GSIH: They Sure Don't Look Like Presbyterians To Me

[x-gambit.livejournal.com]

Farouk is ambushed and Cammie and Kevin nearly are killed with him trying to help.



The attack shouldn't have been unanticipated. A disaster with a refugee train which could be blamed by UN incompetence had plenty of political value in the upcoming conflict. It was surprising that they were as direct with the Imperial Guard as they choose to be, but it could be that their resources were more stretched than they'd considered. None of those thoughts offered much comfort, but they did explain the sudden chaos of the attack. Farouk would have little time to consider it, as he was suddenly yanked back from his perch atop one of the open cars, and hauled down by a garrote around his throat.

"Grandmaster Tremont sends his regards." Was whispered roughly into his ear as the noose tightened.

You've got to be fucking kidding me, Amahl thought his surprise mingling with fury as the oxygen suddenly became a problem. He vocalized his indignant .outrage with his customary elegance and command of rhetoric. "Urk-gha!"

His attempted psi-spike was equally successful, deflected by remarkably good shields, adding another pain-stimulus to an already ample chorus.

Farouk fleetingly congratulated Maria on taking a very timely time off. So much for her promise that she was going to keep him safe until he led her to Deathbird or until she killed him herself.

The the chord of the garrote was cutting deeper and deeper into his throat, making it difficult to focus, he could feel his movements become increasingly sluggish.

I fucking refuse to die in Pakistan. There no bloody way... The sheer unpalatibility of the concept gave him another shot of adrenalin, allowing him to momentarily double his efforts to fight off the attacker. Yet it was as futile as his previous attempt.

Never at his best with the physical combat, Amahl felts a vague sense of unfairness when his original assailant was joined by a friend, who made himself known with a couple of well placed kicks.

I am fucked...

Kevin was making his way back through the train. He didn't know where all these people had come from so suddenly, but it was chaos everywhere and he had no idea what to do. Kevin wasn't a fighter. He was shaken from his own actions moments ago when Yvette was being attacked and a little unstable from the drain of all his mutation usage. The disorientation he felt likely was more psychosomatic than directly tied to the electric shock, but he was feeling out of sorts from it.

Coming into the next train, he couldn't tell what was going on at first. There was someone's back and someone else was kicking something in front of the first someone. Another step and he noticed a familiar shape. Kevin might not have made a point to talk to many people in the mansion but it was always a point to know them on sight.

Amahl Farouk was being strangled. A teacher at the mansion was being attacked, double teamed. Not knowing what else he could possibly do, Kevin moved quickly and reached out with a still bare hand. His fingers wrapped around an elbow of the man attempting to strangle Farouk. The familiar pull he felt from his powers kicked in and Kevin tried to focus, tried to push straight through his elbow. Hopefully he could do something useful before he got himself strangled.

Cammie was pissed. There was the bit where she was trying to get some sleep. And then there was the unmistakable fact that someone was trying to tear apart the train she had worked on. She opened the door to one car, intent on finding someone to strangle or to help her strangle people she opened the door to the next car and paused.

But only for a second. She pulled her bandages off with a quick pull and a shake of her arm, exposing green flesh. There were two people there, the one who wasn't getting the hands on treatment from Kevin quickly got it from her in the form of a swing to the face, and she wasn't being gentle with the dosage.

Amahl wasn't entirely sure of the progression of events, but with the practice born of a long life dedicated in no small part to survival he had no problem what so ever registering sudden slackening of the chord wrapped around his throat.

Exhibiting a level of flexibility that surprised even himself, Farouk wiggled free and - giving his assailant a brief, parting crotch-gouge - rapidly put distance between himself and the fight, scuttling on all fours out of the way.

Given his martial skills, Amahl reasoned piously, he was really doing his saviors a favor.

Mr. Farouk was out of the way by the time Kevin watched the arm break off and fall to the ground. A mass of rotting flesh greeted the man when he looked down at the stump of his arm. It oozed and blood trickled out of arteries that were severed, but not closed off. Only belatedly did Kevin realize it was entirely possible that man might bleed to death from the injury.

He only got so far as that realization before he found himself going down hard from a blow to the side of his jaw. There was still that other arm to contend with.

Cammie would've snarked about disarming the guy, but she was paying too much attention to punching the guy hitting Kevin, again not really caring how much she was hitting for, "Anyone know just what the fuck is going on here?" she snapped, "I mean seriously."

