2868/Poisoning the Well

Poisoning the Well
Date of Scene:	10 August 2020
Location:	Atlantic Coast
Synopsis:	Roxxon learns you don't pollute waterways and cause mass eutrophication without Someone caring.
Cast of Characters:	Meggan Puceanu, Namor

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Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Humans may never admit it, but the ocean always has its dead zones. The bright, clear waters of the point of inaccessibility in the Pacific glow a tranquil blue from the sheer lack of biomass in them. Few and far between species thrive in the heaving open oceans, even in the sunlight zone. On the Atlantic Coast, fed by the rivers and creeks, things ought to be quite different. Muddy courses washing out Appalachia and the ancient forests brought fine nutrients, once. The heartland rivers spill their sediments and liquid bounty onto a plain eager to receive the wealth, currents jettisoning the meals across the abyss for small fish up to the massive shoals to feast on. It's changed since the Europeans step foot on Cape Cod and proceeded to overindustrialize everything, followed by the Americans and countless others. Gone are the great harvests of cod so thick someone could walk across them, and those rivers dump massive yields of chemicals, pollutants, worse. Some efforts to clean up the bays, Chesapeake among them, revitalize the waters. But those once thriving inlets are more half-dead than not.

There's something to be said for the encrusted space where the Delaware River becomes the bay, and black night drowns out the sunshine. Where an insidious poison roams, stalking the belly-up fish, the choked shellfish beds, and the starving bottom-dwellers. Nothing but thick mats of algae survives this, and while the beachcombers are disgusted, the local paper makes a bit of noise. Nothing happens.

Until a little ecological activist comes along, and her seven-digit follower count hears about it. Then the poisoned Appoquinimink River near some state wildlife area is suddenly on a map, marked by her standing in the eutrophic zone taking photos of the sickly washes of green and brown everywhere. This is how an ocean dies, not by leagues but by miles.

They, of course, are the industrial farm upstream happy to hurl their animals into pits and the liquid effluent of those bodies packed in too tight to cages and crates contained in leaky ponds. The fertilizer for the fields is, naturally, dumped year by year.

And so even the waves are ruddy, just as her skin has become, the girl treading a mile offshore and still coughing for air. Even the water can't supply much; the oxygen count is just too terrible, signalling doom.

Well, it helps to have a mad king and a strong stomach.

Namor has posed:
Mad doesn't quite begin to describe the Sea King's mood.

The waters churn and boil, froth and bubble, and though it would be fitting for his rage alone to cause the disturbance, it is perhaps more telling of what lies in his mind that it isn't.

It's the war sharks.

A great horde of armor-plated great whites and tiger sharks, bull sharks and hammerheads. These are not their curious, misunderstood brothers and sisters. This is the personal shiver of the Atlantean King, or a portion of it at least. It writhes at his coming, at least a hundred strong and tasting blood that has not yet been spilled. Their collective fury, fed by their master's, turns the relative calm of the ocean's surface into a foaming rapid that spreads out to surround Meggan, though only the boldest get closer than an arm's reach away. After nearly a minute of this, a path splits through the swarm and a colossal fin rises from the waves. The air breathers once observed what they once dubbed 'the largest great white shark ever recorded' and named it Deep Blue. Weighing in at two and a half tons and stretching twenty-two feet from tip to tail, Deep Blue is truly a sight to behold, but she is but a pup next to the monster that comes out of the depths. Thirty-five feet long, the Queen of this particular shiver is a beast of record-shattering length and size. She cuts a swathe through the angry horde with her presence alone, but she is merely the escort to the true master.

Namor bursts from the depths with enough speed to take him clear out of the water in a spray of salt water that sets his war party to slapping the waves in their anticipation. It is a wonder the oceans themselves do not boil away at his rage, his face a carved mask of fury as he turns his enhanced gaze along the shore a mile off. Pain and anger split his expression as he simply hangs in the air, trident in hand and grimace on his lips. "They will pay," he vows in a low growl, dark eyes descending to Meggan, imploring her to witness his promise of death and violence, "None will survive Namor's fury this day."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
A shiver boiling past a young woman alone in the sea alone might make her blood run cold. An enormous greyish white body erupted from the sun-warmed coastal waters draws her almost still, the steady beating of her feet and calves no longer churning the choppy waves. White foam wreaths her as one sleek sandpaper body after another emerges, the hunters of four hundred million years' perfected swallowing her.

