Hotel California: The Assault
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xp_logsRemy, Nico and Marie-Ange face Gambit.
WARNING: Sexual violence against non-player characters.
The hotel had become the Winchester Mystery House while their backs were turned.
The architecture beyond the study had been replaced by something designed if not by MC Escher then an enthusiastic fan. Doors opened into solid wall, staircases ended in abrupt drop-off. Windows offered a view of adjacent hallways. Passages looped back onto themselves or simply terminated in blank walls. What had once been a normal building had become a labyrinth.
Unless you had a guide. As they approached yet another split in the corridor a Left Turn sign appeared at the end of the hall. The opposite hall developed a sign of its own: Dead End.
"Dat's ominous." Remy muttered as they walked down the hall. It was weird not having the constant feeling of Gambit's memories in his head. The memories were disappearing, even as he walked the familiar hallway. It was Prague, he thought, although couldn't remember why it was apt. As they walked through the door, it suddenly came flooding back.
The first sign was the dead guard dog, with its head severed from the body at the neck. The large door looked more impressive than it was, and if he remembered right, there would be two dead guards and one still barely alive, trying to stuff his guts back into his torso while the second guard dog fed on them. In the room after would be the first daughter. Then the second. Then the wife.
And then the real creativity started.
Marie-Ange tried to keep her eyes off the bodies - qualifying them as bodies, even if they moved kept her from trying to look, to see if she could help. They were not real, and she kept telling herself that - and kept her eyes off Remy too, only glancing at him to make sure he was close. Mostly she watched for the signs, and kept an eye on Nico, to keep them all together.
Remy's face was grim as he walked through the door, and stopped. In a chair in the middle of the room lounged Gambit, idly twirling his staff. They could hear the damp rhythm of sex off in the far dark corner, and the occasional moan of pain, too high to be consensual. The figure smiled as they walked in.
"There are so many ways to break a person, you know. In the corner is little Natalya's two older cousins. She had three, but I gutted the first one and spiked him out so they could watch him die slowly, screaming in pain. 'Kill me, Fedor!'" Gambit said in a pitched voice. "Weeping and babbling and making them shit themselves in fear. And then, you offer them the choice. They can either die just like him, or they can take their young, defenseless cousin into the corner and rape her. Repeatedly. And once I'm satisfied they've shown her a proper good time, I'll let them go."
He smiled, miscoloured eyes switching from Nico to MA, ignoring Remy in the middle. "I did let them go. Poor Fedor killed himself before Christmas. And Nicholas, well, it seems little Natalya awoke something in him. When the police caught him, they found trophies from three victims in his apartment, and he was still wearing the genitals of the fourth around his own. And that was just the warm-up act. Did he ever tell you both about Christos' wife? She was the one that really took time. The red head reminds me of her."
"That is nice. I would appreci..." Marie-Ange started to say, and then her voice caught and hitched like an oncoming sob, as another scream shook the walls, literally. He wouldn't have been fooled anyway, but it might've been nice to try, she thought. She pressed her lips together, thinning them, and shook her head. She knew what Remy had been capable of - might still be capable of. "No... no, this is not real, and cannot be real, even if it was real. It is not real now..." she whispered, and her hand twitched like she wanted to reach for something, and she forced her fingers open, pressed against her ruined pants.
"What, did you never tell her what a hot date you used to be, Remy? Maybe I should show them."
"Dey not de ones you want, Gambit."
"That's where you're wrong."
"Nico, Marie-Ange - run. Through de doors and don't look back." He said, and before they could argue, he grabbed them back and yanked them back behind him, stumbling towards the door.
"Escape? I am God here, Remy. There's not escape."
"Just wanted some privacy, Gambit."
__*__
Jean prepares for the assault on the soul.
Shifting uneasily, Jim spared a glance at the other telepath. It could have been worse, he thought.
He could have been the one waiting for the signal.
The ceiling rippled and a pair of Doc Martens became visible, followed swiftly by the rest of Amanda as she fell through plaster as if it was nothing. She landed on the floor in a crouch, grimacing as she straightened up. "Remy, Nico and Angie have Gambit busy," she reported tersely. "Let's get this going before that fucker catches on."
"Whenever you're ready." The X-Man turned to his teammate, aware his opinion was not the relevant one.
"Jean?"
Jean stared at the fireplace, its hearth should've been blackened from years of fires. It wasn't. Her arms were folded; she didn't answer at first.
Jim exchanged a worried look with Amanda, torn between concern and urgency. "Jean," he said quietly, "I -- don't think they have much time."
"I know," Jean said, cutting through the brief moment of silence as she rubbed her forehead warily. The strain of her time spent there was starting to show by the dark circles under her eyes, her slightly ashen skin, and the way she hunched over, warping her tall frame as she leaned against the wall.
The word 'soul' had been thrown around there so metaphorically. It was perhaps a good a word as any but it felt almost mystical to describe things like that. She didn't feel comfortable with what she had to do.
In a way, relieving the person of suffering was one thing....but when it came down to it it was still ending their existence. It was her calling to preserve life. She had taken lives before. It was not something she relished.
Letting out a breath, Jean almost found herself wanting a cigarette--if she smoked. Perhaps it would take the edge off. She dragged herself away from the wall, limping over to Amanda.
"I'll need you to get a lock. You're the closest tether I have. It'll only be a moment."
Amanda nodded and held out her hands for Jean to take - a physical connection would help. "Whatever you need, Doc." She paused, then, looking intently at Jean. "He's ready," she added softly, meeting Jean's anguished eyes. "He wants to go. What's happening here... ending it will be a kindness to him. If we don't, he's gone anyway. Gambit will destroy what's left." She took the older woman's hands in her own and squeezed gently. "He needs you to help him rest, Jean."
Jean didn't break her gaze as she shook her head. "I know," she repeated, every truth, every second of her years behind those two words. The man was no longer alive, but he was still conscious and in hell. Giving mercy to him was the least she could do. Still, it was difficult. She wasn't going to lie.
After another couple of moments she slipped one hand out of Amanda's to place it on Amanda's temple.
"Let's begin," she said. Her eyes turned unfocused as she met Amanda's own and her mind pierced through the astral plane, searching for all the bits and pieces of the man's psionic signature.
The protection of the wards went beyond the physical. The psychic miasma of the entity's astral body was less choking. Mutant powers and magickal sympathy had expanded the witch's aura beyond the bounds of her astral body; the corruption immediately around her was weaker, like smoke blown back by a steady breeze.
But what Jean sought lay within that miasma. Another resonance hummed in Amanda's mind, weak and fragmented. Questing along the very edge of Amanda's influence, she felt its source. Within the muck of sourceless hunger she found bedrock: a human identity, long eroded and pushed deep beneath the surface like the ruins of an ancient city.
The physical body of Jean momentarily mirrored her astral one's actions, tilting her head. The Phoenix flared up in recognition, bleeding through into the real world. It cast a different light than its regular orange and yellow aura. The flames were dark bluish-black, as if the fire was burning something toxic, consuming the light from the room. It provided no warmth.
"There you are."
Her hand let go of Amanda's and her fingers slipped away from her temple, dropping to her sides.
Jim's lips thinned at the cast of the Phoenix effect, but he said nothing. Nothing was normal in this damn place, and they had no alternative. All he could do was keep an eye out and his mouth shut.
The telepath shook his head and turned his attention to Amanda. "Ready?"
Amanda nodded, transfixed by the dark phoenix form. "I'll try and see if I can help the others," she said, dragging her attention to Haller. "Since I seem to be able to impact this place, I should be able to use the building against the demon."
Jim nodded. "I'll watch your back," he said. If the aging wards around the study failed, as she had warned they might, he could at least provide some protection.
Or, in the case of the scenario no one really wanted to contemplate, alert the others the demon had taken Jean.
__*__
Wanda and Scott move in.
Scott blinked as he took an unsteady step reaching his hand out to steady himself against the nearest wall. Sucking in a deep breath he turned to check and see if Wanda was ok. "That was certainly unusual," he noted, "A little bit like being pulled in two directions at once. Is 'porting with Amanda normally like that?"
"I would not know," Wanda said through gritted teeth. She was pressing the palms of her hands against her eyes as if she was trying to keep them and her brain inside her skull. "That was a first for me. And if it is like that always, my last."
