The Rose: Infiltration
Nov. 28th, 2006 02:00 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsTibet, 4 am Wednesday. Tuesday afternoon in New York. Plans get made...
"... and we have to do this as furtively as possible," Scott said quietly to the three people standing around the Blackbird's holographic projector. Jean had fed in what she could of the layout of the safe house in question. "Hence no leathers. We can't afford to be identified by the Chinese military. Could lead to all kinds of awkward questions."
Plus, Jean added to herself, there was the whole bit where she didn't actually have any leathers on this side of the planet. "The front door's out - we won't be able to shut the alarms down until we get inside, and I'd rather not call every Chinese agent in Tibet down on us. Luckily, though, they've not bothered to wire the windows on the second and third floors. I figure we should go in here." The hologram rotated, giving a view of the back of the house, and Jean pointed to one of the windows on the second floor. "Scott and I will head down into the basement to get to the control room, shut of the alarms and destroy any security camera footage. Logan, if you and Marie head up to the third floor, we'll signal you as soon as the alarms are down, and you can grab the Rose. It's in this room here." She pointed to a window on the third floor, a few rooms away from where she suggested they enter.
Logan studied the image and then nodded. "Piece of cake." he said with amusement. "What kind of shape do you want the guards to be in when it's all said and done?" he asked Jean, and then looked over to Marie. You ready, kid?" he asked her.
"Yup," she replied, the tension in her voice having nothing to do with the image and what they needed to do. The plan and retrieval seemed simple enough, it was the players in the game she was worried about. She looked from Jean to Scott to Logan and wondered what exactly Scott had been thinking when he'd put together the team, especially after the interchange she had pretended not to hear on the plane. "Shouldn't take too long unless we run inta somethin' unexpected."
"In one piece, Logan, and still breathing. Please don't kill the guards. As soon as you've got the Rose, we'll all get out and meet back here at the plane. There shouldn't be anything unexpected but then, that is the nature of unexpected things." Looking over at Scott she added, "We ready?"
Scott nodded. "Fast in and out," he said quietly, "and as discreet as possible. Let's remember that we know how to be sneaky, all right?"
... wires get cut...
Jean grinned slightly as Logan tossed them a half salute before he and Marie slipped off down the hall, then turned back to Scott. "And we go down." She gestured towards the stairs off on their right. "There's two patrols on the first floor, plus the guys in the control room in the basement."
"Busy house," Scott said quietly, following her. You let the telekinetic go first; it was standard practice, and he couldn't help noticing how smoothly Jean fell right back into it. There were other things he was noticing about Jean, too, but this probably wasn't the time. Her hair's longer. I guess that makes sense... focus, Summers...
"Near as I can tell, it's the main base of operations for undercover Chinese in all of this part of Tibet." They hugged the wall as they went down the stairs, slipping underneath the security camera, doing their best to stay out of it's range. They'd be erasing all the footage anyways, but there was no point in being obvious, and not getting spotted in advance was key.
"Sheer luck, Mystique running into them... she'd be well away from here with the artifact if that hadn't happened." He wasn't sure why they weren't just talking telepathically. Would make more sense, wouldn't it?
"And here's hoping the luck holds out. Stupid blue bitch." Smiling still hurt. Which was problematic, because she could feel him, on the link - a bright, present glow now that he wasn't on the other side of the planet - and that made her feel like singing. But she could also feel his caution, which mirrored her own.
They reached the first floor, and Scott stopped as Jean did. He laid a hand on her arm, recognizing the listening look she got, the slight head-tilt that meant she was focusing telepathically. "Show me where they are?" he asked very softly - and somewhat awkwardly.
Jean met his eyes, nodding faintly, then reached out with her mind to overlay that strange, sixth sense on top of his normal five. Her mental senses showed them the four minds on this floor - two at the far end, not a concern, two coming down the hall, unawares and unprepared.
Can you knock them out quietly as they come by? Scott asked, looking around for a handy place to leave the bodies. Ah-hah. Closet, right there.
Of course. She eyed the camera on the landing above them, stepping farther back into the shadows. Let them walk past - they won't see us - and as soon as they're out of range of the camera I'll take them down.
Scott nodded, shifting back as well. They waited, silent, listening to the approaching sound of footsteps. The two uniformed soldiers appeared, passing right by the stairwell without so much as glancing in Scott and Jean's direction.
