Snuggles The Symbiote

Fire! My bones were on fire! White-hot! Everything fucking hurt and I couldn't move my arms or legs no matter how hard I struggled and I was so hungry and there was food right there but I couldn't get it and I was just so angry and GOD IS COMING!

With a great flex, I finally broke from my restraints and felt whatever had been holding me down move like, like it was a person or something so I elbowed it and grabbed it when it stumbled and lifted it overhead and slammed it into the ground... Food. There was food in it. I could tell that it wouldn't be as yummy as the other food, the food I could feel before GOD IS COMING but food is food and I was so freaking hungry so I drove my claws into it and felt around a little until I could feel the food and separate it from the not food parts and then lift up the yummy goodness to my mouth and slurp down the slimy metal tasting...

I hurt less now, which was good, but I was still hungry. If anything, eating the little bit from the one thing made me even hungrier and for some reason, it made me nostalgic for old fashioned farm work.

I left the thing that had bound me on the ground and jumped for the thing with the extra yummy food and GOD IS COMING but as I brought my claws down on it the thing blocked them with something shiny and then—

"Hurk!" Pain. Pain pain pain. Something sharp buried in my guts snapped me back to reality. A big, sharp, metal wing was buried in my tummy. Archangel stabbed me in the gut. Archangel stabbed me in the gut!

"You stabbed me in the gut!" I shouted and then I fell limp and fell to the floor, landing awkwardly on my side.

"I'm terribly sorry," he said, "but you were in an irrational, berserk state and could not be reasoned with, so after what you did to Colossus I decided to force you to hold still with my paralytic neurotoxin. I assumed that with 'more healing factors than you can keep track of' that you could handle it." Taylor said some bad words to Archangel, but he was right. The wound didn't even have time to bleed before it healed. "Now you should be paralyzed for about half an hour. I'm going to give you over to your foster sister, Logan is going to lead you to the Manhattan portal, and I'm going to help Piotr to the healing gardens to make sure you didn't permanently damage his spine."

And then I started giggling.

"...Why are you laughing?"

"Becuase I know something you don't."

"What?"

"Ashley, don't do it!" Taylor shouted. She sounded mad but I needed the codex.

I leaped up and, like I'd done with Wolverine, shot a tentacle out and around and stabbed Archangel between his shoulders to rip out his codex. He didn't fall. "I am not left-handed!" ...Wait, crap... "Look, I was trying to allude to that scene from The Princess Bride but then the exchange got in my head so it turned into a full quote. I was gonna say that drugs and poisons don't work on me... I might be left-handed, I don't know." It'd honestly never come up. How did you know your handedness? I'd never noticed a difference in which was better. Maybe I was ambidextrous?

"Anyway, the point is..." And that's when Archangel's codex hit me. Dr. McCoy had said that he and the other original five X-Men had been on an extended time travel trip to the future when they got their symbiotes, which meant that the symbiote codices they had had been in their spines, growing, and adapting for like, thirteen years. Longer than I'd been alive. Longer than Venom or any of its kids had been on Earth. The only symbiote I know of that'd been around longer was the one that Wolverine had worn in Vietnam that... Huh. I don't remember consciously experiencing Wolverine's memories...

For Beast, that symbiote, that weaponized symbiote that evolved super fast, had adapted to his body and got everything it could possibly get out of his DNA in the time it was bonded to him. He hadn't had any meaningful changes to his power that weren't just something latent in him. Other than a brief boost to raw strength, everything past that first day was just it recording his skills.

But Angel was infused with cosmic power from something called the Black Vortex when he first wore that symbiote... Hell, he still had the power in him, latently. His symbiote hadn't been able to adapt to it at the time but in thirteen years? And then there were his Horseman of Death enhancements like the T-O strain and the Poison he'd tried to use on me, a temporary power magnification from some alien, getting psychic powers and healing abilities when his wings were fused with life force? The cosmic power of the Life Seed? The symbiote codex had been in his body for all of that, everything that'd ever happened to Warren Worthington III had been recorded by a piece of a symbiote that rapidly grew, adapted, evolved to adapt to the living machinery, genetic enhancements, and cosmic power over that time.

