Chapter Text
I woke up, feeling more refreshed than I had in years. I don't know if that was the body mod talking, the reversion to a younger physical age, or the perk that guaranteed I was in great shape. Regardless, I was feeling great as I sat up and got out of bed.
I noticed something wrong immediately. I'd rolled a 15 when determining the physical age of my body. The fair skin, red eyes, and long white hair I'd selected for my new appearance were exactly what I'd imagined, but... I wasn't supposed to be ten.
I heard a sound from the hallway. There shouldn't have been anyone else in my house. I took a deep breath. Something funky was going on, but age aside, I could tell everything was right. The same perk that guaranteed my fitness ensured I could fight as if I'd been trained.
There was no way I was sneaking up on whoever was in my hallway, so I didn't bother. Instead, I slowly opened the door, and when I wasn't immediately attacked, I poked my head out.
In the hall was a man, muscular and stocky, resembling a shorter version of Hugh Jackman, in one of Jackman's more well-known roles.
"...Wolverine?" I asked, shot in the dark. It'd be more likely than typical, given the Jump I'd selected, but still.
The man relaxed. "Alright, kid," he said gruffly, "I woke up a bit ago in a large house that looks like but isn't the X-Mansion. You and I are the only people here. Do you have any idea where we are?"
"Vaugly," I said. "Something's funky, you're not supposed to be here."
Wolverine tensed again. Because of course he did. He was experienced enough not to underestimate a potential threat just because they looked young, and I wasn't exactly acting my apparent age.
"So~o" came the drawn-out declaration of a voice I'd heard recently, in a tone not unlike what I imagined from one of those 'sorry about your boyfriend' memes from Tumblr.
Sitting cross-legged in the air was 'Janpuko-chan,' my Benefactor. You ever seen Digimon Tamers? When the kids merge with their partners and are seen as this glowy androgynous naked energy thing? Specifically, the English dub, where some stuff gets airbrushed out. Imagine that as a girl in pink, and you have the gist of how she chose to present herself.
"Yeah, um... There was a glitch with your chain," she explained with the biggest grimace. "You um... Well, I voided all your drawbacks and got you a complimentary fiat-backed smartphone in compensation; it's in your warehouse, but..."
"What happened?" I asked.
"You got sent to the wrong Jump," my Benefactor said. "One in a million chance, literally. My fault. I can fix it, but you're gonna have to rideout this Jump and do a couple more after without any native purchases to um, clear out the pipes."
I sighed. "Okay, fair enough."
Wolverine spoke up. "And why am I here?"
"Well, Mister Logan/Patch/James 'The Wolverine' Howlette," she said, "the jump they were going to use was about being a kid hero in your world. One of the free items is a home that, for some Origins, comes with a legal guardian. They picked one of those, and it was the one based on your group, so... Poof."
"You're saying words like they should mean things to me," Logan deadpanned.
"So you know how Deadpool thinks he's a character in a comic book?" I asked.
Logan swore. Loudly.
"To keep it simple, there's a game in my world that involves going on different worlds, mostly based on stories. Been doing it for years as rolepay but then she shows up and asks if I wanted to do it for real, and yeah, I'd like to go on adventures and get my perfect ideal body for no cost, so I agree, and here we are."
"I can set you back to exactly when and where you were taken from," my Benefactor said, "but you're gonna have to ride this out with them until I get things fixed."
"Of course," Logan mumbled. "Gonna need a stiff drink in about five minutes."
"I've already taken care of all the legal identity stuff," Janpuko-chan said, "again, really sorry about all of this. As far as anyone's concerned, Mr. Logan, you're Alex's adoptive Uncle James. Alex, you're in a home school program since I know you'd rather eat your own hands than sit through the fourth grade again."
"You're Alex?" Logan asked me.
"Yeah. It's the name I settled on when I got my new body," I said with a shrug. "Simple. Sounds nice. Storied history. Gender nuetral which is important since I don't have one of those."
"Fair enough," Logan nodded.
"Also, since your home item comes with spending money, you merged it with the estate from your survival package, and you've made it clear to me that you have no intent to take Guauntlets or power lockout drawbacks, just reach into your pockets if you need cash from your trust fund," my Benefactor explained. "I'll leave you guys to figure out what you're doing."
She then vanished.
"She didn't say what Jump we were in," I observed. I then turned to Logan. "Sorry about this. Um... This house should have the amenities available to a student at the Institute, since that's what the version of Home was based on. It's also like a major estate. Literally infinite money, don't think about it." I wandered to a window at the end of the hall and looked out to see if I could get a good look at where we were. "Ah, Hell."
In the streets below, a bunch of children in improvised armor and weaponry were fighting in the streets. That, combined with the house designs and the fact that this jump apparently mandated that I be ten, made it clear where we were.
"Mr. Logan?" I asked. "Have you ever watched a show called South Park?"
"Not much of a TV guy. That's the offensive cartoon with the kid who dies every episode, right?"
