating into her chair, "Yeah, that is what we were able to negotiate. They wanted full access but then we reminded them that you were still alive,"

He finished chewing his burger and then replied, "Damn right, I am still alive. Anyway, I didn't come here for that, although you guys should really relax, I am not someone who will fly into a rage. Leaving that aside, I came here because I need someone to come with me, to an event that could use some SWORD presence,"

"Oh, where?"

"Oh, nowhere. It is just the coronation ceremony of the new King of Asgard, Thor. I want to make sure that SWORD is recognised as the de facto authority from Earth and the best way to do that is through Asgard,"

"Done. When is it.?" She asked him excitedly.

"In two days?

He leaned black as she shrieked at him,"What! Only two days?"

Aaand, then she was gone.

____xx____

Some beach in Southern Italy

–Wanda Maximoff–

She rolled her eyes as she watched her brother smooth talk his way into another girl's panties. IT was weird when she thought of it like that but when she had abilities like reality warping on a macro as well as micro scale and was using it to constantly monitor and slightly alter their reality so as to remain hidden, it got hard to filter out the information.

Constantly dealing with this level of information, while they were on the run was headache inducing at first but after she had further acclimated with this body, it was almost like second nature to her now.

It was hard, convincing Pietro that she was not dangerous, not to him, and they had to remain on the run because she made some very dangerous enemies that would find her and then make her go away. She never really said the K word because she did not want to lie to Pietro and she did not know what the Ancient One would do.

The one in her world would have found her through brute force, probably used the Infinity Stone on her, and then banished her entirely but this one seemed to be much more easy going, willing to let her be as long as she didn't do anything too chaotic.

And she hadn't.

She made sure that no large scale mindwipe was occurring anywhere. She just altered the face structure of her brother, who always wanted dimples and sharper jaw lines, something that she was happy to oblige.

And she went with a changed hair colour while tuning her body to gain a better hourglass figure.

Vanity pleasing? Yes, but she did die and come back to life with all the things undone in her life, so she could be excused for wanting to look pretty.

She knew that she would not be able to do this for long. Someday, somewhere, they would come for her, to make sure that her dues were paid for. And on that day, she would go willingly because she knew that there was no point in fighting the inevitable, and there was a chine that Pietro could be hurt because of her.

So, even as she felt something approaching her destiny, she didn't move away. She was done running. She had already done all that she could. She'd supercharged Pietro's powers in a way that she didn't fully understand but it allowed him to enhance himself to ridiculous degrees.

Allowed him to punch really hard, really fast, like on the level of the Hulk, once he gained enough momentum. Heal instantly, like stupidly fast.

As in the bullet hole healing even as the bullet is still passing through his body. Yup, her Chaos Magic abilities really do come in handy when she knew what to boost. All of these abilities, just at the cost of extra calories.

And then, she made sure that he also had a secret account that held enough money to feed him for years if need be.

That was all that she could do. Aside from that, it felt wrong to approach Stark Tower because in this world, her vision was not born yet and if what she felt from the Chaos was right, he never would be born.

It also felt wrong to love someone else. Her love for Vision still persisted, in the form of grief and love. So much love.

So, when her fate came to her, she would be where she was now.

Sipping a martini, on a shack, waiting for the sun to set so that she could sleep in the cool sand like she had done for the past week that they had been here.

It was liberating.

Word Count - 2741

If you guys would like to support my writing or just want to read ahead of the public release, you can head on to my P*treon or Ko-fi .

I already have upto 15 extra chapters published there.