Genosha: The Dawn of Liberation: A Touch of Poison

[x-gambit.livejournal.com]

The battle continues, as they face more dangerous weapons.



Only a last minute warning saved two X-Men, as a light mist-like spray shot out in their direction. Lorna and Sam dodged in opposite directions, but a guard who was trying to escape wasn’t so lucky. He screamed as the mist struck him, and fell to the ground, clutching his throat. Before their eyes, they could see his throat, face and chest start to bulge, and the cracking sound of bones breaking. Through his skin, fungal growths began to push through, tearing holes in his flesh. Both of his eyes popped out from the pressure of the growths behind them, that merged with the giant twist of plant flesh that grew from the still gurgling throat.

Marius sprang back, nearly leaving the contents of his stomach behind him. The spongy growths continued to swell until the man's flesh was completely subsumed, and for a few brief, hideous seconds something within the shapeless mass continued to spasm.

"Inhalant!" the X-Man called, automatically shielding his mouth and nose with an arm even though he knew he was beyond the range of the spray. He didn't know what else to call it -- he was getting bizarre readings whenever he looked at Moreau, whatever process the man had gone through was making an accurate assessment impossible. Was this Callie's power?

"Fuck this!" Kyle didn't even have a shirt to pull up over his mouth. This shit was not cool. "The fuck do we do now?" He coughed a few times, spat out a gob of something ochre yellow and pulsing and then staggered back. "What the fuck is this shit?"

"Goddamn motherfucking son of a bi-" Wade bit his cursing off mid-word because he'd managed to get some of that spray stuff up his nose and that shit not only stung, it tingled like it was doing the fucking tango with his nose hair. He felt something odd shift in his chest a moment later - there was no way that was good. Still, when he started coughing, he produced the same nasty globs of yellow. His were flecked with blood, but that was about par for the course.

The complete revulsion Sarah's body had for the airborne substance was a new feeling entirely. In between violent coughing, she glared up at Moreau. "Why won't you just fucking die?"

Having until now remained quiet, Paige suddenly pointed off in one direction, then another. "Okay, it seems the misters are there... and there. You can see the supplementary ones evenly spaced between. They have about a yard, maybe a yard and a half range, so there is a gap, but only of a few inches and that doesn't take into account wind speed."

"As helpful as that knowledge is, some of us still have an average respiratory system. An' that's not even taking into account the--" Moreau lashed out, and for one of the very few times in his life, Marius was actually forced to stop talking as it slammed into his invulnerable gut and drove him to the ground.

". . . spikes," Marius wheezed from his new position flat on his back.

"At least you get options!" Kyle rolled to avoid horrific injury by way of one of Moreau's seemingly unending weapons, horked out another virulently yellow gobbet and then came to a brief halt, staring at Wade. "Jesus fucking Christ, do you actually shit explosives.?"

Wade didn't even blink at the question, just threw the grenade he'd pulled from one of his many pouches, then pointed a finger at Kyle and said, "No." Pulling his shirt over his head, he ripped it into three sections and tied one of them around his face, then tossed the other pieces to Kyle and Sarah because growing plants was good for nature, but growing them out of your chest was bad for that whole 'staying alive' thing. He would have started singing the Bee Gees just for shits and giggles, but his chest was still being weird and he needed to figure out what the hell they were supposed to do about the gross flora problem. "Idea," he called, kneeling so he could open yet another pouch.

His loathing of Genosha was a complicated thing, tempered more often than not by an intense appreciation of their weapon depots. The mercenary hacked up another ball of wriggling goo and blood, trying not to wonder if that was pus mixed in or just his imagination. He had explosives to shape and remote detonators to insert.

Kyle was a little too busy slapping his hand over a slash in his leg to force the bleeding to stop to cover his face at first, but as soon as the blood slowed and the wound scabbed, he wrapped it around his mouth and nose, bandit-style. "The man shits explosives. Seriously." His voice was muffled by the cotton, but at least he wasn't wheezing quite so much.

