11804/X-F Side Dishes: Not You're Average PG Film

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X-F Side Dishes: Not You're Average PG Film
Date of Scene: 24 June 2022
Location: Rooftop in Weehawken, New Jersey
Synopsis: Power Girl and Deadpool discuss the differences in ideology and find that they sit on different sides of the fence. Go figure.
Cast of Characters: Wade Wilson, Karen Starr




Wade Wilson has posed:
    Deadpool knows how to push buttons. That's the man's true superpower. The nigh immortality granted by his healing factor is just a supporting cast for the Mouth That Knows No Filter. So he probably didn't expect much kindness from the white-clad Kryptonian after calling her "Window" as well as sampling the eye candy of her form without shame.

    What he didn't expect was the strength involved in being unceremoniously wrenched from a basement tunnel and shooting off into the air at breakneck speeds. It's likely he sprained or broke something on their departure (what with the tunnel being one person sized and the pair of them being two people.) But pain is an old friend to Wade Winston Wilson and one he welcomes--albeit begrudgingly--more than others.

    "You have a place in mind or just going to find the tallest rooftop you can and drop me onto it?" the Dusty White & Black uniformed mutant calls up to the ultra-powereed woman. "Also... gotta say, the veiw from here... not bad. Really makes Jersey palatable." That he's not at all looking down at the ground is probably a given.

Karen Starr has posed:
    Nobody really /expects/ the strength of a Kryptonian. They /hear/ about it in papers, and watch it on the television or the internet, wherever they happen to find it, there's always some level of detachment. Some lack of understanding that there isn't anything you can really /do/ once she has a hold of you. Like being caught in the gears of a machine that was turned off just in time for your shirt not to have sucked you in.

    That said, she was merciful enough. There wasn't much damage done to Wade as she pushed them back through to the surface in an in-multiple-ways mad dash to the surface before Boom-Boom blew up the building. What's more disorienting is the speed of it all. Wade doesn't necessarily have a lot of time to run his mouth before they're a few miles away from where the building was cratered.

    The comments are probably why she drops him from a good two stories up onto the roof she's chosen, allowing him to thud, skid, bounce, whatever his anatomy chooses to do at the time, likely dependant on how many of his bones are still intact from the combat in the building.

    She touches down only a few moments later, looking altogether like she might damn well rip Wade apart, something clearly having flipped her temper in a way that definitely didn't come from the comments he'd been making. Hard not to notice now that despite the er- view of Jersey being altogether bearable, Power Girl is ripped. Everyone always forgets that, for some reason.

    "What in the absolute hell do you think you're doing?!"

Wade Wilson has posed:
    While not his natural mutation, the healing factor that is Wolverine Plus Plus is a miracle of nature. Did he break a collar bone on landing? Yup. That slides right back into place and sets itself to its natural state. Bruised ribs? Oh, got 'em. But the blood dissolves to base components and reverses track to go back where it came from. Leather burns? Oh baby, love that. But the skin seals over in secondds and he's no worse for wear.

    He pushes himself to his feet and looks at the woman. "My job?" he asks for clarification. "Having you on site was a bit of a wrench but not an unplasnt one to be fair." He rubs the back of his neck. "X-Force was created to do the things that, the horribly sexist named X-Men, can't. Genetics labs, cloning facilities, cybernetic tech companies... all of these like to exploit mutants--homo superior, fucking trash name that is--for their own gain. We ensure they stop... permenantly. That means, violence, death, and destruction of said facilities."

    He shakes his head, his tone serious. "I don't expect you, a Kryptonian to understand what it's like to have our lives. But here... I'll give you a sample, how many people you want looking like this" he peels off his mask. Wade's face isn't pretty. Scar tissue atop scar tissue creatures a warped, shimmery, hairless facial profile that's seen better days. "How many people in Shiny Beacon of Hope, Metropolis, you want ended up like me? Because that's what they do. They make people in this for profit. X-Force can keep the unnatural manufacture down to a statistical zero."

Karen Starr has posed:
    Karen is unfazed. There are a grand total of three full blooded Kryptonians on this planet. In the whole of the universe? A city's worth, though that number is a difficult topic to broach, considering that that city is currently miniaturized and living its own life. Three full-sized Kryptonians accompany it, bringing the total number in the whole universe to exactly six.