It was like one of my adrenaline rushes, but without the fear or anger that brought it on or the crash. I could feel tingles from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. Every cell in my body practically vibrating from the GOD IS COMING celestial energy, life-force, and intoxicating, fabulous power.

"Ashley, you need to stop this," Taylor said from behind me.

"Please? You're scaring me." That was Grace.

"Kid, this ain't a road you wanna go down." Wolverine. He must have healed from when I stabbed him to get his codex. "Family talks. Gabby? When she got back she was talking about how adorable it was that you look up to Spider-Man so much that the first thing you do when you meet him is to ask him for a picture. He wouldn't do something like this. He couldn't even bring himself to kill the man that threw his girlfriend off a bridge when he caught up to him." Wait, Gwen Stacy was Spider-Man's girlfriend? "You've got every right to be mad about Sinister. Every right to think that the good we're doing with Krakoa isn't worth leaving him free. You wouldn't be the only one, I wonder if what we're doing is worth it every day, but you keep going the way you're going and you're gonna reach a point where you can't walk it back anymore."

"I can't stop now," I said while the power still rolled through me. "This power... This fabulous power is Overwhelming. The celestial power that Archangel was hiding away is changing me, accelerating my evolution and bringing all of my powers up to their full cosmic potential!" My wings tore from my back, dark in color and magnificent... I looked down at myself and thought that maybe Mister Snuggles and I should make this my normal costume: I looked good in black. I gave my wings an experimental flap, they were at least three times bigger than they were before and felt much, much stronger and... Actually, now that I thought about it I could feel two smaller, supporting wings at the small of my back, too.

I hadn't wanted to adapt to Krakoa-the-Island, Excaliber, Monarch, or Exodus's DNA yet, but it was happening whether I wanted it or not... I could tell that it'd started with taking Colossus's but it was getting faster now, but... but it was okay, becuase I was getting other powers too. Other powers and some kind of intuition, that compensated and let me control them. I could sense everything on this Island and the life-force flowing through the plants and soil. Sub-minds forming between me and Mister Snuggles to maximize and control my psionics and other powers, to help me...

"It feels good! It feels so good! I want more! I need more!" I tested my new, still growing power by aiming my hand, fingers stretched, at a table that had gotten broken at some point in between taking Wolverine's codex and Archangel stabbing me, looking past it to see the strings of probability and then I sort of... pulled, twisted, and the table put itself back together seamlessly at the quantum level. I could have done it with Telekinesis, Exodus's powers worked at the atomic level, but bending reality to clean up my mess just felt right.

"Be careful, Evangelion," Apocalypse said as he stood up from his seat. "Divinity is a strong, heavy-bodied liquor accented with the finest of opiates. Take strength from whatever source you wish and make it your own, but pace yourself. And take the time to test yourself, earn your growth, before seeking even greater heights. Build a foundation upon which your power can rest."

I cocked my head to the side. "Who said anything about divinity? Mutants aren't Gods." I didn't give him a chance to answer, instead, I levitated up so that I'd be taller than him, then dragged him over to me with telekinesis. then I grabbed his face and started draining out his life-force, all in the same two seconds. He struggled against my psychic grip but there was no escape. "Look, dummy, you're the one that gave me the DNA of the members of your 'coven' Your team, and Exodus, and Monarch. This is your fault... Psylocke and Exodus's psychic powers, Jubilee's plasmids, Gambit's kinetic force powers and that other stuff that he's had on and off ever since he was Death... did you know he has a psionic-hypnotic compulsion power in his voice?" I had no idea what that had to do with making playing cards explode. "I didn't, but it's neat, huh?" I giggled as I felt some of Nur's skills siphon into me. "Rictor's connection to and control of the earth, and uh, Rogue's powers to drain life-force, skills, knowledge, and superpowers from people on-touch."

"Right now, I'm sucking up your occult knowledge, your skills with science and technology, and all the little tricks you've figured out for your powers over the years. when I'm done with that," in a few seconds, "I'm gonna absorb your language skills because I've heard that you speak literally every dialect of every human language and I want to be fluent in Irish Gaelic."

