Full of broken thoughts [Part 3]

[iamresponding]

Who| Everyone who signed up
What| Part 3 of "Blargh Fhtagn"
Where| The Cancerverse
When| Not long after part 2, before "After These Images" and "Body Snatchers"
Warnings/Notes| Lovecraft, possession, body horror/transformation

They work quickly. While several already-awake members of team had deployed in response to Grif's call for help, several Legion staffers had gotten to work waking up more to potentially be deployed. While wating for them to get briefed and arrive, Brainiac had gotten to work on the stargate that the squids had converted into a portal to the Cancerverse while puppeting Rich.

Brainy doesn't use the stargate itself but the technology grafted onto it by the squids is something he quickly reverse engineers for his purposes and before long a strange-looking array has been built around the forcefield bubble currently containing Rich.

Inside it, Rich hugs himself and rocks in place. Every time tentacles start to sprout from his body, he fights them, drawing them back in. But it's a losing battle. His face is that mottled purple again and he's slowly losing control.

Rich is glad that Robbie and Sam have been sent back to Legion World and don't have to see it. The former because of his injuries, the latter because Rich put his foot down on Sam being remotely close to any of it.

"Brainy, we're running out of time," Rich huffs out, sounding pained.

"It's finished," says Brainiac, and he waves for everyone who's coming on the mission to move closer. "We need to get ready to deploy. Richard, I know you don't want to go back to the Cancerverse, but this --" Brainy holds up a device that looks like a shoulder-mounted laser of some kind "-- phase resonance modulator can destroy the bond between you and the Many-Angled ones. But it'll work if deployed on you when you're within its confines."

Rich closes his eyes tight and his body trembles.

"So I have to go back," he says.

"Unfortunately, yes," says Brainiac. "Equally unfortunate: the dimensional shifter I've reconfigured from the devices created by the Many-Angled Ones will randomize our placement in the Cancerverse. We'll all be placed there, with a functioning portal home, within a ten mile radius, but we'll have to find each other again, and while I believe our omnicoms and will have limited functionality and that the trackers in our flight rings will allow us to reconvene, their flight capabilities aren't configured for the conditions there. The probe I sent through made it clear that Valorium won't have the same effect there."

"So I have to go back, we'll get split apart, and nobody will be able to fly."

"A ten mile radius is manageable," says Kid Q, "especially if your trackers still work. They'll find you, Rich, they'll find each other, and then you'll all find the way out."

It would be "we" but since Kid Q's powers involved altering the universe on a fundamental level - and given it was a world with different physical laws - Brainy had decided it was too risky since there was no telling how her powers might work there.

"Okay," Rich breathes out. "Okay. Just...hurry."

After everyone is ready, Brainy lines them all up in a circle around Rich's containment bubble, turns off the shield, hits a button, and then reality rips with a sickening tearing sound and they find themselves separated - sometimes in pairs and groups of three - in a waking nightmare, a place made of flesh, and cracking stone, and too many eyes. The ground gives when they walk, as if it's made of flesh. The sky is black, filled with hazy red mists, and yet somehow the world is filled with purple-red light, despite there not being a sun. In the sky above there is a moon that looks down on them with unblinking eyes. In the distance there are shrieks and inhuman cacophonous noises.

There are things waiting for them in the dark, waiting to grant them the endless gifts of this realm, unceasing lives that come after endless, repeating deaths.

Comments

[gonebyebye]

Ray doesn't know Rich well enough to get through to him. Which is fine, there's more than enough people here who can. Thus, instead of Nova, he turns his attention elsewhere. There's a giant flesh orb in the sky, after all, and it has a hostage.

"I'm speaking to Worldmind." Ray shouts upward, as he uses the boson gun to blast away at the base of the tentacles holding Quill down. "The real Worldmind, not the grotesque, pus-filled abomination you've been turned into."

"Look around you. Actually look. This is isn't eternal life, it's eternal suffering. It's not a solution, it's a universe-sized monkey's paw."

[sir_vancelot]

When they went up against Giant-Man, Vance got hit a couple of times. Not enough to keep him out of the fight, but enough that his bell was definitely rung. And his reactions weren't the fastest at the moment.

Still, between Danny, Wash and Ray, he has time to plant himself between them and the portal, expanding out his telekinetic shield to cover the front of the portal, shoring it up as best he could.

"He's right, Worldmind." Luckily, he could hold a conversation even with a headache. "I mean. It's not like I don't get it. You lost so much with the loss of Xandar and the Nova Corps. And with the Annihilation Wave. You and Rich both saw so much senseless death and destruction."

Appealing to Rich wouldn't help. They knew that Rich was in there and fighting. But the Worldmind was...immense. Even the strongest minds would have trouble fighting against that on their own. Rich was strong. The Worldmind was stronger.

