xp_logs | Day Zero

Jean-Phillipe finally arrives at the brownstone, and he and Marie-Ange quickly leave to meet Mark at Silver, but run into problems along the way.

A slightly bedraggled Jean-Phillipe Colbert staggered out of the press of people evacuating Manhattan and into the lobby of the brownstone where the members of the Snow Valley office lived. He reached out and grasped the door, pulling it open. The shower of sparks from the electromagnetic lock caused him to belatedly look over at the buzzer system. "Merde," he said somewhat sheepishly. He glanced at the vacant security desk, then headed for the stairs, which he took two at a time to the second floor. He rapped at Marie-Ange's door, hoping she hadn't already left the building.

Marie-Ange wasn't actually in her apartment, but emerged a few moments later from the door to the stairs, with a backpack over one shoulder, and a handful of keys. She coughed, deliberately, to get her cousin's attention, and would have said something sarcastic, if he hadn't looked like several miles of bad road, all of which he had been forced to walk. "You are not hurt, are you? I was locking the other apartments."

"Injured? No," Jean-Phillipe answered after a quick examination of himself. "I had to dress quickly, and getting through the crowds of people evacuating the island caused a bit of jostling on the way here," he explained, brushing his hair back. "Where is everyone else?" he asked, as it didn't appear that anyone else was still in the apartment complex.

While she explained that Mark had gone to Silver, and where the others were, Marie-Ange unlocked her apartment door and led Jean-Phillipe inside. "And I am not sure if Mark has gotten there yet, but that is where I intend to go, I just... did not want to leave and have you arrive here and not know where we had gone." She sized up her cousin expertly, and then took another bookbag from a closet, and handed it to him. "Please get the first aid kit from my bathroom, and there are several boxes of emergency first aid supplies under the sheets in the linen closet. Would you pack them?" She was already in her kitchen, taking the few packages of food from her cabinets and packing them in the already mostly full bookbag. "If Mark is right in his belief that there will be people taking refuge at his club, then they may need supplies. I already went through the other apartments."

Jean-Phillipe bit back a sarcastic retort at Marie-Ange's instinctive bossing of him, because she was right. Food and first aid supplies would probably be in serious demand if Silver was to be a place of refuge. He winced a bit at the thought of seeing Mark, and the potential for awkwardness, but he busied himself packing the bookbag.

It only took a few minutes to go through Marie-Ange's apartment, packing and locking up, and then Marie-Ange gathered up her phone and keys and ID from her purse, and tossed them into the bookbag. "Mark knows to expect us." she said as they left, and she locked the apartment door behind her.

-----

The pair of cousins spoke only as much as was needed as they made their way down the streets of New York. The situation didn't exactly lend itself to small talk, even if their relationship had been less antagonistic than it was. Jean-Phillipe shifted his pack up on his shoulder and warily observed the people around them. The crowds of evacuees were starting to thin, but it was leaving behind those who thought to profit off of the evacuation, looters, rioters, and the like.

A number of the buildings in the lower East Village appeared to have already been ransacked by looters - at least, that would be the assumption until one noticed that nothing of value appeared to have been taken. Jewelry stores had their wares spread out along the floor, easily visible through the kicked-in door. Expensive plasma televisions had been flung out into the street apparently without a care.

A scream from one of the buildings caught Jean-Phillipe and Marie-Ange's attention, followed by a loud, wet crunching sound that cut the scream off into a gurgle. Something was thrown from the second floor of a building to bounce off the pavement, and it took the two mutants a moment to realize that it was - or had been - a human body, brutally twisted almost beyond recognition.

It was obvious that the person was dead, or so close to it that any first aid would be futile - but Marie-Ange still stopped long enough to watch the body not move for a few long seconds before grabbing Jean-Phillipe's jacket sleeve and pulling him across the street. "Whatever did that, we want no part of it." She said quietly.

