xp_logs | Day Zero - X-Force vs Pestilence

With one man down, Remy, Jubilee and Emma increase the assault.

Jubilee watched from the shadows, waiting for Remy's distraction. They didn't have to wait long, and as the noise of an explosion could be heard, and Ignatova's guards scattered toward the sound and concussive force.

It was action time, and Jubilee ran forward into the living machine that the stock exchange had become, heading for the heart, for Ignatova. She sent out streams of pyrotechnic plasmas as she ran, exploding the pulsing meat connectors and the machines as she went, not caring about the fires and smoke forming around her as she ran.

Emma sighed as she watched Jubilee run towards the heart of Ignatova, away from the meat pens. There was little point attacking the structures of twisted flesh that curled around computer but it would at least give the spores and Primes something to follow and she trusted Jubilee to hold her own for a considerable period of time. With a quiet tread, Emma slipped back into the shadows, caught for a moment by the need to stay flesh, to complete her most important role. Her mind followed Doug's as he slipped into Ignatova's maw, his flesh stripped away from bones and bones dissolving as she twisted the key inside his mind, opened up the Trojan Horse.

Freed from that obligation, Emma turned her attention outwards, cataloging her surroundings. It would be pointless to attack the fleshy brain that grew in the centre of the room. Charmingly heroic, perhaps, but doomed to failure. The people still attached to it, however... Emma reached out with her mind and erased theirs, ended their pain, so their desperate howls no longer grated against her ears.

Beyond that, the closest description she could come to was that the NYSE looked as if someone had turned humans inside out and decided that intestines were the wallpaper of choice this month, with added screaming human face motif for the discerning decorator.

Things dripped and roiled and heaved in disturbingly heart-beat like rhythms and the Primes and meat spores that shuffled between them were seriously not put together correctly. While Ignatova's approach to her meat spores was decorative, Emma didn't think having brains outside their protective skull cases and hearts beating outside ribs was a particularly practical approach to creating an army of soldiers. The Primes, however, appeared to be far more sensibly designed and should be avoided.

Jubilee's approach was working nicely however. The Primes and many of the meat spores were following the trail of destruction that preceded the slim shadow through the room, taking them away from the meat pens. Emma turned to diamond and stalked out of the shadows to the first office, its inhabitants watching her with desperate fear, unsure what this latest creature would do to them.

Emma's diamond grip sheared the locked handle from the door, swinging it open. The people inside cringed back from her as she shifted back to flesh, touching their minds - bolstering courage, inducing calm resolve.

"You're free," she said. "Find yourself something to hit them with and see if you can get yourselves out of here without drawing their attention. Try not to step on anything organic."

She turned back to diamond and headed for the next room, ignoring those behind her. She had too many to save; at least some of them would have to save themselves and, if they didn't, at least they would distract the Primes.

"Faster would be better." The Cajun voice said behind her. Three glowing cards slammed into the wall, one after another, and as they exploded, a whole section of the structure fell inwards, expanding the escape route out. Remy distraction had pulled them in one direction, and Jubilee's inadvertent distraction pulled them back, giving Remy plenty of time to escape over the fleshy constructs and meet up with them.

"Ignatova's power is connected to her size. De larger she is, de more processing power dat she has, de faster de meat spores move and de more of dem she can control. We need to cut down her capacity."

Jubilee could see the meat spores and Primes heading toward her, which wasn't what she'd planned but she could roll with the punches.

Energy pulsed from her hands, forming small bubbles of plasma that pulsed and spread around her in a swirling pattern of oscillating satellites. She sent them out around her, headed for meat spores and primes alike, replacing the ones that hit their targets and keeping some around her for protection as she moved further toward the heart of the Exchange.

Jubilee dodged a swipe from one of the Primes, kicking it in the stomach, not so much to damage, as that seemed impossible, but to get some space between it and herself. However, instead of being thrown backwards, her foot sucked into the congealed mass of flesh that seemed to make up the creature. Several satellites zipped off from her crown of plasmoids and hit it directly head on, exploding on impact, as messy splashes of liquid putrefaction surrounded her.

