The Lost Boys | Pandemonium
Sep. 8th, 2025 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsThe reaper has come to harvest their souls and they are powerless to stop it.
Like a scene straight out of a cartoon, Billy slammed the front door shut and locked the deadbolt. If they stayed inside, the creepy stranger would leave and everything would return to normal, right? Billy looked at Tommy for some sign he had done the right thing.
The speedster grabbed him by the arm and yanked them both back upstairs into Billy’s room, locking that door as well. He began to try and push the dresser to barricade them in. “What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.” Tommy was talking a mile a minute, and with a frantic shove of superspeed managed to get the heavy piece of furniture flush with the entry. It made a loud bang as it collided, several tchotchkes falling to the ground.
He whipped around. “Who the hell was that?!”
Billy, useless as Tommy single-handedly fortified their defenses, ran to the far side of his bed opposite the door. He would admonish Tommy for throwing things around, but he could not find the air to vocalize his thoughts. Instead, he slumped against the wall to the floor, dragging Playbill covers that were pinned to the wall with him. The magic 8-ball, which had fallen from its stand on his desk, rolled across the floor to his feet, and he nearly yelped when the sigil, that damned sigil, peered up at him through the window.
Suddenly struck with an idea, Billy extended a hand and called the spellbook to him. "If there's a summoning spell in here then there's gotta be an unsummoning spell, too, right?" As if either of them knew. As if Billy were actually Elphaba with the Grimmerie, or Bernadette Peters' Witch, or Mary Poppins.
It seemed like the most logical solution. As if anything in this situation was logical. Tommy swept the paper sigil from the ground and got the matches to light the menorah candles. “Sure, whatever. Let’s do this.”
"Found it. A Spell of Banishment. Just visualize the target and they go away." Seemed deceptively easy, but clearly magic made absolutely no sense so they could only go along with it. Billy ignored the repeated doorbell ringing and read aloud the incantation. Several times for good measure.
The doorbell stopped ringing and the boys were plunged into silence again.
"Did we do it?" Billy asked after a moment.
A voice behind him answered plainly. "A valiant effort, but no."
Tommy opened his eyes and jumped back a good few feet. “Ahhh!” The scare sent the normal static under his skin into a frenzy.
Billy knocked over the menorah in his mad dash to get away from the red-robed man, who just sighed and waved a hand, extinguishing the candles before the carpet lit up. "This was fun and all, but it's been a long day and I'd like to finish things before sundown, so if you wouldn't mind. Your souls, please."
"Our what now?" Billy was sure he had misheard.
"Souls, souls!" The man flung his arms up in exasperation. "The essence of your being. That immaterial part of you that survives death. Yours don't actually belong to you, and I've been tasked with collecting. So. Souls, please!"
The magic 8-ball sailed across the room, along with a barrage of other objects. Books, pencils, collectible figurines. All aimed at the man (creature?) in red. “No. Go. Away. You. Can’t. Have. Them.” Tommy underscored each word with an object.
"Tommy, wait, stop breaking my stuff!" Billy tried to grab hold of Tommy's arms to stop him, but they were moving too fast for him to reach. He grimaced when Tommy threw a pewter figurine that sailed directly through the mystery guest and smashed against the wall behind him. "Oh, w-what the hell?"
"Enough." Gone was the vaguely amused expression on the man's face, at least what they could see under the silly golden mask that covered half his face. He raised his left arm, which pulsed and spasmed, reshaping itself like wet clay into what Billy could only describe as one of Chernabog's servants, a toddler-sized green imp that freed itself from the appendage and launched itself like a rocket at the boys.
Tommy dove out of the way, tugging Billy along with him. The creature hit against the wall behind them with a smack.
So they’d summoned the actual devil, like from the Bible.
He watched as it began to reload on demon babies and made a split second decision. Seizing the energy vibrating within him, he rushed at the robed figure and shoved him towards the outer wall. A deafening boom rang out as the wall exploded.
Though disoriented from Tommy's quick save, Billy was thrown for a bigger loop when suddenly boom! No more wall. "My room!!! Aww man, my bed. My Playbill collection!" He was prepared to sit shiva for his loss when a flock of those little green monsters flew into the room and encircled them, like a scene out of The Birds.
"Incarnated into mutant host bodies? Fascinating." The sea of devils parted and the cloaked man appeared again, his hair singed and in disarray but he was otherwise apparently unscathed. "I knew of your chaos magic, of course, William. Your little childhood stunt hid you from me for years. Did you come up with the decoy idea yourself? And you." He turned his attention to Tommy. "What a fun surprise for you, though, Thomas. It explains why we couldn't find you until adolescence. Hmm. Well, no matter."
None of this made any sense. Stunts, decoys, finding them? Through this confusion and uncertainty, Billy felt that energy again. But this time, he only had his own imagination to guide it, not some hokey dollar store magic book. So he reached for Tommy and visualized the only thing he actually wanted right now: "I want to be somewhere else. I want to be somewhere else. I want to be somewhere else."
A flash of blue light, a slight tugging beneath his diaphragm, and suddenly, they were in the front yard. The rest of the neighborhood beyond the fence was still white and empty, the mysterious fog still occluding Eastview. But at least they weren't about to be eaten by demons.
The other boy frantically patted himself down as if to make sure everything was there, looking between the smoking house and where they stood. “Dude. Did you do that? Wait- let me see if I can-“
In a blur he was headed into the mist, before being forcefully thrown back by an invisible barrier. Tommy clutched his head as he skidded back to where Billy was. “Owwwwwww.” A few more attempts had him pinball-ing across the yard.
Billy couldn't help himself, a sudden but fleeting giddiness in his heart in the aftermath of . . . did he just teleport? "That deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball . . ." he sang with a soulful baritone.
“Are you seriously singing right now? Lock in, bro.” Tommy was back after his jaunt around the yard. “There’s this force field thingy around the house. We need to figure out how to get out.”
