Yachtsy Wrecks and Nazi Drecks: The Gateway to Retribution, a x-men fanfic

YACHTSY WRECKS AND NAZI DRECKS: THE GATEWAY TO RETRIBUTION

By Quillon42

SOMETIME IN 1990 (BASED ON EVENTS FROM UXM 260)

It was a shame really that those two weathered yet handsome men changed their minds about the flight. Surely Cylla would not have minded such passengers quite masculine, on forays which were otherwise oftentimes very solitary. The milk runs could get difficult when one was on her own, with usually only the faces on the covers of in-flight magazines to give a remote sense of company. The lady thought it mean, to an extent, that the one would-be-flyer named Cassidy, who now cancelled with his friend who appeared to be of Native American origin, even sort of took that away from her, as he nabbed the latest issue of People upon noticing that Blaire floozy on the front of it.

Sighing and shrugging it off, in any case, Miss Markham took it upon herself to hop up into the cockpit once more and make her way down the short strip to takeoff. Beneath her, she knew that the Injun and the Irishman were making much of The Dazzler and her ostensible comeback. For all Cylla was concerned, the blitzy blonde, with her skin turned almost prune from the sun, could so go hang, with her blowsy looks and her blasé catchphrase.

Seriously, though: Dazz's costumes might have always been colorful, if a bit kitsch…but "Go For It"? Really? For one who thrived off the milieu of music, surely Alison could have invented something far catchier.

At any rate, one second Cylla occupied herself with concerns regarding altimeters and iterinaries…the next

[BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM]

the flygirl was a bit more than distracted at the slight diversion of a gaping gash in the side of her ride, what seemed to be lightning emitting from beneath her as another yellowish flash struck home through the undercarriage of the airplane.

Cylla did all she could not to panic, not to allow herself to be palpated overly much by paralysis as she struggled to at least aim what was left of her craft towards the water. It looked more as if she were going to hit the dock near to the drink, or rather this airfield not too far distant…

[WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSHHHHH]

As it turned out, perhaps the ship itself splashed down on the strip of land adjacent to the waterway…

…but Madame Markham, a moment more, found herself not amidst the corals…but the clouds.

She noticed with abject astonishment that all around her was a setting eerie and ethereal. Sparkling spires of gold, as well as other effects of ivory, made the agnostic lass wonder if there were an Almighty after all…and whether He or She were being merciful to the pilot, in spite of the latter's nonbelief in a higher entity.

"Is this…" she started, inarticulate with awe. "Is it…the…"

"No, Lady Cylla Markham…you are not in Heaven."

The sky sailor spun at these words, Cylla now beholding a magnificent lady who sported a long mane of ebony hair, immaculate alabaster skin, and an elaborately ornate gown gleaned from fabrics of something beyond the firmament. It was enough to make the mere mortal maiden wonder if she should doff her own flight bonnet out of reflexive respect…

"There is no need to divest yourself of your headwear for my sake," the other, otherworldly woman stated, filling in the mental blank stymieing Cylla. "Allow me please to welcome you here. I am the goddess Roma. And this place, which you occupy now, is known simply, and only, as Otherworld.

"I wish you should regard me here, not as a superior…but as a…sister, of sorts. You have been salvaged from the imminent disaster regarding your airplane—a catastrophe for which I sincerely apologize you had to experience—so that you may come about to pursue a greater purpose than the mere task of carrying cargo and…busing businesspeople."

Markham crushed her forefingers against closed eyes, attempting to wrest some sense from all of this. "I don't get any of this at all. First off: What the hell happened to me, down there? What was the disaster…the catastrophe…you're talking about, in the first place?"

Roma looked off into the cosmos a moment; then her hair whipped around like sentient black tentacles as she faced Cylla once more. "The two men you were going to transport…they were mutants: people whom I've been very moved to assist in the past." She sniffed a second, and it looked as if a tear were almost to issue from the corner of the goddess's eye. "Unfortunately…not every individual, mortal or no, shares such sentiment.

"There was a pair of very unscrupulous, prejudiced imbeciles imbued with power they do not deserve…and one of them took it upon herself to utilize her talent in firing bolts of concussive force to blast at the very air carrier conveying your person.

"She believed that the two men were aboard your airplane, and she sought to blast them both, Cheyenne and Leprechaun alike, into utter oblivion. She only scored you instead…or so it seemed."

A whistling sound issued from behind Cylla, and she whirled around in response. Standing there was a wizened old aborigine, swinging a small black cylindrical wooden rod attached to the end of a three foot string.

"Don't mind Gateway and his bullroarer," Roma said, her tones maintaining their dulcet flavor throughout. "As with me, he is here to assist and not antagonize.

"He was the man, in fact, who bailed you out of the mayday that would have maimed you in so many more ways than one."

Cylla blinked in amazement as the aborigine swung his roarer ever so slighty…but it still

[WHOOOOOSSSSSHHHHH]

emitted that same sound she did indeed hear as the last sensation experienced before she appeared here, in this haven if not heaven, what must have been just minutes ago.

