xp_logs | Fifth Column: Bloody Sunday (Reply)

The X-Men and the Hungarian police launch their raids, not realizing that through no fault of their own, they've broken the primary rule of any counterterrorism operation - don't let them know you're coming.

It had seemed like one of the more difficult target buildings on the list, which was why Ororo, Jean, and Logan had taken this one. As with each group of X-Men taking part in this morning's raids, there was a significant police presence with them to establish a perimeter, make sure no civilians were caught in any subsequent fighting, and take their target into custody when he was safely corralled. The officers with them inside the building were members of Budapest's equivalent of the SWAT team, and while a couple of them had been visibly skeptical about working with the 'foreign consultants', professionalism had won out.

It was a good thing that they'd minimized the internal challenges, because the setting for the operation was actually worse than they'd expected. The old apartment building had seen much better days; plaster was peeling from the outside walls and the iron balconies were alarmingly rusty. They were also part of the problem; the building was a warren, with far too many exits and an internal geography that had been heavily modified over the decades, in ways that weren't reflected on the old blueprints.

But despite the disadvantages - the building also had far too many windows and thus no non-direct approaches - they'd managed to get in without tipping off their target, at least from what Jean had been able to sense. They were just heading up the last flight of twisting, vaguely rickety-looking stairs to the floor where the suspected Preserver lived when the police officer in the lead abruptly stopped, hissing something in Hungarian that sounded equal parts terrified and desperate.

One of the surviving officers would tell them afterwards that the word his dead comrade had said was 'tripwire'. The explosion took out at least four police officers just in the initial blast, and the force of it blew everyone else back down the disintegrating stairs.

Unfortunately, Ororo had been standing directly behind the fourth of those police officers.

The change in air temperature and pressure had alerted Ororo to the approaching blast before she had even consciously registered what had happened - luckily, she was used to working on instincts. Even as she was flung backwards she worked to gather a pocket of air around her both to cushion the inevitable impact and to deflect as much debris as possible. She hit the pillar behind her crossways, the air pocket keeping her from being battered like a doll, though not protecting her completely. She felt a sharp pain in her ribs and then nothing, as her head struck the pillar and she fell into unconsciousness.

Jean's own shield had deflected any of the debris away from her, but she still flinched back from the heat, remembering the last time she'd been anywhere near a Preserver bomb... But Jean didn't have time for that as she caught a flash of distracted mind which she'd have sworn wasn't there a minute ago. "They have a telepath," she shouted over the ringing in her ears. "His attention dropped for a moment and I saw him, but I don't know how many others there are. We need to pull back and regroup." Already she was collecting Ororo telekinetically, doing her best to keep from bumping the other woman.

"Pull Storm back. I've got the teep." Logan said, claws extending in a hot rush of pain and anticipation as Jean flashed him the image she'd caught. He sniffed the air to get a fix, then put his mind somewhere else and began his hunt, vanishing downwards and onto the floor they'd just passed, heading right for where he thought he had a sniff of something that wasn't cordite and combustion.

He'd gotten off the stairs just in time. The next blast that came down the remains of the stairs had no heat to it, nothing but force; it was as if Scott's optic blasts had turned blue and been fired from the top of the stairs - not once, but continuously, a wall of sheer force slamming them all backwards. And there was incoming from the bottom of the stairs as well, from two floors down. Palpable tentacles of blackness emerged from that door and shot upwards, grabbing two of the surviving police officers and dragging them back down the stairs despite their struggles.

Jean caught hold of Ororo, slinging an arm over her shoulder and wrapping her arm around her waist so she could concentrate her powers on the actual threat. Her shield was holding against the force blasts as the few officers who'd been between her and Ororo raced backwards, one taking a futile shot at the Darkforce tentacles. The tentacles had advanced too far; the door Logan had taken was now inaccessible, trapping them on the stairs. Which meant they had to go one direction or the other, forward or back.

