AMENDS IN THE ABYSS: THE INFERNAL ATONEMENT OF SCOTT SUMMERS

CIRCLE FOUR, GREED: AVARICE, AURICONS, AND MARICONS

What Scott felt next was not the sensation of being horribly roasted alive, but rather that of being slipped into something very snug and mildly toasty. The sound of something slamming issued very distantly in his mind as the voice of his firstborn took over once again.

You've been doing very well so far, Dad, assured Nathan Christopher again, his image beginning to become etched out in a ceiling before Cyke's eyes that was a bit too close to his face for his liking. Apart from a very faint, deep yellow light from off to the side, Scott could make out nothing in the way of his surroundings. The somewhat of a cubby into which he was crammed now felt even more constricting than the crater slot into which he was slammed at the beginning of Gluttony. What was this one all about?

Mom and I both want you to get through all of these layers of Hell, so we can all be together again. I know you may be feeling a bit winded by now, but you have to keep going.

I…I understand, Chris. Scott managed the thoughts as calmly as he could, even though the uncertainty of his surroundings gave him pause. And I am forever grateful to you and Madelyne for your helping me get this far as well. …I wish there were something I could do to help her out, too.

You can, Dad. …Just…you can talk to her, right now, if you'd like. Let her know how you feel. Tell her how much you want to meet again too, as she wants the same.

Scott cleared his mind and allowed himself a brief reprieve from all the undulating anxiety as he gathered his thoughts. Madelyne, he sent out to her mentally, I cannot thank you enough for your help, and your patience in light of all I am going through. I also cannot say how incredibly, eternally sorry I am for hurting you so long ago. If I could liquidate my soul to go back and erase all the pain I caused you, and through this, purchase for you a life free from the torments you had endured, I would do it in an instant. I said on Earth that there was no possible way that I could atone, make up for what I did to you…and to our son. I said that there was nothing I could do for either of you. It is my most fervent prayer now that what I am undergoing at present would begin to begin to set things right.

I want you to know that, should I have the privilege…no, the blessing…of ever even seeing you again…I will gladly, joyfully serve you, be bound in eternal servitude to you, even if you will not accept me again as the man in your life. It would be an honor for me to serve you for all time, to begin to compensate for the unthinkable hurt I had caused you.

I want you to know above all that I love you, so overwhelmingly much, and that I will never, ever cease loving you…even if I never see you again, which I pray will not be the case.

I want so excruciatingly badly for the three of us to be a family again. The family that you, me, and Christopher created was the freest and purest experience I had ever known, and my life's greatest accomplishment. I will always rue that my actions caused it all to fall apart, far too soon.

Scott then took a deep, wavering breath and stared at the uberclose ceiling before his nose as the space of about three minutes passed.

That was very beautifully put, Dad. Where she is right now, in her own place of afterlife crisis…Mom just heard it too, and she wanted to let you know that she very much appreciates your words.

That's…that's wonderful to hear, Christopher.

Yeah… She wanted you to know, too, that she really wants to see you as well, when the both of you make it through this.

Thank; thank GOD.

I of course want to see the both of you too…

Of course.

Another long pause.

Can you…can you tell me what's to come next, Chris?

…Ah, yes. Where you are now is a region where…value is placed, on the prettiest yet pettiest of things. Amassment of the matters not important in life…acquisition of the items that stand as the opposite of the "greatest accomplishments" in life that you have ever known, as you mentioned the term a few minutes ago…that's the name of the game in this Circle. The key here, as with the two previous places, is to resist whatever temptations come your way, regarding the need to hoard or waste what does not really count…but in this place especially, you will be paying the PRICE…in more ways than one…should you "sell out" regarding your soul. Be careful, Father.

The Clops took a second to take this all in. The small cleft in some kind of rock in which he was hemmed felt ever warmer for a few instants, and in that time he became severely fearful.

Then:

"Wait!"

A tense pause, as he could feel some kind of gaze upon him, lasering in on his position more than the most intense optic blast despite the fact that he could not yet register who it was watching.

"Yeah…he's still breathing in there. Get him out!"

