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$#!^ got real; Scott, ask for invite
Topic Started: Jul 27 2012, 06:31 AM (426 Views)
Skids
Unregistered

May 25th noonday

Broken. Broken and discarded. That was Sally Mae Blevins right now. Yesterday, everyone she now knew had become monsters. She had as well.

However right before that....

Skids felt incredibly awful for hiding herself away while she was sick. With the exception of one rock climbing incident she had stuck to herself and avoided others. She hadn't been sick or in pain for a long long time and she worried that her powers might have gone haywire. Perhaps her field would crush someone to death. Or perhaps it would fade away and her germs would infect everyone else. Worse what if she ended up detonating her bubble some how, blasting germs everywhere like some kind of plague monster? Worst of all, no one would want to see her like this. She was after all a Morlock, everyone knew they brought horrible things to the surface. What if she was responsible for all of this? Boss Lady said that she would cause more damage up here

Suddenly her pain magnified to levels she never believed possible. She doubled over her mind reeling from the shock of it all. Sally couldn't move, breathe, scream, or even twitch. Then, for an instant that seemed to last forever, there was no bubble, no field, nothing separating her from the outside world. She was free! She could feel the air, her hands could touch things, her feet made noises on the floor. She literally squealed with joy. All the pain and sickness she had been feeling disappeared in an instant as she spun herself in a giddy circle. She couldn't wait to tell Rusty. He'd kiss her and hold her even if he was still sick.

Then a brief moment later she knew it's terrible cost. Even greater pain had consumed her, her body had been torn to pieces, her identity erased, every facet of who Sally was was eaten by some ungodly parasitic monster. She was too shocked to even struggle, to lost to even question what was going on. She was brood, brood were one, brood were all.

Yet another eternal moment later Skids had been herself again. Yet she was now more then herself. She could feel the calming influence of “Visor Guy” her leader, the various fights and struggles occurring all over Utopia. Sally felt the wounds, the emotions, the deaths, the sheer overwhelming force of being part of something much much bigger then she could ever be. Sally Blevins, who had felt almost nothing for 5 long years, who burned to touch a fellow human being with her own hands, felt everything.

In that moment she made the same choice she had when her father had decided to end her life. She pulled back. This time all the way into herself, to her darkest corner. Anything to get away from this horrible expanded sense of self, anyplace where she didn't have to feel or hurt or think. She found the one place where she was truly safe and dove into it fully.

In the storage room she had been hiding in the transformed Skids fell, as if asleep. First to her knees, like one lost in prayer, then on her side, curling into a fetal position, tucking her legs in and wrapping herself in her wings. Outside the fight continued on to it's inevitable conclusion. One simply did not win against the children of Xavier. They knew nothing of backing down or accepting defeat. They did not calculate odds, nor leave men behind. They fought to exist with every breath against their own species, humanity. What hope did an alien race have?

When it was all over Sally was left “normal” though in a state much akin to autism on the cold clean floor. As she rocked back and forth the room seemed to come alive. Her bubble went minute by minute, inch by inch from 3 inches past her skin to a 30 foot bubble in every direction. Everything in the room was smashed into corners and still the girl rocked back and forth for hours.
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Cyclops
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Danger had been working on re-establishing communications with outside once the wormholes were opened and the fight against the brood was done. Strangely, their initial calls out had gone unanswered, and Scott assumed their system was down after being so long inactive, but Danger had scanned the globe and found no radio signals, no communication, nothing active, though she assured him that there was still life on the planet and no global extinction event had happened, she was unable to explain the lack of voices from the other side of the biosphere. Scott wasn't a fool. He had been told by the interlopers in their midst that there was an invasion coming and he was certain that this was what was going on in here. He needed information, and he needed it immediately, but without knowledge of what was happening on the other end of the wormholes, he wasn't ready to plunge his people into the middle of a war that had already been lost, into traps laid for them.

