Clancy currently sat in a darkened room, sipping the strongest coffee NEXT was capable of illegally smuggling in, the result of its brand newly stolen passenger jet making routes between certain parts of what few unoccupied regions of central america remained. Surrounding her was a puzzle, one that hurt her to look at: three corkboards covered with notes, pictures, observations about a certain individual. She was no stranger to pain, but the enigma of Edgar McCoy brought back a sort of raw hurt she thought she had long since grown numb to.
It was, technically, her day off. Clancy hadn't had a real day off in years. Before Roger died. Before the war began. Before her world went to hell. To Clancy's displeasure, she found herself revisiting that time and comparing it to the world she lived in now, and found in the comparison contradiction.
Edgar and her had never gotten along when they were younger. Unlike Roger, Edgar was intimately aware of what her work had entailed, something that had made sure the otherwise warm teddy-bear of a man (when he wasn't yelling at things) had been cold with her. She recalled the bickering, the arguments: his politics meant that Edgar had always hated her line of work.
He wasn't cold now. The icey contempt he had once held her former affiliation with had morphed into what could only be described as a seething, fiery hatred for the entire world. Her observers hadn't seen him smile once. When he got angry when they were younger, he was as loud as a firecracker. Now, he busted ear-drums and shattered glass with how loudly he would scream at people: the poor agent he had yelled at a few months ago still had signs of post traumatic shell shock. His doctors reports indicated chronic tension headaches and high blood pressure.
"What happened to you, Edgar?" Clancy muttered. "You were always mad, but this is…"
"Miss McCoy? You have a caller: Doctor Warney!" Came the voice of her Mr. Handy from the other room. Sighing, Clancy stood up, walking to the door of the room and opening it, flooding the darkened study with the light from her hallway.
The supervillain walked to the kitchen. "Hand it here: it's probably business," She told the robot, who quickly complied, handing her the phone. "And get started on dinner." Without paying attention to what the machine was doing, she put the receiver to her head. "Clancy here."
"Hey boss," Came the tinny voice over the line: a secure, private one she had to connect her with all her more illicit endeavors. "So, you weren't kidding about your brother being angry."
Clancy sighed. "Yeah. He wasn't always like this: believe it or not, he used to have a friendly streak, deep down," She observed. "The temper isn't new, but the severity…It's like someone turned the dial all the way to max."
"You said it," Warney agreed. "The good news is, he's just as smart as you said he was: I'll send the details over official channels, but your brother in less than half a year without help helped the Atomicrops program crack several problems they haven't been able to fix since the program started."
"Yeah, that about tracks," Clancy agreed. "Everything else aside, Edgar's brain works like nothing I've ever seen before. I've seen plenty of people with minds that almost work like machines: Edgar is different though. His cranium works so fast he'll have already solved the problem, dissected the answer, and analyzed its consequences before a question has even been asked, and his ability to subconsciously intuit data is incredible."
"...Uh, I feel you've probably considered this already, but have you considered the possibility he's a…"
"Psychic?" Clancy intoned. "Maybe. I've considered it: I've never seen it manifest in a way that produces scientific genius, but that particular field is almost newborn with how little we know. I've decided not to invade his privacy by checking."
"...Why?" Warney asked, confused.
The head of the DoP pursed her lips. "Because…"
I owe him one for every other way I'm manipulating him. "Personal reasons," Clancy said, clipped. "So, hows your end going?"
"I'm observing for now. I don't think he's going to last long until he blows up and does something loud and violent," Warney confirmed. "I want to see what that is. We'll see whether he's my kind of bad guy…"
"...Or mine," Clancy finished, stomach curdling slightly at the thought of Edgar joining NEXT. Right now, the whole organization was riding the post-Retribution high: it was getting harder to keep the cells in line. ENFERR had gone mostly dark, Alpha was no longer running all its experiments past her, the mercs had been doing unapproved missions in the gulf region…
If Edgar joined, she could only imagine the chaos. Still, she was confident he'd fall out on Warney's side: deeper anger or no, Edgar was probably still deep down the same moralist he had always been.
For all his bluster during the ACME call, he didn't have a murderous bone in his body.
__________
The man in question, meanwhile, was also enjoying his day off. In a sense.
The minigolf park was empty at this time of day: a dwindling amount of customers who could afford it ensured that when Edgar hastily and sloppily pulled in, his car coming to sudden halt in the middle of several parking spots. Opening his door, the man walked to his trunk, popping it open to retrieve a duffel-bag full of clubs, the man muttered darkly the whole time as he violently slammed the trunk shut with enough force to shake the vehicle, before turning and walking to the gate: "Wally's Future-Golf!" it proudly declared in thick, bold, chipped plastic letters, made well before the oil all ran out, the paint having long since faded.
"Howdy, Mr. Wright!" Came the false chipper voice of the clerk, a teenage girl in a green shirt and pants, the uniform of the park. She stood behind the admission desk, a register in front of her, behind her a small administrative building.
"Claire," Edgar muttered, drawing his wallet from his pocket and placing a large collection of bills on the counter behind them. "100 golf balls and the cart."
