Gorilla Grodd vs MODOK

***

I push open the door and stumble through, tripping over my own feet, and falling head first into the Lair of Mad Science.

Double crap - me and my two left feet! I am on my hands and knees in the doorway to MODOK’s Lair, and gentle, purple hands are around me helping me to stand. I am so embarrassed, damn my clumsiness. I have to steel myself to glance up. Holy cow - he’s so…unusual.

"Miss Kavanagh." He extends an armored hand to me once I’m upright. "You find yourself before MODOK. BEHOLD MODOK! Are you all right? Would you like to sit in a chair that is probably not designed for efficient electrocution?"

So unusual - and attractive, very attractive. He’s not tall, dressed in a fine yellow exoskeleton, with a truly enormous head and intense, pure white eyes that regard me shrewdly. It takes a moment for me to find my voice.

"Um. Actually - " I mutter. If this guy is over thirty then I’m a monkey’s uncle. In a daze, I place my hand in his and we shake. As our fingers touch, I feel an odd exhilarating shiver run through me. I withdraw my hand hastily, embarrassed. Must be static, or perhaps he has subtly restructured my DNA, bombarding my ordinary cells with all manner of mutagenic agents. I blink rapidly, my eyelids matching my heart rate.

"Miss Kavanagh is indisposed, so she sent me. I hope you don’t mind, Mr. MODOK."

"And you are?" His voice is warm, possibly amused, but it’s difficult to tell from his impassive expression, pupil-less eyes and bared teeth. He looks mildly interested, but above all, completely out of his mind with power.

"Anastasia Steele. I’m studying English Literature with Kate, um… Katherine…um… Miss Kavanagh at Washington State."

"I see," he says simply. I think I see the ghost of a smile in his expression, but I’m not sure. His mouth is literally an entire foot wide. "TO REPEAT MY PREVIOUS INTERROGATORY, would you like to sit?" He waves me toward a white leather buttoned L-shaped couch.

His lair is way too big for just one man, if he can even technically be called a man. In front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, there’s a huge modern dark-wood desk that six people could comfortably eat around if it weren’t strewn with the refuse from probably a hundred different highly illegal biological experiments. It matches the coffee table by the couch. Everything else is white with subtle red flecks - ceiling, floors, and walls except, on the wall by the door, where a mosaic of small paintings hang, thirty-six of them arranged in a square. They are exquisite - a series of images of Captain America suffering intense humiliation at the hands of MODOK himself, rendered in such precise detail they look like photographs. Displayed together, they are breathtaking.

"A local artist! Red Skull! HE IS INFERIOR BUT WILL PROVIDE ME WITH SERVICES IN EXCHANGE FOR CURRENCY," shouts MODOK when he catches my gaze.

"They’re lovely. Raising the ordinary to extraordinary," I murmur, distracted both by him and the paintings. He cocks his head – his whole body, really – to one side by tilting his hoverchair and shifting the tremendous weight of his grossly enlarged cranium and regards me intently.

"I couldn’t agree more, Miss Steele," he replies, his voice intense and alarming, and for some inexplicable reason I find myself blushing.

Apart from the paintings, the rest of the office is cold, clean, clinical, and devoted to the pursuit of world domination. I wonder if it reflects the personality of the misshapen Adonis who gracefully steers his magnetically-levitating chair until he is facing my own. I shake my head, disturbed at the direction of my thoughts, and retrieve Kate’s questions from my satchel. Next, I set up the mini-disc recorder and am all fingers and thumbs, dropping it twice on the coffee table in front of me. MODOK says nothing, waiting patiently - I hope - as I become increasingly embarrassed and flustered. When I pluck up the courage to look at him, he’s watching me, one metal-encased hand relaxed in his lap and the other idly shuffling through schematics for a ray gun that can liquefy intestines. I think he’s trying to suppress a smile.

The elevator arrives, and we step in. We’re alone. Suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, possibly our proximity in such an enclosed space, the atmosphere between us changes, charging with an electric, exhilarating anticipation, and also humming with the nanobots that I have been assured will unmake the molecular structure of any who oppose MODOK’s will. My breathing alters as my heart races. His head rotates fractionally toward me, his eyes completely featureless and blank. I bite my lip.

"Oh, *** the paperwork, I WILL NOT BE A PRISONER OF MY OWN RED TAPE, WOMAN," he howls. He floats toward me, the metal carapace necessary to prevent his enormous head from crushing the rest of his tiny little skeleton pushing me against the wall of the elevator. Before I know it, he’s got both of my hands in a vice-like grip above my head with a retractable clamp I didn’t see him deploy and he’s pinning me to the wall using his shriveled legs. Holy ****. Another appendage - it is becoming apparent that his suit contains many - grabs my ponytail and yanks down, bringing my face up, and his gigantic lips are on mine. It’s only just not painful. I moan into his mouth, which encompasses most of my head now, giving his tongue an opening. He takes full advantage, the very tip of his skateboard-sized tongue swiping back and forth across my mouth. I have never been kissed like this.

