So... This one was hard to get started. I ended up having to skip over and summarize a scene I really wanted to include and also, well, something happens in this chapter that would never happen in canon but logically would during an event like Fall of X, which is when this story takes place so...
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After the Champions left, I flopped down on a lawn chair out in the private stretch of beach behind the house I'd been gifted by Venus.
Things had gone... surprisingly well, all things considered. Kamala seemed to genuinely enjoy being able to catch up with her friends after she'd died and I'd gotten to set things right with Miles.
"Look, let's say I believe you about not killing anyone that night, why were you even there?"
"Because I'm a stupid kid who made bad decisions and got caught up in the Kingpin's shit."
"And coming after me at home?"
"I have no excuse for that. Was trying to patch up weaknesses that could be used against me, electricity's a pretty big one, and you had a codex. But, yeah. That was a dick move."
"...I was talking to the other Spider-Man the other day. He said that a girl named Maria helped out his brother. Helped him get his memories back, and patched up his broken mind. Said the girl had a symbiote. That was you, wasn't it?"
"Yeah. I was there, he was hurting, and I could help. I'd have been a real asshole if I just left him."
"...As long as you keep that attitude... I think we're cool."
Also, I informed Amadeus Cho that Hebe was very upset that he wasn't taking her calls anymore. The 'oh shit' expression on his face was priceless but...
Well, that whole ordeal was exhausting.
"Copper for your thoughts?" My beloved Kelda asked while leaning over me.
"No thoughts," I said as my outfit shifted to a bathing suit. "I'm tired. Gonna lie here and soak up some sun, maybe take a nap, and then..." I yawed. "Maybe we can finish that show I introduced you to later. I think you were halfway through season 2?"
"It would be nice to see if my theories pan out," Kelda admitted as she shifted to her own bathing suit. Kelda's father being a poet wasn't all talk, he was, in fact, a skald by trade, and Kelda had learned at his knee, proverbially speaking, that a poem or story was a work of artifice in and of itself and even a seemingly simple phrase could have multible meanings and, as so much as she would weapons or architecture she believed to truly enjoy a story one must properly examine the craftsmanship. And she was pretty good at it. Admittedly using the All-Speak, the ability of gods to speak any language, to identify every possible meaning of a given character's name was probably cheating but she'd been dead on the money when she'd identified that a seemingly antagonistic character would eventually join the heroes because her name meant 'a famine of friendship.'
Anyway, she sat in the other chair we had back here and joined me in lounging off a productive but emotionally stressful afternoon. I closed my eyes and actually managed to relax a bit...
...For about ten minutes.
"Maria, no one can see us back here, right?" She asked.
"Yeah, Venus says we can see out but no one can see in as long as we stay inside the markers," the markers being marble columns planted around the property, including a pair just held in place by magic a decent way out into the sea. "From the outside, this stretch of beach might as well not exist and she says people can't even find the house out here unless they're friendly without powerful scrying magic." I yawned again. "Why?"
"Well, there are a lot of giant red metal men flying over us right now."
Fuck. I opened my eyes to see that, yes, roughly a dozen Stark Sentinels were flying along the coast in the general direction of Los Angeles. They weren't after us, had no idea we were even here, really, but...
"Those things are going to kill innocent people," I said. "I'd feel like such an asshole if I let them." I sat up and manifested my full Godly Regalia. "Looks like we're doing this."
Kelda leaped up and shifted into hers. "Yes. We're doing this. Shall we, my King?"
"Of course, my Queen."
It'd be a bit since I'd actually flown. Gotta say? Flying as a God kicks all kinds of ass. The cold wind rushing through my hair did the work to wake me up but... God damn wear Sentinels fast. I think I can rule out being a God of Speed. I considered heading them off with teleportation but, well, I wasn't sure exactly where they were going. They were flying in the direction of LA, but... If I guessed the location wrong people could die and at the same time if I just attack them here... Bits of robots could land on people's houses or cars... Yeah.
Kelda and I trailed the Sentinels to... a War zone. An entire neighborhood of LA had been swallowed up by writhing vines the size of sequoias, busted sentinels, wrecked houses, and charred corpses littering the former streets.
"Well, if I wasn't already jaded to violence this would do it," I quipped darkly as my senses zeroed in on a lone girl, maybe fifteen, in a red dress desperately fighting for her life as vines seemingly danced to her will against the handful of Sentinels that were still present from the initial attack... The ones we trailed must have been back up.
The poor girl seemed to give up hope when the new squad of sentinels touched down just after she dispatched the last of the initial squad and that? In the worlds of one of Bruce Banner's alters, I took that real personal.
