Snuggles The Symbiote

An escape from the Birdcage.

Something like that hadn't happened... Ever. At least, not in anyone's living memory. There'd been prison escapes, obviously, but... The Birdcage was supposed to be inescapable, a prison suspended in a hollowed-out mountain, surrounded by vacuum, rigged with so many traps that would kill anyone who tried to escape, accessible only by a one-way elevator... There were even rumors that it was actually in a pocket reality or shrunk down or something so that even if someone did get out of it alive, they'd be in no way a threat to anyone.

Naturally, while we waited to be called into the meeting to be informed of what we needed to know, the other Wards and I were somber... Well, mostly somber.

Ashley was instead modeling a robe of some kind that she'd made from her symbiote. It looked to be made of gold silk and decorated with dark blue spiders forming pattern on the bottom half as well as the sleeves, which went down to her knees. The robe was held together with a black and gold sash that tied rather back into an absolutely ridiculously large bow. She had let her hair down so that it hung behind her down to her shoulders, and she'd replaced her shoes with wooden sandals and white two-toed socks.

"This is a furisode," she said while posing. "It's a formal dressing robe that girls and unmarried women in Japan would wear. During the trip, I found out that my Mommy was Japanese so I'm trying to reconnect back to my roots a bit. This is way too formal for casual wear, but like, just playing around with costumes?" She gave a cheesy smile.

She'd been doing this ever since we got back to HQ to wait. She'd started with ditching her black unitard and turning her tennis shoes into cowboy boots and, for some reason, putting a three-headed dog pattern on her skirt. Then she'd switched to a backless dress, that she'd immediately dismissed as being 'too grown-up' and gone for a tuxedo instead. Then an exact duplicate of Vista's costume, an exact duplicate of Spider-Man's costume, and something plus and spider-themed that she called a Kigurumi that I couldn't decide whether it was adorable or horrifying.

"Ashley, sweety, maybe... Look, someone escaped from the Birdcage. This is very, very serious. Could you..." I didn't want to discourage her, she'd had a therapy session yesterday, and ever since it seemed she'd been happier than she'd been since Doctor Strange knocked the sense back into her.

She looked me right in the eye... It said something that I was already used to her eyes being red instead of green.

"Taylor," she began in a very serious affectation, "for you, the day a supervillain escaped a supposedly inescapable maximum security super-prison designed to hold the worst of the worst of supervillains is the most important day of your life. For me, this is Tuesday... Wait, is today Tuesday?" Her tone immediately became confused and childish. "What day is this?"

"...Was that a reference to something?" Clockblocker asked. "It sounds like a reference to something."

"I don't even freakin' know," Ashley admitted. "I've had random pop culture quotes and stuff popping in and out of my head ever since Mister Snuggles stole Deadpool and Ms. Marvel's codices... M'just glad it hasn't happened during anything important so far."

There was a brief moment of silence.

"Also, does anyone know what dragon balls are? Gathering them keeps popping into my head as a solution to problems but trying to sort through my stolen memories all I can put together is that it's an anime thing and I was never really into anime."

"The little yellow box says that you gather seven of them and that lets you call up a dragon who grants you a wish," Grace supplied. "He started explaining the second you asked and... Oh... Okay, apparently there's a lot of rules and lore and I am not repeating all of that... Okay, little box, what did you do, memorize the wiki?"

"...Little yellow box?" Vista asked.

"I'm being haunted by the ghost of someone I murdered," Grace replied matter of factory. "He's giving me advice in the form of a little yellow box that only I can see and that totally isn't a comic book caption box... He told me to add that last bit."

Everyone got up and moved away from Grace after that. Except for Ashley.

"Anyway," my foster sister continued, "Why does it matter if this Marcus guy escaped. He got beat once and he'll get beaten again."

"Marquis was a pretty big deal," Aegis began lecturing. "Ten years ago, the city was worse than it is now and Marquis ran a good chunk of all the crime in the city. It was a toss-up between him and All-Father on who ran the city. He only got beaten in the first place because the Brockton Bay Brigaid took him by surprise and attacked him in his own home."

"And I don't know why," I added, "but the higher-ups think he's coming back here and that he might attack us specifically," I gestured to more or less everyone in the room. All of the Wards.

