xp_logs | Day Zero - First Impact

Saturday morning, Haller receives a phone call that takes a turn for the worrisome.

A horrible noise was coming from his nightstand.

In fact, now that he was being dragged back into consciousness Jim had the vague impression that it had been going for some time now. What the hell was -- oh, right. His cell. He reached out and managed to find the cradle-charger on the third try.

Of course, once he'd picked it up he was faced with another problem.

"Jema-- Da . . ." The clock came into focus. It was before 6am. There was no way he was going to find the proper noun. Jim gave up and settled for, "--Person who owns this phone speaking."

There was a pause on the other line before a woman's voice finally spoke. The voice held the tint of someone trying to keep from laughing into the phone. "Maybe I'll call you back once you've narrowed it down to one person answering the line."

"Betts?" Jim inched a bit closer to coherency, briefly removing the phone from his ear long enough to give the caller ID an accusing glare. He sighed and replaced it. "You know we never know who I am before 7. Although I didn't think you knew there was a six in the morning. Or at least not from this side of it. What are you doing up?"

"I'm just calling to remind you that I'll be at the school in about an hour, barring traffic." Betsy's voice lowered. "And I wanted to give you some warning since I'll have some time before my lesson with Julio."

Jim rolled over onto his stomach with a quirk of the lips. "Oh? Time I should look forward to because you demand entertainment, or time I should dread because you had to see the sun rise from the natural angle?"

"I'm actually in a rather good mood." Betsy bit her bottom lip and kept herself from embarrassing herself further. "If I didn't know better, it sounds like you're implying I'm always in a bad mood."

"Only before coffee," Jim said, dragging a hand over his face with a smile. "So the sessions with Julio are going all right? You don't mind?"

"No, not at all." Betsy said neutrally over the phone. "It actually feels quite..." She went silent on the other line. "Nice."

"Nice is good. How's Julio taking it? Stopped flinching when you make sudden moves yet?" They had never spoken much about her days teaching at Xavier's, which might say something about it in itself. Regardless, it made sense. Having the job she did, it might be nice to have something that was unequivocally neither grey nor black on the spectrum of morality. Jim suspected Betsy wouldn't be alone in that, especially among Snow Valley; he had sometimes wondered if Amanda did the bus-run for similar reasons.

"He's fine," Betsy paused again. "For the most part." A car honk sounded over the line, followed by a cachony of horns. "Hold on."

"What's going on?"

"Christ, Jim." Betsy's voice reached frantic levels over the line. "It's, it's coming out of the ground. " Screams could be heard in the background as she spoke, ".....the others." Static. "Dying." Static. "Oh my god."

"Betsy? Betsy!" Jim bolted upright in bed, but she was gone. For a few seconds his cell screen blinked the minutes of the disconnected call, then went blank.

No signal.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, the New Mutants see what's going on firsthand

"Coffee?"

Jono barely spared the woman in the deli a glance as he lifted his unopened can of soda up and gave it a slight jiggle before he went back to flipping through the pages of the New York Times.

Anne (re: rusty name tag) pressed her lips together in a frown and went on to serve the next customer. "Coffee? Bagel?"

". . ." Suppose that was his cue to leave. Whatever had possessed him to come here in the first place; he had to wonder.

Jono slipped his jacket on, paid for the soda, got his keys out and started toward the double glass doors that led out to the street. The van he'd borrowed to bring the girls out to last night's concert was parked about two blocks away from where he'd wandered off to.

Outside, the sky was dark, the street was quiet and the air around him grew cold. A sudden gust of wind blew past Jono, breaking the eerie silence. All too easy to imagine that it carried with it a warning:

Beware of the calm before the storm.

---

Inez practically jumped out of the hotel bed when she felt the vibrations and loud boom from outside the windows. She fumbled around for her hearing aids, putting them in and blinking as she looked around with bleary eyes. "Oh my GOD, you guys, who is making that noise?" she complained as the groped blindly for her contact lens case. She hadn't bothered to bring her glasses on this trip, since they were only supposed to stay a day overnight.

