Hope Summers and Marius; third contact
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xp_logsMarius approaches Hope Summers with an offer. (Backdated to April 2)
To face or to flee, Marius thought. Face, or flee.
The latter would be easy; she hadn't noticed him yet, and fate had contrived to prevent such chance encounters for weeks. Possibly he could spare them both any further awkwardness by simply avoiding her for the remainder of his stay. On the other hand, invoking even the slightest bit of subterfuge to avoid a 16 year old girl was a blow even to someone as famously without shame as Marius.
Ah, well. He had already cleared the air between himself and everyone else he had personally assaulted. He might as well go twelve for twelve.
"Oi, Hope -- it's Marius. Don't want to startle you." He thought a moment, then added, "Or be struck with any additional furniture."
Hope, curled up in an oversized armchair with a tablet that she was handling inexpertly, looked up, her expression halfway between 'dubious' and 'guilty'. "I won't throw anything at you," she said after a moment, clearly having considered it as one of several viable options. "Rogue explained - well, kind of explained things. A little." Uncharacteristically, she let this stand, the conflicted tone and the tension in her hands standing in for the deluge of words.
No projectiles had been hurled so far, which was a marked improvement over their previous two encounters. "And Kyle . . . made an attempt to explain your particular circumstances." Marius spread his hands. "I imagine it was a bit of a shock, running into a Horseman barely a fortnight after your arrival. Seems we were destined to get off on the wrong foot."
Hope's face wasn't a complete no-sell, but it was closer than anyone at the mansion had ever seen, its normal emotional elasticity hidden behind caution. She drew a knee up to her chest. "You really did get better," she said; not really a question so much as an affirmation, from hearing him speak with reason again. "I never heard of that before. Where I'm from they didn't get better. The city where Death appeared, it's been almost thirty years and nothing grows there."
Marius' features settled into an unreadable expression. "Had I not been stopped, it would've been the same here. Yeah." One hand subconsciously began to readjust the cuff of the opposite glove. "To my knowledge I'm the only one who's come back from it here, and that took some doing. Had the benefit of being mates with certain exceedingly stubborn individuals who saw it was me and assumed I hadn't simply been wooed over by Akkaba's excellent workplace atmosphere."
"You really didn't join them on purpose? For whatever they were offering?" Hope didn't ask what Clan Akkaba was; she knew. But something about the way she asked - maybe the uncertain, scared undertone of her voice - said that this was a question she needed to ask, and have answered, directly. Not something she would take for granted, assumed from other conversations.
"I am an X-Man."
The answer was automatic, delivered in a tone that indicated this should have been an explanation sufficient in itself.
Marius cleared his throat and walked back some of the intensity before he continued. "However, if it must be said: the answer is an unambiguous no. Once Akkaba had me an offer was made, but there was never to be any choice. I refused. Over, and over. It made no difference." The Australian paused for a moment, considering whether this was truly an overture he wanted to make, then accepted that he had nothing else.
"Your dad's mission being what it is, I was thinking . . . if I were to tell you how Horseman are made, might that perhaps come in useful?"
Hope shifted, sitting up a little straighter. Her face lost a little of its cautious restraint, too - not giving way to excitement for intel, but rather reacting to what Marius had said just before that, eyes flashing with sickened unsurprise. "That - that might be helpful," she said, clearly trying to choose her words with care. "But . . . " Her more-natural countenance conveyed some sheepishness. "I did throw a table at you. And steal Kyle's mutation and try to attack you too. You don't owe me anything."
The seriousness of her reply left Marius amused despite himself. "I'm still in the process of making amends to those inconvenienced by the attempted genocide, which I don't mind saying is something I am finding quite difficult to gift for. In short, I find myself in a helpful mood."
Hope blinked. "You're . . . giving people gifts because you tried to kill them?" she guessed after a moment spent trying to parse Marius's words.
"Correct. The gesture is largely symbolic, I admit, but in your case . . ." Marius brushed a curl from his orange eyes. "If a bit of knowledge can help someone in the next world, well, it wouldn't be the worst thing."
