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It's Not My Fault: Epicenter
X-Force races to prevent Marie-Ange's vision of a seismic apocalypse. But when Felicia's powers cause a luck snap and Rictor's magic goes out of control, is the end of the world their fault in the first place?
They were, unfortunately, not the first to arrive on the scene.
Topaz had thought the worst part of this had to be the shaking ground, but of course there were about six people there with guns, shooting at the group performing magic. Great. "They're going to cause more trouble if they hurt someone up there," Topaz said to Marie-Ange, nodding to the mercs. "And I don't fancy our chances of getting close to the group without getting shot ourselves."
"I hate this question, but how powerful are we feeling right now?" Marie-Ange asked, pointing at Topaz, but looking over her shoulder to Amanda. "Shields? From either of you?" She used both hands to grip the door to the Jeep, and climbed out carefully, knees buckling once as the tremors rattled the ground. "No? Yes? Artie, I want you on distraction and distance. Find a vantage point, and if you can make any steady shots, take them." The trees were shaking loose branches down to the ground, and Marie-Ange imaged a shield of discs to cover the passenger side doors of the Jeep.
Artie climbed out of the rear passenger seat and nodded. "Got it boss," he said through his synthesiser. The ground curved up into a steep hill. He looked up and squinted. He'd have to go around to avoid being a target the whole way up. "It's a mile or so if I take the route with cover and all uphill. I'll need a bit of time. The ground is rough. This isn't jogging in the grounds." As he spoke, he was pulling on a backpack, straps snugged tight and picked up a long rifle in a case before doing a final pat down to ensure that his personal weapons - electric batons, knives, pistol - were in place.
“How likely do you think it is they’ll have backup?” Jubilee mused as she watched Artie get ready. She’d piled into the back of the Jeep with their gear and took the opportunity to pop up and stretch. “Might be a good idea if I tag along and play bodyguard, melter of random incoming bullets.”
"What's the likelihood that they don't?" Artie asked. Taking that as a 'yes', he grabbed a box of Quest bars as well as a handful of goo packets from the box of general supplies on the floor, stuffing those into his backpack for Jubilee.
"Try not to hit the magic users - we don't want things getting worse," warned Amanda, staggering slightly as the earth rippled under her feet as she climbed out of the Jeep. "Topaz, you'll have to bear the brunt of the shielding, sorry. 'S too rural here for me to have a lot of juice and I'll need what I have to try and counter whatever it is they're doing up there."
"Might be able to help with that," Gabriel piped up as he climbed out behind her. "I mean, we'll see. The shakes might throw me off, but I should be able to dodge shots. Maybe get close enough to grab one of the gun guys if they're distracted enough." He took a puff of his vape, then moved toward the supplies to see if they'd brought anything Kevlar. "I guess the situation's fluid enough that I can improvise."
“Shoot the gun-nuts not the magic nuts, got it,” Jubilee noted, pulling the slimline pack she normally wore for these things onto her back. “Any other notes? Gabe, think you can do some recon as well while Artie and I are moving? It would be good to know if the people we can see are the only ones here.”
Gabriel made a vague noise of assent, mixed with a grunt as he put on the heavy armor.
"Wow, this is going to suck," Felicia murmured as she watched her teammates ready, the handguns at her thighs already prepped and the claws on her fingertips popping in and out with a sliding metallic whisper as she shifted uncomfortably, glancing at too far treetops. "No pressure, no pressure, definitely no predetermined catastrophe I am definitely okay to help handle, okay, let's fucking do this."
Despite the assault, the Mayan brujos continued their ritual. The young man in the middle of the circle took to their defense instead. He flung out his hand in the direction of the half-dozen interlopers, and the energy fed into him poured out. The air itself seemed to shake along with the ground, and the gunmen were violently flung off their feet as the shockwave collided with them. Satisfied, Julio turned his attention back to the tracks and stomped his bare foot, sending out another seismic wave that deepened the growing maw. Metal creaked and groaned. Julio laughed.
He was doing it. He was going to save the day.
"Right-" Topaz cut herself off as the ground shook, and she grabbed the closest arm to steady herself. "Bloody hell," she grumbled, turning to look back up at the group. "Kid in the middle is probably the source of all this. We're going to need to talk him down. Oh, and he has it in his head he's going to be a hero, so that's great." She swept a hand through the air as she spoke, gathering magic and preparing to cast a shield.
"Brilliant," muttered Amanda under her breath. "Poor bloody kid's probably been brainwashed his entire life into thinking he should do this." And everyone knew how Amanda felt about magic users exploiting kids. "No time to wait for the covering fire, we need to get in there now, before he tears the whole place apart."
"I want Gabriel on interception." Marie-Ange said. "You try to get to the boy in the middle, get him away from the cultists, talk to him You speak Spanish better than all of us, and he is more likely to listen to you than any of us." She pulled herself along the side of the Jeep unsteadily, following Gabe's idea about the body armor- they really should have put on vests earlier but it was the jungle, it was hot, no one had wanted to get even more uncomfortable and sweaty. "Topaz, see if you can calm him down, make him more receptive to anything Gabe tells him."