Two steps past the edge of what Jean calculated to be the camera's angle and they simply folded to the ground without a sound, although Jean frowned slightly. Chinese is a very strange language, she commented, to produce mental patterns like that.
Scott smiled slightly and moved past her, opening the closet and pulling one of the two men inside, leaving the other for Jean. It was all done in complete silence, and Scott relaxed fractionally when he heard nothing from down the hall, the direction where the other pair of soldiers were. Let's get moving again.
Down to the basement. We're clear up to the control room, except for the cameras.
They made it down to the control room with no further ado. The door was slightly ajar, and Scott listened carefully, even as Jean fed him an impression of where the three men were within the room. Can you knock out three at once?
Jean considered it. ... Probably? Definitely not a skill she'd been working on at the monastery, but she was reasonably certain she could get them all.
Scott shook his head slightly. Take the two closest to the console, he sent. She'd taken down two upstairs. I'll take the third. No point in chancing an alarm being sounded.
Jean nodded, reaching out with her mind again. The man sitting at the desk simply slumped in his chair, unnoticed, and she caught the second telekinetically as he began to fall to the ground, keeping him standing so the third man didn't notice anything amiss as the door to the room opened.
Scott moved in on the third man as quickly as he could. No use of his optic blasts, not unless there was no other choice - and there were other options here. The man had been taken off-guard, distracted. Scott knocked him out the hard way, catching the front of his uniform and lowering him to the floor to minimize the noise.
Jean let the other man slump to the ground, then moved over to the console. I'll get the alarms, you deal with the cameras? Everything was marked in Chinese, of course, but she'd learned the necessary motions from the guard's mind and didn't need to understand them to follow them.
Scott nodded and moved to the cameras. Simple tape, so it was easy enough to remove the footage manually. "Doing okay over there?" he murmured to her.
The password had been entered, the systems checked through, and Jean reached over for the power switch. "Well, we're about to find out..." A quick flick and the alarm was off. Jean paused a second, listening with both her mental and physical senses. "I'm taking the lack of sirens or mental ruckus to mean there wasn't a back up. So, yes." Flipping open the com unit she added, "Wolverine, we're good to go."
Scott came over to stand at her shoulder, gazing down at the security system's screens. "So long as they're quick about it, we should be out of here soon." Which would be good. Very good, as a matter of fact. The less time they were in this house the better.
"That's the idea." She looked up at him over her shoulder and smiled.
His heart skipped a beat. "Been a while since I've been sneaky," he
said softly, smiling back a bit hesitantly before he looked back down
at the screens.
... things are liberated ...
Logan dusted off his hands, booted the downed guard in the ribs, and waited for Marie to finish up with her own playmate. "You know, I think I'm starting to like it here," he said with a grin, breathing a little more deeply thanks to the thin mountain air.
"It's a rather nice change of pace," Marie agreed as she kneed her last guard in the face. Laying the unconscious body gently on the floor, she grinned at Logan. "Not even outta breath."
Logan just grinned at her wolfishly. "Bet Slim and Red are enjoying their reunion time while we go look for this doohickey," he said, keeping his grin firmly in place. He really didn't need to be entertaining that thought, not right now. "She looks good, considerin'."
Marie raised an eyebrow at Logan's carefully constructed facial expression, not buying it for a minute. "She does. Tibet's been good to her." She walked over to stand next to Logan, peering around the corner. "Ah'm surprised you were willing to come off on this quest. Half expected you and Cyke to both stick by her and send me off to fetch."
"Thought about it." Logan confessed. "But I'm all outta Rogue treats. Think you'd settle for a scritch behind the ears?" he teased back.
She smacked his arm playfully and then started heading down the corridor. "Ah think you'd be the one wanting Wolvie treats and a nice belly rub to get your leg thumpin'."
Logan grinned at that one. "Think I left the Wolvie treat back with one-eye," he joked, then sobered as they progressed down the hallway. "Gotta wonder, though," he said pensively.
Marie nodded, letting a little of her concern leak out over her expression. "How are you gonna handle things if she comes back with us?" The distant echo of boots on concrete began to drift into the hallway.
"I'll get by, kid," he said distractedly. He didn't like what a stray breeze had brought him. "Two up ahead," he told her quietly. "Besides, I need to get to know her all over again."
"You always will," she agreed. But you don't always have to make it so hard on yourself. Halting at a turn in the corridor, she waited for the two guards to reach them. "She's still just Jean," she said with a shrug.
