Best of Intentions: Fatlip (ch. 23)

As it turned out, it was kinda… ludicrously easy to build a secret shadow organization. Like, it was downright worrying how easy it was. It had me thinking about my old life in my old world -- and how those conspiracy nuts might have been onto something when they ranted and raved about the Illuminati or the Freemasons. Not because I believed those organizations existed, but they might have been a cover for an actual international cabal of puppet masters secretly pulling the world's strings from behind the curtain. 

Because it was really, really, really easy to just… vanish from the face of the Earth. Even when I had unofficially occupied every slot of the Top Ten Most Wanted lists across the globe. The US of A was frothing at the mouth at the thought of getting its grubby little hands on me, and they weren't the only ones. 

Our first order of business had been to slip out of Raccoon City unnoticed, which had also been pretty easy. Though that was partly because of a little forward thinking on my part. I’d always figured that once the day was saved I'd be hunted to be press-ganged into government service. I wasn't sure if it would be the US government, necessarily, but they had always seemed like the most likely candidate. Since I had no intention of working for The Man, I made sure to have an exit strategy in place well beforehand, and it was simple to expand it a bit to include the others. 

One of the best benefits of being an Artificer was that I could change my spell list with every level up. Which worked great for me because it allowed me to mix and match a bit by picking spells that were immediately useful for a situation without being locked into a choice. So far, it didn't seem like epic levels were a thing, which made Level 20 my last opportunity to switch up my spell list and pick off all the options I'd think I'd need for the future. 

Strictly speaking, I hadn't used much in the way of offensive spells. I hadn't even cast a single fireball, for example. That was entirely because… well, I hadn't needed to. At Level 20, my basic cantrips like Firebolt dealt 4d10 damage. With my Arcane Firearm, that was an additional 1d8. That alone was more than enough to deal with… pretty much anything short of Kaiju Nemesis. Plus, with my class, I already had a list of prepared spells, like Fireball, so I could shift my priorities and my spell list and optimize it for one thing. 

Buff and utility spells. Like Disguise Self. Or Invisibility. 

They made slipping into the evacuation easy enough, and from there we had to escape the quarantine erected over Knoxville, which was also alarmingly easy. After that, we were free. The US was combing through Raccoon City with a fine-toothed comb looking for me. Umbrella was already collectively roaching out because the US had more than enough intel to act, so they were enacting the exact mad scramble that I’d expected them to, and all I had to do was keep my fingers on the pulse of the news to see how the pieces fell. 

After heading into another town, and borrowing an identity from a zombie that didn’t have a Raccoon City residence, laying low was as simple as renting out a couple of hotel rooms while I got everything up and running. 

I didn’t know much about running a secret spy organization, but I knew that we needed two things -- money and mobility. And secret bases. So, three things. Money, naturally, had a lot of uses. Creation and Fabrication had a lot of utility for an Artificer, but you couldn’t beat the raw power of money when it came to providing supplies. And, as an Artificer with future knowledge, it was astoundingly simple to rake in plenty of starting cash. 

All I needed was a laptop and an internet connection. My habit of taking the wallets and credit cards of zombies that I killed paid off in this moment -- it gave me the money that was in their accounts, which I used to set up a number of investment portfolios. From there, I set a number of puts on Umbrella’s stock price while simultaneously leaking the entire disaster onto the internet. Pretty sure I made some poor intern who was desperately trying to cover up the entire ordeal weep blood, but the payout was more than worth their suffering. 

That netted me a cool couple hundred thousand. Could have been a lot more, but I wasn’t so pressed for cash that I needed to run the risk of tripping any flags. From there, I emptied the accounts and funneled them into one account in Switzerland and began the process of creating a number of shell companies and LLCs to help hide the money moving around.

Part of the funds went into several more investment portfolios whose sole purpose was to fulfill the dream of anyone who wished that they could go back in time and start buying stocks when the stock prices were dirt cheap. In the year 1998… Apple? $0.31. Amazon? $2.68. Microsoft? $21.26. There were some that were missing, like Walmart, but there was still a fantastic selection to pick from in areas that I knew would be seeing explosive growth over the next couple of years. 

With others, I was looking to facilitate myself in fields that I knew I could dominate in early. Oil wasn’t going to be going away any time soon, but I had that generator design that I stole from Umbrella. I could improve upon the design, making it affordable and practical, which would open up the green energy sector. 