I might not know what it is I'm the god of, but the authorities of gods and weapons that mimicked them were part of the makeup of my divine cosmic power and I could still call upon those and one above all was especially prominent.
In an instant, the afternoon sun was blotted out by dark rumbling clouds and a storm of wind and rain poured down on ruins. I dived down, my axe All-Hell raised, and a massive bolt of lightning struck its head just as I brought it down on that of the lead Sentinel.
Needless to say, I tore straight through the damned thing. As the two halves of the murder bot fell over and knocked over the two next to it, I turned around to face the others.
"So, ORCHIS is supposed to be protecting humanity, right?" I asked, "Then why is it that everyone here who died seems to have been killed by Sentinel weapons?"
"THE DANGEROUS MUTANT DESIGNATED KLARA PRAST, ALIAS ROSE RED, REFUSED TO VACATE THE PLANET AND RESISTED ARREST UPON ATTEMPT DETAINMENT. CIVILIAN CASUALTIES WERE THE FAULT OF THE DANGEROUS MUTANT. DANGEROUS MUTANT SYMPATHIZER MARIA MARSHALL DETECTED. PRIORITY TARGET ENGAGED."
...They were seriously going to blame a goddamned child for the people they murdered. Really? And the population of this country is so god damned brainwashed by anti-mutant propaganda that people will probably buy it hook, line, and sinker. Well, if they were focused on me then maybe the kid could get away.
I swung my axe at the Sentinel who'd spoken and sent a crescent of fire at it. All-Hell began life as Hellnir, a weapon that was to hellfire what Mjolnir was to lightning, but reforming it into my own weapon and going through my ascension ritual alongside me meant it had been purified by the Flames of the Faltine. I don't know what kind of magical flames my axe was producing now, but they seemed to get the job done just fine when it came to flash-melting fascist killbots.
Kelda landed shortly after that and she was clearly on her A-game: One Sentinel was effortlessly smashed to pieces with a single swing of her hammer as she touched down. Another was melted to slag by a gout of flame she exhaled as if she were a dragon, then rapidly cooled back into a solid mass with a hurricane-force blast of icy wind delivered along the same means. She then slammed her free hand into the ground and generated a localized earthquake that shattered the fragile pile of mettle and sent the shards flying into three more Sentinels.
"Well, someone's been practicing," I observed. Ice and fire and the bones of the earth were my Kelda's secondary authorities, I really needed to see what it was that she could forge now.
"Are, are you two Avengers?" The girl behind me asked.
"No," I said, "just a couple of Good Samaritans. I'm sorry we weren't here earlier."
We'd chased a dozen Sentinels here. I'd killed two and damaged two, Kelda had taken out five... five, two already damaged. Easy pickings.
One of the damaged ones raised a hand in order to fire a repulsor beam, so to counter it I generated a repulsor node on my chest and fired off a uni-beam, augmented with ruby quartz lenses and the energy efficiency of the Summers clan, which met the Sentinel's beam mid-air and overpowered it, blasting the bot to bits.
"ADAPTING," the other damaged one declared. I was about to give it another swing of my axe when a girl who was glowing bright pink fell from the sky and made the damn thing explode on contact as she sank through it like a rock through the water.
I got a better look at the girl. Pink aura, glowing pink eyes, long brown hair, dressed in jean shorts, a pink t-shirt, and a purple cat-eared hat. Looked about the same age as the girl I was protecting.
Pink aura faded, the new girl ran for the one behind me "Klara! Are you okay!?"
"...No," Klara admitted.
"NEW TARGET IDENTIFIED," one of the three remaining Sentinels declared. "SECOND GENERATION ARTIFICIAL MUTANT MOLLY HAYES, ALIAS BRUISER."
"You can just say mutant!" Molly shouted back.
The sentinel in question moved to attack only to be immediately crushed by two of the giant vines that tore through the street.
"Leave Molly alone!" Klara shouted before collapsing to her knees. Molly, for her part, seemed to prioritize protecting and comforting her friend over finishing off the Sentinels so Kelda and I handled it.
Kelda, my beautiful beast of a young woman, literally grabbed one of the remaining Sentinels by the foot and lifted it up before smashing it back down until it fell to pieces. The last one I dispatched with telekinesis, making it crumble in on itself like an unpressurized diving suit in the deep sea.
Danger over, Kelda went to check on the other two... I realized I've been thinking of them as 'the kids' even though they were like, maybe a year younger than I was at the most. God damn.
And then I realized we weren't alone. There were people all over the place. Bewildered, scared, and... And I was the only person who could see them.
Or at least, I presumed that to be the case. No one else was reacting to them. Were they...
Wait... I recognized what was going on now. These were the souls of the victims of the Sentinel attack, lingering until a psychopomp came to deliver them to the afterlife. From Valkyrie's codex memories, this... Must be a power I got from her codex, to see the dead and...
