Roadside Monks and Celestial Eggs
Late Summer was decidedly not Emma Frost's favorite time of the year. If anything else, she hated it with about as much aplomb as she hated the mornings when Scott Summers - her lover - would wake up screaming out the name of his late wife, Jean Grey-Summers. The heat was usually putrid during this time of year, and the conditions were uncomfortable. Not that the heat bothered Emma much anyway. She dressed quite revealingly on most occasions, but only because she felt more comfortable doing so.
Emma Frost had spent a lot of money on her body, and thus she felt the need for showing it off just a little bit. Granted, because she was the headmistress of Xavier's School for Higher Learning, she had toned down her dressing somewhat, though maybe not enough to Kitty Pryde's liking. It wasn't her fault that Kitty was such a prude.
Kitty Prude. Ha ha. She could use that. Or, not, since that was much more of a Kitty thing to say than an Emma thing to say. Emma was more refined, like the diamond form that she occasionally took.
The twenty-seven year old bottle blonde was snapped out of her reverie by the door of her bedroom bursting open.
"Miss Frost!" three of the remaining Stepford Cuckoos yelled out. "Miss Frost, there's trouble outside the school!" Emma turned away from the window that she was looking out of and stared at the three identical blonde teenagers.
"It's not another we-hate-mutants picket line, is it darlings?"
"No Miss Frost. It's something else."
"What is it, girls?"
"You should come out and see, Miss Frost," the girls replied as they turned and left the room.
Emma followed them immediately, her spiked heels clicking and clacking on the wood flooring as she headed out into the corridor of the mansion.
Within minutes, Emma and the girls were outside of the mansion and outside the front gates, where a man sat on the side of the road, whimpering while holding a pile of rags. He was dressed in dirty, ripped, tattered, and torn robes that once may have been a cream color but now where muddy and ugly beyond all comparison. Though the man did not stink, Emma distinctly felt that something was off about him, but exactly what that might be she was unable to discern. "Who is this?" Emma asked the girls softly as she approached the man.
The girls shook their heads collectively as they said, "We don't know. We didn't try to probe his mind. We don't trust him."
Emma rolled her eyes. "And you called me here because...?"
"Well, Miss Frost, besides what Esme might have thought of you, you are our headmistress. It was our...duty..."
Emma nods. “Alright, girls. Move aside so I can go see what’s going on with that man.” Emma ordered as she slowly approached the crying man. Emma got down on her haunches as she tried to look into his eyes. “Hello…are you okay, sir?”
The man looked up, his eyes puffy and red. “I…no. My baby. My baby died,” the man wailed.
“You’re…” Emma peered into the rags and tried to see if she could find a psychic signature. There was nothing. If there was a baby in there, it had been dead a good long while. “W-where is the baby?”
“Dead. Dead. Murdered by mutants!” The man yelled, his chest heaving as he stared at Emma. His eyes were wild, furious, and maybe even a little dangerous.
Emma stood up and took a step back. Mutants? Who…? Unless Quentin Quire had woken up again, the mutants in the Xavier Institute were peace-lovers. But no…Emma would have felt it. Emma would have felt Quentin’s return.
Then what…?
Emma shook her head. There was time for that later. Right now, Emma needed to probe this man’s mind and try to find out what it was that was going on in there. She needed to know what happened to his daughter. Obviously, if the man’s child had been killed by mutants, Emma couldn’t bloody go to the police and tell them that. It wouldn’t do her any good at all.
Emma got back down on her haunches and peered into the man’s eyes. “Hush now, darling, I’m going to try a little something, and I need your co-operation, alright?”
“A-are you a mutie?” the man asked her, his voice nearing shrillness. Emma prayed that there was no one else around who could hear them.
“Hardly. I’m…a doctor. A certified psychiatrist, really,” Emma said. That wasn’t a complete lie. Emma was, after all, a certified sex therapist. “Here now…” Emma said as she brought her hands out and brought them up to the man’s face. She kept them a half an inch away from each side of his face as she concentrated, trying to see into his mind.
The first thing that Emma saw was flashes of idiosyncratic color. Those were followed by images of stars and flames. Those were the last things that Emma saw before she was thrown out of the man’s mind and thrown off her feet. Emma flew back, instinctually morphing into her diamond form as she did so. She landed on her back with the Stepford Cuckoos running up to her.
“Miss Frost, are you alright?”
“Define alright, darlings. That man’s had his mind raped by some mutant. We have only one option left in helping him, really,” Emma said as she got back up, morphing back into her flesh and blood self as she did so.
