05-29-2006, 10:08 PM
X3 ... well, it was a pretty good movie, but if I start bitching about it here I'll never stop.
Instead, a short ficlet set sometime around the second movie, with a character I've wanted to bring out for a while now.
Actually, I'm writing - or trying to write, at least - an original story with a chara who's been based off of this guy as the centerpiece.
In my defense, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Happens around the time of X2 or so.
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Just a hack.
a ficlet in the X-Men movieverse.
disc: Marvelverse, in any of its incarnation, is not mine. If it were, I'd have kept it less convulted.
---
I hop out of the bus, drop to the ground, and roll.
It's not exactly my chosen mode of exiting that means of public transportation, but it works in a pinch. Especially when some moron is getting his kicks in by throwing cars around.
I try not to let this sort of thing get me down. Not that it's par for the course, not really, but it's also nothing all that special.
Oh, the girl who just went through the parked SUV and made quite an impression on the concrete wall of the ...
I peek around the hood. Ah, bank. Gotcha.
... building it was standing next to? You'll laugh, she calls herself 'Impact'.
Real name? Oh, come now, you didn't expect me to actually tell you, did you?
Anyway, she's alright. She's had ... maybe not worse, but comparable. Walked away without much trouble. She's what you'd call a mutant, though some prefer meta-human. Freak is an all-time favorite as well, but they never say it to her face.
No, not because she's cute. That doesn't quite work all the time. She's short. Red-haired. Green eyed. Has freckles. Couldn't be more Irish if she painted herself green and started threading clovers through her hair.
Me? I'm just a bystander. Really. Would these eyes lie to you?
Hmm ... yeah, alright, so they would.
My card says 'Ethan Thane, Thane Consulting'. Appropriately ominous, I suppose.
I'm in antiques.
Funny thing is, I don't really fancy history all that much. You could say I learned through osmosis.
Oh, she's up again.
I duck down low and half crouch, half crawl behind the sedan that had been tossed our way a moment ago, and is now leaning against a bent streetlight.
Imp just grabbed a chunk of concrete the size of her fist - meaning not very large - and tossed it back at the moron.
Yeah, I call her Imp. She hates it. She calls me worse things.
No, there is no sexual tension. Trust me on this. She's just a good friend.
Well, you could ask why there is no sexual tension, but I wouldn't tell you. If I did, I'd have to kill you.
Mr. Moron - what, you expect me to actually call him by whatever moniker he's gotten himself when he's doing something as blatantly stupid as tossing around automobiles in front of a shopping center on a busy day? - just got hit by a chunk of concrete traveling at slightly better than Mach One. She's getting good at that.
What? Right. Imp's power, ability, whatever, is something that somebody with far too much time on their hands once called 'para-psionic' ... like those peeps who can move stuff with their minds, only not. Not _what_, exactly, is a tricky question.
The answer boils down to her being able to control the kinetic energy of objects, including her own body, among other related things.
When she hit that wall, she spread the 'impact' energy over a wide enough area that she didn't go through the wall, and nearly nullified her own body's kinetic energy and inertia.
See what I meant when I said she didn't get hurt?
Anyway, Mr. Moron is reeling ... which is weird, since, oh, the chunk of concrete should have gone clear through his chest at that speed, flesh and bone or not.
What, you think Imp's overdoing it?
Right.
The sedan I'm hiding behind is leaking. The road under it is already stained red. I think there's someone still alive in there, but they won't be for long.
I'm not a doctor, you see. Even one of those wouldn't be much good here. First aid I can do. Pulling people out of cars doing sardine-can impressions and healing with a touch is about as beyond me as it is beyond me to not trail off on tangents during monologues.
Am I being blase about this? Perhaps. Or I'm just jaded.
Dead people don't really impress me much.
It dates back to a colorful childhood.
No. I didn't grow up on the streets. I wasn't an
orphan. My parents didn't abuse me. I didn't get ... well, okay, I may have gotten into a few fights here and there, but that's pretty much par for the course for everyone, isn't it?