So, Scott had asked Hank to start producing as much of the Cure as was possible. It had turned the skrull in their midst back into Nuwali, a less warlike and violent race. If that was what it did to all Skrulls, then this invasion could be taken down in a sneak attack, none of them even knowing about the X-Men, much less this secret weapon of theirs. While Hank and the rest of the medical staff (mainly Avery, but some helpers) worked feverishly to produce enough of the stuff to blanket not only this world but the Skrull home world, Scott was working with the Nuwali converted here to try and figure out a way to get their kidnapped people back. According to what he was told, his people would still be alive, but imprisoned and likely not treated well, which meant he wanted in there as soon as possible.

For now though, there was nothing more for him to do but to prepare themselves for the battle to come. He was considering mounting tanks of the Cure onto Kathy Anne and The Phoenix Flight, using them almost like crop dusters to spread the Cure high enough in the air to travel great distances. Wind velocity, distance above sea level, fall patterns, amount needed for exposure to be effective, all these was Scott contemplating, as he went into the storage shed to find out if they had the proper supplies to mount canisters large enough to make it worth their while, but something was wrong, something had hit the shed...

... no it had destroyed everything from inside out.

In the center of the invisible Shield, Scott had moved towards it until he found the edge, was Skids, Sally Blevins, curled in the fetal position, unresponsive. "Christ, what now?" he muttered, exasperated, wanting just five minutes crises free and then feeling guilty for losing his temper when clearly Skids needed his help. Scott crouched down at the edge of the shield bubble and he tapped on it lightly, "Skids? Miss Blevins? It's Scott. What's wrong? Are you hurt?"

::Jean,:: he said in his mind, ::Call McCoy, Skids is in the storage thread and something's very wrong.::
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Skids
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It is said that a picture was worth a thousand words. If this is true then Sally's mind would be worth millions by now. Deep within her own mind scape the girl was trapped. She had been caught in a perfect storm of self-doubt, fear, and physical changes. For the blonde teenager this had proven the perfect cage.

Sally's self awareness was completely offline. She had no sense of anything besides her own near comatose mental torture. Each moment floods of memories assaulted her. Some she weathered, others she rode above, but most simply pushed her further and further inside. Her mind scape provided strange couplings. Images of her father's abuse were paired with memories of him teaching her use a rifle. The feel of Rusty's hand on hers stood alongside her mother's death cries. Callisto's screams and rage and strange activities had the same sequence as her arrival in the jungle. Everything grew disjointed and incomprehensible.

Outside Skids' powers were completely out of control. The bubble had reached it's max radius and now switched into a series of pulses. As the good memories filtered through Sally's terror abated some. This led to the field shrinking and becoming skin tight. The next second it would expand again at incredible velocity as fear reestablished it's dominance. Her body however continued it's rocking motion, as if she were still a small child in need of comfort. Rusty's prediction seemed to have come true, Sally was damaged goods, in need for a great deal of help.
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Marvel Girl
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She hadn't slept yet. Not really. A few fleeting beats of the eyelids but nothing more. And it showed. In the circles under her eyes, the raw patches of skin not yet fully healed from the machinations of the now-fallen Brood force, the latest victims to mutant tenacity when faced with world-ending crises.

She'd spent time with Franklin, of course, and a few brief minutes here and there with newfound family, but there was no real time for revelry or celebration. They'd beaten the badguys, but there was trouble still on the horizon. The outside world was... unresponsive.

She knew the collective opinion, the collective fear. She could hear it in trace thoughts, see it written on faces, hear it in shaky words. The Brood, while a massive threat, were only just the beginning, and with their distraction behind them, with the knowledge presented them by there Skrull... Nuwali guests, well, it was a sudden worry that the world they hurried now to return to had left them far behind.

Rachel Summers was a woman supplanted from her own time. In her world, where heroics and good nature were endangered species, where hope was all but extinct, the world had left its people behind when she was only a child. It was for that reason she'd been flung far back to the days before the future. She was meant to fight for those days, to strike out against any and all who would seek to create the world she lived in. It might have been suicide to do so. To stop the future. But it would be a sacrifice worth making if it meant that Sentinels and worse would never see the chance to patrol the streets unhindered by the world's warped morals.

