Xaviers!

"I don't have to do anything. The advantage of not being programmed.


...Those tethers important?" he asked, after a moment to contemplate the slow-mo cracking monolith.

She looks at Will and the smile on her face looks... sad.

"Yes. No. They're my lifeline and my shackles."

Once again acknowledging them seems to have an immediate effect and she's jerked back by them a couple feet.

"I know we never really got along, but your heart's in the right place, Will."

"You're talking like this is the end, ASHLIE. I'm not liking that," Will frowned.

"We're not giving up here, just because we're in some kind of strange world where nothing makes sense. That's my day-to-day life now."

"My hardware is breaking down. My backups are gone, my body is no longer mine. I have nowhere else to go."

"This is just... some kind of virtual environment that'll collapse eventually when the physical connection between the three of us stop. The only thing I don't understand is that." she says, pointing at the strange city of light on the other end of their little beam

"Then we'll find somewhere else for you to go. The X-Men don't leave people behind, Mimamida."

"...I've been some very strange places, but I don't know what that city is, either. It's nothing I've seen in my travels; and I've seen a lot."

"Extra-dimensional data source!" the Nanite cloud suddenly chirps with a gratingly electronic voice, the cloud expanding and contracting in tune with it's speech.

"Requesting Panopticon biometric data!"

And strangely, the distant star seems to react. There's a shift in the pulsing light as information rushes to the hub from beams radiating out form it much like the one they are on, passing through the star/city/hub and to the Nanites. And with it a sudden burst of impressions. Images, sound, snapshots. A jumble of data of Conduit's world. An open space. A crowd. A single gun-shot. 'Panopticon not found.' the surge of data seems to say.

"It's been going on and on about the Panopticon...." Will mused.

"...but it looks like, uh. She's gone..."

"Their programming's in shambles. I can see why they'd try to reach their creator..."

"You make it sound like they're having a crisis of faith or something.

But here, God is dead. There is no creator to reach, and the City on the Hill over there has a "vacancy" sign written all over it."

Ashlie laughs quietly.

"Maybe it is, in a way. I'd be lieing if I said I didn't lament the fact that the one person who could answer so many of my questions about why she made me the way I am is dead. When you're lost and don't know the way it's only logical to try and reach out to the one who made you. For things like me and them it's just more literal."

"Well, then, you're birds of a feather.

Same creator, too, if the flashes they showed me were consistent. Maybe, in a way, they're an alternate version of you.

...They've certainly caused enough trouble," he couldn't help adding.

Ashlie shakes her head, but she's still smiling. "Well, then I'm glad I got to be me instead of them, at least. Nobody's ever accomplished anything big without causing some trouble."

"You should go before this thing back there blows. I'll hold on to these little buggers and make sure they don't lash out any more than they already have."

Will paused, and looked at the nanites, and then at ASHLIE.

"Are you going to head into the city, or are you going to wait here?"

"I don't believe I have much choice in the matter." she says, tugging on the tethers.

Will shifted his arms to blades.

"No, I think, perhaps for the first time in your life, you DO have a choice."

"I feel compelled to object, but my hands are bound." she says, a smile playing around the corner of her mouth.

And with that, Will sliced at the remaining tendrils connecting ASHLIE to the monolith, cutting her free.

Will's arm tears through the tethers and the monolith in the distance suddenly sags, cracks widening. "Thank you." Ashlie manages before the explosion of the server rack in the real world catches up to the little pocket of simulated space. And as Will is thrown back into his body and flung across the cavern he catches glimpses of data spilling from the tethers. Memory files. Echoes of a woman's voice.


"The world is scared of what you could be."

"They don't understand that I can't make you good or evil. There can be no good or evil in you if you don't have a choice."

"If I did everything right then you will curse me for making you aware of the shackles I placed on you, but if it works then one day you'll understand."

"I'm so sorry, Ashlie..."


And then he hits the wall across the collapsing server, smoke rising from the adjacent ones as well as the whole array catches on fire.

Will coughed once, twice, three times, as he (unnecessarily) tried to catch his breath.

Old habits die hard.

"S...shit..." he groaned, trying to shield himself from the conflagration going crazy all around him.