"Okay, that was foul and disgusting and I am going to hurl as soon as I get the hell out of here." Jubilee noted to herself, slowing her run now as more creatures appeared. She could keep them busy while Emma and Remy did their thing.

Remy's assistance in opening up the escape route improved Emma's mood no end. While she appreciated both her powers, she did sometimes regret that she hadn't also got a "blowing things up" upgrade. "You work on Mastermold," she said to Remy. "I'll try and get us some kind of army to help." Stalking through the shadows, she opened office door after office door, shearing off locks and bolstering courage. She was heading to the fifth office when the Primes finally caught up with her.

"Mission abandoned," said Emma, and turned away from the next door, ignoring the desperate pleading in the eyes of the people inside. She had to admit, she had never revelled more in her secondary mutation than she did at the moment when her diamond fist appeared on the other side of the first attacking Prime's head, brains dripping from it. "That was for Doug," she said. She had little time for words after that, however, as Primes and meat spores surrounded her, attacking from every side. Being essentially invulnerable to such flesh-based attacks, Emma wasn't worried about her safety but she knew sheer volume of attackers could lead to her being overwhelmed and ineffective.

The situation improved vastly when one of the meat spores suddenly went down, its external brain removed from its head. One of prisoners she'd released looked at Emma over the meat spore's body, a metal strut he'd scavenged from somewhere held in his hand, horror turning to a kind of glee at the meat spore's fall. Behind him were other prisoners, not all of them, but enough, holding makeshift weapons. "Avoid the Primes," Emma shouted. "Go for the meat spores, the connections, the computers. Whatever you can get to. Destroy what you can." The man nodded and the slipped from Emma's attention as the Primes closed in on her again.

Jubilee ducked under a swipe from a meat spore and sent a few of her plasma satellites to destroy more of the NYSE's infrastructure. Some poor bastard of a techie was probably going to have an apoplexy over all the damage.

This was taking too long, and for every meat spore she downed, another two were taking it's place. Even besides that, she was starting to weaken and she'd eaten her last power bar before they'd gone in, hoping that the jump in energy would see her through to this fight's end. It would appear that it wasn't going to, and she wasn't sure just how much more juice she had in the engine. She was going to be down to her body's reserve stores soon and after that...

"Remy! I need some help here, like, serious help." she called out, blasting the legs off another meat spore and then ducking under the swipe of a Prime just in time. She ended up having to roll and slide under a set of stair rails in order to avoid being overwhelmed, and even then she could feel more of them surrounding her on all sides.

"Dis is why you don't rush in, Jubilee. Move on my signal." Remy vaulted over his nearest wave of enemies, scattering cards around them. He'd learned in Russia that explosives, tearing their physical forms apart, worked best. His staff carved a hole in the lines, and Remy arced over Jubilee's attackers, yelling for her to move. She vacated her trapped position through the hole Remy made, and in switching spots, LeBeau grabbed the rails with both hands, charging them with purple energy.

"Mes braves, you going to enjoy dis." He said with a decidedly evil smile, and broke away, using his agility to pull himself over the crowd. As they hit the rails, both beams went up in a huge explosion, scything down all of the meat spores around them. Where he had stood, a literal crater had been blown in the area, littering with pieces of mangled flesh.

Emma felt the concussion of the blasts released by Remy and Jubilee, knew that it had bought them some breathing space. Her own fight had become blur in her mind, the sheer volume of meat spores beginning to overwhelm her, even with the help of her rag-tag army of day traders and financial analysts. She needed to do something that had a wider effect and an obvious first option sprang to mind.

Abandoning her attempts to dismantle meat spores, she used a gap created by a strut-wielding man attacking a meat spore to dive out of the circle that surrounded her. Her mental map of the floor, built through the eyes of the dying over the last few days, was still accurate and she ran for the door that concealed one section of the power supply to the floor. In her fury, she tore the door off its hinges, then punched through the plastic coating that covered the wires that ran from floor to ceiling. Grabbing a handful of exposed wires in her diamond fist she turned and, as the first wave of Primes reached her, drove them straight into the closest flesh that she could find.

