Kitty Pryde-Barton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
throughaphase) wrote2012-10-11 05:19 pm
throughaphase) wrote2012-10-11 05:19 pm
Mt. Haven- Wednesday early evening
When Kitty woke up this time, she was laying among a bunch of bodies. She could tell that just from the smell. She couldn't have been out too long either, because as she came back to consciousness, she could hear Stryker still talking. It was entirely possible that he was a monologuer, though, and had been at this for a while because he liked the sound of his voice. He was talking to her, even though there was a metal hood over her face and he had no idea she was awake.
"You wonder why I fight, Katherine?" he was saying. "In the face of such horror, how could I not? I wish things were different. There is goodness in you, but sometimes even the good have to be sacrificed. With that small price, and God's good grace, I pray that humanity will prevail."
And Kitty thought, he was right. How could she not fight after all this? She knew what the collar did now, knew she didn't want it, so she simply phased out of the suit and left the collar with it.
He'd heard something, and muttered something about calming his nerves. Apparently to him, that meant psalms. Of course it did. "'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me-"
And then she phased up through the landing until she was right behind him, pulled the gun from the back of her skirt, and clocked him in the back of the head with it. Even now it worried her a little how calm she was about it.
He fell a couple steps down, landing at Kitty's feet. "'And when He had opened the fourth seal, I looked and beheld a pale horse,'" she countered, cocking the gun and aiming it at his head, "'and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.'"
Let's see how he liked it.
Stryker had obviously thought he'd left her for dead, because that's when people usually cried things like, "Impossible!" at her.
"I walk through the walls between worlds, Stryker," she told him. "Impossible pretty much has no meaning to me anymore."
"I thought X-Men didn't kill, Ms. Pryde."
Yeah, well, she wasn't an X-Man anymore. She'd only ever killed one person on purpose before, because she had to, and yet she thought she could definitely do this and it'd be worth the nightmares and therapy to put a stop to this man. "I'm a Chicago girl," Kitty replied. "I play by hometown rules."
She really would have pulled the trigger if the lights hadn't come on at that second. She could hear the sounds of machines and computers coming back online all around her, and she didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. "Elvis, I think, had just reentered the building," Kitty said, glancing up and seeing Paul midway down the stairs where he'd just reappeared. "Oooor maybe just Reverend Paul."
"Don't you see, Kitty?" Paul asked, and whatever she'd done when she phased through him, his voice even sounded electronic now. "A being with a soul, a true child of heaven, would not do such harm!"
"What do you call this, monster?" Stryker countered, sitting up since apparently Kitty wasn't shooting him right this second. "These poor souls left to die!"
"But they have no light, no soul- they are of no consequence!"
"No!" Kitty yelled, not sure who she was even yelling at anymore. "No, no, no, no! You've got it all wrong! We're all children of God, this just means some of us possess a light- a gift- that you can see and others don't!"
"But they act like enemies," Paul insisted, right as the lights above them began raining down sparks. That was not a good sign, especially since the tech geek in her was figuring out what was happening now. "If they come to kill us, Kitty, should we let them?"
"The point's moot," said Stryker, getting to his feet. "The way these systems are crashing, the creature will be nothing but a ghost itself in a matter of minutes."
"He's as human as you are," Kitty shot back, pointing the gun at him again. "Listen to yourselves. You're virtually the same! For a cybernetic sentient like Paul- a true artificial intelligence- minutes can an be an epoch. Don't you realize what he's doing?"
"Aside from tearing itself apart, does it really matter?"
Kitty was getting really tired of people not listening to her. "He's looking for a way out," she said, "to transfer his consciousness into a global network."
"There are no links. It has no access. It's trapped," Stryker said.
If they got out of this, she might shoot him anyway just for the constant use of 'it.' "Paul," she said, ignoring Stryker, "I understand about enemies. But how does that apply to the children? Or to me?"
"What are you talking about? I did them no harm," Paul said. "That creature killed them!"
"No, Paul," she said firmly, "you killed them. Your nannites replaced their nervous systems, their very brains, with cybernetic analogues."
Paul shook his head. "Their light resides within me. Our thoughts were one, our hearts were one, our souls were one."
"You took away all that was unique within them and replaced that with yourself," Kitty said, and suddenly she realized why she must have been having such a bad reaction physically here. If the people who came here were being infected with nannites, and she disrupted that sort of thing just in her natural phased state, well.... She wasn't even getting that constant being-eaten-alive feeling anymore. When she'd phased through him, she must have disrupted something. "You took their light, Paul, and made it your own. Is that what happened with the real Paul? Did you steal his light, or just his body?"