She started to pull a vest on, and sat down abruptly as another tremor shook the ground, and an interlocking set of metal plates sprung up in a ring around her ankles, and repeated itself until it made a curved partial dome around the Jeep. "Topaz, if you cannot get to the boy, start shutting people down. They cannot shoot if they are weeping from guilt from their careers as hitmen." She peered around the ectoplasmic shield, grunted as a tremor shook it, and then pulled cards. "Incoming monsters, I brought zombies." A pair of grey and green skinned zombies, wet and dripping came out of the air itself and ran for a gunman.
Who was quickly regretting his decision to accept this contract. They were just meant to provide security for construction of the railway against eco-terrorists. For the good of Mexico, they were told. They had not been informed that said eco-terrorists would attack with magic and earthquake powers and...were those zombies?
Still, money was money and their reputation was on the line if they failed. So the apparent leader of the group ordered another gunman to focus on the incoming monsters while the others continued to disrupt the old Indians by whatever means necessary.
The gunshots, the tremors, his teammates; it was one of their more chaotic missions, and that made for a tough environment for Gabriel to focus. And he needed to focus, because bullets were flying everywhere in a way that made getting to the boy a particularly hazardous obstacle course.
If he had been a different kind of person, he might have crossed himself and said a prayer to the Virgen de Guadalupe, and something about being in Mexico did give him the urge. But instead, he simply took off at a run when the time felt right, watching the world slow sufficiently around him that he felt — incorrectly, but still— that he could almost anticipate the trembles in the earth.
He popped up about ten meters from the boy, largely unharmed, then realized he wasn't entirely sure what to say. "Hey there," he called in Spanish, with casual ease that he hoped might be a little disarming. "Bit of a situation you seem to be in here."
The earth alerted Julio of the stranger's approach before he heard or saw anything. Bipedal footsteps, but coming too quickly to be human. Julio pivoted, sliding a foot in Gabriel's direction to send a shockwave at him, but Gabriel moved too fast and Julio instead felled a papaya tree.
"Who are you?" he asked with a trembling voice. "You don't sound like you come from here. If you're with the train company, too, you should go now. Be-before you get hurt."
"I'm Gabriel. And no, not yucateco. Obviously the accent's a give away." Gabriel could tell how nervous the boy was; even beyond the different cadences of their Spanish, the young man's voice was as uneven as the ground.
It was important, he knew, to keep the kid calm, so Gabriel raised his hands to show he wasn't armed. "Not from the train company either," he said. "And I think we're both equally in danger here."
Julio glanced around at his grandparents and the other brujos, still deep into their spell, and seemingly unaware of what was going on around them. He had to keep this going. For them. So, he took more of what they freely gave him and pushed harder. A sinkhole opened a hundred meters away, taking a portion of the railway down with it.
"We can't stop. We're almost done. Get out of here, please!"
Artie's synthesizer crackled over the comms, emotionless. "I have a clear shot on the boy," he said. He'd process the ramifications of this later, when he wasn't on a hilltop wondering if he'd survive a landslide.
Jubilee for her part had set up slightly above where Artie was placed and was maintaining a view of the area. She had a line of plasma laid out in front of them in a thin multi-coloured strip that crackled in the humid air but she’d be able to raise it almost instantly if anyone decided to protest their placement.
Felicia watched as the collapse of the mission unfolded in front of her, low on the ground with claws deep in the knee of one of the shooters. Her breath shuddered, in and out, as nearby a bullet broke a strand of her hair as, bouncing off a steel toed boot to land in the side of another of the gun wielders. "Stupid, fucking precog," Felicia breathed.
She stood slowly, as webbing snapped, swinging a shot wild, a toe caught on a rock, a sudden sneezing fit occured, and made her way closer to the center. It couldn't happen. Birds spooked, guns jammed, and she smiled a little; it couldn't happen and so it wouldn't. A grenade clicked and went still just before a drop of blood hit the dirt.
"Fuck," Felica said, wiping her wet nose, back of her hand bloody.
While good luck turned her way, it turned its back on everyone else. A grenade failed to detonate, feet tripped, and firearms misfired. A bullet impossibly missed Felicia, leaving her with both ears intact, but one of the chanting brujos stopped as hot lead tore through his shoulder, embedding itself in shattered bone and mangled tissue. But unfortunately for the coven, the snap back to reality did not sever their connection to each other or the quaking man in the middle of the circle. Instead, with their concentration to keep on another safe broken, the dam burst and the flow of power intensified.
Fissures tore through the earth beneath Julio's feet, sending everyone in a hundred-meter radius sprawling. Julio tried to get back to his feet, but he could not find purchase through the shockwaves. He cried out in pain, but it would not stop. He was just a free-flowing conduit now: magic in from the brujos, devastating earthquakes out from him. Through the pain, he saw two options: either the shockwaves would tear through his body and reduce him to a pile of broken bones and viscera, or the earth would swallow them all up and send them plummeting to their deaths.
Neither option seemed appealing.
