Great Attractors: Purge

[x-legion.livejournal.com]

The psis lead the charge, but in the end it's the empaths who make the final stand.




There was no convenient way to spread nine people across two minds. With neither Meggan nor Topaz free to exit their own brains, they'd compromised on a split. Hope, Rachel, and the Cuckoo were stationed near Topaz in her dark, dripping library, while Jean, Quentin, and Haller stood under the sunshine in Meggan's chocolate lake. Emma, lead and supervisor, was stationed directly in the breach.

The counselor had been quiet as they took up their positions, but the moment they'd settled he was all business. He turned to his designated partners and said, simply, "Ready?"

Jean was momentarily distracted by the stark contrast between Meggan and Topaz's mind. Meggan's world was so cartoonish that it felt surreal. She almost preferred Topaz's library. Almost.

Turning back to Haller, she finally nodded, extending her hand.

"Yeah," she said. The idea of linking with Haller gave her a sense of unease, but she tried to keep things professional, as to not extend her feelings through link with Haller and Quentin. The sooner they got this done, the better.

Quentin couldn't agree more. He had suffered more than his fair share of Astral Plane shenanigans over the past year. Time to move on and find a new shtick. He just nodded and grunted, extending his own mind to the other two psis to link them all up.

The connection was instantaneous: a light presence that slipped into their minds as his fingers twinned their hands. It was a supportive link devoid of thoughts or emotions, barely more than a steadying hand on the back. Quiet, professional.

"Ready," Haller reported.

“Definitely ready here,” Meggan nodded. She was certainly ready for the candy-coated nightmare to stop. She wanted her mind to look the way it was supposed to, so anything they had to do she was okay with. Linking up was fine.

"Ready." Topaz wasn't nearly as enthusiastic as Meggan. She was absolutely ready for this to be over, but more invasion into her mind wasn't exactly welcome. Still, she'd do what she had to. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, preparing.

Haller nodded, and spared a glance towards his counterpart where she stood on the opposite side of the barrier -- probably looking more incongruously cherubic than she would have liked.

"Celeste?"

14 knew it was necessary, but it didn't mean she had to like it. Once she got over her initial reluctance, physically (mentally?) forcing herself past her own proclivities, the actual act was easy.

She'd kept feather-light touches on Meggan and Topaz' minds since they'd opened the bridge. She was hardly going to trust her own life to someone else's work without verifying, after all. Now, she took a stronger hold and brought the two of them together with her.

A quick thought, and it was done. It was just light enough to secure them all. The mental equivalent of holding something as far away from your body as possible between two fingers.

"We're ready," she said quietly.

While her more telepathically inclined companions did their thing, Rachel hung back with Hope, close enough that they could still see through the breach, but far enough that they were not in the way. The redhead kept one eye on the operations but spared the time to eyeball a black chunk of fungus creeping across a high shelf. Once they had noticed the infection, it was hard to ignore…dark-colored smudges visible from the corner of the eye, only to vanish when one tried to focus on them. Here, in Topaz's mind, the hues were dark and easily lost in the shadows. On Meggan's side the something like an oil-slick rainbow bounced off the liquid chocolate.

Rachel blanched, a semi-translucent shield shimmering into existence above her as an insurance policy. It stretched to cover Hope and Topaz, but did not far enough to impede Emma. Arms crossed, she subtly angled herself in front of Hope, taking to heart that the girl was likely the most vulnerable of the lot at the moment.

Hope didn't notice the shield. She was too deeply entranced in the state of mind that allowed her the aura vision. Now that she had seen it from above... she could recognize the blobs of colored emotions, covered in black speckles... miniature versions of what she had seen earlier. And she had seen them even before that... she was just unable to recognize them.

Haller looked to Emma in the breach, backlit by the reassuring glow of Rachel's shield. The bluebirds still circled their mistress, but in the rift between minds their wings had somehow become pages, their beaks ribbon book-markers. Behind her he could see bookshelves beginning to sprout flowering branches. The longer the bridge was open the more cross-contamination occurred. It was nothing that couldn't be repaired -- as long as they could prevent the infection from finishing the job.

He met the woman's eyes and gave her a nod. The rest of them were set. Now it was up to her.

