Impossible Odds: Com'on, Get Lucky (Unfinished)

[x-longshot.livejournal.com]

What's left of the Wolf's Nest Motel is guest to the X-Men, Mojo's Henchmen, and a whole lot of bad luck.

The X-Men arrive to find the remains of the motel and a fleeing Centino. Rocky is dispatched to follow the blond, and the other X-Men deal with unfriendly suits.

The explosion didn't need much oomph to decimate the stressed motel, but what was left after a roar of fire blasted off one of the lower level doors started to crumble very, very quickly into smoldering ruins.

Several figures moved purposefully to not be part of said ruin. There were two men, stumbling and weary, in tattered black suits who had been sheltered from the explosion due to being on the second story when the trunk had exploded. Two other men, their identical suits still clean, sat dumbfounded outside the door leading to the Wolf's Nest's front desk on the east end of the parking lot.

Another man, blond and not suited at all, emerged seemingly unscathed from the hole the door had made. He was, however, nimble, and flipped and wove up and through the crumbling structure like the scene has been choreographed. He went west and disappeared into the woods, pursued by a Golden Retriever.

Disheveled, angry, and off-balance was not a look anyone ever saw on Spiral. At least not if they wanted to end the evening with their body and mind functioning correctly. But as she appeared at the woods' edge and pursued into the trees, that was exactly how she looked, and a string of curse words came out in a near growl as she ran.

The movement in the ruins of the motel caught Scott's eye dragging him away from his search for a still functional staircase or ladder. The suits seemed as confused by what had happened as the others, although their presences meant that something was up. The running man however looked suspicious "I've located a handful of men who may know what's going on on the south side of the Motel. Rocky, we have a runner headed for the woods if you can cut him off." he informed his team over the radio.

"I'm on it, Mr. Cyclopes!" Dori chirped, taking off at a speed no normal human could match.

As Dori left in pursuit of Spiral, Yvette used her higher standpoint to ambush the two remaining men. Leaping down from the exposed upper floor, she landing on all fours in front of the former front desk, eyes gleaming as her skin thickened into her spiky body armour. "Gentlemen, if you please," she said, the politeness contrasting with her increasingly frightening exterior. "We have some questions for you before you leave."

As the suppressing fire died down Scott poked his head up from his cover for long enough to see Yvette advancing on the goons in her most terrifying armored form. It was a great opportunity for Scott to slink out of his hiding place and move closer to the fight, the better to support his teammate. "Careful, Penance," he warned quietly over the radio, "We have no idea what they'll do if you get too close."

The warning was sensible, but just a moment too late. In response to Yvette's words, the two men drew guns, immediately firing at the red spiky mutant. The bullets grazed off Yvette's armour, and her eyes narrowed, a small growl escaping her throat. The spikes of her hair and hands lengthened as she dropped into a crouch, ready to spring.

"Penance no!" Scott broke cover sprinting towards the girl, "Stop, don't do it. Don't hurt them."

At the sound of the voice - the voice of command, the voice to be obeyed - Yvette froze. For a long moment, it seemed as if she would attack any way, but then a great shudder went through her body, the spikes retracting until she was herself again, albeit a self with a layer of hardened skin plates covering her body. When she rose from her feral crouch, it was with a slight smile on her face.

"Very well," she said, holding up one hand in front of her. The fingers fused together to create a long baton, rather than the usual sharp blades, her powers reacting to the need for her to subdue, not kill. "After you, Cyclops."

Scott skidded to a stop in front of the guards, holding up a hand for a moment to catch his breath, "Had me worried there fore a moment," he told the girl honestly before turning to face a guard and cocking his head before straightening up and touching his finger to his earpiece. "Blink, it looks like we're dealing with some kind of reality warping here. I need you to get Scarlet Witch and Roulette here as quickly as you can." He turned to face the two goons, "Sorry to keep you, shall we get down to it?"

---

Rocky follows Centino into the woods, but the intervention of Spiral leads to a game of tag while avoiding the aftermath of Centino's powers.

Dori didn't normally move through the woods, any woods, on the ground. She was normally up in the trees, going from trunk to trunk and branch to branch. The rest of the world didn't move like she did, however. So, for tracking someone she moved on the ground. Still, Dori was quieter and faster than any non-feral human could hope to be. Right now though, she was paused, her nose to the ground on a trail that was so obvious she was sure it had to be someone else.