Electricity sparked and jumped, a massive wave of power cooking flesh instantly, working as Emma had hoped. Undirected by Ignatova, the power had its usual effect on human flesh, dissolving Primes and meat spores alike. For a long moment, Emma thought there was hope; she had thought Ignatova would cut the power immediately, but it continued to thrum through the wires, rending the Primes down to pools of molten flesh. Perhaps Doug was having an effect.

Until Mastermold finally caught up and the power through the wires cut off abruptly.

With a curse, Emma let go of the power cables, and watched with a certain detachment as the Primes began to rebuild themselves from molten flesh. Behind the rebuilding Primes, a man took a step without looking and his foot slipped into one of the organic puddles that littered the floor. His screams pierced through the building as his flesh began to dissolve.

They were holding, she knew that, making dents in Ignatova's power, but it was not enough. If it kept going for too long, they would lose this war of attrition, simply through numbers. Mastermold had to be taken down from the inside, and it had to be soon.

"It's up to you Doug," she whispered and then waded forward into the fight again.

Some time later, Doug felt the sensation of a door opening. #Wake up, Cypher,# the voice of Emma Frost said.

--

Doug perceived a blankness, his senses devoid of any input after the embedded telepathic command from Emma. At some level, he understood that his consciousness had been stripped from his body by Mastermold's absorption process. There was a niggling sense that perhaps this should bother him more than it did, but it was shunted aside as unimportant. Doug paused as a lightning-swift thought came to him. Having been stripped of the external things that he tended to distract himself with, and now having been stripped even of his physical form, the most accurate word to describe the essential Doug-ness that was left would be 'soul'. Somewhat ironic for a young man who tended to describe himself as 'apathetic agnostic' at the best of times in matters of faith.

Doug moved, 'pushing' his consciousness outward to explore the place where he had awoken. Digital signals were parsed by his power into something akin to sensory input, information that he could interpret and act upon. And with that, he went to work, reaching his 'senses' out into the void and trying to understand how to interact with it. In this place, perception truly did shape reality in a very real way, and a small seed appeared in the nothingness, slowly extending tendrils and creeping outwards.

It could have been Doug's mind making images in order to perceive the complex lines of data, or they could have been Ignatova's that he was now spying on. It was impossible to tell where the interface started or ended, and ultimately, for whom or why it was shaped. Remy surprisingly had often posed a question which he claimed was from Descartes. Hearing the Cajun spout philosophy was surprising, until listening to the concept. LeBeau talked about the emerging power of psionics, and the ability to use them to trick your senses, to make unreal what is real and vice versa. He said that in the field, you cannot believe in anything but your senses, but you must be aware that your senses are not necessarily truth. If you see something that you think you can't possibility have seen, you cannot dismiss it without investigation to the fullest capacity, since even the most powerful telepaths will still make mistakes.

LeBeau's crudely applied philosophy had been for psychic attacks, but it also applied here. Doug couldn't know whether her made the world in order to perceive it in a fashion in which he could manipulate, or that it was Ignatova's creation, in which he must unlock the meanings in order to accomplish his mission. In either case, all he could do was rely on what was there, available to his senses, and try to investigate it for answers. Maybe what worked in the field also could work in the mind.

Regardless of the answer, the seed grew, until it became a plain that he hurtled towards rapidly, and finally touched down on. It was small, populated only by a few desolate spires, made almost from a cartoonish sketch of rock, abstract and sharp angled.

But for the spires, the plain was almost featureless, the stark whiteness making it difficult to determine where the 'ground' he was standing on ended and the 'sky' began. Deciding that one direction was probably as good as another in this case, as he was exploring and gathering information, he began to walk, the plain shifting around him as he moved. In the distance, a speck of something appeared as he approached it. As he grew nearer, Doug could see that it was an apple tree, its roots sinking seamlessly into the white plain. He knelt before it, examining where the roots ended, and then cocked his head and placed his palm against the trunk, trying to comprehend what the tree represented.

