OOM: House of M - Decimation

There's a toll on a child when they see death. When something so final and irreversible enters their world, it changes them, and almost never for the better. Noriko had already seen death, the dying, the nasty blood-soaked ends of people who were too slow to stay on top, and got trampled by the ones who replaced them on the street.

But it was different when she'd joined the Institute and seen it. Been the one doing it.

The first fights she'd gotten into were nothing but bareknuckles brawls, either to scrap and pass the time or to scratch out a pecking order in the dirt in those back alleys. Since she'd been accepted and slotted into this school with so many other kids like her, she'd started to loosen up, to forget what it was like to have to be hard enough to win any fight whenever it happened.

Then there was...her. Noriko wasn't told the full extent of what Wanda had done, and if she was honest with herself she really didn't want to. But it certainly had fucked the world up, that. Ninety percent of the mutant population dead? Ninety goddamned percent?

That was jut shit, all around, no matter what way you looked at it. But the worst part was that more than half the school--more than half the people who'd become her family, her friends, the world around her--were depowered, half of those dead. The others had to be sent home, to protect them. They couldn't stay at a school for mutants, if they were now effectively human; it would have been dangerous for them and a liability for the rest.

And the bomb that had gone off on that bus. It was a bus full of kids, of the ones going home to finally see their families and their parents, who didn't have anything to hide anymore--Stryker killed them, and without a single regret. Nori had been right beside it when it blew.


[ooc: I know, this is a horribly short and overall horrible gloss for the House of M series in Marvel. But, I don't want to have to subject myself to the torture that is reconciling all the mismatched details that come with floating timelines and retcons, and this serves the purpose of moving Noriko into canon, from whence she can go places. So don't hate me, 'kay?]