xp_logs | Fires From The Ashes

Angelo leads a group to Africa to investigate the last spotting of the Dark Riders

The meeting with Charles had helped clarify a few things, but the team still needed to come up with their own individual plan. The Dark Riders were at Muir Island -- of that, there was no doubt. But what was their role? Why did they come out now?

The only way to get that information was to go to the last known location, Cairo, Egypt and start from the bottom: talking to the people around, and determining what needed to happen. It would take everyone's efforts to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The others were relying on them.

"Hope", Angelo said curtly - he'd barely had any warmth in him since the events at Muir, shutting down all emotions hard for better functioning. "You're good with people; go charm them but page in every hour. North, Doc Reyes, you don't need me to tell you what to do. Jessica, you're with me."

"Yes, sir." Hope drew a thin cotton scarf from her bag before draping it around her head and stepping from behind the pillar as she made way from the shadowed corner they had gathered. Taking in the wide variety of small shops in the vicinity, she made her way to what seemed to be the busiest or most popular shop and started browsing through the variety of knickknacks on offer.

Several of the Dark Riders had a distinctive appearance. With some luck she would be able to gather some information if strange figures had been around...

Cecilia watched Angelo as she adjusted the light sweater she'd brought to cover her shoulder. She'd never seen him so tense, although it wasn't like she was the picture of calm herself. The news of Matt's death had hit her particularly hard, but having a task to focus on was keeping her together.

"Okay," she finally said, mostly to prepare herself. "Let's go talk to the people."

North offered her his arm to grasp at the elbow, his expression a picture of serenity in comparison to the storms lurking beneath his companion’s constructed façades. He said nothing of it though, merely patted the doctor’s hand in a vague gesture of comfort. “Pick a spot first.”

In the meantime, the spy’s gaze swept the area behind the dark lenses of his shades, covertly tracking Hope as she flitted towards the stores.

Jessica cringed a bit at the sharp efficiency with which Angelo guided his troops. She guessed that's what they were now. Soldiers. If not, she certainly felt as though she had been drafted. Letting out a slight sigh, she turned to Angelo with a small smile.

"Think while Hope talks nice to the everyday folks, we should hit up some of the other, seedier places? You know, where a little more...force may be necessary? Trying to pick your brain here Angelo, give me something to work with." She asked, crossing her arms over her chest. She'd never done something like this. Tried to track down some strange ass folks with a group of equally strange ass folks, though ones that were decidedly nicer than the first ones.

"That's the plan", he said with a nod. "Force might be necessary, but sometimes you get just as far with looking like you're ready for force. I grew up in places like that..."

"Yes, well, that sounds like a plan." Cecilia said half-heartedly. She was scanning the area much as Hope had, and she finally settled on the line of people outside what she assumed to be a pharmacy. "Enjoy pretending to bash heads in."

That came out more sardonic than she'd intended, so she gently patted Angelo on the back. "Be careful." And with that, she headed toward the store, nodding at Hope as she passed.

"Alright boss man, let's find the nearest dive. I assume you'll be playing bad cop?" Jessica asked. Joking was the best way to hide the fear that flooded her. From what she understood, these Dark Riders were some serious shit. And, well, her training with Rogue aside, she wasn't really ready for all this. She turned to look at Angelo, a man she had just met a short while ago, and she wondered just what had happened to make him so...distant. She shook herself and let out a breath she didn't know she had been holding. She needed to trust him. Otherwise, she'd never be able to make it through this.

"I can do that", he said with the faintest smile. "To the patrons, anyway. Maybe you could be nice to the wait staff?" They probably wouldn't be used to many people being nice to them.

"Good cop? I'm all over it. Now, let's get to it." Jessica answered with a faint smile of her own.

"Right then." And he turned away from the tourist quarter, towards the places tourists would be quietly told not to go.