"Templars," Farouk croaked helpfully from the corner, wincing in pain as his throat burned with the after-effects of the attempted strangulation.

"Also - that."

He pointed toward a flying silhouette of an Imperial Guardsman, who appeared to be wearing some sort of armored suit and seemed to be growing in the general area of his face.

"Oh, that can't be good..."

The tableau froze momentarily, the still hale Templar as shocked as the two X-Men when the Guardsman suddenly emitted a brilliant burst of concentrated energy, seemingly targeting the train-car containing the quintet.

The shock did not last long, however. Whatever other faults of the organization, the warrior-priests trained their cadre well. Breaking his hold on Wither and avoiding Cammie with startling deftness the Templar produced a spare-looking blade and in one fluid motion plunged in into the throat of his compatriot.

Giving Farouk one last malevolently promising glare he then leapt away and threw himself out of the window.

"I am telling Stick on you, asshole!" Amahl croaked vindictively, even as the explosion shook the train.

In the process of trying to get up off the floor of the train Kevin found himself unbalancing and falling over again when the car shook. He scrambled to keep his face away from things like the floor because no one needed a hole there, but he was weak from having used his powers so much lately. By the time he got up he was looking around quickly to find one dying Templar left and something outside the train capturing Farouk's attention.

"Oh, this is going to be fucking fun," Cammie said, pausing for a moment, taking a step backwards and taking in the situation, or trying to, "Are we supposed to follow that asshole?"

Farouk stared at her disbelievingly for a second, before gingerly righting himself and casting a wary look outside the window. The guardsman appeared to be looping around in preparation for another strafing run.

Amahl opened his mouth but, wincing in pain, immediately thought better of it and established a tentative mind-link instead.

*I strongly suggest we concentrate on the flying gentleman in the spacesuit, for now.*

Blinking at the voice in his head, Kevin found said man in said spacesuit flying outside. "Yeah, and what're we supposed to do about it? Projectile think at him?" Cynical maybe, but Kevin wasn't a fighter and on top of not being a fighter his mutation, which was effectively the only offensive weapon he had, worked on contact. He didn't think the flying guy was going to get close enough for him to decompose the guy's brain out. Kevin also would have really liked to avoid doing anything like that anyway.

"What he said. I can't punch through space suit unless something's changed in the past few minutes," Cammie said, "Unless we got a gun lying around somewhere."

Amahl squinted assessing the situation, his brain process motivated greatly by the rapidly narrowing distance between the train and the Indian mutant. He grinned suddenly, a nasty and unpleasant baring of fangs.

You can't fly here... He thought absently, focusing on the tiny breach in the Guardsman's shields. The training provided to the elite of the Neramani's army was solid even by the first. world's standards, much less a second tier Power.

Yet when preparing a non-psi to deal with a telepathic attack, there was no perfection. True, the Indians covered the basics. But it has been Farouk's experience that people always tended to underestimate how little inducement of illusions actually depended on the brute hacking of the opponent's mind.

Instead an oblique and largely non-invasive manipulation of the signal sent by the optical nerves and...

... this is bat country.

The Guardsman's flight path stalled and veered into an uneven spiral suddenly, as his screams of surprise were became audible. The gloved hands scrabbled at the visor and the armor as the Indian soldier tried to get at the flying rodents which suddenly appeared within his protective carapace.

Farouk's triumphant grin, however, did not last long - freezing and disappearing entirely as he finally detected a small flaw in his strategy.

Oh, hell... Amahl had time to think disgustedly before the Guardsman crashed into the compartment.

"Oh that was just fucking brilliant," Cammie shouted, "Any other bright ideas?" She was totally at a loss.

"Why do you think he wears the suit?" Albert wore a suit because he was radioactive. Decaying a hole through Al's suit would hurt them, not Al. Kevin wondered if this guy would be the same. "'Cause Ah think shooting him from very far away is a good idea. In case. If we had a gun." And someone who knew how to use one. Kevin tried to think but he couldn't focus beyond the severed arm on the ground or the way the world went just a little bit blurry.

There's literally nobody in this room that I don't hate right now, Farouk thought with a certain amount of detachment as he observed the Guardsman right himself and reconstitute his shields, breaking Amahl's toehold.

"I am Āftāb-dhamak. Pulsar." The Indian growled finally as he cast a contemptuous look at the trio of mutants trapped with him. "And you are in my way."

