In A Crooked House
A Crooked Man - In A Crooked House
AN: This is a rewrite of my story "A Crooked World", both to make it less revenge-ficy, and to switch to a first-person narrative, since it felt weird writing a self-insert in third person. Things will develop a bit different this time around, though like in the previous story, this setting is still roughly Civil War era Marvel.
You know, Genoshas beaches are really quite beautiful, I can see why this island was considered such a paradise, even if it's prosperity came at a level of exploitation of a minority group that would have made even the staunched South African apartheid enthusiast tell them to dial it back a little.
Standing here, facing the endless blue ocean, I can almost forget about the corpse-filled hellscape behind me where Cassandra Nova decided that wholescale genocide was a perfect way to tweak her brothers nose. Though I suppose if you genuinely believe that you're the only two beings in existance and everyone else is just imaginary, this was probably the equivalent of saying you have bulletproof armor on while playing war in her mind. A dick move, but not genocide.
Of course, it was still one of the worst things that have ever happened, and if I ever get my hands on her, I'm sending her right into the sun. I'm pretty sure I can do that now, I haven't actually tried. Might even stick, but considering she's a psychic parasite piggybacking on Xaviers DNA, you can never be sure.
I wave my hand, the sand in front of me bulging and forming into a large pile before beginning to shape itself to the image in my mind. It quickly solidifies into a glass statue of myself, my transparent doppleganger glittering in the sunlight. The thrill of these powers, the sheer amazement of seeing whatever I can imagine take form in reality right in front of me, doesn't look to be losing it's novelty anytime soon. Even this, creating a glass sculpture out of myself just from beach sand, is little more than the equivalent of doodling in a notebook.
But I want to be used to my powers before I get started with the work I had planned.
I give another wave and the statue collapses back into sand, before I turn around and look at the twisted, marred ruins that is all that remains of Genosha, the "mutant homeland". Under those ruins lie the bones of 16 million mutants, who survived being enslaved and used as livestock, rose up, only to get caught up in the endless bullshit with Magneto and the X-Men, and finally they were just obliberated.
Atleast they didn't have to watch mutantkind as a whole get driven to the brink of extinction because nobody could be bothered to get Scarlet Witch a goddamn therapist.
As far as I can tell, my body is that of a mutant now, despite looking exactly as it did back in... I want to say "the real world", but apparently this world is also real, except all the ridiculous superhero stuff actually exists here, including mutation that gives you superpowers instead of mildly useful biological deviations if you're lucky, and turns you inside out if you're not. And for some reason, whatever quirk of fate brought me here saw fit to hand me the Straight Flush of superpowers - Reality Warping.
Which is a bit of a double edged sword, because while it's an awesome power, Marvel reality warpers tend to go looney tunes in pretty short order. Atleast I don't have omnipotence as well or I'd probably already be insane. If I start turning everything into Wonderland on cocaine like Jim Jaspers did, I'll have to cut back for a while. But for now, I have work to do.
Even without omnipotence, figuring out what's going on in the world is as easy as willing it to happen, I just have to be specific, as I found out early on when I wanted to know what was going on in New York and nearly gave myself a migraine when I got almost every single bit of news about the city dumped into my brain. After testing the limits of it a bit, I simply started to project a screen in the middle of the air and had my power show whatever information I wanted onto it. As far as I can tell, this is Marvel shortly after the godawful Civil War, Cap is dead, Tony Stark is running SHIELD, mutantkind is depowered, a bunch of my favorite heroes are on the run from the law, and the Hulk is stuck in outer space. About the only thing that didn't suck about my new reality was that I couldn't find any trace of the Skrulls hiding anywhere, Elektra, Hank Pym and Spider Woman really are who they seem to be. So no Secret Invasion then, which is atleast one problem off my plate. Of course, there's still Norman Osborn and the Illuminati to deal with, but one problem at a time.