"It's 'Pinball Wizard' from Tommy, because you were bouncing . . . never mind." Billy dropped his explanation and poked at the invisible shield around his home. "What in the Brigadoon? I . . . Hmm, let me try something." There was something sort of familiar about the barrier, a slippery tingling like he'd just felt when he was transported down from his room. He tried to reach for it, metaphorically and literally, imagining their freedom. A flicker of blue light emanated from his outstretched hand, but it dissipated at the barrier. "If I had a little bit of time, maybe I could break through, but . . ."
"But you're out of time." It was the demon man again, with his little monsters hovering behind Billy and Tommy. "Get them," he ordered the imps.
"No! Get away from us!" The power came more easily this time, and it exploded from Billy's fingertips in half a dozen jagged bolts of lightning that struck the oncoming demons.
Twinkle Toes had been holding out on him. Damn.
Doing his best to avoid the lighting, Tommy tried his best to fend off the demons, sending out explosive energy when he could and hitting them at superspeed. He tried his best to cover Billy. Even with the other boy’s flashy lightning, he felt an urge to protect him from the onslaught.
The fried demons plummeted to the ground and seemed to melt into ooze before being resorbed by the enemy. Billy gagged at the sight, but as they felled the demons, his little trick was coming more easily, and they were taking down the demons as quickly as they were conjured. Billy tried to launch a lightning bolt at the man, too, but it curved around him, striking the roof instead. Shattered shingles rained down. Billy winced.
"I can see why my master has been chasing you for decades, from one life to the next." The man sounded almost impressed.
The speedster felt emboldened from their victories so far, and chose that moment to try and rush at the horned figure. He managed to get about a meter away before being flung back towards Billy. “Ahhhh!” Tommy skidded in the grass clutching his nose, which now had a copious amount of blood streaming from it. “Motherfucker broke my nose!”
"Tommy!" Billy was at his side in a second, static still sparking from his hands. He couldn't tell if Tommy's nose was actually broken or just bruised, but he had enough experience with nasal bleeds to advise Tommy to lean forward to try to stem the flow. There was nothing else he could do now, except play the role of protector that Tommy felt the urge to do himself a moment ago. He grabbed another metaphorical handful of the energy fueling his power and flung another several lightning bolts at their attacker. If he could see himself in a mirror, he would see blue energy threading over his brow into a glowing M-shaped diadem.
Cartilage and flesh began to knit itself back together as Tommy stood again. It was not a pleasant sensation, to say the least. He wiped some of the blood away gingerly.
Billy was obviously coming into his element more, and Tommy had an idea. In a hushed tone he said, “If I cover you do you think you’d be able to get a way out through the forcefield?” All the static electricity in the air had his pulse thrumming. Maybe, just maybe, the speedster could give him enough time.
It seemed like their options were running out either way.
"I . . . I can try." Billy could do this, right? He'd just said he could. As this confrontation continued, he had felt his power growing, and surely zapping demons wasn't the only thing he could do with it. So he stepped back and turned to face the magic bubble. His first thought was to overload it, use that wild energy against it by feeding it the lightning. The electricity coruscated around the dome like they were in a giant plasma globe toy.
Tommy, meanwhile, was a blur of white and black as he kept the demon babies at bay. If he concentrated enough energy at one, it would explode into a pile of green viscera. Unpleasant, but it got the job done. He had learned his lesson about going after the main guy directly, and instead focused on attacking and destabilizing the areas around him.
But they kept coming as quickly as Tommy took them out, their broken forms melting, reforming, and flying back into the sky at the wizard's verbal command. He continued to just float there, though, safely behind his own force field, casually observing the battlefield before him.
Meanwhile, Billy continued pouring the seemingly neverending energy into the barrier. "Break open break open break open . . ." he pleaded, but it remained stable and whole. Electricity started to crackle all over his body the longer he tried, and he fell to a half-kneeling position as his left leg spasmed with a mild charley horse.
Holes littered the lawn from Tommy’s chaos, raining grass and dirt from the sky. He glanced back at Billy and doubled his efforts. Pushing himself to go faster and build up more.
Just before the energy blew back on him and sent him careening into his house through the wall, Billy could have sworn he saw a little tear in the force field, what might have been a shock of curly brown hair in stark contrast to the whited-out environment beyond the bubble. But that was of secondary concern after the fact that not only had he failed, but he had not until the last moment realized his control had slipped. Lying in the rubble of the wall in the kitchen, he groaned miserably and tried to get back up, but he was too tired to move an inch.
Luckily for him, a pair of imps arrived to tenderly pick him up and take him back outside, where they promptly pinned him down. Billy cried out in pain as one of them twisted his arm behind his back.
"Next time you wish to escape Master Pandemonium, try that doppelganger spell you crafted a decade ago." The man landed in front of Billy and haughtily gazed down at him. "Even after it was gone, it took me years to find you again. You'll have to tell me how you did it. What a useful bit of magic."
Tommy wasn’t faring much better, having finally been overwhelmed by the creatures. The second he took in the surprise energy shock was a second too long. About a dozen of them kept him from moving as he vibrated in their hold, furious. “Let us go, asshole! I’m not letting you have my soul!” Of course the stupid demon had a stupid name.
Maybe it was what he assumed was a concussion, but Billy could not make any sense of what this guy was saying. All he knew was that a week ago it had been life as normal, and then this white-haired criminal shot into his home. Ever since, Billy felt like he didn't know up from down anymore. It was pure chaos. And yet despite that, his heart swelled with a sense of gratification he could not fathom. He smiled a little even as the tears started to come.
"I'm sorry, Tommy. I tried but I don't know what I'm doing."
The other boy sniffled a little, though he would never admit it. Lowly, he said, “Don’t beat yourself up about it. I failed.” A few more sniffles came from under the pile of demons restraining Tommy, though he was very quickly running out of fight. “… thank you for this week. It’s been the best time I’ve ever had.”
