No one to hand them down anymore either
Beta'd by… just me, this time
Madelyne was… well, not angry, since being angry about this would be a little bit spoiled, but she was a little bit annoyed with Essex for escaping without so much as a word in his defense.
Admittedly, that was at least partially out of misplaced expectations- back in her Rescue Team days, she'd been used to the dastardly Pokémon who had been the cause of the situation of the week sticking around to run their mouth, giving away their plot as they either gave her enough time to figure out some way out of the situation or them to just flat-out leave her an opening to get to them… which, she supposed, he had, in a way.
She'd taken the immediate chance to escape that her fortuitously timed transformation granted her, and just because he hadn't decided to run his mouth off to her didn't mean he hadn't been running his mouth off.
Even so, just the knowledge she'd managed to gain from brushing against his mind after rebuffing his telepathic attack was useful- she hadn't known she was in New York City, for one.
That said, she didn't exactly have much time to investigate and find other information that she hadn't been able to squeeze out of Essex directly- apparently, cutting the power in the way she had caused some… unforeseen side effects, and her sensitive ear fur (not to mention her sense of fire, which was… more nebulous than she remembered, which was a concern for later) had detected spreading blazes from multiple places in the building.
She wasn't nearly strong enough to put them out from where she was, even on her best day, and she couldn't make it to all of them in time to save the building, so she had to prioritize.
Dropping to all fours, she scampered back to the room she'd been kept in, and once she arrived, she stood up, flicked her burning stick out of her sleeve-fur, and focused.
The tip caught fire, just like every time she'd done it before, and as she gazed into the fire, she could feel he unimportant concerns falling away- no worries about the people that Essex was having massacred, who were beyond her help now, no lamenting the failure to wrest more information from his mind in the limited time she had, especially since she wasn't nearly as good at telepathic assault as she was at reading the secrets of the world through flickering firelight.
As her focus narrowed, she flicked one paw at the crate and everything on it, a brief moment of focus sending it floating into the air.
Once she was sure she wasn't about to drop them, she stowed her stick, then returned to all fours and left the building post haste, all but running on the walls of the staircase to make her exit.
She managed to make it outside just in time to see the pinpricks of light visible through the windows really blow up, flickering away almost merrily despite the very limited number of things present in Essex's building that could fuel the increase in size, very few of them anywhere near merry.
Still, it wasn't her concern, and after a moment gazing into the slowly growing firelight, she could be reasonably assured that they weren't going to put the neighborhood at risk.
She skulked in an alleyway a couple of buildings farther down for long enough that a pair of fire trucks had pulled up, flames licking out of the windows and starting to scorch the brickwork at that point, before she departed, crate still hovering obediently behind her.
Her first order of business was finding somewhere she could afford to put the crate down. For as little as it taxed her stamina to hold it aloft, especially now that she had both the Psychic-type and the psychic mutation that had allowed her to save May from the crate that had almost punched her ticket, it was somewhat more intensive in terms of her focus, and between that and following the link that bound her to May, wherever in this city it led, she would have very little awareness to spare for her surroundings- which was a dire threat, here in New York City. She'd heard the stories, and she suspected that if she climbed one of the buildings, she would be able to see the Baxter Building, which might actually have a supervillain flitting about it at this very moment.
After that, though… if she didn't have May in sight by the end of the day, she was going to commit war crimes.
We were lucky to mostly find people who we could actually evacuate into the castle.
They came in ones and twos and threes, looking haggard and maybe a little bumped and bruised, but none of them seemed to be really injured, just the kind of hollow and jittery that comes from staring death in the eye as the scythe passed you over- not that I knew where I knew that look from, just scattered memories from in between snatches of a blacksmith's forge that looked familiar enough for me to pound my head against it over and over again, trying to drag more details into conscious recall, but not familiar enough to actually remember where it was or who owned it in the first place.
All of a sudden, there wasn't time for that kind of pointless musing- we came upon what looked like the world's most prolific steroid user, wearing oversized studded cuffs and a wrestling singlet that looked like he'd torn one shoulder off as a fashion statement, looming over what looked like a grandmother, who was doing her best to shield a red-haired little girl with her body.
For as fast as I charged up and threw out a Thunderbolt, Morgan was faster, hand seeming to just twitch as she dragged the Levin Sword halfway out of its sheath and sent a crackling, spiderwebbing bolt of lightning down from the concrete ceiling to strike the man.
He turned to face us, at that, my own attack seeming to do nothing more than annoy him, and as he did so, his hand swung out almost casually and sent the old woman careening into a wall.