Scott's eyes flickered open just as he felt rough hands managing his figure at the behest of a voice that was all too familiar. It was an inflection that belonged to a fine lady with whom he spent far too much time at a very close proximity.

And as the aforesaid shaky hands of nervous handlers kept conducting the Clops more awkwardly out of a chamber far too cozy for comfort, and then started hastily wiping what must have been ashes from his torso and limbs, he assessed in turn the grime and corruption that had rubbed off from the aforesaid lady and had stuck to him indelibly.

"Emma," Scott managed finally, measuring the woman before him prior to taking stock of his surroundings in this new Circle. The amber empress of immorality was decked out in the same gold and white semi-silken, semi-flesh getup in which she was attired during the Phoenix Five debacle, which by this point Cyclops had hoped was an atrocity that he could put behind himself permanently, especially given the threats and horrors of the last Circle.

Expecting still the beaky visor atop his head, as well as the coal-and-crimson duds from his own stint during that cruel crossover, Scott reached up to his noggin with a hand…

…and found now only the old red-with-gray-bordered optic filter that he wore for years before that whole Avengers-clashing altercation; checking himself out even more thoroughly, he discovered he was indeed again in the navy-blue-with-gold-trim outfit which he wore during the Astonishing Era as formulated by the Governor of Wheedington, about five to ten years ago our time at this writing.

"Well, Scott," began Emma, as she slapped a pallid palm against Summers's chest a few times herself, in a belated effort of her own to relieve him of some more soot, "the interns and I, we never would have guessed that it was really you in there. Good thing we heard you coughing; else you would have become our next auricon."

"Your next what?"

"Oh…I guess I'll have to..." Emma took a second to shake her head most condescendingly, taking in the fact that this man had to be filled in on the situation. In this span Scott started to take stock of the environs all around, specifically of the overly ornate accoutrements adorning this place which for a good number of years in semi-exile he used to call home.

It was none other than the splashed-down Asteroid M, the unusual asylum on the American West Coast known to mutants as Utopia.

But looking upon all the isle's spires and other superstructures, Scott could not recall the place ever looking quite so…gold and gaudy. "What have you done with the place, Emma?" escaped from his lips before he could debate whether to say it, or even before the overarching mindset resurfaced that he was no longer on Earth but in a much more Infernal kind of atmosphere—where reigned reflections of places in one's existence that were altered into the worst sort of distortions.

The beauteous yet baneful blonde looked upon her once-lover anew. "Coveting and converting, my good man," came her cryptic reply. "Coveting and converting."

Somewhere nearby, Scott could hear the unmistakable energy signature of a certain cruel Master of Magnetism, and he set himself a bit more on guard. Cyke could swear he heard the maniacal goings-on of the Master as well.

"Work harder at the citadels, my interns! This land of mine must be farmed for all it is worth. And it will take all of your energies...as well as those of the X-troops coming back from their most recent moneymaking missions. For certain we will require the efforts of the latter; after all, we cannot spell 'extension' without 'X,' now, can we?"

Emma looked over to Magneto as he ranted, then snickered. "You see, down here…people such as your oldest foe Magneto and myself—not to mention other, slightly more obscure mutants, such as the very selfish Von Strucker Fenris twins—we all can chase some of what were, in life, our wildest dreams. You always knew damn well that I, for one, came from money…and I lost out on most of that money when I struck out and rebelled against my clan in order to seek other kinds of fortune in my youth.

"That venture paid off for a while…but at times I felt the squeeze, and it was never pleasant when it visited me.

Emma continued her spiel as she strolled past a golden statue of a young woman whose facial features resembled her own. Scott could swear he recalled that this old flame of his had some siblings…

"See, like my sister Adrienne here," the once-White Regent went on, "I had to beg her for funds when I was strapped while in charge of Generation X back in the 1990s…put me and my students in a VERY comfortable position, and I had to end up shooting my sis, myself, in the end.

"I resolved after that time that I would NEVER be placed in that kind of pickle again, Scott. And whether it was in life, or here and now in the hereafter, I'm still decided on evading that fate. So here, my eyes have constantly been on that prize of self-reliance…no matter what the cost."

