How to describe the Costume Ball, it was an event to see and be seen, where people who have put more effort into bringing their favorite gaming characters, comic characters, writing characters, and movie characters to life than any of the major studios have. That is understandable, the studios look at these characters as product, they could be cardboard boxes, bottles of carbonated water, or five hundred pound laser guided bombs, as long as they generated more profit than they cost to make, the only judgement put into them is how to reduce cost and increase profit while retaining enough market share to improve their brand. To the fans, these were things that touched their soul, and they brought them out with all the skill of the professionals they had the skill to be, and all the love these characters brought to their lives.

Do you know what it is like for a telepath to walk into a room full of several hundred people who are excited, terrified, aroused, exalted, and transformed into the version of themselves that is not flesh and blood, but luminal, that shines and burns in their mind with all the passion and power their own lives never contain?

As a Kree, my emotions were suppressed outside of the narrow range required for surface empathy required of agents of infiltration and the pre programed devotion and fury of the perfect warrior who lives only to serve the Kree race. My merging with a Mind Flayer shattered that, and I was awash in emotions I had little context for.

As a MindFlayer, my understanding of emotions was that of a predator who fed on fear, who used pleasure and pain, fear and joy as training tools for lesser species while standing above it all in a pre programmed persona that believed itself as far above such things as it was above lust. Well, newsflash, merger with the Kree mind shattered that programming, and it turns out Illithids have the same emotional range as any other sentient, and the endocrine system to back it up, only their programming had suppressed that. As an Illithid, as a Flayer of Minds the mind glow was irresistible to us, we reach for it instinctively as our rightful prey, but instead of consuming them, it was as if my mind tendrils were copper wires and I draped them over hundreds of spinning generators. They lit my soul and mind with a sort of heady mixture of emotions I could not process. I was mind drunk, the one weakness of the Illithid, we needed to delve into the minds around us, the hunger for it was irresistible and each sip I took made me drunker and thirstier.

The one part of me everyone accepted as fake, the human SHIELD agent Rick Jones formed the kernel of who I was becoming. Rick was a good guy, not a bright guy in the company of SHIELD, but that is like saying he wasn’t the most gifted on an Olympic team. Rick cared for people, but as the protector of humanity, was forced to stand between them and alien things that threatened them, he hungered to know them, to be a part of them, even as he had to stand apart to protect them.

Alone of my minds, his was the only one who walked in the forest of minds with childlike wonder, whole in awareness and basking in the joy of his people. His people. My people. Sure the average person on the street would look at the people around me and think geek, nerd, wierdo, pervert, but these same people paid through the nose to cosplay in sportswear made by billionaires to sit in stands to watch others do the thing they love because they would rather let others create, let others compete and let others live while they just sat back, paid money, drank themselves into an early grave, and let others live for them.

Around me I saw characters from the cartoons I grew up with, the games I played in my teens (granted, I am pretty sure those memories were fake, but the pleasure in them was real), the games I played now, the movies and comics that were my secret pleasures.

I saw people cosplaying characters that did not match their gender, body type, or racial skin tone, yet they were such authentic and brilliant exemplars of that character that I honestly wanted to call the animators down to the floor to fix their fuckup because surely this was the real thing.

I saw so many aliens stalking the floor like the predators they truly were that both my Kree and my SHIELD brain wanted to claw for my blaster and start servicing targets, yet my Mind Flayer drank their mind glow and realized they were humans that had used the arts of costume and makeup to the point they could have passed a checkpoint of the race in question without any issue, at least until language became an issue.

I looked into the smiling face of The Watcher, cosmic being who stood upon the moon in eternal vigil of this world of humans, and saw him smile. In his Galactus cosplay of purple power armour that honestly probably would terrify any of my three races if they understood its capacities, I realized he was as close to violating his duty as was possible, for he was not just watching but participating. He was not competing, but simply joining in the cosplaying audience for the competition, but still, he showed his own art, his own secret joy right along with the rest of us. He raised his hand in salute and dropped his shields, focusing his vast mind into something so tiny I could perceive a bit of it and understand.

