revivalproject | Don't ever apologize for being the smartest one in the room

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Don't ever apologize for being the smartest one in the room

WHO: Mysterio, OTA
WHERE: Billy's City
WHAT: Time to prove Beck's tech can change the world
WHEN: Mid/Late Event
WARNINGS: MUCH PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA, UPSETING IMAGERY, ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK

Stark Industries

Super villains attacking the building was almost just another Tuesday at this. Not that Mysterio necessarily considered himself to be a villain. A strange green mist spilled through the halls, Beck couldn't help but play up the theatrics a little.

His ultimate goal was Stark, but that didn't mean he couldn't have a little fun with his coworkers as he made his way to his dear boss. Or any other unfortunate visitors to the building.

Before you had time to be surprised by whatever it was he was wearing, you were plunged into a world of illusion, your deepest fears and greatest traumas uprooted and unearthed into an unsettling hellscape.

The Masses

Why not spread the fun around? Mysterio ventured out into the streets, confident no one could stand in his way. After all, what kind of threat could you really be to him when he could twist the very world around you into a personalized hell?

That green mist ventured out, flooding the city block, chaos erupting as people went running and cars veered off course.

Just the Two of Us

It was just the two of you now, and Mysterio chuckled inside his helmet, palms raised in mock surrender.

"You really think you can stop me?" he asked. Sure- they'd put up a good fight, but Beck was barely getting stated.

That mist became almost suffocating, and the world seemed to shift, rewriting itself to plunge you directly into your very own personal hellscape. Even knowing none of it was real did nothing to stop your mind from reacting as though it were. You're just a puppet on a string, and Mysterio's going to enjoy playing with his toy before he breaks it.

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"You really think I wouldn't try?" Bucky shook his head, expression a little sad. "You're hurting people. I can't let that happen."

Was backup coming? He had no idea, really; by now it should be but nothing was certain. At least Bucky knew he could take a lot; if he could keep this guy's attention focused on him, give people a chance to get a safe distance away, that was good enough.

The mist descended on him and while Bucky told himself not to breathe it in, he couldn't help but gasp when he heard the screams, the gunfire. He turned and saw the trenches, looked down and saw that the deep navy of his uniform had been replaced by the olive drab of a uniform he hadn't worn in decades; looking up again he had time only to duck as a rain of bullets sailed over the trench wall in front of him. Reflexively he took a deep breath to force down the rising feeling of wrongness, blinked his eyes rapidly to try to banish the illusion. What was happening?

"They're fine," Mysterio dismissed easily. None of it was real. It just felt that way. Painfully so. "You heroes are always so predictable."

The illusion couldn't be banished as simply as that. It was rooted deep inside his own mind, and that's the hardest thing to escape.

But there was a definite wrongness about it all. Twisted and exaggerated. The earth fell away beneath him, trench threatening to swallow him up, familiar faces dragged under, gasping and choking on earth.

"Look how many lives you failed," Mysterio tsked- his voice looming and echoing from some other plane.

Monica was on her way to her shift at the Hellfire Club and stepping up out of the subway when the gas hit her. At first she thought it might be steam coming up from the tunnel vents, but the smell, the color ... something was wrong.

Her healing would kick in if it was a real danger, she reassured herself, adjusting her purse on her shoulder.

"You," a man's voice called from across the street. "Aeon Flux."

She kept walking. The city was large enough that the woman could have been talking to anyone. Reacting immediately would be a dead giveaway, and she was better than that. If it continued, she had avenues to follow that would put a stop to any threat of a spectacle.

"I know you, you bitch, you killed my girlfriend. Don't ignore me."

People on the street were stopping, turning to look at her. As each of them turned, they called her alias, a ripple of sound. Her eyes widened. What in the hell was going on?

The Kid was floating a few feet off the ground, as casual as can be. Hitting people was his guardian's thing. This was his wheelhouse.

He tilted his head, his long green ears raised curiously at him. He might not look much, but this kid has more skills than looking cute. Thus far, the mist seemed to have had no effect on him. Focusing on Mysterio's mind, he knew that the visions were false and were thus not afraid of them. He smiled, sending his thoughts directly to Mysterio's mind.

I was hoping you would surrender so I wouldn't have to.

"Shut up!" Harsh, words and breath both, and Bucky gritted his teeth, flexing his fist. He needed to punch something, put his fists right through the face of whoever was causing this pain.

"This isn't— this didn't happen." Even though it felt real it felt wrong, like the earth was swallowing him up. Trench or tomb, pressing in around him, suffocating. Bucky felt like he had to force air into his lungs and even then he struggled to get enough.

He stumbled forward, feeling weight dragging him down. It was hard to make himself move, but he had to move, had to lift his rifle to fire at the enemy. His rifle... where was it? What was this weight on his arm?

"Didn't it though? How many men are in the ground because of you?"

Just as the earth seems about to swallow him whole it drains away, iron bars rising up from the ground to cage him, the sounds of tortured screaming in the air, and a burning feeling starts running through Bucky's veins.

