New York, Midtown Manhattan, three floors beneath Vought Tower.
This was the core laboratory with the highest security rating in all of Vought International. Its walls were cast entirely from special alloy half a meter thick, and he had even installed a full set of anti-detection magic runes inside.
Whoosh!
The air warped slightly, and Lucian stepped out of a golden ring of light, having first crossed space back to Kamar-Taj before returning through a mystic Portal.
"Welcome back, sir. Your trip to Nepal for some fresh air was four hours shorter than expected."
A clear female voice, tinged with teasing amusement, rang out in the laboratory.
The holographic projector lit up blue, and the phantom image of a girl about 1.6 meters tall appeared out of thin air beside the lab bench. She had waist-length silver-white hair and ruby-red eyes. Dressed in a neatly tailored skirt suit, she held her hands behind her back and tilted her head, smiling at Lucian.
With a soul as her foundation, the AI had long since shed her old, rigid synthesized voice. Every gesture carried a lively spark.
Lucian glanced at the white-haired, red-eyed little cyber secretary, pulled out a chair, and sat down. "Enough wisecracks. How's the sorting coming along on those advanced Hydra research files Zola left behind?"
"They're already being categorized and archived, sir."
Jade Balance swept her slender fingers lightly through the air, bringing up more than a dozen densely packed data screens. "I have to say, while that predecessor of mine wasn't much to look at, he certainly had plenty of substance in his head. There were seventeen models for weaponizing the Tesseract's energy alone. I've already fed the most valuable algorithms to the company's weapons research department."
She paused, blinked her red eyes, and added in a