LAND GRAFTS AND FRACTION REDUCTIONS
By Quillon42
CHAPTER TWO
Outside of this peculiar inside of a remote, diminutive dimension, that rascally reality-tripping rugcutter known as Spiral was weary with worry regarding whatever had happened to Miss Madelyne—the Main Sister who called all the shots. Did she achieve the positioning with the Phoenix Force, an end towards which the entire alliance had endeavored? Was she lost to the no-persons-land of utter nonexistence once more?
The sleek swordswoman flexed onto tiptoe, tapping most rhythmically to try and figure the plane onto which her mistress had moseyed off. Another several score of syncopated steps and she would be able to situate her Queen's locale, then shove off towards it.
FSASSSHHHHH
"Whoa there!"
It was all Mads could do to shake her former spouse off her ankles. In her mind the pictures of the past had faded somewhat, despite all her years of mooning the memories. Perhaps she just selectively allowed it to slip from her brain banks, the fact that Scott could become a kinky effer when one came down to it.
So when she very suggestively hinted to Hubby that she wished for him to kiss her clothed feet, upon pain of punishing blasts—she was a bit more than taken aback to see the Summers slide right into her, baseball style, and lather her leathered legs with a passion-starved tongue (all his escapades with Emma were always so shallow and unfulfilling, compared to those with Miss Pryor). It was enough for the lady to FSASSSHHHHHH off an optic blast into the fuchsia far reaches of this tiny dimension, in spite of herself.
Madelyne found herself almost feeling sorry for Scotty as the man continued to smother her toes with his saliva. She was taken aback when he started reaching up for the riding crop she thought she had so well hidden in the back of her bondagey costume.
"Jesus…Scott!" She just managed to swat the reaching man's hand down.
"I knew it was you, Madelyne…that it was you with the mask on, and coming on like Emma, the other night. …At least I knew, in good time."
Cyke was referencing an encounter with his first spouse a few issues previous, wherein a woman who was apparently Emma, with her face covered in black leather, had lured the man into a tryst in the middle of a moment of high mutant tension. It wasn't actually until the woman had him within her that it came to him to it was in fact Pryor and not Frost—and then when he came in turn, the realization of the reunion made him shudder all the more with gratification.
And now this fearless leader was forlorn and lecherous for this lady once more, she at first startled, then laughingly still trying to shake her man off as he grabbed a lash from her costume and wrapped it around his throat…
"Sss…
"…SsscOTTTT!"
…and this was just at this mirthful moment that Miss Rita Wayward Spiral came tap-tap-tapping on into their dimension.
The dancer's steely eyes locked with those of her rose-cheeked ringleader for a second, the latter looking shocked and off-guard for an offbeat.
Then Madelyne, tightening the lash-leash around her ex's neck and throwing her arms akimbo, she knowing that it would be both her and Slim's necks if she were caught cavorting with the enemy…
"'CAUSE I MAY BE BAD, BUUUT I'M PERFECTLY GOOOOOD AT IT!
"X IN THE AIR, I DON'T CARE I LIKE THE SOOOOUUUND OF IT!
"STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES BUT MUZZLES AND MASKS EX-CITE-MEEEEEE!"
Mads was again taken a bit aback as Scott was really getting into his Perez Hilton role of the man-dog at her feet, the mutant leader flopping around on the ground all too excitedly to play his part as his Queen strutted all about the alternate area. Whatever, she figured, if it worked.
Indeed, at the display of spontaneous sadomasochistic showwomanship coming from her crimson chieftain, Spiral could only cock her head sideways and stare askance for a spell…
…then she shrugged her shoulders, spun about and sparked out of existence once again.
Hushing back to an alternative main Machine Earth, the dancer to her fellow diva Deathstrike:
"Sister Madelyne's really got Scott on the ropes; let's leave her to her delicious little diversions."
To this Yuriko Oyama sniffed noncommittally, then nodded as the two sisters leapt back into their fray against the Xers.