Emma nodded back at Haller and allowed herself a moment of testing her control over her powers, a feather light dance in her own mind. The effects of the diamond backlash were nearly gone now: between leaching off the oh-so-familiar energy of the Cuckoo and then sharing some of Quentin's power, it seemed that her mind was nearly back to normal now.

"Lucky that," Emma murmured to herself and reached out with a scalpel-blade of thought, sliding it under the edges of the psychic debris that she could see now, like a film over the candy-coloured landscape she'd grown used to. As she sliced and cut, severing stringy connectors that clung to the underlying mindscape, she reached out to the other side, creating another scalpel-blade, slipping it across the edges of books and peeling back the debris as carefully as she could, trying to leave not a skerrick of debris attached to the girls' mindscapes.

The debris fought back. That was the only descriptor Emma could use as she severed connecting tendrils that clung and then reached back again, trying to reattach to the underlying mindscape. Emma made a small noise as her concentration sharpened, using her power to soothe and smooth the areas she had managed to detach the debris from, a crude beginning of healing that should allow fewer sites for the infection to gain a foothold.

Concentrate. Tendrils, one by one. Soothe and smooth. Re-cut the reaching edges before they could reattach, so the shortened and shortened until she could be sure that they were dead. Finally, Emma reached the edge of the piece in Meggan's mind, the last few section that clung. With a quick sweep, she severed its remaining connection and then flung the piece of psychic debris away.

"Incoming," she said as the strange, fungal-looking mass flew through the air, quickly followed by a second as she worked the piece in Topaz's mind free seconds later. She didn't even take the time to look what was happening. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see the pieces of debris everywhere throughout both mindscapes and Emma set at the next infection sites with a will and considerably more speed.

If it was a rush when Quentin first manifested and touched the overwhelming collective power that was the Astral Plane, he was tripping now, linked tightly with some of the most powerful psis on the planet. If he were wielding this power alone, then he knew that he would have been caught under the current. But bolstered by Jean and more so by Haller, Quentin stayed afloat.

One of the freed chunks of psychic mildew floated like a leaf caught in the breeze, and Quentin raised a hand to it. He clenched his fist, and the glob exploded in a cloud of pink fire.

"Huh. Neat."

The particles resembled something like looking under a microscope, and Jean took only a moment to notice with a bit of light fascination before her intrinsic desire to burn the hell out of it so they would be able to leave kicked in. She gently gathered up some of the pieces to make a bigger one using her telekinesis, but not too big, as to become a problem.

Once satisfied, she turned her fingers with a simple flick of the wrist and it soon burst into flames. Using the burning debris, Jean shifted it over to another bit to use it as kindling, like a candle lighting another candle, and soon switched back to setting the fire herself. There was something oddly...exciting about it.

The flares of fire coming from the debris almost looked like fireflies in the sky. Pretty, until one remembered what they were.

As the quasi-opaque debris broke and withered above him Haller said nothing, concentrating on pushing his stunted power into the other two. His only interference was the odd adjustment to maximize efficiency and refine control, like a golf pro gently adjusting a beginner's stance.

14 immediately went to work. As everyone else was busy wrecking everything in sight, 14 took over repairs. Mental collapse was a real threat here, and she had to be on her game.

She hated it. She'd already been forced to get closer to not one but three different people than she ever had in the past, leaving her dangerously vulnerable. Now, she was tasked with something even more impossible.

Whatever this thing was, it was digging its way into both minds simultaneously. Fissures were beginning to split the ground all around them. Repairing them while maintaining the other links would take every bit of focus she had to give. It would leave her effectively defenseless, relying on the others to keep her safe. Could she even trust them to that extent?

Did she have a choice?

She forced to sound of combat to fall away. There couldn't afford to be anything but herself and her job. From her feet, inky shadows began to reach out towards the nearest fissure. They skimmed along the ground, a dark cloud of her psychic powers reflected on the astral level. They covered the closest crack, obscuring it in darkness.

A moment later, they moved on towards another, leaving unblemished ground behind them.

The debris was getting thicker as more and more of the parasite was flensed away under Emma's mind. Haller had been prepared to feed calm to the other two, but neither needed it. He would have liked to credit the control he was providing, but more probably it was the coordination. They were nine. Nothing could stop all of them together.