"I don't think it's her fault," Scott managed as he stood up and took a tentative step to check he had re-gained his equilibrium. "'Porting with Kurt isn't a barrel of laughs either, but at least then it doesn't feel like there's something in there with you that wants to suck out your brain in the most painful way possible."
Their conversation was interrupted by a flash of light. What had been a wall sconce had, at some point, become a stoplight -- and the signal now glowed green.
Wanda shared a look with Scott that spoke volumes about their mutual feelings regarding the hotel. "I'll take the lead," she said, heading towards a door that opened into some sort of court yard. She hesitated at the threshold but stepped through it as Scott approached her back, keeping an eye out for anything that might rush them.
The moment she fully left the safety of the hall, darkness came crashing down upon their head. She gasped and staggered back into Scott; there was an actual weight to the darkness and it settled heavily on her and she would later swear bits tried to creep inside of her as she breathed, unable to see anything.
Scott instinctively raised his hand to catch Wanda as she fell back into him, his eye looking past her to stare into the hallway. It was pitch black. Even the light from the doorway couldn't make headway against the oppressive darkness inside. His heavy glaring proving singularly unable to pierce the darkness, Scott turned to Wanda with a sigh. "Have I mentioned I'm starting to hate magic."
Wanda used Scott to steady herself before bringing her hand up, intent on using her powers to give them some light. "I am starting to agree," she said, words sounding heavier than normal to her ears. Her frown grew at the thready red light that flickered to life around her wrist - normally bright enough to light a room, it barely cast enough light to see the hand in front of her face.
The illumination was just bright enough that they were able to see the shadows squirm. Something that could have crawled from a botanist's deepest nightmares snaked from the courtyard and around Scott's leg. Before the X-Man even had time to register he was caught the vine had whipped him out into the darkness.
"Scott!" She reached for him and then the world, what she could see of it, was turned upside down. A thick vine slithered around her waist without her being aware before it tightened and pulled. Wanda hit the ground hard for a brief moment before being hauled up towards a blackened, writhing ceiling.
Scott couldn't see anything in the pitch black that surrounded him, the glimmer of Wanda's powers were faintly visible but they didn't really illuminate the situation. Not that they needed much illumination, there was something in the dark that had wrapped a...tentacle around the two of them and was dragging them up to the ceiling. Scott didn't want to find out what would happen when they got there. "Wanda, you ok?" the X-Man shouted as he struggled to turn around to face the ceiling.
A quick grunt was her only response as the vine tightened around her rib cage, making it almost impossible to breathe. Thankfully she didn't need to breathe much to wrap her hands around the rough flesh and channel chaos and entropy through it. There was no scream that she could hear but she felt the vine tightened for one moment before it exploded, sending her falling to the floor in a storm of plant bits.
The pulse of chaos energy coursed through the rest of the attacking vines, lighting them like an aggressive tangle of red Christmas lights . . . right before the explosion.
The two mutants hit the ground in a shower of twitching vegetation, and as they did something strange happened. One by one, patches of light began to appear. A gnarled shadow that might have been the trunk of a tree extruded the top of a light pole, while elsewhere the picturesque windows that looked into the courtyard began to transmute into neon signs. Here and there a cobble rose up to become a floodlight to cast halogen light across large swaths of the area.
There was one light not like the others. It was a blinker, the sort of light affixed to the top of skyscrapers to mark its position to low-flying aircraft. It topped a small glass and iron hothouse at the back of the courtyard, past a decorative fountain and nearly obscured by the foliage.
Dusting at his body Scott tried to clean off the last remnants of the vines which had enveloped his body just a few seconds ago, "Thanks," he nodded at Wanda before turning his attention back to the blinking light in the distance, "I think that's probably where we need to head," he theorized, pointing in the direction of the greenhouse.
"No problem." Wanda's response was muffled as she had pillowed her head in her arms upon hitting the ground and was debating the pros and cons of getting up. Finally getting up won and she slowly got to her feet, looking in the direction Scott had indicated. "Alright, shall we go and see what other horrible thing is going to try to eat us next?"
"I don't even want to think about it," Scott replied with a wry smile. "I'd probably just end up jinxing us and the hotel would probably end up turning into a giant venus flytrap and try to eat us," the X-Man noted with a laugh as he picked the most unlikely scenario he could think of as the two of them walked forward into the garden.
Scott and Wanda carefully examined the garden on either side of the path as they walked down the path towards the fountain in the center of the garden. They had already been ambushed once and neither mutant was particularly looking forward to the next obstacle thrown their way.
So a sense of trepidation accompanied the hissing and sloshing sound they heard coming from the fountain. Their heads turned slowly to face down the path only to observe a cloud of mist rising from the boiling red liquid which filled the basin. Scott blinked in surprise as a wave crested over the side of the fountain splashing onto the ground and carrying sadly familiar smell to the mutants.
"That's...Please tell me that's not blood," Scott whispered as another wave crested over the side followed by another. Scott and Wanda could only stare in horror as those smaller waves were followed by a wave that could only be described as a tsunami. It thundered over the side of the fountain and swept down the path towards Scott and Wanda.
__*__
Remy proposes a trade.
WARNING: Sexual violence towards non-player characters.
The scene suddenly shifted; the house melting away around them. A hot tropical sun burned away the last vestiges like it was mist, and around him was the panorama of the South Seas.
Madripoor. They could see Lowtown and Hightown in the distance, and the boats move into the harbour far below them. The open red cinnabar pillars of the temple rose around them, a slate floor firming up behind their feet. Most of the monks lay lifeless, angry wounds torn from their bodies, limbs left severed, like discarded litter about the pools of blood. Mount Yong Batak soared over the island, the temple tucked into the near top of the bluff, carved from the cliff faces by Buddhist settlers in the 14th century. It was one of the oldest Buddhist temples outside of Central Asia still in use - or at least it had been before Gambit.
On a stone dais, a young woman writhed, screaming as she was roughly fucked by a nude man. Her once-expensive silk dress had been torn, and her arms showed terrible gall marks from the restraints. She cried out again, and her head was pushed hard into the stone, as the man looked back over his shoulder at them. "Have you told them about little Mai yet? Her father was silly enough to think that he could sell Agency intel back to the Chinese, and then hide in the temple with his daughter to evade the hit squad Whelan sent after him. Too bad he didn't send a hit squad. Just me. Too bad the monks tried to not give him up right away. Too bad the girl was fifteen, which in just so many cultures is just ripe."
Remy sucked in a long breath and said nothing. He could remember the temple and the girl. Gambit stopped, taking a moment to thread a thin blade through both eye sockets from the side, hitting the nerve cluster in the sinus to cause tremendous pain. The screams went higher, thinner, as the man climaxed. He stepped away from the writhing, screaming girl who tried desperately to clutch at her ruined eyes.
"See, that one never really got enough justice at the Agency. Too many of the old fuckers had made their bones doing the same to young girls in Cambodia and Vietnam. A little too Chinky-Chinee for them to care." He shrugged, ignoring the blood on his naked body or the screams behind him. "She looked a little like Nico. Maybe I'll do that to her, just using that fucking staff first before the knife goes in. I don't think I care for another god here."
"She's not worth your time right now."
"No? Because you've got something more meaningful? Fuck, you've gotten boring. I wish you'd brought your wife for the trip. That bitch has seen some things, and she's tough. She'd last weeks. Maybe months." He laughed. "That is until she started to like it."
"Dat's not going to be part of the deal."
"Oh, we have a deal now? And what's that?"
"You stay here. All of you. All the memories, all the thoughts, everything out of my head. You keep Nico and MA. Dey separated from de others, running around you little funhouse right now. You can play wit' dem a long time."
"Why wouldn't I keep you all?"
"Because unless you got stupid recently, you know dat de longer you keep Jean, David and Scott, de sooner Xavier pulls together every telepath he can find, comes in, and burns you out for good. He will obliterate you and you know it."
"Is it just me, or does it seem like Xavier's been dying to fuck Jean since she was a teenager. I get that vibe, you know?"
"Gambit-"
"Relax sister. You have a point, but I could just let them go and keep the rest."
"We both need a story people will believe. 'manda will have Strange searching de afterlife for her. Same wit' Wanda. But if Nico and MA don't make it - especially if I tell de story how you killed dem and nearly me before we could escape, no one will think twice. De worst dat happens is her idiot boyfriend comes and shoots up de place. Deep down, no one cares if dey don't make it."
