Siege Perilous - Part 3 - Regrouping
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xp_logsSiege Perilous Day 10 - The remnants of X-Force return home, to find even more bad news.
TW: character death
It was a long trip up the elevator when you're tired. It was longer still when you needed an icepack, a rest and a month's therapy. Artie stumbled as he stepped out of the lift and righted himself. "At least it's all over and done with now and I can go home and get some R and R," he said, opening the main door to the foyer. "The sooner I'm out of here the --- fuck. Fuck."
He stepped aside to let the others see.
Jean brushed a strand of sweat soaked black hair out of her face as she eyed their visitor that she had a feeling wasn't just there to grab a beer.
"Way to jinx it, Artie," she muttered, then glanced back at Kevin.
"She's alone," she said quietly.
"Can't think of a possible sinister reason for that." Kevin said as he walked in, tossing his coat on to the rack before freezing. "Oh shit..." As he passed the door, he could see the crumpled form of Charlie lying on the floor, in a now sticky puddle of blood. The young man's eyes were unseeing and glazed over. Sarah was standing over it, looking down at it was a puzzled look before the others had returned.
Sarah didn't recognize the body on the floor, but she had looked around the rest of the office and saw no signs of intrusion. From an outside perspective, the scene looked completely normal except for a body in the lobby. "It looks like we all have business to take care of now. They came to us in the tunnels too. Twenty gone. As many as they could stuff into the back of an unmarked van."
Jubilee stepped off the elevator, glancing at Charlie’s corpse for a moment before giving Sarah the once over. She could already tell it wasn’t the Morlock that had killed him. You didn’t grow up watching CSI without learning the smallest amount about splatter patterns.
“And you came here...why?”
It wasn’t that she didn’t have compassion, more that she wasn’t entirely sure what it was the woman expected them to do. They had their own wounds to lick.
Not bothering to wait for the answer, she moved closer to Charlie, leaning down with painful slowness to check vitals. It was stupid, completely useless given the state of his body, but she couldn’t help it.
The blatant hostility she got from upworlders was exhausting to Sarah. It was why she preferred to stay in the tunnels. "I am here because we are both under attack and if we work together we may avenge your friend and save my people."
Artie sighed. "Can you just chill out? I mean, okay, that's probably the wrong word here but not everything we say is some kind of attack, so please stop being so damn pissy and defensive about everything." She was just so damn exhausting to work around.
"Remy agreed that we'll support the Morlocks. And it's likely connected." Kevin said, his rage tightly leashed. Charlie had been a friend; an awkward squint obsessed with something he hated and didn't understand, but a friend. Someone was going to fucking pay for this. Jean had already filled them in on what had happened at the meet. Another trap, another betrayal. "Jeannie, twenty people. Any way to track that?"
"Depends on if they keep them together or separate them. They stay together, it's easier to track them mentally if we can narrow down where they're being held. Separate them and, well....lots more legwork," Jean said, tilting her head thoughtfully.
"I suspect it's the former, though. If they're focused on the bigger picture they'll want to consolidate resources."
“We’ll need to move fast before they do that, once they’re comfortable it’ll be impossible with the numbers we have left. These fuckers think they have us neatly taken care of, maybe we can use that to our advantage.”
Jubilee pulled herself up painfully, she wanted to close Charlie’s eyes but that only worked in movies, in the real world you had to tape them shut. She looked at Kevin, and then the rest.
“We could all die. We’re outnumbered and they’ll know we’re not gonna let this lie. I don’t think Remy would fault anyone for deciding they had better things to do today.”
"He might not, but I will. It's not just our people." Adam said forcefully. "If they took the Morlocks, they're going to use them. Selene's majicks are based on stealing lifeforce. She could use them to power the transition of the Soulsword to her. If and when she does, that will include the Darkhold. Then she's no longer Queen of the Hellfire Club. She's the kind of magical entity that rules dimensions."
"We need to stop this ritual, first and foremost. That means getting in and getting the Morlocks out of her range while she's distracted. Then getting this Illyana kid out as well. Marrow, if we can disable the alarms, or at least set them off big elsewhere, can you get into the Club through the tunnels?"
Sarah nodded. "Most older buildings in the city have a hatch leading to the tunnels. They started closing them up when I was a kid, but the Hellfire Club is nefarious enough they might have left the door operational. It would be good for slipping in and out unnoticed."
“Okay then. Okay. I can get us a layout of their security, see if we can get in there without them like, just meeting us at the front door.”