My father was an archaeologist ... again, no. He did not have an old hat, and neither did he own a bull whip.
And save me the trauma of remembering the cat-o-nine-tails I found when I was going through my folks' bedroom. Oh. Too late.
Ahem.
Yeah, omitting that incident, it was a good life.
We traveled a lot, and I did like going on digs with my father. It wasn't really the history, it was more the fact that we were going to strange and exotic places and meeting strange and exotic people.
No, my mother was not, in fact, a covert operative of a government agency who'd lost her memories and upon regaining them was being hunted by every agent in the country and had to kill them all because she didn't want to be silenced.
Get. A. Life.
She used to be a biology teacher. Sadly, yet another occupational choice that didn't appeal to me whatsoever. I've never flunked a biology test in my life, though, so it must count for something ...
... although considering the fact that, by anyone's standards, I've pretty much cheated my way through school ... well, take that as you will.
So, yeah, we traveled a lot.
You're probably wondering what it's got to do with me
not being bothered by the blood, the screams, the ... you get the idea.
I'm getting to that ...
... though first, I'm ducking the return fire.
Looks like Moron's up again. Sweet merciful Mary on a pogo stick, they make them tough on this side of the pond.
Or they're importing Russian supersoldiers.
One of those two.
No, I'm not religious. I just tend to swear by it a lot.
I continue the interrupted trek, ducking random incoming debris that Our Boy Imbecile is throwing around in an attempt to make Imp become one with the pavement. To
little effect.
Kinetic energy. May seem trite, no?
'Can take a pounding and throw shit real fast sort of gal, huh? What's so special about that?'
Well, sweet-cheeks, she can make herself inertialess and make every twitch of the toes catapult her from zero to sixty in a second. And beyond.
Right now, she's bounding around like a demented, leather-jacketed, hiking-booted grasshopper.
I have a love/hate relationship with the movie 'Sixth Sense'.
Random thought?
Not really.
See, I can sympathize with the kid.
That's right, I'm 'meta' myself. Mutant. Whatever.
And no, I do not see dead people.
At least, not only those.
I'm wearing gloves right now. I usually do. Cotton, not very thick, let the skin breathe and all, and make life a whole lot easier for yours truly.
Back when I was a kid, my parents thought I had an eating disorder. Then they thought that there was something wrong with my stomach. Then ... well, it took until I was three, but things seemed to settle down.
You see, getting impressions of what the exact moment of death of what I was currently eating looked like may have been an educational experience, but it was one I sure as hell could have done without, thankyouverymuch.
I think I was three when I stopped that, though I still got impressions whenever I touched something, and I tended not to be a very tactile child when it came to playing with other kids my age.
Going to dig sites ... well, touch an old sword. Walk over an area where executions were held. That sort of thing.
They call it psychometry. Every person leaves some sort of impression, call it a psychic trail, on whatever it is they're touching. I can apparently tap into those.
And more. But that was something I found out later.
Ouch. That had to hurt.
Imp just pushed off a fifth story window, plowed though an airborne Mini - damn shame too, it was the classic model - and planted a set of brass knuckles right on Moron's jaw.
Damn, that should have taken off the head, judging by the amount of force she was using. The big lug reeled, but that's about it.
I was almost there.
Anyway, I pretty much grew up with history. And soon learned to shut up about some things that people see as historic fact, but which really aren't.
I'll tell you this though, Jean d'Arc made plate-mail look good.
My family, by the way, is not dead. They were not murdered by terrorists - we missed getting fragged by a bomb once though, which I didn't think was very cool, even at the time it happened, much to the puzzlement of my classmates from there and then - or burglars, or shot down in the streets.
Dad's gotten a lecturing spot at Oxford, mom's writing articles for a womens' mag ... oh, the tragedy of that. It pains me so.
Shyeaaaah.
Me? I did a quick tour, got a degree in archeology - which I basically cheated my way through, really - and at the tender age of 21 win most of my bread with identifying and proofing antiques.
Most.