He called to his grandparents for help, but his voice was caught in his throat. A tree had fallen and pinned his grandmother. A fissure opened just a meter from her head and grew.
Gabriel grunted from the ground. He had tried to outrun the shockwaves, but he could do nothing to stop their impact and stumbled. "It doesn't have to be like this, güey," he called out, as he tried to stand. "I promise, we can..." He stood as he followed Julio's gaze, to where his abuela lay seemingly helpless. "Aw, fuck," he muttered in Spanish.
He couldn't help but picture his own grandma, the one who he'd been unable to see even as she'd been dying. He looked to Julio, and layers of feelings and familial guilt that he'd been trying to keep at bay flooded in. Though he'd been told to divert the boy, he was over toward Julio's grandmother in a split-second, whispering comforting things in Spanish and attempting to use his powers to the best of his ability to free her from the tree.
"I have a shot," Artie repeated. The hillside shook, small rocks starting to roll down.
The ground was rolling under her feet, waves of motion that sent Marie-Ange crashing hard to her hands and knees. The earth between her fingers crumbled and liquified and her hands sunk into the deep black mud. As she pulled them out, they bled black and deep mocha brown and cream and rippling orange and red. She screamed, ready for pain and it came out as a breathy squawk, more like the cackle of a bird than the scream of a woman.
Everywhere Marie-Ange could see was ruins, earth rising and crashing like tidal waves. Massive cracks swallowed her friends, Amanda and Topaz fell screaming into the depths of the jungle. Gabriel ran, sprinting ahead of falling trees until he misstepped into a quickly forming pool of scorching mud. Artie went silently into the ground, swallowed by cracks, Jubilee clung from a cliff face, fingers glowing as she tried to claw her way up.
Amidst the chaos, a pool of calm surrounded Felicia, a flat piece of slate her raft in an ocean of destruction. Marie-Ange did scream then, and the slate she could see in her vision repeated itself under Felicia, solid and cool and damp.
“No!” Felicia screamed, swaying at the effort as blood dripped down her face. She fell, knees hitting hard on her little island. “Don’t take the shot! I can fix-“ she forced out, as finally the ground beneath her cracked.
"Got it!" Artie held the shot and shifted his sights to the mercenaries, still not shooting but mapping out their positions. He almost -- almost --- the sight lines sucked. Unlike with the boy at the focus of the ritual, he just didn't have a good line on any of them. Almost. He breathed in. Held it, an island of stillness on the side of the hill and squeezed the trigger as the earth moved around them. One of the shooters fell.
Jubilee for her part had shut down her powers the moment she felt the ground start to roll underneath her in an effort not to flash fry Artie but had mostly managed to hold her stance. It wasn’t that much more difficult than riding a surfboard and she’d grown up close enough to the ocean to be rather good at that.
“Fi, you okay?” she asked calmly, even through her worry at the screaming.
She brought her powers back on and melted the random bullets that seemed to have started ricocheting directly toward them. Luck snap? She hoped not.
The shouting, the crying, the trees falling, the earth cracking, the gunshots, it was all too much for Julio. He tried to stop, to push the energy back, but he couldn't. His grandparents and the other brujos kept feeding him and his body kept drinking, transforming their magic into this seismic apocalypse. The pride he had felt earlier at participating in this coven, being a true brujo with him, calling upon the earth to save their town from colonizers, it was all gone now. All he felt was terror and shame. He had thought too highly of himself. Pride was a sin, after all. He was getting what was coming to him.
"Ayúdame, por favor," he begged, struggling to be heard by anyone over the din. "¡Ayúdame!"
By the Jeep, Amanda had been desperately trying to keep her feet, watching as somehow everything went to hell. But the thing she was focussing on most was the boy in the centre and when he called for help, even if she couldn't hear him, she could see the desperation on his face. They had to get up there.
"Topaz! Whatever it takes, get us to the kid! Now!"
Amanda could see the desperation in the kid's face, and Topaz could feel it - along with the ground trying to shake apart. She looked around, trying to project a calm she definitely didn't feel. Bullets pinged off her shielding, unfamiliar magic danced around chaotically, and there was absolutely no way she was going to get them there in time.
She took a step back, looking around, working through her options and counting. She needed enough magic to counter what the coven was doing, and even with one or two down, there were far more of them. Which meant she needed a lot more magic. Which meant...
Whatever it takes.
That was basically permission
Topaz looked back at Amanda, meeting her gaze - an agreement and an apology. Her eyes swept around the area, taking in her teammates last, trying to figure out who would benefit from a sudden lack of emotions and who needed their heads on straight, while also reaching out and latching on to the coven members, the boy, and the mercenaries. There was no time to be careful - she just pulled, draining everything she could reach. She was a little more careful with her teammates - she didn't need everything, she just needed enough to top off.
The slates Marie-Ange had created began moving on their own, falling into place in front of Topaz and winding a path up the mountain, cutting through the magic and any solid objects in their way. They were impossibly, almost comically still given their shaking surroundings.
