Little Paper Dolls: Shouldn't Have Touched That...

[xp-cuckoos.livejournal.com]

Someone touched something they shouldn't have, and suddenly it's all going to hell. X-Force might want to leave on the closer side of right now.



Sirens blared. Lights flashed. It wasn't quite like a scene out of a spy thriller, but it was close. All that it was missing was a 'Self-Destruct Sequence Activated' warning narrated by a calm-voiced woman while everybody ran around in a panic, arms waving. Well, they had the latter part at least. All around them was chaos; scientists and guards scrambling to get out of the compound before whatever terrible fate awaited them actually occurred.

And it was all Dom's fault. At least, she was pretty sure it was. She had thought she'd been careful poking through their systems, but the flashing warning that had popped up on the screen said otherwise. And now the whole thing was going to explode or something. Just her luck.

"C'mon! I grabbed the schematics before everything shut down - this way!"

"Bloody hell, Dom, what'd you break this time?" Some things were constant, no matter the universe. And Domino's penchant for creative breaking was one of them. Doug had wanted to backseat hack, but he grudgingly admitted that Dom's skills were more or less equal to his own, so the likelihood of his tripping whatever failsafe she had was probably pretty high. He dashed along in her wake, trusting in her luck to create holes for them to dart through in the panicked throng.

Wade shot two men who looked like they might be contemplating an attempt to stop the trio as they made their escape. "Hey, no need to rush. This is a Weapons facility, we're totally good until the chick starts the countdown -- "

A low-pitched chime came through the overhead speakers, managing to briefly drown out the blaring of the emergency sirens. A preternaturally calm, female voice followed. "Thirty seconds to self-destruct."

"Well, shit," Wade said. "Less 'bloody helling,' more running. Now." He followed his own advice, the map of the place settling in his brain -- so damn familiar.

"I didn't break anything!" Dom protested in vain, sprinting after the others. "At least, I didn't think I did. That rootkit was solid."

"Twenty-five seconds."

"Well, let's play 'who screwed the pooch' once we're out of the fiery death zone." In that Doug was agreed with Wade, and between the schematics Dom had gotten and Wade's experience, they made good headway. "Do we have all the... stuff we came for?" He asked, not wanting to call attention to the fact that they were the ones that had rescued the girls and caused all this in the first place while Weapon personnel were all around.

"Last check-in, yeah," Wade said. He felt like he was herding cats. They were all moving in the right direction, but with the chiming and the shouting. "Ugh, yeah, hang a left here -- left, we won't make it otherwise." He took the corner behind Doug and Domino at speed, almost ricocheting off the opposite wall even as he fired at the men now following them. "Red door, head for the red door." At least some things, like emergency exit doors, were universal.

As was the tendency for people to panic in an emergency. As they legged it down the long corridor Dom spied a flicker of motion out of the corner of her eye: more people spilling into the hallway and clogging the way. To add injury to insult, some of them were carrying guns. "Well, crap."

The nearest guard fell with a bullet in his knee, and it was only the supreme urgency of the situation that kept her from making a Skyrim quip. As another spun towards the sound of gunfire she charged towards her, hoping one of the others would back her up when the short-term distraction had run its course.

"Seriously?" Wade bellowed, the infinitely calm woman's voice coming over the speakers again.

"Fifteen seconds."

"Shoot at us after we haven't all blown up, you mindless Weapon Plus assholes." Wade barreled through the group of people standing between Doug and the door like a linebacker, using his shoulder more than his guns, and guns as blunt force weapons. He didn't care about getting shot, but both Domino and Doug lacked his healing factor.

People went sprawling in every direction.

"Must go faster...must go faster..." Doug and Dom were close on Wade's heels, a wedge driving the flunkies apart as they bolted for the door. If Wade's style was football linebacker, Doug's was hockey forecheck line, and he hammered down anyone left in his friend's wake with forearms and elbows.

And Dom... Dom was just running like hell. They burst out of the door one-two-three and then the rest, or at least whatever staff and security hadn't been plowed over or shot in their escape attempt. Dom didn't stop when she felt snow crunch under her feet or even once she hit the treeline - no distance was too far away if the base really was going to explode. It was only once her lungs began to burn from the chill air that she slowed, and not a moment too soon as behind them there was a loud rumble and a boom, and then the base - or what remained of it - began to spit chunks of concrete and rubble across the sky.

"Well shit. I guess the countdown wasn't fake after all," Dom wheezed, leaning over, her hands on her thighs. "Good to know."

Wade was a winded, but even his gimpy healing factor could take care of all the damage lactic acid might attempt to do to his muscles. He urged the other two farther away, reaching for his phone. "Tunnels," he muttered, gesturing toward the snow-covered dirt beneath their feet. They'd managed to put a good deal of space between themselves and the main part of the facility, but there was a labyrinth's worth of hallways and secret passages underground somewhere. "Fuck," he thumbed to his contacts, hitting the very first ICE one because Marie-Ange had been with Emma and Jean and he really kind of wanted to make sure all of them, plus whatever baby psychic they'd been looking for, had gotten safely out of the facility.