X-Men: Savage Land Scandal Ch. 01

"Writer's block?" Dr. Elsa asked, still retaining a thick Germanic accent despite her years in the jungle, and all her time with what was left of Delta Company. She still wore her labcoat too, just like the men tended to wear their tattered uniforms instead of adopting the leather and furs favored by the natives. You clung to what you could out here. Hell, 'Doc' was getting to answer to that little nickname like his momma had given to it. Easy to forget the last time someone had called him Dr. Rayford Hargrove, or anything similar.

Elsa had said she had contributed some of her DNA to Project Shanna, trying to pass on her intelligence and, let's face it, Aryan heritage. It was easy to see a few other things she'd passed on. Elsa was a head or so shorter than Shanna, and nowhere near as athletic as her; no one was. And she'd lived as softly as Doc had, these past few years, though even a sedentary lifestyle in the Savage Land meant you had to run for your life on a weekly basis. Good cardio.

For all that, she was such a looker, she had to wrap her blonde hair up in a bun about as tight as a neutron star and wear clunky black glasses to keep the Fall People from proposing marriage every time she stepped outside. Her breasts—well, he tried not to pay attention to those, any more than he did Shanna's, but he thought they might've been even fuller than Shanna's, though it was harder to tell with her full waist and wide, womanly hips. Shanna's wasp-waist and tight abs made her bust incredibly prominent; Elsa was more like an old pin-up. Everything buxom and curvy, soft and smooth where Shanna was so often hard and angular...

But it was the faces that marked them as sisters—or maybe mother and daughter, given the epidemic of teen pregnancies these days. Shanna's was drawn in comparison, with her hunting and fighting leaving not an ounce of fat on her. Elsa was by no means some baby-fat chipmunk, but there was no denying that if she had Shanna's cheekbones, they were behind the round, matronly cheeks of her oval face. No, what they really shared was their eyes. Striking blue, and each looking at people the same way. Detached, foreign, observant. Shanna probing for weaknesses, for threats, for... something, even if no one could say what it was. Elsa was similarly judgmental, eying everything and everyone with more scientific curiosity than warmth or friendship. Those icy-blue eyes only melted for Shanna, and even then only a little. Maybe in private, they were warmer. Elsa had maintained Shanna's stasis-tube while all her comrades had... well, whatever had happened to them.

Dr. Elsa snapped to a tense sort of attention. Adjusting her glasses, she said "Living in a fortress full of male jarheads, I am quite aware when I am being pictured naked!"

Doc blustered. "Nothing of the sort, doctor! Just thinkin' about you and Shanna."

Elsa squawked in offense.

"Trying ta figure out how to write you and Shanna into my little story. You're not the easiest intro to put down." He set aside his pen and stared at the page detailing the thirty-seventh day of their exile, the great Brontosaurus hunt. There was no such thing as a Brontosaurus, of course, it was really named something else, but damn if Doc could remember what, so... Brontosaurus. He'd been trying to decide whether to throw in some foreshadowing of Shanna and the Fourth Reich, or if he should just let that backstory drop all at once like the opening crawl in Star Wars. He should've paid more attention in Freshman English, that's what he should've done.

"That is simple," Dr. Elsa said humorlessly. "Near the end of the second World War, der Fuhrer sent his best and brightest scientific minds to a far-flung outpost here in the Savage Land, where he intended they continue HYDRA deep-science experiments in hoped of revitalizing the Fourth Reich after his own demise. However, the project failed due to an experiment gone wrong, and when dinosaurs managed to breach our security, only I and the gestating Shanna were spared. That was where you came in, and I trust you haven't forgotten that?"

How could he? Doc fingered one of the scars under his shirt. "You know, when you say it like that, you sound downright patriotic."

Elsa took his meaning, and her brow furrowed dangerously. "It was his title, that is all. I was an 18-year-old college student with exceptional marks in science, told I could serve my country by traveling to an exotic land and doing simple research assistant work. How was I to know of the killing fields? I am happy to see the remains of that... that... unscientific regime rot in this jungle. And I've never objected to you instilling American values in young Shanna over the proscribed teachings."

"That's cuz the German schoolteachers never showed," Doc pointed out. "So you just kept Shanna and her sisters on ice while you went on truckin'."