"Look around you, Worldmind. Look into Rich's mind." He makes a sweeping gesture to the world around them. "Nobody is happy here. All that there is here is death and more death. Life doesn't have value here." A pause, then, "I know what it's like to not want to lose anybody else, Worldmind. But this isn't the way."

[whyarewehere]

It's not coordinated by any stretch of the imagination, but when Wash goes low Grif goes high. Maybe they can sandbag him, maybe Grif's lightning-speed attack on the tentacles can do some good again, his hands blur as he scrabbles at them.

"What the fuck are we doing?!" he yells. "You're the one who tells me not to quit!"

It's not even a joke at this point, it's anxious patter Grif uses to pretend this is just another mission and he doesn't just want to scream.

"Come the fuck on!"

[calibrates_big_guns]

Garrus, meanwhile, doubles down on Wash's strategy of 'go for the legs.' From his vantage point atop a hill, he sends a cannonball of shimmering blue energy rocketing towards the thing that used to be Nova Prime's knee.

"Come on, Rider, you're stronger than this!" He shouts. "I barely know you, but I know you care too damn much to let this thing beat you so fight it!"

[legionnpcs]

||It is life. Only those who fight it - who refuse to embrace it - face suffering. The deserving are freed from -||

[iamresponding]

Worldmind is interrupted by a scream that sounds even more terrible than the ones before, because it's not a scream of rage this time. There's something high and pained - and human - under the parts that sound unnatural, and that makes it sound that much more awful.

It's the kind of scream that makes it hard to argue that what's being done to someone is a mercy.

The combined efforts of everyone had been successful in bowling Rich over, and the energy shot had driven him to one knee. The squids at that knee ripple and wave...

And now they start to retreat.

It's not just at the knee that was shot by Garrus, either, because it's not just because of Brainy's weapon. Danny's influence is helping, killing them from the inside by proximity alone, and after Grif helps rip a few away, an upper arm and blue uniform is visible again.

The words are helping too, the encouragement. He can hear them in there. He can hear people telling him to fight.

It's like Sam had sad. Novas don't get to quit.

He starts ripping tentacles off of himself with his flesh and blood hand. When he rips enough away from his other shoulder, an arm made of Nova Force energy springs to life at the stump, ripping and burning tentacles as it forms. Then he staggers around, ripping tentacles off of himself, until more and more of his real body appears. The parts that are misshapen morph back into a more human shape and the strange eyes that had appeared over his body start to close and disappear.

Eventually, Rich emerges from his gruesome cocoon and is mostly free, except for a single jagged stalk of tentacles that are still stuck down his throat, jutting out like a particularly gruesome tree root. They can hear him gagging and choking on it. Rather than trying to get help removing it, rather than risk losing control of his body again, Rich does the Rich thing to do and takes the direct approach.

He grabs on tight and yanks.

What gets ripped out is beyond disgusting. It's not something that has any right being in someone's body and the second it's out of him, Rich throws the still-squirming, clearly-alive mass to the ground, stomps on it, and blasts Nova Force at it until it's finally, truly dead. It withers to dust.

Then he turns to face all of them with black gook still dripping down his chin, staggers a few steps forward, and falls to his knees.

"Danny. Kid," he grunt queasily. "You better get out of there, 'cause it's about to get real unpleasant real fast."

His mouth tastes like a toilet. He's going to puke, he's going to puke, he's going to puke...

It's a true act of bro-ness, forcing himself to hold it in long enough for Danny to get out first. He has no idea what it feels like to be possessing someone that's throwing up but he figures it's probably pretty damn unpleasant. Just like being in there while he yanked that thing out probably had been no picnic.

While he kneels there and tries to recover enough to get to his feet, the others will still have plenty to do, however, because the squids are closing in, rushing at them. Humanoid shapes coming out of the mists nearby mean the Revengers are coming, too.

[ordinarily]

There was a big downside to overshadowing someone, Danny learned long ago. A downside that he was remembering right now, as everyone piled it on and brought the sushi abomination to its knees. Jumping inside their, taking it over... it made the body his, just as much as it was theirs. Their muscles were his muscles, their strength was his strength...

And their pain was his pain.

Danny could feel everything, even if the fight for control with the tentacles muted the sensations somewhat. The tackling, the shot to the knee, he could feel it all. Between fighting with the tentacles, and struggling with the sheer pain he was feeling, he should've been driven out of the body just by that alone. But the fight for control and the pain only made him more furious, more stubborn, more irrational--

Until Rich pulled out the tentacle out of his mouth. And Danny himself felt like throwing up.

Rich's eyes glowed green, as Danny's voice came out of his mouth. The first audible thing that could be heard being a nauseous groan, as he commented. "Your mouth tastes like a toilet, and I think I'm gonna throw up." Finally, Danny's intangible body limped out of Rich's own, sinking to his knees the moment he became solid. Until finally, he bent over the ground...

And threw up right there and then.