Hope considered this. "My world already had, um, he was already - woken up. And killed. But my dad helps other worlds, and I want to too. So - " She nodded, decisively. "Okay."
"Right. Well . . . suppose I should start with this." The Australian reached for the hem of his shirt, then realised the possible implications of the gesture in the presence of a 16 year old girl. "Er, I promise this will bear relevance to our conversation."
Without giving Hope an opportunity to reply -- or himself to have second thoughts -- Marius pulled his shirt up to his collarbone to bare the seal of Akkaba that had been carved across his chest. There were still traces of freshly-healed lacerations across the scar of the original wounding.
"When they make you a Horseman they cut this symbol into you," he explained. "There's a whole ritual goes along with it. They pare you away to make room for his will -- En Sabah Nur's, that is. You can feel yourself being crushed beneath it. Like having stones piled onto your chest, one by one, until you can't pull a breath. Don't think everyone they try it with survives. There's a fair bit of physical trauma, for a start, and some sort of magic involved to create the link. Not sure how long it takes, exactly. Felt like hours, but perhaps that was just the drugs they gave me."
The appalled expression on Hope's face did nothing to distract from that fact that tears had welled in her eyes as he spoke, making her blink and look away. She was clearly grasping for something to say. "That's - did you understand anything about the magic?" she said, managing to keep her voice mostly level.
As a mercy to the both of them, the X-Man lowered his shirt and slowly smoothed down the front. He, too, took a few moments to avoid Hope's eyes.
"Not so much the specifics. They give you a paralytic but leave you awake. Some bollocks with chanting to erode your sense of self as it happens, perhaps. It got a bit hazy. Afterwards . . ." Marius folded his arms across his chest. "You're still yourself, to an extent. Values, priorities, relationships -- those you can recall with perfect clarity, but they're secondary to his will. I didn't particularly care to fight my former colleagues, but nor was I bothered when the necessity arose. You can't resist because you no longer recognise his purpose as anything but your own. Allows his avatars to act autonomously, you see. Four minds acting to a single end."
"Could you feel them? The other ones?" There was a sense that Hope didn't know exactly what questions to ask, that she was struggling to compartmentalize the horror of what had happened to the person in front of her. "Or was it just him?"
"Just him. Once he's in your head there's no space for anything else. As I said, independent actors. I barely communicated with Akkaba's hierarchy -- unnecessary, you know. I already knew what was required of me." Marius straightened the cuff of one glove and met her gaze again. Now he smiled, and, while not malicious, it was very clearly the sort of smile that indicated the door on a certain topic had been closed. "At any rate, let's move on to the useful bit. Facing Nur's will head-on does as much good as fistfighting the ocean; this being the case I'm not sure a telepath would've had much chance. But the bridge that's built to connect him to his Horsemen? That's vulnerable. There's a fair amount of magic-users running about this place. One of them realised what they were looking at and cut me free."
"Magic?" Hope deflated, obviously unaware how visible her disappointment was; she picked at the skin on the side of her thumb, thinking. "What kind of magic? What does it need to do? Did it - hurt?"
"Not sure what kind, to be honest -- can't say it's an area in which I'm particularly well-versed, but some of the mutants here are practitioners as well. Most seem to possess some flavour of energy absorption or manipulation, strangely enough. Topaz, it was her who did it. She could tell you better than I. As for pain . . ." Marius shrugged and gestured to his chest. "Nothing about the experience is pleasant. Neither the initiation nor the severance. A bit of discomfort is a small price to pay for one's free will."
"Topaz. I think I met her." Or at least encountered her, during her absolutely necessary and well-planned mansion incursion in December. Her mouth twisted sideways, thinking. Her eyes were troubled. "Magic. I don't do that. I guess I'm gonna have to ask someone."
"You've a few options. Topaz, yeah, and Amanda. A new bloke in Medlab, Stephen, we've met briefly, and two other girls I've not. Quite a wealth of knowledge." Against all odds, Marius could feel himself running out of words. He could see her disappointment at how unhelpful the information had been, and wished he had more to offer.
