Logs:Reserves of Strength
| Reserves of Strength | |
|---|---|
cn: some violence, some body horror | |
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia | 2024-10-05 "Not yet --" |
| Location
<MOJ> Outside the Village - Mojo World | |
One lead has led to another, and it's here that advice from their latest contact has led them. In comparison to some of the gateways they have visited lately this place is almost beautiful, in its own grisly way. Through this particular portal the world glows, faint and glimmering blue-green through slick crystalline walls and slick crystalline floors. Beneath the glassy surfaces small pinpoints of light shift constantly -- on closer inspection each tiny bright speck is some small creature, manylegged and skittering in an infinite bustle. On closer closer inspection their toil is a hungry one, bodies upon bodies from a thousand different alien races laid out in oddly neat rows under the hardened surfaces, each being torn down pincer-ful by pincer-ful, the tiny chunks of flesh carted away to parts unknown. The stripped bodies are being shifted, moved -- bones over here, teeth over here, fur over here, carapaces over here, metal-bits and rocky-bits and things far harder, most likely, for the earthlings to identify, shifted not into piles so much as intricate mandalas that ultimately dissolve only to be replaced again with new parts as new bodies come in. The slugs that have occasionally been spotted drifting through here don't seem to be working (but then, are they ever working?), just admiring the various and gruesome designs. The other aliens that hasten to and fro might well be working, but at what is anyone's guess. Maybe there is a practical purpose to this macabre factory, but the tiny glowing creatures in the floor aren't telling of it. Jax isn't asking it, either. In one seat of the odd blobby floating contraption he is riding in (where, today, he looks very much like a slug himself) he's gone quiet only a short way into the cavernous space as his senses catch up with processing what is actually happening around them. His breathing is a little noisier than usual, where he had, today, been wearing an oxygen mask when they left, a tank of oxygen strapped to his back -- though these can no longer be seen in his slugperson Halloween costume the audible shift makes it all the more noticeable when he stops entirely for the space of several breaths. He swallows. Pulls his eye up -- this doesn't really help, the walls are no relief -- and scans the strange niches carved up at seemingly erratic places in the crystal, leading off in various directions. "It should. Be up ahead." Mystique (slug edition) is looking at the walls with some intrigue, her gaze fixated on several neatly arrayed skulls from creatures she cannot identify. In the gleaming blue-green surface, her wide staring eyes seem almost to peer back from the cavernous eyeholes of one of the skeletons. She reaches a hand forward, pressing it against a jellylike knob -- their blobby contraption veers far forward, and then down a corridor just a little to the side (largely the same in its grisly decor as the main cavern, though its glow trends more purplish, now.) "So might a lot of trouble, if our information is correct." This time, likely to everyone's relief, Destiny is not behind the wheel. Or the...gelatinous control knobs? Her face is tilted up as though admiring the newly purple tint of the morbid construction happening behind the walls herself, though her eyes do not actually focus on them. "Our information is correct," she assures her wife, "on both fronts. The disguise will only take us so far." She tilts her head slightly and closes her eyes. "They assemble whatever is needed, but then, so does Jax." She tips her head farther and looks at Jax, smiling at him beatifically. "It is difficult for me to see for certain the shape they will choose. But." She faces forward again, where the corridor curves and widens, illuminated brighter by something just beyond their field of (optical) vision. "Outside of a certain -- kinda -- light-y-ness, I don't think we got that much in common." Despite himself Jax is looking back down at the glowing creatures and their tireless disassembly work. "You see any path we can avoid the trouble? I'm kinda hoping we can be trouble-light. Just drop off the thing where we gotta and get back out 'fore we make any new work for Joshua." Even so, the wrinkly shapeless lump of him is sitting up just a little more alert. "We all have our parts to play here." Mystique's scoff comes quick and easy at the thought of creating more work for the healer; maybe this is as much out of dismissal of his work as it is because she's rarely enough been adding to this burden. "How much trouble could find us, really." This, though, is dry. She is steering them quietly down the