The vehicle sector was another one I would be dipping my toes into -- civic cars, planes, helicopters, and ships. They were instrumental in my plans for the future, as well as an excellent cover. But there were others I was looking at -- video games, for one. The console wars were still ongoing, but they would be ramping up in a few years. Producing a console of my own, in addition to the types of games I knew would do well, and the chance to popularize my own favorite games early?

There were opportunities like that everywhere, and I fully intended to take advantage of every single one of them to make my real job easier. 

Some shell companies would become real companies as they invested and took over existing companies in their wheelhouse. From there, I would drip-feed them designs that they would produce and then export, which would fund the company. With a little creative economics, some of that money would be funneled into Storm. 

It would take a couple of years for the ball to really get rolling, but that was perfectly fine. I had the most valuable resource of all -- time. 

That, in turn, allowed me to provide both the second and third most important thing for a secret spy organization -- Mobility and a secret base. 

“Is this it?” Chris questioned from behind me, looking out of the window of the minibus that I had purchased to ferry everyone over to the airstrip that I had bought but paid the original owner under the table to keep his name on the files. It wasn't much -- just a long stretch of flat road with a hangar at one end. He sounded oddly disappointed as we came to a stop. 

“This is it,” I agreed, putting the bus in park and glancing at the back of the bus. All the others were looking out at the otherwise mundane airstrip with confusion and some disappointment. Everyone was packed inside, but there was one familiar face that had joined us in the immediate aftermath of Raccoon City. 

Rebecca Chambers. 

She had some real protagonist energy -- sweet as sugar, warm, and kind. Also a certified genius who graduated from college with a Bachelor's degree in chemistry at the ripe age of eighteen. From there, she was recruited into STARS as a part of Bravo Team. She was a member for all of a month before the Mansion ordeal began, which led to her early retirement and return to college for a degree in virology. 

Light brown hair, warm brown eyes -- she looked like she could be Jill’s younger sister. Currently her brow was furrowing, and I think she spotted my surprise, but she was convincing herself that her eyes were playing tricks on her. 

“Umbrella operated all over the globe,” I began, killing the engine and opening the door to lead everyone off. “If we want to have a hope in hell of actually pulling this off, then we need to do the same. Issue is… well, at this stage, Umbrella has a lot more resources than us. We can't respond to them shitting the bed half a world away. That's a problem I'm working on fixing, but for now, the best thing we can do is eliminate the time needed to mobilize. And that is the purpose… of the Bus.”

I made sure to turn around to see their faces when I pressed a button on my wrist to undo the cloaking device. Their eyes suddenly went wide, jaws went slack, and they stared in astonishment. Even Ada seemed genuinely impressed, and I pivoted on a heel to look at the project I had been working on for the better part of two weeks. Two entire weeks of uninterrupted tinkering. 

The Bus was a plane that looked like the love child of a cargo plane and a stealth jet. Not a particularly large one either. It was essentially a small cargo plane in terms of size, but one that I had modified extensively. 

“The cloaking feature helps maintain a low profile during active missions,” I began, activating the cloaking feature once more. It vanished from sight entirely, all except for a slight warping around the edges of the plane -- not perfect, but unless you were already looking for it, you probably wouldn't notice. That ‘probably’, however, bugged the hell out of me so the cloak tech was marked as a MK. 1 with MK. 2 coming soon. “Additionally, it's equipped with stealth tech that's… honestly, about ten generations ahead of the curve -- virtually immune to radar and thermal-based detection methods, and quieter than a bee.” 

Fabrication had saved me billions in materials. I had done some napkin designs for the first iterations the first week, doing some tests on smaller amounts of material to get the right balance of qualities I was going for. Strong, light, great for stealth. Technically, it was a graphene-adamantine alloy, though only by the barest definitions as the graphene had been a starting point for the material I had developed but not named. 

“But, sometimes, stealth will fail or we'll need to reveal ourselves,” I continued, approaching the Bus and deactivating the cloak once more. “In terms of combat potential, the Bus can take a beating and dish it out. 30mm bullets will bounce off and sidewinder missiles won't put a dent in the armor plating, provided that they get through the active Shield.” The forcefield was modeled off the Shield spell. It wasn't something that could be left on all the time, but much like how it protected me in a pinch? When something big was heading our way, that Shield that lasted all of a second could be the difference between life and death. 

