“I did not expect to be reliving my scholarly youth so soon!” he protested, following her nonetheless.

The pair could not help but attract attention from the largely younger student body, and Wade wasn’t sure what all the blazing eyes were for when they looked at him. “Do they think I’m homosexual or something?” he asked Isabella urgently.

“You are wearing custom colors, indicating you are an Elite Brave. They think you are one of their instructors, or a returning and renowned former student, Mister Wilson,” she replied to him, knocking on a door.

He realized he should have been strutting instead of looking nervous, and promptly started moping at having lost the chance to look undeservedly cool and snare some free rep. He might even have been able to flirt!

The Tribal woman who opened it probably had some Scandinavian blood, considering how light a brown her hair was. She was short and cute. “Miss Cartier! This is unexpected! Did you find another stray to bring to us?” Her eyes flickered over to Wade without looking impressed at all.

“Miss Twin Springs, Mr. Wilson is an established mercenary with many kills to his credit, and a mutant with an overpowered healing factor.” Isabella flicked her finger, and Wade’s mask popped off on its own.

“Hey!” Wade protested, grabbing at it, glancing at the woman out of the corner of his eye.

She looked just as unimpressed as before, not cringing at the sight of him in the slightest. “This will be the third one this year. At least he’s not pustular and producing vestigials like the last one.” Wade flapped his mouth a couple times, not knowing quite what to say to that. Vestigials? Extra arms, legs, organs? “Lot of chopping after we got that one’s Core diverted to get him back down to normal. Took a bunch of surgeries. What’s the problem with this one?”

“About thirty percent of his cells are cancerous, Miss Springs. They die, regen pure, go cancerous, die, and so continue the process,” Isabella replied, with zero regard for Wade’s expression.

“Oh, well, we’ll stop that right off. Anything else we should know about him?”

“Accomplished assassin, gunman, bodyguard, thief, recovery specialist, multiple warrants for his arrest in multiple nations. Prone to resort to violence to solve problems. Irritating tendency to say whatever is on his mind due to both habit and lack of verbal restraint often gets him into that violence. Nothing Tribal, as far as I know,” Isabella supplied helpfully. “He’s Canadian, and you know how irascible they can be.” Canadians did have a rather pugnacious international reputation, the Australians very envious of it.

“That is true. Well, then, no issues here. He’ll fit in with the senior biopsis all day, they’re an egotistical and punch-drunk bunch as it is. Shall we get the paperwork done?”

Wade sort of blinked, wondering how this was all so easy, how much pull Isabella Cartier actually had in the Tribes, and contemplated just how much he was underestimating her as he was pulled inside the room to fill out some forms.

---

He was told to go by ‘Slade Wilson’, with the totally cheesy callsign of ‘Terminator’, and to wear blue and yellow instead of red and black as his custom colors, as there were a bunch of loose lips at this place and there was no reason to attract trouble until he had his healing factor back and under control.

He thought that was totally poor taste in name and style, and protested wildly at his rights being infringed upon. He was informed it was standard practice for people lying low with external enemies, and he was rash and impulsive, not stupid, and to quit acting like he didn’t know how to wear a disguise.

------

A couple days later...

He blinked at his face.

To be honest, he didn’t remember what he was really supposed to look like, so the face in the mirror was only roughly familiar. He almost thought he was looking at a photo of his dad when younger.

The constant crawling pain was gone. The impulse to vent everything from his brain right out his mouth was gone, too. “Wow, this is so different!” he promptly blurted out. “I might even be able to exert some mouth control!” He paused for a second, but there were no more unintended or impulsive words to follow, amazingly enough!

He looked down at his left hand, and flicked his fingers, focusing just a little. After learning how to focus through the pain, this was nothing.

The shortsword of hard green light, looking like an eighteen-inch extended triangle of force, snapped into existence, humming softly in his hand. There were some funny curving lines inside the blade, but after trying really hard to match them to a woman’s curves, he gave up and moved on.

He could feel the line of power from the Mutant Core in his gut going up to his shoulder and down his arm. Oh, carving that had been so painful, like hot wires dripping acid grinding their way through glass while getting some nice electroshock torture every heartbeat. A third of the meridian or more was cancerous, and he’d had to carve his way through those cells, kill them, let them heal, and keep going, all without stopping, pounding his will against his own healing ability in a two-hour-long session of agony that couldn’t stop or he’d probably never, ever be able to do it.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

No ninjas or luchadors or robots or aliens or supermodels came jumping through the windows to interrupt and doom him to forever looking like Death’s favorite non-dead zombie replacement actor or xenosym carrier post-pregnancy. He was kind of disappointed that the narrator for his story didn’t have the right level of pathos to inflict something appropriately depressing on him, but shrugged it off after only a little thought.

Of course, when he had finally popped his Mindblade, Eureka’d!, and his healing factor promptly shut off, his whole body had basically crashed instantly. Miss Cartier had reached out even as his whole brain and vision went black, and that was the last thing he’d seen until a few minutes ago.

He checked his watch. It had been three days since he was out, and promptly he almost doubled over with stomach cramps from hunger. With a healing factor, ignoring hunger was totally possible, but he had the feeling that wouldn’t be wise now.