The clerk picked up and counted the money out. "Alright, one moment," She said, opening the register and adding the cash to it. Closing it, she turned around and walk back, opening a door behind her to enter the building. A moment later, she returned, holding in both arms a bucket filled with golf balls and a set of keys. "You should know where we keep the carts,"
"Yeah yeah," Edgar mumbled, taking both, before scuttling off. A moment later, he was driving through the park in an old 2050's model electric golf cart, attempting to design which of the many space themed courses he'd be taking his anger out on today. "Ah, Galactic Windmill," He muttered, coming to a stop, retrieving a club and a ball and walking onto the grass of the course: a long, winding distance that passed through a variety of minor obstacles such as cylinders, loop de loops, and fans, ending at what could only be described as 'what if Isaac Asimov attempted to imagine what a air-powered grain-grinding machine might look like': long thin metal chrome-painted wooden blades spinning in a circle, body a rusting oblong silo covered in pipes pumping nothing, various extraneous vacuum tubes, lights and diodes scattered randomly throughout it, and a tesla coil at the top, all painted a long faded, chipped through blue.
At the courses start, there was a small placard: all of the courses had them. Back when people still played minigolf, the park owners had given each course its own little 'story', a fictitious history of the area you were golfing through. Galactic Windmill was supposedly owned by the 'Space Amish', a branch of Zetans who had visited earth and converted to the agrarian religion and brought it back with them to the stars alongside the practice of wheat cultivation, creating the windmill using the most advanced of their technology to help process the growing wheat surplus owned by the Zetans.
It was horribly kitschy nonsense. Setting his ball up, Edgar took a club out of his bag, a horribly dinged up metal putter that was ever so slightly bent in the middle, and looked at the course. Doing a handful of calculations, Edgar quickly determined the most optimal route to reach the finish line, and pulled back his club, hitting his ball with enough force to send it flying. The next few seconds were exactly as he predicted, with the ball soaring over most of the zig-zaggy part of the course, passing through the middle of a cylindrical loop-de-loop before hitting a tree with just the correct direction and momentum to make the sphere bounce over a patch of rough to the next bit of course, completely avoiding a bend that involved a mechanical robogator jump. Instead, it was whacked by a rotating metal pole, the force of which would catapult the ball further, making it pass over the windmill entirely to reach the small clearing beyond it, in which lied the hole, which the ball almost hit, instead impacting the pole, which the ball bounced against, causing it to land not in the hole, but in the rough surrounding the green of the courses hole.
Edgar's eye twitched. "God-"
_________________
"DAMNIT!"
The voice echoed throughout the park, causing Claire to roll her eyes. Mr. Wright had just had his first failure to get a hole in one. Every week, without fail, he made time to come down to the park. And every time, he would inevitably be foiled by one of the courses.
"SON OF A COCK! THE GODDAMN-THE GODDAMN POLE! FUCK! LITERALLY INCHES! THIS IS BULL-"
She tuned it out, returning to counting the money. As usual, Mr. Wright was the only customer, and as usual, he had overpaid. She wasn't sure if it was him being generous or him having not actually read the sign that listed the prices: either way, if it wasn't for the fact that she knew the place was some kind of money laundering front she'd be fairly certain he was the only reason they made enough money to stay open.
The man was definitely passionate about minigolf either way. And from what she observed, scarily skilled.
"-SCOTLANDS BALLSACK!"
And extremely vulgar. While she waited, Claire held her left arm up, loading up a copy of Super Vault Boy on her Pip-Buddy, opting to kill time: odds were there wouldn't be any more customers today, and while she could do maintenance rounds, as the parks only employee other than a manager who was only here at night and sent her her paycheck in the mail, the teenager wasn't particularly concerned with the parks general upkeep so long as everything was working correctly and in functioning order.
Eventually, an hour so later, she heard the sound of an approaching golf cart, and in the distance she saw Edgar driving back. Not long after, he parked and trudged back up to her, drawing out more bills. "Another 100 please," He said, and Claire responded by picking up a spare bucket she had grabbed earlier.
"Already on it, Mr. Wright. Game going well?"
The man shrugged taking the bucket. "Pleasant enough. Think I've hit a breakthrough on the Storm Nebula course," He said, referencing the course that featured several small wind-tunnels and a great many outdoor fans as its primary obstacle as if he hadn't been yelling horribly explicit swears loud enough for the entire park to hear over it not fifteen minutes ago. "I think if I try to bounce the ball off the Mechagator animatronic the next course over I might be able to skip the three middlemost wind-tunnels: by the way, whenever you do clean-up, you may want to check the roofs in that part of the park."
"Will do, Mr. Wright," She said, the man giving a nod.
___________________________________
The sun was setting by the time Edgar made his way back to his car. "Have a good one, Claire," He said gruffly to the park attendant, who stood up and yawned, grabbing the keys to close the gate behind him.
"You too, Mr. Wright," The teenager said as they exited Wally's Future-Golf minigolf park.
Walking up to his vehicle, Edgar walked to his vehicle, pulling out his keys and opening his backseat door, tossing his clubs in carelessly before shutting the door and making his way to the drivers seat. A few moments later, he was on the road again.
