Most zombies don't have glowing eyes, but these ones do.
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Beta'd by Firstselector, SpytheEngineer, and Kinsfire.
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"Are you sure that this is safe, Morgan?" I asked, Golden Dagger held in a reverse grip as I glanced back and forth between my time-traveling daughter (and wasn't that still a kick in the teeth, even the day after the Forge pulled her out of whatever corner of her hellworld she'd been surviving in) and the small horde of zombies she'd summoned.
She opened her mouth to reply, but paused when the Forge flared up. It didn't discharge anything else, though, so she turned back to me and spoke. "Yeah, Mom, I'm sure. They're all going to behave for me."
One of them chose that moment to snarl, the death mask it wore doing nothing to conceal the omnidirectional hatred in its glowing red eyes.
I said nothing, just turning to her and raising one eyebrow.
She met my gaze for a moment, then sighed, eyes turning down. "It's the best I can do. Maybe if we had, like, a Sentinel or something that you could practice on-"
"A Sentinel. Like, one of the giant ones designed to hunt down mutants that get fucked up all the time and end up killing everyone they're in range of." Morgan wilted a little bit. "I'm not anywhere near ready for that kind of fight, but zombies as training dummies still strikes me as a little bit… unsafe, no?"
Morgan perked right back up. "Oh, no! You don't have to worry about the whole zombie infection thing, the Risen don't actually do that. Just a little bit of fatigue if you get too many scratches, and you're already wearing a ring that lets you heal, so you should be fine even if you do overdo things," she chirped, raising one hand to stroke Castform.
"If you say so," I said, still looking a little askance at the diseased-looking talons on the creatures, even those wielding weapons. "And, uh, the reason they're using axes?"
"Weapon triangle. Axes are easier to beat with swords, and that's close enough to count," said Morgan, in the sort of duh-this-is-a-fact-of-life tone that an expert has a tendency to take when they have trouble realizing that this is not, in fact, a fact of life for the person they're talking to.
"Y'know what, sure, magic zombies with magic axes that don't work as well against swords," I said.
"No, it's an actual thing," said Morgan. "It has to do with momentum and how unwieldy an axe is, and using your sword to guide them away from you, there's whole treatises about it."
"That… well, it does make sense," I said, rubbing the back of my neck somewhat sheepishly with my off hand. "Let's just hope I don't make too much a fool of myself."
Morgan shrugged. "Everyone does, at first. Shouldn't let that stop you- I know I didn't."
"Alright," I said, resettling my grip on the enchanted dagger I'd forged for myself. I breathed in, then out, then in, far more deeply, and as I let the breath out, I took three steps forward and jumped at one of the things, moving faster than I expected thanks to the Speed Ring but not too fast to keep up with.
It was faster or more perceptive than I thought, though, and it managed to turn and smack me halfway to the van, and though I tried to turn to land on my feet, I failed miserably, slamming into the ground back-first and in great pain. Its effort to advance on me while I was still blinking away stars and feeling the cool feeling of the Speed Ring's magic leaching into me to heal me was only stymied by a muttered word from Morgan, and then, when that didn't work, a pencil-thin beam of yellow light, with lightning crackling off of it, passing within inches of the hood that covered its hateful red eyes.
"Lesson one," said Morgan, striding over to pull me to my feet, after which I promptly hunched over in pain. "Don't just charge in like Wolverine, not when you're so squishy. You can't afford to take hits like we can- you need to be more careful than that, unless you decide to go full-on Iron Man."
I wheezed for a moment, half convinced that I was going to need my inhaler that I had left inside the van like a dumbass before something in my back popped back into place and the tightness in my lungs vanished, evaporating under the relief in pressure I hadn't been able to register under the pain. Then and only then did I manage to register what Morgan had said, and after pushing off of my knees to straighten up.
"What do you mean, 'like we can'?" I asked, wincing at the rattle I could still hear as much as feel in my breath.