“Which brings me to the lithium based ion thrusters,” I continued, smiling proudly at them as I gave one of them a pat on the side. “With these babies, we can haul ass when needed. At full throttle, we're hitting mach ten. We'll need to be in upper orbit to do it-” I started before Chris started choking on something. I think it was a sob. 

I figured. Mach 10 had been achieved by the NASA X-43 in my old world by the year of 2001, but it had been unmanned. He might have heard rumors about the aircraft, but at this point, the fastest manned plane was something like Mach 3. So, it was a pretty substantial jump.

“It'll be a rough as hell ride, but it'll get us where we need to be in a few hours no matter where Umbrella shits the bed,” I continued as Claire patted her brothers back. I think he had tears in his eyes. “Offensively, we're a bit more limited. 20mm railguns for close quarters, with one 50mm railgun for long-range targets. Additionally, there are six short-range missiles and six long-range -- both with software-based tracking, so if you send them at something, it'll go away.” 

Looking at the peanut gallery, I saw that they were suitably impressed, which made the next part so exciting. Pressing another button on my watch, I dropped the cargo bay door. “On the inside is where the real magic begins,” I said, walking up the ramp that led into the Bus, and- 

“What the fuuu…?” Carlos trailed off under his breath, openly gaping at the sight. Then, to verify, he glanced over the edge as to make sure he was looking at the right plane. “I… don't think the exterior matches the interior,” he muttered more to himself than the others. 

“That's folded space for you,” I agreed, looking at the interior of the Bus. In function, it was essentially a Bag of Holding just massively scaled up. The infusion gave me a blueprint to work off of, which allowed me to apply it to the ship. The result was that the interior was five times the size of what the exterior would indicate. The cargo hold was already half as big as the plane should be, and it was taller, adding an entire second story that shouldn’t exist. “This here is the mission prep area. It’s a bit empty now, but I’m hoping to fill it up now that this project is at a stopping point.”

The area was large enough for a few all-terrain vehicles that I was in the process of designing. Come desert, snow, mountains, or to the depths of the sea -- we would have a vehicle capable of taking us to whatever dark corner of the world Umbrella was polluting. Before that, however, I was designing our armor. 

I’d tried my hand at it before the disaster happened, but there was a world of difference between what a Level 1 Artificer and a Level 20 could do. It was almost to the point of absurdity, frankly. 

Armor was a must when it came to dealing with Umbrella’s pet monsters, so I was drafting a number of blueprints to give everyone the most protection possible. It would be vastly easier as an Armorer, I imagine, but still very doable. At Level 20, there were a lot fewer things that I couldn’t do. It was only a matter of time and investment. 

My goal was to combine the effects of several types of enchanted armor. Enhanced Defense for that +2 armor bonus? That was a must. Cast-Off Armor so it could be put on and taken off in a few seconds? Very convenient. Arcane Propulsion Armor for some extra movement speed? Why not. Armor of Weightlessness for more mobility? Or Armor of the Fallen to speak to the dead?

It’d take some work, but I was feeling pretty confident that I could at least achieve that much. It was after that point that I would get a little ambitious by swapping out pieces of the armor for magic item variants -- such as making the hands Gauntlets of Ogre Strength, or turning the boots into Winged Boots. Bonus points if I could make the attunement count as one because they were part of a single armor set, rather than needing to attune to three separate items. 

“Inside,” I continued, heading up a set of stairs to the second floor of the cargo plane and opening a door, revealing a classy but casual-looking lounge area. “Is where we will be staying while in the air.”

“Is that… a TV?” Kevin whispered to himself, looking at a briefing television mounted on a wall before a large cream colored couch. I wasn’t surprised by his stunned disbelief -- flat screen TVs had been a thing, but they were hardly prevalent. Tube televisions had been the norm. And, frankly, I don’t think he was prepared for 8k resolution. 

“We have a lounge, mini-bar, a library, study, and a dorm that can house up to fifteen people. The rooms there are a bit cramped, won't lie, but they each have their own bathroom complete with a stand-in shower,” I rattled off. Entertainment was king when it came to having a bunch of people sharing a relatively cramped space. I had stretched the interior as much as I could without adding significant build time to the construction, and I managed to fit in quite a bit inside the plane. “Downstairs,” I continued, heading down a set of stairs and the rest followed. 

“We have a fully equipped gym, a training area, and laboratory,” I finished, walking the length of the hallway that divided the three areas. 

“A laboratory?” Rebbeca spoke up, “Is that safe?” 