Master Pandemonium loomed over the pair, the gilding of his horned mask gleaming in the sunlight. "Brotherly love transcending lifetimes, what a sweet way to end things," he remarked and extended clawed, scaled, devilish hands.
The boys tried to scream, but no sound came out, as if the monster who had subdued their powers and their bodies with ease was stealing their voices directly from their throats. They tried and tried and tried, hoping against hope they would call someone to find them and save them. But there was no one. They were alone, just the two of them, as the beast's maw came down on them.
~*~
Scott hastily assembles a team to retrieve Tommy, only to find Pandemonium.
Eastview, New Jersey. A small suburb about halfway between Newark and Teaneck, not known for anything in particular. The mutant quartet that drove into the unremarkable neighborhood programmed into the GPS just perceived a typical pre-planned community enjoying a Sunday pre-autumn afternoon. No signs of escaped convicts or chaotic emanations.
From the passenger's seat, Wanda glanced over at Scott briefly before turning her gaze back to the neighborhood. "And the reports said this neighborhood? Not to sound doubtful but the most chaos I'm seeing is that shirtless man mowing a lawn while wearing a...is that a hat with beers on it?" Nothing was crying out, even the smallest bit, of stirrings of power.
"That's what they said," Scott slowed the car for a moment as he glanced around, this was idyllic, like something straight out of a story about the American dream, so obviously there was something very very wrong here. "You know, someone remind me to ask that man where he got his hat, we should pick one up for Kyle."
"Aside from the hat nothing is standing out to me. But I don't actually know what his mind feels like -- all I can do is scan for stress and confusion." Jim looked to Jean, who like him, had been relegated to the back seats like children on a road trip. "No chance your telepathy has spontaneously returned, I guess?"
Closing her eyes, Jean paused for a moment, trying to listen but the only thing she heard was the car moving and the faint sound of "Blinding Lights" by the Weeknd playing on the radio. She shook her head.
"No," she sighed. "Still just the telekinesis."
Wanda's head snapped left and to the back so she was staring over Jim's shoulder in the backseat. "Scott, stop the car. Now. That house we just passed - something similar to what I felt earlier today just came from there." Was it more contained this time? By the teens, the tome, or something else?
The car drifted as Scott spun the wheel in a circle, doubling back in the direction it had been travelling so fast that he left tire marks on the asphalt as he pulled them around to face the house. "It doesn't look unusual, like anything special is happening there so...it's probably what we're after."
Jim frowned. Psychically, nothing about the area was standing out to him: it looked to be nothing more than a moderately affluent monument to suburbia with a tidy garden and freshly mowed lawn.
While drawing a blank in his mind's eye, however, something caught the attention of his physical ones.
"What's that?"
This nondescript, cookie-cutter home stood out from the others on the block by virtue of some odd masonry: perched on the picket fence in front of, behind, and on either side of the house were a quartet of stone gargoyles. While some neighbors' yards displayed some whimsical decorations, like an all-too-early inflatable Halloween witch display a few doors down, there was no ornamentation quite like this. The roosts of these stone figures on a wooden fence seemed precarious, too, yet they remained stable.
“A sign.” With the car stopped, Wanda opened her door. Why she hadn’t felt the chaotic energy until right this moment was concerning but irrelevant. “This is absolutely it. They are producing the power surges. And do you see where they are situated? They sit at the four cardinals of the house - something is brewing inside. They’re there to keep people out or keep something in.”
Studying the stone figures, Jean felt a sense of foreboding that she knew only belonged to her. She couldn't pass it off as someone else's thought.
There wasn't much they could do except try the scientific method.
"What if we try destroying one? If it's a magical fence perhaps it might disrupt the balance of the four?"
"We can try." It was something he'd done a thousand times or more, that flash or red energy that speared out to crash into one of the gargoyles, shattering it into dust. Or at least...that was the plan. What Scott didn't expect was for the space where the gargoyle had been to distort like ripples on a lake as the optical blast bounced right back at them.
Wanda dove to the side as she yanked at reality, cursing in Bulgarian, to redirect Scott’s optic beam from the center of her chest. It slammed instead into the dirt next to her, ripping up turf, as she rolled into the previously immaculate rose bushes.
"Seems like the balance will disrupt right back," Jack remarked from behind the telekinetic shield he'd thrown up. The alter watched with narrowed eyes as the chunks of shattered stone crawled back together, reconstituting themselves back into a gargoyle. "Resets itself, too."
Jean grimaced at the result, rubbing her forehead. "Oops," she mumbled. The scientific method wasn't without trial and error. And damaged rose bushes.
She let out a breath, running her fingers through her hair, taking a few moments to think. "Okay…so let's say they’re protecting the house as a set. One falls, the others just put it back. Maybe...If we hit all four at once, that could cut off the source?" she proposed. "Assuming the magic plays by those rules."
"When has magic ever played fair with us?" A smile touched Scott's lips as he nodded in Jean's direction. "That's probably the best plan we've got. split up and then we take them down on the count of three."
“Agreed,” Wanda said as she dusted herself off. “Though I would still suggest a strong TK bubble to be dropped around the fireworks to contain any potential backlash.” Red light sparkled along her knuckles as she concentrated on the gargoyle facing west.
The alter's gaze slid to Jean, a mild question in his eyes, but he only said, "Shields I can do. Phoenix, take my gargoyle."
Jean paused at the prospect. She'd only had her powers back for a week. After nearly destroying the prison medical lab, the idea of having to focus on two at the same time was...a potential challenge. Still, they had a part to play.
"They're actually called grotesques. Gargoyles spout water," she added quietly. After moving to Muir she developed a small fascination with European architecture as a teenager.
"But...okay."
This educational moment was met with nothing but a long stare before the alter turned away. However, in that moment the barest hint of a smile touched his lips.