"But that's why we love him." Sarah coughed out, grabbing the cotton swatch to cover her nose and mouth. "That, and he sacrifices his shirt for us." A spike from Moreau hit her bone-covered shoulder, hard enough to chip a chunk from the surface. She glanced back at Page and Marius. "Hey guys, can we get some help over here?"

With a sigh, Paige extended her arm to Marius. "I'm probably your best bet..."

Marius looked at the writhing mass of spikes and tentacles. There was enough to worry about from Moreau without the constant fear of one's lungs acquiring an exterior view.

The X-Man swiped two claws against the blonde's extended arm, just deep enough to draw blood. Belatedly, the realisation came that he had no open wounds, nor, thanks to Molly's power, the ability to create any. This left him with only one delivery system.

"Twice in two weeks," Marius muttered, lifting his hand. "The taste will never leave my mouth." He closed his eyes and sucked Paige's blood from his fingertips.

"Well, at least you didn't say I was delicious. I'd have hate to of filed all the paperwork involved with a restraining order," Paige shot back, husking away the wound.

"Kyle, Sarah," Wade rasped, then paused to hack up another bit of nastiness - he had to move his shirt aside so he could spit it out. This was not necessarily the most disgusting thing he'd ever dealt with, but it was certainly up there among his top three. Dropping the shirt back down to cover his nose and mouth again, he gestured toward the charges he'd shaped. "We need to get these somewhere that they'll do enough damage. One each. I've got the detonator."

"Oh, fuck you." Kyle scooped up one of the charges. What the fuck was he supposed to do with this shit? He shook his head once at Wade, and then tucked the thing under one arm like a football and went up. Straight up, as he took an impossible leap onto one of Moreau's legs, and climbed it, hauling himself up bodily as the Moreau-thing tried to throw him off.

Getting his claws and the tip of one finger ripped off by a spike, that wasn't so bad. The one that jutted into his shoulder, that was, and Kyle let out a noise that was half roar, half furious primal yell as he shoved the shaped charge into a crevice.

An equally primal roar sounded, and a huge stone cat hit the spike pinioning Kyle. It was Marius, now husked into a clumsy mix of rock and metal. The impact barely jolted the limb, but the X-Man closed his teeth hard and the lower fourth of the spike snapped under the augmented strength of his jaws. The severed remains, still functional and just as deadly, lashed after him as he bounded away -- but the tip lodged in Kyle's shoulder stayed behind.

Sarah circled around to Moreau's back, and tucked the charge under her chin to hold it. Praying she wouldn't drop it, Sarah took a bone knife in either hand and used them ice-climbing style to hoist herself up Moreau's back side. But unlike ice-falls, Moreau was constantly moving and using the vast arsenal embedded in the suit to ensure Sarah didn't make it to her destination--wherever that was.

A sudden jolt nearly threw Sarah off, and she managed to cling on until she could place the charge in a spot in Moreau's armour just below where his shoulders would be. Now, if only she could get down without being impaled.

Suddenly wishing she had a more ranged mutation, Paige rushed Moreau's front, making to quickly scale up his front to his face. It was an easily seen through decoy, but it worked enough to let Sarah at least get halfway to the ground before the both of them were sent tumbling in separate directions.

Everyone was roaring and making so much damn noise - Wade just wanted to blow the shit out of Moreau. He watched where Kyle and Sarah put their charges, then waited for several long seconds as he timed his own move. He went low. If they were gonna blow the fucker apart, they might as well do it right. Stretching uncomfortably beneath Moreau, Wade made quick work of the attaching the charge, avoided a set of spikes and a foot, and essentially threw himself back out from under the creature before he got trampled. The mercenary rolled to his feet, ignored the haze attempting to gather in his peripheral vision, and whistled loud and sharp. "Move out, people. You've got a countdown of five."

And then he began the countdown, backing away slowly as he did.