He was having fun. Humbled by those around him who were more daring, who dared to strut upon the stage and ask for the judgement of their peers. He wished me luck.

Nope. Can’t process. Unpack that one later.

Marge dragged me through the crowd, and hissed at me to “Do something Mind Flayery” or no one will notice her work. She was right, everyone else was performing, so naturally drawing crowds and demanding worship it was like watching a company of geek gods come to earth and founding their own camera cults. I was playing gawking tourist and really letting down the side.

I reached out my mind for Mirage who flatly both denied me and shut me down. She had some self respect and was not going to perform like a trained monkey.

Warpath who was cosplaying Halsin the Druid of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Magik who was cosplaying La’zel the Githyanki Mind Flayer hunting knight of Baldur’s gate 3 had neither any shame nor any chance of letting Dani off the hook for aiding their own cosplay efforts with some illusion magic.

I called upon my Telekinesis, rising into the air, I let my tentacles unfurl into their full glory, writhing slowly to showcase their power and alien nature as I let my arms fall open wide, my long blue claw tipped fingers extending as I allowed my mind to flood the room with whispers of my thoughts.

“The Absolute calls upon you, our parasites are in you. Kneel before me, worship me and be transformed!”

Give me a break. SHIELD agents, and Hydra agents who are SHIELD infiltrators spend a lot of time in lonely apartments and barracks. Secret agents don’t socialize, it complicates cover stories and creates vulnerabilities. We play video games. Baldur’s Gate 3 was the closest to human interaction I had, and that is when I thought I was a human. Let a geek be a geek. Besides, I earned these tentacles, let them have their moment to shine.

Warpath roared and charged out, his Halson body with his leafy green shoulder pads making him the image of the wild Druid. He flexed his muscles, yes, he really did have even my Kree physiology topped, he was a physical monster, and roared his defiance.

“The circle will resist. The balance sustains us, the spirits of nature uphold me. I deny you, Mind Flayer, I deny the Absolute.”

I used my telekinesis not with eficiency, but with the worst possible control, causing the air between us to shimmer and warp with waste energy, visible tendrils of force reached out to raise him into the air.

Then Magik appeared. Cosplaying the Githyanki with silver armour that covered a whole lot less than her brother would have been happy with, and olive drab body paint with leopard like spots, the soul sword in her hand blazed with white eldritch fire that cleaved through my telekinesis with a power that caused me physical pain, causing my tentacles to lash back as if burned and my own instinctive recoil opening the gap between us.

“Guard yourself Mind Flayer, Baldur’s gate will never fall to your kind. You may have escaped our Dragons and hidden from our creche, but you will not escape me.”

She lashed forward, and whips of white fire lanced from her sword like some sort of Anime sword art, they crashed agaist flashy purple shields I made from the least efficient telekinesis I was capable of, a normal Mind Flayer would weep at the energy waste, but visually it was spectacular. At least until Mirage gave in and let Warpath steal the show.

Warpath screamed out “Nature denies you, unnatural creature!” Then Mirage cloaked him in illusion and he seemed to shape shift into a huge grizzly bear that proceeded to charge across the floor. Yes Warpath on all fours can sprint like an Olympian, then he leaped into the air to slam me to the ground. This time my Telekinesis flared with real power as the Apache hero hit me with the force required to knock over a main battle tank, and even my Kree physiology felt ribs straining and the breath pounded out of me.

The crowd was screaming, not in fear but in nerd-gasm. More camera phones were going than at a Taylor Swift wardrobe malfunction, that of course is when the White Queen chose to enter.

I knew the White Queen by reputation. She strolled around in White Lingerie because as she said, we all undressed her with our minds anyway, this way she simply put all the cards on the table and all of us at the disadvantage. You can’t slut shame her, she is aware it is our thoughts that go to the gutter, she is staying focused on the task at hand and usually wins because of it. I was prepared for the cold beauty in the slinky lingerie.