The edges of Marie-Ange's mind felt crisp, like a perfectly sliced raw potato and she felt each image detach itself from her awareness as it became real. It felt like bubbles popping as they rose up a glass of champagne, dry and cool and sharp. She opened her eye, and found no destruction like she had feared. No one falling from sudden cliffs or devoured by the angry earth. The jungle shook, there was screaming, but no catastrophic rending of the very planet. Not today.
Jubilee hadn’t experienced Topaz’s particular brand of energy drain before, Amanda’s yes given their history but it was like the worst depressive episode ever.
It was lucky she’d been here before honestly. It took her a moment but she was able to orient herself again within the void that had become her heart.
“Remind me to never piss off Topaz,” Jubilee noted as she reignited her powers.
Nothing mattered, which meant everything she did would always matter.
The sudden blankness provided by Topaz' powers provided Artie with an intellectual relief. He... compartmentalised and disassociated when he was working, the gnawing horror of murdering people from a distance locked away. This was easier. A distant part of himself wondered if she could do it before every mission as he lined up an older man in his sights - one of the coven this time and shot to wound, not kill. The man fell, bleeding heavily from one leg.
Felicia had thought the overwhelming sensation of a luck snap, the nausea, the dread, knowing out tempestuous her every movement, thought, was and the low boiling anxiety that brought was bad but this. This was immeasurably worse. Bile and blood dripped down the back of her throat, her palms to the ground as her will was drained. At least she couldn't hurt anyone else like this.
"Let's go." Amanda's voice was measured, almost indifferent and she set off at a run, bounding from step to step. The fear, the urgency, all the emotions were gone, but there was still the goal, stopping the boy. As she ran, she was slipping out of her jacket, stripping off her shirt. "I'll take the power, you use it," she said over her shoulder to Topaz.
"Got it." Topaz kept pace a step behind her, still feeding magic into their path to keep it steady, just in case.
"Jesus, fuck, I could use a little help over here!" Gabriel was stressed. The woman he was trying to help was, rather abruptly, not. And if her sudden placidity was his clue that something odd had happened, but it was the relative evenness of his generally energetic teammates that clued him in that Topaz was to blame.
The fissure was coming dangerously close to him and the grandmother, which only made him feel more panicked. His powers did not come with super-strength, and he was not anywhere close to squatting the weight of a large tree. So, trying to think quickly, he did the only thing he could think of: He picked up a sharp-looking rock and, using his powers, tried to give it enough force to smash the tree to bits.
Though the earthquake was not letting up and new fissures opened all around him, Julio felt inexplicably tranquil, like his fear had just evaporated. He still knew he was in danger, but he could not find it in himself to be afraid. Was this serenity a sign of his impending doom? Was the sun-haired woman stripping off her clothes as she flew in his direction an angel? Oddly, he did not feel one way or another about that, either.
With one last leap, Amanda landed on the oasis of calm around the boy. "~I've come to help,~" she said expressionlessly in her bizarrely-accented Spanish, one part Castilian, one part LA barrio. "~Just hold still.~" The witch reached out and put her hand on his shoulder, concentrating on the power swirling through him and the channeling spell on her back. The black scarring began to flicker and glow as she pulled the magic out of Rictor.
At this rate, he would have agreed to anything, especially if it involved a half-naked person touching him. Too bad it wasn't the other mexicano who was struggling to help his chiichi from under the fallen tree. But before he could interrogate that personal revelation, the pressure that was swelling inside him from the brujos' spell did not and threatened to burst . . . didn't. It just deflated, and as it did, the rumbling began to abate.
Still on his hands and knees, Julio looked up into the woman's glowing eyes and offered a prayer of thanksgiving.
Amanda's eyes were glowing with the power she'd siphoned out of the boy. "Topaz," she grated between clenched teeth, the reaction purely physical, not emotional. "Reversal spell, if you can." She beckoned the younger witch to her and turned so her back was within easy reach. The channelling spell was ablaze, characters writhing in the presence of magic.
Topaz didn't say anything - she just stepped up and got to work. She couldn't fix the damage, but she could stop the spell. She reached out, finding all remains of other magic and stamping it down, like blowing out a candle. With nothing to power the spell, it began to stutter out on its own. She took the magic from the boy and directed it into the earth, encouraging it to calm.
Though the magic had been taken from him by these other witches, the connection between Julio and the earth remained strong as ever, and he poured what remained of his energy into it to bolster their counterspell and stabilize the land. Several minutes passed—what felt like an eternity—until the world stopped shaking and he could finally stand on his own two feet again. He looked around at the destruction he had wrought. The gunmen who had attacked him were subdued, injured, maimed, or dead. His own coven was broken and bloody. And while the ground had swallowed the railway as intended, thereby saving everyone threatened by industrialization, the land was ruined. It was perilous to even be here; one wrong step, and they would join the ruined tracks in the abyss.
And yet, Julio still felt nothing. Fear, power, pride, shame . . . He was empty. He turned to Amanda, still looming by him. "Who are you?"
