2013-01-24 Magneto meets The Red Skull

Erik Lehnsherr is not a young man. At seventy, he's in remarkable shape- but still, a late night walking home alone, and beset by hoodlums? Even the most apt warrior can be taken unaware by an aluminum bat to the head. Bound, gagged, and trussed, he was tossed in the back of a truck and driven deep into the mountains, well into the countryside of upstate New York.

Once inside the gates, and past the guards, he was offloaded, then hauled into an interrogation room. A nervous young soldier had reported the capture of a 'dangerous SHIELD sympathizer' to the Red Skull- and that Crossbones had signed off on the action.

Now, Erik Lehnsherr, his suit torn, his hair in disarray, sits calmly in an interrogation chair, strapped to it with leather and steel handcuffs. If there's a bit of fear in the old man's eyes, it doesn't show. He even has the the guards looking a bit discomforted with his grandfatherly gaze of disapproval.

Crossbones checks the restraints one last time and then marches silently to stand behind the elderly prisoner. Several guns are holstered or tucked into various place on his oversized, steroidal body. Two more Hydra goons stand on either side of the entrance, energy weapons held at the ready. The doors slide open, and blinding light pours in from the room beyond. There is a smell of ozone, the sound of energy charging, an iron taste in the air. Science. A silhouette appears in the white space and steps forward into the room to face the prisoner. The Red Skull. Crimson brows craggy and brooding over the dark eye sockets, electric blue eyes looking out with hate. He swings a chair in front of Erik, backwards, and sits, leaning forward against the chair's back, eye to eye with the secret mutant. "Mr. Lehnsherr. So happy you could join us."

"I am afraid you have the disadvantage of me, sir," Erik says calmly and with a slightly Polish accent. "I was also quite certain you had the wrong man. For what reason and purpose, I cannot possibly imagine. Have I done you some wrong, sir? Or is this ransom? I assure you, I have nothing of value of which you would be interested."

"I am the Red Skull, Herr Lensherr, and I always have the advantage." The Skull takes out a black cigarette and fits it into his cigarette holder. He lights it and places the end between his teeth. "As for why I have chosen to bring you here, it has come to my attention that the group you run organizes the mutant rights movement. And to that end you have records of mutants around the country and the world. These records are quite valuable to me. For some unknown reason, we have not been able to crack the encryption on your records. To say that this is curious, well..." he drags on the cigarette, holds it in his lungs for a moment, and then exhales through the nostril holes in his disturbing mask, "...that is an understatement. You are here to help me to this information. And since you are here, I believe we will go ahead and make some minor changes to you brain. All for the greater good, of course." The Red Skull grins. He never stops grinning.

"I would strongly prefer you not do so, sir," Erik replies in a surprisingly mild voice. He tests his restrains with a gentle touch, the leather creaking. "And I must say, your techniques are rather... cliche?" He archs a silver eyebrow at The Skull. "You may as well twiddle a mustache and say 'We have ways of making you talk'." He looks at Skull and quirks a lip. "Well. Perhaps we can find you a novelty replacement, yes?"

Does the grin flicker? Just for a moment? Either way, a nearly invisible nod of the head results in a backhand from Crossbones from behind. Enough to generate stars -- and plenty of pain -- but not enough to make an old man pass out. The grin is definitely still there. "Now, now, Herr Lehnsherr. Bravado is a young man's game. And I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that you are no longer a young man." Skull exhales again, right into Erik's face. "As for cliches, my guest... I prefer to think of them as classics. And you don't abandon the classics, hein?" The Skull leans forward until his eyes are mere inches from Erik's, staring, unblinking. "What is not cliche are the methods with which i will make you talk. I could do it with my psychics. Quite easily. Or drugs. Arnim has designed some fabulous new mind-controlling agents that need further testing. But you, Herr Lehnsherr," The Red Skull reaches out and grasps Erik's chin gently, turning the prisoner's head to one side, then the other, before letting go, "for you I believe we will return to the cliche. I think I will cut your head open and being to remove pieces of your brain until you tell me what I want to know."

