(One time there was with movie called Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It was okay. In that movie when they go to the Madripoor Pit Fighting Fighting Pits of Pit Fight Fighting in one of the fight cells you see a Widow fighting an Extremis person and I thought to myself “I wonder what their story is”. I decided that they were former lovers and it didn’t work out and now by crazy coincidence they were both desperate for cash and ended up fighting each other. I thought “maybe I’ll write about that someday but probably I won’t”.
Someday is today. In your face CCR! )
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The Red Room. Sounds scary doesn’t it? Oooh, look out for the Red Room, the place where little girls are mutilated and tortured and turned into psycho-assassins. Being sent to the Red Room was the best thing that ever happened to me. What was I before? Street trash. Nothing. A punching bag. A little doll to be used and thrown away.
Now? Now if someone looks at me funny I can snatch the eyeball from their head and hold it up for them to see. They can’t actually see the eyeball outside their skull very well because your brain doesn’t work like that, it’s mostly a thing you do for show. Now I can hurt people and kill them in all sorts of interesting and fun ways. All thanks to the Red Room. The part where they taught us ballet was pretty stupid, but even an assassination program can’t hit a home run every time.
There were drawbacks of course. The KGB or Hydra or Leviathan or the KVKD or the XKDC or Red Skull or Taskmaster or whoever the hell was behind all that expected you to only murder people they wanted and just hang around on hooks the rest of the time waiting for murder orders. I think I heard eventually they started using alien mind control powder but I was gone before all that business. They also wanted you to seduce people sometimes and NOT kill them. Can you believe that?
That’s why I got out of there. Twenty years of cardio, hand-to-hand combat, acrobatics, weapons, and tactical training? I’m in for that. The part where I have to listen to a dried up old vinegar tits Russian bim about who to kill and when (for no pay mind you) and also I have to hump fat bastards for intel? No thank you.
And here’s the thing, that Romanoff girl was always crying and carrying on about SHEILD and how they saved her and got her out of the program and blah, blah, blah, I got loose all on my own. I didn’t need some man with an eye patch or a BOW AND ARROW to save me.
I got out on my terms. I got out because I wanted to.
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They say Tony Stark found a cure for Extremis. Like it’s a disease that needed to be cured. I give up the ability to heal from almost anything, enhanced physical strength, reflexes, and resilience, and immunity for all real diseases and in return I get . . . what from this cure? I won’t blow up some day?
I’m going to let you in on a secret, everyone is going to die eventually. The only difference is that when I die I might blow up. Who cares? I’ll be dead. The problem with Extremis, besides the fact that it sounds like’s a flavor of Mountain Dew from the 90s, is that it kills most people once they’re injected with it. If you don’t die in the first few months everything’s peachy.
And by peachy I mean I’m basically like Captain America only I can also heal like Wolverine. And also I’m not an idiot from the 1940s who’s probably a huge racist. People like to speculate about Cap being a virgin, what about the fact that he was born in segregation times? Why does no one talk about that? Because he has one black friend? Come on. He’s the same age as your grandpa, are you telling me that your grandpa isn’t a racist?
Most of the Extremis people (who were killed by Tony Stark everyone seems to forget, no Batman rule for that dude) were combat veterans who had lost limbs. That wasn’t my path. I had a genetic condition called Dubowitz disease. Without Extremis I likely would have died sometime in my 20s.
This whole thing is going to make it sound like I’m obsessed with Tony Stark and hate him, but I honestly don’t care about him. He’s already dead anyway. But, if he can “cure” Extremis why can’t he cure Dubowitz disease? If he’s a genius who can do anything why did he spend his time flying around in a gold plated tin can blowing up Hydra bases with his friends instead of fixing global warming? Why was he snarking off to Congressmen instead of figuring out how to fix the economy? I thought the blue thing in his chest was supposed to give us all free clean energy, what happened to that?
Extremis saved me. Not only that but it made me awesome. I bet I could have taken Cap in a fight. He’s dead too so we’ll never know. Is the Red Guardian still around? They’re the same right? Maybe I can find him and beat his ass and show everyone.
Extremis has healed my shattered bones and stab wounds and gunshots and lasers and all kinds of things. The one thing that it can’t do anything about is a broken heart.
That’s a good line right there.
