LAND GRAFTS AND FRACTION REDUCTIONS
By Quillon42
CHAPTER THREE
Out in the overarching, 616-Prime-Variant place, a certain songstress and a rather crappy scrapper fixed to float their clandestinely-planned plot into motion. Specifically, Babe Blaire and Hooligan Howlett lived up to their last names (or at least a syllable of such) by blaring, howling out into the open air…
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!"
And at this the Governor of Fractiorida up and took note…as none of this played out in his acetic script, he realized from his side of the fourth wall.
The aforementioned hollering ratcheted up Dazzler's inner aural energies, as well as Logan's inner feral ones. So pumped, the latter let the lady go first as Alison belted out with a spontaneous blast
[FSSSSSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH]
which weakened a wall of the structure within which they were standing. Acknowledging that the partition now appeared to be pulped to the degree of recycled Nineties comic book paper, Logan let loose with a clawed lunge
[RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP]
that rent the barrier asunder altogether. Without missing a beat the overhyped aggressor then reached deep into the fissure…
…and pulled out none other than the fracking abovementioned Governor himself.
As the bewildered buffoon lay dazed at Dazz's feet, the mutant mistress, extending a hand downward to grab the "man" by the scruff of his neck:
"Didn't think we'd have the oomph to utter you into our own universe, didja? Felt oh so safe, you did, on your side of the wall!"
When the semi-man reached his feet, he looked around wildly, desperately. Feared insanely for his seemingly-soon-to-be-curtailed existence. Admitted at the bottom of his psyche that the colors and other effects all around him came off so much more vibrantly "in person" than they ever could in the Machine bullpen's offices.
Then Logan waved a clawed hand in front of the Fraction's face, and the latter was brought fully back to the immediacy of his predicament.
By the brunt of Howlett's other gripping fist, the Governor was forced to look over painfully at a stressing European Psylocke, writhing in psychic agony over in the corner. "Look at 'er! She ain't too fond of the position you're puttin' her in! And frankly, neither are we! Betts is fightin' it all she can, the need to conform to the awful edicts of your script…"
"And so are we, in our own way," finished Miss Blaire as she blew out a couple more walls, to completely air out the atmosphere. All around, what sounded like the screams and cries of so many young people, from some kind of distant universe, had issued forth, the noise almost deafening.
Ali stepped up to the diatribe mic once more, the tones jolting up the juice within her all the more. "You hear that, guy?! All this…it's the sounds of your readers, everywhere…finding it a mite distasteful that the old, white Betsy-body ends up trashed, the way it is—eviscerated with claws…blasted with lasers…impaled with the woman's own psychic knife."
She paused to take in the overture all around her a bit more. Then: "…You know, though, we gotta admit, it's really a rather…colorful way to go, for a body. And, in fact, in the end…we really don't want such an idea to go to waste!"
"So we figured, why don't we leave in the idea of the claws and lasers and knives and such…" Logan spat, looking somewhat crazed, somewhat complacent, "but have the very mind that made up the massacre…enjoy his very ideas firsthand…"
Fractiorida then turned on a hinky heel to run, but Logan held him fast with hairy-ass arms…then held him down.
Psylocke's once-writhing body finally started to settle as Alison took position with pulsing fingers directly in front of the wacky writer. "No…" was all he could manage.
And then, just as the lady of light said, just before following through with the script in the miserable-mainstream 616 world, when she ripped into the original Psylocke-form with her lasers:
"Yeah." Ali aimed directly at the top half of the target's body, fixing fully for a Fraction fatality:
"HELL YEAH!"
The brilliance of the lightshow that ensued and consumed the Governor…the spectacle of it was enough to burn through the largest television screen that the Claudlandorado clan had owned. You see, that fam had been two-thirds through Zoolander when all of a sudden their Schiffer-tracer's triple feature had been preempted by the televising of the Fractiorida execution.
Incredulously the Land household's head and Bullpen's hack leveled his clicker to guide his kin away from the awful sight…only to find that the remote was as unresponsive as Cyke was mutant-impotent (as of now, in this story, anyway). The alleged penciler continued to thumb furiously, futilely at the small device while throwing a look to his left, at Mrs. Land on the loveseat…
…when, of a sudden, he was in shock to find sitting in her place a particular German model, of whom the "man" was so fond that he implicitly dedicated every female face he'd ever eked out by designing it in her image. Experiencing a certain explosion in his nether area at this, but ignoring it all the same, the Governor trotted on over to speak with the siren…
…only to discover that it was not the sexual goddess herself who usurped his wife's position, but rather something much less dimensional, a cardboard cutout of the Claudia instead. Something almost as flat and insubstantial as the man's own drawings, in fact.
At this the Gov whirled to look down at his two spawn…only to find miniature counterparts to that pasteboard horror that supplanted his squeeze. They too, like the one who subbed out his wife, were beaming back at him with that same ghastly-inverted-triangular Schifferian smile.
Panicking, this Land of Imposture ran for the bathroom, feeling his face as he went and fearing the worst as the skin was smoother to the touch than he ever remembered. He hadn't even shaved for a few days—as busy as he had been with his legions of line-tracings—and the stubble he'd expected this instant just wasn't there.
It was when Land found grafted onto his face that same superhumanly-familiar grin—the exact one that he'd grinded out in hundreds of panels. The realization of this too-intimate identification with the object of the man's adoration was too much even for him—so much so that the alleged artist considered ending it all by way of an intestinal purge that would make even his ivory-toothed idolatress blush.
Back at the fete at which the Fraction was so unceremoniously, ungracefully reduced to the point of nullification altogther, a burly Wolf and a blarey woman reveled in the reckoning that the writer so deserved.
