V=IR: Log Ten - Nash's Equilibrium

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After activating Tesla's device, Forge and Doug manage to turn the tables on Cortez and Milan - but at what cost?




In the center of the beam, blue energy began to coalesce, and a shadowed form became visible, rapidly becoming coherent. With shaking limbs, Forge staggered over to the three other men, gesturing as the figure stepped from the lightning.

Composed entirely of blue-white energy, the figure's features resolved into a narrow face, impeccably parted hair, and sharply focused eyes over a hawklike nose surmounting a neatly trimmed mustache. The figure looked over the four men, then focused on Forge, as if asking a silent question.

Forge nodded in assent, gesturing with a flourish. "Gentlemen, it is my privilege to present the finest mind of the twentieth century -Nikola Tesla."

Tesla's eyes skipped from Forge to his machine, a pleased look coming across his face, before he looked back towards the group. "Young man," he began, his words clipped to near precision and with an accent that most people would have mistaken for German. "It seems you were the key my invention was waiting for. For this, I thank you since there are few others who could understand my inventions, let alone work it the way it was needed. Now, tell me, what year is it?"

The look on Forge's face was like a devout Catholic getting a personal audience with the Pope- almost... worshipful. He looked at the others, then cleared his throat with a small chuckle. "It's... it's 2007. You activated your machine at Wardenclyffe on June 30th, 1908, didn't you? You weren't trying to transmit just power - you put your own brain patterns into the transmission. You set up this station to catch and store... well, your soul. Amazing."

"You know my work," Tesla replied, sounding quite pleased. He took a step forward, a cane in his hand touching the floor before his foot did -- no slight clack of metal on stone but instead, a slight zark echoed in the room. He didn't say anything for a moment, just took 12 more steps in one direction and then another 13 back the way he came. Tesla stopped in the same place he had started, hands curling around the head of his cane. "Then you must know -- was alternating current a success? And did those fools ever recognize my work on the radio?" He was eager in his desire to know and blue sparks lit up the room before settling back down.

"You won the War of Current, sir," Forge replied. "And your name is spoken alongside Marconi's as the father of radio. Nearly every advance of the past hundred years has been built from your work."

He rocked back on his heels to a slight hissing noise of electricity, nodding with a slight smile on his face. "Thomas Edison must be turning in his grave," Tesla mused with a quiet joy. "It worked. My greatest invention, my greatest theory! And it worked. The year 2007..." A thoughtful, nearly sad expression crossed his face. "So many years -- if only my good friend Samuel could see this, could stand by my side in this moment of triumph."

"Thomas Edison invented the light bulb! He was a genius!" Milan yelled, over the crackling electricity. "You died without a penny to your name and almost no one has any idea who you are!" He waved his arms - and the shotgun - around wildly. "There is no such thing as the soul, you cannot store it in a bunch of wires and diodes! This is a waste of my time!" He stomped around in a circle, pointing the gun variously at Forge, Doug, and the electrical figure of Tesla. "You are not real!" He pointed the gun at Tesla. "And and... you are ... a... a .. charlatan!" The gun swung to face Forge.

Instinctively, Forge's hand shot out, catching the shotgun under the slide and yanking forward. With the sound of popping rivets, the slide and barrel assembly came away in his hand, leaving the shotgun dismantled and useless as the shells clattered to the floor. "Doug," Forge said calmly. "Plan B. Kick their asses."

Doug's grin matched the bared-teeth quality of Cortez's earlier expression, and he rolled his neck and tightened his hands into fists, dismissing Milan as a threat now that the shotgun was out of play. Cortez had been the manipulator behind things for the entire trip, he was the more dangerous one of the two. "Plan B indeed," he murmured.

"How unfortunate," Cortez spat, his face twisted with a furious grimace. The rapier slid out of its sheath, the thin blade glowing under the blue lightning. "And how cruel fate is. Now I am going to have to kill you."

"You're certainly welcome to try," Doug shot back, completely unfazed by the sword. He adopted a relaxed fighting stance, glancing around the room and looking for something to even the playing field with while he waited for Cortez to make the first move.


So he struck first, and it was immediately apparent that the rapier wasn't just there for show. It may be an antiquated way to fight, but that made Cortez no less dangerous.

Forge smiled as he saw Doug engage Cortez, leaving him to face Milan, who still stood holding the useless stock of the shotgun. All around, the shapes and forms of machinery and technology spun in front of Forge's vision as he shrugged his heavy coat off, striding for Milan. "So tell me, Frank, how big do you feel without your toy?" he taunted, slapping the remnants of the weapon from the Italian's stunned grasp. "Huh?"

"I.. I do not need that to hurt you! Fabian showed me many things about defending myself! And... and and... and... " Milan hopped up and down, shaking his hands as if to dry them off. "And you do not know that I have steel-toed boots!" He kicked out at Forge, striking him in the shin. And then promptly shrieked in pain. "Ow! OW! my toes!"

