Fury Said To A Mouse: Remnants

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Anchor, Blink and Polaris explore the outskirts of the ruined town in search of survivors. The results are not promising.



Fred had meant to open the door on the battered military Humvee near the edge of town, to check for a radio or a map or even someone hiding. But the door came right off its hinges in his grip. He grimaced; he hadn't had a strength issue like that in over a year, but the quiet of this place, the taste in the air that wouldn't leave the back of his mouth...it was getting to him.

Anchor dropped the door on the ground and lit a cigarette before leaning into the Humvee. When he leaned back out, he held up the battered remnants of a radio to Lorna and Clarice.

"Who the hell smashes their radio in like this in a fight...?" Unless it was busted to begin with, of course. But then why was it in the vehicle in the first place...?

"I am not sure if it was them that smashed their own radio." Lorna pointed to a weapon near the vehicle that was destroyed beyond repair. "Whatever happened here, they never stood a chance." She walked over, picked it up and examined the clip. "This one still has a full clip." Dropping it back to the ground and looked around. "Looks like there is another Humvee. We should check it out."

Going over and porting part of the door away so she could open it, Clarice climbed in and then stuck her head back out, "The radio is crushed here, too," she reported. "And a dead dude, full ammo. Whoever did this was thorough. They didn't want any chance of communications later either." Which was not a good sign.

Fred exhaled smoke from his nose as he put himself, as best he could, between Lorna and Clarice and the rest of the wrecked vehicles. He hadn't been an X-Man, for very long at all, but he'd learned long ago to listen when the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, "...stay close tah me, guys. Ah'm gonna let the boss know about this." He flipped on his radio, glancing over the ruined vehicles once more before speaking "Dominion, Cyclops; this is Anchor. We're on the edge of town and...somethin' ain't right here. Looks like military vehicles. Ain't damn near a shot fired tween em...but all the Radio equipment is smashed."

Scott paused in his searching raising his hand to his ear, "Not a shot," he echoed, "We knew it was fast, but to take them all without a chance to react it must have taken the troops by surprise." The more he thought about it, the luckier the X-Men had been. If they hadn't seen it coming they might have ended up in the same state as the troops. "Keep looking around," he told Anchor, "keep your eyes open for anything else unusual."

Fred turned to Lorna and Clarice, feeling that maybe he should stay behind them rather than the other way around. The two had been X-Men waaaaay longer than he had, and seemed closer to used to this level of weirdness by now. Fred coughed into his hand, taking another look at the Humvees before glancing over to Lorna, "So, uh...not all the missions are this creepy, are they? Or is this closer to, uh, like about average?"

Lorna would had given Fred a reassuring smile but the smell and sights were keeping her from doing so. "No. Not this creepy. I've seen dead bodies before but..." Lorna shook her head. "Nothing like this." She walked forward to check out their current location.

"This creepy?" Clarice repeated, smiling brightly. "Nope. Creepier. I've seen....well. Worse than this and better than this. It's higher on the fucked up' scale than most though, I'll give it that," was she supposed to be reassuring to the newbie? Nah. Better he learn than be coddled, "Unfortunately, people suck."

Fred lit another cigarette off of his dying one, "Creepier. Great." Not that he had any room to complain. He'd been at Genosha; he knew the score signing up, and no one promised rainbows and smooth roads. Fred moved past the first row of vehicles, looking down the road a ways. He turned to the two other Xers, "Hey, should we, uh...check down the street further? See how far all this goes...?"

"Don't worry Anchor, as long as we stick together we should be fine." Lorna hoped that didn't come to bite her later. She lifted a few feet into the air to get a better view. "We should. I see more cars in the distance." The older X-Man didn't want to any more than that as she took point. The smell was a bit better up here.

Famous last words indeed. "The we soldier on, soldiers," not that they were, not really, but they did the job anyways because the job needed doing and that was good enough for her. "Let's move it!"



Cyclops, Dominion, Emplate and Phoenix find the inside of Jefferies' lab yields only slightly more information -- and a sense of foreboding.



However ostensibly advanced this weapons manufacturer may have been, they had entered production with technology approximately fifteen years behind the curve. The nostalgic quality created by outdated computers and dot-matrix printers in the administrative offices clashed with the carnage, like walking onto the set of Office Space as directed by Eli Roth.

Scott and Marius had taken the upper levels. Marius' nose told him they were unlikely to hold another creature, and information on what they'd found was by far the more welcome option. The destruction of most of the computers was not the tragedy it could have been; the Slorenians' record-keeping seemed to be similarly behind the times. Many of the files were hard copies, though to their credit the researchers had at least stored them in a secure room.

Unfortunately, it had not been secure enough to protect the people who'd sought it out for shelter.

"Not sure what's important," remarked the younger X-Man as he tried his best to ignore the headless corpse splayed across the threshold. "I have many talents, but the ability to read Cyrillic is not among them."

Scott picked up a sheaf of paper, trying his best to choose one as far from the bodies thrown around the room as possible. "Perhaps it's something to add to the list of things to learn when we get home?" he noted. "For all of us, or maybe Hank or Forge could come up with some kind of translation tool," Scott mused as he flicked through the papers before sighing and shrugging at Marius, "All I can really make out are the pictures," he admitted.