Normally Rogue lost the skills and powers she got this way after a while, but symbiotes back up memories and knowledge. I'd still lose the power but I'd keep the skills and knowledge I was stealing from my evil ancestor. Though, since I already had his powers it's not like I was losing much of that, anyway.

"Maybe I'll let you go, run off, combine the genetics knowledge I get from you with what I've gotten from Dr. McCoy's and Dr. Richards' symbiote codices and use that to give my friends an artificial X-Gene so we can form out own Mutant Coven, with blackjack and pillow forts, and not have to work with you or this Island that lets killers get off scot-free to get free magic, or maybe I'll just drink you to death becuase we know this 'good guy Apocalypse' thing is never gonna last."

Someone was crying. Who was crying? I looked to the side... Grace was crying?

I was about to ask her why she was crying when my concentration was broken by an energy blast to the gut which sent me back and rolling into the ground.

"Arrogant child," Apocalypse said with steam rising from the barren of his laser-gun hand, "consider the knowledge you have taken from me a gift. It is the last gift you shall receive: If you would presume to attempt to destroy me, you must first earn the right!"

His gun hand turned into a whole gun arm mounted to his shoulder with the other arm changed to match... But then he got covered in white spiders with purple hourglasses on them. He suddenly ignited in a wreath of cosmic energy which burned away the spiders and he turned to Taylor.

"Ashley, run. We'll talk about this later."

Instead of running, I psychically grabbed Apocalypse again and yeeted him over the horizon. "Taylor, that was really irresponsible. Apocalypse has killed millions of people over the last few thousand years. He'd have killed you in a heartbeat and then we wouldn't be able to talk about this later because you'd be dead and I'm sick of people dying! My parents are dead because Sinister's goons wanted to kidnap me! Panacea's dead because I fucked up! You almost died taking Jorogumo's bite for me! Bakuda exploded Oni Lee because I did something stupid. An entire squad of agents got butchered by Poisons who were after me! Bloodbath killed Emma and Madison and put their heads in my bed to scare me! A man got split in half from head to groin because he tried to help me! I'm sick of people dying because of me!"

The ground beneath my feet shook and cracked. I could feel the island's groan of irritation.

"And even when no one dies... I keep failing. I lose to people stronger than me, I lose to people weaker than me," fucking Task Master, "and I struggle with a punk like Arcade. Arcade! The guy who had to force kids to kill each other to have a superhuman body-count! My superhero career is a bunch of people dying, a bunch of failures... And arresting Jack Slash... And even then I had to bully and blackmail and Penance Stare just to get people to do the right thing instead of executing him without trial... Like no one cares..."

I sat up, then fell to my knees. I pulled my mask back and I looked Taylor in the eyes. Also, it was raining, but only right above me. "I'm sick of people dying. I'm sick of losing people. I'm sick of the bad guys winning. I'm sick of no one caring about right and wrong anymore and I'm sick of feeling weak and powerless!" It was getting hard to talk. "I'm sick of hurting... I'm a lousy hero. I'm not strong enough to be a hero, not if... Not if I keep failing..."

I blinked, and when I opened my eyes Taylor was on one side of me and Grace was on the other. The next second, both of them were hugging me. Taylor didn't even seem to care that at this angle she was also hugging Grace.

"Ashley, I'm sorry," Taylor said. "I've been a bad big sister."

"No, you—"

"I have. I've been too passive. I should have been talking to you about this and helping you process it as it happened... I should have known you felt this way before now. I promise, you can come to me with this kind of thing and we'll work it out from now on."

"For what it's worth," Grace added, "a voice in my head that turned out to be the ghost of someone I killed but who forgave me for it says that being a hero isn't about winning, it's about making the right choices at the right time. After what you did after what I did to you, well... You seem like a pretty good hero to me."

My arms were pinned to me, so I used my wings to hug them both back.

"...Did little lizard girl just say she's being haunted by someone she killed? What is happening? Logan, I can not feel my legs, help me up so I can see." Colossus was still face down on the ground where I'd left him... I'd hurt him and now his legs didn't work and... Had I paralyzed the Scorpion? ...Was I the bad guy?

