Operation: Wonderwall Day 3
Jul. 30th, 2015 10:30 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsReset. Simon calls Wanda. This time he gets Wade, and things start to get weird.
The strains of whatever neutral "best of the 80s, 90s, and today!' radio station had replaced Muzak as the background noise of most stores and offices were mutedly playing in the front lobby of the Snow Valley Centre on a very slow Tuesday morning.
"...should be another hot one today. Anyway, here's Wonderwall."
~Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you...~
At the front desk, the phone rang, caller ID showing as the NYPD 6th Precinct.
Since Cammie was nowhere in sight as he walked through the front door, Wade paused to pick up the phone. "Snow Valley, Wade speaking, how can I direct your call?" As always, he was tempted to answer with something utterly ridiculous, but he restrained the urge. He was pretending to be a professional - had a suit and everything. He couldn't, however, keep himself from softly humming along to the song playing through the office.
Just then, the radio station experienced some sort of technical glitch and the song skipped from Oasis to Asia singing about doing stupid things in the heat of the moment.
"Wanda Maximoff," a cock-sure deep bass answered with the haggard strain of someone who had not slept in entirely enough hours or at the hangover-end of a twelve hour bender.
"May I ask who's calling?"
"Simon," and the type of pause indicative of considered omission, "She knows me, don't worry."
"Hold, please," Wade said, clicking various buttons. Then he dialed Wanda's office extension, found on a helpful piece of paper at the desk, and waited for her to pick up.
Wanda glared at the phone and considered not answering it. She'd been on endless conference calls that day and her head was killing; all she wanted to do was ignore the phone, take the aspirin she was holding and go have lunch. It was lunch time, right? She squinted at the clock and then sighed when the phone kept ringing.
She dry swallowed the pills and picked up the handset. "Wanda speaking," she sighed, moving the mouse to stop the computer screen from going black.
"Hey, TD&G," Wade said. "You gotta call from a dude named Simon. Sounds like he lost a couple rounds with a bottle of jack and a bucket of gravel. You want me to tell him he got the wrong number or something?"
"I should but he is always a good amount of fun," Wanda said after considering putting him off for the moment and calling him after work. But Simon had been fun, though, and she had given him her number for a reason. Perhaps if the first weekend had been the only weekend, she'd call him later but no, she'd take the call, headache or no. "There is probably a very good reason he sounds like that. The Simon I met knew how to survive a good party." …
She made a noise and told Wade to patch Simon through.
There was a small beep as the call transferred. "Wanda? Babe?"
Wanda smiled a little - Wade was right. Simon did sound like hell. "Simon, calling me at work? I think that's a new step for us." She leaned back and looked at her work calendar, wondering what could be rearranged if he was in town. "To what do I owe the pleasure, darling? And I probably do mean that in as many ways as you can imagine."
The actual relief in his words was almost palpable. "Remember that time in Acapulco when we joked about prison? Well, I need help and not of the conjugal sort. Although..." A beat. "No. I goofed hard. You are the only one I can reach."
"..." Wanda pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it for a moment. "Why on earth are you in jail?" she demanded, wondering if a headache could feel smug. Because this one was starting to feel like it was being smug. "And what do you mean I am the only one you could reach? What about the studio lawyers?"
A few clicks of the mouse brought up a national news site and she stared at it. "You punched Tony Stark. That ... would by you are in jail, then."
"Smug ass-faced bastard deserved it. No court will convict me... well, based on principle." He sighed wearily. "Babe, you're literally the only phone I could call that didn't go straight to voicemail or shoot me to a call center in India off my entire contact list. Weirdest thing, but I'm getting desperate."
"Every court would convict you," Wanda corrected but there was no heat to her words. She was mulling over that last part. "The only person you could reach? That seems ... highly unlikely." But when had anything in her life acted normally? "Ah, but who am I to argue with fate? If you had to reach only one person, at least it's someone who is handy and gorgeous."
She sent a quick e-mail to others, letting them know something strange was going on and she was clearing her calendar for the day.
"Outside of a jail break, darling, what can I do? Name it, I'll try and make it happen."
"I need you to play assistant. I only get one of these phonecalls, see, and carrying a wallet while at a premiere is a no no due to inopportune bulges. I'm stuck here with no cash and no contacts and I am far too pretty for the general population."
Despite the situation, Wanda laughed at that. "You would think a premiere would be the perfect place for an inopportune bulge." She switched the phone to her other ear as she grabbed a pen and pad. "Consider this your rescue attempt. Tell me everything you can before they make you hang up on me. Who I should call and your backups just in case I too cannot get through."
"Well, no on has ever complained about my bulge before."
She got her list.
A few minutes later, Wanda was gifted with a list of agency contacts and family lawyers, vague dance instructions for interacting with his publicist's anxiety triggers, and a few suggestions on his office's "for reals real" assistant dress-code.
"I am on it. Just sit tight and ..." She gripped the phone and thought about the strange events Simon had described. Wanda had been doing her job long enough to trust her instincts and they were screaming at her. "Simon, darling, sit tight and be careful. I'll get this sorted and you will spend a very enjoyable evening paying me back."
Once off the phone, Wanda set to work and tried to shake the feeling of dread that was strangely settling over her.
This time, Emma accompanies Wanda to the bail hearing. Wanda is convinced that she's done all this before.
"...all rise," the bailiff said in that sort of perfunctory but still formal tone of a ritual that they had performed over and over every day for years. "Docket ending 616404, People vs Simon Williams. Charge is assault in the first degree..."
#They certainly got him into court quickly,# Wanda sent quietly to Emma. #I suppose that is what happens when you assault a man worth more than God.# Emma's telepathy gave them the best way to talk without having to try to cut through the noise of the courtroom. It was like a circus in there, filled with press and people who thought they'd get to be close to Stark and who were probably disappointed that the man himself wasn't there.
The two women had found a seat fairly close to the front but they were boxed in and Wanda was freely using her sharp elbows to give herself some breathing room. She was counting down until they were out and she could potentially put her head in the nearest refrigerator.
#Would you be kind enough to kill me,# she asked with a pained expression, #before this headache does?#
#Where would be the fun in that?# replied Emma, somewhat absently as she scanned the crowd gathered in the courtroom, sifting through a myriad of over-excited celebrity stalkers to see if she could find anyone with, perhaps, a particularly enhanced feeling of deja vu. #I'd end up stuck in here for hours while they cleaned you up and that would just be irritating.# With a small tendril of her power she reached out to Wanda and took away as much of the pain as she could manage around the strange fuzz of Wanda's powers. #I know I've asked you this before, but you're absolutely certain there's some kind of time loop going on? There's a lot of excitement out there, but I'm not feeling that people think they've done this before. Which would mean that it's something to do with your powers. Some kind of probability futz?#
Wanda's relief was instantaneous, her shoulders slumped in relief and the pinched look on her face eased. #You are a miracle worker,# she sighed happily. The noise of the courtroom was no longer like a knife to the brain and she felt far more like she could deal with whatever was happening. #You are certainly better than any drug on the market and you can quote me on that at any time.#
She thought about Emma's question and tried to answer it as best she could. #If it is, it is the first time this has ever happened. That we know of.# Comforting, that. #I cannot know for certain that it is a time loop. It just ... something is very off. I feel as if everything I have been doing since Simon called has been on repeat. My powers have been feeling off ever since. It seems too weird to believe but...#
#We’ve got students who came back from Asgard and fought a man who may be using magic to make himself immortal,# replied Emma. #You would have to come up with something far more interesting than a time loop to make it too weird to believe. A time loop would pretty much just make it Friday.# She frowned suddenly as she continued to use her telepathy to test the crowd. #I think we’re being watched. And possibly Simon is being watched. Don’t look but gallery, second row, third seat from the left,# Emma inserted the picture of the person she had stolen a glance at when her telepathy had suddenly informed her that one of the crowd was not like the other ones. #Familiar face?#
The image flickered in her mind and Wanda frowned slightly but didn't look towards the woman in question. She didn't immediately recognize the blonde woman that now floated in her thoughts but something ... something ... was familiar ... and then the universe punched Wanda in the face.
Her hands seized for a moment over her knees, fingers tightening on her pants so quickly and painfully that the knuckles all popped at once. The room spun sharply and for a moment the connection with Emma blinked out as Wanda's powers flared, sending the courtroom briefly into darkness as the lights sputtered before coming back on. People around them screamed and muttered at the unexpected power blip.
Wanda dragged her eyes up and locked them on the back of Simon's head as he was lead towards where he'd pay bail. "We have to go," she gasped. "Now. S-she's at the c-c-c..." She put her hand to her nose and her fingers came away bloody but more disturbing were the small sparks of chaos energy at the edges of her fingers. "Emma ..."
#Well, that seems unfortunate,# replied Emma. #Though well timed,# she added as the judge shrugged off the interruption caused by the dip in the power supply and noted that she planned to release Simon on $5000 bail, pending further investigation. The quiet competence of the lawyer Emma had organised to attend for just this possibility, meant that the posting of the bail occupied only a couple more minutes as Wanda sparked and huddled down beside her, trying to keep her glowing out of the attention.
#I’m sorry,# Emma directed to the bailiff she selected, without projecting it. #I think an anonymous bottle of something very fine will be delivered to you in the near future. But for now...#
The faint was spectacular. Not a quiet losing of consciousness and slump to the floor, but a full-on badly acted death scene from a very, very amateur play. The bailiff staggered left, then staggered right, then threw a dramatic arm up to his brow, pirouetted twice, then collapsed with a terrible clatter in the centre of the floor in front of the judge. As chaos arose, and people started to run forward, Emma nudged Wanda. “Would you like to go and collect Mr Williams?” she said, as the prosecutor suddenly began to stagger from side to side, in an equally dramatic interpretation of Emma’s mental command to #Sleep now#.
For a moment, Wanda was as struck dumb as the rest of the court room and then she shook herself as people surged forward towards the bailiff. "I - yes. I think that's wise," she murmured, wiping her bloody fingers against her pant leg. Every once in a while, she was reminded of how scary Emma was and how very happy Wanda was that they were friends.
She caught a glimpse of the woman in question, the one that had made everything hurt, and Wanda realized she was on her way towards them. "Oh yes, out we go," she murmured, letting Emma help her to her feet. Time to go find Simon, she thought, as the world tilted slightly before righting itself.
Wanda brings Simon to the safehouse, and manages to convince the rest of X-Force that there's a time loop, leading to a very interesting strategy.