She replied with the same flat tone as him. "Damage control." She looked around the scene, the fallen security types, the coven members climbing to their feet, her own team here and there. "Let's get you out of here before the authorities turn up."
They were, unfortunately, not the first to arrive on the scene.
Topaz had thought the worst part of this had to be the shaking ground, but of course there were about six people there with guns, shooting at the group performing magic. Great. "They're going to cause more trouble if they hurt someone up there," Topaz said to Marie-Ange, nodding to the mercs. "And I don't fancy our chances of getting close to the group without getting shot ourselves."
"I hate this question, but how powerful are we feeling right now?" Marie-Ange asked, pointing at Topaz, but looking over her shoulder to Amanda. "Shields? From either of you?" She used both hands to grip the door to the Jeep, and climbed out carefully, knees buckling once as the tremors rattled the ground. "No? Yes? Artie, I want you on distraction and distance. Find a vantage point, and if you can make any steady shots, take them." The trees were shaking loose branches down to the ground, and Marie-Ange imaged a shield of discs to cover the passenger side doors of the Jeep.
Artie climbed out of the rear passenger seat and nodded. "Got it boss," he said through his synthesiser. The ground curved up into a steep hill. He looked up and squinted. He'd have to go around to avoid being a target the whole way up. "It's a mile or so if I take the route with cover and all uphill. I'll need a bit of time. The ground is rough. This isn't jogging in the grounds." As he spoke, he was pulling on a backpack, straps snugged tight and picked up a long rifle in a case before doing a final pat down to ensure that his personal weapons - electric batons, knives, pistol - were in place.
“How likely do you think it is they’ll have backup?” Jubilee mused as she watched Artie get ready. She’d piled into the back of the Jeep with their gear and took the opportunity to pop up and stretch. “Might be a good idea if I tag along and play bodyguard, melter of random incoming bullets.”
"What's the likelihood that they don't?" Artie asked. Taking that as a 'yes', he grabbed a box of Quest bars as well as a handful of goo packets from the box of general supplies on the floor, stuffing those into his backpack for Jubilee.
"Try not to hit the magic users - we don't want things getting worse," warned Amanda, staggering slightly as the earth rippled under her feet as she climbed out of the Jeep. "Topaz, you'll have to bear the brunt of the shielding, sorry. 'S too rural here for me to have a lot of juice and I'll need what I have to try and counter whatever it is they're doing up there."
"Might be able to help with that," Gabriel piped up as he climbed out behind her. "I mean, we'll see. The shakes might throw me off, but I should be able to dodge shots. Maybe get close enough to grab one of the gun guys if they're distracted enough." He took a puff of his vape, then moved toward the supplies to see if they'd brought anything Kevlar. "I guess the situation's fluid enough that I can improvise."
“Shoot the gun-nuts not the magic nuts, got it,” Jubilee noted, pulling the slimline pack she normally wore for these things onto her back. “Any other notes? Gabe, think you can do some recon as well while Artie and I are moving? It would be good to know if the people we can see are the only ones here.”
Gabriel made a vague noise of assent, mixed with a grunt as he put on the heavy armor.
"Wow, this is going to suck," Felicia murmured as she watched her teammates ready, the handguns at her thighs already prepped and the claws on her fingertips popping in and out with a sliding metallic whisper as she shifted uncomfortably, glancing at too far treetops. "No pressure, no pressure, definitely no predetermined catastrophe I am definitely okay to help handle, okay, let's fucking do this."
Despite the assault, the Mayan brujos continued their ritual. The young man in the middle of the circle took to their defense instead. He flung out his hand in the direction of the half-dozen interlopers, and the energy fed into him poured out. The air itself seemed to shake along with the ground, and the gunmen were violently flung off their feet as the shockwave collided with them. Satisfied, Julio turned his attention back to the tracks and stomped his bare foot, sending out another seismic wave that deepened the growing maw. Metal creaked and groaned. Julio laughed.
He was doing it. He was going to save the day.
"Right-" Topaz cut herself off as the ground shook, and she grabbed the closest arm to steady herself. "Bloody hell," she grumbled, turning to look back up at the group. "Kid in the middle is probably the source of all this. We're going to need to talk him down. Oh, and he has it in his head he's going to be a hero, so that's great." She swept a hand through the air as she spoke, gathering magic and preparing to cast a shield.
"Brilliant," muttered Amanda under her breath. "Poor bloody kid's probably been brainwashed his entire life into thinking he should do this." And everyone knew how Amanda felt about magic users exploiting kids. "No time to wait for the covering fire, we need to get in there now, before he tears the whole place apart."
"I want Gabriel on interception." Marie-Ange said. "You try to get to the boy in the middle, get him away from the cultists, talk to him You speak Spanish better than all of us, and he is more likely to listen to you than any of us." She pulled herself along the side of the Jeep unsteadily, following Gabe's idea about the body armor- they really should have put on vests earlier but it was the jungle, it was hot, no one had wanted to get even more uncomfortable and sweaty. "Topaz, see if you can calm him down, make him more receptive to anything Gabe tells him."
