ic Change is Necessary for Growth [IC]

[Avenger Assembled]

At the sight of the faulty computer, Citizen took a chance and stopped monkeywrenching the school's power grid, instead focusing on the primitive Earth machine and what secrets it had for him. He found those out by shoving his hand directly into the computer's access port, ignoring the terrestrial keyboard for Tronik speed and efficiency programmed into his emulator by Miss Americana. "Computer is monitoring the vats, brewing something called 'Mother's Milk.' Pretty hardy stuff, whatever it is. I could control the whole complex here." He pushed deeper, his hand sinking into the computer's hard drive as he did so, the pupils of his eyes shifting to a rapidly-shifting green color as he delved further and further into the system. "There's stuff here dating back almost ten years, to before they changed up the school to take kids with superpowers. Something about the Great Mother, her Dark Young...and that's where they're getting the 'Mother's Milk.' Yeah, it's some kind of mutagenic drug that warps people's flesh, makes their powers stronger...it's real detailed, too. They've been doing this for a while."

His eyes focused on the computer, Sharl muttered a word in Lor that Indira recognized as a suggestion that the makers enjoyed sexual congress with their maternal parents. "They're some kind of alien cultists, dosing kids with this stuff to give them powers. Bet you anything she's selling them off to mercenaries, or pulling them into the cult. There's something deeper...I don't understand it," he said, calling up the Dark_Young.pdf on the screens so everyone could see it. "I guess this is their weird religious text or something? Maybe you guys will get it."

[Fox]

Wraith hummed, making a very amused and human-like snorting noise at Citizen's impromptu Lor impropriety. "Do you mean 'us' alien, or 'human' aliens?" she asked, scuttling off across the walls and roof toward the plexiglass cell.

"It does seem very sinister. Milk is a fluid that comes from a female mammal, if I am not mistaken?" She blinked her three black eyes, turning her head back toward the others. "I will ask, then, the obvious question: if this is the milk, where is the mother?"

[KnightDisciple]

Cobalt Templar frowned as they entered the room. This place unsettled him, but it was more than that. He was glad his ring filtered out the worst of the smells in the room; curdled milk of...something...didn't seem like a good aroma. He propelled himself just a bit into the air, trying to touch nothing as he went about the room. He kept one eye on Citizen's hacking, but figured the holographic teen had a handle on the situation.

Then something the Tronik native said caught Corbin's ears.

"Wait, did you say something about a 'Dark Mother'?"

In a blur he was floating in front of the screens, his eyes racing over the text. He didn't recognize everything, but one term cropped up a couple of times. The document clearly referred to the "Dark Mother". He next words were an exclamation in Hebrew.

"×–×” רע מ×וד. זהו מצב רע."

He turned to the others, actually visibly paled a bit.

"Guys, the 'Dark Mother' is a...nickname...for a creature known as Shub-Niggurath. It's from the same, well, place, as Kid Cthulu's powers. Which would explain all the warping of the flesh and such. But..."

He turns back to the empty cage.

"That's an excellent question, Wraith. Where did it go? Just as important, how did it get her in the first place?"

[Electra]

"Wait a minute," Koshiro interrupted, holding up a hand. Next to him, the paper soldier mimicked the moment perfectly. Koshiro glared at it till it subsided. "I've heard of that Shrub Niggeroth, that's like H.P. Lovecraft stuff. He wrote the one about the tentacle-mouth monster that got run through by a boat. We talked about him in my Lit class, till somebody complained to the principal." He glowered at the machines. "That stuff's not even real. This has gotta be like some villain thing, mind control juice or something. Tell people you can give them superpowers, then give them this stuff and get them doing whatever you want."

[Gizmo]

"I... I dunno," Kimber spoke up at Papercut's skepticism. Even feeling a little better about her earlier panic attack, she was reluctant to disagree directly with the already stand-offish young man, but he natural tendency toward chattering vocalization won out. "If it was just a cover, why would it be on their computer with all the, y'know, science experiment data and stuff? I don't think they expected us to be looking at it." The poltergeist floated slowly about the room, glancing back up the way they came. "Ghost-proof doors... I didn't even know that was a thing. I dunno if it's magic or... whatever this cult is supposed to be up to, but it's pretty darn weird, at least!"