"You'd really trade them in order to get those memories out? I surprised. Didn't you turn over a new leaf; become the big hero."
"Remy never been a hero, and since Wisdom broke down, de hard decisions have come to me. I know dat I can't beat you here-" Appealing to his vanity never hurt. "and I've got a real life to go back to. Are de lives of MA and Nico worth spending de rest of my life wit' Ororo, finally at peace in my own head?"
Remy looked hard into Gambit's identical gaze. "Dey are. I hate to disappoint de others, but it's worth it to me."
"Are you so sure? Want to know what I have waiting for them?" The place shifted again, to a dull gray room with a long one-way window that Remy was on the other side of. Gambit walked in, dressed in a dark suit, and smiled at the girl in the shapeless grey dress, handcuffed to the table. "Remember Detroit? That little MI5 agent that was caught at the border and Whelan said had to be lost in the system?" He dropped a screwdriver on to the table.
"Don't do dis."
"We choose the screwdriver because it was easiest for prisoners to slip into their cells. They used to sharpen the tip on the concrete floor before using them as a shiv. It creates those deep, penetrative wounds that got me - well, us - thinking. What else could those be used for? Remember that young cop that tried to arrest you when he accidentally walked in during the fourth round?" He picked it up, and for a moment, the girl's face flickered to Marie-Ange's, and then Nico's, and then back. "Here, I can do it a dozen times. A hundred times. Day in and day out until I get tired of the screwdriver and find something else to use - I've got high hopes for an apple corer. And the whole time, they'll know it was you that did this to them. Is that what you want, Remy? Is it still worth it?"
Remy squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. "Oui."
"Oh, I like this. Because I don't think you realize just how much more this will hurt compared to all the other memories." He buried the screwdriver in the base of the girl's neck and stepped forward, putting his hand palm first on the glass. "If you're sure, just click your heels three times and say there's no place like home."
Remy reached up, and matched the gesture on the other side of the glass.
"That's right, Remy. Get ready for it to all be over," he said. Would Gambit honour the deal? Only if he believed Remy was still like him.
__*__
The final push.
The X-Man immediately unleashed an optical blast at the wave, but it was like trying to dam the river Nile with a plank: a good effort but ultimately futile. The blood flowed around the optical blast and carried on down the path. Scott grimaced as the seemingly endless wave approached only to be snapped out of his reverie by the ground beneath his feet shaking. With a grating noise the ground beneath his feet heaved up, sending Scott scrambling backwards to retain his balance as a storm drain rose out of the ground directly in the path of the wave.
With a sigh of relief Scott watched as the boiling blood which had almost swamped them was instead funneled down the hole which had opened up in its path. With a gurgling noise the flood was rendered null leaving only the path and empty fountain glistening with a few left over drops. Scott let his eye flick over the path before turning to Wanda.
"Maybe we wanna go around instead?"
"Smart man," Wanda responded, slowly retreating from the fountain in case it decided it wasn't done yet. Another path seemed to open up off to the side and, cautiously, they started to approach it.
The ornamental trees on one side erupted with steel spikes as the flowerbed on the other heaved itself to life and clawed towards them with a gnarled tangle of roots. The cobbles under their feet tore apart, hurling them both back towards the spikes.
Or would have, had a row of concrete construction barricades not sprung up to catch them just before they could be impaled.
Wanda was barely able to stop herself from releasing a wave of chaos energy - the barricade had come up so suddenly that it felt like she'd pulled a formerly unknown mental muscle in stopping herself. She and Scott nodded at each other and began to edge around it when the bushes that they were edging along began to shake as more vines shot out towards the two of them.
A sharp tug on her ankle caused Wanda to fall flat on her already inflamed back and she cried out in pain as the creature in the bush - or perhaps it was the bush - began to drag her towards it so quickly that her shirt ended up rucked up around her shoulders. Her fingers scrambled at the dirt in an attempt to stop her forward momentum towards the flash of red eyes and dripping teeth.
Back on the astral plane, Jean traversed the foundation, looking for a section of the "bedrock" that was more concise. She gathered the fragments that she found and they floated beside her, being pieced together and molded like clay to once again form some semblance of a human form. Her astral armor, sheathed around her, was heavy, extra fortified, reacting to the danger around her.
The corrosive presence of the demon resisted her efforts. The clay was gritty, crumbling; every time a fragment was placed another slid away, resuming its loose orbit around the attempt. The form held in a few places -- a patch of leg here, a piece of skull there -- but it was no more than a broken statue with features eroded with age.
Jean tried not to be deterred, and doubled her efforts to find every scrap, every part that was still left. She didn't want anything remaining for the demon to be able to corrupt or hurt any more. The fog around her was thick and dark. She almost felt like she were getting lost in the woods.
The darkness around her intensified, as if sensing the danger. Dry wind began to whip, scouring fragments from the edges.
There was increasing stress on Jean's astral armor. At first nothing more than the pressure of water against skin, every breath came harder. It was like being a deep-sea diver sinking ever closer to the ocean floor.
The wards broke.
There was a sensation almost like a pressure change, and the room began to distort. Jim started to call to Amanda, but the witch was embedded into the floor up to her forearms, her expression intense and distant -- her mind was not here, and there was no telling what an interruption would do.
The lights began to fail as the study twisted around them.
She felt Scott clamp down on her shoulders right as she wedged a booted foot into the widening jaw; the teeth pressed against the leather - it wouldn't protect her flesh for much longer. Feeling as if she were being torn in two as her friend pulled back and the creature forward, Wanda channeled as much entropic power as she could through the dirt beneath her. It channeled through the ground and burrowed through the roots of the plants thrashing about the ground.
It took a little longer than she would have liked but soon Wanda was able to extract her foot and, with Scott's help, shuffle backwards where she thunked her head on his shoulder. "I hate this place," she said, glowering as the wilting paths died enough to clear a path to what looked like a bridge. Wanda looked at Scott over her shoulder. "You go first."
There was a shriek behind them as something like a deranged Ent tore through the concrete barriers only to be run down by a phantom taxi that careened into it, horn blaring, before disappearing as abruptly as it had arrived. Signs of "Wrong Way" began appearing behind them as a none-too-subtle hint.
"Shit, fuck, forget that, ladies first!"
Scott took a moment to turn around and managed to catch a glimpse of the plant monster being hit by the taxi. "Looks like Amanda has everything in hand here," he agreed as he hurried after Wanda.
Jean sensed the fragments being scoured and tried to keep them as intact as she could with the astral version of a force field.
"No!" she gasped, lifting up her hands toward her face. Her hair billowed in the wind.
So intense was the pressure that the figure's subtle change was almost imperceptible. Though Jean's power kept the figure transfixed the space between the fragments deepened. Gaps became void, shadow darkened to emptiness.
The void did not decrease as the repair progressed. Instead the shadows fed on Jean's light, becoming sharper, more profound. The emptiness shifted, the blackness pushed out and back -- a shadow separated from its source.
The darkness around her was now claustrophobic. There was a pop as a hairline crack appeared in her armor. Then another, then another.
The only stable area was around Amanda. Her influence spidered concrete from where she knelt and altered the corner of a horsehair couch into that of a wooden bench. Cursing, Jim relinquished control to the telekinetic alter and threw up a shield that enclosed the area. With gritted teeth he looked to his teammate.
Jean stood on the shield's cusp, muscles locked and aura sputtering.
Neither of them managed to get much closer to the greenhouse before the next obstacle showed up in their path. Scott stumbled as the first tremor shook the ground. Scott shot Wanda a worried look as the quakes rapidly increased in intensity and frequency. The pebbles on the ground started bouncing as the ground beneath them started to heave, the two mutants shared a look before a small crack appeared between them. Scott's eye was drawn towards the crack as the shakes started to widen it. It looked like a grin, like something he imagined would look at home on the face of the Cheshire Cat.
"Move," he shouted as he and Wanda dived in opposite directions just in time as the crack split open into a wide maw. Looking around Scott saw that the smile wasn't the only maw which had opened, as the one-eyed man watched another crack appeared beneath his feet, sending him scrambling for safety before another maw appeared. Glancing over at Wanda he saw she was also beset by the randomly appearing holes in the earth. The X-Man couldn't stay still for long as the earth beneath him split open necessitating a desperate dive to get clear, a dive which sent Scott rolling into a metal pillar.