"Maybe," he conceded. "Been fooled that way once before." When the guards came around the corner, he was ready for them. Punch to the nose, elbow to the head, and one of them went down sprawled like a rag doll, blood streaming from his face.
Meanwhile, Marie had wrapped her arm around the other guards neck, floating up so his feet dangled off the floor. A well placed punch and she had another body to lie carefully next to the guard Logan had dispatched. "You doubtin' her?"
"We got suckered once," he pointed out. "I believe her, but I believed Jane, too."
Marie merely shrugged. She hadn't been there for the Jane incident, but she'd read the files on it. "We've all had a time or two like that. But sometimes you just gotta have faith." Frowning as they reached a doorway, she paused. "Is it this one or the next?"
"Next one," he said, searching his memory for Jean's instructions.
She continued walking in silence, glancing over every few seconds at Logan. She had known seeing Jean again would affect him, but she hadn't expected it throw him off this much.
"We'll just have to let Wheels put his big brain to use," he said with a shrug. "You ready? I hear four, maybe five." he said, listening at the doorway for a moment.
"Piece of cake," she said with a grin. Wrapping her hand around the knob, she turned it, the crunch of the lock breaking barely audible. "Ladies first," she said with a mock bow to Logan as she pushed the door open.
"Ladies and Rogues first," he amended, then followed her into the room. The five men inside fell quickly to a combination of her sheer strength and his ferocity. Mopping up didn't take longer than thirty seconds.
"That's it?" Marie said, staring at the green-copper spirals surround a piece of almost opaque glass. The fight with the guards had taken so little time, it had barely registered as important. "Looks like something my Aunt Carrie would have cluttering up her house." It certainly didn't look like anything important or worthwhile. Reaching out she picked up the artifact, cradling it gently in her arms. Better safe than sorry. "Cyclops, Phoenix, we have the doohickey, moving to the rendezvous location," she announced into her comm.
"No sign of Mystique," he added into the comm, just to be thorough. "Wolverine, out. C'mon, kid. Let's go see if these monk geeks have any beer."
... and someone gets a little payback.
It couldn't have been more than five minutes before Wolverine's voice piped up, quietly, from the comms to say the Rose was secure. "Fabulous. We'll meet you out at the plane." Standing up again, she gestured towards the door. "Let's get out..." Jean's voice trailed off. "Someone's here."
Scott made it to the door first, pausing to listen. Can you tell who it is?
No. Which really narrows down the options. Now that she was looking, she could tell that the other pair of guards on the first floor were down, that disturbing blankness which could either be death or deep unconsciousness, and the brief flicker of awareness was too uncertain to even pinpoint where in the safe house the other intruder was.
It was, of course, the same blue-skinned infiltrator that Jean had run into not too long before. Mystique had returned to retrieve what had been taken from her, and this time she wasn't wasting any time. Unfortunately, working alone had its downfalls, and the inability to cover more than one area at a time was one of them. Still, the shapeshifter was moving quickly, opening the door and passing through it before she even realized that she wasn't alone.
Scott, closest to the door, was inches away from Mystique even before his mind processed who was standing in front of him. His instincts were faster to react - he reached out and grabbed her, intending to introduce her head to the wall. Quick and efficient.
Unfortunately Mystique was not amenable to that plan, and she managed to twist enough to absorb the brunt of the impact with one shoulder and rebound off the wall, dragging Scott with her with a tight grip on his arm. "X-Men," she hissed, the word sounding like a curse coming from her. Lightning-fast, she yanked away from Scott and raised a knee towards his stomach, teeth bared in a grimace.
He was out of shape, and out of practice in hand-to-hand. He tried to twist away, but the knee reached its target, and he doubled over. Mystique pressed the advantage, and Scott didn't have a chance to reflect on the indignity of having his head bounced off the door before he wound up on the floor, barely conscious.
There'd been only moments between Mystique's entry to the room and Scott's exit from the fight, but it was enough time for Jean's mind to process Mystique. Bitch. and to kick the other woman in the chest as she turned away from Scott with enough TK power to the blow to knock the other woman back.
The blue-skinned woman stumbled back, regaining her balance after a few steps. She immediately moved towards Jean again, intending to hammer her with blows from both her feet and fists.