Perhaps he did.
"One thing more," he said. "When you copied me you said you found nothing. As myself I have nothing. I absorb, steal, and redirect, a bit like Rogue. I'm told I've been excised of Nur's influence, but just in case . . ." Marius stepped back and spread his arms, indicating the building around them.
"Environmental damage is what I recommend. Avoid direct applications of power like energy blasts or telekinesis -- I'll just turn it back on you, as you have found. However, if it should come to a simple chair to the face I'm just as vulnerable as the next man." Despite himself, he grinned. "As you have also found."
The girl had the decency to look abashed again. "I shouldn't have done that," she said, just barely not mumbling. "I didn't - um - stop to think about the context and situation first. Or ask an adult." A clear repetition of something someone had told her, begrudgingly allowed.
Marius' eyebrows rose in amusement. The density of said eyebrows made the expression very obvious. "It was both quite understandable and an excellent instinct. As I said, something to keep in your back pocket. Should it come to that, though, don't let me put hands on you. Again, the mechanism by which I take powers is similar to Rogue's, but a bit more, ah, organic." Odd, though. Now that he looked at her Marius realised he couldn't read her. In their previous encounters her power signature had shown as psionic, then feral. Without anything to copy, however, the girl's aura was . . . not human, precisely, but not something that set him off, either. Marius' brow creased. The only other person he'd met who'd been able to cheat his perception in this fashion was Namor.
"You don't just copy the genes?" Hope was genuinely curious; other than Rogue, whose absorption was fundamentally different than her own, she'd never met another power copier. "You have to, like, touch someone? Do you absorb their personality too?"
"Alas, nothing so elegant." Marius held up a gloved hand and waggled his fingers. "I have rather unattractive orifices on the palms of either hand. If given the opportunity they engage to extract marrow from the donor, which my body then uses as a template. This will allow me to maintain the power for a week or so, but it's taxing for the donor. Weakens the body, impairs mutant powers for a day or so. Back when I was on the team my preference was a bit of blood in a pen needle. The half-life is considerably shorter, but I find the process significantly less awkward. And since you ask, no, it is their powers only which I duplicate. Proficiency must be acquired the standard way: a combination of hard work and embarrassing misadventure."
"Orifices?" Hope wrinkled her nose - not in disgust, but the expression of someone whose biological vocabulary was being pushed past its modest limits. "But that's nice that you can keep them for so long," she said, grasping to the part of his explanation she'd actually understood. "I only get a few hours. The rest of the time I'm just normal." This was said with absolutely no sense of irony.
"Mouths," Marius clarified, attempting to recalibrate himself for "Sixteen and ???". "Or a structure similar enough to qualify. No worries, the duration is not so enviable as it might seem. Insofar as we can tell, power duplication is merely a byproduct of their primary purpose. My x-gene is a bit dysfunctional, and I go through turns where it chews through my own bone marrow unless I can arrange regular donations. I was in such a phase when Akkaba scooped me up, though happily I appear to have found myself back in remission. Apparently jobbing as Death included a generous benefits package."
“Hand mouths?” Hope’s eyes gleamed with genetic avarice. “Can I see?” Remembering politeness as a bare afterthought, she added, “I’m glad you’re feeling better. I don’t get it but that’s good, right?”
Marius found himself warming to the girl. Other than a very few critical areas he, too, prefered to exist in a state of amiable ignorance.
"Indeed. And certainly, you may see the mouths, although I should warn you they are a bit--" Marius caught Hope's expression, mentally replayed their exchange thus far, and amended, "you know, never mind. I imagine you'll be fine."
The older man peeled off a glove and presented his hand. One shallow, silver-dollar-sized orifice gaped at her.
"Huuuuh," Hope said, fascinated; her expression only conveyed the extent to which she wanted to touch and had been trained not to. In fact, her hands went automatically to her pockets. "They're not too deep. So you don't need a lot of genetic material? Or does it convert everything to energy before storage is a problem? Or maybe a pocket dimension that holds excess until you need it?"
