HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO

Part II: Which Fire?

By Bren Hunter

Stuffed full with steak and sodas, a pair of statuesque men strolled the last block towards the Weird Happenings Organisation’s Imaginaut Platform. They had squandered most of the day in attempts to develop new technologies that would rouse James Braddock II from his comatose state, and had forgotten about distractions such as food and hydration. It was then only an Otherworldly metabolism that kept the blond from worrying about eating such a heavy meal so late at night, and six-hundred crunches a day that did the same for the brunette.

Their thoughts resting soundly on other matters entirely, the brunette—Dane Whitman—asked the other, “Do you ever take measure?”

“How would I measure…?” the blond—Brian Braddock—incredulously asked back, but then interjected into his own question, “Gluing newspaper cuttings into a scrapbook?”

“Nothing quite so morbid,” Dane promised, as if the idea was absurd as cutting himself for every life he didn’t save. “But I feel the least I can do is give my prayers to the people who have died because Black Knight swanned off to his self-indulgent science lab.”

“I… no…” Brian grasped for articulation, but failed in favour of the fervor in his voice. “I can’t think like that. Neither you nor I can shoulder the responsibility for each harm that comes to everyone in this world, nor even in Britain. How do you identify the tragedies you, and you alone, could have prevented?”

“It’s not rational. I realise that. I accept that,” Dane admitted to both himself and to Brian, taking slow precision and care with his words to show that they were well considered. Although his eyes had been down on the road, Dane made imploring eye contact with Brian to say, “Some deaths make me feel more guilty than others. I’m always afraid to read in the newsfeed about harm brought about by any of the Avengers’ rogues gallery. …Are you telling me that doesn’t get to you?”

Brian’s brow furrowed and he got crinkles of sympathy at the edges of his eyes for the guilt he could hear wilting Dane’s words. Finding a shard of shame to call his own, Brian said, “I’ve never… Most of my enemies are dead.”

Clearly pondering on the ramifications of such a thing, Dane landed upon, “Including Sat-yr-9.”

“Yes.” A single simple word summed up how the vile trollop and her army had massacred the majority of the Captain Britain Corps.

“Brian, I was supposed to stop her.”

“How can you say that? I didn’t even stop her. Excalibur was counting on you to protect our Earth while we journeyed to Otherworld.”

“It was my destiny to prevent what happened on Otherworld. She told me. The lady in the lake warned me that I, her Pendragon of that passed age, would be needed on Otherworld. I missed my destiny.”

An electric kettle spouted off puffs of steam in Braddock Manor’s kitchen.

While Jane Braddock managed to be coddled back to sleep, after an abrupt crying fit, her governess remained awake, searching through a cupboard for her packets of apple snap tea. The violet neglige, which clung to Ananym’s curves in the sticky heat, was perfectly matched by the silk violet boxers being worn by Whitman Knapp. Cradling Jane against his tee-shirt, Whitman turned the contents of another cupboard upside down with his free hand.

Grinning, Whitman sing-songed, “Found the last pair.”

“My hero,” Ananym purred, in taking the tea bags form his grasp. She awarded him with a kiss on the corner of his lips. Reminded of what Jane’s hollers had halted, Ananym firmly planted her lips more centrally on Whit’s lips, before biting on the lower one.

From the patio, a warm breeze wafted in along with Rachel Summers’ voice; “You’ll be safe here. No one will judge you. Hell, no one will know you.”

Ananym playfully kissed the tip of Whitman’s nose, before taking a step back. She spun on the spot, brining herself face to face with Rachel Summers and Amara Aquilla, who were standing — the former uncomfortably and the latter dismissively — between Ana and her empty mugs.

“Who is this whore?” Amara sniffed at Ananym.

“Witchfire,” Ananym grit back, and followed up with a wry, “At your service.”

Noting the hint of anger in the red-head, Amara matter-of-factly said, “Take no offense. The etymology of ‘whore’ lies with a word meaning ‘lover’. …I suppose it is a root word that has not survived to any language of this time.”

“Fantastic,” Ananym scowlingly enthused.

“Is it hot in here?” Whitman bluntly non sequitured. He laid a hand on Ananym’s shoulder, and gently tugged her back from the blonde amazon who was locked in Ana’s loathsome glare.

“Sizzling,” Rachel agreed, and telekinetically shrugged off her ivory jacket. Continuing to direct the conversation, she remarked, “I think it’s long past time we turn on the central air conditioning.”

“Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat,” Amara quipped, displaying only a shadow of her former sense of humour.

“Oh my god,” Rachel wailed, the words torn from her throat.

“In truth, much is lost in the translation. There is a subtlety to the humour in the Latin,” Amara attempted to explain away whatever had caused Rachel distress. And then Amara noticed that Rachel was looking right past her, causing a feeling very similar to distress. “Oh, Jupiter.”

A bloody shade of red pooled into the seemingly lifeless eyes of Ananym. She mechanically outstretched her arms, palms up, as if pleading for help. The only help that came to her was a metallic nub, which pushed up from under the skin of her left wrist, stretching the skin to the breaking point and beyond. Bathed in blood, the slate grey nub poked up through Ananym’s torn skin, and once it was exposed to oxygen, it flickered orange. With the heel of her right palm, Witchfire bashed the nub, eliciting a pained grunt from her own throat. At the same instant, an explosion rocked the manor. An oppressive wall of fire roiled in through the hallway, and washed over the entire kitchen.

Encased within a telekinetic dome of Rachel’s creation, every living thing avoided the fire’s heat and pressure blast. Trapped within the dome, no living thing avoided Rachel’s fire.

“Coma,” Ray commanded. Backed by the deeper register of Rachel’s voice, and the stern psychic suggestion, Ananym’s crimson eyes rolled back in her head and her knees gave out. She crumpled to the floor like a bag of meat. In the time Ana’s fall took, Rachel instinctually reconfigured the molecules of her clothing into a simple scarlet bodysuit, with a white phoenix emblem over her chest. When a protest came to Whitman’s lips, Rachel commanded both he and Amara to, “Protect.”

Telekinetically pulling metaphoric strings in mere moments more, Rachel rolled Jane’s bulky pram-like stroller within the protection of her dome, and inspected it with both her eyes and her teke. Finding the Brian-designed perambulator to have been utterly unscarred by the fire, Rachel placed Jane within it, and offered her a kiss on the forehead. Pushing on a switch that adored the pram’s handle, swaths of armour mechanically jut out of their recesses within. Once Jane was securely sealed inside the pram, Rachel teke’d Amara, Whitman and the perambulator past the burning walls, and into the basement. Triggering one of the Manor’s security features, a steel door slid into place, thereby smashing to splinters the shoddy wooden basement door.

“No one shall enter,” Amara promised, and held her ground on the other side of the doorway. She crossed her arms over her chest, and attempted to use the absolute conviction that Rachel had injected into her consciousness to regain her psionic control over tectonic plates and magma. Striving to feel the heat of her mutant power, she touched the flat of her hands against the warming metallic door, and awaited the eventual burn. Heat. Fire. Shock. Protect. They would ground her again, and force her to touch her humanity and her homo superiority. She avowed once again, “Must protect.”

“Must protect,” Whitman Knapp absent-mindedly whispered. Further along, down at the bottom of the stairs, Whitman fled into the heart of the basement, all the while holding tight onto the handle of Jane’s pram. The basement was everything he expected, and nothing like anything he could have imagined in his waking hours. In all directions, in every direction, on and on for illusionary eternity, Whitman was surrounded by a Wonderland, much like the one ventured by Alice. All of the pieces were right out of the storybook, but the pieces appeared to be sewn together by a madman. From out of the castle, the natives came exploring. The creatures appeared to be just like characters from Alice in Wonderland. Except, there were also trolls. All of them had once been enemies of Captain Britain, but all of them had accepted lives of peace, in exchange for this place where they could live without persecution from superhero-types.

The group from the castle were led by a costumed and made-up jester, as well as a metallic man wearing a playing-card-adorned sandwich board. For a brief moment, Whitman Knapp travelled forward along his evolutionary chain — transforming into a person beyond human, beyond mutant. Using his evolved telepathic abilities, Highbrow Whitman examined the approaching men and monsters. He discovered that their intentions were entirely pure; they spilled over with genuine curiosity and concern. Upon transforming back to his baseline self, Whitman announced to the men and trolls, “We must protect Brian’s child!”