It had been a long four months up in the mountains, with nothing to do except exercise her mind and her body in an effort to gain better control over both. Jean was probably in better shape than she'd been in years, as Mystique found out when she dodged under Mystique's fists and moved through the kick to lessen the impact before cracking her own fist across the blue face in a TK-powered echo of the shot that had blacked her eye. "You interrupt my meditations, knock me out and now you've concussed my husband. Definitely not on my 'favorite people' list."
To say that Scott was coming to wouldn't be quite accurate, as he hadn't been right out in the first place. But Jean's crisp words penetrated the haze inside his skull, and Scott raised his head, trying to make his eye focus on the two slender shapes facing each other inside the control room.
"Then allow me to remove myself from your presence," Mystique grunted, pain radiating through her skull with each word. She lashed out again at Jean, trying to maneuver herself towards the next doorway in an attempt to escape.
Mystique was trying to get out of range but Jean knew they needed her out of commission, and fast. Jean lashed out with her foot again, knocking Mystique away from the door and she could almost swear she heard a rib or two crack. Not that that mattered much with a shapeshifter, but it had to have hurt.
With a sharp oath, Mystique crashed into the wall again. She tried to move back into a fighting stance but couldn't do so fast enough - Jean's next TK-enhanced blow caused her to fall to the floor in an ungraceful heap. She twitched once and then lay still, her breath coming shallowly to avoid jarring her ribs any more.
Mystique might honestly be unconscious, but Jean didn't believe it, and the respite gave her the chance she needed to fight her way into the other woman's mind. Mystique was well trained, and had natural defenses which made her hard to spot or fight telepathically, but now that she could concentrate it was the work of a few moments to place the mental commands to keep her unconscious for several hours. You ok? she asked Scott, turning back to him.
Scott pushed himself up to a sitting position, shaking his head - to clear it, not to tell Jean 'no'. "Think so," he muttered, and took Jean's offered hand up. He couldn't quite concentrate enough to direct a thought down the link. "That was an unexpected delay." He glanced down at Mystique, then smiled a bit crookedly. "Let's get out of here. I wonder how long the Chinese will be able to hold onto her..."
"Here's hoping it's a very long time." She quickly scanned the house and added, "We're clear to the exit. Let's go."
"... and we have to do this as furtively as possible," Scott said quietly to the three people standing around the Blackbird's holographic projector. Jean had fed in what she could of the layout of the safe house in question. "Hence no leathers. We can't afford to be identified by the Chinese military. Could lead to all kinds of awkward questions."
Plus, Jean added to herself, there was the whole bit where she didn't actually have any leathers on this side of the planet. "The front door's out - we won't be able to shut the alarms down until we get inside, and I'd rather not call every Chinese agent in Tibet down on us. Luckily, though, they've not bothered to wire the windows on the second and third floors. I figure we should go in here." The hologram rotated, giving a view of the back of the house, and Jean pointed to one of the windows on the second floor. "Scott and I will head down into the basement to get to the control room, shut of the alarms and destroy any security camera footage. Logan, if you and Marie head up to the third floor, we'll signal you as soon as the alarms are down, and you can grab the Rose. It's in this room here." She pointed to a window on the third floor, a few rooms away from where she suggested they enter.
Logan studied the image and then nodded. "Piece of cake." he said with amusement. "What kind of shape do you want the guards to be in when it's all said and done?" he asked Jean, and then looked over to Marie. You ready, kid?" he asked her.
"Yup," she replied, the tension in her voice having nothing to do with the image and what they needed to do. The plan and retrieval seemed simple enough, it was the players in the game she was worried about. She looked from Jean to Scott to Logan and wondered what exactly Scott had been thinking when he'd put together the team, especially after the interchange she had pretended not to hear on the plane. "Shouldn't take too long unless we run inta somethin' unexpected."
"In one piece, Logan, and still breathing. Please don't kill the guards. As soon as you've got the Rose, we'll all get out and meet back here at the plane. There shouldn't be anything unexpected but then, that is the nature of unexpected things." Looking over at Scott she added, "We ready?"
Scott nodded. "Fast in and out," he said quietly, "and as discreet as possible. Let's remember that we know how to be sneaky, all right?"
... wires get cut...
Jean grinned slightly as Logan tossed them a half salute before he and Marie slipped off down the hall, then turned back to Scott. "And we go down." She gestured towards the stairs off on their right. "There's two patrols on the first floor, plus the guys in the control room in the basement."