hallway, the glow getting steadily deeper in its purple tint. "We have the liberator of mutantkind here with us. -- New liberator. If you live up to your reputation better than the last one you should be able to handle a lot of flak." "Creative," Destiny supplies, not very helpfully. Then magnanimously elaborates, "You build with light and heat. They build with flesh and bone. Sadly, there is only one of you here right now. You have better marketing than Erik ever did, and so, more to live up to. Still." She lays her hand on Mystique's arm. "He has already handled a lot of flak." She doesn't turn to Jax, but it's completely clear she is speaking to him again. "You should get ready to shield. On your blind side." Just up ahead, the tunnel is opening up. The room it branches out into scintillates -- it might be somewhat painful to normal human eyes, and though Mystique's slugshifted ones handle the radiance fine they cannot quite clock the intense brilliance of the color spectrum of glowing that Jax can, radiant in shades others can't detect and some he has not, actually, seen before on Earth. There are no more bodies here, at least not any intact ones, no discrete dismembered parts being moved about beneath the floor. There is some sort of machinery, complex and intricate and almost hypnotic in its ceaseless motion, partially encased in the crystal floor though at many places gleaming polished spurs jut through carefully carved grooves to move in their own strange patterns. The whole of it hums soft and warm. There's little enough time to take in the shift, though. They've barely crossed the threshold into the space when part of the wall beside them is opening up, a barrage of some sort of energy firing rapid upon the vehicle. Coming from (spoiler alerts, Destiny!) Jax's blind side. "I ain't none of that. I just -- did have great PR." There's only a tiny bitter note in Jax's voice, here. "Here, I'onno what we've --" He doesn't turn towards his blind side, at Destiny's caution, but a shield does bubble up in a long guardwall to that side of their craft. Those first blasts strike solid at the wall. Jax flinches faintly, and as that shield fades the next one he puts up seals right over the opening that just appeared in the wall. "All the men the world thinks of as important had great PR. Embarrassingly few of you live up to the hype." Mystique is barely paying attention to the blasts that shoot at them. She rolls their craft wide to one edge of the room, leaning down as she does so to scoop up a small flat contraption from the floor of their vehicle. Judging by the Frankenstein look of it, part Stark smartphone and part god-knows-what alien gizmos, some handiwork of B's. Mystique veers back abruptly, towards the center of the space now, leaning out to roll the small contraption towards one of the open grooves in the floor. It's hard to say if her leering slugface looks satisfied when it slides neatly in and disappears, but she does give a very small nod when she looks back to the shield blocking off the wall. "-- and then you waste your talents with those assimilationists. Don't you want more for our world?" "He asked for none of it. I'm not sure he was even consulted in the matter." Destiny sounds more like she's musing than really defending Jax, though there's something almost like admiration when she adds, "Considering that, you have risen to it well. And I think that you do, want more for our world." She turns her sightless eyes up toward the ceiling and actually sinks into a fighting stance, tilting her cane though she keeps its tip braced against the floor of the craft. "Beware. They descend." Whatever has been shooting at them from out of the wall is shifting, reactive, once the shields seal them up. Something warps -- the rift that opened in the wall is partially closing (right over Jax's shield, the barrier simply encased now in the odd glowing crystal of the room) and partially reopening along a different axis, some rift torn right through the forcefield. It's not an immediate process, and in the few seconds it takes for the openings to recalibrate themselves around-and-through the unexpected barrier there are other figures flowing down from the corridors already branching off above. They look very mechanical, a fleet of strange robotic orbs that are racing swift towards their craft. Several of them are opening fire, some sort of energy projectile that hones in on the blobby vehicle, though a pair of the faster ones are simply dropping down to attach themselves direct to its outside -- the vehicle begins to sizzle where they touch, its squishy skin starting to dissolve as the bots begin to burrow inside. The veneer of illusion that has been rendering Jax and Destiny more sluglike shatters immediately as the odd dimensional holes warp through Jax's shields. Jax himself (non-slug-version) is shuddering, pitched forward with a sudden retching heave, his hand braced against the fleshy surface of their craft's console. Another shield flashes briefly overhead, taking the brunt of the volley though not quickly enough to prevent all the bolts that target them. Though Jax's head is bowed and his eye closed tight there are pinpoints of light flashing bright around them, spearing in bright X marks where they slash unerringly through the bots that are firing on them. Slug!Mystique's teeth are clenching a little harder. She's speeding up their craft as they retrace their steps, with only barely a hiss as one of the bolts tears through the semipermeable jelly-membrane of the roof. The roof closes itself back up, neat and undamaged, as soon as the bolt is through -- then again, so does Mystique's flesh where the thing has hit. Part of her bulk has expanded, stretching out and wide in a kind of buttress to shield Destiny from the flak that makes it past Jax's barrier. The hand she isn't using to steer is shifting and growing rapidly -- no longer a long clawed limb but a tentacle, now, snaking out and around to tug at one and then the other of the bots that are trying to scuttle their ship. There's a sizzle of flesh as her skin starts to dissolve, too, but she's mostly ignoring that also, just chucking the orbs disdainfully to the ground and pulling still faster back towards the blue-green glow. With the immediate threats handled, Destiny does not bare her sword. She looks entirely serene, sheltering now in her wife's... Well. Her wife. "They have barricaded the way. He may not have enough strength left to burn through it unassisted." She unslings the oxygen tank from her back and holds it out for Mystique's tentacle. "He might have enough to set this alight." One of the bots takes a good part of Mystique's tentacle with it, flesh sheared from flesh as it tears away and thunks to the floor. Almost immediately it is getting absorbed into the floor, many pinpoints of light surfacing to pluck at the meat and carry it away. There are more bots descending in a thin stream, scattering to surround the craft as it moves and fire upon it again. Up ahead the portal they came through, though its glow still signals it is on and operational, has, indeed, been bubbled into a hard crystalline dome of its own, the wall rushing up fast toward them. Jax is peeling his own oxygen mask away from his face, expression slightly twisted up in disgust as he wipes bile from his cheek. The bots overhead are still falling, an unsteady thumping patter of heavy rain as they're X'd out from the sky. Though his skin doesn't neatly close itself back up when their bolts sizzle through it he's just wiping irritably at the blood now leaking down his arm the way he might swipe away a mosquito. "Not yet --" He's lifting a bloody hand, quick, fist clenched in silent freeze signal, to stay Mystique's tentacle and the oxygen tank. "Beggin' your pardon, ma'am, but ain't you or the future got any idea what strength I still have." There are cracks of light blazing through the crystallized dome, splitting painfully bright along its faceted edges. The many knifesliver shields that have blossomed are visible in faintly iridescent honeycombing for just a moment, splitting all through the barricade to leave it crumpling into so many glassy pieces around the base of the portal pillar just moments before they actually crash into it. It's only the instant after they've shot through the portal that Jax drops his fist, brows lifting to Mystique. There's a searing-hot flare of light behind them around the gateway, and then he, too (considerably less spectacularly) crumples back into his seat. The end of Mystique's arm is regrowing almost as soon as the bot has taken it. It coils around the oxygen tank, and though she's ready enough to throw it her limb stays with Jax's signal. She doesn't slow, not even when they seem near upon the barrier, and in her current boneless heap-of-slug form it may only be sensible to Destiny when she relaxes just a bit when they go through and do not spectacularly crash. She's tossing the canister over her shoulder almost casually, then, like yes, totally the plan all along. Behind them the explosion booms, shuddering their craft in a rolling rumble from which it rights itself easily enough. The pillar gateway has gone dark, only one stray bot closest to their tail blackened and inert in the cooling wreckage behind. Mystique's form is rippling again, distorting somewhat grotesquely until there's a large extension of somewhat blanket-like material that she can toss lightly over her now very un-illusioned and visibly Earthen passengers. She wipes at the inside of Jax's mask, strapping it back over his face as she starts to steer them home. Her sigh is very small. "Utterly wasted on those fools." | |
