The Protagonist System

I had to make a few promises to Rikki to ease the restrictions on Vance, like helping Viper develop cell phone technology. The biggest step on that one was creating a microchip, which would be a huge technological development, considering the current computers were the size of rooms and needed huge cooling machines to keep them operating.

So, I cheated. I had a ruined CB radio and satellite dish sitting in my inventory and that had a bunch of microchips inside of it that I could enlarge enough to try and duplicate using current tools. I still had a few sets of working ones as well if I needed them, which I shouldn't. We only needed innovations, not an entirely different system to install. Viper already had a mobile phone installed in a car and we just had to make it smaller.

Ed was surprisingly understanding on my situation and accepted my combined offer with Rikki Dicker's to watch over the kids and to have a maid assigned, everyone knowing the woman would really be a government agent that would keep them under close observation. We were all okay with that, too.

I hung up the phone and had a delicious breakfast with Viper, then I was perched on the couch and had to wait for my appointment with a shrink. Viper was a little worried that I was perfectly fine with seeing someone that was going to psychoanalyze me and I tried to reassure her that everything was going to be fine. She went to work still worried.

About fifteen minutes later, a quite short woman stepped out of the elevator. She had white and slightly poofy short hair, wore goggles like a headband, had on a lab coat with an equipment belt, and she looked well put together. A few things caught my eye as she approached me and introduced herself as Doctor Sunbright, which was a surprise, because this woman was Ed Mode's sister.

“Ah, you recognize my name. Excellent.” She said and had to pull herself up onto the couch to sit beside me. She pulled down her goggles and looked at me through them, nodded her head a few times, and slid the glasses back up to become a headband again and held her hair up, which explained the poofiness.

“I visited Ed a few times over the years.” I told her.

“Ah, so you're the Hank he enjoys having visit? It's very nice to meet you.” She said and held a very dainty hand out to me.

I took it and stretched my lips out to kiss the back of it instead of shaking it.

“Enchante.” She said with a little laugh and I relaxed. “You're quite the charmer, Mister Parr.”

I let out a sigh at that. “I don't know if I should keep that name after the divorce.”

She looked surprised by that. “You're getting a divorce? What for?”

With that prompt, I spent the next two hours going over everything that happened, was happening, and might happen in the future. When I was done and ended with myself being there at Viper's place and my best friend being so accepting of me and my condition, Doctor Sunbright looked like she was caught up in her thoughts.

“What is it?” I couldn't help asking.

“Oh, it's nothing. Just an odd thought I had.” She said and waved my question away.

“No, please. Tell me.” I prompted.

She slid closer and gave me a sexy smile. “What would you say if I asked you to ravage me?”

I jerked back from her and gave her wide eyes. “Wh-what? Why would you ask me that?”

She backed off and smiled widely. “I asked because I specifically wanted to check something.”

I wasn't sure how to respond to that, so I didn't.

“It's all right, Hank. I didn't mean to scare you with my forwardness.” She said and patted my hand. “Would you mind meeting with me again in a few days? I want to hear more about your life before you became a husband.”

“Um, sure. It's not like I'll be going anywhere for a while.” I said with a one shoulder shrug.

“Excellent.” She said and hopped off the couch to smile up at me. “Thank you for talking to me like I was a normal person. It was quite nice to just have a regular conversation for once.”

I thought back over her visit and had to agree. It really had been nice to get it all out in the open. “It was quite nice, Doctor Sunbright.”

She beamed a smile at me and patted my knee. “Then I'm glad I was able to come over to visit. Have a good day, Hank.”

“You, too.” I said and watched as she walked across the living room to the elevator. For some reason, I didn't try to imagine what she was hiding under the thick lab coat. Was it the lack of swaying hips or her short stature that stopped me from seeing her as a potential sexual partner? I waved to her after she stepped inside and turned to face me.

She let out a little laugh and waved back. “Work.”

The elevator closed and left me alone in the living room. I now had a choice to make. Stay here and wait for Viper to come home for lunch or drag my floppy butt into the kitchen to try and make lunch for her? Decisions, decisions. I remembered Viper's worry about me moving around without her nearby and chose to stay right where I was.

