Merry Christmas, Magneto (Sorry About The Mess!)

[x-cyclops.livejournal.com]

In Hawaii, Pietro waits for the arrival of Scott and the team. And waits. They're a whole four minutes late, curse them. Toad, of course, jumps to the conclusion that they're there for his new prized gadget.


To all outward appearance, Pietro was seated at his terminal, flicking through news items as fast as the machine could serve them up. Inside, he was seething. Summers was late. All of four minutes late, true, but to someone with Pietro's accelerated perceptions it might as well have been four hours. Unacceptable. He so very much resented having to employ amateurs.

Toad wandered into his office, his idiot's hunch more pronounced than usual. "There's a flicker on the perimeter security I don't like," he said peevishly. "Something's wrong."

"Nothing's wrong," Pietro retorted. "Your better mousetrap has simply developed a fault. Again. Perhaps you've slimed a capacitor this time. Why don't you go find out?" Something should be wrong, of course. Something should have gone wrong four minutes, forty-eight seconds ago, but punctuality was apparently dead.

Toad glared, dully, and opened his mouth, no doubt to regurgitate some ill-conceived attempt at wit, but thankfully Pietro's patience was spared as the entire building shook. Alarms sounded, and Pietro tabbed over to the security feed: all of perhaps two seconds' view of Summers' black-clad Keystone Kops before one of them waved a hand and the feed went dead.

"X-Men!" Toad hissed over his shoulder. "I told you something was wrong!"

"Congratulations," Pietro spat back. "Your giant miswired electromagnet caught Dane's attention, it seems. I hope you didn't do anything too objectionable to her in Florida."

"Never mind that now!" Toad shouted. "We can't let them have the enhancer!" He hopped off, Pietro following more sedately.

The break-in had occurred, of course, in Toad's lab; Pietro had highlighted it on the schematics he'd given Summers, and Summers was capable of taking a hint. When Pietro got his first good look at the X-Men stepping through the giant hole in the wall, he decided to forgive Summers the tardiness: Blaire and Dane, as agreed, Guthrie, Marko . . . even Dr. Grey. Quite satisfactory.

Toad, of course, didn't see it that way. He growled something vile, swept some kind of remote control off the table . . .

Pietro almost swore himself as a shimmering wall of force surrounded the device. Toad vanished into the bowels of the building, and Pietro, shaking his head, sped back to his office. There was nothing for it but to continue with the original plan and hope the X-Men had woken up on a particularly destructive side of the bed this morning.

--


Toad turns out to have protected his gadget - rather well, as a matter of fact. Sam and Cain ponder the problem. So does Lorna. Look who's on-site after all!


Stepping into the lab, Cain glanced around while the remainder of the team stayed a few steps behind, wary of any booby traps that Toad may have set.

Looking at the massive machine, he raised a fist. "We're in the right place," he growled. "Time to shut this thing down."

Stepping forward to bring both massive fists down on the machine, the Juggernaut was shocked and surprised when his blow was halted in midair, his punch stopped as if he'd hit an invisible wall. A frustrated barrage of short punches, kicks, and headbutts met the same resistance.

"Anyone want to explain this to me?" he said, turning with a shrug.

Lorna stepped forward, frowning. "Let me try." She stepped right up to the field, stripping off her gloves so they wouldn't interfere and rested them flat on the strange field she felt. Trying to shove through was like standing in a lightning storm. She pulled back, gasping for breath and shaking. "Christ, what is that thing?"

Sam pushed down the urge to simply rocket forward and pound his head on whatever the field keeping them back was, and stopped for a moment to think. Anything that could brush aside the fists of Cain Marko probably wasn't going to magically drop due to him hitting it either. "Ah'm guessin' that whatever that force field is, it's probably bein' powered by that generator sittin' just inside there." Which ruled out the possibility of taking out the generator to take down the force field. Sam screwed up his face in intense concentration for a moment. Maybe enough force would overload the generator, but where were they going to get more...he looked sideways at Juggernaut. "Ah got an idea."

--


Rematch time, as Toad spots Jean. But there's been a lot of water under the bridge since Liberty Island, and Toad is no match for Phoenix.