[Avenger Assembled]

"There's a difference between real and real," said Sharl, adjusting a moment when he realized what he'd said didn't make much sense at first. "Sure, all this talk about alien gods from other dimensions is just primitive nonsense, but that doesn't mean the stuff in the tanks is fake, or that the people here aren't using it to hurt kids. Hell, maybe there _is_ a Shub-Niggurath, some kind of extra-dimensional alien that's passing itself off as real the way those other 'gods' do. Just because these people are superstitious doesn't mean they're not true believers, or that they can't hurt us. I've fought their kind before." He thought for a minute. "We've got to tell Mr. Summers and get out of here. The last thing we need to be fighting is a school full of kids who are high on super-alien steroids."

[Fox]

Wraith bristled when Sharl mentioned 'alien gods', but she was willing to let it pass - personal beliefs were just that, after all: personal. It wasn't her place to criticize what others believed in, any more than it was their place to criticize what she-

"....passing itself off as real the way those other 'gods' do."

She narrowed her eyes, stretching head-first down off the ceiling like a single, massive drop. Partway down, though, her three-eyed head stopped and turned to regard their electronic teammate. "It must be very hard," she noted in a voice that could have given the frost outside of the room a run for its money, "to believe in nothing."

Then she continued her decent, collecting herself back into a more humanoid form on the ground. "I do think that Citizen is correct for our course of action, however. It...seems somewhat strange that this could be connected with a work of fiction, but no matter where this 'milk' came from it clearly has an effect on the students. Mr. Summers may know what we should do about it."

[KnightDisciple]

CT raised an eyebrow at Koshiro's angry skepticism.

"There's a reason he goes by the name "Kid Cthulu". And he wasn't spinning tall tales. KC never jokes about the Outer Things. And it is one of his areas of specialty. And it's very clear something was kept here. And the stories we found are more fitting for a school being fed mutagenic compounds derived from something not of this world, this universe, better than "mind-control juice"."

His face grew worried at Kimber's point about the door.

"You're right. Them proofing the door like that means they had time, resources, and knowledge to prepare against a large variety of intruders. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole place was warded..."

Then Sharl went and put his foot in his insubstantial mouth. CT frowned.

"I'm going to let the "primitive" remark slide, but remind you that we have a guy who uses magic origami, a guy who uses a centuries-old holy magic ring, and a genuine ghost on our team. Try not to be too dismissive of all the options out there, Sharl. I've seen enough things in the last year or two that I won't speak for sure on what's what when it comes to magic and gods."

He winced as he saw how angry Indira probably was.

"Maybe we should try contacting Sage over our mental bond. She can pass stuff on immediately, and the Headmaster can give us an evac plan. I'm not sure I'd like the odds of us versus the whole school..."

He glanced around, still nervous.

'We have the cage and the milk. Where's the prisoner?'

[trollthumper]

The cafeteria was, at this point, pretty much divested of everything but Summers, Sage, Collins, and her security staff. Even the faculty had cleared off to the dorms to oversee the students.

"I thought your students would come to you first, Summers," she said.

"I don't teach kindergarten," he said. "We had fall back orders for something like this. Convene around the truck."

"Paranoid as usual, I take it."

"We're veterans, Sam, and worse... teachers. Paranoia comes with the territory."

Collins was poised to respond, when she put her hand up to her forehead as if fighting off a headache. She then turned towards Duncan, her eyes locked tight on him. "Yes, it does." Her arm lashed out like a whip, extending beyond the sleeve of her suit jacket and wrapping around him like a constrictor. Summers anticipated the attack, weaving around it -- but a second barrage took his legs out from under him. Limbs like whips wrapped around his waist and his neck, lifting him up like a puppet.

"This is a shame, Duncan. I really appreciated our time together, back in the day." She turned to her staff, who appeared absolutely unphased by this demonstration. "Absolute measures must be taken. We must seek the aid of the Dark Mother on this matter."

---

Meanwhile, down in the basement, something clicked on in the computer. Sharl could hear a recording streaming into the plexiglass cell -- the words were in some hideous perversion of a language he could barely distinguish from noise, let alone translate. The others didn't seem to hear it; odds were the cell was soundproofed. The air inside the cell began to distort, twisting in on itself like crumbled paper.

The cell was now occupied by what looked like a tree. Some members of Young Freedom mistook it for a baobab, a tree with a thick trunk and bare branches that wasn't exactly known for its foliage. And then the branches began to sway... and pulse. And it quickly became clear that the "tree" wasn't so much bark as it was flesh. The "branches" came crashing down on the plexiglass like sledgehammers, but the wards carved in the sides began to glow as soon as the tree moved towards it. When the branches made contact, a wall of cold fire washed over the surface, and the tree pulled back as if burned.

