Any Port In A Storm: Briefing / Here Come The Cavalry

[x-cannonball.livejournal.com]

Amara, the rest of X-Factor and the X-Men meet up with Vanessa briefly to get the run down on what's going on.

Everyone had been assembled for the briefing, which hadn't taken too long after they'd been tapped for the mission. Sam had rounded everyone up and was sitting there among them now, waiting for Vanessa to give them the latest update on the situation so they could put their heads together and figure out the best way they could help recover the kids. After scanning the room to make sure everyone was in attendance, Sam nodded to Vanessa. "The floor's all yours, boss."

Vanessa took quick visual stock of everyone assembled before she spoke, mentally trying to figure out where people were of the most use. "Lucas and I found the kids but they're in cells and there're too many guards, for lack of a better term, patrolling. Without a distraction and forces," she nodded to the group, "we can't get the kids out without getting ourselves caught or possibly killed. There are mutants patrolling the halls and what could be mutants but also could be humans. There are also...earth people. We're not sure what they are, exactly, but they look like giant hulking people made of dirt and mud, basically. There's a lot of tech and everything's underground. I need a distraction to pull attention away from where the kids are and I need back up to help get whoever is left near them off our backs long enough for Lucas and I to break 'em out. Questions?"

Amara was a little twitchy about being outside the apartment, but she was doing her best to hide it. Being here, helping, was more important than her hang-ups, and she needed to start getting back to normal. Granted, it had been awhile since she had gone out with the X-Men, but she could do it. She could.

"Dirt and mud I can handle," she stated, her voice full of a confidence she hadn't felt in awhile, but strangely flat and emotionless. "It won't take me much to turn them to clay. Or convince the earth to take them back."

Marius cracked his knuckles. "I can identify any additional mutants, should the need arise. Otherwise, I'm always game for a round of Operation: Meat Shield." He shot Angel a quick grin. "Be interested to see if microwaves work on earth-people. Buy you lunch should you redecorate the place with a sort of Forbidden City-look."

"Sounds good to me," Angel said, her lips quirking slightly into a momentary cocky grin. She'd have rather taken the earth people anyways, in all honesty. "I'll go with Amara for the earth people," she added, bouncing back into business mode.

"Earth people." Kyle said flatly. "Oh fun. So we go in, hit earth people, find kids, rescue kids, go home, have burgers. Seems pretty straightforward, what's the catch? Please tell me it's not giant sewer alligators, because seriously, if it is, I am on the hook for like fifty dollars worth of donuts to my girlfriend." He caught the odd looks, and shrugged. "Don't ask, was one of those stupid conversations you have in the shower."

"You have very weird conversations Kyle." Lorna was trying not to have a mental image of Kyle in the shower discussing about giant alligators, instead she was thinking of the earth people. "But don't forget the mutants or humans patrolling the halls. Those should be easy to take out."

"Oh, humans! I want humans, please," Adrienne spoke up, raising her hand. "Earth people, not so much. Maybe when I thought you meant, like, New Age-y weirdos, but seeing how you mean literal earth people, no thanks. Unless I get a gun. Wait, can I have a gun anyway?" Her powers weren't exactly offensive, after all. She didn't have anything to bring to a fight except what she'd learned in boxing lessons, self-defense and hand-to-hand combat training.

Callisto seemed to realize people were expecting some sort of input from her at some point, and she cleared her throat. "Dirt or meat, don't much care," she said mildly. "Point me at what I need to hit. I can tell mutants too, generally, if Marius would rather fight the mud men. Whatever."

Once everyone had presented some input, Sam stood up, arms crossed over his chest. "Alright, anyone have any questions?" He paused and looked around the group before continuing. "If not, here's how we'll tackle it. Three groups: Amara, Angel, you're with me in one group, Callisto, Adrienne, and Lorna, you're another group, and Kyle and Marius will pair up."

Vanessa nodded. "That works. I'll direct you guys once we're inside so we can funnel attention and forces away from where Lucas is keeping an eye on the kids. Let's go." The metamorph turned and headed for the door that opened into a dark tunnel burrowing down under the chemical plant and into the earth.

