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Lessons in Lightning; JC
Topic Started: Jul 18 2009, 07:44 PM (338 Views)
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1:09 pm, July 11th




Edmund looked over his shoulder, backing the company car up against the curb just outside the X-Factor building. Having agreed to visit the X-Factor's headquarters when he found the time, Edmund was here to fulfill the agreement. Things seemed to be slowing down and from time to time he was able to take a day off from the hectic and proactive X-Corp assignments. Business was business, and business was booming. Warren's organization was making great leaps for the local community and Mutant Town still seemed to be recovering at a rate faster than the rest of New York. Maybe it was the fact that Mutant Town was the hardest place hit so any recovered damage seemed like a lot...

Watching the rear view mirror for a moment as a car drove by, Edmund slipped out of the vehicle and onto the sidewalk. With a brief click of the button, the car was locked.

Narrowing his eyes pensively at the door of X-Factor's home base, he wondered how they all managed to live in here. Given, it appeared to be a decent size building, but weren't there like... thirty of them? How they all fit into this place was beyond him. Maybe he thought there was more than there actually was, but for all he knew Mutant Town was all part of X-Factor. From what he understood, it was a volunteer thing.

That... or it was a secret organization of clones.

Edmund was still weirded out that Jonny, the person he was coming to see, might actually be a clone. It had been bothering him... For some reason, he could accept anyone as a mutant, but a clone was... different. Maybe it was from all the stuff he had read in magazines, seen in movies, or heard on the news. Controversy surrounded it... But he wasn't too aware of controversy surrounding Jon. It was more like... well, honestly, he had no idea. Jon was Jon... Or Jon was the new Jon. Either way, he was about to spend the better part of a day with the guy. It was either get over the issue and accept it or ignore it.

Stepping up to the door, Edmund tapped his knuckles onto the door a few times then opened it.

"Anyone alive here?"
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Electrokinesis / Cloned Origin
"And, then just when we all thought everything was settled and we were safe, suddenly, the whole island rose up!" Jon was standing on the lobby desk, surrounded by several small neighborhood children who watched with round, amazed eyes (not always two per face, mind you) "RAWR, I'M KRAKOA, AN' I'MA EAT YOU ALL UP AND USE YOUR BONES TO BAKE MY BREAD!!!!"

"Hey!" said one of the little kids, "That's the Jack and the Beanstalk!"

Jon glanced up as Edmund entered, and then looked down at the little kid, "Hmmm, well, I knew I heard that somewhere." He thumped a fist against his forehead and said, "Now, what did that mean ole island say just before it tried to swallow us whole? Oh yes, it said, RAAAAAAAWR!" And, as he growled, he jumped into the middle of the crowd of kids, suddenly crackling with static sparks, that flashed blue and shiny, but absolutely harmless.

The kid squealed and scattered, Jonny chasing them growling, slobbering and snarling, zapping them with shocks no more than one might get from scuffing their foot on the rug. He chased them around for a few seconds, until he reached Edmund standing at the door. His hands and hair glittering with electricity, he reached out and tapped his finger on Edmund's forehead to shock him a little and he laughed. "Hey, Mr. Lennart, welcome to X-Factor daycare," he winked. "Lemme shoo the rug rats home and I'll be right with you."

"Awwww," the kids began to protest. "Mr. Volt, sir, no fair! We never found out if the Island ate you or not!"

Jonny smiled, "Yup, it ate me whole, but it spit me up again. Turns out I gave it a horrible tummy ache!" He burped and covered his mouth as if it had been unintentional, which it most certainly had not been. The kids giggled and the little pack ran out, waving good bye, some of them hugging Jon before they left.

As the last one scurried off, Jon kicked the air as if giving the little boy the boot, and then shut the door, smoothing his spiky hair into some semblance of order, and though he had been running around like a madman, he wasn't breathing hard, or sweating at all. His stamina was greater than his donors had been, the redundancies in his system seeing to it that he was able to keep up with anything he needed to do... even chase six five to eight year olds around the room.

"Hey, Eddiekins," he greeted with his usual flippancy, "What brings you to the lion's den today?"
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Okay... Edmund had always thought that X-Factor was a kind of volunteer policing group, but what he saw as he entered the X-Factor's HQ. A bunch of young children (some he recognized from around Mutant Town, having been to nearly every adobe in District X) being watched over by the eye of the man he was coming to see. Jonny was, not suprisingly, rather childish around kids it seemed. Though most people slipped into their perverbial youngster when surrounded by children, Edmund had never seen such a regression before. Either Jonny was really acting like this or one of the kids spiked the man's coffee.

