xp_logs | Krakoa: And When There Was One

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Juggernaut, Blink, and Sunfire finally discover the secret of Krakoa.

Cain motioned for the other two to stop in their patrol. They'd been around most of the island, seeing nothing more than a few overgrown structures that might have been shanties, obviously abandoned. Following the once-paved roads seemed to get them nowhere. Nothing seemed to explain the dead Japanese military, or the recently-dropped bomb that still lay out on in the sand dunes.

Stopping, Clarice looked around to see why Cain had signaled them. There was nothing she could see, but she didn't have his eye for the subtle nuances of military tracking and patrol. So far though, she hadn't seen anything noteworthy except absolutely nothing, which she was beginning to realize was noteworthy in and of itself. "Not that I don't like hiking around deserted islands....but am I missing something?" she finally asked. She really wanted to take the hot suit off, but she didn't want to end up like the Japanese on the beach.

"Whatever it is," said Shiro, peering through infrared signatures behind the brush and trees to see if anything alive was hiding there, "Then I do not see it, either. I wonder if the mutant either died or fled." At this rate, preferably the former. If there was one more dead body he has to see today, best whoever it was who caused all this trouble.

Cain shook his head. "If he would've escaped, he wouldn't have gotten far. Took us how long in that boat to get here? Ain't no one swimming those currents. Almost like this..."

Realization struck Cain, and he turned around. "That's what this is. It's a prison island." He pointed to the bare road behind them. "That ain't a road, it's a short-length airstrip. Fly prisoners out here, drop 'em off to be forgotten. It's starting to make sense."

He counted off on gloved fingers. "Island that no one talks about. Military squad dead on the shore. Microwave bomb dropped to try and clean the place out. Anyone else putting two and two together to get five here?"

Shiro swore loudly. "The only time that could make sense is if Krakoa dates back to the Second World War. And if this is a Japanese prisoner of war camp, then . . ." He looked away, suddenly unable to look at either American in the face. Another muffled curse could be heard through their comms. "Tojo did not treat his prisoners particularly kindly. Count number fifty-four of his conviction."

This was just getting better and better, "And if 60-plus years have passed with people on this island, even if they've managed to survive all this time...we're looking at someone who's probably insane. And slightly out of touch with modern society. Is it terrible if I hope no one is alive here but us?" If that were the case though, they wouldn't have been called in.

Cain nodded to Clarice. He took a step forward, then old instinct kicked in. "Sunfire, Blink, stay behind me. We're not alone here."

Cautiously, he moved forward, eyes on the woodline. Everything looked normal... except for one area of brush slowly turning from green to brown to black.

Shiro looked up and raised an eyebrow at Cain. A nasty retort about him being able to protect himself thankyouverymuch died on his lips as the greenery died and disintegrated. He instinctively dropped into a defensive position, fireball almost at the ready, until the branches fell to the brown earth and revealed a man, emaciated like Indian images of the Buddha.

"Oh man," Clarice breathed, half to herself. This was not what she had expected on this mission, not at all. "That poor man..."

The gaunt man raised a hand, gesturing towards the ocean. His matted grey hair and beard obscured most of his words, but his meaning was clear.

Leave.

Cain stepped forward, hands outstretched and open. "No one's going to hurt you, buddy. We're just looking for some answers."

The wild-haired man crouched away from Cain, registering the man's actual size and recoiling in horror and shouting something barely intelligible. Cain turned to Shiro and shrugged. "You get that?"

Shiro stepped up slowly and placed a hand on Cain's upper arm, a silent request for him to stay back. "He is speaking in Chinese. I think Mandarin, but I do not know enough to clearly distinguish between dialects. He is not going to take kindly to me if he discovers my nationality." He lowered his hands and bowed slowly in greeting. "Ni hao," he said, loudly enough to hear from behind the mask. His accent was atrocious, but the meaning got through.

"Ni...hao?" The bedraggled refugee blinked in surprise before limping forward and falling to his knees in the sand. He rasped out more words in his native tongue, raising a shaking hand to the three mutants. Attempting to stand, he coughed and as he did so, a wave of barely visible wind emanated from him, and where it touched the living vegetation, leaves curled and fell.

