“Victor consider this….This life is too short and then you die. A bleak phrase that shows the condition of the human experience and how we live it. We are all pessimists at heart are we not my child? You may still be too young to quite understand this but you are not like others. Your smile, your brain, you will someday change the world.” His mother’s soft smile burned a permanent image in his mind. Sitting, motionless, pondering the childhood that once was Victor began to laugh….a maniacal laugh from others looking in on him laughing. The utter shattered psychosis of what happened in the years past, though to Von Jokan it was a simple pure laugh. His laugh was for him and for him alone, shocking his subjects he stood suddenly, the clinking of his armor the only noise in the throne room. His eyes scanned the room as his subjects seemed to cower before him. Breaking the silence with a loud clap of his hands Jokan looked around,
“Our progress?” He asked simply to one of his advisors, pointing a metal finger at the shaking man.
“M….My lord.” Victor rose a hand,
“Before you continue,” Victor started, his eyes slanting behind the mask, his voice taking on a cold tone. Then followed by a snicker and a giggle, then a loud laugh from the ruler, “Drop the my lord crap, it is already established that I’m ruler…The ruler of this candyland jam so drop the play at my ego.” Victor laughed again and then his voice dropped back to its more serious tone, “Now report.” His advisor stood rigid and began his report on the land,
“Nationalism in Latveria is at an all-time high. Average health….” Jokan’s mind was a mile away, as his advisor continued on dolling out information that his computers had transmitted to his armor. A simple latverian day, by his father’s side, some uncountable years ago he had just returned from home. The academia of the United States finest colleges behind him, his adolescent mind still on making a radical difference in the world, his father’s ambitions pressed upon him. Victor remembered trying to count all the wrinkles and white hair that his father had. A reclusive man ever since his mother had died, the call of the Latverian throne was something his father could easily fit into. Well-spoken through his adviser’s, the name Von Jokan sprouted into that of power, a symbolism of peace.
Victor remembered what his father had told him when victor had breathed his first eighteenth year of life,
“Son listen to me….You are….The most intelligent of Jokan’s to date.” His father smiled widely as he sat in his throne, chin in hand as he peered; at least it felt like this to Victor, through his son. “This world, though in all of its evil, is one of good. You must look beyond what is given to you at face value and take it with a smile.” His father’s trademarked laugh was the final thing Victor heard as an explosion lifted him up and off of his feet throwing him and against a throne room wall.
His consciousness crept back with a throbbing pain in the base of his head, then a gurgling noise accompanied by a tight restricting pain. It wasn’t until Victor was lifted off of his feet that he realized he was being strangled.
Reality snaps back to Victor as he shakes his head, an armor clad hand creeping up to his throat. “And sir about the man you wanted us to look up.” The room seemed to chill as Victor set his sights dead on his advisor,
“Go on.” The tone of his voice set in stern, angered tone, and an undertone of pain. His advisor swallowed,
“He um well lives in the states, the man, well my lord….I mean sir….Victor, um he went to Gotham City for Gifted youngsters.” Victor’s mind put the pieces together before the advisor could finish,
“StevenWayne.” He said aloud, more to his armor’s uplink to his databases. He ignored his advisor’s frantic head shaking as information was spilled out before his armored eyes. “StevenWayne, roommate at Gotham’s City for Gifted youngsters. Egomaniac before his parents were murdered, pure sociopath afterwards. A sociopath with a fortune to match my own…A sociopath with the skills and funds to make my life a living hell.” Jokan shook his head smiling behind his mask, as he ran a hand over the metal cover on his face. His mind wondering back to that moment,
“Listen to me you next in line piece of crap.” The darkly clad man shoved a young Victor back against the wall roughly, pushing him against the wall with such force Victor felt a thick wet patch on the back of his head. “I’d like to send a message to all dictators or anyone thinking of such totalitarian ideals.” He saw the man reach for something on his belt, a medium sized vial as he reared back smashing the vial over Victor’s face. Pain…Searing pain was all Victor could feel as he was released, falling to his knees as the smell of burning flesh wafted over his nose as he tried to wipe it off of his face. This only earned him a burning on his hands that seemed to crawl all over his body and even permeate his hair as he curled into a fetal position and fainted.
The smell of copper was almost overpowering as his eyes opened, the burning feeling residing to a more cold numbing one. The smell of copper seemed to emit from a corpse that was once his father. Lifeless in their family’s ceremonial armor, Victor knew but he just had to confirm for himself. Victor rubbed the back of his head to be greeted with a dry patch of blood as he wobbled to his feet.
“F…father?” He asked in his native tongue as he licked his unnaturally parched lips. Rolling his father over, Victor’s fears was confirmed. Before him lied his father, name, not relevant though his legacy is what Victor would hold onto, though what Victor saw in his father’s mask reflection shocked him. His hair was a neon green color, a stark contrast to his father’s dark green cape. His face chalk white, his lips a ruby red. Dropping to his knees in a hysterical laughter and pain, tears streamed down his face as he felt humiliated and confused, the irony that one of one of the world’s largest superpowers flawlessly infiltrated by a man in a black wet suit almost funny. So he laughed.
“Sire the action we will take?” His advisor must have asked again, a tinge of concern in his voice. Victor shook his head as his computer filed in the last bit of information about all that concerned Steven Wayne.
“I will deal with this personally,” Victor said in a deep voice waving away his advisors. Sitting back on his throne with a solid thud, Victor’s eyes went over the newsletters, the memoirs, and the funeral obituary for Thomas and Martha Wayne. How years after Steven’s graduation he had went missing for almost ten years, returning in his prime to take hold of the Wayne Enterprises. Following a string of untraceable disappearances made Wayne enterprise the only weapons corporation….Outside of the new upstart of Ivo Corps, Victor’s blood froze.
“Computer a jet, now, I need to get to Ivo estate in Russia as quickly as possible. Forward ahead and tell professor Ivo and his son to hold off on the weapons testing.” Victor stood, his mind running through how to save his old friend.
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