xp_logs | Seven Minutes In Heaven: Ghosts

They arrive at the Taygetos facility and discover it empty, but only of people. All the pieces of the puzzle are there to be put together. If only they had the time.

It was bigger than expected, a prefab building of modular design, set on stilts - only to be expected, this far north. There were no vehicles or people visible. Hadn't been for miles. The SHIELD pilots followed directions and set the helicopter down at a safe distance, but it was only a formality, one last precaution. Nathan and Jean had established the lack of human activity from miles away.

When the combined SHIELD/X-Men team disembarked from the helicopter and proceeded into the facility, however, it was safe to say that few of them were wholly reassured by that.

--

Even the fact that he knew there was no one but X-Men and SHIELD operatives in the building didn't really diminish the feel of moving through a haunted house. Moving around in the dark with flashlights didn't help, but the power had stubbornly refused to come back on; Sam had reported from outside that the generator was damaged. Nathan thought that Kyle and Suzanne were largely buying his assurances that there really were no stray mental signatures around anywhere, but Chow, the operative Baird had sent with him, was much less trusting. He'd toyed with the idea of telling her to holster her gun if she was going to be that jumpy, but doing so would probably only make her feel less secure.

"You know," Nathan said after trying the latest door, "it's seeming a lot less likely that they lit out of here in a hurry." It had seemed to make the most sense in the initial inspection, given that the place had been left intact with all its equipment, rather than stripped. "If they were fleeing in panic, why would they have locked everything up?" He laid his hand back on the door handle, concentrating as he reached into the lock with his telekinesis.

"Anal retentive admin assistant?" Kyle offered. "I mean, there's always that one guy in accounting or human resources or some paper pusher or something." He was probably not supposed to be chattering, but he was still twitchy and the quiet wasn't helping. He kept glancing over his shoulder and cocking his head, almost hoping for something, and so far, not getting anything.

"Or they meant to come back," Chow added, sounding somewhat paranoid. She was frowning, her eyes flickering back and forth as if she was expecting something to jump at her out of the shadows.

"Also a possibility," Nathan said, still 'feeling' at the lock. He started to frown as he did; most locks short of a high-tech safe were fairly easy for him, and this one wasn't going to be too bad, but he couldn't help but notice something about it that was vaguely disturbing. "There's no access to this lock on the inside of this door. Only from outside."

"No access to the lock, like it's a storage closet and there's no reason to have a lock on both sides, or no access like they didn't want whatever was inside getting out?" Zanne was definitely feeling unnerved. Power outage aside, the way building was ready to be turned on left a strange sense of anticipation, like they were waiting for something to start.

"I think definitely the latter," Nathan said with a sigh. The lock clicked open, and he turned the handle. "Which suggests certain things to me..." As he opened the door, shining his light into the - very large - room beyond, his expression twisted at what lay on the other side. "Shit," he said, very quietly.

Barracks. Or something very like barracks. "I don't find this reassuring," he said, stepping farther into the room to allow the others to come in.

Kyle went into the room as close to nose-first as he could, staying close to Nate. "Nothing. I mean, like, you'd think I'd smell something, if it's some kind of jail or whatever, but I got nothing." He went so far as to close his eyes to focus, and still shook his head. "It just smells stale, like it's been closed up for a long time. So whatever was here, they cleared out so long ago that anything they left doesn't have a smell anymore."

"Interesting set-up," Chow observed, coming around to get a better look. "Don't those look more like hospital beds to you?"

They did, Nathan thought, shining his flashlight on one. "Given what we're dealing with, that just makes the implications worse," he said curtly, and then looked at Suzanne. "That secondary ability of yours. Would it be able to turn anything up here?"

"Only one way to find out," she replied with a touch of hesitation, and closed her eyes. A dull, throbbing tension filled her body as her mind searched for a memory. After few moments, one emerged from the roiling sea of red she found herself in, tasting of age and damage. Zanne latched onto it, opening her eyes and projecting it into the room. Around her ghostly figures flicked to life, phasing out as fast as they came in, broken up and jerky in their movements and appearance.

Nathan's awareness of her retrocognition had been on a purely intellectual level; he'd read it in her brand-new file, hadn't had the opportunity to see her use it. Maybe it was the length of time working against her in this case? It was hard to see anything useful in the fragmented projection. A few people in white coats, shapes in the beds. Nothing inconsistent with the set-up of the room or what little they knew about the facility. No faces.

"It was in use," he said. "That does tell us something."

Kyle bit his tongue, literally, to stop the "Well, that was -creepy-" from coming out of his mouth. No one gave him grief about the freakier aspects of his powers, he wasn't gonna give anyone else shit. Even if it was creepy. "So, no cells, probably not, uh, a training facility, not like Vermont? Is this where they sent people after places like Vermont?" He asked, curosity overcoming his want to not have to -think- about it.

Nathan shook his head, but Chow was answering. "A medical facility, maybe?" she asked.