"It is perhaps more accurate to think of them as a means to facilitate infusion," Marius replied, noting that, as with Namor, the mouths were non-reactive to her proximity. "As they do not connect to my digestive tract 'overeating' is not an issue, I merely require a means to introduce the genetic material into my body. Regardless, I find borrowing more than two mutations at once to be unwise. Unforeseen interactions can occur, you see. I believe my personal best was . . . four? Two flavours of shapeshifter, a classic pairing of super-strength and invulnerability, and just a soupcon of chaos manipulation. Results were--" the man paused here, trying to decide how best to articulate the experience of having one's body bloom with quartz nodes and teratomas before landing on, "--unpleasantly organic."
"Like that gross green juice in the fridge?" Hope nodded sagely. "It's bad. I get it." She blew out a breath, getting back on track. "You can stack them, though. I can only do one at once. Which is mostly good and I don't have to drink any genetic material or green juice, but more would be better."
Marius allowed himself a moment to entertain the mental image of this particular child having simultaneous access to multiple mutations. It did paint quite the picture, but alas, the artist was Hieronymous Bosch.
"Not necessarily," he replied, diplomatically refraining from specifying for whom. "At any rate, your power is quite enviable in its own right. I imagine people are much more amenable to lending their powers when doing so does not require an act of physical donation, and, of course, it involves so much less clean-up afterwards. The grass is always greener, eh?"
"Yeah, but people also get really mad if you borrow their powers without permission," Hope said, sighing as though this was unreasonable and unfair. "Like I'm just copying their gene but they get all 'it's personal!' and 'you don't even know how not to set this entire house on fire' as though everyone doesn't have some tiny little problems with manifestation."
Marius tapped a finger to his chin, thoughtful. "An interesting point. On the one hand, mutant powers are typically neither earned nor chosen. On the other, if someone were to appear one day having constructed an exact duplicate of that staff of yours without so much as a friendly notice I assume you might experience a similar reaction. Regardless, it is simply good manners to extend a polite request."
Hope wrinkled her nose again. "I think the Askani would be more upset about that than me," she said, "But I get it. And I don't copy anything without permission. Unless it's an emergency." The angelic glow she emitted was tarnished slightly by a soupçon of smugness. "Emergencies are different."
"So they are." It was a point of mild concern that Marius could find no fault with this reasoning. Ah, well, it was probably fine. Probably.
"At any rate," he continued inexorably, "whilst perhaps not so useful as Rogue in this area, I do have a bit of experience working with borrowed powers. On such occasions as you manage to procure the requisite permission to borrow I would be more than happy to offer what guidance I can." A voice in the back of his head insisted on pointing out that some might call it perverse to volunteer his expertise to one he had met during the course of an attempted murder, but Marius chose to deal with this the same way he responded to naysayers and unwanted common sense in general: by ignoring it. He'd lived most of his life refusing to allow second thoughts to get the better of him and he certainly wasn't going to start now.
"Yes. Um, please." Hope's face had a particular determined set that meant she wasn't totally sure this was a good idea but she was damned if she'd let that stop her. "That way I can learn how to defeat y - uh, people with powers like this." Again, she emitted the angelic aura - she would never use such an offer for an intended dual purpose. Whether this was convincing or not was, of course, up to the recipient of said aura.
In this case it was not, but happily for Hope this made no difference. That was ultimately the point of this little tableau, wasn't it? Restitution. Without Arthur's intervention he might have killed her. She was owed whatever sense of security Marius could provide.
And, well . . .
The more people prepared to stop him, the better. That was a conclusion he'd reached long before his conversion to Horseman.
The glossy smile never slipped. With an amiable nod to Hope, Marius pulled the glove back onto his hand. "Always a pleasure to do a bit of good. My metaphorical door is always open."
To face or to flee, Marius thought. Face, or flee.
The latter would be easy; she hadn't noticed him yet, and fate had contrived to prevent such chance encounters for weeks. Possibly he could spare them both any further awkwardness by simply avoiding her for the remainder of his stay. On the other hand, invoking even the slightest bit of subterfuge to avoid a 16 year old girl was a blow even to someone as famously without shame as Marius.