The vibrations and noise startled Catseye out of a sound sleep on Angel's stomach and she found herself hitting the floor of the hotel room with a thud before she could stop herself. The purple cat let out a yowl of disapproval and jumped back onto the bed, shifting into girlform and rubbing her shoulder irritably. "BusyTown has BigLoudParty? Or maybe ShockyGirl?" she suggested, still groggy with sleep.

Nori had been awake a few hours, curled up on one of the couches in the 'living room' that connected the bedrooms the girls had been assigned at the hotel. Toes twitching back and forth she didn't even look up from the manga she was reading as the shaking continued. "Mada jishin da," she said, turning a page. "Is not Nori make." Earthquakes didn't bother the Japanese girl, and it wasn't like Manhatten was on a fault line.

Angel would have normally been awake earlier but between the concert last night and staying up real late with some of the girls to do girly things meant that she'd let herself sleep in. Until the ruckus. And even if that hadn't woken her up, the sudden claws in her stomach from Catseye sent her scrambling over the side of the bed in a flurry of blankets. "I hear sirens," she said, blinking the sleep from her eyes as she clutched the wall.

"What is happening?" Yvette asked sleepily, coming out of her room yawning. Over her usual black body suit she was wearing Hello Kitty pyjamas, the pink trim clashing with her skin. "Is it the earthquake?"

Meggan was almost the last to jolt awake, with a sleepily muttered "Wha--?" For a moment, she had assumed the sirens were part of a very strange dream she had been in the middle of. She was wearing a pair of pajamas that had kittens all over it. She rubbed her eyes, sitting up, and listening. She was glad she wasn't a really deep sleeper.

Tat was literally as far away from Angel and Catseye as she could possibly be, but she shook her head. "Not here. New York doesn't get earthquakes." She yawned, pulling her foot out of where it was tangled in her sheet. "Well, mostly." She remembered something about one when her mom-

Not thinking about her mom. She ran a hand through her hair, and slid out of bed, squinting in the light of Nori's one lamp. "Hey, can somebody hit the lights?" She'd have to trip over all the stuff on the floor to get to them, and... well. Closer to Catseye then she wanted to be.

"What the hell, then?" Inez mumbled as she walked out of the bathroom with her contact lens case in her hand. She pulled back the drapes and immediately jumped back with a loud "HOLY CRAP!" when she saw the immense clouds of dust and smoke outside.

"Holy crap, this is bad, right?" she asked in a small voice. "What do we do?"

The lights were flickering on and off now so Angel held a hand above her head - a small ball of controlled flame flickered into being. It cast a blue light over everything but at least it was holding steady. Mostly. "W-where's Jono?" she asked, staring out over Inez's shoulder.

Cess pushed her hair out of her face as she sat up. "I thought I heard him slip out way early," she said. "He doesn't sleep, right?"

"Hai," Nori said, closing the book and finally sitting up as she stared out the window. "Jono is stopped, to say was go out. Before two... three hours." She could actually feel the power flickering before finally giving out entirely.

Shit. Tat squinted in the sudden darkness, not able to see, much less anything else. "...... Crap." The headlights below were the only lights, and now that her eyes had adjusted she could see them. "Uhm. What're we supposed to do now?"

"We could be calling the teachers at the school?" suggested Yvette, hopefully. "They can be coming to get us?"

Cess groped beside the bed for her shoes, her cell always in the left one just in case of The Weird. "I'm on it. The school's speed dial is one, right?" She unlocked the keypad, startled by the sudden light.

Yvette nodded. "Yes, that is being right." She clasped her long hands together anxiously as Cessily punched the number and held the phone to her ear. In the silence that ensued, it seemed they could all hear the busy signal.

