NitroNorm's Snippets Thread

[Nitronorm5688]

"One thousand years ago,
Superstition and the sword ruled.
It was a time of darkness.
It was a world of fear.
It was the age of… pft! Ha-hahahhahaa!"

Yeah, I couldn't keep it up. I had the voice while I was in costume but I was still a bit punch-drunk about my situation.

Ah, well. I'll keep practicing.

-000-


The girl appeared in a puff of smoke and a flash of thunder. The sound of lightning split the heavens and shook the trees.

I didn't have eyes anymore so it was impossible for me to blink, but I think I almost pulled it off.

I looked to the left, then slowly to the right.

The view didn't change, of course. No matter which way I looked at it the girl was still here with me.

A girl in a torn Goth getup with a white streak of her otherwise dark brown hair was with me in a cemetery, late at night, under a full moon. Unconscious just a dozen feet away and at my mercy, while a sky full of stars and a full moon shone overhead.

There was no explanation for why she was here.

I didn't know why I was here either but she was the first human I'd seen in days.

Someone had either set this up, felt sorry for the girl, or wanted to be entertained.

Sighing, I knew that it was probably all three. I knew what I was going to do. There was no reason to wait either.

Crawling out from underneath a stone bench I approached the girl like a monster from under the bed in a late night horror TV series. My view flew over the ground from six inches high, quickly and silently. Soon I was upon her. There were bits of electricity coursing through the girl's body shocking her muscles and making them twitch. That wasn't normal physics. If you could see that much electricity jumping around a person they should be fried and very dead.

She didn't smell dead.

This was mutant power junk.

It had been days since I'd last fed. My last meal was a field mouse. There used to be crows and other creatures in this cemetery but they'd all fled the last few days. For all I knew I was going to be stuck in this cemetery until I died of starvation.

There was a barrier I just couldn't cross. Possessing birds and rats had let me reach out beyond the barrier for a few minutes to get at a bit of newspaper but they had all died when I sucked them dry for power.

The newspaper piece had been an obituary and had rankled my sense of 'irony' something fierce. I still didn't know what the date was since it was nearly completely rotted. None of the dead people in the cemetery struck a bell from my memories as a human.

However …

This girl had to be Rogue: a high-class mutant and a level 9/10 on the exclusive My-Life-Sucks-O-Meter.

I really should not be involved.

Except that she was my meal ticket out of this creepy abandoned cemetery late at night.

There was also this unmistakable scent of innocence around her that was so pure, it was like wild strawberries. I could smell her virginity.

Whoa-fuck!

I backed off.

I shook my skull-like heads. Yeah, let's not think about adult things right now. Let's keep that word out of our skull-head shall we?

What are we waiting for? I've spent enough time looking through the bars of the fence watching the outside world, like a window. Let's go!

Using the chains that I now had instead of hands I rearranged the girl so she was lying down straight with her arms underneath as if she was getting ready to do a pushup, the face turned towards me in the recovery position.

Then I folded myself over her entire body and entered her.

God, that sounds dirty.

At least I can think the word without hurting. Some vampires and demons can't.

The inside of Anna Marie was just as messy as and a bit more complicated than a rat or a bird. Her brain was fucked, though. I found a mind that was constructed rather like a town made from model building sets that a twister had smashed together. The school where Anna Marie and Cody Robbins went to was the main feature with parts of their houses occupying this small fenced in community perched on top of separate floating islands inside of her headspace universe.

I wasn't going to question it too much. It was the 1990s after all. A little Lawnmower Man action combined with Scanners head explosions of mind fuckery wasn't the scariest thing in this world.

Kurt Wagner (Nightcrawler) and Ororo Munroe (Storm) had made their own contributions as well. Because Kurt had been homeschooled at the Xavier Institute until he was given the Image Inducer by Professor X so he could go out in public in disguise, most of his mind had knowledge of the Xavier Institute and the nearby area he grew up in. Forests and a bit of mountains from Germany, in other words. That means that the swampland was from Anne and the jock she kissed. Meanwhile Ororo had grown up in Africa where she was worshiped as a tribal spirit and so her mind was filled with thoughts of super wide open spaces and empty skies.

All of these landscapes had been patched onto Anna Marie's mind-universe like a scrapbook.

In the school library I found the knowledge in Anna Marie only somewhat organized on the shelves. Crowding out the floor space were three other libraries worth of books from three other people in huge piles all over the place. An unorganized mind leads to unorganized thinking.

I put my hands together and cracked my knuckles: Time to get to work!

First I picked up all the books from off the ground and put them on tables. Little attention was made to organization until I could move around. Then I had to sort them all.

At one point while I was halfway through a particularly big pile of Storm's experiences in book form I found the ghostly hand of Anna Marie sticking out from underneath. Which makes some kind of sense I guess, since that woman was the last mutant Rogue touched and it overwhelmed her. I had to get her out and then I put her in a chair. She looked just like the girl appeared in real life, but transparent and white like a ghost.

I kept at it.

Some of the books tried to organize themselves as I worked and this was actually more of a nuisance than it should have been. Some of these other memories involved sex from the male perspective. I had to summon the conceptual concept of string to tie stacks of the books together to stop them from wandering around.

Kurt, Ororo, and Cody all had knowledge that Rogue could use to improve her talents and skills. Such as Kurt's advanced agility, reflexes and balance and Cody's wrestling moves that could be permanently added to her library in the Sports section thanks to my help. Anna Marie knew colloquial English and French, which is what she learned growing up in the Mississippi bayou area. Into the Language section of the library I also sorted Kurt's German and Ororo's knowledge of African languages.

These were just a few examples.

There were some things that should not be included in her mind space. Like what a boy did at home while he was alone. I locked those up behind a door in a new Restricted Section of the library, which I, sort of, created.

The new knowledge that she had gained about people she had never met, like the X-MEN and Cody's football friends and family, was organized into separate three ring binders and put into the Reference section under the People She Knew section of the library next to Friends, Relatives, Associates, Teachers, Enemies, people she saw on the News, and so on.

"Who are you?" asked the ghostly voice of Anne Marie's most inner self.

I turned around. I knew this question was going to be asked. I'd been working under her eyes for a while now.

Ororo Munroe, like most adults, had experienced laughing gas at the dentist. It made you calm and relaxed and the time flew by like nothing. I was using the memories of these experiences from the people Anne had absorbed to induce a calm state.

She probably thought it was a dream.

It looked like she had become more cognizant the longer I worked. Now that the extra personal memories of people were locked away behind closed doors the angst and embarrassment of teenager-dom had also fallen to the wayside.

It also looked like the landscape outside had cleaned itself up somewhat. The school had mutated (no pun intended) into this rather large mansion smack dab in the middle of the African planes surrounded by gardens and distant forests with rivers that turned into swamp, which had been liberally barrowed from other people's heads. There were four houses representing each person Anna Marie had touched out along the main street of the town and there were plenty of other islands in an orbit with structures on top that represented those people's favorite buildings, like restaurants, movie theaters, shops, hang-outs, government buildings, and a bunch of other unidentified features that hadn't settled out yet.

It was very Twilight Zone.

But it was all clean at least. A damaged landscape might have been an indication of brain damage. So at least Rogue's power prevented that from happening.

Hmm. How do I explain this?

She's not going to be happy with a Hell-spawn and roommate. But at least I'll get out.

I wonder if we'll become friends. There are far less useful friends that a teenager could have than someone who feeds on half your calorie intake.

I turned back to the Casper the Friendly Ghost version of Rogue who had her arms folded over her chest in fear, curled up as if waiting for a blow. This insecure and uncertain teenager was definitely not the voluptuous bombshell of comic books and I didn't like it.

"I am not going to hurt you," I told the girl who had only recently run from the younger versions of the X-men. "I won't. I need you to survive."

She lifted her head up at my words. I could feel the loneliness, envy, bitterness, and despair slowly turning into anger.

"It would be rather pointless as well. If you got hurt I'd have to spend resources to repair your body and I don't have much energy to waste at the moment," I explained. "My name's Norman."

"W-w-w-what are you?" she asked, very thick with the accent, looking around. "Where am I?"

"We'll get the easy parts over with first," I told her as calmly as possible. "First off, we're inside your head. This landscape is something I'm just going to call a Mindscape. Animals have it, humans have it. This library represents everything you've learned, everything you know. I've separated out the other people's knowledge and locked away the more disturbing bits in the restricted sections. When you wake up you're going to be quite a bit more knowledgeable than before."

Knowledge and experience yes, but not by much. It just seemed like a big thing to take in because her experiences were so limited. Compared to adult Storm it was very little. Combined together it was a bit overwhelming.

"As for what I am, I'm not a mutant like you. I'm something like supernatural battle armor. My soul is the intelligence that guides it. I'm alive, a member of the House of K. People in the heaven-made realms call me a Hell-Spawned Symbiote," I smiled. "It's nice to meet you."

Dream Rogue, Rogue, or Anne Marie looked flabbergasted. This was inside her head after all so she was running on dream logic. Things weren't tracking. If I asked her what (2+2) equaled is she wouldn't be able to do it. I know because I tried it before. I've only been "awake" in my dreams three times that I could remember, so I could relate.

