xp_logs | Shadow King: White Noise

Hell hath no fury like a father in psionic shock and convinced that whatever just hit him is after his daughter.

Something had happened, with the others. Charles had been slumped in his chair, and something hadn't been right with the others, either, but Nathan hadn't waited to check on them. Something had happened to him, too - he could tell from the thundering pain in his head, far louder than the continuing fiery ache of the healing gunshot wounds. Not to mention the taste of blood at the back of his throat and the muffled, barely audible buzzing at the back of his mind. Something was very wrong.

And he had to get down to the boathouse and get to Rachel. Whatever this was, if it hurt her too... no, not going to let it! Nathan thought viciously and swore in frustration as he reeled slightly to the left and ran into an antique table where a vase of flowers sat.

With a thought, he flung it across the hallway, out of his way. The shattered glass of the vase glimmered strangely in the light that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere.

Monet took a deep breath and looked nervously at the X-Men, picking at the hem of her windcheater. "Uh, just so I'm clear on this, will I get in any trouble if I accidentally hurt hurt him? I haven't killed any droids for weeks now, but will there be consequences if I smash him a bit?" Trying not to think Nate's name was making the part where she was about to go and beat up on her boss easier to get her head around. And she wasn't, for the life of her, going to crack her shields. She'd done so briefly before and things had felt so wrong that she'd slammed them back up again.

Marie was still in her pajamas, luckily one of her nicer pairs, exactly how she'd been when Storm had come banging on doors to get people up and moving. She'd barely taken a moment to put her hair up after she'd seen the look on Ororo's face and she'd taken off at a run at the brief explanation that had followed - all the psis had snapped. And/or gone homicidal. It was not going to be a good day.

"The goal is to try and take him down while hurting him as little as possible," Rogue replied. She was all too aware of Nathan's powers and abilities...taking him down without hurting him at all was going to be next to impossible. The key was going to be knocking him out without causing permanent damage, while keeping him from hurting anyone else.

Piece of cake she thought to herself sarcastically.

Nathan came to a stop, his breathing ragged as he looked around for the source of the voices so calmly discussing taking him down. Why couldn't he hear properly? But it didn't matter. If they got in his way and tried to stop him from getting to Rachel, he'd kill them.

"I want everyone to work together - no one confronts him alone. And the safety of the other residents is paramount. Keep them out of harm's way." Or, in this case, Nathan's way. Ororo shut her eyes tightly for a moment, when she opened them, her expression was resolute. "Alex, Marie, Garrison, you're one team. Monet, you are with me. We must try to herd him away from the residential area and neutralize him then."

Ororo's last words were clear enough, at least to his ears. Neutralize him had connotations. Memories, to go along with them, and something in Nathan that had been stretched to fraying already snapped.

Every piece of furniture in the hall between him and them exploded into sharp pieces of wood and metal, porcelain and more glass. The projectiles froze in mid-explosion, then whirled into orbiting patterns around the telekinetic, moving at a dangerous rate of speed.

The tiniest of adjustments would send the debris lashing outwards like a dozen bullwhips. A bit more concentration would ramp them up to ballistic speeds and impale anything that wasn't invulnerable.

Nathan hadn't gestured, hadn't even twitched. His eyes went from Marie to Ororo to Garrison, resting only briefly on Monet and Alex. Cataloguing the threats. But he didn't move - not yet.

"Huh. Wood, glass, bits of tacky bric-a-brac; hardly the Doom Fortress of shields." Kane said, watching the materials. Unlike Marie, he was perfectly sure he could take Nate down without hurting him. A dose of neural stunner to his bruised psionic brain would be lights out if he could get close enough. "One blast of plasma can turn his shrapnel into dust. Marie, if you can tangle him up for a half second, I can send him lights out."

Why had anyone thought him being here was a good idea? When Storm had come around recruiting X-Men, she'd given Alex (who'd spent the night here after Scott had asked him to hang out when Jean was called in to do something that he hadn't bothered asking about) one look and told him to come with her. He'd mildly protested, since while he was glad to help he had no X-Men training, just the bit he'd been doing with Scott, but she'd insisted that if did what she told him, he'd be fine.

Still a bit wary, he looked over at Kane when he spoke. "I can get rid of the shrapnel." Alex's voice was steady but he was internally worried. He'd practiced things like this, but he'd never used his powers in such close quarters before.

"No," Ororo snapped, holding up a hand to stop Garrison and Alex from making any further moves. "Not here." She didn't even want to think about the destruction that could happen while they were still inside the mansion, with the walls and floors just waiting for an out-of-control telekinetic to batter them. "Get him outside."