Ah, well. He had already cleared the air between himself and everyone else he had personally assaulted. He might as well go twelve for twelve.
"Oi, Hope -- it's Marius. Don't want to startle you." He thought a moment, then added, "Or be struck with any additional furniture."
Hope, curled up in an oversized armchair with a tablet that she was handling inexpertly, looked up, her expression halfway between 'dubious' and 'guilty'. "I won't throw anything at you," she said after a moment, clearly having considered it as one of several viable options. "Rogue explained - well, kind of explained things. A little." Uncharacteristically, she let this stand, the conflicted tone and the tension in her hands standing in for the deluge of words.
No projectiles had been hurled so far, which was a marked improvement over their previous two encounters. "And Kyle . . . made an attempt to explain your particular circumstances." Marius spread his hands. "I imagine it was a bit of a shock, running into a Horseman barely a fortnight after your arrival. Seems we were destined to get off on the wrong foot."
Hope's face wasn't a complete no-sell, but it was closer than anyone at the mansion had ever seen, its normal emotional elasticity hidden behind caution. She drew a knee up to her chest. "You really did get better," she said; not really a question so much as an affirmation, from hearing him speak with reason again. "I never heard of that before. Where I'm from they didn't get better. The city where Death appeared, it's been almost thirty years and nothing grows there."
Marius' features settled into an unreadable expression. "Had I not been stopped, it would've been the same here. Yeah." One hand subconsciously began to readjust the cuff of the opposite glove. "To my knowledge I'm the only one who's come back from it here, and that took some doing. Had the benefit of being mates with certain exceedingly stubborn individuals who saw it was me and assumed I hadn't simply been wooed over by Akkaba's excellent workplace atmosphere."
"You really didn't join them on purpose? For whatever they were offering?" Hope didn't ask what Clan Akkaba was; she knew. But something about the way she asked - maybe the uncertain, scared undertone of her voice - said that this was a question she needed to ask, and have answered, directly. Not something she would take for granted, assumed from other conversations.
"I am an X-Man."
The answer was automatic, delivered in a tone that indicated this should have been an explanation sufficient in itself.
Marius cleared his throat and walked back some of the intensity before he continued. "However, if it must be said: the answer is an unambiguous no. Once Akkaba had me an offer was made, but there was never to be any choice. I refused. Over, and over. It made no difference." The Australian paused for a moment, considering whether this was truly an overture he wanted to make, then accepted that he had nothing else.
"Your dad's mission being what it is, I was thinking . . . if I were to tell you how Horseman are made, might that perhaps come in useful?"
Hope shifted, sitting up a little straighter. Her face lost a little of its cautious restraint, too - not giving way to excitement for intel, but rather reacting to what Marius had said just before that, eyes flashing with sickened unsurprise. "That - that might be helpful," she said, clearly trying to choose her words with care. "But . . . " Her more-natural countenance conveyed some sheepishness. "I did throw a table at you. And steal Kyle's mutation and try to attack you too. You don't owe me anything."
The seriousness of her reply left Marius amused despite himself. "I'm still in the process of making amends to those inconvenienced by the attempted genocide, which I don't mind saying is something I am finding quite difficult to gift for. In short, I find myself in a helpful mood."
Hope blinked. "You're . . . giving people gifts because you tried to kill them?" she guessed after a moment spent trying to parse Marius's words.
"Correct. The gesture is largely symbolic, I admit, but in your case . . ." Marius brushed a curl from his orange eyes. "If a bit of knowledge can help someone in the next world, well, it wouldn't be the worst thing."
Hope considered this. "My world already had, um, he was already - woken up. And killed. But my dad helps other worlds, and I want to too. So - " She nodded, decisively. "Okay."
"Right. Well . . . suppose I should start with this." The Australian reached for the hem of his shirt, then realised the possible implications of the gesture in the presence of a 16 year old girl. "Er, I promise this will bear relevance to our conversation."