I continued, "I'm extremely valuable and a really cool thing to have. Not only can I control your mutant power for you but I also eat half your calorie intake. You'll never get fat."

It was a hell of a lot more than that actually. When I'd grabbed a few rats to use as hosts I'd drained them dry of both calories and life force. A human was bigger, had more energy, a greater soul. The life force draining mutation was something I'd just supernaturally acquired when I bonded with her. It was the mac daddy of superpowers.

I had a counter in my head, "9999," and used one units of energy just from existing. When I attached myself to a rat the counter went up a bit so I know I'm feeding on it.

If I ever bonded with some fat guy I didn't see that lasting very long at all.

Rogue had come pre-loaded with Nightcrawler and Storm's powers and the life force of three people that I'd used to top up my tanks. I just needed time to digest.

Being able to teleport spam like there's no tomorrow with no danger of tele fragging or being tele fragged was a huge bonus I was going to relentlessly abuse. The 2-mile radius, carrying limit, and having prior knowledge of the location or line of sight of it was just something I was going to have to train to overcome.

Weather Control also gave us flight and slight immunities to temperature extremes and electricity. Using it to bring forth clean water to drink, even hot water showers to bathe in were all going under the file of Things I Need To Abuse to Survive.

"You want to… eat me?" Rogue asked, still dreamy.

"In the most literal sense, yes," I nodded. "For all intents and purposes I am – will be, become a part of you. I need your energy to survive and you can provide it. Unless your enemies have a magical item that can kill or hurt me I cannot be disabled, forcibly removed, or detected. I'm a supernatural and magical thing. I also extend these protections to you so nobody can mess with your brain or your soul. I can also push your body to your physical limitations to give you Captain America body powers."

Rogue's eyes widened, then she tapped her fingers to her lip as she thought about it. "Really? Captain America, just like that?"

Steve Rodger's legacy is stronk!

"His enhancements were biological, mine are supernatural. But with my help nobody's going to hurt you again," I walked up to her. "Are you ready to wake up?"

She looked up at me and nodded.

I reached out and gave Anna a big hug in my arms.

 

[Nitronorm5688]

When Anna Marie's eyes opened she was a bit disorientated.

She stood up and it didn't take long to figure out that she was now dressed in something else. Her hands went all over the costume, touching herself to make sure she was still in one piece, and then she tried to pull it off.

"Ahh, what, what is this?"

I spoke in my awesome Keith David Spawn voice, "That would be me." My voice didn't come from any direction she could detect. Her eyes darted around quickly, no doubt expecting me to be there looming over her or just behind her.

"YAAH!" she turned around fast. It was quite a bit faster than she was used to. I wasn't crazy enough to give her full Spawn powers right off the bat ; she was just in a bit better shape physically when I repaired the electrical burns and started on the long list of physical improvements I could make using the food fuel in her guts and a bit of cellular rearrangement.

Now her heart was beating quite a bit faster. Adrenalin was being pumped into the circulatory system, which I ate to keep that from going out of control.

"Not there, I'm speaking to you in your head. … This is telepathy. It'll give you a bit of a headache, it's a real nail-and-hammer pain-torture, but that'll be gone in a few days. You've never used that part of your brain before after all."

"Norman? What am I wearing?"

"Your Cowl. It's supernatural battle armor from the House of K. The person who wears this cowl is known as a Spawn. We're a team, two minds in one delightful package. Welcome to the new army, kid."

"How do I get this thing off?" she tried to grip it and pull it off.

"It dosen't. That cowl you're tearing at is my physical form on this plane of existence. Not only am I attached to your body but to your life force and soul as well. Unless you've got a very powerful magical artifact there's not much in this world that's going to make me let go. I'm pretty durable as well. I can take a fifty caliber armor piercing bullet with no trouble at all."

Rogue looked down at her new outfit. I thought I was rather dashing myself. I'd taken what would be her X-Men costume and given it the Spawn makeover.

I tried to send over emotions of joy and smugness.

The full body outfit was a black fibrous muscle suit with red boots with pyramid-like black spikes, red gloves with claws with black spikes on the knuckles, the neck collar and armbands had spikes as well. White skulls were on each shoulder, as usual, along with a white X over the chest armor with a red underside. The belt was started in the small of her back and looped over the curves of her wide hips creating a very daring plunging belt line, with another skull over her lower pelvis. For the hair I'd combed her mullet back and flattened the hair close to her head, with the thick white stripe in the middle, going all the way down to her butt in a braided ponytail. The white spawn mask was in place with a little black border, her eyes glowing green with a darker solid green iris.

Rogue grabbed at her chest and realized how thin the material was. "Did you give me implants? Surgery?"

"Of course not. I refuse to take any blame, or thanks, for those curves, you lucky girl. That is what you're going to look like as a fully developed woman. In about ten years or so, maybe."

She stopped freaking out, and then slowly lowered her arms, her hands tracing the taunt everything on the way down to her quad stomach and over her deadly child-bearing woman hips. "You know what? I'm okay with that." There was another momentary pause. "So I'm stuck with you?"

"Don't worry, I'll teach you the ropes. Now first thing's first: Introductions," Rogue crossed her arms, or tried to before her new chest got in the way, so she then crossed them underneath her boobs, which pushed them up higher. "That feels kind of nice from this side of the fence." Rogue blushed hard and put her arms down, her fists squeezing. "Oh don't stop on my account. You're beautiful. Never be ashamed of what you are. Now to recapitulate, I am a Hell-Spawned Symbiote. I am Norman. I used to be human, male, and was a bit older than you are when I died. It's nice to meet you."

"How old are you?"

"Not important!" I'm certainly not going to tell her. "I am commonly referred to as a Cowl. I'm now your Cowl. I'm a supernatural battle armor designed to rend oceans of blood from our enemies. When I am bonded with a human being we are known as the Spawn, A Spawn, The Spawn, or A Hell Spawned; take your pick."

"Yeah, I seem to recall that you said that, while you were in my head, and everything . . ." Rogue put a hand to her head and shook it. "What has my life become?"

"Do you also recall how you were being pursued?"

Rogue's eyes widened in realization, standing up straight and looking around as if expecting the X-Men to appear as if by magic. Her heart beat sped up again with panic.

"The X-Men!"

I could use that panic to motivate her. I just know I was going to a certain place in the afterlife, but I couldn't stop myself from thinking it. I wanted to take this horse for a ride.

"I suggest we get moving. Now: A little demonstration about what you can do. You see that stone bench over there? Go on over and pick it up."

"What? Seriously?" She eyed the cemetery's more permanent feature. The stone was as long as she was tall and nearly a foot thick.

"I am the supernatural super powerful suit of battle armor, here; I'll say what you can and can't do. Now do it!"

"All right, I'll give it a shot," Rogue walked over to the bench and gripped it with both hands. She gave it a tug, was surprised that she could move it like it was made of Styrofoam, and then slowly proceeded to lift the whole thing up over her head. Her lifting technique was atrocious, but we'd work on that soon.

"Be super careful," I cautioned while the girl flexed her muscles. "Watch your center of gravity. Even with me on you that stone slab is heavier than your average car. As your personal body armor I can stop a fifty caliber bullet with a layer of material as thin as your average bit of clothing but if that falls on you it will still hurt like a bitch. Good, now put it back where you found it. Carefully."

Rogue put the slab down, and she even moved it a bit so it fit in the slots it came from.

"Look down at your boots. See how far they sank into the dirt? Now pull them out. You've got body powers with five main abilities, Strength, Speed, Smarts, Regeneration and Toughness. Bending steel and lifting rocks is only a part of it. At some point my supernatural abilities give you the power to break physics. You can run as fast as a car but also turn on a dime and stop without slowing down. You can regenerate all damage in minutes or seconds, allowing you to fight as you heal, mend bones and make new ectoplasmic blood. You're also durable enough to ignore taking hits that would put holes in walls and fall off of buildings. You'll be mangled, and it will hurt as much as you'd expect."

"What about what you said about being smarter?"

"That's actually a part of regeneration. You see, in ancient medieval times, or in worlds without your healthcare, people were sick a lot because of their crappy diet and poor health, or eating from dishes made with lead. If you had good teeth, if you didn't have parasites, or skin blemishes, than you were beautiful. Making you smarter by removing poisons from your body is step one. You know how a neuron works right? From health class?"

"Sort of? Ah! I mean yes," momentary pause. "You know I can tell when I'm accessing knowledge from someone else?"

"Moving on. Well a neuron works by being stimulated and then sending a signal down a wire to another neuron. That neuron is a part of your nervous system. But if you were to measure the speed of your nerves throughout your whole body, you'll find some that are faster than others or that some of the neurons are ridiculously long when they only need to go a short distance. By doing some work I can upgrade this a bit so that not only are you able to keep up with your new abilities but you'll gain about a dozen IQ points."

"Okay, that sounds impressive." She nodded as Anne agreed with herself. "I like the idea of getting smarter."