"What?" The X-Man looked around. He'd rolled onto the Brooklyn Bridge, or something that looked like a smaller version of the Brooklyn Bridge. Scott glanced at Wanda and saw she was safely positioned on Tower Bridge. Another bridge and another one appeared, linked end-to-end to create a safe path leading on towards the greenhouse, and most importantly over the maws which were still appearing on the ground beneath them.
Scott took a deep breath and hurried down the pathway that had been created, meeting up with Wanda as they stood staring at the greenhouse. There was only a short stretch of ground left but neither of them thought it was going to be easy to cross the remaining ground. "Once last push," Scott noted nodding at the ground, "Shall we?"
Sighing, Wanda started forward slowly, eyes scanning the ground and surrounding area for any potential traps. Not that any of the other surprises had really given them much in the way of warning before trying to kill them. Still, there was no heavy shrubbery or walls or anything else but open ground - and that made her even more nervous.
They had only gone a few feet when she stopped and drew back at the sharp smell of something burning. What, she couldn't say - she had sat at enough campfires in her life to recognize the gentle smell of an open camp fire and had witness more violent conflagrations but this escaped her ability to catalog. Another step, though, and suddenly ...
Where sand had once been a sudden river of lava started to boil up from the ground, chewing through dirt and earth at a startling speed. Wanda screamed as a flash of hot fire flew by, missing her face by inches and leaving the smell of slightly scorched earth as she struggled to maintain her balance. Any remaining safe ground was quickly eroding beneath their feet and her already abused boots were turning soft as she leaped from one shrinking piece of ground to another.
Jean gritted her teeth, letting out a shriek of pain as she felt something other than her armor snap. Some of the flames around her slowly started to go out, snuffed by the wind. She floated up into the air, trying desperately to keep the pieces together. Tendrils of flame shot from her body, wrapping around the form in an attempt to bind the pieces.
And the gathered shadow leaped.
It sprang at her with boneless fluidity almost too fast to register, a dark, empty space in the shape of a man. Not just featureless, but a lack -- of warmth, of light, of life. The thing twisted with Gambit's monstrous grace and caught her in mid-air. Freezing hands closed around her neck, and its foul, carrion breath fell on her like a winter wind.
In the center of a void that should have been a face floated two points of ruby light.
Jack hissed as the pressure on the shield intensified. Shapeless objects squirmed around their tiny island, felt but not seen -- there was no longer any sense of space around them, only movement pressing down on all sides. The sole illumination now was Jean's corona, now dimmed to nothing but a faint, bluish glow.
Almost out.
Jean began to gasp again, fighting to breathe as her eyes locked on the void, her body twisting and writhing in agony from the pressure and the cold. Suddenly, her narrowed eyes softened. Anger. Pain. Fear. It was all of these things the demon craved. It would consume it, gorge itself on her, on the others, until there was nothing left. Letting herself be overcome with those emotions only fed the demon itself. It made it stronger. She had to do things another way.
"No," she repeated, wisps of flame bleeding through the cracks in her armor. She could feel something growing, changing, as the fire snaked through it's hands and spread throughout Jean's form, bluish-black melting away into orange-yellow.
"I am fire. I am life, " Jean said. Her astral skin burned away to reveal a body made of fire, the Phoenix's wings unfurled.
" So burn. "
Its scream tore the sound from the astral plane. It reared back, but too late; the flame was already coursing up its arms, flowing towards its head and heart. It writhed, humanoid form losing cohesion as it did. With a handful of stumbling backward steps, the avatar disintegrated.
Jean spread her palms and lifted her head, searching the miasma. The darkness still remained, it had only retreated. Her eyes lowered toward the remains of the demonologist. They lingered. Lifting one hand, the Phoenix's wings billowed, growing in strength as the fire spread throughout the entire area. It shot through every nook and cranny, obliterating every trace of the demonologist it could find.
"Goodbye."
There was no death cry, no shattering of self. Not enough remained of the man for that. But there were wisps of sensation, and so Jean knew the shock of an alien personality and the sharp red edge it brought. She felt, too, the hopeless grasping of a drowning soul -- and unexpected purchase. Another presence, removed but carrying the spirit of a world she had longed to know but had been unable to see. Not purchase enough for salvation, but enough. Enough to guide flame, and the release it brought.
Just impressions, like the last of the light of a long-dead star.
She didn't hear the items appearing on either side of the river of fire, not over the roar of the lava and her own heart beating wildly in her ears, but Wanda couldn't miss the sudden explosion of water from over a dozen small things. Water pressure like that was unheard of in any city but here Amanda was pulling from more than a regular city. In minutes, Scott and Wanda were left standing, soaking wet, amid a now empty riverbed that steamed around them.
Not saying anything, too frustrated and tired, Wanda simply pointed forward.
Scott felt as tired as Wanda looked but forced himself to wring the water out of his hair and gingerly stretched his foot out to touch the dirt remaining between themselves and the greenhouse. No killer plants or darts of ice appeared, it looked like they were safe for now. Quickly crossing the remaining distance Scott reached out to test the handle of the greenhouse. As expected it was locked. Turning back to face Wanda, Scott shrugged. "It was worth a try," he noted wryly.
Wanda pressed her hands against the glass. It was thick and old, the type of glass that wasn't smooth enough to be anything close to modern. Old or new, didn't matter. "Stand back, Scott," she said, fingers pressing tighter against window pane; under her flesh, tiny fractures began to show as she slowly fed chaos into structure barring their way. "And cover your head."
Like ice fracturing under the weight of a footstep, the glass followed suit to the pressure of her powers. The fissures exploded outward from under her palms faster than any eye, even hers, could track before it finally exploded into tiny but deadly daggers. Wanda dropped to her feet, arms above her head, screaming a warning as the shattering glass showed them what it had been hiding.
What it had been trapping.
Scott let the arm which had instinctively flown up to cover his face drop down to his side and caught his first view of the scene inside the greenhouse. All that was left of the demonologist was a gaunt cadaver lying in the middle of a collection of broken plant pots and shattered tools. Spiderwebs coated the whole scene, lending it a depressing ambiance. There was nothing demonic or evil about this. Scott wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn't this: an old man who had dragged himself here to die, sucked dry by the demonic essence he had proven unable to control.
Gathering energy in his eye Scott took a moment to examine the old man's face. He may have brought the demon that had tormented them all into the world; but nobody deserved to die like this, alone among the detritus of a greenhouse.
Focusing the energy he'd built up in his eye Scott loosed a wide-angled optical blast, one which covered the entire remnants of the greenhouse, pulverizing everything that had survived Wanda's shattering of the glass structure and leaving a shallow crater as the only sign anything had ever occupied the spot.
Turning his back on the crater, Scott stared back across the garden that they'd had to cross to get here. It had fallen silent. No sign of the hazards which had plagued their journey across it, just the grass trees and flowers waving in the slight breeze.
"I really hate magic," he said softly speaking more to himself than Wanda as he started down the garden path towards the door he hoped would lead them out of there.
The Phoenix's flare slashed the darkness like a blade. Jack recoiled, instinctively shielding his eyes from a light that was only half visual, but his falter made no difference. Shapes that had been amorphous contracted, retreating before flame now clear and untainted. The room wavered, then stabilized, then was still.
Jack, still hovering protectively over Amanda, hissed "Jesus, woman!"
Initially Jean merely floated there like a buoy in the water, staring at nothing as she tried to process what had happened, all the while surveying the mindscape to see if there was anything left. Nothing.
Haller's voice brought her back like a kick to the back of the knee and she blinked. The world stormed back in and the Phoenix dissipated, as if a candle had been blown out. Jean floated back down to the ground, gently testing her weight on her bad leg. The small burst of pain made her draw in a breath, which, in turn, made her bite back a heavy grunt as she discovered a new broken bone in one of her ribs.
"He's gone."
__*__
A parting word.
"Now, which one to start with? Maybe the- wait..."
Remy was fading out of existence, already shifting. "Something wrong, homme?"
"There's- what have you done! This was you!"
"Non, dis was de people dat you were sure were trapped ripping de guts out of you control over dis place. While you got to - indulge youself in dis. Hope you like you own company, Gambit. It's about to be all you got in a minute - a sad little god of a world of one."