Oh. Great. They're down to hammering one-another in-close.
Heh. Guy's still not going down, but he isn't hurting Imp any either. He hasn't caught on yet, it looks like. Well, so much the better.
Imp isn't actually feeling more than a few light slaps from what he's doing to her. Still, he isn't slowing down any, so it's a fair bet that he can do this for a while longer than she can.
I met Imp a while ago. Has to be ... more than four years now, actually. I'd gotten into college early, and you can preach to me about dishonesty as much as you want, mates. Imprinting and assimilating psychic impressions isn't quite as hard as it sounds, meaning that I do actually know all the material. Unfair? Yeah, maybe.
I may lie, I may cheat, I may steal, and maybe on occasion kill, but it's all for a good cause.
Self preservation.
Or I'm just lazy. One of the two.
Imp once dubbed me 'Hack'. It fits. It stuck.
She bumped into me. Well, no. Actually, she trashed her bike, did a limp flip through the air, and crashed helmet-first into my stomach.
Amazingly, it didn't hurt.
Either of us.
One thing led to another, and ...
Shit. Moron's caught on, ripped a sheet of aluminum plating from a van's side, and is trying to use that to cut her.
I give a shout to get his attention.
He tries to swat me with it.
My strength isn't enhanced. Neither is anything else.
I _have_, on the other hand, been wearing a prayer-bead band around my left wrist for the past six years. It's somewhere between four to four hundred and fifty years old. Belonged, originally, to a shaolin monk.
I stole it.
Deal.
It was of better use to me than it was in that pawn shop, though what it was doing there I have no idea. By now, I wear it more out of habit than need. The impressions are pretty much hardwired into my brain and muscle memory.
I hop up, brace my gloved palm on the sheet of aluminum, and vault over the top.
Then I plant both feet on the Moron's shoulders and balance like that.
How?
I fucking know kung-fu, ya?
And yeah, my head's a pretty messed up place. Some things got there by themselves, some things didn't.
Most, though, I pulled, prodded, and put there on my own.
To telepaths, I'm a walking, talking, ticking bomb in a people suit.
They call me 'Nightmare'.
I use my teeth to pull off my left glove, slap the palm of that hand into the middle of his forehead as he's raising his own hands to slap me off from my perch, and give him a taste of the things I pulled from the old dagger most people believed belonged to a cult of some sort, but which I know was the personal favorite toy of one Torquemada.
Then I'm on the ground, a little disoriented - this sort of crap always takes a bit out of me - and Imp's there, and lugging me away.
Yeah, not smart, being around this mess when the cops finally show.
Or the government goons.
Whatever the hell the President of this Stateside Asylum is doing with the current 'anti-mutant' policy he's got going doesn't have him very high on my list of favorite people.
Still, we've got a job, so we've pretty much obliged to stay here and do our frigging best, no?
It's Imp's job, to tell you the truth. I'm mostly just along for the ride, though there's a big fat commission for this sort of thing that she pays me too. Hey, friendships come and go, but money is forever.
I think I said that out loud, because she just slapped the back of my head. Well, at least the stars are going away now, and I can more or less walk.
A few weeks ago this girl, who'd been on a trip overseas at the time, disappears.
Normal case, it seems like, right?
Well, disappearance was Stateside. Only lead was her backpack, found by the local coppers and feds.
Imp, thanks in part to me, and in part to her own skills, has more than a bit of a reputation for finding things that aren't easy to find, and people who've gone under.
Missing Girl's family's pretty well off.
So, here we are.
We got here, talked to some people, looked over the pack.
Should have expected this, really. Girl's as normal as Imp or myself.
Meaning an extra angle, and a somewhat more narrowed down field for our search.
Then, when we were on the way to get our rental car and start some serious work, this idiot with a chip on his shoulder shows up and starts tossing things around, squishing people left and right.
Karma's a bitch.
What can you do, though?
Well, it doesn't look like we're going to be bored on this job. If we get out of it alive, that is.
But hey, I think we can hack it.