"If you think that's impressive just wait a few weeks. Not only are you going to be gaining weight but I'll be making sure it goes to all the right places. With my help you'll have an eight pack in no time."

Anne Marie just stood there for a few seconds looking dumbfounded. Then she seemed to get mad. "I thought you said that you didn't do this to me? Wait. Does that mean you can make me look like this when I'm not wearing you?"

"No, I said that this is what you would look like all grown up! Pay attention. Look, this isn't all that difficult to understand. I'm supernatural body armor, YOUR supernatural body armor, and this is what we look like NOW. You're a young girl who can't do one hundred pushups. You've still got a few growth spurts left. With good diet and exercise this is the kind of body you'll have in civilian mode. In Spawn mode, once you are all grown up, you'll be about two feet taller. Got it?"

"Holly shit!" her eyes were round as ideas of walking around in little to no clothing, and at the beach, and about a dozen magazines, floated through her head. "I'm gonna be fucking sexy!"

"Good attitude. Now let's get started. See that fence over there? Go over there and jump over it. You've got the memories of Nightcrawler so you'll be able to grip that fence and jump over it. Just don't land on the spikes. As a Spawn we've got supernatural regeneration and we can survive having a spear through our guts, but they'll still hurt like fuck. Especially when we have to pull them out ourselves."

Anne Marie gave herself another look over as I talked, imagining all the changes that will be coming over her in the next few weeks. Since I was a part of her I had an insider's view of her mind and it was both fast and explicit. Even long after school ended for me and all the interactions with women I've had, I can't imagine a girl turning down a chance to get sexy so she could attract a man, and this one was no exception.

"Okay."

I watched as Rouge went to the fence, eyeballing the distance. She jumped a few times on the spot and was surprised when she jumped a little higher than the fence itself. The next time she jumped she grabbed onto those spikes, did a hand stand, flipped herself over and landed on her feet on the other side.

A perfect leap.

I was out!

I mean she was out!

What I mean was that we were out, yes!

"That was awesome! Maybe being a Hell Spawn won't be so bad," Rogue crowed.

"Good job."

"What about those people from before? What if that person comes after me again?"

"What person?"

Rogue started walking and said, "The one pretending to be Wolverine and Storm and Marvel Girl?"

It took me a second to realize that she was talking about her little interaction between the X-Men kids and her mother Mystique. The X-Men Evolution cartoon show. She didn't know I had outside context knowledge. But she had a few advantages as well. I shouldn't have been surprised that Anne Marie was a smart girl who could put things together. Of course helping put her brain back together probably speeded that up by a lot.

"You noticed that?"

"Kind of hard not to with the way I'm remembering things. I'm a mutant. It's weird," she shook her head to clear it as she started walking away from the cemetery. "I've only just heard of the term and yet I feel like I've known about it for years. But that's because of all the new memories I've got. I remember Storm and what she did when I touched her, and if I close my eyes I can see things as she saw them, and she never hurt me but someone who looked like her did. This is like something from the movies. I've even got a cape. So what's next?"

"Let's forget about those people and keep going for now. Do you recognize this road?"

It's made out of asphalt dirt and packed down but not a solid. The road was so old it was in pieces for as far as either of us could see going in both directions. There were no signs to be seen, no power lines either. The cemetery we had come from was old old.

Rogue looked around. "Not really."

"Then any direction is fine. I can change your scent and on a road like this Wolverine can't track you the way he would through the woods."

"But what about home?"

"Sorry but you can't go home again."

Rogue was going to start to argue, I could feel it in the chemicals in her brain, but then she held her breath and let out a sigh. "Tell me why not?"

"Did you just use the knowledge in your head to come to a wise decision?" I asked.

Rogue nodded.

"Well, that's good then. Okay, besides the fact that the X-Men have a mind reader, and they're the good guys, the bad guys have access to the same methods; there are other ways to track you. The person who can look like other people was able to separate you from the X-Men very easily, created all that chaos and very nearly got you seriously hurt. You know from their memories that they're not the same person. However this means that they're able to operate on the same level as all those people with all those abilities and still give them the run around. And they got to you first! We're probably dealing with a large organization, spies and wet works."

Rogue nodded and kept on walking. "What a day."

And the sun wasn't up yet.

 

[Nitronorm5688]

A Keetha has very strict dietary requirements.

Ghosts were fine but they had all the nutrition of a ball of cotton candy floss. They made me hyper and gave me a headache that made me more in tune with the babysitters of the world. The ghosts in the cemetery hadn't lasted nearly long enough as far as I was concerned.

What we needed were fresh kills with a lot of emotion dripping off their souls like the juicy fat from a fifty dollar prime rib dinner.

It doesn't need to be human either. Each year approximately 1.5 million animals are euthanized in shelters and veterinary clinics around the world.

"We need to eat," I declare.

Rogue didn't bother to acknowledge my communication as she was too busy puffing like a steam locomotive as we ran down the stupidly long road to try and get somewhere more soonish.

This was the emptiest road I've ever seen!

Considering we've been traveling for half the night and have yet to see a gas station or even a set of ruins while the pine trees passed us by at highway speeds I was starting to think that something was wrong.

Or was that Anne Marie's feelings?

Anne slowed down to a walk as she cooled down. "Something's wrong with this place. There's no signs, no side roads, no trash, no buildings!"

"Very remote," I remark. "Go get a drink to rehydrate."

Anne nods and walks off into the wilderness. There was a river in the distance. We'd been following the road in the direction that took us downstream which I thought was south.

We didn't have any supplies. Thankfully, a plethora of supernatural abilities could make up for that so we were unlikely to die of starvation. The weather was on the cold side, unfortunately. Anne had decided to take up jogging to keep up her internal temperature while I used most of my cloak to give us some extra padding.

We'd gone over the powers we had available to us. A few attempts at Nightcrawler's teleportation had revealed that we'd better have our mouth shut if we didn't want our lungs full of sulfur-smelling gasses and I'd managed to store away a few exotic chemicals.

There was a reason why the fuzzy dude was blue.

I'd then endeavored to make Anne's lungs, esophagus, teeth, lips, eyes, ears, nostrils, and a few other assorted orifices, more like Kurt's. Anne's ears had become more pointed and she was not amused.

We'd had more luck with flight. A stiff wind on Anne's backside had allowed for swift travel and I was experimenting with making our cape more like Storm's battle outfit with the ends of her flying cape attached to the wrist.

So the last hours were alternating between learning how to fly, bamf-teleporting to someplace two miles down the road, running and catching our collective breathe.

Wherever the hell we are we certainly weren't in Louisiana.

An unexpected thing Anne figured out quickly was that with supernatural regeneration came the benefits of supernatural exercise. Also supernatural hunger. Healing Anne's body had required emptying out her digestive tract.

Anne' used our cape to scoop up a bag of water from the river which I could filter. As far as I could tell there were no strange chemicals in it. I used our new Life Force Absorption ability to kill anything living that might have been in the water to make it super extra special dead. So I suppose it was okay.

When Anne had drunk her fill I was able to store some of the water in a bag in the small of Anne's back for later.

Anne then used her weather power to summon a small rainstorm and drank the water she caught in her hands and wet her hair.

"You are getting better at that," I announced. "Okay, you need to eat."

Anne did her best to follow my instructions. She was much more interested in fishing than in hunting bunnies. Which was too bad. I had these fantasies of her running through the woods to strangle the little carrot munchers with our chains.

"Why do you hate bunnies so much?" Rogue asked me then.

"I don't hate them. You can't hate something you love to kill so much," I had replied right back as visions of pulped rabbit carcasses drifted through my imagination. "When I was alive I used to have a garden."

Rather than respond she instead she used our chains like fish-seeking torpedo-serpents of carnivorous intent. One of the things I hadn't realized was that Spawn could see through the eyes of the skulls in their decorations. And on the ends of our chains were skulls with eyes.

Actually, I'm not sure if the chains normally have skulls on the ends of them. I only had them that way because I saw the movie and the animated series.

In fact, the chains usually come from the skull motif's mouths. Or, from somewhere behind our back where they can't be seen by mortal eyes. I can't see where they come from either, they're always coming from some place just out of sight.

I think that's a supernatural feature.

So Rogue made the chains explode from her body and we had a bunch of skulls on the ends of the chains with blades instead of teeth to be used as hands. They went right into the water.

We caught some fish.

I held up the first for the girl. Anne frowned and not at all looking forwards to what was going to happen next.

She took off one of the gloves. "Do I have to?"

"It's going to die anyway," the fish was gapping at the air but our metal claws had cut through its scales and bones like paper.

"This is going to be so icky," Rogue reached out and touched the fish.

She held it for a few seconds and it was still flopping around.

Strange.

Then there was something almost like a sound. There was also a slight shimmer in the air where Anne's hand touched the dying fish. There was this flash where the colors of everything became the opposite of what they were. Then it was gone and the fish didn't move anymore.

Anne shook her hand to remove the blood and broken scales on it. "Ew!"

There were a few more fish in various forms of dismemberment that hadn't died yet. "Just a few more to go."