Without giving Hope an opportunity to reply -- or himself to have second thoughts -- Marius pulled his shirt up to his collarbone to bare the seal of Akkaba that had been carved across his chest. There were still traces of freshly-healed lacerations across the scar of the original wounding.
"When they make you a Horseman they cut this symbol into you," he explained. "There's a whole ritual goes along with it. They pare you away to make room for his will -- En Sabah Nur's, that is. You can feel yourself being crushed beneath it. Like having stones piled onto your chest, one by one, until you can't pull a breath. Don't think everyone they try it with survives. There's a fair bit of physical trauma, for a start, and some sort of magic involved to create the link. Not sure how long it takes, exactly. Felt like hours, but perhaps that was just the drugs they gave me."
The appalled expression on Hope's face did nothing to distract from that fact that tears had welled in her eyes as he spoke, making her blink and look away. She was clearly grasping for something to say. "That's - did you understand anything about the magic?" she said, managing to keep her voice mostly level.
As a mercy to the both of them, the X-Man lowered his shirt and slowly smoothed down the front. He, too, took a few moments to avoid Hope's eyes.
"Not so much the specifics. They give you a paralytic but leave you awake. Some bollocks with chanting to erode your sense of self as it happens, perhaps. It got a bit hazy. Afterwards . . ." Marius folded his arms across his chest. "You're still yourself, to an extent. Values, priorities, relationships -- those you can recall with perfect clarity, but they're secondary to his will. I didn't particularly care to fight my former colleagues, but nor was I bothered when the necessity arose. You can't resist because you no longer recognise his purpose as anything but your own. Allows his avatars to act autonomously, you see. Four minds acting to a single end."
"Could you feel them? The other ones?" There was a sense that Hope didn't know exactly what questions to ask, that she was struggling to compartmentalize the horror of what had happened to the person in front of her. "Or was it just him?"
"Just him. Once he's in your head there's no space for anything else. As I said, independent actors. I barely communicated with Akkaba's hierarchy -- unnecessary, you know. I already knew what was required of me." Marius straightened the cuff of one glove and met her gaze again. Now he smiled, and, while not malicious, it was very clearly the sort of smile that indicated the door on a certain topic had been closed. "At any rate, let's move on to the useful bit. Facing Nur's will head-on does as much good as fistfighting the ocean; this being the case I'm not sure a telepath would've had much chance. But the bridge that's built to connect him to his Horsemen? That's vulnerable. There's a fair amount of magic-users running about this place. One of them realised what they were looking at and cut me free."
"Magic?" Hope deflated, obviously unaware how visible her disappointment was; she picked at the skin on the side of her thumb, thinking. "What kind of magic? What does it need to do? Did it - hurt?"
"Not sure what kind, to be honest -- can't say it's an area in which I'm particularly well-versed, but some of the mutants here are practitioners as well. Most seem to possess some flavour of energy absorption or manipulation, strangely enough. Topaz, it was her who did it. She could tell you better than I. As for pain . . ." Marius shrugged and gestured to his chest. "Nothing about the experience is pleasant. Neither the initiation nor the severance. A bit of discomfort is a small price to pay for one's free will."
"Topaz. I think I met her." Or at least encountered her, during her absolutely necessary and well-planned mansion incursion in December. Her mouth twisted sideways, thinking. Her eyes were troubled. "Magic. I don't do that. I guess I'm gonna have to ask someone."
"You've a few options. Topaz, yeah, and Amanda. A new bloke in Medlab, Stephen, we've met briefly, and two other girls I've not. Quite a wealth of knowledge." Against all odds, Marius could feel himself running out of words. He could see her disappointment at how unhelpful the information had been, and wished he had more to offer.
Perhaps he did.
"One thing more," he said. "When you copied me you said you found nothing. As myself I have nothing. I absorb, steal, and redirect, a bit like Rogue. I'm told I've been excised of Nur's influence, but just in case . . ." Marius stepped back and spread his arms, indicating the building around them.