Once inside Lorna, Adrienne and Callisto break off from the group and find themselves up against some of Molekevic's thugs of the mutant variety.

Lorna entered the large cavern from one side, her eyes were already adjusted to the dim lighted area. Flying up and hugging close to the walls, she scanned the area before returning to the group. "There are roughly seven guys and look to be scattered about, two to the left, three to the right and the other two are directly in front."

"So that's five for Callisto and one each for you and I, right?" Adrienne dead panned, then gave a slight smirk. "Hell, you'll probably have taken care of five before I even take out one, huh?" she inquired of Callisto, smirk turning into a grin. "I'll go left, if no one minds."

Callisto shrugged. "I'll take the middle," she said simply, pulling her hands out of her pockets to reveal that she'd slipped on her rarely-used knuckle dusters.

"And I'll go right." Taking a metal from her suit, she formed it into a crowbar like shape. "Here." Handing it to Adrienne before making her way to the right side, where three unlucky men were standing about.

Adrienne tested the crowbar's weight by twirling it like a baton a few times and fell into step with the other women as they made their way through the cavern. Since Lorna was flying and Callisto was way better at sneaking around, it was Adrienne's tread that first alerted the thugs to their presence, which meant the other members of her group could get a better jump on their assigned targets in the split second they were all looking at Adrienne. She swallowed instantaneous panic as two thugs rushed towards her, going into combat training mode and moving on autopilot as she lashed out with the crowbar.

Callisto was moving fast and low, and the first guy she reached barely knew what hit him - well, that'll happen when someone looks like a heroin addict and punches like a freight train. The thug went flying backward, physically thrown as he was caught entirely off-guard by the force of the blow. Straightening, Callisto faced up to the remaining group in front of her. She didn't say anything, but her expression clearly said 'Next?'.

Lorna landed on one guy bring him down, the other two turned towards her, metal forming at her fist as she punched on before letting the metal fly towards the last one hitting in the chest, causing him to fly back and hit the cavern wall. Easy as 1-2-3. Standing up and lifted up her hand as the metal began to reform on her hand and crawled up her arm to reform the armor on her x-suit.

Though by no means as efficient as her teammates, Adrienne had been learning self-defense, boxing, and combat training for several years now, and took it seriously. She went through a series of moves without even thinking, coupling her dominant right hand to land blows on her two attackers with the added heft of the crowbar in her weaker left.

Unfortunately, she'd only ever trained with a single instructor, and though she'd run through scenarios with multiple attackers, theorizing about attacks on multiple fronts was different from actually experiencing one, and the thugs managed to coordinate their advance and land a series of blows she couldn't counter effectively enough. Taking punches simultaneously from both sides, she soon crumpled despite spirited efforts fight her way clear.

Punches landed hard and fast - at least one of the assailants was superhumanly strong and though they were disorganised and getting in each others way somewhat, blows were landing, and it was starting to hurt.

Another person on coming to the rescue might have a pithy one-liner prepared for such a situation - perhaps something about 'picking on someone their own size' or 'evening the odds'. Callisto didn't seem to go in for such time wasting, however, and Adrienne felt a sickening crack followed by a great rush of air as the two offenders' heads thumped together, and they were pulled backward away from Adrienne, apparently by the scruff of their necks. As she backed away, Callisto was jumped on from behind by another of the thugs, and she momentarily disappeared herself beneath the mound of bodies, although from the grunts of pain coming from the scrimmage Callisto was faring rather better than the other members of the pile-up.

Wrapping her arms around herself to fight the searing pain in her sides, Adrienne skidded clear of the fray, intending to catch her breath and go back in on the off-chance that Callisto needed help, but catching her breath was causing a significant amount of pain, so she couldn't seem to manage it.

Lorna landed nearby and looked over at Adrienne and then over to Callisto, it seemed that didn't work out to what Lorna had hoped. "That should be all of them. You okay ?" Looking back over Adrienne.

