Lucius leaned back into the sofa, pulling Bob's status page before his eyes with eager anticipation. For a moment, his gaze flickered with hope, but soon the expression hardened, and the grave look of a man once more disappointed by the universe appeared on his face.
Name: Lucius Noctis
Race: Eternal
Class: Wizard
Affinity: Alchemy, Rituals
Innate Skills
- Rapid Healing
- Mental Shields
- Teleportation
- Telekinesis
- Flight
- Force Field Generation
- Energy Blasts
- Molecular Manipulation
Racial Skills
- Genius-level Intellect
- Master Scientist
- Master Engineer
- Master Combatant
- Multilingualist
- Immortality
- Superhuman Strength, Durability, Speed, Agility, Stamina, Reflexes
- Regenerative Healing Factor
- Cosmic Energy Manipulation
- Construct Creation
- Illusion, Decoy, Presence, Sound Manipulation
- Matter Transmutation
Class Skills
- Veil of Fate
- Blessed Brewing
- Sacrificial Array
- Array of Convergence
Lucius frowned.
No little star, no enhanced Eternal package, no elegant upgrade to the standard physical suite. He had sacrificed two more Eternals, and all he had to show for it on that front was the same old superhuman strength, durability, speed, agility, stamina, and reflexes every basic cosmic aristocrat apparently got for free.
He felt cheated, conned, scammed, and no, never fucked. He was a healthy, normal male, and his arse was a one-way street built for one kind of traffic only, namely the kind that left.
Still, the principle offended him with a hollow ache at his bottom.
He put the back of one hand to his forehead and slumped sideways in theatrical misery.
"Alas," he said to the suite at large, "I am fated to misfortune."
With a sigh that only half belonged to the performance, he looked again at the useful changes. Invisibility had vanished as an Innate skill, yet he could still turn invisible without any trouble, which meant Sprite's contribution had folded the effect into the broader cluster she brought with her.
That cluster deserved testing first.
Lucius stood, sent Bob back to his inventory, and cleared a space in front of him.
Illusion, decoy, presence, and sound manipulation sat close enough together to promise delightful abuse if handled properly. After a moment's thought, he pictured Jean Grey and Natasha Romanoff in front of him, stripped down and dancing for him. A very direct display of his better judgment had never once successfully been argued against.
The result appeared at once.
Two smoking bombshells now occupied the centre of the sitting room and did their level best to keep his attention where they thought it belonged. The illusion quality was excellent. Light, movement, presence, and voice all came in together with just enough weight to convince the primitive portion of the brain before the smarter portion remembered this was a talent test and not a reward programme.
Lucius grinned.
Then he decided to improve it.
"Let's add Fury twerking."
Nicholas Joseph Fury appeared in a skimpy outfit that should have been burned before its invention and started throwing his arse back with grim determination while glaring at Lucius like this was somehow his fault.
Lucius recoiled so fast he nearly tripped over the coffee table.
"Bloody hell." He shut the illusion down at once and put both hands over his face for one long second. "I need to be very careful with this talent. That nearly gave me a lifelong trauma, and I'm immortal."
He shook his head hard as if the image might come loose and fall out by force.
Sadly, it did not.
After another breath, he turned to matter transmutation.
That one mattered more. He snickered.
Sersi's own wording limited it to non-sentient transmutation, which would have been disappointing if the films had not already spoiled the lie. Sersi had turned a Deviant into a tree and volcanic rock into birds that then flew away. That meant the ability touched living form even if the system preferred to describe it like a nervous lawyer.
"You learn by doing," Lucius murmured.
Then he vanished.
--
Mystique reached the floor a little later and stood in the corridor outside Lucius's suite wearing somebody else's face with the bored patience of a woman who had spent too much of her life adapting to the world one bad disguise at a time.
She knocked once.
Nothing.
She waited, knocked again, and got the same result.
