Template:Featured Articles/33-2023

Moment of Awesome - Alison Blaire/Dazzler: Following the X-Men's defeat at the hands of the Brotherhood, Alison gives Nica a private lightshow in the name of recharging her. Alison burst into Nica's room, one hand holding a 'Get Well Soon' balloon that had had 'Well' scratched out with black sharpie and replaced with a hand-written 'EM'ed' and the other full of a box that contained a pair of small little chocolate mousse cakes. They had raspberry coulis on top and dark chocolate crust with a white and milk chocolate mousse layers, and the cold was starting to sting Alison's hand a bit. "Hello Nica, I heard you needed help." Her smile (or maybe that was her power) lit up the room. Nica looked up from her laptop. Megan had switched it to voice-to-text for her, which helped, but she was still very aware of how much not being able to touch things was limiting her. Composing an email to her professors explaining that there was an outbreak of chicken pox in her shared living space and that the doctors had told her to isolate had taken her an hour. Still, the sight of the balloon had her smiling. It was just too cute for words. "Yeah, I really do," she replied. "But you didn't have to go to all that trouble?" "Please," Alison said with a smile and a shrug, "I was already making mousse cakes and I definitely shouldn't eat them all myself anyways. Besides, chocolate makes everything better." She set the box on a nearby table. "How are you feeling?" "Insubstantial?" Nica shrugged. "I mean, I don't have to focus on not fading out entirely or concentrate on staying in one place as much as I was, but this is getting old. Real old." She demonstrated by passing her hand through the box of cakes. "Any help at all would be awesome." "Whoa... you're like a ghost. ~~Young Danny Fenton, he was just 14 when his parents built a very strange machine~~" She smiled, but it was kinda brittle. "Give me a second to set up my phone and get some music going and I'll see what I can do. Any preference in genre?" “Whatever your powers like best? Is that even a thing?” Nica realised she didn’t actually know much about Allison’s powers beyond “converting sound into light frequencies. “I’ll never say no to Beyonce, if my choice doesn’t change things.” "Nah, not really," Alison said, thumbing through the playlist. She was actually... kind of embarrassingly light on Beyonce music, she realized. It wasn't her fault, though! These phones could only hold like, thirty thousand songs or something, and she had to pick and choose her favorites once space began to run low. "I mean, kind of yes, but basically not really. As long as I'm not the one making the sound, I can technically convert anything, more or less? The effect is just different, is all." She found a song. "This will do, actually." She pressed play, and 'Halo' begin to fill the room. "Good solid drum echo for the grey stone flashes, fluttery piano for the feathersweeps... yeah, this should have a good blend. Let's see how this goes." And she let her power play. Nica hadn’t really seen a lot of Allison’s powers in use before, so she was curious to watch them up close. And you didn’t get more up close than being on the receiving end. First Allison’s eyes began to glow, then the rest of her body, until she was encompassed in a… well, yes, it was a halo of light. As the song built up and the volume increased, rainbow-coloured streamers undulated through the air around them, while she could literally see the drum beat as a series of waves, darker in colour, moving along the floor. Then the light hit her and she sucked in a sudden breath. It was like being dropped into a spa bath when you were exhausted – bubbles of sensation percolating around her body, seeping into her skin and bringing with them a sense of solidity as she felt her powers grasp at the EM wavelengths contained in the visible light. She dropped to the floor from her slight hovering above the ground, delighting in the feel of carpet under her toes. The process was slow, but thankfully not terribly difficult, and after a good twenty minutes Alison could start to see some color coming back into Nica's cheeks. And her everything else, for that matter. She'd gone from a mostly incorporeal spectre-like appearance to actually having a definite outline again, for one thing. It was like a bad special effect from an old B-movie, only it was real life and it was honestly kind of cool to watch.