"Huh? Oh, right." Morgan raised her hand and pulled down her sleeve, revealing her arm. More importantly, it revealed the dark scales that ran down her arm, almost looking like feathers when the light hit them just right. "I've got the dragonskin, from- well. I don't remember everything Mama did with me, to try and keep me safe, but I'm hard to hurt, and I'm still fast enough to move around. I like to think she found something in Limbo to help me out, but… near the end, I could barely recognize her and what she did to try and keep me safe."
I didn't need to see the tears trailing down her cheeks (which, now that I was actually looking at them, had a faint feathering of scales on them as well) to know that Morgan needed a hug, and I was more than willing to offer one to her.
"We're going to get her back, Morgan," I said, burying my doubts I had about our ability to rescue Maddie deep, hiding my thoughts about how I'd fucked up by jumping into this in such a hare-brained way. "There's no way some jumped-up albino with cheap-ass Dracula fangs on all his teeth is going to keep her down, even if we don't manage to find her."
Morgan giggled into my shoulder at my description of Essex, then again when Castform licked her cheek almost like a dog before recoiling back, having landed her tongue right on one of Morgan's tears. She let out a sound almost like Mia, our family dog when I was a kid, had when she was about to throw up, but fortunately nothing but spittle and clean water came out of her mouth. Nevertheless, I shuddered at the noise, even a decade and a half later the memory of having to clean up dog puke stuck around.
The Forge flared up and died down without discharging another flame, and eventually Morgan and I broke apart.
"Thanks, Mom," she said, bonking her forehead against my shoulder. "Thank you for…" She trailed off and gestured vaguely with her hand.
"Being ride or die with Maddie? Caring about you? Not giving up?" I gave in to my inner child and ruffled Morgan's hair, eliciting a pout from my daughter. "Of course. I… You're all I have, now, you and Maddie, and I can't lose you. I won't."
Morgan smiled, then gently pushed me off, making a fake disgusted face. "Alright, alright, enough with the sappy stuff," she said, her smile bubbling past her scrunched-up nose and into her voice despite herself. "We're here for you to learn to fight, not for us to get snot in each other's shirts."
"Yes, ma'am," I said, rolling my eyes in response to Castform's tongue protruding from her mouth at me as Morgan turned around to walk back to where she'd been standing before my disastrous approach to the zombies.
"You too, little one," she said, unable to see Castform's overblown expression of shock and dismay at being addressed directly. "You need to work on training up your stuff to be able to fight too, you can't just rely on Rain Dance and Hurricane to throw people away from you. In this world, you gotta be strong to back up your convictions!"
Castform pouted, making appropriately dejected chirps, but Morgan was unmoved. "No, Castform, you can't just rely on being able to run away. For Illyana's sake, you've got the kind of power we would have killed for back after Ororo died, you just have to learn how to use it!"
The reminder of where Morgan had come from was a sobering one, both to me and for Castform if the way that her mouth closed and her cloudy body roiled was any indication.
"Hop to it," said Morgan, clapping her hands, and both of us turned towards the milling mass of manes with… well, not grim determination, per se, but the kind of determination to get stronger that we'd need if we were going to get Madelyne back.
I didn't manage to successfully kill one of the zombies on my next try, or the time after that, but by the time we packed it in for the night so I could make us dinner, Castform and I had managed to put three or four of the things down each, Castform with squalls and thunderbolts and myself by being able to move around their axes and get in close enough that I could stab the Golden Dagger into something important.
The exhaustion after Morgan sucked the ones we hadn't killed back into the odd wooden box that reeked of death and blood was tinged with pride at actually taking another step closer to being able to get Madelyne back.
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Jean Grey wasn't sure how, exactly, being resurrected was supposed to feel, but to her she just felt… lesser.
The first thing she remembered after… after the shuttle was waking up in the Avengers' mansion, still thinking that she was on the station about to fight the X-Sentinels. After Scott came and took her to her parents' house, she remembered what came after, piloting the shuttle and giving a part of herself up to the Phoenix, and then things got… murky.
She knew, on an intellectual level, that she'd been in the cocoon-pod-thing since that day, but she also felt with unbearable certainty that she'd lived through what the Phoenix had done with her body.
She remembered the Hellfire club, the Shi'ar… dying.