"Yes, she did," Wolverine said he helped the Russian man up. "C'mon, you've been at this long enough that something like that shouldn't even register."

...Like I'd done with the table, I looked past the surface to see the quantum strings and with a little wiggle of my fingers, a bit harder than before since I wasn't pointing at him, and his spine fused back together.

Colossus gasped. "Wait, let go. The feeling came back." Wolverine obliged him, Colossus to a few steps to brace himself, then sort of bent back a bit and flexed. I could hear some of his bones popping. "Ah, much better. Anyway, haunted little girl is right: To be a hero is to make a choice. Little girl, no one is happy that Sinister is here. No one is proud that we had to turn to him. But with the technology he has, we were able to bring back dead X-Men. There were a lot of dead X-Men. Now, there are enough X-Men to run and protect a country, and with Krakoa there are hundreds of children who will never go through what you did."

"What is more important? To defeat and punish the villain no matter what? Or to make sure that the innocent do not suffer without need, even if it means that evil men go unpunished? We made our choice. You have right to be angry. You have right to leave this Island and have nothing else ever to do with your fellow mutants again. You even have right to make yourself an enemy of all of Krakoa in the pursuit of justice for you and your family against Sinister and many here would not oppose you. I just hope that you understand why we allow people like Sinister to live here. Do you?"

I looked down. "...Yeah." If... If it was keeping children safe, then I guess...

"For what it's worth." Wolverine added, "Chuck's got Sinister and the other really bad ones on a tight leash. If he breaks the rules... Which I'm pretty sure he will, then everything he's done catches up to him, and, well... There ain't no prisons on this Island."

I didn't have an answer for that. I just kneeled there being hugged by my big sister and my friend. Eventually, a glowing white circle formed off in an unoccupied part of the general area we were in and three people materialized.

I immediately recognized Nightcrawler with his glowing yellow eyes and his blue fur and his circus acrobat suit and his tail. I did not recognize the young blond man in the sleeveless uniform who was completely covered in eyes but I got the weirdest feeling that he was starring at me. Then again with at least eight eyes on his face, a dozen on each arm and probably a lot more he was probably staring at everyone.

The third person, in front and dressed in a black outfit that covered her arms, legs, and top but left her belly exposed, with the weird stick thingies in her hair, holding a big giant sword to the ground, took me a second but then I realized she was Magick. Half-Demon Ruler and Sorceress Supreme of Limbo, apprentice and potential successor of Doctor Strange, veteran X-Woman...

And former symbiote host. All three of them were. Seriously, was there a symbiote invasion while I was gone or something? Because I could feel the bits of symbiotes in these guys but there were still a bunch more. Like, I'd just taken five but I could still feel eleven codices, so either I overlooked some or some people just got back to the Island or maybe I just counted wrong becuase I was angry?

"We heard there was a situation," Nightcrawler said. His German accent sounded softer and less cartoonish than Donnar's did.

"A kid who's been through enough to break a grown man had an understandably poor reaction to finding out who was responsible for some of it shortly after learning that some of our more... controversial policies meant he couldn't pay for it," Wolverine explained. "Almost had a Code Phoenix, but other than Apocalypse being pissed off whenever he hits the ground there's no damage that ain't already been fixed."

"Good, that's good. I'd still like to get a statement from everyone, do everything by the books. Some people are a bit spooked by the 'attack.'"

"Yeah, that's fair."

"Illyana," Colossus said. "Little girl has acquired cosmic power. For her own good, she may need exorcism or binding spell."

"No!" I shouted loud enough that it hurt. Loud enough that Taylor and grace flew a few feet away from me. "You can't take it! I need it!" The warm tingly good feeling was starting to fade even. I'd need more soon. "I have too many people to protect, and... Back home, in their world, there are these monsters that show up every few months and destroy huge chunks of whatever city they land in and dozens of heroes die every time trying to fight them off and even when they win there's billions in property damage and huge casualties. With this kind of power I can... I could destroy them, save so many people, and..."

"Don't justify yourself to them, child," whispered a voice in my head, "Whatever reasons you want it, you deserve this power and so much more. Don't even ask, just take it."