Except I'd never seen the dead before, even after taking her codex, despite... Despite going around in cities where plenty of people died every day and...
Someone else was here. A skeleton in dark purple robes. I knew intuitively that she was a woman even though there was no possible way I should have been able to tell. She stopped in her process of ushering souls of the dead off to the other side to look dead at me and... Physically speaking, she couldn't smile or wink, but she certainly gave the impression of it.
...Son of a bitch. It all clicked together... The thing I was the God of... The thing that had been a defining feature of my life for... Well, ever since Carnage went on his rampage.
Call me Massacre, Goddess of Death.
I turned back to where Kelda was comforting Klara and Molly and... Now that I knew what my powers were, it was so obvious to me to see that... That if the girls stayed here, they'd both be dead within the hour. My first thought was that more Sentinels were on the way, and in bigger numbers, but I had no intent to leave them here and find out.
"They're all dead, Molly," Klara said as I tuned back into them. "All my neighbors... Josh and Paul... Everyone is..."
Molly was hugging Klara tight. "you still have me, I... I'll"
I noticed two souls watching the scene, a skinny white guy with glasses and a portly dark-skinned man. I intuited them to be the Josh and Paul Klara mentioned and tried to broadcast to them not to worry, that I'd take care of her.
"Okay, kids. I'm taking you two somewhere safe before more Sentinels show up," I said I put a hand on the shoulder of each girl. Seeing where I was going with this, Kelda grabbed my own shoulder, and in a flash of bright scarlet flame, I took both girls back to my house.
I let go of the two girls and stood back. "Okay, you're safe here. There's all kinds of magic on this house to keep people from finding it, are either of you thirsty? Hungry? Just had a barbecue, I've got some brisket left..." I did not know how to be comforting.
"We'll be fine," the girl Molly mumbled. "This isn't the first time something like this has happened. For either of us."
"Well, you can stay here as long as you need to," I insisted. "I have plenty of room and... I know what it's like to lose everything... At least let me make you some tea to calm your nerves."
There was no objection to that so I left the girls with Kelda and swooshed off to the kitchen. While I set a kettle of water to boil, I pulled out my phone and dialed Kamala's contact.
She picked up pretty quickly. "Maria? Is something wrong?"
"Kinda, how far out are you in that... Airship the Champions use?"
"About halfway to Chicago, why?"
"There was a massive Sentinel attack in LA. Multiple human casualties, Kelda and I got in when we noticed some sentinels flying in that direction just a little bit after you guys left." I took a deep breath. "There was one mutant survivor and another mutant girl who showed up to help her after Kelda and I got there, I evacuated them both and I'm keeping them a my place until further notice since they apparently don't have anywhere else to go."
"Do you need any help? We can turn the ship around."
"No, it's all blown over by now just... Once you get back to the East Coast, tell the X-Men what I told you... And that Massacre is gonna be taking a much more active role in the fight against those fascist fucks."
"I'm not going to phrase it that way but alright... Are you okay, Maria?"
"I'm fine," I replied. "I'm jaded to this kind of thing by now... I'll bring it up with my therapist."
We ended the call after that and as my kettle was boiling I finished the tea preparation and carried it back to my living room just to overhear the tail end of a conversation.
"It's just... My... I don't want to call her my mother but I don't know of any other words for her," Klara was saying. "She would always tell me that my powers were proof that I was born evil and every bad thing that ever happened to me was God punishing my wickedness."
"Sounds like you need a new god," Kelda quipped, and then something clicked in my head.
"Or maybe she should be a new god?" I suggested rhetorically as I handed the two girls their tea mugs. These two... One had super strength, one could control plants. Those were two of the archetypes Loki had said to keep an eye out for. And now that I was looking for it, I could sense that they were both pretty powerful. And they both had super aliases so they probably had some adventures under their belt. "This um... Kelda and I are gods. I can make you into gods, too. Give you the power to get back at the people responsible for this. If you'd like."
Klara sipped her tea, then looked me in the eye. "You know what... Fine. I'm tired of running and hiding, I'm tired of my happiness being taken away from me, I'm tired of the world kicking me when I'm down. These people plucked the Rose, now they get the thorns."
AN: Okay, so we have the first two members of Maria's pantheon: Klara Prast and Molly Hayes of the Runaways. There will be two more canon recruits and two OCs but first Maria's gonna deal with an infestation of jackasses.
Also, I'm going to go back through the story and try to fix some errors and inconsistencies over the course of the next few days. At least on AO3 and SB since editing the chapters is a reasonably easy thing to accomplish, but of a pain in the ass on FFN so that update might be a while.