    "X-Force? Christ," she begins, placing her hand on her forehead for a moment. "So you put together a team consisting of a couple of teenagers, what I'm /pretty/ sure matches the description of a former terrorist, and whatever other mercenaries you could find- name, age, history, didn't matter as long as the killing came easy?"

    The scars on his face didn't seem to make her budge. Of all six Kryptonians in existence, Power Girl is the one who's seen the worst of it. She's been doing this for two decades. The Never-Ending Battle. "You think /I/ don't understand? You think people aren't after what's locked up in our genetic code? I've been cloned, Superman's been cloned, and absolute /masses/ of experiments have been done that have made things that make your face look like it belongs on the cover of a damned /magazine./ Every one of them could level a city, or worse, and there have been /tonnes,/ made from people who had grudges, or just people who needed /money./ But, you know what? That's not what this is about."

    There's a scowl, there. Deep and foreboding, something that nobody ever wants to see. The absolute displeasure and fury of a being that could shatter the planet. "It's your methods and your people. You have /kids/ killing people in there, Wade. These groups buy out who they can to work for them, and intimidate whoever they can't buy. You're damned lucky that this little mission of yours didn't result in two dead kids and a rough gaggle of murdered innocent people just trying to do whatever the people who have their family tell them to. You /all/ have power. More power than almost if not -everyone- you met in that building, and at no point did it look like you had asked yourself if anybody should've been allowed to live."

Wade Wilson has posed:
    Wade actually chuckles. "Pretty sure only one of them is a kid, and even that's a only a matter of a few months. And given what she's done and who her father is... she's probably the most relaxed about doing what needs to be done. And there are -no- terrorists on my team," he replies and tucks the mask in a pouch at his belt.

    "You think this was a practice run, PG?" he asks with a shake of his head. "No. This is the third place we've hit. All of them attached to Armadon. All of them using various methods to create weapons of -war- using our blood, our flesh, our abilities. And the other two met the same fate" he ticks off the big three on his list. "Workers dead, people free, facility destroyed."

    He continues on. "Look, I get you're worried about Honey Badger and Boom Boom. But I laid out what the job would detail to them both before they were let on the team. They know the risks, they know the score, and they both have this shit ingrained in them" he moves forward a bit closer to the caped woman. "HB's a clone. Only survivor of ten. She watched her sisters die in her formative years. She wasn't able to get closure then... I'm giving it to her now. Boom Boom has lost more of her 'innocence' to fuckers like this than any of us... she can't get payback under hall monitor rule at the school. I'm letting her get it here."

    "You spend your time fighting the good fight Pee--do you have another name? You clearly have my number, dropping 'Wade this' and 'Wade that.' Least you can do is offer me the same courtesy. Ms. Girl is just right out and Ms. Power," he shakes his head, "last thing we need is Aussie football rags thinking you and Luke are a thing; though, you could do worse, love that jawline."

    He waves a hand dismissively. "Anyway, you fight the good fight... but just as you fight the good one, others fight the bad one. We are those others. Do I care about the worker's families--if they have them? Most of the tac suits there were storm trooper fare. Clones with no autonomy aside from protect the lab. But for the other places we hit? No. You can't expect me to believe anyone who wants to fuck, eat with, or love the motherfuckers that work there is worth my time. So fuck 'em. As for the infrastructure? Damange Control, Inc. needs some business; least Jersey can do is outsource to a group that specializes in that just across the river."

Karen Starr has posed:
    "Practice run or not, it doesn't /matter./" Karen replies, throwing one hand out towards the ruins of the building- just barely visible from their high vantage. "You've hit three places with no-matter-how-justified terrorist attacks, and expect the outcome to be a net positive?" Facing him directly now, her scowl still evident. "That you haven't stopped to /think/ about what you're doing past that you /can/ is brutally evident, and the hypocrisy is /astounding./"

    There's is, then, this sort of... Moment. When Karen swings on Wade, this half-second of thought occurs to most people- the quizzical thought of just how much strength she's going to put into that hit. She knocked Logan across a parking lot once, she's damn near punched the Juggernaut into orbit. How /hard/ is she going to hit Wade? The reality of it is, in the grand scheme of things, not very hard. Should she connect, she probably isn't going to do more than break his jaw, if that.