“Under normal circumstances? Not in the slightest! But I've managed to mitigate the danger,” I reassured. I understood her concerns quite well. The laboratory served a dual purpose -- for one, it would be where we unfucked Umbrella's fuckery when it came to the T-Virus and whatever other genetic abominations that they’d cooked up. We could create antivirals, cures, and vaccines here. 

I had planned my build around it, and it was half the reason why I chose to be an Artificer. With my Feats, I had taken two expertises and they were Arcane and Medicine. My intelligence score was much higher than my Wisdom, so my Medicine bonus was a +13 to my Arcane of +17. I hadn't really worked with Rebecca yet, but given that she was an actual certified genius who specialized in chemistry and virology… 

I had high hopes. Especially when I had taken two spells that would aid us in our research and development, one of which had helped me greatly with developing the Bus -- Skill Empowerment and Enhance Ability. The former granted expertise in a skill that someone else was proficient in while Enhance Ability gave advantage on ability checks. 

The latter was exceptionally useful. There were no dice to roll, but I'm fairly sure that there were invisible ability checks that happened during the creative process. 

Additionally, the laboratory would serve as a workshop for me. It would be where I worked on new tech on the go, though my larger scale projects would require a dedicated location. 

“I have a containment measure established -- the first sign that something is going wrong, you're getting teleported out and the lab goes into lock down. Everything inside will be incinerated in heat equal to the surface of the sun, the lab will be ejected from the Bus, and then a rip in space will suck up the remains and eject them from this plane of reality.” 

By that, I meant that I had synergized Glyphs of Warding. Otiluke's Resilient Sphere would lock down the laboratory while a Glyph containing Misty Step would trigger, evacuating the inhabitants of the lab. From there, immediately, explosives would tear apart the lab, but that explosion would be contained within the sphere. Once ejected from the plane, two Bags of Holding would be fed into each other, causing a temporal rip and sending the whole problem to someone else's doorstep if the virus managed to survive being scorched. 

“That's… an exaggeration, right?” Rebbeca questioned, looking vaguely alarmed as she looked around at the others for support. 

“I don't exaggerate about safety,” I reassured her, but that didn't seem to work. “We're not Umbrella. Something trying to escape from a petri dish and rack up a body count on the way out is treated as a bad thing. But, beyond that… any questions?” 

Ada surprised me by being the first to speak up, “How long can the plane stay in the air?” Curious for spy reasons, are you? 

“For general-purpose flight? Indefinitely,” I answered with a shrug. “I redesigned the generator that Umbrella had for its Hives. Don’t know who they ripped the design off from, but they knew their stuff. Wasn’t that hard to create a semi-perpetual motion generator from the base design.” I elaborated, making Ada blink slowly. 

“... What?” She muttered under her breath, but I ignored her. 

“The generator powers up fuel cells that we’ll tap into when needed -- weapons, going full throttle, shield, etcetera.” I moved on -- it was the same basic design that I had given Dakka. The generator gave a base amount of power for continuous use, with the excess going into fuel cells that could be drained for extraneous use of power. “When we need to put the pedal to the metal? We have about twelve hours of continuous use. Stuff like the active camo doesn’t drain the power too much, so they’re a non-issue.”

My gaze swept over their faces for a moment, seeing dull incomprehension on a lot of faces. “Well, I’ll let you get acquainted with the Bus. We’ll be in the air by the end of the hour, though.” That gave them a burst of nervous excitement as the founding members of my organization began to explore what would be their tentative home for the foreseeable future. 

I intended to expand as time went by. There was simply no way that we could handle all of Umbrella with the numbers that we had now -- not because we were lacking in quality but because… well, Umbrella couldn’t outsmart us, so they were determined to outstupid us. When dealing with them in Raccoon City… I’d thought I understood the depths of their fathomless stupidity and short-sightedness, but I had been wrong and Dakka paid the price for it. 

No. The only way forward was to treat Umbrella like a drunk toddler that had nuclear launch codes. 

As we expanded, the teams on the Bus would rotate while we put another Bus or three in the air to cover the various continents. Ground teams would be split between those that rotated on and off a Bus, and those that conducted investigations by keeping an ear to the ground. 

I just needed to find people who were moderately trustworthy. 

