So the thing was? I didn't actually know how to become a God. And I wasn't getting any more obvious connections when I searched the hive I guess Kassady had been telling the truth about nudging me and now he wasn't anymore.
Eventually, I settled on... I mean, I still didn't have a dedicated power source for the Endo-Sym. There had been a lot of people infected by Symbiotes, many of them with superpowers, there had to have been at least one whose schtick was generating or storing energy, right?
My range for sensing with the Hive Mind had gotten a bit wider. I could actually feel Westchester from Manhattan now, though admittedly not with very much detail. And after a few days of searching and scanning and reading through codices, I found something promising.
Out on Randalls Island was a codex that was a lot older than it should have been, paired with another from Knull's invasion, but I was focused on the first one. It'd spent... years? Decades?.. It'd spent quite a lot of time adapting to the body of someone with highly efficient energy powers and a great, great deal of energy. I could also sense that there were times when the host had had even more overwhelming power, or different kinds, though each was short-lived. It also felt like there was something... Special, about the Symbiote
I'd need to get closer to get more details than that but it seemed like a promising start.
Traveling out to the Island, I eventually found myself observing a 'Henry Gyrich Re-Education Center,' from a distance, a bronze statue of the man prominently displayed.
If I had the facts straight, Gyrich used to be the Avengers' government liaison but he was a jerk about it and they had to keep going over his head. He was also in charge of Camp Hammond, the place where they tried to turn super-teens into child soldiers back during Superhuman Registration... I heard a kid died there and they tried to cover it up by cloning him... Something something about illegally deporting American Citizens who happened to have alien ancestry, that was a whole thing, and according to some of my codex memories, Gyrich tried to drop a space station on Australia and frame the mutants, then killed himself when it didn't work a little while back.
So even if it wasn't common knowledge that 're-education center' was doublespeak for 'for illegal prison at best,' a place named after him couldn't be anything good. I activated my camo as I got closer, no point in letting them see me coming.
Hoping the fence, it became readily apparent to me that this was an ORCHIS facility. Like, a real one, not like the lab that I wasn't really sure about. All the guards were wearing ORCHIS uniforms. As I snuck about, invisibly, making my way into the building, I noticed that pretty much every room was a tiny cell with a thick metal door.
Eventually, I got to a point where I could tell that my target was behind a wall and, turning a corner, found the door. I checked for cameras, checked for guards, then liquified and slid through the crack.
This close I got much more detail about the codices. One was, as I said, just something picked up during Knull's invasion. An offshoot of a dragon, but otherwise nothing special except for who it was bonded to. The other... Back when I was picking through the memories I got from Deadpool, and realized that he'd inherited one of his codices from Cable, I vowed to have nothing to do with time travel. This was another reason why.
I rematerialized in the room and saw the prone form of Scott Summers, Cyclops, the leader of the X-Men. Apprently, his old pall Beast pulled the team's teenage selves to the future to prove a point and couldn't send them back. I'd been wondering about that younger version of him that had been handing around Ms. Mavel's team for a while, but I just thought it was a Legacy. The teen mutants bonded to symbiotes, then eventually went home to preserve the timeline meaning that Scott here has had a piece of symbiote goo in him for... Okay, there's something fucky going on because the codex keeps trying to tell me that it's been in there for 60 years but there's no way that could be right,
Anyway, it'd been in there for a while and picked up a few extra things that, you know, supers pick up when they've been out and about for a while... Honestly, OG Spider-Man's codex must be insane at this point.
I couldn't tell what, exactly, was chilling in his spine. Some kind of radiation, soot and embers of cosmic power, yadda yadda. Wasn't exactly expecting anything unique from it, I was more interested in his mutant power. That's what'll probably fix my power-source issues for the Endo-Sym.
Cyclops was beaten all to hell and strapped to a slab. They'd also sewn his eyes shut, and had a metal noose around his attached to a cord going through the wall. I had to wriggle a thread of abyss under him and position it just right before expanding it at the end and extruding the needle upward into his spine... Which was apparently broken outright. Wow... They did not want this poor man to get out of here.
