Fury Said To A Mouse: Arrival

[x-emplate.livejournal.com]

The team responds to Heather Hudson's request and find themselves in the aftermath of a massacre.


August in Slorenia was surprisingly pleasant, with temperatures barely reaching the mid-70s. While suffering a degree of disrepair common in former Soviet territories, the field-girded town they'd been called to was large enough for a school, a smattering of squat apartments, and a handful of restaurants. At least one billboard had been erected recently enough that it had not yet begun to peel in the sun. While by no means bustling, it was clearly a place where people lived and worked.
Until now.

They'd found the first body shortly after landing the Blackbird. It had been so mangled that if not for the flies it might have been mistaken for a pile of rags. A little further down the road another lay beneath the remains of a heavily-repaired moped. Even at a distance it was obvious there was not enough mass for a whole corpse.

The town was worse.

Someone had to be the first to lose the battle against nausea, and today that person was Marius. The X-Man spat to the side one last time before finally managing to straighten. "Apologies," he said, hoping he didn't look as ill as he still felt. "It's the feral. Smell hit me harder than I expected."

"It's not just you," Scott assured the younger man. Even though he lacked Marius' feral powers the smell in the town was enough to make the X-Man gag, "Everyone spread out, but be very careful. Whatever did this might still be around. If you see anything out of the ordinary call out." He cast his gaze out over the town and its assortment of massacred bodies, "Anything more out of the usual than this," he noted sadly.

"Lot of bodies. Whatever hit them must have gotten pretty much the whole town." Garrison said through clenched teeth, trying to avoid being sick in the middle of the street. The destruction seemed patternless; a chaotic murderous storm that enveloped the town completely without favour or reason.

Jean scanned the area, both visually and mentally. After a few moments she pulled herself out of the telepathic scan and caught her gaze lingering on a man who was missing the lower half of his body, his intestines spilled out across the ground like a bowl of spaghetti. She glanced away, her jaw setting.

"I don't sense any life signs in the immediate area," she said. And her reach went pretty far. Her medical experience was the only thing that kept her from looking green, even if her stomach reacted just like everyone else's and did a flip flop when they came upon the scene. The smell was overwhelming, wet, dense, shockingly sweet, like vomit and bad breath.

Reaching into her medical kit, she pulled out a couple of Vicks Vapor Rub sticks and offered them to the others to pass around.

"Put a little under your nose. It'll help with the smell."

Fred coated the area above his lips, taking in the picture in front of him a blink at a time. It almost reminded him of a horror movie...but in those you don't smell the dead, the rusty sweetness of blood, the char of skin cooking. He'd have certainly been more terrified or disgusted, if he wasn't struck dumb simply by trying to take it all in.

"What the fucking hell could've done this...?" Fred muttered it almost to himself, putting words to what he was almost sure everyone else was thinking as he handed the Vicks to Yvette.

The small red girl took the Vicks from him mechanically, face frozen and blank as the shock and horror she felt reflected in her powers. "This was not an accident," she said faintly, her eye glow dimming as she looked around the carnage. Something about the shredded bodies and sprayed blood seemed... familiar. Like a memory of a nightmare. "The government, they wanted to hide this."

Angel swallowed hard, trying to breathe through her mouth until the Vicks got to her. After a moment she pushed herself into the air, both for an aerial view and to try and put some space between her and the smell of rotting bodies. "The view isn't much better further on," she reported down hollowly, still breathing as shallowly as possible. "Big surprise I know. Nothing moving. Not even any animals." And it wasn't because they'd run away - she could see what she assumed were cats and dogs intermingled with the humans - they were just mangled bits of fur now. "God..."

Lorna took the Vicks from Angel and quickly put some underneath her noise. It was a smell that she knew would last for days. "This was a massacre." Lorna looked around and put her hand to her mouth as she felt the urge to vomit but was trying to hold it down.

Tabitha waved off the Vicks. She knew it would just make the smell worse for her. Instead she tried to just breathe through her teeth. She blew out a breath and closed her eyes a moment. "Where do we start?"

Like Jean, Clarice used her medical training to handle the smell. As for the visions in front of her, well...that was another story. "At the beginning," she replied hollowly, "We can't help these people, they're past that. And we can't spend our time burying them properly, that won't help anyone right now. So. We find who did this. And we stop them," she tugged her ponytail a little higher and tighter on her head, "And we make sure it doesn't happen again."

Marius hoped this was a possibility; he didn't want to respond to another mission summons two months from now and run across another sight like this. The Australian wiped his mouth, refusing the Vicks. He'd borrowed from Kyle; he had a very strong suspicion the synthetic smell of the ointment would only add to his nausea. Besides, there was a chance they might need his nose. He waited for his stomach to fully settle, then breathed deeply.