The apples quivered as he touched the tree, flickering into different colours. The bark felt artificial against his hands, roughly textured but smoothly formed, like plastic. Was it Ignatova, trying to remember what it felt like to touch a tree, or was it himself, trying to capture the image or 'idea' of a tree, in a way that indicated it was more? The nature of the world was like a snake eating it's own tail; all thought reversed and twisted until you ended up where you started.

With a jerk, Doug pulled down one of the apples, this one a viridian green never represented in nature before. Like the tree, it too seemed artificial, and a seam ran around the edge of it. Digging his fingers into the seam, the apple popped open into two clean halves, and seeds ringed the core. Considering, he pulled one of the seeds, and dropped it to the ground. The white featureless plain shimmered, and a tendril grew from it, reached up into a mockery of a sapling, with a new fruit, a single pear, dangling in front of him.

A subroutine! He didn't know what the fruit represented, or what the apples gave access to, but it was clearly a computer process.

He plucked the pear and split it open, just like he had with the apple. It came apart and showed seeds in exactly the same way. He pulled out a seed and dropped it again, and this time a bush sprang into existence, with a plum growing off one of its branches. Clearly the subroutine was recursive in some fashion, but changing subtly each time it was accessed. He plucked the plum, opened it, and dropped a seed. It took root, but this time instead of a plant, a polished hardwood door grew out of the ground. Doug stepped back, startled by the change. But he quickly recovered and reached his hand out to open the door and step through it.

The door opened to a set of steps, perhaps deeper into the system. He walked along them, and the side walls fell away. Around him was darkness, split in a thousand points and lines by bright colours. At first they seemed like wireframes, until he drew closer, moving further down the stairs, to see them collapse. He was descending into a vast city of light, which hummed and groaned and pulsed with power around him.

It could be cast from Doug's mind, or maybe it was the only way a digital being could comprehend the whole of the cyberspace ether, as one vast complex, glowing from activity. There were signs in a hundred languages around him, but for once, his power failed to translate them. That was a sign. It could be that his power didn't work in Ignatova, but it could also be that they represented commands and databases either he or she couldn't access yet, made obtuse by languages that they couldn't understand.

It couldn't be solely Ignatova's mind, and it couldn't be solely his. Somehow, the deeper he went, the less the border between them held in the massive data structure.

Doug descended into the city and landed on the glowing pavement. Around him, blocky geometric solids zipped around and through the buildings. Doug presumed that the movement of the solids was meant to represent information exchange, but it wasn't readily apparent. Could it be some other completely arcane purpose? Doug shook his head. He could second guess his interpretations and sit there paralyzed with indecision for an eternity. He moved to one side as a solid bore down directly on him, barely ducking out of the way in time as it zipped by. Though they had passed easily through the glowing structures of this place, no sense in risking harm to himself on the assumption that they would do the same to him.

The city seemed to stretch endless in front of him, underlying the need for speed. Doug's body would only last so long before it was fully assimilated into the flesh of Ignatova, and once that happened, Doug would lose his own mutant abilities. With those gone, he would be utterly powerless, trapped inside Ignatova's mind as an impotent ghost in the machine. He had to work fast, and find a way to work the system.

He hurried up the wide steps of one of the buildings, and stepped through the door, only to find himself in an isometric square garden, bordered by the walls of the building and yet, only solid for the first story for the most part, following the corners up further, opening the area up like a ruin whose reinforced corner posts are all that remains. The garden was green and grey, stone and bright grass all around a square of flagstones, surrounded by low benches. It was some kind of meeting place, and perhaps public areas meant some kind of access node?

If it was an access node, then how did one gain access? There was no obvious clue anywhere in the garden, no sign saying "THIS WAY TO GAIN CONTROL OF MEAT COMPUTER". Of course it wouldn't be that easy. Doug prowled the garden, pushing at benches, attempting to pry up flagstones. Somewhere there had to be a key, a way to delve deeper into the system.