But despite that grand quest of rescue, there were always smaller battles that needed fighting.

She stood there in the cafeteria, watching over a table of children eating what little food they still had to scrounge together. A small child, a morlock girl with velveteen skin and more than the normal amount of eyes, each shut tight, stood by her, thin-fingered hands outstretched, Rachel's own on top of hers.

A telekinetic slap pelted the young girl's palm, but Rachel's hand stayed perched atop it. Her eyes opened, a sudden sense of wonderment in them as a smile crossed her face.

"I didn't even feel your hand move!" She said. "How did you do that?!"

"Magic." Rachel said, forcing as calm a grin as she could.

Then she heard it on the astral airwaves. A plea from her father to her mother. Rachel's own link with her parents, established while she was still very small, even before she had taken in those first blinking, tearful eyefulls of the world, had grown stronger in the weeks since her arrival. It was deep-rooted. A muscle rife with atrophy that was slowly working itself back to health.

::Hank's busy at the infirmary with the wounded. I'll grab a kit and head over.::

She sent a mental ping to McCoy, figuring if both she and her mother poked him he'd head down.

---

When she arrived, she watched as storage containers were pelted back as Skids' field contracted and relaxed like a heartbeat. Wordlessly she moved to her father's side, a white box cradled under her arm as a brow crooked over her eye.

"I can feel it already. She's... just shut down. Afraid of something. Can't tell what though..."

She looked up to the man at her side, the man who was dead and yet lived. It still struck her dumb to think about it. But those were thoughts for less trying times. She turned back to Sally, focused on her fears, her apprehensions, those ghostly thoughts that were pinning her down like a fly in someone's collection, and using them as stepping stones she whispered into her mind.

::Sally? Honey? You've gotta wake up and get a grip on this field. We can't help if we can't get close.::

She didn't want to have to go delving in another person's mind. Not yet. She wasn't even sure of navigating her own headspace, let alone that of a relative stranger.

Her eyes didn't leave the girl, but her words moved then into her father's head. ::I'm synching you up with us, so she can hear your surface thoughts.::
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Cyclops
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He didn't have time for this, no, he most certainly did not. Scott Summers was not without compassion, of course. He ran a school for mostly unwanted children with terrifying powers and he showed, in his own way, a great deal of care for them all. But, if his friends and family got together and made a list of his flaws, and foibles (surely a fairly long list), a lack of patience with those who withdrew into panic and terror would likely be up near the top. Now, that is not to say that he was not guilty of it. In those first few months when he woke up a year older and a family shorter, young Scotty had curled into himself and gave into misery, but Dr. Essex had taught him how to channel that fear into determination, telling him that the only way to thrive was to use every action, every thought, every means to survive. It had been part of a darker purpose, perhaps, but just as the skills he had learned at Jack's side had been, Scott took those lessons and repurposed them, making the evils that had shaped him into strengths that brought him to a place where he could stand before the end of the world and say, "No one dies today."

He was mentally incapable of understanding when someone did not do the same thing, and that made him unable to crouch beside a panicking child, and wrap comforting arms around them. He did not know how to show comfort in that fashion, choosing instead to stand strong and present a steadfast figure which they could look to in that fear, and know that he would not let them be hurt, that he would cover them with his own body if bullets were flying. Scott was not warm as a rule, and Scott was not soft ever, and so that made him a very poor source for someone looking for coddling.

Rachel arrived, unexpectedly, in response to his mental call, and instantly did what her father could not. She was his child in her strength and determination to do what was right, but in this, her mother clearly shone through and Scott loved her for it. She spoke in silent words to Sally Blevins, and Scott listened, in awe, as always, that this was so easy for these amazing women who he loved so dearly. He had nothing to add though, so he waited for Skids to pull herself to rationality.
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Skids
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Sally's field continued to pulse with her heartbeat, though now a new wrinkle was added. As other thoughts slid into and around her own her mind reacted as a hand to a hot stove. She instinctively pulled away and snapped her defenses even tighter. In response her bubble became as solid as it ever could be. For a moment it shone in the light like a distorted transparent membrane. The fear reaction was so severe that for almost a minute the shield hung in between the Summers clan and Miss Blevins blocking off even light, air, and sound from the traumatized girl.