Nervously, Catseye looked around the room at the other girls, having no trouble seeing them in the dark. What was going on? Why wasn't anyone picking up at the school? "Catseye doesn't like the smells," she piped up quietly, squirming on the bed. She could smell sewage, gas, and smoke. A lot of smoke. "BadSmells. Smoke. Gas. Catseye doesn't like. Catseye thinks everyone should put on their clothes and shoes. Now." Sliding onto the floor amid the pile of stuff belonging to the various girls, she began trying to sort clothing items based on smell, handing a piece of footwear to Inez, a shirt to Angel...

Inez slipped on her boots and hopped over to the window. "Right. Okay, seriously. We need to get the hell out of here. We'll take the van and... shit, don't tell me Jono has the keys."

Meggan got her shoes and regular clothes from Catseye, hurriedly putting them on. With the power out, she was hoping she wouldn't run head first into a wall. Especially before anyone knew what was going on out there. She felt around and found her duffle bag under the bed. She might as well take that along, too—she only had her pajamas in it, now, so it could be used to carry other stuff later.

"I think he does," Yvette quavered, eyes flaring bright with worry and adding another light source to the room. "Maybe we could be finding out from the news?"

There was a muffled reply from Angel before she tugged her head through the neck of the shirt Catseye had handed to her. "Well, power's out for right now but if we all head down to the lobby, maybe someone down there will have an idea," she suggested, grabbing something to prop open the hotel door with. If the power was still out, the key card wasn't going to get them back in. "And I think whatever we actually do? Splitting up is out. People always get eaten in the movies if they split up..."

The hotel must have had a generator, because there were emergency lights in the hallway, and between that and Angel's glow they'd at least be able to see, Nori figured, as she stood up. She started to slip the manga into the zippered pocket of her skirt, then paused and set it down on. Reach over, she unscrewed the light bulb from the lamp she'd been using; it glowed briefly before she dropped it into her pocket instead. "Lobby is many adult. They is say 'we kids. we stay', Nori thinks," she said as she joined Angel at the door.

Cess wrapped her arms around her middle, cell still clutched in one hand. "That might not be the worst idea," she said. "We don't even know what's going on. What if we make it worse?"

Inez cleared her throat and looked at the other girls. "Okay, screw this. We're training for this kind of stuff, right? Disasters, crisis kind of stuff. I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting out of here to where we can at least call someone to come and get us. And Angel's right, we shouldn't split up. Everyone grab whatever you can carry and come on."

Yvette nodded, ducking into her room and re-emerging in her clothes rather than her pyjamas. "But where should we be going?" she asked.

"Silver," Angel suggested from where she was kneeling in a corner, stuffing her packback full of things she might need. "Or the Snow Valley Offices. I've never been inside the club but I know where it is and I'm at Snow Valley, you know, like every week."

Inez nodded and waited for everyone to head out into the hall and towards the emergency exits. "All right. Looks like we're taking care of ourselves. Let's go."

Across town in the brownstone and other places, some of the Snow Valley crew get a rude awakening.

Emma had finished perusing the financial papers and a number of reports from Snow Valley and was just considering whether she should wake the Senator sprawled, deeply asleep, across the bed to continue their evening's entertainment or to kick him out of the room. Her decision was made for her by the windows blowing in broken shards into the room, followed by a howling shockwave.

"That," said Emma, imperturbably, to the suddenly awake and obviously terrified Senator, "is probably not a good sign." She brushed glass shards from diamond skin and, rising, crunched her way to the window. No fire, she noted, no falling buildings, no immense and overwhelming destruction, though the streets below the buildings in Tribeca were filled with glass that glittered like drifts of ice-crystals. But there was considerable damage in midtown, too close to the Snow Valley offices and the brownstone to make her comfortable. Diamond rippled back to flesh and Emma reached out with her mind. Feather-touch she made, Mark, Doug, Marie-Ange, Pete, Bishop, Amanda, onwards and onwards she reached out, reassuring herself that they lived, leaving a whisper of reassurance in each mind until she had satisfied herself that none of her Snow Valley staff had been hurt by the impact and that none of them knew more than she did. Satisfied, she turned back to the Senator.