Reaching into the rags of clothing he wore, he withdrew a canvas-wrapped case, extending it to Shiro.

Clarice bit her lip as the vegetation died so she wouldn't say anything and stood half behind Cain. She wasn't sure what the man would do if she saw her obvious mutancy, but more than that was also her gender. If she was remembering things correctly, he might not like a woman being present. Now more than ever she was glad to be wearing the hazmat suit.

"Xie xie." Shiro accepted the case with both hands and took a step back before opening it, revealing dozens of medical records and blueprints and financial records, dating back from the 1930s and '40s. "These are . . . kuso. This was not just a POW camp. This is Unit 731." He hastily handed the case over to Cain, almost slamming it against his chest so he could grab a stick on the ground. He could not speak much more Mandarin, but Chinese and Japanese share an system of writing. So in the dirt, Shiro scratched the kanji for "prisoner," and looked over at the man.

The prisoner, for that seemed to be what he was, nodded. He touched the kanji, then his chest. "Zu Zhou," he said, nodding weakly.

Cain shook his head. "What's a Unit 731?"

Wow, did Clarice feel fairly useless right now. She didn't know kanji, Chinese, Japanese or military. All she knew was Arabic and how to sew. Not useful at all. "He's been here this entire time?" she said, rhetorically. "As a prisoner? Oh my stars and garters..."

With a trembling hand, Shiro sketched more kanji in the dirt: Japan and weapon. The characters were messy, a far cry from his normal near flawless handwriting. "His name is Zu Zhou. Unit 731 was one of Imperial Japan's efforts at human experimentation and torture. Russians, Americans, Chinese, Mongolians . . . anyone they could get their hands on."

Zu reached out to smear away the kanji for 'weapon', then pointed at the one for 'Japan'. Slowly, he traced another next to it. "Zu Zhou", he rasped, tapping the inscription in the sand. With one move, he wiped it away then slowly retraced it. He repeated this, over and over, pointing to the 'Japan' kanji each time, before writing his own name again, then the kanji for 'weapon'.

"Holy shit," Cain whistled, slowly understanding the man's pantomime. "They did this to him. And then they stuck him out here to die. And he didn't. How long has he been here? Can you ask him that, Shiro? How long?"

The next two characters were what and year. Two simple characters, but it took Shiro three minutes to write them clearly, his hand was shaking so hard. His people had captured countless innocent human beings and ripped them apart to see their insides, and they would not even admit to it. The Germans held no secrets about their past. Why did Japan?

Zu shook his head sadly. He stood and shuffled off to one of the shanties, motioning for the others to follow. Slowly, they made their way to the wooden lean-to that must have been this man's home for any number of years. He pointed to the wall, and reached down to lift a rock and slowly scratch one more line in the dry wood.

Cain's jaw dropped inside the suit. "This poor bastard's been here almost as long as I've been alive," he breathed, slowly crouching in front of Zu. "We're here to take you home, Zu Zhao. Home?"

Clumsily, he tried to point to the emaciated Zu, then to their boat, and the ocean. "Home."

With a sigh, Zu shook his head. He picked up his rock and made the sign for his own name in the wood, then placed another kanji next to it. He pointed to the two, then to himself. "Home," he repeated, nodding. "Home."

Shiro was not sure if he was going to throw up or blow up. He wanted to do both. Instead, he fell to his knees. "I think . . . I think that he wants to die." His voice was barely audible, even over the comms. With a gloved finger, he drew the characters for desire and death to ask again.

Zu nodded, then pointed back to the lines he'd carved into the wall of his home. Slowly he traced a finger over them, then to Shiro's message.

"Home."

"Um, moral and ethical issues aside," Clarice was too pragmatic to begrudge an old man who had been tortured his entire life a chance to die. If their situations were reversed, she hoped someone would do the same for her, "how? He kills everything not in a hazmat suit."

"The bomb," suggested Shiro. "We can show him how to detonate it when we are far away." It was an effort to pull himself back up to his feet, and even through the small window on his mask, it was evident on his face just how despondent this situation made him.