As the other three took their positions the telekinetic raised a hand to the sky, palm up. He focused on the sensation of his feet planted on the earth, imagining them as an anchor, and threw up a shield. A series of invisible concentric domes enclosed ground zero like maruskha dolls: three layers, one for each mutant. No need to take chances. Satisfied, Jack nodded.
"Ready."
Wanda’s view of the world turned red and she breathed slowly out her nose as she watched the lines roil and shift, untouched. Getting in the house was vital.
She focused on her gargoyle but mentally marked where everyone was, ready if necessary to manipulate and redirect the others powers should it react poorly.
“And on three…”
"One" Scott held up a hand. "Two" His eyes started to glow red. "Three" A spear of red light cut across the lawn, angled in to strike the grotesque at just the right angle to shatter it and sent its parts raining over the neatly manicured lawn like a rain of dust.
Jean inhaled, trying to center herself. Only two targets. Just...hold steady.
At the count of 3, the stone shrieked as she crushed the grotesques inward, fractures racing through their wings and jaws until they were pulverized.
For a heartbeat she thought she had it under control...until the pressure rippled past her focus. Her power bled outward like water through a cracked dam. Windows along the street rattled in their frames, curtains billowed as though caught in a storm, and porch lights stuttered on and off in a frantic rhythm.
She gritted her teeth, forcing the telekinesis to stay on target even as the entire neighborhood seemed to shudder with her. From the outside, it looked as if the house was fighting back.
Then...silence. The air stilled, the lights steadied, and Jean was left swallowing down a spike of pain behind her eyes. She straightened quickly, masking the throb with a forced breath, hoping no one noticed the tremor in her hands.
Jack grunted. Intercepting rocketing debris was one thing, but the mind was everywhere. The best he could do against Jean's telekinetic backwash was blunt it and hope everyone in the neighborhood chalked it up to a random tremor.
"That work?" he asked, shield still raised.
"What the heck is going on out here? Who are you?" The front door of the home opened, and out stomped a 40-something woman in a red sweater and blue jeans. She did not get far before she gasped and nearly fell down, because where a moment ago there was just an empty patch of grass, a pair of teenagers had popped into existence. "Ohmygawd, William! What . . . AAAAHHH!" If the assorted booms and blasts from the X-Men hadn't woken half the neighborhood, Rebecca Kaplan's shrieks must have.
Because it wasn't just Billy and Tommy who had materialized out of nowhere; they were being restrained and held down by live versions of the monsters that had just been destroyed, and a man in a blood-red cloak with a golden horned face mask loomed over the two, mouth open like a snake poised to eat an egg.
The man's head snapped back as if he'd taken an uppercut to the jaw. An imp that had been standing nearby, caught in the telekinetic blow, exploded like a bug striking a window.
"The fuck is this?" Jack snarled, one hand still raised. He'd used enough force that the man's head should have been embedded in the nearest tree, but instead he was already straightening. In the grass ropes of intestines slithered back to the masked man, chunks of meat dragging behind them, and disappeared beneath his robes. The imps swarming the teens began to shriek.
"Phoenix, Legion, protect the kids and their mom." As Scott spoke, he let out an optic blast that should have sent the man tumbling but instead bounced off him and into one of the demons. "Witch, do what you do best, I'll play support."
Jean’s stomach clenched at the sight of the twins pinned under the creatures. She pushed past the ringing in her skull and lashed out, yanking two imps off Billy and slamming them against the ground with a crack that rattled her teeth.
Another tried to dart toward her, and she crushed it mid-screech, her own breath hitching as the backlash spiked through her temples. A hot trickle of blood slid from her nose, and she swiped it away quickly with the back of her hand.
“Get them clear!” she forced out, her voice rough. Even with her vision starting to swim, she braced herself to hold the line, headache pounding, knowing she didn’t have much left in the tank.
“Chthonic entity, it’s mine, get the imps!” Wanda yelled, opening herself up - at the same time she was deeply accessing her pool of power, she was announcing her presence to those who were looking.
And the entity in front of her might not have been looking for her but it understood that the chaos energy she controlled was more vast than the child was currently capable of.
She charged, hex bolts blasting out in front of her.
Whatever demon sorcery Master Pandemonium commanded was sufficient to subdue a pair of young, newly awakened, and untrained mutants. But not this new quartet was systematically annihilating his master's pets. He was forced to resorb them into his body until they could be resummoned, each creature throwing him off kilter that he could not respond in time to this woman's command of chaos. He could barely keep up a shield under her assault.
"Rom witch!" he bellowed as a stray hex bolt disintegrated one of his horns. "Fine, take the twins. But their days are numbered. I'll be seeing you soon, boys, you can count on it." The air around him rippled, a small portal tearing open that seemed to reach out and consume him before sealing up. Besides some damage to the lawn that Jeff Kaplan was moaning about from the front door, there was no evidence Master Pandemonium had ever been there.
Billy barely had time to stand up before he was nearly barreled over by his mother. "William, baby, what happened to you? Ohmygawd, look at your beautiful face! What's going on here? Who are you people?!" Though the question was primarily addressed to the four strangers, Billy could not help but notice his mother's gaze swept over Tommy, too, and she pulled Billy closer when she looked at the other boy.
Tommy picked himself up off the ground, along with the remnants of his shoes. He’d managed to run through the shitty prison-issue pair during the fight. The look on the Kaplan’s faces told him that whatever charm Billy had done was broken, and although he never had any right to their home, it made him sad.
He briefly considered making a run for it — but where else would he go? Slowly, the speedster put his hands above his head. “I surrender. Just.. leave them alone.”
Beaten and bruised, for the first time in a long time, Tommy was tired.
Both boys looked worse for the wear, they in fact looked like they'd been the playing of forces far beyond anything they'd experienced before. The realization that they would spend their lives looking like that, dealing with those forces and trying to plan for them almost broke Scott's heart, as his features softened, his voice when he spoke quietly. "There's no need to surrender but...why don't we go inside and talk."