Back in the blush byways of the other, smaller world: Scott grasping once more for his old lover's arms…
"Rihanna doesn't say 'X in the air,' babe…"
"I know, you effing fool." Then throwing herself down on top of Scott:
"It's all because the 'X' you're referring to…well…that's not in the air here, but really all on the ground…"
The two laughed into each other's throats as each found the other's tongue once again, this time on the floor of this puce paradise.
Out in the primary planet that figured into each reality of the Machine's multiverse—this particular reality a bit left of the 616 center—another up-close-and-personal interaction was about to occur…although this one wasn't going to be quite as chummy.
Its level of viciousness, in fact, was one to take aback both the Dazzler as well as the Douche who served as the X's chief crux for far, undeservingly too long.
Said Douche, gritting bitterly and gutturally under his breath: "I don't like it, Ali. Not one little bit."
The blaring blonde, in turn: "I know, Logan. I've followed the Machine's Bullpenshit to the letter for decades now…but the two of us going dutch in defacing the old Betsy…? It doesn't matter if she's Sisterhood—there's got to be another way."
Deep within, Alison knew that the people on the other side of the fourth wall shared her sentiments. For she and the hairy-ass Howlett to tag team their lovely lavender old-school partner with brawl and blast, respectively, would be to act in the worst kind of concert since the time Miss Blaire did backup keyboards for Lila Cheney in the Machine's 214th Uncanny outing.
Each now looked across to the orchid-clad opponent meters away, she seemingly waiting for the clash to commence. However, the truth was that Betsy's attention was really turned inward, as the lady underwent a similar discussion of disquietude with, in this reality that the author cooked up anyway, a female presence all too familiar.
On the astral plane: "Kwannon, I really don't want to do this."
(NB: It's unclear, at least according to the sources this author checked, as to the identity of the opponent spirit within Psylocke, on the astral plane…here, in any case, it's Kwannon, for convenience of the narrative and to back up this author's invective against the Machine).
The shadow spirit nodded, she whose self had been squelched consummately by the machinations of 616. "Believe me, Betsy, I want a fight alright…
"But you're the last lady with whom I would ever throw down. In fact, with you I'd rather play co-op, rather than deathmatch. There are tons of targets out there, after all, which are ripe for my rage…such that there's enough to go around between the both of us."
"And what better way for us to bond all the more," said Elisabeth, finishing her Japanese soulmate's thoughts, "than to take out all of that trash together?"
Kwannon, owning her Asian face once again here in the psychic plane, flashed a naughty smile at Betsy, who was correctly back in her Caucasian form. And these ladies would each carry the comfort of this psychic/corporeal consistency back into the physical world as the white, wondrous Elisabeth and the golden, glorious Kwannon tripped triumphantly out of the astral and into the Earthen.
Within the far more diminutive and damask dimension, though, a pair whose occupants were not long ago at odds…each was now smothering the other with uninhibited affections, the likes of which neither had known so tenderly for so long.
With sincere ardor, the Queen drank in Scott's smooches, and the lady returned the favor more than readily. She knew that her erstwhile spouse had hungered for her more than any other girl—even the goody-shit-shoes herself, from whom the manuscript of Madelyne had been photocopied.
Mad pushed the thoughts of that mood-murdering Marvel Girl aside, in any case, and pulled Slim closer now, the two casting aside their differences to tryst most tightly and triumphantly. As much as she might have superficially reminded the man of his first love, her wiles would make him jettison from his memory forever that four letter cuss beginning with J.
"Madelyne," said Scott now, cuddled in the crook of his ex's arm, "I'm so…I'm so sorry for everything. I was such an ass…such a scumfuck to do what I did. All I ever wanted, all these years, was a chance…a chance to make it all up to you. A chance to set things right."
The lady rubbed the top of the man's back gently, caringly. "…It's alright, Scott. The fact is…after all this time…I'm happy now."
The man glanced up shakily from his place in her arms.