But nope, scent confirmed it. As did the locals, chattering among themselves. Big, dumb human crashing through everything, doesn't know where he's about.

Normally, Dori would chide them for being rude but despite herself she almost had to agree with the dumb part. At least when it came to moving through this type of terrain. Either this was a trap, which she sincerely doubted, or it was exactly what it looked like and he had no idea what he was doing.

"Well," she muttered, "at least it will be easy to find him."

There were two sets of prints and many, many broken tree branches.

Felix had gained and overtaken Arthur, who was hampered by his rebuilding migraine and what felt like the start of another anxiety attack. He had hoped to escape Spiral in the pines, again, but every way he turned brought up an exposed root. Every hold snapped. The forest, nestled and grasping in the craggy mountain foothills, had seen better days.

"Doesn't this park have a forest ranger? I give good money to the Park Service!" Arthur yelled to no one in particular, holding his head, as he skidded down a mossy incline in what he felt must be away from the Wolf's Nest.

Dori paused, "I can hear you! Can you hear me?" she asked, after all her hearing was leaps and bounds above other peoples and just because she could hear this kid didn't mean he could hear her, "I promise, I'm friendly! I'm not a forest ranger, but I love trees!"

Her voice filled what Dori could soon see was a large valley intersected by a creek. There was a lake framed by mountains in the distance. A few beats later, an echo responded, "Just stay away! You won't take me back!"

A distant rumble signaled an approaching storm.

"I'm not going to take you anywhere you don't want to go, promise! I'm really nice! My name is... well I don't think I'm supposed to say right now but I have a nice name and I really just want to help!" Dori called.

How obliging of Arthur and whoever else was out there to highlight their positions by shouting. Spiral didn't have near the level of outdoor training that her wayward target did, but whatever small noises her passage through the pines made were covered by either the nearing sound of thunder or the back-and-forth shouting.

Now if she could only figure out how to lay hands on Arthur just long enough to get him teleported back to Mojo's nearest studio-cum-safehouse. And then she could have a long hot bath, a mojito, and take her usual vicious pleasure in watching Arthur's brain be turned into pudding again.

The trees thinned as she found herself on the outskirts of the lake. She couldn't see Arthur, but she could see the young woman who had been engaged in a bizarre game of Marco Polo with him. Was that a tail? Spiral took a moment to thank whatever genetic fluke had left her without any visible mutation - keeping an enormous bushy tail clean just seemed ridiculous.

[Watch out! Watch out! From above! From above! Watch out!] The chattering of the Squirrels was suddenly as loud as thunder. Dori looked up, there was indeed someone else there.

[Thanks!] she said, changing direction, looking to get behind the baddie. She could do this. She was awesome. She was the Amazing Squirrel Girl.

Damn, Spiral thought as the girl shifted direction. How had she figured out that she was being shadowed? No matter, though, Spiral was a woman of practicality. No sense in bemoaning what might have been, deal with what is. And so she waited until Tail Girl circled up and into the treeline, and then teleported down to the waterline, continuing toward where she'd heard Arthur shouting last.

She wasn't far behind. Arthur was hopping from rock to rock across the path of the creek in a futile attempt to mask his trail west and toward the lake. By this time, a light rain had began to fall, coating the frosted valley in a light film of soak. The gravely soil quickly turned to mud as the previous thaw was tempered by the new runoff at an alarming speed -- none of this, course, was of noticed by the blond on the rocks.

"Nope!" It was a short phrase, but the echo of it sent unlikely tremors through reality, surfacing pitfalls that Arthur was too dumb to notice as he continued unknown back toward the hill he had just stumbled down.

One such echo caused a flock of panicked starlings to burst from the underbrush near where Dori and Spiral had unwittingly started to converge.

Dori almost fell out of her tree, but held on. Her thick claws were good for something. The squirrels were chattering, almost screaming, [The one human vanished! Poof poof! Gone! Vanished!]

[Find them for me? I'm a friend, I brought lots of food! It's a great game!] Dori called out, loudly. Ever squirrel in the area was invited to help with the search. [We have to stop the teleporting one! Save my friend - the scared kid! Help! Help!]