Like a scene straight out of a cartoon, Billy slammed the front door shut and locked the deadbolt. If they stayed inside, the creepy stranger would leave and everything would return to normal, right? Billy looked at Tommy for some sign he had done the right thing.
The speedster grabbed him by the arm and yanked them both back upstairs into Billy’s room, locking that door as well. He began to try and push the dresser to barricade them in. “What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.” Tommy was talking a mile a minute, and with a frantic shove of superspeed managed to get the heavy piece of furniture flush with the entry. It made a loud bang as it collided, several tchotchkes falling to the ground.
He whipped around. “Who the hell was that?!”
Billy, useless as Tommy single-handedly fortified their defenses, ran to the far side of his bed opposite the door. He would admonish Tommy for throwing things around, but he could not find the air to vocalize his thoughts. Instead, he slumped against the wall to the floor, dragging Playbill covers that were pinned to the wall with him. The magic 8-ball, which had fallen from its stand on his desk, rolled across the floor to his feet, and he nearly yelped when the sigil, that damned sigil, peered up at him through the window.
Suddenly struck with an idea, Billy extended a hand and called the spellbook to him. "If there's a summoning spell in here then there's gotta be an unsummoning spell, too, right?" As if either of them knew. As if Billy were actually Elphaba with the Grimmerie, or Bernadette Peters' Witch, or Mary Poppins.
It seemed like the most logical solution. As if anything in this situation was logical. Tommy swept the paper sigil from the ground and got the matches to light the menorah candles. “Sure, whatever. Let’s do this.”
"Found it. A Spell of Banishment. Just visualize the target and they go away." Seemed deceptively easy, but clearly magic made absolutely no sense so they could only go along with it. Billy ignored the repeated doorbell ringing and read aloud the incantation. Several times for good measure.
The doorbell stopped ringing and the boys were plunged into silence again.
"Did we do it?" Billy asked after a moment.
A voice behind him answered plainly. "A valiant effort, but no."
Tommy opened his eyes and jumped back a good few feet. “Ahhh!” The scare sent the normal static under his skin into a frenzy.
Billy knocked over the menorah in his mad dash to get away from the red-robed man, who just sighed and waved a hand, extinguishing the candles before the carpet lit up. "This was fun and all, but it's been a long day and I'd like to finish things before sundown, so if you wouldn't mind. Your souls, please."
"Our what now?" Billy was sure he had misheard.
"Souls, souls!" The man flung his arms up in exasperation. "The essence of your being. That immaterial part of you that survives death. Yours don't actually belong to you, and I've been tasked with collecting. So. Souls, please!"
The magic 8-ball sailed across the room, along with a barrage of other objects. Books, pencils, collectible figurines. All aimed at the man (creature?) in red. “No. Go. Away. You. Can’t. Have. Them.” Tommy underscored each word with an object.
"Tommy, wait, stop breaking my stuff!" Billy tried to grab hold of Tommy's arms to stop him, but they were moving too fast for him to reach. He grimaced when Tommy threw a pewter figurine that sailed directly through the mystery guest and smashed against the wall behind him. "Oh, w-what the hell?"
"Enough." Gone was the vaguely amused expression on the man's face, at least what they could see under the silly golden mask that covered half his face. He raised his left arm, which pulsed and spasmed, reshaping itself like wet clay into what Billy could only describe as one of Chernabog's servants, a toddler-sized green imp that freed itself from the appendage and launched itself like a rocket at the boys.
Tommy dove out of the way, tugging Billy along with him. The creature hit against the wall behind them with a smack.
So they’d summoned the actual devil, like from the Bible.
He watched as it began to reload on demon babies and made a split second decision. Seizing the energy vibrating within him, he rushed at the robed figure and shoved him towards the outer wall. A deafening boom rang out as the wall exploded.
Though disoriented from Tommy's quick save, Billy was thrown for a bigger loop when suddenly boom! No more wall. "My room!!! Aww man, my bed. My Playbill collection!" He was prepared to sit shiva for his loss when a flock of those little green monsters flew into the room and encircled them, like a scene out of The Birds.
"Incarnated into mutant host bodies? Fascinating." The sea of devils parted and the cloaked man appeared again, his hair singed and in disarray but he was otherwise apparently unscathed. "I knew of your chaos magic, of course, William. Your little childhood stunt hid you from me for years. Did you come up with the decoy idea yourself? And you." He turned his attention to Tommy. "What a fun surprise for you, though, Thomas. It explains why we couldn't find you until adolescence. Hmm. Well, no matter."
None of this made any sense. Stunts, decoys, finding them? Through this confusion and uncertainty, Billy felt that energy again. But this time, he only had his own imagination to guide it, not some hokey dollar store magic book. So he reached for Tommy and visualized the only thing he actually wanted right now: "I want to be somewhere else. I want to be somewhere else. I want to be somewhere else."
A flash of blue light, a slight tugging beneath his diaphragm, and suddenly, they were in the front yard. The rest of the neighborhood beyond the fence was still white and empty, the mysterious fog still occluding Eastview. But at least they weren't about to be eaten by demons.
The other boy frantically patted himself down as if to make sure everything was there, looking between the smoking house and where they stood. “Dude. Did you do that? Wait- let me see if I can-“
In a blur he was headed into the mist, before being forcefully thrown back by an invisible barrier. Tommy clutched his head as he skidded back to where Billy was. “Owwwwwww.” A few more attempts had him pinball-ing across the yard.
Billy couldn't help himself, a sudden but fleeting giddiness in his heart in the aftermath of . . . did he just teleport? "That deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball . . ." he sang with a soulful baritone.
“Are you seriously singing right now? Lock in, bro.” Tommy was back after his jaunt around the yard. “There’s this force field thingy around the house. We need to figure out how to get out.”
