xp_logs | Day Zero: Distractions

Emma comes to the Frost Enterprises office to check on Doug, who is having no luck against Pestilence. And then, together, they come up with a desperate, risky strategem.

Doug had never understood the absolute anger and frustration that led some people to throw extremely expensive computer equipment out of windows before. Even at times he'd been frustrated with World of Warcraft or a particularly difficult programming project, he'd never felt the red-hot rage that currently had him spewing half-coherent obscenities at his laptop. Every moment he'd spent trying to battle Mastermold since Emma had taken him to the Frost Enterprises storefront near the NYSE had merely driven home how painfully outclassed he was, as if he hadn't known it from the first skirmish he'd had while trying to access the closed-circuit television system. He'd barely been able to accomplish the most brute-force of hacks against her when she'd been using obsolescent Russian technology while her attention was divided by the rest of X-Force physically attacking her. And now she had been upgraded.

The only saving grace was that Mastermold was biding her time, building up her resources before she could crack the nut that was New York's financial network. If they didn't find a way to counteract her soon, the perfect communist would have total access to America's capitalist brainstem.

"And we can't let the Reds under the Bed win the war," said Emma as she strode into the room. "If nothing else, the shopping would be terrible." She didn't usually announce her reading of someone's thoughts so bluntly, but Doug was undoubtedly aware that his anger was leading him to broadcast his thoughts quite clearly, if only over a short range. "I presume your fight against her goes as badly as mine." Emma did not bother to hide her weariness as she sat down; her work on the psychic plane had been draining and, worst of all, wasted.

"From the look on your face, I'm guessing so," Doug replied with a grunt. "Can't do a thing to counteract her. I can't react faster than a computer, much less one who's upgraded her 'hardware' to the top of the line." He ran a hand through his hair, clenching and pulling at it in frustration.

"Actually," replied Emma. "You can." She ignored Doug's expression, too tired to bother hiding her ruthlessness. "For what we are doing, the fight we are in, your power is almost without limit - except for those limits you choose to impose. If you were as single-minded as Ignatova, you would have a chance of besting her." She closed her eyes for a moment, unutterably weary and heart-sick. "And I am very tired of making people die, Mr Ramsey."

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.

Doug frowned at the naked expression on Emma's face, the way she was looking at him like he was a piece on a chess board to be moved here and there at her need.

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.

He rather doubted that Emma was carrying Fabian Cortez in her back pocket, which only left one other option he could think of. "What, are you going to hop me up on Kick?" he asked nervously. He didn't care much for the idea of becoming an addict just so that they could foil Ignatova.

"Oh my dear Doug," said Emma and her laugh was almost a purr. "Why on earth would you need Kick when you have me?" Her humour vanished as quickly as it came. "Your head is full of mental blocks, Doug. Distractions." She stood up, walked to Doug, touched her hand lightly on his temple. "Power is - a dangerous thing." Her fingers feathered down his cheek, cupped his chin gently so he couldn't avoid her eyes. "A seductive thing. Some of us revel in it. Some of us are afraid of what it could turn us in to." For an instant her fingers trailed down the curve of his neck, the hollow of his throat and then, almost reluctantly, returned to her side. "When I touch your power, I can see what it could be. But you hide it away from yourself with childish things, stop yourself feeling what you could be. I can put all of those away, take away everything that limits you. Make you - complete."

Doug shivered at Emma's touch, and the way her lips had almost caressed the word 'seductive'. He remembered when she had gone peeking in his head for his 'dictionary', and let him shut her away from his more visceral reactions when she had playfully touched the pleasure centers of his brain. He rather doubted she was going to let things go so easily this time. "What...what did you have in mind?" he stuttered slightly.

"Let me in," replied Emma. "No shields. No barriers. Let me see what you really are and I can make you more than you imagined. A match for Ignatova. A perfect weapon aimed at her heart." A smile played on her lips. "Or more precisely, her stomach. And her mainframe." Her expression sobered. "You'll have to trust me. Absolutely," Emma said, aware of the irony, aware of the number of times she told people she was not to be trusted. "You have to be willing to die for me and hope that I've given you the power to bring yourself back from the dead. To let me take away your limits - and your boundaries. But first of all, you have to be willing to let me see everything that's in your mind and change it as I choose. You'll have to put yourself in my hands, Doug, utterly naked, utterly vulnerable." Her gaze held his. "Are you willing to do that, Mr Ramsey?"