Erik's eyes are abruptly cold and hard. Like glittering agates. There's a sudden fury in them that's utterly unbridled, taking his demeanor from a calm grandfatherly figure to an utterly implacable, enraged man.

"My name." There's an explosion of metal as the handcuffs fly apart of their own volition. "Is not." Every gun in the room suddenly crumbles, a few of them discharging bullets explosively. A few guards howl in pain. Lights flicker, and with tiny *zings*, fragments of metal shear through Erik's restraints like surgical knives.

His hand sweeps up with shocking speed, grabbing for Skull's fingers with enough force to crush concrete. "Herr Lehnsherr. You skurwysyn /kraut/," he snarls.

Skull's grin freezes as Erik's eyes harden in response to his threats. That's not how this was supposed to go. As the metal in the room begins moving with life of its own, Crossbones steps forward, a knife already in his hand stabbing towards the base of Magneto's Skull. He's a pro. But the knife goes wide, and several bullets in the guns on his body fire and he yells, clutching at his torso. There's blood. The two guards lower their weapons in time for them to twist and shatter. There is a tightening of the Skull's muscles as his fingers are squeezed. A cracking of bones. But from within the crimson mask there is no sign of response. From him no scent of desperation. Only a grin. And hate. Suddenly he spits the lit cigarette straight into Erik's face and then yanks his hand back with the kind of force generated by super soldier muscles. Continuing the pull into a roll, he stands up and smacks the button beside the metal doors, which begin to slide open. "Kill him." This to the two guards and Crossbones, all three who begin advancing from separate directions.

A shard of metal the size of a needle promptly pins the cigarette to the wall before it comes within a hair of Erik. He gets to his feet with a casual ease, ripping away the remaining straps and kicking out of them contemptuously. Crossbones is smart- he throws a soldier at Erik and vanishes out the door a hairsbreadth behind Skull.

From inside the room, there are the sound of screams- horrible, brutal screams- and a spray of blood spatters the doors, escaping into the hallway Skull is running through.

A moment later, the partially closed doors are blasted off their rails with enough force to crumple them. "You should know, sir, that I do not have a merry opinion of your countrymen," Erik's voice declares, his words frosty and full of fury. "The last time Germans visited me, I ended up with a number on my skin. I think it's time I taught you an object lesson about the true nature of the 'superior man'."

Erik walks out of the room with a measured stride, metal flying from bulkheads and doors to him as if on strings. It screams and shrieks and protests as it wraps around him protectively, reformed into a suit of form-fitting armor. A visor wraps around his face, and his eyes become a burning pair of sky-blue pits in a T-shaped shadow.

"Come and meet Homo Superior," he invites with a hiss.

Magneto enters a cavernous room within which all manner of scientific work proceeds. Or was proceeding. Alarm klaxons ring out at ear-shattering decibels, lights flashing. AIM techs scurry to try to save their experiments before fleeing, while Hydra troops converge respectfully but rapidly on Erik's location. There are energy rifles. There are Dreadnought attack robots. Armored exoskeletons. Deep in another room in another building on another continent, Arnim Zola watches the events via video camera, studying the mutant through visual inputs and comprehensive sensor readouts. The Red Skull stands atop a futuristic looking tank which is powering up beneath him. "A number? What a coincidence!" He removes a lethal black handgun from a holster on his hip. "I wrote many of those numbers myself." There is a sick glee in his voice to be able to say such a hurtful thing. "You should let me check *my* records. Perhaps you were one of mine, hm? Herr Lehnsherr?" The Skull watches as Magneto becomes haloed in scrap metal and blue. "Magnificent!" Chaos burns ecstatically in those blue eyes. "FIRE!" A virtual army unleashes projectiles, missiles and lasers of all types. Radiation. Gas.

Radiation. Lasers. Gas. Projectiles. Enough weaponry to wipe a city block off the map, turn it to glass. To destroy a battleship.

And when the dust clears, Erik Lehnsherr and a small patch of concrete exactly three feet wide are all that remains.

