Tropic of Capricorn: Sneaky Spy Stuff

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Unconvinced of Magneto's commitment to peace, Garrison decides he and Adrienne should sneak into Magneto's base to see if they can discover what he's really up to. They succeed, but they're discovered before they can do anything about it.


Kane was sure their 'guest' hut was being watched. Erik Lensherr hadn't survived as one of the most wanted men in the world by being foolish, regardless of his claims to have reformed. Fortunately, his minions weren't always of the same calibre, and it seemed that his 'guard' for tonight was Toad, who had instead plunked a six-pack under his 'midnight' fishing spot and was now passed out in his chair. The one that worried Garrison was Mystique, but he'd seen her return to the base for the night, and while he didn't count out Toad being a bluff for their real watcher, it seemed unlikely because of the sheer lack of numbers on the island.

"OK, coast is clear, babe. Let's go."

"I just need time to powder my nose," Adrienne deadpanned, right behind him. As they left the hut and made their way towards the centre of the volcano, she was careful to keep her hands clasped together in front of her, almost as if they were handcuffed. She wasn't wearing any coating solution, knowing that this was intended to be a reconnaissance mission and wanting to be as useful as she could. Occasionally she'd touch something along their route to try and monitor the movements of the Avalon residents.

There were a few people up and around, but the temporary town was mostly quiet. When they reached the access door of the base, Kane placed his palm against it first, checking for traps. He simply didn't trust Magneto to have reformed, regardless of what the man said.

"Keypad lock. This is your show, Adri."

"Easy peasy," Adrienne grinned at him, touching the keypad without delay. Once inside the corridor, she put a hand on the walls. "Three guards went in this way, and unless there's another way out of the base, they're still in there, doing patrols or something," she warned him. "Oh, one mentioned being on 'comms' duty. When we get farther along, I can see which way he went so we know which room that is. Maybe we can get in and send a message to the mansion?"

"Let's find out where he's going, but if he's on duty in there, I don't see a way to sneak in without taking him out and alerting them. Let's get deeper into the base, maybe see what the hell Magneto's plan really is. I don't buy this whole reform idea."

"Well, you know him better than I do," Adrienne commented. "And I trust you." She led the way down the hall, touching the walls every few feet. "Okay, comms guy went that way," she pointed off to her left. "And so did the other two. Apparently there are cookies in there, and they want some before they do their patrol." She kept moving straight ahead, wanting to stay ahead of the guards, touching the walls every few feet. "It looks like a patrol takes about thirty minutes," she told Garrison, so he could have an idea of the size of the base. Further along the route they came across another door. "Oh hey, Erik apparently goes in here a lot," she commented. "But he's not in there now." The keypad yielded the code to her and she typed it in.

"Let's see what he's got to hide, eh?" They started down, but a few feet inside the room stopped. The pale aura of one of Erik's magnetic shields stopped them. One of his early power tricks had been the replication of his personal shields, making them an extraordinary defensive measure for his bases.

Kane got close and placed his hands on the shield. He pushed at it a little, and his skin started to shift, looking slightly iridescent. After a moment, his hands passed through shield and his entire body went with it. He reached out and killed the shield's power to let her through.

Adrienne hadn't seen Garrison's omni-skin in action very often so it took her a moment to get the incredulous look off her face after what he'd done before stepping forward, frowning at the random pieces of detritus Erik had chosen to shield. "What a weird, creepy dude this Erik is," she muttered. "What the fuck is this? Looks like a museum." She reached out and touched something. "Soviet..." she muttered to Garrison, then touched something else. "Uhh, Gar? These... these were a sub. And not the delicious sandwich kind. The nuclear kind. It sunk. Uhh... thirty years ago? The Leningrad," she mumbled, frowning.

"The Leningrad?" Kane thought back. It wasn't anything he could remember right off the bat, but he stored it away in the back of his mind. It sounded like it should be important. "What would Lensherr have to do with a Soviet sub?"

"Uhh... do you really want to know?" Adrienne asked after touching a few more pieces. "It looks like it was supposed to be bringing some scientist guy here, when it was a research base. A geneticist. Eew, ugly. Except he's dead now, so kinda sad. Ack!" she tore her hand away and scrubbed at her eyes, even though she knew that would do no good in terms of erasing the images she'd just seen. "Erik sunk it. Shit. Years ago. But he just recovered all this stuff recently. Shit shit shit. He took the nukes."

