Chapter 15: #14
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A SAGE ADRIFT
#14
When Emma Frost had decided to follow Mystique's plea to rescue someone from a sticky situation, she had not hoped, even in her wildest dreams, that she would come across someone like Naruto.
While his mind itself was unreachable for her, which is something she was still trying to wrap her head around, his feelings, on the other hand, were quite easy to discern. Naruto Uzumaki was an extremely empathetic person. So much so that she suspected that something happened during his formative years that made him so. It is not natural to have that level of empathy without something extraordinary happening to one's psyche. Such events normally break most people but the ones that come out of it stronger than before?
Those people are one in a billion and she was looking at one right now. They were back at one of the "black sites" where her father kept using shell companies. Well, when he was still alive anyway. Now that he is dead and everything he ever owned was in her name, she used most of these sites as a place to either stash assets like her Jet or house new members of the team, like Naruto.
This facility in particular was in Alaska, hidden deep beneath the frozen tundra that allows for exceptional stealth along with privacy for any issues that might occur. Like the one that was happening right now.
She had brought Naruto along with her because this was the perfect moment to manipulate him into joining her cause. He was at a low point emotionally and it was always easier to aim such people at targets that happened to just be her enemies as well. She had planned for him to be trained for a while so she could estimate his overall skill sets but the second he had set foot on the base, he had asked, no demanded, to be given information on the organisation known as "Friends of Humanity" so he could begin hunting them down.
Oh, Naruto said to bring them to justice but if he was actually so naive as to believe that the Justice system of the United States or any other country, for that matter, would help him achieve the justice he intended, she pitied him.
Her brother, Christian had once been naive as well, hoping that his father, the sperm donor, would come to love him eventually. His eventual disappointment was what led him to substance abuse and then, his death. She would not want Naruto, or anybody else, to experience that crushing hopelessness and despair but she was not in the business of coddling anybody, certainly not members of her team and that's what she was hoping Naruto would become.
A member of her team that worked as a third alternative in the current scenario. According to Emma, it was a fool's endeavour to join either of the two sides that were available for the mutant community.
Xavier was a fool if he thought that the government would accept mutants only if we helped them by becoming heroes and not taking proactive action in getting laws passed that would help mutant-kind.
Magneto, on the other hand, is a much bigger fool who refuses to recognise the effects of the trauma he had sustained during his childhood and as such, continues to lash out at the world for giving him pain. He doesn't understand that going by pure numbers, mutants are outnumbered immensely. No matter how powerful he thinks he is, humans will always find a way. She was sure of it.
How Magneto's issues did not get treated despite him being best buddies with Charles Xavier was beyond her understanding. Xavier's refusal to treat the mental illnesses of his friend was what led to many of the disasters of the man that she had to clean up. Despite the government only tolerating both of their organisations, they continued to believe in the extremes. Both of them are the extremes of the mutant community and she hoped to become the moderate cornerstone of the mutant community.
A third option, so to speak so that when a mutant who just wants to live a normal life is being hunted down by the authorities, he doesn't have to choose between an idiotic pacifist who will endanger your life by making them fight in his battles but not allowing them or giving them the proper tools to defend themselves, or chose the second option where they would have to join a bunch of rag-tag people who are just one step below terrorists and would be forced to assault innocent people who actually had nothing against them but just for the sake of your leader's voice can be heard by the people in power.
It was a dilemma she faced as well when she came to power by taking over Frost Industries once her father died a tragic death. She had told both of them that they were idiots if they thought she would legitimately join them but she had been extremely lucky back then to have her powers developed by the time they realised about her because she was pretty sure that without the protection granted by either of those fools, she would not have been able to survive had it not been for the extensive experimentation and training she did with her powers ever since she was but a confused teenager who was curious about the voices she heard in her head.
Then came the Hellfire Club and all that entailed joining it. Honestly, she was still curious as to what happened to Sebastian since he had not been seen since he was swallowed by a burning orange portal during Naruto's fight with Juggernaut.
Naruto, on the other hand, who was apparently favoured by the Ancient One herself, was constantly fidgeting with the container that was given to him by the same method Sebastian was swallowed, by an orange burning portal.
She had tried asking him about it but he refused to elaborate more on it until she held up her side of the bargain, i.e., giving him details about the assailant and also telling him how she had been at the right place at the right time.
She was not about to just hand over information to him free of cost so she was about to go to the meeting room where Naruto was waiting for her so they could hash out a deal which would benefit both of them, her more than him of course.