    Regardless of the success of her swing, she doesn't seem to have calmed down too much. "Murder isn't closure. It's a drug. It just leads to more killing. It just leads to you realizing you don't have enough force to get the killing done anymore so you recruit other people you can make into career killers and the cycle continues. You think this is going to make everything they've been through okay? You think after a few missions they're going to be happy and content? Or are you just going to make them like you?"

    "Stick with Power Girl. Look at the damage you did, and think for half a moment what's about to happen. That place had a front. It had a legal reason to exist. Probably a shipping company or something with a nice, happy public face to hide the black site that it was. Thanks to your destruction, it's going to be labelled a terrorist attack, and my money is on it being blamed on mutants. That's your legacy here. More violence in Mutant Town. More work for people who are trying to stop this from being an acceptable thing."

    She turns, approaching wherever wade happens to be at the time. "How many attacks do you think it's going to take before what they're doing in there becomes perfectly, ineffably legal, because your team has made people even more afraid of Mutants the world over? Nations go to WARS over things like this!"

Wade Wilson has posed:
    Wade takes the hit, and yeah, his jaw go slack at an odd angle when he stops staggering. "He reaches up to wipe at a spot of blood at the side of his lips and wreches the mandible back into place to let it heal up with relative ease. The lunatic is laughing softly at he turns back to her. "Next time, buy me dinner first..." he says to her. "You think we're not already at war?"

    "Think about it, -Power Girl-" he says adding emphasis to her monicker. "Magneto and Professor X are two sides of -the same coin-" he shakes his head. "The end result is going to be the same as it has for every single minority group out there. Blacks, women, gays, muslims; it all goes to war. Maybe not on the trenches, but in the streets? In the courtroom? In the halls of government? We've been at it for over 50 years!"

    He points sharply at the smoking mass of their target. "Yes it had a front... but not shipping. It was a -weapons manufacturing plant-. Supposedly made guns for Smith and Wesson." A chuckle. "Not too far from the truth when you look at it. Guns to put in the hands of soliders? Mutants to use as fodder for the wars abroad? It's all the same to them. We're tools. We're weapons. We have to be 'regulated.' To them and anyone who supports that ideology: fuck that. And I don't care if that includes you, the US government, or the fucking Pope."

    He looks at her for a moment. "I get it, you're a white hat. You wear white. Your skin is white enough to almost reflect the sun you absorb. You've got the legs, and the legs and window bare because why not let the bad guys get a moment of peace before they end u behind bars--or something. But X-Force, we're grey. We use the tools the bad guys use because sometimes they don't answer to anything else. You could've gone in, rounded them all up and waited for the cops to come get them."

    "But the guy that dropped you to a knee? You think he's going to answer to a cop? Or to the government? Or to anything? And the people that protect him, clones, mutant experiments past the point of recovery? You think they care about breast windows" he gestures to her chest, "and walking pelaton commercials?" He follows with a gesture to her legs. "Because if I'm not mistaken 'Hail Hydra' is the last words of hundreds, if not thousands of people with cells just. Like. This."

    "We view the world with different lenses, Power Girl" he says looking almost eye to eye with her, she's only got an or two on him after all. "What I do, is sanctioned. What I do is so Jean, and Cyclops, and Beast, and Hope and all the rest of the X-Men can still look good. What I do is help some of the more 'troubled'" the word is laced with derision, "mutants have an outlet for the 'troubled' habits while still keeping themselves off the streets and out of groups like The Brotherhood, or the Morlocks, or any other black-hat organizations out there. So the question for you is... do you want to help me to help them? Or are you going to stand in my way? Because I can't go through you. But you can't be everywhere either... and I got a list miles long of organizations just like Armadon that need to get a wake up call."

Karen Starr has posed:
    One can wager that Karen doesn't even register the impact upon Wade's jaw. "You're not my type, and I /know/ you're at war. I know the fight you're in, one of the worst people I've ever dealt with regularly, decided just because my cousin and I are what we are, we needed to be taken down and killed. Otherwise? Philanthropist. One of the shining examples of mankind, but for no reason other than that we can do what we do, and that we choose to do it for no other reason than that it's the right thing to do, this guy has almost killed us more times than I can count. We /never/ return the favor. We /never/ make that leap, because that isn't how it's supposed to be."