"Environmental damage is what I recommend. Avoid direct applications of power like energy blasts or telekinesis -- I'll just turn it back on you, as you have found. However, if it should come to a simple chair to the face I'm just as vulnerable as the next man." Despite himself, he grinned. "As you have also found."
The girl had the decency to look abashed again. "I shouldn't have done that," she said, just barely not mumbling. "I didn't - um - stop to think about the context and situation first. Or ask an adult." A clear repetition of something someone had told her, begrudgingly allowed.
Marius' eyebrows rose in amusement. The density of said eyebrows made the expression very obvious. "It was both quite understandable and an excellent instinct. As I said, something to keep in your back pocket. Should it come to that, though, don't let me put hands on you. Again, the mechanism by which I take powers is similar to Rogue's, but a bit more, ah, organic." Odd, though. Now that he looked at her Marius realised he couldn't read her. In their previous encounters her power signature had shown as psionic, then feral. Without anything to copy, however, the girl's aura was . . . not human, precisely, but not something that set him off, either. Marius' brow creased. The only other person he'd met who'd been able to cheat his perception in this fashion was Namor.
"You don't just copy the genes?" Hope was genuinely curious; other than Rogue, whose absorption was fundamentally different than her own, she'd never met another power copier. "You have to, like, touch someone? Do you absorb their personality too?"
"Alas, nothing so elegant." Marius held up a gloved hand and waggled his fingers. "I have rather unattractive orifices on the palms of either hand. If given the opportunity they engage to extract marrow from the donor, which my body then uses as a template. This will allow me to maintain the power for a week or so, but it's taxing for the donor. Weakens the body, impairs mutant powers for a day or so. Back when I was on the team my preference was a bit of blood in a pen needle. The half-life is considerably shorter, but I find the process significantly less awkward. And since you ask, no, it is their powers only which I duplicate. Proficiency must be acquired the standard way: a combination of hard work and embarrassing misadventure."
"Orifices?" Hope wrinkled her nose - not in disgust, but the expression of someone whose biological vocabulary was being pushed past its modest limits. "But that's nice that you can keep them for so long," she said, grasping to the part of his explanation she'd actually understood. "I only get a few hours. The rest of the time I'm just normal." This was said with absolutely no sense of irony.
"Mouths," Marius clarified, attempting to recalibrate himself for "Sixteen and ???". "Or a structure similar enough to qualify. No worries, the duration is not so enviable as it might seem. Insofar as we can tell, power duplication is merely a byproduct of their primary purpose. My x-gene is a bit dysfunctional, and I go through turns where it chews through my own bone marrow unless I can arrange regular donations. I was in such a phase when Akkaba scooped me up, though happily I appear to have found myself back in remission. Apparently jobbing as Death included a generous benefits package."
“Hand mouths?” Hope’s eyes gleamed with genetic avarice. “Can I see?” Remembering politeness as a bare afterthought, she added, “I’m glad you’re feeling better. I don’t get it but that’s good, right?”
Marius found himself warming to the girl. Other than a very few critical areas he, too, prefered to exist in a state of amiable ignorance.
"Indeed. And certainly, you may see the mouths, although I should warn you they are a bit--" Marius caught Hope's expression, mentally replayed their exchange thus far, and amended, "you know, never mind. I imagine you'll be fine."
The older man peeled off a glove and presented his hand. One shallow, silver-dollar-sized orifice gaped at her.
"Huuuuh," Hope said, fascinated; her expression only conveyed the extent to which she wanted to touch and had been trained not to. In fact, her hands went automatically to her pockets. "They're not too deep. So you don't need a lot of genetic material? Or does it convert everything to energy before storage is a problem? Or maybe a pocket dimension that holds excess until you need it?"
"It is perhaps more accurate to think of them as a means to facilitate infusion," Marius replied, noting that, as with Namor, the mouths were non-reactive to her proximity. "As they do not connect to my digestive tract 'overeating' is not an issue, I merely require a means to introduce the genetic material into my body. Regardless, I find borrowing more than two mutations at once to be unwise. Unforeseen interactions can occur, you see. I believe my personal best was . . . four? Two flavours of shapeshifter, a classic pairing of super-strength and invulnerability, and just a soupcon of chaos manipulation. Results were--" the man paused here, trying to decide how best to articulate the experience of having one's body bloom with quartz nodes and teratomas before landing on, "--unpleasantly organic."