Traveling along his evolutionary chain once again, this time backwards, Phylogeny transformed into what he affectionately referred to as Ape Man. The extra muscle mass would be muchly needed if the explosion was a precursor for an attack, and reverting to a simplistic brain would cleanse his consciousness of Rachel’s telepathic manipulations. That simple mind also meant that the Ape Man only held onto the barest impression of what Whitman’s original intentions were: surrounded by friends; protect the child. He hardly paid notice to the actions of the Crazy Gang who joined him.

The Jester declared, “I will protect Jane even if I have to lose a limb.”

The metallic man, Knave, declared even louder, “I will protect Jane even if I have to lose two limbs.”

“Three limbs,” Jester shot back.

“Four limbs,” Knave riposted, doing jumping jacks in the air.

“Five!”

“Six!”

Taking hold of the pram, Jester disengaged the outer layer of armour. “The child,” he insisted and pulled back one of the inner-layers, “Will be protected…” When he finally pulled a blanket off of Jane, he declared, “By me!” Beneath the blanket, baby Jane was entirely made out of ice.

“There we go,” Knave celebratorily beamed. “Now she’ll snap in half. We can each have a part to protect. I want the left half.”

“But I want the top half.” Jester reached into the pram, and when his hand touched Jane’s shoulder, her body turned to flesh again. Recoiling violently from the sight, Jester vomited on Knave, and covered Jane with the blanket.

“I missed my destiny,” Dane Whitman stated, and sounded nebulously horrified by the notion of it.

Following Dane along the pathway between the Imaginaut Platform and his own turbosonic hovercraft, Brian Braddock deadpanned, “…Do you even know what you said means?”

His foul mood evaporating along the edges, Dane wisecracked, “I had a date with destiny, but I only got to second base?” He had to laugh at himself, considering the retrofitted twists and tucks his own destiny had taken over the years. As Black Knight, Dane had been turned to stone, travelled to the Crusades, flown an ‘atomic steed’, become infected by his own sword, and been exiled to other dimensions. All of it so haphazard and inelegant; no single plan could possibly be in play. His life was an advertisement for free will. And yet he still felt… off. “My soul itches.”

Circling the Midnight Runner’s port wing, Scott Wright waved an arm over his head and shouted out, “There you are!”

All of their attention snapping into the direction of the lean brunette man, Dane and Brian both took defensive postures. Recognising Scott as the occasional vigilante Micromax, but holding no clue as to the purpose of his presence, Brian relaxed his stance, and called back, “There you are! Why are you there?”

Sauntering close enough to avoid having to shout, Scott explained, “Rachel said you’d be here. Something about finding a cure for your brother?”

“Exactly,” Brian nodded, and needled further, “That’s why I’m here. But why are you here?”

“I’m flying out to Skye Isle with you,” Scott reminded, with annoyance at Brian’s blank stare increasing at every word.

“No, you’re not,” Brian asserted, with every intention to go home to his large, embarrassingly comfortable bed.

Further exasperated, Scott scoffed, “Rachel said you were ducky with it.”

“I am the duckiest,” Brian grinned, and then felt stupid for it. “But Rachel also told you that I won’t be visiting Moira until next week. You are welcome to join me then.”

“On Sunday, she said you were headed there tonight,” Scott earnestly cajoled. “I need to know if Moira will let me use her facility by tonight.”

Finding his first bout of interest in the conversation, Dane inferred, “Use it? You’re a geneticist?”

Always a fan of absurd comedy, Scott snickered at the idea of himself as a scientist. “No. I’m volunteering on the sound design for a documentary about the second Union Jack. I’m hoping to use Moira’s home as a location to hold interviews.”

“Maybe we should ask her tonight, then,” Dane said to Brian to do his convincing, but addressed Scott. “You won’t be able to contact her for some days. All of her telecommunication lines have been disconnected for repair.”

Stoically, Brian pointed out, “Moira’s not fond of uninvited guests. Not since Cassandra.”

“I thought you wanted to investigate her telecomms being on the blink a night early,” Dane challenged.

“I do,” Brian affirmed. Defensively holding up his palms, he said, “I’m just not going to be the one to ring her bell in the dead of night.”

Eagerly heading in the direction of the Runner, Scott tossed off, “Won’t be so bad if you have one hand on the bell and the other hand wrapped round a bottle of whiskey.”

Within a twenty kilometer radius around Braddock Manor, every open flame snuffed out.