I briefly consider doing a dramatic walk in the air back to the city ruins, but considering that everyone else here are still dead, it seems a little silly to try and show off to the seagulls. Instead, I simply will myself from one spot to the next, stepping through an invisible door to the highest remaining building on the island. The ruined husk of the skyscraper groans in the wind, but it's stood this long, it can stand a few minutes longer.
I close my eyes, throwing up a field over the island to make sure I don't set off Cerebro or tip off anyone else who might be looking in, before forming an image in my mind. Of M-Day, of millions of mutants stripped of their talents and left defenceless in an already unjust world, of anti-mutant forces smelling blood in the water, like this whole thing was a fucking victory...
I feel a twinge in the back of my mind, like an unused muscle flexing.
.......
Half a world away, chaos erupts on the streets of the Middle East Side in New York City, formerly known as M-Town, a ghetto neighborhood for mutants, and for the past few years just a regular ghetto when most of the inhabitants lost their powers. Flames and electricity arcs over the crowds, scales and wings and strange-colored skin bursting back into existance. The same scene plays out across the world as powers thought to be gone forever suddenly reactivates. Even those who never had powers before suddenly find themselves mutants.
A few miles away from New York, Professor Charles Xavier awakens with a start in his bed, with the strange sensation that some great flaw has been corrected, though his own power can't quite put a finger on what. When his excited students burst in a few minutes later, he's already awake to meet them.
Tony Stark has a less pleasant start to his day, as he's met at his desk by hundreds of angry messages from congressmen and senators who had been assured that the "mutant threat" had been dealt with once and for all. all demanding some variation of the same thing; make all our problems go away, that's why we had you fight your little war. Not for the first time, Stark wishes Steve was still here, that he had just listened. Maybe then he'd have someone to help share this burden, which is made all the heavier knowing that he put it on himself.
A haggered Pietro Maximoff looks out the window from the crumbling old M-Town tenament he's squatting in, and witnesses the chaos in the street. His hope dies in his heart when he finds that his own powers remain gone.
In a little village in the Wundagore mountains, a woman known to the villagers only as Wanda feels a faint stirring of...something, something vaguely familiar. But nothing else seems to happen, so she simply forgets about it and moves on with her day, her chores waiting for her.
The man once known as Magneto barely stirs from his spot on the park bench in Argentina when he hears the news on a radio in a nearby cafe. He's not surprised when his own powers make no reappearance. Perhaps this is all he deserves.
.......
I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding in.
It's hard to describe the feeling of using my power on this scale, just changing whatever is in front of me is one thing, but this was affecting the entire planet, even if it did only involve turning the X-Gene back on for the relatively small group of people who used to have it. With three notable exceptions.
I sit down on the edge of the rooftop, my legs hanging down over the rusted shell of the wall as I stare out across the ruins and think about my next move. It's ridiculous to think that reversing M-Day is actually the easiest part of my plan, but it's true. And even then, the consequences of what I just did are going to be massive. The SRA deliberatly excluded mutants because they were assumed to be dead in the water anyway, now that's blown to Hell so SHIELD must be shitting themselves about having millions of unregistered, untrained superhumans running around. And that's not even touching on the various secret villain plans I just disrupted. Norman Osborn, I think Red Skull is still possessing that Lukin guy, whatever HYDRA is working on, Doctor Doom probably has something going on...
Hmm, Doom does have a pretty good track record with high-level superhumans, I'll have to be more careful if I deal with him. Or atleast not wander blindly into an obvious trap like the Silver Surfer did.
But, if I'm being honest, fuck the consequences.
Mutantkind has gotten screwed coming and going for decades, I'm not interested in micromanaging the whole planet, but I'm going to use my powers to do atleast two very big things, and after that... well, we'll see. One of them is already done, and now it's time for the second one.