Jubilee fished her phone out of her back pocket and started tapping, trying not to look back at Charlie’s body.
“Adam, any idea how many people they’re gonna need actually doing the ritual? Like, can we walk up and just take out one of them and then it’s done?”
"A decent amount. Ritual with an artifact of this power is going to be extensive and powerful." Adam shook his head. "Figure a packed house."
"We're hitting the Club itself. Selene wouldn't have it anywhere else and the security is tightest there. So, we need to figure out how to crack it long enough to shut the ritual down." Kevin waved towards the conference room. "Start thinking of ideas. Jean and I will take care of Charlie and then join you."
Jean herself stared at the body with a certain detachment, After all that was all that it was now, just a body. What made it Charlie had come and gone. What mattered was picking up the pieces that had been left and avenging his death.
"I'll get my kit," she said, disappearing upstairs.
Elsewhere, North retrieves the missing member of the team.
Her nose seemed to have finally stopped bleeding, though it was honestly hard to tell in the cracked mirror Felicia was staring into, as she gently tried to wipe at her face with a wet paper towel. Three people had come into the public park washroom she'd chosen to wait in, hiding in the last stall each time at their arrival, but they generally took one look at the broken mirrors and faucets that wouldn't stop running, and walked back out. It wasn't an ideal spot, but it had been close.
Her legs were already threatening to give out, again, and she braced against the sink, watching the red swirl down the drain. Honestly, it'd be a miracle if the sink didn't suddenly decide to pull away from the wall right now, a miracle she didn't have, and she bade a mental farewell to whatever tooth she would manage to knock out on her way down just in case. Maybe Murphy's Law would save her.
A pair of arms caught her as she tipped over, one folding her against a warm chest and the other finding its place under the back of her knees, lifting her into a close cradle.
"Liebling," North murmured into her hair, both in greeting and as a reassurance. He hated how familiar he was with this state of affairs, but the fear clawing at his chest quickly dissipated with a deep sigh of relief together with the thin film of milky white covering his eyes. "Es wird alles gut."
"Hey boo," she murmured into his shirt, wincing as a nearby mirror, one of the last survivors, spontaneously cracked. "Rating you five stars on Uber. Excellent service. You got an exit plan, my love?"
"Ja," he responded, long strides making a beeline away from the chaos and toward the nearby parking lot, glass and debris crunching under his boots. In a matter of seconds, they were within the cover of darkness. "I will follow the GPS unless you have a preferred route."
"Nah," she replied, a half smile. "I trust you. Come on, I'm just making inane conversation until we get home. What would any of our road trips be if I didn't pull up Google for no reason other than to second guess your weird mental compass?"
"Have to keep my five star rating somehow," he chuckled, though the worry in his eyes was plain for all to see as he bundled her into a waiting car, unwrapped the thick woolen scarf from his neck and tucked it around her. He paused to steal a blood-tinged kiss before grabbing a packet of tissues from the backseat and placing it in her lap for her nose, together with a small glass bottle filled with what looked like small plants.
Felicia curled into the seat, carefully trying not to touch anything. A seatbelt right now would just jam, and it was going to be a painfully slow drive, between the stoplights that always seemed to turn red and the straight up praying that the engine didn't choose now to fail. Ignoring the tissues for now she held the tiny bottle of four leaf clovers in her open palm, trying to breathe in a square like Remy had taught her. She closed her eyes tight, face screwing up against tears. The driver's side door opened and closed, and North quietly waited until she finally was able to speak. "It was an ambush. They're all dead."
There was no good response to that, so the precog simply settled his hand on her knee, thumb gently caressing the bloodied fabric of her pants. He steered them carefully through the small streets with the aid of his powers and switched on the headlamps only just before entering a main street. "We will be home soon, darling."
Her hand hovered over his, trembling, before she gingerly placed it on top. Felicia took another breath, held, released. "I love you."
"I love you too, katz," he replied easily, squeezing her knee in reassurance for the both of them. Only he knew how hard his heart had plummeted when the vitals he had been monitoring went offline; how frantically he had spun through hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of possibilities just trying to locate her team like a needle in a haystack. "We'll run a hot bath and I've got enough stew in the fridge to tide us through until you can go anywhere. And I'll look into it, I promise."
"Okay. Okay," she repeated, half to herself, as her body shuddered against the waves of abuse, mixed with her own hampered weeping. The left side of the street erupted in car alarms and she looked over at him, tired. "Fuck. Okay."
"Es wird alles gut," he said in a tone, though gentle, was backed with firm conviction. It was going to be okay. "Trust me. I'm a precog."