The safehouse that the members of X-Force had gathered at was a perfectly anonymous townhouse in the East Village — two bedrooms (with weapons lockers in the closets), one and a half bathrooms (cupboards filled with painkillers, bandages, and sterile gloves), and a spacious kitchen (well stocked with a wide variety of alcohol). Doug leaned over his laptop where it sat on the small kitchen island and made a frustrated noise at the lack of anything like productive results. "What does an Asgardian sorceress-slash-possible-demigod need with — no offense, Wanda — at best a C-list celebrity?"
"His body? His stunning personality? Or perhaps the universe just likes to mess with me?" She came out of one of the bedrooms, dressed in street clothes and pressing a towel to her face. She'd been dressed for the courtroom but now she needed to dress for what might be a fight with very powerful enemies. Luckily, they had clothes stashed at their safe houses.
Also luckily, they had towels and washclothes, she thought, to help sop up the nosebleed that had hit the moment they'd gotten into the safe house.
Barefoot, she walked over to Simon and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Something is really messing with us," Wanda said, her voice tight and worried. "I know a time loop is hard to believe but ..." She grimaced as the pain increased. "Fuck, this better end soon before my brain tears itself apart."
It said something that Simon Williams did not even flinch at the affront to his ego. Then again, judging from his body language, it wasn't at all — the man was practically coasting on adrenaline. His puffy eyes were drawn tight in thought, as if enough wishful thinking would ward away the day's confusion. He did not, however, jump at Wanda's touch. In fact, he practically melted into its familiar embrace.
He breathed, and the words came lighting quick, only punctuated by swearing. "The. Fuck. A timeloop? What happened in the courtroom? People don't just... The flying fuck. This makes no sense. What. The. Fuck."
He breathed heavily again, and his eyes were pinpoints of accusation. Everyone save Wanda might as well ceased to exist in that moment.
Wanda sighed knelt in front of him, reaching for his hands. "Simon, I am so sorry. I told you when we were together last time that there were things in my life that - defied description, I suppose. I do not tell people about parts of my life. It is ..." She closed her eyes and realized she was at a loss for words. "It is supposed to keep you safe! Had I known you were going to get dragged into something like this, I would have told you I was ..."
Wanda glanced over at Doug, knowing she looked as miserable as she felt. "Douglas, a little help here?"
Now that Wanda had told them there was a loop, Doug could feel the slightest undercurrent of a pattern, the vaguest sense that he had done this before. There was a rhythm - Him, then Wanda, then Simon, then Wanda, then him. He glanced around, wishing again for Pete to take the podium and talk about the bastards of the world. But it looked like it was down to him. He sighed and stood up, moving to the center of the rough circle of people in the room.
"Okay, Cliffs Notes time, Hollywood," he said to Simon. Most everyone in the room knew the score, except for perhaps Gabriel as the newest of them. "The world is a messier place than you're even starting to suspect right now. Gods and monsters, that sort of thing. To give you an idea of the scale of weird and terrifying stuff your..." He looked at Wanda. "...maybe-girlfriend...deals with, a time loop? Doesn't even make the top five."
"Asgard? Real place. That lady that stalked you at your bail hearing? Goes by 'the Enchantress'. Gets her kicks bending people to her will, and she's had a really long time to get really good at it." He grinned. "But it's not all bad news, because this?" He waved a hand to indicate his teammates.
"This is what we do."
Marie-Ange's mouth snapped shut, teeth clicking, and then she shook her head hard enough to shake her half-braided ponytails loose. "No Hellboy this time. We can change the loops." She drifted between Doug and the wall and then over to Wanda, laying a hand on her neck. "We can change the past. We can change the knots in time." Her eyes were unfocused, looking through Wanda to Simon. "Bleed from the eyes, and from your heart, not ragged nails clawing at grief, unravel who you think you are, unknot the ties, it will all return, you are not a man of letters. You are not that man."
A sudden knock on the door in a very particular pattern interrupted things for a moment and then the door opened, admitting Wade. He had three large, paper bags in each hand as he kicked the door shut behind him, locking it with a quick bump of his elbow. Limping into the room where everyone else was, he held the bags out and said, "I come bearing tacos. And a really weird story about tripping over my own feet and somehow damaging both my shoulder and my hip, what the fuck? The first person to make a 'I've fallen and I can't get up' joke gets my hand in their face. And no tacos."
He plopped all six bags on the center table and reached into the nearest one, grabbing three wrapped parcels for himself before turning and limping over to the wall near the door. "I do not like today," Wade said. "What've I missed?"
"Time loop, Simon freaking out, Marie-Ange getting her prognostication on and Wanda possibly thinking about her life choices. Oh, and Doug mentioned Asgard because Enchantress." Jubilee replied, stepping out of one of the bedrooms. She'd come in from the roof and the smell of tacos was heavenly, "Hope you got enough for me in there, bucko."
"There's six grocery bags, Jubes. There's enough for you and me and everybody else here. Also, goddammit." Wade scowled at his first, unwrapped taco and then took a vicious bite. "I will fucking shank that woman if I get the chance. I do not like her."
"Somebody please help me find Advil." A weary Gabriel came down the stairs, scratching a surprisingly full beard with one hand and scrolling through texts on his phone with the other. His feet dragged on the steps. "Everything hurts, and there's Oxy here, but no goddamn Advil." He tried to say those words with the usual bravado, but his voice was quieter than usual, the signs of fatigue shining through. "I need some fucking coffee too."
As he neared the last step, he tried to put the phone in his pocket and let go a few inches short. The device fell out of his hand, hitting steps as it bounced toward the floor. "Great." He groaned as he bent down to pick it up, every muscle aching. When he flipped it over, the screen was cracked. He closed his eyes for a bit too long, then they shot open. "Tell me we've got some fucking coffee."
Artie tucked a hand under his elbow, tugging him toward a seat. A moment later, he placed two tacos and a coffee in front of Gabriel before collecting his own.
"Okay, now that we've all used our words and caffeinated ourselves substantially, I figured getting back to the whole 'what does the lady who thinks she's a God want with the pretty boy? I mean, it's a pretty long way to go if all she's lookin' to do is bump uglies."
"Bumping uglies is usually just a fringe benefit for Enchantress, I'd think. I mean, come all the way to 'Midgard' just to get her rocks off?" Doug shook his head. "Doesn't add up." He tapped a finger against his lips. "Okay, let's start with what we do know." He grabbed a dry-erase marker and started writing on the whiteboard they kept in every safehouse for just this sort of purpose.
"Okay, start with Simon here, since he seems to be the linchpin." Doug drew a circle and put the man's name in it. "Let's Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon it." He drew a line and another circle, labeling it WANDA. "Hey, what -is- your Kevin Bacon number anyway?" he asked Simon idly as he drew in circles for the rest of X-Force connected to Wanda, starring some of them. "Okay, stars are people who have experience with Asgard, either from way back, or that more recent thing in Montana." He frowned at the board. "Okay, what else?"
Everyone's gaze lingered on Simon before shifting nearly as one to Wanda. "Oh please, I find it charming," she defended, reaching over to grab a taco. Breakfast felt like a lifetime ago - and considering the apparent time loop, it might be close to that - and she needed to recharge. Wanda also snagged another chair next to Simon and threw her legs over his lap.
"If Douglas could stop distracting him ..." Wanda frowned in thought. "Did you notice anyone following or stalking you over these last few weeks?"
"I..." Simon straightened his posture a little bit as if trying to shore up the confidence he wasn't feeling. "The jail thing was a change. I'm not usually whisked away from a bail hearing, except for the part where it has happened before? So... everything here is new and then nothing is?"
He sighed dramatically, but caught himself as he took stock of all of the eyes on him. "No. Too complicated. I got processed. No paperwork, one phonecall, and a medical exam from a German doctor who sure liked to monologue. Then I sat in jail for half a day."
Doug cocked his head. "Uh, it was more than half a day. More like twenty-four hours - you punched Tony Stark yesterday." He tapped his fingers together and frowned. "So there's a time loop, -and- people are losing time? That means something about the way we're doing things isn't working."
"Point A to point B, not point A to point Q." Marie-Ange said, pointing at Doug. "Also stop cheating with my precognition and explain for the rest of the class." She had one hand up to her face, using a knuckle to dig at the tension headache in her face. "If there is a time loop and I still do not believe there is, then how do we break loose?"
"Normally you answer the question before I ask it," Doug replied with a smirk. "This is TVTropes 101, though. I mean, Groundhog Day. Bill Murray kept going through the same day over and over again until he learned to actually be a decent person and not just a walking id." He shrugged. "So something is keeping us repeating this day. It just seems to stand to reason."
Wade was on his last taco, having taken about half of it all in one bite. As he chewed, he got a thoughtful look on his face, then very obviously shoved all of the food in his mouth into his cheek before asking, "Do these tacos taste funny?" He shook his head, still doing a pretty impressive job of a chipmunk as he continued, "Also, since we're not generally assholes and this all seems to be revolving around Wanda's hunka-hunka-burnin' love over there, maybe it's something to do with him being a walking id. Yo, Burnin' Love, don't be an asshole."
"He says," Gabriel's voice creaked up, "being an asshole." It was a peanut gallery remark. His eyes were fixed on his coffee, his attention focused on the math he was trying to do in his head. A time loop. How much had they lost? How much had he lost? The beard was a clue. Maybe it wasn't. He didn't know. "Seriously," he half-muttered, "what the hell is going on?"
"Oh come on," and Simon's voice dripped with incredulity and a generous peppering of loathing as he stared Wade down, "All I did was punch Stark, and that asshat had it coming. If the universe is saying that I shouldn't have, then fuck it. I'll burn it down around me."
Simon's face was burning red at this point. Today had already been too much. "Do you know what Stark Industries did to my family? He killed my father."
Wanda dropped her legs from Simon's lap in favor of putting an arm over his shoulders. "Hey," she said quietly, catching his attention. "I know, Simon, I know. Ignore Gabriel, he is being a smart ass because this is not a great situation. Especially for you." She shot Gabriel a look, a silent request to turn it down a notch. Everyone was stressed and worried and this was not helping.
She felt Simon's shoulders relax under her arm. Turning back, Wanda returned his half-smile with one of her own before placing a kiss to his brow. "Now eat your taco, you'll need your strength," she said, drawing back slightly but pausing when she thought she caught a flicker of ... something? ... around Simon. Wanda stared hard for a minute, wondering if the flicker of light had been her imagination or, perhaps, she realized, sitting back, maybe her powers were reacting to her stress and the time loop.
Yes. The more she thought about it, the more it had to have been her and not Simon.
