Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The detention centre was a crooked little thing. It was a SHIELD black site in downtown Danville. It had served it’s purpose of housing various people over the years. Everything from political dissidents to superpowered terrorists. On this particular day, it housed two fifteen-year-old boys. A pair of brothers. Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher. A gang of SHIELD agents beat the piss out of them outside of a lab on the eastern side. Evidently, the head of the pair had very nearly convinced someone at the facility to pass on some yellowcake uranium to them. 

Phineas continued to smile, even though he wore a massive shiner that he received from the steel-toed boot of a SHIELD agent. His brother was expressionless, which was typical of him, even in a situation that should have stressed him out. The room was plain grey and the pair of them had these strange glowing collars on. It gave them a mild headache, but outside of that, they felt dandy.  Outside they could hear their guard, a middle-aged alcoholic with arthritis suddenly grumble to attention. Probably sweating a lot in his stupid SHIELD issue bodysuit.

“Soldier, I heard you had a pair of boys in there. If you don’t let me in you’re inviting a world of nightmares on yourself,” said a voice that commanded attention

“Feel free to, sir.” said the agent, his words dripping with dismissive and bitterness.

In he swaggered, a tall muscular man dressed in the stars and stripes. Sam Wilson, Captain America. Behind his goggles, Phineas could see his eyes briefly widen with shock as he registered him. 

“Say, aren’t you boy’s a little young to be arrested for domestic terrorism?” he asked, chuckling a bit at his own joke to try to ease the tension, and perhaps to focus on something that wasn’t Phineas’s bizarre head.

Phineas smiled a bit, “No, no. We aren’t terrorists sir, this is a massive misunderstanding. We’ve worked with you guys before. You weren’t there, but I’m sure it was notable.”

“Well, from what I’ve heard the pair of you tried to get some radioactive elements. Care to tell me what you were planning, bud?” Said Cap.

“We were going to use it to power a generator, ideally it was eventually going to power a small grid in the neighbourhood to run a carnival.”

“A carnival?”

“That’s right.”

“To what end?”

“For fun? I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“How were you planning on paying for the uranium? There’s no way either of you has the money to get it, so someone must be backing you. Who arranged this?”

“Nobody arranged anything, we just swung by and I asked.”

“Just like that? You just ask people for access to high-level scientific equipment and they just hand it over?”

“Yeah, pretty much. We’ve been doing things like that for nearly...what is it, three years now?” Phineas turned to Ferb who acknowledged his guestimation with a nod and a thumbs up.

“So, this happens a lot? And you say this started around the age of...what, twelve? Thirteen?”

“Just about, yeah?”

“Have you ever used your way with words or machines to...hurt anyone, son?”

“Why would I do that? Isn’t it the point of life for everyone to have a good time?”

“I suppose. You’ve never convinced like say, a friend to do something to hurt themselves?”

“Never, I would never.”

Before Sam Wilson could respond the agent from outside passed him a document that was printed out on cheap paper that was still hot from whatever machine it came in on. His eyes scanned the document before going back to the brothers. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. 

“Tell me, how aware are you two boys about mutation or mutants in general?”

“Outside of the rare movie, nothing. We’re more engineers than anything else.”

Sam clicked his tongue again, was this kid with the triangular head messing with him? He honestly couldn’t have been that ignorant about what should have been obvious, could he?

“Tell you what, I’m going to clear this for the two of you. Only, I want to make an offer. For this summer, I want the pair of you to leave Danville.”

“Why?”

“Thing’s will be a little hot under the collar for a bit and I’ll need you two to make yourselves scarce. There is a school in New York that you can attend.”

“Come on, man. It’s the middle of summer.”

“ Don’t come on, man, me. You two just have to spend a few months there and things will be square. After that, you two can come back here and do what you like. But, I’m sure things would be more comfortable if you two were to hone your natural abilities.”

The brothers exchanged a look with one another and then looked back to Sam Wilson. This time it was Ferb who spoke.

“Where in New York?”

The Jean Grey School for Higher Learning was a great building that was overlooking Lexington Avenue. It looked like any other skyscraper that was filled in the backdrop of Manhattan. Only, most of the skyscrapers in New York didn’t have a flock of flying teenagers circling it’s roof like pigeons. As they neared the building’s gate Phineas wondered how on earth this wasn’t the biggest attraction in the entire city. Surely, someone else had to have noticed the flying people.

Phineas looked to Captain America who was dressed in a plain t-shirt instead of his superhero costume, “Why hasn’t anyone noticed the people flying around the building?”

“The way I hear it is nobody sees it because they have a bunch of psychics in the basement. Nobody sees it unless they’re in the know. Y’know? Mutants.”

“Ah, That’s really inefficient. We could probably whip together something that could do that better.”

“Well, I’m sure whoever’s running the show would love to hear your ideas, Phineas. They rounded a corner that lead towards the front entrance and with it the little guard’s booth. In the booth was a forty-year-old woman with a mess of dirty blond hair whose skin was entirely carved out of marble. At first, they thought she was a funny statue wearing a wig and a yellow and blue polo shirt. Then she turned her head and growled at Sam.

“What do you want, dumbshit!?”

The rock woman was named Bridget Fitzsimmons and she was scowling a very cruel scowl at Sam for some reason.

“Just dropping off a pair of students for their first day,” said Sam, who was smiling through gritted teeth. 

He gently patted the two boys on the head. Some small part of him hoped they could trigger something to make this tense moment pass buy a bit faster. 

“They can go in but you can’t, fucking Craptain American’t, piece of shit.” She growled.

Sam audibly winced, “Will you boys  be able to find things safely?”

“Yeah, I think we can manage. Thank you, sir.”

The boy’s very quickly filed past the gate and it’s guard. Sam waved at her as he started to walk off, “Always a pleasure to see you, Bridget.”

“Why don’t you suck my fucking cock,” She sneered before going back to staring off into space, “Fucking star-spangled muppet ass bitch.”

The two boys gave a light jog across the micro quad, putting as much distance between themselves and the horrid gate guard as humanly possible. As they entered the building proper, they were suddenly hit by a sense of familiarity, despite being in a completely alien environment. To Phineas, the twisting maze of halls reminded him of the lines and circuitry on a motherboard. Ferb could hear the machines in the walls. He could hear the gentle, emotive chirps and chimes of the cameras and the sensors in the walls chit-chatting with one another.  Before long they found themselves at their destination. Room 84. 

Inside there was a classroom like any other. There were a handful of desks arranged in six, neat little rows while at the head of the room was a woman in her mid-forties. At a glance, she looked like a very plain white woman in a purple pantsuit. But, if you allowed your gaze to linger you’d notice that her skin had the exact same scale texture as a horned toad, with a series of sharper scales lining her jaw. Her name was Emma Tutweiller and she likes to start her day with one simple task. 

As she starts the day, at four in the morning she locks herself in her 1979 Ford Pinto, she sips whiskey out of a jug and sobs. The boys are seeing her come off of a hangover.

The boys decided to ignore her as she tried to put her personality together at her desk. Instead, their focus was on the eight-foot-tall golem made of candlewax that was standing on the opposite side of the room. It seemed to be on the receiving end of a conversation with a profoundly short black girl who was dressed in a rainbow fringe leather jacket that seemed to have a small pile of glitter amassing on the ground behind her. The boys walked over to investigate what was happening, but as they approached they felt a kind of electric quality in the air. Calling it electricity diminishes what it was, it was an ultra-positive sort of energy. Supernatural kinship between strangers. The girl definitely took notice and stopped talking to the golem. 

She did a turn on the heels of her bright yellow cowboy boots and faced down the two brothers, her eyes were incredibly wide and a deep shade of brown that almost matched the black of her irises. She had a toothy smile was wearing a reverse tie-dyed K.D Lang Boom Tour T-shirt. 

Before either boy could say anything she thrust her hand out to Phineas, and said only one single word, “Goo.”

Phineas stood there stunned by every dramatic turn of the girl before them. “I’m sorry?”

The girl blinked rapidly for a second, her smile briefly vanishing into a look of equal confusion before ultimately returning with a vengeance. She retracted her hand and drummed her fingers along the hard colourful fabric of her jacket. 

“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry. I forgot, got a little strayed, there. My name is Goo. Nice to meet the two of you. How are the two of you today?” Goo’s words fired off with machine-gun rapidity. 

“My name is Phineas and this is my brother Ferb,” Phineas relaxed, this was mostly nothing new for either of them.

“You have a very pleasantly shaped skull, Phineas. It reminds me of someone I created when I was six. The triangular shape evokes a pleasant feeling of approachable friendliness.”

Phineas was genuinely floored by everything about that sentence. His hand went to rub the back of his head, but then he started processing the middle of the sentence, “Some one that you created?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s my thing. I make friends. If that makes any sense.”

“I’m not going to lie, Goo. I might need you to walk me through it.”

Somehow, Goo’s smile widened. It was as though someone had broken open the lock on a box. 

“Well, where do I start? When I linger on a thought, any thought about a possible being it just comes into existence. I can make very simple things quickly, or great big complex things like dear Big Jim, here!”

Goo gave a dramatic turn, making sure that the tassels on her jacket moved all about as she turned before coming to rest her hand on the leg of the gigantic wax monster that had stood behind her.

“That’s incredible...Where do they come from though, you can’t exactly make something out of nothing.”

“Not sure,” The girl shrugged. “They kind of just appear, but I have to take them apart or they’ll gain complete sentience and get violent towards anyone who isn’t me. Then if I’m not focused on my thoughts I could get sidetracked and make a bunch in a single sitting.”

She made a finger gun and took aim at Big Jim, making a small, almost sad “Whoosh” with her mouth and in an instant Big Jim was gone. Goo then took a seat in a rolling desk chair, taking an only mildly sudden spin in the chair before coming back to face them again.

“So, what can you guys do?”

Phineas and Ferb exchanged a glance before turning back to her, “We build things.”

Saying it out loud kind of made their Modus Operandi seem pedestrian when compared to Goo’s spontanious creation of life.

“That’s neat. Have you guys been here long?”

“Just arrived, you?”

“About a week. I flooded my old school with bear men and they sent me here. I like it here, though. Most of the teachers are nice.”

She developed a strange kind of feigned aggressive pout as she looked over Ferb’s shoulder and at Ms Tutweiller. Ferb and Phineas looked over at the teacher who was sneakily eating a little thing of plain Pringles while browsing the internet on her desktop. 

“Is there something wrong with her?”

Her look of fake annoyance vanished and she started again, “Oh, no. She’s just fine. I get the feeling that she’s not exactly happy to be here. Y’know?”

Following that the trio took their seats as two older boys entered the room. The boy at the lead was a dark skinned boy who had a mess of incredible long black hair.  He was dressed in a dull blue shirt and jorts. This boy was named Joseph to contrast, next to him was a bizarre and weirdly skinny boy. His face was a mess of acne scars and were it not for his unibrow, his ginger buzzcut would be his most prominant physical feature. He was dressed unseasonably in a big green trenchcoat and baggy jeans. His name, was Ed. Joseph and Ed seemed enthralled in a quiet conversation about Death Grips when they took their seats. They sat down next to eachother on the opposite side of the room, far away from their younger classmates.

Emma Tutweiller took a walk to the front of the room, she expected the classroom was as full as it would be. There was a sudden, cacaphonus bell that sounded. Only, it wasn’t so much an actual sound. It seemed to come from the direct center of everyone’s minds and shake them to their collective core. It even shook Ms Tutweiller, who fancied herself immune to psychic attacks of all sorts.

She sucked on her teeth and gave everyone a moment to collect themselves.

“Good morning all, welcome to homeroom. My name is Ms. Tutweiller. Now, you’re all here because your manifesting abilities have recently been proven to be some cause for concern. Hence, why you’re here doing the X-summer school in New York rather than the academy in Westchester.”

Her face dropped slightly at the thought of the Westchester school. 

“Now, don’t get me wrong. The curriculum for the most part will focus on that of any other school. A curriculum that mostly falls on me because somehow, despite the rising mutant population, i’m the only one they could find that has an actual background as a teacher. Every other teacher here is horrifically underqualified. I say this as someone who basically had to wrangle little rich bastards on a cruise ship for three years. Then, I start to grow scales and I can only get work with the Xavier Group, next thing I know the feds have blown away the Westchester school. Now, I’m here.”

Emma paused and took a sip from a bottle of water on her desk.

The class had a moment to stare at Miss Tutweiller in the wake of her manic rant before a blast of energy sent the knob of the door flying away and into the wall opposite it. They all froze and turned their attention on the man who walked in.He was dressed head to toe in a strange, black plastic suit. It looked to most of them like if H.R Giger designed the Apollo astronaut suits. It had a clear plastic visor that showed the pale face of it’s occupant, his eyes narrowed and focused. There were a mess of tubes and wires that ran to a mess of metal tanks on his back, while in his hands he held a grotesque weapon. The base of the gun reminded Joseph of an assault rifle, but as their eyes went to the where the barrel should be, they were met by a tetached human arm. The dead limb radiated magenta energy and had a tangled nest of wires that stuck out of it’s flesh and fed into a black cylinder on the stock.

The U-Man, turned his attention to Joseph and focused the arm-gun on him. Emma Tutweiller ran and stepped between them, arms akimbo, ready to face the bastard down, properly or die. Then something else happened. As the man readied himself to blast through her, he started screaming.

Then a sudden inverted dome of absolute darkness stared it’s way up, slowly. Severing his legs at the shins. Causing the rest of his body to fall into the dome’s void. Eventually, it formed into a large sphere and vanished, taking most of the man and part of the floor with him. In it’s place there was a large crater and a small pile of flesh and plastic that seemed to have come from his thigh. 