While the energy blast was maybe not as strong as one of Scott's at full force, the fact that it was one continuous blast meant Jean had to focus on holding it off rather than trying to push it back and reach the energy projector. Luckily, the already problematic stairs meant she didn't really have to. Enough discussion with Scott over the years about spatial geometry made it easy enough to figure out where the projector had to be standing and she solved the problem by simply destroying the top stair, dropping him to a hard landing in the rubble.

Logan was doing what he loved to do best - hunting the bad guys. The telepath was too used to relying on his gift to give him advance warning and against him that was a very, very bad idea. He found him in one of the apartments, sitting on a couch with his eyes closed, meditating while his mind probed outwards, looking for answers, to disrupt and to destroy. A right cross from Logan to the man's chin solved that problem as he went unconscious with a gurgle.

~Teep's down.~ he thought at Jeannie, bringing his mind back and opening back up. ~Any idea how many others we're dealing with here?~

---

It was one of Budapest's more lovely small neighborhoods; the yellow-walled buildings had been built as housing for the employees of a neighboring gas factory decades ago, and for industrial housing, was surprisingly charming. The buildings surrounded a central park, full of mature trees and well-tended gardens. Not precisely where one would expect to find terrorists, but according to their intelligence, one of the Preservers did live in the easternmost building on the left.

Fortunately, that meant that the police and their accompanying X-Men could come in discreetly, down a long laneway surrounded by hedges, where they weren't visible from the building's windows.

"Perimeter's almost in place," the police captain in charge murmured to Kurt as they paused at the end of the laneway. The 'cover' ended there; from here, they had to cross open ground to get to the nearest door. "Even if the subject gets out of the building, we should be able to delay him for long enough to let the two of you catch up."

Kurt nodded, scanning the open ground automatically, though he doubted the subject would be in sight. "Let us just hope he is alone."

Monet nodded. "Yeah. That... would be good." She bumped Kurt lightly on the shoulder and nodded to the police. "I go in loud, obvious and invulnerable and distract them, while you lot and Kurt are more subtle, then?"

The police captain actually cracked a brief smile; he'd come off as a very amiable sort, however, showing no signs of resenting having to work with outside specialists. "We'll do our best to stay out of the way. We're here for containment purposes, remember. When it comes to actually taking this terrorist into custody, I defer to the two of you." He placed a finger to his earpiece, frowning a little. "They should be in position on the other side shortly. When they are, I'll-"

He never got to finish his sentence. Something, maybe a car, exploded in a roar and a rapidly expanding fireball on the other side of the square, where the rest of the police team assigned to this raid had been moving in to seal off the area.

"I think we spoke too soon", Kurt muttered, stepping forward both to stand between the police captain and whoever might come at them from the other side, and to see better. "Can you raise your people over there?"

Monet swore. "They're too far away for me to try to listen in and find out if they're okay," she muttered, watching the flames.

The captain wasn't answering them. He was talking rapidly in Hungarian, pausing only to listen to whoever was responding to him over his earpiece. More of his men moved up and past them, heading at speed for the site of the explosion - and then running for whatever cover they could find as fireballs starting raining down on them from the direction of the building.

"That would be our cue", came from Kurt, grimly. "Captain, please keep to cover as far as you can. We need you unharmed to coordinate things... Monet, shall we go?"

"Yep." She took off, going straight up into the air before homing in on the source of the fireballs. They kept raining down on the police officers for a moment before the mutant inside the building spotted that he or she had incoming. The balls became a thick stream of fire that took on the shape of a giant hand, catching Monet in mid-air and squeezing. The leather of her uniform immediately started to burn.

---

There had been seven mutants waiting for them, they would ascertain later - seven, rather than the one that they'd been expecting. The energy-projectors had started to fire from the high ground - six stories up on top of the target building, one of the elegant nineteenth century residential blocks that lined this street - as soon as the police had started to establish a perimeter. While they were still reeling from the initial blasts, more mutants had moved in to engage them hand-to-hand.