"Like that gross green juice in the fridge?" Hope nodded sagely. "It's bad. I get it." She blew out a breath, getting back on track. "You can stack them, though. I can only do one at once. Which is mostly good and I don't have to drink any genetic material or green juice, but more would be better."
Marius allowed himself a moment to entertain the mental image of this particular child having simultaneous access to multiple mutations. It did paint quite the picture, but alas, the artist was Hieronymous Bosch.
"Not necessarily," he replied, diplomatically refraining from specifying for whom. "At any rate, your power is quite enviable in its own right. I imagine people are much more amenable to lending their powers when doing so does not require an act of physical donation, and, of course, it involves so much less clean-up afterwards. The grass is always greener, eh?"
"Yeah, but people also get really mad if you borrow their powers without permission," Hope said, sighing as though this was unreasonable and unfair. "Like I'm just copying their gene but they get all 'it's personal!' and 'you don't even know how not to set this entire house on fire' as though everyone doesn't have some tiny little problems with manifestation."
Marius tapped a finger to his chin, thoughtful. "An interesting point. On the one hand, mutant powers are typically neither earned nor chosen. On the other, if someone were to appear one day having constructed an exact duplicate of that staff of yours without so much as a friendly notice I assume you might experience a similar reaction. Regardless, it is simply good manners to extend a polite request."
Hope wrinkled her nose again. "I think the Askani would be more upset about that than me," she said, "But I get it. And I don't copy anything without permission. Unless it's an emergency." The angelic glow she emitted was tarnished slightly by a soupçon of smugness. "Emergencies are different."
"So they are." It was a point of mild concern that Marius could find no fault with this reasoning. Ah, well, it was probably fine. Probably.
"At any rate," he continued inexorably, "whilst perhaps not so useful as Rogue in this area, I do have a bit of experience working with borrowed powers. On such occasions as you manage to procure the requisite permission to borrow I would be more than happy to offer what guidance I can." A voice in the back of his head insisted on pointing out that some might call it perverse to volunteer his expertise to one he had met during the course of an attempted murder, but Marius chose to deal with this the same way he responded to naysayers and unwanted common sense in general: by ignoring it. He'd lived most of his life refusing to allow second thoughts to get the better of him and he certainly wasn't going to start now.
"Yes. Um, please." Hope's face had a particular determined set that meant she wasn't totally sure this was a good idea but she was damned if she'd let that stop her. "That way I can learn how to defeat y - uh, people with powers like this." Again, she emitted the angelic aura - she would never use such an offer for an intended dual purpose. Whether this was convincing or not was, of course, up to the recipient of said aura.
In this case it was not, but happily for Hope this made no difference. That was ultimately the point of this little tableau, wasn't it? Restitution. Without Arthur's intervention he might have killed her. She was owed whatever sense of security Marius could provide.
And, well . . .
The more people prepared to stop him, the better. That was a conclusion he'd reached long before his conversion to Horseman.
The glossy smile never slipped. With an amiable nod to Hope, Marius pulled the glove back onto his hand. "Always a pleasure to do a bit of good. My metaphorical door is always open."
no subject
Date: 2024-04-12 03:13 am (UTC)"I won't throw anything at you," she said after a moment, clearly having considered it as one of several viable options."
I love how Hope's training peeks out in statements like this and her sharing of the devastation of her home reality by Apocalypse. I love her little thinking motions — picking at her thumb, small movements — matched with the asides ("absolutely necessary and well-planned mansion incursion in December.")
Marius's tactical side continues to be wonderful to read as well. "Fighting Horseman for dummies," essentially, and his wise advice gleaned from being hit by a car.
Also wonderful to have folks with like(ish) powers comparing notes.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-12 04:13 pm (UTC)