"Be somebody else." Doug smacked the dry-erase marker into his hand. Off of everyone's blank looks at the non sequitur, he elaborated. "Okay, so we're time looped, right? That means something keeps happening to reset the loop. Which means that it almost certainly is being caused by something we're doing, if Simon is the focus. So we do the unexpected. Think like somebody else. -Act- like somebody else."
A loud crash at the door interrupted them. "Just remember that," he told them as they all came to the ready. "Be somebody else."
The grand entrance of the gatecrashers is a bit ruined by X-Force being really tired of this crap...
There is only so much reinforcing that can be done to the door of a townhouse in the middle of New York City without arousing the suspicions of neighbors. Those precautions are good at keeping out the casual B&E set, but don't do much against a determined strike force with a small battering ram.
Even as the loud bang of the door giving way sent X-Force scurrying for their weapons, several men in black balaclavas scurried through the doorway, semi-automatic weapons at the ready. But they held fire, waiting for another person to enter. The person who followed them in, though, was not Amora the Enchantress. Instead, it was another foe that at least some of the people in the room recognized immediately by the bright purple sacklike mask fitted to his head.
Zemo did not walk so much as strut into the townhouse. He looked the definition of poise and confidence as he took in the room, smiling under his mask. Everything was going exactly according to plan.
"Ah," he said simply. "'The gang, it is all here,' as you Americans are prone to saying." He turned an eye to the leader of the mercenary crew. "Remember, I'm simply here for my masterpiece. The rest... are unnecessary, so if they move..." X-Force appeared surprised to see him. Zemo was almost offended.
"Come, come now. Surely you must have suspected, expected my involvement? Who else could have been responsible for such a momentous achievement for humanity? None but I have the intellect, the skills, the genius to have made such a creation! He is far beyond anything the likes of which Red Skull or Hydra could produce!"
He met each of their eyes in turn. There was no reason to show fear; he held all the cards and he knew it. "They claimed he was impossible. A fools ambition far beyond the scope of anything that had ever been achieved before. I, in turn, chose a different path. I chose the impossible. I chose to create a Master Man.
"All things great I have accomplished flow through him. He is to be the first of many; the greatest of them all. Your simple minds cannot comprehend the depths of my accomplishments, so allow me to simplify this in such a way even you can understand:"
Zemo pulled out his pistol and aimed at at the closest target, the gypsy shrew the previous cleansing had missed. Her death would be the start of something incredible.
"He is -"
"No, for the love of God, no! If I have to hear this fucking speech one more time, I'm going to save you the trouble of shooting me and do it myself!" Wanda snapped, simply not able to take it any longer. "Where is that bottle of vodka when I really need it?" She turned her glare towards the doorway and continued in the same vein, "And, please, save us the anticipation and stop skulking out there. I can only imagine what the humidity is doing to that much leather."
The woman who walked in was clad in little more than a chartreuse bathing suit, much to nobody's surprise since they had seen Amora's shrinking wardrobe over how many iterations now. She scowled at Wanda as she stepped through the door, clearly not a fan of having her entrance spoiled by a mouthy pest. "If you're so impatient to get this over with I'm sure we can oblige," she said icily, motioning at the nearest guards, who shifted and lifted their weapons to point at the intruders. "I would hate to keep you waiting any longer."
"Then why wait out there for so long?" Artie asked, after a few seconds of furious typing into his synthesizer. "We'd have welcooommmmmm" It gave a sad bleep and shut down, battery finally dead. He sighed and shoved it back into his back pocket and glared.
Doug smirked and flipped Amora the bird. "Want some?" He pulled a gun from his waistband and popped off a round in her direction, even as he went diving toward an overstuffed chair for cover. "Get some," he called out as the rest of his teammates also sprang into motion.
X-Force changes their strategy, but ultimately are saved by someone else changing their actions...
This time, X-Force already knew the score, and they didn't wait for Zemo to monologue and dismiss them, scattering to take out the various threats that faced them. Do the unexpected, Doug had suggested before the goons had broken in, and he'd taken his own advice to heart.
WWWWWD, he'd asked himself. What would Wade W. Wilson do? As he dove behind one of the chairs, taking cover from the gunfire, he produced his answer - several small balls of C4 explosive. "Light 'em up," he told Jubilee, then popped up from behind the chair to scatter them in a fan toward the gunmen.
Jubilee did exactly that, fanning out a series of multi-hued, crackling miniature balls of death as they exploded on impact with the C4, in turn creating greater explosions blowing back anything stupid or unlucky enough to be caught in the blast radius. She topped it off by remembering what Doug had said and immediately started trying to think like him, using what he'd taught her of pattern recognition to find the weakest links.
When she thought she had one, she grabbed a gun from Wade's belt and started shooting.
Right, do something he wouldn't normally do. A thing that was not a Wade Wilson and/or Deadpool kind of thing. Puffing out his cheeks, Wade stood perfectly still for a moment and actually checked out the room as everybody moved, people slotting into spaces and fights and teams as they fought. His shoulder was killing him, his hip hurt like a motherfucker, and that was a very pretty explosion his people had just created. He went... purely defensive, allowing his teammates to take whatever they wanted off him so far as weapons were concerned.
There were plenty of mercenaries but Wade didn't actually try to take any of them out. He did interpose himself between the bulk of them and the rest of his people after the initial flare of C4 but he didn't go for any of his weapons. Instead, he moved through kata to block and dodge hits. Wade took damage, but it was all circumstantial and he worked very specifically to funnel mercenaries toward his various teammates even as he pointedly did not put himself in direct line of fire.
Doug, on the other hand, was pointedly -not- analyzing, and pointedly -not- having much regard for his personal safety. Well, the latter was something he was occasionally guilty of, but not with the same reckless sort of glee that Doug-channeling-Wade did. One of the mercs, his gun slagged by the C4-fueled pyrotechnics, pulled out a short baton. "Heyyyyyyyyyyy batta batta SWING!" Doug called out derisively as he ducked under the first stroke of the baton. "He cannot he cannot he cannot SWING-" and another reckless strike whooshed through empty air.
"That is just all kinds of disturbing," Jubilee muttered to herself as she took careful aim again before putting a bullet neatly between they eyes of one of the goons currently gunning for her. "Yo, guns and ammo, throw me another clip, yeah?"
Sliding out of the way of a rather vicious looking kick, Wade kept his mouth shut because normally he wouldn't. Instead, he just tossed the requested items over to Jubilee, ducked a series of punches from the mercenary currently in front of him, and then gripped the man's shirt to toss him in Doug's direction.
"Hi. How you doin'?" Doug asked the man, almost personably, then punctuated the question with a headbutt across the bridge of the nose, knocking him to the floor. A roaring sound came from across the room, where the illusion of a giant wolf had appeared. "That is a -bad- dog," Doug muttered reflexively. But their teammates seemed to have things well in hand.
Taking her cue from Wade, Jubilee fell silent, letting Doug do the talking for a change. Instead she focused on taking out the mercenaries that Wade was funneling her way.
Block, block, block - jab, jab, jab - dodge, dodge, dodge - kick, turn, shove. Repeat.
Pretty soon they'd whittled down the mooks and Wade spun one of the last around into a sleeper hold as he raised his eyebrows at his friends.
Doug's smirk turned to a frown as motion at the corner of his vision caught his attention, and he turned just in time to see Simon Williams slump to the floor like a ragdoll. As red gathered around Wanda's hands, he made choppy motions at his teammates. "Get the others, pull back," he directed, darting toward Wanda as Wade bludgeoned the final man and tossed him aside.
-
This time, X-Force already knew the score, and they didn't wait for Zemo to monologue and dismiss them, scattering to take out the various threats that faced them. Do the unexpected, Doug had suggested before the goons had broken in. Take the fight to them, and break the cycle.
Wanda's outburst hadn't quite given Marie-Ange time to pull cards, but it had given her a chance to slip back towards a dividing wall. As Zemo's hired guns stormed into the room, her corner of it shrunk, walls growing into each other, the faux wood panels even spreading on the floor, rolling over the ceiling, spreading up Marie-Ange's legs as an odd sort of wooden armor.
She spread her fingers and the wood grew, appearing more and more fake, with a plastic sheen and woodgrain that repeated over and over and blocked off a full third of the room. It bent smoothly around Artie, making him a cozy nook, and parted to allow Emma to pass through it, and buckled and twisted and melted where Amora the Enchantress touched its surface.
~lie to her, yes? so many lies~ Marie-Ange's thoughts were faint under the busy windy feathery noises that were the rest of her mind.
The mind of a demi-goddess wasn't easy for Emma to grapple with - there were levels of magical protection and natural shielding as well as a strangeness that made Amora's mind almost impossible to penetrate in any meaningful way on such short acquaintance. But there were edges and small spaces she could play off and Emma took the opportunity to do what she could with them. Small things. Small lies, multiplying, multiplied. Beneath Amora's hand, where the wood buckled and twisted, a spider appeared, running across the back of the Enchantress' hand. The recognition of the spider flashed in the very forefront of her mind, where Emma could catch and twist it and suddenly spiders were pouring out of the wood, multiplying and swarming outwards, up Amora's arms, across her body, a tide of tiny black and red bodies.
"Cretins!" shrieked Amora, twisting in disgust and horror as the spiders swarmed over her limbs. As she flailed the maze around her ballooned and shrunk, disguising the location of the mutants who were bedevilling her so frustratingly. But that frustration fed her anger, which winnowed out the chink that Emma had isolated and fed it, causing the spiders to begin to grow and grow. As they neared the size of her palm they began to drop from her body, scuttling off into the twisting, flowing maze of corridors and corners, their mandibles clacking threateningly.
Artie didn't need to look at Emma to acknowledge the images she'd fed him, spiders no longer just appearing in Amora's mind but hinted at in the movement of the shadows and against the walls. Nothing too real but, hidden in the shadows, they didn't need to be as he made the lights flicker, shadows dancing still further before bringing one, and then two and three spiders out, images for Marie Ange to draw on if she needed to.
Keeping the maze up was a hard battle. Amora's aura of power disrupted Marie-Ange's images, causing them to wrap and twist on themselves, making nodules of ectoplasm that pulsed out of control and split from the false walls to plop on the ground wetly. She forced them to unfold up, coating the ceiling in more fakery and blotting out more of the light. Where she could, she left grates, barred openings to let flashes from Wanda - and Jubilee's powers in.
Her maze design was random, she barely planned the movements of the tightly knit walls around the four of them. What little planning Marie-Ange did was only in the form of warnings, hints to Emma, and through Emma to Artie about which ways the floors might buckle, or the faux paneling might twist around them.