That was fun.
ETA: to fix formatting.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
Instead, a short ficlet set sometime around the second movie, with a character I've wanted to bring out for a while now.
Actually, I'm writing - or trying to write, at least - an original story with a chara who's been based off of this guy as the centerpiece.
In my defense, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Happens around the time of X2 or so.
Demonbane Ltd.
presents
Just a hack.
a ficlet in the X-Men movieverse.
disc: Marvelverse, in any of its incarnation, is not mine. If it were, I'd have kept it less convulted.
---
I hop out of the bus, drop to the ground, and roll.
It's not exactly my chosen mode of exiting that means of public transportation, but it works in a pinch. Especially when some moron is getting his kicks in by throwing cars around.
I try not to let this sort of thing get me down. Not that it's par for the course, not really, but it's also nothing all that special.
Oh, the girl who just went through the parked SUV and made quite an impression on the concrete wall of the ...
I peek around the hood. Ah, bank. Gotcha.
... building it was standing next to? You'll laugh, she calls herself 'Impact'.
Real name? Oh, come now, you didn't expect me to actually tell you, did you?
Anyway, she's alright. She's had ... maybe not worse, but comparable. Walked away without much trouble. She's what you'd call a mutant, though some prefer meta-human. Freak is an all-time favorite as well, but they never say it to her face.
No, not because she's cute. That doesn't quite work all the time. She's short. Red-haired. Green eyed. Has freckles. Couldn't be more Irish if she painted herself green and started threading clovers through her hair.
Me? I'm just a bystander. Really. Would these eyes lie to you?
Hmm ... yeah, alright, so they would.
My card says 'Ethan Thane, Thane Consulting'. Appropriately ominous, I suppose.
I'm in antiques.
Funny thing is, I don't really fancy history all that much. You could say I learned through osmosis.
Oh, she's up again.
I duck down low and half crouch, half crawl behind the sedan that had been tossed our way a moment ago, and is now leaning against a bent streetlight.
Imp just grabbed a chunk of concrete the size of her fist - meaning not very large - and tossed it back at the moron.
Yeah, I call her Imp. She hates it. She calls me worse things.
No, there is no sexual tension. Trust me on this. She's just a good friend.
Well, you could ask why there is no sexual tension, but I wouldn't tell you. If I did, I'd have to kill you.
Mr. Moron - what, you expect me to actually call him by whatever moniker he's gotten himself when he's doing something as blatantly stupid as tossing around automobiles in front of a shopping center on a busy day? - just got hit by a chunk of concrete traveling at slightly better than Mach One. She's getting good at that.
What? Right. Imp's power, ability, whatever, is something that somebody with far too much time on their hands once called 'para-psionic' ... like those peeps who can move stuff with their minds, only not. Not _what_, exactly, is a tricky question.
The answer boils down to her being able to control the kinetic energy of objects, including her own body, among other related things.
When she hit that wall, she spread the 'impact' energy over a wide enough area that she didn't go through the wall, and nearly nullified her own body's kinetic energy and inertia.
See what I meant when I said she didn't get hurt?
Anyway, Mr. Moron is reeling ... which is weird, since, oh, the chunk of concrete should have gone clear through his chest at that speed, flesh and bone or not.
What, you think Imp's overdoing it?
Right.
The sedan I'm hiding behind is leaking. The road under it is already stained red. I think there's someone still alive in there, but they won't be for long.
I'm not a doctor, you see. Even one of those wouldn't be much good here. First aid I can do. Pulling people out of cars doing sardine-can impressions and healing with a touch is about as beyond me as it is beyond me to not trail off on tangents during monologues.
Am I being blase about this? Perhaps. Or I'm just jaded.
Dead people don't really impress me much.
It dates back to a colorful childhood.
No. I didn't grow up on the streets. I wasn't an
orphan. My parents didn't abuse me. I didn't get ... well, okay, I may have gotten into a few fights here and there, but that's pretty much par for the course for everyone, isn't it?