Stalking through the smoldering ruins of Brian’s kitchen, Rachel Summers rooted herself a pace away from Ananym. Telekinetically raising Ana into a standing position, as well as binding her to that spot, Rachel awoke the witch from her coma. Ananym’s eyelids parted, revealing eyes that were human looking, and green, once more. While Ray waited for Ana to regain her bearings, she invited Amara and Whitman to return, meanwhile removing any of her telepathic influences from all of their minds.

Recognising lucidity in Witchfire’s eyes, Rachel interrogated, “What did you do, Ananym?”

“I don’t remember,” Ana replied, almost serenely.

“That’s convenient,” Rachel stridently pointed out.

“No. It’s consistent,” Ananym returned. “I suffered random and frequent memory loss until well after I was old enough to bleed. I have not experienced a blackout in years, but there was never a medical reason found for them.”

“I believe that you don’t know why attempted to destroyed my home,” Rachel said coldly, but released Ananym from her invisible hold.

Shrugging effortlessly, Ananym posited, “Personal memory is hardly a thing to be trusted. The manor remembers. It will tell us.” Witchfire closed her eyes, to concentrate on whispering subaudibly and swaying with a music playing between realities.

Resting a supportive hand on Rachel’s shoulder, Amara told her, “You look so nice.”

“I just barely stopped Brian’s home from burning down, and even then, Jaye only has half a roof over her head, but if I’m looking nice, then yay me,” Rachel diatribed.

“What I mean is: you appear as if you would be a nice person,” Amara evenly clarified.

Rachel blurted back, “I am a nice person, dammit! Except when…” –Thinking on her actions in the crucible of the fire, she faltered– “Except when I’m not. Oh god. I brought you here to discover who has been contorting and controlling your mind, and the first thing I do is overwrite your will…”

When Rachel evidently had no more words inside her, Amara allowed, “Think not on it. It was the first time today that I truly perceived you as the Rachel I knew.”

Ray could only offer an “ugh” of disgust in recognition of her own actions.

“I disagree,” Whitman said to Amara, as Rachel groaned. “Mind control is something I think should be seriously thought on, both immediately and often. How can you be apathetic about this?”

Considering his question for a moment, Amara measuredly said, “I have been prescribed haloperidol.” It was one of several conditions of living apart from SHIELD custody after her acts of destruction.

“Well, I’m not tranquilised,” Whitman retorted, and then snapped his gaze over to Rachel. “Seriously, though, is this something we need to worry about? Isn’t this Dark Phoenix behaviour? Do we need an intervention?

Having heard all the stories in her time as a New Mutant, Amara laughingly refuted, “It is not the Phoenix Force that shows the way for Rachel’s self-acting impulses. It is Hound, Rachel herself.”

Soot and ash filled the air like thick milkshake smoke, curling around Ray, Amara, Whit and Jane’s pram. Although Rachel fully intended to respond to Amara’s accusation, concern cut through her midsection when she could no longer see Witchfire through the smoke. Using only her voice, rather than her telepathy, Ray instructed Whit and Amara to “Take Jaye outside.”

As the pair carried Jane out to the open air garden, Rachel levitated herself deeper into the thick of the smoke, following its procession into the hallway and up the damaged staircase. Telepahtically locating Ananym’s unhidden thought processes, Rachel darted through wreckage and the increasingly fast-spinning smoke to reach her prey. The heart of the smoke storm was Ananym — clad in body-clinging mystical armour that was black on the left side of her body, and silver on one-third of her body from the right side — sitting cross-legged on a platform of black ash. Moments before Rachel was going to dissipate it all, the smoke moved into formation and solidified into a representation of Ananym’s bedroom.

Lifting a smokey representation of her wand from the closet, Ananym monologued her findings, “My magic wand; my crutch. For years — fighting enemies of the Canadian government when I was in Gamma Flight — I could only conjure up my powers if I focused them through this wand they gave me. All this time, it’s been filled with a polymer-bonded explosive. More stable and more damaging than plastique.”

“Why would they do that?” Rachel skeptically asked.

“I don’t know. Department H’s movements were always a mystery. Even if I had learned anything about their intentions while in their care, I wouldn’t remember it.”

“I could take a peek.”

“You’ve been spending quite a bit of time sorting through memories of late. Perhaps that is the destiny you search for.”

“Memory mining isn’t a career.”

“Maybe it should be.”