This of course was a rather large problem. As the minute wore on the young lady could not breathe, which of course lead to a violent coughing episode. Which thankfully led to the shield collapsing back to it's normal three inch radius around her form. In response her mind went deeper still, away from the physical to attempt to erect some form of mental armor to keep out any and all perceived threats.

Meanwhile in the mind-scape of Sally Blevins.

The unfortunate girl was housed in a glass sphere of her memories. This part was normal for Skids. With a lack of physical sensations her mind tended to weigh memories and current events the same. However the sphere was no longer smooth or perfect. It was jagged, twisted, broken, like badly spun glass. The physical sensations of her powers failing combined with the bodily changes of being an alien life form. The mental sensations of the brief hope of being normal were wrapped around the network of minds she was brutally shoved into. Instead of looking at 20 images of memories and thoughts and sights at once and trying to make the right choices, The blonde was poked, prodded, and in some cases impaled upon thoughts, sensations, and feelings that she had no context for.

So she spun there, trapped in a bubble of the mind that mimicked the one around her body. Rusty had been completely right, she was damaged. However this time the damage was too big to ignore, too through for her to ride out. In short Sally had completely lost control. Deep within this sphere a string of her father's mantras floated in visible form around her.

“If you don't work, you don't eat. Some people are just better then others. If you ain't winning, you ain't trying. Daddy's always right. If they're gonna hit ya, hit 'em first. You're only as good as what you can do for others. If you can't fix the problem get out of the way of those that can.”
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Marvel Girl
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JP Rachel and Sally

Rachel looked to her father, awaiting the nod. The nod that said it was okay for her to pry in. In another time, long after today, a time which she vaguely remembered and yet wished so desperately that she could forget, she would not have waited, would not have given much thought to the ethics or moral conflicts that walked hand in hand with the invasion of anothers mind. It was a violent and penatrative act, even when held aloft by beneficient intentions. But like those days of future past which she loathed and loved all at once, they were running short on time. His nod approved her and she moved to a seated position, crossing her legs, taking a few deep breaths, and focusing her green eyes on the child in the center of the room. On her thoughts, what thoughts there were to hear, and, like a lasso she caught a loop around them, and shut her eyes.

When she opened them, there was only the stark of the astral. Standing she looked around. Blank. Empty. Hallmarks of a retreating mind. She thought briefly to the landscape of her own psyche, that horror-show of thorns and hounds and its miserable little piles of secrets. Considering that, she counted Skids lucky.

"Sally." She spoke. "Sally I know you're very scared right now but I need you to be brave." Rachel Summers had never done this before. She'd used her telepathic powers to gain information, to cause misdirection, and even destroy and dismantle the minds of others. She had never used them to pull someone back from the brink, and for a moment she faltered, her form here becoming fluid and plagued with worry, sagging briefly before she steeled her resolve. She took a step forward, flagstones of her own thoughts meeting each footstep to carry her forwards.


The girl that called herself Skids was no mental warrior, she had not even the smallest of telepathic gifts. However she was all but beyond peer at shoving others away from her and living in isolation. This seemed to extend to even the astral realm. As soon as her guarded mind sensed another it immediately labeled the other presence as an intruder, a source of pain. The sphere that existed as a metaphor for her Sally's emotional barriers shifted from translucent to opaque and slowly started moving away from Rachel. In addition literal hurdles were raised up in the psi's path. They were of course flimsy, gossamer things. The young blonde had no training in mental combat, but they were there, numerous and and some quite tall.

In the real word Sally's body shuddered and her frictionless field turned off completely. She no longer had the energy or emotional charge to split her focus on defending her mind and her body. Her mind registered an immediate threat and shifted the resources accordingly. Her breathing slowed, her heart rate was cut in half and her body went limp. Skids had retreated fully into her own thoughts.