"Yeah, yeah."


-000-

Well… Anne isn't hungry anymore. And neither am I.

Amazing what hunger can do.

Or not.

Apparently Anne can choose not to absorb the life force of a living thing if she really didn't want to. None of my help required.

I wasn't going to have issues with it. Comic books are weird. Their characters can have all kinds of untapped abilities and new ones get added all the time. Because most of their powers came from the 1960s future writers were forced to develop explanations for how they worked decades after the fact. That didn't even get into how weird things can get with traumatized teenage superheroes with brain injuries to suppress their abilities or how they were experimented on by alien psychos or magic artifacts to acquire power-ups.

Since Rogue was a character from the Marvel comic universe where the heroes and villains all have tragic backstories I'm going to blame it all on Trauma.

I tried to think of a character from Marvel that didn't need therapy.

I couldn't.

Anne Marie looked at the living fish in her naked hands as it flopped back and forth.

Anne asked, "You're not controlling this?"

I sent her feelings of a headshake. We were pretty close as Host and Cowl and I could usually explain things pretty simply without using words.

"So it's not permanently on," It was a statement of fact. She drained the fish of life. This time green rings of energy manifested around the fish and were absorbed up her arms into her body. First she only drained one part of it to stop it from moving, then all of the rest.

Anne Marie didn't develop gills or anything silly like that. I wouldn't have let her. But apparently that sort of thing would only happen if Marie acquired mutant fish powers. Maybe? So it was all good.

"I think that if you wanted to you could keep it stuck in the 'ON' position while you slept to keep yourself safe from predators." And so many other things that wanted to grab her, I didn't say. "Good thing it's not on all the time."

Whistle-whistle, looks left, looks right, nothing to see here!

There was still some emotional bleed through. So when she nodded I knew she got the unspoken message.

I'd pity anyone attempting harm to our little girl now.

All we needed was a hitchhiker serial killer so we could have a new car and we'd be all set.

Anne Marie was not that enthusiastic about eating fish raw without a bucket of cocktail sauce. But she did do it. Anne used her new claws to take off the fins, the head, and pull the guts out of the fish. Funnily enough this version of Rogue liked cooking and had made a fair amount of alligator gumbo.

"My desire for a chopping block is great," says Anne.

Then she used my ability to make spikes grow from all of our body parts to make blades appear on her finger. The blades spun around her finger. Then she used the new power tool to de-scale the fish.

"Look on the bright side: With your powers to absorb all life from an animal you don't have to worry about parasites."

"Hmm." Anne practiced for a while with her Storm powers to electrocute the fish until it was more dead and not quite burnt.

Anne's mutant powers are hers alone. Any calories that she burns using them are on her. When she used her cowl to fly that energy was on me.

It was nice that we were able to learn how to fly. We had the coolest cape.

So there we are, flying like a bat out of hell with a belly full of electrocuted fish, with nothing but forest for as far as the eye could see. Rogue was testing out her windy powers trying to find that balance between having enough force to move us better and too much. Wind flight was a tricky thing.

Good thing we had memories from Ororo and the birds I ate to help.

Of course if we got into trouble Rogue would teleport us back up high into the sky and away from the trees where we could practice falling with style.

But that was all on her. All I did was make the cape do cool things.

I think we traveled a good distance. I mean I don't have an odometer. I was pretty sure we were flying faster than most birds even if it was more of a controlled glide and wind push than actual flight.

I don't think we were going very fast.

Eventually we got much higher in the sky.

When the road was little more than a tiny line down below us we saw some signs of it ending.

 

[Nitronorm5688]

"Well that explains where we are," Anne Marie said as we looked through the glass wall.

The glass wall contained the entire world we'd been flying through for the last two days. On the other side of the wall was a shop containing a bunch of knickknacks for tourists, antiques, and shelves of oddities?

We were in some kinda jewlery.

"How in the world did we end up in here?" I asked. "I thought we were in some remote place, not the outback of Canada! We're not anywhere near the Mississippi. Kurt's teleportation gimmick is only good for about two miles. How does that translate to us being up here?"

"Maybe it was some kind of weird power interaction?" Anne suggested with a shrug. "I was struck by lightning after all. Maybe it was super powered or something?"

"It's as good an explanation as any. But since you were dropped on my doorstep I think there's more to it than that. Never mind how you got here, how did I get here? And I've been in here for weeks without knowing this."

"You don't believe in coincidences do you?"

"My soul comes from another world where the Hell Spawn is an item in a comic book. Now I'm in a world with superheroes with powers that remind me of people from Other comic books. And now I'm finding out that the world we were traveling though, which had a sun and moon and stars, was an item on a shelf this whole time. Which is probably magical, by the way. And I'm not sure I want to know who set up the cemetery, whose bodies are buried back there, or the ghosts I ate, or how that scrap of newspaper I read when I got here."

Anne's heart is beating very fast now. I know what she's going to ask. "Did you know about me before I showed up?"

"It's very hard to keep secrets between a Host and a Symbiote," I remarked. "Do you remember reading A Connecticut Yankee In King Author's Court?"

Anne turns around and flies off into the air and turns south towards the 'front' of the snow globe facing the store. A few quick teleportation's got us high enough in the air that we could glide for a few hundred miles without effort.
"It's not a book that I've read yet," she said.

"But you have heard of it, and Kurt did read it on his own, so you should know all about it, plus there were movies," I point out. "You've never read about King Author and his Knights of Justice, but you could write a few pages about the characters. You'd get the details wrong, but you'd at least be able to recognize the legends. If you saw them in a movie you'd know who they are without an introduction, the tale is ingrained in our culture that much. I'm in sort of the same position. I know a lot of names, and I have enough information to be dangerous. But I'm not an encyclopedia." I pause. "It's kind of exciting actually. Like falling through the TV screen and appearing in a fictional town. Is it the one based off the book, or the TV show, or the comic? Will elements of the video games show up?"

"Can you please be quiet now? I need to think and you're giving me a headache," Anne Marie says.
I nod and Anne can feel it.

This was how we've been talking. My telepathy is painful for mortals to hear so we've been keeping things short. It's kind of like after having major surgery on your mouth. You want to eat and talk, but you dare not open your mouth too wide. And we don't have any pain meds.

After an hour when her head felt better Anne started talking again.

With the benefit of hindsight Anne Marie was remarkably open-minded about the idea that I come from another dimension. She had three sets of additional memories in her head and the X-Men, Storm and Nightcrawler, had seen and experienced plenty of things that made my story not as outlandish as it should have been. From the reference of A Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court I'd opened her up to the possibility of falling into a book in the library or through a TV and ended up in a world where the story was real.

"So how do you suggest we get out of here? We could cut a hole in the wall, or I could try teleporting?" she went up to the wall and gave it a knock with her hand. It felt pretty solid. "Or do you think we should try to find a way out?"

"Let's try giving it a cut. I'm not sure about the effects of teleporting through a magical artifact."

Anne held up her hand, summoning up some long claws that were more capable than most knives and swords you can name, and took a swipe at the glass. To make our efforts even more pathetic than they are, we were unsuccessful in making even a teeny-tiny scratch in the wall. There wasn't even any sound as the claws went against the glass.

"So that didn't work," Anne backed up from the glass and made to fly right through it. "Teleportation it is then."

"Go full Hell-Spawn first with you Rotting Shell. If you die from the attempt you won't end and you can change back to your living human form afterwards."

"Ahhhhhh… You know I hate our Rotting Shell!" Rogue groaned as the costume covered her face and her eye's glowed a bright sickly green.

Inside the cowl her body became lifeless and dead, like a corpse that had been given a few days to rot. The right arm became nothing but bones and gristle, a lot of the flesh lost its fat and the skin became white or nearly transparent in a few places. Cuts became open wounds black with decay. The right side of her face opened up to expose her teeth. Rogue also gained weight and became a 300 pound monster. She became taller, more imposing, like a muscular freak preserved in embalming fluid.

She made a well preserved corpse.

I told her, "Better safe than sorry."

So Anne went full Spawn and then tried to teleport out.

We had about one second to appreciate being micro sized before we suddenly grew into a giant. The world we had been traveling through for days became the jewel of a small necklace on a shelf, containing a small model of a forest with a single road passing by a loanly graveyard. Then we landed on the floor.

"Well that worked out all right," then Rogue fell to her knees and arms, breathing heavily. "Hey are you all right?"

"Teleporting through that thing took a lot out of me. Ha-ha. Where are we?" she asked

Rogue turned to look around the shop. Now that we were on the outside the place didn't look that great. It was kinda boring, actually. There were shelves where choice books had been removed but the rest were left behind. Little woven iron wire trees with glass jewels on the ends. A bunch of gypsy knickknacks like crystals and wooden staffs and things like that covered with cobwebs and dust. A fairy woodland village made of clay mushrooms dominated the center of the room. What looked like water damaged came through the ceiling, spreading rot in all directions.

"We're in an abandoned shop." I said in awe. "What a stroke of luck." My thoughts turned to the medallion on the lowest most shelves where it rested with a bunch of other broken junk. Anne turned her head to look where I wanted to look.