"Small, pathetic man," Erik sneers. folds his arms, his voice oddly distorted, the atmosphere around him lensing as if reality itself is warped. "I knew I smelled the wretched stink of the Third Reich on you. That bombastic fool," he says coldly. "So self assured. So full of his own lies and promises to himself. Hitler was a failing artist with delusions of grandeur who pinned the failure of his government on a single people, then went to war with the world to justify the failure of the Aryan Nation."

He makes a single gesture- a flick of a finger. As if pointing at a dog.

In a single wave of force, starting at Erik's position, men start dropping. They drop with a scream, their weapons falling to the ground as if suddenly weighing a thousand stone. Hands too slow to release the gun are crushed underneath them. Steel bolts in helmets bring the entire assembly to the ground in a motion so violent that necks are snapped. Steel rivets and even pocket change become liabilities that break bones and limbs, hitting the ground like gunshots.

The tanks are next- axles snapping, treads flying apart. Bearings are crushed and go flying like lethal greandes. The dreadnoughts collapse under their own weight, and the screaming of metal is drowned out only by the screaming of men, dying by the score under the weight of bare ounces of alloys on their person.

Skull nods at Magneto's words. For some reason the singular tank he now rides like some kind of gigantic, insectile steed does not even tremble under the magnetic onslaught. Nor does his handgun, designed with nonmetallic materials to avoid security detection. "Yes. You have the right of him. A small man, a fearful man. Not worthy of the greatness he aspired to. And even the Aryan people... a myth. At least when applied to a nation, a bloodline." The Skull watches cooly as his men fall as wheat under a cosmic scythe before, around and behind him. His valuable equipment turned to so much junk.

"The true master race is made of men of will. Men who will not stop for anything in pursuit of the one single truth... POWER." The turret before him hums and recoils, an orange gel propelled towards the master of magnetism at the speed of sound, roiling, folding, growing in its intent to engulf and smother its target. The Red Skull is already springing off the back of the assault vehicle and onto a catwalk, then dropping down into another nest of bizarre machinery.

The moment the turret takes aim at him, Erik twitches his head. Scrap metal, stained with blood, flies up in a solid wall, then wraps around the orange gel as if it were a tissue around paste. Erik brings his palm up, then flips it towards the tank. The cannonball- which must weigh neary a quarter ton- shoots towards the tank with enough speed to crack the air, accelerating from a dead stop to a hypersonic round in the space of a hundred feet.

"There is power, kraut, and there is Power." Erik clenches a steel-wrapped fist. "There is the power of the bully and the fearmonger- the terrorists. This is the power you seek. The power to control," he spits. "This is what makes us difference, kraut. I /have/ power. I /am/ power!" He walks towards the man's last location, the tanks and screaming men being flung from his path like so much detritus in the face of a windstorm. "Mine is the power of the mind, fool. Of true will- not just the power of a dictator or a scientist. Mine is the power of the future of humanity!" At that declaration, as if in reponse to his very voice, the lights spark and start blowing out, leaving the room shrouded in darkness.

Liquid circuitry etched into glass and ceramic tubing forms a knotted tube of twisted pipes erupting into a mushroom. On the far end, where the Red Skull stands defiant, two of the tubes turn at right angles, connecting the weird sculpture into a vat of pale blue plasma. Shapes swim within its depths, hints of some larger whole. As the lights die down in the rest of the room, sinking the vast space into stygian darkness, this mass of... something... continues to glow. "Ah, but you mistake having power for power itself, mutant. You did not receive what you wield through superior will. You rely on what you were given... you mistake the gift for the man."

The Red Skull's voice raises, powered by zeal and mania until it fills the cavernous silence. "Take away that gift and what is left? Allow me to show you the power of the dictator, the power of the scientist... the power of THE RED SKULL!" He flips a switch on the side of the vat and the blue quickly spreads through the tubes, lighting up the convoluted object with an eerie bioluminescence, like a firefly unable to dim itself. As it increases in intensity the surrounding area decreases in power, which is to say the electro-magnetic spectrum (that beyond which a body generates and contains within itself) is depressed, leached sideways into another tiny, folded dimension.

