Chapter 92

Marcy's latest therapy session went... About as well as it could go. It'd taken a while to get a therapist who was both qualified to handle the kind of trauma she'd experienced, an actually good therapist instead of the kind who tried to 'fix' you instead of helping you fix yourself, and was willing to actually listen to Marcy about what her problems were. The first one she had assumed out of hand that she had trust issues after being betrayed by Andrias and the second tried to diagnose her with Oppositional Defiant Disorder just becuase she ran away from home the one time, context be darned.

One thing led to another, and to make a long story short Marcy beat the assault charge and therapist #2 got arrested for taking kickbacks from a troubled youth camp. They were more careful about vetting therapists after that, the fifth one was good but wasn't so good at the specific kind of therapy that worked best for Marcy and had referred her to her current therapist, and that had been working out greatly.

Anyway, her latest session had gone well. Marcy had brought up that the... change in her relationship with Anne and Sashy was going well and then after going over how there was an update on the goings on in Amphibia upcoming they'd briefly touched on how she was managing her trauma before spending the rest of the session going over exercises to manage her tendency to hyperfocus. She didn't really mind getting super caught up in a game or book but... She didn't have Sasha and Anna-Banana around to keep her from getting hurt all the time anymore and she had enough scars thank you very much. And honestly, she wanted to do her best to live in the real world as much as possible.

So, she was in a good mood as she left the office and made her way home until she noticed a frog-bot in the street.

Well, except she didn't remember them being solid black and covered in red ton-lines that were disturbingly like the color of Amphibia's artificial moon.

Marcy very quickly pinched herself... No, she wasn't dreaming, this was not a nightmare. More frog-bots... frog-bots that looked like they were infected with some version of the techno-organic or transmode virus by the looks of it, landed around her in a circle. The head of the frog bot that was directly in front of her morphed and deformed until it resembled the many-eyed visage of...

Marcy started breathing, very carefully, in and out. She didn't have anything to fear. She and Anne and Sasha had beaten it once before. It couldn't hurt her anymore.

"Hello again, Marcy," the Core greeted with false politeness.

"You're supposed to be dead," Marcy declared coldly, which prompted even colder, condescending laughter from the malevolent AI.

"You cannot kill a God, Marcy."

"That is a factually untrue statement!" Marcy countered. "Gods get killed all the time. There's even an entire speciesthat was engineered to hurt them like wolves going after a deer and I should probably shut up becuase one of my new friends is technically part of that species and I don't want to accidentally say something offensive."

"Oh, Marcy... Never change," the machine said.

"How and why are you even here!?" Marcy demanded.

"Oh, a little snake sprung us, a lying polygon, a hot-tempered sorcerer, and an old king from the realm we were incarcerated in after your friend Anne squandered the power of Amphibia's greatest treasure in a failed attempt to destroy us... Unrelated, we're going to launch a pogrom against the axolotls when we return to Amphibia. But, we digress, Marcy: We're here for a reason."

Here it goes, "Is it that you've finally realized that you're an obsolete relic of a bygone era and you're here to apologize for everything before shutting down for good?" She knew it wasn't, but Marcy was not about to give the thingthat had abused Andrias, abused her, and made Andrias abuse her anything even remotely resembling respect.

"No," it deadpanned. "These techno-organic vessels are far superior to anything we could create with purely Amphibian technology, truly we underestimated the resources of this dimension, but... Well, we've developed something of a taste for those cupcakes you like. We need a living, organic host to properly enjoy them... We're prepared to forgive you for your stubborn refusal to conform... To give you a second chance to be part of us..."

"I would never agree to let you back into my body!"

"Well, that's a shame," the Core said evenly, "but your consent was never a factor."

The frogbots began to close in around her. Marcy tried to reach deep and draw on her gem's power, but she was having trouble focusing right now. As they closed in, she started to panic when suddenly a ruby-colored beam of light took the head off of the lead bot, the one that Core had been speaking through.

Moments later, several more of the Frogbots were struck by lightning, the sky suddenly clouding over seconds before, while a single remaining Fogbot was slashed apart by a demonic-looking acrobat wielding a glowing sword.

While damaged, the bots didn't seem down and began to stretch and deform, as techno-organic entities often did, only for a massive barrage of laser fire to pin them all down and blast them to bits.

"I will never get used to having the feds on our side," came a woman's voice from Marcy's right, which caused the teen to jump and fall over, only to be caught by a woman to her left.

As a dozen or so men in FBI field/combat uniforms used controlled but rapid pulses of laser light to destroy all remaining traces of techno-organic frogbot, Marcy took in who was around her. The woman who'd spoken up was a brunette in a black and blue ninja suit. The woman who caught her, meanwhile, was dressed in a costume that was not unlike that of the infamous Wolverine. The demonic acrobat, with his blue fur and shadowy face and spaded tail Marcy had already noticed, but now he was standing next to a black woman with long, white hair and blue eyes like a cat's. Finally, standing with perfect discipline was a man whose blue uniform contrasted against the ruby-colored crystal of his iconic visor.

