xp_logs | Genosha: The Unrelenting Struggle: All Aboard!

A group of prisoners find themselves loaded on the 'mutant train'.

The loading station was a squat, armored structure connected by a long, featureless corridor to the jail. It had not been a good morning; awoken early and roughly, forced to strip and walk through a co-ed delousing shower before the cluster of technicians reached them and forced them into the patterned and brightly coloured environmental skinsuits. They had obviously been studying in the night, as even Kurt's was designed to fit his tail and odd skeletal structure. The import and recycling features of the suits had been invasive, but there was no use in struggling. Guards would simply descend on them until they capitulated. Now, under the guns of their captors, they marched down the hallway, wrists locked together by prison issue shackles that jangled with each step towards an unknown future.

"Hey, I think I have a first class ticket; why am I stuck back here in third class with all of the rabble?" Adrienne quipped in a deadpan as she entered the train in the middle of the queue of prisoners. She was quite effectively Not Dealing with everything that was going on, using her snark technique to simply be as annoying as possible. "Also, this is a really horrible colour on me. I think if I'm paying this much for an all-inclusive trip to Hell I should really be accommodated much better than I have been. I'll be reflecting this on my comment card and there will be no gratuity included, I'll have you know. Oh, also, I need to be facing forward on the train because if I'm facing backwards, I'm going to throw up on someone. Probably you." She indicated the guard who had hold of her arm, and was dealt a gun butt to the ribs which doubled her over.

Kurt was facing straight forward, speaking to no one and doing nothing but move along as fast as their captors demanded. His eyes were bright and alert, though, scanning everything in sight. Clearly he wasn't giving up just yet.

Kyle had struggled, growled out a barely-understandable "Fuck you" and attempted to bite one of the guards when they were ordered to strip down. That had earned him a hard shove into a wall. The skinsuits had nearly sent him into a rage-filled panic, and he'd lashed out with claws, only to find that the guards no longer seemed to want to use fists or boots to force him. Another guard simply raised a pistol and pointed it at Layla. "Her, then the mouthy bitch, then the blonde, then the asian," he said, and shoved the suit at Kyle. He refused to meet anyone's eyes, and sat knees drawn up to his chin, worrying at where the suit covered his wrist with his teeth to no great effect.

Some kid she didn't know was dead because Layla had tried to shove her fist into Captain Asshole's brain yesterday. Some kid she didn't know but most of the other people with her did. Pile the gun in her face on top of that and she was the picture of submission. Who would get killed next time she lashed out? She wanted to, God everything in her wanted to fight and claw like Kyle until she found a hole to wriggle through to freedom. But the fight had been beaten out of her for now. Bruises and blood would have been better than this. As a result, the blond girl hadn't fought the environmental suits. She had stared at the heels of the person in front of her as she shuffled on toward the train. What the hell were they going to find when that train got to its destination? Were the others even still alive?

She couldn't think very well past the pain in her jaw, her nose, her eye, not to mention her ribs and elbow from the fight previous. It was all she'd been able to do to get the suit on, even with Kurt's help, and she'd have to thank him later for looking after her, even while dealing with everything else that had happened. Rachel, fuck, she couldn't stand the thought of someone having to talk to the ones that weren't there about it, never mind having to tell Nathan and Moira.

Jubilee moved slightly, tears slipping silently down her cheeks as a sharp gasp of pain exploded from her lips, despite her best efforts to deny the fuckers who'd taken them any such satisfaction. She felt betrayed by her own body, she should be better than this, smarter and faster, she was trained for fuck's sake, it didn't matter that it hadn't been as long as someone like Remy, or that he'd been taken just as she had.

She'd make them pay, just give her a chance and she'd make them pay for every single indignity, every single moment of pain that they'd ever exacted from a mutant. Fuck mercy, and fuck them.

Cammie was trying not to panic, though it wasn't obvious on her face. This whole ordeal was every runaway's worst nightmare and though she had been off the streets for years it had still stayed. She was powerless and shoved into this suit and going to god knew where. When she did talk it was to let out a string of quiet profanity.

