Template:Featured Articles/10-2019
"I have...one. And it is an exceedingly bad one." Jean-Phillipe pulled his hand from Angelo's and put it on his wand. He had watched the movies, though he did not care to admit it, protective as he was of his image. But he remembered the warnings - you had to mean it, to really want to cause pain. It was an impulse that he largely channeled into being an X-Man and protecting others, but he could not deny that a deeper, darker part of him would always be there, always revel in the fact that his mutant power allowed him to do it. The part that had led him to the Brotherhood so long ago. And he remembered what the Unforgivable had looked like when Voldemort had used it on Harry Potter - very much like a victim of his own ability. And so his wand thrust outward, with that peculiar little flick of the wrist at the end that also tended to accompany his power when using it in the real world, and he spoke coldly. "Crucio." It was far too easy to sometimes dismiss her cousin - her wry, sometimes slightly camp cousin who dropped fashion magazines in her hospital room and was actually picking out a china pattern, Marie-Ange thought. She did, she underestimated him and it was easy to forget that under fitted vests and scarves and patterned shirts was a man who had started his adult life openly queer as a dock labourer - and had joined the Brotherhood of Mutants openly. She thought of herself as the worst of the pair, and that was still true. She wouldn't had the twisted expression of guilt on her face if she had been the one to cast that spell on the troll. But it was probably a closer thing than she liked to think. Her own hand twitched to a wand tucked into a holster under her blazer sleeve as the grey-skinned creature went down bellowing, but she cast no spells - just nudged her cousin's arm with the blunt end and then deftly plucked his wand from his fingers. "Enough. Alexander, please repeat your spell. The thing is quite overcome, it does not need much more to be of no danger to us." "Right. Right. Uh...." Alex pointed his wand again, feeling a little ridiculous. Another explosion of energy, and the walls rattled as the troll was thrown into the wall, roaring, before suddenly going very still. "Oh jeez, did I kill it? Wait, does it matter? Are trolls even real?" His tiny bordering-on-teenager voice cracking on the last word. "I mean," Stephen inched closer to the troll, his fingers clasped firmly over his nose as he inched closer to the body of the troll. Despite his best efforts, the boy could feel his eyes watering as he backed away from the troll, "Yeah, it looks dead but...I mean none of this is real right? So I mean...you should be ok...I think." He didn't really know what was going on but, sounded like Alex needed comforting." Hope quickly latched on with Stephen's effort. "How real this might seem, it's still just a world made of light and computer programs." Alex rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "Let's just go before I think too much about this. I can talk to someone later about the ethics of maybe killing a maybe not real troll." "It is a fictional construct of some sort, given that we are all versed in the references," Jean-Phillipe said, making no move yet to retrieve his wand from his cousin's grip. If he kept reminding himself that, perhaps he would not feel as guilty over jumping straight to a torture analogue as his first solution to a problem. |