"Believe me when I reveal to you, Miss Markham…it would not have only been your body that you would have lost, upon your imminent aircrash. You would have survived the catastrophe…but also you would have been laid up for a seeming eternity in a hospital following, with the diagnosis looking rather poorly as to your physicality. A choice would have arisen, in which you would have either elected to remain entirely in burns and bandages for the remainder of your mundane mortal coil…

"…or you would have had to embrace a far more awful fate: a reconstruction of your constitution, your body given back to you, in a way…but at the price of your soul. Said reconstruction, specifically, would have occurred at the behest of one Donald Pierce: a monster who made the convalescent into cyborg assassins who slaved away upon his very whims. In time you would have died horribly anyway, by way of the energy-absorbing energies of a vampire named Bloodscream. In any case, you are far better off being here.

Roma drank in the girl's hopelessly-befrazzled looks, as well as the tentative sense of relief that washed out from it. It was when Cylla opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again at a complete loss for words, that the goddess went on.

"There is one commonality between the monster Donald Pierce and myself, though. I, too, seek to recruit you, for my own ends, you see. But you will not be transformed—and the cause you are to undertake will be far nobler, and not involve blood on your hands-not really, anyway."

The goddess processed Markham's most recent pose of perplexity as other, relative neophyte to Otherworld alighted onto the scene. Cylla turned to see what looked to be a white man in his late thirties, perhaps, a mite bit portly and wearing leather and a look of slight mania in his eye.

"This is Eric Beale, Cylla," Roma introduced. The man took a bow which seemed somewhat sarcastic, at the mention of his handle. "He's very good with a gun—with several, in fact. Like you, he was set to tread down a very wayward path...looking to snipe with his shotgun and otherwise at one Alison Blaire, whom I'm sure I do not need to describe to you."

Cylla shook her head derisively at this. No, the prissy pruneskin songstress sure did not need any introduction at all.

Roma again: "I plucked Mister Beale away from his meanderings, before he could even attempt anything…before he could even hit the estate at which Miss Blaire was sunning and surfing. I knew of his skills and his proclivities…and I decided to give him a better, worthier target. Many such targets, in fact.

"You see, there's a threat out there, one which maybe only psionics like Elisabeth Braddock might be able to foresee—and even then, be unable to prevent. The precious X-Heroes, which I once brought back from the brink of death during a tussle with an ancient enemy known, among other names, as the Adversary…these X-People, they are going to face a force in the near future which they cannot hope to prevent, much less defeat. They are bound to forge forth into a dire dimension, and naught will be able to stop their slide.

"The place in which they once existed, it was a peaceful place of unassuming obscurity which we immortals dub informally as the Woodwork. However, within the next few years, the heroes will tumble into another area, a realm which is far more obnoxious and forbidding…one which we call the Mainstream."

Cylla looked to Gateway, then to Beale, and then back to the grandiloquent goddess before her.

"People who drink from the waters of the Mainstream, they will largely be very, very accepting of the X-Individuals. Many of them are good people, in all honesty. However, there are a few of them…they are not evil, by nature, exactly. They are merely to be considered as…punkass boners, for lack of a better descriptor, if you will. And they cannot be allowed to thrive.

"What is worse, there are those who fancy themselves masters of marketing…as much as the Xers will sell out per se…these people will make the mutants shills for everything from pizza to effing underoos. It's an atrocious state of affairs, honestly.

"And to top it all off…the way the ball will be rolling, eventually the Machine's balls will, in fact, roll off entirely. Empowerment of certain demographics will completely castrate the God of Thunder, for one…and who knows where it will go from there…"

(…

(What?! This author asks you ladies in the audie…in the readership: What if Joan of Arc yielded, irreversibly, to the concept of John of Arc? Or if we had Calamity John all of a sudden in the old, Wild West—or Andy Oakley? Or have that great figure of the American Revolution become…Marty fucking Pitcher, for Christ's sake, all of a sudden? Would you all be okay with that?!)

Roma at any rate began to walk over to the schlubby shotgunner and placed a warm hand on his shoulder as she spoke yet again. "This…this is the task with which I have commissioned Mister Beale…and with which I have commissioned you as well. Eric here will have many targets upon which to train his sniperscope. The X-Franchise has always featured a fascination with redheads; well, this man's cranially-inclined bullets will make for an overwealth of many red heads in the Mainstream indeed.

"And you, Miss Cylla…you will be the one who will deliver his forceful modus operandi upon the Mainstream."

Cylla could only stare at the ominous uberlady as she went on.

"I am aware that you are as good with prop-tops as you are with planes. I shall provide the helicopter by which you will convey Eric Beale. This whole endeavor…I think it will be very exciting, and very entertaining. Think of the whole dynamic of this not so much as a superhero adventure, but rather as a sniper/harrier avocation. Think of it not so much as Gen 13…as more Golgo 13, I would say."

Markham's brow crinkled hard at this, not primed in anime or NES games enough to understand what Golgo was…and not prescient enough, here in 1990, to know what the heck Gen was either.

Regardless, Miss Markham couldn't imagine the alternatives as Roma set them out…so she agreed to the jobs proposed.