"Busy house," Scott said quietly, following her. You let the telekinetic go first; it was standard practice, and he couldn't help noticing how smoothly Jean fell right back into it. There were other things he was noticing about Jean, too, but this probably wasn't the time. Her hair's longer. I guess that makes sense... focus, Summers...
"Near as I can tell, it's the main base of operations for undercover Chinese in all of this part of Tibet." They hugged the wall as they went down the stairs, slipping underneath the security camera, doing their best to stay out of it's range. They'd be erasing all the footage anyways, but there was no point in being obvious, and not getting spotted in advance was key.
"Sheer luck, Mystique running into them... she'd be well away from here with the artifact if that hadn't happened." He wasn't sure why they weren't just talking telepathically. Would make more sense, wouldn't it?
"And here's hoping the luck holds out. Stupid blue bitch." Smiling still hurt. Which was problematic, because she could feel him, on the link - a bright, present glow now that he wasn't on the other side of the planet - and that made her feel like singing. But she could also feel his caution, which mirrored her own.
They reached the first floor, and Scott stopped as Jean did. He laid a hand on her arm, recognizing the listening look she got, the slight head-tilt that meant she was focusing telepathically. "Show me where they are?" he asked very softly - and somewhat awkwardly.
Jean met his eyes, nodding faintly, then reached out with her mind to overlay that strange, sixth sense on top of his normal five. Her mental senses showed them the four minds on this floor - two at the far end, not a concern, two coming down the hall, unawares and unprepared.
Can you knock them out quietly as they come by? Scott asked, looking around for a handy place to leave the bodies. Ah-hah. Closet, right there.
Of course. She eyed the camera on the landing above them, stepping farther back into the shadows. Let them walk past - they won't see us - and as soon as they're out of range of the camera I'll take them down.
Scott nodded, shifting back as well. They waited, silent, listening to the approaching sound of footsteps. The two uniformed soldiers appeared, passing right by the stairwell without so much as glancing in Scott and Jean's direction.
Two steps past the edge of what Jean calculated to be the camera's angle and they simply folded to the ground without a sound, although Jean frowned slightly. Chinese is a very strange language, she commented, to produce mental patterns like that.
Scott smiled slightly and moved past her, opening the closet and pulling one of the two men inside, leaving the other for Jean. It was all done in complete silence, and Scott relaxed fractionally when he heard nothing from down the hall, the direction where the other pair of soldiers were. Let's get moving again.
Down to the basement. We're clear up to the control room, except for the cameras.
They made it down to the control room with no further ado. The door was slightly ajar, and Scott listened carefully, even as Jean fed him an impression of where the three men were within the room. Can you knock out three at once?
Jean considered it. ... Probably? Definitely not a skill she'd been working on at the monastery, but she was reasonably certain she could get them all.
Scott shook his head slightly. Take the two closest to the console, he sent. She'd taken down two upstairs. I'll take the third. No point in chancing an alarm being sounded.
Jean nodded, reaching out with her mind again. The man sitting at the desk simply slumped in his chair, unnoticed, and she caught the second telekinetically as he began to fall to the ground, keeping him standing so the third man didn't notice anything amiss as the door to the room opened.
Scott moved in on the third man as quickly as he could. No use of his optic blasts, not unless there was no other choice - and there were other options here. The man had been taken off-guard, distracted. Scott knocked him out the hard way, catching the front of his uniform and lowering him to the floor to minimize the noise.
Jean let the other man slump to the ground, then moved over to the console. I'll get the alarms, you deal with the cameras? Everything was marked in Chinese, of course, but she'd learned the necessary motions from the guard's mind and didn't need to understand them to follow them.
Scott nodded and moved to the cameras. Simple tape, so it was easy enough to remove the footage manually. "Doing okay over there?" he murmured to her.
The password had been entered, the systems checked through, and Jean reached over for the power switch. "Well, we're about to find out..." A quick flick and the alarm was off. Jean paused a second, listening with both her mental and physical senses. "I'm taking the lack of sirens or mental ruckus to mean there wasn't a back up. So, yes." Flipping open the com unit she added, "Wolverine, we're good to go."
Scott came over to stand at her shoulder, gazing down at the security system's screens. "So long as they're quick about it, we should be out of here soon." Which would be good. Very good, as a matter of fact. The less time they were in this house the better.
"That's the idea." She looked up at him over her shoulder and smiled.