She was right. His power did frighten him, the brushes he'd had of it with Xorn and Cortez. And while Emma was certainly manipulative and ruthless, he sensed somehow that this was his decision, and that she'd abide by it either way. His brain snapped through pros and cons in an instant. He could be a match for Ignatova. But at what cost? ~For what shall it profit a man if he save the world, and lose his soul?~ he paraphrased to himself. Did he trust Emma? Did he trust -himself-?

"Yes," he answered her seriously and simply, the answer to all the questions he'd asked himself as well as the ones Emma had asked him.

For a moment, Emma's breath caught in her throat, touched by the raw courage and trust she was being offered. "Oh, my dear Douglas," she said. "You really are quite a remarkable young man. And soon, you'll be - extraordinary. But I think it may be best if we sit down for this." She caught his hand, led him over to the couch and sat him facing her. It wasn't strictly necessary, but she touched her hands to his temples, anchoring herself in their physical reality, before smiling. "I promise," she said, "that this won't hurt a bit," and stepped into his mind.

Emma's mental touch was like a whisper. Ruthless and hard she could be, but Emma was also extremely accomplished with her mutant abilities. He felt her touch his face, then he was swimming in her eyes, and then the pair were 'standing' together inside his mental landscape, a strange 3-D representation of a computer's graphical desktop, with a cascade of images and folder icons labeled "World of Warcraft", "Porn", "Magic: The Gathering", and so forth. As unrealistic as the visuals in movies like Hackers and Swordfish had been, they had clearly influenced Doug's mental picture of his own consciousness.

"Oh Doug," said Emma. "Going for the classic geek computer interface mental landscape? How very last season." With a deft touch she riffled through Doug's subsconscious, looking for something she would find easier to work with. The more familiar and the more specific she could make Doug's mental scape, the less likely she would be to cause permanent damage. Or at least no more than was strictly necessary. Finding something suitable, she twisted Doug's psyche into a new shape and when it settled, they stood in a hall of mirrors, lined with open doors, aspects of Doug's mental life contained in each room, reflecting over and over around them in a mad, distracting jumble of images.

"First," said Emma and pinched off the ends of the hallway, so it was suddenly finite, the doors limited. "A Trojan horse," she said. "Closed off, hidden away inside your world of mirrors, so Ignatova cannot see what she ingests. Just you, and a key, and your power. No distractions." Emma took Doug's hand and led him to the first door.

The mirror behind the first door did not actually contain an image of Doug Ramsey. Instead, a hunched figure with rotting flesh hanging off of him stood inside a darkly gothic throne room. He was clad in robes of red, yellow, and purple, a skull with upswept horns taking the place of a helm on his head. A pair of bat wings spread behind him as he raised his hands, shadowy energy surrounding one and emerald flames the other. At his direction, a powerful dark-skinned demon carrying a massive two-handed axe charged towards a rime-encrusted throne, where a man with lanky white hair and glowing blue eyes stood at the ready, glowing runes dancing around his sword.

"I think," said Emma dryly, "that this may not be strictly necessary for the fight." She took Doug's hand, firmly entwined with her own and put both upon the door-knob. Together they closed it firmly, even as the Lich King's sword swept down towards the demon, cutting the battle off in mid-cry. Stepping back into the hall, she noted that the kaleidoscopic reflected images were slowing, becoming clearer.

Stepping forward again, they moved to the next door.

The next two doors were practically adjacent to each other, and their mirrors could be seen at the same time from the hallway. In one mirror, Doug sat in a T-shirt and jeans at one of a series of long rows of tables inside a convention center under a banner with the words "PRO TOUR" on it. The mirror-Doug examined a handful of plastic-sleeved cards, examined the board before him, and pushed several cards into a red area on the playmat. His opponent frowned before tossing his cards to the table and extending his hand to Doug.

In the second mirror, a slightly more well-dressed Doug glanced at a pair of cards, leaving them face-down on the green felt. His brow furrowed slightly as he examined his opponents, then he carefully removed several chips from the stack in front of him, tossing them towards the growing pot in the center of the table.