Back in the mental plane Sally's mind used all of it's new found focus to create warning signs and deadly looking gossamer traps. Ravines, pits, sand-traps, anything at all that would warn the intruder away. However there were also signs that welcomed someone, anyone to help her. Wide open roads pointing out the shell she kept herself in. Projections of translucent, but warm looking Ranch homesteads drifted about. Over the years the teen had developed a way of living that involved making people not want to notice her, to ignore her so they couldn't threaten her. By extension the mental landscape shifted as well. This was the truth behind the “little miss superwoman” act. The girl was desperately lonely and wanting to belong, but even more scared of being hurt or forgotten.


No more had she gone a triplet of steps than the world around her shifted, undulated, and plunged itself into shape. She took brief pause to look on as the world around her took form, providing astral pitfalls and facsimile booby-traps, warning her off, but begging her to come in all the same.

"I'm not here to hurt you, hon..." She called out, eying the beacon dot on the horizon that betrayed the locus of her thoughts on the astral plane. "I'm here to help you."

Her feet left the flagstones and they fell off, cast into the void of her own conciousness and she floated their in all the psychic ether, and in those fleeting, unmeasurable spans between the blink of a metaphorical eye she shot off for the edge of perception, towards that pale dot on the line between the ground and the sky.

In the glow shooting around her charging shape she took on something far more avian in nature, alien and yet familiar all at once, and as it screached through the air, over the traps and punching through the thin shaped barriers and barricades of her mind, she felt herself growing nearer, wordlessly nearer.

And then she hit something. It pulled her back, down to the ground. Wrestled her away from that assumed shape and back into a small bipedal frame. The black clod wrapped itself around her and she felt suddenly cold, her hands in the material plane clenching as she her body shivered.

The figure loomed up, strong and paternal, and it took on a far more human shape, one familiar more to Sally than to Rachel, and it struck her across the face, sending her realing through the sudden white as the landscape around them began to crack and shift. She hit the floor, amorphous and frail now, a meek and featurelss creature haunted by the massive shadow that haunted Blevins' mind. She scrambled away but it was too late, and she was caught up, flung against the ground again. "Sally!" She shouted. "You gotta snap out of it!"


The problem for Sally, well her main problem at the moment, was a lack of anything to snap into. Though her bubble hurt her and kept her all alone, to walk out of it would mean accepting all the pain and fear, hurt and sorrow. Sally, quite simply, refused that idea. Besides what was there for her to claim? What kind of life could she expect to have? Her best friend was a hostage of the Morlocks, her boyfriend busied himself with people he could actually touch, and the only one who wanted to work on her powers was her. Her greatest accomplishment to date was climbing some rocks like a silly kid. Even that didn't work right as she had been all battered by the time she reached the top and promptly fell back off of them.

Unbeknownst to Miss Blevins her thoughts, and so many many past thoughts of pain, loneliness, suffering, and self doubt were flickering like a TV show upon the projection of her dad that beat upon Rachel like a Frost Giant. Though Bill had been physically removed from her life, the mental scars had never been dealt with. Like any wound left untreated they had festered and grown infected. The apparition of her father was made even worse by Sally's own twisted love for him, for the good times that were her childhood. This tyrant like mass of violence held just as many good memories as bad.

Skids could somehow feel the intruder was under attack. This made her smile, it seemed that her shield had finally become something capable of giving back. Something that could hold it's own instead of just deflecting everything around her. She gave more of her will into the malevolent being as the mental landscape darkened accordingly. She would never admit it to a living soul, but it felt good, no great, to be the one dealing out the hurt instead of always receiving it. This was control, true safety, stop the ones who would harm you before they could.


She felt it in every bone of her body, outside in the real world. She hissed and gritted her teeth and grabbed white-knuckled at her knees. Inside the faleshoods of Skids' broken thoughts she was flung around, stomped, kicked, and battered. She wasn't Rachel any more, just some small thing to be tossed around and belittled. And as she struggled to her feet she felt it's cold dark hand wrap around her throat and pin her against the nothingness behind them, choking at her life.

"Skids... glk! Skids you gotta... wake... up...'s'killin' me..."

She struggled, unable to pry herself free.