"...You're not Mister Snuggles?" I thought back, my eye's narrowing.

"He's gone dormant in order to process the power you've taken. Don't worry, he'll be fine. In fact, taking more codices will make him recover faster, as counterproductive as that sounds."

"Look, kid," Archangel said, "Cosmic power isn't a toy. The way you're talking? It sounds like you've somehow gotten the power of the Black Vortex. I took that to try and avoid the future I was seeing but that kind of power can mess with your head, make you go berserk... And I don't think anyone wants that to happen to you again."

"Who are you?"

"We've been in the same place before, but we've never met. But you've sensed my presence before, and now your connection to the symbiote hivemind is strong enough that I can talk to you. I want to join with you, and your symbiote. I want to help you."

"The burden of saving the world shouldn't be on someone your age, even if you can. You shouldn't have to worry about that, you should leave it to people who are old enough to shoulder that kind of responsibility." I couldn't even tell who said that.

"See, the so-called heroes of this Island don't trust you. They want to take your power and are making excuses. Just becuase they're young. I want you to have all of the power you deserve. I want to help you use it the way you see fit."

"Why?"

"Becuase God Is Coming, and you need to be strong enough to fight Him."

"Energizer was half my age when she started fighting crime," I said out loud o the people around me. "I'm more than old enough to decide to be a superhero. To decide that I want to use my powers to help people. to save thousands of lives if I can. You don't have the right to make that decision for me. You don't have the right to take my power away."

"The power you only have because you ripped alien good out of my spine?" Archangel said

"Not like you were using it," I dismissed.

"Look, someone your age probably can't handle that kind of power. The way you're acting tells me that it's already messing with your mind."

"Then I better hurry up and get older then, shouldn't I!?" I'd snapped, but then I realized... Why couldn't I? I'd meant that as sarcasm but... I could change my mass and volume, manipulate my cells and molecules... And that was before I had atomic-scale telekinesis and quantum reality warping. Mister Snuggles had said that all my powers were limited because I wasn't mature enough to fully express them... What point was there in staying a kid?

I stood up, spread my feet so I had a nice, sturdy base, held out my arms, flexed, glared up at Archangel with a nice toothy grin, and willed myself to grow.

It wasn't like embiggening normally. That was just changing size or stitching, this was more like... It didn't hurt, but I could feel my bones growing, my muscles tensing and growing and shifting.

Within a few seconds, I went from glaring up at archangel to glaring down from at least half a foot above him.

"Aaahhh," I sighed, my voice deeper and kind of silky. I rubbed my fingers along my arms to feel the contours of my new limbs and then took a few seconds to slap my belly and squeeze my forearms to feel the rock hard muscles.

The form-fitting suit didn't work for me anymore though. After a second of thinking I shifted it to make it a tight sit, yes, but with panels of proper armor over my chest, jagged at the edges, with pauldrons and gauntlets and grieves. Like Dark-Elf armor, but black-on-black instead of white-on-black. Then I did my normal emblem, but in red, becuase that would look better against the black, with the Hell-Mark still burning in the middle. Finally, I let my hair down becuase a ponytail is kind of childish.

"Okay, if I did it right, now I'm twenty-five and I've got the strong, muscular body of a bodybuilder. Am I still too young to handle this kind of power?"

"Shapeshifting and artificial aging don't count," Archangel claimed. "And... Yes. every single time someone's gone Dark Phoenix, it's been someone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. Cosmic power is no joke, so even if this did count..."

"Well screw you then," I deadpanned and then I turned back to the others. I figured I should finally try out that atomic TK and I had the perfect test.

I had enough of an idea of what a human body was like inside and where codices where that I could get a grip on the three in the three people who'd come into investigate.

"Ashley, you need to stop this," Taylor said authoritatively. "I'm... I'm going to count to three, and if you don't... shrink back down to normal and let these people help you then you're grounded."