"Would you rather we tried to further her as a weapon? I may not believe in the Nazi Party--I may never had, if you could be so forgiving--but I do believe in the science. Shanna is a remarkable achievement. If I could get to a proper lab, with a proper team, there's no telling what that body of hers could unlock. Imagine a cure to sickle-cell anemia, or cystic fibrosis!"

"Yeah, yeah." Doc waved her off. It was a moot point anyway. She could have her jackboots and red armband buried in the backyard, it wasn't like it made a difference. None of the boys were Jewish even. And Shanna certainly wasn't, with that fair white skin, the blonde hair and blue eyes... "Say, where's our girl?"

"Shanna?" As always, Elsa took a peculiar relish in Shanna's improvised name. "She's with the tribesmen again. Der... what is word?... Capheads?"

So-called because the feathers they wore in their hair had reminded someone of Captain America's winged helmet. "Fall People. We're sure they're not cannibals?" Doc groused.

"Nein. Cannibalism has actually been recorded so rarely among primitive cultures that it is statistically nonexistent, largely a facsimile built of urban myth and racist speciousness."

"I was joking."

Elsa's eyes flashed. "It is hard to tell sometimes. You do not trust them?"

"I trust God and my semi-automatic."

"And that is why you have been in here for three days straight? Because they are inside and everything else is out?"

He shuffled through the sheaf of papers he'd filled. "Author's a lonely job."

"I think it has more to do with that." And she pointed.

Doc picked up his crutch, as if for her benefit, and hoisted himself onto his one leg. The other, Shanna had chopped off to free him from a rockslide. It'd been a pretty good deal. Keep the leg and lose the rest of him when the raptors came, or lose the leg and keep the rest. Shanna'd made the right choice. "Well, long walks on the beach have gotten a lot harder."

"Perhaps if I came with you? I can build a litter in case there's another rockslide."

Doc supposed he deserved that. He added a period to the last sentence he'd written and turned to face the door.

***

Shanna had been the one to find that if you butchered a spinosaurus and yanked out its musk-gland, you could mark a good-sized area as its territory. Couple that with shooting any varmints who got ornery, and you have a safe space past the walls. Room enough to grow crops, herd cattle... yes, Doc was quite proud of ol' blue-eyes. "How is our girl--really?"

Elsa walked close by his shoulder. With her hands clasped tightly behind her back and her deliberate gait, she looked like he could walk off a cliff and she would only watch disdainfully, but she'd proven herself enough times for him to know she'd put her own life on the line to drag him back to base if it came to that. "How do you mean?"

"She looks... different, this past year. Y'know? Not that she ever wasn't a knockout, but before, I would've pegged her as twenty-something. Now... not that she ain't the most youthful thing I ever saw, but she seems more mature somehow. I don't know how to explain it..."

"Her hips have widened. She's gained a cup size. Her hair is more vibrantly colored. There are more superficial changes, but those are most indicative of internal shifts."

Doc stopped walking to lean on his crutch. "Internal shifts?"

Elsa walked past him, stopping a few feet away with her back to him. "Yes. I believe Shanna's body is preparing for motherhood. Do not be confused; I do not imply she is pregnant. Merely that she is entering a sort of... 'mating season,' I believe the English is."

Doc blinked. He might as well give up on the memoirs. This no editor would believe. "You made a super-soldier that goes into heat?"

Elsa shook her head tightly as she came to face him. "The experiments were highly unorthodox and very rushed; a brilliant but eclectic attempt to replicate your Captain America and his super-soldier formula. Dr. Erskine's work was light-years beyond our ability to comprehend. We improvised, mixing multiple disciplines and using methodologies gleamed from other failed experiments attempting to develop a viable clone harvest in time to save our homeland. Animal and mutate genomes were applied as necessary, accounting for Shanna's extreme stamina, speed, and strength. It is likely there were side effects to go with these blessings. Going into heat, as you put it, is merely my hypothesis."

"And if your hypothesis is right?"

"Judging by the extreme competence the subject has shown in other endeavors, I believe Shanna will select an appropriate mate or family unit to join with, as well as court multiple suitors of desirable genetic stock. You have already noticed the prodigious amount of time she spends with that local boy, Zar?"