But then, as quickly as it bloomed, the fire went out, like a candle in a stiff wind. The "tree", which had been doing something close to cringing, suddenly stood upright again. It brought its branches down, testing the strength of the plexiglass - and split it like a rock through plate glass. The thing surged out into the basement proper, testing its tentative freedom...

[April]

The teen telepath, hidden amid the shadowed rafters, had been unobtrusively monitoring the surface thoughts of her teammates as she kept an eye on their Headmaster. She was about to relay some of the teams finding to Headmaster Summers when she--too late--noticed the subtle shift in body language of Collins and her security personnel now that the cafeteria had emptied of the rest of the faculty.

Sage flashed a brief, unseen, smile when Headmaster Summers evaded the first attack but that vanished when Collins' follow up snared the Headmaster; thorough trough some stroke of fortune the Dunwich headmaster was right below the hidden gymnast. Dropping silent and unseen into the center of what were now the enemy, Sage struck at Headmaster Collins with a blade of focused willpower; a precise upward slash crossing from hip to shoulder.

[trollthumper]

The blade cut deep into Collins' psyche. She let loose a cry of pain and released her grip on Summers, her arms receding back into something resembling human shape. One of Collins's guards tried to close the distance and take out Summers, but the headmaster was too quick. He drew a telescoping baton from his pants pocket, extended it, and took the guard down to the floor. The assault, however, was enough for Sage and Summers to briefly take their eyes off of Collins. They turned back, only to find an empty suit where she had been standing - and the last traces of something protoplasmic slithering into the air ducts.

"That old trick," Summers said. "These ones shouldn't be any trouble. Once we're done with them, we'll find the others and make sure Collins doesn't have her encounter with the divine."

[Electra]

Downstairs, Papercut stared in fascinated horror as the tree-monster broke free from its prison. Normally he'd figure that anything imprisoned in the basement of a villain school might actually be good, but this particular creature looked like it had just stepped out of a bad nightmare and he wasn't going to wait around to see what its intentions were.

Crouching down behind a piece of machinery, he opened his bag and let the cranes free from their cardboard prison. With a soft rustle of paper wings, they rose in a cloud and crossed the room, surrounding the trunk of the monster right where those big, creepy eyes were staring. "Get it now!" he hissed urgently to the others.

[trollthumper]

The flurry managed to find its way into every fold where the thing had eyes. It reeled back under the assault, letting out a noise that wasn't so much a roar or a screech, so much as what it might sound like if a cow was hit with a blender the size of a steam locomotive. After batting away the last of the cranes, it drew its "branches" together into a fleshy cat-o'-nine-tails, and brought them down upon the floor. It was still practically blind, however, and Koshiro was too fast for the assault, dodging ably out of the way. The ground where he'd been standing split under the assault, sundering easily as powdered concrete drifted into the air. The thing drew back its limbs, trying desperately to regain its bearings.

[Gizmo]

Floating in the air closest to the formerly empty compartment, Kimber didn't bother to flinch when the plexiglass shattered, pieces of it flying through her immaterial form. She did glide back the distance of a pace in apprehension when the summoned thing began to move forward, Papercut's cranes flapping around and through her on their way to harry the creature. "I... I don't think that's a tree at all!" she said finally, the surprised words tumbling from her lips in with an indignant tone. This trip had not been going at all as she'd hoped and, fists bunching at her sides and jaw jutting forward in determination, the specter decided that she'd had quite enough.

"You can just stay where you are, pal!" she demanded before her mouth opened into a yawning chasm, stretching lengthwise even longer than unhinging should have allowed as the ectoplasmic flesh about her cheeks and eyes grew taut and skeletal while her long hair flew even more wildly behind her, whipped about in an ethereal gale. With a hollow echo that conveyed terrible, terrible distance, a blast of frigid wind poured from Ghost Girl and washed across the gnarled monster, the vats and the remnants of the cell as though a door had been opened during a blizzard or unnatural fury. A thickening coating of ice quickly began to coat everything in the wake of her impossible maw.