"Strategy," said Emma. "Weighted and possibly just slightly unfair strategy, considering your ability to see patterns." She turned to face Doug. "You are my unfair strategy against Ignatova, Doug. This," she waved her free hand at the mirrors, "is only part of it. In here, all distractions are removed, all blocks taken down, all limits taken away. The Doug that is in here will have full access to all of his power. The Doug I leave on the outside will still be - mostly intact. There will be - spaces. When you go inside Ignatova, there is little likelihood that she'll preserve your physical form. We're creating a telepathic construct that will survive your physical dissolution with all its power intact and the capacity to attack Mastermold from the inside." Emma looked down at their intertwined hands for a moment. "I believe that you can destroy her, Doug. What I do not know is if you can save yourself afterwards. And if you can recreate your physical form, it's likely that your mind will be different. The Doug that comes out may not be the same Doug as went in. Your choice," she said and lifted his hand in hers. "You close the doors with me. You make the choice. So," she asked, nodding at the poker player and the card geek behind the doors, "do you approve of my strategy?"

Doug reached out with their entwined hands and closed the pair of doors without answering. The next door opened on a triptych mirror like those in the fitting rooms of clothing stores, each panel containing a separate image. In the first, a vast army of anthropomorphic insectoids carrying a variety of firearms marched in lockstep towards a huddling blonde-haired figure in the distance. In the second, a weeping, dirty, bleeding Doug knelt over the fallen bodies of the other members of X-Force. And in the last, a recognizably Doug-shaped figure, but formed of flexible black and gold circuitry, placed his hands on the foreheads of his friends and coworkers as they knelt in restraints before him, the circuitry engulfing their forms as he touched each of them.

"Ah," breathed Emma and the pictures in the mirrors flickered suddenly, and in one Emma knelt in subservience to a naked man, in another a school was burning as children died, in the third a diamond queen on a diamond throne laughed as her fingers closed around the throat of a blond man, who knelt on a pile of bodies. "Those are the things that will kill you," said Emma and, in the mirror, the Emma images disappeared behind the slam of a wooden door, reverting back to the images of Doug. "These hold you back from understanding the true potential of your power." Her gaze turned inwards for a moment. "But they also keep us from becoming - inhuman. I doubt Ignatova even understands what fear is."

The flash of insight into what had to be Emma's own fears startled Doug, though he supposed it made sense that, given the depth of the connection they were currently making, that there would be some spillover from her to him. The final image was a partial answer to Emma's early question: he was afraid that if they shut all those things away, that he might irretrievably lose some vital part of himself in the process. As he looked at the mirror and the door, he came to a decision. Even if that were the case, not all victories could come without cost. And he was willing to pay that cost if he had to. That decision made it much easier to reach out with Emma and shut the door, and when the door was shut, even easier to step to the next one.

That door seemed to open, rather than on a mirror reflection, on an entire room. A perfectly polished hardwood floor covered a large open space in the center, surrounded by rice-paper screens that softened an external source of light. Some of the screens showed stylized animal forms, others a series of bold Asian ideograms. In the center of the room, another reflection of Doug stood in a crisply starched black gi, with a matching black belt around his waist. Coming to a position of attention, he began swiftly and silently flowing through a series of martial arts moves without ever changing expression.

"Absolute control," said Emma. "It creates perfection of form and movement, but it removes you from instinct. To defeat Ignatova you have to trust your power completely, let your instincts flow, respond without thought. You are not losing control, lashing out in rage or hurt. You are moving beyond control, into the realm of complete trust in your power, in your instinct. Trust in yourself."

The pair shut the door and moved to the next. If the last door had been about absolute control, then this door was the polar opposite. Behind the door was a flawless diamond, its facets polished to a mirror shine. Each facet had a different image on it, and those images shared one theme. Unbridled passion. A large majority of the images showed Doug and Marie-Ange in a variety of sexual positions and a host of different locations: their apartments, the server room, the roof of the brownstone, the conference room table at the Snow Valley offices.

But not all of the images involved Marie-Ange. Or not -only- Marie-Ange, in some cases. Most of his female friends and coworkers featured in at least one or two of the images. In one, Marie ran thinly-gloved fingers over Doug's bare chest. In another, Paige removed a lab coat to reveal nothing beneath, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Illyana even featured in one of the fantasies, wearing a cheerleader's uniform and necking with Doug in the back seat of a vintage Studebaker. And in one small, almost invisible facet, Betsy Braddock smiled hungrily at a nervous-looking Doug.