The spike in Kyle's shoulder burned, altogether too much like the pain Laurie had delivered and he could feel the muscle growing around it. He gave Marius a glance that clearly said "Thanks for the save" and let himself drop, hitting the ground already crouched for a run, and getting out and away, over to Wade, and more importantly to Wade's very sharp knives that could dug out the spike in his shoulder.

Sarah had to push herself to scramble out of the way, not only to avoid Moreau's feet, but to avoid the explosive charge that was soon to follow. Regaining her breath from the fall was just going to have to wait until she had the luxury of time to breathe. Unsteady and gasping, the force from the exploding charges nearly knocked her backwards into Wade and Kyle. She coughed hoarsely as smoke and fire erupted on Moreau's suit. "Oooh, pretty."

Moreau reeled back, from the pain and the shock of the explosion, exposing his underbelly and the dispensers.

"Aaand... go!" Paige yelled, hauling off towards the wall of poison spritzers. The smaller ones were easy to deactivate, like weeding out a dandelion; wiggle and pull. The larger ones, however involved more involved methods. More involved as in involving a lot of the full use of her legs, the strongest muscle knocking it down into a funny, bent angle.

Marius followed Paige into the tangle of spikes and tentacles, positioned himself opposite her, and began to tear everything that looked even remotely connected to the dispensers before Moreau could recover. He ripped with teeth, and claws, and let Wanda's powers sing to life and began shredding with chaos, too.

Just as it was occurring to him his side might be disabled, the mingling of chaos, shapeshifting, and the bath of mutation-based spores began to interact.

It helped to focus on the fight rather than the blood soaking his front while the spike was cut out of him, and it helped more to focus on it while the pain ebbed away as the wound healed over. Kyle's attention bounced from Paige to Marius to Moreau to Marius, stopping on his friend as he watched him... turn colors. Unnatural colors, more unnatural than the amethyst and rose quartz colored stone cat he'd been, now rippling with burnished copper and geode-like growths that spread up his paws and flanks.

Wounded shoulders were ignored utterly when Marius let out a cry of pain and was swatted away.

Marius fell in flailing heap that had nothing to do with the impact. The aggregations of metal and crystal embedded in the husked form bubbled into bizarrely organic shapes, as if attempting to echo the horrific growths that had erupted from the dead guard. His body was rapidly deforming into a shapeless mass, every thrash growing weaker and more limited.

Once before, Kyle had simply acted on instinct to save his friend, raking open his arm to share a healing factor. Now, Marius' skin was too thick, the chunks of rock growing and shedding off like flakes of mica, and there was one violent thrash and then nothing.

Kyle moved then, desperate and instinctive and bent to try to find Marius' face, to clear the growths away, and all he found was more growths, what could've been hair, a tumorous thing that had teeth and hair, a geode that burst under his claws to become wet sticky mucus. His claws slipped over flesh and metal and rock and caught, and Kyle pulled away on instinct, and a piece of Marius' ruined form came with him, splitting like a cocoon.

Under it was a shoulder. A real shoulder, not an overgrown bulbous thing, and Kyle dug in without pause, shredding skin and flaking stone and rusting metal away far too easily.

He couldn't feel the claws shredding at him, but Marius suddenly felt air on his skin, and realised it was skin, and then there was an entire arm he could move -- a human arm, with a hand. He reached for his face and gripped something hard and knobbly and pulled off the mass like a wet paper bag, and he could see now that Kyle was over him, still ripping away pounds and pounds of weight.

And then the malignant husk was off, and it was just a bloodied Kyle and panting Marius crouched in the middle of a slowly flaking mass of meat and stone.

"Worst Easter egg hunt ever." Kyle muttered. "I was expecting candy, not naked Marius." But he was smirking, and reaching a hand down to help up his friend regardless.

"And if I was to be forcibly stripped, I'd . . ." Marius paused, then looked at the pile of skin around him. He took Kyle's hand with a heavy sigh. "Never mind. Experience too traumatic, Quip Not Found."