Felicia gave a surprised little laugh. "Always."
TW: character death
It was a long trip up the elevator when you're tired. It was longer still when you needed an icepack, a rest and a month's therapy. Artie stumbled as he stepped out of the lift and righted himself. "At least it's all over and done with now and I can go home and get some R and R," he said, opening the main door to the foyer. "The sooner I'm out of here the --- fuck. Fuck."
He stepped aside to let the others see.
Jean brushed a strand of sweat soaked black hair out of her face as she eyed their visitor that she had a feeling wasn't just there to grab a beer.
"Way to jinx it, Artie," she muttered, then glanced back at Kevin.
"She's alone," she said quietly.
"Can't think of a possible sinister reason for that." Kevin said as he walked in, tossing his coat on to the rack before freezing. "Oh shit..." As he passed the door, he could see the crumpled form of Charlie lying on the floor, in a now sticky puddle of blood. The young man's eyes were unseeing and glazed over. Sarah was standing over it, looking down at it was a puzzled look before the others had returned.
Sarah didn't recognize the body on the floor, but she had looked around the rest of the office and saw no signs of intrusion. From an outside perspective, the scene looked completely normal except for a body in the lobby. "It looks like we all have business to take care of now. They came to us in the tunnels too. Twenty gone. As many as they could stuff into the back of an unmarked van."
Jubilee stepped off the elevator, glancing at Charlie’s corpse for a moment before giving Sarah the once over. She could already tell it wasn’t the Morlock that had killed him. You didn’t grow up watching CSI without learning the smallest amount about splatter patterns.
“And you came here...why?”
It wasn’t that she didn’t have compassion, more that she wasn’t entirely sure what it was the woman expected them to do. They had their own wounds to lick.
Not bothering to wait for the answer, she moved closer to Charlie, leaning down with painful slowness to check vitals. It was stupid, completely useless given the state of his body, but she couldn’t help it.
The blatant hostility she got from upworlders was exhausting to Sarah. It was why she preferred to stay in the tunnels. "I am here because we are both under attack and if we work together we may avenge your friend and save my people."
Artie sighed. "Can you just chill out? I mean, okay, that's probably the wrong word here but not everything we say is some kind of attack, so please stop being so damn pissy and defensive about everything." She was just so damn exhausting to work around.
"Remy agreed that we'll support the Morlocks. And it's likely connected." Kevin said, his rage tightly leashed. Charlie had been a friend; an awkward squint obsessed with something he hated and didn't understand, but a friend. Someone was going to fucking pay for this. Jean had already filled them in on what had happened at the meet. Another trap, another betrayal. "Jeannie, twenty people. Any way to track that?"
"Depends on if they keep them together or separate them. They stay together, it's easier to track them mentally if we can narrow down where they're being held. Separate them and, well....lots more legwork," Jean said, tilting her head thoughtfully.
"I suspect it's the former, though. If they're focused on the bigger picture they'll want to consolidate resources."
“We’ll need to move fast before they do that, once they’re comfortable it’ll be impossible with the numbers we have left. These fuckers think they have us neatly taken care of, maybe we can use that to our advantage.”
Jubilee pulled herself up painfully, she wanted to close Charlie’s eyes but that only worked in movies, in the real world you had to tape them shut. She looked at Kevin, and then the rest.
“We could all die. We’re outnumbered and they’ll know we’re not gonna let this lie. I don’t think Remy would fault anyone for deciding they had better things to do today.”
"He might not, but I will. It's not just our people." Adam said forcefully. "If they took the Morlocks, they're going to use them. Selene's majicks are based on stealing lifeforce. She could use them to power the transition of the Soulsword to her. If and when she does, that will include the Darkhold. Then she's no longer Queen of the Hellfire Club. She's the kind of magical entity that rules dimensions."
"We need to stop this ritual, first and foremost. That means getting in and getting the Morlocks out of her range while she's distracted. Then getting this Illyana kid out as well. Marrow, if we can disable the alarms, or at least set them off big elsewhere, can you get into the Club through the tunnels?"
Sarah nodded. "Most older buildings in the city have a hatch leading to the tunnels. They started closing them up when I was a kid, but the Hellfire Club is nefarious enough they might have left the door operational. It would be good for slipping in and out unnoticed."
“Okay then. Okay. I can get us a layout of their security, see if we can get in there without them like, just meeting us at the front door.”
Jubilee fished her phone out of her back pocket and started tapping, trying not to look back at Charlie’s body.