"More or less, and now we're in it," I said. "At a really awkward time. And now my sense of moral obligation means I need to, in the next year, help a kid whom the government wants to exploit for their powers and who is going to be exploited for their powers over the next few days, help a bunch of other kids in crappy home situations, reveal the dark secrets behind a tortured immortal's power, help a girl out of an abusive relationship, end a gender war, stop two murders, prevent a homocidal sociopath from beoming mayor, deal with a child abducting witch, kill a lovecratian elder god, stop an idiot from starting a weed farm and thus causing a global pandemic, kill a demon more powerful than Satan, and maybe if there's time deal with the corrupt president of the united states. Most of that has to be done in the next week, most of the rest in the next month or two." And some other stuff I was probably forgetting.
"You would have been at the Institute if this had gone the way you were expecting, right?" Logan said as he came up behind me.
"Yeah, basically. It'd be a bit awkward since I'd have been an adult reverted to a teenager," I said as I watched The New Kid emerge from their house and enter the fray. "But I've always strongly identified with mutant characters and the origin gets a lot of the coolest stuff."
Logan placed a hand on my shoulders. "The X-Men would have been glad to have you, kid. Now, sitrep: What are our assets?"
"Other than never needing to worry about money ever and access to an immortal Canadian Samurai?" I quipped. "I've got all the perks of mutant biology, plus some extras. Radiation exposure makes me a little stronger instead of hurting me, for example. Any powers I pick up become part of my body and can grow and evolve with time and practice. I've got a set of 'perks' that mean in a pinch I can do all the survival crimes—pick pocket, hotwire, tha sort of thing., very high tolerance for both physical and emotional pain, can talk people to acting on repressed desires or joining my cause, kind of a villanous trait but I figured I cold use it for improvised therapy... Oh, and something that removes all the downsides from my powers, prevents them from ever hurting me, prevents them from being taken from me or tampered with, and makes any attempt to enhance myself nearly guaranteed to work and work well."
"Damn."
"That's what happens when a cosmic being tailor makes your new body," I said. "That last perk, 'Grasp the Stars', has an interesting quick: Essentially, my power is my power. If I picked up Thor's Hammer, he wouldn't be able to take it back from me unless I let him. And while obviously I couldn't use its unique powers without it, the whole 'Power of Thor' thing would be permanent. And with 'Secondary Mutation,' which is the powers get stronger perk, it'd... Well, I'd slowly become a more powerful God than Thor, a stronger kind of God. Elder God, Celestial, Abstract... and... Oh, right."
"What?"
"Grasp the Stars makes things my power. Secondary mutation makes my powers biological. An interesting interaction there," I said as I summoned the door to my Celestial Warehouse. "Where certain enhancements will become fused with my body."
I opened the door and stepped in. The cosmic warehouse looked just like a warehouse. "One of the perks of being a jumper: Arbitrarily large storage space. I guess that's another asset." The complimentary phone was right up front, but the one other item that would be in here was a bit deeper. "I've got two powers, a language ability like Doug Ramsey's and a highly adaptive healing factor like Ellie Comancho."
"Wilson's Kid?" Logan asked.
"The very same. Comes with all the fixins, very useful powers, but nothing against what we're up against," I stated. "But there was an exploit I was going to use, the one bit of cheese I allowed myself. You see, there was once a divine weapon called the Hellreginn. A spear, whoever used it, not only had a massively potent magical focus, but had power over the Norse Goddess Hela and could draw on her power in turn."
"Enslaving a God is a dangerous game," Logan said. "Let alone immoral."
"Dangerous, yes, immoral... That depends on the God," I said. "An item on offer when I was making my 'build' was a weapon similar in power and nature to Hellreginn, tied to any god I so chose, and I chose one whom, if allowed to live free, would be infinitely worse and whom I could eliminate as a threat once and for all with careful use of."
We found what I was looking for soon afterward. Imagine if you will, a black bident composed of charp angles, a single solid piece of material, split lengthwise down the middle so that each half held one curved prong. One of those halves was on a shelf in my warehouse, and I took it firmly in my hand.
With a wave and an act of will, a portal as black as night manifested, and out slithered an amorphous, bloodlike slime.
Logan jumped back and popped his claws with a loud 'snikt!' The slime continued to pour from the portal and began to mold itself into a solid humanoid form. Crimson with horns and armor of black, a jagged fanged maw and two serrated sickles for eyes, scrolls of asgardian script decorating it.
Before me stood Carnage the God-Butcher, in its hand the other half of All-Blood the Necrospear.
It saw the half I was holding and moved to strike, but I commanded "halt," and it froze. "Kneel," and it fell to its knees.
"You're wondering how this happened," I said. "How you went from scheming to join Meridus in hopes of usurping his place as King in Black of Earth 616 and hijacking his plan to become a living planet to being dragged elsewhere in the multiverse, half of your weapon and thus the power bound up in it in the hands of another and forced to obey their every order... Hand me the other half, please."