"It's 'Pinball Wizard' from Tommy, because you were bouncing . . . never mind." Billy dropped his explanation and poked at the invisible shield around his home. "What in the Brigadoon? I . . . Hmm, let me try something." There was something sort of familiar about the barrier, a slippery tingling like he'd just felt when he was transported down from his room. He tried to reach for it, metaphorically and literally, imagining their freedom. A flicker of blue light emanated from his outstretched hand, but it dissipated at the barrier. "If I had a little bit of time, maybe I could break through, but . . ."
"But you're out of time." It was the demon man again, with his little monsters hovering behind Billy and Tommy. "Get them," he ordered the imps.
"No! Get away from us!" The power came more easily this time, and it exploded from Billy's fingertips in half a dozen jagged bolts of lightning that struck the oncoming demons.
Twinkle Toes had been holding out on him. Damn.
Doing his best to avoid the lighting, Tommy tried his best to fend off the demons, sending out explosive energy when he could and hitting them at superspeed. He tried his best to cover Billy. Even with the other boy’s flashy lightning, he felt an urge to protect him from the onslaught.
The fried demons plummeted to the ground and seemed to melt into ooze before being resorbed by the enemy. Billy gagged at the sight, but as they felled the demons, his little trick was coming more easily, and they were taking down the demons as quickly as they were conjured. Billy tried to launch a lightning bolt at the man, too, but it curved around him, striking the roof instead. Shattered shingles rained down. Billy winced.
"I can see why my master has been chasing you for decades, from one life to the next." The man sounded almost impressed.
The speedster felt emboldened from their victories so far, and chose that moment to try and rush at the horned figure. He managed to get about a meter away before being flung back towards Billy. “Ahhhh!” Tommy skidded in the grass clutching his nose, which now had a copious amount of blood streaming from it. “Motherfucker broke my nose!”
"Tommy!" Billy was at his side in a second, static still sparking from his hands. He couldn't tell if Tommy's nose was actually broken or just bruised, but he had enough experience with nasal bleeds to advise Tommy to lean forward to try to stem the flow. There was nothing else he could do now, except play the role of protector that Tommy felt the urge to do himself a moment ago. He grabbed another metaphorical handful of the energy fueling his power and flung another several lightning bolts at their attacker. If he could see himself in a mirror, he would see blue energy threading over his brow into a glowing M-shaped diadem.
Cartilage and flesh began to knit itself back together as Tommy stood again. It was not a pleasant sensation, to say the least. He wiped some of the blood away gingerly.
Billy was obviously coming into his element more, and Tommy had an idea. In a hushed tone he said, “If I cover you do you think you’d be able to get a way out through the forcefield?” All the static electricity in the air had his pulse thrumming. Maybe, just maybe, the speedster could give him enough time.
It seemed like their options were running out either way.
"I . . . I can try." Billy could do this, right? He'd just said he could. As this confrontation continued, he had felt his power growing, and surely zapping demons wasn't the only thing he could do with it. So he stepped back and turned to face the magic bubble. His first thought was to overload it, use that wild energy against it by feeding it the lightning. The electricity coruscated around the dome like they were in a giant plasma globe toy.
Tommy, meanwhile, was a blur of white and black as he kept the demon babies at bay. If he concentrated enough energy at one, it would explode into a pile of green viscera. Unpleasant, but it got the job done. He had learned his lesson about going after the main guy directly, and instead focused on attacking and destabilizing the areas around him.
But they kept coming as quickly as Tommy took them out, their broken forms melting, reforming, and flying back into the sky at the wizard's verbal command. He continued to just float there, though, safely behind his own force field, casually observing the battlefield before him.
Meanwhile, Billy continued pouring the seemingly neverending energy into the barrier. "Break open break open break open . . ." he pleaded, but it remained stable and whole. Electricity started to crackle all over his body the longer he tried, and he fell to a half-kneeling position as his left leg spasmed with a mild charley horse.
Holes littered the lawn from Tommy’s chaos, raining grass and dirt from the sky. He glanced back at Billy and doubled his efforts. Pushing himself to go faster and build up more.
Just before the energy blew back on him and sent him careening into his house through the wall, Billy could have sworn he saw a little tear in the force field, what might have been a shock of curly brown hair in stark contrast to the whited-out environment beyond the bubble. But that was of secondary concern after the fact that not only had he failed, but he had not until the last moment realized his control had slipped. Lying in the rubble of the wall in the kitchen, he groaned miserably and tried to get back up, but he was too tired to move an inch.
Luckily for him, a pair of imps arrived to tenderly pick him up and take him back outside, where they promptly pinned him down. Billy cried out in pain as one of them twisted his arm behind his back.
"Next time you wish to escape Master Pandemonium, try that doppelganger spell you crafted a decade ago." The man landed in front of Billy and haughtily gazed down at him. "Even after it was gone, it took me years to find you again. You'll have to tell me how you did it. What a useful bit of magic."
Tommy wasn’t faring much better, having finally been overwhelmed by the creatures. The second he took in the surprise energy shock was a second too long. About a dozen of them kept him from moving as he vibrated in their hold, furious. “Let us go, asshole! I’m not letting you have my soul!” Of course the stupid demon had a stupid name.
Maybe it was what he assumed was a concussion, but Billy could not make any sense of what this guy was saying. All he knew was that a week ago it had been life as normal, and then this white-haired criminal shot into his home. Ever since, Billy felt like he didn't know up from down anymore. It was pure chaos. And yet despite that, his heart swelled with a sense of gratification he could not fathom. He smiled a little even as the tears started to come.
"I'm sorry, Tommy. I tried but I don't know what I'm doing."
The other boy sniffled a little, though he would never admit it. Lowly, he said, “Don’t beat yourself up about it. I failed.” A few more sniffles came from under the pile of demons restraining Tommy, though he was very quickly running out of fight. “… thank you for this week. It’s been the best time I’ve ever had.”