Emma side-stepped neatly as a wall beside her slumped and dripped something vile nearly close enough to besmirch her Ralph and Russo top, which would have been a tragedy. She sent Marie-Ange a hint of thanks and then sought to find another hold into the Enchantress' mind. A small hole, a slight unravelling, and there was another image Emma could find in there. Waiting for Ragnarok, waiting for the end of all things, a man undone, no, a god undone, trickster god, writhing beneath the poison that dripped from a serpent's fangs, bound to the earth, the underearth, this Hell place, by the intestines of his own son.
"You people are so weird," breathed Emma and then caught the image, fed it to Marie-Ange, to Artie, grasped the image Amora gave her and fed it back, enhanced. ~Look up, look up to the ceiling,~ she sent, wafted, gave to the breeze, a message that was no more than a dream.
Artie closed his eyes, took a deep breath and took the image, filling in the gaps in what he'd been given. The walls to the maze vanished as the floor outside the reach of the circle they stood in began to bleed into grey rock, ectoplasm becoming stone, which swooped up overhead, the ceiling lost in shadow and flickering light from torches on the cavern walls, the snake no more than a suggestion in the darkness, eyes and teeth gleaming and more of it unseen than seen as it moved, slow and lazy, jaw dropping open.
He opened his eyes and let the image go, spinning it out into reality between one heartbeat and the next. It hurt, working at so large a scale and Artie dropped to his knees, nose bleeding, gasping as he clenched his fists. Hurts. hurts hurts hurts make it stop make it stop make it stop while the snake writhed overhead.
An inhuman scream ripped through the labyrinth as Amora tipped her head back to see the serpent coiled above her, the echoes of it worse than the reality could have been. She could feel the ropes about her own wrists and ankles - no, not ropes, guts, foul-smelling and taut as chains as she struggled to banish the illusions and reassert her own reality.
The wolf, the wolf.
A sudden rumbling growl drowned out the sussuration of the snake, and a moment later a wolf made of black thunder and rage stalked out of the shadows, eyes glowing red as it searched for its prey.
Marie-Ange's hiss of fear and pain was drowned out by the wolf's crackling growl. The labyrinth caved in on itself, collapsing into splashes of wet goo around her ankles, and she turned her head away from Amora's face, and swiped at her own, hand coming back smeared with red. She gave the blood a moment's glance and then pulled a trio of cards from her sleeve.
Out of the wet that clung to feet and shoes crawled another Emma, opal and obsidian and blood-red ruby entwined in the diamond, wielding an executioner's axe. And another Artie, skinless and serpentine, tongue like a hangman's noose - and then he twinned, and twinned again and the gooey pink clones raised their guns as a horrific firing squad. And another Marie-Ange, wrapped in pearlescent grey with a scythe slid next to Amora, and caressed her cheek before dancing away, fast as thought.
Artie took a deep breath - hurtshurtshuts - and wrapped the three of them in illusions that matched Marie-Ange's projections. He had to stand, smiling and still to maintain the illusion and it was so hard. So hard. Emma moved like water, like a dancer, as she came around, a second and third figure moving with her, with him, with Marie-Ange, each copying each other's movements.
One of the advantages of a fight that didn't need her to go diamond was that Emma had been able to keep an eye on more than what was going on in front of her. That gave her enough warning to send an urgent message to both Marie-Ange and Artie. ~Out,~ she sent. ~Out now. Leave the illusions here, but chaos is coming hard.~ With the tiniest shudder, Emma moved away from her opalescent double, leaving it menacing Amora, as Emma threw a telepathic cloak over her real companions, leaving their retreat unnoticed even as Emma mentally harried them. They had barely cleared the building when chaos boiled over behind them.
-
This time, X-Force already knew the score, and they didn't wait for Zemo to monologue and dismiss them, scattering to take out the various threats that faced them. Do the unexpected, Doug had suggested before the goons had broken in. Take the fight to them, and break the cycle.
Wanda was tempted to shove Simon into the closet but there was too much of a chance that she couldn't protect him from everything if she couldn't keep tabs on him. That, she thought wryly as she directed him under the table with a quick kiss and a promise she'd protect him, was probably why they were in the situation they were in. She straightened and saw Zemo approaching from one side but spotted Gabriel to her left.
"I would like to get Simon out of here, quickly," she said to Gabriel, trying to get a read on Zemo as he approached. Wanda tested the waters, throwing out a hex bolt that was easily dodged.
"Okay..." Gabriel watched her hex bolt move, then darted to her side to put himself between her and Zemo. "But honestly," he glanced at Simon, back at Wanda, then at Simon again. "I'm low on gas." He sounded a bit resigned, and when he turned back to Wanda, he looked slightly defeated. "Running on empty. Not sure I can move two of us, especially the way he's built."
"Are you calling me fat?" The retort was immediate and had very little pride behind it, but it did a very good job pointing out Simon's hiding place under the table. A gulp followed with a brief yelp to illustrate that Simon was further deciding to help but peeking out to see what was happening.
It was going to hell quickly.
Zemo would not be made a fool of! He was a scientist of the highest order! And these... these... simpletons! were standing between him and his perfection. That they lacked even the proper decorum to listen when he spoke was no great surprise, as infuriating as it was. But now he was done playing. His masterpiece would be returned to him and the rest of their bodies would be left to rot in the streets like the trash they were.
They wanted action, he'd give them action. He ignored the other men for now as a small threat. The puppy was more likely to run face-first onto Zemo's blade than try anything, and his master man was cowering under a table. (He'd need to be re-educated once they returned to the lab, clearly.) So not only was the Romani shrew the only remotely viable threat, but she was the kind of woman he took great pleasure in gutting. Not only tactically viable, but fun and personal. It's almost as though they'd been thinking especially of him!
Even as he charged, he swung his sword up. The tip was right in line for her pretty little neck. He'd cut that sharp tongue of hers right out of her head.
It didn't meet her neck. Instead, Wanda threw up a hand as if to, perhaps stupidly, catch it. The thing that stood between her flesh and the blade was an explosion of pure entropic energy. The sword carried through on the swing but it was changed now, the top portion a melted, rusted mess that formed a sharp point.
Zemo was off balance and she moved in, kicking him sharply in the stomach to force him back, away from Simon. Wanda's hands were glowing red, energy spitting off angrily as she moved.
"Oh, este pendejo," Gabriel grunted. Whether he was referring to a still-cowering Simon or the staggering Zemo was unclear. "Don't move," he said to Simon, the weariness in his voice making him sound more resigned to the situation than anything. "And get ready to make a break for it."
He pivoted on his heel, cracking his knuckles and looking at Wanda and Zemo. Whether by luck or by accident, the mad scientist had gone after the strongest of them. Which was fairly perfect. He took a step toward the two of them and vanished into a blur. The fatigue messed with his powers, and he could feel himself slipping in and out of the speed-time-whatever, so he took advantage of it. He darted around the room, switching between the blurry and static versions of himself before appearing behind Zemo.
Lacking formal fight training, Gabriel did his best Billy Zabka impression and tried to sweep Zemo's leg, figuring he could knock the Nazi asshole further off balance and then get Simon the hell out of here.
If this was truly the strongest might they could muster, he was even more disappointed in Amara now than he had been when he first learned of her failure. The Romani was a trickster, throwing little lights as though it would protect her. He hopped as soon as the puppy appeared behind him, then slammed his full weight down hard on the offending leg. The fact that his sword was melted meant that he was left to kick the young 'hero' away instead.
Pity. It was likely to leave blood on his shoes.
"Fuck!" Gabriel's lack of formal, normal-speed fight training was going to do him in. Zemo had telegraphed his move, but with the muscle fatigue and his powers acting up, the young man couldn't move fast enough to avoid it.
And so when the Baron made impact, Gabriel let out a few loud swears and fell to the ground, clutching his leg. "Red," he called to Wanda, rolling in her direction as a genetic purist loomed over him. "If you've got a plan C, now's a good time."
"I always have a Plan C," Wanda said flatly. Plan C was simple: make Zemo not alive.
She lunged forward as Zemo was distracted and brought both her hands up, preparing to push through the madman as much chaos energy as Wanda could bring to bear. Considering her anger and her power, the amount she was gathering was immense. Enough to kill him in one blow. And with Zemo out of the way, then they could ...
Her hands slammed against an invisible barrier that shimmered into existence only a few inches away from his body. Wanda's eyes widened and she caught a brief hint of the Enchantress's laughter right as her chaos energy interacted with the magical shield.
Badly. It interacted badly.
The backlash caught both Gabriel and Wanda and it flung them backwards, away from Zemo, in a powerful rush. Wanda slammed into the ground a few feet away from Simon, the breath knocked out of her and her entire body screaming as if it had been hit with lightening. She tried to regain her feet but couldn't even roll over.
Simon was hovering over her protectively in an instant, but his eyes — bloodshot and practically glowing with anger —were glued onto Zemo, practically daring him to advance further.
Oh, oh, now wasn't this interesting? Of course such a moment would be the catalyst Zemo had been searching for. He laughed. It was not a happy sound.
"Of course you would choose this moment to grow a spine, Simon. I regret to inform you, however, that you are too late." He gestured to the mostly-destroyed room, and everyone that lay there-in. "Look around you, Simon. Your protectors are dying; your hope, gone. You have lost. Submit, and I promise I will end their lives quickly." Except the shrew. She still owed him for his sword.
"You have my word."
Simon's tone matched an accompanying sneer, and his sheer revulsion buoyed his confidence. "I am Simon Williams. I am no man's puppet," he recited as if almost reciting lines but there was, for once, a certain lack of cheese, "And I need no protection.I'll show you where you can stick your word."
His eyes tightened more until all he could see was red.
He then very heroically swung a punch at the Baron.
The blow was hard enough to turn Zemo's head. Simon had left his fist connected, and the red lightning crackling over Simon's hand jumped to Zemo, running across his bag face. It looked truly impressive.
Zemo hand clamped around Simon's wrist. It twisted, and the snap of breaking bones echoed through the room. "So be it."
And before Simon could quite follow it, Zemo had dropped his wrist, reached into his vest, and pulled out a knife. It was no sword, Zemo figured, but it would do. Zemo slid the knife into Simon's chest.
Zemo watched impassively as he went down. "Just rest, Simon. You'll be back in the lab when you wake."
He turned back towards the room. Now, for the rest of them.
The pain was no longer important. She didn't remember moving but Wanda caught Simon as he crumbled and held him tightly. "You stupid man," she whispered, pressing her lips against his forehead. Her powers told her what her training knew - he was gone. And this wasn't a movie, they didn't have time for the tears burning her eyes or for her to shake him and demand that he come back.
He was gone.
The room went red.
But this time it wasn't the universe resetting. This time it was Wanda reaching out to the chaotic energy and bringing it to bear on the world around her.