But, Edmund couldn't help but smile. It was actually quite funny seeing Jonny chase around little kids, firing off little sparks like those you'd find on the fourth of July. It was a few days late for them, but who ever said sparks were limited to a holiday? The sparkling babysitter sent the children skittering across the room until the guy finally worked his way over to Ed, touching his forehead with a shock. Unfeigned by it, Edmund took a slight step back, putting a few more inches of space between them. Edmund valued his personal space and coming up to someone and touching them on the forehead wasn't exactly something he was used to. He had a feeling he'd be forced to get used to that stuff here soon...

Yeah... Jon was a weird one.

"Looks fun. I'm sorry I missed the story," he grinned, letting Jonny go and begin shuffling the children out. A few of them said hi, as Edmund had been one of the X-Corps employees who helped in their recovery. Edmund made sure to thanks little Pete for the coffee cake his mother had made in thanks.

"Not much. I said I'd stop by when I had the chance for a bit of a work out, so here I am," he said with a casual shrug. Looking around, he didn't think this would be a good place for any sort of training, especially with potentially destructive powers as theirs. "I hope this doesn't lead me to getting locked in a basement, but we aren't going to be firing bolts of lightning around in here, are we?"
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"Oh, yeah some training, sure sure, not a problem," Jonny said, "I'm not on the roster for patrol tonight, Alex is a real stickler on that or me and Piet would probably work harder than most. We don't need to sleep as much as the others, him because a three hour sleep is like eight hours for a normal guy and me because well, I'm chockful of cloney goodness. But the bossman, he's a weird kinda guy. Likes everyone to feel... I dunno, equal, I guess, not under anyone else's shadow. I guess that comes from having Scotty as a big bro. Not many people can live up to Cyke... not even Cyke some times."

He beckoned Ed towards the stairs. "Naw, we're not going to practice in here. Last time I went shocky in here Box had to replace the entirely electrical system. No, Mr. Lennart, you and me are going to bum a favor from the fairest flower plucked from the Transian countryside."

Leading the man up to the roof top, chattering the entire time, Jon crossed to what appeared to be a doorway standing in the middle of the roof freely, attached to nothing, opening to nowhere. He knocked on it, and called, "Wandy, are you in? I beg entry and a boon that only you and your magnificence can grant."

He looked back at Edmund and winked, "She does like a bit of flowery speech."
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Rules did not apply to Wanda. How ever much Alex wanted X-Factor to be a place of equals, everyone pulling together and standing tall… there was always Wanda, who often pulled in the wrong direction or had hold of the wrong end of the rope or was busy turning snow sculptures into living snow creatures. It was always best to simply have faith that things would work out in the end and not get too tied in knots about how it got that way.

Wanda opened the door and gazed at the pair on her doorstep, one familiar and one a stranger, through round bi-colored glasses, a yellow lens and a blue-green lens. Through the doorway behind her was the interior of a cottage, the kind of place that, if it existed in reality, would not really be as cozy and homey as Wanda’s creation. Currently, hundreds of glass lens hung from the rafters, in a rainbow collection of colors and an infinity of shapes. When Wanda got a bee in her bonnet about something, she didn’t go halfway. Glass was her new obsession.

“Jonny,” she beamed at him. Like any other girl, she was a sucker for his roguish charm and clever tongue. She stepped back to let them enter. “Do you see how lovely your glass is,” she pointed to the shifting patterns formed by the flames in the stone hearth shining through the hanging glass, glass formed by Jonny’s lightning melting sand. With a sigh, she at last tore her gaze from the light show back to Jonny. “And what good fortune brings you to me?”
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Edmund got one of those dweebish dumb faces as Jonny went on a tangent about patrolling and being equals among X-Factor. Edmund was quite proud of himself when he actually recognized the names Jon was talking about, which was like patting himself on the back. He wasn't very good with names, but he had heard them enough (except Cyke... who was that? Mrs. Grey-Summer's husband? ) to be able to put faces or positions to them

Edmund fought a grin at Jonny's words, remembering the amount of times he had to replace wirings or fix computers. He was glad to know he wasn't the only electrokinetic with the issue. It was probably a lot more wide-spread than he thought. "Good. I think we'd end up frying the place... is there a place up here?" Like the bottom floor and basement, the upper floor was relatively the same. And fairest flower? Is he talking about a bush or a woman?

