There are things you expect, as a Kree-Flayer mutant defender of humanity, and things that surprise you. Granted I have been one for no great span of time, but I have several sets of memories that share a common set of expectations for how the world works. Emma Frost may or may not have heard of these common expectations, but she clearly does not feel bound by any of them.

Standing in the parking lot, surrounded by the dead, shattered vehicles, crumpled light poles, lit by the fires of a cheerfully burning Tesla, I expected a quiet tactical entry by Emma Frost and perhaps a few of her Hellions as security.

What I got was a glowing white magical circle in the middle of the street that disgorged two white Rolls Royce Phantom II limousine, with licence plates that read simply Frost1 and Frost2. When the first came to rest, not far from the burning Tesla, the rear door opened and Warpath stepped out, swept his eyes around, before stepping back. Then Echo came out in a sleek business suit in tasteful tweeds, who offered her hand to her mother, who stepped out in very tasteful but extremely minimal white lingerie and a long white fur coat.

From the Frost2 stepped Mirage, Magic, Wolfbane, and Bernadine ( the second, or B clone of the Stepford Cuckoos and thus Echo’s older sister) all in tactical gear you would expect from superheroines, supervillains and werewolves about town. Everyone made there way to stand in a semicircle around the Skrull. Warpath and Magik were eagerly poking dead ones, Wolfbane had shifted to a wolf about the size of my dead Hyundai and was sniffing about the area and radiating annoyance that the Skrull Stealth field which was receding into he distance along with whatever generated it was annoying her hearing with its white noise. As a human she had excellent mental shielding. As a wolf she could not care less what prey species thought about her griping.

Spiderwoman was looking between Warpath and Emma Frost, which honestly ignored the threat of Magik and Mirage, either showing an underestimation of their threat level, or an overestimation of their heroic character in this setting. Spiderwoman eventually settled on The White Queen as the threat to watch, as she snapped her fingers and pointed to one of the living Skrull. Obediently I raised it with my Telekinesis, and she stared into its eyes with the cold normally found in deep space or Asgardian Hel.

“So, another alien species. This one isn’t just imitating a human, he is channelling one. He isn’t so much copying the mind as he is running a data retrieval on the mind in real time, arguing whoever he is imitating has to be alive someplace and hooked up to some sort of mechanical mind reader and projector. I am betting if we dug around in his mind, he will have some sort of receiver for the information because the Skrull himself doesn’t seem to be any sort of natural mind reader.” The White Queen said as she flensed the Skrulls mind like a butcher sectioning meat off a hanging carcass.

“Pathetic human, you have no idea who you are messing with. Release us at once, and you may find a higher status among the herd once your kind has been domesticated!” The Skrull said, and everyone, Mutant, Superheroine and Kree-Flayer winced as one.

Emma reached out a hand and caressed the Skrull’s face. “Oh you should meet my good friend Eric. You see, they herded him into cattle cars once. He rhapsodizes about it periodically, usually before vast numbers of very powerful and heavily armed people start dying, usually at his hands. You will find that we mutants are more common among humans than you or they would admit or feel happy about, and we do not go quietly into that good night. You on the other hand, will not speak again, until I tell you to. Then, my little alien friend, you will betray everyone you know, everything you believe in and every hope your kind has of victory, and then, when I have it all, I will let you remember what you did.”

Whatever she did to his mind locked down his shapeshifting ability totally, as his wounds reopened, but the psychic scream of despair he gave off was so terrifying that I am surprised that Spiderwoman did not hear it. Perhaps she did, as she shifted subtly, and her pheromones flared, causing Wolfbane to growl, Mirage and Magik to turn to her, and Warpath to swear softly and adjust his tights. I could feel the pheromones of Spiderwoman reacting with an instinctive flood of “come hither” to every male nearby to defend her from the threat of the enemy queen threatening her, but the same pheromones made every woman in the area react negatively.

Emma sighed.

“Wolfsbane, I know this is trying for you with your enhanced sensitivity, and there isn’t a male present you want to fight her for, so ripping her throat out would not solve your emotional or physical needs and would complicate an already tense situation further. Magik, I agree you need to date, but you need to do a lot of work on your self before you are not going to be at risk of an abusive relationship feeling like a more positive thing than it will turn out to be. Mirage, Spiderwoman is not making moves on Warpath. Warpath your response is physiological, and men simply aren’t that evolved, do not overthink it. Bernadine dear, jealousy of Echo is unbecoming an elder sister. You are worthy of love and will find someone compatible, not simply someone available. Echo, very well done. Your control does me proud.”

Turning to me, Emma glared.

“You, on the other hand, are wearing a human being like a hat, and I don’t think I can let that pass without comment. You and Jessica can join me in the Rolls. We can stop for some nice pasta and what promises to be a very long conversation. There is one of the Kingpin’s private after hour places nearby. I keep a table there for the occasional Sentinel problem, Xavier foolishness, or body cleanup like you have presented me.”