I was not prepared for her convention persona.

I should have remembered. This was Frost Towers, her property. Here she really was queen. This time she did not display herself as the world saw her, but as she saw herself.

In Hall D, the great convention hall, there is the table top gaming tournament that started at convention beginning and will be among the last torn down at the end. One of the great draws there is Warhammer 40K, where huge armies of miniatures battle for supremacy in a a grimdark future forty thousand years from now where humanity hangs on by a hair, serving a god-emperor who sits chained on his golden throne in eternal psychic battle with the forces of hell while armies of super soldiers and millions of common soldiers die in his name on thousands of worlds against threats alien and demonic. It is a more expensive habit in time and money than heroin, and if I didn’t suck at painting little figures, I might have gone that way myself, but I can’t paint anything smaller than a house so I stayed strong.

Emma Frost was into it.

Emma had five clones of her made by the Hellfire Club. They were intially made by her enemies to oppose her, so she conquered them and then adopted them. They were collectively known as the Stepford Cuckoos. They strode in now, one behind her bearing a Roman style legion banner with a double headed eagle in gold upon a scarlet field.

Each perfect copy of Emma Frost wore white power armour that whined and clanked indicating it was in fact powered battle armour. Two of them bore oversized plasma flamers I recognized as Shia’ar Imperial Guard issue, two carried Kree power swords. The armour was covered in red purity seals from which hung little silk prayer ribbons, and each of them had a small black fleur de lis tattoo on one cheek.

They marched around a central figure whose armour burned in bright gold and whose head was framed in a golden metal halo. This was Emma Frost, cosplaying the God Emperor of Mankind.

They marched in lockstep that was as perfect as could only be achieved by six identical bodies in psychic metaconcert, each right foot slamming down twice as hard to rock the floor as their power armour and weapons presence parted the sea of humanity and alien before them like the ocean parting before a battleship prow.

Then the White Queen stopped hiding.

I had been in the presence of one of her Stepford Cuckoos earlier, and her mind had been so much more precise and controlled than my own that it let me know the difference between mastery and simply ability of mental powers. I couldn’t understand why she would so blindly serve her original, who should be nothing more than a slightly older version of herself.

Gods forgive me. I didn’t know.

The halo above her blazed as the psychoactive metal burned with faery fire as Emma Frost let humanity bask in the glory of the God Emperor of Mankind. In Warhammer 40k, the lore is that the Astronomicon, the guiding navigation beacon for all interstellar transit was the blazing mind of the God Emperor of Mankind on his golden throne, and Emma Frost made me believe it.

She shone. Her mind blazed brighter than a hundred suns, and all three of my minds looked upon it in helplessness. My Mind Flayer brain looked upon it in stark terror of a power before which it could only be prey, wanting to flee. My human brain looked upon it as one would look upon the face of god, wanting to fall down in worship. My Kree, let me just say there is something very wrong with my Kree brain. My Kree brain looked upon the naked power of a mind that could strip my consciousness from my very flesh and leave me a mindless living corpse with just a flick of her will and immediately got a hard on that made Marge's costume choices a real problem as it was not so much hidden as highlighted when my flesh betrayed me.

As my Mind Flayer tentacles rolled themselves back in submission to the greater mind, and my human brain looked on in slack jawed awe, my bloody Kree body had me flexing like I was on the Mr Olympus body building stage, and I found myself going through several different poses before my shame was brought to an end by two of the Stepford Cuckoos with swords throwing me to the ground and Emma Frost’s golden boot pressing my head to the floor.

“Xenos scum, I am the God Emperor of humanity. Prepare to be judged.”

With that, she stepped over my head, pressing it firmly into the ground as she ascended the stage and took the throne. She was ready to judge the cosplay competition. I was beginning to fear I was going to develop a fetish over this.