Cyclops gandered all around him, took note of several more statues in the likenesses of certain individuals he had encountered long ago…and whom, as far as he knew, had been long deceased by the time of his own passing. Devlin Greystone, a crazed kind of terrorist from some alternate future, who was destroyed in an aircraft at the same time Scott's brother Alex was caught in the same explosion, but sent into an alternate Earth as captured in the series Mutant X…Bastion, a glorified Sentinel who tried to wipe out mutants most robotically on a worldwide scale on more than one occasion…

Scott was still staring very intently at all these petrified personages when Miss Frost suddenly, abruptly pulled him away. As the man's gaze swept to reach the eyes of Emma once more, he couldn't help but notice several small printouts all over the floor, each of which had a huge six-letter word in white printed brazely against a red rectangular background.

"Ahh," said the wily White woman, grinning fiendishly upon Scott's acknowledgment of the strewn papers, "you see the whole picture now. What you are presently beholding are the host of notices of payment for the invoices we've sent out to our one and only, best client.

"See, for so long in this place in eternity, we've been working with the entity which you, perhaps, would be the greatest threat to the integrity of our outfit. All of us…Magneto, myself, the Struckers…all this time down here, we've been in league with none other than the Machine itself."

Scott's enormously-frazzled brow crinkled at this. "I don't understand."

"The ones who made us from beyond, Scott. The authorial, editorial bastards who brought us all into being. They worked out a deal with us down here; it's perfect, especially because there's no better place for it. I mean, where better than the Fourth Circle…to break the Fourth Wall, right?

"What we're doing in this place is nothing more than pursuing the single greatest passions of our lives: aggregation and accumulation. I've always wanted more and more, of the most material things. So, certainly, have the Struckers, in their own spoiled wealth…and Erik, or Max, or whatever the hell 'real name' Magneto uses now anymore…he always wanted so much more, but in slightly less than currency terms, given that it was really land he coveted, such as Asteroid M, or Avalon/Providence, or any of those other landforms which he always grabbed for while on his mortal coil.

"In order to get what we covet from the Machine, what we have to do is convert. Simply put, we're taking the bodies and souls of the dearly departed from our universe, encasing them in gold as collectible figures, and selling them off. The commissions we get from these pieces of Mutant Meat Merchandise line our pockets, and help us get more and more stuff as we go. As I said before, Scott…

"I won't allow myself to be put in that desperate position I was in with Adrienne again. And if I have to sell my soul…" And then the woman walked up to the statue of her own sister and knocked on one of the shoulders, "…or hers, to secure myself in my little fixation, then I'll do those things."

Scott's countenance crawled with incredulity. "And where do I come in, in all of this?" He figured his soul was relevant somewhere in the picture here, as he would not have been sent here otherwise.

"Well, one other way in which we're all profiting down here, in our myriad transactions with the Machine, is through the endless stream of episodes and titles that the X-Franchise has generated, and continues to generate, throughout the eons. You see, unlike the more…finite mediums, such as those of the film or the regular book, the comic book series…doesn't exactly have to end. Especially with an angle such as ours…in which we're all mutants, which means change, which means constant evolution and growth growth growth…all of us can just keep pumping out adventures into infinity, and lots of readers and other consumers out there will never, ever get tired of it.

"Where you come in is that you go out for us and, as the late John Proudstar would say, 'punch a few heads for Xavier'…(God, Proudstar…we're gonna get a really ace deal on that golden goodbody, by the way)…anyway, you go out and fight evil, it gets posted and published as exploits for Issues 700 through 1700 of Uncanny X-Men—Volume 26, of course. And ALL the spinoffs and splinter titles from there…my GOD.

"We've gone from Uncanny to Astonishing to Amazing…gone past using adjectives in front of the franchise into adverbs and prepositions. The most fun ones, really, have been the interjections. I'm telling you, Scott, 'Shit! The X-Men' and 'Damn! The X-Men' were some of the best runs we've put out in a long, long epoch or two down here.