Kicking back a bit, Logan cracked open a cold one, and Alison popped open a Pepsi Free delivered unto her by a warping-in Fallen Angels Ariel (and unlike Marty McFly in 1955, Ali wouldn't have to pay for it). (Nevermind.) Just as Howlett took a second to mentally celebrate the fact that his brew didn't spritz into his face, given the fact that his raucous throwdown with Deathstrike an hour ago had at one point resulted in his being slammed hard against the fridge…
[SPRSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH…]
…of a sudden another of the walls nearby opened without warning, and a thick, viscous red fluid washed over the Wolvy One thoroughly. Before he knew it, the ubiquitous douchebag was colored more crimson than Betty Ross's most recent (and omnipresent) alter ego. "What the flamin'…?!"
Alison nearby shook her head in confusion for an instant…
…then completely waved it off (as anyone should do with Logan anymore) and waltzed over with her cola to the lavender-haired lovelies who were chilling in the corner. By this juncture, Betsy and Kwannon had settled matters at last, after so many years of yearning for one another's bodies in the most platonic sense possible (as the bottom line was that each wished for a corporeal communion that would bring her back to her true self).
"It's just good to be home," said Kwannon, and Betts nodded in assent as the former was back to her Japanese self inside and out, and the latter was full-blooded British once more, from bod to brain. And although this author delved in such outcomes before in an earlier, Revision-ary story a year ago…the idea bears repeating in this case, to rebut the overly presumptuous idea forwarded by the Fraction: that a body other than one's original could be considered "home."
In any case, as well, the dual crimes of the flaying of Betsy's fair European figure, as well as the flinging away of Kwannon's fine Asian mind, were now answered for in this reality by a Fraction reduced to the lowest common denominator—at this point mere atoms, swirling around the Sisterhood stomping grounds.
And speaking of Sisterhood siblings, both extant and defected…
"Really it was so much fun to spray him just now," said the Red Queen to her cycloptic consort, speaking of the sprinkling she unleashed upon the clawed cootie paragraphs ago. Scott was still in the middle of giving Chris a new pair of baby undies, and wishing that his sense of smell were rendered as defunct as his destructive optic abilities. "I did it as a favor to you, Scotty…now that Howlett's doused with the Redpellent, ain't no scarlet-locked lady gonna go for him. If Jean comes back again, she'll Schism herself so far away from his ass just from the odor alone.
"I know it gets under your skin, after all…the idea that Logan could end up with the miserable Marvel Girl. So as a reconciliation gift to you…I got a little something onto the idiot's skin in turn."
Scott laughed heartily for the first time in this pocket-place—and really for the first time perhaps in a Machine millennium. (For sure, under the regime of a certain Schifferian semblance of an "artist," he'd shown his fair share of supermodel smiles…and also terrible Seventies hair for some reason…but laughing had been long gone in his life, partly from the guilt he'd girded upon himself from hurting Maddy and Chris so long ago).
Nothing made him relax more at this juncture, though, than the placid grin of his first wife before him right now. "It's all gonna be so good, Scott," she said, winding her arm around his waist as the two looked out to the same home and hearth they enjoyed in the first X-Factor issue, back in '86. "Just…I'm effing warning you: Don't hurt me and our son again."
Madelyne didn't have to flash fuchsia in the eyes for Scott to say warmly, back to her, "No way, Mads…we're in this one together now."
Just then at that moment
FSSSSSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH
the couple was greeted by the entire contingency of one sultry siblinghood wondering where its head had gone off to. Chimera and maybe Lady Mastermind (this author can never remember where she hell she figures into anything) and Martinique Whoever and Deathstrike were all stymied at the sight before them—but none of them more shocked than Spiral, who seconds later started going through the motions of some sort of transformative spell to bring Madelyne's mind corruptively back to their side.
But then Madelyne herself cut off the overtures of Mojo's main maiden with a wave of her hand and a full opening of her eyes. "Let'sssthh go, gurlsssthh," she lisped most Britneically, Maddy gleefully imitating the by-default- most-memorable line of Spears's insufferable film trailer (to say nothing about the insufferability of the film itself…not that this author has seen it or anything) as the Queen shot out against all her "Sisters" with the optic abilities she inherited from her husband. Mads set the ensuing blast only to stun, but she effectively shunted them all out of the pocket dimension while Spiral's interdimensional portal behind the ladies was still ajar.
Satisfied, Lady Pryor turned to her husband and jumped into his arms. "Come on, Scotty…let's shimmy out some more Summerses together while little Nathan's still asleep in the crib."
EPILOGUE
And what of the other love interests of the Paradoxical Man-Whore of Commitment that was Cyclops?
As those who read this arc are aware, there was a moment in which one White, Frosty blonde regent was lying in a small pocket locale of her own, she doing all she could to garner energy against the enemy. Along came a certain cosmically-endowed chick who was adored abnormally by so many (including this author, admittedly), who sparked a bit of the Beatific Barbecue Bird within Emma. For some reason, though, Jean in this instance was utterly unclothed upon this transaction, which struck this author as odd and unnecessary.
(Be sure to look out for a possible sequel to Nuke-Nudes Forever this fall or winter, by the way, as this author keeps carping about but may or may not deliver on).
As with the other aspects of the aforesaid arc, though, here matters played out a bit differently. Just as Jean was about to deliver that one command to arouse Emma to action…
"Prepar…"
The vanilla virago stood, spun around, and shed all her fabric effects in turn, she facing the Phoenix in just an au naturel condition.
"Oh, darling," said Emma, spreading her arms welcomingly, throwing the slyest grin, and winking more weightily than any of the blast-imbued optic tics Madelyne's gave Scott, in this story, "All this time I've just been so fucking ready."
THE END