"What is this?" Anne picked the jewel that we had been trapped inside of for so long. "Who leaves behind a magical amulet?"

"It's an interesting thing. We might be stuck here for a while. On the one hand our Rotting Shell won't need to eat or breathe so we won't have that problem here. And we have a nice place to stay now."

"Especially if we take this with us," Rogue places the necklace around her neck. "It's not exactly a home away from home, but I'll be able to make a mansion in the woods and take it with me. And I hate our Rotting Shell. So let's not use it."

"Up to you."

We teleported out of the tourist shop and took to the skies again. We were in a city. There weren't any people around. But I put the reason behind that was because the sun was coming up and it looked like the place had been on fire for a few days.

It was kinda futuristic looking up until you saw all the cars with exploded engines.

Curious, Anne landed next to one of the vehicles to have a look inside. The battery and/or capacitor were completely fried and melted, the slag pooled on the asphalt. She then traced the wires back to this thick double antenna laid out on the roof of the car. The wires were thick and you could pop the thing out of the roof with the right tools.

"This looks like some kind of sci-fi power receiver," Anne remarked. She broke off a part of the burnt plastic, which smoked and hissed when she did. "This happened recently. It's still hot."

Now that we knew what to look for there was evidence of some kind of power surge or an EMP strike all over the place. Anything plugged into the city's power network was fried. Anything battery operated had burned. There was smoke damage on every building.

Then we heard the scream.

Anne BAMFed us to the roof of a nearby building. We were treated to quite the sight.

There was a woman with two children running down the road being pursued by flying motorcycles driven by living skeletons in rags of clothes. The skeletons were driving slowly to give the woman the chance to run but they also weren't allowing her to duck into an alleyways.

And they were laughing about it.

"Those assholes!" Anne had us assume her Rotted Shell form in an instant as rage overtook her mind. The white mask around her face manifested itself as she flew into the air to swoop down on the bikers.

We came crashing down on the one in front of the pack. His bones broke like celery sticks under our weight. Chains of pain and blades of steel shot out to skewer the rest of the undead and pulled them off their machines.

The motorcycles went flying off in every direction and crashed.

The other skeletons that had not been knocked off their rides stopped to see what was going on.

"Who's the girl?"

"Who cares?" one of the skeletons had a futuristic gun in chrome but we snagged it before he could do anything with it. Took his hand with it as well. "Aw nuts. That was my bonein hand!"

More chains appeared, spearing them through their chests in every direction, manifesting hooks through rib cages, tearing apart spines and rotted clothes with yanks and tosses.

Leaving one gasping dead girl in the middle of quite a bit of wreckage.

"What, the fuck, was that!?" Anne gasped.

I remained silent. My eyes from the skulls were on the woman and children that had gotten away when the getting was good.

"No, seriously, tell me what the fuck just happened? I tore through those skeletons like a fucking chainsaw with no hesitation. How'd I do that?"

"Ingrained skills, no hesitation, I think," I shrugged with Anne's shoulders. "You handled yourself well in that first fight. Savage and beautiful."

Then something grasped our ankle.

Anne looked down to see the hand of a skeleton on her boot. This was followed by the rapidly assembled arm, rib cage, spine, and then skull of the skeleton reassembling itself at our feet.

"It ain't over yet doll face!" the skeleton laughed.

Anne kicked at him with her other boot and sent his remains scattering again.

"That's not good," I watched as the other skeletons assembled themselves quickly with a magical glow around their flying bones. They picked themselves up and took a hold of their weapons. "Definetly not good!"

One of the skeletons came at us with a pipe. Not even an actual weapon. Anne grabbed the pipe out of his hands so easily it looked as if the skeleton had given it to her. Then she spun around him like a ballerina and threw him to the floor with her other arm, finishing him off with a hard stomp to his rib cage.

Now Anne was armed with a pipe.

She was holding it like she knew what to do with it. Her elbows were tucked in tight, the length of steel in position by her right shoulder, her feet placed on the ground just so.

Batter up!

The other skeletons eyed one another with a silent conversation. One of them tossed a dagger from hand to hand.
Then they all rushed her.

Rogue went full on murder-machine-matrix on their asses.

She ran to the first one, smashed it three times, 1, 2, 3, in the face, ribs, and pelvic, shattering him with the pipe. The next she threw the pipe into another skeleton's so hard the metal went right through its nose hole. Rogue then grabbed and tossed pipe-face into a third skeleton, then skewered them both on a chain, constricting the chain and blades and pinching them in into two pieces, tops and bottoms, cutting them in half.

Yeah… I guess she didn't need that pipe.

It was . . . honestly very impressive the way Rogue was moving through the battle like she completely fucking owned it. Because she did. Moving from one place to the other dodging attacks from behind like she knew the guy was there and was counting down the seconds until he moved.

Until finally Rogue used her chains to grab the skeletons skulls and drove them into the pavement, holding them there and ending the fight.

Rogue wasn't breathing anymore. She was dead after all. But there was a great big grin on her face. "That. Was. Awesome!"

"Yeah… grab one of them for interrogation."

Rogue blinked, "Right!"

The chains holding down one of the smaller specimens is brought before the newly born Hell-Spawn. "Now what makes you so special?"

Rogue takes a hold of the skeleton and then begins dismantling him. Hands and arms and legs are pulled off, real easy like, given a looking over and then tossed far away.

The skeleton doesn't scream in pain, but he does yell. "Hey, I needed that!"

The bones were about the same as the one in my high school science class. But they were much harder, like really solid. And they stayed together as if connected by magnets. Until we pulled them apart that is.

Then we get to the rib cage and find this ruby-like stone where the heart used to be.

The moment Rogue touched it I could taste the essence of evil from it. It was sharp and plentiful and covered with a sweet shell. Like the chocolate core of a tootsie-pop.

"This looks important," Rogue pulled the Heart Stone from the rib cage and for the first time the skeleton screams in actual pain.

The bones that had made up his body fly back to him. Then there's a flash of light. After Rogue blinks we're left holding onto a normal human being dressed in normal clothes.

The hell?

"I'm human again!" the guy growled, "The Baron will have your head for this!"

Rogue puts her hand on the now human's head and drains him of his life force. No powers, and only enough to put him in a coma. We also get a rush of memories!

The man was some kind of petty criminal taken from the prison after Baron Dark took control of the city. He'd grabbed the man, said a little speech, and turned him into his Skeleton Warrior.

There was also a bit of mind control involved. But not much. Without his flesh he has no emotions, no conscience, an instant psychopath ready for orders.

These Skeleton Warriors had a lot in common with our Rotting Shell. They don't age because they're not alive. They don't suffer from hunger or thirst, don't need to sleep, feel no real pain, and can reassemble themselves when blasted apart by ray guns. They made loyal minions of the Baron and an army of them had taken over the city in a single day.

Rogue tossed the unconscious man away and then did the same to the rest of the biker gang. A simple task now that we knew the trick. The heart jewels were downright tasty!

"I know where we are. Do you?"

"I know where we are, yes."

"You know what we have to do?"

"Bury Baron Dark in concrete?"

"Yes, because even if you are immortal you can still be buried alive!"

"We were fucking made for this kind of universe!"

"I couldn't agree more!"

"This is going to be so much fucking fun!"

Rogue nodded, "Oh yeah, and we'll do it together," she turned her head towards the bikes. The flying, gravity defying, rocket propelled, equipped with ray-gun turrets, rocket shooting, covered in skulls, motorcycles. "But first we need a ride."

Rogue's face hurt from smiling.


-000-

So, does the symbiote know what the Hellspawns are truly capable of, given that there is a sufficient inner reserve of magic?

Click to shrink...

Sort of yes, sort of no. I don't think anyone actually knew what the Hellspawn was supposed to grow up into or they never would have given it to a human. Then there's the fact that the writers kept on adding little things over the years.

 

[Nitronorm5688]

Had to do a bit of editing with this chapter. So much of it was just unfinished. Anyway, enjoy.


View: https://youtu.be/a3ZlpTp_dJA?si=hPUEEXsek7-3pNQi



We made much better time.

The memories she'd gotten from those punk bikers had given her more than enough information to pilot. Until the fuel ran out the machine was more than capable of matching our previous efforts at flight. Later on we could try to craft something a bit better. And with our Rotting Shell in place none of the other skeletons even bothered us all that much.

"So how do you know about Skeleton Warriors?"

"I watched them on TV. You?"

"Internet."

The apocalypse was now!

Luminicity was in ruins and crawling with Skeleton Warriors. The normal people had spent the past week evacuating the city into the countryside.

Baron Dark's forces were growing with every convert. They couldn't be destroyed. He was letting the normal humans leave so that he could take over the city.

Meanwhile the Royal family hid out in the countryside avoiding his hunter parties.

But that wouldn't last very long. Without power you couldn't open the doors to the grain silos. Food in refrigerators was going bad. And every vehicle that depended on power from Luminicity was now useless. The motorcycles and a few other vehicles were the exception, not the rule.