Enduring the chatterings Jon was prone to, Edmund ended up on the roof of the X-Factor building, a brow raising as he saw a door standing there without any walls or room. That... is weird. Standing a few feet back as Jonny went to the door and knocked, calling for Wendy or something, he just watched, baffled as to why there was a door free-floating door.

A woman answered the door, her face hidden by the type of glasses one would expect to use for a 3D movie. Behind her, the inside of a mountain home or cottage. Glass hung in the air behind her, countless shates and combinations refracting light.

Edmund would just stay quiet, letting Jonny do the talking. He didn't know this woman, and as much as he would've liked to ask what the hell a door was doing that led to some wooden house that wasn't real, he figured it would be better not to.
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Wanda was probably Jon's favorite person in X-Factor. His childish tendencies were reflected in her innocence which charmed him as completely as if she'd cast a spell on him. Jon was in his original incarnation a man of fragile maturity, and like all of Mojo's creations, that was enhanced in his clone, so often times, like a kid, he was subject to fits of guileless delight and wonder. Wanda alone seemed to share that, so her glasses and the shimmering kaleidoscope behind her, some of it made of fulgurites he had created for both of their amusements, made him smile that pure smile of pleasure. She purred her question to him in that exotic accent he loved so much and he gave a courtly, but playful bow.

"As lovely as the glass is, it's dull and colorless compared to you," he said, and then he turned to Edmund. "Edmund, this is the incomparable Wanda Maximoff, formerly of the Maximoff Clan of Transia, though now she belongs firmly in my rapidly beating heart. Wandy, this is Mr. Edmund Lennart, a member of X-Corps, and one of the brave heroes who fought against the end of the world. He's a lightning wielder like I am but hasn't had the programmed and retro-remembered training that I have, so I thought, if you had the time and the inclination, you could make us a safe place that I could show him a couple tricks of the trade?"

He kept up the flowery speech, and teasing because one, he knew it made her happy-- two, he found it fun-- and three, he guessed Edmund was going to be confused as hell, which was also very amusing. It wasn't that he disliked Edz, no, in fact, he liked him a lot, it was just that Jon was one of those people who liked a bit of chaos and surrealism in his life, and so felt the need to inject it into the lives of others. Being a mutant used to be enough to be weird and unreal... the state of the world being what it was, that had developed a scary and sinister tone. So, Jonny, who had juggled lit light bulbs for the amusement of tourists in Times Square, could always be counted on to bring some brightness wherever it was needed.
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Wanda smiled at Jonny’s charming silliness and looked at the stranger as he was introduced as one of the heroes, a defender of the world in this last crisis. He seemed to be rather on the quiet side, but that was really neither here nor there to her.

“Hmm,” she said and turned back to her room. It was a mad collection of odds and ends dripping from the shelves and cluttering the tables. Clutter… glass jars of buttons, dried plants, papers, tangles of string, random twigs. As close as the twins were, this was one aspect where they were opposites; Pietro lived a simple, nearly Spartan existence, just his clothes and few personal items that could fill a shoebox… with room left over, but Wanda was a magpie of a person who saw wonder in even the most ordinary of items. She reached down, and from the clutter on the table, plucked out a worn deck of cards.

In her fingers, the cards spread, a fan of red and black. “I saw a man on the street once... he had a table.” She smiled at the fragmented memory that could’ve been from yesterday or years ago, time was such a slippery thing. Pietro would know but more and more, Pietro had not been around. “The cards in his hands spun and danced. You are so talented with your hands, Jonny, can you make the cards do tricks?” For Wanda to use her powers, she didn’t ‘push’ her will, merely let her imagination fly and reality warped around it. The cards flew like a fountain from her hand and swirled around her two visitors. As they flew, the cards began to fasten together, encompassing Ed and Jonny in a box of cards, in the dark.

"I'm more of a juggler, Wandy, but street magic's street magic." Jon said, and the cards swooped around them, stacking like a brick box. He whistled, "And, this... this is something else entirely." Then they were sealed away from the light.