Suffice it to say that it took her quite some time to actually properly separate out the Phoenix's memories from her own, which wasn't particularly helped by the way that she saw the world so differently from the ancient force. It was… arrogant wasn't the right word, but it had trouble caring about the concerns of lesser beings.
Compared to that, the loss of her telepathy was a small issue, even if she would have loved to be able to lean on Scott's mind to help ground her to a human perspective as she went through her inheritance from the Phoenix.
Still, she would persevere, and after weeks of physical therapy and mental realignment, she was finally ready to venture out into the world again, at least tentatively.
Walking around Times Square was, perhaps, a little bit early, but to be entirely fair to Jean, she'd been cooped up in either the Avengers' mansion or one of Warren's buildings for too long, and Scott had caved eventually, his insistence that she bring him along with her nothing she wouldn't have asked for on her own.
So, here she was, wandering around New York's most infamous tourist trap and enjoying the sheer clamor after the too-quiet confinement and recuperation, Scott's hand on her arm just in case her legs decided to give out again.
"Maddie?" Jean couldn't help but see the woman who asked that, all but directly in front of her. She was tall, with a strong jaw and strong shoulders filling out her leather jacket, brown skin and black hair framing blue eyes with big dark circles underneath them. At her side was a shorter woman, who looked unnervingly like Jean herself, in appearance if not in wardrobe, since Jean wasn't the kind of person to wear such a bulky long coat, especially in indigo and purple with gilt edges.
"I'm sorry," she said, "you must have the wrong person."
Seeing the woman's hopeful gaze turn to despair was almost physically painful.
"Right, sorry. You just… you look a lot like her. Let me get out of your hair." She turned, taking the other woman with her as she let the crowd carry her away, and she was almost out of sight when it happened.
Fire blazed around her, but not the callous blaze of the Phoenix, uncaring about anything nearby, or a forest fire, wild and uncontrolled but still a part of life. No, this flame felt constrained, husbanded and refined by an intelligence the equal of the Phoenix.
It felt like the power of a god of craft, of creation, and Jean felt almost hollow as it receded.
"Jean? Are you okay?" It took a moment for Jean to realize that Scott was looking at her with concern clearly visible in his eyes.
For a moment, she could feel his concern too, before the last of the warmth from the flames died away and she was locked within her head once again. She looked around for the woman, and she thought she saw a hint of the shorter woman's red hair descending into a subway entrance, but there wasn't any way to be certain.
"Yeah, I… I think she could have helped me get my, ah, mojo back," she said, making eye contact with Scott (or at least as much eye contact you could make when one party is wearing nearly opaque sunglasses).
It took only a moment for Scott to catch on, and he, too, cast his gaze about for them, to no avail. "Damn. We'll see about going back and getting Psylocke to use Cerebro and find them." He frowned. "Something about them seems familiar…"
"You'll figure it out," Jean said.
"For you, always," he replied with the kind of steadfast determination that had drawn them together in the first place.
Jean smiled and squeezed his hand. In the future, there were things to do, but now? Now she could just spend time with him and let the world pass them by.
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And that's that!
Perks Gained:
Minor Crest of Flames (Fire Emblem Three Houses, 400 CP): The Crest of Flames, the Crest of the Goddess, of the Creator, of Sothis, the Fire Emblem. Whatever you wish to call it, the Crest grants its wielders a level of control over the flow of time. At its simplest, it allows you to heal yourself by returning you to an uninjured state. Slightly more advanced, one can speed up their personal time and deliver faster blows, or slow down their opponents for an instant to disrupt the flow of combat. Unfortunately, that's where the simple and easy uses stop. From there, instinctive use of the power for short bursts will no longer be enough. You'll need a great deal of practice, trial and error... Or a teacher. But where on earth would you find one of those? Without one I can't imagine you being able to actually do any of this within the time frame of the jump, but I shall describe it for you anyways. The next level of power obtainable from the Crest of Flames is the Divine Pulse, the ability to travel backwards through time. Oddly enough for such an ability, there is no difference in cost between going back five minutes and going back five years, as it is more a matter of skill. With that said, you can only use it so many times in a row before needing to rest and recharge, and trying to use it mid combat drains you even faster.
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