Toad sped through the mazelike halls of the base, caroming off walls in his haste and nearly incandescent with rage. How dare they break in when he'd been so close to perfecting the device? They would spoil everything, everything, and Magneto would chalk it up to his account as another in a depressingly long string of failures. This was supposed to have been his redemption!

Well, perhaps it could still be, if he could bring Magneto a dead X-Man or two. Someone was following him--well, they'd have to, he thought, grinning. They weren't going to get at his enhancer without the remote, and clearly that's what they were after. Now who was it? A glance at the convex security mirror in the hall corner was all he needed--aha, the dead/not-dead, lovely Dr. Grey. He could finish what he'd started on Liberty Island, if he could set up a suitable ambush. And the base was very well equipped for ambushes.

God, damnit!That stupid hoping maniac went careening around another corner, too fast to get a solid TK grip on and too well trained for her to follow him by his thoughts. As she sped up, racing around the curve Jean once mored damned Magneto for his (perfectly justifiable) paranoia about telepaths. Not that she wasn't fast, but it was still taking every ounce of speed she had and then some just to keep up with Toad.

As Jean rounded the corner, Toad's tongue wrapped around her ankle and yanked, sending her sprawling. He pounced, landing in a crouch on her chest, his feet pinning her arms to the floor; he grinned down at her. "Hello there. No boyfriend this time around, hmm?" Toad hawked and spat, coating Jean's face with his slime, and bounded away.

As Toad turned to bounce off he didn't see his disgusting slime lift away, never having actually managed to connect. Sitting up Jean reached out and grabbed at Toad's legs, hauling them up into the air until he was dangling above the floor upside down. "Honestly, Mr. Spitty, do you even have any other tricks?"

Toad glared--most of his other tricks needed something to springboard off of--thought very loudly indeed about a few of the fantasies he hadn't yet managed to pay anyone to fulfill, and lashed out hard with his tongue. Maybe if he hit her hard enough in the throat she'd lose her concentration, and then they could really have some fun.

A good two feet before the tongue hit Jean, and thus a good two feet before Toad was expecting an impact, his tongue slammed into a TK shield. "Tell me where the remote is," Jean said, not even bothering to comment on the physiological unfeasibility of some of his odder fantasies.

"Fuck you," Toad snarled. Nimble fingers pulled a flash grenade from his sleeve, and he squeezed his eyes shut before setting it off at Jean's feet.

Anyone who ever suggested that containing even a minor explosion at close range should not take all of Jean's attention was insane. Throwing herself and everything back away from the bubble she instantly formed around the grenade was exactly the right response, and if anyone pointed out that that included launching Toad farther away from herself and then letting go as she had to focus on the explosion or that that perhaps was not the best thing to have done was going to get smacked. The gaping hole in the hallway floor was also a reminder that she should have made the bubble go under the grenade as well.

At this point, Toad decided, his only real option was to run. She'd clearly been practicing. A lot. Or a powers upgrade had come free with the resurrection, or something. Either way, he was just going to get safely clear of the building, hit the self-destruct, and--he grinned--well, Pietro was fast, wasn't he? All his fault if he didn't get out of the way in time. And maybe he'd catch a few of the X-Men in the blast, that would be good. He kicked his way into the ventilation system and scrambled like hell.

It took Toad a few seconds to get his mental defenses back up and running, and that brief moment was all that Jean needed. "Aw, hell..." she muttered to herself before reaching out towards him, shuddering slightly as the running mental dialog of things he would like to do to any semi-willing warm body that served as his shields started up again. Night night, Toad. Can't have you blowing up everything -takes all the fun out of doing the property damage ourselves. A concentrated mental burst knocked the man unconscious and she sighed as she headed down the hall towards the vent he'd vanished into. Getting him out of there was going to be a pain.

--


Back to the forcefield. Sam and Cain indulge in a little nostalgia. It doesn't precisely work.