Warpath and Magik did not help, as they picked me up and pointed at my embarrassing (well I mean it’s normally a point of pride but under these particular circumstances embarrassing) barely there groin covering and laughed.

“Emma’s got a new fanboy, and he’s a squid!” Magik crowed.

“Miss Frost has him by the balls, his heart and mind will be locked away in the safe where she keeps the rest of them. “ Warpath said helpfully.

Marge gave me a big thumbs up. Getting direct interaction with the judge was a big plus in the cosplay war here in the convention.

I had not been fully briefed on this. Not by SHIELD, not by Hydra, not by the Kree, and not by the Mind Flayers. Miss Emma Frost, and cosplay at conventions in general were so far from my comfort zone that if the real Galactus showed up to destroy the world, or Thanos the Destroyer I would have been overjoyed because at least then I knew what to do.

Instead, I tried to read Marges mind in the crowd when my time came to do the model walk on stage. I only managed to get third, but I got on the podium so Marge was happy.

It didn’t help that the entire time Emma Frost, the White Queen was sifting through my minds like a microtome, taking my brain apart one slice at a time. She was so much better at telepathy than anyone I had ever even heard of. She had maybe twice my power, but it was the precision she wielded it with that humbled me. I would grow stronger. The union of my Kree and Mind Flayer minds had wrought something new in the galaxy, but her precision was something I could not hope to achieved in a hundred years.

She was a healer. Professor X is more powerful, but he largely uses it to fight people and fuck over his allies. Trust me, I have the scraps of two sets of programming in my brains and I can spot the signs. His X men are as tampered with as I am. He may be the strongest telepath on earth, but he isn’t concerned like Miss Frost is.

Her touch was so gentle and so precise that my shielding was utterly irrelevant. She sifted through my brain, walking me through my brain as if a realtor showing off a new home.

No, scratch that, as if a contractor brought in by a prospective new home buyer to show the deficiencies of a property they were over eager to buy without critical examination.

In my brain she wore her customary white lingerie, but the power radiating off her in psychic space made my Mind Flayer and human brains want to fall down at her feet in worship. The Kree, god help me, the Kree just found her intelligence and power were only eclipsed by her sheer skill in making him desire her even more. I mean, he wasn’t even trying to hide it. HAVE SOME GODDAMNED SELF CONTROL OR SHE WILL NEUTER US!

Emma Frost smiled as my Kree-Flayer tripartite brain struggled to deal with her strolling through its corridors and looking at the defects.

She looked at the memory of Rick Jones, Agent of SHIELD

“This is real. This is the first memory that is not a construct.” She said, looking at me in my grey sweats, ready to begin SHIELD screening at the US Army Ranger Training school.

It was official. My whole life was a lie. I was remaining loyal to a girlfriend who had been in 9-11 who didn’t exist. My whole grief, my fixation to make sure we never suffered such a loss again, my whole dedication was a pre-programmed lie. My wounds, which I struggled with, my loss, the love that caused me to turn away from others who reached out to me was a goddamned lie. Technically I was a virgin. Of course, technically I was also about two years old. I shouldn’t even be drinking.

My Kree memories were all fake, but the muscle memory was real. Kree programming was whole body, so all the memories of battle all the combats were both real and not real. I had the experience of centuries of war, of battle with weapons and without, in starships, on planets. The programing was the real memories of Kree warriors who had fought and died for the Supreme Intelligence, only to be strip mined for useful bits to make the next generation of Kree a little deadlier. Oh, but they were sanitized. So many of the memories included being taken by Kree and killed because the best of their warriors began to question the programming, and defy the Supreme Intelligence. So many of their best warriors had died screaming under the Supreme Intelligence mind probes to find out how to stop the next generation from breaking free again.