"Taylor, I love you, but that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard," I said while turning to her. "Has that ever worked ever in the entire history of parents and kids? And what are you grounding me from?" Honestly, the concept of how parental punishments like that work was always confusing to me. Maybe it's becuase I never misbehaved when I was younger (I couldn't even if I'd wanted to) but the idea of taking away the things your kid liked or forbidding them from going places always seemed like it would just make them angry and more likely to act out. "Look, I'm sorry, but I need to do this and. I love you, and we can talk about this later when I'm strong enough to make those Endbringer thingies go away and never, ever come back."

I pulled the codices free from the atoms of their hosts' spines and made them slip between the gaps in their molecules to easily phase-out of the thinner layers of body tissue. Nightcrawler, Magick, and... I wanna say Eye-Boy? They were all surprised when the codices when the symbiote codices flew out of their mouths, but they didn't even seem uncomfortable so now there was really no reason why I couldn't take as many codices as I wanted since I could do it without hurting anyone now.

The codices flew to my outstretched hand and I crushed them in my palm to absorb them and... Sweet Mjolnir, it felt even better than Archangels. It was different, but that was becuase there were three of them I think. There was some kind of weird, pseudo-demonic energy that came with Nightcrawler's powers and memories... There were a lot of circus memories, a lot of Chruch memories, and something about being a pirate. Magick's was far more... Demonic power, but different from the Hell-Mark or my Ghost Rider powers, a different kind, a different flavor, something... other. Arcane knowledge flowed into my mind, inherited from the sorcerer she usurped in Limbo and learned from Stange... And Eye-Boy(I was right about the name.)

I could see the Cosmos! Every direction at once, for thousands of miles. The colors were richer and more vibrant and I think I could see more of them. Ultraviolet, infrared, seeing things while also seeing through them. Seeing people's emotions clouding about them and the connections between them... Taylor and Grace were upset, I'd have to make it up to them later... But I could also see the magic flowing through the world. Psychic auras and the electromagnetic spectrum and I could count the individual grains of sand on a sand bar hundreds of miles away from the Krakoan shore.

It was amazing!

I vanished with a bamf, using Nightcrawler's powers to travel to a dock on the side shore of the island, under come cliffs that were dominated by a white building, a black building, and a red building. A ship was just coming in, with scared but optimistic people coming off of it under the guide of a few people. Including Shadowcat in a red pirate outfit complete with a cutlass and nice hat and Lockheed sitting on her shoulder like a parrot. There was probably a cool story here, I'd have to come back and ask about it later.

But I wasn't here for Shadowcat. I was here for the man next to her. Blue eyes and brown hair... It was actually kind of weird to see Iceman when he wasn't frozen. He had a codex, from Beast and Archangel's memories at the same time as there's and with the same modifications. Iceman was an Omega Level mutant, and I didn't... Apocalypse tricked me into drinking Omega-Level Mutant Blood, so I had Omega Level powers, but this would be my first Omega Level Codex and I didn't know how that'd affect me. I was only supposed to get a fraction of a symbiote's raw power, but a symbiote that had fully absorbed and adapted to an Omega Level Mutant? I mean, divide infinity by a billion and you get a billion infinities.

People were starring at me now. Nothing to do but get it done. Grip, untangle, phase, pluck! Iceman yelped in surprise as the codex slide loose and jumped from his mouth to my hand. I consumed the portion of Living Abyss and...

Cold! This time it was cold. Not bad cold, it still felt amazing, but... I didn't see any of his memories, not exactly, but I saw a vision... A vision of the Earth frozen solid with the knowledge that this was something I could do if I wanted.

I bamfed away again, this time landing in a field where a bunch of teenagers were hanging out. A couple of them saw me and started running with a couple yelling "Oh shit she's bigger!" and "Fuck she can teleport!" at the same time but I was focused on five young adults in particular. Grip, untangle, phase, pluck, five codices.

After the last couple, these ones were kind of a letdown. Minor powers and mostly normal teen mutant skills and life experiences. Each codex amounted to a tiny bit of raw power but every little bit helps.

The next bamf took me to a hospital room. A black woman with long white hair was sleeping in a hospital bed. Storm was sick? And they weren't able o fix her? With my new super-vision, I could see the subtle clues that she'd been here for a while now.