"Hi, steel leg," Forge quipped, rapping his knuckles against his thigh. "Now, you little shit, I'm going to take you apart."

As soon as he said it, it was like a switch was thrown in Forge's mind. Milan's outline began to waver in front of him, overlaid by lines of blue and gold. Skeletal system providing support and leverage as muscles tightened and ligaments stretched. The heart, beating faster and faster to rush blood through a network of vessels, providing oxygen for each cell to metabolize into energy. Energy conducting along nerve pathways, branching through the limbic system to the spinal cord to the cerebellum, all parts of one complex biological machine - all laid bare before Forge's supercharged power.

"I think I might do just that, literally," he said in a distracted voice, reaching a hand out for Milan.

Despite hopping up and down on one foot and still making high-pitched whimpering noises, Milan wasn't entirely unprepared. As Forge reached for him, he flailed wildly, most of his swings not connecting, but managing to slap away the hand reaching for him. "No no NO!" He yelped, trying to shove Forge away without actually letting the other man touch him.

Doug spun away nimbly from Cortez's strike, continuing to stay in motion. "I suppose appealing to your notion of fair play given I'm unarmed is right out," he quipped wryly. As he scanned the room again, his eyes narrowed. He circled around the outskirts of the room, staying out of Cortez's immediate reach until he came to an antenna, which appeared to be largely decorative, as it hadn't done anything since Forge had activated the tower. Grabbing the top, he separated a sword-length piece of it by sharply kicking at the base. He grasped the metal in his hands and turned back to Cortez, no longer retreating.

Cortez smirked. "We don't treat traitors fairly. You had your chance, but you've given it up. And there is no forgiveness without atonement." He lunged forward to strike.

Doug parried easily and returned a strike at Cortez's neck. He was still at something of a disadvantage, because the antenna was neither sharp nor pointed, but at least he'd eliminated most of the other man's advantage. Doug's two-handed stance looked nothing like Cortez's fencing posture. "What, no Snidely Whiplash taunt about how I couldn't possibly know the sword as well as you?" he asked. "You've already hit half of the other 'evil overlord' clichés, why not go for all of them?"

"This is not a game, Mister Ramsey." Cortez raised his sword to deflect Doug's counterattack, and then moved to take the offense again. "We're talking about the future of the mutant species, and what we must do to ensure our survival and dominance."

Doug's style drew heavily from his time in Asgard, with a strange blend of the staff fighting he'd been training in with Remy. Because of the lack of edge or point on the antenna, he used it to parry Cortez's attacks and move into arm's reach. From the locked-up position, he shifted to one side, driving his knee into Cortez's midsection. "Dominance?" he said with a snort as he disengaged. "Survival I can understand. Dominance is not an imperative."

Cortez oofed and pulled back to regain his composure. He stripped off his other glove, leaving both hands bare. Then with the speed that one would expect from a world-class athlete, dashed towards Doug and gripped his hand, his powers activating the instant they touched. "Dominance is destiny!"

For Doug, touching Xorn's consciousness, even indirectly through the link with Haller and Betsy, was like trying to dip one toe precisely in a raging river and not get torn away by the current. The communication from his mind almost transcended language, as if, by the nature of his power, Xorn was communicating in some sort of proto-language, each word conveying a vast depth of nuance and meaning. It was overwhelming for Doug, coming up against a language that he had to struggle, for the first time since the certain knowledge of his mutancy, to translate.

As Doug took a deep breath, he idly remembered reading in a D&D source about a group called the Fraternity of Order, who believed if they could but tease forth every law of the cosmos, they would then have the power of deities. For a stunning moment, he could see patterns. And they were -everywhere-. The subtle interconnectedness of everything around him left him in awe. Then, he saw Cortez pulling his arm back, looking to take advantage of the overload he'd put on Doug's power. It was so utterly clear to him. "No," he said, a single word in the proto-language he remembered from the Xorn mission. He flowed forward, the antenna brushing Cortez's rapier aside. "You know nothing of destiny," he told the other man, letting one hand slip down to strike against a pressure point in Cortez's sword hand.

The rapier fell from Cortez's hand and clattered noisily on the ground. Cradling his injured hand, his expression for the first time revealed an uncertainty that this battle would not be his. "You'll perish," he spat, backing up. "You and all your kind. Traitors will be the first cleansed, and then the worthy will ascend. You've signed your own death notice, child."

"Wouldn't be the first..." Doug began as he stalked toward Cortez, but then a blur of motion in the corner of his eye drew his attention away from the other man.

Milan's wild slap caught Forge flat on the ear, and he yelped, skipping away and shaking his head, holding both hands to his ear. "Son of a bitch!" he cried, "You... you slapped me!"