The Mind Flayer memories were worse, while the Kree viewed themselves being noble warrior heroes (what a mouthful and such a loaded piece of obvious propaganda) the Illithid knew themselves to be villains. It made the irony of their actual slavery even more bitter. They enslaved, corrupted and destroyed across the cosmos, never growing, never learning, always a third tier race able to prey only upon the defenseless, yet programmed with an arrogance that was literally the chain them that kept them from every questioning why they could never learn, never advance, never build anything of their own, only take over, corrupt and destroy. They were a dead end race enslaved by an Overmind that had never allowed any of its children to join it. The racial shared consciousness was stunted, heavily edited and deliberately twisted by the Overmind. Whatever they had begun as, whatever they had been when they created it, they were now something less; a tool as devoid of freedom as it was devoid of true individuality.

The great racial telepathic and telekinetic abilities whose training and use took us so much of that programming was also stunted. I was a living mental weapon, yet my ability to heal, to feel, my ability to teach, all the things that should have been woven into all my telepathic arts were artificially blocked and blighted, hidden from my awareness to the point I should not even be able to conceive of them, let alone attempt them.

“So, three times agent, two times enemy of humanity, who are you? What are you? Who do you serve?”

She was deep past my defenses, deep past any wall I could throw up, and her control was so different from my own that in mental combat I was an angry teenager next to a mixed martial arts champion. If she didn’t like whatever truth I found after her guided tour of my fragmented and freed tripartite mind, I would never regain consciousness. My identity crisis ended here, the White Queen sat in judgement.

I remembered Warpath and Mirage. He called me Lovecraft, for he looked upon my physical deformities, my mental powers, and saw one of his own kind. He was not stupid, although his simplicity let others assume that of him. His was a tactical mind that reduced the complex input of the battlefield into the essential actionable truths, and stripped away all the unnecessary details. He called me mutant. Like him.

I remembered Magik and I, the rapist and the girl we saved. Kree-Flayer was my race, born of two peoples who existed to put all lesser races under their boot, yet my delusion, my dream was that of the SHIELD agent I never truly was. Defender of humanity, even though I didn’t have any.

I remembered SHIELD headquarters, even when the guns sought me out, I looked upon the merely human agents of shield, manipulated by Kree and Skrull both, yet standing firm in defense of humanity against foes and forces they could not understand let alone resist, yet they faced me without fear. They would never let me stand with them, yet, their cause was mine.

I turned to Emma Frost, the cynical and the clinical surgeon not of the mere flesh of the brain, but of the minds that wove those cells and chemicals into something that rose beyond flesh to become soul, and spoke my truth.

“I am Lovecraft, the Kree-Flayer. I am mutant. I am the defender of humanity, most especially those like myself whose mutations make us both humanities targets for hatred, and only defense.”

She laughed. The surprise on her face was like the shattering of the ice on the Yukon River in springtime. One moment a wall of cold ice that looks to stand unchanging for eternity, and the next a shattered torrent of laughter. She let her mental image fall against my own, and her body leaned against me as she laughed until she could not breathe, pounding her fist into my chest.

She drew an X on my forehead that blazed in white fire, that my own mind could not put out.

“Oh my god, you are the biggest idiot on not only this planet, you may well be the biggest idiot in any of the empires you are supposed to serve! I thought Charles cornered the market on impressionable children with delusions of heroism and a martyr complex, but you, you are a thousand times worse!”

She turned and grabbed the side of my head, and suddenly her face swelled to that of a giant, of a goddess, and her eyes blazed with white fire as her words cut into me, branded my soul with her judgement.

“Hear me. You are outcast. You are alien. You have no race, no nation, no people. You are a broken weapon, a flawed tool, an army with no flag that still strives to fight for a country that will not accept you. You will bleed for them, die for them, and they will never accept you.”

Her feelings on humanity were, complex. In her was an endless weariness, and a pain so deep I don’t think those who had not been in her mind could ever understand. There was a despair in her so deep oceans would fear its depth, and yet her will drove her onward because she had been born Emma Frost, mutant and telepath, but she had CHOSEN to be the White Queen.

My mind did not fight against her, did not resist. I let my defenses down and accepted her judgement, but spoke my truth.