One picked up one of the police vehicles, smashing it against the ground with a fine disregard for the two officers still trapped inside. The towering man raised it above his head with a roar, then threw it at the line of police officers.

Immediately, Clarice stepped forward, creating a disc to teleport the car away, though with their instinct to protect civilians, she almost hadn't made her way through in time. Dead police officers were a bad thing, regardless of country. "Fuckaduck!" she cried, closing the portal after the car so they could better see what they were facing, unfortunately, they were not transparent, but an opaque purple colour.

"We need to get those snipers out the way so we can focus down here", Angelo muttered. "Roulette, can you do anythin' about them? Any weak spots in the roof?"

"Oh Mommy yes." Jennie said, scanning the roof line. "Keep the ones on the ground offa me, this is going to take a little bit of work." Jennie also didn't want to think what would happen if she was forced to do hand-to-hand combat. Visions of Nimrod danced through her head. She was going to have to do something soon.

She backed up and hurled a red disk in a softball pitch, it smacked into one of the projectors on the roof. He went down with a cry.

One of the cops was pointing towards the mutant coming at them, lumbering really, very slowly, but he looked a lot like a moving mountain. A mountain that did not want to stop moving when it reached them, either. Angelo moved to help engage the man mountain, putting himself between him and both the cops and Jennie. Trained as she was in fighting, she was far more useful to them left undisturbed at the moment. "Blink, don't s'pose you can drop him in a police cell somewhere?"

The rain of energy fire from the roof only picked up in pace, despite one of the snipers having been lost. They were moving now, too, changing their positions, making themselves harder targets. A fireball landed directly on one of the police vans and it went up in the resulting explosion. As the smoke started to clear there were two police officers on the ground, one struggling to get back up, the other unmoving.

The enormous mutant wrenched a wrought iron streetlight from the ground and swung it like a baseball bat, directly at Angelo.

---

It had all gone so well. Getting into position at the square, finding their way into the tall, red-brick building and up the back stairs. They hadn't even run into any innocent bystanders, which would have complicated the raid to no end. They got all the way up to the top floor, the police taking up their positions on either end of the hall and allowing the three X-Men to make the actual entrance into the apartment.

He would never have been able to explain how he knew it was coming --perhaps it was Jack's hypervigiliance, or Cyndi's passive but almost synesthetic perception of the world. But in that split-second between the ignition of a charge and the ensuing blast, Jack had already stepped forward and flung a wall of telekinesis between the apartment door and the three X-Men.

He didn't hear the explosion, and he didn't remember ending up on the floor. There was a low-pitched hum in his ears; if he tried he could hear other sounds, but they were distant, as if through water. Jack raised himself to his elbows, shedding debris. Nothing seemed broken; his head ached, but his shield seemed to have held. A look to either side told him his two teammates were similarly intact. A look further down the hall showed the police hadn't shared their luck.

Amara was usually someone who could be relied on to be calm and rational about things. She didn't get riled up, didn't lose her cool, the first one to back down from an argument. They hadn't expected a lot of trouble on this mission, so Amara wasn't prepared for the sudden explosion ahead of them. Thrown back but thankfully unharmed, Amara did something she hadn't in a long while.

She panicked. Her energized form flamed forth, heat and light blazing from her as the ground below them began to shake. What was she doing here? She couldn't do this, it was dumb, stupid, dangerous. She wasn't cut out for this, all her powers could do was hurt people. Look, even now she was just making things worse, there had just been an explosion and now she was making the ground shake. She was going to ruin everything.

Zanne had peeled herself up off the ground just in time to see Amara light up like a torch, and the nerve-stricken look on her face and the growing tremors rumbling under her feet were the opposite of reassuring. This mission wasn't turning out exactly as advertised, but falling to pieces when that happened wasn't an option. Glancing over to see that Haller was in one piece and moving, she focused back on the other woman. Oh, fuck. This didn't look good.