The room went red and the building around them screamed.
The strains of whatever neutral "best of the 80s, 90s, and today!' radio station had replaced Muzak as the background noise of most stores and offices were mutedly playing in the front lobby of the Snow Valley Centre on a very slow Tuesday morning.
"...should be another hot one today. Anyway, here's Wonderwall."
~Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you...~
At the front desk, the phone rang, caller ID showing as the NYPD 6th Precinct.
Since Cammie was nowhere in sight as he walked through the front door, Wade paused to pick up the phone. "Snow Valley, Wade speaking, how can I direct your call?" As always, he was tempted to answer with something utterly ridiculous, but he restrained the urge. He was pretending to be a professional - had a suit and everything. He couldn't, however, keep himself from softly humming along to the song playing through the office.
Just then, the radio station experienced some sort of technical glitch and the song skipped from Oasis to Asia singing about doing stupid things in the heat of the moment.
"Wanda Maximoff," a cock-sure deep bass answered with the haggard strain of someone who had not slept in entirely enough hours or at the hangover-end of a twelve hour bender.
"May I ask who's calling?"
"Simon," and the type of pause indicative of considered omission, "She knows me, don't worry."
"Hold, please," Wade said, clicking various buttons. Then he dialed Wanda's office extension, found on a helpful piece of paper at the desk, and waited for her to pick up.
Wanda glared at the phone and considered not answering it. She'd been on endless conference calls that day and her head was killing; all she wanted to do was ignore the phone, take the aspirin she was holding and go have lunch. It was lunch time, right? She squinted at the clock and then sighed when the phone kept ringing.
She dry swallowed the pills and picked up the handset. "Wanda speaking," she sighed, moving the mouse to stop the computer screen from going black.
"Hey, TD&G," Wade said. "You gotta call from a dude named Simon. Sounds like he lost a couple rounds with a bottle of jack and a bucket of gravel. You want me to tell him he got the wrong number or something?"
"I should but he is always a good amount of fun," Wanda said after considering putting him off for the moment and calling him after work. But Simon had been fun, though, and she had given him her number for a reason. Perhaps if the first weekend had been the only weekend, she'd call him later but no, she'd take the call, headache or no. "There is probably a very good reason he sounds like that. The Simon I met knew how to survive a good party." …
She made a noise and told Wade to patch Simon through.
There was a small beep as the call transferred. "Wanda? Babe?"
Wanda smiled a little - Wade was right. Simon did sound like hell. "Simon, calling me at work? I think that's a new step for us." She leaned back and looked at her work calendar, wondering what could be rearranged if he was in town. "To what do I owe the pleasure, darling? And I probably do mean that in as many ways as you can imagine."
The actual relief in his words was almost palpable. "Remember that time in Acapulco when we joked about prison? Well, I need help and not of the conjugal sort. Although..." A beat. "No. I goofed hard. You are the only one I can reach."
"..." Wanda pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it for a moment. "Why on earth are you in jail?" she demanded, wondering if a headache could feel smug. Because this one was starting to feel like it was being smug. "And what do you mean I am the only one you could reach? What about the studio lawyers?"
A few clicks of the mouse brought up a national news site and she stared at it. "You punched Tony Stark. That ... would by you are in jail, then."
"Smug ass-faced bastard deserved it. No court will convict me... well, based on principle." He sighed wearily. "Babe, you're literally the only phone I could call that didn't go straight to voicemail or shoot me to a call center in India off my entire contact list. Weirdest thing, but I'm getting desperate."
"Every court would convict you," Wanda corrected but there was no heat to her words. She was mulling over that last part. "The only person you could reach? That seems ... highly unlikely." But when had anything in her life acted normally? "Ah, but who am I to argue with fate? If you had to reach only one person, at least it's someone who is handy and gorgeous."
She sent a quick e-mail to others, letting them know something strange was going on and she was clearing her calendar for the day.
"Outside of a jail break, darling, what can I do? Name it, I'll try and make it happen."
"I need you to play assistant. I only get one of these phonecalls, see, and carrying a wallet while at a premiere is a no no due to inopportune bulges. I'm stuck here with no cash and no contacts and I am far too pretty for the general population."
Despite the situation, Wanda laughed at that. "You would think a premiere would be the perfect place for an inopportune bulge." She switched the phone to her other ear as she grabbed a pen and pad. "Consider this your rescue attempt. Tell me everything you can before they make you hang up on me. Who I should call and your backups just in case I too cannot get through."
"Well, no on has ever complained about my bulge before."
She got her list.
A few minutes later, Wanda was gifted with a list of agency contacts and family lawyers, vague dance instructions for interacting with his publicist's anxiety triggers, and a few suggestions on his office's "for reals real" assistant dress-code.
"I am on it. Just sit tight and ..." She gripped the phone and thought about the strange events Simon had described. Wanda had been doing her job long enough to trust her instincts and they were screaming at her. "Simon, darling, sit tight and be careful. I'll get this sorted and you will spend a very enjoyable evening paying me back."
Once off the phone, Wanda set to work and tried to shake the feeling of dread that was strangely settling over her.
This time, Emma accompanies Wanda to the bail hearing. Wanda is convinced that she's done all this before.
"...all rise," the bailiff said in that sort of perfunctory but still formal tone of a ritual that they had performed over and over every day for years. "Docket ending 616404, People vs Simon Williams. Charge is assault in the first degree..."
#They certainly got him into court quickly,# Wanda sent quietly to Emma. #I suppose that is what happens when you assault a man worth more than God.# Emma's telepathy gave them the best way to talk without having to try to cut through the noise of the courtroom. It was like a circus in there, filled with press and people who thought they'd get to be close to Stark and who were probably disappointed that the man himself wasn't there.
The two women had found a seat fairly close to the front but they were boxed in and Wanda was freely using her sharp elbows to give herself some breathing room. She was counting down until they were out and she could potentially put her head in the nearest refrigerator.
#Would you be kind enough to kill me,# she asked with a pained expression, #before this headache does?#
#Where would be the fun in that?# replied Emma, somewhat absently as she scanned the crowd gathered in the courtroom, sifting through a myriad of over-excited celebrity stalkers to see if she could find anyone with, perhaps, a particularly enhanced feeling of deja vu. #I'd end up stuck in here for hours while they cleaned you up and that would just be irritating.# With a small tendril of her power she reached out to Wanda and took away as much of the pain as she could manage around the strange fuzz of Wanda's powers. #I know I've asked you this before, but you're absolutely certain there's some kind of time loop going on? There's a lot of excitement out there, but I'm not feeling that people think they've done this before. Which would mean that it's something to do with your powers. Some kind of probability futz?#
Wanda's relief was instantaneous, her shoulders slumped in relief and the pinched look on her face eased. #You are a miracle worker,# she sighed happily. The noise of the courtroom was no longer like a knife to the brain and she felt far more like she could deal with whatever was happening. #You are certainly better than any drug on the market and you can quote me on that at any time.#
She thought about Emma's question and tried to answer it as best she could. #If it is, it is the first time this has ever happened. That we know of.# Comforting, that. #I cannot know for certain that it is a time loop. It just ... something is very off. I feel as if everything I have been doing since Simon called has been on repeat. My powers have been feeling off ever since. It seems too weird to believe but...#
#We’ve got students who came back from Asgard and fought a man who may be using magic to make himself immortal,# replied Emma. #You would have to come up with something far more interesting than a time loop to make it too weird to believe. A time loop would pretty much just make it Friday.# She frowned suddenly as she continued to use her telepathy to test the crowd. #I think we’re being watched. And possibly Simon is being watched. Don’t look but gallery, second row, third seat from the left,# Emma inserted the picture of the person she had stolen a glance at when her telepathy had suddenly informed her that one of the crowd was not like the other ones. #Familiar face?#
The image flickered in her mind and Wanda frowned slightly but didn't look towards the woman in question. She didn't immediately recognize the blonde woman that now floated in her thoughts but something ... something ... was familiar ... and then the universe punched Wanda in the face.
Her hands seized for a moment over her knees, fingers tightening on her pants so quickly and painfully that the knuckles all popped at once. The room spun sharply and for a moment the connection with Emma blinked out as Wanda's powers flared, sending the courtroom briefly into darkness as the lights sputtered before coming back on. People around them screamed and muttered at the unexpected power blip.
Wanda dragged her eyes up and locked them on the back of Simon's head as he was lead towards where he'd pay bail. "We have to go," she gasped. "Now. S-she's at the c-c-c..." She put her hand to her nose and her fingers came away bloody but more disturbing were the small sparks of chaos energy at the edges of her fingers. "Emma ..."
#Well, that seems unfortunate,# replied Emma. #Though well timed,# she added as the judge shrugged off the interruption caused by the dip in the power supply and noted that she planned to release Simon on $5000 bail, pending further investigation. The quiet competence of the lawyer Emma had organised to attend for just this possibility, meant that the posting of the bail occupied only a couple more minutes as Wanda sparked and huddled down beside her, trying to keep her glowing out of the attention.
#I’m sorry,# Emma directed to the bailiff she selected, without projecting it. #I think an anonymous bottle of something very fine will be delivered to you in the near future. But for now...#
The faint was spectacular. Not a quiet losing of consciousness and slump to the floor, but a full-on badly acted death scene from a very, very amateur play. The bailiff staggered left, then staggered right, then threw a dramatic arm up to his brow, pirouetted twice, then collapsed with a terrible clatter in the centre of the floor in front of the judge. As chaos arose, and people started to run forward, Emma nudged Wanda. “Would you like to go and collect Mr Williams?” she said, as the prosecutor suddenly began to stagger from side to side, in an equally dramatic interpretation of Emma’s mental command to #Sleep now#.
For a moment, Wanda was as struck dumb as the rest of the court room and then she shook herself as people surged forward towards the bailiff. "I - yes. I think that's wise," she murmured, wiping her bloody fingers against her pant leg. Every once in a while, she was reminded of how scary Emma was and how very happy Wanda was that they were friends.
She caught a glimpse of the woman in question, the one that had made everything hurt, and Wanda realized she was on her way towards them. "Oh yes, out we go," she murmured, letting Emma help her to her feet. Time to go find Simon, she thought, as the world tilted slightly before righting itself.
Wanda brings Simon to the safehouse, and manages to convince the rest of X-Force that there's a time loop, leading to a very interesting strategy.