When I took her Codex, I felt lightning course through my veins, a cool soothing rain on my skin, and gale-force winds flowing through my hair. Feeling the life-force of the whole planet and everything on it and a million different experiences and... Okay, there was one mutant who was a God. Weird bloodline magic stuff mixed with suddenly being worshiped by an entire country, how was I supposed to know she was being literal?

I also realized why she was in the hospital. she'd been infected with some kind of machine virus that was gonna kill her in a way she couldn't come back from. Not Krakoa's way and not any other way she knew of and they didn't know how to cure it even with all of their healers.

From what I knew, Storm was good people. It'd be bad for everyone if she died. I don't know what was gonna happen to her in some hypothetical universe where I never came along, but I was a decently strong technopath, I literally just got Godlike power to manipulate atoms and bend reality at the quantum level, and I just sucked up something with a full recording of her biology so...

What kind of hero would I be if I left without helping her?

First I took a second to sense every bit of microscopic machinery in her and make sure that it was all the virus, and then I turned every last machine-virus off and once they were good and deactivate I grabbed the individual atoms of each virus's molecular structure and pulled them apart. Then I quantum manipulated the pieces into elements that wouldn't hurt her.

Exodus had healing powers and Angel had them too when he had the Life seed, but I didn't know how Exodus's healing powers worked and I didn't know if I could use the Life Seed ones if I only had Life Seed energy, not the Seed itself, so not wanting to risk hurting her more I bamfed out with the thing actively killing her taken away. Worst case scenario I could tap Exodus for a few seconds to absorb the memory of how his more complicated powers worked and come back later.

There were only two codices left on Krakoa, and luckily they were right next to each other. Cyclops and Jean Grey... I think I was interrupting a date, which made me happy that one of my OTPs was confirmed but also kind of awkward.

I decided to get this out of the way nice and fast like so Grip, untangle, phase, pluck! Last two codices and, more psychic power and eye-lasers... wow. This is... complicated. Really freaking complicated and...

"When were you a hulk!?" I shouted... I wasn't sure which one I was asking but... there were embers in the codex. Psychic power and life and fire... Phoenix! It was just traces, but both of them had been Phoenix after getting their symbiotes. It was only a tiny, tiny bit of phoenix fire, just a flavoring compared to the kind of cosmic power I'd already had, but it was making their memories jumble up and... I wasn't just getting more psychic power and JEan's experiences. I wasn't just getting Scott's optic beams. Their symbiotes had adapted... I already kind of had the sub-minds, but now I had more. And Scott's symbiote could see in every direction, which I could kind of already do, and fire energy from every part and...It was like every power I had was getting millions of times more powerful. I'd started adapting to the few bits I hadn't gotten to yet when I'd taken Angel and Colossus codex, the bits of Gabby that weren't in Deadpool and Laura and Logan, whatever useful traits were int he normal human DNA and the tiny, tiny bit from Jorogumo, and the Human Torch powers that the Dreadface symbiote had absorbed but his codex had never been able to adapt to.

The tiny embers of Phoenix Fire were reacting to those powers and... Cyclop's energy powers were reacting to everything, magnifying it hundreds, thousands, millions of times over and making everything bleed together.

I bamfed out again, a hundred miles up and a hundred east, over the open sea, and then I had to vent a crapload of energy out in the form a dragon made of psychic plasma. I don't even know how I did it, but after that, I had to use weather control and ice-man powers to make sure that I didn't damage the atmosphere. But after a few seconds, I was used to the power...

And I was still unsatisfied. I wanted more. I needed more.

AN: The Storm bit is based on a hanging plot thread from the comics... There's probably a reason in-universe that no-one has tried this yet but I don't know it. I hope it's not too fix-ficy, but I figured that I'd take the opportunity to show that Ashley might be power-drunk, riding the high of a codex addiction, and being influenced by someone, but she's not so far gone just yet.

Ashley's comment about being wrong about the number of codices on the Island is becuase I made a mistake. Either I only counted Logan once despite his having three codices or I got the number of extras from the Mutant School who were in Venomized wrong.

(And no, the age up isn't permanent and she's still mentally a child.)