Spiral skirted around the birds - she may have already scuffed up her outfit with dirt and debris, but she drew the line at being shit on by birds. On the other hand, she had kept her sense of direction better than Arthur, clearly, and knew where they were headed. Now to just keep herding him back toward that rinky-dink motel, and maybe one of those useless flunkies she'd been saddled with might manage to actually earn his pay.

So she made a bit more show of her pursuit, the flash of her teleportation visible in the gloom, cutting a rough arc behind Arthur to drive him along before her.

The starling, panicking at the teleportation, flurried low and began to peck at any human they could see. This began a cavalcade — or, frankly, a mass exodus — of other woodland creatures from the area. Raccoons, foxes, snakes; all now underfoot, the forest suddenly teeming with life that just wanted to get the fuck out.

Thunder sounded in the distance, which almost covered the low rumbling of the valley floor. Arthur, falling into Spiral's herding, left the creek frantically and began to scale the side of the hill to avoid her. His eye was pulsing bright yellow again.

Dori fell from her perch but landed easily on the ground. The squirrels in the trees panicked and took off in all directions, running down the trees and all over the forest floor like suddenly every squirrel for a hundred miles was packed into the small area around Dori's feet. She stumbled and tried to get a foothold again without stepping on anyone.

[Sorry!] She squeaked, [Excuse me! Coming through! I owe you guys lots of walnuts! Don't worry, I'll pay up!]

Spiral's reflexes with her teleportation stood her in good stead — only just fast enough to keep her from being flattened by a falling tree. She pressed forward, trying to not only close the gap between her and Arthur, but also to outrun the chaos that spread behind him like the ripples left by a boat's passing. "Damn you," she said, loud enough to be heard. She was going to take all of this out of his hide when he was back in custody.

The ripples were growing steadily, and the ground quaked and slide as more trees became uprooted and jostled as a mudslide ravaged the hill and the surrounding wilderness gradually fell apart in Longshot's passing.

Arthur himself has already scaled the hill, running and dodging for his life in the cacophony, but almost stopped to gasp as he was brought right back out near the Wolf's Nest motel.

He threw his hands up in the air. "This is ridiculous!"

---

Blink is called to bring in the Scarlet Witch and Roulette to deal with Arthur's reality bending.

"You ready?" Clarice asked Wanda as she came through her portal. It wasn't really a question, she was here for Wanda whether she was ready or not. The shit was going down and they were needed. It was as simple as that.

How long had it been since Wanda had stepped up with the X-Men? She honestly couldn't remember but it wasn't like she'd been sitting on the sidelines since she'd left the leather behind. Though, she thought with a sigh, maybe more sideline lately than she'd prefer. "As if I'd be sitting around in my nightgown when Scott asks for help," she responded to Clarice, heading towards the younger woman. "The quicker the better, though, to get Jennie. Teleporting into this mess will need all of our concentration."

"Just don't screw up my powers," Clarice laughed, knowing Wanda wouldn't do something like that. "Leathers look good on you still," she grinned and tightened her ponytail. "Let's go then," she extended an arm out to the older woman.

"I'll keep my chaotic tendencies to myself, then." She felt slightly smug at the compliment, despite the urgency of the situation. Wanda took a hold of Clarice's arm and took a deep breath as they stepped through the portal. Wanda really, really hated this kind of transportation...

At the other end of the portal stood Jennie, arms crossed over her old uniform. The sleevelessness offered a greater range of motion along with healthy padding for her forearms. She was a much sharper version of the girl who had previously worn the uniform. Her biceps twitched with anticipation. "Y'all ready to get this party started?" Jennie asked, a hint of her former mischievousness in the corner of her mouth.

"Ain't no party like a chaos-luck party!" Clarice crowed, giving Jennie a fist-bump. "All we need is Marie-Ange and the insane headache will be complete!" Thank goodness she wasn't a telepath. Nope. She liked her portals and staying the hell out of peoples minds. "After you guys," Jennie gestured. She had never gotten used to the gut-punch-wrench that accompanied teleportation. At least shed stopped throwing up afterward. Mostly.

"Brace yourselves," Wanda said, voice grim. "The disruption we face on the other side will make "landing" -" If that's what one called the end result of teleporting. "- even trickier than just having the two of us along."

"Shut up," Clarice replied blithely, tone unconcerned even though she worried about that, too. "I've not teleported into a wall yet and I don't intend to start now. So, shush with the doom-n-gloom and let's go," she opened the portal before anyone had a chance to respond.