"Nukes? What are you talking about?" Kane took her by the upper arms, looking into her eyes as she shook. "Adri, what nukes does he have?"

Flinching at the touch, Adrienne became flustered. "I-I dunno! Nukes! I-I just hear what people say and I see fucking... fucking radioactive stickers, okay? I-I don't know specifically what to look for! Do you want me to draw you a fucking picture of them?! They were on the sub when it was a sub but now they aren't because the sub's in pieces and he took the nukes! We-we need to look around more, yeah? Maybe they're here somewhere? The patrol takes a half hour," she repeated, remembering what she'd learned earlier. "There has to be more here. Two more doors." She pointed at each one in turn, then broke away from Garrison to open another one, scurrying down another corridor, distraught.

The room at the end of the corridor was also keypaded. "Well, now I'm starting to realize why Creepy Erik is so fucking paranoid," she muttered as she took deep breaths to counteract the lightheadedness she was starting to feel. "You go in," she told Garrison when the door wooshed open. "I don't wanna look."

"Son of a- he didn't just keep the nukes. He repurposed the warheads." Kane said in shook. Around him, hundreds of carefully engineered devices were arrayed in neat rows. "Hundreds of bombs."

"I'll... take your word on that," Adrienne replied, staying outside the door. She poked her head in long enough to see that there was no other door in that room to take them to anything more horrible, then turned away, keeping her hands in fists at her sides. No way did she want to chance going in there and touching one of those. The precognition could make her go mad.

"I'm going to go poke around the other door in the sub museum room to see if it'll lead us to that amplifier Creepy Erik mentioned," she told Garrison. "You wanna stay here or come with me?" She was half hoping he'd stay there so that they wouldn't have to have a conversation right now about the hundreds of bombs. She was only barely keeping it together, and was worried that musing about what exactly was going on with the bombs would break her. She also didn't want to stick around lest he ask her to touch the bombs and glean info from the precognition she was so afraid of.

"I'll catch up, Adri." He said, seeing her unease. He let her leave, looking around long enough to get a sense of the threat. They couldn't simply destroy the bombs yet - the amount of fissionable material in the room would kill them as they worked. This entire place was a trap, he thought, following her out.

He found her flipping off the keypad to the door at the end of another corridor, the second corridor from the sub museum room, and cursing up a storm under her breath. "When I touch the keypad it tells me the code, as usual, but when I type it in it says it's invalid," she told Garrison, frowning. "And weirder than that, the code I'm getting off it is the same as the code from one of the other doors. I remember."

"Maybe it's got a time based modifier? Something that flips it every so often but hasn't been keyed in to show up for your powers?" Kane took a look at the door. "Or maybe the keypad isn't the important part. Check the door and see if anyone has been through there? It might not even be locked - a diversion."

"Huh. Yeah, maybe," Adrienne replied, mollified. "I mean, it is behind two locked doors already." She tried the door in case it wasn't locked, but it was. A touch revealed that only Creepy Erik had been through the door lately, information she relayed to Garrison with another frown. Biting her lip, she wiped her hand on her thigh and tried the keypad again, getting a different image of Erik typing in the code most recently this time. The door opened when she typed it in. Rather than musing on the oddity, however, she just shrugged at Garrison and stepped through the door into the room. She had far too much on her mind to puzzle this out at this moment.

"This must be that amplifier he was talking about on the beach." Kane said, as they stepped into the room with the complex machine in the centre. It was like a hundred solar panels tesseracted together into a mal-formed cube. "Fuck, I would pay good money to have Forge here right now."

The nature of the amplifier blocked Adrienne's powers the same way as a heavy EM shield would, and Kane couldn't figure out an interface to look into it. Eventually, they had to admit defeat and retreat from the room.

"He's got an amplifier that can turn this place into a fortress, dozens of nukes who could plant anywhere, and a team of powerful and experienced terrorists to support his moves. This is really bad, Adri." Garrison was about to go on when the sound of the door at the other end of the room stopped him, and they turned to confirm that they had been discovered.