xp_logs | Masque | The artist at work

Ororo awakes in Masque's lair and comes face-to-face with the man himself. It starts to rain not long after.

The first thing Ororo noticed as she slowly dragged herself back to consciousness was the dankness of the air around her. It was warm and slightly humid, but what she noticed most of all was the stagnation. There was no breeze, no wafting flow of air passing through. It made her skin crawl, and the white-haired woman had to take a deep breath to remain calm. The next thing was the low murmur of voices insinuating themselves into her hearing, the sound indistinct and unintelligible.

Opening her eyes, Ororo looked around, taking in the fabric-draped walls of the small room around her. Stubby, half--melted candles threw flickering shadows on the walls and over the few pieces of secondhand furniture scattered about.

"Awake now? Good."

A figure seated on a battered couch to her right rose, the movement jerky -- off, somehow. The figure itself was hooded, his face doubly concealed by cloth and shadow. He limped a few steps to place himself directly in front of her, his arms thrown out in a grandiose gesture of presentation.

"So, how do you like it?" he asked, a wet, lisping edge to the words. "Yes, it may be a murky piss-filled hole in the ground, but one must do one's best."

Blinking, Ororo tried to peer into the shadow left by the hood, but to no avail. She ran her gaze from his head to the floor, taking in every detail as best she could. It was only then that she realized that she was naked, the clothes she had been wearing earlier nowhere to be seen.

"Why did you bring me here?" she asked, her voice tinged with iron-hard control and the slightest edge of fear. Many of the other victims they had heard about had been attacked aboveground, though the incidents of kidnapping were growing more and more frequent.

The arms dropped, replaced by a lopsided shrug. "Call it a hobby. I have an appreciation for beautiful things." There was a flash of yellowing white from beneath the hood. "After a fashion."

Ororo swallowed, finding herself unable to move. Her arms and legs felt stiff, unyielding, and she had to quell a rising wave of panic at her situation. "You have hurt many people with your actions."

"They hurt me first!" The spectators hovering around them drew back as if the shriek were a whip across their faces. The hooded man whirled and flung a shaking finger toward the cowering rabble. "Did any of you care when people hurt me? Did any of the normal, pretty people do anything to save me when I was tortured and ridiculed? No, no, no!" The man spun on Ororo and ripped off his hood to expose a face bulbous with tumors, riddled with dark, ropy growths that crawled across skin like worms. "No one showed any mercy for this," he snarled, spittle frothing from the corner of his malformed lips, "so now I'm giving it back. To all of you."

Ororo didn't wince as the man revealed his face, having seen that much and worse in her various dealings with the X-men. She did, however, quiver at the pure hate and malice in his voice, and the realization that none of her team was here, now.

"What they did to you was not right," she said in her most soothing tone, looking him straight in the face. "But that does not make what you are doing right, either. I am sorry how you have been treated, and I know that you must be hurting. Stop this, and I will help you find a place where you can find help. I promise."

The man sneered at her. "Everybody promises when they're down here. Unfortunately for you, my love of pretty things doesn't extend to words. But that's fine. You won't be talking for much longer anyway." With quick, purposeful movements that belied the stiltedness of his gait the man removed his robe and tossed it to the floor, revealing a torso just as ravaged as his face. As if sensing what was about to come, some of the spectators began to retreat. Others moved forward, vying for a better view.

The man raised his hands to Ororo's face, and she saw that, absurdly, they were perfect. Long-fingered and sure, free of the deformity that twisted the rest of his body. The hands of an artist.

"I think we'll start on that now."

Ororo did not flinch as he approached, keeping her chin raised as high as she could despite the restraints on her body. Her heart was racing, her pulse jumpy. She could hear the steady drop of water or some other fluid in the background, and the low murmur of the on-lookers as they craned their necks to see what would happen next.

"Wonder what he'll do to this 'un," one of them cackled in a high-pitched voice. "She won't be pretty for long!"

"Destruction is for the unimaginative," the man said, his tone light, almost conversational. His fingers traced quick, birdlike movements in the air before her, like a rehearsal. "Let's see if we can't come up with something more . . . unique."

Lightly, almost tenderly, the man dragged his fingertips across Ororo's face, from forehead to eyelids to lips to chin. At his touch the sensation of stale, oppressive humidity against her skin vanished, replaced by an alarming numbness -- and paralysis.

His hands travelled up the sides of her face again, fingers briefly tangling in her hair to slide through the length of it. "Close," he said, taking a step back to examine his handiwork in the dim flicker of the candles, "but not quite. This is not the ideal angle from which to work." His lips curled in a vicious smile, and he placed the palm of one perfect hand between her breasts. "Let's reposition."

Ororo was helpless to resist the gentle push he gave her, and her stiff joints and limbs meant that she fell straight backwards onto the mattress behind her. As she fell, her eyelids moved of their own accord to cover her eyes, and as she hit the mattress, everything went black.

Her jaws were clenched and frozen in place, her lips unable to move the barest centimeter. The only sound she was able to utter was a strangled whimper, though a scream burned her throat and vocal cords. Ororo was trapped in darkness, though she could still hear every cruel laugh and jeer from the watching crowd of mutants around her.

"And now," she heard a voice say as she felt a weight settle on the mattress beside her head, "it's time for the detail work."