I drop from the roof edge, only to find myself back on the beach once again. Making sure that the protection I put over the island remains intact, I turn back towards the ruins and raise a hand. In the far distance, the rubble of the city begins to shift and move, before bursting apart, releasing what I was searching for. The pitiful mortal remains of one of the countless victims of Cassandra Nova is deposited in front of me, the bones still wearing a few scraps of black clothes.
And then something shifts, and the bones are replaced by the intact body of a teenage girl with nearly white skin and long dreadlocks, dressed in goth-style clothes.
"Ellie? Ellie, wake up. We got shit to do"
Ellie Phimister, better known as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, gasps her first breath of air in years and sits up on the beach in a panic.
"AHHHH!!! WUH-WHAT- MISS FROST!!" She looks around herself in distress, her fear increasing when she spots the ruins behind her. "OH GOD! IT HAPPENED! IT REALLY DID!"
"Yeah, it did, I'm afraid. I'm working on fixing that."
She turns back around at the sound of my voice, and stares at me in shock "Who the... who the hell are you?! What happened?! Where's Miss Frost?"
"Uh, in reverse order, probably with Scott Summers, you died, and I'm Ginnungagap...but under the circumstances, I think you can probably just call me Johan." I offer her my hand to help her to her feet, but she doesn't even seem to be looking at it, just staring off into space.
"I was...dead! My nightmares, they came true! We ALL died!" She rubs her palms over her face, like she's trying to chase away a bad dream. "I don't understand, what's going on?!"
"Well, you were dead, and I brought you back to life. Easy as that."
She freezes and stares up at me like I just spoke in tongues "...you...brought me back from the dead?"
"Right."
"That's...impossible!"
I blink "How do you figure? Jean Grey has come back to life like three times now, nobody even bats an eye anymore. Granted, the process is usually a bit more complex than what I just did, I'm just saying, there's ample precedent."
She looks like she wants to argue but stops herself "I... why did you bring ME back?! I've never seen you before in my life!"
"Couple of reasons. You were one of the few victims I knew specifically by name, don't ask why, you're also one of the strongest mutants who died on the island, and lastly, and I know this sounds sort of bad, but I wanted to make sure the resurrection worked properly before I tried to do it en masse."
She gapes at me "You didn't KNOW?!"
"Hey, I've had these powers for like a week, cut me some slack. Anyway, I also started with you because I wanted a second set of eyes when I put all the infrastructure together again, make sure I got that right too."
She begins struggling to her feet and I take her by the arm, helping her up. She brushes off her clothes before turning back to me "Wait, you're fixing that before you bring everyone else back?"
"As opposed to what, awaken 16 million people in a pile of charred rubble with no food or water? I mean, I can fix that in the blink of an eye anyway, but still, they're going to be panicked enough as it is. Speaking of which" I open my hand and a bottle of water pops into existance. "Thirsty? I've never been dead, but it seems like it might make you thirsty."
She just stares at the bottle for a few seconds, before finally reaching out and accepting it. She takes a long drink, then a deep breath, which seems to steady her somewhat. "I wish Miss Frost was here..."
I shrug "I can... drop you off at the X-Mansion, if you want? That's where she lives now.You don't have to stick around if you don't want to."
Ellie looks away towards the ruins, staring out over the devastated island for a good long while, before shaking her head "Just...just give me a moment. And tell me what's going to happen next."
"Well, first I'm going to separate the remains of everyone who died from Nova's attack from the people who were already dead, because trust me, some of those guys you do not want to come back, then I'm going to move all the bones out of the cities, and then put everything back together. Finally, I'll spread all the bones out across the island, and bring everyone back to life."
She takes another drink "Just like that?"
"Just like that. Like resurrecting you, but on a way bigger scale."
She shakes her head in disbelief "That level of power, and you talk about it like you're pressing a button."
"Oh, that's nothing, I already fixed mutant powers for the whole planet like 20 minutes ago. Atleast this is just one country."
She stops, the water bottle halfway to her mouth "...you fixed what now?"