"But once a hero we're in control of doesn't want to do it anymore…we retire them…and they share the fate of those you know have been long dead. See, I've even lost track of you down here all this time, in my bid to beg, borrow, and steal for as much stuff as I can amass in this Circle. When the Machine transactional interns and I found you down here just now, we'd thought you had opted for the retirement route. Thought you'd wanted to become an icon in gold, for sale to Marvel…an auric icon, or 'auricon' as we call them most jauntily.

"If it turns out, though, that you want to jump back into the fray…go right ahead. I'm sure that 'Crap! The X-Men' could use a good leader in there…"

"Fuck the X-Men."

Emma paused at Scott's reply. "No…Nightcrawler's already on that title, running that group."

"I'm not talking about being in one of your 'interjection' Machine titles, Emma. I am not down here to go around in circles, chasing that 'dream' any longer. There's something much, MUCH greater than adventure—or if you could believe it, profit—which I'm pursuing down here."

The White One, with her hair of glimmering greed-glutting gold (which had matched the petty-acquisition platinum of Magneto's own mane, to balance matters out between the genders here), she just looked back at the Clops in utter incomprehension at this.

"Yes, of course you wouldn't understand, Emma. I wouldn't take you as one to do so…"

"You know, you're not even worth encasing in gold, Scott. You would make a maricon (as the epithet goes in Spanish) of an auricon. No way would you stack up to the Wolverine Figurine that we hawked off a few years back…you would never fetch any kind of sum like that.

"In fact, sooner than make you into a sellable icon, I'd sell off my prized possession: the corpse-stuffed-in-gold-straw which I've made of Age-of-Apocalypse Jean Grey. She's my own personal effigy…which I appropriately call Effin' Jean. Whenever I feel a bit hollow in all my pursuits down here…I just light her up…and it's so wonderful, because instead of her most magnificent, fiery incarnation, in which she burns again only to live again, and burns again only to live again, and burns again only to live again…here, she lives again only to BURN AGAIN, and lives again only to BURN AGAIN, and lives again only to BURN AGAIN…which perhaps, in fact, I could go and make also out of y…"

Emma became so caught up in her mania here that she closed her eyes tightly in her avaricious ecstasy, not noticing that Scott had already put a decent distance between himself and her person in the last several seconds. "Scott?"

The man now stood next to a gigantic tapestry, standing fifty feet tall, which collected the #1 Issue covers of every X-Title ever. In Cyclops's right hand was the chisel with which Andreas Strucker had carved the Greystone auricon.

"I'm through with being part of any of this, Emma," the man said with stoic conviction. "I'm not adventuring anymore, not to line your pockets, or Erik/Max's, or anyone's in the Machine.

"You know…a lot of these Circles down here…they feature vices that reflect the deadly sins. Lust, Gluttony, Greed…well, you know what? From what I remember of The Divine Comedy, there was at least one deadly sin not captured in a Circle of Hell…something of which I might have been found guilty of late…

"…SLOTH." Scott turned the chisel over and over in his hand, as Emma took a step forward. "I'm really lazy anymore, in my old age, Emma. I'm just not feeling up to…punching heads for anyone, anymore. So I'm out."

Emma quickened her steps and started to place her fingers to her temples, in a vain attempt to subjugate the Summers's mind, but he would abscond far out of range before she could reach him. The Greed and Gluttony and all the other gloomy, glum G words got the man down, so he decided to embrace other, giddier and goofier G's as he thrust the chisel into the tapestry next to him.

The word "Sloth" sped through his mind once more as he jumped at the tapestry and started raking down the length of it with the tool as he fell, Scott invoking the iconic quote and imitating the iconic act near the end of a Mid-Eighties cinematic youth's epic which was uttered by a deformed hero with the same name as the lazy vice:

"HEEYYYYYYYYY YOOOOOUUUUU GUUUUUYYYYYYSSSSSS!"

And here, the "Guys" in mind for whom Scott called were none other, of course, than the beloved wife and son whom he was endeavoring so desperately to reach, in another several Circles below. As the man disappeared into a small, dark fissure just beneath the bottom of the tapestry, Emma sighed and mused to herself.

"You want to talk deadly sins, Scott…

"You're headed right for what might be the most dangerous of them all."

TO BE CONTINUED