Passing a muttered command to Mirage about the scene, she lead Spiderwoman, myself, and Echo back to Frost 1.

It turns out that Kingpin’s private after hours place was a very nice Italian restaurant, and I do mean very nice. The ambiance was soft and soothing, a live pianist somewhere in the maze of dark grotto played softly and hauntingly as the quiet murmur of conversation and occasional laughter mixed with the scents of divine food and general psychic relaxation to produce the impression of some sort of old world club where the movers and shakers could come to enjoy the finer things and get away from the stresses of secretly controlling the world and all the little people in it.

Jessica was in superheroine costume, I was outwardly wearing a short fat Eurasian geek body who looked like he belonged in a lab or anime store, while Emma looked like Hell’s walking advertisement to temptation as a pathway to absolute power. The wait staff made us feel as if we were dressed entirely appropriately. Kingpin, for all his many sins, knew how to make an after hours club.

The waiters came and went several times in the next few uncomfortable minutes, and then withdrew. Emma raised a hand in an utterly unnecessary and wonderfully theatrical gesture and sealed us behind a ward I could not break if you gave me a dozen years and an amplifier.

Turning to me, she told me simply.

“This is a communication between telepaths and nontelepaths. She cannot hide any secrets from us, so to level the playing field we will not keep any secrets from her. You will drop your illusions, and all conversations will be carried out verbally unless you are carrying out a memory share that is first authorized by the recipient and if it is initiated with Jessica, will be overseen by me to make sure that it is done safely, and that nothing beyond the memory is transferred. Understood?”

I dropped my illusions, and reached out with a tentacle to cup Emma and Echo’s wine glasses, then pour for each of them. I gestured towards Jessica’s glass, and with a bemused expression, she watched as my last tentacle picked up her glass, filled it with wine, and extended it to her. Taking the glass gingerly, she gestured to her mask.

“Do you expect me to unmask?” Spiderwoman asked cautiously.

“That won’t be necessary dear. While you are a very lovely woman, being physically unmasked will raise your tension and be counterproductive to our purposes here. Now, will you accept that I will only allow truth to be spoken at this table? If you are unwilling to share something, simply say so. If anyone speaks a lie, I will name it as such, and again that will be counterproductive to reaching understanding in what I am seeing is already quite a bit more tangled than your pasta.” Emma suggested, taking a sip from her wine, then a scallop from her linguine.

Spiderwoman finally looked at me and asked. “You are serious? What you showed me, that vision of Nick Fury being one of those Skrulls, it was real, not just speculation?” She said, jabbing at me with a fork still wrapped in three cheese pasta.

I nodded. “I came to tell Nick Fury that SHIELD was infiltrated by the Kree, as was Hydra, and discovered that he had been replaced by a Skrull, along with who knows how many others. The organization designed to protect humanity from alien threats has been taken over by Skrulls who are able to field entire SHIELD tactical teams of their own people in open operation in the city without fear.”

Jessica looked at Emma who nodded and chewed thoughtfully. “As infiltrators, they must start with kidnapping, because their agents cannot do more than physically mock up their target until their victim is returned to whatever base has their mind reading and broadcasting equipment. It can’t be very simple or small. To do that level of mind reading mechanically is something that even the alien technology I have come across would have real problems doing, let alone for a number of individuals at once.”

Jessica shuddered and ran her hands through her long black hair, finally her pheromones were under control and not setting off the horny or hatred gender based responses that had been mildly draining to ignore.

“Jesus, they got Nick Fury. I would have sworn he couldn’t be ambushed.” Jessica muttered. “This is bad. He IS SHIELD.”

Emma tapped her glass with her knife, making it ring like a bell.

“Nick Fury is a man. SHIELD was put together and made into what it is today by Peggy Carter, and only turned over to Nick Fury because she didn’t trust the powers behind SHIELD to remember their mission and not turn into just another secret police with no oversight or accountability. Nick is an amazing man, but that organization has produced or recruited dozens of amazing men and women over the years, each equal to what Nick Fury was when SHIELD was place in his hands. If they can’t save it, then he failed all of us in training them.” Emma’s voice was quiet, but firm and cold as the heart of a glacier.

Jessica nodded. “Right. You are right. Nick would kick my ass for giving up like that. Besides, you said if he has a double working inside SHIELD, then he has to still be alive somewhere, right?”

Emma nodded. “Very good. Now you are thinking. On that subject, once I have dealt with my problem child apprentice, you and I should talk about the nasty little bits of trash Hydra has left in your head. I know you have used magic of some sort to tear through most of it, but there is quite a lot of foreign programming still in there, blocking memories that are real, inputting memories that are false, and creating a number of conflicts that seem to be inhibiting your control. It isn’t something I can simply wipe away in a single sitting, but a few appointments across a month and I am pretty sure I could clean you out and leave you alone in your own head.”

Emma extended a card to the mute Spiderwoman, and then glared at me. Echo grabbed my hand under the table as the White Queen lanced into my eyes and brain with her will.

