I split from the mutants not long after the jailbreak. Kicking fascist ass for a bit had been fun, but ORCHIS wasn't my enemy to defeat and I had other priorities. Just felt like it'd have been a dick move to leave them all there.
After that, I had to take a few days. I'd gained considerably more power than I'd intended, and an all-around body upgrade. It took some getting used to. Especially the slowly but steadily growing psychic powers.
The telepathy seemed to synergize with my connection to the symbiote hive mind. I could sense things a lot further out now. In fact, I could sense something... Big, somewhere upstate.
Cable's psychokinesis started coming in the next day but... It was slow going. Like the codex it came from was a might shy. Right now, I can lift what I think is my own weight with it but precision is wonky. It's getting a little stronger each day but... The good news is, my enhanced learning applies to it. I just need to practice it a little each day and see where that took me I guess.
Eventually, however, laying low and getting used to my new powers was starting to get, well, a little boring. So I started poking around a bit with my new technopathy. It took a bit of trial and error but I figured out how to interface with a local Internet hotspot with my mind, no more public library for me which was good since I wasn't hiding my face anymore. Anyway, that something big I could sense from upstate? There wasn't much out there but I did find a warehouse in the middle of nowhere that was apparently owned by Damage Control. Part construction company, part storage shed, these people fixed all the damage after super incidents and held onto any lost or abandoned super stuff that was too dangerous to leave lying around but didn't have a clear legal owner, or whose legal owners had used it for something illegal, on behalf of the government.
So... What symbiote-related stuff would Damage Control have gotten their hands on...? I'd have to go out in person to find it, which is why I was flying upstate.
...Flying upstate was also boring. Note to self, try to figure out if any teleporters have codices I can take. Sooner or later I might have to flee New York and I'd hate to be bored out of my skull on an hours-long cross-country flight.
Eventually, I managed to touch down outside an unmarked warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Telepathic and technopathic probing showed that... Well, the power was on but nobody was here. This close, it was possible to get a read on what was here and it was... A lot. It was hard to tell what exactly it was, or how much specifically was here, but it was a lot and it was all mixed up with what I could only describe as... Dark magic.
The only security I could find was the fence, which was more than easy enough to hop. The door wasn't even sealed with anything fancy, I was able to jimmy it open for fuck's sake.
I was honestly a little on edge, a slight tingle in the back of my skull telling me that this was too good to be true. Still, I pressed on. The lights worked, but it became readily apparent that this place had been shuttered for a while, there was dust everywhere but I could smell that people had been here within the last few days...
A computer terminal near the door illuminated the situation. This particular warehouse had been shut down a few years ago but had been reopened very recently to serve temporary storage for a few things that had been stored at other facilities while those facilities were being renovated.
I started checking the inventory, just to get an idea of what I was sensing, and... The basement had facilities for cryo-pods. In addition to some miscellaneous villain tech and super weapons that had been hastily moved in over the course of the last few weeks, they'd brought in cryo-pods containing a few bodies that had been claimed after incidents that the government might not wish to destroy.
One was something called "Svartalfvenom." Supposedly a dozen dark elves, each bonded to a portion of Venom, tried to fuse into one being for some reason back during the invasion of Earth by all the bad guys from Norse Mythology at once. Kind of weird that Roxxon Energy didn't face any consequences for selling out the human race like that. Anyway, they got killed by Thor and left where they lie.
There were four more cryopods down there, they were a bit older... Apprently a while back Vegas got turned into hell on Earth by someone named 'Blackheart' and he had these... Clones of X-23 that he'd bonded to modified offshoots of the toxin symbiote? It was suspected that he'd been enhanced with some degree of demonic magic, but they'd all been killed and left to rot by the real X-23.
They'd also stashed a casket down there but no details on what was inside. Out of curiosity, I looked through what else was in this facility but there wasn't really anything that interested me. I mean, sure, I could absorb tech now but there wasn't really anything of particular value to me. The most dangerous thing here was something called a "Banner Cannon," which was a minigun supped up to shoot huge rounds at a higher speed and the bullets were charged with enough gamma radiation to instantly vapourize a human body it was discharged into but... I had firepower comparable to that and any situation where I specifically needed that much gamma concentrated into a kinetic shell was one that I probably had another solution for.
That done, I made my way to a set of stairs that sunk into the ground. Might as well collect what I came for.
As expected of a room equipped to store cryo-pods, the basement was colder than a witch's tit. I could make out a few places where a pod would have been, but only five were actually down here. One extra large one with two more on either side. Waking up to the big one, I wiped the frost off the glass and saw one ugly son of a bitch. Lots of faces, lots of arms.
Checking the one to the right, I saw what certainly looked like a dead copy of X-23.
It was then that I noticed the scent of reasonably fresh soil. The inventory said they'd stashed a casket down here. Poking around a bit, I found a simple pine box. As I pried open the nailed shut lid I found myself having a vision. A red spiral flashed before my eyes followed by a book bound in human flesh. Then it cleared up and I found myself staring at a box of bones. Bones with a particular codex in them.
The bones of Cletus Kassady.
...Then I felt it. A change in air pressure. I stood up and twisted around as my arms morphed into blades. I wasn't alone anymore.