Doc nodded. The kid seemed a little young for Shanna, practically still in his teens and only recently a hunter even by his tribe's own standards. Still, as Elsa had put it, by chronological age and emotional maturity, he was about on equal footing with clone-girl. "You telling me she wants him to be her... her baby daddy?"

Elsa shrugged. "This is all guesswork. It could simply be youthful hormones; he is quite... cute. And there are not suitable mates to be found here."

Doc rogered that. Most of the guys left on the base saw Shanna as kind of a kid sister, and while the others weren't immune to the charms of a stacked blonde in an animal-skin bikini, they were more like the pervy uncle at a Thanksgiving dinner than serious contenders. "Suppose I should be glad she ain't come onto me. I suppose she thinks of me as..." he grinned in a bit of bemusement. "Well, sort of a father figure, I guess!"

Elsa nodded once. "Or she does not believe you capable of providing her with offspring."

Doc's face fell.

***

The waterfall poured a curtain of water into the cozily small lagoon, stirring up the waters before letting them escape into a thin stream that dwindled down through the jungle, providing a brief, cool drink for any animal passing. The lagoon itself--all sixty feet of it--provided a comfortable home for a multitude of shimmering fish, their scales seeming to laugh visually as they caught the light that didn't bounce off the sparkling water. In the sweet spot of the lagoon, halfway between the white waters of the waterfall and the quickening torrent that became the throat of the river, in the middle of the water where it was as placid and wavering as the dunes of the Gobi Desert, there laid some kind of insect atop the lake surface. It moved only slightly, fitting its great size, and this interested the fish of the lagoon greatly. One detached from its school, swimming up with impressive speed to gobble the insect down before it left.

The next thing it felt was the lure's hook skewering it.

Zar watched as Shanna reeled the fish in. 'Fly-fishing,' as she called it, was quite strange to him, he and his tribes being used to spear-fishing. They never fished in the lagoon, despite its dense population, because the fish there were simply too fast to spear. And yet as counterintuitive as Shanna's method seemed, baiting a trap and then waiting for a fish to come to her, it was effective. Not as much fun, but effective. And spending a great deal of time with Shanna with nothing to do but wait for some dumb fish to bite was fun enough for him.

"Doc showed me how to do it. It's a very old tradition where he comes from," Shanna explained for perhaps the tenth time. She was as shy a conversationalist as Zar, which heartened him a little. The girls of his tribe seemed to have an opinion on everything from the color of the sky to the length of each others' hair, and he could only describe in stilted words how much he had liked observing a wild boar going about its business the past day, the stalking preparation for another hunt.

"Maybe if many of them fish this way at the same time, it is not so boring. Someone would always be getting a bite!"

Shanna nodded in thought. "I prefer the spear too."

As always, she saw right through him. It shouldn't bother him--she still spent a great deal of time with him, despite surely knowing what colored his heart every minute of every day, but he could not help but be embarrassed. Because surely, if she knew his feelings about simple fishing, then she also knew why he looked at her the way he did.

It was something Zar tried desperately to curtail. It wasn't as if her clothing, dainty as it was, covered any less than the woman of his tribe. They often went topless or fully naked, so long as it wasn't a ritual-day. And there were many great beauties among his tribe as well. Korza, with her long strong legs; Quinta, with the halo of curled hair she maintained so artistically; Jorla, whose thick arms and back let her toss around any man. Some of them even thought Shanna was displeasing to the eye--her pink skin might as well be the green of the Saurians, her yellow hair made it look like her head was catching fire, her blue eyes made it seem like her insides had frozen. Zar thought some of them must be jealous, because to him, Shanna was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, of any color.

And of late, she'd become impossibly, intolerably erotic. Her breasts and hips, any man's delight in women, had once been the size of the common tribeswoman. Now, her breasts strained at the covering that had once held them fully, while the back of her panties (as the outsiders called it) disappeared between firm, round buttocks whenever her loincloth flipped up. Her blonde hair (as the outsiders called it) seemed brighter than before, like it was metal and had been polished to gleam. Her skin was clearer, her scars only detectable by the faintest touch... and ever since she had told him Dr. Elsa was showing her something called 'make-up,' her lips appeared fuller, her eyes darker... on and on the perfections piled, until she seemed less mortal than god. A fertility goddess, holding the wondrous curves of the tribe's matrons with also the hardness and sleekness of the warriors.