Across the room, Goo simply chose to shut her mind off. The brightness in her eyes dimmed and she slumped down. Phineas and Ferb focused on the crater in the floor and watched as Ms Tutweiller focused her attention on Joseph. His eyes were as black as the void sphere and he breathed out a single sigh like someone sated after a large meal. Then they all watched as he registered what he did. A look of horror replaced his blankly pleased expression. He collapsed to the floor and started to dry heave. All the while repeating.

“I’m sorry, oh dear god. I...I didn’t mean to take all of him.”

The only one who didn’t seem upset by the whole tragic turn of events was Ed, who had gotten up to examine the crater and the pile of flesh in it’s center.

It was the first time most of them had seen a man die.

Chapter Text

Late at night, the boys sat awake in their dorm room. It looked and functionally identical to their rooms, but it lacked something. There was a kind of quality to the situation that left it in for want of something neither could place. This older sister, Candace had left them with a letter that sat unopened on a nightstand, pressed beneath the weight of a desk lamp. At least, for now. A letter of well wishes from an older sibling could wait.  At night Phineas dreamed of the city outside of the school. He dreamed of it as it could be. A great city, powered by their impossible machines. The lights of a glittering, future city only just hidden beneath it’s lush greenery. A green, perfect city. While at the same time Ferb dreamt with the city. With one another exchanging binary lullabies like boxers trading punches.

Goo doesn’t dream. She slept in a cold, single room. She sleeps at night with her mind dark from the constant inhibitors in the walls. God only knows what she could come up with in her sleep. 

Down the hall, towards the section filled with the older students, a pair of students adamantly refuse to sleep. Joseph sits up on his bed and takes in a deep inhale on his poorly rolled joint, but chokes almost immediately after. He can’t focus on sleep, but he also refuses to think about the day. But at the same time, he can’t help but be brought back to it as his body growls with hunger. He did the right thing, didn’t he? If he hadn’t done anything, they all could have been massacred and if the others were right, they would have had their organs harvested. But...Joseph had never fed another person into The Null. 

Sitting down on the same bed is Ed, who ate part of a gummy and has been stuck on the same page of an old E.C comic for the past fifteen minutes. Joseph’s phone connects to a cheap bluetooth speaker with a harsh, electronic ‘pop’ sound. What followed was the harsh and bizarre sounds of the Death Grips song Takyon (Death Yon).

Ed moved from side to side, laughing to himself, “This is what my brain sounds like, Joseph.”

“That’s messed up, man,” he gave Ed a gentle nudge with his foot. “Just get the heck off my bed before you get couch lock.”

“Way ahead of you, d...Joesph.”

“You ass,” he laughed and snubbed his joint out in an old glass Faygo bottle.

 Before long, they were both asleep, Joseph with his dreams of the U-Man screaming as he fed him to The Null and Ed with his dreams of...well to be quite frank, schlocky b-movie monsters.
Deep in the lower levels of the school was another room. A glorified teacher’s lounge dressed in science lab drag. It might have been able to pull it off were it not for the two vending machines in the back corner. But, nobody’s attention was on that. The attending staff were focused on the jar on the table in front of them. Inside the jar was a fist-sized chunk of pink flesh and black plastic.

Rogers, the sixty-two-year-old  home ec teacher’s face was very nearly the same shade of green as the splotches on his tie-dye shirt as he spoke, “You’re saying that the kid left only this behind?”

“It’s a mess, why didn’t any of you tell me what he could do?”

Rogers’ cousin, Headmistress Barbara spoke next. She looked half his age, despite them sharing a birth year, “It didn’t feel important at the time. Your job is just normal teaching, the rest of the staff can handle the rest.”

“I think I should have known, at least for the safety of the other students. I mean, for christ’s sake.”

A young red-haired teacher formed a second version of theirself and they both asked in unison, “And you said he was a U-Man? I figured those guys went out of commission years ago.”

“Positive, had the black suit and everything. All of the body-snatching terrorist trappings. But, he had a gun that looked like it was made out of somebody’s arm.” said Emma Tutweiller.

“Like, you think we should call up Westchester for some kind of help?” 
Rogers directed the question at Barbara, but before she could answer Miss Tutweiller spoke.
“No, I don’t think so. I can get my class up to speed on combat training, we have to keep this from happening again.”

 The red-haired teacher and their dupe exchanged a look and crossed their arms then shot Tutweiller a copy of the same look, “No offence, Emma. but your students are temperamental at best, keep in mind that they did this. You have a loose assortment of criminals and fuck ups who are only here because they were press-ganged into our summer school program by a walking flag.”

 They pressed their hand to the jar of pink meat. 

 “Well I’m not exactly hearing any positive ideas, none of you really want anyone from the main school down here. If one of them comes down here it’ll escalate things. I’m not interested in a riot or a localized genocide.”

The following day in class, Joseph and Ed attempted to continue to sleep, while off in the corner Phineas and Ferb stared at Goo as she started to slam four cans of Monster without vomiting. Upon the completion of her herculean task, Goo turned to face the brothers.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the second Bush Administration lately. Now, you see the big power in that relationship was Dick Cheney. Because Bush,” She turned and cackled at nothing like a cartoon witch. “Bush, George H.W Bush is an idiot. The man doesn’t know the price of milk. Dick Cheney and his Texan sock puppet let 9/11  happen. It’s all right there, So we could invade Iraq. Wild stuff. But who’s to say we won’t be next.”

She stood on her chair and started to gesticulate wildly like an evangelical preacher, Ms Tutweiller was too hungover to particularly care. “Hear me out here, fellas.  The next time we get a weird horror president we’ll be dropped all around like atom bombs from the sky. Next thing you know, we’re eating garbage in the bombed-out ruins of a city, ruled over by a cruel child-king who speaks only in emojis.”

She started pumping her arms up and down like a manic pixie bodybuilder, “Then, before he can even get through a speech made of heart eyes and eggplants, his brittle bones, weakened from a lack of milk are shattered underneath the cold metal legs of Robo-Cheney.”

Ferb raised his hand and spoke, “So...In this scenario is Robo-Cheney the big good because he freed us from being ruled over by this cruel boy king?”

“Well. No, because it’s still Dick Cheney, he just has a bunch of little robot legs like robot Hitler from old comics.”

“But why would someone attach Dick Cheney’s head to a robot body?” asked Phineas.

“Why is he on his second heart despite not deserving his original one? I have a lot of questions, Phineas but I am lacking some answers.”

Just outside they all heard the grunting and growling of Gate Guard Fitzsimmons The entire class along with Ms Tutweiller went to the window and saw the guard fighting with a creature with a metal crab-like body, but with the head of Dick Chaney sticking out of the centre.

 Ms Tutweiller rested her head against her knuckles, “Well son of a bitch.”

 Goo opened up the window and mimed the act of taking aim with a sniper rifle before Tutweiller butted in, “None of that young lady. You brought that sputtering abomination into existence while talking with the boys. You have to get rid of it in a more complicated way. The rest of you should help her, it will be a good training exercise.”

 “But why?” asked Phineas.

 Tutweiller clapped Phineas on the shoulder, “Not going to lie, strange Dorito-lad, you’re going to encounter a lot of weird scenarios in your life as a mutant. Whether it’s fighting a cyborg vice president or waking up in a puddle of melted plastic with a bunch of cow’s legs and no answers. Right now I’m asking you to handle this in a somewhat safe environment.”

 She quickly shuffled the whole class out of the room and locked the door so that she could smoke cigars and drink. They went outside to face down the Robo-Cheney. Guard Fitzsimmons ran at it only to get smacked away and embedded in the wall, dazed, but alive.

 Phineas cupped the lower part of his being where his face met his neck that definitely wasn’t a neck and surveyed the scene, the Robo-Cheney was walking around and screeching. 

 “If you’re god, then I’m the holy ghost and I’M GONNA FUCK THE VIRGIN MARY!” screamed the Robo-Cheney.

 “Uh-huh. Goo, why did it say that?”

 Goo replied with a shrug, “Sometimes if I don’t invent a lot of personality for them they kind of latch onto other things. This one seems to have connected with one of Joseph Kallinger’s hallucinations.”

 “Okay, noted. Okay, since it seems like Ms Tutweiller wants us to treat this like a game it shouldn’t be easy. So, let’s take stock of our abilities. Ed, what can you do?”

 Ed puffed out his chest, “I’m strong.”

 “Alright, you’re strong...try something with that and we’ll see where we go from there.”

 Ed smiled and started to giddy tap the tips of his feet against the lawn. He then proceeded to pick up Joseph and toss him at the Robo-Cheney like a screaming spear.

 “Okay, that’s good,” he cupped his hand to yell, “Joseph, when you hit him do the void thing around his head.”
 
 Joseph hit the Robo-Cheney with an uncomfortably loud thud. The beast didn’t even seem to notice him, despite his arms and legs being wrapped around the strange metal neck that stuck up from the centre of it’s weird crustation body.
   
 “Mkay, good. Now just void his head!” shouted Phineas.

 “This fucking sucks, dude!” He shouted back.

 Now, Goo started to say, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t scream near the Robo-Cheney” or something along those lines, but before she could the Cheney head swivelled around with a smooth metallic whir. Then It’s jaw unhinged and a sudden deluge of blue vomit blasted Joseph in the face with enough force to send him crashing into the ground, his eyes and mouth sticky with bright blue nonsense. It didn’t even regard him after that. It just chittered away like a bored child that was finished with a toy it didn’t care for.

 As he laid there, on the ground, caked in blue slime, Joseph really considered that he would have rather had that U-Man shoot him with a weird arm gun than deal with this. Ed rushed over and scooped him up in his arms, in the same manner, one might a baby, and ran away as soon as possible with the Cheney head spraying his blue vomit at him as he trotted.

 Phineas focused on Goo, “Why on earth does he vomit blue?”

 Goo traced her foot in the dirt, a bit embarrassed by the question, “I...I thought it made him seem like a well rounded character in my head.”

 Ed dropped Joseph and ran at the chittering abomination, his arms raised above his head shouting, “Oh, why me, why me, oh, I mean oh my me
Don't see why I need all these hairs can't stand by these!” 

 He wrapped his entire body around one of the cyborg’s weird spider legs and took a big bite out of it.

 Phineas grabbed at his hair, “Can we please form a plan here?”

 Joseph spoke, “Not going to lie, man. I’m pretty fine with dying right now.”

 Phineas growled and started rooting around his bag, “Okay, fine. Fine. I have an idea. Goo, can you imagine up a bunch of things and put them between us and Cheney?” 

 Goo winced and in an instant, the yard was flooded with a sea of shambling, technicolour crowd of people, all of whom started to crowd around Robo-Cheney and Ed.

 Phineas dug out a pair of strange metal gauntlets that had strings of wires and LEDs flashing violent colours. He tossed a set to Ferb and another to Goo. 

 “Okay, Goo, follow our lead. Joseph, when Robo-Cheney gets near you I need you to do the void thing.”

 Goo was listening but she was suddenly hit by a smattering of viscera. Robo-Cheney was ripping through her crowd of imagined flesh shields like it was nothing. His cruel spider legs just rending and tearing.

 Goo collapsed and started retching at the horrid smell of the gore and the sight of a bisected Manish creature with cotton candy hair. She looked it in it’s eyes and spoke to it, “I’m sorry, you were so beautiful and you should have been brought into this world for pure reasons.”

She made a finger gun and blew the candy-man away into the great oblivion. Vanishing it along with it’s spilt entrails. 

Joseph began to speak as he too had been caked in gore when a shirtless and violently pale boy wearing only a pair of shorts and a burger king crown came out of nowhere and bloodied his face with a powerful left hook.

The cruel boy-king cast his wild-eyed gaze on the others and somehow spoke,  “:) >:)  ;w;!”

Goo and Phineas stepped back as the crazed imaginary boy started swinging his large fists around like a drunken toddler. All the while still screaming, “;( XD !”

There was a hard, meaty sounding thud. The boy’s wild expression fell and his eyes went dull and empty. The boy’s body toppled to the ground, revealing that behind him was Ferb, holding a large pipe wrench that was now caked in blood and chunks of the skull.

 That was what finally put Goo over the edge and she proceeded to vomit. Phineas shot his brother a pained look, “Good lord, man. That seemed like overkill. Did you have to hit him that hard?”

 “I didn’t hit him, the wrench merely turned in my hand.”

 Phineas helped Goo to her feet. She kept looking up, away from the corpse of the Cruel Boy King. The three of them smelled something like a bunch of burnt batteries and turned their head to find it’s source. Headmistress Barbara Roberts ventured into the yard, behind here were a crowd of students and faculty that had been watching for most of the fight but had concluded that it was none of their business. Her body was enveloped in a fire that was a brilliant shade of pink. In the palms of her hands, they could see a set of strange mounds that were glowing. In rapid succession, she pitched them at the face of Robo-Cheney with all of the force of a professional softball player. They slammed into the creature’s face, balls of melted plastic searing its face.

 Headmistress Roberts smiled to herself, “That was oddly cathartic.”

 She turned her attention on the kids that were still conscious, her smile still present, but there was a sense of urgency attached to her words, “Flynn, is Gribble still alive?”

 They all turned and heard Joseph groan.

 “Yes.”

 “Good, you three go help the other one and steer Cheney into the building,” she said.

 “Steer him into the building?”