"Something smells . . . wrong," he reported. Now that he was getting accustomed to the stench of viscera his nose was beginning to discriminate. "Not dead -- something else. It's coming from upwind."

Angel followed Marius' description of the direction, going up a little higher to get a look further ahead. "Hang on," she called down suddenly. "Think I got something. East, maybe about a hundred feet or so. It looks kind of..." Ridiculously creepy, actually. "I'm not sure but it's big and it kinda looks deformed. It's not ripped apart or dead looking though." Which was saying something considering what the rest of the town looked like. Normally she would've flown ahead to try and get a closer look, but every single thing about that screamed bad idea. So she stayed close to the team, hovering in the air still to lead them on in the right direction.

Scott jerked his head in the direction Angel had indicated, "Let's go, guys." The X-Man's eye darted around the scene, a green tint to his face as he tried desperately to focus on anything other than the sight of the dismembered bodies lying discarded in the street. "No-one get closer than a hundred yards of...whatever it is," he ordered, cold anger flooding his voice. "We don't want whatever did this to turn onto us." He hoped it tried though, really hoped it tried. Nothing would make Scott feel better than blasting whatever perpetrated this massacre back through 3 or 4 walls to start with.

As the group started toward the location Angel had specified, Jean walked with Scott, reaching out her hand to squeeze his gently and let go without breaking her stride.

"Do you see any signs of life, Firestar?"

Angel squinted ahead, staring hard at the thing. "Not...really?" Uncertainty made the words a question. "I mean...it's not moving, but it's all hunched up..." If it was dead it wouldn't have been hunched over like that, right? "It's not moving though. If it's alive I don't think it knows we're here." Which was a good thing. The longer they could go unnoticed, the better.

"Not to be the killjoy here, but it sounds a little too convenient for the only strange element here to be dead and harmless." Kane clicked off the com for a second. "I'd pull Firestar back for now, boss. Anchor, Penance and I can take point. If this this does something, we're the most likely to survive the first attack."

Scott nodded his agreement, "It does seem oddly convenient, doesn't it, and I stopped believing in coincidence a long time ago." He fell silent for a moment while he considered their approach. "I'd honestly rather we didn't risk you guys in close proximity to it. We have no idea what that thing can do. I'd rather we all kept our distance, and if it does anything we hit it from range and burn it down hard. Better safe than sorry." And no X-Man was going to end up in the same state as the poor town residents if Scott had anything to say about it. "Take point, but stick as close to the group as you can so we can cover you if we need," he decided.

Yvette's eyes flared briefly, but she nodded her assent at the plan. "We will be careful," she promised. "I shall be taking the high road, perhaps? I can move without being seen a bit better than Anchor." She indicated the ruined buildings. "There are plenty of shadows for me to hide in, at the least, and get closer."

Fred nodded, liking the plan. Mainly because it meant Yvette was a little further away from the thing than she coulda been, and he was just fine with that. "Sounds like a plan. Ah'll take point, boss." He nodded to Scott and moved ahead of Kane...but not too far. Kane and Scott were in charge, and he didn't want to separate from the group, but Fred was probably more durable even than Garrison; if anything was going to hit them, it was going to hit him first.

The rest of the team fell into their designated positions as they made their way to the area Angel had identified. The destruction to the surroundings was indiscriminate; holes had been knocked in buildings and doors smashed, with many vehicles overturned and often mangled. The buzz of flies was the only sound.

In the center of town, the X-Men found the apparent cause.

The creature appeared folded in a crouch, making its size difficult to gauge. Roughly humanoid, its skin was the sickly purple-black of necrotic flesh. While its arms and torso were enormously thick, its hipbones jutted with the unnatural sharpness of emaciation. Its head was bowed as if in sleep.

Keeping her distance, Jean studied the creature with a wild, healthy scientific curiosity. Despite the utter atrocities it had committed, she was a tiny bit fascinated. She had never seen anything like it, but expecting the unexpected was par for the course.

"I'm going to try to do a telepathic scan," she said, taking a step forward but only just. "See if there's anything I can glean about what it is."

She fell silent, gaze falling upon the creature with the unnerving stare of a telepath. The alien connection made her flinch but she steeled herself, furrowing her eyebrows, nodding slowly.

"It's alive. But there aren't...thoughts...just...Instincts," She blinked rapidly . No emotions. No hate. No pleasure.

"No. Just...Just one instinct. Over, and over, and over....Eliminate whatever's in it path." Jean abruptly lurched back, her eyes widening.

"It knows we're--"

Things happened very quickly.