Cain nodded, then turned away from Zu to face both Shiro and Clarice. "You know if we do this, all they're gonna know about him is whatever we tell them. All anyone's going to know is what we tell them. Are you okay with that? I know Cyclops put me in charge here, but we either make this call as a team, or we don't make it at all."

Clarice nodded, really appreciating that this was going to be a group decision and not just Cain's call. "I think it'd be worse not to help him die....I won't say anything. Let him rest in peace." It was a surprisingly easy decision.

But Shiro wasn't so easily convinced. "This cannot be kept secret," he protested firmly. "That is, what happened on Krakoa. I feel honor-bound to acquiesce to Zu Zhou's wish for an end, and keeping his existence a secret is a wise choice, but I cannot in good conscience keep to myself that this island was a concentration camp. Do you understand?"

Cain looked Shiro in the eye for a long moment, then nodded. "Then let's do this."

Slowly, the three X-Men walked towards the sand dunes, with Zu Zhou following behind. Upon reaching the bomb, Cain perused it carefully. "Shit," he said, looking at the nose of the cylinder, bent into a compressed shape. "This thing's active, it just ain't gone off. When it does, this place is gonna look like Little Hiroshima.

"That's my cue," Clarice opened a small disc, they weren't quite ready to go yet, "Cain, then me, then Shiro. He blasts the bomb right as he goes through....I honestly don't know if any radiation will come through with us though." It was things like this that were hard to check until the situation arose.

"What about the soldiers? Can you keep a portal open long enough to drag them through as well as us?" Shiro bit his lip and turned back to the bomb, considering it carefully. He continued slowly, his twitching fingers now the only physical sign of his discomfort. "If not, then do not take me along. Close the portal, and I can detonate the bomb. The radiation will not affect me, and I can fly back to Okinawa."

Cain shook his head. "They got families, folks who need to know what happened. No one gets left." He looked out at the row they had made on the beach, the six bodies laying untouched by the tide. A small twinge of conscience nagged at him. These guys might have been some kind of death squad, or they could have just been soldiers doing their job. Either way, the ones who sent them to their death would have to answer.

"We'll put them in the boat. Blink, you think you can keep that thing open enough?"

It would be hard and she'd probably regret it later, but she'd find a way, "No one gets left behind," she agreed.

No question about that. Shiro crouched down and sketched the character for weapon again, looking up at the ancient and not-so-hopeless face. Then he pointed to the bomb and pantomimed an explosion with hand gestures. He was going to make absolutely certain than Zu Zhou understood that they were offering the bomb as his salvation, and not condemnation. "Zai jian," he said, finally rising and following Cain to help him load the corpses.

Cain followed Shiro towards the bodies. He gave a quick look over his shoulder to see Clarice preparing the portal. Zhou was sitting next to the unexploded bomb, legs folded into a lotus position, eyes closed. For what might have been the first time in over half a century, he looked to be at peace.

Bodies loaded, documents in hand, and portal open, Shiro conjured a fireball in his right hand. "Hao shui," he called out lobbing the the tennis ball-sized globe of plasma and quickly jumping through the closing portal. The instant it snapped shut, the small island of Krakoa was enveloped in a blinding burst of white light, incinerating every corner of the once terrifying death camp, leaving behind nothing in its wake.

~*~

Decision made, the X-Men return to Okinawa for a very unpleasant debriefing.

Clarice tumbled out of the teleportation disc and onto the floor, doing her best not to throw up inside her suit and potentially choking herself. Distantly, she knew that would be bad. Fumbling blindly with the safety seals, she gasped, throwing up on someone's shoes. Teleporting six dead Japanese military men, a small speedboat, Cain, Shiro and herself back to Okinawa was her limit. That they seemed to have all arrived in one peice meant that she had not exceeded it. She hoped.

"So much for sterility," Shiro muttered as he hurried to Clarice's side. "You could not wait until after we bathed ourselves in bleach?" Not that he could fault her for not teleporting them all into the tiny decontamination chamber.

Following Clarice's lead, Cain unfastened his helmet, pointing to the bodies of the military team they'd brought back. "There's your 'rescue group'," he growled at one of the nearby attaches, not bothering to ask for an interpreter. "Sorry we couldn't bring back your live nuclear weapon, though."