 “Yes, the building can shrug off the mortar fire of a tank, it can handle a cyborg war criminal.”

 Without another thought, the three of them ran over and pried Ed off of the leg of Cheney, as the three of them pushed they forced the entire body of the creature into a granite column. Caving in his gargantuan head with a wet pop.

By the end of it, most of them were sweating. Goo had taken to vanishing away the brutalized flesh shields and the corpse of Robo-Cheney. Ed helped Joseph up. While vanishing Cheney also vanished the blue vomit, it failed to correct his nose, which had been busted up by the cruel child king. The front of his shirt was soaked with his own blood. Headmistress Barbara approached the group, looking just a bit apprehensive. She dug a tampon out of the inner pocket of her blazer and handed it to Joseph. 

“You’ll need to see a school healer, but this will help with the bleeding for now,” She said.

Joseph didn’t say anything, he just used the tampon to stuff up his nostril. And gave her a thumbs up. 

“Now, as for the rest of you. I would not call...well at least nobody’s dead. That’s good. 

Goo stepped up to her.

“This is my fault Ms Roberts if I hadn’t-”

Headmistress Roberts cut her off, “Goo, relax. Nobody is mad at you. Things like this just happen. Sometimes you wake up in a pool of cow legs with no answers.”

“That is the second time I’ve heard that today,” said Phineas.

Ms Roberts clapped Goo on the shoulder, “Now, all of you can go get washed up, you smell foul.”

Chapter Text

At night, Luke Ross ventured out of the comfort and safety of his family's penthouse. Down to the subway, but he wasn't looking for a train. As soon as he arrived at the station, he leapt off the platform and started to make his way down the track, taking care, at least to avoid the third rail. Not that it would hurt him. His mutation caused electricity to be a non-issue for him. He couldn't generate it quite yet, but it couldn't hurt him. 

 A lot of people know about the snaking network of trains underneath the city of New York. What many don't know is that a good chunk of it is abandoned. Empty stations and forgotten subway turnarounds. Luke knows about them, Luke had been reading up on them a lot over summer break. It wasn't that big of an issue. He was going out looking for a very particular group of people. A group of mutants called the Morlocks lived on the very fringes of mutant and human society. He thought it was important, to see how the other half lived. What he didn't know is that they weren't the only ones hiding in the darkness. 

 He certainly found out when something slammed into the back of his skull, sending him crashing to the ground.  When he came to his head was throbbing and he felt as though he was going to vomit. After an attempt to vocalize, he quickly found out why that would be an issue.  There was a strip of duct tape on his mouth and he was suspended upside down from a hook with his arms and legs tied together. Like a pig in an abattoir. There were dozens of people seated at long driftwood tables.  Great fires and electric lights illuminated them. Some of them looked fairly normal, a few a bit scruffy, but a lot of them were wearing this strange kind of suits. They reminded him of scuba divers, but if they had metal plating. He saw a face that he recognized, sitting at a table closest to him. It took him a minute to put a name to her face, but the girl was for sure Connie Thompson. She had been his stalker, following him and making his life a living hell since they were both twelve. Last he heard she had vanished. Guess, he found her. She looked strikingly different from the last time he had seen her. She had once had long, messy blonde hair. now, it was shaved bald and where there was once was hair was now a mess of very intense tattoos that brought to mind pictures he had seen of white power prison gangs, but different in a way he couldn't place. What surprised him was the fact that Connie didn't even look at him.

 He looked around and saw a few other people hanging with him. Definitely mutants from the look of some of them. Though, nobody he knew. At the back of this subway turnaround was built a makeshift stage with a podium.  Out from the darkness emerged an older Hispanic woman, maybe late thirties if he had to guess. She had a crown of curly blonde hair that almost looked like a halo in the dim light of the fires and battery lights.  She was wearing a sleeveless hoodie and the side of her face and neck were heavily scarred. 

 "You all know me, you know what I am. I'm 'Magic Hands' Dolores. you know what I did before we came to be here. Before all of you came to know my embrace." 
 She paused and ran a hand along the scarring on her face, "That shit doesn't matter now. I was betrayed by my man and in the end, I did what I needed to survive. That's what everything in this crazy world is about, right?"

 The crowd murmured in agreement. Luke thought he recognized that. Magic Hands Dolores. There was something about it that rang familiar, something familiar that made his stomach churn.

 "When I came down here. I was lost. I had lost everything for the third time. Then, I found this," She held up a weathered book with a blue cover and embossed in large, shiny letters were the words: "The Third Species."

 She repeated those words aloud five, maybe six times. As though the three simple words were a kind of incantation. The whole show of it reminded Luke of a street preacher's spiel. 

 "But, what I discovered was that Sublime was wrong. That discovery hit me like a freight train. Now, you're asking, but, Dolores. How could the late, great John Sublime have been wrong?"

 She stepped off of her podium and walked alongside the table, eventually selecting a random man in a weird scuba suit. She pressed her fingers underneath the sides of his helmet and the entire room was treated to the sound of a loud, pneumatic hiss as the helmet was lifted. The man beneath sported a five o'clock shadow in addition to his bright blond bowel cut. 

 "The air is clean, Brother Beetles. The air and our world isn't the problem. The problem is the new neighbours," she gestured to the trussed-up mutants. "The problem was he was incorrect. He was wrong about how we will eventually ascend. It won't be by attaching pieces of them to us. No...our ascension. Our claim on the earth will come by their flesh, that much is certain."

 Magic Hands Dolores walked over and rested her hands on the shoulders of Connie and a chubby looking black boy who couldn't have been any older than twelve.

 "For tonight's feast, we have initiates Connie Thompson and Lamilton Taeshawn to thank. Tonight, they will do us the honour of preparing the meat. They have done good by us and by humanity, unlike Brother Adrian who was murdered by those little bastards in their prep school."

 The pair of them stood up, clean and sharp butcher's knives in hand and they walked over to the mutants. Luke looked up and into the blank stare of Creepy Connie for one final time as she dragged the knife across his throat.

Chapter Text

They came from the sky. A great machine that looked like a mound of light that was forced into the shape of a tumourous mound zoomed past the towers of the Manhattan skyline. Before coming to a stop in the air above the quad. It seemed to glow with a brilliant light that nobody could quite place. In even in the late evening light, they could see the shapes of figures within the craft. Invaders from another world? Nobody was sure. Students and faculty filed onto the lush, green grass, all pushing past one another to get a good look at it. Phineas thought, he had some idea about how it worked, but his thoughts on it were cut short when he was suddenly pushed aside by Headmistress Roberts. She stepped out, onto the grass and shouted up at the craft.

“What the absolute fuck are you doing!?”

The craft came to rest on the grass just a foot shy of Roberts. The semi-opaque wall of the craft dissolved and revealed it’s occupants. Many were let down to see fairly normal-looking mutants walking out of it, rather than whatever interstellar horror their minds had invented. All they were certain of was that they were mutants. They all looked wildly different, but you’d be a rube if you didn’t recognize them as the Ross family. One of the oldest mutant families in the city. At the head of the group was it’s matriarch, Christina, a halo of brilliant obsidian energy encircling her head. Behind her stood her oldest daughter, Emma and her nephew Jimmy. Following that was her son, Ravi who cradled a rather large monitor lizard in his arms like a puppy, who was in turn followed out by his sister, Zuri. As they all came into view, everyone could see that there was a long cord of dark flesh that ran from the inside of the craft and up underneath Zuri’s button-up. In a single instant, the crowd watched as the ship folded up and collapsed into a small, box before returning to space in Zuri’s chest cavity. From afar, Goo watched the scene with intrigue and she thought about walking over to ask the girl questions, but then headmistress Roberts started in on Ross.

“What the fuck, Ross? What the hell was all of that about? Are you trying to get my goddamn students killed?”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Barb. As far as the good people of New York are concerned all they saw was a viscous cloud of pollution from a factory.”

“What do you want? What’s so important that you couldn’t have called. You’ve made it very clear that you don’t want any-”

Headmistress Roberts and Christina Ross’ eyes turned the same shade of black in an instant before returning to normal. As if a switch had been flipped Roberts growled. “Sweet Jesus, okay. Follow me. We can talk in the office, away from so many eyes.”

She turned on her heels and the two women exited the scene for Barbara Robert’s office. Before long, the crowd dispersed, most of their classmates had already left once they discovered that the craft wasn’t an alien war vessel. Ed rushed the family and scooped Jimmy Ross up in a hug, spinning the younger, curly-haired boy around in a great bear hug. The other’s were shocked by this, initially, but before they could react by Ed put the short boy down on the ground and the two began chatting like a couple of old friends.

From their vantage point next to the door, the others watched the scene with intrigue. Except for Joseph. He had missed the Rosses' initial introduction and had only just returned from his trip to a bodega with a sandwich and quite frankly, he was more interested in it than the strange bunch of rich kids that littered the lawn.

Phineas turned to Joseph as he sunk his teeth into the side of his sub, “Hey, you’re close with Ed, who’s that that he’s chit-chatting with?”

Joseph looked at the boy with a look of surprise, he hadn’t been paying attention. He looked over to Ed and Jimmy who were still chatting, much to the chagrin of the other Rosses. “Oh, that’s Jimmy Ross. He and Ed grew up together in the same little Cul-De-Sac.”

“Jimmy Ross, the designer?”

“The same, I guess. I don’t know or really care. Apparently, he’s dating Ed’s little sis, so he’s like weird family to them or something.”

“I’ve never seen him before...Is he like thirteen?”

“I think so.”

The two of them walked over to the group and away from the Rosses who were standing around, apathetic to the school and it’s student body.’

“Small friends, Joseph,” began Ed. “This is Jimmy.”

The boy stood a full two feet shorter than Ed and had a mess of curly hair that was so blonde it almost matched the lily white tone of his skin. He raised his hand shyly. It was almost hard to believe that this was the foremost name in mutant fashion since Jumbo Carnation bit it in ‘03. He also didn’t seem quite as out as Jumbo. As far as anyone could tell from looking at him, he was a baseline human teen.

“I..urm...Salutations?” he said in a small, meek voice.

Phineas looked straight at Jimmy instead of giving him a side glance. To his surprise, instead of reacting with horror, this seemed to put the boy at ease. Jimmy puffed out his chest. 

“You’ll have to try much harder than that if you want to intimidate me, short stuff. I was held hostage last week. Your weird face doesn’t do anything for me.”

Phineas turned, giving him a more friendly sideways glance. The atmosphere becoming more personable, “Fair. So, what’s up with the flashy and sudden arrival?”

“You’re very upfront, strange triangle fellow. I like that. You have a strange infectious friendliness. No, doubt, that’s your ability?”

“Part of it.”

“Lovely. We’re here because my idiot cousin got himself lost in the sewers searching for The Morlocks.”

“The Morlocks?”

Jimmy made a dismissive sound that was halfway between a laugh and a violent gasp, “You must be a recent manifestation. Might as well have been living under a rock if you haven’t heard of The Morlocks.”

Ferb fixed the younger boy with a stern glare that shook him to his soul.

“I...The Morlocks are mutants who live in the sewers under New York.”

“There, was that so hard to say without being a rude little pest?” said Ferb.

“No.”

“Why don’t we all relax. Don’t get so mad?” asked Ed.

“Yeah,” Said Goo, although, she wasn’t actually listening. She was focused on Zuri Ross who was sitting on the outskirts of the spot where her other siblings stood. The other girl gave her a weak smile and walked over to the group.

“So what are you dorks talking about?” she asked when she joined the group.

“Nothing, Zuri,” Said Jimmy in a quiet voice.

To which Ed proclaimed, “We were talking about Luke.”

The smile vanished from her face a bit, before returning a bit smaller, “The whole situation has everybody in stitches.”

“What if we found him?” suggested Phineas.

“Don’t do-!” began Jimmy before being quickly cut off by Zuri.

“What are you suggesting?”

“I’m saying what if all of us went underground and brought him back?”

“You’re insane, what you’re suggesting is insane,” replied Jimmy.

“Hush. I’m in. I’m all for it. Besides, it’ll give me something to do for a few hours,” Zuri turned her attention to Jimmy, “I want you to keep everyone off our backs until we get back.”

Jimmy gritted his teeth, “I don’t know, the last time you asked me to help you with anything I was locked in some guy’s trunk.”

“Just do it, Jimmy. This is my brother.”

Jimmy rubbed his temples, “Okay, okay, fine. Good christ.”

“I’ll umm, I’ll hang back to. Keep everything alright here,” Said Joseph.

And hung back he did. Nobody raised a hand in protest. Ed might have, but he didn’t think to.  As the night sky darkened Zuri found that it gave the craft adequate coverage in the clouds above the city. The view from within the ship was dramatically different from the outside. From within none of them could really tell that they were inside a strange, tumour floating across the sky. As far as they could tell, they were just floating through the sky on an invisible platform.

Ed had laid down on the floor with his limbs spread out like a starfish and his eyes cast up into the sky, tricking his mind into not thinking about the fact that they had reached unnatural heights. Phineas and Ferb, by contrast, were looking down, marvelling at the dazzling display of light that was the city. Goo was quiet as she walked from the back of the ship and over to it’s pilot who stood very still in one spot. Her eyes glowed a brilliant white, while from within her abdomen a long, gnarled cord of flesh snaked from her and across the floor. If Goo’s eyes were to follow it’s trail, she would notice that as it reached it’s end it started to become invisible along with the rest of the ship. She did not. Instead she stood next to the girl, marveling at her crown of curly black hair that just barely hid her face. Goo caught herself staring a bit and looked away, her arms hanging slack at her sides.