"Mon dieu," Jean-Phillipe murmured, swallowing back the urge to vomit. The man looked as though he had had his head twisted entirely around, and none of his limbs were pointed in the correct direction. He'd seen some scuffles on the way to the brownstone, but this was something else entirely. He followed numbly at Marie-Ange's urging, his eyes wide with shock.

"Mutants..." the growl came from the shadows inside a partially-collapsed storefront. Something moved in the shadows, something large and at odds with the slightly high-pitched voice. "Evolved, yes. Powerful, mmm, yes..."

The pronouncement was accompanied by an animalistic sniffing noise as an enormous man moved out from the shadows. Massive and hunchbacked, yellow eyes darted back and forth, deeply-set in a chalk-white albino face, twisted and barely recognizable. A blackened tongue licked at thin lips as the albino spoke again. "Caliban smelled you, yes. You have come to help Caliban find more?" He nodded at the body in the street. "More cattle. More meat. Humans." The final word was spat as an epithet as Caliban looked back and forth from Jean-Phillipe to Marie-Ange.

"Get behind me." Marie-Ange whispered, and hoped that if this went as she feared that Jean-Phillipe had enough control to help, because the man across the street from them was certainly more than she could handle alone. She went over her options quickly - ignore and move on, hoping the man would not follow, answer him, provoke a fight, given the body on the ground, she suspected that all of her available choices would result in a fight.

Walking away seemed the least dangerous option, and might put them in a position where they could run, or get somewhere that could be secured from the inside. "Start walking. No eye contact." Marie-Ange said under her breath.

Despite Marie-Ange's instructions, Jean-Phillipe kept sneaking a glance over his shoulder, the itching feeling between his shoulder blades intensifying as they walked. He was torn, because on the one hand, some of the scuffles he'd seen on the way to Marie-Ange's apartment had been humans blaming mutants, but the hunchback was clearly insane.

Down the street, however, a number of people began to move from shadowed alleyways and buildings. They appeared to be everyday New Yorkers, dressed in whatever they'd grabbed when they left their homes - but to a man, they all wore the same blank stare and exhibited the same jerky movements.

Movements that mimicked that of the hunchbacked albino Caliban as he lumbered out into the street. "If you are not of the strong," he hissed, "then you're the meat. Which is it, yes?"

He reached out one pale hand, almost in a caressing gesture, toward Marie-Ange's hair. "Such pretty mutants, yes. But smelling of such fear. Fear like upworlders. Does Caliban frighten you, pretty upworlder?" he cooed at Marie-Ange.

"Not really, no" Marie-Ange snapped. Giant man-shaped swarms of bees frightened her. Not one large and crazy man. "We only want to get to our friends, please let us alone." She put the emphasis on the word friends, and hoped that this big ugly mutant would understand that she meant other mutants, and let them leave. Not that it was likely.

It wasn't Caliban's appearance that was frightening to Jean-Phillipe. He'd seen many visible mutations, both at rallies in Europe and during his time at Xavier's. It was the predatory look on the other mutant's face, and the complete lack of expression on the faces of the crowd surrounding them. "We are not meat," he retorted hotly at Caliban, doing his best not to stare at the person that had been flung from the window.

"Not afraid...?" Caliban's childlike voice was halting, as if the concept was completely foreign to him. "Yes, yes. Upworlder mutants will be Caliban's friends. Come, come!" He shuffled over towards one of the expressionless humans, who whimpered as the albino drew closer. "Humans... humans are not friends. No, no. Kept Caliban underground, so many years. Now city is ours, upworlders. Apocalypse, yes, Apocalypse has given to Caliban. Given power."

With a sudden yet casual gesture, the pale giant reached out and engulfed the man's head with one hand and squeezed. A muffled scream could be heard over the sound of cracking bones. "So much... meat."

"We may have to fight, or run. Be ready." Marie-Ange whispered, barely audible. "No, no, our friends are mutants, and we must go to them." She turned away from the corpse, trying to slowly move towards the next cross-street. "They need our help to stay safe, we are bringing them food and medicine." It was like talking to a very violent psychotic toddler. Despite the calm tone, Marie-Ange was pushing the sleeve of her shirt up, trying to reveal the tattoo on her arm. Of all the times not to have any cards on her!