"Am- Caldera! Get yourself together. We've got to focus on getting out of here."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Amara couldn't cry in this form, but from the edge in her voice, it was evident that she would be if she could. She frantically tried to get herself under control, to power down, but when the walls around her started to crack, it just got worse. She just burned brighter, and any attempts to gulp down air to try and calm herself down were pointless - she couldn't and didn't need to breathe in this form.

Jack got to his feet only to nearly lose them again as the floor bucked, catching again just as a sharp snap announced a parting of wall and ceiling. The blast had been mercifully small, but his shield had done nothing to spare the structure. Against an earthquake . . .

"Kid, pull it back," he rasped as the air around them thickened with heat, "the building--"

Something flickered in the doorway of the room that had just exploded.

The movement came again, and two men stepped sideways out of empty air and into view. One simply glanced at the one police officer struggling to get back to his feet; a shimmering bubble took shape around the man's head and he hit the floor, grasping desperately at his throat, choking.

The other leapt in Amara's direction, breathing out what looked like a cloud of green smoke directly into her face.

Amara had lost track of what was going on - she'd been so focused inwardly, trying to calm herself down, that she didn't even notice the men appear until one was in her face. She reacted instinctively, one hand coming up to slap him away. She'd forgotten she was a-flame, so the slap ended up being a little more than the brush-off she intended. The skin of the man's flesh twisted and melted at her touch, and she panicked again, backing up until she was against a wall, trying to speak to apologise but really not being capable of it. The shaking of the ground underneath their feet was just getting worse - cracks were starting to form, and it wouldn't be long until lava would start bubbling out of it.

"Shit!" Jack hissed as the stricken attacker went down screaming and clutching his face. Too much, too soon -- the psi cursed himself for walking into this, and dragging the girl along. They needed to get Amara out of here, but the chances of that happening were decreasing by the second. Two more men appeared just as suddenly as the others. Teleporter, had to be. One, enormously muscled and strangely hairless, stepped forward with his fists raised to challenge the psi.

"You will--"

A telekinetic hammerblow sent the man flying over the heads of downed officers and right into a blown-out window at the end of the hall. Rather than stopping, the man's body disintigrated into chunks of something pale and bloodless the second it hit the frame. Most of the mass went out the window, leaving only a few lumps that clung to the wall and floor like wet clay. As his partner gaped, Jack made a decision.

The tall man turned to Zanne, eyes squeezed shut. "Sway," he said in a thick voice, "Caldera -- priority. Need time and . . ." There was a pause, and his eyes opened blue and grey.

#. . . your help,# the young man, now Jim, concluded. With these words came an idea, slipped into her mind sudden as an epiphany. He watched her face, expression strained from the forced switch and glowing in Amara's flame. #Can you do it?#

Zanne nodded wordlessly and threw down a freeze that encapsulated their end of the hallway. The flickering light thrown from Amara's form now suddenly halted, coalescing into a steady, warm glow, casting dark shadows on the frozen figures with it's radius and she could feel the flames fighting against the freeze. Down the hall the uninjured attacker watched them warily, unsure what was happening.

#Whatever you're doing, Legion, you had better hurry,# she thought before being sucked onto the astral plane.

---

The Centre for Psionic Arts was not the most defensible location Nathan had ever found himself defending. Nor was it the least, he had to admit; it was located on the third of four floors in a nineteenth century building on the university's downtown campus, with narrow stairs at either end of the building and windows narrow enough that it would be hard to come through them on your way down from the roof. An energy projector would be able to take shots at the building from street level, of course, but Nathan was fairly confident in his ability to shield the place if it came to that. And there were enough police around to give him sufficient warning.

"I still think it would be better to evacuate the building," he said, entering the office he'd commandeered for their purposes. Forge was there, of course, apparently looking at security footage on his laptop, and Lil was busy trying not to look uneasy. He knew she wasn't thrilled about being in the midst of this many telepaths; he hadn't felt the need to call her on it, though. "The lower floors, at least. Just until the bastards are safely in custody." He went over to the window, sighing as he looked out on the street, and the obvious police presence. "But no, we must give them the metaphorical finger..."