The safehouse that the members of X-Force had gathered at was a perfectly anonymous townhouse in the East Village — two bedrooms (with weapons lockers in the closets), one and a half bathrooms (cupboards filled with painkillers, bandages, and sterile gloves), and a spacious kitchen (well stocked with a wide variety of alcohol). Doug leaned over his laptop where it sat on the small kitchen island and made a frustrated noise at the lack of anything like productive results. "What does an Asgardian sorceress-slash-possible-demigod need with — no offense, Wanda — at best a C-list celebrity?"
"His body? His stunning personality? Or perhaps the universe just likes to mess with me?" She came out of one of the bedrooms, dressed in street clothes and pressing a towel to her face. She'd been dressed for the courtroom but now she needed to dress for what might be a fight with very powerful enemies. Luckily, they had clothes stashed at their safe houses.
Also luckily, they had towels and washclothes, she thought, to help sop up the nosebleed that had hit the moment they'd gotten into the safe house.
Barefoot, she walked over to Simon and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Something is really messing with us," Wanda said, her voice tight and worried. "I know a time loop is hard to believe but ..." She grimaced as the pain increased. "Fuck, this better end soon before my brain tears itself apart."
It said something that Simon Williams did not even flinch at the affront to his ego. Then again, judging from his body language, it wasn't at all — the man was practically coasting on adrenaline. His puffy eyes were drawn tight in thought, as if enough wishful thinking would ward away the day's confusion. He did not, however, jump at Wanda's touch. In fact, he practically melted into its familiar embrace.
He breathed, and the words came lighting quick, only punctuated by swearing. "The. Fuck. A timeloop? What happened in the courtroom? People don't just... The flying fuck. This makes no sense. What. The. Fuck."
He breathed heavily again, and his eyes were pinpoints of accusation. Everyone save Wanda might as well ceased to exist in that moment.
Wanda sighed knelt in front of him, reaching for his hands. "Simon, I am so sorry. I told you when we were together last time that there were things in my life that - defied description, I suppose. I do not tell people about parts of my life. It is ..." She closed her eyes and realized she was at a loss for words. "It is supposed to keep you safe! Had I known you were going to get dragged into something like this, I would have told you I was ..."
Wanda glanced over at Doug, knowing she looked as miserable as she felt. "Douglas, a little help here?"
Now that Wanda had told them there was a loop, Doug could feel the slightest undercurrent of a pattern, the vaguest sense that he had done this before. There was a rhythm - Him, then Wanda, then Simon, then Wanda, then him. He glanced around, wishing again for Pete to take the podium and talk about the bastards of the world. But it looked like it was down to him. He sighed and stood up, moving to the center of the rough circle of people in the room.
"Okay, Cliffs Notes time, Hollywood," he said to Simon. Most everyone in the room knew the score, except for perhaps Gabriel as the newest of them. "The world is a messier place than you're even starting to suspect right now. Gods and monsters, that sort of thing. To give you an idea of the scale of weird and terrifying stuff your..." He looked at Wanda. "...maybe-girlfriend...deals with, a time loop? Doesn't even make the top five."
"Asgard? Real place. That lady that stalked you at your bail hearing? Goes by 'the Enchantress'. Gets her kicks bending people to her will, and she's had a really long time to get really good at it." He grinned. "But it's not all bad news, because this?" He waved a hand to indicate his teammates.
"This is what we do."
Marie-Ange's mouth snapped shut, teeth clicking, and then she shook her head hard enough to shake her half-braided ponytails loose. "No Hellboy this time. We can change the loops." She drifted between Doug and the wall and then over to Wanda, laying a hand on her neck. "We can change the past. We can change the knots in time." Her eyes were unfocused, looking through Wanda to Simon. "Bleed from the eyes, and from your heart, not ragged nails clawing at grief, unravel who you think you are, unknot the ties, it will all return, you are not a man of letters. You are not that man."
A sudden knock on the door in a very particular pattern interrupted things for a moment and then the door opened, admitting Wade. He had three large, paper bags in each hand as he kicked the door shut behind him, locking it with a quick bump of his elbow. Limping into the room where everyone else was, he held the bags out and said, "I come bearing tacos. And a really weird story about tripping over my own feet and somehow damaging both my shoulder and my hip, what the fuck? The first person to make a 'I've fallen and I can't get up' joke gets my hand in their face. And no tacos."
He plopped all six bags on the center table and reached into the nearest one, grabbing three wrapped parcels for himself before turning and limping over to the wall near the door. "I do not like today," Wade said. "What've I missed?"
"Time loop, Simon freaking out, Marie-Ange getting her prognostication on and Wanda possibly thinking about her life choices. Oh, and Doug mentioned Asgard because Enchantress." Jubilee replied, stepping out of one of the bedrooms. She'd come in from the roof and the smell of tacos was heavenly, "Hope you got enough for me in there, bucko."
"There's six grocery bags, Jubes. There's enough for you and me and everybody else here. Also, goddammit." Wade scowled at his first, unwrapped taco and then took a vicious bite. "I will fucking shank that woman if I get the chance. I do not like her."
"Somebody please help me find Advil." A weary Gabriel came down the stairs, scratching a surprisingly full beard with one hand and scrolling through texts on his phone with the other. His feet dragged on the steps. "Everything hurts, and there's Oxy here, but no goddamn Advil." He tried to say those words with the usual bravado, but his voice was quieter than usual, the signs of fatigue shining through. "I need some fucking coffee too."
As he neared the last step, he tried to put the phone in his pocket and let go a few inches short. The device fell out of his hand, hitting steps as it bounced toward the floor. "Great." He groaned as he bent down to pick it up, every muscle aching. When he flipped it over, the screen was cracked. He closed his eyes for a bit too long, then they shot open. "Tell me we've got some fucking coffee."
Artie tucked a hand under his elbow, tugging him toward a seat. A moment later, he placed two tacos and a coffee in front of Gabriel before collecting his own.
"Okay, now that we've all used our words and caffeinated ourselves substantially, I figured getting back to the whole 'what does the lady who thinks she's a God want with the pretty boy? I mean, it's a pretty long way to go if all she's lookin' to do is bump uglies."
"Bumping uglies is usually just a fringe benefit for Enchantress, I'd think. I mean, come all the way to 'Midgard' just to get her rocks off?" Doug shook his head. "Doesn't add up." He tapped a finger against his lips. "Okay, let's start with what we do know." He grabbed a dry-erase marker and started writing on the whiteboard they kept in every safehouse for just this sort of purpose.
"Okay, start with Simon here, since he seems to be the linchpin." Doug drew a circle and put the man's name in it. "Let's Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon it." He drew a line and another circle, labeling it WANDA. "Hey, what -is- your Kevin Bacon number anyway?" he asked Simon idly as he drew in circles for the rest of X-Force connected to Wanda, starring some of them. "Okay, stars are people who have experience with Asgard, either from way back, or that more recent thing in Montana." He frowned at the board. "Okay, what else?"
Everyone's gaze lingered on Simon before shifting nearly as one to Wanda. "Oh please, I find it charming," she defended, reaching over to grab a taco. Breakfast felt like a lifetime ago - and considering the apparent time loop, it might be close to that - and she needed to recharge. Wanda also snagged another chair next to Simon and threw her legs over his lap.
"If Douglas could stop distracting him ..." Wanda frowned in thought. "Did you notice anyone following or stalking you over these last few weeks?"
"I..." Simon straightened his posture a little bit as if trying to shore up the confidence he wasn't feeling. "The jail thing was a change. I'm not usually whisked away from a bail hearing, except for the part where it has happened before? So... everything here is new and then nothing is?"
He sighed dramatically, but caught himself as he took stock of all of the eyes on him. "No. Too complicated. I got processed. No paperwork, one phonecall, and a medical exam from a German doctor who sure liked to monologue. Then I sat in jail for half a day."
Doug cocked his head. "Uh, it was more than half a day. More like twenty-four hours - you punched Tony Stark yesterday." He tapped his fingers together and frowned. "So there's a time loop, -and- people are losing time? That means something about the way we're doing things isn't working."
"Point A to point B, not point A to point Q." Marie-Ange said, pointing at Doug. "Also stop cheating with my precognition and explain for the rest of the class." She had one hand up to her face, using a knuckle to dig at the tension headache in her face. "If there is a time loop and I still do not believe there is, then how do we break loose?"
"Normally you answer the question before I ask it," Doug replied with a smirk. "This is TVTropes 101, though. I mean, Groundhog Day. Bill Murray kept going through the same day over and over again until he learned to actually be a decent person and not just a walking id." He shrugged. "So something is keeping us repeating this day. It just seems to stand to reason."
Wade was on his last taco, having taken about half of it all in one bite. As he chewed, he got a thoughtful look on his face, then very obviously shoved all of the food in his mouth into his cheek before asking, "Do these tacos taste funny?" He shook his head, still doing a pretty impressive job of a chipmunk as he continued, "Also, since we're not generally assholes and this all seems to be revolving around Wanda's hunka-hunka-burnin' love over there, maybe it's something to do with him being a walking id. Yo, Burnin' Love, don't be an asshole."
"He says," Gabriel's voice creaked up, "being an asshole." It was a peanut gallery remark. His eyes were fixed on his coffee, his attention focused on the math he was trying to do in his head. A time loop. How much had they lost? How much had he lost? The beard was a clue. Maybe it wasn't. He didn't know. "Seriously," he half-muttered, "what the hell is going on?"
"Oh come on," and Simon's voice dripped with incredulity and a generous peppering of loathing as he stared Wade down, "All I did was punch Stark, and that asshat had it coming. If the universe is saying that I shouldn't have, then fuck it. I'll burn it down around me."
Simon's face was burning red at this point. Today had already been too much. "Do you know what Stark Industries did to my family? He killed my father."
Wanda dropped her legs from Simon's lap in favor of putting an arm over his shoulders. "Hey," she said quietly, catching his attention. "I know, Simon, I know. Ignore Gabriel, he is being a smart ass because this is not a great situation. Especially for you." She shot Gabriel a look, a silent request to turn it down a notch. Everyone was stressed and worried and this was not helping.
She felt Simon's shoulders relax under her arm. Turning back, Wanda returned his half-smile with one of her own before placing a kiss to his brow. "Now eat your taco, you'll need your strength," she said, drawing back slightly but pausing when she thought she caught a flicker of ... something? ... around Simon. Wanda stared hard for a minute, wondering if the flicker of light had been her imagination or, perhaps, she realized, sitting back, maybe her powers were reacting to her stress and the time loop.
Yes. The more she thought about it, the more it had to have been her and not Simon.
"Be somebody else." Doug smacked the dry-erase marker into his hand. Off of everyone's blank looks at the non sequitur, he elaborated. "Okay, so we're time looped, right? That means something keeps happening to reset the loop. Which means that it almost certainly is being caused by something we're doing, if Simon is the focus. So we do the unexpected. Think like somebody else. -Act- like somebody else."