It took about one hour fourteen minutes for Edgar to make his way back home. Halfway through, he began to feel the dull throbbing sensation return to its pre-golf state, painful enough to make focusing briefly difficult. Reaching into his glove-box, he pulled out a white bottle out. Briefly using his legs to steer and navigate the crowded freeway, he unscrewed the bottles lid, popping out three thick coin shaped gummies. Tossing the headache medication into his mouth, he quickly chewed and swallowed the custom formulated chems while he did his best to place the lid back on the bottle and return it to its proper place even as his vehicle bobbed and weaved its way through traffic at the exact legal speed limit.
Once the bottle was in its proper place, he once more placed his hands on the wheel, doing his best to not grind his teeth while he waited for the medication to kick in, enduring the throbbing in the skull in the meantime.
Eventually, he came to his home. It was an old bookstore he had bought, a brick and mortar store sandwiched between a long since folded accountant business and a long failed restaurant located on a street that was otherwise entirely deserted in a neighborhood that had less than twenty residents. Walking to the door, Edgar placed his thumb on the biometric lock he had installed, letting the square pad scan his vitals. A moment later, the green light above the pad came on, and grasping the doors handle, he entered his home, giving a brief sigh of relief as the chems finally began to work.
Admittedly, the endorphins he was getting helped. Edgar's home had three stories. On the first was the original store, now converted to his personal collection: the only nice thing about working for his fascist of a sibling was he had enough pay to afford to buy and preserve the greatest hits: Aasimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Tolstoy, Adamov, Orwell.
Some were hard to find copies of. A few were fairly rare first editions: not his preference for collection, since he wasn't egotistical enough to believe he was the best possible set of hands for such valuable items, but a few still wound up in his orbit regardless, largely in situations where the alternative would have been their destruction, like his Soviet Political Philosophy section.
All of it on the shelves of the original store, kept in fine condition by Edgar, though the register had been replaced by a few arcade cabinets the man had bought. He didn't like ACME, but they did make fun games.
Giving a whistle, he immediately saw something small and fuzzy zoom from the stairs, coming to an immediate halt. Reaching down, Edgar picked up the now-meowing fat fuzzy bundle of fur at his feet, holding him in a scoop that gave the cat free use of its paws. "Howdy howdy Blinky," He coo'ed petting the black, green eye'd cat, who immediately began buzzing with excitement, bumping their head against Edgars repeatedly, kneading their paws against his shirt. Edgar gave a small sigh, feeling the tension begin to melt away a little as he snuggled with the cat. After a little bit, he walked to one of the empty shelves and gentle deposited the kitty gently. "Alright, let's get you fed," He said, causing Blinky's ears to stand up and the cat to straighten out as they recognized where Edgar was walking, jumping down and zooming up the stairs, Edgar following behind, trudging up the carpeted staircase as he ascended his way home: second floor was where he actually lived. Third was his lab: the latter was where he was destined for. Reaching the top of the stairs, Edgar placed his eye in front of another device, which scanned it and unlocked the door. On the other side was his lab, the third and what used to be fourth floor of both the bookstore and neighboring building: on one side was a series of small enclosures where he kept his animals, using force-fields to prevent the tiger he kept from eating the ostritches he was raising and prevent the injured foxes he was rehabilitating from killing his chickens. On the other was his experimentation area. Terminals, DNA sequencers, chem-synthesizers, sample fridges, cold storage. And all above them in the rafter were birds and precision laser turrets.
In front of him was Blinky, having arrived from the cat-passages Edgar had installed throughout his home. Joining his cat was his assistant. "Greetings, sir!" Came the chipper voice of his personal securitron, Maxwell, the screen that was the machines face a single cartoony brain. "How was your day golfing?"
"So-so," Edgar admitted. "Definitely could have gone better, but I'm making progress. How did the animals treat you?"
"Well, Tiberius is no longer terrified of me," The securitron said, referencing the tiger. "But I think there might be something wrong with the alpacas, sir: they seemed extra sluggish today."
Edgar sighed. "Okay, I'll look at them before work tomorrow. Meantime, let's get them all fed: after that, you're relieved for the night."
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This was commissioned by
@chellewalker for a cool 20 dollars under the prompt "Eve's protagonists having a day off". In Clancy's case, I depicted the closest she comes to having days off: cooping herself up in her house and obsessing over things that trouble her/doing workshit in her free time. She doesn't really have a life outside what's absolutely necessary, what with juggling NEXT and the DOP, and I don't just mean that in the sense of hobbies: she doesn't have friends, pets, or any kind of a social life outside the bare minimum of whats required to accomplish her goals.
Edgar, meanwhile, does actually have a life outside his job and ambitions, even if that life mostly consists of venting his fury through the medium of absolutely sick minigolf trick shots, collecting books, and his pets. In both cases, neither sibling is particularly well adjusted, but Edgar is, overall, slightly more healthy in how he deals with it, in spite of arguably having
several way better justifications than Clancy for being a maladjusted weirdo.