“Your ability is awfully neat,” She said, with a sudden, dramatic sweep of her arms.

“I guess,”  said Zuri with all the enthusiasm of a deflated balloon. “I think it’s kind of disgusting.”

“Well...What makes you say that?”

“My brother Luke once said that the ship looks like one of those tumours with the hair and the teeth.”

“A teratoma?” 

“Yeah, that.”

“Your brother sounds like a rude fuck.”

The sudden bluntness of Goo’s statement caused Zuri to giggle, “He can be sometimes, but that’s just how big brothers are, I guess.”

“I think the ship is very beautiful.”

There was a brief moment where they stopped speaking. It wasn’t an uncomfortable or awkward silence, but it was definitely palpable. Goo almost continued but there was a sudden jerk as the craft’s structure squeezed itself into an alley, absolutely scaring the fuck out of a guy who was standing in it. Although, he didn’t run for whatever reason. He looked even less shocked when the group stepped out, but his eyes were wide.

“What the hell are you kids up to?”

He was a tall, lean black man, who was dressed in an old green coat. His eyes were a brilliant brown that seemed to have the same golden glow as the city’s lights while his fingers were lightly dusted with spray paint. He was slowly starting to recognize the group, though none of them could recall seeing him before. At least, not seeing him like this. The kids were unsure how to respond to his question. Save for Ed, he cut through the group and up to the man and very eagerly shook a hand that was not extended. The interaction between the two of them felt beyond odd, did they know each other?   

“It’s good to meet you, sir. I’m a fan of your art.”

The man’s eyes went from Ed to the rest of the group. 

Phineas was the first to cut the tension that followed the statement, “Hey, Ed. would you be so kind as to introduce us to your new friend?”

Ed gave him a weird look and then hummed, “What? Oh, no. I don’t know his name. I’ve seen his art around the city with Joseph.”

“Then how do you know it’s his art?”

“I’ve seen it in my dreams.”

“Ominous. Anyways, let’s get out of here.”

The group was starting to shuffle off,

“Wait,” Called out the man. “I know who you’re looking for. I know you’re looking for that Ross boy. I have an idea of where he was.”

The group froze, and Zuri spoke up, anger tinging her words, “Fuck off, you’re a psychic, there’s no way you could have to know that.” 

“I’m not a psychic. I’ve got the knowledge of the city in my head. I’m a hustler of a sort. But, I am willing to help all of you. In exchange for something. Fifty dollars.”

“That’s not-!” before she could continue, they all watched as Ed dug out a crinkled wad of the twenties and handed it to the man.

Zuri angrily puffed out her cheeks before exhaling, “I guess it’s as good of a lead as any.”

The man nodded and gave Ed a smile, “See, this strange gingery young man is a regular patron of the local arts.”

In a moment, they all watched as the alley was slowly torn apart like someone had run a knife through its fabric. Layers of brick and asphalt twisting only to come undone as they sank lower into the different levels of the city. At the moment, the man seemed bigger than life. His face seemed to shift and twist with the landscape of the city. With no time, the man was gone and they were all together in some back part of a very old subway station. ‘

They all wisely chose to not acknowledge it. 

The station was oddly clean and smelled mostly like a disinfectant cleaner. Like a hospital or a super high-end restaurant. That was the most striking thing. Another thing was how the cleanroom clashed with the long, driftwood picnic tables and the stage at the head of the room, all lit up with floodlights. Phineas went over to fiddle with one of the lights, finding ways to make it brighter.

Zuri was unconcerned with why the room looked so immaculate. It was just an awful background to her. Something that would easily be ignored. She went over to one of the tables and while crawling on her hands and knees, desperate for any sign of her brother she came across something intriguing. A dark pink plastic tub. She sat up on the floor and pulled it out, quickly finding that it was full of wallets. This was a good in. She dug around, knowing that she’d know it first by its texture alone. Cold metal touched against her fingertips and she seized it. It was a blue metal wallet. A year into owning it, Luke had filed off the logo’s paint and replaced it with the words, ‘Bad Mother-Fucker’. Written using a yellow sharpie and a stencil. Inside she found his i.d and little else. 

The lights in the subway glowed unimaginably bright but were quickly followed by a sound like a whip crack of thunder as a bolt of magenta electricity shot across the room. Zuri looked up and she saw Connie Thompson standing in a doorway, her smile wide as she trained an arm gun on the group.

Chapter Text

Creepy Connie focused the front of the arm gun on the group initially, but her eyes soon went wandering, falling on Zuri. Who had moved from her spot at the driftwood picnic table to stand in front of her. The mad bitch then focused the gun on Zuri.

“Connie.”

“Zuri. How are things?”

“Where’s my brother?” She asked, but it came out more like a demand.

Connie smiled and twirled the arm gun around like a baton. She then makes a disgusting sound of satisfaction.  Zuri didn’t pick up on it, but to everyone else, it sounded identical to the sound Joseph made after he fed that U-Man to The Null. She then propped up the gun so that the hand’s palm was to Zuri and she shook it about in some kind of macabre approximation of a wave. Then she started to speak in a baritone. 

“Heya Zuri! It’s Lukey! I had the best time. Connie found me and other roaches wandering around the sewers! But it’s okay now. I’m clean and safe. Conne and the others ate me, now we get to be together forever!”

Zuri’s expression dropped and the last thing Connie Thomson saw was Zuri’s eyes as they turned white.  In a single moment, the ship whipped out of her and slammed into her body with a wet crunch, sandwiching Connie between it’s hull and the brick wall that she was in front of. It was back within her as soon as it appeared, pulling away to reveal the pulped corpse. Zuri approached and picked up the arm gun. 

Phineas had been curious about the make-up of the arm guns since the U-Man attack on the school. But, before he could follow that thought any further the room was flooded in on all sides by U-Men, all dressed like clean versions of Connie. Some were armed with crude weapons like the arm guns, but with different mutant parts. Most came armed with knives and they slashed about wildly. Ferb broke a fluorescent lightbulb and stabbed one in the face. 

The students and Zuri quickly fled the crowd and into the subway. The change in the air quality was starkly different from the abandoned turnaround. The air smelled of ozone and human shit.

Phineas shouted over the madness, “Everyone stay clear of the third rail! It might still be active!”

The U-Men filed out of the door like a bunch of ants. Some of which were clad in crude metal armour. This gave Zuri an idea. She fell to the back of the group and drew her aim on the crowd. The dipshit cultist at the front growled at her and she pulled the trigger.

The full body off Luke’s arm briefly glowed with orange power. Shooting off a great electric bolt right into the U-Men.  Sparks bounced in all directions and the long-neglected lights of the tunnel roared to life one final time before all popping and sending everyone into the darkness. 

The sudden noise, followed by the immediate darkness caused Ed to snap into focus. He grabbed the two nearest people and threw him under his arms like luggage before taking off at a breakneck speed down the corridor. Those two just so happened to be Goo and Ferb, neither of whom were super enthused about being picked up by a boy who smelled like sweat and rancid tacos, but they were hardly in a position to argue. They could hear the U-Men behind them. Their voices echoing, hiding how close they were. 

“ We’re going to rip you apart. I’m going to eat your goddamn lungs! ” 

They kept running even when they felt their throats get raw. There was...as cliche as it sounds a light at the end of the tunnel. They assumed, whatever it far better than what laid behind them. As they neared they found that what they saw was not the bright light of day, but the barely visible glow of lanterns outside of threadbare tents. Out from one of the tents stepped a figure. A pale, almost iridescent figure whose human eyes were seemingly replaced with a set of compound eyes like a fly. They didn’t speak, but the kids heard a voice that echoed from their minds.

“Get over here!”

Without another thought, they ran by the figure’s side. They all watched in mute horror as the remaining U-Men ran right past them in the dark. Up close, they could see that the figure’s eyes weren’t quite like a fly’s. They were compound eyes, for sure, but each individual eye was human, rather than the solid colour of a fly’s. The figure then spoke properly, once they were sure that they were all safe and alone.

“You are not of us. Mutants, yes, but Morlocks, no. Why are you in the underground?”

Zuri punched the figure in the chest, but they seemed unphased. “My brother got lost down here looking for you! But he found them. Where the fuck were you?”

The figure blinked all of its eyes slowly. They rested a hand on Zuri’s shoulder. “Tell me about your brother, girl.”

In an instant. Zuri’s eyes went blank. The figure’s neck and eyes started to light up. Each eye glowing a brilliant white as the making of an insect carapace on their neck started to glow. Zuri started weeping. In an instant, all of her memories of Luke were dragged to the forefront of her mind. It was as though she was locked in a beautiful dream.  Everything from her earliest memories to the night Luke vanished were in front of her. She felt an intense weight that had built up in her chest shift and move between her and this strange mutant like a bridge.

“What is she doing to her?”Asked Goo as she strode over to break the connection.

A girl covered neck to toe in bugs gave her a harsh hiss, “Conscious is a they. If you break their connection now, you can risk shattering your friend’s emotions, permanently.” 

“Oh,” Good gave her a very anxious wince, “Sorry, but what are they doing?”

“They’re establishing a psychic rapport, they’re helping her shoulder whatever’s happened to her...I assume it has something to do with that arm she has.”

The glow vanished from Conscious and they were all left in the dark again. Zuri’s eyes were still wet with tears, “Thank you.”

Conscious nodded.

“I’m going to wipe those flatscans off the face of the Earth,” she said. She didn’t say it with anger or the sadness that consumed her in her mind. Zuri Ross said it like she was talking about taking out the trash.

Before long the group found their way to the surface. Zuri formed the ship and they flew back to the school. It was a deeply uncomfortable silence. Ed had once again spread himself on the floor like a starfish during the flight, but nobody said anything. Phineas and Ferb looked out over the city and wondered about their place in the city and the larger world. Goo could only focus on Zuri and try to piece together how she was. By the time they arrived at the school, the sun had already started to rise. An intense whistle like that of an ancient steam engine echoed from the centre of their minds and died, quickly getting replaced by the psychic wail of Christina Ross. Evidently, she had read her daughter’s mind.

Chapter Text

The idea was simple enough: A community garden. 

The Jean Grey School's quad had become littered with rows of crops floating in a  hydroponic gel that was stuck into neat little rectangular boxes that ran along the yard. Botanicals maintained the plants. Within a handful of hours, people like Savannah Shane or Jessica Lovejoy could make plants reach their full maturity in what should have taken months. While plasticines worked to erect bio-plastic domes around them. It caused the quad to look as though it was being cleaned up by harsh government workers. 

 "It will start in Manhattan," spoke Phineas to a group of residential students as he stood above them on a literal soapbox. "But, soon nobody in the five boroughs will have to go hungry. "

  In the main section of the building that led out to the quad, Joseph and a few others had started a processing line. Veggies were carefully sorted, cleaned, then cut up and put on bread before being bagged. Of course, he and Rogers had been in charge of quality control. Any sandwich that was found lacking was immediately fed to The Null. While Joseph was far from a vegetarian, any food was welcome. 

Nobody had considered asking Headmistress Roberts what she thought of the whole affair. She walked in with a paper bag that had the face of Jean Grey herself stencilled in on it like a figurehead from a piece of propaganda. 

"Norville, can either you or Mister Gribble explain what this is?"

Joseph answered quickly before the granola authority figure could, "A paper bag with a babe on it?"

"Shush. Babs, Look. Don't freak out." Said Rogers as he tried to swat away Joseph. 

"That's not a good way to lead."

"Alright, alright. Look. The boys were talking with me and some of the students and we decided to start a community garden."

"The boys. You mean Phineas and Ferb. they're behind all of this?"

"Yeah...well mostly, again community garden."

"Norville, this isn't the sixties. I can't have a bunch of students farming in the middle of Manhattan. It's not a great look."

"Yeah, the other cults will make fun of us," Sniped Joseph.

"We are not a cult. I have a headache. Joseph, your father called he's going to be showing up some time for a 'wellness check'. I'm going to go talk with the boys."

She walked out and into the crowd where she found Phineas and Ferb hunkered over a tomato plant, dressed in overalls and fun straw hats. The very spitting, cartoon image of farmers.

"What's going on here?"

They turned up to face her. 

"Hi-yah miss Roberts, what can we do ya for?"

"What are you boys up to?"

"We've had a moment to reflect on the nature of mutantion, and I've concluded that we must ease the suffering of as many people as possible. And why not use it as a good form of self-promotion?"

She sighed, "I can see you're both being very altruistic, but no amount of sandwiches is going to endear humanity to us."

"Frankly, you sound quite cynical."

"I'm sixty-four, I can afford to be cynical and no matter what happens in my movies, I'm not easily swayed by musical numbers."

The boys' heads briefly slumped, as though they were about to do that exact thing only to then raise them suddenly.

"Still," said Phineas. "I think the idea has the potential to help a lot of people."

"Or put a target on our backs," she replied.

"Mutancy can't just be fighting nightmare robots and cults. Most of us don't really have combat based abilities, so why not use what we have to help the world on a smaller level?"

She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed, "Okay...Fine. Whatever. Let's call this a science class assignment. But I expect everything to be kept clean, young man."

"Already ahead of you, Miss Roberts. Ferb?"

His vertette brother nodded and walked over to a leather backpack, pulling out a large remote that looked like the kind hobbyist used to pilot model airplanes. but, Ferb was not controlling a little airplane or a drone. 