"But for whom? We didn't see any sensory deprivation rooms..." Small blessing, that. He wasn't sure how Kyle would have reacted if they'd opened a door into a white room. He wasn't sure how he himself would have reacted, to be honest.

"It's a strange medical facility that locks you in, though," Zanne remarked, not really catching the significance of Vermont and noting Kyle's discomfort. She didn't like this place any better than he did. "Who are they trying to protect?"

"Themselves, quite possibly," Nathan said darkly. "Manipulating mutants in anything apart from a petri dish is not the world's safest hobby." He went over and stood beside one of the beds, laying a hand on the metal railing. There was something beneath the blanket, he realized, and pulled it back. "Oh, look. Restraints," he said flatly.

--

Thankfully, the SHIELD scientists had brought along a couple of very large flashlights, enough to illuminate much of the large room into which they, along with Jean and Clarice, had just gained entry. "Well," Dr. Morrisseau said, sounding surprised as he shone his smaller flashlight into some of the darker corners. "I have to admit, Dr. Grey, when you said no one was here I expected the place to be empty."

It most definitely was not. Despite the layer of dust and the general air of disuse, the place was stuffed to the gills with equipment. Not just larger items that might have been difficult to transport had the original owners of the facility left in a rush, but even smaller pieces, things that could have been carried.

"It doesn't even look like it was abandoned in a hurry," Jean said, stepping inside and peering about. "No particular mess, other than the dust. On the plus side, though, that means their notes and files are likely to be intact," she added. "Still, it's more than a bit odd."

"What is all this stuff?" Clarice asked. She was into medicine and some science, but she was far from a technological whiz. She could operate her laptop for school and the TV remote, anything more than that and she needed a few minutes to try things. This stuff was light years past her laptop or an ipod. Wandering around and trying not to disturb things too much, she came to a door on the other side of the room. Trying it, Clarice found it locked. Standing on her toes she tried to shine her flashlight in, but no success. "Anyone know where this leads?" she asked.

"We don't have blueprints," Weston, the computer specialist - a rather athletic specimen of the 'computer geek', not unexpectedly - said, giving the door Clarice was studying a slightly wary look. "Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I have mental images of booby traps..."

"Come on, Jim, don't get glum on me," Morrisseau said, giving his younger colleague a quick, reassuring smile. Payette and Thirsk, the other two scientists on the team, were moving silently through the lab, making a visual inventory of the equipment. Morrisseau chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then turned back to Jean. "Pretty well-equipped, this place. We knew they were shipping in a lot of equipment..."

There was a distinct lack of surgical tools in the lab, which put to rest some of Jean's most prominent worries, particularly after Alkali, but there was still something... ominous about the room, although it was taking her a moment to put her finger on just what it was. For the moment she ignored Morrisseau as she moved to the center of the room, turning about to let her light play over everything slowly. A pair of centrifuges, with racks clearly designed for holding sample tubes, microscopes, freezers... she paused at what was clearly a fairly state of the art PCR thermocycler. Without saying a word she moved to open one of the cabinets near a full size electrophoresis chamber and reveal slates of agarose gel. "It's a genetics lab," she said at last, turning to look at Morrisseau. "Well supplied and still stocked. And somehow I don't think they were working with the Human Genome Project..."

Morrisseau's expression tightened as he looked around, but obviously not with disagreement. "I wish I could say this is the first place like this I've seen lately," he said, going over to one of the other cabinets. "These privately funded operations - people just cannot seem to resist the urge to tinker. And it's never anything innocuous, or beneficial..."

"I don't know - I'd prefer this to a room full of programmed mutant soldiers," Payette said, clearly trying to look on the bright side. The look Morrisseau gave her wasn't quite quelling.

"Ewww," Clarice did not like people experimenting on people. It just reeked of creepy wrongness, especially since when mutants were involved it always ended up being creepy wrongness. "We should check out what's behind door number 2," she said, cocking a thumb towards the door. She could think of a few ways through it, some of which would even leave the door intact. "I mean, just in case..."

"Go ahead," Morrisseau said absently, rifling through the cabinet. "The more information we can gather, the better."

Foregoing a more high or low tech way to open the door, Clarice blinked the locking mechanism to the floor. She had learned to crack safes, but picking a lock was somehow much harder. Pushing the door open, she shone her light into the room beyond. Its purpose was immediately to obvious to anyone with indoor plumbing.

"Jean!" Clarice shrieked, "It's the Gyno Chair of Doom!" Of all the things she had done and seen in her relatively young life, the stirrup chair in the obgyn office still freaked her out.

The shriek of her name got Jean broke her attention away from going through the other cabinets and she was in halfway across the room before she processed the rest of what Clarice had said. Joining her teammate in the second room she gave the chair a quick glance, but her attention was caught by the machine next to it. Ultrasound. Slowly, praying she was wrong, she turned and surveyed the whole room, stopping dead still at the sight she'd feared; the clear plastic box was unassuming, for all that it had any number of medical sensors attached to it, and surely the pad it was lined with and the small cloth discarded in it shouldn't be so alarming.