The world around her seemed to shift, like a bad drug trip, melding and shifting into a disturbing blend as it fed off her memories. Those people who called out began to pursue her, growing in numbers, aiming to cut her off.

"..."

Inside his dome Mysterio blinked. This...was not an avenue he'd considered. How the hell did you account for a tiny alien...psychic??

"Go home to your parents before I step on you, you little bug," he dismissed, narrowing his eyes, "This is for big boys."

"No, not because of—"

Before he could finish the sentence the ground pressed in tight, stealing the air from his lungs, suffocating. Bucky struggled to breathe, feeling lightheaded when the earth melted into iron bars. He sagged for a moment, the rush of oxygen to his brain making him momentarily dizzy.

The dizziness intensified with the rush of pain, burning in his arms and legs. He forced his eyes open to see tubes, wires, needles, drugs and who-knows-what-else pumped into his veins while all he could do was scream.

Mysterio seemed to materialize outside of those bars, peering in unsympathetically.

"Did it hurt? How long until they got it right, I wonder? How many test subjects did they burn through before they got to you?"

There was a crashing sound, one that should have preluded Steve's arrival to come rescue him from this place, but no one came. Mysterio faded away again, and along with him the bars, plunging Bucky into darkness to suffer alone.

It was just like being strapped down on that table again, restrained so he couldn't struggle while all manner of fire was injected into his veins. HYDRA didn't bother with painkilers or sedatives, not when either one could have potentially interfered with their experiments.

"This is not for you," he growled at the apparition peering through the bars. Bucky tried to push himself forward, to swing a punch at that glass dome, but stumbled to his knees instead as the burning sensation intensified. He wouldn't scream. He wouldn't.

The sound torn from his throat was inhuman, suffering and pained as he pitched forward, trying to catch himself on his hands. This was worse than what he'd endured, so much worse, and as blackness encroached, he didn't know if it was his surroundings or his own consciousness that was fading away.

Echo was in the middle of trying to pull someone out of their totaled car when it started, keeping his focus on the person who was already in the middle of a panic attack. "Hey! No, stay with me, you're alright. Take a breath, take a breath, I need you to stop– "

The man's arms flailed as he screamed and a fist swung upward, right into the deliveryman's jaw. He stumbled back, half-dragging and dropping the man onto the curb. The throbbing sensation sharpened before it dulled, leaving Echo to draw in a sharp breath.

What he didn't realize was how thick the mist had become by then. The second he looked back up, man and the car were long gone. The sound of gunfire filled the air, rapid and wild, forcing him to drop down into the dirt as a spray of bullet holes riddled the walls. Yelling came from all sides, so distant yet so close, only to be drowned out by more noise.

Some of the buildings began to crumble to ruin around her, while other simply aged, their windows cracking, visible metal rusting. The sound of gunfire rattled, growing closer.

"Aeon!" One woman broke free from the pack: it was Lark, but yet at the same time it wasn't - her face had a hard time staying her own. One? Uno? Something about the number scrabbled at her mind, but she couldn't figure out why. All she knew was she loved this indecisively-faced woman like a sister, if she wasn't actually one somehow.
"Aeon, watch out--"

Another woman in the crowd of accusers came forward and shot the first squarely in the temple, but the surrounding mob wasn't bothered or fazed by the gore. "You betrayed me, left me for dead," the shooter said in a thick Russian accent, her red curls pulled back into a tight bun. Were those ... leather gloves on her feet, not boots? No, they were boots ... no wait ...

Aeon clutched her temples, squeezing her eyes shut. "STOP IT," she cried out. "I don't know any of you--"

No one expected the tiny mutant!

He giggled, sounding like a toddler. Quite a contrast from his words. I'm not afraid of you, magician. I'm older than you think, and I can see straight through your illusions.

The surface of the ground beneath his hands might have given the game away some. What looked in that moment to be smooth cement felt distinctly coarser. He could only trick the mind so much, he couldn't change the real world around them.

The darkness pushed in, a distinct sound rising, and then there was a suddenly light. Bucky was crouched a top a moving train, wind whipping around him.

"Just give in and it all stops. Do you really want to relive all this?"

"Can you see through this?" Mysterio growled, taking a swing at the kid.

Maybe not his finest moment, but Beck was well past worrying about the morality of punching a possible child at this point.

Really? That's almost child abuse!

Thankfully, The Kid is able to fly up and away from Mysterio's fist. He lands on top of that stupid fishbowl on his head, looking down at him between his bare feet. That wasn't very nice. Do you want to try that again?

Blacking out would have been preferable, but Bucky wasn't so lucky. Hands clenched into fists against the ground; the texture didn't match the appearance, and that helped. (One could even say it...grounded him. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.)

Anyway, Bucky looked up in time for the darkness to give way to light, for the wind to whip into his eyes and his balance to sway as he had to clutch the train car under him. Except it wasn't the metal of a train and that helped him force himself to his feet.

"I won't give in to your games," he growled, trying to goad his opponent into more talking. If he could follow the voice to pinpoint the location, maybe he could stop all this.

