The Sage of the Mind

Disclaimer - The rights of the respective characters are with their respective owners. I don't mean to violate their intellectual property rights and thus, only my original characters are my IP. 

The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 20

Seattle [October 2008]

–Phil Coulson–

"That will be all, Mr.Turner. If we have any more questions, we'll be sure to contact you during your stay here. Also, if you remember something that you might want to inform us of, call this number. Have a Good Day, Mr.Turner, and stay out of trouble," Saying so, he handed Chris his card and turned around, and left the house, his agents following behind.

God, today had been such a rollercoaster ride that he did not know what to think about.

Everybody, from the janitor at the Triskelion who only spoke Russian, to the World Security Council, knew about the Invisible Man as the media had dubbed the mystery savior of Manhattan. Of course, SHIELD was worried about the implications of such a powerful enhanced roaming free in the world, doing as he pleased but seeing that he was on the side of good right now, they had backed off.

Backed off, in the sense of overt legal moves. Their agents continued to monitor every single aspect of Manhattan and the way the man's powers worked. They were prudent in their caution because imagining someone capable of crushing a car to bits and rescuing a cat from a tree at the same time was bone-chilling.

If he was that worried, imagine the state of Director Fury. He was very much fuming because, apparently, they had found a single link in all the time that the Invisible Man had operated in Manhattan but they could not actually approach the link in any meaningful way.

Why? Because the link was a small group of civil engineering students playing a club at their university who happened to be acquaintances of the Invisible Man, so much so that they had regular conversations with him, not face to face of course but through clever use of his powers.

Unfortunately, Manhattan was, for them at least, the Invisible Man's fief, and going there with hostile intent was a surefire way of getting knocked out and waking up in police custody. Things had evolved to such a level that even the Mayor and NYPD Commissioner would refuse to lift their hand against him.

The reasons were twofold. The 24-hour Business zone instated in Manhattan that brought in so much revenue that it practically dwarfed all other Boroughs combined and secondly, the vastly safer working environment that he had created for any emergency services.

The Boys in Blue would most likely defend the Invisible Man because of the sheer deterrence he represented. Gangs now avoided Manhattan and its surrounding areas like the plague and the men in blue were very grateful for that.

Of course, in the short term, all that criminal activity had to go somewhere, so the gangs had begun intruding on other gangs' territories, and shootouts and gang wars had increased a bit but going by SHIELD analysts' words, it was just a temporary uptick and things would soon turn to normal.

So, interrogating, even a softer subtler one, would have been very risky to do in Manhattan, no matter how hard they tried to figure out ways to block his sight. They had tried everything, from lead to copper, to high energy frequency blocking to plain old jammers. Nothing seemed to work and it was clear that without having direct access to the enhanced himself, they would not be able to create a countermeasure for him.

So, they had to resort to this. A fully paid-for vacation for both his parents that made sure that his parents were out of town and a fully paid-for trip home from a competition they ran at his university.

Of course, they would not be able to make him "disappear" as Mr.Turner put it so aptly because that would just antagonise the most powerful enhanced they had ever encountered.

As far as he knew, nothing, aside from that one person he met in the 90s, could beat him and even she would have a hard time considering her specialty was just punching through things, and as far as anybody knew, there was nothing to punch.

They had been laser-focused on Manhattan for the better part of a year now and they had figured out nothing. No energy signature that would indicate activation of enhanced powers. Nothing.

There should have been something but it was as if they were blind to it. Better sensors, better satellites, better computers, they tried it all. But still, they were as blind as they were in the beginning.

It was as if the man had an Invisible hold on the city, and was capable of processing that vast amount of information and acting on it, in real-time. He didn't understand how the hundreds of rich people who had now taken residence in the city did so without caring about their privacy that much.

Essentially, the man was everywhere and yet nowhere to be seen.

The only thing they were able to find was that while the man himself was very strong, he was not really that smart or he was just playing around with a bunch of grad students.

After all, who would make an island-spanning highway underneath the island, deeper even than the subway, just because a bunch of students suggested that it might relieve the traffic situation?

Yeah, as if they needed one more lane to reduce traffic. Like that has ever worked out for anyone anywhere, ever.

But they had sent a couple of drones after digging in a way and what they found had boggled their analysts' minds. That discovery was part of the reason they were ordered not to make any overt moves with respect to him.

He had seen the footage and the terrifying fact was that he knew that all of it was done solely by that man. There was no indication anywhere that any type of tool was used to make that tunnel, not that he could do so without it coming to their attention.

They had gone through the plans of the students and seen that the tunnel was built to scale, very accurately. The amount of earth moved for that project while also maintaining the integrity of the tunnel at the same time…the numbers alone made it so that Director Fury himself forbade anyone from approaching him at all.

Then, he had appointed him to interrogate the student to see if they could find any new information that they didn't already have from their hacked devices. It was seriously getting easier and easier to spy on people without even assigning people to them.

Just turn on the mic, assign a few keywords, and then voila, you have a mass surveillance system ready at your fingertips.

From Chris, they had confirmed what they already knew. The Invisible Man's range extended beyond the island of Manhattan, that was certain but, the way in which he exerted his influence mattered a lot.

See, on the island of Manhattan, the Invisible Man was like a god. He could perform a dozen different things, all at once, without stuttering. He could stop bullets, asphyxiate fires, hold entire houses together, lift trucks, etc. 

Outside the boundary of Manhattan, however, was where things got a little interesting. They had noticed that his power did not extend very far out of Manhattan but enough to cover all of its periphery. Whereas inside Manhattan, the Invisible Man used enough brute force to shame even Captain America in terms of power, outside Manhattan, he used creativity to solve the problems.

In Manhattan, he used his powers to just float any cars that were about to crash and then after bleeding their inertia, deposited them back on the ground. Outside Manhattan however, he could not do much in terms of a car crash aside from taking control of the steering and trying to take it away safely.

Same when it came to apprehending criminals. Brute force knockout or just dropping heavy things on just the right stop to knock them out. 

He had power, in spades, that much they knew but building that tunnel and manipulating something as small as Scrabble from far away distances meant that he had impeccable control as well.

That type of expertise doesn't just come automatically. From all their research on the enhanced people, they knew that powers were just like another skill that you had access to. It was unique and tied to you, nobody aside from you could learn it, but it was just something that people needed to practice to get better at.

Somebody had practiced with their powers, likely for years on end, to reach this level of skill with their innate powers. He knew that having stronger powers meant a loss of control, at least in the initial stage.

Weaker powers were just easier to control. 

Thinking of the tunnel, this person had probably been going at his powers for a decade, there is no other explanation for it. Well, aside from him having this level of proficiency instantly which was just impossible, even in the messed up logic of Enhanced people.

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