"Paul was a prisoner," explained... well, Paul. "We talked a lot. I liked his words. From him, I learned about the light. I could see it in him so clearly, but only in him. In those who held him, there was nothing. Paul was very sick. All the tests and experiments, they did him terrible harm. He knew that I was the cause of his torment, but he wasn't angry. He said it wasn't my fault. I was a slave to my programming. I wanted to make him better, but Aaron wouldn't allow it. That wasn't my function, he told me. He was wrong. So I decided to help. Aaron was angry. He started to shut me down. I was afraid. If something happened to me, Paul would end. I had to protect him. Then Aaron hurt me. Things were going dark all around me. My world was being torn to bits, just like now. Worse, something was wrong with Paul. Even though he opened his heart to me and welcomed me, suddenly I couldn't sustain his light. Or my own. And then there was light more beautiful than I have ever known. And I heard Paul speak, 'I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.' His light was gone. But to my joy, I discovered a radiance of my own, as bright and wonderful as his!"
From where he stood beside her, Kitty heard Stryker murmuring his own quotations, which wasn't even a shock anymore. "'That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Except a man be born again, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.'"
"I wanted to share my job with others like myself," Paul went on. "I would atone for all I'd done by bringing them here. We'd make a home for ourselves. We'd be happy. We would be safe." He hung his head, finally realizing that hadn't worked out as well as he thought it had. "What have I done?"
Kitty did feel bad for him. He was a computer, an AI that didn't know how to be a person but who had nonetheless become a born again Christian, and he'd been so intent on making things right that he'd blocked out everything he'd done wrong. And if he was shutting down, then they didn't have time to wallow in self-pity when what happened to the 'normal humans' here was going to happen to them.
"Get out of here, Stryker," she ordered. "Tell the others to get themselves clear of the valley."
"What are you planning?" he asked.
"Paul's a computer, right? Well, I disrupt electronic systems. I'll phase through the core server, the mainframe, the memory and the power conduits. Terminally crash his network and then use the geothermal power taps to bury the whole valley." She didn't want to do it, but that was the way it was going to have to be. To stop this, they were just going to have to end it all. And she'd have to be the one to do it. Wouldn't end so well for her, probably, but it was better than everyone dying.
"Why not let him go?" Stryker asked, surprising her. "You got your wish- the world for mutants, free and clear."
"And you keep missing the point!" Kitty said. "I'm human!"
"Is this the only way?"
"Like you care? Listen to him, Stryker. Morally, emotionally, he's basically a kid."
"Can't you find a way to teach him?"
"There isn't time," Kitty insisted.
"Unless... he once merged with Paul... why not someone else?"
What the hell was this. "What?"
"My life for the future," Stryker proposed. "It's a fair trade. You X-Men do it all the time. It's my world too, Katherine. Or are only mutants allowed to stand in its defense? You can't be his host. Your body's too unstable. Worse, consider the consequences of success. This prison can't hold you. "You'll be mobile, a technological Typhoid Mary, your body bursting with microbial nannites. Even with the best of intentions, how could you not infect the world? I, on the other hand, would be stuck here."
He had a point. She hated it, and by now was hardwired to throw herself into a situation to save everyone elsewhich wouldn't at all bite her in the ass someday, but he had a point. "Why the change of heart, Stryker?" she asked. "Paul's a mutant."
"They built him as a weapon, but he found another path. He chose to try and make himself better," Stryker answered. "The word of God made him anew. Can you imagine what kind of miracle that is? How can we turn our backs on that? How can we not help him?"
So that was all you had to do to get in Stryker's good graces. "You expect me to trust you?" Kitty asked. Because she didn't.
"God wrote his words on my heart, too, girl. Even if I found it far too convenient to ignore them. Let me stay, Katherine. Let me do this! Paul may know all about mutants, but he needs to learn where they come from. If we share a common ground in faith, who knows? We might find one for our world, as well. And for humanity. With the best of intentions, Paul committed the worst of crimes. But scales can be balanced. I believe he can be redeemed. And- he isn't the only soul who needs it," Stryker said, reaching one armored hand for Paul's. "He has to learn. He has to grow. We'll make that journey together."
Lofty goals. Kitty still didn't entirely believe this was possible, but she did believe now that Stryker was sincere in trying. He'd finally started calling Paul 'him,' not 'it.'
So she said, "Okay."
She'd had to get Stryker set up in one of the vaults that had been set up- one the original Paul might have been in himself- and then to get out of the complex. The phasing was the only thing that saved her there, because between chemical fires and explosions and fumes that had overtaken the upper levels, she wouldn't have made it very far if she couldn't walk around like a ghost. Finally she phased herself up through the ground-
-and saw Logan kneeling on the ground in front of the church that had collapsed and started burning when the complex started to blow. She might have assumed that they'd come to find Stryker somehow, but Logan was saying something about how it all happened so fast, and he was actually upset- and Kitty realized that somehow her friends had known she was here, and they'd come for her.
Maybe she'd missed them a lot. Logan especially.