For a moment, Meggan goes under the horrendous algae mat, the chunks of it broken up by the surge. Those pristine waters are too clear, stirred up by bubbles, but the bracken down at the bottom a mat of rot and failed growth, season after season. The view down there is just as impressive, thrashing tails and torpedo-lean bodies swishing and swerving around the maelstrom of their own making. Even the king among them is impressive and cause not to swim too hard, too much, lest she be the central force of that wrath unchecked.

When she emerges again, her silver-and-gold hair is much closer to a rusted blood, her skin a pale shade almost blue. Bones pierce the thick braids pulled back off her face, curiously pearly. Holding up her hand reveals the sick stains running over smooth skin, her nails to her wrists awash in what honestly looks like a gutting of a passing cetacean or mortal sailor. But the sorrow in her eyes is too great for such signs of reckless hate.

"There's no air here. Nothing for them to breathe. Nothing can grow, because they have smothered the earth and the waters together." She gestures silently at the shore, where even the trees are a bit unhappy. Namor may be the king of the seas, but she stands where the worlds meet, knowing them both. "This is what I cry out against. This is what I speak, and they still /don't/ listen."

Namor has posed:
If Namor had more of his conscious mind free of the descending bloodlust, he might have made note of Meggan's physical changes and asked after their meaning. There's not enough left of the Curious King to mark such a thing though, only the Bloody Tyrant. He looks away from her to once more scan the horizon, listening half-heartedly to her explanation of the state of things. There's no recognition on his face, though. He's no ecological warrior or activist, he cares not if the humans poison and taint themselves, killing their fields and trees. It is when their reckless pursuit of industrialization spills into the waters that are his home, his people's home, and his sovereign territory that his temper snaps.

Adjusting his grip on his trident, he has only one thing to say in response, the words spat like a curse through gritted teeth: "Imperius Rex."

The air pulses and roars in protest as he accelerates from a dead stop hanging above the waves to a speed that leaves sound in his wake. The brood of war sharks snap and churn and as one surge toward the shore, following their master's path. Meggan is forgotten and left behind, ignored as the frenzy begins to build. Only the Queen is so self-assured that it dares to brush past the Elemental Empath, but its mind is focused and turned toward the oncoming bloodshed promised by the King. In less than a second, the Sub-Mariner passes over the coast, his eyes trained on the land, following the stream of toxin and death back to the source, searching and hunting for his prey past a film of red.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Rage, rage, the siren of the deep;
Unholy calls from bitter sleep.

The empath is, at best, bombarded by the unhallowed fury and the righteous anger spilled forth from the psychic wounds in her companions. They might not see it so. She cannot taste the memories, only the impulses. She cannot know the thoughts, only the shape their shadows cast in bloody fervor, relish standing unbowed and firm as the golden sheen of an Atlantean treasure fallen into an imperial fist. Her dark hands trace down her face, buried into her hair, and the girl slips under the muck in the wash and the spray.

Two legs, floating in the sea. Sister earth, mother water, daughter wind: she is all those things, even the princess of fire. None of that sparks in her veins, kindled to something more like the surge of the waves knocking her about back and forth. "How can you think, so wrapped up in wrath?"

Questions spoken to the currents, to the stagnant bottom where a sad crustacean scuttles around, partly aware of the risk above. But perhaps not well.

The frenzy begins and she absolutely is not part of it, breaking out of the waves in a transcendent leap that leaves her hair a banner of gold and blood beneath her, behind her. The bottom of that arc would slam her into the beach or the shallows at a breakneck pace, but it's not necessarily as she swirls after him, hastening to catch up. To catch him?

Wrong, if he's aiming for that, for she has the advantage of being on the ground before, taking photos, as the trail is made plain by ink and text. Namor can look all he likes, but the Briton goes as the crow flies, shooting for a huge patchwork of squares, a crazy quilt of mown fields and big industrial buildings, the stench of it rising off the retaining ponds too close to the waterways. From above the breach isn't hard to see. From above, neither is the scale as she plummets down but doesn't touch the earth. Some things are vile and gross, especially when wet from the sea and barefoot.