Extracting his codices took a bit longer than normal, it was a somewhat delicate process, but soon enough I was in the process of adapting and sorting new information... Honestly felt kind of wired and... Yeah, that's about what I expected for the extras. He was apparently a Hulk for a bit, a few sparks of Phoenix power, residue from something called The Black Vortex that he'd used not too long before getting the Symbiote... I was gonna have to look into that later. The cosmic energy was nowhere near enough to actually use those powers, but it was like, reinforcing the foundations of everything else. Something or other that was making me evolve considerably faster. And...
Oh... Ohh. Oh shit.
At some point... Cyclops here was merged with Apocalypse. Not for too long, really, but long enough. I came here looking for copper and found pure fucking vibranium!
And then it hit me. The consequences of adapting to that portion of the codex. I stumbled back to a wall and then slid down it, my body rolling from the sensation of my entire body being rebuilt at the levels of atoms and molecules. Control of his entire body, including mass and volume, down to the tiniest structures... That was the first power of the first one, and it was doing miraculous things to the living abyss that composed my body. At the same time, I felt my mind expanding... for a brief instant I felt in my bones the anger and despair of every mutant illegally imprisoned in this hellhole, but then inherited memories of practicing control kicked in and it was silenced. Then all the stuff he'd added to himself over the years, genetically.
...Then came the effects of the Techno-Organic virus. Seriously, fuck time travel. He's the one who gave it to Cable but he got it because Cable accidentally infected when he went back in time to kill Apocalypse... Anyway, the ancient mutant took better to it than the Summers kid did, his body adapting to and absorbing it so guess who has as many thumbs as she has hands at the moment and is now fused with living machinery at the genetic level? This gal!
Then came What the hell, did he eat a laboratory? All kinds of advanced tech that he'd fused to his body, The name Rama-Tut popped into my head, along with the image of an armored figure not unlike the one who'd been judging everyone a while back. Something called a Celestial. Not only did he have their technology, they'd given him some of their power... That was inherent, not external like the other stuff that had been in Cyclops's codex. According to my codex memories, I only had a small fraction of the cosmic power of the real Apocalypse, but still. I had enough to do stuff with.
Then, and then the Stark Tech and smart metals from the Endo-Sym were assimilated into the rest of my now techno-organic biomass, and... It was like, it was upgraded by the other tech, and the other tech was upgraded by it, and my biology improved it, and it improved my biology... Kinda?
...Then the data from the Cable codex I got from Deadpool decided that now would be a good time to kick in, so the beneficial effects of his techno-organic infection kicked in, and so on... Luckily, his psychic powers seemed to still be a bit shy. I'd probably either have to grow into those or find him and take his codex directly for that. It was probably for the best, I don't need to be warping reality in my sleep or anything.
The whole thing felt like it took about five minutes, a lot longer than it typically took me to assimilate a codex and fully adapt to it, but, you know... I was still technically adapting, because of whatever chemical thing it was that Cyclops's first symbiote had been exposed to, but that was a minor background process in comparison. It was kind of a lot. In the back of my head, I realized I was aware of all the electronic machines in the area.
I prepared to slink away... But my gaze focused on the broken, unconscious on the slab. He wasn't a villain, he wasn't a base animal, he wasn't someone who hurt me... I made a decision.
Ten minutes later, his every injury had been healed except for some pre-existing brain damage thanks to the miraculous healing properties of Anti-Venom, I'd cut him loose from his restraints, I'd used the signal that a device in his body was sending out to piggy-back my new technopathy to remotely disarm a bomb, I'd eaten the now useless deadman's switch to get it out of his body, and I'd used what I'd learned from his codices to make a crude ruby quartz visor out of some spare biomass.
A tiny nudge from my new telepathy woke him up. "Mister Summers," I began, "You don't know me but... I could help you escape... Or, if you'd prefer, I can remotely disable the security of this facility and all the power suppression features then telepathically patch you into all of the illegally detained prisoners and we could fight our way out at the head of a small army of mutants and mutant sympathizers. I know what I'd prefer."
"Who are you?" He asked.
"Call me Massacre. Now I need an answer."
Ten minutes later, I was the ball in a Fastball Special, the motherfucking Juggernaut having tossed me toward one of those so-called Stark Sentinels so that I could dismember it.