“Adam, any idea how many people they’re gonna need actually doing the ritual? Like, can we walk up and just take out one of them and then it’s done?”
"A decent amount. Ritual with an artifact of this power is going to be extensive and powerful." Adam shook his head. "Figure a packed house."
"We're hitting the Club itself. Selene wouldn't have it anywhere else and the security is tightest there. So, we need to figure out how to crack it long enough to shut the ritual down." Kevin waved towards the conference room. "Start thinking of ideas. Jean and I will take care of Charlie and then join you."
Jean herself stared at the body with a certain detachment, After all that was all that it was now, just a body. What made it Charlie had come and gone. What mattered was picking up the pieces that had been left and avenging his death.
"I'll get my kit," she said, disappearing upstairs.
Elsewhere, North retrieves the missing member of the team.
Her nose seemed to have finally stopped bleeding, though it was honestly hard to tell in the cracked mirror Felicia was staring into, as she gently tried to wipe at her face with a wet paper towel. Three people had come into the public park washroom she'd chosen to wait in, hiding in the last stall each time at their arrival, but they generally took one look at the broken mirrors and faucets that wouldn't stop running, and walked back out. It wasn't an ideal spot, but it had been close.
Her legs were already threatening to give out, again, and she braced against the sink, watching the red swirl down the drain. Honestly, it'd be a miracle if the sink didn't suddenly decide to pull away from the wall right now, a miracle she didn't have, and she bade a mental farewell to whatever tooth she would manage to knock out on her way down just in case. Maybe Murphy's Law would save her.
A pair of arms caught her as she tipped over, one folding her against a warm chest and the other finding its place under the back of her knees, lifting her into a close cradle.
"Liebling," North murmured into her hair, both in greeting and as a reassurance. He hated how familiar he was with this state of affairs, but the fear clawing at his chest quickly dissipated with a deep sigh of relief together with the thin film of milky white covering his eyes. "Es wird alles gut."
"Hey boo," she murmured into his shirt, wincing as a nearby mirror, one of the last survivors, spontaneously cracked. "Rating you five stars on Uber. Excellent service. You got an exit plan, my love?"
"Ja," he responded, long strides making a beeline away from the chaos and toward the nearby parking lot, glass and debris crunching under his boots. In a matter of seconds, they were within the cover of darkness. "I will follow the GPS unless you have a preferred route."
"Nah," she replied, a half smile. "I trust you. Come on, I'm just making inane conversation until we get home. What would any of our road trips be if I didn't pull up Google for no reason other than to second guess your weird mental compass?"
"Have to keep my five star rating somehow," he chuckled, though the worry in his eyes was plain for all to see as he bundled her into a waiting car, unwrapped the thick woolen scarf from his neck and tucked it around her. He paused to steal a blood-tinged kiss before grabbing a packet of tissues from the backseat and placing it in her lap for her nose, together with a small glass bottle filled with what looked like small plants.
Felicia curled into the seat, carefully trying not to touch anything. A seatbelt right now would just jam, and it was going to be a painfully slow drive, between the stoplights that always seemed to turn red and the straight up praying that the engine didn't choose now to fail. Ignoring the tissues for now she held the tiny bottle of four leaf clovers in her open palm, trying to breathe in a square like Remy had taught her. She closed her eyes tight, face screwing up against tears. The driver's side door opened and closed, and North quietly waited until she finally was able to speak. "It was an ambush. They're all dead."
There was no good response to that, so the precog simply settled his hand on her knee, thumb gently caressing the bloodied fabric of her pants. He steered them carefully through the small streets with the aid of his powers and switched on the headlamps only just before entering a main street. "We will be home soon, darling."
Her hand hovered over his, trembling, before she gingerly placed it on top. Felicia took another breath, held, released. "I love you."
"I love you too, katz," he replied easily, squeezing her knee in reassurance for the both of them. Only he knew how hard his heart had plummeted when the vitals he had been monitoring went offline; how frantically he had spun through hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of possibilities just trying to locate her team like a needle in a haystack. "We'll run a hot bath and I've got enough stew in the fridge to tide us through until you can go anywhere. And I'll look into it, I promise."
"Okay. Okay," she repeated, half to herself, as her body shuddered against the waves of abuse, mixed with her own hampered weeping. The left side of the street erupted in car alarms and she looked over at him, tired. "Fuck. Okay."
"Es wird alles gut," he said in a tone, though gentle, was backed with firm conviction. It was going to be okay. "Trust me. I'm a precog."
Felicia gave a surprised little laugh. "Always."