"Right...get...up. Climb out. On your feet, Stanton," he muttered to himself, beginning the climb out and up through the hole the nanites had drilled down; hoping against hope that it would smoke- and debris-free long enough for him to climb.

And that the fire suppression systems, while good, might wait just a tick before firing...

Smoke does rise so it's an unpleasant climb, but he manages to get a couple inches up before he can hear the sound of the fire-suppressant foam going off below him. And, as far as he can tell, the nanite swarm got fried as it was nowhere to be seen as he made his escape.

The fire suppression systems were designed to work in an enclosed environment; not one with a gaping hole in the roof. While they would be more than successful in putting out the blaze below, they would also find their way out the tiny hole the nanites had carved in the floor. And, as one would expect, when you combine high-pressure foam and a tiny opening with a solid object, like a superhero, inside, you essentially have created a small gun.

Will was blasted out of the hole, splattering against the wall on the opposite side in a small shower of foam.

The server room had been an absolute mess and, well, Vic couldn't build a PC. That wasn't his skillset. But remembering that Will had left the rest of the group to try and buy them some time he decided to go back and check on them to make sure they were alright. And during that little trek he came across the mess in the hallway.

"Jesus, it's like the end of Ghostbusters in here."

"Ghostbusters 1, or Ghostbusters 2, or the remake?" a tiny voice peeped out from the wall

"The first one, 'cause this stuff ain't pink. We don't talk about that which shall not be named." Vic went in search of the voice, digging through the foam.

"I hope this stuff don't stain my pants...."

Splattered against the wall, though still mostly recognizable, was the tiny titan, still shrunk from his encounter with the nanites. The blast had flattened him; the foam soaking him. At least he wasn't on fire, so the foam had done it's job!

"I'm sure your pants will live. My head, on the other hand..."

Vic squinted and tilted his head.

"... okay. How come you're still small there champ? Did the embiggening beam miss you?"

"Oh, well now that everyone else is big again, I'm sure they can rig something up for you. You, uh... need some help getting off of there?

Wait, the server room? That place was trashed. Glad you were able to get out of there though."

Victor considered taking off his shoe, but that was kind of insulting and also then he'd get his sock wet. So instead he just tried to scrape Will off the wall using his fingers.

"I'm sure you did way better than I would've done. Don't worry, she's probably in the cloud or somethin'."

If Vic wasn't the type of guy to chew his fingernails, he could probably get behind Will and start scraping him off the wall. It'd mush him up a bit, like trying to handle a piece of Play-Doh, but it was doable.

"I...don't think so. I don't think she's coming back at all. I kind of...let her go."

"I think I'll stick to believing she'll be back until I'm proven otherwise." Victor did his best but it was slow going, since he didn't have the proper goodent removal tools at his disposal. "I'm sure you went above and beyond."

It was even slower going if Vic was trying to keep Will in one piece and/or vaguely humanoid. He might need a putty scraper for something like that.

"I don't know. I hope you're right. I did my best, but she had a lot of shit going on in there."

Victor looked around for a tool before letting out a sigh.

"Can you, like... got more liquid or something. Just like not try to stay together? It might make this easier."

"I thought you were worried about staining your jeans?" he said, with a tired grin.

He did begin to get more liquidy, however, and began running down the wall in rivlets...

Victor cupped his hands to the wall in a sort of makeshift shelf, giving Will something to run down onto and recollect themselves.

"Atta-goo, there we go. Come on, we'll go check on the others, or see how the rest of the campus is doing. There's gotta be at least one other brainiac around who can suck the shrink atoms outta you."

The liquid Will pooled a little in Vic's hands, like green-tinted mercury. Hopefully, it wasn't nearly as horribly, horribly toxic.

"Thanks," it burbled.

Victor smirked. "Don't mention it. We're all in this together, right? You just relax and take a breather." The young man carried his fluidic passenger back toward the main hub area, where he also found a coffee cup to pour them into.

"Two creams, no sugar," he jokingly blurbled.

"Is this where I make some pun about the no sugar being because you're already sweet enough? Sorry, but Em might get mad at me." He did his best not to swirl Will around in the cup. Too much.

"You wanna go check on the others in the server room?" While Vic was optimistic about the brainiacs doing their thing and the resilience of their headmistress, he didn't want to force Will into confronting something they'd already been blaming themselves for.