All his gear was folded up neatly over there, but the crimson and black was now blue and yellow. He sighed, shook his head, wondering how he was supposed to get the bloodstains out now, and stood there in front of the triple mirror looking at his non-tumorous, unscarred, fully intact, and completely normal, if incredibly well-conditioned body, only his dashing good looks separating him from any other Caucasian human male.

“It... feels so good. I might even have to start shaving again. No, no, I am definitely going to grow some metrosexual facial hair just to take advantage of how gorgeous I now am!

“Slade Wilson, you fine-looking Terminator guy, you,” he muttered, lifting the basically overlong knife in his hand. “Man, what a pathetic little thing you are,” he informed it sourly, giving it a shake in disappointment. “You need to be a real sword like, really quick, you know?” The hum seemed a little petulant there in his hand. After all, it had saved his life! “No excuses! You’re going to be a gorgeous thing in my hand, or I just can’t bring you out! This is totally beneath a Terminator’s reputation, or a proper Canadian!”

The Mindblade seemed to think that over, and winked in assurance at him.

“Good that we’re on the same page!” He looked around, saw some papers on the table over there, and threw a plain robe over his magnificence before ambling over to sit down and go through them.

Just normal stuff. Identification, tuition (all paid), class schedule to start as soon as he was able, map to the school and the city nearby.

He didn’t know how long he was going to be here. Probably long enough to cause too much trouble, if the past was any indicator, but then, he’d heard some skinny that life at the Academy of the Braves was never dull, anyway.

“Is there a class on attempting to assassinate the teachers? I think that is a great idea! Someone should make a cartoon about it! I could totally be a cartoon assassin-teacher, I’m sure of it! Have lots of improper student-teacher relationships... wait, it would be even better if they were high school kids, truant types, my kind of troublemakers! I could be a noble soul afflicted with some terminal condition...

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going to have to do something with this idea!” Whole plotlines began to spin out in his head as he sat back for a moment, before his stomach growled at him again and he realized he REALLY had to get something to eat...

---

-He’s graduating from cyborgs to Psions. I’m sure he’ll fit right in,- Isabella /informed me.

-Flourishing his mindblade and uttering something cute about where it fits in a strange accent?- I /asked back.

-He’s more uninhibited than Peter and amusing in a sad clown way. We’ll see if being relatively cute helps that impulse,- Isabella /replied calmly.

-I got my doubts, Bella.-

-Someone has to make bloody gunfights into rousing hilarious entertainment events, right?- was the placid /answer. I smirked despite myself.

---------

Some time passes as the former Deadpool starts a whole new life for himself...

“How the heck is there a Yankee Code going off?” I complained to nobody as the Markspace alarm bleated in my head. “Do I need to go back home?” I was doing some black ops stuff in the Negative Zone, which in recent days seemed to be my primary duty. Karnak Awareness meant I could still hit them at key places and annoy the piss out of them, even if it was an overall drop in the bucket.

High-end Isotopic refineries of certain types were still valuable targets, galactic-scale or no.

-A crimson tower over a mile across and a hundred miles high just popped up on my front door!- Cleo /exclaimed indignantly, relaying the sight of it to everyone. -I am severely tempted to do something very explosive to this thing! Someone tell me who this is!-

Tatyana started /laughing from a couple alternities over. -That’s one of Khan’s assault towers! You’re the chosen site for the next expansion of his transdimensional empire!-

-REALLY.- Sama’s incredibly unamused /voice inserted in, looking at that view. -Yes, that’s one of them.-

-I have eyes on aircraft, mobile units, and infantry rolling out of the bloody thing.- The weather around Madripoor was starting to rumble and darken with breathtaking speed. Even if the tower punched right through it, the invading army had to look up in bloody alarm as the sunny, clear day became a dark and rumbling nightmare in about ten seconds. -I just finished taking over this bloody place and instituting proper clean-ups. While this is a good opportunity to get rid of a lot of outdated infrastructure with happy accidents, someone want to tell me why I shouldn’t drop that whole tower into Hell?- she /grumbled.

Cleo was very much the aggressive type, as all of the old families and powers working on Madripoor had found out. Her body count of drug cartels, smugglers, slavers, thieves, assassins, extortionists, and general lowlifes from all forces interested in the island nation had reached over five figures, and stretched across the South Pacific and a good distance beyond.

When she said she was taking over the place and rebuilding it into a force to be reckoned with there, she was bloody serious. Any of her competitors for influence who hadn’t agreed to give up their unsavory activities had disappeared, often with very loud and thorough explosions that hadn’t left much behind.

There were a lot of people upset with what she had done, and there were a lot more who were very, very happy that the criminal elements of the city were mostly dead, incredibly advanced schools were set up, service jobs were being put in place, money was coming in by legitimate channels, trade was opening up, and the many, many vices of the city were being shut down completely.

==========

For those of you don’t know, Deadpool was a blatant and admitted rip-off of Slade Wilson, the Terminator from DC Comics, when he was originally created. He’s become something more, of course, but that is his origin. Isabella knows this and is naturally playing against it.