Though Adrienne intended to say she was fine, a pained "owwwww" that had a similar tone to a screeching tea kettle was what came out instead. At least she'd finally caught her breath. Gritting her teeth she staggered to her feet and tried again. "I'll live," she nodded. That was more like it. "I don't think anything's broken. 'Course, the last time I felt like this my husband forbade me from getting checked out, so I dunno what broken ribs feel like, but I don't think I'm gonna pass out or anything. Think Callisto needs any help?"

Another howl of pain emerged from the pile-up where Callisto had last been seen, and a hand appeared briefly from the fray, scrabbling at the dirt before a heavy boot came crunching down on top of it.

"I think she got it." Lorna said about Callisto before looking back at Adrienne. "Broken ribs feels like a lot of pain and bruising around the area."

"Oh goody," Adrienne muttered. She definitely had the pain part. "At least I can breathe." So it wasn't like they were broken enough to have punctured anything, if they were broken. "Alright, should we move along before these guys wanna go another round?"

Meanwhile, Kyle and Marius run into those earth people standing in the way of Kyle's burgers.

"You know, I really should've taken geology in college." Kyle said, eyes tracking the shuffling humanoids. "If I'm going to fight monster things made of rocks and dirt, I at least wanna be like "Well at least they'll be full of geodes." but man I don't even know." At least they were fairly mindless, he'd decided after kicking one into another one and watching both golems crumble. It was just that there were a stupid number of them.

"Do you not recall the Unfortunate Husking Incident? Henceforth, whenever I see anything remotely inorganic I fully expect to break through the outer shell only to discover a chewy centre of terratoma." Marius ducked a blow and turned the momentum into a low spinning kick into another golem's knee-joint. The leg split from the body, an end result which would have been more satisfying had the sudden loss not also caused the creature to topple forward and nearly onto Marius.

"I recall the." Kyle was rudely interrupted by a golem trying to remove his (Kyle's) head from his body, and paused long enough to elbow strike it, and then blindly reach around, grab Marius's jacket and pull him a full one-hundred-eighty degrees before Marius' ex-golem could fall entirely forward onto him. "the unfortunate naked Marius incident. The one where you passed out on me, naked, and the entire population of Genosha saw your junk."

"Yes, and would you know" Marius twisted in Kyle's grasp to land an un-leveraged kick on an advancing golem like the world's most proactive human shield, "not one of them sent me a thank you--" Marius shoved Kyle back to intercept a burning red bolt with a grunt, which transformed into a hiss of pain even as Marius returned the blast and flash-baked the responsible golem into poorly-fired pottery.

"Marmot-fondling zipper!" cursed the Australian and ripped open his smoking jacket, revealing a livid red welt already forming where the metal had seared him.

"Wheel of powers turn turn turn said me not Angel?" Kyle asked, ducking a clumsy swing by an over large golem and head butting it in the chest. After coughing - and spitting out a mouthful of pebble-sized pieces of clay he glanced over his shoulder at his teammate. "Second degree, give it twenty minutes. Fifteen maybe if you ate earlier." Long experience with his own healing factor, and he could sort of guess at times. "Thanks for the save, what the hell was that?"

Marius drove a doubled elbow into an advancing golem before replying, "I just got the weight back on, I'm not chancin' an energy projector. Figured I could always pull more if necessary" he clasped his hands together and brought them down hard on the staggered creature's head, caving in its skull "and I've no idea what that was. Can read a few like I do mutants, a bit. Didn't figure the usual rules would apply as to actual power absorption, though. Something-"

He hopped backwards to avoid another swing, swore as he tripped on one of the increasingly numerous chunks of disabled golems, and avoided the blow by the simple expedient of landing on his back.

". . . something . . . Science," Marius finished, the golem's arm swinging wide above him.

The golem got in another wild swing, and then Kyle kicked out it's knees - or ... golem-knee-equivalent anyway - and the entire thing toppled over, struggling to get up on it's now half-length legs, kicked them a few times and then went still and fell apart. "Huh." Kyle muttered, and then offered Marius a hand up. "Okay, so are you packing energy blasts now and I should make a note to order a dozen pizzas on the way home, or is it still unruly toenails and healing factor."