"No!" he lunged at Remy, but the Cajun had already disappeared, leaving him behind on the floor of the chamber and left entirely alone.
WARNING: Sexual violence against non-player characters.
The hotel had become the Winchester Mystery House while their backs were turned.
The architecture beyond the study had been replaced by something designed if not by MC Escher then an enthusiastic fan. Doors opened into solid wall, staircases ended in abrupt drop-off. Windows offered a view of adjacent hallways. Passages looped back onto themselves or simply terminated in blank walls. What had once been a normal building had become a labyrinth.
Unless you had a guide. As they approached yet another split in the corridor a Left Turn sign appeared at the end of the hall. The opposite hall developed a sign of its own: Dead End.
"Dat's ominous." Remy muttered as they walked down the hall. It was weird not having the constant feeling of Gambit's memories in his head. The memories were disappearing, even as he walked the familiar hallway. It was Prague, he thought, although couldn't remember why it was apt. As they walked through the door, it suddenly came flooding back.
The first sign was the dead guard dog, with its head severed from the body at the neck. The large door looked more impressive than it was, and if he remembered right, there would be two dead guards and one still barely alive, trying to stuff his guts back into his torso while the second guard dog fed on them. In the room after would be the first daughter. Then the second. Then the wife.
And then the real creativity started.
Marie-Ange tried to keep her eyes off the bodies - qualifying them as bodies, even if they moved kept her from trying to look, to see if she could help. They were not real, and she kept telling herself that - and kept her eyes off Remy too, only glancing at him to make sure he was close. Mostly she watched for the signs, and kept an eye on Nico, to keep them all together.
Remy's face was grim as he walked through the door, and stopped. In a chair in the middle of the room lounged Gambit, idly twirling his staff. They could hear the damp rhythm of sex off in the far dark corner, and the occasional moan of pain, too high to be consensual. The figure smiled as they walked in.
"There are so many ways to break a person, you know. In the corner is little Natalya's two older cousins. She had three, but I gutted the first one and spiked him out so they could watch him die slowly, screaming in pain. 'Kill me, Fedor!'" Gambit said in a pitched voice. "Weeping and babbling and making them shit themselves in fear. And then, you offer them the choice. They can either die just like him, or they can take their young, defenseless cousin into the corner and rape her. Repeatedly. And once I'm satisfied they've shown her a proper good time, I'll let them go."
He smiled, miscoloured eyes switching from Nico to MA, ignoring Remy in the middle. "I did let them go. Poor Fedor killed himself before Christmas. And Nicholas, well, it seems little Natalya awoke something in him. When the police caught him, they found trophies from three victims in his apartment, and he was still wearing the genitals of the fourth around his own. And that was just the warm-up act. Did he ever tell you both about Christos' wife? She was the one that really took time. The red head reminds me of her."
"That is nice. I would appreci..." Marie-Ange started to say, and then her voice caught and hitched like an oncoming sob, as another scream shook the walls, literally. He wouldn't have been fooled anyway, but it might've been nice to try, she thought. She pressed her lips together, thinning them, and shook her head. She knew what Remy had been capable of - might still be capable of. "No... no, this is not real, and cannot be real, even if it was real. It is not real now..." she whispered, and her hand twitched like she wanted to reach for something, and she forced her fingers open, pressed against her ruined pants.
"What, did you never tell her what a hot date you used to be, Remy? Maybe I should show them."
"Dey not de ones you want, Gambit."
"That's where you're wrong."
"Nico, Marie-Ange - run. Through de doors and don't look back." He said, and before they could argue, he grabbed them back and yanked them back behind him, stumbling towards the door.
"Escape? I am God here, Remy. There's not escape."
"Just wanted some privacy, Gambit."
Jean prepares for the assault on the soul.
Shifting uneasily, Jim spared a glance at the other telepath. It could have been worse, he thought.
He could have been the one waiting for the signal.
The ceiling rippled and a pair of Doc Martens became visible, followed swiftly by the rest of Amanda as she fell through plaster as if it was nothing. She landed on the floor in a crouch, grimacing as she straightened up. "Remy, Nico and Angie have Gambit busy," she reported tersely. "Let's get this going before that fucker catches on."
"Whenever you're ready." The X-Man turned to his teammate, aware his opinion was not the relevant one.
"Jean?"
Jean stared at the fireplace, its hearth should've been blackened from years of fires. It wasn't. Her arms were folded; she didn't answer at first.
Jim exchanged a worried look with Amanda, torn between concern and urgency. "Jean," he said quietly, "I -- don't think they have much time."
"I know," Jean said, cutting through the brief moment of silence as she rubbed her forehead warily. The strain of her time spent there was starting to show by the dark circles under her eyes, her slightly ashen skin, and the way she hunched over, warping her tall frame as she leaned against the wall.
The word 'soul' had been thrown around there so metaphorically. It was perhaps a good a word as any but it felt almost mystical to describe things like that. She didn't feel comfortable with what she had to do.
In a way, relieving the person of suffering was one thing....but when it came down to it it was still ending their existence. It was her calling to preserve life. She had taken lives before. It was not something she relished.
Letting out a breath, Jean almost found herself wanting a cigarette--if she smoked. Perhaps it would take the edge off. She dragged herself away from the wall, limping over to Amanda.
"I'll need you to get a lock. You're the closest tether I have. It'll only be a moment."
Amanda nodded and held out her hands for Jean to take - a physical connection would help. "Whatever you need, Doc." She paused, then, looking intently at Jean. "He's ready," she added softly, meeting Jean's anguished eyes. "He wants to go. What's happening here... ending it will be a kindness to him. If we don't, he's gone anyway. Gambit will destroy what's left." She took the older woman's hands in her own and squeezed gently. "He needs you to help him rest, Jean."
Jean didn't break her gaze as she shook her head. "I know," she repeated, every truth, every second of her years behind those two words. The man was no longer alive, but he was still conscious and in hell. Giving mercy to him was the least she could do. Still, it was difficult. She wasn't going to lie.
After another couple of moments she slipped one hand out of Amanda's to place it on Amanda's temple.
"Let's begin," she said. Her eyes turned unfocused as she met Amanda's own and her mind pierced through the astral plane, searching for all the bits and pieces of the man's psionic signature.
The protection of the wards went beyond the physical. The psychic miasma of the entity's astral body was less choking. Mutant powers and magickal sympathy had expanded the witch's aura beyond the bounds of her astral body; the corruption immediately around her was weaker, like smoke blown back by a steady breeze.
But what Jean sought lay within that miasma. Another resonance hummed in Amanda's mind, weak and fragmented. Questing along the very edge of Amanda's influence, she felt its source. Within the muck of sourceless hunger she found bedrock: a human identity, long eroded and pushed deep beneath the surface like the ruins of an ancient city.
The physical body of Jean momentarily mirrored her astral one's actions, tilting her head. The Phoenix flared up in recognition, bleeding through into the real world. It cast a different light than its regular orange and yellow aura. The flames were dark bluish-black, as if the fire was burning something toxic, consuming the light from the room. It provided no warmth.
"There you are."
Her hand let go of Amanda's and her fingers slipped away from her temple, dropping to her sides.
Jim's lips thinned at the cast of the Phoenix effect, but he said nothing. Nothing was normal in this damn place, and they had no alternative. All he could do was keep an eye out and his mouth shut.
The telepath shook his head and turned his attention to Amanda. "Ready?"
Amanda nodded, transfixed by the dark phoenix form. "I'll try and see if I can help the others," she said, dragging her attention to Haller. "Since I seem to be able to impact this place, I should be able to use the building against the demon."
Jim nodded. "I'll watch your back," he said. If the aging wards around the study failed, as she had warned they might, he could at least provide some protection.
Or, in the case of the scenario no one really wanted to contemplate, alert the others the demon had taken Jean.
Wanda and Scott move in.
Scott blinked as he took an unsteady step reaching his hand out to steady himself against the nearest wall. Sucking in a deep breath he turned to check and see if Wanda was ok. "That was certainly unusual," he noted, "A little bit like being pulled in two directions at once. Is 'porting with Amanda normally like that?"
"I would not know," Wanda said through gritted teeth. She was pressing the palms of her hands against her eyes as if she was trying to keep them and her brain inside her skull. "That was a first for me. And if it is like that always, my last."