"You've committed to the correct cause, my lovely Cylla," said the Otherworld overseer. She then commenced a wavering yet alluring stroll towards a terrace which yielded a seemingly starless expanse of night sky. "The first air assignment for you and Mister Beale will not begin for another several hours."

Then Roma motioned towards the open space in the evening atmosphere. "Why don't you avail yourself of a slight…fringe benefit, a sort of bonus, if you will, for joining up with the Otherworld. Come, enjoy a small gander revealing what became of that wayward whore who might have made you lie or float amidst the burning wreckage of your poor plane.

Cylla saw the sky ahead seem to burst into brightness…then realized that Roma was somehow converting the molecules of midnight before her into some sort of large-screen televisory monitor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Gateway person, conversing with some copiously-mulleted man in a blue uniform, with a red kerchief around his neck. When the pilot chanced a glance over in their direction, she found herself shocked a second to find no one standing in the corner that the aborigine must have occupied only seconds previously.

Markham shrugged and turned her attention back to the sky-screen of sorts. On it, there was depicted a proud, blond(e) couple, decked out decadently in the sparest scraps of swimwear. The male vanilla blight held a champagne flute in one hand, and the female's delicate fingers in the other. At the end of that woman's other hand was smoke, emitting from the tips of the digits.

The pilot then noted the presence of her plane, tracing its way along the borders of the distance above the decadents' heads. The he-blond squeezed his sister's hand, perhaps a bit too tenderly, while the she-blonde took aim at Cylla's airborne baby, then fired.

Ruefully Cylla heard

[booooooooooooooommmmm]

the same baneful blast (though at a significantly diminished volume from before), the blast might have brought her into so many bandages, as well as so much badinage with White Royalty that was even worse than Emma Frost (if such could be conceived).

Of a sudden, in the foreground; the he-blond to his darling sister:

"Splendid shooting, Andr…"

[BLIPPP]

Then a whirl of wheat-hued hair from the woman as Andrea von Strucker turned at the abrupt slack in her heretofore-twin's-held hand, as well as the aural ellipsis from his split-second disappearance. Without bodily contact from her brother, the She-Strucker was utterly bereft of her blasts-just as Andreas was worthlessly, powerlessly normal without the touch of his sultry sibling in turn.

Frantically the fraulein looked around, here and there on the quarterdeck of her quadrillion-dollar estate's best yacht. What was a second ago a scandalizing maiden, with her tanned thighs and tapioca-gold mane, was now a steaming mess as she searched ever the more frenetically for Andreas by the instant.

In the ensuing beats, the tow-haired temptress would become all the more effervescent—as would her beloved brother, given the explosive impromptu reunion each would soon experience with the other.

See, where Andreas von Strucker was, now, in all this—the he-blond was stripped from his sister, and swapped with the Cylla, courtesy of the combined space-time shenanigans of one Gateway and his great-great-great-descendent Lucas Bishop. A little carousing with the continuum caused Miss Markham to be ushered into the Otherworld, as the lady could witness from an exterior perspective, now in Roma's lair—just as the august Andreas was deposited in the pilot's doomed place on the craft's crashpath.

Cylla's plane, the little crate that could as it was, was now indeed well into its downward spiral-and here, directly on collision course for the Strucker schooner. Thanks to the aborigine contingency's playing with time, in this reality the femme Nazi now did not have time, in her shock, to redirect any of the aircraft's fragmented frame towards that "pathetic little airstrip"—said landing area was now safe from her harm.

The same safety could not be said for the blond(e) monsters themselves.

Somehow, perhaps through her too-intimate connection with her brother—Andrea knew exactly where her brother was, now. And he, her, in turn, as each Strucker knew that an all-too-close connection was about to occur between them.

(Even between these two, who were notorious throughout international rumor mills for having engaged in various recesses of incest).

Andrea nonetheless, out of the most selfish kind of instinct, pointed with her index finger at the hurtling plane remains falling directly for her boat, pointed futilely sans her prurient powers, pointed impotently at the plane sans the necessary, sketchy tactile presence of her brother's physical contact to make her concussive force bolts fire out.

"Nein," she blurted Germanically, in spite of herself. The airborne entrails were descending down, directly for her, the nose of the plane directly overhead.

"NEIN!" The Aryan inflection in the back of her mind commanded the lady to retreat, to make for the rear of the yacht, to leap to safety…

…and yet the part of her that perversely worshipped her sibling, as he did her in turn, remained rooted to the spot.

She could by now even make out her beautiful brother's face, still scrabbling at the cockpit's controls in vain, then the man looking up, making eye contact with his sister through the plane's front pane of glass.

"NEIIIIIIIIIIIII…"

Then the rumors became more brutally confirmed than ever, as Andreas drilled harder into his sister than either of the Struckers could ever have imagined it. Or dreamed it.

"SCRAM, indeed," mused Roma at Cylla's side, the goddess imitating the awful sound of the plane pummeling planet, just as it sounded in the issue on which this tale was based. "Good riddance to you both."

In mockery of Andrea's own words, from that canonical exchange:

"What matters is that you Master Race motherfuckers are dead."

EPILOGUE