Namor has posed:
Searching. Hunting. Stalking. Namor closes on his prey, but not nearly fast enough. His eyesight is beyond keen, but even he must still allow for the information to flow, to register in his rage-soaked mind, and to be analyzed so he can continue to follow the path. He's quick, but not nearly as quick as Meggan who has the benefit of knowing where she's going. It doesn't take long for her to pass him, and even in his bloodlusted state he sees her and knows what she must be about. So he turns and twists in the air to follow now in /her/ wake, matching his pace to hers until the offending farm appears below.

She might be loathe to set foot on the poisoned earth, but the Atlantean King does not share her same connection to nature. It is a vile thing, but no more vile than the acts of bloodshed he's itching to participate in, and so it barely registers in him when he angles his descent but does not slow his speed.

Striking like a missile out of the blue, Namor crashes through an outlying barn, turning solid timber and supporting struts into matchsticks in an explosion of force. A massive thudding roar fills the air when he carves an unstoppable path straight into the ground and turns poisoned soil into a crater fourty-feet in diameter. Shouts of pain and surprise follow, and from the outside looking in it seems almost as if the barn itself has come alive to slay all those within. A maelstrom of noise kicks up just before bloody timbers pierce through the outer walls and embed themselves halfway through. One by one the pained cries are silenced, each accompanied by a thudding shockwave of force that shakes the very foundations of the barn, and finally only one voice sobs for mercy. It's prolonged, drawn out, lasting longer by seconds than any other pitiful plee, but in the end it too ends in a shriek of fear and a horrendous ripping.

Silence hangs for just a moment before the barn doors are blasted from their hinges, spiraling out into the fields beyond like frisbees of cardboard. The Emperor of the Deep strides from the ruins, his body streaked in gore, and the shadowed interior over his shoulder a scene of horror with men in pieces, impaled to the walls by splintered timbers twice their length, strewn across the floor and hanging from the rafters and ceilings. Some are no more than streaks on the dirt floor, especially those nearest the crater that marks Namor's landing. His gaze swings from left to right, locating the next cluster of farmers before he leaps and slams through the wall of another building to repeat the process.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
It's an industrial farm. There can be no escaping the horror or the gore because they seep into the concrete floors, to the cages holding creatures intended for being birthed, bred, and slaughtered all in the same confined spot. Forget turning around. These beings bathe in their own bodily fluids, the open sores on their legs and the lesions on their skin a fair price to pay for a cheap cut of meat at a market. For the starving, hungry masses that teem for their cheap meals, this is an acceptable price, a reasonable outcome.

Quite frankly, they don't give a damn about the cost. That can gets kicked down the road.

One barn, then another, then a third. All of them, ripe with foul odors and the ordure of the animals and the humans there. Meggan hangs in the air a few feet above it, suspended by the fields that flutter behind a sad electrified fence. No signs of anything grazing there but the odd moth, sprayed to death, producing feed for animals that sure as fuck don't live in sight of their imprisoned, abominably treated cousins. Her hands fly to her mouth as pain and shock slay all hope, and the fortitudinuous wrath of the sea charges along the ground in a way they probably never imagined, save in a hurricane. Rivers don't flow backwards. The muck can't be sent upstream. Namor is a force of reckoning and nature, but she feels the seething wrath before the embers fly.

One gets too close for comfort and the cries for mercy send her shuttling away, not even running, but in full flight to whatever looks like an office building. Pleas made to shrieks... that's his calling card, but for her, it's an aspect of the Hell she was imprisoned in.

The ground shakes where she drops, in front of something conspicuously more like an office. Trucks parked outside help with that, and she flings open the door to sweep inside, probably a sight to see. Soaking wet, bare-foot, teary eyed. Someone's about to say something when their desk goes flying out an open window, computer and all. The prediction from her lips is short, swift: "Run."

Is it freedom or the illusion of freedom? Has she given them hope or a hunter a chance to chase down the administrative staff, the economic bean counters, worse?

Perfection is a long way off, but for all he is bloody and horrific, she looks more like a wingless cherub trying to offer a taste of salvation. Though when one of the sheets of metal falls through the open doorway and flattens her, that's another matter altogether, but hey, the rest of the buildings going down like matchsticks and foam logs only makes it fairer.