"I don't think it's her fault," Scott managed as he stood up and took a tentative step to check he had re-gained his equilibrium. "'Porting with Kurt isn't a barrel of laughs either, but at least then it doesn't feel like there's something in there with you that wants to suck out your brain in the most painful way possible."
Their conversation was interrupted by a flash of light. What had been a wall sconce had, at some point, become a stoplight -- and the signal now glowed green.
Wanda shared a look with Scott that spoke volumes about their mutual feelings regarding the hotel. "I'll take the lead," she said, heading towards a door that opened into some sort of court yard. She hesitated at the threshold but stepped through it as Scott approached her back, keeping an eye out for anything that might rush them.
The moment she fully left the safety of the hall, darkness came crashing down upon their head. She gasped and staggered back into Scott; there was an actual weight to the darkness and it settled heavily on her and she would later swear bits tried to creep inside of her as she breathed, unable to see anything.
Scott instinctively raised his hand to catch Wanda as she fell back into him, his eye looking past her to stare into the hallway. It was pitch black. Even the light from the doorway couldn't make headway against the oppressive darkness inside. His heavy glaring proving singularly unable to pierce the darkness, Scott turned to Wanda with a sigh. "Have I mentioned I'm starting to hate magic."
Wanda used Scott to steady herself before bringing her hand up, intent on using her powers to give them some light. "I am starting to agree," she said, words sounding heavier than normal to her ears. Her frown grew at the thready red light that flickered to life around her wrist - normally bright enough to light a room, it barely cast enough light to see the hand in front of her face.
The illumination was just bright enough that they were able to see the shadows squirm. Something that could have crawled from a botanist's deepest nightmares snaked from the courtyard and around Scott's leg. Before the X-Man even had time to register he was caught the vine had whipped him out into the darkness.
"Scott!" She reached for him and then the world, what she could see of it, was turned upside down. A thick vine slithered around her waist without her being aware before it tightened and pulled. Wanda hit the ground hard for a brief moment before being hauled up towards a blackened, writhing ceiling.
Scott couldn't see anything in the pitch black that surrounded him, the glimmer of Wanda's powers were faintly visible but they didn't really illuminate the situation. Not that they needed much illumination, there was something in the dark that had wrapped a...tentacle around the two of them and was dragging them up to the ceiling. Scott didn't want to find out what would happen when they got there. "Wanda, you ok?" the X-Man shouted as he struggled to turn around to face the ceiling.
A quick grunt was her only response as the vine tightened around her rib cage, making it almost impossible to breathe. Thankfully she didn't need to breathe much to wrap her hands around the rough flesh and channel chaos and entropy through it. There was no scream that she could hear but she felt the vine tightened for one moment before it exploded, sending her falling to the floor in a storm of plant bits.
The pulse of chaos energy coursed through the rest of the attacking vines, lighting them like an aggressive tangle of red Christmas lights . . . right before the explosion.
The two mutants hit the ground in a shower of twitching vegetation, and as they did something strange happened. One by one, patches of light began to appear. A gnarled shadow that might have been the trunk of a tree extruded the top of a light pole, while elsewhere the picturesque windows that looked into the courtyard began to transmute into neon signs. Here and there a cobble rose up to become a floodlight to cast halogen light across large swaths of the area.
There was one light not like the others. It was a blinker, the sort of light affixed to the top of skyscrapers to mark its position to low-flying aircraft. It topped a small glass and iron hothouse at the back of the courtyard, past a decorative fountain and nearly obscured by the foliage.
Dusting at his body Scott tried to clean off the last remnants of the vines which had enveloped his body just a few seconds ago, "Thanks," he nodded at Wanda before turning his attention back to the blinking light in the distance, "I think that's probably where we need to head," he theorized, pointing in the direction of the greenhouse.
"No problem." Wanda's response was muffled as she had pillowed her head in her arms upon hitting the ground and was debating the pros and cons of getting up. Finally getting up won and she slowly got to her feet, looking in the direction Scott had indicated. "Alright, shall we go and see what other horrible thing is going to try to eat us next?"
"I don't even want to think about it," Scott replied with a wry smile. "I'd probably just end up jinxing us and the hotel would probably end up turning into a giant venus flytrap and try to eat us," the X-Man noted with a laugh as he picked the most unlikely scenario he could think of as the two of them walked forward into the garden.
Scott and Wanda carefully examined the garden on either side of the path as they walked down the path towards the fountain in the center of the garden. They had already been ambushed once and neither mutant was particularly looking forward to the next obstacle thrown their way.
So a sense of trepidation accompanied the hissing and sloshing sound they heard coming from the fountain. Their heads turned slowly to face down the path only to observe a cloud of mist rising from the boiling red liquid which filled the basin. Scott blinked in surprise as a wave crested over the side of the fountain splashing onto the ground and carrying sadly familiar smell to the mutants.
"That's...Please tell me that's not blood," Scott whispered as another wave crested over the side followed by another. Scott and Wanda could only stare in horror as those smaller waves were followed by a wave that could only be described as a tsunami. It thundered over the side of the fountain and swept down the path towards Scott and Wanda.
Remy proposes a trade.
WARNING: Sexual violence towards non-player characters.
The scene suddenly shifted; the house melting away around them. A hot tropical sun burned away the last vestiges like it was mist, and around him was the panorama of the South Seas.
Madripoor. They could see Lowtown and Hightown in the distance, and the boats move into the harbour far below them. The open red cinnabar pillars of the temple rose around them, a slate floor firming up behind their feet. Most of the monks lay lifeless, angry wounds torn from their bodies, limbs left severed, like discarded litter about the pools of blood. Mount Yong Batak soared over the island, the temple tucked into the near top of the bluff, carved from the cliff faces by Buddhist settlers in the 14th century. It was one of the oldest Buddhist temples outside of Central Asia still in use - or at least it had been before Gambit.
On a stone dais, a young woman writhed, screaming as she was roughly fucked by a nude man. Her once-expensive silk dress had been torn, and her arms showed terrible gall marks from the restraints. She cried out again, and her head was pushed hard into the stone, as the man looked back over his shoulder at them. "Have you told them about little Mai yet? Her father was silly enough to think that he could sell Agency intel back to the Chinese, and then hide in the temple with his daughter to evade the hit squad Whelan sent after him. Too bad he didn't send a hit squad. Just me. Too bad the monks tried to not give him up right away. Too bad the girl was fifteen, which in just so many cultures is just ripe."
Remy sucked in a long breath and said nothing. He could remember the temple and the girl. Gambit stopped, taking a moment to thread a thin blade through both eye sockets from the side, hitting the nerve cluster in the sinus to cause tremendous pain. The screams went higher, thinner, as the man climaxed. He stepped away from the writhing, screaming girl who tried desperately to clutch at her ruined eyes.
"See, that one never really got enough justice at the Agency. Too many of the old fuckers had made their bones doing the same to young girls in Cambodia and Vietnam. A little too Chinky-Chinee for them to care." He shrugged, ignoring the blood on his naked body or the screams behind him. "She looked a little like Nico. Maybe I'll do that to her, just using that fucking staff first before the knife goes in. I don't think I care for another god here."
"She's not worth your time right now."
"No? Because you've got something more meaningful? Fuck, you've gotten boring. I wish you'd brought your wife for the trip. That bitch has seen some things, and she's tough. She'd last weeks. Maybe months." He laughed. "That is until she started to like it."
"Dat's not going to be part of the deal."
"Oh, we have a deal now? And what's that?"
"You stay here. All of you. All the memories, all the thoughts, everything out of my head. You keep Nico and MA. Dey separated from de others, running around you little funhouse right now. You can play wit' dem a long time."
"Why wouldn't I keep you all?"
"Because unless you got stupid recently, you know dat de longer you keep Jean, David and Scott, de sooner Xavier pulls together every telepath he can find, comes in, and burns you out for good. He will obliterate you and you know it."
"Is it just me, or does it seem like Xavier's been dying to fuck Jean since she was a teenager. I get that vibe, you know?"
"Gambit-"
"Relax sister. You have a point, but I could just let them go and keep the rest."
"We both need a story people will believe. 'manda will have Strange searching de afterlife for her. Same wit' Wanda. But if Nico and MA don't make it - especially if I tell de story how you killed dem and nearly me before we could escape, no one will think twice. De worst dat happens is her idiot boyfriend comes and shoots up de place. Deep down, no one cares if dey don't make it."
