I have no excuse for this, the only thing that happened is that my brain went "Madelyne Pryor was fucking robbed" and then I blinked and now here we are with five chapters already written.
Fire is not exactly the way to make friends, especially when it's you burning down their house.
Not much to say here- First chapter syndrome and all that jazz.
Beta'd by Firstselector, SpytheEngineer, and Kinsfire.
May Trujillo had always been fascinated by fire.
When her parents dragged her to mass, it was a struggle for her to remember anything, after, save for the flickering of the candles that lit up the enclosed foyer with dim, steady light, so different from the rest of the church with the soaring windows and dark wood bracing the roof.
Chemistry classes had always been hit or miss, with May liable to be mesmerized by the burners when they grew bright; it was often that that day's lab partner had to physically cover her eyes to divert her attention from the steady blaze. Those days where they could ignite magnesium were her favorites, because at least then she could focus relatively well after.
College was the first time that anything changed in that status quo, with a mystic adept of one sort or another stumbling out of a fire right in front of her, charred around the edges, but alive.
Six months he remained in town, just long enough to understand the first layer mystic compulsion that drew her to flames and, perhaps more importantly, alter it. Not by much, no, but just enough that she could, after a moment, tear her focus away from fire.
Not enough to stop her from moving to Alaska, mechanical engineering degree in hand, to try and avoid all forms of fire (as well as her parents, who hadn't taken her coming out well), just in case it caused problems, but every little bit helped, and the Anchorage International Airport always needed qualified mechanics.
In Anchorage, she could be just May, not that deluded boy who was an arsonist in the making, mark my words!
While at the airport, she'd struck up a friendship with a pilot named Madelyne Pryor, with hair just as fascinating as fire and wry green eyes that crinkled up just so when she smiled, which over a period of months grew beyond what May felt comfortable calling merely friendship. She didn't push, though, not until one of the planes had gone down on a cargo run, killing Madelyne's copilot and leaving the redhead in a cast for months.
Their first kiss came as a surprise to both of them, their second less so.
Upon Madelyne's discharge from the hospital, May convinced her to move into her apartment's spare room, just until her arm healed and she could take the cast off. Funnily enough, neither of them made much of a fuss about moving out once the cast came off, and indeed, a year later, the two took three months off to build themselves a cabin in the woods to move into.
For a time, they coexisted thusly, Madelyne being tolerantly amused of May's insistence on overhauling a Volkswagen Vanagon to join her reliable Beetle and May, in turn, encouraged Madelyne when she expressed her desire to learn fire-dancing, cracking many a joke about being able to stare at both her greatest fascinations at the same time in between their work at the airport.
Sadly, this idyllic life was not meant to last.
The status quo was shattered firstly by Madelyne one summer day, when one of May's jealous coworkers had deliberately neglected to properly secure a heavy crate, hoping to take her place as head mechanic when she was forced to take time off to recuperate from whichever injury it left her with.
Unfortunately, May was not working as he expected, and when the crate fall, it did so on a direct course to collide with her head and telescope her spine.
It was for the best, therefore, that Madelyne was in view when the crate fell, and more than that her panicked scream unlocked the X-gene buried in her genetics, her first flailing telekinetic effort smashing the crate away from May's head without doing more than ruffling her hair.
The confusion on Madelyne's face was only matched by the gratitude that May turned to her upon realizing that she had saved her life, and the two of them did not sleep until well after night had fallen that day, first out of worry and later out of their engrossment in each other.
Three nights later, when Nathaniel Essex came to reclaim what he saw as his latest masterpiece after wiping her from the minds and records of the city, ready to turn her to his own purposes, he took great pleasure in coaxing May into a much deeper sleep than normal before igniting the cabin around her, flying away from the rising blaze with the clone of the Phoenix's host over his shoulder. Even the unrefined telekinetic blast she leveled at him upon awakening to find his pale visage did nothing to him, breaking around him like a wave to splash around the room, leaving a rain of splinters to fall to the bed she shared with May, some nicking each of them before he bound his clone with naught but his will.
May, however, was not so easily ensorcelled, and roused herself as the scent of woodsmoke hit her hindbrain and things far more mystical than that.
Coming to instant awareness, the light of the fire held no fascination for her, the window swinging shut behind Essex and the bloodied splinters on her bed drawing far more attention.
She made it to the window in time to catch a glimpse of the man's pale visage before the rising flames drew her attention, and though she tried, she could not overcome the bond that Essex had induced between window and sill.
She made it halfway to the door before the flames hit the can of gas that Mr. Sinister had left in the middle of the floor, detonating it in a fireball that consumed the entire cabin.
Or rather, it would have consumed the cabin.
Instead, the flame drained into May, extinguishing itself as, within her, a mighty Forge that even the Celestials would hesitate to touch blazed to life, burning through the enchantments placed upon her.
Though the backlash of the Forge's first surge left her unconscious, Nathaniel Essex had just made himself a very dedicated enemy.