*

“He's definitely been influenced a lot in his thinking.” Doctor Sunbright told Viper and Rikki at their not-so-secret meeting. “He kept justifying Bobbie's actions all during their marriage and couched her behavior as frustration over not being able to help people as much as she could, while also completely ignoring that she wasn't really helping her own family.”

“The debacle at Insuracare when she punched out her old boss, had been the last straw for the relocation program for Bobbie. I had to cut her loose or the program would have been shut down.” Rikki said and rubbed her forehead in frustration. “I didn't think Bobbie would so easily fall to villainy after that.”

“It took months for that to happen.” Viper said. “Bobbie started getting back into shape and making a lot of money...”

“...which went straight in to fuel her ego.” Doctor Sunbright said. “Or super-ego in this case.”

Rikki sighed. “What am I supposed to do with this mess?”

“The only thing we can do, Rikki. We take things one day at a time and try our best to help those who needed it.” Doctor Sunbright said.

“Hank and Vance.” Viper said and the doctor nodded.

Rikki nodded as well. “The both of you keep at it and keep me updated. I'm going to hope that we can get it all sorted out before anything else happens.”

“You just jinxed it, you old bat.” Viper said with affection.

Rikki groaned and the doctor chuckled.

“I'm going over to Ed's to visit Vance and talk to him.” Doctor Sunbright said. “I'm sure it's going to be a unique perspective to discover what he was thinking about as he engaged in such socially unacceptable behavior.”

Rikki gave the doctor a bit of a glare. “Please don't say anything like that around him... or your brother... or around Danica. It's bad enough it happened and they're traumatized enough. We don't need to hammer it into their heads that it was wrong.”

The doctor patted her arm. “I'm not a novice, Rikki. I'll handle it properly.”

“See that you do.” Rikki said. “I used up the last of my favors to keep Vance out of the conscription program, so do everything you can to get his head straightened out... or, if needs be, pointed in a particular direction and away from where it was headed.”

Doctor Sunbright nodded in agreement, despite the warning. She had been a licensed doctor for supers for years and knew what she was doing.

*

After lunch, Viper brought me down to the garage and we started working out how to reduce the car phone's sheer size down to a more manageable one. We both knew that there wouldn't be a sudden miracle with a technology breakthrough that would give it to us instantly. It would take work, and planning, and a lot of money and infrastructure to produce what we planned for the government.

That was the key to the whole thing, too. The government wanted it. Whatever we made had better be worth the time and investment, so we couldn't give them a defective or insufficient product. The car phone had been a huge development and had been deployed to a majority of the top government agents and members, so they all benefited from them.

They were also sold to a lot of the rich and influential members of society, which ensured it was widespread enough that word of mouth could easily be passed around and raised their status that much higher. If we made them personally portable, that would raise them even further.

It was a good thing that my own work on making the CB radio both long distance and compatible with walkie-talkies was easily adaptable towards the current technology Viper had created for the car phone. Also, she was increasingly turned on as I continued to help her develop a computer chip that wasn't the size of her palm, like the ones she had been using for years.

I called it a microchip during the third day of working on it, because it was barely a third of the size of the normal ones, and I showed her how to solder it together and ensured the proper connections. I typed up a basic communication protocol to flash to it and we finished it up after snapping a hardened cover onto it.

Viper carefully set it aside to show off to Rikki and I thought I heard a cute little whine, then Viper turned to me with love clearly showing on her face and she pulled me close to kiss me passionately. We then proved that her workbench was comfortable enough to sleep on, just like I had joked when she first took me in, and we made love to each other right there among the plans and tools we had used.

With a prototype successfully created, Viper could send it off to be tested and patented. Just that one microchip design was going to revolutionize computers all around the world, because people were going to design even more things with a smaller and much more reliable computer chip available. Well, after it had a factory modified to produce it, anyway. Until then, they would need to be made by hand.

It was going to cost the government a lot of money to get the industrial sector up to speed with them and then it would rake in the money. Having a portable phone be possible was almost a secondary concern after the people in charge realized how big of an impact the microchip was going to have on the world.

Over the next few weeks, the very first brick-like portable phone with a huge antenna was constructed by Viper and myself, almost 20 years before it was supposed to be produced. When it was done, we stared at it, stared at each other, then we both started laughing. The thing weighed like 10 pounds and had huge buttons that were difficult to push and there was no display to show the numbers you had already entered.

