Snuggles the Symbiote
"...And now I get weird feelings when I think about my memories of Klara," the newest Undersider finished.
He was sitting on a couch, next to Regent, or Alec as he was called out of costume. Other than Tattletale, or Lisa, off in her room, they were the only ones currently in the loft.
"Look, Mike," Alec said slowly and deliberately, "I only asked how you were doing as a formality. I didn't want your entire life story…" There was a beat. "So, like, as far as you're concerned you basically went to bed a girl and woke up a boy. Did that by itself feel weird, or..."
"Not as much as you'd think," Mike replied. "Like, I think it's becuase this me was born a boy instead of the real Molly getting turned into a boy, but I was really more concerned with finding pants and not getting hit by the other clones. But, I thought you didn't want my life story?"
"I'm just curious, is all," Alec dismissed. "So, you any good at videogames?"
"Do you have a Nintendo Wii?"
"Uh, I don't know how things went in your universe, but Nintendo shut down after Kyushu tanked Japan's economy. I've got a Reality and a bootleg conversion of an Aleph game called Goldeneye but if you pick Oddjob I'll stab y—"
Alec was interrupted by a loud, massive 'BAMF!' of smoke and the smell of rotten eggs.
The smoke made Mike start coughing. Enough that it actually started to hurt for a second. By the time he stopped, the smoke had cleared and he could make out that an adult woman in a tuxedo and a fancy cape with her face hidden by a hood and a feathered green mask.
"So, who are you and why don't you have nerves?" Alec said as though he honestly didn't care about the sudden intrusion.
"Ms. Mystic and magic," the self-proclaimed magic-user deadpanned. "Now, If I timed this right, Lisa will be out in three, two..."
Mike could hear the commotion of Lisa running into the room. "Okay, miss—Ahh!"
Mike couldn't see, but it sounded like Lisa collapsed.
The visitor snapped and Lisa was levitated into the air and sat on the couch.
"Sorry about that," she said. She then reached into the lapel of her tux and pulled out a gold coin. "Magic charm. Meant to neutralize certain thinker and master effects. Keeps Regent from tripping me up and stops you from figuring out who I am before you're supposed to." She mumbled under her breath about it not working on smell and kicking the ass of someone named Ashley when she got home. "The headache should clear up in a second."
"Why make it give me a headache!?" Lisa shouted while clutching her head.
"Because your head could do with a bit of deflating right now," Ms. Mystic replied. "Now, despite the unusual circumstances of my arrival here, I come in peace." She pulled a big, expensive-looking briefcase and opened it up to reveal that it was full of stacks of cash. "As you can see by the ludicrous amount of money that I stole from some nazis, I have a job for Tattletale and Bruiser."
"Really, really don't like you right now."
"Lisa, those are stacks of hundreds," Mike said. "I know I agreed to follow your rules if I got to live here, but we almost robbed a bank for a lot less than that so if you're gonna say no to that then you might need to go over the rules again."
"So, if the job's not for me can I just like, go and take a nap or something?" Mike had noticed that Alec didn't seem to care about much of anything.
"That's right," Ms. Mystic said with a dismissive wave of her hand. Alec got up and wandered back to his room. "I'm gonna miss him," she said randomly. "So, onto the job—"
"Why? What makes you think that—" Lisa was cut off by Ms. Mystic shoving a piece of paper in her face. "Okay, I'll hear you out," she said while pocketing the paper.
"So, Mike… You probably remember Molly being a huge fan of the X-Men," Ms. Mystic began.
"Wolverine mostly," Mike clarified. "She wanted to marry him when she grew up at one point." Idly, Mike wondered if Honey Badger had a boyfriend.
"Well, I'm a sorcerer from about six years in the future," Ms. Mystic explained, "and right now I'm doing the kind of thing that Bishop and Cable tend to do: Tinker around in the past to make sure the future happens right."
Mike felt his eyes going wide. "I'm in."
"What exactly do you want us to do?" Lisa asked carefully.
"Nothing major," Ms. Mystic said. "Mike needs to be immunized for something, there are some serums that I need to give to people and Lisa… Well, spoilers."
"That's not exactly very reassuring," Lisa said slowly.