A loud crash at the door interrupted them. "Just remember that," he told them as they all came to the ready. "Be somebody else."
The grand entrance of the gatecrashers is a bit ruined by X-Force being really tired of this crap...
There is only so much reinforcing that can be done to the door of a townhouse in the middle of New York City without arousing the suspicions of neighbors. Those precautions are good at keeping out the casual B&E set, but don't do much against a determined strike force with a small battering ram.
Even as the loud bang of the door giving way sent X-Force scurrying for their weapons, several men in black balaclavas scurried through the doorway, semi-automatic weapons at the ready. But they held fire, waiting for another person to enter. The person who followed them in, though, was not Amora the Enchantress. Instead, it was another foe that at least some of the people in the room recognized immediately by the bright purple sacklike mask fitted to his head.
Zemo did not walk so much as strut into the townhouse. He looked the definition of poise and confidence as he took in the room, smiling under his mask. Everything was going exactly according to plan.
"Ah," he said simply. "'The gang, it is all here,' as you Americans are prone to saying." He turned an eye to the leader of the mercenary crew. "Remember, I'm simply here for my masterpiece. The rest... are unnecessary, so if they move..." X-Force appeared surprised to see him. Zemo was almost offended.
"Come, come now. Surely you must have suspected, expected my involvement? Who else could have been responsible for such a momentous achievement for humanity? None but I have the intellect, the skills, the genius to have made such a creation! He is far beyond anything the likes of which Red Skull or Hydra could produce!"
He met each of their eyes in turn. There was no reason to show fear; he held all the cards and he knew it. "They claimed he was impossible. A fools ambition far beyond the scope of anything that had ever been achieved before. I, in turn, chose a different path. I chose the impossible. I chose to create a Master Man.
"All things great I have accomplished flow through him. He is to be the first of many; the greatest of them all. Your simple minds cannot comprehend the depths of my accomplishments, so allow me to simplify this in such a way even you can understand:"
Zemo pulled out his pistol and aimed at at the closest target, the gypsy shrew the previous cleansing had missed. Her death would be the start of something incredible.
"He is -"
"No, for the love of God, no! If I have to hear this fucking speech one more time, I'm going to save you the trouble of shooting me and do it myself!" Wanda snapped, simply not able to take it any longer. "Where is that bottle of vodka when I really need it?" She turned her glare towards the doorway and continued in the same vein, "And, please, save us the anticipation and stop skulking out there. I can only imagine what the humidity is doing to that much leather."
The woman who walked in was clad in little more than a chartreuse bathing suit, much to nobody's surprise since they had seen Amora's shrinking wardrobe over how many iterations now. She scowled at Wanda as she stepped through the door, clearly not a fan of having her entrance spoiled by a mouthy pest. "If you're so impatient to get this over with I'm sure we can oblige," she said icily, motioning at the nearest guards, who shifted and lifted their weapons to point at the intruders. "I would hate to keep you waiting any longer."
"Then why wait out there for so long?" Artie asked, after a few seconds of furious typing into his synthesizer. "We'd have welcooommmmmm" It gave a sad bleep and shut down, battery finally dead. He sighed and shoved it back into his back pocket and glared.
Doug smirked and flipped Amora the bird. "Want some?" He pulled a gun from his waistband and popped off a round in her direction, even as he went diving toward an overstuffed chair for cover. "Get some," he called out as the rest of his teammates also sprang into motion.
X-Force changes their strategy, but ultimately are saved by someone else changing their actions...
This time, X-Force already knew the score, and they didn't wait for Zemo to monologue and dismiss them, scattering to take out the various threats that faced them. Do the unexpected, Doug had suggested before the goons had broken in, and he'd taken his own advice to heart.
WWWWWD, he'd asked himself. What would Wade W. Wilson do? As he dove behind one of the chairs, taking cover from the gunfire, he produced his answer - several small balls of C4 explosive. "Light 'em up," he told Jubilee, then popped up from behind the chair to scatter them in a fan toward the gunmen.
Jubilee did exactly that, fanning out a series of multi-hued, crackling miniature balls of death as they exploded on impact with the C4, in turn creating greater explosions blowing back anything stupid or unlucky enough to be caught in the blast radius. She topped it off by remembering what Doug had said and immediately started trying to think like him, using what he'd taught her of pattern recognition to find the weakest links.
When she thought she had one, she grabbed a gun from Wade's belt and started shooting.
Right, do something he wouldn't normally do. A thing that was not a Wade Wilson and/or Deadpool kind of thing. Puffing out his cheeks, Wade stood perfectly still for a moment and actually checked out the room as everybody moved, people slotting into spaces and fights and teams as they fought. His shoulder was killing him, his hip hurt like a motherfucker, and that was a very pretty explosion his people had just created. He went... purely defensive, allowing his teammates to take whatever they wanted off him so far as weapons were concerned.
There were plenty of mercenaries but Wade didn't actually try to take any of them out. He did interpose himself between the bulk of them and the rest of his people after the initial flare of C4 but he didn't go for any of his weapons. Instead, he moved through kata to block and dodge hits. Wade took damage, but it was all circumstantial and he worked very specifically to funnel mercenaries toward his various teammates even as he pointedly did not put himself in direct line of fire.
Doug, on the other hand, was pointedly -not- analyzing, and pointedly -not- having much regard for his personal safety. Well, the latter was something he was occasionally guilty of, but not with the same reckless sort of glee that Doug-channeling-Wade did. One of the mercs, his gun slagged by the C4-fueled pyrotechnics, pulled out a short baton. "Heyyyyyyyyyyy batta batta SWING!" Doug called out derisively as he ducked under the first stroke of the baton. "He cannot he cannot he cannot SWING-" and another reckless strike whooshed through empty air.
"That is just all kinds of disturbing," Jubilee muttered to herself as she took careful aim again before putting a bullet neatly between they eyes of one of the goons currently gunning for her. "Yo, guns and ammo, throw me another clip, yeah?"
Sliding out of the way of a rather vicious looking kick, Wade kept his mouth shut because normally he wouldn't. Instead, he just tossed the requested items over to Jubilee, ducked a series of punches from the mercenary currently in front of him, and then gripped the man's shirt to toss him in Doug's direction.
"Hi. How you doin'?" Doug asked the man, almost personably, then punctuated the question with a headbutt across the bridge of the nose, knocking him to the floor. A roaring sound came from across the room, where the illusion of a giant wolf had appeared. "That is a -bad- dog," Doug muttered reflexively. But their teammates seemed to have things well in hand.
Taking her cue from Wade, Jubilee fell silent, letting Doug do the talking for a change. Instead she focused on taking out the mercenaries that Wade was funneling her way.
Block, block, block - jab, jab, jab - dodge, dodge, dodge - kick, turn, shove. Repeat.
Pretty soon they'd whittled down the mooks and Wade spun one of the last around into a sleeper hold as he raised his eyebrows at his friends.
Doug's smirk turned to a frown as motion at the corner of his vision caught his attention, and he turned just in time to see Simon Williams slump to the floor like a ragdoll. As red gathered around Wanda's hands, he made choppy motions at his teammates. "Get the others, pull back," he directed, darting toward Wanda as Wade bludgeoned the final man and tossed him aside.
-
This time, X-Force already knew the score, and they didn't wait for Zemo to monologue and dismiss them, scattering to take out the various threats that faced them. Do the unexpected, Doug had suggested before the goons had broken in. Take the fight to them, and break the cycle.
Wanda's outburst hadn't quite given Marie-Ange time to pull cards, but it had given her a chance to slip back towards a dividing wall. As Zemo's hired guns stormed into the room, her corner of it shrunk, walls growing into each other, the faux wood panels even spreading on the floor, rolling over the ceiling, spreading up Marie-Ange's legs as an odd sort of wooden armor.
She spread her fingers and the wood grew, appearing more and more fake, with a plastic sheen and woodgrain that repeated over and over and blocked off a full third of the room. It bent smoothly around Artie, making him a cozy nook, and parted to allow Emma to pass through it, and buckled and twisted and melted where Amora the Enchantress touched its surface.
~lie to her, yes? so many lies~ Marie-Ange's thoughts were faint under the busy windy feathery noises that were the rest of her mind.
The mind of a demi-goddess wasn't easy for Emma to grapple with - there were levels of magical protection and natural shielding as well as a strangeness that made Amora's mind almost impossible to penetrate in any meaningful way on such short acquaintance. But there were edges and small spaces she could play off and Emma took the opportunity to do what she could with them. Small things. Small lies, multiplying, multiplied. Beneath Amora's hand, where the wood buckled and twisted, a spider appeared, running across the back of the Enchantress' hand. The recognition of the spider flashed in the very forefront of her mind, where Emma could catch and twist it and suddenly spiders were pouring out of the wood, multiplying and swarming outwards, up Amora's arms, across her body, a tide of tiny black and red bodies.
"Cretins!" shrieked Amora, twisting in disgust and horror as the spiders swarmed over her limbs. As she flailed the maze around her ballooned and shrunk, disguising the location of the mutants who were bedevilling her so frustratingly. But that frustration fed her anger, which winnowed out the chink that Emma had isolated and fed it, causing the spiders to begin to grow and grow. As they neared the size of her palm they began to drop from her body, scuttling off into the twisting, flowing maze of corridors and corners, their mandibles clacking threateningly.
Artie didn't need to look at Emma to acknowledge the images she'd fed him, spiders no longer just appearing in Amora's mind but hinted at in the movement of the shadows and against the walls. Nothing too real but, hidden in the shadows, they didn't need to be as he made the lights flicker, shadows dancing still further before bringing one, and then two and three spiders out, images for Marie Ange to draw on if she needed to.
Keeping the maze up was a hard battle. Amora's aura of power disrupted Marie-Ange's images, causing them to wrap and twist on themselves, making nodules of ectoplasm that pulsed out of control and split from the false walls to plop on the ground wetly. She forced them to unfold up, coating the ceiling in more fakery and blotting out more of the light. Where she could, she left grates, barred openings to let flashes from Wanda - and Jubilee's powers in.
Her maze design was random, she barely planned the movements of the tightly knit walls around the four of them. What little planning Marie-Ange did was only in the form of warnings, hints to Emma, and through Emma to Artie about which ways the floors might buckle, or the faux paneling might twist around them.