"Obstetrics," she whispered, moving to pick up the little blanket. "Well, of course, if you want to do genetic experiments you have to start at the beginning..."

Morrisseau was standing in the doorway, giving the room a strange, set look as he shone his light over the contents. "Well," he said, not quite briskly. "Sometimes I prefer the mystery."

--

"You know, it would probably be best to see if we can't get this generator working again," Lieutenant Finlayson said, bending over to get a better look. The generator room was a large shed of sorts, attached to the rear of the facility. They had the door wide open to let in as much light as possible from outside, but it was still dim in here, and the SHIELD operative shone his flashlight down into the innards of the generator, frowning. "I mean, if they left the whole facility intact, there's got to be spare parts around here somewhere."

Angelo nodded. "If we can find any - my roomie's a mech genius, an' I'm not him, but I picked up a couple of things. I can probably get stuff in the right place."

"It would definitely make their job easier inside." Finlayson straightened, shining his flashlight towards the rear of the room -and revealing metal storage lockers. "Ah-ha."

Sam was familiar with mechanics like this from working on the farm, so he bounded over to the lockers and pulled them open to stand back and see what they had to work with. "Looks like we found what we need, at least."

"Good," Finlayson said, looking pleased. "I know a little about generators myself - between the three of us, we can either get this back up and running or give it one hell of a good try." He was clearly about to say something more as he leaned over to get a closer look at the generator again, but was interrupted by noise from outside. Straightening with a frown, he turned towards the door. "That's a helicopter."

Angelo glanced that way, also frowning. "Could just be passin' by. Nobody knows we're here, right?"

"Except it really sounds like it's getting closer, not moving off. And there's not a lot of traffic in this particular neighborhood." They stood there waiting, as if by mutual consent, for a minute or two longer. But the noise only got closer, resolving into something that was definitely a helicopter

Finally, Finlayson put a hand to his ear. "Vicks, Smythe," he said, "do we have company incoming?" The X-Men had been linked into SHIELD's communication loop as well, so both Sam and Angelo heard the burst of static that came instead of a response from the pilots. "Hell," Finlayson said and headed for the door. "Baird, I think we've got trouble."

The three of them were barely out the door when Finlayson urged them back into cover. There was indeed another helicopter coming in, another CH-47 but clearly a civilian model, unlike the one they'd come in. There was someone leaning out the open door, and the two SHIELD pilots were on the ground beside their helicopter, not moving.

Sam looked quickly to Angelo once they were behind cover "I can't tell who this is..." He looked back out quickly, seeing another civilian model CH-47 approaching, maybe two minutes behind the first. "But we have two and they know we're here. We better get back inside and come at this a different way."

The first helicopter had landed, and a large number of very obviously armed men were exiting. Some took the two SHIELD pilots into custody, while others checked the inside of their helicopter. Some of their comrades headed off at a trot to begin setting up a perimeter. The man who'd been leaning out the door, though he'd been first to step out, was hanging back. Watching the men - his men? - carrying our their tasks. He was wearing body armor similar to theirs, but unlike them, carried no visible weapons. Tall and sharp-featured, he was familiar to both X-Men from the team files.

John Lense went over to where the two pilots were lying. Even in the noise from the helicopters and at a distance, the two X-Men and Finlayson saw his lips moving. The older of the two SHIELD pilots shook his head, and Lense smiled faintly and gestured. The two men were slammed hard against the ground as the ex-Mistra operative turned gravity against them. Finlayson swore.

"I know that guy", Angelo said, pale and tight-lipped. "He's got a grudge against Nate, and if he's here..."

The second helicopter landed as they watched. This one didn't appear to be filled with armed men, at least. Emerging first was a tall, pale-haired man who dwarfed the small woman beside him. He moved with a smooth assurance, wearing an amused smile as he looked around, assessing his surroundings. His companion, in contrast, looked almost diffident, her glance at Lense's team close to dismissive.

Lense stepped forward to greet them, offering Ilyas Saidullayev his hand. The Chechen telekinetic took the offered hand, and the handshake lasted just an instant too long, the fixed smiles both men were wearing suggesting that there was a certain degree of testing going on there. Tanya Callery just stood and watched, looking vaguely bored. As if she saw this sort of thing happening every day.

Behind them, a slender blonde was stepping down from the helicopter. Amber Hunt's smile was over-bright as she sized up the facility and the military helicopter parked outside. 'Little kid on Christmas' was the best way to describe her expression. She shook herself slightly, as if waking from a happy reverie, and turned back to help Tara Trask step out onto the tundra.

The older woman took a moment to look around as well and then walked over to join the others, Amber sticking close beside her. Her pace was measured, unhurried. As if they had all the time in the world. Lense watched her approach, that tight little smile remaining on his features. Instead of his hand, he offered her a brief nod.

"A lot of these people have a problem with Nathan... and all of us. We really ought to tell everyone else they're here, particularly her." Sam nodded toward Trask. "This could get really dangerous."

"Time to fall back and regroup, then," Finlayson said, sounding edgy. "Good thing we didn't come out the front door."