In the small chance no one interpreted the simmering anger behind Cain's words, he cracked his knuckles loudly, watching everyone quiet down and take a step back. He folded his arms and nodded to Shiro. "I think the floor's yours, Sunfire."

"Thank you." A pause, and then a small explosion that freed Shiro of his suit. With his fire form blazing, he did not have to worry about any biological oddities making him ill. The suited technicians who were supposed to help them gasped and stepped away, but Shiro wasn't interested in them. On the other side of a window was General Nakamura Jibue, their point of contact on this mission. Without hesitation, Shiro blasted the window, melting the glass instantly, and reached through it to grab Nakamura's collar. "You son of a bitch," he snarled, pulling Nakamura through the portal and onto the cold, tiled floor.

Apparently no one cared that she was throwing up on the floor. That actually suited Clarice just fine since it meant she could huddle in the fetal position without being bothered. It was all she could do not to pass out. She really wanted to pass out. "Cain?" she whispered, "Can I pass out now?"

Cain calmly lifted Clarice up and cradled her in one arm while a medic ran over and checked her vitals. His attention was focused on Shiro, and the General he had at his mercy.

Shiro paused as he roughly pulled Nakamura to his feet. Behind the general's head, he could see half a dozen guns trained on him, and he could only assume a dozen more soldiers were ready to shoot should he inflict bodily harm on Nakamura. "~Tell your men to stand down~," he ordered, ignoring the new odor of a smoldering military uniform and the smoke rising from where he held onto the collar. Nakamura said nothing, just raised his head to look down his nose at Shiro. But he nodded, and the soldiers stepped back, lowering their guns but not putting them away.

"I am going to say this in English so we all understand. You are a fucking idiot, Nakamura. You must have known what secret Krakoa held. Why else would you drop a weapon of mass destruction on such an insignificant space?" Shiro was almost growling as he spoke, his face twisted with such a rage that no one had ever seen before, and he finally lost his grip on Nakamura as he burned straight through the collar. The general fell to his feet but did not back away. And that arrogance only made Shiro furious. "Our people killed thousands of innocent humans and you will not admit it! Chinese girls were not raped and forced into prostitution, Japanese soldiers carried the spirit of samurai, every aggressive military action against the West was holy and justified . . . That is what you believe. You are a disgrace."

Being upright, even if it was in Cain's arms was preferable to laying on the floor. "You have shamed your ancestors," she managed, glaring feebly. She'd spent enough time around Shiro to learn a thing or two about honor and right now she was not above using them.

"Unit 731," Cain intoned solemnly. "We know all about it."

"Many people claim to know of Unit 731," Nakamura replied evenly. He stood at equal height with Shiro and stared him straight in the eye, repaying Shiro's belligerence with hostility of his own. "But whatever unfortunate mistakes were made long ago are irrelevant."

"Bullshit." Shiro's aura flared, and beneath the sound of crackling fire, he could be heard gnashing his teeth. "You knew what purposes Krakoa served, which is why you sent military to investigate, and why you tried to erase it with a bomb. I will not keep your secrets, Nakamura. I will not help you recreate the 'lost glory' you are seeking. We are leaving."

Clarice forced herself down from Cain's arms, she was going to walk out of there on her own two feet, even if it killed her. Japanese pissing contests aside, she had her own honor to maintain. "Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it," Clarice said evenly, holding on to Cain's arm for support. "And we will not dirty our hands for your mistakes."

Cain just nodded, watching with no small degree of pride as his two young teammates stood with conviction. He looked to where some of the military attaches were reaching for their sidearms and just pointed a finger. Despite the language barrier, the look in his eyes was enough to cow them, and all watched as Shiro faced down the General.

When all is said and done, this episode made Shiro feel a little sick. Not because of any contamination, but the thought of violently confronting an authority figure - and a military one, at that - was more than unsettling. That he had the pride or the foolishness to do so made him want to pull a Clarice over Nakamura's shoes. At least he could pretend that his trembling was due mostly to anger.

He turned away from Nakamura and nodded slightly at his teammates. "I think we are done here," he said, trying not to open his mouth too much. "I want to go home."