Ororo had been trying her best to rally spirits throughout the ordeal, murmuring encouragements and cautions to those who needed them and putting herself in the way when she could to draw the ire of the guards away from the younger members of the group - acts which had earned her share of blows and curses, but she had no ability to help things now as they were led into the armored train car and shackled into place.

North watched, almost detachedly, as he was shackled to the seat. Already, he had buried his emotions beneath rational thought. But then the guard glanced at him, and his lips curled into a sneer beneath unruly facial hair. Immediately, he was treated to a blow to the back of his head and a snarled warning for him to remember his place. Oh, he knew his place. But once upon a time, Christophe Nord had been the one wielding the gun and the power that beat fierce spirits into submission. Now, North only wished that he could tell the younger ones to shut up and spare themselves and each other further agony; wished he could point out in cold logic that further injuries meant injuries to their chances – no matter how slim – of escaping. The German sighed and slouched into his seat in his ridiculous suit of orange, green and blue. Every eye he caught, from his teammates to his furred countryman and the unfamiliar, he sought to reassure with a steady gaze. But the exhaustion and pain at the back of his mind was getting harder and harder to ignore. “Must be a long ride,” he commented, voice raspy from his prolonged silence, directing his half-question to no one in particular. Muscles tensed in preparation for any repercussions he might have earned himself. “We may as well settle in.”

The securing of the car was quick and effective. There were no windows, only solid bulkheads on their end. A third of the way down, a steel mesh reinforced with metal slats separated them from the guards, keeping them trapped, but also partially obscuring their view. Obviously, the guards were confident that the restraints would hold them in place. Their wrist shackles were threaded through another chain, which was then pulled through a metal ring, and attached to their leg shackles; simple and efficient, locking them in. Once they were settled, they noticed another man in the back with them, wearing a similar outfit. He gave them a wan smile as the doors were closed and they were locked inside.

Angel could only stare, note even seeing what her eyes appeared to be focused on. She wanted to say something, to distract someone from this awful moment, but her mind refused to function. It didn't want to function. Functioning meant having to deal with what was happening now, what had happened before, what she had seen...

And so her mind stayed blank, not acknowledging the heavy shackles wrapped around her wrists and ankles, nor the rattle of the chains as someone moved. The only part of her brain that was still working was the part that was repeating, over and over, We're going to get out of this. We always do. There's always a miracle. We're going to get out. And when we do, you have to be ready to fight. Don't break down now. You need to be ready. When that miracle comes, you need to be ready.

For most of the night and through the next morning, Vance seemed to be a broken man. The bruises on his face from the day before had become rich blues and purples, and his right eye had finally swollen shut. He had not gotten much sleep, and those times he managed to close his eyes, he saw Rachel's fate over and over, replayed like a bad video without end.

Submitted to the humiliation of the suits was nothing to him, garnered no reaction. Pliantly, Vance was marched into the car with the others, speaking to and looking at no one. Even when the shackles were placed, he did nothing more than twitch with the finality of being locked in place. The guards could ignore him in favor of other unruly prisoners, and so they did.

But as the doors closed behind the guards, locking the lot of them in, a change seemed to come over Vance. His eyes blinked and he returned to the present as he looked up from the floor and looked over his newly found teammates with his one good eye, pausing here and there for those he had already made personal connections with. And then his eyes fell on the strange man he had never seen before, and he spoke for the first time in almost a day, "Who are you?"

His voice was quiet and raw from the screaming he'd done, but his voice carried lowly to the other prisoner; the stranger to them, bound for a similar fate.

"Fucked. That's who I am." He leaned back and sighed. "Just like the rest of you guys, I'd guess, right?" He was maybe forty, that kind of thin faced mischief that was currently dulled by the situation.

"There have been better days," Ororo said wearily, testing the chains that linked the cuffs on her wrist to the other restraints. They were dishearteningly secure. "What do you know of where they are taking us?"