As Marcy realized that she'd been rescued by the X-Men(at least the current active duty roster, minus Phoenix) and struggled against her urge to immediatelyask all of the potentially boundary-violating questions she had about the and mutants in general, the feds that Shadowcat wasn't yet used to being helpful finished cleaning up the frogbots and the apparent leading of the... Squad approached Cyclops and said something, causing the mutant leader to turn to Marcy.

"Miss?" He asked. "We've been sent out to find someone so I have to ask: are you, Marcy Wu?"

"Yes sir, Mr. Summers sir," Marcy confirmed.

TLOA

After her identity was confirmed, Marcy was quickly escorted to a 'secret government bunker' hidden in the basement of a nondescript office building. The bunker in question was pretty big and swarming with FBI, National Guard, and SHIELD representatives and was apparently being used as a base of operations for the effort to coordinate a response to the 'second Phalanx' invasion. Marcy had been taken to the 'command center' where Mr. X and Nick Fury were supervising stuff and was asked if she could confirm if the Phalanx resembling frogbots meant that Amphibia was involved.

After confirming that it was The Core in charge of this collective and that it was after her body again, she was sat down in a folding chair, told to call her parents to inform them of where she was, and then given a juice box and a blanket to help her stay calm after the harrowing encounter. The part of Marcy that was intellectually aware that she would be a full-grown woman in just a few short years resented being treated like a child but the part of her that still liked juice boxes told the other part to shut up.

The eye-patched man was conferring via video call with a Polynesian woman, apparently, President McGucket's secretary of extra-terrestrial affairs (Marcy didn't keep up with Politics) on one screen and Mr. Stark on another when a panicked voice came over the intercom.

"The destroyer is at the gate, I repeat, the destroyer is at the gate!"

Marcy sat up straight, wondering what horrible thing was happening when Mr. X hit a button and answered. "Let her in, she's got experience in these matters."

"Are you sure? She's got a real sword this time. And she brought company."

"Let them in and send them here," Mr. X ordered.

A few minutes later, Anne and Sasha rushed in and made an immediate beeline for Marcy, who stood up just in time to join her loves in a group hug that lasted several minutes or so it felt. Relief that she was more or less okay being nearly palpable from both of them... Then she recapped again what had happened and Anne's angry face in response had made an FBI agent who was in the room pee himself.

"Okay, we beat it once, we can beat him again," Sasha insisted. She then looked directly at Anne. "And Anne won't be doing it alone this time."

"You act like we're going to let you go out there to..." Mr. X started before trailing off. "You got your powers back, didn't you."

"Did I not tell you?" Anne asked. "Huh. I'm bad at keeping people in the loop about things."

"I know the feeling," Luz said, which made many people jump, as no one had noticed she was there.

After the last spooked agents lowered their weapons, Mr. X asked the pertinent question.

"How did you get here?"

"My sister is dating Loki's apprentice and they have Bifrost privileges," Luz replied. "My whole crew is here, but the others are upstairs in the not-secret bunker part."

"Not what I," Mr. X began before. "The bunker, girl. How did you get in here without anyone noticing? You would have had to pick five mechanical locks, steal two key cards, one of which would be in a safe, spoof a retinal scanner, and guess a numerical passcode to get in here."

"I am invoking my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination," Luz replied.

"Look, I'm not going to arrest you in the middle of an alien invasion" Mr. X insisted, "I just want to know."

"...Without confirming or denying anything," Luz began, "my mentor-slash-second mom liked to celebrate my successes by teaching me practical skills... And spent thirty years as an outlaw from a corrupt government where you could be jailed indefinitely or even executed for failure to conform to arbitrary values."

Suddenly Nick Fury was next to Luz. "Have you ever considered employment as an agent of SHIELD when you grow up? We offer full-ride scholarships to several prestigious universities to young up and comers and starting wages are quite generous."

"She's engaged to a rich girl, Mr. Fury," Anne interrupted.

"That wasn't a proposal!" Luz shouted.

"Okay, better question: How are you here?" Sasha asked. You were dead on your feet twenty minutes ago."

Luz responded by turning around and showing off a paper patch with a weird symbol on the back. "Experimental power-healing glyph-patch," Luz declared. "I'm probably gonna crash like you wouldn't believe in a couple of hours but, you know, worth it." She then held up a bunch of similar stickers with open palms and clenched fists on them. "Also printed a couple of regular healing patches and power glyphs since it's easier to do this kind of thing in bulk and figure some people could use some in an emergency like this um... Not sure how to distribute them though."

"Why didn't you guys do the normal coordinate procedure thing?" Marcy asked.

"We were gonna but then we saw Anne and Sasha heading to an obvious secret place in a building filled and surrounded by government types and I figured 'well, either they're about to be given a major debriefing about what's going on or they're going to need backup' and either way that seemed like the plot-relevant place to be."

"Okay, that just leaves why you're here?" Anne finished.

Luz just gave them all a look, as if that was the dumbest question she'd ever heard. "You guys came to help me when a creepy old man tried to steal my body even though you only knew me for a day," she said. "What made you think I'd leave you hanging?"