A horrible sound like someone walking in muddy boots started to quickly sound down an aisle between corn rows.  The shape came into view and stopped at Headmistress Robert's feet. It looked like a mostly formless mass of strawberry vanilla flesh. A partially solid puddle of awful which made cruel gurgling sounds that passed along the spectrum from croaking to metal grinding. She scowled at the awful thing as her eyes passed from it to the boys,
"Whuh-what the hell is that?"

"It's the mass. It cleans," Said Phineas with a smile. Like he wasn't talking about a PG Cronenberg horror. 

"Why not just use a  vacuum?"

"I mean we already had it, so why not use it? We removed the teeth."

"WHY DID IT HAVE TEETH!?"

Ferb spoke, "We thought that putting teeth all over The Mass would give it character.

Then Phineas spoke, "We cut them off after it made Mindy Smith vomit."

"That's...That's great boys. I'm going to put as much distance between myself and that...thing as possible."

As she walked up, Goo started to enter the scene. She was not put off by The Mass. Not even as it schplorped past her to clean something.  She instead chose to strike dramatic poses while sighing loudly. A behaviour that quickly brought to mind a cat.
Phineas bit the bullet and asked, "Hey buddy, what's the matter?"

Goo sauntered over to them, "I've been in a weird funk since the sewers."

"I mean...yeah, that will happen."

"It's Zuri, I can't stop thinking about her and I want to call her and chat with her. But, it's not exactly good form to bother a lady while she's mourning her brother, is it? is that messed up? Or would it be like...chivalrous? Give her a shoulder to cry on."

"That and she kind of killed eight people that night," said Phineas.
"And that one nazi looking girl, " chimed in Ferb.

"They were cannibals," said Goo.

"Still people. I mean. I've been thinking about that one thing she said about wanting to wipe them out? Does that mean we could reach a point where we just dehumanize anyone who isn't a mutant?" asked Phineas. "If we start othering them as they do us, are we any better?"

Ed emerged from a hiding spot amongst the corn, "I bit a cop once. Took the whole hand."

Phineas clicked his tongue and Ferb ground the toe of his shoe into the dirt. 

"Every time I hear about your life the more I think you're great, Ed," said Goo.

"Thank you," He did a small bow before procuring a thermos from some inner pocket of his trenchcoat. When he opened it, the steam smelled like pot roast.

"My point is, " went Phineas. "The moment we stop viewing ourselves as human, we could start viewing them as cattle. I mean, what else is the point of the community farm but to reconnect with humanity?"

"I thought it was a smokescreen to hide that Savannah Shane was growing weed," Said Ed, a thin line of thick brown liquid dripping off his upper lip. 

"Do what now?"

"You know, Savannah. Around my height? hair like this?" the older boy gestured around his head with his hands to indicate some manner of hairstyle in the poorest way imaginable.

"Where is she? We have to put this down immediately."
Ed gestured in a general direction towards a big white plastic pod. The group went over to the pod and they found her inside, on her knees as she carefully trimmed the worn leaves off of a very obvious pot plant while beside her a bald girl stood and was nodding her head along to the music within before they entered.

"Savannah, what's going on here?" said Phineas, trying and failing to do his best impression of someone in a place of authority.

Savannah's expression dropped and she rose to her feet, quickly turning to face the bald girl, "I thought you said nobody could see it."

The girl took out an earbud, "I said, nobody can see it unless they're looking for it."

Savannah growled and focused her attention on Phineas. "Fucking delightful. What do you want?"

"What do you mean, 'what do I want?' I want you to not jeopardize the entire operation with a pot farm. For god's sake."

"Don't worry your pretty little Dorito head, Flynn. I'll cut you in on this if you keep quiet."

"I don't want money. I want this shut down before you mess this up for everyone."

She laughed a bit at this. "Look, Phineas. I like you. you've got this weird wide-eyed idealism thing locked down. but if you step in my way I will snap your body like a wet towel."

Ed stood by a bit closer to Phineas.

"Don't act tough Ed, you fucking narc. I'm omega level."

"That doesn't even mean anything. you're an omega level botanical.  you're hardly a threat," Said Ferb.

"And what do you do exactly, Limey?"

Ferb showed her exactly what he does. He showed her by immediately setting her jacket on fire.

Vines rapidly shot from her pockets and slammed into Ferb, knocking him back and out of the plastic bubble, like a ragdoll.  Goo ran off to check on him while Ed and Phineas tried to rush her. 

Her friend crouched down and started to crawl out, "Fuck this, you're on your own, Savannah."

"You remember that asshole!" She shouted back long, gnarled vines slammed the two of them through the plastic and out of the bubble, but she was far from finished.

Up in her classroom, Emma Tutweiller was supremely drunk as she overlooked the scene. She considered going down and stopping it, but a nap in her comfy chair felt much better.

Savannah started to wrap Phineas in layer after layer of vines even as tiny robots scurried out of his pockets to cut away at the plant matter. Ed had passed out while in the thrall of another set. A sphere of perfect nothing appeared from a pinprick in the air and quickly singed away the vines like it was nothing. She spotted Joseph standing on one of the gardening plots victoriously pumping his fists in the air and in response she ran over and gave him a right hook to the jaw. 

Phineas ran over and tried to Grapple with her, but as he tried pulling on her hair, large thorns began to form, cutting up his hands and face.

Ferb emerged from the corn, his face bloody and eyes saucer wide as he held a controller in his hands. The Mass grabbed onto her leg, she toppled and brought herself and Phineas crashing to the dirt.

"THIS IS THE END! KILL ME!" she screamed.

Chapter Text

The sun in the mid-afternoon sky made the city beneath it smell like cooked trash. It was the weekend and most of the summer school students were either in town or lounging about in their dorms, rather than taking the risk of getting cut down by the cruel beams of the sun. 

The true exception was Goo. She was seated beneath the shade of a tree at the dead centre of the quad, surrounded on all sides by towering crops. She cast her eyes up to the clear blue sky and wore an uncharacteristic bored look. She was hoping she could catch a glimpse of Zuri in her ship or at the very least spot Spider-Man getting his ass kicked. She supposed that Zuri likely wouldn't be out, anyways. She hoped she was doing alright, for the good it did her.  

The world fell away. Now, without warning she found the sun to be eclipsed by a strange shape. It was a mansion, decked out in chipped orange paint that revealed a rotten, grey body beneath.  The house shouldn't have been there. Granted, a house should not float anywhere, that's some sort of strange heresy. But, in the moment, the house and it's position in the sky was not seen as odd by her. She only struggled with trying to figure out why it was so familiar. 

Her body floated up to the chipped manor, with it's elegant towers and balconies. Shapes moved among the tinted white windows, but nothing she could make out. Surrounding the house were a handful of people whose faces looked familiar to her, but she could not place them. They floated, unmoving just beside the stairs. A square-headed boy who should have been her age and another boy with a bald head who should have been older. 

Slowly her body descended to the undercage of the house, where she saw a mass of exposed metal pipes that were frozen mid leak. But, to one of those pipes was attached a coarse rope. Her eyes followed it down and she was level with a cage. A cage with bars that bent and twisted inwards and outwards at odd angles, but kept it's prisoner held in place. The prisoner was a thin stick creature whose body looked to be made of wood. It looked at her with eyes that were drawn into place in blue crayon. It's lips curled back, revealing meaty gums with glass shards that she supposed acted like teeth. 

Her first action was to try to shoot it. She raised her fingers to the creature and pulled the hypothetical trigger. But, the thing in the cage did not vanish as all her creations did. 
The thing in the cage hissed, "I'm not your puppet to break, Goo Noceda.  I am more. So much more. I am the cruel hand who will master reality. Just as you master it."
Before Goo could say anything in response she felt herself suddenly get pulled down, as though she had weights attached to her feet. She descended. Going faster and steadily faster as she slammed down into the earth. 

Her eyes shot open and she leapt up suddenly to the very apparent shock of the various Florakinetics that were wandering about the garden.

Chapter Text

It doesn’t rain in New York anymore. The sky hasn’t seen storm clouds in years. There is only the oppressive heat and the thick swaths of pollution.

The ship floated across the ruined skyline, across seas of UFOs, forever frozen in the middle of combat. Queens had been reduced to a flattened expanse of polished marble. 

Then there was Manhattan.  Where the majority of the island had once been was now a perfectly smooth crater. It was as though god himself had leaned down and taken a bite out of the city.  

The Ship came to a stop at the edge, where the twisted city’s remains met the lip of the crater. They stopped at the small office building that had once been the Jean Grey School, now a ruined shell. Hollowed out by scavengers and wanderers.

The fleshy shell of the ship opened up and it’s pilot and passenger exited. Zuri Ross and her should have been cousin, Sarah stepped onto the ruined Lexington Avenue. Zuri shot Sarah a look and they continued down the street together wordlessly with Sarah backing her from behind. She pulled her baseball cap low to hide her eyes from god.

Eventually, they reached a door in an abandoned alleyway, it was carefully disguised as a trash can and before long they started down it’s ladder and into the lab of The Phinerb.

The room itself was an immaculate collection of Frankensteined computers and other patchwork technology. The lab’s master was hunched over a computer, their many limbs clacking away at the keys absentmindedly. 

“You were not followed by The House, yes?” it said.

Zuri made a dismissive sound, “Of course not, I’m not even sure she can perceive the ship.”

“Good, good.”

“Want to tell us why you asked us to come here, you miserable fucking monster?” blurted Sarah.

“That was rude. But, all in good time. I have others who will be joining us. Some, not of the homo-superior persuasion,” It said. It's four sets of eyes narrowed on Sarah. 

As though it was on cue, a door appeared beside The Phinerb. Unfolding out of nothing and opened up with a hollow, unnatural creek. Out from it stepped a figure wrapped in the patchwork remains of the Cape of Mercury and brandishing an owl-headed staff. They were known to the people of the waste world as The Weird. Beside her was a cruel amalgamation of robot and square-headed teenage fuck wit. He was called by many, Kid Sentinel, but that was hardly what young Thomas Turnbull would have liked. He focused a mechanical eye on Sarah and in an instant a long metal arm sprung from his left side and grabbed her by the throat, training a microscopic laser on her trachea. She dug her fingers into the appendage, leaving indentations in the titanium. 

“You little sack of shit, this monster tried to bushwack me in New Mexico last year, now you bring him here?”

“Believe you me, gene-trash. I’m not thrilled about seeing you either. I’d prefer to have your head mounted on my wall,” said Kid Sentinel. 

“Will you both stop!” boomed the voice of The Weird, echoing around their minds as well as their ears. The voice of a god.

In an instant, they released their grip over one another. 

“If this was a fair fight, I could have had your head off before you could blink,” said Sarah. 

“Hmmm.”

“You both heard The Weird,” said the Phinerb, it’s voice now unsettlingly English, “The sooner you two stop, the better.”

“Thank you,” Said The Weird with a dramatic bow.

“Let’s cut to the chase, Barnum,” said Sarah, who was rubbing her neck. “Why did you ask us all here?”

“We’re going to save the world.”

Chapter Text

The collected group all sat and stared at The Phinerb for a moment, allowing what they had just said to really sink in.

“How exactly do you expect us to do that, fathead?” asked Sarah.

There was a mild electric buzz and Kid Sentinel spoke, “I agree with her, none of us are exactly powerful enough to take on The House, even as a group it would tear us apart.”

The Phinerb silenced the two of them by cracking their knuckles, causing them to cringe in response.

“If you will relax and listen, we have an idea.”

The Weird joined by the Phinerb’s side and cleared her throat, “Since I came back to Earth, I’ve discovered certain magical practices and people who could be of use to us. Chronomancy is an interesting one.”

“Like time travel?” asked Zuri.

“Yes. It’s that exactly, I speculate that if we were to acquire someone like Illyana Rasputin we could possibly journey back in time and stop The House at its inception.”

“The only issue with that is that Magik died during the Westchester War, blown away along with the rest of the X-Men,” Said Zuri.

“I didn’t say we needed her alive. I want her bones.”

“Well…Shit. I would have suggested we just use the Danville time machine, but…y’know. Crater.” Said Sarah with a mild flourish of her hands.

“Yes, thank you for that reminder, Sarah. I sure do appreciate you reminding me of that horrible reality.”

“Not a problem at all, dipshit. So, where are these bones? I’m not exactly up for grave robbing upstate.”

“That’s the fun thing,” said The Weird, a smile stretching across her face. “They’re being held by a cult in Alabama…A cult in what  used to be  Alabama.”

Before everything fell apart, Auburn used to be a city. Not a great city. But not necessarily a bad one either. It was the home of famed comedian, Rivers Langely. It used to be called The Loveliest Village On The Plains. Now it was an island. An island city wreathed in kudzu. Zuri’s ship and the collected group that was The Blank Generation exited into a small clearing in the woods just outside of town.

“Okay,” said The Phinerb, “our target is simple, Weird says the cult is operating out of Auburn University’s old radio station, so that should be a good place to start.”

“Why don’t we just have weird make a door into it?”

“Do you have extra Titan’s Blood on you to compensate for it, Sarah?”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Exactly. But don’t fret, you have a big role to play in this mad scene.”

The group walked in silence for an hour. As they neared the city, they started to near the border of Auburn University. And It’s accompanying radio tower that played out its mad message for all within its signal to hear. Further past it, they could see the silhouette of the mechanical horror known only as The Grandpatron. The grass outside was littered with ancient McDonald’s trash and pornographic magazines.

“We’re going to get murdered by hill people,” lamented Zuri.

“Who’s we, mutie? They’ll worship me as a god. Then I will murder them for being perversions of humanity,” boasted Kid Sentinel.