“Maybe,” Rachel acknowledged, without letting her mind wander too far from the mission at hand. Pointing her telepathic-telescope eyes on Ananym’s brain, Rachel blinked hard, metaphorically speaking. “There’s something there, but there’s not. I think… I think there are magical barriers in your brain, physically cutting off portions of your hippocampus.” — Rachel gasped in pleasant surprise, and grinned– “Telepathy uses the brain against itself, but magic is purely unnatural. It’s not supposed to be there. The Phoenix can burn it away.”

The flight to Scotland’s Skye Isle played out like a horror movie to Dane Whitman. Strapped into his seat in the Midnight Runner, he was forced to watch the literally-painful awkwardness of Brian Braddock attempting to socialise with a person he had no history with. Like a car wreck, Dane desired to look away, but like a reality show, he couldn’t take his eyes off the offense to all things natural. It was akin to a recursive loop, really: in the pilot’s chair, Brian would attempt to start a conversation using whatever little bits of knowledge he had of Scott, and Scott, in the co-pilot’s chair, only responded as a taciturn teenager would.

“Ray tells me you’ve given up your volunteer search and rescuing,” Brian said, as with everything else in the last ten minutes, awkwardly.

“…’kay.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Got back into patrolling London for criminals.”

“…Funny you say that.”

“…Not really.”

“No, I guess it’s not funny. …Not exactly.”

“No, it’s really not.”

“…What brought you back to patrolling?”

“Family.”

“I didn’t know you had adventurers in your family.”

“I don’t.” Scott Wright glanced down at his digital wristwatch, and then the GPS display on the console before him. A delicious smirk spreading its edges across his face, Scott beamed, “…and now we’re far enough.”

“Far enough from what? Far enough for what?” Brian implored, the second question more urgent than the first.

“For planning Rachel’s surprise birthday party, sunshine,” Scott excitedly announced.

“Isn’t it a bit late to only start planning a surprise party?” Dane pondered, although honestly knew little of them.

“Very late,” Brian sternly agreed. “Considering we already have reservations.”

“Planning it forty-eight hours in advance is practically aeons too early when you’re dealing with a telepath,” Scott chided them both. “Once we get Moira’s clan involved, we’ll just have to ask none of them to see or speak to Rachel before Friday.”

“I said we already have reservations on Friday,” Brian repeated himself, making it clear with his tone that he didn’t like to repeat himself.

With a verbal roll of his eyes, Scott said, “I already heard you.”

The chandelier spiraled most glitteringly above the main stage of the opera house Its clinking crystal teardrops sang surely to the beat of its heart’s timpani Down below In the spotlight of the centre stage Witchfire pirouetted a quadruple axel of evil and tore her new black tutu Did not stop her any Did not faze her any Only made her laugh and tear other tears on the tutu to make them symmetrical And the backup dancers arrived A long haired greasy boy A pair of Chinese twins A girl covered from ponytail to toenail in a red leather bondage suit They all danced in a circle Ring around the rosie There can be only one

“…Hunh.” Rachel Summers sat in a box seat to the left of the performance stage, watching over Ananym’s memories from within a shared point of imagination inside Ananym’s mind. “Not the dark secret I was expecting.”

“This place does not exist,” Ananym said quite surely, seated primly beside Rachel. “It never existed.”

“A construct,” Rachel caught on much slower than she would have liked, but was pleased to have done so all the same. “Your memories must not have been chemically recorded properly. An interpretation is the best we’re going to get. You still have control over this reality, though; I need you to concentrate on the wand if I’m going to find the memories we’re looking for.” She didn’t need to ask if Ananym had done it.

Alone once again but wearing a new tutu Witchfire took great jaguar leaps to run across the stage She ran with her toes pointed gracefully forward and landed on the balls of her feet Keeping off her stiletto heels She climbed an incline A paper m‰che hill painted grassy green in oil paint Upon the top of the hill Witchfire could spot another hill in the distance Perhaps it was two feet away perhaps it was twenty feet away She jumped for it One leg stretched out forward flush to the floor one leg stretched back flush to the floor She lost all momentum over the hole and plummeted into coffin that was engraved with her name

Alone once again but wearing a new tutu Witchfire took great jaguar leaps to run across the stage Though this time she clutched her wand in her hand And thusly she floated across the stage Up the paper m‰che hill And right over the hole in the world to land gracefully atop the hill in the distance

Rachel and Ananym watched in mostly silence, as the Witchfire on the stage was surrounded by male dancers wearing black leotards and helmets akin to the Master of the World’s. When she was without her wand, the Masters beat her to a bloody pulp. Literally. With her wand in hand, she transformed the Masters into a variety of sentient, non-sentient, and non-organic creatures. With her wand in hand, she was utterly unharmed.

