Natasha had looked through all the records about Shiller since S.H.I.E.L.D. had first co into contact with him, and ultimately realized that Shiller might indeed have a vendetta against Hydra.
From the mont Shiller appeared on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar, not a single Hydra agent had managed to survive his sches.
Even just dying was not enough; they had to die in a way that maximized usefulness. After death, they had to be resurrected for secondary utilization, then die and be revived again, as if he wanted to squeeze everything out of them from their flesh to their soul.
Touching her conscience, Natasha said that from the ti she'd known Shiller, she indeed had seen quite a few instances where he had trapped many people with one crazy plan. Even so who had been bewildered and manipulated ended up having to thank him.
Besides actually using these plans to shear wool and gain benefits, most of the ti Shiller preferred to watch the sheep run naked. Natasha knew that many steps in the plan were purely Shiller's bad taste, without any other reason.
But for Hydra, this didn't seem like shearing wool but more like direct bleeding, or rather, like chopping the sheep's head right off.
This did not conform to Shiller's way of doing things. According to Natasha's observations and the summarized data, Shiller cared about sustainable developnt, aning not just shearing one sheep but giving most sheep space for their wool to grow long.
However, looking at the past few years, Shiller aggressively targeted Hydra. In the early stages, he could shear several tis a day, and the plans were all different, each with his hand in it.
As a result, now Hydra could hardly be sheared at all. This historically renowned organization had been hit by Shiller with a series of lightning-fast blows, completely forced out of the historical stage.
Even the Hydra branch of S.H.I.E.L.D. that Nick had constructed had hardly any Hydra mbers left. After the Solar System developnt projects began, most Hydra mbers who had committed cris were replaced by agents specially trained by the Spy Academy.
The era of S.H.I.E.L.D. with Hydra agents, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, and KGB agents in a tripartite balance was gone for good.
The current state of Hydra was basically one of social extinction; it had been too long since anyone had heard news of them causing trouble. The reason was definitely that Shiller had been too ruthless, not only did many of the Hydra heads directly fall to him, but he had also thoroughly gutted their grassroots organizations.
Connecting this to the Hydra boss of the Manhattan Area that Shiller killed when he was younger, it all seed very abnormal—had Hydra offended Shiller in the past?
That, however, was impossible to investigate, as Hydra had offended too many people. In the years since World War II began, they had committed countless misdeeds and brought ruin to many, seemingly having offended every reputable organization in the world. It was very normal for Shiller to have a vendetta against them.
The investigation had hit a dead end, but Natasha knew that Nick wouldn't be satisfied. His ethos of leaving no stone unturned ant he was determined to uncover everything, even whether soone had an extra bowl of rice on a certain day. Knowing that Shiller's connection with Hydra was extraordinary, he wouldn't let it go.
Sure enough, after Natasha turned in her investigation results, Nick first roared curses at Hydra, then roared at her to scroll through more short videos to see if she could uncover the relationship between Shiller and Hydra.
Of course, that yielded nothing. To the general public, Hydra was still sowhat mysterious. Although many had heard of such a terrorist organization, it was too distant from their lives, and it was even less likely that any Hydra agent would co forward to expose anything.
After so thought, Natasha felt that it wasn't great to leave things this way, but it was also pointless to keep flipping through the sa outdated files. In the end, she decided to travel back in ti.
Nick was currently the de facto controller of the Ti Managent Bureau, and he had the ans to allow ti travel while maintaining a stable tiline. The Ti Managent Bureau was explicitly for this purpose, and Natasha had been there a few tis before, investigating obscure and indistinct pasts of the previous generation.
However, their agents had to follow many regulations when on duty, such as not changing past events, participating solely as observers, not encountering their past selves, and not leaving behind any photographic or video evidence. Any written records had to be summarized upon returning and edited into an acceptable version before they could be kept.
Natasha filed a report, and Nick approved it quickly, so she got ready to set off.
The ti point to which she was traveling back was even earlier, a ti when the Soviet Union had not yet dissolved, and Shiller was likely just a child.
Natasha speculated that if Shiller truly held a significant grudge against Hydra, it must have occurred during this ti fra because even the strongest humans have a vulnerable childhood. Given Hydra's utterly despicable thods, it was highly likely they had hard Shiller during his youth.
But Natasha went back and took a look around and didn't find any problems, or to be more precise, she didn't find Shiller at all—she didn't manage to locate Shiller.
The records of Shiller's childhood were blank, and Natasha had too little information on hand. Although she knew that Shiller could be of mixed heritage, she had no clue which countries were involved, or when he had co to Arica, or if he was even born there.
If even this was unknown, it would be incredibly difficult to investigate. Surely they couldn't check every single entry and birth in Arica for a particular year?