Namor has posed:
A localized natural disaster is a fair way to describe the path of destruction Namor leaves behind him. Even as Meggan skitters away from the pain and terror and emotions even more foul that rise from the King's work like a fetid stench to urge those in his way to flee, one might wonder if a war had broken out behind her. The office staff might have a glimpse of it over her shoulder before they either run or are crushed, a roaring flame unleashed on whatever it can find to feed on. Explosions and cars launched high enough to be seen a quarter mile away, their occupants unsure whether leaping or holding on for dear life the easier way to die. Briefly the source of the destruction can be spotted rising from the devastation like an avenging angel, trident held aloft, his silhouette stark against the backdrop of a ball of raging fire as he drags a struggling figure into the air by its throat, only to let them drop with a wail of terror that ends quite suddenly. Then the sight is gone as he dives back into the fray, dismantling everything in front of him with his bare hands.

In the distance, the roar of the King can be picked out over the sound of collapsing, splintering buildings apparently in response to some desperate and unheard plea of 'Why?' "Why?! Why!? Because you have asked for this, human! You have declared biological and chemical war on my realm! You have stoked my fury and attacked my Empire, pouring your foul toxins into the waters of Atlantis with no care for what you do! The creatures of the sea die choking and sickened, a slow and painful death that they do not deserve! You are to blame, and so you shall pay the price! This is but a counter-attack, an answer to your assault! Grit your teeth and count yourself lucky to fall at my hands!" The answer is a cry of surprise and horror that grows in volume until its cut off at the same time a body slams through the wall of the office building, tumbling through onto desks in a mess of mangled and bloody limbs. There's silence for half a second before the King himself crashes against the structure's wound, his shoulder splintering what remains of the support like it was made of paper. Whatever office workers still scramble in a howling mass for the exit draw his attention, and in an instant he pulls back his arm and launches his trident through the air to impale the rearmost victim to the door. The bean counters struggle and weep, try desperately to make their way out but the weight of their pinned coworker combined with the might of the Bloody Tyrant's throwing arm is too much to overcome in time before he descends on their rear and begins to quite literally rip them to pieces.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Another disaster for a region known for little wealth, except all those businesses headquartered in a city where it seems like each resident has three corporations. Another disaster in a slew of them, on that strange little peninsula forgotten largely by history, swept away from the Revolution.

Meggan doesn't hide from them, though she has to fling off the metal sheet fallen onto her and sloped along the ground. A certain amount of care in lifting the aluminum and corrugated steel away helps only a little, her shoulders bearing up the larger piece. It doesn't suit her as a shield, tossed to the ground, the look up into the sky to assure nothing larger is swinging down to nail her into the ground like a crucified angel gone earthbound. His claim of destruction is just; her personification of the other side of the coin may equally be so. Those hiding behind her in the office might take to their knees or flee, but when she turns -- ah, the screams begin then. What is the face of terror other than Namor himself, and that is what they see, and what she is, all in the same moment.

Some fall to his assault. Some get up and race away, throwing themselves out of the door, through the back entrance on the ground. Scattering like rats, but while she does not aid them, neither is she willing to let him pass. For if the titanic strength thrown past her guard dares to hurl himself in their wake, it's the lithe blonde who flings himself into his path and doesn't quite care how it looks if she has to wrap her arms around his waist or pin him down.

Namor has posed:
It is testament to the blind rage that engulfs Namor, that even with his potent eyes and ears, the King didn't even seem to see Meggan as she pulls herself free from the steel sheet. He doesn't see her as he lurches forward in a surge of inhuman speed to strike at the back of the fleeing workers. He doesn't see her as she crashes into his side and wraps her arms around his waist, pulling him off course to slam hard into the wall. The King sees only red and the backs of those who must die for their transgressions. This he sees, even as the force of Meggan's tackle and his own momentum carry him clean through the inner wall of the office and straight into the next room to slam into the ground. Warrior instincts kick in, and though in some deeply buried part of his mind, he knows this can be no farmer slamming into him with such strength, he still only registers a threat. A force acting to keep him from exacting his vengeance. Their passage hasn't even begun to slow from their violent detour before he's twisting, both hands on her side as he flips and throws, looking to use their combined velocity to his advantage and hurl her free of him. He still doesn't see her as he leaps forward to catch at her throat, to lift and shove her against the far wall with enough force to break a mortal's spine. Only when his other hand draws back, fingers curled in a fist ready to put a hole through the head of whatever foolish individual sacrificed their life to slow the King's assault, does he finally realize who it is that's tackled him.