Which should have not taken that long to say, and wouldn't have, if the pair hadn't been repeatedly interrupted by more of the golems, who were clearly programmed to attack in the "bad martial arts movie come at the heroes one or two at a time" fashion. The crowd of waiting golems was just a little eerie, as though they were spectators waiting for their turn.

"Give us a second--" Marius stretched out a hand, which completely failed to produce an energy blast. He shrugged and sidestepped to avoid another clumsy blow, handily providing Kyle with more elbow room in the process. "The rule of equal returns also applies, it seems. Can't say much of the exposition tracked for me. Something about infusions of mutant stem cells?" Marius intercepted a lunging golem by the arm and shoulder and pivoted so the throw launched it away from his teammate. This one had a fine sheen of frost on it, which may have served some offensive use but in this circumstance only caused it to shatter instead of crumble. "It appears dirt does not work as I believed it to work."

"Kay." Kyle's response was limited, as he struggled with a golem who had been 'blessed' with what looked like a tail and a shark-like mouth and teeth that glittered with - obsidian, he thought, as it bit into his arm. Fortunately, it did not seem to have much more in the way of gifts, and the elbow strikes from Kyle's other arm soon had the black shiny "teeth" littering the floor, along with some of Kyle's shirt, and a few spots of blood. "Hey, what happens if you -eat- the dirt?"

"Presuming you aren't taking the piss? Not the faintest idea." The Australian dropped into a crouch and punched out the knee of another golem as he squinted into the ranks. The creature let out a crackle of electricity as it grazed him on the way down, but Marius barely noticed. "I see . . . bugger this is odd . . . right, I think I understand. I get mutant readings, but only from the very centre of the bloody things. No read off the head or extremities. Organic core, maybe. If I could get to it, perhaps . . ."

Then something else caught his eye. Marius waited until a swing from Kyle's fist had cleared his head to spring upright and point into the crowd. "Oi -- a few read like that Molkewhatsis bloke. We take them out, perhaps we save ourselves a bit of work."

"Dude made himself a bunch of dirt monsters with his own powers? What the fuck, that is a creepy ass way to have kids." Kyle footswept another golem, and kicked out of the resulting pile of rocks and dirt. "How durable are you feeling? Because we could kill two stones with one Emplate. You eat one of the Moldewort golems, we get to see what happens and if it works we save ourselves a bunch of time?"

"Durable enough, though the fact you ask lead me to believe you have a proposal that will give me cause to question our friendship." Marius drove a doubled elbow into an attacker and glanced at the sea of automatons between him and his proposed goal. "Let me guess: it does not involve a joint venture in heroic last stands against a vastly superior force."

"Hey, if I could eat golemmeats and gain powers I'd totally do that for you." Kyle said. "That's the kind of friend I am." He kicked another golem, swore as a toe broke, and kicked it again, just for good measure. The tally of golems dispatched to minor injuries was starting to lean towards the not-favoring-Kyle column.

Marius hammered another golem as he listened to the brief strategy Kyle sketched out between grunts and torn knuckles.

"Based on what you've just said, there are a number of unflattering terms that could be described to your friendship," Marius concluded. He dropped and scythed out the legs of another golem, coughing at the resultant cloud of dust. "That said, I'm fast growing bored of this and I've done madder, so let's give it a go."

"If you die I'll sing at your funeral." Kyle said, grin wide despite the clay smeared on his face and the bruises showing under it.

"Have I been that bad a friend?"

It would have been difficult for an onlooker to discern precisely what happened next, in part because of the crush of golems and in part because most sane people would not be expecting to see two men pause to grab one another's wrists like they were about to interrupt fight with a spontaneous dance number. There was a moment's pause to confirm logistics, and then, with the kind of immediacy granted only by trust, familiarity, and the knowledge both parties had access to a power that could repair most catastrophic injuries, Marius and Kyle began to spin.