“They programmed me,” Ananym recognised sadly. Her voice breaking on the words, she said, “My guardians at Hull House psychologically engineered my dependency on the wand.”

As the Midnight Runner touched down, on the landing pad behind Moira MacTaggert’s Skye Isle research centre, a welcoming gift was pitched in its direction. Brian only first saw it when the gift collided, with a whimper, against the Runner’s forward viewport. All three men recoiled from the sight with varying volumes of yelps. The gift was Neal Shaara.

Dane was the first out of his chair, and kicking open the hatch, when its hydraulics wouldn’t move fast enough. Soaring over Dane’s head, Brian darted to the aft of the Runner and squeezed past the bed that Jamie Braddock was strapped into. The Midnight Runner was originally designed as Excalibur’s hospital hovercraft, and for the first time in years, Brian was going to let it have its true purpose back.

Dropping out of the ship and pacing towards the gift giver, Dane Whitman grasped the arcane pendant around his neck to whisper “Avalon,” while Scott Wright began growing in size, his muscles growing disproportionately larger and denser than the rest of his body. Effusing an eldrich light, Dane was enwrapped in the navy blue armour of the Black Knight, while Scott’s jacket shredded as his body grew. A pale charcoal officer’s vest, dark charcoal slacks and black combat boots — all made of good old fashioned unstable molecules — grew with Micromax’s size. Still larger than Scott was Guido, the Stong Guy who had hurled Neal their way.

Arching out and over the Midnight Runner, Brian landed delicately against the viewport, and crouched down by Neal’s side. Finding that the unconscious mutant was still breathing and still had a pulse, Brian was slow and methodological as he worked the neck brace onto Neal. Using his finest control over his strength and flight, Brian steadily moved Neal onto the thin gurney, but nearly knocked the man off the Runner, when he heard a shout.

Spreading his arms wide into a cocky shrug sent Strong Guy’s way, Micromax challenged, “What are you doing?”

Motionless, Strong Guy glowered, “I won’t let you cover Lila’s song.”

Matching Guido’s impressive height and muscle mass, Micromax scoffed, “What does that mean?” And then he grew himself even larger than Strong Guy.

“Anything Strong Guy says, I assume it means he is strong enough to break your spine and he wants you to know it,” Brian related, as he secured Neal to the gurney. Gripping it with a firm hold, Brian levitated above the Runner, and arced under it, towards the open hatch.

“Guido’s blinded by telepathy,” Black Knight guessed. As Micromax began to circle Strong Guy, Knight raised his Shield of Night, preparing it to absorb any unexpected blows. The only unexpected blow came from Scott, who laid a right hook on Guido’s jaw. In response to which, Black Knight immediately shouted, “You can’t hit him!”

Landing more undefended punches with his increasingly large fists, Micromax sighed, “Look, I know my martial arts are more like martial occasional-past-times, and it shows, but–”

Strong Guy cold-cocked Micromax in the face, landing the larger man several yards away.

“He’s like my shield and sword,” Black Knight exposited swiftly, as Strong Guy came at him. “He absorbs the kinetic energy of your blows and uses it against you.”

“Oh!” Micromax cried out in understanding. “Then I can’t hit him! Right.”

Weilding dramatically wide Canadian flags the greasy boy the bondage girl the Chinese wonder twins and the Witchfire performed a complicated dance routine that would be the envy of any pop routine But Witchfire quickly fell out of line from the others Her dance was tribal Could not understand the dance of the others Could not remember the moves Earning her a glare from the guardian drum major who was performing the routine two beats ahead of the others Epsilon guards stormed the stage to drag Witchfire into the wings

“They attempted to control your every move,” Rachel realised, based on what she saw on stage, and what she detected from the synapses of Ananym’s brain.

“My memory loss undid their complicated programming,” Ananym surmised.

“You’re almost as damaged as I am,” Rachel murmured.

“Just enough to be interesting.”