Wade spared a glance for Marius and Kyle, but he couldn't really focus on them, as he was trying to figure out what to do with Moreau now that his charges had blown and his people were having... issues. Whipping the assault rifle around on its strap, he positioned it, took aim, and started firing controlled bursts of armor-piercing rounds into the creature's face. If that didn't get his attention, the mercenary really didn't know what would.

Distractions. Right.

Sarah pulled a bone from her shoulder, breaking it in two over her knee. She waited until Wade stopped shooting, and swung one of the bones in the direction of Moreau's head. "Hey asshole!" she shouted, throwing the second half of the bone, "how does it feel getting your ass kicked by your own prisoners?"

Paige smiled, and right on beat, tore the master circuitry from its box.



While they had neutralized some of Moreau’s weapons, the massive creature still kept coming. An optic blast punched a deep hole in his side, which was immediately filled by fungal growths, which poured in as rapidly as foam. They had seen it before; the growths covering the area while his entire repair systems fixed the damage, protected from further home. Unless they could find a way to shut it down, losing to Moreau was just a question of time.

Amanda grimaced, wiping sweat mixed with blood from her face. It felt like they'd been in this fight for days, and with the fucker constantly repairing himself, they were losing ground, not gaining it. They had to stop the weird fungal repair thing.

But how?

A flash of green caught her eye - Cammie, doing what Cammie did best, violence and mayhem. A sudden thought came to the witch and she grinned suddenly.

"Oi, Cammie! You ready for a recharge?"

"Give it to me," Cammie said, grinning, "I can always use a bit more juice. Just to end this fucking thing faster!"

Amanda took a deep breath and set her feet. "Get clear of Cammie!" she called out to whoever was in range, before she did something she hadn't done for a while, a series of basic elemental summoning spells. Air first, her urban magic twisting the spell to reflect the city's smog and industrial pollutants, then water, dredging up the sewers and drains, garbage and effluent essences combining into a type of sludge. She aimed all of it at Cammie, encompassing her team mate with a toxic cloud that would kill any other living thing even touching it.

"Grasshopper!" the witch grated, the twisting of the spell straining her nerves. "Snack time, front and centre, go!"

"I'm going to need you all to keep as much distance as you can from me." That was the only warning she would issue before getting to work. And by getting to work Nico meant letting loose. It was, in a way, a liberating feeling, to openly release the leashes that kept her apparently infinite hunger on hold. In seconds, her face was a number of cracks and fangs and dark energy flowing from everywhere, as she floated a few feet from the ground, arms opened as if she were about to embrace the monster in front of her. And in a way, she did; reaching out with her power Nico drained like the first time she had found her powers to be active, killing everything in her path, cracking the ground and making it dust, as if an invisible eraser had suddenly swept over the area.

It felt awesome. Nico was suddenly full of energy, which in turn made her drain stronger. Her cracks closed partly, as she had less need to strain herself, but her attack continued as she placated the fungus' attempts to outgrow the drain.

The reaction was immediate and visible, the fungus growing in overdrive in an attempt to do its job. And then Kurt, already looking pale and sick from just moments of contact, appeared and dropped Cammie onto the thickest section, poison dripping from her skin.

It almost knocked her out. It took a lot to overload her system, but whatever Amanda had done almost did it. Poison was oozing out of everywhere. Her arm, instantly overloaded, just kept discharging over and over again.

She laughed, not sure where her big brother had dropped her, "Holy fuck, this feels weird. So fucking weird!"

Callie stood back, watching the battle heat up before her. She watched as those she knew attempted to pull apart the abomination of a once-man, only to have their efforts thwarted as the fungal growth reappeared mere seconds after it had been removed. She watched as Cammie's attempt to poison the fungus resulted in explosive growth when she felt a familiar tugging sensation in her brain; something was screaming for her attention.

That was not right. Plants didn't cry out, didn't demand attention. They were more passive, needing her to establish the link before they could tell her anything. But the last time this had happened, she recalled, it ended up being a blood thirsty plant that tried to attack her and her classmates. Callie looked around her, trying to feel out the source of the this aberrant plant behavior when her eyes locked on the giant creature and her mouth formed an "o".