After pushing and prodding at every other aspect of the garden, the only item left was a statue in the center, a granite figure approximately twice as tall as Doug. A heroic, strapping youth stood with his chest thrust resolutely out and one arm outstretched to point off at something in the distance. As Doug approached to within arm's length of it, however, the arm came down with a basso grinding noise and the head swiveled down to stare at him. It reached a hand out to Doug in a questioning gesture, and when Doug reached out and touched it, there was a flash and he was seated at a table opposite a figure whose face was completely in shadow. Between them was a game board, but the board and pieces were unlike any Doug had ever seen. The board rose in tiers that pivoted in multiple places, and the pieces were a bizarre blend of chessmen, mah-jong tiles, fantastical monsters, and abstract solids.

Doug reached out his hand hesitantly and set it on a piece that resembled a chess knight. He had to learn the rules of this game before he could hope to play it, and he sensed that he had only the single opportunity to get it correct and defeat his opponent.

The clack of the knight was visceral, a sound that was very real. If this was an interface, the sounds behind it were drawn from someone's actual experience and memories. Whatever this game came from, it wasn't an artificial application. As the first piece was set down, the figured reached out with a blue pyramid, placing it on the same line of squares and tiers as the knight. Under the piece, the squares all turned as blue as the pyramid.

Hm. That was different. The move of the knight hadn't lit up any squares the way the opponent's piece had. Maybe it had something to do with the solids. Doug experimentally picked up a cube and moved it forward. Instead of all the squares underneath the piece, the squares surrounding the cube on its tier turned the same red as the piece. ~Okay, so the geometric solids control territory...~

Slowly and hesitantly, he began to move pieces as he learned what each one seemed to do. More than a few of his lessons came at the hands of his opponent, as the faceless figure reached out and removed one of his pieces from the board. Some of the pieces seemed to have offensive roles, others had defensive roles. Some controlled territory; some subverted enemy pieces and brought them over to his side. The one thing he still couldn't seem to figure out was the victory conditions. His moves grew swifter as he learned the interactions, however. And at the very least, he could probably win by attrition, simply removing all of his opponent's pieces from the board. Of course, if his opponent reached a winning position before that happened... But he put that out of his head. He -had- to win. Failure was not an option.

As Doug's movements became quicker and more confident, his faceless opponent's became slower and unsure. As the game progressed, Doug began to discern a pattern in his opponent's reactions, as particular moves brought the same countermove when repeated. The question was how to exploit those repetitions to his advantage. He began a series of moves that he had played earlier in the game, and his opponent began to move their pieces in the same countering moves. Then, abruptly, Doug began to move a completely different set of pieces in a radically unorthodox shift in strategy, watching to see how the other player would react.

His opponent paused, as if unsure of its next move. Then, the face which had been shrouded in darkness paused, and looked up from the board. Behind the cowl was a face, young, female, but stylized to be almost abstract, like an old propaganda poster image. Only the eyes were real, staring out at him.

{{:.:independent actions:.:response not consistent with existing program routines:.:collective unity omits independent weakness:.:foreign presence interfacing:.:this is not your place:.:}}

"I was wondering when you would join the game, tovarisch," Doug responded, pressing the attack that he had begun. Obviously the faceless opponent was an automated security routine, and Mastermold had detected Cypher's intrusion and attack. And now she had taken over direct control of the game. Which was both a good thing and bad thing, Doug supposed. Good because it meant that he was winning, and he'd made Ignatova nervous. Bad because now he was playing a real opponent, and not the automated one. He pushed another piece forward, and the battle for control - of the board and the system - began in earnest.

Doug frowned after a particularly vicious exchange of pieces. He'd thought that Ignatova's play style would be different, and yet it was not all that dissimilar from the automated game that he'd been playing beforehand. It came on him in a flash. Ignatova was, in many ways, the perfect communist. The instrument of the state. Innovation and independent thinking were alien to her. And Ignatova's reactions were still coming slower and slower. He'd thought it was his creative gameplay confusing the automation, but as he saw pieces of the digital city around them flicker and darken, he realized that Emma, Jubilee, and Remy had taken the fight to the physical form of Mastermold, destroying her spores and primes, and denying her precious computing power. It was working. They were going to win. They were going to beat her again.