"It's very low risk," Ms. Mystic said. "Get in, smash a robot, steal some stuff, head to a desert, loot a corpse, we're back here in less than an hour." She paused. "Also, you don't really have a choice: This needs to happen and we already left."
She snapped and Mike felt like a hook had grabbed him behind where his belly button would be if he had one and then pulled hard.
The room spun and Mike's head swam and the next thing he knew he was on the hot ground with the afternoon sun beating down on him.
He pushed himself up to see Lisa doing the same and Ms. Mystic standing calmly and checking her nails. They were inside a big fence, at least ten feet tall and topped with barbed wire. The fence was around a grey building with no windows and a heavy metal door with
"Where are we?" Mike asked.
"A government biological and chemical storage facility on Earth 727," Ms. Mystic said matter of factly. "SHIELD was maintaining it but then they disbanded and Washington didn't have much in the way of spare resources to devote to protecting a facility in the middle of nowhere that only a handful of people know about, so all they did was post one hidden robot guard." She paused. "Honestly, it's a bit of an oversight. There's at least one sample of just about every biological agent, drug, or toxin ever encountered by the CIA, FBI, SHIELD, SWORD, HAMMER, ONE… Honestly, if our intentions weren't noble, our being here would mean that the world could be fucked. I should probably burn this place down when we're done."
"What are we here for!?" Lisa asked, clearly angry about getting jerked around.
"Medicine," Ms. Mystic said like a businesswoman would say it just as the ground began to rumble.
Out from the earth emerged an android at least twenty feet tall. It was filthy, covered in dry soil, but mike could make out the purple metal of the body and the blue armored torso, hands, and boots. It's head, like a sci-fi version of one of those Olmec statues, bent down and stared directly are Mike. "Mutant detected. Priority, defend the facility from the threat of mutants. The mutant will evacuate the facility or be destroyed." The android, the sentinel, held out one palm with the laser blaster or whatever glowing a bright orange. "The Mutant has ten seconds to comply. Nine. Eight. Seven."
Mike didn't let it get to six. As soon as it started counting down he ran towards it and, his eyes and fists glowing pink, punched it in the shin hard enough to take its entire left leg off.
The Sentinel collapsed to the ground and Mike picked up the leg and brought it down, foot first, onto the main body again and again and again until the whole Sentinel was good and smashed. The machinery whined as it shut down.
Mike turned back to face Ms. Mystic and Lisa, who was staring at the Sentinel's remains and clearly didn't like whatever she was learning from it and sat down. Going out that much made him tired. "So," he began, "what were they planning to do if someone who wasn't a mutant tried to attack this place?"
"They weren't planning anything," Ms. Mystic said dismissively. "Government bureaucracy can be horribly ineffective at the best of times, and this was immediately after HYDRA's takeover and the concurrent collapse of SHIELD," she continued as she walked past Mike to the door on the building. "Hardly anyone knows about this building and a lot had to be redone, so they slapped a bandaid over it with plans to come back later and never came back."
As Mike turned to keep an eye on the sorceress, he could see her standing in front of the heavy metal door and doing the rocker-horn thing that Doctor Strange did when he was casting spells with her right hand.
Then she pulled with her left hand and the door was pulled right out of the wall.
Lisa came up next to Mike. "I don't think I'm going to like the answer, but why is there a giant killer robot designed specifically to kill one specific minority guarding a government building?"
"Some people are really, really prejudiced against mutants," Mike answered. "A lot of those people are in Government." He noted that Ms. Mystic was waving him and Lisa forward and went up to join her, Lisa following.
Mike got the feeling that Lisa wasn't comfortable being a blind follower.
The facility was mostly just rows and rows of reinforced shelves with glass panes and number pads every couple of feet on each shelf. They walked all the way to the right wall of the building and followed the shelf to the far end.
Along the way, Mike could make out vials with labeled with strange serial numbers. Once they stopped, Mike could see a shelf with a dozen vials, including three in the middle filled with something red and viscous-looking.
Ms. Mystic sprinkled some powder on the number pad and then beckoned Lisa forward. "Your power should let you guess the code now that I've illuminated the finger-prints from the last person to open it."