"Foreigners, I see." He straightened up a bit. "You have the unlucky honour of getting carted up to Prenova; a shithole by the sea, in order to get your brains fucked in and sent down to the bottom of a geothermal powerplant positioned on a deep sea vent. There, you will get to enjoy dangerous labour securing the intake lines, enlarging the superstructure, and maintaining the turbines, in the hope that a single mistake doesn't get you boiled alive, crushed under rock or the pressure of the ocean, or my personal favourite, just fucking drowning to death."

Adrienne continued to rub her hands together to combat the feeling of cold that was permeating them as a side effect of losing her powers, poking randomly at her suit and at her restraints, still unused to being able to touch things without the mindtrip of her psychometry. "Best. Trip. Everrrr," she muttered in response to the Genoshan's answer to Ororo's question, rolling her eyes. Really, she didn't see what the fuck else she could say at this point.

"It'd be fucking amazing if we could stop like, sitting here and actually figure out if we can get off this fucking train." Kyle's voice was pitched low and sounded rough with anger and fatigue. "Cause, seriously, fuck this shit." He pulled at his restraints a few times. "Pretty sure I could break a thumb and get one hand out but then I'm fucking useless."

“Don’t,” North cautioned Kyle, an unspoken not yet in his voice, accompanied by a minute head shake as eyes darted to the wire mesh separating the guards from them. He could not know for sure if they were listening, but he would bet on it. The spy glanced over first at Ororo and then at Jubilee, having already tested their restraints and suits, and hoped his growing despair was not visible on his face.

“They expect us to do dangerous manual labour without our powers?” He asked the stranger, not quite sure if he had understood the man. Then, abruptly, “how long is the ride there?”

"They won't be your powers any longer." He sighed. "Name's Liam O'Shea. I am one of the people who doesn't fit into the new vision for Genosha that is being quietly implemented under everyone's noses. Used to sniff out ore deposits with my powers. But, with my history, it looks like the government's decided to make me an 'undesirable'. Which means that fucking mutate process they came up with a few years ago. They can use it to replace your powers with ones more suited to the job, and then you'll end up shoved into the expansion of the power plant on the cheap, without any regard to safety or body count. It's a quiet way of getting rid of mutants who won't fit into the new system."

Angel turned her head slightly to better listen to Liam's words. Replacing powers? Jeez, what was this place, a mad man's playground? "Nobody's taking my powers," she declared quietly. She pressed her lips together for a moment, taking a deep breath and ignoring the urge to light something on fire - mostly because at the moment, she couldn't. She turned to look at Liam the best she could, given their current positions. "What happens after the mutate process? I mean, I get that they replace our powers-" Which was still absolutely insane, "but what happens to us?" She was trying to ask what would happen to their minds - their personalities - the things that made them...well, them. But she couldn't figure out how to put the question into words.

"Daring, choice is the one thing you aren't going to have." He said quietly. "Mutates don't... think, I guess. They obey. It's like a trained dog; just waiting for orders and following them without question. The only time I've ever seen one so any emotion was fear when they thought they'd failed, or happiness when a Magistrate handler gave them a pat. Scary shit. The official line was that mutates are mutant criminals, which we believed until we saw a couple that we used to work with, last year."

"So, what about your background made you so undesirable that they'd give up a blood hound?" Paige asked flatly, looking over the small crowd. Her posture was still strong, tall despite her height, but the last several hours had stripped away her niceties, at least for the moment. "What kind of process is there for selection?"

"I drink too much and don't like spending my vacation days inside the borders. I'm a troublemaker who's been too vocal that this whole 'mutate' shit is nothing but slavery." He shrugged. "That's why I'm getting the suit. Past that, I don't know. I heard a couple of guys talking about seeing mutates who had been barely mutants before they were changed. People who had the power to make their farts turn blue go in and come out able to lift ten tons or generate a heat ray that can cut through solid rock."

"So they take the undesirables and rabble-rousers, turn them into useful, obedient slaves, and count on the fact that they will not be missed," Ororo said, sounding almost as if she was musing to herself. She looked up, then, meeting eyes with as many as she could in the crowded train care, and imbuing her next words with as much belief as she could muster. "But that is where they have made their mistake with us. There are many who know we are here, many who will miss us - and who will do all they can to find us. We are not alone and abandoned here. We will find a way out."