Anne saw a group of Skelton Warriors walking their way down the street in a group. Some of them had even dressed in old armor with bucket helmets and horns.

Rogue grinned, "Time to be a hero."

She pulled our new Skull Cycle into an attack run, beams of shooting green energy strafing the warriors. Their bodies exploded quite satisfactory and sent the others scattering.

We landed quickly. As usual our chains came out grabbing skulls from every direction. All except from one rib cage. A quick grasp, a twist, and yank gave us another heart stone to devour. This one tasted of lies and deceit.

The man that came into existence in our hands looked kind of fat. And he had glasses.

Rogue put her hand to his head, draining him of life force to send him into a long coma and acquiring his memories in the process. The process hurt, but not as much as our telepathy, and I was quick to organize the memories into things we wanted to keep and things that we were okay with loosing.

With another yank of the chain we picked up one of the Skeleton Warriors energy guns from off the ground. Rogue aimed it at a stop sign down the street and pulled the trigger.

"Pu-chu! Pu-chu!" there was a nice explosion when the concrete we hit overloaded its energy threshold.

"Nice looking blaster, but why the fuck does it aim to the left?" as the cowl I created a new holster for the gun which Rogue put on her hip. And I had to agree with her, the gun was shit. "Long range options should never be ignored. I'll keep an eye out for a better gun later."

It took but a few more minutes to divest the skeleton scum of their Heart Stones. I was on a full tank of evil essence and had taken to saving the morsels for later. Waste not want not and all of that. Rogue stopped stealing life force and memories after the third one.

"These idiots don't have any skills worth knowing," Rogue growled.

It was then that I heard the sound of motorcycle engines in the air. "Looks like that won't be a problem."

From the sky there came a patrol of three skull cycles. And these guys had actual guns!

Rogue Bamf!ed us half a mile up so we came down right on the leader's cycle. Two chains went out left and right to grab the other skeletons from off their rides. The claws of our hands went into the rib cage of the first, her strength enough to bust through bone as she grabbed at the Heart Crystal within.

The human we got back looks kind of gnarly with tattoos all over himself. Rogue then touched his head and sent him to sleep. While she was dealing with the memories I used some of our spare chains to guide the vehicle onto the roof.

The other two skeletons were turned to human and then punched in the side of their heads to knock them out.

"You know, they could get seriously brain damaged from you doing that," I remark.

Rogue snorted, "I soooooo don't care. The memories I'm getting from these creeps are fucking awful. But at least this guy knew a little something about being a mechanic." A little something was more than ten years operating a chop-shop and fixing races, but who's splitting hairs here?

This new bike we got looked a lot better than the other one, I had to admit. It had both laser guns in the eyes of the skull mounted on the front and a pair of wings holding four more guns and a set of rocket launchers underneath. And this one had ammo for all of it.

We stayed long enough for Rogue to siphon the hydrogen fuels from the other bikes into our new favorite before taking off again.

I asked, "Do we have a plan?"

"Simple, we know what will happen if Baron Dark gets both halves of the Lightstar Crystal," Rogue said. We looked around, her with her own un-dead eyes and me through the skulls eyes decorating our costume. "There are no swarms of Skeleton Warriors on Skull Cycles, nor are there any Positron gun emplacements throughout the city. So we must be pretty early in the series," she nodded. "His forces will only get stronger from here. So we hit him now and put these 10,000 years of combat skills I've got to the test."

"I like this plan!"

We flew over Luminicity and headed for the palace in the center. Or was it a power plant? The fortress was once the center for all power in Luminicity and for half of the continent. But that was over a thousand years ago with a few Kings and Queens to renovate the place into something larger and grander. Within the deepest innermost chamber was where the Lightstar Crystal was housed before it was broken in two. Who knows where it was now?
The number of skeletons became greater as we flew closer. They didn't seem to be aware that they were under attack until the last minute when we landed right in front of the palace.

Our half rotted appearance may have gotten us through the city without a second glance but a close up look showed that there was still some meat on our bones.

Two skeleton Warriors at the doors to the entryway pull out guns as we appear. Two chains grabbed at the warriors and pulled them close enough for the new Rogue Spawn to pick then up and slame them both into the ground, sending their body parts flying and cracking the pavement.

"A bit too much force," I commented.

"Damn, what an annoying girl," one of the skeletons said.

"Shut up!" Rogue kicked the skull away, and then reached down for the Heart Stone.

I absorb Evil Essence!

A few skeletons that had been hanging out nearby see the commotion and come out to bum rush us. Two more get kicked in the chest before Rogue's hands go down to pull their Heart Stones.

I absorb Evil Essence x2!

Rogue throws her cape at the approaching skeletons trapping three underneath. She leaps at them and kicks a skull into the next country before reaching through our disconnected cape into the chests of the skeletons trapped within.

I absorb Evil Essence X3!

Another pair of skeletons show up, one with a gun. The gun gets yoinked by a chain, then the weapon and the hand are tossed across the courtyard. The other skeleton rushes us, but gets a fist to the jaw for his troubles. A yank on the Heart Stone of the one left standing returns him to human form. The other skeleton now missing a hand backs off.

"Wait a- Wait!" he yells as Rogue grabs his flailing hand and pulls him closer, taking his heart stone and tossing him to the side.

I absorb Evil Essence X2!

Next Rogue summons a chain and throws it up into the battlements, pulling us up and out of the way of incoming reinforcements.

"Chain of destruction," Rogue grins as four chains are sent out, this time with a full skull, and extended teeth blades.

The four skeletons down below have their chest punctured one at a time by my skull and teeth, grasping four Heart Stones when we're done. Yoink! Yoink! Yoink! Yoink! Then we pull the chains back so the jewels ended up in Rogue's hand. Moments later the Heart Stones evaporate into black ash and the skeletons down below are human once again.

I absorb Evil Essence X4!

"That was fun!" Rogue turned around to find us facing more Skeleton Warriors.

"If I might make a suggestion?" a chain with blades on it is extended from Rogue's right arm, ending with four grasping claws.

The next minute was an incredible slaughter as we used our new chain blade with seeker skull to slash, smash, and yank the Heart Stones out of the Skeleton Warriors to victory.

I absorb Evil Essence X23!

Rogue reached down to the two men who were closest and absorbed their life force and memories. Nodding once to herself, she imputed the code to the door and got us inside the castle.

The castle was not swarming with Skeleton Warriors. We made a direct line for the Throne room. Thanks to the memories she had absorbed Rogue knew the way. We only ran into three other warriors on the way inside.

Just as we entered the throne room however we were shot with a green energy gun. It went right through us.

Rogue looked down at the hole in her chest. Through our Rotting Shell we could see the green goop that had replaced her blood. We could also see parts of what had once been lungs and a heart through her charred bones. Then the wound and our costume closed up on us.

"That was unexpected," Rogue remarked, before we looked up at the shooter.

He was a short guy with a leather skull cap on his head holding a gun with a tiny skull on the end of it with the barrel pointing out of the mouth. "Oh dearie me. Shouldn't you be falling over?" he asked as Rogue stomped up to him.

Rogue gave him a golden high kick to his skull and sent it bouncing off the ceiling. "No."

"Clap, clap, clap."

A larger skeleton near the golden throne grinned at us. He had six smaller skulls around his neck attached to his dark red cape. He was different from the others in that he had a pair of giant fangs and two fangs from his chin like some weird goatee. He also still had his black hair and eyeballs, which were black with red glowing irises.

"Well done my dear, well done indeed," he laughed. "I haven't been this entertained since we ran the royal family out of town. Tell me dear, however did you manage to do that? You're not one of my Skeleton Warriors."

"Baron Dark I assume?" Rogue asked as we walked across the room.

"The very same," he pulled his cape to the side and bowed. "And who might you be?"

Anne thumbed herself in the chest, "They call me Rogue-"

I took momentary control and made her eyes flash green, "Spawn."

Baron dark rubbed at his bone-goatee, "Well my Rogue Spawn, pray tell what reason do you have for visiting my humble abode? Shouldn't you be preying on the innocent in some backwater town?"

Rogue grinned very savagely as the mask on her face peeled away to reveal the rotted muscles underneath. "Well you know how the ascent to power goes. There were some unusual side effects," Rogue showed off her skeleton hand and the corpse-like half rotted other, looked from one hand to the other and back again. "So I have a tiny question to ask, 'what would happen if you skeletonize me'?"

Baron Dark tapped at his bony cheek. "Interesting. What do you think, doctor?"

A cyborg came from behind the pillar. He also had a gun in hand pointed at us. Unlike the other warriors his right leg from the knee down, his entire left leg, left arm, left eye, and part of his skull had been replaced by blue prosthetics from when he was human. The square socket for his cybernetic eye could even blink. "She does pique my curiosity. I think that some experimentation is warranted. That is if this isn't just some trick to get at the Lightstar Crystal and pull your Heart Stone while you're distracted."

Rogue points towards the very evil man, "I'll make you a deal. Turn me into a Skeleton Warrior and I'll serve you. Fail, and I'll take the Lightstar Crystal. Seem simple enough?"