Lisa stepped up and looked at the number pad for about half a minute, then she punched in a code, the pad beeped, the buttons flashed green, and the glass on the shelf slid up.
Ms. Mystic reached in and grabbed the vials of red liquid. She shoved two into the confines of her cape and popped the cork out of the third. She dropped a tiny green crystal into it, then pulled out and eye-dropper and put a drop of something clear in, then she recorked it and shook it up.
She started muttering something in some language Mike couldn't understand. Probably Egyptian, he caught her saying 'Imhotep.' The vial glowed green, and then she handed it to Mike.
"Drink up," she said. "A killer from Earth Bet has figured out how to synthesize Terrigen. It's weaker than the real stuff, but a mist of it can cause M-Pox all the same. She doesn't know M-Pox only affects Mutants though, so when she releases it in Brockton Bay… Well, it's basically only you at risk. The other three mutants that'll be in Brockton Bay when the Nine hits are either immune or have some other way of protecting themselves from airborne toxins. With that spell combined with the potion's native immune-boosting effect, you'll be immunized."
Seeing no reason not to, Mike popped the cork and downed the vial. It tasted bitter and metally.
When he finished he grimaced and looked up to Ms. Mystic. "That was gross. What was that medicine made of?"
"Mostly human blood," Ms. Mystic stated as a matter of fact. Lisa cussed.
Immediately, Mike felt sick to his stomach. He couldn't think of any reason why a potion made of blood would make him not get sick unless…
"Am… Am I gonna turn into a vampire?"
"No," Ms. Mystic quickly corrected. "You remember a few years ago when Apocalypse went in front of the UN and demanded that 90% of the human population be exterminated or he'd kill them all with a plague?"
"I think so," Mike said. "Molly didn't watch the news much but that sounds familiar."
"Well, his blood has healing powers and he used it as the base for a cure-all potion to protect the 10% or so he figured were worthy but a lot of it got lost in a fight. ONE was involved in the conflict, that was back when they were nominally allies of the X-Men instead of a government-sanctioned hate group, and they managed to get a few samples of the blood potion, which we just looted."
"What are you gonna do with the other two?" Mike asked of the sorceress.
"I'm going to give one to a certain someone to use in an upcoming emergency and the other is going into storage so that a Cape who doesn't exist yet can tinker with it in the future," Ms. Mystic explained. "Now, we need to get the Hell out of this building so I can burn it down and destroy all of these biohazards."
They started walking out and Lisa spoke again. "Okay, I can't figure it out, and if you know me that means something: How would someone know that their blood has healing powers if you drink it? I can see that power existing but if it's genetic I don't see how you'd find out about it. With a Parahuman power, you can guess from the trigger event if it's not obvious, but without a Trigger what would make you think to try that?"
"I don't know the full story," Ms. Mystic said as they walked back out, "I'm a Bet native, most of what I know of 727 comes from… Well, you know her as Cuddlebug. This is like, a third-hand story, she'll learn it from someone and who learned it from someone else… Apparently, it involved a fight with Dracula."
"Oh, haha," Lisa began sarcastically. "Yeah, but… You're serious..." Lisa went quiet for a second. "Mike. Everything about your universe terrifies me."
Mike shrugged as they left the building and Ms. Mystic led them over to the fence.
"Now," she said, "I can only cast this spell every so often unless I want Mephisto to know I'm stealing his shit, but I think that making sure a bunch of diseases and toxins get destroyed is worth a use. Please stand back."
Mike backed up so that his back was to the fence while Ms. Mystic waved her hands about and chanted words that sounded wrong and scary. Her hands glowed orange and then a beach-ball sized burst of flame went screaming from her fingertips and through the door of the building. A moment later the entire building was engulfed in flames and was letting off a wail like a banshee.
Mike covered his ears and watched for a whole minute until the building was nothing but a pile of ash. He uncovered his ears just in time to hear Lisa muttering. "Hell is real… Hell is real. Oh, God..."
"You can have an existential crisis later," Ms. Mystic said callously. "We've gotta loot a corpse and then get you two back to the loft."
She mentioned something about a Great Weaver and pointed to an empty space and a big blue-white rift in space appeared. "Mike, walk through that and you'll be in the middle of the desert somewhere in Arizona back on Bet. I need to have a quick word with Lisa, we'll be right behind you."