“Can you not be a monstrous little bastard for five seconds?” asked The Weird.

“I’m perfect.”

The Church was made from the remains of the radio station, in addition to a bunch of hastily welded trash. I mean, use what you have, right?

Sarah started to light a cigarette. Normally, she didn’t smoke, but she started to only blow smoke in The Phinerb’s face, “So, what’s the plan here, boss?”

The Phinerb scowled at her, “Now’s where you come in. How bulletproof are you?”

Mister Goodnight  was  the man of the hour. He  was  the tower of power. He  was  too sweet to be sour. His body  is  made of twisted steel. But since the world got wrecked, he no longer had supersonic sex appeal. The Terrigen Mist crisis in Missouri had warped his body into a mess of metal skin and many mouths that all spoke different things at once. Not unlike his fashion icon, Elvis. He had drifted to the south and became the head bitch of a cult in Rivers Langely’s old hometown.

His twisted form was wrapped around a great pole in the centre of his church as he started to growl about the vulgar equations that would lead his cult to salvation. What he didn’t count on was a muscle-bound woman breaking through a wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man and ripping apart his foul congregation. It didn’t take long. She just walked around and started snapping necks. After fifteen minutes of watching helplessly as Sarah lead a one-woman massacre on his cult, she focused her attention on him. Smacking him around like he was a helpless child.

After coughing up a handful of incisors he began to speak using his original mouth, “Merciful Christ, honey. Don’t hit me no more.”

“Where are the bones, shithead?”

She walked away from him and picked up a brick from her entrance. She then used it to brush one of his teeth.

“What fucking bones?!”

The rest of the Blank Generation entered, The Phinerb kneeled down next to Mister Goodnight, grabbing his face in one of their hands, “You better start giving her some answers, friend. Bear in mind, this is her with us holding her back.”

Mister Goodnight’s mouth blood was flowing hard out of his mouth, “You’re a fucking demon.”

He vomited up the bones of Magik, all gilded like she was a saint.

None of them wanted to touch them, so they drew straws for who would have to carry them. Kid Sentinel lost. They were all once again mostly silent as they flew back to Manhattan. But, as they were over Virginia, Zuri spoke.

“You two have gotten more ruthless since getting fused together,” she said to the Phinerb.

“We don’t know what you mean,” they said in response.

“You sat and watched Sarah completely ruin that man and your reaction was to threaten him further.”

“We needed the bones, Zuri. It was that or we went without.”

“We need them, yeah. But what’s the plan after that? What will you do if we manage to go back in time? Do you plan on killing her?”

The Phinerb paused, “No. We’ll make Sarah kill her.”

“Make? I’ll do that anyway, with or without you. Bitch killed Ed and Jimmy so I’m taking her head.”

“Could you not call her a bitch, Sarah?” said Zuri, venom dripping off her voice.

“I’m sorry that your ex is a murderous nightmare person, but she’s got to die, Zuri.”

“She doesn’t necessarily have to die, Sarah. We just have to keep her from becoming The House.”

“Yeah, and killing her will make that just as easy.”

“I’m up for cutting up a mutant monster,” said Kid Sentinel, but nobody could give a fuck about his opinion.

“Weird, she’s your cousin, what do you have to say about all this?” asked Zuri

“I…We were never really that close, my mom hated her brother, it was a whole thing. We met maybe twice. I guess we’ll have to figure it out once we get there.”

They touched down in Manhattan and made their way into the lab. After spraying off the bones with a hose. Before long they were in a circle underground as they surrounded the bones.

“So, how do we use these to go back in time?” asked Zuri.

“We have to ask her,” said The Weird. “Everyone join hands.”

They all did as she said. Sarah growled because she was standing next to Kid Sentinel and had to hold his hand, meanwhile Kid Sentinel had to hold hands with both her and The Phinerb, so he was doubly uncomfortable in his own, weirdly bigoted way. Meanwhile, The Phinerb was just fine because the hand that Kid Sentinel held was one of their nerveless hands. The Weird only broke the circle to open a glass bottle and dip her fingers into its thick, red contents. With the blood, she drew a glyph on her face. Her brown eyes began to slowly glow golden as her voice began to chant out an old poem in a language none of them knew.

A burst of awful energy and the glowing spectral form of Illyana Rasputin herself was at the centre of the group.

“What the fuck is this, a slumber party? Who are you people and why am I back?”

“Miss Rasputin, we require your help,” said The Weird.

“Everyone and their mother need my help, what the fuck makes you special. Dipshits. You’re all terrible dipshits.”

“Lord of Limbo, Darkchyld. We seek your aid to fix a broken world,” said The Weird, with an overly dramatic, Doctor Strange-esque accent.

“And how do you expect me to do that? I’m a ghost.”

“You can possess me, and we can do a time travel ritual.”

If she could manipulate her skeleton, Illyana’s jaw would have been agape, “You’re fucking crazy. I’m into this plan. Alright, kid. For a proper possession, I will need you to wear my bones.”

Kid Sentinel gave the ghost and weird a disgusted look, “You two are a pair of fucking perverts. Why aren’t you all bothered by this?”

“I mean,” said Sarah. “As long as it’s between two consenting adults it’s cool, right?”

They all fell silent as The Weird picked up Illyana’s ribcage, then watched aghast pulled and stretched it out to fit it over her wizardly robes.

“This is perverse, you two are fucked up,” said Kid Sentinel.

“This isn’t perverse,” said The Weird. “This is all a means to an end.”

“It’s still fucked up.”

She crowned herself with Illyana’s skull and her body was bathed in white and gold light, then the voice of Magik spoke using The Weird, “Alright…I…we…I am in synchronicity with Miss Noceda.”

Then the voice shifted to a mix of The Weird and Illyana’s “Her…it’s strange to be like this again. I think. I think I want to vomit.”

Then the voice drifted back to Luz’s own. “We have to focus.”

“Yes,” said the Phinerb. “Let’s please focus. Weird…Magik? Both of you should take the lead on this, we’re at a loss when it comes to magic.”

“Right,” said the united voices. “All of you release your hands, I have a grip on this plain while I’m possessing her body.”

She drew her soulsword out of nowhere, taking a moment to run her finger along its glowing, brilliant blade. She then dug the blade into the ground, drawing a large circle, followed by a curved arcane glyph.

“Everyone step into the circle and make it quick; The House has seen us, and it is on the move!”

Everyone shuffled into position all looking to The Weird-Magik hybrid as they started to chant loudly with hands pressed against the large floor glyph.

The House moved past the solid barricades and the walls of the lab. A great towering thing. A thing made of rotting wood and chipped orange paint. So small, but impossibly large at the same time. To The House, the Blank Generation was less than nothing.

“The circle will protect you; they cannot enter but you can exit. Don’t listen to what it says!” screamed the voice of Illyana.

The door to The House opened and hell flooded out and surrounded the circle. 

The Phinerb watched as things that looked like their parents and Candace stared at them, hands pressed flat against the invisible surface of the dome.

“Boys,” said the thing that looked like their mother. “We need you to come home. We have everyone with us. Baljeet, Isabella, even Buford. They’re all in The House with us. So, come home.”

They started to reach out, tempted by the thing’s words. But they watched as a beam of bright blue light shot past them and blasted apart their not-mom's head into a pile of bright yellow and orange bile.

“Oh my fucking god,” The Phinerb collapsed on their hands and knees and started to vomit.

“Quit crying, you’ll fuck up the whole operation,” said Kid Sentinel, his robot arm gun still smoking.

On the opposite side of the circle, Zuri faced down The House’s approximation of Goo. She…It. It looked exactly how Zuri remembered her. All dressed to the nines in bedazzled yellow cowboy boots and a rainbow fringe leather jacket.

“Hey, Zuri.” It spoke, sounding exactly like Goo, but lacking all the energy and endless enthusiasm of her voice.

“You aren’t her. I know you aren’t,” she said indignantly. “You can’t fool me, so fuck off.”

“That’s cruel, Zuri. I just want you to come home. They’re all just a handful of steps away, inside The House. All of us. Me, Ravi. We even have Luke. We found him and made him all better. You can see him if you’d only just come home.”

“Fuck you.”

“Bitch knows you too well,” said Sarah, as she stood, facing a perfect approximation of her brother, Ed.

“Come home, baby sister. We miss you.” He said, sounding nothing like Ed.

“All of you stay focused! Don’t…” The voice of The Weird stopped as she faced down her own demon.

The crowd was partially parted as she was faced with a girl. A girl who had a pair of pointed ears and hair that was a messy nest of blue. As though to mirror her, the magical energy surrounding her began to warp her ears to match those of Not-Amity. She knew it wasn’t her. That was a grotesque impossibility. But all it takes is for a small bit of doubt to creep in. A small bit of doubt for the barrier to shatter.

The crowd of strangers rushed the glyph, going after Kid Sentinel first and ripping into him. The Phinerb was followed, still horror-stricken even as the ghoulish versions of their childhood friends tore into their body. A great flash of light and they were gone. Back to the past.

Chapter Text

A mad bastard rolled down the rain-slicked street in his Rascal, firing off a machine gun while chittering away to himself. His ears were blown out by the endless symphony of gunfire. His name was Bob, and he fancied himself to be the King Bitch at Wendy’s. That was until they fired his ass for yelling racial slurs at customers. The very night after that he blew the last bit of his cash on trucker speed and bullets. After browsing incel Reddit he decided that he wasn’t the problem, it was women who were the problem. Then he took his stupid, bigoted rage to the streets.  
His violence was very short-lived as a shape stalked in from the darkness. A twisted shape that was only just barely human. thunder crashed and suddenly, the shape of Luz Noceda, The Weird was illuminated for him to see. The magic and the possession of Illyana Rasputin had warped her, leaving her with a pair of pointed ears and a set of lopsided demon horns. Personally, it didn’t bother her because she thought the result made her look a bit like a dragon.  

“I remember reading about you in an old newspaper after I got back. The King Bob massacre, right? You think you’re a king, bob?” 

She drew a quick glyph on her palm and grabbed the barrel of his machine gun, melting the metal with unnatural heat and bending it up. Bob was so goddamn offended by this. He was salivating as he ranted like a rabid dog, “Fucking beta cuck bitch fucker!” 

The Weird smacked a sticky note onto his mouth and pressed her thumb to it. In an instant, the sigil burned away along with the paper, disappearing and taking King Bob’s mouth with it. 
 
“There, that’s a bit better now. I don’t enjoy that kind of talk, as you might imagine. I especially won’t enjoy hearing it while I do what’s to come next. If it’s worth anything, I’m only doing this next part out of necessity. But then again. I also don’t care if my words are worth anything to a mind like yours.”  
 
She drew out a small blade and cut his jugular vein.  
 
 
Elsewhere in the city, a handful of the Jean Grey School’s summer school students were gathered on the quad, because they were the sorts of people that enjoyed rainy days. Phineas was working with Ferb on some sort of device while Ed was showing Goo and Joseph that he could fit his entire fist in his mouth. On any other day, Goo would have been as enraptured with the disturbing act as Joseph was, but instead, she just yawned.  
 
“What’s eating you?” asked Joseph.  
 
“I haven’t been sleeping well. I think the psychic students have been trying to give me nightmares,” she said, lacking her usual machine-gun cadence. 
 
“Do you want me to send Ed around them to scare them?”  
 
“Ed’s about as scary as a teddy bear.” 
 
Ed unhinged his jaw to release his vise grip on his fist, “I can be scary.” 
 
“As scary as a puppy dog.” 
 
“Have you considered taking melatonin? Ferb and I have been manufacturing it and putting it in the gardening food bags.” 
 
Before anyone could ask why there was a massive sound like a miniature bomb blast. They looked across the quad and saw a shape in the security guard, who they had all forgotten was even there.  
“I don’t care who you are, you aren’t coming into the school!” she shouted. Then the small bomb sound started again.  
 
The group, being curious came out and started to watch as Security Officer Fitzsimmons and a taller muscular woman in a pink tank top started slugging it out like a pair of titans. The woman had messy red hair and eyes that glowed orange with the promise of power. She delivered an uppercut to Fitzsimmons, but her gaze drifted, and she locked eyes with Ed. All the hardness and rage in her expression fell away and she smiled at him. 
 
“Hello big brother,” she said. But then her eyes fell on Goo and all the violence returned and she pushed aside Fitzsimmons to grab at the girl.  
 
She lunged and the group moved back, she hammered her fist into the ground, creating a miniature crater in the radius around her fist. Ed ran over to her and got between the woman and his friends. 
“Sarah? What’s going on? Why are you so old?” 
“I’m 25. Ed, let me past. Now,” she said through gritted, yellowed teeth.  
 
“Sarah,” he said, using a small bit of older sibling authority, despite who they are and despite the circumstances. 
 
“Okay. I’m from the future. Like in ‘Robot Rebel Ranch’. You’re dead. I need you to let me go, so I can rip apart that little bitch before she can kill you.” 
 
“Who’s going to kill me?” 
 
“Goo Baptista.”  
 
The students fled for the main building while Ed talked to his older sister. Goo was still shaking from coming so close to getting crushed and the rest were just kind of stuck in a state of mute horror. Except for Ferb, who simply didn’t speak because he didn’t have anything to say about the situation before them. To their further shock, Zuri’s ship landed beside them as they made for the door. 
 
“Oh, what now?” asked Phineas as he panted. 
 
Out from the ship stepped an older Zuri Ross. She cast her eyes over to the situation that was unfolding with Ed and his older-little sister, “Shit. Okay, all of you inside.” 
 