My father was an archaeologist ... again, no. He did not have an old hat, and neither did he own a bull whip.
And save me the trauma of remembering the cat-o-nine-tails I found when I was going through my folks' bedroom. Oh. Too late.
Ahem.
Yeah, omitting that incident, it was a good life.
We traveled a lot, and I did like going on digs with my father. It wasn't really the history, it was more the fact that we were going to strange and exotic places and meeting strange and exotic people.
No, my mother was not, in fact, a covert operative of a government agency who'd lost her memories and upon regaining them was being hunted by every agent in the country and had to kill them all because she didn't want to be silenced.
Get. A. Life.
She used to be a biology teacher. Sadly, yet another occupational choice that didn't appeal to me whatsoever. I've never flunked a biology test in my life, though, so it must count for something ...
... although considering the fact that, by anyone's standards, I've pretty much cheated my way through school ... well, take that as you will.
So, yeah, we traveled a lot.
You're probably wondering what it's got to do with me
not being bothered by the blood, the screams, the ... you get the idea.
I'm getting to that ...
... though first, I'm ducking the return fire.
Looks like Moron's up again. Sweet merciful Mary on a pogo stick, they make them tough on this side of the pond.
Or they're importing Russian supersoldiers.
One of those two.
No, I'm not religious. I just tend to swear by it a lot.
I continue the interrupted trek, ducking random incoming debris that Our Boy Imbecile is throwing around in an attempt to make Imp become one with the pavement. To
little effect.
Kinetic energy. May seem trite, no?
'Can take a pounding and throw shit real fast sort of gal, huh? What's so special about that?'
Well, sweet-cheeks, she can make herself inertialess and make every twitch of the toes catapult her from zero to sixty in a second. And beyond.
Right now, she's bounding around like a demented, leather-jacketed, hiking-booted grasshopper.
I have a love/hate relationship with the movie 'Sixth Sense'.
Random thought?
Not really.
See, I can sympathize with the kid.
That's right, I'm 'meta' myself. Mutant. Whatever.
And no, I do not see dead people.
At least, not only those.
I'm wearing gloves right now. I usually do. Cotton, not very thick, let the skin breathe and all, and make life a whole lot easier for yours truly.
Back when I was a kid, my parents thought I had an eating disorder. Then they thought that there was something wrong with my stomach. Then ... well, it took until I was three, but things seemed to settle down.
You see, getting impressions of what the exact moment of death of what I was currently eating looked like may have been an educational experience, but it was one I sure as hell could have done without, thankyouverymuch.
I think I was three when I stopped that, though I still got impressions whenever I touched something, and I tended not to be a very tactile child when it came to playing with other kids my age.
Going to dig sites ... well, touch an old sword. Walk over an area where executions were held. That sort of thing.
They call it psychometry. Every person leaves some sort of impression, call it a psychic trail, on whatever it is they're touching. I can apparently tap into those.
And more. But that was something I found out later.
Ouch. That had to hurt.
Imp just pushed off a fifth story window, plowed though an airborne Mini - damn shame too, it was the classic model - and planted a set of brass knuckles right on Moron's jaw.
Damn, that should have taken off the head, judging by the amount of force she was using. The big lug reeled, but that's about it.
I was almost there.
Anyway, I pretty much grew up with history. And soon learned to shut up about some things that people see as historic fact, but which really aren't.
I'll tell you this though, Jean d'Arc made plate-mail look good.
My family, by the way, is not dead. They were not murdered by terrorists - we missed getting fragged by a bomb once though, which I didn't think was very cool, even at the time it happened, much to the puzzlement of my classmates from there and then - or burglars, or shot down in the streets.
Dad's gotten a lecturing spot at Oxford, mom's writing articles for a womens' mag ... oh, the tragedy of that. It pains me so.
Shyeaaaah.
Me? I did a quick tour, got a degree in archeology - which I basically cheated my way through, really - and at the tender age of 21 win most of my bread with identifying and proofing antiques.
Most.
Oh. Great. They're down to hammering one-another in-close.