Mike heard a loud slap just as he stepped through and ended up in the desert. He took two steps forward and stopped because he was right in front of a human skeleton. It looked a bit disarrayed, some bones not connected and one of the legs missing, and there was something golden in the rib cage, rolled up in a ball with cords sticking to individual bones.
He heard footsteps behind him and found Ms. Mystic and Lisa stepping out of the portal, which closed behind then.
Lisa looked down at the bones. "Picked clean by scavengers and sun-bleached… pelvic bones are female, facial bones, probably of East Asian descent… I'd say late teens or early twenties… Cause of death would be the broken neck… No scraps of clothing, so she was naked when she was left here… Probably murdered elsewhere in dumped in the desert… I'd say no more than a couple weeks ago…. And I've got no idea what the hell that thing in her ribcage is."
"Close, but no," Ms. Mystic explained. "She's from the same cloning facility as Mike. when reality got torn a new one, most of the clones ended up on the east coast but a couple ended up elsewhere. She landed in the desert head first and broke her neck. The thing in her ribs is what we're here for." Ms. Mystic pulled a crooked pink dagger from out behind her back and pricked her right middle finger. She then held it out and let a drop fall from her finger and land on the skeleton's sternum. "When blood is shed..." Ms. Mystic said, and Mike's eyes went wide.
That sounded exactly like what… Lisa said the bones probably came from a young Asian woman…
The gold thing in the rib cage oozed out and through the ribs to form a blob on the top of the bones, and then Ms. Mystic moved like lightning to grab it in her hand. She pulled it up from the bones and with a zap somehow shocked the golden ooze, which caused it to shift and solidify into a gold and blue copy of Nico's staff.
"There's an artifact in Mike's homeworld called The Staff of One. Belongs to the women of the Minoru family, a clan of Japanese sorcerers. Can cast any spell once per wielder… Under normal circumstances. Stronger and more knowledgeable with magic, the more fast and loose you can get with the rules. The people who made the clones were doing all kinds of experiments with biological weapons and super soldiers." Ms. Mystic started twirling the staff "They managed to make biomechanical weapons with the properties of a magic metal called Uru and decided to see if they could make their own Staff of One with Uru infused Biomass, the DNA of a couple of people with natural magical affinities, and a bunch of nanobots that collectively serve as a database for everything they know about magic."
Ms. Mystic tapped the head of the staff on the ground a few times. "Once they got it close enough, they put it in a clone of the real thing's current master hoping that her magical bloodline would complete it. It didn't work. Magic doesn't work like that, but the Symbiosis Staff, as I've taken to calling it, is still a high-quality magical focus, a potent magical battery, and the nanobots can function as a post-modern spellbook once the staff finishes adapting to a host."
"So we desecrated a corpse so you could get a toy?" Lisa asked, annoyed.
"We have to bury her," Mike said. "We have to." He wasn't Molly. This wasn't the real Nico. But still…
Ms. Mystic waved a hand and the ground turned to loose sand. The bones sank beneath them. A snap and the ground became solid one more. A flick of the wrist made a rock from the distance flow over and sit over where the skull had been. Finally Ms. Mystic drew what looked like Norse runes in the air, which lingered there in blue light, before fading.
"Laid to rest with a spell to keep her grave from being disturbed," Ms. Mystic said with more empathy than she'd shown since they'd met. "Feel better?"
"A little," Mike replied.
"As for you, Lisa," Ms. Mystic began with a turn, "no. The staff isn't for me. I've already got one exactly like it."
Once more moving like lightning, Ms. Mystic stabbed Lisa with the staff and it turned to goo and slithered inside Lisa's body. Lisa's screams were bloodcurdling.
Mike moved to do... Something, but he got that pulling feeling in his belly again.
Mike and Lisa landed on the couch back at the loft. When Mike got his bearings about him again, he could see Lisa clutching her belly where'd she'd been stabbed, but there was no blood. Her shirt wasn't even torn. And there was no sign of Ms. Mystic... Other than the briefcase from earlier
"Lisa, are you okay?"
"I think so," she said breathing heavily. "But God damn… I am such a bitch!"