Template:Featured Articles/10-2015

Moment of Awesome - David Haller: From The Dark Phoenix, the mentally-shattered son of Professor Charles Xavier faces down the monster who has struck his father down. The Phoenix raptor reared up, as if stoked by gasoline, and suddenly charged, using its talons to try to slash at Haller, to skin the mask that he'd constructed around his psionic avatar. The attack came too fast and vicious to block. As with Jean, the expressions of their telepathy were antithetical: water to flame. Haller turned that metaphor into a weapon and absorbed the blow, diffusing the Dark Phoenix's power with his own. The talons caught him across the face and chest nonetheless, marking his astral body with trails of blood and leaving his body screaming with sympathetic pain. He staggered, but did not fall. He raised his hand to his face, half-expecting to feel wetness under his fingertips, and only then realized something. This parody of Jean was right; it was his instinct to mask his astral form to match his physical appearance. Past traumas and his own illness had left his avatar a patchwork man, a collection of disparate parts trailed by every selfish, shameful impulse given personality and form. But not now. Here, in this moment, the mask had never even occurred to him. David Haller looked up at her, blue eyes calm. "Today," he said, "what you see is what you get. But you're right, I am pathetic. And I feel sorry for you, because if this is what someone as worthless as me can do for the people that matter to them, I can only imagine what you could have been." Though perhaps he already knew. It didn't matter. Narrowing his eyes, Haller extended his hands and lashed out at the woman that was the beating heart of the flame. "Get away from my father."