The transition from frothing rage to ragged calm is not quick or easy. The film of red that covers his vision drains slowly, laboriously from his sight as first one hand lowers, then the other, releasing her from the wall. Only after his fingers draw away from her throat does he step back in a slight stumble, confusion filtering into his expression as he looks around, not entirely sure where his anger has brought him. "Why?" he finally asks, echoing the cries of so many dead, "Why did you stop me?" Dark eyes turn to her, accusation and a fresh spark of anger in the look he levels on the Lighthouse Keeper. "Who are you to stop the wrath of a King?"

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Tackle the sea, expect it to pound you into the shore. The blonde elemental knows this, at some level, reckoning on the cost and considering it reasonably fair. They have sparred in the past, side by side against lurking horrors, but never entirely against one another. Logic drives her in part, impulse and emotion braided into a formidable surge. Whether it gets torn asunder like tissue paper in front of the rightfully infuriated Atlantean king is another matter altogether, but that will all come in a tally together.

A threat is a threat. She puts herself in that radar instead of a shuddering accountant or the young receptionist trying to run in stocking feet across the slippery floor, falling on blood, screaming at the back of her throat and in her mind, all swirling in the chaotic maelstrom. Thoughts drown. He hurls her away and she goes sailing, gold and blood and cream, slamming into the earth hard enough to curve out a deep, long furrow that introduces her ribs to her lungs more than anyone could like. Namor doesn't hit; he /is/ a continent there to be flung from or devoured by. A recalcitrant island dropped on her erases all sensation, his expression carved in wrathful lines emblazoned on blinded vision. Grabbing her by the neck isn't hard, neither is hauling her up, though her eyes are that unearthly green from corner to corner, blood dripping from broken lips, dirt and gore smeared around her back. Parts are broken, but they scarce matter what, long as he demands and snarls.

Ready to put a fist through her skull -- that intention is there, but the empathy spiking wildly in muted alarm finds her already starting to dissolve into the liquid feminine likeness of her, legs only in the semblance of physical form, mist swirling rapidly upward, higher and higher, the weight he lifts dramatically displaced by a sudden shift to another state happening on an instinctive basis.

Spiked shards of bedrock roar up behind the waves of pain blinding her to anything else, the vibrations building out from an impact point, responding to the wild mind, primal wrath seething, churning. "Child," she spits out, not really coughing, not quite speaking. Ashen spirals of the zephyr swirl around him, wet, cold, the creeping fogs of Newfoundland and colliding hot and cold currents. Who, who indeed?

Who is she?

At that moment, she has no answer. Not from arrogance, definitely none of that sort, but because there /is/ none except trying to ask the ocean who it is. It IS. Who dares ask it to identify itself when always has it been, always will it be, the lifegiver and the drowner and the fallen. "I don't know. Told you. Never have."

Namor has posed:
"Child?" Namor asks, voice dropping to a low seething whisper, "You call /me/ child?" He holds still for a moment, before snapping his hand out to the side, fingers open expectantly. As if thrown from the other room by another with the King's own strength, the bloody Trident of Neptune bursts through the already smashed wall behind him and finds his waiting palm. No sooner has golden Atlantean adamantium reached his fingers than a thunder crack booms in the distance, the wind roaring in sudden strength. The Emperor of the Deep may himself command only the sea, but with the Trident gifted to his line by a god, he becomes much more. The earth begins to tremble even as the sky darkens and seethes, rain as thick as thumbs conjured from nothing dropping out of storm clouds that race from the horizon and swirl viciously above the devastated industrial farm. Lightning arcs down to strike at the ground, and in the distance the fires begin to quench themselves in the newly called downpour.

Namor begins to hover, rising slowly to halt five feet off the ground as something cracks outside, spraying dirt and stone into the air past the building's window. "What did you expect of me when you called me here? What response did you think the Lord of the Seven Seas would give to creatures who defiled his realm and tainted his waters? Mercy? Redemption? Never." Power burns from the pointed tips of the Trident, multi-colored fog spilling forth and falling heavy to the ground below. "I will drown every last one of them."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Ah, the clarity shines through the rain pouring down on her. "Was. a. child," she enunciates as the accelerating force of the unraveling physicality grows by the moment, taking her trunk and her arms in a visible opalescent wave until the rain is falling through her body and simply adding to the tremors. Her hair is the last to shift, gold vanishing into the pearled haze, a shifting creation of suspended water droplets and air molecules ignoring the behaviour of the dew point or the weather's sudden shift. Earth hardly ceases to understand her or respond unconsciously, the sky answering the Trident's call and spiralling in haunted moans, dizzied back and forth. For all she might be woven of seafog and the creeping mists cloaking the West Country, famously shrouding the sacred isles and hidden coves of that indented land, neither is she subject to being blown away. "Girl at the computer. She did not do this." To gesture risks the broken shoulder. Easier to nod at the barns. Whatever remains.