Erik groans and drops to one knee, gritting his teeth. The sudden... imbalance in the reality of the universe pulls at him. He groans and struggles upright, arms and body clenched against the pull of the reality-warping device. "You... think you are... more man?" he pants. "You think... your toy... can overcome me."

Erik struggles to his feet, the armor now more liability than protection. "You rely... on systems. Upon systems. The knowledge of your precedecessors... your understanding of machines, electricity..." he droops his head, hiding a savage gleam in his eyes. "Of men."

The Red Skull is walking forward towards his fallen foe, a fresh cigarette clenched between his teeth, a pistol in one hand, a black, ceramic commando knife in the other. He has the walk of the lion approaching his fallen prey. His cologne is victory. "I rely on whatever I can use to my advantage. That is not weakness, fool. That is how an organism, a race, a species succeeds... only survival matters, not the means to that survival."

He walks right up to Magneto and raises the gun to the mutant master's head.

Erik roars, digging deep, and instead of falling to the device, throws the full weight of his power into it. Electricity across the base dims and falters. The might of the Cosmic Cube /itself/ seems to groan as he draws power from everywhere- from the sparking remains of the batteries in the tanks to the dying breaths of the men themselves. Lights and monitors dim, computers flicker and die- and Erik Lehnsherr stands at the center of it all, pulling as fiercly /in/ all the rampant electromagnetic energy as the Cube-powered device does.

And then he throws it- all of it- directly into the heart of the machine. All of his raw power, his strength- the gift of the gods that grants Erik the ability to move /mountains/ with only his mind. He throws that might directly into the teeth of Red Skull's device, roaring his rage at all the Skull stands for, and ignoring the predatory advance of the Red Skull as he closes on the downed Magneto. He unleashes the full force of his might just as the phrase, "Of men." is uttered, blasting it through the Skull as if he were so much the fly in the face of the hurricane.

BBBWWWWAAAAAARRRRRMMMM

The blast spins each every atom within the Red Skull several times as it lifts him bodily and projects him back and over the proto-cube device. He continues flying, smashing through the thin wall surrounding the space and then again through a thicker wall and out into the sunlight, where he dros into a drift of snow.

Inside, the massing of willpowered energy reacts with the cosmic technology, creating a vortex of fire around the mushroom which begins to crack, then splinter, then shatter. Bits of it swirl and drift upward in a triple helix. Sound bends in uncomfortable ways and even someone not attuned to the magnetic fields of the planet could field the building powered clogged, pressure mounting quick to some terminal point.

"Damn that kraut's eyes," Magneto snarls, eying the device in a way no human, and precious few scientists, could comprehend. "Damn him." He steps forward towards the device with quick, certain steps, hands outstretched. He makes a flickering gesture after the hole in the wall, sealing it up with a thick layer of steel.

No longer fettered by the draining effect of the proto-cube- bolstered by the radiation, enough to kill a normal man- Magneto goes to work with his bare hands, caressing the cube as if soothing a furious animal.

It's the labor of long minutes, precious minutes for someone as resourceful as the Skull to make his escape. The energy is vented, diverted, redirected, until the walls of the building glow with radiation, the very air supercharged with gamma particles. He works diligently until the cube stabilizes, then with the utmost care, feeds the radiation back into the cube's tiny dimensional shunt.

Slowly the walls stop glowing. The heat dissipates. The environment, lethal enough to kill a mortal in moments, rapidly approaches normal as all that excess energy is slowly fed back out the vortex and into nothingness. With an exhausted sigh, Erik puts his hand atop the cube, watching the blue luminescence wink out into nothingness. He pats it once, the heaves a weary sight. Armor peels away from him, clattering to the ground. He is a weary, exhausted old man. Pale, furious blue eyes stare at the hole in the wall.

"We will meet again, Skull. You still have not taken the measure of /this/ man."

Outside, there is no one to hear Magneto's defiant words but the wind, for the Red Skull has pulled himself up from the dirt once again and vanished. To lick his wounds. To plot. To wait for the opportune time and place... to strike again. Die Roten Schadel lebt!