Doug was not male in all of the images, as his time spent in a curvy female body had clearly had an impact on him. In one of the images, his female self drew a black dress over her head while a stunned Forge stared incredulously. One of them had the female Doug kneeling before the male form Marie-Ange had inhabited. And in another, Amanda and Doug curled together in a spooned position, Amanda's hand running gently over the curves Doug had briefly sported.

Amanda featured in more than a few of the images, as did Wanda. But the person who featured in the most fantasies after Marie-Ange was the person standing next to him observing all of them. In some of the fantasies, Emma held the dominant position, in some, Doug did, and in others they came together as equals. No kink was left untested in those thoughts, including a few extremely vivid images of Emma and the female Doug. ~You'll have to put yourself in my hands, Doug, utterly naked, utterly vulnerable...~ And so he was, his most intimate secret thoughts open to her.

Emma's amused approval held no hint of mockery. "The point and purpose of humanity," she said. "The ultimate drive. They say we do it because we need to pass on our genes. But really," her free hand reached out for a moment, touched one of images of her and Doug, "we all need to know that we are not alone in the dark. It's the ultimate power and the ultimate surrender." She turned a knowing smile on Doug. "To want and be wanted in return. To offer yourself freely," her hand drifted over a number of the more vivid images of herself and Doug, "and to be accepted. But also," her voice sobered, "the ultimate distraction. I doubt Ignatova ever got laid in her short, unhappy human span, but if she finds these inside you, she can use them against you." She smiled again, scanning the images. "Though I promise you, my dear Douglas, if you come out of her alive, I shall make sure that this part of you is not lost. Such imagination deserves to be rewarded."

They closed the door gently, and began walking to the end of the hallway, where one final door stood open to them. Partway towards the door Doug paused and looked backward at the locked doors, then down at his and Emma's joined hands. His fear and other distracting emotions had already been locked away, but he still felt a slight...unease. "Emma?" he asked hesitantly. "What if..." he waved his free hand back down the hall. "What if after all of this, I'm still not good enough?"

"Then we all die," replied Emma, calmly. "Why predict the result of the exam before you've sat the test, Doug?" She turned him to face her. "Be good enough. Be what you can be." She smiled suddenly and Doug's clothing bled colour, until he stood clad in white. "I claim you as my White Knight, Douglas Ramsey, and you will not fail your Queen."

"I...um...what?" Doug asked as he looked downward at the white shirt and pants that Emma had put him in. "Me?" But when he stopped and thought about it, it made a perverse sort of sense. His signifier cards in Marie-Ange's tarot decks had always been the Knights, first Cups, and now Swords. The first was something of a 'white knight' of romance and emotion, but the Knight of Swords had strong connotations of politics, and if there was an organization where political maneuvering was its lifesblood, it was the Hellfire Club. He straightened and nodded. "Yes, my Queen."

Emma leaned forward and her lips touched Doug's gently, the Queen bestowing her favour, but also using the sensation to create a telepathic cue with which she could focus Doug's attention. When she leaned back, she released his hand. "Such a good boy," she said and walked to the door, leaving Doug alone in the centre of the room, the mirrors reflecting back only the single image, a young man in white, the images reflecting back on themselves, so that he appeared without limit. "You have some time before Remy and Jubilee arrive. What I have left outside this room will be enough to function, but your attention span will be - somewhat limited. What remains in here has time to become - what you need to be." Emma stepped through the door. "I'll see you on the other side, my Knight," she said and closed the door. With a twist of her hand, a key appeared in the lock and, turning it back, Emma locked the door. For an instant she closed her eyes and the image of the key wavered in her hand as she built shield upon shield around it, linked to her thought patterns. When Emma was done, the key still appeared a glowing blue in her sight, but would be invisible to anyone else on the Astral Plane. Concentrating further, she bent telepathic light around the closed off room, concealing it from psionic view. Not, Emma thought, as she opened her eyes, that it was likely that Ignatova would see Doug's body as anything but more meat for her grinders. It never hurt, however, to be careful.

Emma stepped back onto the physical plane to find herself looking into the eyes of a somewhat startled and quite confused Doug, her hands still lightly on his temples. "Sleep," she whispered to him and reinforced it mentally. She held him gently as he curled around on the couch, pillowing his head on her lap and was asleep within seconds. Lightly stroking his hair, she waited patiently for Remy and Jubilee to arrive.