"I would suspect," she said, "that you should hurry back to your wife's side. Very, very quickly. I have things to do and I think this day may become interesting."
Dismissing him from her mind, Emma strode to the wardrobe and started working out something practical to wear. She had staff, Frost Enterprises staff, throughout Manhattan, and she needed to make sure they were safe. She trusted the Snow Valley staff to be ready for whatever the world could throw at them, but the majority of her other staff were human and she needed to get them away, off the island, away from whatever had just landed in the middle of it.

Something, and it may have been the sound of screams and sirens that were starting to drift through her now-open windows, told her that this was not going to be a good day to be in Manhattan.

###

In her bedroom, with the heavy drapes drawn, and windows closed against the light October chill, and with down pillows and her comforter pulled up to her chin, Marie-Ange heard and felt nothing. Not the boom like a single bass note, or the car alarms that started and did not cease. Nothing. She had designed her room for that purpose, and it served all too well.

What she did hear was the pounding on her apartment door, rhythmic and insistent and very loud, and she pulled herself out of bed, only glancing at her alarm clock, and then her phone. If whoever it was couldn't see fit to have called her, she wasn't sure why she should go to the trouble of answering the door.

By the time she got to her door, not more than twenty or so feet, what had been an unhappy and confused young woman bent on murdering whichever of her co-workers had woken her at 6am on a Saturday was now a very concerned and still confused young woman who -could- hear the alarms and the sirens and all of the other noises that crept out of the usual chaos of a New York City Saturday.

Early morning!Mark was not a pretty sight. Clad in just a pair of mesh shorts and an old t-shirt that after years of use was more yellow than white, his hair a mess, and his eyes still red and crusty, he barged into Marie-Ange's apartment without so much as a word (despite her fabulous state of undress) and headed straight for her living room. "TV," he said simply, flipping on the television to the local news, where camera crews were trying to get a good shot of what had previously been Madison Square Garden. "Holy fuck."

"Oui. Yes." Marie-Ange had sat down hard on her sofa and was staring at the television. "What is that? What happened?" And already she was back up and heading for the pile of purse-coat-papers-keys-phone that she'd dumped on her table after coming home the night before and pulling the phone out. After barely a moment, she thumbed it back off with a frustrated sigh. "Busy. I should have expected."

"I can't get anything either. I just got an automatic text a little after 6 which is what woke me up, but then I tried to call out and couldn't get through to anyone." Mark parked himself on the couch and leaned forward to study the scene as well as he could. "No one has any idea what it is. Looks like terrorist bomb or something, but so far they say there's no evidence that a mutant was involved. So far."

"Are any of you bastards awake?" Pete came down the hall at a run, dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt that might once have been black, but was now making a determined bid for "pale grey". He paused at Marie-Ange's open door.

"Have you seen the fucking news? Put the TV... Oh."

"Mark woke me." Marie-Ange said, walking back to her couch without looking away from the television. Obviously, since she was still in a tank-top that was best described as 'barely decent' and underwear bottoms. "Phones seem to be all busy, I tried to call Remy. I imagine everyone in the city is trying to call someone right now."

"I couldn't get Emma or Betsy either," said Mark, "And Amanda and Doug didn't answer their doors. Dunno where everyone else is." He rubbed his eyes to clear them and then took out his iPhone from his pocket. "Fuck. Can barely even get online. Ah, here . . . double fuck. No more information, just that Penn Station is pretty much shit, too."

Pete stepped inside, running a hand through his still-damp hair. "You know, given that we allegedly have an intelligence network that spans the globe, just once it'd be nice to get warning of once of these fuckwits *before* they do this crap..." he muttered, frustration all-too-evident in his voice as he trailed off, as they watched the news in silence for a few moments.

Largely, the news was repeating the same information, with only the numbers of dead, injured or missing changing as reports, what few there were, came in, and occasional speculation as to the cause of the explosion. A few minutes of that, and Marie-Ange stood up, shaking her head. "Until they report something useful, I am not sure I want to sit here and do nothing. I am going to go check on Doug - I have keys to his apartment." She paused, and turned towards her bedroom. "First, I am going to put on -clothes-."