After almost fifteen minutes of engaging and dodging and distracting Strong Guy, Black Knight was beginning to wonder just how seriously Brian Braddock was committed to the notion that Captain Britain was dead. Brian had flown into the Midnight Runner, and offered no signal that he was going to return as the cavalry. Dane would have considered dragging Brian out or at least calling him on his cowardice, but Strong Guy wrapped an impenetrably strong grip around his ankles. Like a baseball bat, Black Knight was swung into the outer wall of one of Moira’s research silos, and Strong Guy continued swinging until shards of wood showered down, the Knight’s helmet fell off, and his limbs stopped flailing.

“Can your eyes absorb kinetic energy?” Micromax taunted — from mid-air — after launching himself at Strong Guy. His fists stretched forward and aimed at Guido’s glasses, the punch struck Guido hard, actually staggering him. Then, Strong Guy metabolised the kinetic energy as additional muscle mass.

Instead of a follow-up blow, Micromax just sighed, took a wobbly step back, and cursed, “Fuck everyone in the universe to death.”

From out of the sky, Brian Braddock dropped directly onto Guido’s back. He locked his legs around Guido’s torso — as well as he could, considering Guido’s girth — and slammed a bulbous silver helmet over Guido’s head. Jumping from side to side, twisting his shoulders, Strong Guy attempted to shake Brian off, but the smaller man held tight. In addition not letting himself get bucked off, Brian used much of his strength towards keeping the helmet on Guido’s head, despite Guido’s swats at it. All Strong Guy managed to do was whip Brian with the helmet’s dangling cables, which had been torn from the Midnight Runner

Quitting the useless motions, Strong Guy boomed, “No more free music download for you,” and jumped back. He slammed his back against the silo’s outer wall, crushing Brian between a tower of wood and a tower of muscle. As he repeatedly crashed Brian back against the wall, severely cracking a support pillar, the cerebro unit on Strong Guy’s head began to hum. When a green light strobed, Guido stopped bashing Brian.

Limping down to the ground, wishing for his amplification suit, Brian putting on a show of strength and used his flight ability to stand upright. Hovering around Guido’s body, Brian faced him, to question, “Guido? Guido? Do you recognise me? I am Brian Braddock.”

“Brian?” Brian groggily acknowledged. Squinting at Bri, Guido muttered, “You’re not a… Yes, I… I… remember.”

“I’ve blocked the telepathic influence that was controlling you,” Brian explained succinctly, while Micromax edged in closer.

Delivering a spinning kick to Brian’s chest, Strong Guy growled, “I remember you guys just hurt me.”

“Oh Christ,” Brian coughed out, from where he landed on his back. “You’re being influenced by more than telepathy,” Brian came to recognise aloud. Moving at preternatural speed, Brian shot into the air, performing a back flip over Guido. When his legs were higher than his head, Brian snatched two of cerebro’s dangling wires, and twisted them around Guido’s neck. Landing his feet on Strong Guy’s back, he tightened the wires around Guido’s thick neck, and pulled until they crushed his windpipe.

“Hey,” Micromax snarled. “Why do you get all the fun?”

Greasy boy Bondage Girl Chinese wonder twins Witchfire They were Gamma Flight They were the Canadian government’s greatest puppets called super heroes At least they were great until the hypothesised day that was dramatised on stage Centre stage Witchfire grew thick black horns out of her forehead and her dancing was jerky as if there was a techno-beating brass orchestra playing in her mind Also she was snorting fire out of her nose

Behind her the rest of Gamma Flight had traded in their Canadian flags for big manilla folders on which Classified had been written And a dancer dressed as a news reporter from the nineteen forties hopped towards them But the reporter was then followed by the Master of the World and the Purple Man and some giant gods that were imprecisely based on certain First Nations myths

A dancer dressed in the Guardian uniform sashayed downstage He was carrying a large placard on which had been scribed a big Latin word The moment Witchfire caught sight of the placard her wand exploded Everyone on the stage was eaten and crapped out by the mushroom cloud

“They could only imbue me with a simple command. I was the murderous plan B in case of any worst case scenario,” Ananym supposed — a distance in her voice to match her distance from the stage. “I’m only alive because changes in government meant shuffles in Department H, and new projects from Hull House went to centre stage.”

Striding to the end of a darkened corridor, with human-sized Micromax by his side, Brian Braddock wrapped his fist around the handle of the door he remembered from his last visit to Moira. Without much strain, he tore the door from the wall. Purposefully stepping inside the blackened room, he flicked on the fluorescent lights, which illuminated the entire chamber greenly. It became much easier to find the crate he was looking for. Working his fingers under one of the steel crate’s lids, Brian ripped it off, and cast the metal plank aside. Nothing between he and his goal, Brian wrapped his fingers around the grenade launcher, and mounted it on his shoulder.

