Template:Featured Articles/18-2016

Moment of Awesome - David North/Maverick: Called in to stop a mutant terrorist attack, X-Force's Maverick and Daytripper pair up against the Tunneler Fever Pitch. The fire hissed where the water hit it, but did not diminish and the steam smelled of burned mildew and metal. "Get wrecked fucks!" The words came from everywhere, but the jawbone of the flaming skeleton moved along with them, in a steady stream of filth. "I'll fuck you and your mum and your dog!" His bones turned inside the fire that sheathed him and he slid towards Amanda on a path of flame. "You are not really my type." A spray of white foam arced towards his flaming back, followed by short bursts of the same substance from the fire extinguisher North had appropriated and was in the process of emptying at the Morlock, dodging the counter attack that came at him in a series of hit and misses. He recognized by now that the creature was stalling for time and thought this as hard as he could to Amanda, while wondering how their attacker would hold up against bullets. "Wow, and Jubes says I have a potty mouth," Amanda muttered, catching North's eye and nodding. The city didn't make her telepathic, but the Morlock was the city, as much as the bricks and mortar and traffic. Water wasn't working, so she decided to go a bit more basic and with a gesture, she hurled chunks of the tiled and concrete floor and walls at the burning figure, intent on battering him unconscious. When the foam splattered against the flaming skeleton, he shuddered and screamed in pain, but the fire blazed to consume the foam. This two-pronged assault had finally eared his full attention. "Die gene traitor bitches!" The flaming skeleton man thing "yelled", in a telepathic voice that felt like the smell of burning hair tasted. One flame-sheathed bone arm snapped around, and he began pitching wads of fire at Amanda and North, missing his mark whenever one of Amanda's chunks of City cracked against his bones, but increasing his assault until the fires elsewhere diminished, and his focus was entirely on the pair of mutants he fought. The volley was impossible to entirely avoid, and one smacked into Amanda's shoulder, burning red hot through the thick leather coat. North ducked behind a pillar, looking more than a little singed around the edges. He glanced at Amanda, appreciating that her assault had not abated. But the cylinder was getting lighter by the minute, and the nearest one was a good quarter mile away. Pointing the nozzle around the pillar, he let off another stream of foam as he hefted it on to his shoulder and launched it at Fever Pitch's face. Then drawing a gun from its holster, he fired at it. Fire. I'm on fire. Fuckfuckfuck. Ignoring the flames licking at her braid and adding the smell of burnt hair to burnt leather, Amanda switched tactics. Time to finish this, preferably before she actually started with the second and third degree burns. She cast her shielding spell again, but this time as a bubble around the flaming skeleton. Fire needed air, after all. Slowly closing her fist, she shrank the bubble around their foe, until it was compressing him tightly. Wherever the foam spray had hit the flaming skeleton, the fires bubbled and dulled, until they were little more than a dully glowing flame barely sheathing the bones. But as Amanda's shield tightened, the other flames brightened, going white-hot even blue-hot. The mental word-vomit also flared, growing from simple profanity to the worst sorts of language, insults that had nothing to do with Amanda or North, but were just plain noxious words chosen to shock. And then it stopped, all at once. The fires went out, the bones collapsed into a man-shaped heap that left a greasy film on the ground, not unlike smeared butter, and then the fires on the ground began to splutter and fade, only lingering where they had contacted something flammable. That 'something flammable' included Amanda's jacket. But before she could actually drop and roll, she was engulfed in heavy wool, hands patting out the flames on her shoulder and back. "Ta, North," she said gratefully, looking up at her teammate. "That was a little too close for comfort." He helped her up, surveying the destruction around them. "Might have been roasted alive without you." Squeezing her uninjured shoulder in his own expression of thanks, he jerked his head at the stairs to the platform. "Come, we should see what he was distracting us from."