It wasn't exactly any ordinary Sunday for Drake. Normally, he would be trying not to think about work, perhaps relegating himself to grocery shopping or household maintenance. Today, he had a preliminary appointment with a Stark International consultant with the aim of determining whether he needed mental therapy for his strange flashbacks, or gene therapy for some more dangerous and unpredictable mutation. He was not looking forward to either outcome, but he may have preferred them compared to what was about to happen.

First, there were the muffled screams. He and the waiting room clerk both stood in alarm.

“Call 911.” He said immediately.

“And tell them what?”

“I don’t know! Active shooter! Tell them there’s an active shooter. How d’you lock this door?”

“There’s- there’s a pin hidden in the top hinge, you twist it in the the lock and it’s like a deadbolt.”

No sooner had he gotten the door locked than he noticed the green mist seeping beneath the door and cursed under his breath.

“Open that window!”

“It doesn’t op- sir! Sir, what’re you- Hey!”

Drake had grabbed the clerk’s chair and hurled it at the window. Next, he began cramming anything he could - his jacket, the couch pillows, Kleenex tissues - under the door to block the mist.

“Have you called 911 yet?!”

But the clerk was no longer there.

Instead, there was a tall man in a dark, military-looking uniform. He had a broad, handsome face and dark hair and was kissing a woman - or was she kissing him? The woman had fiery red hair and was wearing a transparent red gown with gold ornamentations.

He had no idea why, but something about this vision was unbearably painful. The woman broke away from the kiss and her eyes gave a strange white flash when she looked straight at him.

“Sekhmet.” Drake whispered, although he didn’t know who or what Sekhmet was or why the name suddenly popped into his head.

The woman - Sekhmet? No, that didn’t seem right. The woman wasn’t Sekhmet, something about the woman or in the woman was Sekhmet, but that didn’t make much sense - took two or three slow, swaying steps toward him, smiling knowingly when he tried not to stare, and in fact, made a valiant attempt to actively look away. She grabbed him around the throat and forced him to face her.

“She hoped you wouldn’t come for her.” The woman said in a deep, warped voice that was horribly familiar and frightening. “She likes it here, under my protection, enjoying the long life and decadence of a god.”

“You’re not a god…”

“And you’re not a man.” She gave a little smile and a little shrug, as if it were a quid pro quo. “In fact, you’re barely an animal worthy of sacrifice; what was it she said to you when you questioned her affection?” Her voice became that of a normal, human woman. One he knew very well. “I just miss the cats.”

She leaned in close, and in that beautiful human voice, said, “We are going to bleed you like a hog, and drink your blood. But it’s all right, darling. She never loved you.”

It’s not true. It’s not true, it’s not true, I saved you, we’re not happy, but we’re getting there, the kids visit every other weekend, you’re proud of them, I fixed your dishwasher, you died in…you died in a…

The next thing Drake knew, he’d fallen to his knees as a terrible, crushing pain splintered through his head, and all he could see through the haze of golden energy was Sekhmet, hand outstretched above him as the central jewel in the kara kesh that she wore glowed a bright orange. And all he could hear was the terrible animal scream wrenched from him by the agony.

"Okay but you all ready have," Mysterio mocked, easily baited. His voice came from somewhere off to the left, somewhere over the side of the train. Up ahead some burly HYDRA goons climbed their way on top of the cars, and opened fire on Bucky. Technically they couldn't hurt him, but it wouldn't stop that pain from feeling real if he was struck.

"Aeon-" Another voice prompted, almost right in her ear. And a name seemed to come with it- Trevor. But if she opened her eyes again there was no one there.

There was however greenery peeking through the ruined buildings around her, spreading and growing far too fast, and an inherent knowledge forced its way into her mind. Those plants were dangerous. And they were getting closer.

Beck narrowed his eyes, and snatched the kid's ankle to pull him back down to eye level.

"You'd think someone so small would have the sense to stay away from people who were bigger than him," he threatened, attempting to hurl the kid away with a violent toss.

The yelling was familiar, voices Echo knew, but also ones he'd never heard in this life. There was the sound of an explosion not too far off, one that left a ringing in his ears, and pained cries for help beyond the continued shooting. There were voices calling for Echo by name, desperate voices.

For a short time Drake seemed to be left to reflect on that, a stillness falling over the room, only his own breathing to keep him company. And then eventually, distantly- a sort of drip. It didn't demand much attention at first, until suddenly, there was a sheen of water seeping from under the door, those tissues and pillows soaked through as they struggled to hold it back.

That voice wrapped around her heart in a way no one else's ever had, and nearly stopped it, stealing her breath. She whirled around, searching frantically, but saw only anger, blame, betrayal, and danger.

"No," she said, backing away, searching for a way out. "What IS this...?!"

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Don't ever apologize for being the smartest one in the room

Just the two of us (Building castles in the sky)

^_^ CW: this will all be upsetting

The Masses - cw for all that psych trauma

Just the Two of Us (You and I)

Mwahaha, etc., etc.

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The Masses

cwa: deadly shooting, mild body horror

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Stark Industries

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