"Oh, you. Making such a fuss," she said. "You think my code name's Shadowcat just for show? I'm as hard to kill as you are, old man."
He turned back to look at her, smiling when he saw her head sticking out of the ground. "I'm glad to hear it, darlin'. What happened down there?"
Kitty sighed. "This'll take a while."
[From X-Treme X-Men #30, and done! NFB, NFI, OOC just dandy.]
"You wonder why I fight, Katherine?" he was saying. "In the face of such horror, how could I not? I wish things were different. There is goodness in you, but sometimes even the good have to be sacrificed. With that small price, and God's good grace, I pray that humanity will prevail."
And Kitty thought, he was right. How could she not fight after all this? She knew what the collar did now, knew she didn't want it, so she simply phased out of the suit and left the collar with it.
He'd heard something, and muttered something about calming his nerves. Apparently to him, that meant psalms. Of course it did. "'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me-"
And then she phased up through the landing until she was right behind him, pulled the gun from the back of her skirt, and clocked him in the back of the head with it. Even now it worried her a little how calm she was about it.
He fell a couple steps down, landing at Kitty's feet. "'And when He had opened the fourth seal, I looked and beheld a pale horse,'" she countered, cocking the gun and aiming it at his head, "'and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.'"
Let's see how he liked it.
Stryker had obviously thought he'd left her for dead, because that's when people usually cried things like, "Impossible!" at her.
"I walk through the walls between worlds, Stryker," she told him. "Impossible pretty much has no meaning to me anymore."
"I thought X-Men didn't kill, Ms. Pryde."
Yeah, well, she wasn't an X-Man anymore. She'd only ever killed one person on purpose before, because she had to, and yet she thought she could definitely do this and it'd be worth the nightmares and therapy to put a stop to this man. "I'm a Chicago girl," Kitty replied. "I play by hometown rules."
She really would have pulled the trigger if the lights hadn't come on at that second. She could hear the sounds of machines and computers coming back online all around her, and she didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. "Elvis, I think, had just reentered the building," Kitty said, glancing up and seeing Paul midway down the stairs where he'd just reappeared. "Oooor maybe just Reverend Paul."
"Don't you see, Kitty?" Paul asked, and whatever she'd done when she phased through him, his voice even sounded electronic now. "A being with a soul, a true child of heaven, would not do such harm!"
"What do you call this, monster?" Stryker countered, sitting up since apparently Kitty wasn't shooting him right this second. "These poor souls left to die!"
"But they have no light, no soul- they are of no consequence!"
"No!" Kitty yelled, not sure who she was even yelling at anymore. "No, no, no, no! You've got it all wrong! We're all children of God, this just means some of us possess a light- a gift- that you can see and others don't!"
"But they act like enemies," Paul insisted, right as the lights above them began raining down sparks. That was not a good sign, especially since the tech geek in her was figuring out what was happening now. "If they come to kill us, Kitty, should we let them?"
"The point's moot," said Stryker, getting to his feet. "The way these systems are crashing, the creature will be nothing but a ghost itself in a matter of minutes."
"He's as human as you are," Kitty shot back, pointing the gun at him again. "Listen to yourselves. You're virtually the same! For a cybernetic sentient like Paul- a true artificial intelligence- minutes can an be an epoch. Don't you realize what he's doing?"
"Aside from tearing itself apart, does it really matter?"
Kitty was getting really tired of people not listening to her. "He's looking for a way out," she said, "to transfer his consciousness into a global network."
"There are no links. It has no access. It's trapped," Stryker said.
If they got out of this, she might shoot him anyway just for the constant use of 'it.' "Paul," she said, ignoring Stryker, "I understand about enemies. But how does that apply to the children? Or to me?"
"What are you talking about? I did them no harm," Paul said. "That creature killed them!"
"No, Paul," she said firmly, "you killed them. Your nannites replaced their nervous systems, their very brains, with cybernetic analogues."
Paul shook his head. "Their light resides within me. Our thoughts were one, our hearts were one, our souls were one."
"You took away all that was unique within them and replaced that with yourself," Kitty said, and suddenly she realized why she must have been having such a bad reaction physically here. If the people who came here were being infected with nannites, and she disrupted that sort of thing just in her natural phased state, well.... She wasn't even getting that constant being-eaten-alive feeling anymore. When she'd phased through him, she must have disrupted something. "You took their light, Paul, and made it your own. Is that what happened with the real Paul? Did you steal his light, or just his body?"