I didn't know where exactly the technical database that had been dropped into my head came from, but working with it was a bitch and a half. Half of the technology looked to have been built off of the assumption that it would have access to some form of exotic energy that I had very limited options to provide, none of which I was enthusiastic about committing to, and the rest was a hodgepodge of who knew how many different methodologies. What's worse, entirely too much of the technology was designed around a way of life that I had trouble wrapping my head around- a global computer network, some form of post-scarcity society, and a disregard for the natural laws of the universe you didn't see this side of Xavier's school, all of which made it harder to understand and apply the database.
Still, I could make enough work, and as the flames of the Forge within me rose and fell back to their resting state, that much brighter than before, I tightened the last bolt on the van that had been my passion project and stood, taking in the whole thing with as assessing an eye as I could.
To be honest, it looked like shit- I'd dragged the van out of a scrapyard, and while I'd managed to replace the worst of the damage on the frame with whatever I could get my hands on, the paint was beyond my ability to handle- and, to be entirely honest, my willingness. As long as it ran, and the modifications I'd crammed in worked, then I'd worry about covering up the pockmarks, scratches, and flaking later, once Maddie was back.
One last check of the exterior showed no other problems, so I opened the door and fit my key into the ignition.
It turned over without protesting, and a quick check under the hood showed the engine that I'd managed to cobble together between the deformed block that had been left in the van, borrowed and stolen pieces from work, and raiding Maddie's Bug was running smooth like butter, better, even, with the more efficient shaping the other world had come up with to cram into the smallest spaces for their airships and planes, and I let the hood slam before I turned back to the garage, just long enough to throw a tarp over Maddie's Bug and close the grate.
"Don't worry," I said, the thud of the garage closing far weightier than what the mass of the door would suggest. "I'm on my way, Maddie.
With that done, and the charred door to the cabin already locked up (not that anyone would come out here, not after whoever had taken Maddie had erased all the damn records of us being here- I was lucky I could still access our bank records by calling out of state, even if the way they were giving me the runaround for a good long while was making me want to consider picking another bank), there really wasn't anything to do but get on the road.
The loneliness was different, behind the wheel of the hulking van. Back when I'd first dug it out of the scrapyard, I'd envisioned using it for road trips, swinging back down to the contiguous 48 to hit all the classic tourist spots and rub it in my parents' face that yeah, I got a girlfriend, what're you gonna do about it?
Being alone at home was one thing- I could always just pretend that Maddie was asleep in bed or in another room reading or- well, or doing something else, no matter how empty the building felt, but here, the culmination of the secret dream I'd never let myself fully confess to Maddie… it felt worse, somehow, in a way I couldn't put into words.
After a moment, I smacked myself across the face- getting lost in my wallowing wouldn't help me find the guy who'd taken Maddie.
I had managed to find security footage from when he went into the bank to remove records of us- he'd thankfully not managed to catch himself on the CCTV, so I had a face to put to the concept of the man.
He was tall and well-muscled, but the kind of well-muscled that spoke to good genetics and occasional workouts rather than actual concerted effort, and his suit was clearly cut to show this off- he was a vain man, more likely than not. His face was perhaps the most striking element of his appearance, with fine cheekbones, harsh lines, and sharp angles, even his chin jutting out in what was just a hair shy of the uncanny valley.
That is, at first glance.
The longer I looked at the footage of him, the more unnatural he seemed.
His skin was just the far side of too pale to be human, reminding me of some of the pictures I'd seen of that living vampire guy in New York that Spider-Man spent some time around, and his teeth were sharper than possible for a human- more like a shark's, if a shark only had one row of the damn things and liked to flash them at every opportunity to unnerve any viewer. There was a red diamond that I really hoped wasn't actually made of blood pressed directly above the bridge of his nose, glinting in the light, and he walked less like a man and more like a marionette being dragged into position by the puppeteer's strings.
He introduced himself to the teller as "Dr. Nathaniel Essex" and seeing as how he smiled and led the man back into the building after mere moments and a handful of persuasive words, the people evidently couldn't see his true nature.
This, I assumed, was where he'd gotten access to the bank's records to destroy them, and thankfully he didn't feel the need to go in to the IRS systems, or JP Morgan's as a whole, and erase us out of them entirely.
But all of that was immaterial next to the fact that I had a name to go on, and more importantly, he'd introduced himself as "doctor". Doctors were licensed, or had advanced degrees, and there had to be a repository of somewhere that held the kind of data that would let me run him down.
The Forge flared up within me again, swelling slightly but not discharging another flame as it had when I was given the understanding of this other world's technology, and I nodded to myself.
First, I would find where the hell this Nathaniel Essex lived.
Then, I would find out wherever the hell he'd taken Maddie.
And that's that!
Perks Gained:
Technology is Incredible! (NPCs of Pokémon, 400 CP): It sure is. And now, you hold its secrets. You know how to create all of the technology shown in the Pokèmon series, from Pokeballs to TM's to Pokèmon and item storage devices. If you tried hard and put in the time and effort, you could even make a Porygon! Evolve it into a Porygon2! And who knows, maybe you'll even create the program that would properly evolve it yet again, instead of the glitched form of Porygon-Z?
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