Template:Featured Articles/13-2021

Moment of Awesome - Logan/Wolverine: Trapped in a haunted house and his own fears, it takes Megan Gwynn to talk Logan down from his worst nightmare. One moment Logan was tracking the multitude of Betsy scents up the stairyway. The sooner they found the source the sooner they could figure out how to get out of here. The next moment he was submerged in liquid, tubes and wires plugged into his skin, and a breathing mask attached to his face. He flailed in the liquid. It was water pumped full of drugs. It was all too familiar. He remembered this all too well. His first real memories, the ones he'd started building a life upon. He struggled, kicking and punching, only sending waves of water over the sides of the tank. He howled his rage into the mask, yanking as hard as he could to dislodge the wires from their anchors. The water turned red from his thrashing and all he felt was the needles digging into his skin, the electrical pulses spasming his body. His claws were useless in the water. Unable to gain leverage, unable to pull himself in the directions he wanted, he was a lab rat trapped under a glass slide. Meanwhile, Pixie jumped back from the tank as Logan began to thrash in the liquid. She fired a spell to break the glass, but it bounced off harmlessly, breaking some equipment behind her. So much for that. Pixie took a couple deep, calming breaths. "None of this is real! I'm going to get you out of there," she said, then added to herself, "OK, get it together, girl. It's just demon magic. It's true, you do have demon magic inside of you." There was a snapping sound as a wall monitor shorted out and went black. "We're not going to die here just because Dad died in a hospital," she continued softly, allowing bad memories of the months spent in hospital rooms to blossom and wilt in her mind instead of burying them. There were more sounds of equipment powering down. Soon, the only thing in the room functioning was the tank. There were no buttons, switches or valves to release it from the outside. That meant... "Logan! Let go! You can free yourself!" Logan barely heard Pixie's voice through the water. Her voice sounded like it was coming from miles and miles away. Even with his enhanced hearing he still had to strain to make out her words. He stilled when he processed her words. Let go? Let go of what? There was nothing in the tank he was holding onto. He was struggling to get away from it all. He snarled into his breathing mask and yanked at the wires again. Nothing gave. Nothing felt like it was working. He shook his head and stared into the murky water as he made himself take deep breaths and hold still in the water. This tank and this lab and everything about it had been destroyed a million times over. It shouldn't exist and everything here was just a product of whatever messed up place this haunted house had turned into. He closed his eyes and tamped down on his instincts, breathing slowly in and out. The wires began to fade until they disappeared completely. The needles and their drugs and their hurts did the same until there was nothing there but the faint outline of a water filled tank. The mask over his face disappeared too and then Logan was standing with his feet on the floor, dressed as he had been and dry as a bone. He swiped his claws at the lingering shadow as he stepped through it and toward Pixie. "Let's get the hell out of here." "I couldn't agree more," said Pixie, heading for the stairs.