"An idea?" Cain resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the hayseed, before remembering that Sam was his XO, and the closest thing Scott had to a protege when it came to matters of strategy and tactics. Thumping the heels of his hands against the field, he scowled in annoyance. "Fire away, Cannonball. I ain't got the first clue."

Lorna shrugged and leaned against the wall. She was here to make this look like an accident--or her fault, no other reason. Idly, she continued poking at the field, trying to sort out precisely how it was constructed and where the generator was intersecting with the field. Blinking hard, she let her vision slip until the shift of the EM fields was all she could see and the world was made up of the green shifting lines.

Sam looked over at Cain, trying to assess whether he had enough available thrust to pull off what he had in mind. He'd carried people before, but those people weren't the better part of eight feet tall and the good lord only knew how many pounds. "Remember Youra?" he asked the larger man.

"Remember...?" Cain paused, glancing at the field, at Sam, back at the field, then up to the sky. With dawning realization, he sighed, turning his back to Sam and lifting his arms slightly. Turning to Lorna, he gave a resigned smile. "You may want to back up a ways in case this don't work."

"Christ, you're both insane." Lorna wrapped herself in shield and moved quickly back down the hall. "If this doesn't work, I have something to try. Try not to tear the building down around us first."

Sam just hoped he'd have enough available thrust to lift Cain. Taking a firm grip under Cain's armpits, he lit off his blast field and rocketed straight upward. It definitely took a lot more thrust to accomplish anything, and he certainly wouldn't have wanted to attempt any complex maneuvering while carrying the larger man, but going straight up wasn't much of a problem. Reaching an apex, he rolled back over his head in a sort of vertical Immelmann turn, dropping the Juggernaut as he did. "Bombs away," he quipped over his communicator.

Tucking his shoulders, Cain rolled in midair, eyes focused on that generator like it was a opposing quarterback, and that invisible field of force was nothing more than an offensive line that was about to be knocked aside like tenpins.

So when he hit it with the force of a train wreck, and bounced off like a tennis ball, the Juggernaut was rightfully perturbed. Rising to his feet and shaking his head, Cain prodded the field again, getting the same resistance.

"...the hell IS this thing?" he groused, thumping heavily on it to no effect.

Lorna jogged back over and prodded the field again then slammed it with a stronger blast. The shield barely rippled as it absorbed the force. "It's, um, getting stronger." She looked back over her shoulder at the two men. "I don't suppose anyone sees a plug we can pull? I can't just short the damn thing." She frowned. "Where are the brilliant physics people when I need them to tell me if I can make it think that my sheilds are part of it."

"Tech nothing!" Cain yelled, kicking at the field. "Can't you just reach into there and crush it like a tin can?"

--


Scott, sitting in the plane, is joined by Pietro, with the list. Pietro doesn't take Scott's concern for him very well, but that's just his way.


Oh, how he hated this. Scott tried not to grind his teeth - or scratch at the side of his face, because Jean would kill him if she caught him at that again - as he listened over the coms to what his team was doing. Outside. Without him. Things seemed to be going as planned, from what he could hear, but still...

At least he was sitting in the pilot's seat of his plane, he tried to console himself. Even if he wasn't actually going to be flying her except in case of last resort.

The boarding ramp thrummed for a moment as Pietro entered the plane, coasting to a halt behind Scott's chair. "They do say all good generals lead from the rear," he pointed out sardonically. "Sorry about the forcefield, it seems Toad's a bit less inept than I'd thought. I do, however, have the list here." He proffered a gleaming CD.

"Temporary state of affairs. And they'll take care of the forcefield, don't worry." Scott took the CD from Pietro with a nod. "I'll make sure Charles gets this."

"See that you do--and that he acts on it very quickly. Absent the actual report I'll still have to tell my father everything I remember from it, and there's a limit to how forgetful I can afford to be." Pietro shook his head. "With any luck, a few solid failures will put him off the idea of a second Cerebro for the foreseeable future."

"We can hope. The children will be safe, even if it has to be at the school, and we'll make arrangments for the families." Scott gave Pietro a careful look. "You're ready for the next part? I briefed Dazzler."