It was not an easy effect to achieve. It certainly wasn't a tactic that would go down in the record books in categories that might include phrases like "manliest," "artfully coordinated," or "most dignified." However, Kyle had several inches and more pounds on Marius, and with a little initial momentum on Marius' part Kyle had worked up enough speed that when Marius kicked up from the ground the only casualty was two of his temporary toe-claws.

The key to harnessing centripetal acceleration was not to stop, even if your now-horizontal partner's ankles were banging into animated automatons. And so, like the world's most dedicated hammer thrower, Kyle managed three further revolutions and released Marius' wrists just as his trajectory put him in line with one of the command golems.

At this point the term 'partner' became interchangeable with 'ballistic missile'.

Marius did not, in fact, strike the golem they'd been aiming for. Fortunately this did not ultimately prove to be an issue, since he went right through the one he did and pieces of three more.

Kyle kept some of the momentum from turning and then letting go, and turned it into a move straight out of the best martial arts movies in his DVD collection.

Of course, that only went so far when the mud-golems broke apart when they were damaged, and so the flying hurricanarana became something more like Kyle gets his legs around a golem's neck-analogue and its head pops off and he falls down into another golem, drives his elbow through its chest-analogue and takes out a third via leg-sweep before he hits the ground. Efficient, and effective, but not quite what he'd been trying for.

Matching him in the efficient, effective and not entirely intentional was Marius. True, he'd missed his target, but since he'd taken out three others and was staggering back to his feet significantly nearer a command golem than he'd begun the maneuver had been a success. Essentially.

"Right." Wobbling a bit on his battered ankles, Marius dropped into a crouch. "You're up," he said, and launched himself at the golem's centre mass.

The thorax cracked under the impact, and even as the golem toppled back Marius was working his claws into the gap to force the break larger. Chunks of stone and clay coming away in his hands, Marius plunged his face into the cavity, closed his eyes, and made his best guess.

Kyle's maneuver had put him directly in the path of an oversized golem with arms that looked more like pylons to hold up highway overpasses - unlike most of the rest, this golem was the dirty grey of concrete, not the red and brown of clay. He ducked one wild swing from the golem, and then hit the ground arms over his head as it crumbled to bits over him.

Picking himself out of the pile of disintegrated rock, Kyle had to clear his face of dust before he could see that several more had done the same. He coughed, spit out a few pebbles, and reached down to lend Marius a hand up from his own pile of crumbly dirt. "Either that worked or Moldewort gave up."

Marius accepted the hand, hacking. After pausing to spit gravel he managed, "Glad to see taking out a leader does indeed yield results. Now let's see if this will prove worth the night's indigestion." Steadying himself against Kyle's shoulder, the X-Man focused on the next nearest command golem and raised a fist.

For a moment the only effect was a slight bulge in the creature's back. Jaw clenched in concentration, Marius whipped his arm fist into his chest, then thrust it out. In response to the motion the bulging clay elongated outwards -- then snapped back into the main mass like a released rubber band.

Had the golem been human, what followed would have been the equivalent of a man's spine exploding through his own torso.

A fine rain of stone and particles showered the two men, and around them half a dozen more golems crumbled.

"Dude." That Kyle was impressed was not rare - that he was impressed enough to shut up was. He stayed quiet only so long as it took Marius to steady himself without the need of support, and then he turned, kicking an approaching golem hard enough to render it one-legged. As golems did not hop well, it fell over before it could do any further harm, joining several more golems as Marius took out another commander.

"What kind of friend are you again?" Marius asked smugly.

Fifteen seconds later, Marius spent a few dazed moments being tolerantly defended by Kyle and a golem's former leg when it turned out that rocks were hard, trajectory was important, and one could indeed inflict friendly fire on oneself when exploding targets.

It was that kind of relationship.

The fire trio find not just more golems but also Molekevic who slips away from them,

Well this was just grand. Angel stared at the rock...clay....things standing before them, advancing towards the group. "Why do mad scientists always have henchmen that they built in their labs?" She asked no one in particular as flames lit up around her hands. Assuming the order to attack was implied (the golems didn't seem to be waiting for the verbal okay), Angel lifted herself into the air, drawing her hands together and shooting off a single, large fireball that exploded when it impacted, destroying one golem and throwing several others aside with the aftershock.