Nathan staggered sideways, one hand going to brace himself against the wall. The spinning projectiles dropped, falling in interlocking spirals on the floor. "Shut up - shut up, stop hissing in my head-" Black snakes wearing his teammates' faces, trying to keep him away from Rachel so that they could take her away from him, hurt her... "Not letting you do it! Not again - I'll kill you," he said, his voice ragged even as it rose. "I'll kill every... single one of you, GET OUT OF MY WAY!"

As he shouted he whirled back towards them, telekinetic energy blazing around him. Some of it steadied into shields. Most of it went into a single focused telekinetic blast - aimed right at Marie, and only Marie. Even in the midst of all this confusion, he knew where the real threat was. She could reach into his mind and break everything.

The blast sent her right through the wall behind her.

A stream of profanities scrolled through Marie's mind as she realized what was happening. Sometimes it was better to roll with a punch then fight it though, so she curled into a ball as she smashed through the wall. "Nate, if Ah end up breaking a nail, you're so paying for the manicure," she said as she straightened out and came back through the hole she'd made. She glanced around at her teammates quickly when an idea began to form in her mind.

Storm had said to take it outside. And there was a window right behind Nathan. Ok, well it was more like a little behind him and to the left, but it would do. "Ah think you need some time to cool off," she said as she sped towards Nate, wrapping her arms around him and blasting through the window, trying to take the brunt of the glass against her own body.

The TK shields cushioned the impact, and Nathan flung her away from him desperately, staggering as he rolled back to his feet. So dizzy. He nearly went back to his knees, one hand up to shield his eyes. Bright. Too bright, the whole mansion was glowing like hellfire and he hadn't been able to see it from inside...

Monet stared at the former window and then looked over at Ororo. "You said I'm with you, but Garrison can't fly, so I'll have to carry him out the window, won't I, and meet you out there." She wrapped her arms around Garrison in preparation.

Garrison shot a quick look out the window. "Actually Monet, you're going to love this. Just throw me. I'll take care of the landing." The Canadian said with a cockeyed grin.

Would it be entirely inappropriate to giggle? Probably. Monet bit down on the giggle and shifted her grip on Garrison before hurling him out the window. She waited a moment to be sure she'd aimed correctly and shot out the window, herself, flying up to hover in mid air.

Alex moved to look out the window, actually quite relieved not to test his powers in an enclosed space with people close by. He concentrated and let his power flow into his hands only enough to make them glow but at the ready. "Hey Monet, I need a lift!" He hoped they would be able to control Nate now without his help, but he'd offered and he was going to see this through.

Ororo bit back another reprimand - never one for much talk during encounters, she found it was hard to grasp any levity at all in the current situation. Trusting that Monet would get Alex safely outside, she swooped through the hole left by Marie and Nathan's exit, bracing herself for any sort of retribution from the angry telekinetic.

Monet dove back down to the window and carried Alex down to the ground, dropping him before going back to hover in mid-air. She was well aware that her shields had ...issues and she'd caught a flash of thought, not projection, but thought, amplified by emotion, from Nathan earlier, focussed on Rachel and a driving need to get to her. Monet bit her lip, struck with an idea and tried to think it through. Oh, hell, she was invulnerable. What could he do to her, anyway? "Oi! Nathan! I've got Rachel and you have to come with me to get her!" she screamed.

Unfocused gray eyes snapped to her, gone hot with feral rage. The firebird exoskeleton exploded into life around him, shining so hard it was nearly blinding, its wingspan a good ten feet bigger than usual. Nathan dove at Monet with a snarl and more speed than any of them had seen the exoskeleton manage since that race back to the beach in San Diego. Massive glowing telekinetic talons snatched her out of the air and clamped down on her with all the force he'd used that same day to keep the oil platform from sinking.

Nathan had caught Monet before she'd even been aware of what was going on, dimly aware inside the crushing grip that she'd been smacked into shrubbery, landing with enough force to leave her black and blue with bruises for days afterwards. "Ohgodohgodohgod I didn't mean- don't kill me. Please don't kill me please don't kill me please please don't kill me." She'd never been as scared as she was then.

An icy thread of panic shot through Ororo as she witnessed Nathan's reaction to Monet's taunting; he truly was gone beyond all reasoning. After the initial explosion of motion, things had gone quiet again, and the girl's desperate pleas ran like a never-ending undercurrent through the night.

Spreading her arms, Ororo's eyes clouded over to a stark white and the sky above roiled for a moment before sending down a lance of lightning, directed at the glowing firebird and intending to draw Nathan's attention, if not knock him away from Monet completely.