Jessica sighed internally as she spoke to yet another patron of the dive that they had found themselves in. She'd was getting very tired of people attempting to touch her inappropriately and was within seconds of breaking some fingers if she didn't find out anything soon. At Angelo's suggestion, she'd been talking up the wait staff, hoping to find out something that could help them.

"You're saying nothing...unusual has gone on, then? No big jobs?" She asked. The man she was speaking too gave her a wide eyed look before he spoke.

"This place is full of big jobs miss, and I don't think I like you asking." The man replied. Jessica had to stop herself from tearing her hair out in frustration. Instead, she grabbed the man's right hand in her own and pulled herself toward him. Her lips paused next to his ear, her hair falling to provide cover for her words. She'd told Angelo she was good cop, but that hadn't gotten her anywhere. "Alright, look. I'm going to ask you one more time. Has anything out of the ordinary for you sleazebags happened recently? I'm asking you nicely and politely. Refuse to answer and you're going to have to explain to your bosses how you can do your job with a pulverized hand. Get it?" She asked, applying just the slightest bit of her strength to the man's hand. He hissed in pain, and his lips loosened immediately.

"No, please!" He begged. "I-I heard something about someone taking writings. One's written in the old tongue. I-I don't know from where or when exactly. Please, that's all I know." He answered. Jessica smirked and released the man. He scuttled away from her at an astonishing speed, and Jessica quickly began to look around for Angelo. 'Stealing writings? Is that really what the big baddies are after? If it's strange to these sleazebags, it might be worth running by Angelo.' She thought as she made her way across the dive toward her fellow mutant.

Angelo had watched this with some amusement from across the room, where he'd been having better luck with one of the local drunks. Only too willing to talk, the man had spilled every detail he'd heard about bizarre strangers in the district.

"That looked satisfying."

Jessica gave a small smile as she brushed a stray lock of hair out of her face.
"It was. This whole shitstorm must really be starting to get to me. Let's do me a favor and forget about that skeeze. What'd you find out?" Jessica asked.

"My friend here", he patted the man's arm, "thinks he might have seen the people we're looking for, and they raided some kind of museum. Really old books and engravings, like a thousand years old."

Jessica nodded.

"Your friend might be right. The skeezy waiter told me someone took some old writings, written in a language no one uses anymore. Think we should grab the others and check it out?" She asked.

"Sounds like a plan. What they wanted probably isn't there anymore, if it was, but we might get an idea what they're interested in."

Meanwhile, in another section of the town, Hope, North and Cecilia had been busy in their own right.

Hope saw the others move from their sheltered spot from the corner of her eyes, never pausing once as she held up various knickknacks and enthusiastically chattered at the shopkeeper all the wonders Egypt had to offer. Her eyes never quite showed the smile that she had pasted on her face... Matt was gone... and not just him...Dr. Grey vanished... and so many injured.

"I heard something about a movie shooting or a theater play nearby? People said they had seen characters in their costumes on the street! I do so love the theater!" At the shop keeper's disappointing response, she quickly paid for a small scarab medallion and left the shop, making way to the next one, once more pulling the smile on her face. From porcelain to ivory to steel...

Wary that Hope’s overly cheerful act and the fact that she was a lone white girl in the marketplace would draw unwanted attention to her, North kept Hope in his line of sight as he joined the queue to the pharmacy with Cecilia. He stood slightly out of line to sweep and catalogue the people in the queue, brows arching over the rim of his shades as a heavily bandaged man joined the line behind them.

“Whoa, dude. You all right? You look like someone dropped a camel on you.”

The man crossed his arms with a wince, which deepened into a frown. "I am fine," he said gruffly, taking a step away from North to put some distance between them.

Cecilia turned around to face him. "I'm sure you are, but what's under the bandages? I'm a doctor - let me take a look."

"No," he said curtly. "There was —" He glanced at a younger man next to him and muttered some words in Arabic. "It is glass. I got cut."

"Okay." The doctor just nodded, because that was hardly helpful. She glanced up at North and shrugged then started rifling around in the bag slung over her shoulder. "Can you tell me where?"