Then something landed on his back, cold and shapeless but somehow sharp, biting into his flesh, into his heart --

Convulsing, Haller tore his hands from Jean and Quentin's and fell back. The connection was broken.

It was like a slap. No, a sucker punch, when Jean felt the connection become ripped away and she found herself and Quentin to be alone.

Had it been another time, had she been wide awake and bright eyed and not worn down and tossed around like someone who had been at war with the sea, she might have been fine. She might have been able to take over, to figure it out on her own.

But as it stood it was as if gunpowder had been added to flame.

The sudden severing had momentarily sent Haller's reaction through the link before it was abruptly cut off, making the control Jean had managed to scrape up become nonexistent from the shock. She had tried to keep up her walls but it was the unfortunate cruelty of empathy, and of a defense against walls that were already shaken.

Letting out a gasp, the fire around her, once precise, soon flared into an inferno, pushing outward, though she managed to sever her link with Quentin before it did. What was once a halo, a shield, was wrapped around her like a cloak, setting her ablaze.

"No...No..." she whispered, closing her eyes, but the fire refused to obey, sending out swaths of flames that burned every bit of fungal debris---or anyone--in its path.

"GET BACK!"

As wild flame roared across the adjacent mindscape holes began to appear in Rachel's shield. The semi-organic mass seethed against the surface with the activity of frenzied maggots, and pits began to appear in the dome. Sections sagged like wet cardboard.

Drawn by power yet unable to reattach to its original hosts, the infection was congregating over the psis. Scant feet away from Hope the area directly above 14 was darkening, thinning like rust-eaten iron -- giving way.

Hope could only watch, enthralled by the various blobs and shifting colors. She stayed in her aura sight, since that gave her the clearest picture... a picture the others had trouble seeing. Like what she was seeing now... a blob, shifting in a sickly green and blue pattern, covered in black streaks was dropping towards the little Emma lookalike. Who was obviously doing something that could not easily be stopped.

She didn't hesitate. Diving around the shield Rachel had formed, she floated up, hovering between the girl and the blob that was moving towards her quickly. Yet she did not move, shielding her. Only a few seconds later the blob made contact and Hope let out a mental yell.

"Oh, balls," Rachel swore under her breath, power thrumming through her veins as she reinforced the existing shield and extended it over Emma's head, simultaneously forming another beneath it and slamming the two together. There was a squelching sound, the bits of disease between the two shields obliterating from the force. Other parasites in the vicinity jerked, as though momentarily stunned by the shockwave. Then resumed their attack, eating through the energy with frightening speed.

A blue sphere snapped into existence around Hope, snatching her from above Emma, the space above the blonde quickly filled by the presence of a thicker, diamond-like shield. She landed the injured girl next to Topaz, not liking the way the black blob seemed to be... consuming her astral form. "Topaz. Look after her," the redhead ordered, unable to spare more attention for the pair as she refocused her attentions, rapidly building shield after shield to keep the ugly tar-like shapes at bay.

Topaz knelt down with Hope, instinctively shoving down the panic as she examined the blob. What the hell was she supposed to do? Grabbing it and trying to pull it off her probably wasn't going to do any good but she tried anyways - and was surprised when it shimmered and started to dissolve under her hand. She jerked back, surprised, and nearly missed the sudden flash of panic and sadness and fear in her mind.

What...oh.

Realization settling in, she put her hand pack on the blob, shivering only slightly as it dissolved and the pure emotion it was made of became part of her.

Hope suddenly seem to relax a little, but the part of her body that had been covered by the blob, now seemed to be covered in something that seemed like road rash. "That hurts..." She muttered as Hope opened her eyes and tentatively moved a little.

"Can't help that," Topaz mumbled, shaking her head and trying to see past the sudden onslaught of emotions in her spinning head. "Just try to relax."


The string of curses that Quentin let out in response to the sudden conflagration was lost in the roar of the fire. He fell down hard onto his ass and scooted back several inches to get away from Jean. "The fuck happened? You, Hair Boy! Why'd you . . ." He turned to Haller to demand an explanation, but it was clear had happened. One of the freed parasites had escaped the psychic annihilation wave and latched onto him. It was draining him, corrupting him. What could they do to save him? And more importantly, save themselves. "Oh God fucking dammit, you stupid bitch."