Master Pandemonium loomed over the pair, the gilding of his horned mask gleaming in the sunlight. "Brotherly love transcending lifetimes, what a sweet way to end things," he remarked and extended clawed, scaled, devilish hands.
The boys tried to scream, but no sound came out, as if the monster who had subdued their powers and their bodies with ease was stealing their voices directly from their throats. They tried and tried and tried, hoping against hope they would call someone to find them and save them. But there was no one. They were alone, just the two of them, as the beast's maw came down on them.
~*~
Scott hastily assembles a team to retrieve Tommy, only to find Pandemonium.
Eastview, New Jersey. A small suburb about halfway between Newark and Teaneck, not known for anything in particular. The mutant quartet that drove into the unremarkable neighborhood programmed into the GPS just perceived a typical pre-planned community enjoying a Sunday pre-autumn afternoon. No signs of escaped convicts or chaotic emanations.
From the passenger's seat, Wanda glanced over at Scott briefly before turning her gaze back to the neighborhood. "And the reports said this neighborhood? Not to sound doubtful but the most chaos I'm seeing is that shirtless man mowing a lawn while wearing a...is that a hat with beers on it?" Nothing was crying out, even the smallest bit, of stirrings of power.
"That's what they said," Scott slowed the car for a moment as he glanced around, this was idyllic, like something straight out of a story about the American dream, so obviously there was something very very wrong here. "You know, someone remind me to ask that man where he got his hat, we should pick one up for Kyle."
"Aside from the hat nothing is standing out to me. But I don't actually know what his mind feels like -- all I can do is scan for stress and confusion." Jim looked to Jean, who like him, had been relegated to the back seats like children on a road trip. "No chance your telepathy has spontaneously returned, I guess?"
Closing her eyes, Jean paused for a moment, trying to listen but the only thing she heard was the car moving and the faint sound of "Blinding Lights" by the Weeknd playing on the radio. She shook her head.
"No," she sighed. "Still just the telekinesis."
Wanda's head snapped left and to the back so she was staring over Jim's shoulder in the backseat. "Scott, stop the car. Now. That house we just passed - something similar to what I felt earlier today just came from there." Was it more contained this time? By the teens, the tome, or something else?
The car drifted as Scott spun the wheel in a circle, doubling back in the direction it had been travelling so fast that he left tire marks on the asphalt as he pulled them around to face the house. "It doesn't look unusual, like anything special is happening there so...it's probably what we're after."
Jim frowned. Psychically, nothing about the area was standing out to him: it looked to be nothing more than a moderately affluent monument to suburbia with a tidy garden and freshly mowed lawn.
While drawing a blank in his mind's eye, however, something caught the attention of his physical ones.
"What's that?"
This nondescript, cookie-cutter home stood out from the others on the block by virtue of some odd masonry: perched on the picket fence in front of, behind, and on either side of the house were a quartet of stone gargoyles. While some neighbors' yards displayed some whimsical decorations, like an all-too-early inflatable Halloween witch display a few doors down, there was no ornamentation quite like this. The roosts of these stone figures on a wooden fence seemed precarious, too, yet they remained stable.
“A sign.” With the car stopped, Wanda opened her door. Why she hadn’t felt the chaotic energy until right this moment was concerning but irrelevant. “This is absolutely it. They are producing the power surges. And do you see where they are situated? They sit at the four cardinals of the house - something is brewing inside. They’re there to keep people out or keep something in.”
Studying the stone figures, Jean felt a sense of foreboding that she knew only belonged to her. She couldn't pass it off as someone else's thought.
There wasn't much they could do except try the scientific method.
"What if we try destroying one? If it's a magical fence perhaps it might disrupt the balance of the four?"
"We can try." It was something he'd done a thousand times or more, that flash or red energy that speared out to crash into one of the gargoyles, shattering it into dust. Or at least...that was the plan. What Scott didn't expect was for the space where the gargoyle had been to distort like ripples on a lake as the optical blast bounced right back at them.
Wanda dove to the side as she yanked at reality, cursing in Bulgarian, to redirect Scott’s optic beam from the center of her chest. It slammed instead into the dirt next to her, ripping up turf, as she rolled into the previously immaculate rose bushes.
"Seems like the balance will disrupt right back," Jack remarked from behind the telekinetic shield he'd thrown up. The alter watched with narrowed eyes as the chunks of shattered stone crawled back together, reconstituting themselves back into a gargoyle. "Resets itself, too."
Jean grimaced at the result, rubbing her forehead. "Oops," she mumbled. The scientific method wasn't without trial and error. And damaged rose bushes.
She let out a breath, running her fingers through her hair, taking a few moments to think. "Okay…so let's say they’re protecting the house as a set. One falls, the others just put it back. Maybe...If we hit all four at once, that could cut off the source?" she proposed. "Assuming the magic plays by those rules."
"When has magic ever played fair with us?" A smile touched Scott's lips as he nodded in Jean's direction. "That's probably the best plan we've got. split up and then we take them down on the count of three."
“Agreed,” Wanda said as she dusted herself off. “Though I would still suggest a strong TK bubble to be dropped around the fireworks to contain any potential backlash.” Red light sparkled along her knuckles as she concentrated on the gargoyle facing west.
The alter's gaze slid to Jean, a mild question in his eyes, but he only said, "Shields I can do. Phoenix, take my gargoyle."
Jean paused at the prospect. She'd only had her powers back for a week. After nearly destroying the prison medical lab, the idea of having to focus on two at the same time was...a potential challenge. Still, they had a part to play.
"They're actually called grotesques. Gargoyles spout water," she added quietly. After moving to Muir she developed a small fascination with European architecture as a teenager.
"But...okay."
This educational moment was met with nothing but a long stare before the alter turned away. However, in that moment the barest hint of a smile touched his lips.