She looked down at him. "I'm just so glad that Fate brought us back together. I want everything to be as it was before."
"So do I, Maddy. You know, I'll tell you…back in Manhattan, when Hell was almost unleashed on Earth…I would honestly, really give my soul to have been in your place, and for you in turn to have been safe and sound. I'm so sorry that you had to go through that."
Madelyne could only look down again, meet Scott's sorrowful gaze, and nod in understanding.
"But…for what it's worth…I never wanted you so badly, in love and in lust, as I did back then. Again, if I could, I would have traded my soul for yours, and become damned…but God I just wanted to jump to the top of the transformed Empire State Building, noogie my brother and knock him out, and just…jump your bones, like you did me a few minutes ago just now."
The Queen rubbed the top of Slim's back a little faster, then kissed his forehead warmly.
"It's like…compared to how you looked…to how you just…came off, back then…Jean herself in her X-Factor gear, she looked like fucking Ronald McDonald's concubine in contrast. She had nothing on yo…"
At this the Queen whipped Scott around and threw herself into an embrace of limbs and lips.
A few moments later, Scott, holding and beholding his lovely wife of long ago: "Well…what about the Sisterhood, Maddy? Your plans with them, and…"
"Ahh, the Sisterhood is like…Britney Spears…Crossroads bullshit. Like, seriously. I don't need them."
In the amaranth air, a serene beat passed. Then:
"Know, too, Scott…I don't need you, either."
Madelyne fixed a hard, insanely-serious look on her man as she said this.
"I'm grateful for your saving me, back in the graveyard about an hour ago. I am. …But we're only here together, and grafting a homestead onto this pocket dimension, because I'm allowing it. This second chance is entirely mine to give…and mine to take away, too. So you'd better not hurt me this time."
Nodding sincerely, Scott leaned toward his lady and kissed her deeply, passionately.
About three minutes later, settling down, Her Majesty held Scott a foot away. Locked upon his now-ineffectual eyes with emerald orbs of her own that now housed the man's mutant talent as well.
"Scott," she said, rubbing the man's clasped-together hands lightly, "…I'm really glad we're back again.
"I'm so glad, in fact…
"That I'm confident, now, that you're going to be everything you should have been, all those years back. I've decided, you see, to take it upon myself…"
[SSSNAP]
"To make it all as it had been before…as we were, then…"
Around Scott he noted the Eighties Alaskan homestead environs which he once occupied with his lady, in the throes of retirement bliss. The stark residential architecture, with its spacious floors, its wide windows, and its peculiar triangular roof was all back now, after all this time in which it only existed as a burning brand in Scott's memory. The man was decked out now in those same denims and leather jacket that he had then, as well as the squarical shades he sported back in that day—not that he needed, now, to hold back any kind of energies, of course. The sky outside still maintained its magenta magnificence.
Scott turned again and beheld Madelyne now, the lady dressed in the same brown jacket, blue jeans, and bowly Louise Simonson hairstyle she had back then—back when she was so much more innocent. But it was not so much what the lady was wearing, that struck him most…
…but rather, what she was now holding.
"Goo…goo goo…"
The lady's former hate-and-stress-streaked face now yielded to a serene peacefulness. Her voice was warm and calming. "Look who's here, Scott!"
Looking up at the man was the one who would, in a far-flung time, become that gray, gruff, gritting warrior whose codename suggested an alternative to local television programming, but instead was supposed to represent the link between the present and that which was yet to come.
Here, though, he was back as Scott and Madelyne originally knew him, as an ordinary, innocuous, smelly-ass toddler.
Before Slim could say anything, Maddy sloughed the slobbering Askani's Son into the man's arms. "You're gonna learn that with great parenting comes great responsibility, Scotty," she said, adapting a line uttered ad infinitum by the husband of another great redhead of the Machine. "I know that, with all the demons that have been haunting you regarding what you did to us back then, you'll be sure not to completely fuck it up this time.