Was it any wonder Zar could barely control his power-of-man when she visited him? He tried everything, sitting cross-legged, heavier loincloths, thinking of the most savage sights the hunts had to offer--even the time he'd seen Doc bathing in the lagoon--but she made his power-of-man so strong that it overcame all obstacles placed before it. She always seemed to realize, giving him a look both curious and knowing, and even if his power-of-man was dormant, that look would bring it to life. Sometimes he even had to think up excuses to end their hunts early, so he could go somewhere private and perform the polishing-of-the-spear upon himself.

Some of the other hunters, older but not wiser, had realized her hold on his power-of-man. They callously asked why he did not simply ask for her blessing with a kiss or a brisk touch to the behind (their suggestions became progressively cruder from there), as if she could not simply refuse him and make him forever shame-faced. And him knowing for a fact that those same hunters were harangued by their mates day and night, either in hopes of receiving their blessing upon their power-of-man or because the women did not find their power-of-man sufficient to their blessing!

No. No, he would track his prey, learn its tracks, its spoor, its movements and habits, so that one day he could flush it out into the open and--

His power-of-man had been summoned again.

By then, Shanna had reeled the fish in--this was also strange, as she seemed to spend as much time allowing the fish to attempt escape as she did pulling it to shore. Zar sat down quickly by the fire he'd prepared, crossing his legs to hide the power-of-man and focusing on how she gutted the fish for the fire-pan. Getting so deep inside the fish--this was not helping.

"I hope the taste is worth the effort," Shanna said, tossing the bones aside with one hand while tossing the flesh into the pan with the other. It sizzled explosively and she licked her fingers clean of blood. That also did not help.

Go away, power-of-man, I have no use for you! he thought desperately, but it would not listen to him. Only Shanna. That... that she-devil!

"I'm sure it will be," Zar said. She looked at him and laughed. She only seemed to do that around him. Like so many things, Zar did not know if that was for good or ill.

"I like your hair," she added, as her laugh became a smile became her usual set expression.

"My hair?" he asked, reaching up to touch it as if he hadn't noticed it before. He'd never quite liked it. Although he'd lived nearly twenty eclipses and been on his first hunt, he still had not slain a raptor and earned the right to wear his hair in the hunters' dreadlocks. It remained a wedge of wispy curls that defied all control, like a woman's. He would've liked to shave it off, as did 'Billy' of the soldiers, who many of the tribeswoman spoke of lovingly, but the shaman told him that would offend the spirits.

"Yes. It looks very soft, but also... not like the soldiers' hair, when they don't care. Not unkempt," she added, in the rigorous tone she always got when remembering Dr. Elsa's language lessons. "May I touch it?"

Zar could've sworn his power-of-man spoke to him then. Say yes, YES you idiot! If she touches you, perhaps you can touch her! The shamans say never to touch without permission, but why would she deny you permission when you have given her yours?

"Yes!" he blurted out, rather too excited, and felt a dread in the pit of his stomach and a stirring in his loins as her eyes dropped down momentarily. That. Knowing. Look.

She-devil.

Shanna reached out, leaning across the fire, and Zar lost his breath as he realized he could see directly down her top-covering, seeing almost all of her breasts but the nipples themselves. He looked away hurriedly--from the way the soldiers spoke of them, he knew breasts had a great deal of religious significance in the outsiders' culture--but the only other thing to see was her face. She looked at him with the same stern intensity she regarded an opponent, or prey. All that was lacking was the joyful anticipation of victory she wore before violence. In its stead was... trepidation.

He had never known anything to make her nervous before.

A-ha! his power-of-man cried. She fears the reaming we will give her once permission is given! Let her fear! Fear and want!

Shut up, power-of-man, Zar thought, because Shanna's hand was in his hair. He liked the way it felt around; her touch itself made his hair seem softer, more luxurious than he would've believed. And when she didn't just feel, but reached down to his scalp and touched--oh, he should worry he would melt underneath her fingertips, but even were that to happen, he wouldn't fret over it at all.