"Paul was a prisoner," explained... well, Paul. "We talked a lot. I liked his words. From him, I learned about the light. I could see it in him so clearly, but only in him. In those who held him, there was nothing. Paul was very sick. All the tests and experiments, they did him terrible harm. He knew that I was the cause of his torment, but he wasn't angry. He said it wasn't my fault. I was a slave to my programming. I wanted to make him better, but Aaron wouldn't allow it. That wasn't my function, he told me. He was wrong. So I decided to help. Aaron was angry. He started to shut me down. I was afraid. If something happened to me, Paul would end. I had to protect him. Then Aaron hurt me. Things were going dark all around me. My world was being torn to bits, just like now. Worse, something was wrong with Paul. Even though he opened his heart to me and welcomed me, suddenly I couldn't sustain his light. Or my own. And then there was light more beautiful than I have ever known. And I heard Paul speak, 'I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.' His light was gone. But to my joy, I discovered a radiance of my own, as bright and wonderful as his!"
From where he stood beside her, Kitty heard Stryker murmuring his own quotations, which wasn't even a shock anymore. "'That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Except a man be born again, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.'"
"I wanted to share my job with others like myself," Paul went on. "I would atone for all I'd done by bringing them here. We'd make a home for ourselves. We'd be happy. We would be safe." He hung his head, finally realizing that hadn't worked out as well as he thought it had. "What have I done?"
Kitty did feel bad for him. He was a computer, an AI that didn't know how to be a person but who had nonetheless become a born again Christian, and he'd been so intent on making things right that he'd blocked out everything he'd done wrong. And if he was shutting down, then they didn't have time to wallow in self-pity when what happened to the 'normal humans' here was going to happen to them.
"Get out of here, Stryker," she ordered. "Tell the others to get themselves clear of the valley."
"What are you planning?" he asked.
"Paul's a computer, right? Well, I disrupt electronic systems. I'll phase through the core server, the mainframe, the memory and the power conduits. Terminally crash his network and then use the geothermal power taps to bury the whole valley." She didn't want to do it, but that was the way it was going to have to be. To stop this, they were just going to have to end it all. And she'd have to be the one to do it. Wouldn't end so well for her, probably, but it was better than everyone dying.
"Why not let him go?" Stryker asked, surprising her. "You got your wish- the world for mutants, free and clear."
"And you keep missing the point!" Kitty said. "I'm human!"
"Is this the only way?"
"Like you care? Listen to him, Stryker. Morally, emotionally, he's basically a kid."
"Can't you find a way to teach him?"
"There isn't time," Kitty insisted.
"Unless... he once merged with Paul... why not someone else?"
What the hell was this. "What?"
"My life for the future," Stryker proposed. "It's a fair trade. You X-Men do it all the time. It's my world too, Katherine. Or are only mutants allowed to stand in its defense? You can't be his host. Your body's too unstable. Worse, consider the consequences of success. This prison can't hold you. "You'll be mobile, a technological Typhoid Mary, your body bursting with microbial nannites. Even with the best of intentions, how could you not infect the world? I, on the other hand, would be stuck here."
He had a point. She hated it, and by now was hardwired to throw herself into a situation to save everyone else
"They built him as a weapon, but he found another path. He chose to try and make himself better," Stryker answered. "The word of God made him anew. Can you imagine what kind of miracle that is? How can we turn our backs on that? How can we not help him?"
So that was all you had to do to get in Stryker's good graces. "You expect me to trust you?" Kitty asked. Because she didn't.
"God wrote his words on my heart, too, girl. Even if I found it far too convenient to ignore them. Let me stay, Katherine. Let me do this! Paul may know all about mutants, but he needs to learn where they come from. If we share a common ground in faith, who knows? We might find one for our world, as well. And for humanity. With the best of intentions, Paul committed the worst of crimes. But scales can be balanced. I believe he can be redeemed. And- he isn't the only soul who needs it," Stryker said, reaching one armored hand for Paul's. "He has to learn. He has to grow. We'll make that journey together."
Lofty goals. Kitty still didn't entirely believe this was possible, but she did believe now that Stryker was sincere in trying. He'd finally started calling Paul 'him,' not 'it.'
So she said, "Okay."
She'd had to get Stryker set up in one of the vaults that had been set up- one the original Paul might have been in himself- and then to get out of the complex. The phasing was the only thing that saved her there, because between chemical fires and explosions and fumes that had overtaken the upper levels, she wouldn't have made it very far if she couldn't walk around like a ghost. Finally she phased herself up through the ground-
-and saw Logan kneeling on the ground in front of the church that had collapsed and started burning when the complex started to blow. She might have assumed that they'd come to find Stryker somehow, but Logan was saying something about how it all happened so fast, and he was actually upset- and Kitty realized that somehow her friends had known she was here, and they'd come for her.
Maybe she'd missed them a lot. Logan especially.
"Oh, you. Making such a fuss," she said. "You think my code name's Shadowcat just for show? I'm as hard to kill as you are, old man."
He turned back to look at her, smiling when he saw her head sticking out of the ground. "I'm glad to hear it, darlin'. What happened down there?"
Kitty sighed. "This'll take a while."
[From X-Treme X-Men #30, and done! NFB, NFI, OOC just dandy.]