"'Specially 'cause I've got my eye on you now." She punctuated this with another vermilion wink with an eye that could optically blast the man out of existence at any second.
Decades into and five minutes ago in the future, a rabbleroused resistance rose once more against a viciously-jawed villain known to people of all ages as Apocalypse. At the front lines were one Nathan Christopher Summers and his tremendously daring, yet terribly designed operatives who functioned more than anything to fight alongside their grizzled, gray-bearded leader.
At this point the mavericks of the morrow had the evil En Sabah Nur on the proverbial ropes, they endeavoring through the ordeal with ordnance to cow an entire nation of cads like the old, ever-untiring 'Lypse.
Among these heroes was one young woman with a scalp of scarlet locks, who was allegedly of the elder Summers's lineage and whose methods could not possibly be questioned or contradicted.
Nearby, a young lady of Nubian descent, who incidentally had the same name as the One Not To Be Questioned, had committed the indubitable folly of calling her Caucasian nomenclatural counterpart on a certain military maneuver.
"Hope," said Hope, the latter more obscure in the face of the former's obnoxiously-overexposed existence, "I don't believe that attempting to charge in blindly against Apocalypse, even at this point, is the most advisable…"
This was answered immediately by the White Hope's grabbing the Black Hope by the scruff of the latter's greenish, midriff-baring half-vest with one hand, and forcing the obscure one's face against a fuming laser rifle barrel with the other.
"I don't remember where it says in any of my prophecies that my actions can be subject to review and commentary by others, Novitiate," said Popular Hope, the girl already getting off on the power-tripping she relished in pushing around other members of her team. She then shoved the other girl away abruptly. "So you can keep your fucking criticisms to your own damn self."
And with this, the redheaded roustabout started another rush against Señor Nur once more. And readers on the other side of the fourth wall were not at all surprised or shocked by the unfortunately-familiar Hope's behavior, as what just happened was exactly what occurred when she shunted Scott Summers's face against the end of her gun, during the heat of the legendary 237th Legacy adventure—and there it was completely acceptable, of course, for such bullying to exist in the name of female empowerment, as well as eternally dumping all over the Slim team leader as has been the norm for the last decade and a half.
Here, with the other, Obscure Hope, of African descent, there was no such demographic justification…but readers at this juncture looked the other way as well, as accustomed as they were to automatically giving young carrot-top Hope a pass for everything humanly conceivable.
Nearby, the utterly-unclunkily-named Tetherblood was loading magazines into oversized, overstylized arquebi while his daughters, Fettersweat and Harnesstears, were struggling dually to overcome Apocalypse's barrages as well as the inner opprobria they felt at being so awkwardly named. But this was the casual by-product of being designed in the Nineties, where garish crass appearances and godawful compound appellations ruled the day.
These dozen-letter-codenamers all cast aside their concerns, though, at the heart-stopping frightly sight of their leader, Cable, dissipating before their very eyes.
Everyone's favorite freedom-fighting old fart had felt it too, as he began to make like Marty McFly during the middle of that rendition of "Earth Angel." "Keep fighting, all!" hollered Cable, in vain as he continued to vanish before them. "We shall reach victory in the ennnnn*"
From face to face among the troops, a look of consternation and dread reigned. The only one present to enjoy an opposite expression was En Sabah himself.
"YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!" he crowed, gloating in what would now be his imminent victory over the resistance.
In direct dialogue to the evil one's interjection, the troops, collectively:
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NAAAAATHAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNN!"
Without their fearless leader, the heroes had had it for certain. Silo threw his hands to his face bitterly while Eleven registered nothing, but wept inwardly and ruefully.
They all looked to one another, and found only the same forlorn faces that each knew that he or she was wearing. It was really the end now…
…but then…
A certain contemptible redhead, she now too looking desperately at her evanescing hands, realizing that she was about suffer the same fate as her father.