“Now Geralt Lovecraft, will you kindly explain to me why you are wearing a dead man as a hat, and understand that while anything you share with me in therapy is privilidged information, if you are roaming about eating people for no reason I will put you down like a rabid animal and order desert.” Emma said, twirling some pasta around her fork, sliding it into her mouth and making a faint mou of appreciation, before giving me a long hard stare over her wine glass as she took a sip.

Emma is a therapist with a very firm code of conduct both for herself and for her patients. At her level of power, it can be no other way. My heart swelled with pride, for Mind Flayer, Kree or agent, I responded to power, Kree or human secret agent I responded to Authority, and the White Queen was that. A single blazing beacon of morality, an unwavering moral compass point that cared not a whit for society or law’s judgement, but steered its own course, true ever to her own ethics, the single constant star in her internal heavens. You could see how the Stepford Cuckoos could only fall into a constellation around her, how someone with as fragmented an identity as my own could not help but imprint on her.

She would kill me in a heartbeat if I had crossed the line, and I would die feeling sad I disappointed her.

I explained to her about Invictus Life and Ronald Sung. Jessica contributed a lot I didn’t know about Invictus Life, and the stories behind the players in that lab. To be honest, if I hadn’t been determined to defend humanity already, listening to the stories of the trials and struggles of the personnel in that lab, that collection of extraordinary minds that turned their back on corporate American and the huge profits they could have gotten without every daring anything, only to risk their careers on the chance to give wounded soldiers and civilians with limb, organ, and sensory deficiencies, the chance at a normal life, I would have converted on the spot.

Then I explained how Ronald Sung had been seduced by Hydra to sell them all into slavery as long as he got to rape Anna Kendrick, for the crimes of being beautiful and more talented than he was. He would steal the lives of everyone there because he couldn’t stand the thought that she never gave up on her dreams and actually achieved greatness, and he quit trying and ended up just supporting staff.

Emma looked at me firmly. “So you had no choice but to murder him, to eat his brain?”

I thought about that one a long time.

“No. I had several choices. In the end, I can’t arrest Ronald. I am not with SHIELD anymore, and they would probably just try to turn him and use him as a double agent. He would get away more or less free. I simply decided the shittly little traitor and would be rapist was better off dead, and I could flay his mind to pull everything he ever was and wrap myself in his dead mind to infiltrate Hydra. I could have let him walk, and let the lab take its chances as I tried to find another way into the Hydra cell. I chose to kill him, and eat his mind as the best way to save Invictus Life and the amazing people in it from ending up as Hydra slaves or just another pile of dead Hydra victims.” I said, waiting for the lobotomy which would be the only sign I had failed this ethics test.

“Fair.” Jessica said coldly. “More than fair.”

She met Emma gaze, blank white mask eyes meeting ice cold blue ones. Emma raised one sculpted eyebrow and laughed softly.

“Well, I am trying to raise you like my daughters as fully conscious moral agents, not rule following drones. You had your reasons, fully assessed the costs and chose a method that lined up with both your stated goal and ethic. I will not tell you that eating people is mentally healthy. The longer you do this and the more often you do this, especially with such a nascent and unformed sense of self, the greater harm you will do to yourself.”

She sighed and worked her forehead. Echo reached over and hugged me. Jessica looked me over with a long slow gaze, as if trying to figure out who or what she was seeing.

“Why do I get these would be heroes? How do you teach enlightened self interest and mental health to would be martyrs with an inborn sense of melodrama and no sense of fear? It was honestly easier teaching sociopaths to pretend to be decent human beings on pain of, well, me, than it is to deal with these would be heroes. I fully believe we were given such a powerful and rewarding sex drive for the single reason of trapping us into parenthood before we had a clue what the costs would be, and none of mine came from any of my sexual liaisons.” Emma muttered, glaring at me, then Echo, then me again.

“At least I am not Charles. I will not neuter you and send you out to die ignoring your racial gifts. While not without its issues, and with the understanding that you must only use it on people you were justified and intending to kill anyway, I will not restrict your use of Mind Flaying as an infiltration tool. You will not teach it to Echo or my daughters though. Your brain works differently from a mutant human, we cannot integrate another personality without creating a devastating disruption to our own psyche. Your Illithid brain is quite a bit different.” Emma concluded.

“This evening is going to ruin my diet. I had to sift through the entire memory of your eating a brain, so I get cheesecake.” Emma said, once again glaring at me. Echo clapped happily and handed Jessica, Emma and herself a desert menu. I reached for one, and Emma slapped my knuckles with a fork.

“You ate a brain. No cake for you.” She said sternly.

Therapists. They can be cruel sometimes.

It is a process.

A process without cake.

The White Queen had, and would squeeze dry the Skrulls. Jessica and I had a Hydra attack to thwart. Everyone except me had cake.

I guess, it’s a win?

I would still have liked cake.