"We have a Thor," Ashley said with a gesture to Gallant, who reflexively clutched his cane. "If he thinks coming after us is a good idea, then he's stupider than a horror movie about The Banana Splits... By the way, Dean," she said changing subjects on a dime, "I've been meaning to ask, do you hear my prayers at night?"

"...No, but... Please don't pray to me." Dean seemed incredibly uncomfortable all of a sudden.

"And if he gets here after my powers get unsealed," Ashley continued, pivoting back to the subject at hand, "and he tries to hurt me... Or hurt someone else while I'm there..." She punched her own palm. "He won't be able to have kids anymore."

Sometimes, I think that Ashley was getting too dependent on punching people in the dick to win fights.

"But seriously," Ashley finished, "this kind of thing happens all the time back home. I'm immortal, and most of us have enhanced toughness or regeneration, it's gonna fine." No one was convinced by her confidence. "I mean, I've already died and come back once already." Ashley's eyes slowly widened. "Actually... Actually, I've died and come back twice."

I blinked. "What?"

"When I was about two or three," Ashley explained slowly... "It's actually really vague in my memories, I'd almost completely forgot about... there was sort of a... blip. A bunch of people died all of a sudden, but then a little bit later they all came back to life. It was seemingly random, fifty-fifty odds, like a coin flip. Little three year old me got tails. I died, then I wasn't dead. Weird stuff like that happens all the time and I was so little, but... Yeah. Getting my organs shredded into meat confetti was the second time I died."

"How the shit does something like that even happen!?" Vista asked, and I agreed with her tone perfectly.

"Language please," Grace and Aegis chastised simultaneously.

"Okay, so... I only know this becuase of all the memories I stole," Ashley admitted sheepishly. "There's this guy... Sorry, I think I need a visual aid for this." she turned her skin purple for some reason and her clothing into some kind of blue and gold armor. On her hand was a big jewel-encrusted gauntlet.

"Thanos. The Mad Titan," Ashley explained with great gravitas. "A Mutant Eternal with Godlike magical and cosmic powers who is obsessively in love with Death... Like, not the concept of death, or the like, but like... The actual Grim Reaper. Her. The Death. But she's not into him, so she told him some nonsense about how there were too many people and they could only be together if he killed a whole bunch of people... so he created the Infinity Gauntlet and began looking for the Infinity Gems. Or the Stones of Infinity, if you prefer."

She held up her own gauntleted fist, which I suppose was a mock-up of this Infinity Gauntlet. "Space. Time. Soul. Mind. Power. Reality. Each Gem grants powers of and over the concepts it embodies." Ashley tapped one of the jewels on her mock-up as she listed off the names. "And they form a network, where mastery of one concept feeds into and improves mastery of another, in addition to the Power Gem enhancing the powers of all the others and the other five all enhancing the Reality Gem and vice-versa as innate functions of those specific gems. With all six them combined and focused by the Gauntlet, you become an Omnipotent Reality Warper. Thanos got all of the gems, and..."

Ashley snapped her gauntleted fingers, the sound was loud and somehow echoed through the room. "Fifty percent of all living beings in the entire universe, Trillions of Trillions, randomly selected, dropped dead in part so Thanos could be with Death and in part of a mere, petty test of the completed Gauntlet's power. But, The Avengers, and Adam Warlock, The Silver Surfer, they were there. They managed to trick Thanos into projecting his consciousness out and merging with the universe, then stole the Gauntlet off of his unconscious body, used it to fix everything, and then split the gems up among various people in hopes that they'd never be used again... Didn't really end up working out that way, but that's a story for another time. And that's how I died and came back the first time."

Kid Win was the first one to speak up. "How can you talk so casually about something like that?"

Ashley shrugged. "It happened when I was super little and everything turned out alright. I wouldn't know about it at all if it wasn't for my little rampage." She shrugged again. "You know, that was also around the time my powers kicked in..." In an instant, Ashley was back to her normal appearance and normal outfit. Her eyes widened, and then her face twisted into an ugly scowl of rage that seemed wrong and repulsive and inhuman on her normally cute face. "Thanos just ended up on the top of my shit list. Right next to Sinister."

Ashley's tone was dangerously close to how she sounded right before she went on her rampage. Grace did not call her on her language.

I was about to offer her a hug and suggest bringing this up the next time she goes to therapy, but then my phone went off, as did everyone else's

An alert. We were being called to the biggest meeting room in the building for the briefing.