Emma side-stepped neatly as a wall beside her slumped and dripped something vile nearly close enough to besmirch her Ralph and Russo top, which would have been a tragedy. She sent Marie-Ange a hint of thanks and then sought to find another hold into the Enchantress' mind. A small hole, a slight unravelling, and there was another image Emma could find in there. Waiting for Ragnarok, waiting for the end of all things, a man undone, no, a god undone, trickster god, writhing beneath the poison that dripped from a serpent's fangs, bound to the earth, the underearth, this Hell place, by the intestines of his own son.
"You people are so weird," breathed Emma and then caught the image, fed it to Marie-Ange, to Artie, grasped the image Amora gave her and fed it back, enhanced. ~Look up, look up to the ceiling,~ she sent, wafted, gave to the breeze, a message that was no more than a dream.
Artie closed his eyes, took a deep breath and took the image, filling in the gaps in what he'd been given. The walls to the maze vanished as the floor outside the reach of the circle they stood in began to bleed into grey rock, ectoplasm becoming stone, which swooped up overhead, the ceiling lost in shadow and flickering light from torches on the cavern walls, the snake no more than a suggestion in the darkness, eyes and teeth gleaming and more of it unseen than seen as it moved, slow and lazy, jaw dropping open.
He opened his eyes and let the image go, spinning it out into reality between one heartbeat and the next. It hurt, working at so large a scale and Artie dropped to his knees, nose bleeding, gasping as he clenched his fists. Hurts. hurts hurts hurts make it stop make it stop make it stop while the snake writhed overhead.
An inhuman scream ripped through the labyrinth as Amora tipped her head back to see the serpent coiled above her, the echoes of it worse than the reality could have been. She could feel the ropes about her own wrists and ankles - no, not ropes, guts, foul-smelling and taut as chains as she struggled to banish the illusions and reassert her own reality.
The wolf, the wolf.
A sudden rumbling growl drowned out the sussuration of the snake, and a moment later a wolf made of black thunder and rage stalked out of the shadows, eyes glowing red as it searched for its prey.
Marie-Ange's hiss of fear and pain was drowned out by the wolf's crackling growl. The labyrinth caved in on itself, collapsing into splashes of wet goo around her ankles, and she turned her head away from Amora's face, and swiped at her own, hand coming back smeared with red. She gave the blood a moment's glance and then pulled a trio of cards from her sleeve.
Out of the wet that clung to feet and shoes crawled another Emma, opal and obsidian and blood-red ruby entwined in the diamond, wielding an executioner's axe. And another Artie, skinless and serpentine, tongue like a hangman's noose - and then he twinned, and twinned again and the gooey pink clones raised their guns as a horrific firing squad. And another Marie-Ange, wrapped in pearlescent grey with a scythe slid next to Amora, and caressed her cheek before dancing away, fast as thought.
Artie took a deep breath - hurtshurtshuts - and wrapped the three of them in illusions that matched Marie-Ange's projections. He had to stand, smiling and still to maintain the illusion and it was so hard. So hard. Emma moved like water, like a dancer, as she came around, a second and third figure moving with her, with him, with Marie-Ange, each copying each other's movements.
One of the advantages of a fight that didn't need her to go diamond was that Emma had been able to keep an eye on more than what was going on in front of her. That gave her enough warning to send an urgent message to both Marie-Ange and Artie. ~Out,~ she sent. ~Out now. Leave the illusions here, but chaos is coming hard.~ With the tiniest shudder, Emma moved away from her opalescent double, leaving it menacing Amora, as Emma threw a telepathic cloak over her real companions, leaving their retreat unnoticed even as Emma mentally harried them. They had barely cleared the building when chaos boiled over behind them.
-
This time, X-Force already knew the score, and they didn't wait for Zemo to monologue and dismiss them, scattering to take out the various threats that faced them. Do the unexpected, Doug had suggested before the goons had broken in. Take the fight to them, and break the cycle.
Wanda was tempted to shove Simon into the closet but there was too much of a chance that she couldn't protect him from everything if she couldn't keep tabs on him. That, she thought wryly as she directed him under the table with a quick kiss and a promise she'd protect him, was probably why they were in the situation they were in. She straightened and saw Zemo approaching from one side but spotted Gabriel to her left.
"I would like to get Simon out of here, quickly," she said to Gabriel, trying to get a read on Zemo as he approached. Wanda tested the waters, throwing out a hex bolt that was easily dodged.
"Okay..." Gabriel watched her hex bolt move, then darted to her side to put himself between her and Zemo. "But honestly," he glanced at Simon, back at Wanda, then at Simon again. "I'm low on gas." He sounded a bit resigned, and when he turned back to Wanda, he looked slightly defeated. "Running on empty. Not sure I can move two of us, especially the way he's built."
"Are you calling me fat?" The retort was immediate and had very little pride behind it, but it did a very good job pointing out Simon's hiding place under the table. A gulp followed with a brief yelp to illustrate that Simon was further deciding to help but peeking out to see what was happening.
It was going to hell quickly.
Zemo would not be made a fool of! He was a scientist of the highest order! And these... these... simpletons! were standing between him and his perfection. That they lacked even the proper decorum to listen when he spoke was no great surprise, as infuriating as it was. But now he was done playing. His masterpiece would be returned to him and the rest of their bodies would be left to rot in the streets like the trash they were.
They wanted action, he'd give them action. He ignored the other men for now as a small threat. The puppy was more likely to run face-first onto Zemo's blade than try anything, and his master man was cowering under a table. (He'd need to be re-educated once they returned to the lab, clearly.) So not only was the Romani shrew the only remotely viable threat, but she was the kind of woman he took great pleasure in gutting. Not only tactically viable, but fun and personal. It's almost as though they'd been thinking especially of him!
Even as he charged, he swung his sword up. The tip was right in line for her pretty little neck. He'd cut that sharp tongue of hers right out of her head.
It didn't meet her neck. Instead, Wanda threw up a hand as if to, perhaps stupidly, catch it. The thing that stood between her flesh and the blade was an explosion of pure entropic energy. The sword carried through on the swing but it was changed now, the top portion a melted, rusted mess that formed a sharp point.
Zemo was off balance and she moved in, kicking him sharply in the stomach to force him back, away from Simon. Wanda's hands were glowing red, energy spitting off angrily as she moved.
"Oh, este pendejo," Gabriel grunted. Whether he was referring to a still-cowering Simon or the staggering Zemo was unclear. "Don't move," he said to Simon, the weariness in his voice making him sound more resigned to the situation than anything. "And get ready to make a break for it."
He pivoted on his heel, cracking his knuckles and looking at Wanda and Zemo. Whether by luck or by accident, the mad scientist had gone after the strongest of them. Which was fairly perfect. He took a step toward the two of them and vanished into a blur. The fatigue messed with his powers, and he could feel himself slipping in and out of the speed-time-whatever, so he took advantage of it. He darted around the room, switching between the blurry and static versions of himself before appearing behind Zemo.
Lacking formal fight training, Gabriel did his best Billy Zabka impression and tried to sweep Zemo's leg, figuring he could knock the Nazi asshole further off balance and then get Simon the hell out of here.
If this was truly the strongest might they could muster, he was even more disappointed in Amara now than he had been when he first learned of her failure. The Romani was a trickster, throwing little lights as though it would protect her. He hopped as soon as the puppy appeared behind him, then slammed his full weight down hard on the offending leg. The fact that his sword was melted meant that he was left to kick the young 'hero' away instead.
Pity. It was likely to leave blood on his shoes.
"Fuck!" Gabriel's lack of formal, normal-speed fight training was going to do him in. Zemo had telegraphed his move, but with the muscle fatigue and his powers acting up, the young man couldn't move fast enough to avoid it.
And so when the Baron made impact, Gabriel let out a few loud swears and fell to the ground, clutching his leg. "Red," he called to Wanda, rolling in her direction as a genetic purist loomed over him. "If you've got a plan C, now's a good time."
"I always have a Plan C," Wanda said flatly. Plan C was simple: make Zemo not alive.
She lunged forward as Zemo was distracted and brought both her hands up, preparing to push through the madman as much chaos energy as Wanda could bring to bear. Considering her anger and her power, the amount she was gathering was immense. Enough to kill him in one blow. And with Zemo out of the way, then they could ...
Her hands slammed against an invisible barrier that shimmered into existence only a few inches away from his body. Wanda's eyes widened and she caught a brief hint of the Enchantress's laughter right as her chaos energy interacted with the magical shield.
Badly. It interacted badly.
The backlash caught both Gabriel and Wanda and it flung them backwards, away from Zemo, in a powerful rush. Wanda slammed into the ground a few feet away from Simon, the breath knocked out of her and her entire body screaming as if it had been hit with lightening. She tried to regain her feet but couldn't even roll over.
Simon was hovering over her protectively in an instant, but his eyes — bloodshot and practically glowing with anger —were glued onto Zemo, practically daring him to advance further.
Oh, oh, now wasn't this interesting? Of course such a moment would be the catalyst Zemo had been searching for. He laughed. It was not a happy sound.
"Of course you would choose this moment to grow a spine, Simon. I regret to inform you, however, that you are too late." He gestured to the mostly-destroyed room, and everyone that lay there-in. "Look around you, Simon. Your protectors are dying; your hope, gone. You have lost. Submit, and I promise I will end their lives quickly." Except the shrew. She still owed him for his sword.
"You have my word."
Simon's tone matched an accompanying sneer, and his sheer revulsion buoyed his confidence. "I am Simon Williams. I am no man's puppet," he recited as if almost reciting lines but there was, for once, a certain lack of cheese, "And I need no protection.I'll show you where you can stick your word."
His eyes tightened more until all he could see was red.
He then very heroically swung a punch at the Baron.
The blow was hard enough to turn Zemo's head. Simon had left his fist connected, and the red lightning crackling over Simon's hand jumped to Zemo, running across his bag face. It looked truly impressive.
Zemo hand clamped around Simon's wrist. It twisted, and the snap of breaking bones echoed through the room. "So be it."
And before Simon could quite follow it, Zemo had dropped his wrist, reached into his vest, and pulled out a knife. It was no sword, Zemo figured, but it would do. Zemo slid the knife into Simon's chest.
Zemo watched impassively as he went down. "Just rest, Simon. You'll be back in the lab when you wake."
He turned back towards the room. Now, for the rest of them.
The pain was no longer important. She didn't remember moving but Wanda caught Simon as he crumbled and held him tightly. "You stupid man," she whispered, pressing her lips against his forehead. Her powers told her what her training knew - he was gone. And this wasn't a movie, they didn't have time for the tears burning her eyes or for her to shake him and demand that he come back.
He was gone.
The room went red.
But this time it wasn't the universe resetting. This time it was Wanda reaching out to the chaotic energy and bringing it to bear on the world around her.
The room went red and the building around them screamed.
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