"Ohhhhh nooooo guyyyyyys…" cried the Brat White Hope, as her image continued to evaporate before everyone's unbelieving eyes. "I'm alllllso fading out of exisssssten*"
It must have been the result of some sort of unlikely time paradox, in which the semi-daughter of the Askani's Son must have been erased as a result of her quasi-father's abrupt trip back to the present time of his parents, Scott and Madelyne.
What a surprising happenstance. Huh.
The heroes looked to one another, at this, and then to Apocalypse; then the wicked warlord back to them.
Both sides, simultaneously:
"YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!"
Surfy music started up out of nowhere, and everyone erupted into epilepsies of ecstasy, as the spark was set off. Without that scarlet scar of a soldier on the scene, the entire ensemble could now relish the passing of their universe's greatest threat.
People from the creatively-named "Jenskot" (a girl who enjoyed an identity inspired by a combo of the names "Scott" and "Jean"…how earth-shatteringly inspired) to Boak, that stupid-looking guy with the 3D-glasses-hues for eyes and microchips for hair (see the cover of 1993's Cable #1 to find out what in the blue fuck this author's talking about), they all started stripping and waving their pants in circular motions over their heads while others began making out and just full-out making love. Garrison Kane started getting it on with Dawnsilk, while the latter's sons, Suppercorduroy and Recessvelcro, began chugging down what appeared to be beer coming out of a transformed-Apocalypse's nether turret.
In truth, this last was nothing more than the ancient enemy's Number One bodily fluid, but a) there were leagues of lagers over the ages that tasted the same way, so who could tell the difference; and b) at the risk of sounding like a certain Angry Video Game someone or other, these toughs of tomorrow would all rather drink Apocapiss anyway than spend another second with Hope Effing Summers. So nobody at all really minded any of what was happening, in the end.
But speaking of dumping on certain infamous Summerseseseseseseseseseseseseseses…
"Dah-Dah…
"DAH-Dah…"
Where could one now find the aforementioned old fart? None other than in diapers, and about ninety years younger, an infant once more and perched atop the small of the back of his foolish fail of a father, the hapless Scotty on his stomach and suffering the full weight of his baby son upon his lumbar.
The man's lady Madelyne watched in abject amusement as their boy commenced to drum upon his pop's pate with meaty toddler paws, with each of the following capitalized and italicized DAHs marking a moment in which little Nathan Chris was slapping batteringly on Cyke's brow with both of his pudgy palms:
"DAH-Dah DAH-Dah DAH-DAH…
"DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH…DAHHH!"
This last with a triumphant baby grin as the littlest Cable rested his smothering infant hands over Scott's ineffective eyes and looked over to his mother for approval. The smacked-into-submission father beneath the babe could only lie there and take it, the man knowing that this was a light castigation compared to what he really deserved from his family here.
"Wow, Nathan!" pepped Mads, nodding and clapping with approbation at her son's energy, "I was thinking of doing all that to him myself…but you literally beat me to the punch…or slap, I suppose!"
"Eh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!" guffawed the child in his victory over the Clops. Neither of his parents, in truth, could ever remember him being so tickled. "EEYOOOMMM!" he then cried, nonsensically, in his own little infantile tongue.
And then
[PFLPFLPFLFLPFLFLFPLFLFPLFPFLPFLPFLP]
Nathan's entire weight seemed to shift suddenly, slightly atop Scott, as if his son were becoming heavier in the bottom…
…but then the man knew exactly what it was, especially upon the other, er…sensory cues to give it away.
Madelyne just kept on laughing, though, as she waved a rosy palm in front of her beautiful face. "Awwwww…looks like…well, smells like, really…that little Nathan was so excited about giving his first asskicking…that he just gave out a literal assload of something else!"
"Eh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!" chortled the babe again in assent.
His mother then fixed his newly-minted mutant eyes upon Scott. With a deliciously tormenting inflection, as she leaned in toward her fellow parent's defeated face:
"Guess who's changing him…"
And then another crimson wink.
TO BE CONCLUDED