[Avenger Assembled]

Citizen stared at the monster, shock and a little disgust on his visored face as he took in the crawling, staggering, gelatinous beast. He'd gazed into the face of madness before, into the face of sheer unreality, and this was like that terrible soul-sucking madness of the unfiltered computer network had come crawling out into the 'real world' and infected what lay inside. When the others went into action, he did too, Papercut's cranes passing through him and eyes widening at the sight of the hideous face that lay beneath Kimber's perky exterior: he'd seen it before, of course, but that didn't change the sometimes-creepy nature of the living psychic impression. When an opportunity presented itself, he flew in close and threw a carefully-aimed punch, one that landed solidly in the monster's midsection and made its too-soft flesh wobble sickeningly beneath his hand.

[KnightDisciple]

"Huh. Never seen that before."

Cobalt Templar didn't seem overly disturbed by the creature's presence or appearance. Sure it wasn't pleasant to look at, but he'd seen plenty that was worse. Also, it didn't seem to have much intelligence, which could hopefully work in their favor...

He nodded with a small smile as the others went to work, blinding and trapping the creature before Sharl gave it a healthy blow.

Cobalt Templar himself took a few steps forward, his hands gripping first air, and then a rough, menacing weapon that had a bit of flame licking out of the end. He stopped and took aim, keeping his firing line clear of anyone else.

"Hope you can take the heat alongside the cold."

For a moment, a line of bright blue fire connected the young hero and the creature, yet the temperature in the room never wavered. The armored hero cut the attack after a couple of seconds, seemingly satisfied with the hit.

'Hopefully we can take care of this thing before the Headmistress gets here.'

[Fox]

Wraith's first instinct was to go for her blades - make them, that is; they were her preferred weapon, certainly, for all that she didn't have much opportunity to use them these days. But she hesitated, the scythes half-formed, and if she'd been human (or just had a mouth) she'd have bitten her lip. Shapeshifters seemed to get such a bad reputation on Earth...for all she knew this thing, strange and vaguely horrible though it might be, was just lost or exploited.

She shook her head, charging up toward the tree-like creature as her hands came together to form a single, massive spiked mallet. Her body lunged down and to the left as the weapon came down, smashing it directly into the thing's side at an angle.

[April]

The petite telepath positioned herself between Summers and the remaining guards, nodding once at the Headmaster's assessment as she warned her teammates of Collin's vanishing act along the telepathic link she maintained. Sage held her blade of focused willpower at the ready in a guarding stance, the entire length of the construct glowing a steady orange hue.

One of the guards shifted and Sage lunged at him. Her blade sank deep into his chest and though there was no visible damage the guard began to spasm, his neurons misfiring. A second guard began to move in response to the telepath's assault, coming at her from the side. Sage twisted, tearing her blade from the torso of the impaled guard and in a sweeping arc sliced through the neck of the other.

Both guards dropped to the ground twitching and unconscious.

The remaining security staff turned to run whether out of fear or attempt to summon reinforcements Eve did not know. Letting her blade dissipate into a rapidly fading mist, the young psychic picked up a large cafeteria table and hurled it telekinetically, bowling them over.

[Electra]

"It's still not down!" Koshiro yelled, his voice cracking from excitement and nerves. "Come on, what the hell, it's just a tree!" That obviously wasn't the case, since it had eyes and moving limbs, but it still seemed to have taken a beating that would've put even really persistent arboreal foes in their place. He waved his arms in the air then circled them sharply, an action echoed in macrocosm by the flock of now sap-sticky origami cranes. Leaving just enough at the trunk to continue pecking at the wooden eyes, the birds circled wide around the tree and then dove in fearlessly with a sound like the rustle of leaves. En masse, they collided with the bark and bounced away, fluttering through the air on battered wings or collapsing to the ground as scraps of crumpled paper.

[trollthumper]

The creature quivered under the barrage, but stood tall. It turned towards Koshiro, less by sight and more by the general sensation of the attack. Its eyes, sealed shut in response to the storm of paper cranes, flew open, alighting in a dozen horrible shades upon him. It let out a dreadful yell, and started to surge forward, trying to strike at the young hero.

Or it would have, if not for Kimber's frost barrier. The flesh tree thing was wholly confined by the ice, and could only lash out in a futile effort to strike Koshiro. The blows caused the ice to shake and crack, but the creature's prison remained whole. It would only be a matter of time, however, until it could break through and seek revenge...