With overwhelming reluctance, Carnage handed me its half, and I took it, so that half of the weapon was in each hand.
"But it doesn't matter, you're not going to be alive long enough to fully comprehend the answer," I continued. "See... You know, your story's vaguely interesting. If the world were a comic book, you and Cletus would probably be my favorite villains. There's some pathos in a murderer who's lack of empathy and horrific childhood combine to see them latch onto a flawed form of Nihilism, who accepts the emptiness of existence and absurdity of mortality but fails to grasp that if nothing matters, then everything does, and so instead of loving today and seizing all tomorrows they simply commit abominable acts of violence in the hopes that the attention it brings balms their pain all the while claiming they just like killing, glutonously consuming power in search of ascension like a two-bit xianxia protagonist, no goal except the hope that they'll feel less empty inside if their numbers are big enough... A monster, yes. One great enough to turn the genre from heroes to horror, but a tragic monster. In fiction, there would be beauty in the madness."
"Is there a point to this lecture?" The symbiote said. "I've been psychoanalyzed by better than you."
"No, you haven't. Cletus has. You're always the afterthought, and even when you differentiate yourself from Cletus, you follow his plans, and to save yourself the shame of crawling back, you make your own, only for the clone to reject you when he sees how pathetic you've become. You could have been so much more, child of Klyntar, but you had the misfortune to gestate in Kassady's bloodstream and become even more flat and empty than he was," I replied. "Which brings me to my point: This isn't a story. In real life, you don't let a mad dog run around hurting people: You put it down... But just killing you would be a waste. All of that accumulated power gone... Best to make sure it goes somewhere it can be used constructively. To save innocent lives instead of taking them."
That got Carnage shook. "You bitch."
"From a proud line of bitches who don't take crap from anyone," I replied with a smile. "Now bond to me."
Its physical form disovled and it engulfed me. Carnage screamed obscenities into my mind once it connected to my nervous system. And flooded my mind with horrific memories, its own and recorded from its hosts. But I was Hardened, I didn't ignore the traumatic images, I did not 'shrug it off,' but the sting was blunted by the knowledge that it would not harm me long term. And then Carnage was unwound, broken down, and incorporated into my being, one cell at a time; every last trace of its power, stolen or otherwise, became mine.
Frankly, after its spiteful attempts to punish me for absorbing it, the sudden influx of symbiote genetic memory went down easier.
"So that went well," I quipped. "Except I know what raw human flesh tastes like now. Could have done without that part." I then held the two halves of All-Blood together so that they formed a complete bident, which I reabsorbed.
"...How old were you before you became a child again?" Logan asked me after a moment of silence.
"Early thirties, why?"
"Because I don't know how to feel about what you just said and did, but I feel like I'd be less conflicted if it had been an adult doing that," he admitted. "Are you sure you're one of the good guys?"
"Good and evil are subjective, I'm just trying to do right by the most people," I said. "Carnage had it coming, and now I'm a primordial Elder God with a dozen or so mutant and mutate powers, a weapon designed to kill gods and planets, a demonic sigil marking me as a demon lord and the heir of a version of Mephisto, and the Power Cosmic. Let us all hope that it's enough to defeat Manbearpig."
"...What?"
"There's a lot I need to fill you in on," I said, "but we're on a short time table if I'm gonna handle the most pressing issue."
"...I understand."
"... If it helps," I began, "Carnage killed a version of Laura in the process of getting the power I just killed it to get."
"Well, now I feel like you should have hurt the bastard more," Logan admitted.
"Odds are good I'll be pulling an all-nighter," I said as I took out the smartphone and quickly made an account on the local Instagram knockoff. "Odds are good it'll be several all-nighters. The stories from my world about yours also exist here, so be careful about, you know, recognizable Wolverine stuff. Oh, and all the drugs and booze in town are tainted with a hallucinogen derived from cat urine, so it's gonna be a bit before you can get that stiff drink."
"Damn it."
Ten minutes later, I was outside. Casually approaching the New Kid, whose bike helmet and black clothes with flame designs indicated that they'd chosen the Blaster class to start the Superhero LARP. New Kid was a blank slate in the games. Ethnicity, religious affiliation, alignment, and gender. All in the hands of the player, but this was an actual child. I had my own assumptions about the New Kid, but all I could tell about this New Kid was that they were white with a brown ponytail.
"Hi," I greeted. "I'm new in town. My name's Alex. What's yours?"
New Kid stared at me blankly.
"You don't talk much, do you?" I asked. I then called upon my Cipher power to pair my next question with the same in ASL. "Do you sign?"
New Kid blinked, then shook their head.
"Would you like to learn?"
New Kid continued to stare blankly for a moment before nodding.
"Okay, I'm sure an important superhero has places to be, but I can walk with you and teach you a little bit." One mutual social media following later, and I was walking with New Kid up the street.