Forge shook his head, eyes still on the security display as he scanned rapidly through multiple camera views. "We evacuate, and you suddenly have over a hundred civilians out in the open, when we don't know which way an attack's coming from. Here, at least we can make some kind of defensive stand. The victory in a battle goes to the one who can choose the battleground."

He looked up, a slightly abashed expression on his face. "What? Scott made me read Sun Tzu like, forty-seven times."

"Great," Lil replied from where she sat, rear planted in one office chair while her feet were propped up on a second. "So much more comforting to know we're choosing to get herded to the roof like a bunch of cows who can walk up steps and not down when they attack." She blew a tuff of hair out of her eyes with an exasperated breath. "But I'm just a dumb blonde brick so I dunno anything."

"We're hoping they won't get the chance to attack, remember," Nathan pointed out. He wasn't quite that optimistic, however. Neither was Ororo, or she'd never have left them behind as a rear guard. His eyes strayed towards the door, his attention drawn, yet again, by the telepathic activity going on in the building. For all that the Centre students were minor telepaths - some could only project, others only receive, while others could do both but only at very short range - the psionic atmosphere was alive in a way he rarely felt. It was like a constant, all-encompassing glow, instead of the individual 'lights' one could perceive back at the mansion.

"I'm all for smiting them if they do," he murmured, more to himself than to his younger teammates. "I like this place."

"Hey, hey, hey - Cable?" Forge snapped his fingers impatiently. "Stay with us here, man. Legs McGee over there has a point - the highly-trained-but-still-regrettably-human SWAT team out there probably has no idea how to react if an assault comes in by air. If I were going to go all shock and awe on a place like this... well, look at the architecture," he gestured around them. "Like the high-low techniques we practice in the Danger Room."

Nathan shook his head, as if shaking the cobwebs loose, and turned his attention back to the view out the window. "The square across the street will be helpful," he said. "If they come in by helicopter I can force it down there without doing much in the way of property damage. At least they're keeping the street blocked off."

"Just so long as you're not expecting me to jump outta one," Lil replied with a lazy stretch before digging into her pocket to pull out her lighter which she began to flick on and off anxiously. "You boys are always looking to crash or blow up something. Not that I'm complaining or anything..." She just prefered not to sit around, waiting to get shot at.

"I object!" Forge exclaimed, "I haven't crashed anything in... weeks. And that was totally intentional! Besides, name me someone else who can whoa whoa whoa-" The young inventor's voice rose in pitch as he suddenly leaned in towards the screen. "We have movement out there."

"Hell," Nathan said - or started to say, at least, before he felt it on the switchboard. Clearest from Jean and Jim, of course, but he'd tied the other groups in, knew what was happening... "Ambush," he said aloud, "the other teams are being ambushed - this is a set-up."

"Fuck," Lil growled, tucking the lighter away as she hopped up to her feet. Fish in a fucking barrel. "What's the movement, Forge? How many and where?"

Forge winced at the telepathic connection to the switchboard - his brain wasn't fond of telepathic mass-communication under training circumstances, and even less so when actual panic was involved. "Multiple groups... crap, they're already coming for here."

He looked up at the other two, a dawning realization in his eyes. "We're going to have to split up and try and head them off. Or at least buy time to regroup."

Nathan gave a brief, tight nod, simultaneously reaching out on the switchboard to gauge the situation of the other teams. There was a sudden burst of static in the earpiece one of the police officers downstairs had given him, and he pulled it out, swearing. Judging by the reaction from the other two, the same was happening with theirs. "That's a little too coincidental," he growled. "Someone's jamming standard communications. Forge, get down to the police on the ground floor, get them to pull back into the building. Lil, check that back entrance we saw earlier. We need an exit for the civilians. I'll-"

One of the police vehicles outside exploded, the fireball blossoming upwards into the clear blue sky. Nathan's jaw clenched.

"Move," he said brusquely.