Jean-Phillipe readied his power, a small spark twitching its way between the fingers of one hand. Anyone who touched him would get a somewhat severe shock, at least enough to make them back off and give him time to run or attack.

"No, no," Caliban hissed, stepping forward and grabbing Marie-Ange by the shoulders, looking into her eyes. "You stay..."

"Stay... no... " Marie-Ange repeated, shaking her head as if trying to clear it. "I should... " When Caliban grabbed her, her arms had gone immediately up as if to fend him off, and now they dropped, although one hand still flexed as though she were trying to grab something. "Aidez... non... je séjoure ici. Allez-vous-en."

"Quoi?" Jean-Phillipe's eyes flicked between his cousin and Caliban, confusion on his face. She had just been saying that they needed to get away, now she was saying stay? Just after Caliban had? Something was very wrong here. He reached out a hand to pull Marie-Ange away from the other mutant's grip.

Caliban casually backhanded Jean-Phillipe, then yanked his hand back at the sudden arc of electricity. "Not human..." he hissed, narrowing his eyes. "But meat all the same, yes. Little traitor upworlder, fights his own kind. Needs to die, yes."

The albino's eyes seemed to grow larger, their yellow irises spinning. "Kill yourself, meat.", he ordered.

There was a brief surge of fear, and Jean-Phillipe felt his muscles tense, but then he twitched slightly, the inside of his head feeling slightly warm and fuzzy as his power instinctively kicked in to throw off the empathic control. The sparks surrounding his fingers intensified, and he spat on the ground. He drew himself up and declared, in his best Stereotypical Pissed Gay Man voice, "Bitch, please."

Caliban screeched and slid back a step, his watery eyes blinking. Lashing his head back and forth, he pulled Marie-Ange to his side and turned to the humans in his thrall. "TAKE HIM!" he howled, shuffling towards the shadows as the disheveled human mob began to surround Jean-Phillipe.

"Merde, merde, MERDE" Jean-Phillipe yelled as the mob completely cut him off from the escaping Caliban. The first thrall reached him and grabbed him roughly by the shoulder, only to take an electrically-charged fist in the mouth. He fell to the street, twitching uncontrollably, as Jean-Phillipe thrust his other arm at a second thrall. "Fiche moi le paix!"

The humans' faces wore tortured expressions and they moved like awkward marionettes, obviously trying to resist Caliban's compulsions. But fear was a basic human emotion, and nothing fueled fear more than violence.

As one, the mob surged forward, dogpiling on the young Frenchman.

Under the proper circumstances, it can take as little as fifteen to twenty volts of electricity to induce major heart fibrillation in the human body. Jean-Phillipe's maximum capacity could be measured in the hundreds of volts. Skin-to-skin contact provided the path, and le bevatron provided the juice. "Brûlez dans l'enfer!" he screamed, the thralls on the outside of the pile falling away as their muscles spasmed from the smaller amounts of current they had received. The thralls who had actually been touching Jean-Phillipe, by contrast, had smoke curling from the ends of their hair, and their faces lay frozen in the rictus of death.

The majority of human thralls were jerking spasmodically on the ground, but a few were awkwardly trying to rise up. One looked directly at Jean-Phillipe, electrical burns crossing her face. "Help... us..." she gasped. "Please..."

Jean-Phillipe shoved himself away in disgust, crabwalking backward before he could stand up. He looked around the street. Not all of the thralls seemed to be breaking free of the control, and a good number of them were not as incapacitated as the others. As they shambled toward him, he began running in a panic away from the direction Caliban had taken Marie-Ange. The thralls were still between him and them, and he wasn't sure he could take them all. He needed help. He staggered drunkenly around a corner, his head spinning. Mark was at Silver. Maybe he'd be able to help.