Both the man and his companion looked dubiously at them, uncertainty clear in their expressions. The hushed conversation in Arabic that followed was far too quick for North to keep up with his smattering of knowledge of the language. So he offered up a wry look and an amused twist of his lips.

"You may as well let her look, man," he said. "She's very stubborn. I mean, I can take the woman out of the hospital but not the doctor out of the woman."

"It's true," Cecilia shrugged apologetically, taking one hand from her bag and clapping North on the back a little more forcefully than she'd intended. "Old, strong-willed, highly-educated me. With my three degrees and years of experience." She went back to searching.

The man appraised Cecilia, frowning slightly before looking at North and shrugging. "Okay," he said. He turned his head slightly to his friend, saying something that seemed terse in Arabic. The other man started to unwrap the bandages.

As he peeled off the last one, he gasped, causing an otherwise-preoccupied Cecilia to look up. "Holy shit." His gashes were long, and they were numerous. One looked particularly deep - deeper than the kinds of lacerations she'd have expected from a broken window. "How - how did this happen?" She finally located the tube of Neosporin for which she'd been searching and pulled out of her bag. She unscrewed the cap and gestured to his arm. "May I?"

The man hesitated, but angled the largest of his wounds towards her. "Big explosion at work," he said finally with a heavy frown. "This is from window glass."

"Crazy people," his companion added, accent more pronounced in his speech, made more emphatic by an eye roll and a vaguely exasperated hand gesture towards the heavens.

"Where?" North asked, ignoring the way the injured fellow's head snapped to the side to glare at his friend. "Are there more people injured? Shouldn't your employers have sent you to the hospital instead?"

The man snorted. "Hospital?" He winced and pulled his arm back as Cecilia began applying the antibiotic to his wounds.

"Sorry, sorry." The doctor threw a hand up in apology. "Might sting a little. I forget," The man moved her arm back toward her, muttering what she had to assume were some curses in Arabic. Rather than cursing back, she forced a smile onto her face, trying to look the very picture of medical service. "You were saying. What's wrong with Cairo hospitals?"

"Nothing's wrong," the injured man said, now looking at North. The disdain on his face was all too clear. "They ask questions, and it takes too long. And it's expensive. The pharmacy here, they just ask what's wrong; they give you what you need."

"Sure," his friend scoffed and shook his head. "And you don't have to tell them about the men with the hoods who ransacked your—."

The injured man drew his arm away from Cecilia so he could jab the other man's breastbone with his elbow.

North arched an eyebrow at them. "Oh-kay..."

"Ignore him," he said stiffly.”Some things are better not knowing about."

His friend huffed, looking slightly insulted and launched into a whole string of Arabic. North traded glances with Cecilia.

Cecilia shrugged at North. They both should have brushed up on her Arabic. She reached for the man's arm, pulling it back toward her with a bit more force than necessary. "Listen - see how it's red around here?" She glanced up at him, then back at the arm. "You need to keep an eye on that, because it could get infected.”If you start to see fluid or you get a fever, go to a doctor."

The man responded with a curt nod, then waved his free hand as if to tell Cecilia to get on with it. She dropped the Neosporin back in her bag and pulled out new bandages. "You know," she said quite casually, "if something exploded - something big, I mean, there could be other people who need help. Treatment. I'd hate to think they didn't get the help they needed because you didn't tell me where they are." She shrugged as she worked. "Wouldn't want that to cause any rifts either." Her eyes darted toward his friend. "You know, if they found out."

The man scowled at her. "They will be f—"

"Oh, shut up, Gamal." His friend, apparently relishing the opportunity to win this argument, rolled his eyes. "I can tell you where, but it's better to draw a map, I think. You two, you will get lost."

The injured man, now shooting death daggers at her, frowned. "Finish up," he commanded Cecilia.

"Almost done," she smiled, then nodded at both men. "Thank you. I appreciate it"

Suddenly, North stiffened, head swiveling to the side as he peered through the marketplace in search of something. Or someone

"Hey, Hon? I think our little troublemaker has wandered a bit too far. You do your thing I'm gonna go get her, 'kay?"