The cards burst apart in a flurry revealing the absence of Wanda and her strange cottage. Everything was lit with a soft ambience, no sun in the dark void above them, no candles or lights around them. Streaking across the dark void that was, for lack of a better term, the sky, normal sized playing cards danced and twirled. Also overhead, giant cards, like slow-moving celestial bodies floated over the flat plain on which the men found themselves standing. But it wasn’t an empty plain. Simple houses and towers of giant cards, balanced on their edges, stood as a fake, empty village.

Under their feet, the men saw white and crisp colors… a giant card. Over their heads, the Ace of Hearts floated by, its shiny white face reflecting the image of the card they were standing on – Wanda, a playful smile on her lips. And in the corner, to mark the suit, wasn’t a club, a spade, a diamond, or even a heart… but a J, the Joker.
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Edmund was clueless as to the exchange between them. There was a lot of flowery language going between Jon and the woman in addition to Jon treating her like some queen. Bowing was so 1500s. In addition to that, they were inside a door to nowhere on top of a roof that went into some dimensional rift. Sometimes, Edmund forgot that some mutants were more weird than others. This woman must've been one of those weird ones.

When Jon made introductions, Edmund felt obliged to smile and nod in acknowledgement with a curt "Hi" between Jon's words as he explained, or rather asked, for their need for a safe place to what Edmund could only assume was throwing lightning bolts around and calling thunder down from the heavens.

Listening to their exchanged, Edmund felt like Wanda was a bit spacy and Jon was more childish than he originally assumed. Something about cards was said and suddenly a thousand of the little buggers came into existance, flying around them in a storm of broken physics. Not wanting to get chopped to bits by the paper-cut frenzy, Edmund remained still, watching with a confused and baffled expression. Making sure to close his mouth, he watched the cards begin to construct themselves in a down-the-rabbit-hole wonderland. All the place needed now was some cards with faces. The cottage, glass, and colors were gone, replaced with a lot of white, red, and hearts.

"Huh... Cool."
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Smiling at the confusion Edmund showed, Jon smiled, "She's something, isn't she? I swear if she wasn't waaaaaay out of my league, I would marry that girl. Heavy sigh, I will have to worship her from afar." He looked around and said, "I don't think Wanda is going to join us, but the smiley face beneath our feet means she is watching us. She'll know when we're done. Let's get to business shall we."

He extended a hand and flexed his powers. Beneath the black gloves he always seemed to be wearing, the round implants in his palms that were Arize's concession to speeding the training and focus of the unpredictability of electrokinesis lit into life. A ball of lightning formed, blue and dangerous, crackling like a living thing, which Jon sometimes believed that it was. His eyes locked onto the ball and he said, "Edmund, I don't know a damn thing about how I do this, where the lightning comes from within me, how electricity is formed in real life, but I know how to manipulate it because I don't think about it. I feel it. I reach inside me and bring out the lightning, sculpt it, aim it, release it."

Suddenly, he tossed the ball into the air, and it became three smaller balls which he began to juggle, "The key, Edz, is belief. Look I am not blowing smoke about my origin. I'm the second version of Jon Harper. The first died of Pancreatic cancer almost six years ago. There is no reason, logically, why I should be able to wield these powers the way I do after only five years of life. But I can, because I remember Jon's years of practice, his training with the X-Men. Because I believe that I did all that learning and developing, it's just like I did. Simplistic maybe, but remarkably effective you want to give it a try." He flicked his fingers and the balls exploded outwards, each one slamming into the dead center of a different Card-- one two three.

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"That's something, for sure," he said distantly, still a bit confused how everything just happened to happen. At first he thought it was an illusion or some dimensional power, but it didn't feel like that. It felt like things were... warped. Changed beyond recognition into something completely different. Trying not to attempt to wrap his head around it like he tried to wrap his head around the size of the universe as a kid, Edmund dismissed it and gave Jon a look, grinning. "Did you actually just say 'heavy sigh', Jon? I realize some women can knock us off our feet, but to knock the action into words? Damn, man. Just marry her already." Finished teasing Jon, he went back to admiring the strangeness and surreal feeling the card-world was giving him.

Turning to face Jon after a brief moment, he watched as sparks begin to form from his hands, generating a sphere of electricity. He'd never seen that type of lightning before, but he'd heard of it. Ball lightning was a fleeting and brief phenomenon, but Jon held it in his hand like a baseball. Listening, he tried to understand what Jon was saying. A mutation was part of you, something you shouldn't have to think about. Like an arm or a leg, it was just there. Maybe he thought too much about his mutation and just thought of it as a tool rather than an extension of himself?