"Best take everything, then. Suppose we could use the standard tool, but it does feel a bit unfair to keep shifting off work to Cypher. Or are we turnin' it over to SHIELD? This is . . ." Marius paused, not wanting to say "a massacre". He finally settled on, "Not a minor incident."

"I'd rather let Cypher take a look at it before we turn it over to SHIELD," Scott replied. "If we turn it over chances are we won't hear anything about it again till they show up later and tell us they need us to sort it out. At least this way we'll know what we're dealing with if we run into this again and can do our own research." It wasn't that he didn't trust SHIELD, but they never told anyone anymore than they needed to know, which didn't always go over well.

Marius nodded. He found his banter capacity not up to full operation at the moment, so settled for professionalism instead. Dutifully, he began to gather everything that looked like it might be important. It was difficult to tell. For all he knew he was collecting invoices for the office breakroom.

Except . . .

"Oi, look -- English." Marius prized a few papers that had half-fallen from a folder. His brows furrowed as he leafed through them before looking back up at Scott. "Looks a bit like a marketing packet."

"Lets see what you've got here." Scott took a proffered copy of the papers from Marius and browsed through it. "Hmm so it's apparently called the Fury, an 'area depopulation weapon'," he noted sourly. "It never fails to surprise me how many new ways people come up with to kill one another. Looks like they were worried about its effectiveness as an anti-mutant weapon," Scott drew Marius' attention to a pair of hand written notes in the margin of the brochure, "Looks like they found it wasn't that effective. That explains why it went down so easily outside."

"Lucky for us, then." Less so for the population of the town, unfortunately. They'd stood no chance. Marius wondered who best expressed the apathy of the business world: the person who had put together a brochure with bullet points like "optimized for autonomous ground combat or area depopulation", or the executive who'd off-handedly jotted the note wondering if "anti-mutant security measures" could be added to the list.

The Australian fished out another copy and gave it a cursory page-through. "'Cybiote Project'? I feel certain that's not a real word . . ." He tilted his head at another note. "Says here it self-repairs with technological and biological components? Er . . ."

Scott exchanged a worried look with Marius. "Self-repair?" he echoed, paging through the brochure till he found the point Marius was referring to. "And we just left it outside..." Scott couldn't remember if there were any other bodies around the Fury where it lay. "We should probably get back there and destroy it as soon as possible." the older man noted.

"No argument there, though I imagine effecting any manner of repair requires it be somewhat operation. Seems a bit unlikely, given the beatin' it took. It's at least half computer, seems like. Still . . ." Marius hesitated. "Don't know that I want to say anything just yet, not without the search done, but that Jefferies bloke Dominion had his eye out for -- he was a fleshcrafter, correct? I've not seen any mutants here, but I did see a bit of an aura on the Fury-thing. Just a specific spot, mind. It was a bit like those dirt golems from Molekevic -- mutant DNA infused in something else. If the Fury uses whatever's to hand . . ."

"Then we might have a problem if we leave it too long," Scott finished for him as he reached for his radio. "Phoenix, Dominion how's your search down there going?" he queried the other searchers. "I'd like to get outside and back to that weapon as soon as we can. We might have come across some bad news for Dominion up here."

Jean and Garrison's footsteps echoed across a gleaming white floor as they scanned the lower levels. "Under better circumstances I would've been highly impressed with their set up. Everything's top of the line down here. I can see where all the money went," she said. The equipment, centrifuges, pippettes, burettes, a photospectrometer, and more, were created to anticipate most scientific and mechanical needs.

But as they made their way further down the hall, the shiny, sterile environment disappeared, as evidenced by large bloody footprints and the smell of death. The blood increased the further they went, in droplets, in smears, in chunks of flesh, until they came to body parts, bullet holes, and a door ripped off its hinges.

"It's like a bad horror film down here." Kane took a look at the door. Whatever had ripped it off was strong enough to leave finger impressions in the metal. "Someone trying to weaponize a mutant and it got out of hand, you think?"

Jean shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted. "At first glance, I don't think so. When I read its mind it felt...Not quite human. Almost mechanical. But...there was still that...trace of something. It's hard to explain. " she said, drawing in a shuddered breath. This was the reason why she didn't watch horror movies. She'd seen enough of it in real life to not be even remotely entertained.

"From what Madison's said about his brother do you think he would do something like that, though?"

"It's hard to say. What he's capable of doing as a mutant and capable of doing as a person are potentially two different things. Lionel's powers were apparently badly diminished following a traumatic incident. But if they were at their full potential?" Kane shook his head. "There might be more to it than just him."

"There's always usually more to it," Jean said, reaching out her hand to trace the indentations the creature had made on a nearby wall. She turned away.

"What's the bad news, Cyclops?" It was a mostly rhetorical question, however, as she had a feeling they already knew the answer.

"We think we know what happened to Jefferies," came the answer over the radio, "Emplate wants to head back to the remains outside to check, but it's not good."

Jean shook her head sympathetically as she glanced toward Garrison with a sigh. "And here was the one time I was hoping for psionic interference. If worse comes to worse and there are no immediately identifiable parts left I could run a--agh!" she flinched, clenching her eyes shut as her hand shot to her temple and she stumbled backward with a sudden limp.

"Phoenix?" He moved quickly, grabbing her arm to stabilize her.

Barely a moment passed, marked by a heavy breath, before Jean's head snapped toward the direction where the other teams were, her face blanched.

"Something's wrong outside."