"You'd really trade them in order to get those memories out? I surprised. Didn't you turn over a new leaf; become the big hero."
"Remy never been a hero, and since Wisdom broke down, de hard decisions have come to me. I know dat I can't beat you here-" Appealing to his vanity never hurt. "and I've got a real life to go back to. Are de lives of MA and Nico worth spending de rest of my life wit' Ororo, finally at peace in my own head?"
Remy looked hard into Gambit's identical gaze. "Dey are. I hate to disappoint de others, but it's worth it to me."
"Are you so sure? Want to know what I have waiting for them?" The place shifted again, to a dull gray room with a long one-way window that Remy was on the other side of. Gambit walked in, dressed in a dark suit, and smiled at the girl in the shapeless grey dress, handcuffed to the table. "Remember Detroit? That little MI5 agent that was caught at the border and Whelan said had to be lost in the system?" He dropped a screwdriver on to the table.
"Don't do dis."
"We choose the screwdriver because it was easiest for prisoners to slip into their cells. They used to sharpen the tip on the concrete floor before using them as a shiv. It creates those deep, penetrative wounds that got me - well, us - thinking. What else could those be used for? Remember that young cop that tried to arrest you when he accidentally walked in during the fourth round?" He picked it up, and for a moment, the girl's face flickered to Marie-Ange's, and then Nico's, and then back. "Here, I can do it a dozen times. A hundred times. Day in and day out until I get tired of the screwdriver and find something else to use - I've got high hopes for an apple corer. And the whole time, they'll know it was you that did this to them. Is that what you want, Remy? Is it still worth it?"
Remy squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. "Oui."
"Oh, I like this. Because I don't think you realize just how much more this will hurt compared to all the other memories." He buried the screwdriver in the base of the girl's neck and stepped forward, putting his hand palm first on the glass. "If you're sure, just click your heels three times and say there's no place like home."
Remy reached up, and matched the gesture on the other side of the glass.
"That's right, Remy. Get ready for it to all be over," he said. Would Gambit honour the deal? Only if he believed Remy was still like him.
The final push.
The X-Man immediately unleashed an optical blast at the wave, but it was like trying to dam the river Nile with a plank: a good effort but ultimately futile. The blood flowed around the optical blast and carried on down the path. Scott grimaced as the seemingly endless wave approached only to be snapped out of his reverie by the ground beneath his feet shaking. With a grating noise the ground beneath his feet heaved up, sending Scott scrambling backwards to retain his balance as a storm drain rose out of the ground directly in the path of the wave.
With a sigh of relief Scott watched as the boiling blood which had almost swamped them was instead funneled down the hole which had opened up in its path. With a gurgling noise the flood was rendered null leaving only the path and empty fountain glistening with a few left over drops. Scott let his eye flick over the path before turning to Wanda.
"Maybe we wanna go around instead?"
"Smart man," Wanda responded, slowly retreating from the fountain in case it decided it wasn't done yet. Another path seemed to open up off to the side and, cautiously, they started to approach it.
The ornamental trees on one side erupted with steel spikes as the flowerbed on the other heaved itself to life and clawed towards them with a gnarled tangle of roots. The cobbles under their feet tore apart, hurling them both back towards the spikes.
Or would have, had a row of concrete construction barricades not sprung up to catch them just before they could be impaled.
Wanda was barely able to stop herself from releasing a wave of chaos energy - the barricade had come up so suddenly that it felt like she'd pulled a formerly unknown mental muscle in stopping herself. She and Scott nodded at each other and began to edge around it when the bushes that they were edging along began to shake as more vines shot out towards the two of them.
A sharp tug on her ankle caused Wanda to fall flat on her already inflamed back and she cried out in pain as the creature in the bush - or perhaps it was the bush - began to drag her towards it so quickly that her shirt ended up rucked up around her shoulders. Her fingers scrambled at the dirt in an attempt to stop her forward momentum towards the flash of red eyes and dripping teeth.
Back on the astral plane, Jean traversed the foundation, looking for a section of the "bedrock" that was more concise. She gathered the fragments that she found and they floated beside her, being pieced together and molded like clay to once again form some semblance of a human form. Her astral armor, sheathed around her, was heavy, extra fortified, reacting to the danger around her.
The corrosive presence of the demon resisted her efforts. The clay was gritty, crumbling; every time a fragment was placed another slid away, resuming its loose orbit around the attempt. The form held in a few places -- a patch of leg here, a piece of skull there -- but it was no more than a broken statue with features eroded with age.
Jean tried not to be deterred, and doubled her efforts to find every scrap, every part that was still left. She didn't want anything remaining for the demon to be able to corrupt or hurt any more. The fog around her was thick and dark. She almost felt like she were getting lost in the woods.
The darkness around her intensified, as if sensing the danger. Dry wind began to whip, scouring fragments from the edges.
There was increasing stress on Jean's astral armor. At first nothing more than the pressure of water against skin, every breath came harder. It was like being a deep-sea diver sinking ever closer to the ocean floor.
The wards broke.
There was a sensation almost like a pressure change, and the room began to distort. Jim started to call to Amanda, but the witch was embedded into the floor up to her forearms, her expression intense and distant -- her mind was not here, and there was no telling what an interruption would do.
The lights began to fail as the study twisted around them.
She felt Scott clamp down on her shoulders right as she wedged a booted foot into the widening jaw; the teeth pressed against the leather - it wouldn't protect her flesh for much longer. Feeling as if she were being torn in two as her friend pulled back and the creature forward, Wanda channeled as much entropic power as she could through the dirt beneath her. It channeled through the ground and burrowed through the roots of the plants thrashing about the ground.
It took a little longer than she would have liked but soon Wanda was able to extract her foot and, with Scott's help, shuffle backwards where she thunked her head on his shoulder. "I hate this place," she said, glowering as the wilting paths died enough to clear a path to what looked like a bridge. Wanda looked at Scott over her shoulder. "You go first."
There was a shriek behind them as something like a deranged Ent tore through the concrete barriers only to be run down by a phantom taxi that careened into it, horn blaring, before disappearing as abruptly as it had arrived. Signs of "Wrong Way" began appearing behind them as a none-too-subtle hint.
"Shit, fuck, forget that, ladies first!"
Scott took a moment to turn around and managed to catch a glimpse of the plant monster being hit by the taxi. "Looks like Amanda has everything in hand here," he agreed as he hurried after Wanda.
Jean sensed the fragments being scoured and tried to keep them as intact as she could with the astral version of a force field.
"No!" she gasped, lifting up her hands toward her face. Her hair billowed in the wind.
So intense was the pressure that the figure's subtle change was almost imperceptible. Though Jean's power kept the figure transfixed the space between the fragments deepened. Gaps became void, shadow darkened to emptiness.
The void did not decrease as the repair progressed. Instead the shadows fed on Jean's light, becoming sharper, more profound. The emptiness shifted, the blackness pushed out and back -- a shadow separated from its source.
The darkness around her was now claustrophobic. There was a pop as a hairline crack appeared in her armor. Then another, then another.
The only stable area was around Amanda. Her influence spidered concrete from where she knelt and altered the corner of a horsehair couch into that of a wooden bench. Cursing, Jim relinquished control to the telekinetic alter and threw up a shield that enclosed the area. With gritted teeth he looked to his teammate.
Jean stood on the shield's cusp, muscles locked and aura sputtering.
Neither of them managed to get much closer to the greenhouse before the next obstacle showed up in their path. Scott stumbled as the first tremor shook the ground. Scott shot Wanda a worried look as the quakes rapidly increased in intensity and frequency. The pebbles on the ground started bouncing as the ground beneath them started to heave, the two mutants shared a look before a small crack appeared between them. Scott's eye was drawn towards the crack as the shakes started to widen it. It looked like a grin, like something he imagined would look at home on the face of the Cheshire Cat.
"Move," he shouted as he and Wanda dived in opposite directions just in time as the crack split open into a wide maw. Looking around Scott saw that the smile wasn't the only maw which had opened, as the one-eyed man watched another crack appeared beneath his feet, sending him scrambling for safety before another maw appeared. Glancing over at Wanda he saw she was also beset by the randomly appearing holes in the earth. The X-Man couldn't stay still for long as the earth beneath him split open necessitating a desperate dive to get clear, a dive which sent Scott rolling into a metal pillar.