My tongue tentatively strokes his and joins his in a slow erotic dance that’s all about touch and sensation, all bump and grind, like I’m vainly licking a damp comforter that someone is swirling around my entire head. He brings a many-segmented exoskeletal appendage up to grasp my chin and holds me in place. I am helpless, my hands pinned, my face held, and his little bitty legs bracketing my hips. I feel the industrial-grade titanium of his armor against my belly. Oh my… He wants me. MODOK, howling-mad super-genius, wants me, and I want him, here… now, in the elevator, if it is even possible to access his erogenous zones while he is encased in metal and bristling with weaponry.

"You. Are. So. Sweet. You. Inferior. Mental. Gnat," he shouts in my face, each word a staccato.

The elevator stops, the doors open, and he bobs away from me in the blink of an eye, leaving me hanging and coated from my shoulders to the top of my head in saliva. Three men in business suits look at both of us and smirk as they climb on board. MODOK interprets this as an insult, and the gentleman in the center doesn’t quite have time to scream before each one of his cells is unraveled by MODOK’s murderous nanobot army. The men on either side snap to attention as their former coworker’s component molecules splash against their pant legs in a reddish slurry. My heart rate is through the roof, I feel like I’ve run an uphill race. I want to lean over and grasp my knees… but that’s just too obvious. Also I’m trying to keep my face as far as possible from the floor, which is slick with gore.

"Can I relieve you of your coat?" MODOK asks. I shake my head. I’m still cold from the twenty minutes I’ve just spent clinging to the back of a jet-propelled rocket-cycle, thousands of feet above the ground.

"Would you like REFRESHMENT?!" he asks. I blink at him. After last night! Is he trying to be funny? It’s hard to tell - he only really has the one facial expression. For one second, I think about asking for a margarita - but I don’t have the nerve.

I don’t have very much nerve, generally speaking.

“WHY ARE YOU JUST BLINKING AT ME, SIMPLETON? Refreshment! A beverage! Drink! IS - YOUR - THROAT - DRY?” I am too confounded by his impressively booming speaking voice to answer right away, so he sighs and swivels his chair away from me. “It pleases MODOK to have a glass of white wine. Are you familiar with the practice of drinking wine? If I pour you a glass, will you be able to figure it out, you tragically dull creature?”

"Yes, please," I murmur.

I am standing in this enormous laboratory feeling out of place. I walk over to a glass wall, and I realize that the lower half of the wall opens onto a balcony. Seattle is lit up and lively in the background, I imagine, although the balcony is cluttered with incubation chambers containing dozens of MODOK clones in suspended animation, their organs ready to be harvested if any of MODOK’s should fail. I walk back to the bar area - it takes a few seconds, it’s so far from the window, and on the other side of a yawning pit that seems to plunge all the way to the ground floor of the tower and beyond. Every few seconds the ghost of a scream floats up from the floor. The effect is breathtaking.

MODOK is withdrawing the cork from a slim bottle of wine with one of the countless metal limbs he can summon from his armor at will. This one has a corkscrew on it.

“This is a Latverian white. It is similar to - do you like Riesling?”

"I know nothing about wine, MODOK. I’m sure it will be fine." My voice is soft and hesitant. My heart is thumping. I want to run, even though I have been asked to refrain from sudden movements to avoid provoking the blade-sentries. This is seriously rich. Seriously over-the-top Tony Stark-style wealthy. What am I doing here? You know very well what you’re doing here, my subconscious sneers at me. Yes, I want to be in MODOK’s bed. Or whatever he sleeps in. Perhaps some kind of hyperbaric chamber.

“Of course it will be fine! MODOK does not debase himself with the kiwi-mango swill that passes for wine amongst your undergraduate peers, you cow. Here.” He extends a claw-tipped limb, from which dangles a glass. Even the glasses are rich…heavy, glowing slightly but hopefully not in a way that indicates radioactivity, crystal. I take a sip, and the wine is light, crisp, and delicious. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been poisoned.

"You’re not pestering MODOK with pointless questions, and you’re not even blushing. In fact, I think this is the palest I’ve ever seen you, Anastasia," he notes. “I have a variety of substances that would have sufficient caloric content for a female of your size. Are you hungry?"

I shake my head. Not for food.

"It’s a very big place you have here,” I offer.

"Big?"

"Big."

“MODOK Tower, headquarters of my global - galactic, even - organization, staffed by thousands of the brightest minds I have been able to create or kidnap or coerce into my employ; one hundred and ten floors worth of technology so advanced a credulous monkey like you would think it magic; hundreds of cells containing unspeakable biological abominations; all of it in service to MY ULTIMATE WILL, and the greater goal of the sublimation of all mankind by my SUPERIOR INTELLECT - you think this is…big?!”

His eyes burn with something. Maybe I’ve amused him. Maybe he wants to transplant my brain into a robot octopus, just to see what happens. Either way, I hope he likes me.