"Oh, right, you were dead. Okay, we should talk..."
AN: This is a rewrite of my story "A Crooked World", both to make it less revenge-ficy, and to switch to a first-person narrative, since it felt weird writing a self-insert in third person. Things will develop a bit different this time around, though like in the previous story, this setting is still roughly Civil War era Marvel.
You know, Genoshas beaches are really quite beautiful, I can see why this island was considered such a paradise, even if it's prosperity came at a level of exploitation of a minority group that would have made even the staunched South African apartheid enthusiast tell them to dial it back a little.
Standing here, facing the endless blue ocean, I can almost forget about the corpse-filled hellscape behind me where Cassandra Nova decided that wholescale genocide was a perfect way to tweak her brothers nose. Though I suppose if you genuinely believe that you're the only two beings in existance and everyone else is just imaginary, this was probably the equivalent of saying you have bulletproof armor on while playing war in her mind. A dick move, but not genocide.
Of course, it was still one of the worst things that have ever happened, and if I ever get my hands on her, I'm sending her right into the sun. I'm pretty sure I can do that now, I haven't actually tried. Might even stick, but considering she's a psychic parasite piggybacking on Xaviers DNA, you can never be sure.
I wave my hand, the sand in front of me bulging and forming into a large pile before beginning to shape itself to the image in my mind. It quickly solidifies into a glass statue of myself, my transparent doppleganger glittering in the sunlight. The thrill of these powers, the sheer amazement of seeing whatever I can imagine take form in reality right in front of me, doesn't look to be losing it's novelty anytime soon. Even this, creating a glass sculpture out of myself just from beach sand, is little more than the equivalent of doodling in a notebook.
But I want to be used to my powers before I get started with the work I had planned.
I give another wave and the statue collapses back into sand, before I turn around and look at the twisted, marred ruins that is all that remains of Genosha, the "mutant homeland". Under those ruins lie the bones of 16 million mutants, who survived being enslaved and used as livestock, rose up, only to get caught up in the endless bullshit with Magneto and the X-Men, and finally they were just obliberated.
Atleast they didn't have to watch mutantkind as a whole get driven to the brink of extinction because nobody could be bothered to get Scarlet Witch a goddamn therapist.
As far as I can tell, my body is that of a mutant now, despite looking exactly as it did back in... I want to say "the real world", but apparently this world is also real, except all the ridiculous superhero stuff actually exists here, including mutation that gives you superpowers instead of mildly useful biological deviations if you're lucky, and turns you inside out if you're not. And for some reason, whatever quirk of fate brought me here saw fit to hand me the Straight Flush of superpowers - Reality Warping.
Which is a bit of a double edged sword, because while it's an awesome power, Marvel reality warpers tend to go looney tunes in pretty short order. Atleast I don't have omnipotence as well or I'd probably already be insane. If I start turning everything into Wonderland on cocaine like Jim Jaspers did, I'll have to cut back for a while. But for now, I have work to do.
Even without omnipotence, figuring out what's going on in the world is as easy as willing it to happen, I just have to be specific, as I found out early on when I wanted to know what was going on in New York and nearly gave myself a migraine when I got almost every single bit of news about the city dumped into my brain. After testing the limits of it a bit, I simply started to project a screen in the middle of the air and had my power show whatever information I wanted onto it. As far as I can tell, this is Marvel shortly after the godawful Civil War, Cap is dead, Tony Stark is running SHIELD, mutantkind is depowered, a bunch of my favorite heroes are on the run from the law, and the Hulk is stuck in outer space. About the only thing that didn't suck about my new reality was that I couldn't find any trace of the Skrulls hiding anywhere, Elektra, Hank Pym and Spider Woman really are who they seem to be. So no Secret Invasion then, which is atleast one problem off my plate. Of course, there's still Norman Osborn and the Illuminati to deal with, but one problem at a time.