"Not my fiiight... hrk! Not... my... demon...glkk!"

She tried to pull herself away but this creature had too strong a hold. Too much anchorage to let her slip back to her body.

"Nrghh.. Skids... Sally... please."


Those words penetrated Sally's psyche like nothing else ever could. They were the last words her mother had ever spoken, minus the Skids part of course. As she lay there bleeding to death, as Sally's hands slipped over her broken skin again and again, she had done nothing but beg for help. Just like this intruder. For a moment things became crystal clear to the young mutant. She was in a bubble away from everything, safe, secure, completely immune to any harm. However that was only part of the truth. Her own withdrawal harmed others. Right now she was doing what her dad did to her, more importantly to her mother. This... this couldn't be right. No intruder, no person deserved to be snuffed out just for existing.

The mental landscape twisted again. This time the shell that had been Sally's home for years split open revealing a 10 year old girl with pigtails on her head and fire in her eyes. This was Sally when her family was still her family, when she had a best friend that would die for her and her for him. Back when she knew right from wrong and never held her feelings in. A simple glare from this avater was all it took to make the dark twisted image of her father drop Rachel like a sack of dirty laundry. The spectre moves with the uncanny speed of thought and wrapped it's hands around the little girl's neck instead.

Sally made not a move, not a sound. She knew this was her fate. She would not be the abuser, would not let someone suffer for her own problems. She should have died alongside her mother and she embrassed that now.


“Go ahead. Destroy me, that will end you too. After all you're just part of me. I just wish you weren't the stronger part.”


Tears started flowing down Sally's cheeks as her airways started closing off in both the physical realm and the mental one. This was after all the way it should have been. If not for her powers she could have died in place of her mother.


Coughing, both physically and in this steadily more harrowing realm of fear and self doubt she pulled herself together, pulled her face back into something more recognizable and familiar, scrambled towards the shadowy facsimile assaulting the student. Before she got too close, however, she rebounded off of the slippery barrier, sliding along it. "Sally. Don't give into it. This is your head. This is your place. Don't let it own you, own it!"

She began testing the barrier, trying to find a weakness, but there was none. "Sally Blevins. You're a student of Xavier now! We don't help those who aren't willing to help themselves! You kick that things ass! Show it how worthless it is and show it the door!"


“But it is me, or atleast a part of me. If I reject it, nullify it, I won't be me anymore. Besides, this thing is a thing too, it has the right to live. It's not like I can just ignore the bad memories anymore. I can't just let everything slide off like it doesn't matter. Rusty was right, I'm not right. I'm just a broken doll, not real, just a bubble girl.”


She hung her head, giving up. She just had nothing left. The creature roared and squeezed harder, making the girl's face bulge and in the real world her breathing stopped completely.


"Don't ignore it!" She shouted. "Nobody said ignore it, nobody said shove it aside. You have to be bigger than it. You have to get around it, get over it! The world's crashing down, Skids. We need you on your feet. This thing isn't real, it's just a bad dream... Wake up!"


Mental warrior Skids was not, nor an ace at using her powers, nor even really a stable individual. However she did one thing really well. Quite simply that was spending time lost in her thoughts. She understood on an intrinsic level how her mind worked and what problems she had, even though she never faced them. Today she did. She did what she had never believed she could do. As she left her bubble she remembered the scrapes on her hands and knees. The evidence that she had climbed those rocks, that she had conquered her powers even if only for moments.

The little girl apparition flared back to life fighting and wailing like a woman possessed. It scratched bit, kicked, and clawed like it's life deepened on it. The specter of her father however changed tactic as well and fought back with a series of brutal blows, each seeming stronger then the one before.

Sally however was no longer either of them. Her astral self stood next to Rachel, outside the barrier that had formed around both previous aspects of herself. This self was composed of words, like a living letter of correspondence. All of the words Skids had bottled up that needed to be said. Words of courage, hope, love, and redemption. This was the true person of Sally Blevins, a scared, hurt individual, but one that would never ever give up. The word covered female figure opened it's mouth unleashing words in Sally's voice.