"So... Huh..." Jon affirmed his existance as a clone before he could even address it. Yeah, it was something he was curious about, but would the truth really change anything? Would knowing that Jon was a clone make him see Jon different?

"I guess... That's cool." Sure, there were a thousand questions he could ask Jon about his origins, but that was all in good time. Asking something like 'what's it like being a clone' would be a dumb move on his part. So! Just getting over it and accepting it was something easily done once he figured that technology was that far along.

"Belief," he said, letting the word go through his head over and over. Belief could do thousands of things, from saving one's soul to winning the lottery. If belief was all he was lacking, then what could be hard about believing electricity could become a ball or chain?

Lifting his hands, he set his palms together several inches, fingers spread out, threatening to touch eachother. Finding his mutation, he activated it, tendrils of electricity dancing between his fingers. He'd never tried a lightning ball before... Hell, it'd only used his electrokinesis a few times. Changing some currents in wires and throwing a bolt, he realized he'd neglected the electrokinetic part of him in favor of the electromagnetic part. But both could do so much... He'd be able to do more than he did during Apocalypse if he learned more about himself.

Focusing and training his thoughts on the belief that lightning could indeed become a sphere, he didn't feel, but rather did. The spatial image of a sphere took over and sparks pulled into a single point, and built until it was the size of a ping-pong ball.

"I always thought it was too dangerous to play with, I think. Maybe it's because it's visible. Manipulating electromagnetism... All you can really see is the distortion of light, kind of like looking at the hood of a car in the middle of summer. With electricity," he added more to the ball, letting it grow, tendrils occasionally lashing out, sharp blue-white light glowing ,"it just looks dangerous."
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"Well, it is dangerous, Edz," Jonny said, "I mean, that's why we have to train, and that's why we have to use every method that we have to control it. Look, we're a dangerous group of people, there's a reason Mojo chose Jon Harper to clone. I was built to kill, and kill efficiently. The Gods killed with electricity, and you and I, well, we ain't Gods, right? So, we gotta learn that control."

He flung out his hand and blasted right into the ground at Edmund's feet, exploding in a powerful and perfectly aimed burst. "Because if we don't we're what they think we are. I could kill you right now, if I wanted, and there is nothing you can do about it, but it takes that control for me not to, that control for me to give you a little start, a little scare." He made a gun with his fingers, and mimed twirling it and putting it in a side holster. "So if I can purposely scare you, I can purposely keep from scaring you, you see? It's the purpose, it's the doing with your powers what you want to do, as opposed to letting your powers do whatever they want. You see? I'm not the Professor, hell, I'm not even Arize, my creator and trainer. I don't know if I know how to show you how to do this right."

He smirked, "But I do know a little about the power of choice. So, now that you know that you need to believe, believe in choosing. If that makes sense. Believe you have free will. Choose to be in control."
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"Haha. I hope not. If we were gods, that means we'll have to get followers. As much as we might be people-persons, I don't think we'd do well with a band of deciples tagging along," he mused over the thought. A bunch of people wearing necklaces with little Ls or Js with the top turning into a lightning bolt. Yeah... That'd be something to see. A cult with a bunch of people wearing Jonny's face, all day, all the time.

Edmund had a sudden freakout, jumping back a few feet as he was suddenly drawn from the cult fanfic he was writing in his head as an electric explosion radiated out at his feet. His senses flared to life as the electric grenade fizzled, his mutation instantly reacting to its presence. Before he could even blink the blast was gone.

"Yeah... I think I got what you meant. If they're scared out of their shorts, they won't try anything. Something tells me that's half of the world, but the other half isn't just going to stand around and be intimidated. That just makes it half as easy." Recovering from the sudden urge of addrenaline from the bolt of electricity at his feet, Edmund hardened his resolve and focused on generating another specimen of ball lightning. "Arize was your creator? Kind of a weird name... Who's the Professor?"

Edmund grinned. "Welcome to America..." Until the Registration act. Then there will be no choice.

Drawing his hand back, the ball lightning came with it, hovering just off of his palm. Edmund toyed with it, rolling it around his hand, dropping it, and playing a sort of electrified hacky-sack with his feet. With a sudden motion, Edmund kicked the ball lightning at his teacher, a fizzling trail of electricity following behind it.

"So what happens when they aren't scared? Do we ignore it or do we have som aggressive negotiations?"
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