The only ones who remained behind were Chris and Jill. Rebecca went straight to the lab, sliding by me with a hesitant smile, while Kevin, Carlos, and Leon went to the gym. Ada vanished upstairs, probably to do spy things. Jokes on her -- I had her watched like a hawk. The very moment that she tried to betray us to someone like Wesker or any other Umbrella muppet, I’d know and I fully intended to follow that connection back to her boss. 

“So, this is what you can do when you’re not panic building?” Jill questioned, leaning against the hallway wall as she gazed through the window into the sparring area where Claire was walking about, getting a feel for the equipment. “This took you a month?”

“Couple of weeks, technically,” I corrected, wanting to get that straight. “But, yeah. And this is just the start,” I told them both, my gaze bouncing between them. 

“That’s actually kinda terrifying to hear,” Chris admitted, his eyebrows climbing high. “But I’m more curious on how this tech is going to get used,” he added, crossing his arms. “Umbrella has been scrambling, just like we expected. I know the plan was to lay low for a couple of months…” But he wanted action. I understood that. I agreed with it, even. 

I gestured for them to follow me, and I headed into the briefing area of the Bus. There, I unveiled what I had managed to pick up from Umbrella’s mad scramble. Exactly as I’d expected, Umbrella had divided itself up as everyone tried to claim as many resources as they could on the way out the door. However, it hadn’t been to the degree that I had expected. 

A lot of Umbrella’s top brass had simply vanished, it felt like. Which told me that they had been far more prepared to bug out at the drop of a hat than the rest of the company, and that they had their own resources stashed away so they didn’t need to join the feeding frenzy. 

The CEO and founder of Umbrella, Oswell E. Spencer, was among those who vanished. Joel Allman, the Vice-President, had turned up dead and no one seemed to know who killed him. Douglas Lauper, Head of Medical Research in North America, was one of the centerpieces in the blood bath. Fritz O’Neal, Head of Internal Investigations, had also vanished. It was both more and less messy than I had expected, as some had clearly been in the know while others had been caught with their pants down when Uncle Sam came knocking. 

Finding those that vanished was our top priority, but for all intents and purposes, they had done what I wanted them to. In their mad scramble to gobble up resources, they had laid down a trail to their hidden assets. 

“Rockfort Island?” Chris remarked, looking over at the file that I had compiled over the past month. 

“The Ashford family wasn’t one of the winners when it came to Umbrella collapsing,” I answered. The Ashfords had been amongst the original founding families of Umbrella, with Edward Ashford founding the company along with Oswell E. Spencer and James Marcus in the late sixties. Only Oswell still lived amongst the trio. Not sure what happened to them, but knowing Umbrella they probably murdered each other, with Oswell managing to survive the power struggle. “Alfred Ashford was edged out of the company years before the Raccoon City outbreak, but he still retained influence inside it. Enough that some fringe elements started to rally around him.”

“Perks of having the right last name, huh?” Jill noted, and I nodded. Alfred’s career within Umbrella was less than stellar. His last name landed him a few cushy positions with lofty job titles, but never one with any real responsibilities or importance. After a few years of that, he was edged out entirely -- technically, he was still a part of Umbrella, only in the sense that he used his lands for Umbrella’s goals and collected a pretty fat cheque every month. He just had no official administrative power, which is probably why he was spared initial scrutiny. 

“The right name, and the right resources. The guy is absurdly rich, and seemingly has an interest in rebuilding Umbrella under his banner because he’s been accepting all the fringe groups that have flocked to him,” I confirmed. “Researchers, paramilitary forces -- the whole nine yards.”

“Well, we can’t allow that,” Jill remarked, closing the folder and looking at me expectantly. “What’s the plan?”

Rockfort Island was a small island in the South Pacific, southeast of the coast of New Zealand. Small, unassuming, and a stone's throw away from Antarctica, so not particularly valuable. Which made it great for Umbrella’s ends -- which seemed to be a paramilitary training base according to the records that I had found. 

“First?” I started, a grin finding its way onto my face. Infiltration. A Hat of Disguise, which would take me a grand total of ten hours apiece to make, and they would be perfect for slipping in unnoticed. “We map out the island, we find what they’re cooking up and what relevant information that they have about other Umbrella activities… and once we're done, we blow the place sky high.”

That got a wide grin from Chris, “That’s a plan that I can get behind.” He said with a laugh, already looking forward to it. I’d call it a few weeks, maybe another month before we were ready to take on the island and whatever it had to throw at us. And I fully intended to make the most of the time that I had.