Now there was a new issue: Shiller's childhood had beco an unresolved mystery. As the tiline moved to when Shiller beca famous, she realized that Nick really wasn't suspicious about why he would cooperate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He started questioning a more fundantal issue: what exactly happened during Shiller's childhood?
Almost all the superheroes, including Nick, knew that Shiller was very likely not of this world. Shiller himself didn't plan to disguise this fact; for instance, he'd occasionally let slip Chinese idioms that couldn't be translated into English or were too cumberso when translated. Moreover, his educational background showed no record of studying abroad in China, such as understanding things that went beyond the reach of all other superheroes.
Steve and Stark had also investigated Shiller's childhood before, but they did it inside Shiller's High Tower, where they found so fragnts of his past mories.
That included the stairwell plastered with flyers and that room; they were real but only from after he was taken back to the institute. The institute needed renovations, so he was taken by his nurse to stay at her place for a while, which was also within the institute's grounds, just moved to the staff residential building. That's why there were scenes that looked like everyday life.
As for those miscellaneous stories, they were concocted by Steve and Stark—though, of course, so mories from his ti at the orphanage might have been mixed in. After all, Shiller's mories from that period were confused. Even after compiling them into a volu later on, there were often mix-ups.
That's why Shiller was certain that they hadn't included this part when compiling the Super-Ego Manuscript's backstory. Most of Shiller's mories from that ti were a ss, and when everyone contributed their recollections to compile the volu, many details were missing. Now there was no way to verify it, and such mories filled with magical realism couldn't possibly fit into the logical world of Marvel.
In that case, Shiller's childhood should be like an unknown minor character in the comics: a blank slate. Originally, no one cared who he was so it didn't matter if there was a history or not. But once Nick looked into it, the blank spaces beca apparent.
Besides worrying about not being able to explain himself, Shiller also wondered if such large gaps in his backstory might beco loopholes in the universe. As long as those weren't anchored, there was a possibility they could be altered. What would happen if his origin story changed, causing many future events to shift?
After pondering, he realized that if his origin story needed filling in, he'd have to do it himself. However, the tricky part about patching up a childhood story was that to have a childhood, he needed a family. Even if he lacked biological parents, there still had to be an adoptive family at least. He surely couldn't have grown up in the forest, now could he?
Picking any adoptive family wouldn't be a problem, but he still had to reconcile the business with Hydra and the Soviet Union. Not to ntion the matters involving China and Arica. What kind of magical family could encompass all four attributes?
After thinking for a while, Shiller felt the China and Soviet Union issue could be put aside for now. The room that Steve and Stark saw in his mories could just as well be explained away as an illusion or a fabricated tale.
The Soviet Union was off the table because it was unrealistic to expect a child under ten to grasp grand ambitions. Such a story would have to wait until he was in his teens to fill in.
Thus, the problem boiled down to Arica and Hydra. Firstly, it had to be an Arican family; otherwise, the complications of overseas adoption were too much. That was an easy fix—the adoption system in Arica was relatively robust. If Shiller approached a decent orphanage, finding an adoptive family wouldn't be tough.
The Hydra part was more troubleso. Although Shiller wanted to flesh out his backstory, he didn't wish to doom a family that hadn't been killed by Hydra. He wasn't sure he could provoke Hydra as a child in a family that wouldn't have crossed paths with Hydra otherwise. So the best option was to find a family that in the original tiline had already angered Hydra and been killed by them.
It might sound complicated, but it was quite straightforward: if Shiller were adopted by a family victimized by Hydra, then the logic would flow smoothly onwards.
The backstory would then likely go like this: he grew up in an orphanage, was adopted by a family, which was later killed by Hydra, and Shiller encountered the KGB while seeking revenge, joining the grand cause of the Soviet Union. Later, he returned to Arica to initiate his vendetta against Hydra.
But being too young and careless, he was caught by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which forced him to cooperate. Eventually, he still pursued the path of a psychologist, and due to Stark's hiring, began to interact with superheroes. Finally, S.H.I.E.L.D. hired him as their psychological advisor.
This whole story could be said to blend Shiller's past and present backgrounds smoothly, simply substituting Hydra as the enemy from his previous life.
Not that it was a stretch—Shiller knew that when he had repeatedly sheared Hydra's wool, even wiping them out, it wasn't without a factor of personal vendetta. It was sowhat tinged with private grudges. After all, these cross-national, large-scale criminal organizations were all pretty much the sa.
Once the script was ready, Shiller began selecting the victims. Just as Natasha had discovered, there were countless victims of Hydra in that era. Shiller settled on a couple of scientist spouses who had built the latest firewall for Hydra's then-electronic life leader Zola but were silenced by Hydra for knowing too much.
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