[Gizmo]

Lifting her lower jaw back into more normal proportions with both hands, Ghost Girl had to take a moment to work it back and forth and massage her stretched ectoplasm into shape. All the while she gave the trashing abomination a look that was somewhere between frustration and pert disapproval. "Oooh!" Stamping her foot in the empty air, the phantasm balled her fists and soared forward, coming up around the opposite side of the creature from Wraith. "C'mon, guys, we just need to keep wearing it down!" With that, she raked suddenly six inch long fingernails deep into leathery, bark-like flesh, the immaterial digits slipping in without resistance but leaving an unearthly, strength-sapping chill in their wake.

[Avenger Assembled]

As the hideous alien monstrosity weathered their strongest attacks, Citizen fumed in disgust. This sort of thing seemed natural enough to the other students of Young Freedom, to whom magical abominations were apparently a freeday's walk in the hydrobay, but for the Tronik-raised teen the monster was unsettlingly alien and familiar all at once. He remembered the raw, naked madness of computer networks without his emulator program, the terrible things with no names and impossible bodies that had seemed to slither through and in and out of reality, and felt a pang of recognition at the sight of the Dark Young. It's just a coincidence, he told himself with desperate determination as the thing shrugged off the paper birds from Koshiro and barely looked phased by Kimber's touch. It's just imitating forms that drive the humanoid mind crazy. I won't let it drive me crazy!

Stepping back, he didn't bother with summoning a phantom keyboard; instead he shoved his hand directly into the control panel for the dairy machinery that was all around them, reaching out with his mind and mastering the simple program inside by sheer force of will. That was reassuring; that was a reminder of the way the world was supposed to work. Behind him, the machinery whirred to life as he faced down the monster. "Hey, meathead!" he yelled. "You like animal protein so much, why don't you eat this?!" At his words, suddenly an overhanging tube, used for some arcane engineering Sharl didn't want to know about, detached from a tank nearby and slammed into the monster, pinning it to the floor as milk spilled out over its body in a disgustingly slow, viscous process: luckily the tube itself was sealed where it was connected to the tank behind, or they'd have a flood on their hands. "Hit it now, while it's stuck!" he called, his hand still inside the sparking panel.

[KnightDisciple]

Cobalt Templar didn't need to be told twice. He'd had quite enough of this blasphemy against reality. He began to jet forward, the flamethrower in his hands disappearing, the energy that made it up swirling in the air for a few moments.

"Time for my George Washington impression!"

A savage grin lit his face as the fiery energy manifested as a wicked-looking weapon that trailed flames from the buzzing teeth.

When he drew next to the thing which ought not to be here, he drew both arms back for a powerful swing, then brought his weapon forward, the teeth buzzing through the air like a swarm of hornets before it impacted the creature, and the flames flared at the moment of impact.

"TIMBER!" boomed the young man's voice as he struck out against the foul creature.

[trollthumper]

The flaming chainaxe of holy might tore into the bulk of the imprisoned creature, and the bound entity, whose protoplasmic flesh had already been pushed to the limit, began to go to pieces under the assault. It let out an unearthly shriek that resounded off the walls of the basement and drove at the brains of the members of Young Freedom like ice picks; the shriek was relatively brief, however, quickly cutting off as the thing's flesh began to resolve into a strange, milk-white dew. Everyone took a step back as the lights went out in the thing's eyes and its corpus was reduced to sludge. The remnants of the creature quickly permeated the concrete floor of the basement, leaving a massive mark upon the stone.

"Collins is in on the operation," Summers said over the communicators. "She's also fairly... strange. She said she was going to seek the aid of the Dark Mother and ran off. Minus her suit. We need to find her before her benefactor decides to pay a visit."

[Fox]

Wraith's whole body hunched down in discomfort as the thing screamed, her significantly-wider-range hearing not really helping matters. At all.

Summers' announcement over the communicators cut both her hearing-related pains and feelings of victory over the () tree-thing short, though. Celebration of their martial prowess could come later; for now, there was hunting to be had. Her body flowed down onto four beast-like, three-clawed feet, her neck and shoulders growing a mane of short, thin tendrils that waved a little as if tasting the air. "I will hurry back and try to track her the way she went; you may have more luck travelling through the facility proper. If that was not the Mother we...we may be in trouble."

And then she was off, leaping to one of the ceilings and running along the wall like it was the floor.

And then she was back, ducking her head a little in chagrin. "Um. Ghost Girl, perhaps we could follow together? It is always best to hunt in pairs, I think, for safety."