She started to pull a vest on, and sat down abruptly as another tremor shook the ground, and an interlocking set of metal plates sprung up in a ring around her ankles, and repeated itself until it made a curved partial dome around the Jeep. "Topaz, if you cannot get to the boy, start shutting people down. They cannot shoot if they are weeping from guilt from their careers as hitmen." She peered around the ectoplasmic shield, grunted as a tremor shook it, and then pulled cards. "Incoming monsters, I brought zombies." A pair of grey and green skinned zombies, wet and dripping came out of the air itself and ran for a gunman.
Who was quickly regretting his decision to accept this contract. They were just meant to provide security for construction of the railway against eco-terrorists. For the good of Mexico, they were told. They had not been informed that said eco-terrorists would attack with magic and earthquake powers and...were those zombies?
Still, money was money and their reputation was on the line if they failed. So the apparent leader of the group ordered another gunman to focus on the incoming monsters while the others continued to disrupt the old Indians by whatever means necessary.
The gunshots, the tremors, his teammates; it was one of their more chaotic missions, and that made for a tough environment for Gabriel to focus. And he needed to focus, because bullets were flying everywhere in a way that made getting to the boy a particularly hazardous obstacle course.
If he had been a different kind of person, he might have crossed himself and said a prayer to the Virgen de Guadalupe, and something about being in Mexico did give him the urge. But instead, he simply took off at a run when the time felt right, watching the world slow sufficiently around him that he felt — incorrectly, but still— that he could almost anticipate the trembles in the earth.
He popped up about ten meters from the boy, largely unharmed, then realized he wasn't entirely sure what to say. "Hey there," he called in Spanish, with casual ease that he hoped might be a little disarming. "Bit of a situation you seem to be in here."
The earth alerted Julio of the stranger's approach before he heard or saw anything. Bipedal footsteps, but coming too quickly to be human. Julio pivoted, sliding a foot in Gabriel's direction to send a shockwave at him, but Gabriel moved too fast and Julio instead felled a papaya tree.
"Who are you?" he asked with a trembling voice. "You don't sound like you come from here. If you're with the train company, too, you should go now. Be-before you get hurt."
"I'm Gabriel. And no, not yucateco. Obviously the accent's a give away." Gabriel could tell how nervous the boy was; even beyond the different cadences of their Spanish, the young man's voice was as uneven as the ground.
It was important, he knew, to keep the kid calm, so Gabriel raised his hands to show he wasn't armed. "Not from the train company either," he said. "And I think we're both equally in danger here."
Julio glanced around at his grandparents and the other brujos, still deep into their spell, and seemingly unaware of what was going on around them. He had to keep this going. For them. So, he took more of what they freely gave him and pushed harder. A sinkhole opened a hundred meters away, taking a portion of the railway down with it.
"We can't stop. We're almost done. Get out of here, please!"
Artie's synthesizer crackled over the comms, emotionless. "I have a clear shot on the boy," he said. He'd process the ramifications of this later, when he wasn't on a hilltop wondering if he'd survive a landslide.
Jubilee for her part had set up slightly above where Artie was placed and was maintaining a view of the area. She had a line of plasma laid out in front of them in a thin multi-coloured strip that crackled in the humid air but she’d be able to raise it almost instantly if anyone decided to protest their placement.
Felicia watched as the collapse of the mission unfolded in front of her, low on the ground with claws deep in the knee of one of the shooters. Her breath shuddered, in and out, as nearby a bullet broke a strand of her hair as, bouncing off a steel toed boot to land in the side of another of the gun wielders. "Stupid, fucking precog," Felicia breathed.
She stood slowly, as webbing snapped, swinging a shot wild, a toe caught on a rock, a sudden sneezing fit occured, and made her way closer to the center. It couldn't happen. Birds spooked, guns jammed, and she smiled a little; it couldn't happen and so it wouldn't. A grenade clicked and went still just before a drop of blood hit the dirt.
"Fuck," Felica said, wiping her wet nose, back of her hand bloody.
While good luck turned her way, it turned its back on everyone else. A grenade failed to detonate, feet tripped, and firearms misfired. A bullet impossibly missed Felicia, leaving her with both ears intact, but one of the chanting brujos stopped as hot lead tore through his shoulder, embedding itself in shattered bone and mangled tissue. But unfortunately for the coven, the snap back to reality did not sever their connection to each other or the quaking man in the middle of the circle. Instead, with their concentration to keep on another safe broken, the dam burst and the flow of power intensified.
Fissures tore through the earth beneath Julio's feet, sending everyone in a hundred-meter radius sprawling. Julio tried to get back to his feet, but he could not find purchase through the shockwaves. He cried out in pain, but it would not stop. He was just a free-flowing conduit now: magic in from the brujos, devastating earthquakes out from him. Through the pain, he saw two options: either the shockwaves would tear through his body and reduce him to a pile of broken bones and viscera, or the earth would swallow them all up and send them plummeting to their deaths.
Neither option seemed appealing.
He called to his grandparents for help, but his voice was caught in his throat. A tree had fallen and pinned his grandmother. A fissure opened just a meter from her head and grew.