As the other three took their positions the telekinetic raised a hand to the sky, palm up. He focused on the sensation of his feet planted on the earth, imagining them as an anchor, and threw up a shield. A series of invisible concentric domes enclosed ground zero like maruskha dolls: three layers, one for each mutant. No need to take chances. Satisfied, Jack nodded.
"Ready."
Wanda’s view of the world turned red and she breathed slowly out her nose as she watched the lines roil and shift, untouched. Getting in the house was vital.
She focused on her gargoyle but mentally marked where everyone was, ready if necessary to manipulate and redirect the others powers should it react poorly.
“And on three…”
"One" Scott held up a hand. "Two" His eyes started to glow red. "Three" A spear of red light cut across the lawn, angled in to strike the grotesque at just the right angle to shatter it and sent its parts raining over the neatly manicured lawn like a rain of dust.
Jean inhaled, trying to center herself. Only two targets. Just...hold steady.
At the count of 3, the stone shrieked as she crushed the grotesques inward, fractures racing through their wings and jaws until they were pulverized.
For a heartbeat she thought she had it under control...until the pressure rippled past her focus. Her power bled outward like water through a cracked dam. Windows along the street rattled in their frames, curtains billowed as though caught in a storm, and porch lights stuttered on and off in a frantic rhythm.
She gritted her teeth, forcing the telekinesis to stay on target even as the entire neighborhood seemed to shudder with her. From the outside, it looked as if the house was fighting back.
Then...silence. The air stilled, the lights steadied, and Jean was left swallowing down a spike of pain behind her eyes. She straightened quickly, masking the throb with a forced breath, hoping no one noticed the tremor in her hands.
Jack grunted. Intercepting rocketing debris was one thing, but the mind was everywhere. The best he could do against Jean's telekinetic backwash was blunt it and hope everyone in the neighborhood chalked it up to a random tremor.
"That work?" he asked, shield still raised.
"What the heck is going on out here? Who are you?" The front door of the home opened, and out stomped a 40-something woman in a red sweater and blue jeans. She did not get far before she gasped and nearly fell down, because where a moment ago there was just an empty patch of grass, a pair of teenagers had popped into existence. "Ohmygawd, William! What . . . AAAAHHH!" If the assorted booms and blasts from the X-Men hadn't woken half the neighborhood, Rebecca Kaplan's shrieks must have.
Because it wasn't just Billy and Tommy who had materialized out of nowhere; they were being restrained and held down by live versions of the monsters that had just been destroyed, and a man in a blood-red cloak with a golden horned face mask loomed over the two, mouth open like a snake poised to eat an egg.
The man's head snapped back as if he'd taken an uppercut to the jaw. An imp that had been standing nearby, caught in the telekinetic blow, exploded like a bug striking a window.
"The fuck is this?" Jack snarled, one hand still raised. He'd used enough force that the man's head should have been embedded in the nearest tree, but instead he was already straightening. In the grass ropes of intestines slithered back to the masked man, chunks of meat dragging behind them, and disappeared beneath his robes. The imps swarming the teens began to shriek.
"Phoenix, Legion, protect the kids and their mom." As Scott spoke, he let out an optic blast that should have sent the man tumbling but instead bounced off him and into one of the demons. "Witch, do what you do best, I'll play support."
Jean’s stomach clenched at the sight of the twins pinned under the creatures. She pushed past the ringing in her skull and lashed out, yanking two imps off Billy and slamming them against the ground with a crack that rattled her teeth.
Another tried to dart toward her, and she crushed it mid-screech, her own breath hitching as the backlash spiked through her temples. A hot trickle of blood slid from her nose, and she swiped it away quickly with the back of her hand.
“Get them clear!” she forced out, her voice rough. Even with her vision starting to swim, she braced herself to hold the line, headache pounding, knowing she didn’t have much left in the tank.
“Chthonic entity, it’s mine, get the imps!” Wanda yelled, opening herself up - at the same time she was deeply accessing her pool of power, she was announcing her presence to those who were looking.
And the entity in front of her might not have been looking for her but it understood that the chaos energy she controlled was more vast than the child was currently capable of.
She charged, hex bolts blasting out in front of her.
Whatever demon sorcery Master Pandemonium commanded was sufficient to subdue a pair of young, newly awakened, and untrained mutants. But not this new quartet was systematically annihilating his master's pets. He was forced to resorb them into his body until they could be resummoned, each creature throwing him off kilter that he could not respond in time to this woman's command of chaos. He could barely keep up a shield under her assault.
"Rom witch!" he bellowed as a stray hex bolt disintegrated one of his horns. "Fine, take the twins. But their days are numbered. I'll be seeing you soon, boys, you can count on it." The air around him rippled, a small portal tearing open that seemed to reach out and consume him before sealing up. Besides some damage to the lawn that Jeff Kaplan was moaning about from the front door, there was no evidence Master Pandemonium had ever been there.
Billy barely had time to stand up before he was nearly barreled over by his mother. "William, baby, what happened to you? Ohmygawd, look at your beautiful face! What's going on here? Who are you people?!" Though the question was primarily addressed to the four strangers, Billy could not help but notice his mother's gaze swept over Tommy, too, and she pulled Billy closer when she looked at the other boy.
Tommy picked himself up off the ground, along with the remnants of his shoes. He’d managed to run through the shitty prison-issue pair during the fight. The look on the Kaplan’s faces told him that whatever charm Billy had done was broken, and although he never had any right to their home, it made him sad.
He briefly considered making a run for it — but where else would he go? Slowly, the speedster put his hands above his head. “I surrender. Just.. leave them alone.”
Beaten and bruised, for the first time in a long time, Tommy was tired.
Both boys looked worse for the wear, they in fact looked like they'd been the playing of forces far beyond anything they'd experienced before. The realization that they would spend their lives looking like that, dealing with those forces and trying to plan for them almost broke Scott's heart, as his features softened, his voice when he spoke quietly. "There's no need to surrender but...why don't we go inside and talk."