The Stepford Cuckoos looked at each other before looking back at Emma. “You can’t possibly mean…”
“That’s exactly what I mean, girls. Now come along and help Miss Frost with the mind-raped man.”
Ten minutes later found Emma, the Stepford Cuckoos, and the mysterious man - still clutching his rags - in the sub-basement of the X-Mansion, which held within it all of the X-Men’s super-powered facilities, including a medical bay, an extensive training facility known to everyone as the Danger Room, among the other many things that the X-Men had. Emma and her little group were all in the medical bay.
Emma, thus far, had not been able to discern anything about the man, including his name. Though she couldn’t anything non-offensive to call him by, Dr. Henry McCoy, better known to the X-Men as the Beast, had offered to call him Muggle, for which Emma had promptly reprimanded him. “After all, darling, we’re mutants, not fictional wizards.”
Beast, who had been working on a new machine that could enhance telepathic ability from one telepath to any other person, had helped Emma connect the machine between her and the whimpering man, who just repeated, over and over again, “My baby…my poor baby…”
Emma rolled her eyes as she sat down across from him.
“Are you sure this is safe, Emma?” Beast asked the young woman.
Emma looked over to Beast. “Obviously it’s not, darling. But when have our lives ever been safe? Besides, Charles is in Genosha, and it’s not like we’re dealing with bloody Jean again. This is small. I, love, can take care of it,” Emma replied, with a confident smile. “Just go on ahead and turn the thing on and…what are you doing here?” Emma snapped as Kitty Pryde sauntered into the medical bay.
“I heard from one of the students that you had brought a mysterious man down here along with the Cuckoos. Wanted to see what you were up to myself.”
“Curiosity killed the Kitty.”
“Oh, right, because that’s incredibly original,” Kitty snarked back as she took a seat next to Beast at one end of the medical bay. “Go ahead Miss Frost. Do your mind mojo with Cerebrette,” Kitty said, indicating the machine that sat betwixt Emma and the man.
Emma rolled her eyes, ignored Kitty, and continued on with her little mission. She started up Cerebrette and peered into the man’s eyes, attempting to see into his mind, even though Emma really didn’t need to look into his eyes to see what was going on inside his head. She found that, sometimes, it just helped her concentrate a bit more.
Moments later, Emma found herself again inside the man’s head. She saw the same old flashes of mad, swirling color that she’d seen before. She then saw the form of a man commanding flames from somewhere, all the while whispering, “Yes, my child, my darling child, come to me.” He separated flame from cosmic brimstone as he shaped the flames into the form of a powerful bird. Stars surrounded the bird as Emma gasped in horror, realizing just what it was that she was seeing.
Emma tried to break apart from the man’s mind, to break away from the images that he was seeing in his own head, but Emma was unable to do so. The images started to come faster, images of the Phoenix Force gaining power, images of the Phoenix Force taking over many, many other people before taking over Jean Grey.
The images shifted then, and Emma saw a beautiful, golden colored egg resting in a cosmic nest of stars and clouds, glowing softly, with an iridescent orange sheen over it. Emma - inside the man’s head - slowly approached the egg, intrigued though she knew she shouldn’t be, and touched the egg.
Celestial fire slid up Emma’s hand and arm as she was thrown from the egg, the power of the Phoenix Force overpowering Emma. Emma screamed in agony as she was thrown from the man’s mind, the force of the blow disconnecting her from Cerebrette. The man cackled madly as Emma hit the wall of the medical bay, flames crawling around her flesh, not giving her pain, but giving her an intense kind of ecstasy. Her white clothes changed to black, the entire outfit changing its look as it did so, adding the Phoenix symbol at the top of a newly made high collar. Emma couldn’t stop screaming as she realized who the man was - an empty shell from the order of monks who had first raised the Phoenix Force - perhaps even the monk who himself had harnessed it’s great cosmic energy.
It was the bloody Phoenix force plotting it's return.
And succeeding.
Emma struggled to keep the Phoenix Force at bay, but realized that she could not do so. She screamed and yelled, willing herself not to become part of that which Jean Grey had once been as she heard Kitty and Beast’s quickly fading reactions.
Kitty and Beast both jumped to their feet as Kitty cursed under her breath and Beast himself let out a proper “Oh my.”
“The Phoenix Force,” Kitty said in bitter shock as she watched it take control of the one person that Kitty could rightfully say she hated. “It’s back.”
Muse: Emma Frost Fandom: X-Men Words: 1,801 Rating: PG