Gabriel grunted from the ground. He had tried to outrun the shockwaves, but he could do nothing to stop their impact and stumbled. "It doesn't have to be like this, güey," he called out, as he tried to stand. "I promise, we can..." He stood as he followed Julio's gaze, to where his abuela lay seemingly helpless. "Aw, fuck," he muttered in Spanish.
He couldn't help but picture his own grandma, the one who he'd been unable to see even as she'd been dying. He looked to Julio, and layers of feelings and familial guilt that he'd been trying to keep at bay flooded in. Though he'd been told to divert the boy, he was over toward Julio's grandmother in a split-second, whispering comforting things in Spanish and attempting to use his powers to the best of his ability to free her from the tree.
"I have a shot," Artie repeated. The hillside shook, small rocks starting to roll down.
The ground was rolling under her feet, waves of motion that sent Marie-Ange crashing hard to her hands and knees. The earth between her fingers crumbled and liquified and her hands sunk into the deep black mud. As she pulled them out, they bled black and deep mocha brown and cream and rippling orange and red. She screamed, ready for pain and it came out as a breathy squawk, more like the cackle of a bird than the scream of a woman.
Everywhere Marie-Ange could see was ruins, earth rising and crashing like tidal waves. Massive cracks swallowed her friends, Amanda and Topaz fell screaming into the depths of the jungle. Gabriel ran, sprinting ahead of falling trees until he misstepped into a quickly forming pool of scorching mud. Artie went silently into the ground, swallowed by cracks, Jubilee clung from a cliff face, fingers glowing as she tried to claw her way up.
Amidst the chaos, a pool of calm surrounded Felicia, a flat piece of slate her raft in an ocean of destruction. Marie-Ange did scream then, and the slate she could see in her vision repeated itself under Felicia, solid and cool and damp.
“No!” Felicia screamed, swaying at the effort as blood dripped down her face. She fell, knees hitting hard on her little island. “Don’t take the shot! I can fix-“ she forced out, as finally the ground beneath her cracked.
"Got it!" Artie held the shot and shifted his sights to the mercenaries, still not shooting but mapping out their positions. He almost -- almost --- the sight lines sucked. Unlike with the boy at the focus of the ritual, he just didn't have a good line on any of them. Almost. He breathed in. Held it, an island of stillness on the side of the hill and squeezed the trigger as the earth moved around them. One of the shooters fell.
Jubilee for her part had shut down her powers the moment she felt the ground start to roll underneath her in an effort not to flash fry Artie but had mostly managed to hold her stance. It wasn’t that much more difficult than riding a surfboard and she’d grown up close enough to the ocean to be rather good at that.
“Fi, you okay?” she asked calmly, even through her worry at the screaming.
She brought her powers back on and melted the random bullets that seemed to have started ricocheting directly toward them. Luck snap? She hoped not.
The shouting, the crying, the trees falling, the earth cracking, the gunshots, it was all too much for Julio. He tried to stop, to push the energy back, but he couldn't. His grandparents and the other brujos kept feeding him and his body kept drinking, transforming their magic into this seismic apocalypse. The pride he had felt earlier at participating in this coven, being a true brujo with him, calling upon the earth to save their town from colonizers, it was all gone now. All he felt was terror and shame. He had thought too highly of himself. Pride was a sin, after all. He was getting what was coming to him.
"Ayúdame, por favor," he begged, struggling to be heard by anyone over the din. "¡Ayúdame!"
By the Jeep, Amanda had been desperately trying to keep her feet, watching as somehow everything went to hell. But the thing she was focussing on most was the boy in the centre and when he called for help, even if she couldn't hear him, she could see the desperation on his face. They had to get up there.
"Topaz! Whatever it takes, get us to the kid! Now!"
Amanda could see the desperation in the kid's face, and Topaz could feel it - along with the ground trying to shake apart. She looked around, trying to project a calm she definitely didn't feel. Bullets pinged off her shielding, unfamiliar magic danced around chaotically, and there was absolutely no way she was going to get them there in time.
She took a step back, looking around, working through her options and counting. She needed enough magic to counter what the coven was doing, and even with one or two down, there were far more of them. Which meant she needed a lot more magic. Which meant...
Whatever it takes.
That was basically permission
Topaz looked back at Amanda, meeting her gaze - an agreement and an apology. Her eyes swept around the area, taking in her teammates last, trying to figure out who would benefit from a sudden lack of emotions and who needed their heads on straight, while also reaching out and latching on to the coven members, the boy, and the mercenaries. There was no time to be careful - she just pulled, draining everything she could reach. She was a little more careful with her teammates - she didn't need everything, she just needed enough to top off.
The slates Marie-Ange had created began moving on their own, falling into place in front of Topaz and winding a path up the mountain, cutting through the magic and any solid objects in their way. They were impossibly, almost comically still given their shaking surroundings.
