Nate Grey (thexman) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2011-09-10 22:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | nate grey |
WHO: Nate Grey. Narrative.
WHAT: A violent arrival.
WHEN: Night, September 10th.
WHERE: A forest near Lawrence.
WARNINGS: Not really any.
Pain. Release. Pain. Release. Pain. Release.
This simple binary pattern was Nate Grey’s world now. Some days it was hard to remember a time without the pain. Some days all he had were flashes. A blue bitch, a lunatic in gold tights, the god of war, and a cackling laugh paired with a flash of purple and green. Other days, days when Sugarman was too focused on building new Mutates to tend to the Omega Machine, things were clearer. His name was Nate Grey, and once upon a time he’d been the most powerful weapon in a dead timeline. Then he’d been a wanderer, a grifter trying to outrun the reaper but always moving ever closer to the black-robed specter. Then, finally, he’d been a shaman, a protector of not just the mutant tribe but the entire world. He’d sacrificed himself, he remembered that much, sacrificed himself to prevent a race of parasitic aliens from devouring every living cell on Earth. Then he’d come back, come back to a world gone mad, ravaged by wars and invasions and in the grips of a madman’s horrible reign. Not two seconds after his rebirth, he was fighting for his life and the lives of others, just as with his original birth in the labs of the vile Sinister.
This pain was the price of defeat.
He was fused with the Omega Machine, a terrible weapon that forced him to use his psionic power to rip open portals to other realities. Under Osborn’s care, the device had been a tool for conquest. Under Sugarman’s, it was little more than a torture device. Sugarman, another refugee from the same dead world that Nate was from, wanted to go home. Nate knew this was impossible, knew it in his heart of hearts. Home was dead, erased with Magneto’s successful gambit to use the M’Kraan Crystal to recreate the correct timeline. More than that, even if home did still exist somewhere along the spiral, Nate couldn’t turn Sugarman loose on it. He was a monster, a butcher almost as horrible as the Dark Beast, and Nate wouldn’t turn that horror loose on any world.
Which is what he told himself to hide the fact that his will to resist was fading. How long had he been trapped in the machine? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? He wasn’t sure. Time lost meaning for him long ago. He didn’t think it had been years since his catastrophic fight with Osborn in the madman’s own head, but Nate couldn’t be sure. The only thing he had to chart time with was the same binary pattern that made up his world now.
Pain. Release. Pain. Release. Pain. Release. Pa-
SUDDEN RELEASE.
Light, no brighter than any other sunny day but blinding to a man kept so long in darkness, streamed in from trees above him. TREES! Gone were the broken metal rafters of Osborn’s defunct warehouse. Around him there was air that wasn’t stale, above him were trees that wafted left and right in a gentle breeze, and under his feet was dirt that crumbled between his toes.
And there was no pain.
The sudden release from his nearly unending pain sent a wave of shock through Nate’s mind that sent him to his knees as legs unused to supporting his weight buckled. His hands flew to his head and he threw it back and screamed, screamed even as his left eye sent a geyser of psionic energy up, up, and away like a flare. Even that wasn’t the end of it, wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long shot. The worst of it was the psionic pulse, telekinetic and telepathic, triggered not just by the sudden shock or sudden relief but from the build-up of months upon months of unending pain finally finding a way to come tearing violently out of him. There was the sound of thunder as all around the boy, trees were felled by an invisible force more powerful than any manmade explosive. On the astral plane, waves of energy tore through any spirits in the area, leaving the place essentially a psionic wasteland, and anyone even remotely psychically sensitive within miles would feel a telepathic pulse so strong it would likely knock them off their feet, accompanied by a mental scream that sounded like nothing more than an agonized wail full of pain and terror and rage.
It lasted maybe half a minute before it all went quiet. It wouldn’t be hard for those with even a little psychic sensitivity to trace the pulse to its origin: A newly made clearing in a forest just outside of Lawrence. There, in the center of a devastated landscape full of twisted, mangled, and downright fused trees, lay a man barely old enough to be called that. Clad only in a dark leather trench coat and dark leather pants, Nate Grey was lost to the world of the conscious, simply too emotionally, physically, and mentally spent to pull it together.