A head snapped up to reveal not a face but a collection of lenses --the creature was suddenly upright and charging without seeming to pass through the intervening motions -- pavement was cracking with a rapid bam-bam-bam under legs as powerful as pistons and the weight of a truck as it rushed them--

Scott had been expecting whatever it was to react, but the speed if its reaction took him by surprise. Before the X-Man could react the monster had already covered half the distance between its starting position and the group and was still charging forward, intent on rendering the group of X-Men apart as it had the town folk. He didn't even have a chance to think. All Scott could do was react with the instinct drilled into him by decades of training as an X-Man: hit the bad guy with an optical blast. So he did.
The force beam shot out of the X-Man's eye and impacted the charging humanoid. For a breath it hung there, its forward motion arrested before it went flying backwards through one, two, three walls before collapsing to the ground in a pile of rubble.

The moment it hit the ground, Jean took over and telekinetically launched the creature off its feet before it could try to get traction. It was already starting to move, twisting, turning, looking for something to grab. She let it hang, narrowing her eyes.

"I don't think there is a way to safely contain it without the potential for serious harm. It doesn't think like a human...more like an animal. If there were any other way....but I don't see it. I think we should..."

"Do what you need to do," Scott agreed as he watched the thing twisting around in the air. "We can't risk anyone else being hurt by it, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop."

Jean gave a solemn nod. Drawing in a breath, she lifted her hand, and with a simple wave, a faint popping noise was heard as she snapped the bones in its neck, severing its spinal cord. Because the creature had no traditional brain patterns she couldn't turn off its mind the way she could a normal human. This was the most humane way even if there was absolutely no humanity in the thing. The X-Men still were.

The creature jerked, and its body went still. Jean turned to glance back at the others, then noticed the faint remnants of neural activity as its arms and legs started to twitch again.

"That...should've worked."

"Should of, but I can sense something mechanical inside its body. Maybe it is what's keeping it alive?" Lorna stepped forward as she located the core of the metal chunks located deep within the body. She lifted her own hand to sent out an EMP pulse to knock out the circuits. After a moment she lowered her hand, "I don't sense anything mechanical moving within..."

It was equally inert without. While no activity would have been visible to the naked eye, no more muscle twitched in Jean's telekinetic grip, and no vestige of neural impulses shivered across her mind.

Faceless as it was, the creature still managed to convey the subtle change between living thing and lump of meat.

A moment passed, then another, and yet another still before Jean's unfocused eyes finally blinked and she tilted her head with a somewhat surprised pause. "I don't sense any more signs of life. I think it's really dead." She had expected more of a fight, for all the creature had done.

Holding a sword-shaped portal in one hand, Clarice wanted to make sure. "Let me check, for good measure." First do no harm maybe, but also stay down and stay dead, too. One of her portals in its head, no matter how small, would ensure it wouldn't get up regardless.

Tabitha juggled a trio of bombs in one hand, eyes warily on what was supposed to be the source of all this gore. "Do we have to leave it in one piece?" she asked.

"Not when we leave no," Scott allowed, "But for now, let's leave it be. I want to know more about what exactly that was and why it attacked this town before we do anything more to it. We may need it as evidence." The X-Man gave the monster's body one last look before motioning to his teammates, "Split up into groups and let's comb through the rest of the town and see if there is anything else out there. If you run into anymore of those let me know, but they don't appear to be that tough, just fast."

Garrison was looking around, a preoccupied expression on his face. "There's a pattern to the killings." He said, pointing out a vague but discernible path that had been made through town. "Anyone want to follow the horribly bloody brick road to the Wizard with me?"

"I think that's in the direction of Lionel's lab. I'll go," Jean said, nodding grimly.

"Maybe he'll still be there, or close by at least. I'm not picking up any immediate readings from him, or anyone else, but it's possible something might be blocking my telepathy. It's happened before." And in this instance she was hoping she was right and there was someone still alive out there, hiding, waiting for rescue.

"May as well go with," Marius volunteered. "Might be able to sniff him out. Or if worse comes to worse identify his . . . him." The young man kept looking back to the bizarre creature with a puzzled look on his face, but declined further comment.

Scott nodded slowly, "Ok, let's split up and see what we can find. Emplate, Phoenix, Dominion and I will head up and take a look around the lab to see what's up there." The X-Man glanced around the rest of the team, "Blink, Polaris and Anchor, why don't you head that way and sweep around the edge of town. Firestar, Penance and Meltdown, you take the opposite direction. Everyone stay in contact and let us know if you run into anymore of those," he nodded at the pile of flesh that had been the creature that attacked them. "We'll meet here again in 2 hours to compare notes."