“Yeah, we kind of thought of that,” said Joseph. “Who’s to say you won’t try to kill us like the scary ginger.” 
 
“Don’t start with me, Gribble. I’ll kick your ass,” she said. She focused her attention next on Goo. “Hey Goo, are you hurt?” 
 
Goo shook her head. 
 
“Fantastic. Everyone inside, now.” 
 
The group with Pilot Zuri in company shuffled into the skyscraper and locked the door behind them. Ed was relatively durable and seemed to have whatever the fuck was happening handled. 
 
Once safe and secure Phineas asked Pilot Zuri, “What’s going on here?” 
 
“There’s a lot to explain. Do you want me to start with the apocalypse or with the time travel blood ritual?” 
 
“I…I guess the apocalypse? Or is it Apocalypse like the man?” 
 
“An apocalypse. Not, like Apocalypse the guy,” She pointed two finger guns at Goo. “Something happened to you, and you turned evil and created a nightmare house that kills things.” 
 
She retrained her fingers on both Phineas and Ferb, “To create the perfect thinking machine, Mister Sinister fused you two together.” 
 
Next, her attention was on Joseph, “You and Ed were killed trying to kill Goo. So, we travelled back to this year to stop you from becoming The House and prevent the apocalypse.” 
 
Phineas and Ferb kind of shuffled away from each other, Joseph looked a little annoyed knowing that he got killed by Goo. Goo, meanwhile, looked absolutely horrified. 
 
“I don’t understand, what happened to make me do that?” she asked, her voice regaining her rapid-fire cadence. 
 
“Yeah,” said Joseph. “She dresses like a gay pride parade and has the personality of mountain dew and skittles. How is she even a little evil?” 
 
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you. It’s a whole mess. I wasn’t even in New York at the time. One day, you just became or went into or summoned this floating mansion and started using it to kill things without any reason.” 
 
Goo fell silent and started to pull a small sketchbook out of her bag. Her pen moved with the speed of her thoughts. Before long she presented the group with a drawing of the floating mansion from her dreams, along with the images of the boys that floated alongside it. She neglected to draw the horror in the cage that hung beneath the house.  
 
“Is this the house?” she asked. 
 
Zuri studied the sketch closely. “Almost exactly. Where did you see it?” 
 
“I’ve been dreaming about it for the past few days. I…I feel like I’ve seen it somewhere, I just don’t know where.” 
 
Her fingers traced along with the near-perfect sketches of the boys, “And these?” 
 
“I don’t know either. In my dream they’re...” She stopped herself, shutting down that part of her mind. “No. I won’t say anymore. I don’t want to make them real.” 
 
The door was forced off of it’s hinges with a loud bang! Sarah shuffled in, with her older brother Ed trailing sadly behind her, his eyes focused on the floor.   
 
“Ross, what are you doing? Just step away and we can prevent everything so quickly,” She started to get closer to them, but she was quickly stopped by Ed’s hand. She turned and fixed him with a stern look, but in his other hand, he held Goo’s sketchbook. His fingers rested on the sketch of the bald boy.   
 
“It’s Jonny,” said Ed. 
 
“It... certainly looks like him,” She shook her head and turned her attention back on Goo. “You, what’s this? Is this some kind of plan? Did you look him up just to fuck with me?” 
 
“I don’t even know who he is. Leave me alone.” 
 
“Bullshit. You know something, I can see the gears in your brain turning. You know more than you’re saying.” 
 
“No, I don’t. I don’t know who he is or why the house keeps appearing in my dreams. I’m confused and I'm trying to keep myself from getting murdered.” 
 
“You’re a snide little shit.” She rushed at Goo but without warning, Ed pushed her and Pilot Zuri’s ship knocked into her body, embedding her in the wall. 
 
Ed looked just as shocked as his sister as she struggled to get out of the concrete crater in the wall. “Oh my god...My mom is going to be so pissed with me.” 
 
Ignoring that, Phineas started in. “Ed. Who is Jonny?” 
 
“Jonny was a guy who used to live in the same cul-de-sac as us.” 
 
“What happened to him?” asked Goo. 
 
“I don’t know. One day he just disappeared.” 
 
Phineas and his brother exchanged a look and started to rummage around for notebooks, “Okay, so the facts are simple. Goo has been dreaming about a house. A house that in the future somehow terrorizes the world. In the same dream, there are two boys. One of whom was a real person that both Ed and his terrifying sister knew. That boy has vanished. But, what about the other one?” 
 
He gestured to the sketch of the square-headed boy. 
 
“We don’t know him. But, as far as we also know, Goo is only able to make people...After a fashion. Have you ever made a thing? Like a structure or an item?” 
 
Goo thought on that, “I don’t think so. But I also don’t have any memory of this Jonny kid, but I must have at some point to know what he looks like.” 
 
“Ed, what was Jonny like?” 
 
Ed twiddled his thumbs as he tried to conjure up a bunch of buried memories, “He was alone. We all knew him and talked to him, but he just walked around talking to a wooden board with a face on it.” 
“An imaginary friend,” offered Ferb. 
 
Phineas nodded, “It’s quite the connection. In a way, the things Goo makes are imaginary friends. So, is it possible that he was a mutant who could basically do what Goo can?” 
 
“But I would have remembered that. I would think. Wouldn’t something like a crazy kid talking to a board stick out in my memory?”  
 
“Clearly you do if you’re able to draw him and see him in your dreams. Maybe it’s not so much that you have no memory of him, but that the memory has been repressed or recontextualized. Like what people used to say about extreme trauma survivors.” 
 
“That’s insane. I don’t think I've been traumatized...I know I was traumatized recently, but besides that, I think I'm fine.” 
 
“Maybe that’s what’s triggered it. Dots are getting connected that were erased a long time ago because the new trauma is reminiscent of the old trauma.”  
 
“So how do we kill it?” 
 
“We either erase the memory wholly with a psychic or...” 
 
“Or what? I am sick of waiting all of this constant anticipation over what’s going to happen and what needs to happen is making me so tired.” 
 
“You can face the house and kill it from the inside,” Said Luz who stood at the door covered in blood and viscera.

Chapter Text

The sky was bleeding. High above the whole of Manhattan, at the eye of a swirling storm of pollution and sky blood was The House. Standing darker than black against the hellish sky. Below, on the Earth the summer school class stared at a young woman, now twisted, demonic in shape and covered in blood.  

Joseph’s eyes turned black before he could think about it. He wanted more than anything to banish the demonic figure of Luz Noceda to The Null, but Goo stepped up to her.  

“Joseph, stop,” She growled without turning her head. “You...Don’t I know you?”  

Luz smiled. It was not helpful or pleasant, but she did. “I think we met a few times before mom stopped speaking to your family. I’m Luz. I’m a witch...and now I think I'm something more. But, that’s beside the point. You're at the meeting of the goddess stage, now go up there and kill it.”  

Goo choked on the spit in her throat, “I don’t understand what you mean.”  

“Look, you don’t have to understand. Your mind dragged this horror into existence, and you are the only thing that can kill it.”  

“I can’t. I won’t. I can’t go in there, I’ll become the monster.”  

“Why the hell are we still letting her speak? She’s the fucking devil!” shouted Joseph. Turning almost everyone’s attention to him.  

“I’m not the devil, I've been messed up by powerful magick, but don’t focus on that. Focus on my words. You have to kill it, there’s no way around it. I looked into the blood and it showed me the two tracks. One, you become The House, the other you kill it.”  

“What will I find in the house?”  

“I don’t know. That’s for your eyes only. I could only see things I might live to see.”  

“That’s nonsense, we can’t let her go in there. At least not alone,” argued Phineas.  

“No, I... I think I see where she is coming from. My lost memories and the dreams are all connected to The House, I need to go in there to sort all of this out, or die trying. It’s a path that only I need to walk,” Goo turned on the heels of her cowboy boots and stared down Pilot Zuri. “Could you fly me up there?”  

Her face twisted as she considered it, “Yes. Whatever you need.”  

Together they ascended up into Hell. Silent figures floating up, past the pollution, past the horror clouds, and the blood from the sky. Up to the front porch of the house, now standing brilliant in its sheer size. The effect caused them to feel like sand on a beach. Or the tiny flakes of snow in a snow globe. Goo stepped out and onto the porch as soon as a door in Zuri’s ship opened up. The two exchanged a glance. Zuri smiled at her, the way you might smile at a dog before having them put to sleep. But Goo was steadfast, giving her a brave smile before walking into The House.  

Goo had never liked the word, foyer. Anytime she had ever heard it in her life she found it pretentious and unnecessary.  “Welcome to the foyer.” Jeez . She stepped into the house’s foyer. It was a tall room with an incredibly smooth floor that seemed to warp as she stepped. There was a long stairway that crept up, presumably to one of the many rooms inside of the house. As she stepped close a part of her mind started to burn and she walked faster to the stairs, finding that there was a door hidden by a panel on one of the steps.  That was it,  she thought as she pried it open and stepped down it’s latter and into an endless dark hall. She felt like a light. Her entire body felt as though it was light made person and so she illuminated the dark hall, showing that it was made of wood. A vast, solid woodgrain pattern that had been carved into faces and shapes. Inhuman, impossible faces, and shapes. Imaginary faces and shapes.  

She walked on until part of the wall started to move. A large, wilting shape emerged partially. The left side of it’s body was mostly consumed by the woodgrain. The right half that wasn’t was red and textured like the flesh of a rose petal. His long arm reached out for her, bulbed fingers scratching along the floor as he found her out of his reach.  

“ You trapped us here! ” He snarled, but soon his voice calmed. “ But it’s fine .  I am Sorry.  You need to come home  Goo. Come home and fix the mess you made when you abandoned us to the recess of your forgotten memories!”  

Goo stepped back, but kept away from the walls. “I...I don’t remember, I.”  

She did recognize the figure. The wilted monster that tried to pry his body free from the wall. Wilt.   

“I know you; I knew you. Wilt, tell me what happened.”  

The figure’s eyes were on long stalks above his mouth. They widened and shook with a curious sound, like a rattle.  It’s face was free from malice and the violence that it once had, “Goo, I...I’m sorry. We are trapped. The house was going to go and you and the boys tried to save it.”  

His teeth snapped and he snarled like a rabid dog,  “But you fucked it all up! You trapped Madam Foster’s dream in your little head and forgot us!”  

Once more, the look of rage was replaced with unknown sorrow. “I’m sorry, please believe me, I’m sorry. We were desperate and he said he would help us stay away from the void, but we were fools. Please, help me.”  

She leveled two fingers on Wilt’s head and in an instant, he was gone. She vanished him away. She sprinted down the hall and away from the faces of horror. But she steeled herself. For a moment, the smallest moment, she felt it. She could feel eyes on her as she moved. They were you. For the briefest second, she was happy, knowing that she was not alone. That you were joining her in this mad journey. But, just as soon as the feeling was there, it was gone. Leaving her with only a feeling of elation, that she couldn’t quite place.  

The hall faded from woodgrain and faces to a normal hallway of doors, kind of like a hospital.  She watched as boys who should have been her age walked from room to room. She froze, not wanting to bring The House’s wrath down upon her. As they were passing, one of the boys stopped. He was the bald boy, that Ed and Sarah had called Jonny. He looked surprised to see her, but his face wasn’t full of malice like Wilt’s was.  

“Wow...You’ve gotten older.”  

Goo was at a loss for words, she found it odd that Jonny...or the ghost of Jonny? Wasn't immediately attacking her, so she chose her words carefully. She awkwardly raised her hand and said, “Hi.”  

“I know, weird, isn’t it? Sorry... you don’t recognize us, do you?”  

“I know your name is Jonny and that’s about it.”  

“Well shoot,” he snapped his finger and ran a hand along his head, moving it along the stubble of what might have grown out to be a pretty decent afro.  

The other, square headed boy, continued to slowly move from room to room, unaware of Goo’s presence or the fact that Jonny was talking to her.  

“Can he see us?” she asked.  

“...not really. I don’t think. How much of it do you remember?”  

“Nothing, I only remember Wilt and know that somehow I ruined everything.”  

“Broad strokes. When Mac came to the Foster Home, he was here to drop off his imaginary friend. A fierce and really independent little guy named Bloo. That was his  gift.  We all had the same gift, mostly. We could make imaginary things real. I’ve thought a lot about this. As a kid, my mom might have called it a tulpa. A thoughtform. But, I wasn’t able to make more than one and even then, Plank wasn’t really physical. He made an independent, physical tulpa that could react with or without him. Now, being here has stolen his independence and thought.”  

“I’m sorry. I can get you two out of here, we can go to Manhattan and you two will be safe.”  

Jonny waved the suggestion away, “Not going to happen. Our bodies don’t really exist anymore. If anything, being here is the only thing keeping us like this. Besides, never liked cities anyway.”  

“Jonny, what did I do to make this all happen?”  

“It’s tough to say. It wasn’t you,” His face scrunched up. “It wasn’t  all  you. Think about it like this. I was a runaway form Georgia when I heard the call. Someone like us was dead, and we needed to save this place by imagining it back into existence. We failed and it got thrown into your head. Along with us.”  

“Oh my,” She rubbed her arms awkwardly. “You know that it’s evil, right? I have to destroy this place to save the world.”  

“Do what you have to, either way. I’m at peace.” He held out his hand, “I’m actually just grateful that I was able to talk to someone after all these years. Plank became part of the thing controlling this place and I can’t talk to Mac, so this was probably the nicest time I’ve ever had.”  

She shook his hand, “I agree, I'm sorry I still don’t remember everything, but I will remember you, Jonny.”  

