Usual: Characters? Mostly Not Mine. However, Joy is mine. No money being made. It's another of my one-way conversation thinggies. I think I must be addicted to them. Fill in your own dialog. I'm too lazy to write it. See if you can guess who Illyana is tormenting, before she tells you. This is for everyone who knows what a cosmic-funny is.
Jeanne M.
"Hello, my name is Illyana Nickolevna Rasputin, a.k.a. Magik and Darkchilde. I'm a mutant with the ability to teleport throughout space and time, and I also happen to be a demon sorceress. I'll be your tour guide today, as we traverse across reality. Oh yeah, and I'm dead."
"What? You act as if you've never met a dead girl before. Sweetheart, I'll give you a news flash. If you can see and interact with me, then you're either dead yourself, or mad. Or my brother, 'cause I let him see me awhile back, but who's not to say he's one of the afore mentioned? Besides, around here, most everyone's been dead once or twice at the very least. See her? That's piece of Phoenix shard that is/will be/has been Rachel Summers. Don't ask, it gives even me a headache."
"Why are you here? Well, that's a very good question. I have no clue. I simply have orders to escort you in a whirlwind showcase of life. Ya see, you're a special case. Not quite dead, you see. You can still go either way. And someone with a big sense of cosmic-funny has decided I'm the one to make you choose. What? Why do I say that? Aren't you the curious one. Well, how old are you? Yeah? Well, remember that little ditty awhile back the spandex-wearers called Inferno? I see you do. I sacrificed my mutation and magic to stop it, and was reverted to a small child. Martyr thinggie. Anyways, later I was the first to die of this nasty little bug called the Legacy Virus. I'd like to damn Stryfe to the deepest bowels of Limbo with only S'ym for company because of that. Ah, you've heard of that too? With the crowd you hang with, I'm not too surprised. Yeah, I'll agree with you there. They are obsessive, aren't they? Hm. Maybe I need to do some haunting-stuff, tell a few of them to lighten up."
"Or I could tell them to seek therapy, that too."
"Ya know, I like the way you think. They've needed someone like you around for awhile. Always obsessing about their "Dream" and everything, with old baldy as some sort of mutant Moses. It always made me a little nauseous while I was alive. Anyway, it's time for us to get going, look....."
I see Pitor sitting outside painting. And there's Scott, just after the surgery to remove that nanotech bomb so very long ago. It flashes to the kids at the Academy. So young, angry, and full of life. Next are the world-weary members of X-Force. There's Pete Wisdom's funeral??? I didn't know. Or has it happened yet? I see Pete meet Kitty Pryde. Have I even met Kitty? I can't remember. I see other people I know I have never met. Doug Ramsey, Candy Southern, Rachel Summers, Emma Frost's Hellions, this Illyana girl, so many people. I see men and women die. I watch Phoenix kill a planet. I am standing there when a radiant Maddie Pryor presents her son to her friends. I see some of the Generation X kids again, with children of their own. I stand in horror watching Remy pull himself and a little pink girl......Marrow?!?!......through the muck of the Morlock Massacre, while the screams of Warren Worthington echo in the background. I watch myself, broken, bleeding, dying and alone. There's the first time the X-Men faced Magneto. I find myself standing on the cliffs at Muir, watching a giddy Meggan dance with the wind. Images, overflowing, swirling by me all at once with the speed of a thousand currents. I don't understand how I can see all this, but it encloses me to the point I can't see my guide anymore.
And then it stops.
"Are you okay?" Her blue eyes are sympathetic. "I know that can be a lot to deal with. Some of the newbies spend days puking after just a few moments of that."
"No, I don't know how long you were really 'gone.' Does it matter?"
"You really have a mouth on you, ya know that? Tic-tock. Time's up, Doc."
"It's time to make a choice, Cecilia. Choose....."
"Choose......"
So I make my choice.
And I am back on the floor of my room, heaving my guts out. A wasted, strung-out junkie, needing her next fix. Muttering foul things in Spanish that my abuelita would scrub my mouth clean if she heard, I haul myself upright, and almost pass out again. Everything is hazy, blurry. Twisting around like an evil roller coaster ride. I remember taking the pills, then the Rave. I had broken my Oath, I killed a person, and I still couldn't accept that fact. Then Pitor had....... And I took the pills. I remember feeling so sleepy...
Whatever the hell just happened to me was no hallucination. As I force my protesting body to stagger along the wall, I know that much. I had a choice, and I chose to come back to this. To being hunted. To the killing. Something I saw made me come back. I just can't remember what. The pale girl wearing the top hat, the one who was standing in the shadow of the doorway, she would have taken my hand if I had wanted her to. I don't know why that's important, I just know it is.
And in another time and place, Illyana Rasputin sits, watching images flicker before her eyes. A faint rustle of wings announces her visitor's arrival. "Hey, D."
"Hey yourself." The pale girl settles down next to Illyana to watch the flowing montage. "You know, you just sentenced that poor woman to years of heartbreak and pain."
"And joy. Don't forget Joy." Illyana raises one hand. "Pause." The current image stops, a crystal clear moment of girl in sometime-not-yet. "Didi, meet Joy Reyes. Cece is going to adopt her in a few years, taking her away from abusive parents. Joy's a low-level healer, who will grow up aspiring to be like Cece. Lots of things are going to happen, Didi. Lots of things." She smiles at the picture. "A little bit of Joy in the world might just be a very good thing. A very good thing indeed."