The lightning bolt smashed into the exoskeleton, and Nathan reeled backwards, dropping Monet. He whirled on Ororo, the firebird's wings flailing wildly as he tried to steady himself. But the look on his face wasn't so much anger as anguish. Betrayal.

"How could you - how could you keep her from me!" Then the anger rushed back, all at once. "I WON'T LET YOU!"

The firebird collapsed abruptly, snuffed out like the sun had just fallen beneath the horizon. But in the same moment, an expanding wave of telekinesis exploded outwards, tearing through grass and earth and soil - and wood and plaster, as a sizable chunk of classroom and office space and everything it contained exploded.

The crater was roughly circular, maybe only a hundred meters in diameter. Small enough in comparison to what Nathan could do - but Ororo had been within range of the telekinetic groundburst.

Ororo was thrown back into what had been one of the classrooms, impacting against the crumbling wall with full force and then crumpling to the ground. She tasted blood in her mouth but was even more disoriented by the abrupt change in the world around her - the grass and trees and ground and sky were all but quivering from the explosion, and clear thought was an impossibility at that moment. She struggled to her feet nonetheless, but had to stand, shaking, with one hand against the twisted remains of a desk to keep her balance.

The trouble, of course, was finding a way to stop a wildly unbalanced psi without hurting him. Despite the man's formidable array of psionic powers, any two of the X-Men scattered around him could bring the other man down, but not without risking severe injury in the process of doing it. After a legacy of injuries, no one was particularly keen to risk being the one to deliver the coup de grace concussion that finally turned him into a vegetable. The trouble was that using the kid gloves opened up too much potential for property damage and personal injury, at the wrong end of a TK fury.

Kane stood at a quandary. All the advantages his powers gave him still didn't trump the one Nathan had; range. They needed speed and the ability to drop him quickly and non-violently, and without a teleporter on deck, there was no way to get close enough to the man to use his neural stunners. They needed to blindside him to make it work, and that meant a flyer.

"Sorry, babe." Kane said, as he reached out and laid his bare hand over Marie's forehead. The only way to get through without killing the man, or forcing his TK to feedback until it stroked him out was to be able to react faster than Nathan could, and Kane's heightened reflexes provided the most immediate answer.

Marie stared, stunned, at Garrison as memories washed over her. She'd had no warning about the contact, meaning she'd had no time to prepare the techniques Twoyoungman had taught her to shunt an absorbed personality away from her own. Pull yourself together. Taking a deep breath, she began adjusting to the new information, memories, and skills that had initially washed over her. Gritting her teeth, she shoved hard against Kane's personality, forcibly pushing it away from her central self while pulling out the parts she needed to be able to control his abilities. She'd deal with the consequences later.

An idea slowly came to her mind...Nate didn't seem all that coherent about what was going on, so hopefully he wouldn't really comprehend what she was saying. Storm was injured, Kane was going to be weakened from the absorption...that left the non team members as her assists. "Alex, let off some blasts, get Nate focused on you, but don't actually try to hit him...just make it look like you are. Monet, stand by him to swoop him out of the way if this doesn't work right."

So far, once the fight had moved outside, Alex had concentrated on staying out of the way. But when he heard Marie's orders, he nodded to himself, taking a moment to concentrate as he let more of his power flow into his hands, the glow becoming brighter by the second. "You got it!" He called before being his hands together and concentrating his power into a smallish stream, letting it off in small bursts. He winced when it looked like they came to near Nathan at one point, but he figured he could make it up to the man later.

The beams faltered for a moment when the powerful psi turned towards him, but Alex swallowed down his fear and kept going, hoping Marie would hurry up!

Nathan dodged the closest of the bursts, stumbling. A snarl escaped him, and he pushed out at Alex telekinetically - the equivalent of a body-check, maybe, nothing more. The plasma-blaster wasn't attacking him directly, and Nathan didn't understand that, didn't like the sense of being herded. He managed to straighten, and looked around at the blurry figures around him, concentrating on the mental shape of another groundburst. A bigger one, this time. Enough of this. Golden light gathered around him, flaring almost too brightly to look at.

The instant Nate's attention had turned to Alex, Marie had lifted off, getting close behind Nate while he didn't notice. Beginning to feel her control slip, she knew she needed to act quickly and take him down before the fight could draw out any longer - her hand flashed out the instant her brain stopped thinking, a precise hit to plunge Nathan into unconsciousness. "Ah'm sorry Nathan," she whispered, staring down at the body lying prone at her feet, before letting out a groan as her hands rose to hold her temples.