---

The Scarlet Witch and Roulette work to undo Arthur's building lucksnap as tensions with Mojo's men come to a boil.

Arthur wanted to call bullshit on the universe.

Despite being an outdoorsman for most of his life and successfully managing to evade two attackers, he had managed to get turned around in a circle in a valley. This is why, after he emerged victoriously through the underbrush — caked in mud, his wounds reopened — all he could do was toss his hands in the air.

"This is ridiculous!" He announced breathlessly to the still burning motel and the fight that had broken out around it.

Scott ducked an attack, retaliating with an optical blast that knocked his opponent off his feet, but before the X-man had a chance to act on his opportunity another goon had slid smoothly into place, covering the first has he scrambled back to his feet, the barrage of fire forcing Scott to duck behind cover once more. "Whoever they are, they're seriously organized." The X-man commented on the radio.

"And well trained," came Yvette's reply. She was hampered by trying not the hurt the man she was up against - unfortunately, he had no such restriction and she grunted as a knife slammed into her side, snapping off against the hardened skin of her body armour.

"I got someone! Well, THE person. I'm following him, he's really easy to follow but we should get him out of here!" Doreen said, keeping right on Arthur's tail.

A purple portal opened, depositing Jennie, Wanda and Clarice with the others. "Booyah! We're here for the party!" Or not so much.

"Holy shi — " Jennie said, eyes wide. Probability was stretched incredibly thin here. The world throbbed red, warning of an impeding lucksnap. She threw out her hands, a white nimbus surrounding her as she prepared to deal with reality basically folding back in on itself.

"What kind of knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing moron does this?" she hissed, a fine sheen of perspiration breaking out long her forehead.

Wanda, on the other side of Clarice, had paled in just the few moments they'd been there. She'd been called on several times to help control or work through snaps like this but this was by far the worst one she'd ever seen. "At least it's easy to find the center of this," she said, grimly, and pointed.

That moron, his left eye shining like a supernova in the middle of the impending chaos, was trying to move stealthily along the treeline in the opposite direction of the motel. Yet all the tiny, twingy rosettes of reality, probable cause humming like Flight of the Bumblebees set to double time, pointed right at him if you knew how to look correctly. Pointed and twanged in anticipation.

A white, swearing blur materialized a few feet ahead of Arthur, and reality bent sharply to the left as a large tree fell to close the gap. The woman blinked away, but the man took the opportunity to swing himself up and onto the falling trunk. He danced across it like a gymnast on a balanced beam — forward flips and tucks to avoid branches — until a leap and a roll parkored him onto the top of cars left in the parking lot.

In the distance and up the steep slope leading to the valley wilderness below, the deeper bedrocks of reality boiled in warning.

Jennie dragged her attention away from the cause of it all, a man encased in a bit of white that caused the world to bloom red as he walked, and up the hillside where an ominous crack echoed through the valley like a canon shot.

"Oh for the the love of--" Jennie turned and pushed out, luck blending with chaos, trying to find the perfect balance between stability and a landslide.

There was too much distraction. If the fighting hadn't been bad enough, the luck snap and the physical effects of it were making things difficult to concentrate on. But Wanda didn't need her physical eyes for what she had to do. When she closed her eyes, it nearly took her breath away - there had only been a few times in her life where the red chaos lines blazed so brightly or chaotically. And none of those times had been good ones.

The lines flicker and move as fast as she's ever seen them, impacted not just by the man who caused this but also swaying, changing, as Jennie manipulates things on her end. Wanda had been the guiding hand when Jennie first came to the mansion which meant that even though their powers were different, they could play off of each other better than almost anyone else in their field. She weaved the strings a few steps behind Jennie, redirecting energy, catching the odd straggler or shoving something back at the other woman to field.

It was a really, really headache developing dance.

Over the comms came Yvette's voice, sounding relieved. "One goon down. What is going on out there? Rocky, do you need help?"

"We need to get him out of here, he's being chased and I'm trying to get the locals to help me out but you know how that goes," Dori said referring to her squirrely help. "So yeah, could use an extraction for him, got my eye on him."

The blazing man, painted in all the luck left in this mountain valley, sat perched on top of a sedan assessing the new onslaught with wild eyes. He searched vainly against the crowd before leaping from the cartop to what remained of the motel's lobby rotunda on the far side of the lot from the assembled X-personages. For what the Wolf's Nest lacked in grandeur, it made up in sheer length as it was built to hug the cliff-face nestled what was supposed to be tourist-enticingly close to the mountains.