Doug confidently pressed forward a mass attack of his pieces, a straight hammerblow aimed at Ignatova's defenses. And when she moved pieces forward to meet the attack, exactly as he had anticipated, Doug shifted a small group of pieces in from one side, a tiny dirk aimed straight at the heart. The board flashed and disappeared, and Doug stood from his position.

{{impossible:.:there is no resistance:.: inevitable:.:you will not stop me:.:long live the heroes of the revolution:.:}}

"It's called perestroika," Doug retorted. "Don't you read the news?" The city around them began to quiver and shake, rocked by tremors and fracturing along fault lines. Pieces of it began to dissipate into random symbols, cascading off into the void. Doug sensed that the destruction within was being mirrored by destruction without, the flesh-encased mainframes decomposing rapidly without Ignatova's will to hold them together. Even as he seized control, he could feel her ceding the system to him, but not herself. As before, she had flung herself into the electronic ether as a digital ghost, without home or succor open to her. He spared the briefest moment of almost pity for Mastermold.

At the end, like the scorpion in the fable, she was only acting according to her nature. But that single moment was all he allowed himself, as he realized that with the system rapidly falling apart, he needed to pull himself back out, or he himself would cease to exist. He reached out, grasping the twisting bits of code that were fragmenting around him, frantically shaping them into a program. He visualized a womb, a place of safety, and prayed that he would be in time.

---

Emma ignored the people she had freed, allowing Jubilee to gather them and start herding them from the decomposing sludge that was the NYSE main trading floor. Frantically, she cast her mind into the disintegrating gloop, seeking some physical form that would match the echo of Doug's consciousness in her mind. He was still there, still alive - if vastly changed - but his mind echoed back and forth inside the walls, everywhere and nowhere. If she couldn't find him, if he hadn't had the strength to re-build himself from Ignatova's flesh, when the disintegration ended, then Doug would die.

Two miles was not anywhere outside Marie-Ange's jogging range. To do it at a full run was something else. Two miles, between Silver and the New York Stock Exchange, in a city that more resembled a war zone, in torn jeans and a borrowed t-shirt and sneakers and a backpack with a blinding headache. And her shoes were the only part of the run that was even close to helpful.

Marie-Ange wouldn't remember more than going out of Silver's damaged front doors at a dead run and then coming to a breathless panting stop just outside the NYSE. The migraine had only gotten worse the closer she got, the flashing lights at the edge of her vision and nausea twice causing her to slow just long enough to keep from falling over her own feet.

The fleshy growths on the outside of the building were already sloughing off into rapidly rotting piles of gore. Marie-Ange ignored them, and stepped over the the ropy wet tentacles crossing the ground and entranceways and the floor inside and looked across the vast trade floor at the sludge and growths and columns of repurposed flesh.

Emma knelt in the centre of the sludge, ignoring its vileness. Plunging her hands deep into it, she used the physical connection to direct her mind through the web of it, seeking Doug's physical form. His consciousness was spread wide, weakening and disintegrating with the flesh that contained it. Carefully, Emma scouted outwards, her mind gathering together what she could of Doug, carefully teasing his mind from the flesh, saving what she could even as she tried to follow the threads of it to its centre.

She had to stop running as soon as she entered the building - there was far too much slippery mess everywhere and knocking herself out would be slower than walking carefully. Marie-Ange gave no attention to the handful of people being led out of the building, and the very familiar voice of Jubilee urging them on, and moved unerringly through the NYSE to what she believed would have been the middle of the trade floor, and was now just another mass of rotting gore, with Emma Frost kneeling amidst it.

"I know where Doug.. is.. will be.. I don't know which one it is!" Marie-Ange stated, all traces of her usual formal precision gone in the urgency of the situation. "There should be... a ... womb? No, that is not quite right.."