The girl screamed, but he just sneered. "I'll get to you in a minute, little missy, I gotta handle these idiots."
"Are you sure about that?" I was reasonably sure that Illyana was playing her accent up, but the humming sound that her sword was emanating was more than enough to make even the big guy hesitate.
He gave us all a second, more thorough look, his thick-knuckled fists clenching briefly, before he chuckled, baring perfect square teeth that seemed almost incongruous with the calluses on his knuckles. "Yeah, you girlies ain't gonna take two minutes." He dropped his shoulder and started charging us like a bull after a good dose of the matador's "tender" ministrations.
I managed to get Geirskögul between us and braced before his ground-eating strides brought him all the way to us, but instead of his momentum impaling him on the supernaturally-sharp edge, he just swatted it aside, just under the head, and hit me like a bowling ball. It was only the fact that Protect was off its cooldown that I didn't break myself as I bounced off the wall and rolled a handful of feet to land right next to the girl he'd been menacing.
As I groaned, I could feel the newly upgraded Speed Ring working, cool relief spreading itself over the bruises I'd managed to pick up through Protect.
Morgan screamed, a furious, birdlike sound, and he had to brace himself to withstand the shockwave that pulsed from it. The torrent of Dragon-type energy died out with her scream, though, and he was able to lunge forwards, through the telekinetic barrier that Rachel was putting up, and ram one meaty fist into my daughter's stomach, folding her in half like a cheap table.
As the Forge guttered and failed to catch, I launched myself at him like a fuzzy missile, shrinking into the foot-tall squirrel that no one would expect to be able to take out such a giant of a man, and nailed him right behind the knee with Super Fang.
He went down in a heap, swearing enough that a sailor would be hard pressed to keep up, and I took the opportunity to hop to his other knee and chew out the tendons with another Super Fang.
This attack started him flailing, and though I managed to avoid getting squished with Protect, it still sent me bouncing around the room again.
Fortunately, it seemed like Illyana had just been waiting for a solid shot at him, and as her sword plunged down through the man's sternum, he went limp, although thankfully he didn't stop breathing or actually start gushing blood, if for no other reason than the kid still huddled in a trembling heap on the floor.
Once I was sure enough no one was going to come through the corridor, and that Morgan was pushing herself to her feet, bracing her sword against the wall to help her up, I returned to human form and rushed over to the old woman.
She was… not looking great, to be honest. Even in the dim light we had down here, she looked jaundiced, and not all of the lines of her pale face, already livid with bruising, spoke to smiles. Her chest looked… deformed, and even though she was breathing, at least for now, it was a rattling breathing that sounded like it wasn't going to last much longer.
Thankfully, even if I didn't have any healing magic prepared, I could still hand out the enchanted rings that had bee, if not my most impressive creations to date, then definitely the most reliable.
Just as I'd hoped, the act of slipping the slim metal band over her thumb eased her breathing, and after a moment, Rachel walked over to the kid, who was watching me with uncomfortable intensity, knelt down, and started talking into her ear.
As I could just start to see the old woman's bones realigning themselves within her skin, Rachel stiffened, and managed to just barely raise a telekinetic barrier between herself and the brute that I thought we'd managed to take down already, his fist slamming into thin air with the kind of volume that you usually associate with jet turbines and industrial accidents.
"Stop!" Morgan shouted, punching forward and sending a forest of sickly purple spikes growing forwards.
They punched through his super-reinforced skin even better than Super Fang or Illyana's sword, the sheer weight of the impact throwing him back out the corridor opposite the one we'd come in and leaving a trail of blood behind in his wake. After a moment, there was a sound like concrete being crushed, then like rubble grinding against itself, and by the time I rose from where I was kneeling over the old woman to go and check, Geirskögul held low and ready to sweep at his legs, he was gone, leaving a trail of dusty footprints in his wake that led down a side path.
"The mutant-killing Marauders are easily startled, but he will soon be back," I said, some paranoid instinct in the back of my head standing on its hind legs and yelling its tiny little heart out, "and in greater numbers."
The fact that, instead of Madelyne's wry rebuttal, I got a chuckle from the curly-haired brunette that Illyana had brough with her brought a little bit of pain to my heart.
She'd loved those movies, and had been the one to make sure we went to go see all three of them in theatres, and so the fact that she wasn't around to respond to the quotes I had gotten into the habit of making specifically to get her to respond was… disheartening, although hopefully once this mess with the Marauders and the locals was handled, hopefully I'd be able to try and build something that would let me track her down, and then I'd be able to kick down Essex's door.
Until then, though… I had some preparatory work to do, and not much time in which to do it.
And that's that!
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