The man began to yell. "I'm tired of playing, Rita! Show yourself!"

If Arthur was tired of playing, Spiral (and god, did she hate that he somehow knew her given name) was somewhere past exhausted with it. She was not exactly in a mood to engage Arthur's need for theatricality, but maybe if she did, she could manage to catch him off guard.

"You rang, lover?" she said as she appeared in a flash of light, leaning against what appeared to be the remains of the continental breakfast bar as though it were a grand piano and she were in a thousand-dollar dress rather than her dirt-and-pine-needle ravaged slacks.

"Rita?" A quiet voice piped up as Scott walked around the corner letting the last of the goons fall unconscious to the floor, "Well at least now I have a name to put your face." The X-man cocked his head and looked back and forth between Spiral and Arthur, "You know, I get the feeling he doesn't really want to go anywhere with you right now."

"The name," came a reply so icy it crackled, "is Spiral." She turned slowly to face the newcomers. Recognizing Scott, she smiled thinly. "Ah, my second-favorite Boy Scout. Did you bring that delicious cornfed bohunk with you again?" She made a pouty moue when she didn't see her previous 'rescuer' anywhere. "Pity."

"Oh, you know how it is, Rita," he said you were just to drab dreary and well frankly boring to be work his time. Lets see, his exact words were I think "He'd rather muck out a pig pen than have to have anything to do with you." Scott allowed a smirk to show on his face, "Can't fault his taste there."

Back on his little perch of the roof, Arthur had decided to make the most of this very, very confusing interlude and back stealthily away. His headache was building again and all the leather looked suspiciously like uniforms -- just like the suits in their matchy matchness -- but the fact his producer's aide was distracted was all he needed. He began to sidestep away very, very slowly toward the roof's edge.

Right into a bright-eyed, literally bushy tailed savior.

"Hey! I'm Dor-I mean Rocky, you know, like the squirrel from the cartoon with the moose and the squirrel and the Russian stereotype spies and all that stuff. I'm here to save you!," she said happily.

Arthur yelped a very undignified yelp, curling in on himself as anxiety finally got the best of him. Reality quivered in response. The already tense strings snapped red, and the mountainside rumbled as it began to fall on the hotel.

Wanda's eyes jerked open at the sound and her head whipped towards where it was coming from. Which was a big chunk of rock and mud that was tearing away from the rest of the previously very stable mountainside. She felt reality shift around her, new possibilities — most of them bad or worse — forming from nothing. "Jennie!" she yelled, though there was no mistaking what just happened for anything good. The strings were fading through her fingers as the reality that they'd been attached to changed and she desperately grabbed for more.

Jennie's hands glowed white to Wanda's red, order to balance chaos. Trees took the worst of the damage, rocks pushed more out of the way. Jennie gritted her teeth and sweat broke out along her brow. There was trouble, but if she pushed hard enough they could turn the lucksnap back in on itself.

In concert to the X-Men's efforts, Arthur's gap-mouthed confusion helped abate the flow of probability energy as he stood there, still panicked and still confused, locked in a moment of clear and unexpected speechlessness. His eye flashed out, and the man began to laugh.

The landslide stood temporarily locked at its crest before imploding inward to coat the valley in a wave of dust as all of accumulated water evaporated. The newly formed dry ground was still littered with accumulated forest debris and fallen trunks, but was no longer moving.

"I... just." He wiped at his eyes, pointing to Dori. "You're adorable, but this makes no sense." And then quieter, piteously, "Help me."

That was all Scott needed to hear, "Blink, get him out of here," he commanded over the radio, "We can sort out his powers back at the mansion but we need him out of here now so we can deal with them." he told her referring to Spiral.

"And this isn't working," Clarice announced, a firm hand on Arthur's shoulder, "You're coming with me, boyo," she opened a portal as she spoke, pausing for a moment when a dog jumped into Arthur's arms. Oookay, well, they were all going to the mansion then.

A single spat curse word came from Spiral as she saw her target and assignment slip out of her reach. She turned a finger on Scott, and a laser-sharp narrowing of her eyes. "Don't think this is over, Slim," she said before disappearing in a flash of her own.