His heart skipped a beat. "Been a while since I've been sneaky," he
said softly, smiling back a bit hesitantly before he looked back down
at the screens.
... things are liberated ...
Logan dusted off his hands, booted the downed guard in the ribs, and waited for Marie to finish up with her own playmate. "You know, I think I'm starting to like it here," he said with a grin, breathing a little more deeply thanks to the thin mountain air.
"It's a rather nice change of pace," Marie agreed as she kneed her last guard in the face. Laying the unconscious body gently on the floor, she grinned at Logan. "Not even outta breath."
Logan just grinned at her wolfishly. "Bet Slim and Red are enjoying their reunion time while we go look for this doohickey," he said, keeping his grin firmly in place. He really didn't need to be entertaining that thought, not right now. "She looks good, considerin'."
Marie raised an eyebrow at Logan's carefully constructed facial expression, not buying it for a minute. "She does. Tibet's been good to her." She walked over to stand next to Logan, peering around the corner. "Ah'm surprised you were willing to come off on this quest. Half expected you and Cyke to both stick by her and send me off to fetch."
"Thought about it." Logan confessed. "But I'm all outta Rogue treats. Think you'd settle for a scritch behind the ears?" he teased back.
She smacked his arm playfully and then started heading down the corridor. "Ah think you'd be the one wanting Wolvie treats and a nice belly rub to get your leg thumpin'."
Logan grinned at that one. "Think I left the Wolvie treat back with one-eye," he joked, then sobered as they progressed down the hallway. "Gotta wonder, though," he said pensively.
Marie nodded, letting a little of her concern leak out over her expression. "How are you gonna handle things if she comes back with us?" The distant echo of boots on concrete began to drift into the hallway.
"I'll get by, kid," he said distractedly. He didn't like what a stray breeze had brought him. "Two up ahead," he told her quietly. "Besides, I need to get to know her all over again."
"You always will," she agreed. But you don't always have to make it so hard on yourself. Halting at a turn in the corridor, she waited for the two guards to reach them. "She's still just Jean," she said with a shrug.
"Maybe," he conceded. "Been fooled that way once before." When the guards came around the corner, he was ready for them. Punch to the nose, elbow to the head, and one of them went down sprawled like a rag doll, blood streaming from his face.
Meanwhile, Marie had wrapped her arm around the other guards neck, floating up so his feet dangled off the floor. A well placed punch and she had another body to lie carefully next to the guard Logan had dispatched. "You doubtin' her?"
"We got suckered once," he pointed out. "I believe her, but I believed Jane, too."
Marie merely shrugged. She hadn't been there for the Jane incident, but she'd read the files on it. "We've all had a time or two like that. But sometimes you just gotta have faith." Frowning as they reached a doorway, she paused. "Is it this one or the next?"
"Next one," he said, searching his memory for Jean's instructions.
She continued walking in silence, glancing over every few seconds at Logan. She had known seeing Jean again would affect him, but she hadn't expected it throw him off this much.
"We'll just have to let Wheels put his big brain to use," he said with a shrug. "You ready? I hear four, maybe five." he said, listening at the doorway for a moment.
"Piece of cake," she said with a grin. Wrapping her hand around the knob, she turned it, the crunch of the lock breaking barely audible. "Ladies first," she said with a mock bow to Logan as she pushed the door open.
"Ladies and Rogues first," he amended, then followed her into the room. The five men inside fell quickly to a combination of her sheer strength and his ferocity. Mopping up didn't take longer than thirty seconds.
"That's it?" Marie said, staring at the green-copper spirals surround a piece of almost opaque glass. The fight with the guards had taken so little time, it had barely registered as important. "Looks like something my Aunt Carrie would have cluttering up her house." It certainly didn't look like anything important or worthwhile. Reaching out she picked up the artifact, cradling it gently in her arms. Better safe than sorry. "Cyclops, Phoenix, we have the doohickey, moving to the rendezvous location," she announced into her comm.
"No sign of Mystique," he added into the comm, just to be thorough. "Wolverine, out. C'mon, kid. Let's go see if these monk geeks have any beer."
... and someone gets a little payback.
It couldn't have been more than five minutes before Wolverine's voice piped up, quietly, from the comms to say the Rose was secure. "Fabulous. We'll meet you out at the plane." Standing up again, she gestured towards the door. "Let's get out..." Jean's voice trailed off. "Someone's here."