I briefly consider doing a dramatic walk in the air back to the city ruins, but considering that everyone else here are still dead, it seems a little silly to try and show off to the seagulls. Instead, I simply will myself from one spot to the next, stepping through an invisible door to the highest remaining building on the island. The ruined husk of the skyscraper groans in the wind, but it's stood this long, it can stand a few minutes longer.
I close my eyes, throwing up a field over the island to make sure I don't set off Cerebro or tip off anyone else who might be looking in, before forming an image in my mind. Of M-Day, of millions of mutants stripped of their talents and left defenceless in an already unjust world, of anti-mutant forces smelling blood in the water, like this whole thing was a fucking victory...
I feel a twinge in the back of my mind, like an unused muscle flexing.
.......
Half a world away, chaos erupts on the streets of the Middle East Side in New York City, formerly known as M-Town, a ghetto neighborhood for mutants, and for the past few years just a regular ghetto when most of the inhabitants lost their powers. Flames and electricity arcs over the crowds, scales and wings and strange-colored skin bursting back into existance. The same scene plays out across the world as powers thought to be gone forever suddenly reactivates. Even those who never had powers before suddenly find themselves mutants.
A few miles away from New York, Professor Charles Xavier awakens with a start in his bed, with the strange sensation that some great flaw has been corrected, though his own power can't quite put a finger on what. When his excited students burst in a few minutes later, he's already awake to meet them.
Tony Stark has a less pleasant start to his day, as he's met at his desk by hundreds of angry messages from congressmen and senators who had been assured that the "mutant threat" had been dealt with once and for all. all demanding some variation of the same thing; make all our problems go away, that's why we had you fight your little war. Not for the first time, Stark wishes Steve was still here, that he had just listened. Maybe then he'd have someone to help share this burden, which is made all the heavier knowing that he put it on himself.
A haggered Pietro Maximoff looks out the window from the crumbling old M-Town tenament he's squatting in, and witnesses the chaos in the street. His hope dies in his heart when he finds that his own powers remain gone.
In a little village in the Wundagore mountains, a woman known to the villagers only as Wanda feels a faint stirring of...something, something vaguely familiar. But nothing else seems to happen, so she simply forgets about it and moves on with her day, her chores waiting for her.
The man once known as Magneto barely stirs from his spot on the park bench in Argentina when he hears the news on a radio in a nearby cafe. He's not surprised when his own powers make no reappearance. Perhaps this is all he deserves.
.......
I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding in.
It's hard to describe the feeling of using my power on this scale, just changing whatever is in front of me is one thing, but this was affecting the entire planet, even if it did only involve turning the X-Gene back on for the relatively small group of people who used to have it. With three notable exceptions.
I sit down on the edge of the rooftop, my legs hanging down over the rusted shell of the wall as I stare out across the ruins and think about my next move. It's ridiculous to think that reversing M-Day is actually the easiest part of my plan, but it's true. And even then, the consequences of what I just did are going to be massive. The SRA deliberatly excluded mutants because they were assumed to be dead in the water anyway, now that's blown to Hell so SHIELD must be shitting themselves about having millions of unregistered, untrained superhumans running around. And that's not even touching on the various secret villain plans I just disrupted. Norman Osborn, I think Red Skull is still possessing that Lukin guy, whatever HYDRA is working on, Doctor Doom probably has something going on...
Hmm, Doom does have a pretty good track record with high-level superhumans, I'll have to be more careful if I deal with him. Or atleast not wander blindly into an obvious trap like the Silver Surfer did.
But, if I'm being honest, fuck the consequences.
Mutantkind has gotten screwed coming and going for decades, I'm not interested in micromanaging the whole planet, but I'm going to use my powers to do atleast two very big things, and after that... well, we'll see. One of them is already done, and now it's time for the second one.