Mark only half-heard what either of them said. He wasn't even paying much attention to the reporter anymore. Madison Square Crater claimed all of his attention. His lips quivered as he absorbed in the image and fixed it in his mind. "Whoever did this is going to pay," he said finally, his voice just a harsh rasp.

"I think you can count on..." Pete broke off for a second, looking a little distant before refocusing. "That's Bets. She's alive, and no better informed than we are. She's going to see what she can find out, and check in later. Right, I'm going to go and do my level best to get hold of anyone at Charlie's place, see if they know anything. Check for anyone else in the building, do you level best to get in touch with any of our people, and meet back here in 20 minutes, and we'll see if we can act like we've got a plan past that, shall we?"

The news that someone was alive and out there knocked some sense back into Mark, and he tore his eyes away from the TV. "Uh, yeah, sure. I'll go see if Mister Barnes is okay. Fuck knows what this is, but if it gets worse, then we might have to get him out of here."

On Marie-Ange's kitchen table, her phone buzzed, rattling the keys next to it, and she ran out of her room, pulling a long-sleeved shirt over her head. A moment of checking and she frowned. "My cousin is in the city, and walking here. He does not know where else to go." She was obviously disappointed, having hoped it was Amanda or Doug. "Mark? Perhaps pants?" She said belatedly, registering that he was standing up as if to go somewhere. "I know that sounds silly, but better to be dressed now when we have time than have to leave in a hurry. It is chilly out."

"'Kay. I . . ." Mark jumped as Marie-Ange's apartment was briefly filled with "Hung Up"'s trademark flute hook. "Angie, it's Doug," he said, quickly scanning over the text message. "He's at the office, he's fine. So that's two accounted for, him and Betsy."

"I can check the other apartments. For all we know, Jubilee is hung over and ignoring us." The relief was apparent on Marie-Ange's face, but she still moved around the apartment, pulling two keyrings with single keys on them from a kitchen drawer. "I know one of these is Amanda's, I can check there, and the other might be... Wanda's? I cannot remember if I gave her the spare back." And now that she thought of it, she couldn't remember why she had it in the first place.

"If she's hungover and missed this, then someone remind me to have a word with that young woman about her drinking habits when all this is over. Right, let's see if we can't round up enough people to do something useful." He glanced round at the two of them, then looked down at himself. "Or at least some proper fucking clothes."

And elsewhere, a father and daughter react to the news

Laurie staggered out of her room, her hand trailing along the wall as the building itself seemed to shake. "Dad?" she called out, frightened and wanting to make sure he was okay.

Something was wrong, New York didn't get Earthquakes as far as she knew and there'd been the sound of some sort of explosion that had woken her from a deep sleep. She'd have thought it a dream if it hadn't been for the shaking.

Zach was already up, turning on the television and flipping channels to the news. "Seems there was some kind of explosion at Madison Square Garden," he said. "They're not sure what just yet."

Laurie reached for the portable phone Zach kept on charge on a side table and quickly dialed the mansion. It was instinctive, something she didn't even think about till she heard the 'all circuits are currently busy, please try your call again later' automatic message. They'd been taught to always call when there was an emergency, but now she couldn't get through.

"The lines are jammed." she said, trying to keep her voice calm.

"Everyone's probably trying to call out, then," Zach said. "The news says that there's been damage to Penn Station. Subways probably aren't running." He stopped and scratched the thin beard he'd been growing for the last month or so. After months of not using his mutant power, his hair was actually starting to come in as its normal light brown instead of bearing the purple tinge that was the outward sign of both his and Laurie's abilities.

"Do you think they're going to need you back at Xavier's for this?" he asked.

"I'm not sure, but it's usually the first stop when there's a crisis. They might need to scramble the X-men for this if it's something untoward, or RedX if it's just a gas line or something. Either way, I should probably head back there." Laurie said, biting her lip for a second in indecision. "I don't want to leave you by yourself though, Dad."

Zach thought, then nodded. "Let me get my coat."