The German man left with squeeze to her shoulder, fingers brushing through the ends of her hair in a subtle show of affection that doubled up as reassurance as he left Cecilia to wrap up the conversation while he weaved quickly through the crowds towards the early stirrings of a potential commotion.

This guy had looked at Hope suspiciously as soon as she inquired about theater shows or movie sets. Clearly, she had struck somewhat closer to home here. "I am so sorry, sir... Did I ask something strange?" She lowered her eyes just a bit, but still enough to keep him in sight.

"What do you know about this, girl?" The man asked, his dark eyes shimmering angrily.

She quickly sidestepped as he reached for her. "Nothing much, sir. Only that I think you must have crossed paths with them and did not enjoy the encounter very much, so to speak." Hope replied as she stepped to the side again. This was not quite going the way she had hoped...

A heavy hand landed on her shoulder, which may have caused her to tense defensively until she looked up into North's face. "What did I say about staying close, kid?" He asked, tone almost scolding, but mostly fondly exasperated. She could not have missed the way he had put himself between the man and herself -- and neither had the man, judging from the look that passed across his angry features. "And about annoying the locals?"

Hope folded her arms and glanced over at the German man. "I think someone else already did the annoying for me." She stepped around North, reaching out soothingly with a hand, though she did not touch the man in regards to the cultural traditions of where she was. "It seems to me like they hurt someone or something he cared about, just like they did with us." And putting him on the same plane as they were, Hope hoped.

North said nothing, merely crossed his arms and watched the upset man for further signs of violence. But at this moment, despite the way his body was still angled to make a grab at her, the shopkeeper seemed to have stopped short, blinking rapidly as though he were still trying to understand her words.

"My friend and I..." Hope indicated North with a gesture. "... We are hoping to bring these men to justice. But to do that we do need to find them and everything you can tell us will help." The man seemed to relax a little further and Hope glanced over at North, knowing he would know far better which info was best to get.

"Just tell us what is wrong," North said easily, though the hardness in his eyes was anything but. "Who wronged you and where we may find them."

The shopkeeper's continued hesitance was obvious, more so than Cecilia's patient had been. But when North kept to his silence and drew Hope back in closer to his side, he relaxed and curled in on himself in defeat, moving back into the shade of his shop.

"My sister's husband, he was a scholar. He worked at this place that keeps old writings. I don't know," he made a vague, abortive gesture on the air. "Complicated. But very boring. Yesterday, bad men attacked. Killed him. I don't know," he repeated, looking lost. "They say the men looked like monsters. Out of movie or film." He nodded at Hope.

North hummed thoughtfully, then requested pen and paper on which he redrew the map Gamal's friend had drawn from memory. "At this place?"

"Yes, yes," the shopkeeper nodded fervently, speaking its name in Arabic a couple of times.

Glancing at North, Hope stepped forward once more. It seemed like they had the information they needed or at least confirmation of earlier information. "Please, convey our regrets to your sister for her loss and reassure her we will do what we can to gain justice for her husband."

"You mean that you will..."

She quickly interrupted the man.”Please sir, you do not have to concern yourself with that. Your sister is far more important here..."

North's face remained impassive, hiding his discomfort at having revealed too much to the man; made too many promises. Instead, he reached out and clapped a solid palm on the man's shoulder, giving it a sharp squeeze that could have been comfort or warning, no one but him could tell.

"Just make sure you keep this meeting to yourself," he said, not unkindly. "Or we may not be able to help at all."

He waited for the uncertain nod of reply and quelled the shopkeeper's fumbling thanks with a pointed look before spinning on his heel and ushering Hope away. "He'll last maybe a day or so. If we're lucky. We need to move quickly," he said gruffly. Sometimes when you tell a person too much, they became both a liability and a target themselves. But North said nothing else, and waved at Cecilia as she approached.

Time to regroup.