He stepped in, swinging awkwardly at Milan and missing by a good six inches. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Forge recalled a rather heated email exchange from the past, something about refusing to take the hand-to-hand training he'd been offered. Perhaps it would have been relevant, in hindsight.

His hindsight, however, was interrupted by a shove to the face and weak kicks to his non-prosthetic shin. Although equally as inept, Milan had at least forty pounds of mass on Forge, and was putting that to use, shoving the smaller mutant across the floor.

So Forge did the only thing he could think of. I have you to thank for this one, Kyle, he thought as he bit down on Milan's hand as hard as he could.

Milan shrieked and jerked his hand back, leaving a bloody smear on Forge's face. He stumbled backwards, tripped over his own feet and landed with a snowsuit-swishing thud. "You bit me! You... you.. you bit me!" He stared at his hand, wiping it furiously on his shirt. "We do not bite! No biting! No!" He crabwalked backwards across the floor, shaking his head and nodding it up and down between Forge and his bleeding hand.

"No biting. My grandmother says that no, biting is very bad. Very, very bad, it is the worst worst thing you can do is to bite someone." He kept shaking his head back and forth, as though he was a dog with a bone.

Reaching down, Forge grabbed Milan by the nose, yanking him up to his feet. "Should have listened to your grandmother then, Frankie," he said with a half-smile as he drew one metal hand back in a fist. "This is going to hurt you a lot more than me."

"No, you!" Milan pulled his face back and shut his eyes tightly. Behind his closed eyelids, his eyes visibly moved back and forth and up and down rapidly. A moment later he laughed, and opened his eyes again. "There is a saying..." He said, laughing to himself as Forge's fist twitched closer to his face. "I believe it goes... 'why are you hitting yourself?"

Forge glanced to his left in sudden horror as he watched his fist uncurl against his volition. His artificial arm began to twitch, then his entire body started to shake. "You... your power..." he stuttered, looking over at Milan before crumpling to his knees. "Can't do this to me... I'm not a machine... I'm not..."

Contradicting his words, however, Forge could see through his Cortez-enhanced power Milan's influence creeping through his hand and up his arm like black oily smoke, robbing him of control and sensation. Slowly, he watched as his left arm rose, metal fingers clutching his own throat. He choked out an epithet as he attempted to rise to his feet, but found his vision going black at the edges.

With a physically painful surge of will, Forge managed to haul his uncooperative limb away from his throat, gasping for a quick breath and trying to concentrate. Find the connection, he's just a virus, find a way to isolate and work around...

And then it struck, like the lightning crackling around the tower. Since his mutant power emerged, Forge had established a bond with his artificial limbs, his brain and nervous system working in perfect synchronicity with the prosthetics he had designed for himself.

Unfortunately, that bond worked both ways, as Milan's power forced its way through Forge's body, metal and flesh both seizing up with conflicting signals. Like a computer being given too many commands at once, Forge's brain began to struggle to reconcile the different stimuli as the world exploded before his eyes in a cascade of electric blue.

Accompanying the explosion of electric blue in Forge's mind was a surge in electricity in the real world. "That...is...enough!" Tesla suddenly bellowed, his normally soft voice amplified by the crackling and zarking of the energy that now made up his body. No, that now made up his life. As the fights had taken place -- in his lab, of all places -- he had simply stood to the side, still as death, and reasoned with himself.

In the end, what his intellect had told him he couldn't deny. He was but a copy of himself from all those years in the past and that this 'life' was no life at all. And in those eyes, electricity had pulsed as his anger and despondency had grown, a hint of perhaps the madness that may have haunted him in his later life.

"Edison was a fool!" he bellowed, cracking his cane down on the ground with every word. lightning spit and hissed along with him, throwing contrasting shadows on the walls. "I cheated the very thing that he could not, I have been reborn, just as my theories had said! My soul, the very essence of who I am, has been reborn! The only charlatan in this room is you!"

The cane struck the ground behind him and a storm took place in his tower of science. lightning bolts struck the ground and as Milan turned to stare, a shape high above took form in the eye. It swooped down, shrieking silently and slammed into him, the roughly avian shaped lightning shattering a window and taking the mutant through the shattered glass and into the world beyond.

Forge barely noticed the conflagration around him, as the electrical storm in his brain matched the one going on in the tower. Thoughts and memories began racing through his mind, as he reached out -

- and then everything shut down, and he slid to the floor.

Tesla, mind already unwinding, snapped. In another lifetime, that young man might have been a prized student of his. Not another Sam, for he had been one of a kind friend, but perhaps a student. A colleague. One that he would have treated better than Edison had treated him.

A lifetime of possibilities...the electrical charges sizzled and grew in the room. St. Elmo's Fire started to grow in the center of the room, fueled by Tesla's anger and madness. His shape wavered, as if he were feeding it's very essence into it -- the storm was as alive as he was and just as angry.