Baron Dark paced on his throne for a moment.

"Baron?" Dr. Cyborn said. "You're not really thinking about going through with this? She has abilities completely unknown to us. We have no idea what would happen if you tried to strip her of her rotted flesh. Risking the Lightstar Crystal is most unwise!"

"Unfortunately Doctor, I think I'll have to," Baron Dark stopped pacing. "She can obviously tear through the rough scallions I've turned into Skeleton Warriors and she is just as immortal as us. She could hunt us for eternity. This might be our best opportunity."

Baron Dark called for more warriors to fill the hall until Rouge was nervous about taking them all on. I think we would be fine. But they could still bury us in concrete. We'd break out in a few days. But so long as they didn't take Rogue's head we'd be fine.

Then Baron Dark stepped down from his throne, "If this dosen't work, shoot her."

We met the Baron halfway. Rogue extended her hands to him and he grasped hers in turn. There was a static shift in the air as the wind picked up in a small tornado all around us. It wasn't because of us. The Baron started to glow as he put all his strength into pushing Rogue. Force was met with force as Rogue held her ground.

The Baron chanted, "Darkest Soul, Evil's courier, Serve Me Now as a Skeleton Warrior!"

The energy crawled down Rogue's arms and all over her body. She could feel his dark essence entering her but that was nothing compared to what I was getting. I was drinking in Baron Dark's energy like a sponge. We were already full, but now we were getting double tanks!

Rogue's absorption power then synchronized with our Engine of Evil and started pulling at the Baron's own essence.

Rogue's form of Rotted Flesh started flaking away into a skeletonized form. Her glowing, green, etherial eyes became like cold green rocks of jade, but the pits were still glowing green with ectoplasm. Then she grew fangs, big ones just like the Baron. And a set of horns grew out of the side of her head facing forwards. In addition to all that we also aquired the former baron's cloths. A dozen new skulls appeared over her shoulders attached to a chain that held a golden skull that hung around Rogue's neck.

I hadn't chosen any of these features.

The shock on Baron Dark's face as the power was pulled from his body was sweet indeed as Rogue stood over him in his human form as he then collapsed on his knees before her.

Dr. Cyborn yelled, "Shoot her!"

A dozen weapons aimed and fired at the spot where we had been. By the time the triggers were pulled however there was nothing left but a giant cloud of dark sulfurous smoke. As for the former baron, well, he was mostly a wet stain of exploded flesh, and his skeleton wasn't pulling itself together anymore.

We appeared behind Dr. Cyborn and reached through his rib cage for his heart stone, but stopped just short of pulling it out.

"How!" Dr Cyborn turned his head completely around at our appearance on the throne pedestal behind him.

"I'm special," Rogue declared. "Now call them off."

"Y-yes, my lord. Stop attacking!" he yelled. "We surrender ourselves to our new lord. Baron Rogue Spawn is our master now!"

The other skeletons in the room stopped what they were doing.

"Good. Now you're going to be my personal guide to the Lightstar Crystal. And if I'm feeling generous I'll let you keep you skeletonized self." Rogue turned the man around with her fist still inside his ribcage.

Dr. Cyborn nodded, "Of course my lord. It's just down in my lab. I'll take you there right now."

With our hand in Dr. Cyborn's chest we slowly made our way out of the throne room and down the corridors, taking the elevator to the basement. At the lab Dr. Cyborn used his robot arm to extend an interface cable to unlock the safe. Within the safe was the Lightstar Crystal.

We let go of Dr. Cyborn and gave him a push to the side. Rogue reached in and took the crystal.

"So you have the crystal," Dr. Cyborn picked himself up off the floor. "So what now? Are you going to take the Baron's place?"

The crystal calls to us and it has a very lovely singing voice.

It can give us power. Unlimited in every form. Electricity equal to a million gallons of oil. Even the evil found in one's very soul could be found in abundance within this thing. Whatever you had it would be provided for, amplified, without end.

Rogue's powers are amply suited for absorbing and abusing whatever kinds of energy this crystal put out. Even broken this thing had enough power to destroy nations.

Rogue slowly transformed herself back from her Skeleton Warrior self to her Rotted Shell self to her normal Human self. "No. But you do have a choice."

"A choice?" Dr. Cyborn asks.

"Yeah. You can either suffer Prince Lightstar's wrath when he comes back into the city, or you can work for me." Rogue grinned at him. "You're choice."

"Not a very good choice for career advancement, I must say. But I accept." Dr. Cyborn nodded.

 

[Nitronorm5688]

I'm Red



Oh gods! I have too many eyes!

One moment I'm stuck in some kind of small confined space. It was cold too. The next moment I'm waking up, it's hot, and then I hit something.

With the hit had come more activity. I started waking up. Like I was already awake, but my thoughts were as slow as molasses. Now they were fast, faster than before. Memories started rushing into my mind. And with it came information.

Most of it I didn't like.

Apparently when you want to leave your old life behind and someone makes an offer the option to say 'Nooooo!' becomes vanishingly small. There was no pressure. But I'd recently become a fan of old monster movies. The number of people that were flat-out jackasses in the films were legion. If they would only treat the science experiments and unfortunate beasts with some dignity and respect there was a whole lot of drama that could have been avoided.

Like the actor Matthew Broderick had said in the 1998 Godzilla movie: "He's not an enemy, he's just an animal. If you give it what it wants, he'll come to you."

This was about where I had gained my opinions on treating monsters with the respect they deserved.

The one who did the offering was . . . maybe a bit more enthusiastic than he should have been. He'd reached out to me and I'd gone Splat! There wasn't much of me left. Even if I didn't technically die it was very awful. But that didn't matter anymore. I was gathered up, stuffed into a tiny ball, and thrown through a hole.

I hadn't wanted to become the monster!

That had sucked. It had sucked when I'd changed. It had sucked when what was left of my bones turned into a calcified shell to protect my goopy inner mass. It had sucked when I was thrown through space, survived reentry, and hit the planet.

Thankfully the meteorite had cracked open and spilt me out nice and easy like. I'd absorbed the calcium and a portion of the nearby ground for the minerals. There was nothing wrong with me even after hitting hard enough to go a foot into the dirt.

I was Carrion.

The chunk of biomass the size of a good 32 ounce T-bone steak that was my new body easily sprouted a dozen tentacles and too many eyes in all sorts of directions.

I had a few minutes alone to try and make sense of 360 plus vision.

Then I was attacked by a dog.

NO you stupid animal you can't eat me!

I had a very brief moment of terror as Cujo came out of the bushes to run me down to show me his nose and teeth and tongue and the back of his throat. Some part of my mind compartmentalized that the animal really didn't know what it was doing and unlike its wild brethren had not learned to do stupid things like this.

The other part of my mind in the process of being eaten like a raw hamburger patty thrown on the ground at a barbeque party by the owner's household hunting dog panicked and attacked!

I learned several things about myself in very quick succession that night.

The first was that I was a very loaded, fully optimized Carrion-type Entity. The moment I decided to attack the dog biting and tearing at my body I went full nightmare fuel on its diseased and flea-bitten fur.

Tiny and weak tentacles armored themselves in the last of my calcium to make armor that were as hard as my old teeth to fill the dog's mouth up with porcupine quills that pierced the roof of the mouth, cheeks, tongue, esophagus and nose cavity. Some became hooks, others became like the heads of spears with a screw-like head that were soon drilling their way into the creature's brain. The main mass of my body that the dog had picked up in its mouth had a few mouths of its own already. Three in total, actually. At the same time as I was doing all the other things I'd immediately gone full French-kisser mode on the mutt's tongue and torn through it like a wood chipper to take its flesh into my own.

Plus thanks to the eyes that I already had, the one's that weren't destroyed between the dog's stupid and suicidal attack on what it probably thought was a chunk of raw meat, I got to see EVERYTHING as I tore the creature's face off from the inside out.

Contrary to my previous ideas, Carrion did have something like a digestive system. Its ability to assimilate DNA was at least in part dependent on creating organs that could do the work. My ability to Echolocate, to sense creatures, was dependent on one of these organs. The skin needed its own organs and neural tissues so it could figure out how to become Invisible against your average background. By manufacturing the organs of a Spider I could spin webs.

Dogs have a whole lot of things going for them, let me tell you. First samples of skin, hair, muscle, taiste buds, olfactory sensors, eyes, ears. Really great stuff.

Didn't know I wasn't actually hearing anything until I fixed up an ear canal and an eardrum. Nor that what was brushing up against my skin were pheromones until I made a nose modeled after Cujo's sniffer here.
Carron are a very special sort of bullshit when it comes to bio manipulation and getting every erg of information from every nerve.

Our central nervous system was ridiculously advanced compared to earth life forms. Capable of moving on its own, reconnecting when severed, multiplexing, and the list goes on. Most people were lucky when they could sense temperature, internal pressure, vibration, light touch and pain, all wrapped up in one sensory experience called "touch." Some think that humans have as many as twenty senses due to the amount of cross talk between our senses and the number of specialized nerve types and cells dedicated to gathering information. Carrion have fifty at least!