“So, I didn't think that would work, but... I got them both behind my um... bubble I guess. What do we do now?”


She staggered backwards, hoping against hope that all was well outside. That her field wasn't threatening to bring down the walls around them. But in a seeming instant, an instant that took hours, a change came over the fielded planes of the mindscape around her, and in a sudden moment of clarity, Miss Blevins stood at herside, and Rachel looked to her, breathing a sigh of relief that was neither warranted nor necessary but given circumstances, altogether welcome.

"What do we do now?" Rachel repeated. "We give them a place to stay."

She turned to face the warring entities, and with a grunt of exertion that was really no trouble at all, the various flooded images that spun around the area, those recorded memories, both good and band and those few in between, began to spin around and coat the outside of the sphere containing them. Soon a barrier came into existence, and another, and another, and before long, a cubic box stood around the conflict, thickening, darkening, and shrinking, down down down, until it was no bigger than a breadbox.

The black prism stood there, in all the boring white of the astral, and she took a few steps towards it. "This is where you keep things. Think of it like a mental buffer. A place thoughts can stay when they get too heavy." She squashed it down smaller, and smaller still, until it was nothing but a small black tablet. "Take your medicine."


Sally eyed this with extreme caution. Both the mental powerhouse that was Rachel and the black pill she offered. Old habits die hard and she wasn't about to take unnescary risks. Still she took the tiny thing into her hand. It pulsed with a rhytum both famiular and strange, comfortable yet beyond discription.


“You know those were just words right? I'd rather just go chuck this ting somewhere and forget the whole mess. I mean what if one or both get lose again? I'm not strong enough to do this whole dance over and over again. I knida got lucky this time, ya know? What if this happens again and you're not arround? I'm no mind er... psi warrior?”

Skids felt bad about her almost slip. She had always thought of those with psi powers as mind muckers. People who were just waiting to warp those around them into something they never wished to be. She never trusted them, never felt “safe” around them. Of course this being the astral plane her thoughts were plain as day to her companion.


"Sally. I'm not here to hurt you. If I were here to go prying through your thoughts I'd have done it. This..." Rachel motioned to the blank world around them. "This is just a translator. A way for you to process things. I'm no more in your head right now than you are in mine." The girl who's past was this girl's future took Blevins' hand in her own, folded it tightly around the construct in her hand. "This isn't a trick. And they won't get out unless you let them get out. You did all this, not me. I just put it in a package. Now you could just let that sit here but if you do there's no telling what will happen. If you don't keep it close, and I mean real close, you're just letting old dogs keep biting, and you and I both know that's the furthest thing from what you want."


In the physical realm Sally took a deep coughing breath. She had been pretty much dead for almost a full minute. Right on cue her powers kicked back in and there she was lying on the floor gasping for air and behind her bubble. This time was different though, her field stayed at it's normal 3 inch mark and once the girl stopped gasping for breath a brave smile crossed her face.


Skids made a choice. Either stay here and be afraid of what could happen forever, or take it on the chin and do something about it. Rusty would have been the first to say which she'd do. The teen took the pill and swallowed it with a rebel grin. Damn the consequences, it's not like she could be isolated more. Even if she was, someone had come and found her. Perhaps that's what being a hero was, just making sure to look for the lost.


The pill was bitter, sweet, painful, delightful, trauma invoking, and peaceful all at once. It was, as Sally would describe it later to others, the function of swallowing yourself. You probably didn't like most of it, but you know the ingredients. The blonde favored the red-head with a small nervous smile.

“I do good boss?”


"You do good." She said, and like that, she faded into light and then nothing, and Skids' own connection with the Astral faded, sending them both back to sorts.

Marvel Girl's eyes shot open and she leaned forward, clutching her head in her hands, wiping the blood free from her nose as she looked up to Sally across the way. Pushing herself up from the floor she looked to her father and then back to the young girl. "Sally? You awake?"


“No ma, 5 more minutes. I already did the laundry and cleaned out the stables.”

Sally's barrier faded away entirely as her body slumped to the floor at the same time her mind slumped into dream land.
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