"What?" The X-Man looked around. He'd rolled onto the Brooklyn Bridge, or something that looked like a smaller version of the Brooklyn Bridge. Scott glanced at Wanda and saw she was safely positioned on Tower Bridge. Another bridge and another one appeared, linked end-to-end to create a safe path leading on towards the greenhouse, and most importantly over the maws which were still appearing on the ground beneath them.
Scott took a deep breath and hurried down the pathway that had been created, meeting up with Wanda as they stood staring at the greenhouse. There was only a short stretch of ground left but neither of them thought it was going to be easy to cross the remaining ground. "Once last push," Scott noted nodding at the ground, "Shall we?"
Sighing, Wanda started forward slowly, eyes scanning the ground and surrounding area for any potential traps. Not that any of the other surprises had really given them much in the way of warning before trying to kill them. Still, there was no heavy shrubbery or walls or anything else but open ground - and that made her even more nervous.
They had only gone a few feet when she stopped and drew back at the sharp smell of something burning. What, she couldn't say - she had sat at enough campfires in her life to recognize the gentle smell of an open camp fire and had witness more violent conflagrations but this escaped her ability to catalog. Another step, though, and suddenly ...
Where sand had once been a sudden river of lava started to boil up from the ground, chewing through dirt and earth at a startling speed. Wanda screamed as a flash of hot fire flew by, missing her face by inches and leaving the smell of slightly scorched earth as she struggled to maintain her balance. Any remaining safe ground was quickly eroding beneath their feet and her already abused boots were turning soft as she leaped from one shrinking piece of ground to another.
Jean gritted her teeth, letting out a shriek of pain as she felt something other than her armor snap. Some of the flames around her slowly started to go out, snuffed by the wind. She floated up into the air, trying desperately to keep the pieces together. Tendrils of flame shot from her body, wrapping around the form in an attempt to bind the pieces.
And the gathered shadow leaped.
It sprang at her with boneless fluidity almost too fast to register, a dark, empty space in the shape of a man. Not just featureless, but a lack -- of warmth, of light, of life. The thing twisted with Gambit's monstrous grace and caught her in mid-air. Freezing hands closed around her neck, and its foul, carrion breath fell on her like a winter wind.
In the center of a void that should have been a face floated two points of ruby light.
Jack hissed as the pressure on the shield intensified. Shapeless objects squirmed around their tiny island, felt but not seen -- there was no longer any sense of space around them, only movement pressing down on all sides. The sole illumination now was Jean's corona, now dimmed to nothing but a faint, bluish glow.
Almost out.
Jean began to gasp again, fighting to breathe as her eyes locked on the void, her body twisting and writhing in agony from the pressure and the cold. Suddenly, her narrowed eyes softened. Anger. Pain. Fear. It was all of these things the demon craved. It would consume it, gorge itself on her, on the others, until there was nothing left. Letting herself be overcome with those emotions only fed the demon itself. It made it stronger. She had to do things another way.
"No," she repeated, wisps of flame bleeding through the cracks in her armor. She could feel something growing, changing, as the fire snaked through it's hands and spread throughout Jean's form, bluish-black melting away into orange-yellow.
"I am fire. I am life, " Jean said. Her astral skin burned away to reveal a body made of fire, the Phoenix's wings unfurled.
" So burn. "
Its scream tore the sound from the astral plane. It reared back, but too late; the flame was already coursing up its arms, flowing towards its head and heart. It writhed, humanoid form losing cohesion as it did. With a handful of stumbling backward steps, the avatar disintegrated.
Jean spread her palms and lifted her head, searching the miasma. The darkness still remained, it had only retreated. Her eyes lowered toward the remains of the demonologist. They lingered. Lifting one hand, the Phoenix's wings billowed, growing in strength as the fire spread throughout the entire area. It shot through every nook and cranny, obliterating every trace of the demonologist it could find.
"Goodbye."
There was no death cry, no shattering of self. Not enough remained of the man for that. But there were wisps of sensation, and so Jean knew the shock of an alien personality and the sharp red edge it brought. She felt, too, the hopeless grasping of a drowning soul -- and unexpected purchase. Another presence, removed but carrying the spirit of a world she had longed to know but had been unable to see. Not purchase enough for salvation, but enough. Enough to guide flame, and the release it brought.
Just impressions, like the last of the light of a long-dead star.
She didn't hear the items appearing on either side of the river of fire, not over the roar of the lava and her own heart beating wildly in her ears, but Wanda couldn't miss the sudden explosion of water from over a dozen small things. Water pressure like that was unheard of in any city but here Amanda was pulling from more than a regular city. In minutes, Scott and Wanda were left standing, soaking wet, amid a now empty riverbed that steamed around them.
Not saying anything, too frustrated and tired, Wanda simply pointed forward.
Scott felt as tired as Wanda looked but forced himself to wring the water out of his hair and gingerly stretched his foot out to touch the dirt remaining between themselves and the greenhouse. No killer plants or darts of ice appeared, it looked like they were safe for now. Quickly crossing the remaining distance Scott reached out to test the handle of the greenhouse. As expected it was locked. Turning back to face Wanda, Scott shrugged. "It was worth a try," he noted wryly.
Wanda pressed her hands against the glass. It was thick and old, the type of glass that wasn't smooth enough to be anything close to modern. Old or new, didn't matter. "Stand back, Scott," she said, fingers pressing tighter against window pane; under her flesh, tiny fractures began to show as she slowly fed chaos into structure barring their way. "And cover your head."
Like ice fracturing under the weight of a footstep, the glass followed suit to the pressure of her powers. The fissures exploded outward from under her palms faster than any eye, even hers, could track before it finally exploded into tiny but deadly daggers. Wanda dropped to her feet, arms above her head, screaming a warning as the shattering glass showed them what it had been hiding.
What it had been trapping.
Scott let the arm which had instinctively flown up to cover his face drop down to his side and caught his first view of the scene inside the greenhouse. All that was left of the demonologist was a gaunt cadaver lying in the middle of a collection of broken plant pots and shattered tools. Spiderwebs coated the whole scene, lending it a depressing ambiance. There was nothing demonic or evil about this. Scott wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn't this: an old man who had dragged himself here to die, sucked dry by the demonic essence he had proven unable to control.
Gathering energy in his eye Scott took a moment to examine the old man's face. He may have brought the demon that had tormented them all into the world; but nobody deserved to die like this, alone among the detritus of a greenhouse.
Focusing the energy he'd built up in his eye Scott loosed a wide-angled optical blast, one which covered the entire remnants of the greenhouse, pulverizing everything that had survived Wanda's shattering of the glass structure and leaving a shallow crater as the only sign anything had ever occupied the spot.
Turning his back on the crater, Scott stared back across the garden that they'd had to cross to get here. It had fallen silent. No sign of the hazards which had plagued their journey across it, just the grass trees and flowers waving in the slight breeze.
"I really hate magic," he said softly speaking more to himself than Wanda as he started down the garden path towards the door he hoped would lead them out of there.
The Phoenix's flare slashed the darkness like a blade. Jack recoiled, instinctively shielding his eyes from a light that was only half visual, but his falter made no difference. Shapes that had been amorphous contracted, retreating before flame now clear and untainted. The room wavered, then stabilized, then was still.
Jack, still hovering protectively over Amanda, hissed "Jesus, woman!"
Initially Jean merely floated there like a buoy in the water, staring at nothing as she tried to process what had happened, all the while surveying the mindscape to see if there was anything left. Nothing.
Haller's voice brought her back like a kick to the back of the knee and she blinked. The world stormed back in and the Phoenix dissipated, as if a candle had been blown out. Jean floated back down to the ground, gently testing her weight on her bad leg. The small burst of pain made her draw in a breath, which, in turn, made her bite back a heavy grunt as she discovered a new broken bone in one of her ribs.
"He's gone."
A parting word.
"Now, which one to start with? Maybe the- wait..."
Remy was fading out of existence, already shifting. "Something wrong, homme?"
"There's- what have you done! This was you!"
"Non, dis was de people dat you were sure were trapped ripping de guts out of you control over dis place. While you got to - indulge youself in dis. Hope you like you own company, Gambit. It's about to be all you got in a minute - a sad little god of a world of one."
"No!" he lunged at Remy, but the Cajun had already disappeared, leaving him behind on the floor of the chamber and left entirely alone.
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