Amahl blinked and turned around to see what exactly was putting his life in jeopardy. There was absolutely nothing behind him except a door leading to the engineer's cabin.

*I say we leave this gentleman to his devices, children, and be on our merry....* Farouk advised and smiling in as calming a manner as possible carefully edged away from the door.

The wave of indignant shock swept down the mindlink with enough force to give Amahl a mild headache.

*We can't do that!*

*He is trying to stop the train!*

Farouk bit back a curse as the Guardsman growled again and began moving forward. Sidling even farther away Amahl tried to be reasonable. *We don't know that! Why jump to conclusions? Maybe he just wants to toot the train-horn. It's every little boy's dream. Who are we to stand in the way of a life's dream?*

From the depressingly determined expressions on the Xavier's brood's faces it was clear they were not entirely amenable to Farouk's carefully reasoned argument.

And it occurred to him that his chances of securing continued welcome at the mansion would diminish somewhat were he to run and possibly hide, leaving the two young morons to be incinerated.

Also if the train was stopped he would end up trapped in Pakistan.

Bad day. He thought sadly and, shrugging apologetically at him, slammed Pulsar in the head with a chair.

The Guardsman, for all appearances only slightly inconvenienced by the attack (that twisted something painfully vital in Farouk's wrist) roared with rage and lunged forward.

Bad, bad day....

Alright. She had to stop and think clearly. She took a moment to pick up her bandages from the floor. Instant rope. Maybe while flying Space Man was busy she could get a 'rope' around his neck. Hold him in place if nothing else. If there was flesh under that suit and it was like Al there was a chance it wouldn't do jack shit to her and she'd be death to him.

There was always the chance that this was also the king of bad fucking ideas, but she was ready to roll with that.

"Kevin, I don't care what it is, but be ready to put a hole in something, okay?" she said, before diving into the fray with a make shift garrote made of putrid bandages. When all else fails, go for the neck. She was ready for this to hopefully work, and ready for it not to. She knew she wasn't all that on a grand scale, it had only taken a few hard knocks to learn that.

This was a bad plan. Kevin was sure of that. But he shoved away the mild dizziness, the way the world blurred a little - which he was pretty sure was an indication of something really bad - and focused on what Cammie was doing. She got behind the man in the spacesuit and Kevin followed her lead. With her attempting to choke the guy Kevin laid a bare hand against his chest. He tried to focus the decay inward, through the suit and down into whatever laid beneath it.

Farouk thought a series of extremely unkind things in rapid succession as the one of Pulsar's hand closed around his much abused throat, while the Indian began punching him in the face with the other, the blows lending with metronomic regularity.

The response of the girl - what in the hell was her name? - was to try and emulate the Templar assassin. The uncertain prospects of that little maneuver when tried on a gentlemen ENCASED IN THE MOTHERFUCKING ARMOR apparently eluded the product of Xavier/Dayspring School of Tactics and Suicidal Insanity.

And then Amahl gratefully blacked out.

His body went slack, as an un-stringed puppet, momentarily surprising the Guardsman and taking him fractionally off balance. The brief moment of distracted attention, however, was all that was needed for Kevin's powers to take effect.

The flaw produced in the suit was minuscule, the tough material resisting admirably, but in the end it was enough. Pulsar screamed, a high and pained, horrible sound as he lost his hold on the corporeal form, the energy making up his being losing cohesion and direction.

The great force of it escaped his hold and turned against the suit, now no longer structurally capable of diffusing the enormous internal pressure.

The armor disintegrated like a punctured balloon, Āftāb-dhamak still screaming as he was expelled out of the compartment by his own powers now beyond his control.

With the threat seemingly gone, Kevin took a step back and wavered on his feet. "Ah think Ah've been usin' my mutation too much," he muttered before falling against the wall. Adrenaline alone had kept him going along with the high using his powers always gave him. Now there was no adrenaline rush and he just felt sleepy and drugged. Mr. Farouk was passed out and that looked like a real good idea. The Southerner started slide down the wall, unable to continue standing. "Cammie, you seen my glove?"

“No, but it has to be around here somewhere. Heh. That worked. I thought I was going to kill us,” Cammie said honestly, “How surprised to be alive is he going to be,” she said, poking Farouk with her foot, “Sit down Kevy, I’ll find your glove.”