“I am Lovecraft, I am mutant. I was forged for someone else’s war, for someone else's cause, but your people accepted me, and for them I will fight.”

Her presence withdrew, and she was simply Emma Frost again, standing beside me in the twisted forest of my mind. She sighed.
“Do you wish an introduction to Charles?” She asked, and the question was loaded.

“I do not. I have seen the marks of what he has done to his students. I have had enough puppet-masters already. I have lived enough false lives. Whatever I am in this one, it will be real.” I answered truthfully.

“Well, I won’t take you in. I do not train heroes. But I won’t cast you out either. You need a therapist, and my facilities for training here are not something you can get on the outside. Your cause is your own, your fate is your own. Do not lead them back here to threaten me and mine, but if they chance to find you here, they will live to regret it.

If my students choose to share with you some of what they have learned, I will not stop them.”

She withdrew from my mind. As she left, a whisper of her mental voice sounded softly, almost below my threshold.

“Marge wants to take you to the Hentai hospitality suite on the seventh floor. I can confirm that your body at least is a virgin, and it seems like a waste to have tentacles like that and not put them to use. Marge has been thinking about some possible applications since she began costuming you.”

I was somewhat stunned from the whole mental vivisection and reconstruction when the White Queen awarded the cosplay prizes (I got third, there was a reptilian mutant who cosplayed as the Queen from Aliens with a really cool prosthetic inner jaw that lunged out and snapped on command that got first, and a Hispanic girl who cosplayed Ashoka from the Star Wars series absolutely divinely. Her Lightsaber was entirely costume, and yet her light saber looked more like an energy blade than the real ones the Stepford Cuckoos wielded.

Say what you will about Emma Frost (although carefully, she will know), she can read people. I did indeed have Marge come and grab me, with Destiny to go check out the Hentai Hospitality suite where tentacle based degeneracy for the cultured gentleperson was being displayed in ungodly definition on some seriously advanced TV. Both women grabbed an arm of mine and worked hard on projecting impure thoughts into my head. It didn’t take half way through through the second Overfiend movie before Echo, the Stepford Cuckoo joined us. Echo (each of the girls was allowed/told to pick a name matching the designation of their clone, Echo was the fifth, or E clone and chose the name Echo. Echo was a work in progress, as she described herself, and had been forbidden, as had all the Stepford Cuckoos in physically indulging in sexual acts until she had achieved full personhood and could thus give knowing consent. Honestly the White Queen was a better parent than my fake memories gave Rick Jones, of course my fake memories were programmed by a Nazi sentient computer, so not really that surprising. She was “intrigued” by our “non standard sexual expressions” and wished to see if my physical tentacles matched up in performance to the fantasies of tentacle sex as created by a race that had no tentacles. She made it sound like a term paper, but she was dead serious about not simply watching Marge, Destiny and myself try to work some wild tentacle love to the tune of Kree racial memory of debauchery from inside the room, but from inside our head.

An hour and a half we decided to go grab dinner, and then see what my VIP suite looked like. My inner Mind Flayer was acting like a nun in a whore house at the thoughts of sexual degeneracy involving his beloved tentacles by these horribly gendered sexually reproducing life forms. My inner human was a desperate weeb who just found out he was actually a virgin, and was thus scare-roused at the possibility of being corrupted by these two middle aged cosplayers. My Inner Kree was telling me that I needed to take up lots of fluids during the meal, and stay away from carbs. Lots of protein because staying power and hydration were about to be critical.

We were about fifty yards from the Japanese restaurant when Juggernaut put me through the wall of a Waffle House. As I flew through the air, and the wall I heard/saw a golden beam hit Echo in the head and explode as an Irish voice called out.

“Hellfire club sends its regards. Seems you are something like stolen property, and being the law abiding citizens we are, Juggernaut and Black Tom Cassidy figure to turn your fine ass in for the reward. Sleep tight my little Frosty payday.”