With their focus on offense interrupted it was now clear the protective shield had been compromised. The debris that seethed like bees against the dome were corroding it, eating through it. They were under assault.

Despite it Emma still stood in the eye of the storm, still tearing, still fighting, untouchable -- and anything that came near Jean blackened into ash. The rest of them weren't so lucky. Even as Quentin watched another half-visible glob hit the ground just feet away and began to crawl towards the psis, the dome above them dripping with more. Haller twisted on the ground, face streaming blood and completely defenseless.

Meggan had jumped in surprise when the fire had gone out of hand, and everything seemed to be failing. She had an idea, though, in spite of her fear, and hoped it would work. Meggan had been able to disperse portions of the molasses river earlier. Filter out the infected bits. She reasoned that perhaps she could help Haller, in a similar way and dove to kneel at his side. She moved to wrap her arms around him, to help him fend off the parasite as best as she was able to. She couldn't tell at her angle, but was it smaller now than when she’d started?

Somewhere through the choking emptiness Haller registered arms around him -- her embrace was like a psychic windbreak. The warmth shocked him into something approaching sensibility. He found the presence of mind to reach back and grab at the thing on his back, but he was weak, and when he pulled at it he felt the tug of barbs in his skin.

The parasite squirmed and sucked at his fingers, but Meggan's influence prevented it from attaching. It couldn't seem to gain further purchase.

Meggan briefly wondered if she needed to wrap her legs around Haller, too, or if arms were good enough. They had to be good enough, because she could feel him reaching back now.

She was hesitant to even attempt to tear the thing off, for fear she would do more damage to Haller. It might cling harder to him, and become twice as painful. Or it might even split off. But what if they worked before when it purged things, even temporarily? “Quentin! Aim right here, at this one spot like before,” she shouted over to him. Her arms were busy, wrapped around Haller as they were, but she could still nod her head in the general direction she meant.

“You might want to stay very, very still, if you’re able to, Sir,” was the quiet advice Meggan whispered in Haller’s ear.

"Aim?" Quentin repeated incredulously, as if Meggan were turning into one of these monsters herself. Subtlety and accuracy were not his strong points. He would need to develop bullet-like precision to . . .

A wicked grin grew as the thought came to him. He pulled himself to his feet and held out his hands as wispy pink energy coalesced around them. "She's right. Do me favor and don't move a muscle. I got this." The cloud of psychic power took form in his hands, a long solid rod connected to a flat plate at one end. When he raised it, holding the butt firmly against his shoulder, it was a glowing pink shotgun. Quentin pulled the same trick on Jean all those months ago, but this time instead of loading it with a flag that would unfurl where fired, he'd created concentrated pellets of psychic energy. "Seriously, don't move. I've never actually used one of these before in real life."

Quentin wasn't expecting his fake psychic shotgun to make such a loud BANG when he fired it and he hoped he hadn't given himself tinnitus, but he brushed aside those personal concerns for once. The focused totality of his telepathy blasted through the parasite, which exploded in a fine mist of ectoplasm.

Haller felt the impact, but not pain -- perhaps from shock, or perhaps some side-effect of Meggan's hold on him. Every straining muscle went limp at once as the psychic invasion abruptly vanished. He sagged against the blonde like an unstrung puppet.

Meggan was thrilled that it had worked, and nodded her thanks to Quentin. There had been a mild tingling sensation that passed through her, from hanging on she guessed. When Haller sagged, she very carefully lowered him back to the ground. She didn’t need to cling to him now that it was off, but she stayed close just in case another tried to get him while he was down.

Quentin's words stung and borrowed their way into Jean's mind, reminding her of how out of control she felt and how badly she had failed as a teacher and an X-Man and only fueled the fire. She could feel the tears welling up in her eyes but they turned to steam the moment they rolled down her cheeks as she struggled to get the fire to stop. To keep her distance, she tried to get farther away from the others, but she wasn't sure where to go.

"Please stop please stop please stop...." she whispered under her breath.

"Jean."