Heh. Guy's still not going down, but he isn't hurting Imp any either. He hasn't caught on yet, it looks like. Well, so much the better.
Imp isn't actually feeling more than a few light slaps from what he's doing to her. Still, he isn't slowing down any, so it's a fair bet that he can do this for a while longer than she can.
I met Imp a while ago. Has to be ... more than four years now, actually. I'd gotten into college early, and you can preach to me about dishonesty as much as you want, mates. Imprinting and assimilating psychic impressions isn't quite as hard as it sounds, meaning that I do actually know all the material. Unfair? Yeah, maybe.
I may lie, I may cheat, I may steal, and maybe on occasion kill, but it's all for a good cause.
Self preservation.
Or I'm just lazy. One of the two.
Imp once dubbed me 'Hack'. It fits. It stuck.
She bumped into me. Well, no. Actually, she trashed her bike, did a limp flip through the air, and crashed helmet-first into my stomach.
Amazingly, it didn't hurt.
Either of us.
One thing led to another, and ...
Shit. Moron's caught on, ripped a sheet of aluminum plating from a van's side, and is trying to use that to cut her.
I give a shout to get his attention.
He tries to swat me with it.
My strength isn't enhanced. Neither is anything else.
I _have_, on the other hand, been wearing a prayer-bead band around my left wrist for the past six years. It's somewhere between four to four hundred and fifty years old. Belonged, originally, to a shaolin monk.
I stole it.
Deal.
It was of better use to me than it was in that pawn shop, though what it was doing there I have no idea. By now, I wear it more out of habit than need. The impressions are pretty much hardwired into my brain and muscle memory.
I hop up, brace my gloved palm on the sheet of aluminum, and vault over the top.
Then I plant both feet on the Moron's shoulders and balance like that.
How?
I fucking know kung-fu, ya?
And yeah, my head's a pretty messed up place. Some things got there by themselves, some things didn't.
Most, though, I pulled, prodded, and put there on my own.
To telepaths, I'm a walking, talking, ticking bomb in a people suit.
They call me 'Nightmare'.
I use my teeth to pull off my left glove, slap the palm of that hand into the middle of his forehead as he's raising his own hands to slap me off from my perch, and give him a taste of the things I pulled from the old dagger most people believed belonged to a cult of some sort, but which I know was the personal favorite toy of one Torquemada.
Then I'm on the ground, a little disoriented - this sort of crap always takes a bit out of me - and Imp's there, and lugging me away.
Yeah, not smart, being around this mess when the cops finally show.
Or the government goons.
Whatever the hell the President of this Stateside Asylum is doing with the current 'anti-mutant' policy he's got going doesn't have him very high on my list of favorite people.
Still, we've got a job, so we've pretty much obliged to stay here and do our frigging best, no?
It's Imp's job, to tell you the truth. I'm mostly just along for the ride, though there's a big fat commission for this sort of thing that she pays me too. Hey, friendships come and go, but money is forever.
I think I said that out loud, because she just slapped the back of my head. Well, at least the stars are going away now, and I can more or less walk.
A few weeks ago this girl, who'd been on a trip overseas at the time, disappears.
Normal case, it seems like, right?
Well, disappearance was Stateside. Only lead was her backpack, found by the local coppers and feds.
Imp, thanks in part to me, and in part to her own skills, has more than a bit of a reputation for finding things that aren't easy to find, and people who've gone under.
Missing Girl's family's pretty well off.
So, here we are.
We got here, talked to some people, looked over the pack.
Should have expected this, really. Girl's as normal as Imp or myself.
Meaning an extra angle, and a somewhat more narrowed down field for our search.
Then, when we were on the way to get our rental car and start some serious work, this idiot with a chip on his shoulder shows up and starts tossing things around, squishing people left and right.
Karma's a bitch.
What can you do, though?
Well, it doesn't look like we're going to be bored on this job. If we get out of it alive, that is.
But hey, I think we can hack it.
That was fun.
ETA: to fix formatting.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
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