    There's a turn, then, and she folds her arms. It's a gesture she shouldn't be allowed to do, at least not in polite company- but Wade isn't polite company, so, she can do what she wants.

    "So you blew up a blue collar factory that employed a whole bunch of workers with names, a huge list of people that may or may not have been made up, just doing their jobs, now definitely dead in the public record. The world will probably be told that Mutants were responsible, that it was a terrorist attack, and they won't be able to separate the people who are just trying to survive from the ones that can grow spikes and shoot them out of their skin at mach two, or heal from whatever they get hit with."

    Dropping her arms, then, she turns back to face Wade with that same stern expression. "That guy? He answers to whoever he feels like, and right now that's only him. He'll do whatever he damn well pleases until what he's doing is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light as the horror and torture it is. Let's say I'm not there the next time you see the guy. You manage to put a bullet in his skull, and call it a day. There's going to be another one. There's /always/ another guy. So you kill that one too. He won't answer to you. He won't answer to a gun, he won't answer to anything other than death, sure, but it's not /your/ responsibility to be judge, jury, and executioner."

    Holding her arms out wide, she gestures to the world around them, dark and slimy, in the night sky, following the rain from the previous day. It's an excellent metaphor. "We look at it through different lenses because you're new to this, and you can't see the forest for the trees. A perfect world doesn't need Power Girl. A perfect world definitely doesn't need X-Force." She sneers then, approaching and pressing a single finger into his chest- for a moment, there might be the worry that she'd just press it right through him, like a bullet in slow motion.

    "You're not 'helping' anyone with issues by letting them murder everyone that happens to be in front of the bad guy. People like him? You knock them down, you get them into the system and you make them face justice, and you make sure the world knows what they were doing and that it was Mutants that put a stop to it. That's the way the world deals with things like Hydra. That's the way the world deals with assholes like that. Sure, a quick, clean death has a nice ring to it, but do you /really/ think that's what those people deserve?"

    Stepping away, then, Power Girl brings one leg up onto the ledge of the building. "I can only help you if you're willing to do this the right way. Because it's the /right/ way to do this. It's not easy. It hurts. You're going to end up on your ass more times than you can count, and that's in addition to the count you've probably lost already, but you keep getting up."

    Floating up into the sky, then, Power Girl intends to leave, but not before she's delivered one last message: "I can be anywhere, but I can't be everywhere. I hear it, every day, every second, every moment. Every life that gets lost on this planet that I could have stopped, and then some. I listen to it to remind myself that even if I can't save everyone, I'm still going to try. Maybe you should think about that for a bit before you go in guns blazing next time."

Wade Wilson has posed:
    Wade rolls his eyes, it's not anything he hasn't heard before. From Charles, Piotr, Logan, Hank... it's all the same rhetoric, wrapped in different packaging. Just a matter of time before they either see the truth of it, or get bored and find other pastures.

    "You're wrong. You won't see it, but you're wrong. Been at this a lot longer than you might think... new? Maybe the crew is new, but I'm far from new at this business. Special Forces, mercenary work, and now this... it's all the same in the end." He gestures to her, giving her leave to depart--even though she hardly needs it. "Look, I'm not going to fight you. There's no point to it. You're as easy to kill as I am. As many times as you tear me apart... won't stick. And I don't have faintest idea what will take out a Kryptonian aside from chaning the color of our sun... which is beyond me."

    "But we're going to keep doing what we're doing... nothing else for it" He tugs out his mask and slips it back over his head. "My suggestion to you? Stay out of the same light as we're in. It'll let you rest easier at night and allow us to keep fighting the war that you want no part in. Justice doesn't work for us... and we deal in currency too final for you to accept."

    He moves to an opposite ledge and looks down. "You've got fire. It could've been great... but sometimes the partnerships are better for What If...? than the mainstay series." He hops up to the ledge. "If you ever change your mind, look for Sister Margaret's School for Wayward Girls. More often than not, that's where you can find me."