That was mildly irritating but not surprising. Men like Lucius Noctis did not become difficult by accident.
She checked the corridor, took out the card she had lifted from a member of staff downstairs, and opened the door.
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her quietly.
Then she stopped. The suite was empty.
Mystique did not relax.
She wanted to search it. There was probably useful information here in the form of tools, records, notes, and habits made material.
She also wanted to keep breathing.
That preference won.
Mystique took in the layout instead, letting her eyes move over the furniture, the routes between rooms, the balcony, the bedroom door, and the small signals of occupancy without touching more than necessary. The man had no visible bodyguards in the suite, which fit what she already knew so far. He did not need any. Men who trusted their own power that much rarely bothered paying other people to stand nearby and feel important.
So she waited inside instead of in the corridor and listened.
If Lucius returned, she would know something from how he moved, how he entered, and what he looked for first.
That alone could be worth more than rummaging through drawers and dying for the effort.
-
Lucius found his first lucky junkie in the Bronx.
The man was half folded against the side of a building, filthy, underfed, and chemically ruined in a way long abuse carved into a body. He looked up when Lucius stepped into view and managed the faint suspicion of someone whose life had already gone bad enough that miracles now registered as possible scams.
Lucius smiled with all the warmth of a television preacher and spread his hands.
"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find." He tilted his head. "Rejoice, my son. Your prayers have been answered."
The man blinked through the grime and stale confusion.
"The fuck... I'm an atheist..."
Lucius teleported him out before the sentence could finish.
The next instant, the junkie stood in a snowy forest under a black sky, miles from anything useful, with panic rising fast enough to count as cardio.
He started screaming.
Lucius silenced it with voice manipulation because one of the great virtues of that talent was how quickly it improved the atmosphere around ungrateful wretches and infidels.
The man clawed at his own throat, felt the sound refuse him, and stared wide-eyed at Lucius through the dark.
Lucius approached with the calm interest of a butcher inspecting quality.
Matter transmutation required touch for the cleaner tests. He had already concluded that much from the way the instinct sat in the skill. So he laid one finger on the junkie's elbow and started with the obvious.
Purge the chemical rot. Rebuild the blood. Strip out the years of poison pumping. Correct damage without leaning on healing.
The body reacted.
Not well, but that was secondary. The talent was capable of working on living beings.
There might have been some minor errors when cleansing years of abuse out of tissue that had long since forgotten what normal was supposed to mean. Lucius preferred to think of them as learning experiences. The man convulsed once, went rigid, then collapsed with the deep and lasting stillness of someone whose educational contribution had just ended.
Lucius looked down at the corpse.
"Unfortunate."
Still, the result was not worthless. He went back to bring another believer whose prayers were answered at that exact moment.
Hours passed, and many more prayers were answered.
He had managed to strip years of drug abuse from the bodies without any healing ability. He had done it using pure matter transmutation. The predecessors of the man currently staring at him with dead eyes, may God judge their souls with mercy and a sense of proportion, had helped Lucius learn crucial details about the anatomy of worthless scumbags.
He looked at the man a beat longer and transmuted him into a tree.
Wood rose where flesh had been, branches spread, bark replaced skin, and roots dug in under fresh snow.
See, he was adding value to the forest.
For balance, and because he was feeling generous towards botany, he added a couple of palm trees nearby as well to show his support for inclusivity.
"Next phase." He smiled, a little manic now. "Homo superior."
Then he disappeared again.
Over Union Square in Manhattan, Lucius flew high and let his telepathy sweep downward through the crowd.
The X Gene victims were visible to his mental probes. His range was more than good enough for this.
After about twenty minutes of slow flight and selection by private standards he would never admit aloud, he located over a dozen possibilities.
Then he brought back the luckiest one.
The choice was totally random.
It had nothing at all to do with her being slightly good-looking and matter transmutation being a touch-based exercise that benefited from physical cooperation.
Nothing whatsoever.