Scott made it to the door first, pausing to listen. Can you tell who it is?
No. Which really narrows down the options. Now that she was looking, she could tell that the other pair of guards on the first floor were down, that disturbing blankness which could either be death or deep unconsciousness, and the brief flicker of awareness was too uncertain to even pinpoint where in the safe house the other intruder was.
It was, of course, the same blue-skinned infiltrator that Jean had run into not too long before. Mystique had returned to retrieve what had been taken from her, and this time she wasn't wasting any time. Unfortunately, working alone had its downfalls, and the inability to cover more than one area at a time was one of them. Still, the shapeshifter was moving quickly, opening the door and passing through it before she even realized that she wasn't alone.
Scott, closest to the door, was inches away from Mystique even before his mind processed who was standing in front of him. His instincts were faster to react - he reached out and grabbed her, intending to introduce her head to the wall. Quick and efficient.
Unfortunately Mystique was not amenable to that plan, and she managed to twist enough to absorb the brunt of the impact with one shoulder and rebound off the wall, dragging Scott with her with a tight grip on his arm. "X-Men," she hissed, the word sounding like a curse coming from her. Lightning-fast, she yanked away from Scott and raised a knee towards his stomach, teeth bared in a grimace.
He was out of shape, and out of practice in hand-to-hand. He tried to twist away, but the knee reached its target, and he doubled over. Mystique pressed the advantage, and Scott didn't have a chance to reflect on the indignity of having his head bounced off the door before he wound up on the floor, barely conscious.
There'd been only moments between Mystique's entry to the room and Scott's exit from the fight, but it was enough time for Jean's mind to process Mystique. Bitch. and to kick the other woman in the chest as she turned away from Scott with enough TK power to the blow to knock the other woman back.
The blue-skinned woman stumbled back, regaining her balance after a few steps. She immediately moved towards Jean again, intending to hammer her with blows from both her feet and fists.
It had been a long four months up in the mountains, with nothing to do except exercise her mind and her body in an effort to gain better control over both. Jean was probably in better shape than she'd been in years, as Mystique found out when she dodged under Mystique's fists and moved through the kick to lessen the impact before cracking her own fist across the blue face in a TK-powered echo of the shot that had blacked her eye. "You interrupt my meditations, knock me out and now you've concussed my husband. Definitely not on my 'favorite people' list."
To say that Scott was coming to wouldn't be quite accurate, as he hadn't been right out in the first place. But Jean's crisp words penetrated the haze inside his skull, and Scott raised his head, trying to make his eye focus on the two slender shapes facing each other inside the control room.
"Then allow me to remove myself from your presence," Mystique grunted, pain radiating through her skull with each word. She lashed out again at Jean, trying to maneuver herself towards the next doorway in an attempt to escape.
Mystique was trying to get out of range but Jean knew they needed her out of commission, and fast. Jean lashed out with her foot again, knocking Mystique away from the door and she could almost swear she heard a rib or two crack. Not that that mattered much with a shapeshifter, but it had to have hurt.
With a sharp oath, Mystique crashed into the wall again. She tried to move back into a fighting stance but couldn't do so fast enough - Jean's next TK-enhanced blow caused her to fall to the floor in an ungraceful heap. She twitched once and then lay still, her breath coming shallowly to avoid jarring her ribs any more.
Mystique might honestly be unconscious, but Jean didn't believe it, and the respite gave her the chance she needed to fight her way into the other woman's mind. Mystique was well trained, and had natural defenses which made her hard to spot or fight telepathically, but now that she could concentrate it was the work of a few moments to place the mental commands to keep her unconscious for several hours. You ok? she asked Scott, turning back to him.
Scott pushed himself up to a sitting position, shaking his head - to clear it, not to tell Jean 'no'. "Think so," he muttered, and took Jean's offered hand up. He couldn't quite concentrate enough to direct a thought down the link. "That was an unexpected delay." He glanced down at Mystique, then smiled a bit crookedly. "Let's get out of here. I wonder how long the Chinese will be able to hold onto her..."
"Here's hoping it's a very long time." She quickly scanned the house and added, "We're clear to the exit. Let's go."
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Date: 2006-11-28 10:09 pm (UTC)Good logs all, though. :)
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Date: 2006-11-29 01:42 am (UTC)But yes, good logs. And yay for having a Cora back! *happydances*
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Date: 2006-11-29 04:19 am (UTC)