I drop from the roof edge, only to find myself back on the beach once again. Making sure that the protection I put over the island remains intact, I turn back towards the ruins and raise a hand. In the far distance, the rubble of the city begins to shift and move, before bursting apart, releasing what I was searching for. The pitiful mortal remains of one of the countless victims of Cassandra Nova is deposited in front of me, the bones still wearing a few scraps of black clothes.
And then something shifts, and the bones are replaced by the intact body of a teenage girl with nearly white skin and long dreadlocks, dressed in goth-style clothes.
"Ellie? Ellie, wake up. We got shit to do"
Ellie Phimister, better known as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, gasps her first breath of air in years and sits up on the beach in a panic.
"AHHHH!!! WUH-WHAT- MISS FROST!!" She looks around herself in distress, her fear increasing when she spots the ruins behind her. "OH GOD! IT HAPPENED! IT REALLY DID!"
"Yeah, it did, I'm afraid. I'm working on fixing that."
She turns back around at the sound of my voice, and stares at me in shock "Who the... who the hell are you?! What happened?! Where's Miss Frost?"
"Uh, in reverse order, probably with Scott Summers, you died, and I'm Ginnungagap...but under the circumstances, I think you can probably just call me Johan." I offer her my hand to help her to her feet, but she doesn't even seem to be looking at it, just staring off into space.
"I was...dead! My nightmares, they came true! We ALL died!" She rubs her palms over her face, like she's trying to chase away a bad dream. "I don't understand, what's going on?!"
"Well, you were dead, and I brought you back to life. Easy as that."
She freezes and stares up at me like I just spoke in tongues "...you...brought me back from the dead?"
"Right."
"That's...impossible!"
I blink "How do you figure? Jean Grey has come back to life like three times now, nobody even bats an eye anymore. Granted, the process is usually a bit more complex than what I just did, I'm just saying, there's ample precedent."
She looks like she wants to argue but stops herself "I... why did you bring ME back?! I've never seen you before in my life!"
"Couple of reasons. You were one of the few victims I knew specifically by name, don't ask why, you're also one of the strongest mutants who died on the island, and lastly, and I know this sounds sort of bad, but I wanted to make sure the resurrection worked properly before I tried to do it en masse."
She gapes at me "You didn't KNOW?!"
"Hey, I've had these powers for like a week, cut me some slack. Anyway, I also started with you because I wanted a second set of eyes when I put all the infrastructure together again, make sure I got that right too."
She begins struggling to her feet and I take her by the arm, helping her up. She brushes off her clothes before turning back to me "Wait, you're fixing that before you bring everyone else back?"
"As opposed to what, awaken 16 million people in a pile of charred rubble with no food or water? I mean, I can fix that in the blink of an eye anyway, but still, they're going to be panicked enough as it is. Speaking of which" I open my hand and a bottle of water pops into existance. "Thirsty? I've never been dead, but it seems like it might make you thirsty."
She just stares at the bottle for a few seconds, before finally reaching out and accepting it. She takes a long drink, then a deep breath, which seems to steady her somewhat. "I wish Miss Frost was here..."
I shrug "I can... drop you off at the X-Mansion, if you want? That's where she lives now.You don't have to stick around if you don't want to."
Ellie looks away towards the ruins, staring out over the devastated island for a good long while, before shaking her head "Just...just give me a moment. And tell me what's going to happen next."
"Well, first I'm going to separate the remains of everyone who died from Nova's attack from the people who were already dead, because trust me, some of those guys you do not want to come back, then I'm going to move all the bones out of the cities, and then put everything back together. Finally, I'll spread all the bones out across the island, and bring everyone back to life."
She takes another drink "Just like that?"
"Just like that. Like resurrecting you, but on a way bigger scale."
She shakes her head in disbelief "That level of power, and you talk about it like you're pressing a button."
"Oh, that's nothing, I already fixed mutant powers for the whole planet like 20 minutes ago. Atleast this is just one country."
She stops, the water bottle halfway to her mouth "...you fixed what now?"
"Oh, right, you were dead. Okay, we should talk..."