"What do you think?" She asked Elijah, one of the oldest additions to her team. He was one of her "sensory" assets, as in, someone whose powerset mandates that they stay off-field and help in their own way. Elijah, in particular, was blessed with information gathering. He was a master of information gathering even before he got his mutant powers. His powers also supplemented his skill sets, allowing him to gather information on targets by just staying in their general vicinity for a certain period of time. His powers were crucial because they also helped her identify the sub-species of a person without ever taking blood off them.
"He is definitely not a mutant," Elijah replied. She hummed in response. She was quite aware of that, especially since she saw with her own eyes, the number of powers that Naruto possessed made it almost impossible for him to be a natural-born mutant.
Mutants don't normally come with wholesale dozen different powers that Naruto had. Super speed, Super Strength, and Super reflexes can come hand in hand with an elevated physique power but those orange energy balls? They were a completely different power as far as she was concerned.
Even if she did assume the second one to be his secondary powerset, the third healing arm cannot be explained by him being a mutant or even a human, for that matter. She had her suspicions on his origin and she was about to voice them for Elijah when he himself replied.
"Whoever he is, he is human. At Least a part of him is human but it is all wrong."
Wrong?
"What do you mean, Wrong?"
"Wrong, as in his biology is very different from a normal human but my power is reading him to be a vanilla human. This is impossible since he also has an energy rating that is the highest I have ever recorded. Even the other person you brought it doesn't have the same energies Naruto has. Then there's the issue of his arm. My powers read that arm as a completely different object than Naruto's, rather than it being just his arm. The arm is also a plant or a tree according to my powers. This is the first time this has happened and I believe the reason for that is because Naruto is some sort of alien."
Alien? That seemed plausible to Emma since she was quite aware of all the different Alien species that had crash-landed on the planet since the thousands of years of recorded history. Also, it was ridiculously easy to glean classified information from heads of state before Xavier came in and offered every country the technology behind blocking telepathy.
"He might just be from another universe then?" Alex voiced in between them. He was still a little disturbed by what he had seen from Naruto because he very much believed before this fight that his barriers were the strongest barriers anybody with powers could produce but after seeing Juggernaut in action, he was not sure of his barriers holding up to the strength of someone of that level. It also didn't help that he clearly saw Naruto's barriers holding up just fine during their battle.
He was of the opinion that if the barrier spells could be taught, he would like to learn more about it since it would enhance his powers by an order of magnitude and she was all for it, once she had ascertained Naruto's exact relationship with the sorcerers since they could be unpredictable at the best of times and downright hostile at the worst. She couldn't risk the life of her team on just a hunch, she needed to be sure.
"Maybe, he is a human but from another multiverse? That's why my powers are acting all wonky since they are used to humans from our universe."
"What's a multiverse?"
"A multiverse is just a cluster of universes that are…"
The voices of Elijah and Alex faded in the background as she moved towards the meeting room with purpose.
She was just about to enter the room when a chill rose in her spine but before she could do anything but barely transform into her diamond form, something pushed her and she fell right into the burning orange portal, landing straight on hardwood flooring.
Immediately snapping up, she assumed a combat-ready stance as she looked around.
"Behind you, Ms.Frost," She swore that there was nobody there when she looked but now the Ancient One was standing in the same spot with her hands behind her back.
Sighing, she relaxed a bit before deactivating her diamond form. Crossing her arms beneath her chest, she said, "So, why have you called for me in this very rude manner here, Ancient One?"
The Ancient One looked at Emma with the same placid smile and empty eyes that made her shiver internally. It never failed to creep her out once she realised that the person in front of her was thousands of years old and was strong enough that she could wipe out even the Juggernaut with a single snap of her fingers.
She had been warned by all of the mystics she had found that the Ancient One was not someone to be crossed. She could and probably had trapped multiple enhanced people in a dimension where time passes, but only for their minds. Their body remains biologically immortal while their mind rots away in the eternity of time.
That single piece of information alone had dictated how she dealt with any sorcerer throughout her stint as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club.
"I am here with a warning. A warning about Mr.Uzumaki."
As she had expected, she was here for Naruto. Honestly, what was so special about him other than him being stronger than most people but pure brute strength would never appeal to someone like the Ancient One who could erase most people on the planet with but a single spell.
"What about him?"
She nodded, trying to hide her nervousness but in front of someone with the experience of a thousand years of doing the same, it felt like all of her secrets were laid bare. This is why she hated dealing with immortals.
Word Count - 2147
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