Cracking open a crate of his own, and finding his weapon of choice, Micromax reached in, and then paused. He asked, “Do they make silencers for chainsaws?”

Kicking down the door to one of Moira’s unmolested research labs, Brian strut into the room — grenade launcher first, and Micromax followed Brian. Brian drank in the occupants of the room in a left to right sweep. First he saw Moira MacTaggert. She was naked, save for the metallic ventilation ducts that were binding her body, and she was bleeding from a badly sewn wound on her neck. Only her arms were free to move, and she was using them to type on a laptop. To the right of her stood Spoor, a mutantly hirsute and muscular man, who held blood-spattered Rahne Sinclair close. She was his mutant shield. He held one hand over her mouth, and had his other arm wrapped across her forehead. The muscles in his arms were tense, as if preparing to break the girl’s neck. Brian attempted to communicate to Rahne with a look, telling her when to duck, but her stare was blank. She couldn’t even meet Brian’s eyes. That made Brian angry.

“Come,” Spoor warmly invited, his elocution distorted by a Scottish brogue. “Kill this girl. The baby blood of your child decorates her face.”

“I don’t think so. I’m here to save the girl,” Brian swore. He repositioned the grenade launcher on his shoulder, and then swung it into Micromax’s face. Scott was bashed into the wall, and left in an unconscious heap on the floor.

Off-handedly, Brian conceded, “I’ll kill him.”

NEXT ISSUE: The final chapter of “Holding Out For A Hero”, because, honestly, even Chris Claremont would be embarrassed by this many mind-controlled slaves.

Author’s Notes

Seriously. I never actually intended to write a story about mind-control/slavery. (Well, Rachel accidentally mind-controlling Magma and Phylogeny was pretty much intentionally, but I just thought it’d be cool for her to accidentally use them like limbs). I mean, obviously, Rachel Summers is the epitome of Claremont’s mind-controlled slaves. She escaped her Hound programming and her timestream to join 616’s X-Men… only to be enslaved by Spiral and Mojo. Let’s not even think on her modern-era enslavements (She’s a dinosaur? She’s always been a dinosaur? What?). One of the purposes of this series, though, is to move Rachel beyond the drama of her alternate-universe, questionable-parentage, mutant-hound, Mojo-slave, time-traveling, Phoenix-possession, end-of-time prisoner, future-destiny past.

And so there is Spoor. Captain Britain versus Spoor was meant to be a one-shot story to convince Brian to seriously consider putting the Captain Britain uniform back on. The extent of Spoor’s pheromone effect was meant to make the MacTaggert gang angry and violent, to clear the decks for a one-on-one confrontation. But then, I cut my Starjammer story down from two issues to one. That gave me a whole extra issue to play with. And then half of my plot for issue four was delayed until the final story arc, and so the Spoor storyline spilled in to fill the gap.

And so there is Witchfire. My intent was always to bring in some Alpha Flight mythology, but my planned plots for Ananym involved her doing little more than caring for Jane. She seemed the right character to feature in this extra issue, and her mind-controlled past ended up coming from my own pet peeve at her character having such a nebulous past, and an attempt to tie her in with some of the recent events of Alpha Flight. Rachel being needed for her telepathy, in a non-violent way, also seemed like the right sort of stepping stone in her quest for a destiny. I considered losing this storyline, but by the time I started to see how many slaves I had, I had already plotted an important (slaveless) follow up to this event, for later in the year.

And so there is Magma. Bringing in Amara, to also get her memory scoured by Rachel, was never planned at all. She needed a telepath to sort her out, and there are currently no powerful telepaths in the X-Men’s stable. Since she makes for an interesting character, and she needed someplace to be right now while I was writing a storyline that had some room to spare, I figured it’d be fun to have some inter-title crossing over.

And so there is Guido. I came very close to writing out the fight against mind-controlled Guido. In the end, I couldn’t, because that would have left Brian doing nothing more than flying the ‘Runner in this issue. But it wasn’t until coming upon the Guido fight that I fully recognised the piles upon piles of mind-controlled slaves. While it might have been prudent to spread them out across this first year, maybe it is for the best to get them all sorted out in a single story.

— Bren
06/07/05