Pietro gave him a caustic look. "I've been knocked unconscious before, Summers, it doesn't take much in the way of preparation. As long as she does her part, and the rest of your people destroy Toad's machine properly, I'll be satisfied."

"I actually meant after you wake up. Not that you're incapable of fast talking, but I suspect you're going to have to do a fair bit of it with your father."

Pietro's expression, if anything, grew even more caustic. "I hardly need your advice to handle him, Summers. Stick to blowing things up. Or listening in while others do, since that seems to be more your speed these days."

More or less the reaction he'd expected, and Scott let the jibe pass. He'd needed to say it. "Just be careful," he said, turning back around in the chair. Pietro would need to be out there again shortly. The conversation was coming to a close. "Your sister's worrying herself gray as it is, and we both know she'll be able to read between the lines of the mission report."

"She always did worry too much." Pietro turned to leave, then paused. "Tell her--well, whatever you think she needs to know, I suppose. Your judgment hasn't been too disappointing so far." Another thrum from the landing ramp signaled his departure.

"Dazzler," Scott murmured over the coms. "All set up. Knock him down."

--


It turns out that it's a very good thing Lorna's on-site. She's the only one who can figure out Toad's remote. Maybe.


Lorna's statement that the field was getting stronger halted Sam as he was about to circle around to take another pass at it. If his full thrust wasn't accomplishing anything, and Lorna's large amounts of power output weren't accomplishing anything, and the kinetic force of dropping the Juggernaut on it hadn't accomplished anything, then the only hope was that the thing had an off switch of some sort. Of course, that meant they had to figure out where it was and how to flip it...

Lorna rolled her eyes at Cain. "Yeah, I could but I like building the dramatic tension which is why I'm standing around bitching that it's absorbing my fields. I can't get past it anymore than you can. So unless you can figure out a way to turn the generator off, we're pretty much screwed." She had to step back, the field was one of the more unpleasant without being painful experiences in recent days.

Leaving Toad in the vent once she'd gotten the remote had not been vindictive. Locking the vents in place with some carefully wedged pieces of scrap metal? That had been vindictive. What could she say, the little bastard pissed her off. But now that she had the remote there were more important things to deal with. She considered it as she ran down the hallway towards the others, but there was a decided lack of big red button that said 'push me'. Given this was apparently also the remote to the bombs Toad had placed, it seemed reasonable to get back to everyone before they tried to figure it out.

Cain looked up from where he'd been ineffectually thumping on the field. "Jeannie!" he exclaimed with a smile, poking a finger towards the generator. "Whatever that thing is, we can't get to it. Cannonball can't headbutt his way through this invisible wall thingy, I can't punch it down, and Polaris can't reach through it. Ideas?"

"Well, the good news is I have the remote to the machine, the generator and the self destruct set up for the entire area. And possible the vcr. The bad news is that by the time I got it and realized I couldn't work it, Toad was already... suffering a slight case of unconsciousness and scanning him wasn't an option. Here," Jean said, offering the remote up to the others at large. "Anybody got an opinion on what the hell his notational system means?"

Lorna sighed and bit down on the impulse to ask Cain not to call her Polaris. She wasn't on the team, she was just here...assisting. She held out her hand for the remote, "Let me see it. Between my memories and hers, we might have an idea of what's in that twisted frog brain. Not that she was any more fond of him than I was. Horrible creature."

Jean nodded, handing it over without comment.

Sam resisted the urge to tap his foot. The longer they were here, the more likely that things could go further awry. He knew everyone was working as hard and as fast as they could to solve the problem, and rubbernecking wouldn't solve anything.

Lorna looked over the remote, handling it gingerly even though she knew it was silly. Still better safe than blown to bits. "I think..." she touched a fingernail to one of the buttons. 'I think it's this one. How good are your shields, Jean?"

"Good," Jean said. "Hopefully good enough." She dropped deeper into her mind, building up a solid tk wall around them, and nodded to Lorna when it was ready.

Cain glanced back and forth, then obligingly took a few steps back, bracing himself for the inevitable explosion that was likely to ensue.