“Hooooo, hoooo. That's hilarious.” I said, because my idea had been to make the thing with currently available parts and we could worry about streamlining it after we made it work.

Viper hugged me with one arm and wiped at her eyes. Her laughing so hard had made her cry. “The batteries are huge, so there's no helping the bottom part for now. About the rest? We have a lot of work ahead of us to make smaller capacitors and resistors, especially if we want to decrease the tolerances to make it work better.”

Since I had both walkie-talkies and CB radioes in my inventory and could examine them whenever I wanted, I had no problem helping her make better parts. “We'll need to document the process, too. If the microchips are having such a huge impact, you can imagine what making those things smaller is going to do.”

Viper nodded and gave me a kiss. “You and I are going to keep sending shocks across the tech world, aren't we?”

I gave her a huge smile. “Only until I run out of ideas for us to make.”

Viper gave me an equally huge smile back. “Didn't you tell me you had tons of ideas a few weeks ago?”

“Hey, don't throw my pillow talk back at me. I said that to get your motor going.” I joked and she laughed.

“It worked, too.” Viper said and straddled my waist as she pet my hair. “What was that one you mentioned about a flying drake to bomb enemies?”

I chuckled. “It's a drone. An unmanned drone, actually. It's shaped like a miniature plane and can be remote controlled from a command center, flown over enemy territory using mobile phone technology, and bombs or missiles can be launched from it. No soldiers need to lose their lives in wars ever again.”

Viper made that cute whine again and we ended up on the floor and we went at it again. It was honestly fun to tease her like that, because my ideas were appealing to both her mind and her body. She couldn't wait to figure out how to do it and couldn't wait to physically build it.

It was quite a while before we stopped and laid there on the floor, cuddling and basking in the afterglow.

“You know, we should probably try calling the mobile phone eventually.” I said and Viper let out a girlish giggle. “Not right now? Okay, it can wait.”

“That's good, because I need your cuddles and I will not be denied.” Viper said, kissed my cheek, and went back to cuddling me.

I chuckled and held her close as I fulfilled her demand.

*

The divorce happened without my input or opinion. Apparently, I was declared to not be in my right mind to make decisions when it came to Bobbie, and I could admit that was true. I had too many memories about us that influenced my decisions a lot more than they should have about her.

Our assets were split evenly, even with Bobbie sequestered inside a government facility to be deployed when another person with powers was found and she would be sent out to handle them. Discreetly, of course. They didn't want to give anyone ideas about becoming villains to fight against the growing number of people with powers.

Did I think it was bad that the government was fully enforcing the suppression of super-powered individuals? Kind of and not really. If there was no one watching them and keeping them in line, who was going to pick up the pieces when they started wrecking cities with their huge fights?

The collateral damage after a few of Miss Incredible's battles were ranged in the tens of millions of dollars and that was too much for the taxpayers to handle every few weeks when a fight broke out. A few of them had even happened when someone new would appear and challenged her to a fight to prove themselves. Bobbie had always been happy to prove that they were not up to challenge.

Custody was a minefield, because neither of us were in a position to take care of them, so Rikki had Ed Mode declared a government supported foster father and he was granted tentative custody. My daughter Danica thought it was the next great adventure in her life after the island adventure and she embraced her new life completely without complaint.

Vance on the other hand, did not like how all of his decisions had been countered and he was no longer in control. He had stepped up and saved his family and now he was tracked everywhere he went and treated like a child. He bristled under every restriction he was under, even at school, and he resented that he wasn't consulted about anything.

Of course, this was when I finally managed to visit Ed's to see the kids. Vance then found out that I had been awake for almost a month already and hadn't contacted him. He didn't care that everyone thought Bobbie told him already or that I was the one to arrange his release. He shouted at me to leave him alone and to never talk to him again, because I was no longer a part of his and Bobbie's family.

Vance's voice had been filled with so much hatred and venom towards me that it scared me, Viper, and Ed. Doctor Sunbright was called immediately and took him away to talk to him. She eventually called us and only told us that she had a lot of work ahead of her.

Viper and I went home after that and I was resigned to the fact I couldn't help Vance come to grips with everything. I would leave it in the professional's hands and would hope for the best. It was all I could do.