Not going to lie but Carrion's ability to plug and play into other nervous systems was probably the reason why it had grown into the creatures it had become. Weather it had evolved this ability to mimic other nervous systems as another one of Mother Nature's scarry sons of evolution or it had simply manufactured what it needed, or if it was an artifact of alien intervention, didn't matter much at this point.

At some point past when the dog screamed in pain as I tore through its face and somewhat after it had fallen over dead as I ate its brain I stopped what I was doing. I was a bit shocked at how I had feasted on Old Rover here but I was also fascinated in how I was plugged into this guy's nervous system, muscle groups, how my body was shoved halfway into its lungs, down the esophagus into the stomach, and had roots going through its skin.

I'd torn through the body like a shotgun blast of bone and claws.

On the other hand the dog's body was close enough to how my old body felt that I'd been brought back to my senses pretty quickly.

No pun intended.

I was wondering if I could control people like Carrion had in the game. Could I just point and click or would there be more to it than that?

I flexed my might into the remains of the dog body and watched at it twitched and flexed. First the dog tail, then the left rear leg, then the heart muscle.

The body rolled over, the spine twisted, the legs spazed out to jump us off the ground and suddenly we were up off the ground.

Hell. Fucking. Yes!

Controlling the dog's body wasn't quite like controlling my old human body but I was nearly instantly able to reverse engineer what I needed to do from the information I'd gotten from the dog's DNA and its brain in about two seconds flat.

Sorry you dumb beast, but welcome to the museum of horrors. I managed to coordinate the right signals to move the muscles in the legs to get us going up the nearby path through the woods by the light of the moon. I had the heart beating in the thing's chest to circulate blood to the rest of the body while I was also oxygenating it to keep everything fed. I was also managing our balance.

Having a dozen eyes pointed in the front does well for your ability to notice things on the ground in the dark.
Not that I would want anyone to see us at this moment. The animal was being held together by my own tendrils, had no head, and I was slowly replacing the lungs as I burrowed deeper underneath the fur.

But still, my Carrion Dog was cool looking. Where was the fan art when I needed it?

I guess I wasn't disgusted at my new form. If I'd seen something like this in real life I'd probably be freaking out. The closest I got to seeing something like Carrion was in my high school science class.

So many bottled animal fetus and organs . . .

As I started figuring out this whole sneaking through the woods business on my ride of dog food. The dog didn't have a collar, just a chain with a ring on the end. As I went through the bushes I spotted an old man in a coat.

"Boy? Where are you? Damn that dog!"

I took extra special care not to make a sound as I moved my lunch on legs through the underbrush.

The man had lost his dog but kept his life, a fair and equitable exchange if you ask me.

I didn't know much about California but the plants, forest, ferns, heat, tall trees, flowers were all recognizable.
The old man had been recognizable too. If you'd watched both version of The Blob movie you'd recognize him easy, that is he was iconic.

'Sorry homeless old man in a trench coat with an ax,' I thought to myself as I made my way farther from my point of impact, 'you will not be starring in this sci-fi horror story as the first victim of the monster from outer space.'

By the time I made it through the woods to the road I didn't need the sign on the road to tell me that I was in Arborville, California, but it was nice to have confirmation.

Now, where do I go from here?

 

[Nitronorm5688]

"Normal Speech."
*Huragok speech.*


*We are going to die.*

Floats Sideways would have liked to have contested this conclusion, but could not. It was in their nature as biological supercomputers to compute the facts and arrive at conclusions even before their sentience got in the way. Truth, pattern recognition, data, personal memories, life experience from their progenitors, all supported the previously mentioned statement.

The ship was on fire.

Ships weren't supposed to be on fire. They were supposed to be firing, at their enemies! Fire was used for thrusting in primitive rockets, also for shooting, and sometimes for cooking, or to forge metals, or to be on stars or in active volcanoes and in hot water springs. Not for the threatening of the humble and brilliant engineers and life makers of the Covenant, their locally accepted government at this time, and of the Forerunners, indisputably their creators.

Nevertheless, the Covenant Heavy Cruiser Life-Extension-At-Great-Sacrifice had taken several direct hits to the engine and was going down. If Floats Sideways hadn't been working on the elevator he'd have been dead already.
Gravity from the local Gas Giant would soon pull the vessel down into the local Red Spot and the hurricane force winds bigger than 86% of most life-bearing planets that Floats Sideways could list would have no trouble tearing it to pieces along with everyone inside.

*At least we're free of the bomb-harnesses,* Sideways Tipper remarked with some glee, his tendrils playing with the explosives he had extracted from their floatation harnesses, and used to blow open an armored access panel for the last door in the name of speed and efficiency.

As opposed to, you know, dismantling it and repairing it, as was the Huragok's way!

Floats Sideways thought there was something wrong with Sideways Tipper. Supposedly he just liked looking at the world upside down. Being trapped underneath a Human Assault Tank when it got blown up and landed on him couldn't have been the source of its weirdness, nu-ah, no-way, yeah-right.

He'd been like this long before then. Floats Sideways should know, their progenitor had used Sideways in both of their names. He was first.

*Truth, and what a time it is to be relieved of such religious idiocy, we to die without them,* Bright Flyer was the only Life Maker among them and was the one to forge a shard of hull metal into a series of throwing needles equipped with poison to disable their oh-so-helpful guards, starting with the ones holding the remote controls to their bomb harnesses.

Having a ship blown up underneath you was a very useful distraction.

Said harnesses had been dismantled by the explosives-loving Sideways Tipper, rebuilt with extra materials, so that the sub-group of Huragok could make their escape at increase speed with stronger gravity impellers while all the other species went for the lifeboats.

Maybe they could escape and make it to the Human side of the Human-Covenant War?

Don't know, don't care. Couldn't hurt to try. This was their only chance.

Unfortunately they were now at a dead-end that hadn't been there when Float's Sideways had last serviced this area. The corridor was full of damaged hull metals, plastics, glass, ceramics, and the bodies of several sapient's turned into paste, the ground covered in the spaghettified artwork of said materials being heated to a near gaseous state and flash-forged in space vacuum and then shoved into the interior what should be on the exterior.

It was a mess and they all hated messes. Also very spikey and sharp.

On the one tendril, this was a good thing, as the plug of materials was fairly airtight, or they would have all been sucked through a tiny hole in the hull and dragged over the millions of sharply pointed hull metal by now.

On the second tendril, the chemical-fuel fires were getting closer.

On the third tendril, Sideways Tipper just handed him a shaped charge.

*Why?* Floats Sideways asks.

*Rather than heating and popping, followed by burning and death, makes it quick,* Sideways Tipper answered.

Bright Flyer exclaimed, *You want us to blow ourselves up?!*

*It'll be quick,* Sideways Tipper repeated himself, placing the charge on his body near his major ganglion. *It was nice to be able to do whatever I wanted to do for once. Even my own life is mine to take.*

Floats Sideways briefly contemplated creating an astronaut suit for itself. Yet it wasn't the lack of material, but time that was critical. They had less than thirty seconds to live. Huragok were fast workers, but they weren't that fast!

The fire was getting closer, the air was getting thinner as the energetic thermal runaway consumed all fuels and was vented out other holes in the ship, the flames approaching at the speed of a good running Covenant soldier class standard, their bodies would be next.

And yet they did not die.

Before the fires could get to them, a space-time anomaly appeared!

It had a very warped edge, as if the universe had been the surface of a lake that had become a whirling vortex to be drained into a new location. Past the opening was a planetary surface, with a forest landscape, blue skies with flying creatures, green vegetation, white clouds, insects, and a human making gestures at them!

What the Random Brownian Movement of Chaos was this?!!

The atmosphere was also mighty cool compared to the heated interior of the ship and at a much lesser air pressure. Even if Floats Sideways had wanted to disagree with what his eyes were telling him, evidence to its authenticity was presented immediately as some place other than the ship. Almost as soon as the opening appeared a vaccum-like effect came roaring into existence as everything within the ship rushed down the corridor to get through the opening and out!

Rather than fight the vortex the three Huragok joined tentacles and vented their gas bladders to ride the air wave to arrive at this new location in a speedy and efficient manner!

Which was to the good. Almost immediately after they were thrown from the ship the fires came through with them and nearly caused Bright Flyer to pop!

*FREEDOM!* Sideways Tipper exclaimed, the larger-than-average Huragok was pulling at the vegetation to pull the group that much further away from the life-ending green and blue fires even as the mysterious doorway closed leaving behind a very burnt spot on the ground.

The human, Float's Sideways noticed, immediately backed away from the spot it was occupying to get away from the heated air from the fire, waving his hand to shield his eyes even as the opening disappeared. Perhaps with second-degree burns on the male's manipulator's appendage, but nothing that Bright Flyer couldn't fix in a few minutes.

They were safe!

They even had a Human to get answers from!


-000-

Author's Notes: So rather than having an unfortunate human being inserted into the world of Halo, I thought it would be funny if a few of humanities supposedly ancient biological drones came to join us here instead.