He nodded and she passed him by. She almost bumped into Mac as he passed, his strange cyanotic form shambling from room to room.  

The hall ended in stairs and she ascended them, coming to a door that led into a large antechamber. A lesser person would have described what she saw as the beating heart of The House, but she knew that was far from true. The bent, mass of wooden flesh was a tumor and she was the scalpel.   

A face, part wood, and part horrible, made-up flesh formed out of the cancerous mound, it’s eyes were drawn on in blue and red crayon, and its mouth opened up revealing gums with thin pricks of glass sticking out like cruel teeth.  

“ Hello Goo, how’s it going? ” It said in a voice that sounded like thousands of bugs buzzing in her brain.  

The sound-thought made her skin crawl, “I’ve come to fix things.”  

“ A bit late for that isn’t it, sister? ”  

“I don’t have a sibling, dead or alive. You're a monster and a liar.”  

“ I’m closer to a sibling than anyone in reality, Goo. My existence came at the exact same time as your birth, don’t you find that curious? I do.”    

“You’re a monster.”  

“ I’m a friend, and friends can do lots of things for each other, wouldn’t you say? I can give you anything you want. ”  

“Bull.”  

Before her stood Zuri. Not an older, future Zuri, but a Zuri that was of her age. She walked over and sat down at a neatly made-up dinner table that was not there before. Zuri turned to face her and spoke with the horrible buzzing voice, “ This could be your everyday life, sister. If you simply choose to come home and join with me. We can make everyone as we could ever want them.”  

Goo felt bile rise up from her stomach and into her throat, she pushed it down, “That’s grotesque.”  

“ That’s what I can offer. You want happiness, you want security, you want to not have to worry about anything ever again, I can give it to you. It’s yours only if you say the word. ”  

She imagined herself as an atom bomb. An all-consuming blast of energy and death radiated out from her body and consumed everything, and she felt a splitting pain in her mind as this happened, as the radiation consumed the antechamber, but did not fully destroy it.  

“ Killing me will not save your world! ” hissed the monstrous tumor that she now knew by one of it’s true names as it stuck out in her mind. Jib bared it’s horrible monster teeth as it’s crayon eyes became solid, human eyes.  A troll made out of the trees. A thing of the moon. It’s form turned cylindrical and it lunged at her like a great cobra.   

For a moment, she was in  my place . She was me. She imagined herself in my position, the position so many other had held before me and will hold after me. Jib felt it. He felt her voice. He felt our voice. In his mind, across the world, everyone felt it too. A combined human empathy that united everyone and everything, across reality. She could see it. With a couple billion eyes she saw everything. Tears fell from Jib’s eyes as he felt the full spectrum of empath get slammed into his skull. Everything anyone has ever felt slammed into his mind and raged like a fire fueled by gasoline. Thought and imagination danced along our neural pathways and for the smallest fraction of a second, there was absolute peace. We were her. She was us. We were nothing and everything and it was elating.    

The house exploded in an impossible beam of brilliant rainbow light and touched down on the quad of the Jean Grey School. It took a moment for everything to really register for them. They felt the connection to one another fade and a coldness consume them, but at the site of the crater sat Goo. The hair on her head burned away, but she sat with her eyes closed with an expression of absolute calm across her face. She held one hand open, palm up to the sky, while in her other she held a snow globe. A snow globe containing the house.  

Chapter Text

“I want to skin you alive. I want to wear your flesh like a costume.”  

-Anavae.  

The jar opened up with a soft metallic sound and Jaye sat the lid on the seat. Amina rested her head on their shoulder and watched the mad act with mild intrigue. The mixture stunk like a bottle of hand sanitizer and aspic.   

“You’re a monster, you know that right? It’s really important that you know that.” she said.   

This did nothing to halt Jaye, but it did produce a laugh from them. They dug their fingers into the cruel, vaguely blue gelatinous goop before fingering a ball of the goop into their mouth. It’s amazing what happens when you let a bag of sour gummy bears sit in Everclear for a few days. Amina feigned vomiting as she watched her partner eat the disgusting booze gel. As a general thing, Amina fancied herself to be straight edge. This was mostly because of her religious beliefs, but that aside there was something that she found particularly disgusting about her Jaye’s love of sugary alcohol experiments.  

 “You’re incorrigible.”  

“I’m fun.”  

In true scumbag spirit, Jaye began to slurp the cruel sugar dusted gel from the jar. The two of them had a general rule. They both had their own vices, but they were never cruel to one another about it. At least, not in any way that mattered. Jaye and Amina shared a pair of earbuds as they watched a video of some punk band from Inglewood.   

Something with an older and stranger sound. Something even more bizarre than on off brand Monks’ song. A sound like a harsh radio buzz moved in the jelly of their skulls. Jaye moved their head up and away from the phone. The other passengers on the train were gone. Did they zone out? Just Jaye and Amina. Alone on space ship Earth. The buzzing remained the same volume, but it was starting to itch. As though several cockroaches were emerging from a nest at the center of their brain. Tiny insect legs dancing the Elaine on Jaye’s neural pathways. Then she was there. There wasn’t a sudden sound. No change in the atmosphere. No new sudden smell. She was simply there where she was not before.  She was dressed in a tailored hoodie and torn jeans, a rich man’s idea of a poor person. Her skin was a patchwork of other skin that probably belonged to other people before her. While up near her head, her half shaven blond hair exposed a mess of Prison-Nazi tattoos, along with strange plastic tubes that glowed.   

Looking at her directly caused Jaye’s eyes to feel like they were being boiled in their tears. Amina was unable to look, unable to move really. She felt more or less the same, as a sensation like television static traveled up her throat like vomit, spreading through her organs and her veins.   

The buzzing in their brains took on a voice that was composed of the non-sound of white noise, “ TWO FOR ONE! ByYYE cHRIST! TWO FOR ONE! ”  

Jaye and Amina did not scream. They were unable to.  

Chapter Text

The sun shined outside on the Texan town of Arlen, but it did not shine on Dale Gribble. He was in his home’s basement, seated and focused with rapt attention on the radio, as the mid-day host, Richard Rialto read off the news of the day.   

“Another report coming out of Manhattan, folks. They’ve finally identified one of those skinless corpses on the subway as ESU student Jaye Miller. Some of you might remember our coverage of the event as it unfolded yesterday, but I still maintain that if it’s blood glows, the thing ain’t human.”  

Dale shut off the radio, slipped out a notebook and added to the newest addition of his serial-killer esque conspiracy theory web.   

A note written in purple ink read, “Luminous blood” was attached to a corkboard with string leading from it to a few others, notably another note reading, “X-Factor Cult?” and one below it that read, “Richard Nixon Zombie?”. He lit a cigarette and focused on his conspiracy wall as if he could somehow read through it like a children’s book and find some kind of simple answer to the world around him.   

There was a sudden pop behind him and he turned to see an old oak door stationed at the foot of his stairs where there had once not been an old oak door. Dale immediately screamed and tried to dodge to the side, only to smack into a filing cabinet and fall with it to the ground. He searched around inside for the Deringer he stashed away inside it, but all he found was a smooth turquoise stone.  

The door opened and a smooth faced college kid with a guitar strapped to his back stood in the door. He had an odd sort of bowel haircut, like one of the Beatles but more hipster-y. He was smiling and opened his mouth to speak.  

But, before he could, Dale screamed again, “DEAR GOD! YOU’RE HERE TO STEAL MY LIVER!”  

 He followed that up by beaming the college kid in the head with the rock. The kid immediately doubled over in pain as Joseph Gribble emerged from behind him, in a room that the door was somehow attached to.  

“Dad are you serious?” asked Joseph.  

“Oh Jesus, Joseph. I’m sorry. I thought your mutant friend was a government agent,” said his dad as he got to his feet.  

The college kid started to stand up, blood coming out of a small wound in his forehead, “Did you hit me with a fucking marble you absolute pussy?”  

Joseph stepped past the college kid, whose name was Evan, “Dude, it’s fine. Don’t freak out.”  

“If I wanted to get hit by random bullshit by some fucking hick, I would have kept touring with Cowcatcher.  Call someone else for a ride back to Manhattan,” The door closed   

And just like that, the door slammed in Joseph’s face and vanished. Dale and Joseph sat in silence for a solid six seconds before bursting out laughing at how pissed off Evan was. He stopped laughing when he looked over his dad’s shoulder to see the conspiracy theory wall. He was accustomed to Dale’s eccentricities. After all, this same man had read him the Warren Report as a bedtime story, but seeing anything with an ‘X’ on it hit differently. It made him feel as though he was running low on time.   

“Everything going okay, dad?”  

“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine...fine as it can be given the state of things. Are you okay, I heard some weird stuff was going on in New York.”  

“Yeah, mutant stuff. I asked the school and they okayed me to come home for a few days.”  

“Well, that’s good, it’s been weird quiet around here without you.”  

“Yeah...Hey, I was wondering, could we like...talk?”  

“We are talking...unless we’ve been communicating psychically. Are you a psychic Joseph?”  

Joseph had never considered that before and was not sure. So, he tried to read his dad’s mind. It did not work.  

“Nothing.”  

“Shoot. So, what do you want to talk about Joseph,” Dale took a seat and ashed his cigarette in a novelty ashtray that was shaped like Dick Cheney’s face.  

Joseph sat opposite his dad in a metal fold out chair. He could feel a touch of The Null float around in his chest, but he ignored it. He searched around for the words to say, but they didn’t connect right, until they just spilled out of his mouth.   

“I know you aren’t my real dad.”  

Dale was an exterminator by trade. He had been stung by all manner of things, from fire ants to giant Japanese hornets. But hearing Joseph say that stung harder than anything he had ever been stung or bitten by.   

“That’s not true.”  

“Come one, let’s not be weird about this. I mean, look at me. I look nothing like you, Dad.”  

“I know, Joseph that’s not...” Dale gestured around, equally finding it difficult to find the words. “I’ve known that I’m not your bio-dad. I’ve known that since you were born, Joseph.”  

“Then why lie and pretend like you are? Why not get pissed off at mom and stop pretending that things are cool?”  

“Joseph it’s...it’s complicated son. I’m deep into a weird trench of thought. I’ve never pretended anything, son. I’m your dad. Since you were born, I’ve only wanted the best for you. I don’t have a clue who fathered you, but I am your dad. No conspiracies or anything about it. I am your dad, you are my son, there’s nothing that changes that.”  

Joseph sat with his elbows resting on his thighs, and his head in his hands as he tried to unravel everything. But The Null as it sat in its chest felt empty and powerless in that moment. He did not feel hungry or angry as he did seconds ago, but relieved. Dale felt the same way, as though there was just a big kind of weight taken off of his shoulders.  

“Joseph, are you alright?”  

“I’m fine, just...It’s good, right? To kind of have it out in the open?”  

“Yeah. I think it is.”  

Dale walked over to a little Styrofoam cooler and produced two cans of beer, passing on to his son and cracking one open for himself. Joseph looked at the cold condensation slicked can that rested in his hand.  

“Dad, what is this?”  

“It’s a beer, just relax.”  

“Are you sure?”  

“Yes, only one. But you deserve it, you’re having a weird time.”  

Joseph formed a sold ball of darkness in his hand feeding both the can and the beer to The Null.  

Dale sipped his, “That will never not be cool as hell.”  

Joseph didn’t really start to feel the effects of the alcohol. At least, not in the traditional sense. There was the kind of warm, fuzzy feeling in his chest and the slight burn of carbonation in his throat, but it was also cut pretty hard with the electric-aluminum taste of the can as it swirled around in The Null. A newer, different form of nothing that would eventually join the uniform void. The two talked for a bit. The typical father and son things. Dale ranted about how he thought that the former president was a gigantic cockroach wearing a suit. A welcomed departure from him believing him to be a Skrull or even the odd Zygon. It was nice. Although Dale did not offer his son a second beer. Then things began to hurt. A noise echoed from their minds, causing everything to feel incorrect. The beer Dale was sipping tasted like battery acid and vomit. But he knew where it was.  

Once, its name was Tyler James. It has lost any use for that name. Its body was a twisted thing. A patchwork of skin that did not belong to it. None of it was from the original body. Some parts of it glowed a vibrant blue, other parts did not. Its naked form was mostly hidden by the cloak of blacklight hair. He was more than human. But not yet a mutant. A Frankensteined super-abomination.   

Joseph had enough where with all to turn to it and his eyes turned black, but he wasn’t quick on the draw. A beam of light shot from Tyler James’ eyes and made a hole the size of a dime in Joseph’s forehead. The last two things he could recall before dying was the taste of pennies in his mouth and the sound of gunfire ringing in his ears.    

Following that was a pool of blackness. He wasn’t aware though, not in the traditional way that you might be. He simply was surrounded by and was the void. The Null incarnate.   

Then there was light. A golden light and Joseph’s body awoke surrounded by a strange golden amniotic fluid. The body’s fist thrust forward, and he spilled out onto the floor of some manner of tree room.  Standing above him was a man, dressed in some kind of black bodysuit and a great helmet with an ‘x’ for a visor.  

“Let’s see, who are you?” said the man. His eyes searching through a directory before finding his answer, “Ah. Yes. Very good.”  

The body’s mind was flooded by memories. An entire lifetime’s worth of memories from the day he was born to the moment he stepped through a door and into his dad’s basement.   

“Where am I?” asked Joseph.  

Chapter Text

This is not the ending. The Jean Grey School will return in a later iteration. If you are an avid reader of this, please stay tuned.