This was it. The fungus wasn't merely a fungus, it was a lichen! She could stop the growth, maybe. Biting her lip so hard she threatened to draw blood, Callie concentrated hard on the plant portion of the fungal-like substance, managing to slow and halt the expansion of the growths. Nothing about this plant felt even relatively normal, she noted as she scanned the creature. Everything she felt was completely wrong, as if someone had taken a harmless piece of lichen and twisted it and manipulated it into thinking its purpose was to protect and preserve this unnatural creature. It was not right. It was not just. And it definitely was not fair.

Like a gardener who weeded and pruned his garden to encourage good growth, Callie knew she had to destroy all the plant life connected to the monster. Cammie's poison had already started the process of killing all the life it touched, and it was now up to Callie to finish the job.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. She closed her eyes, unable to look as she coaxed and wheedled the plants to take in the poison as nutrients. The emptiness that followed made her sick to her stomach, or maybe that was feeling Cammie's poison at work. But it did not matter, as the potent substance continued to work its magic. The fungus would grow, and demanding more food it would feed upon the herbicide, then would quickly die off, with no new growth able to take its place.

She wiped a tear from her cheek. "I am so, so sorry."

"What are you little bastards doing?" Moreau puked up a gob of black, smoking fluid, body starting to convulsive. The more that his body tried to adapt for the poison, the more that the fungus grew, and the worse it made him. Parts of his armor were starting to corrode and smoke from the industrial chemicals running through his body. He coughed up another pint of chunky fluid, before accessing his internal systems. There was no choice but to shut down the fungal system. His armor plates locked up and his body turtled somewhat in a protective hunch as his systems shut down the system before it could overwhelm him.

Cammie was now completely enveloped in the fungus, and Kurt was all too aware that she still needed to breathe. Unceremoniously, he grabbed Kyle and Sarah and teleported back to where he'd left her. "Cut her out", he ordered. "Then jump down, or shout if you need me."

The fungus was soft and yielding under Kyle's claws, but as he dug, threatened to grow up over his arms, and he did as much tearing it away from his skin - at times taking the skin with it - as he did digging for Cammie. His head was down, and despite the fungal spores in the air, he kept breathing. He had to trust the healing factor would just deal with it - for once, his friend and mosh-pit buddy's smell was muted, a bare whiff of the sour milk and burnt oil that she normally gave off.

The bone armour sprouting from Sarah's arms and legs protected her from the fungus they were digging through, but she could feel the spores filling her lungs every time she breathed in. Still, she kept digging, carefully, in the same spot Kyle had indicated Cammie was. But when they found her, she wasn't moving.

Cammie hadn't been sure how long she had been in there. And what she had done actually implied a lot of trust in people - something she normally didn't have. She had eventually stopped breathing because, simply, there was no air to breathe. And though painful, it had been just like a light going out. No tunnel, no nothing.

And then there was pressure on her chest and pain and thought returned suddenly.

What the fuck? Was Kyle making out with her?

"Fuck..." she whispered, "Buy a girl a drink first."



With a wordless growl, Moreau turned and smashed through the wall. The prison block wasn’t the right place to do this. He wanted all the advantages he could find, as his spiked legs sank into the walls and tore the hole wider. The central maintenance shaft of the Citadel’s core opened up before him, dwarfing even his massive form. He smiled and started to climb it, slamming his spikes deep into the sides and pulling himself up the walls. Behind him, the mutants fire after him, but he was already too far to coordinate their attacks against.

“Flyers, track him. De rest of you-“ Remy pointed at the huge service elevators that lined the core, sending them up in knots to keep the pressure on Moreau. If they didn’t stop him now, there was no telling what he’d be able to do. Especially with his ranting threats. There wasn’t anyone they cared about that was out of Moreau’s target list if he survived. Moving with purpose, they followed him up, into the very top of the Citadel.