Sam eyed the golems as they advanced, trying to gauge just how much of a threat they presented. He was confident his team could handle them but it was never smart to underestimate an opponent in his books, especially a new one. Taking the point, he tested out their foes by leaping skyward and activating his blast field. He plowed through one of the nearer golems with little trouble, shattering it to pieces before he looped back to the team, touching his comm as he did so.

"Alright ladies and gents, you know what to do. Be careful just the same." They didn't seem like they'd pose too great of a threat but it was better to be safe than sorry.

Amara had paused a moment, letting Angel and Sam take the lead. For a moment, she almost let the earth swallow her, to take her away from here. But then Sam spoke, and she moved, the switch to her fire form instantaneous, a blade of fire appearing in one hand as she moved to attack the closest golem.

At the same time, on instinct, a blast of molten rock hit a golem attempting to creep up on Angel. The blast was hot enough that the golem quickly turned to clay, and it quickly disintegrated, shattered pieces littering the floor of the tunnel. She didn't speak, quickly spinning to continue the fight, her movements oddly graceful as she sliced off the arm of one of the golems.

"Philistines! Interlopers!" Arthur Molekevic was extremely angry, and he shook a fist and stamped his foot, summoning forth more of the golems as if he could simply inundate the trio of mutants with the mud and clay that formed them by force of will alone.

"You know you're really cocky for a guy who built his minions in a mudpit," Angel muttered under her breath. She currently appeared to be in a tight position - three golems closing in on her. What the golems didn't seem to notice was that the temperature of the air around her was shooting up, blue flames forming just a few inches from her body. The second they stepped into her microwave, their bodies turned hard, and Angel stretched her arms out, shooting off a circle of flame that sliced through the golems, which collapsed into harmless piles of clay and dirt.

The golems seemed to be going done fairly easily, which was good news, but Sam didn't ease up on them. He launched himself downward, slamming into a pair of them and smashing them all down several feet into the earth until they broke to pieces. Flying back up out of the little crater, he assessed the battlefield. "Keep it up, guys." The battle was seriously going in their favour so far.

Amara could feel the golems coming, an echo of her Gaia connection. But they were wrong, twisted, earth manipulated and abused for the benefit of a man. Part of it infuriated her, and the fire around her flared out, a blanket of flame halting the mud men in their place. A swing of her flaming sword smashed them to pieces, the sword then breaking up as she flung out fiery blades at a pair out of her reach.

Angel was careful to keep the temperature around her nice and toasty, a shield of blue flame dancing around her body as she dodged in and out of golems diving at her, trying to pin down the girl that turned them to dry cement the second they were within six inches of her. Once more she waited until she had enough around her before firing off one large blast and taking out several at once. She didn't even have a witty comment. No time for one at that moment; she made a note to come up with one later.

This...was not going well. Even with the benefit of powers of their own, Molekevic's creations could not stand up to the firepower mustered against them. Molekevic was quite good at statistics. What a lesser intellect would call 'figuring the odds'. And statistically, things looked to be against him. He summoned up an even larger number of golems than before, until they practically formed a wall in front of their master. And then, when he couldn't see the invaders for the mass of earth between him and them...he turned and hurried into a side tunnel. He was no fool, and he had no problems with making his escape while the making was good.

Had they been having trouble with the golems, Sam would've been worried to see so many more spring up, but as it was this just made their task of cleaning them up a longer one, not a harder one. "Double time now, folks, we've got this." The benefit to having so many more bunched up meant there were more of them to smash through in one swoop, which was exactly what he did, blasting through a half dozen or more and leaving behind a trail of broken rubble.

"He's getting away." Amara's words were clinical, her moment of fury having tempered. She could feel his footsteps as he hurried away, moving through the tunnels she could sense rabbit warrening under the city. "Wait a moment." Summoning up a deeper well of power, the rubble strewn around them turning molten as her flames flared. The approaching golems started to harden and sink as they hit the fiery stream, eventually melting away.