Emma heard Marie-Ange's words and relief coursed through her. Doug had managed to make himself a physical form. The realisation that she hadn't killed him sang through veins like wine. Her head snapped around to face Marie-Ange. "Where?" she asked. "Point." She didn't care how brutal she sounded; too much of her attention remained on holding onto the parts of Doug's mind that wanted to slip away from her.

"The back. In the back, far away. Somewhere ... " Marie-Ange was already on the move, heading towards the back of the trade floor. "Cramped, and dark, and small." She stopped and closed her eyes for a moment, trying to recall the visions she had seen in the days prior. "Somewhere safe. No, not safe, somewhere isolated."

Emma rose from her knees in one fluid move, closely following Marie-Ange. She remembered the interface Doug had been heading towards when Mastermold had eaten him. It was somewhat isolated from the mass; perhaps memory had drawn him back at the end? Stopping beside Marie-Ange, she scouted the area around them, isolated an area where the disintegrating goop seemed unusually thick. Switching to diamond form, she dug her hands deep into the goop, shoving it sidewards. Her lips formed a thank you as she uncovered something that could only be described as a fleshy cyst, a smooth ovoid of flesh that pulsed with life even as the flesh around it died. Diamond fingers rippled carefully into the cyst, spilling out a clear fluid, then Emma ripped it wide.

In the midst of the fluid, a human body tumbled out to the floor, naked and curled in on itself. It had only the shortest of hairs on top of its head, and its skin was extremely pale and lacking in any calluses or scars or other dead tissue, but it was still recognizably Doug Ramsey.

Doug's eyes slowly opened, blinking against the harshness of the fluorescent lights in the building refracting off of Emma's diamond form. He struggled to his hands and knees and opened his mouth as if to speak, then coughed wetly, hacking and clutching at his throat. He retched, and the fluid from the cyst began pouring out of his mouth.

Emma switched back to flesh and held Doug's head gently as he managed to cough and retch up the fluid in his lungs and stomach. Even as she held him with one hand, she unzipped her jacket, shrugging out of it without letting go of Doug. With the hand that wasn't holding his head, she used it to wipe the majority of the fluid off his limbs.

"Em...Emma?" Doug asked, still squinting as the light shone painfully in his eyes. It felt like he'd been kept in darkness forever, and was practically blinded. He saw a blurry red-haired form standing off to one side. "A...Angie?" How had she gotten here? "Did...did we win?"

"We won," said Emma, simply. "You won. You beat Ignatova and saved us all. I'm proud of you, Douglas Ramsey." Emma turned her head back to Marie-Ange. "He's in pain, Marie-Ange. Like everything has been rubbed raw - mind and body. Be careful with him." She rose gracefully, gesturing for Marie-Ange to take her place. When the redhead had done so, Emma turned away from the couple, letting a weariness beyond imagining wash over her, for just a moment. Then she squared her shoulders and went to help Jubilee with the survivors.

Marie-Ange only had the very faintest idea of what Doug had done, what little she had seen and what she could guess at, and being anything less than absolutely gentle was the furthest thing from her mind. Heedless of the mess around them, she stayed holding Doug until he could sit up, and even after, kept one arm around him.

Once he was sitting, and the bouts of coughing had seemed to pass, she let the backpack slip from her shoulders, and reached in for one of the water bottles, keeping one arm around Doug. "When you're ready, I have clothes for you.." She said quietly.

"Clothes?" Doug looked down at his legs, completely naked and bare. "Oh." He should probably have been embarrassed at being naked in front of both Emma and his girlfriend, but that would have taken effort and brainpower he didn't have at the moment. He took the shirt and pants that Marie-Ange offered and pulled them on with her help. They immediately stuck to the remaining fluid on his body, but at least he wasn't naked anymore.

When Marie-Ange opened the water bottle, he was able to hold it in his hand and take small sips, washing the foul taste of whatever the goop he'd been in was out of his mouth. He climbed to his feet slowly, holding tight to Marie-Ange, and throwing his arm over her shoulders and leaning heavily on her after he had stood. The pair shuffled through the remains of Mastermold and out of the New York Stock Exchange and into the sunlight.

--

* Caissa is the goddess of chess.