Haller was at the edge of her aura, already back on his feet. He'd only realized he'd pushed Meggan aside to do so once it had already been done. His head was still disordered, and the power and stress spilling from Jean had triggered something instinctual.

"Jean, it's okay. Take my hand." Hand extended, Haller started forwards.

Haller's voice made Jean jump, and she lurched away, sensing his presence as he came near her.

"No...NO! I'll burn you. I messed up...I keep messing up. I don't know what to do! I can't....make it stop."

Haller stepped into the flame. The colorless wash of his own shield glowed against the crimson, the focused effort easily repelling Jean's wild energy. Gently, he reached out and took Jean's arm. He met her eyes, his gaze clear and blue through the blood.

"You won't hurt me," he said, so low only she could hear him. "And now we're going to make it stop."

As he spoke calm flowed through their contact: acknowledgement of her fear, but equal belief it was surmountable. An understanding of the stresses she'd been dealing with, and how hard and fast she'd been pushed as both an X-Man and as an individual. And, above it all, the certainty that she hadn't failed -- she had been let down.

Jean took in a quick breath, and she slowly uncovered her face, meeting his eyes, her own still blinded by tears. For a few brief moments it almost felt like she were looking through him. Because there was something underneath. Pain, grief, and guilt he had been hiding from himself until the parasite had broken him open to show what was inside.

Staring at him wordlessly, she kept her attention on him as the fire seemed to dissipate as if a candle being blown out by a gust of wind.

"I don't think that," she said faintly.

Haller gave her a blank look, and in that instant it was clear he hadn't realized how much of himself he had revealed.

Like a leech sucking blood, the parasite had forced the buried to the surface. Steeling himself, Haller gathered up all the pain and ugliness, pressed it back into the hole that was his heart, and returned Jean's gaze.

"We'll get through this," he promised her, and turned to stretch out his other hand to the youngest psi. "Quentin."

For a moment, Quentin thought he would be better off without anyone. His faux Remington curved and shortened into a Godfather-inspired Lupara that was sure to annihilate the parasites swarming around them. What "help" did he really need from other psis who could barely keep it together any better than he could?

Or maybe they needed him. He'd been the one to discover they were walking inside a disease, Emma had asked for his help to bring together and stabilize the two minds, and now here he was, cleaning up the mess. So he shifted his gun to his dominant left hand and took Haller's with his right, opening up the flow of psychic power again so these chumps could do something right.

The link reformed instantly, and with it the boost in power. As Jean and Quentin resumed their assault, Haller caught Meggan's eye and gave the blonde a small nod.

Meggan wasn’t bothered by the earlier push. She understood things were hectic and the link had to be fixed on all parts. She nodded back, ready to watch for any other portions of parasite to fling themselves at the trio.

14 wasn't dead. She considered that a win, all things considered. Repairing minds was easy for her. It was almost like she was bringing back repressed memories, but different. The difficulty came from all the damage that had been done. Both minds were a mess, and she was patching as fast as she could while making sure she didn't accidentally patch the two minds together permanently. That would have been bad.

She'd been forced to split her focus three ways just to keep up with the damage, clouds of shadow weaving their way across the battlefield. She was just able to keep up with how fast everything was falling apart. Still, she couldn't keep this up forever. If something didn't change, she'd be overwhelmed soon.

Something changed. 14 felt the shift somewhere deep in the layers of mind she was working in as some unknown threshold was hit. Fissures began to seal themselves before she even reached them. Both minds had apparently decided they wanted to live, and they were going to make it happen. 14 smiled. She did good work.

Still, she wasn't done. There were a few fissures that would need her attention. Collapsing her shadows back into a single mass, she got back to work.

Emma gave a small sigh of relief as her life became a tiny bit easier. Instead of having to scrape away each parasite piece and make the barest efforts to start a repair process on the mindscapes beneath, suddenly the mindscapes began to repair themselves. Simpler. Easier. Her only half-healed powers thanked her as they strained beneath the effort she was exerting to flense away the parasite. Her focus sharpened and she cut harder, faster, spinning chunks of debris away ever more quickly.

The build up had been happening naturally, and Topaz had been in control of it. More or less. A little bit on the side of less but she could handle it as long as she was the one controlling what came in.