Lorna added her own shields to Jean's, just in case. She looked around, taking stock of the others in the room then shrugged. "Well, here goes nothing." She pressed the button she thought most likely to not kill them and flinched automatically. There ensued a most terrible silence.

--


Elsewhere, the last part of the plan falls into place as Alison knocks Pietro out, somewhat ostentatiously.


Pietro zipped back into the base; now that the important part of the operation was concluded, it was time and past time to get himself knocked convincingly unconscious so that the whole fiasco could safely be blamed on Toad when his father arrived. He could still hear the echoes of the X-Men's attempts to bash through the forcefield, and had to restrain a snort; Toad might have been born to be a scapegoat, but he did have a knack for building things. Brute force certainly wasn't going to be the answer there.

Not that the X-Men would listen, of course; he'd brought them here to apply brute force, after all. And speaking of which . . . ah, yes, there was Blaire now.

"We'll have to make this look convincing," he said, coming to a halt in front of her, "but do try not to inflict any serious damage. I have plans that I'd rather not put off with a long recovery."

The occasional chatter through the comm system told her everything was well under control elsewhere. She and Scott had agreed - with very solemn nods and ill-concealed satisfaction on Scott's part - that this would in fact very much have to be made convincing. Which meant, well...

"Right. No serious damage. No long recovery." Alison gazed around the pristine room, the camera systems obviously not functionning - Lorna had been thorough in that, without a doubt and with a fair amount of spiteful satisfaction, though it hadn't been too obvious to see. "Of course... we should at least try to make this convincing," Alison said innocently.

"The security cameras would be knocked out by the pulse regardless," Pietro pointed out dryly, noticing her glance. "Now, I've given this a certain amount of thought; here's what we'll do. Fast as I am, I cannot outrun light." He indicated one of the inner doors. "I'll start over there. If you're reasonably skilled, you ought to be able to disorient me with a bright flash before I cross the room, and from there I'm sure you'll be able to think of something. Any questions?"

"Oh goody!" Alison clapped her hands at him, smiling brightly. "I get to do the pretty light show!" The sarcasm was thick enough to cut with her own lasers, but something about Pietro just made that happen. It wasn't her fault at all. Really. "So, you know. Whenever you're ready and stuff. Oh wait!" She beamed at him, ignoring the skid marks on the ground from where he'd breaked suddenly at her call. She'd not done that on purpose. Much. Really. "It's okay if the room gets marked up a bit, right?"

Pietro rolled his eyes. Typical. "Yes, you may commit unnecessary wanton destruction of my father's property all you like. And tell Summers, if he wants to convince me, he needs to stop providing counter-examples. He'll know what I mean."

He took his starting position in the doorway again. "Now, are we quite ready?"

A bubbling sound answered him, Alison nodding enthusiatically. "Yep!" Oh, she was ready all right. It was too bad in a way that the camera system was fried. This would so have made a nice present for Scott's Christmas gift, even if she was diverging slightly from things and adding in her own touch.

But hey, she was an artist. She was supposed to get creative, right?

Ignoring the blur running about, though the buzz was not at all unlike that of a really big buggy mosquitoe (and was she suprised? Why no, not at all!) Alison concentrated on firing off a few low level laser shots, clearly the usual type of lasers she used when trying to knock or slow someone down without causeing permanent harm.

Though they did tend to sting a little. The thought made her grin in an entirely un-bubbly way.

Pietro screeched to a halt in the middle of the room, glaring at her. "Dammit, Blaire, stop messing about! Or is this really the best you can do?"

His last words were greeted by a brilliant smile and a far more blinding flash of light - which was neatly sustained, taking into account his accelerated metabolism. Though it would have been far more satisfying to literally punch his lights out, Alison opted for the more efficient and calculated ray of solid light, as it were, clipping him neatly in the jaw seconds after she'd blinded him.

it was mean, she supposed, to make him wait and wonder, but apparently Pietro Maximoff just brought out the worse in her.

And this the first time they met, too.

--


No boom today. Maybe boom tomorrow.


After a moment, Lorna let out the breath she was holding, "We're not dead."

And on the heel of her words, the forcefield flickered and went out.