In every sense, Meggan is still Meggan but bearing the ancient lines and marks of the Otherworld, gifts borne down in a line, against the Inquisitor's fire and the white god's cross, succeeded when continents and cities drowned, sheltered when civilization burned to ashes and blew away to reveal the bones and sprouting seeds of the next empire. A succession of losses and gains, all of them entwined in mythos too hard to name in one. He may hover, and he may crest over her, but the young woman lifts her head and the inhuman intensity of the hurts crackling through that shifted form haven't changed. Neither has the all too human compassion burning clear and true through her blood, if blood she has. "The Lord of the Seven Seas has greater wisdom and age. He has seen much. Will he spill the blood of a youth led down a wrong path, or bring change by example?"

It's a question without force. If he means to throw the very weight of the storm and the divine artifact in his hand at her, she seems utterly sanguine about the whole matter. Oddly so.

On the other hand, if that receptionist still not out of high school is the subject... well, it's another matter, and one already accepted as a foregone conclusion, even if she doesn't know it yet. Namor is many things. As wild as the waves he commands, as unknowable as the fabled cities beneath the surface, and some things are worth risking, worth daring, worth wagering all for nothing but the black wings of pain and her brother.

Namor has posed:
If a storm could hold its breath, the sudden silence that hangs in the aftermath of thunder and howling wind would be the best example of one doing so. Lightning flashes once more, but it's far in the distance, the answering clap of noise quiet and much delayed. The rage that has been lit anew in the Atlantean King bleeds away as the energized smoke from sparking trident point dissipates and dies. Rain still pours through the various holes smashed through the administrative building and it soaks the Emperor's skin, washing away the gore and grime of battle in sheets of water as he very slowly lowers the Deific weapon and drifts back down to the floor. There /was/ a child. She had stopped him from slaying her, from adding her blood to his hands. He looks at his free one now, watching as fat raindrops fall on his palm and clean it of the violence.

There's no regret, no guilt or doubt in the King's eyes when he lifts them again to fix on the Empathic Keeper, but neither is there so much as a spark of anger. Just weary calm as another peal of thunder rolls off into the distance. "Very well," he finally relents, letting out a sigh as he sets the tip of his trident into the floor, impaling the tile beneath his feet with a fluid motion, "Let the rest tell the story of what happened here." He crushes shattered glass beneath his bare feet without suffering so much as a scratch as he looks around, realizing that they've come to rest in something of a conference room. Deliberately, he skirts the edge of the table until he reaches its head, pulling the slightly more elaborate office chair out and wheeling it over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that line one of the walls. The glass itself is shattered, rain blowing in sideways from the wind to quickly coat the leather of the chair in a thin film of moisture before the King settles into it like a conquered throne to look out over the devastation he's wrought, watching the straggling survivors desperately try and escape an onslaught that is no longer coming.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Satisfying enough, perhaps. Is anything more required in the balance? Ancient wrongs require ancient punishment by laws as old as their respective lands, and it is done to call up the king of the seas and invoke his wrath. Meggan pays that price doubly; their deaths and screams resonate in her ears, their cries of fear leak into her guarded psyche. No matter what, this night as so many nights will lie in her blood. The paper trail of a poisonous farm leads to a poisonous operation that in turn links to a larger front, a global corporation bent on control or annihilation and truly, it cares not which. Whatever convenience presents itself would suit the CEO and board of a group with a six-letter name and an abuse of X well enough.

But a child caught in that web is the limit to her path, and Namor countennaces the rest. He may not regret or concern himself with petty matters, but some then must eat the wages of sin and know the consequence of each life. When the floor is steady and shattered, when the battered buildings unable to stand another hour, so be it. For the moment, she offers her hand in wordless testimony, floating even when she sinks down to her knee for that vigil. Having no more substance than would fit in a bottle like some demented djinn proves itself accordingly. There are limitations beyond the physical.

Let it be seen, the god in his wrath can check it, and dredge even greater terror. Eye for an eye, as the old tales go.

If he knew what this company did to his people, by some other turn, well...