Unfortunately that was very suddenly no longer the case. The emotions flooded through her mind and she gasped, the sudden influx driving her to her knees. It was a lot. Too much. Fearsadnesshateangerpanicfearpanichatesadness... over and over through her head, too much, too much, TOO MUCH...

"Damn it," Topaz bit out, half whimpering, as her left hand closed around her right wrist and she dug her nails into the skin, trying desperately to keep herself focused on what was going on outside of her head. She really didn't have time for a breakdown.

Meggan began to feel a portion of the influx of feelings, and hoped to take away some of the strain. It was a lot. It was more than she’d expected, but halved the other girl’s in some strange way. She was like a coffee filter for the grounds of panic and sadness and fear that would otherwise overwhelm Topaz.

There were also good feelings floating through the waves from her half, and she closed her eyes to help focus on separating everything.

Some of the pressure on Topaz's mind eased, at least allowing her to breathe for a minute and push herself back up. She could still feel everything - all the emotions from the parasite, all the power that came with absorbing it...

Focus. Come on.

She shook her head, taking a deep breath. Focus. Right.

In the back of her mind, Meggan half wondered how bad the freak out would be when Amanda heard about this. The thought was immediately chased away by the sheer amount of emotion and power flooding through before it began to stabilize. She concentrated on what was in front of her. All of the ridiculously happy things augmented by the parasite were now transforming into a normal flood of pleasant feelings and joy as they flowed through her and not impossible levels of wrong.

Just concentrate.

Behind Topaz, the puddles trying to consume the library - the parasite's one last attempt at winning, it seemed - began to slowly evaporate. Energy crackled between Topaz's fingers and she spared one brief moment of thought to wonder what would happen if she used magic here, inside her own mind, with all this energy-

She shoved it down quickly, forcing the magic back under control and re-focusing. Now wasn't the time for that.

For one instant, Meggan thought the remains of the parasite’s influence would cause molasses to flood out of the river and consume everything. In the next, it stopped, and receded. The cartoon aura flecked off the animals like eggshell. Beneath, they were normal forest animals. The unicorn was just a stag beneath, to Meggan’s fleeting disappointment, and the teeniest feeling of guilt that should not even exist.

Sorry, Emma. At least the little guy’s not dust.

The Pegasus morphed into a bird. Meggan focused on cleaning up the mess, now that she could. Molasses dried to an odd brown stain. A moment later, that, too, was absorbed into the green of the grass. The leaves returned to their natural colors. So did the trees, as the sap disappeared. Honey on the shrubs morphed into the beginnings of flowers.

In Topaz's mind the water evaporated into air, the bookshelves and chairs and tables picking themselves up like something out of a demented Disney movie, righting themselves at last, and lights flickered overhead, even threatening to turn on.

Maybe it's not just a sad dark place after all.

That thought gave Topaz a little bit of hope.

The creature which Meggan had mentally dubbed Anime Martian Bambi stopped looking like it belonged in the most warped of Disney movies, and changed into a regular deer. It promptly wandered back into the forest. The licorice was purged from the last of the grass, and the overpowering smell of it was gone.

A chocolate filled path that had sprinkles on top became a regular dirt path again. It looked like a regular piece of nature again, and Meggan felt relief creep in. The water flowed clean and clear in ponds and streams and even little puddles near where Quentin had climbed out of the former taint of molasses.

Topaz dug her fingernails back into skin, trying to focus on what was happening. The lights finally flickered on over head...

And then the ground started to shake, hard enough that Topaz dropped to her knees again instead of risking falling over once more. What the hell?

Everything that wasn’t already fixed was righted in one fell swoop. Meggan caught herself on the branch of a nearby tree as she stumbled, surprised by the sudden movement of the ground. That couldn’t be a real earthquake, could it? Here?

Topaz's head snapped up to look around, and she realized something that was both wonderful and - strangely - a little offsetting. She was alone in her mind. Completely alone.

What-?

Before she could question it any further, her vision whited out.

Everyone on Meggan’s side was gone, presumably thrown out. She only had enough time to hope they were okay, before she realized that she couldn’t feel Topaz anymore. As she looked around, everything before her turned into a haze of white.