The edges of Marie-Ange's mind felt crisp, like a perfectly sliced raw potato and she felt each image detach itself from her awareness as it became real. It felt like bubbles popping as they rose up a glass of champagne, dry and cool and sharp. She opened her eye, and found no destruction like she had feared. No one falling from sudden cliffs or devoured by the angry earth. The jungle shook, there was screaming, but no catastrophic rending of the very planet. Not today.
Jubilee hadn’t experienced Topaz’s particular brand of energy drain before, Amanda’s yes given their history but it was like the worst depressive episode ever.
It was lucky she’d been here before honestly. It took her a moment but she was able to orient herself again within the void that had become her heart.
“Remind me to never piss off Topaz,” Jubilee noted as she reignited her powers.
Nothing mattered, which meant everything she did would always matter.
The sudden blankness provided by Topaz' powers provided Artie with an intellectual relief. He... compartmentalised and disassociated when he was working, the gnawing horror of murdering people from a distance locked away. This was easier. A distant part of himself wondered if she could do it before every mission as he lined up an older man in his sights - one of the coven this time and shot to wound, not kill. The man fell, bleeding heavily from one leg.
Felicia had thought the overwhelming sensation of a luck snap, the nausea, the dread, knowing out tempestuous her every movement, thought, was and the low boiling anxiety that brought was bad but this. This was immeasurably worse. Bile and blood dripped down the back of her throat, her palms to the ground as her will was drained. At least she couldn't hurt anyone else like this.
"Let's go." Amanda's voice was measured, almost indifferent and she set off at a run, bounding from step to step. The fear, the urgency, all the emotions were gone, but there was still the goal, stopping the boy. As she ran, she was slipping out of her jacket, stripping off her shirt. "I'll take the power, you use it," she said over her shoulder to Topaz.
"Got it." Topaz kept pace a step behind her, still feeding magic into their path to keep it steady, just in case.
"Jesus, fuck, I could use a little help over here!" Gabriel was stressed. The woman he was trying to help was, rather abruptly, not. And if her sudden placidity was his clue that something odd had happened, but it was the relative evenness of his generally energetic teammates that clued him in that Topaz was to blame.
The fissure was coming dangerously close to him and the grandmother, which only made him feel more panicked. His powers did not come with super-strength, and he was not anywhere close to squatting the weight of a large tree. So, trying to think quickly, he did the only thing he could think of: He picked up a sharp-looking rock and, using his powers, tried to give it enough force to smash the tree to bits.
Though the earthquake was not letting up and new fissures opened all around him, Julio felt inexplicably tranquil, like his fear had just evaporated. He still knew he was in danger, but he could not find it in himself to be afraid. Was this serenity a sign of his impending doom? Was the sun-haired woman stripping off her clothes as she flew in his direction an angel? Oddly, he did not feel one way or another about that, either.
With one last leap, Amanda landed on the oasis of calm around the boy. "~I've come to help,~" she said expressionlessly in her bizarrely-accented Spanish, one part Castilian, one part LA barrio. "~Just hold still.~" The witch reached out and put her hand on his shoulder, concentrating on the power swirling through him and the channeling spell on her back. The black scarring began to flicker and glow as she pulled the magic out of Rictor.
At this rate, he would have agreed to anything, especially if it involved a half-naked person touching him. Too bad it wasn't the other mexicano who was struggling to help his chiichi from under the fallen tree. But before he could interrogate that personal revelation, the pressure that was swelling inside him from the brujos' spell did not and threatened to burst . . . didn't. It just deflated, and as it did, the rumbling began to abate.
Still on his hands and knees, Julio looked up into the woman's glowing eyes and offered a prayer of thanksgiving.
Amanda's eyes were glowing with the power she'd siphoned out of the boy. "Topaz," she grated between clenched teeth, the reaction purely physical, not emotional. "Reversal spell, if you can." She beckoned the younger witch to her and turned so her back was within easy reach. The channelling spell was ablaze, characters writhing in the presence of magic.
Topaz didn't say anything - she just stepped up and got to work. She couldn't fix the damage, but she could stop the spell. She reached out, finding all remains of other magic and stamping it down, like blowing out a candle. With nothing to power the spell, it began to stutter out on its own. She took the magic from the boy and directed it into the earth, encouraging it to calm.
Though the magic had been taken from him by these other witches, the connection between Julio and the earth remained strong as ever, and he poured what remained of his energy into it to bolster their counterspell and stabilize the land. Several minutes passed—what felt like an eternity—until the world stopped shaking and he could finally stand on his own two feet again. He looked around at the destruction he had wrought. The gunmen who had attacked him were subdued, injured, maimed, or dead. His own coven was broken and bloody. And while the ground had swallowed the railway as intended, thereby saving everyone threatened by industrialization, the land was ruined. It was perilous to even be here; one wrong step, and they would join the ruined tracks in the abyss.
And yet, Julio still felt nothing. Fear, power, pride, shame . . . He was empty. He turned to Amanda, still looming by him. "Who are you?"
She replied with the same flat tone as him. "Damage control." She looked around the scene, the fallen security types, the coven members climbing to their feet, her own team here and there. "Let's get you out of here before the authorities turn up."