A Haven to Call Home: Into Oblivion

[xp_erverse]

X-Factor meets to go through what they've learned about the District X riot. They do not like what they've discovered, particularly Quentin.


The staff of X-Factor Investigations gathered in their conference room, everyone carrying their preferred methods of caffeination, intoxication, hydration, or some combination thereof. It was going to be a long day. The front door was closed and locked, the shades drawn, and front lights off to keep them from being disturbed. And so no one could walk in on them and their pile of pilfered police evidence, handily obtained by Sue. A lot of detritus from the rally-turned-riot the other day, including fragments of the explosive device that triggered that transformation.

"Okay, Sue," Quentin started once they were all seated. "What do you have?"

There was nothing better than the first cup of coffee in a day, that wonderful smell, that glorious taste only mildly detracted by the handful of eyes staring at her over the rim of the mug, blue eyes sparkling with mischievous laughter as she lowered it, offering the room a small smile. "I guess I better get started then huh?"

A delicate hand waved at the bomb fragments lying in the centre of the table before reaching down to tap a button on her tablet, sending a slide up to the projector. "After the...windfall of evidence appeared I ran those bomb fragments through every test we have here, and some that we don't. I even borrowed a lab from my dad to make sure I wasn't missing anything, some new or obscure chemical or explosive. And, I've got to say that...it's nothing. Just a plain tear gas canister. Nothing special, nothing new, just something you could find in any police armoury the world over."

"Alright, that means that it wasn't anythin' in the canister, then," Inez said, frowning. "Y'would've thought that'd be where the source of this thing was comin' from, it'd definitely be the easiest way t'distribute things," she rationalized. "So... if that wasn't it, then what the hell could've caused it?" she wondered aloud, even though she knew everyone else was wondering the same exact thing.

Well, maybe not everyone. Arthur had never been a man to hide behind shyness where single minded optimism could be used as a blunt weapon instead, but his voice came out with a note of indecision. "Sue, science might have been a bust, but I," and he bit his lip at this, "I could give it a try."

"That is a fair idea and we should certainly pursue that. But there is another angle we should follow too." Hope rose and headed over to one of the white boards in the room. Quickly she erased its contents before picking up a marker. "Inez, April and Alex... they were all affected by whatever this is." She quickly wrote down the names. "There must be something they have in common. But what is it?"

Inez shook her head as she tried to come up with something. "I mean, other than we all were in contact with those people... but at different points in time, an' different folk, am I right?" She sighed, taking a deep breath. "I'm at a loss... do we have any idea if there's some overlap with the people, or maybe a vehicle or somethin' that was in common?" She looked to Arthur and Sue. "His plan is worth a shot, yeah?"

Quentin nodded at Arthur. "Try it. Maybe you can see where it came from or who launched it. It was the FOH, I'm sure, but let's get confirmation." He turned to address the rest of the table. "Were there any other flares besides Alex and Parker? Any similarities between all those people and Inez?"

Arthur locked eyes with Hope across the table as he very carefully began to remove his gloves. Yet, as he focused, the chatter and hunches at the top all faded into the background as the blonde man's attention was drawn to the metal at the center of everyone's attention.

A reach.

A touch.

BOOM. Smoke, everywhere. An itching of the eyes. Lost, lost. Where was...

Another chain, another perspective.

Closer to the blast, and a spike of adrenaline. Hands, alight with energy. Red light that shone against a singular hemp bracelet. Their fire was usually so carefully contained, spiking as... Arthur seized in his chair, his eyes going wide as the chains continued, pinging back and forth between the impressions of those at the rally. Sweat beaded on his skin as his nervous system raced to catch up.

Breathe. Close your eyes.

Arthur inhaled deeply, focusing. The emotions began to dim as he worked through his standard mediation mantras to unfocus. Control. Hours and hours of practice clicked into place as Arthur surrendered to the queues taught to him by Haller and Hope. The blonde man's posture loosened as he worked, but there were tears collecting at the corners of his eyes.

Another shift, but the lack of emotion muted anything tangible. Just another bomb. Another plant.

Arthur grit his teeth. Further.

"We're making a better world," a gruff voice assured himself as he balanced an eyedropper. A lab was arrayed before him — not one of those mad science setups from Arthur's film career, but more like a storage shed. But the light was completely clinical. All overhead, too blue. No windows.

A sense of faith prevailed above all of it. Importance, which the bomb maker particularly held onto, but also true, deep belief in the cause. He was a catalyst for a glorious future. Any nagging conscience was onset by the knowledge that no one would be hurt. Well, no one important. The worthy would be healed.

Radha would shape the future.

Radha was the future's mother.

Another hand raised to position the metallic cylinder for careful assembly. This hand only had three fingers.

Arthur opened his eyes only to find that everyone had gone quiet. "It," and his voice was shaking with the emotional backlash, "It was... Haven."

Silence reigned. Maybe it was concern over Arthur's near-seizure or shock at the truth he'd revealed. But for several long seconds, no one at the table reacted. Until Quentin finally found his trembling voice again. "No. You did it wrong. Do it again. Do it right this time."

"Wait... do you mean..." Inez started, inclined to side with Quentin for a moment - which was a slight shock in and of itself - before recalling her first interactions with them. That first meeting on their property, when she met with Josie, when she... she looked down at her wrist, which still bore her gift, the bracelet that she gave her. Her eyes went wide and she held her arm up, away from her body, away from herself, and it was all she could do not to just tear it off altogether. "W-would this have anything to do with it?" she asked, her voice quiet and filled with dread.

Hope sunk back on her chair, shaking her head. "To be honest, I am not entirely surprised. I have been looking into Radha Dastoor since you first mentioned her, Quentin. After we seriously started considering Haven as a part of the Underground, I began a deep dive and started looking into some of her associates as well... Her associates are still in the early stages, but with Radha... I am no expert, but I managed to consult with someone who is... Radha Dastoor does show some dangerous signs of fanaticism and matches several characteristics of a cult leader."

"I reached out to some FBI agents who owed me a favour or two and got them to look over the data we'd collected before, the compound itself is showing all the signs of a cult compound. It's isolated and self-sufficient; Once you're there, you're effectively cut off from your family and the outside world, it's not like most people have the resources to just fly out there like we did." The blonde reached for her coffee, her shoulders rising in a sad shrug, "It could have been totally innocuous but it really doesn't seem like it." Blue eyes met Inez's, "I...don't think it's good either way."

"None of this is proof. Unless you saw Radha, this is conjecture." But Quentin's assertion lacked the typical intensity of his proclamations, and he even looked unwell saying those things. "Arthur, there has to be something else you can see that'll tell us the real truth."

"You're right," Arthur admitted with a pout. The emotional backlash had visibly exhausted him into both a mental and physical slump. "I saw the groundskeeper, Theo, making the bomb in a room I couldn't place. His thoughts were focused on Radha, but it isn't a smoking gun."

That is until the man's gaze settled on Inez's point of order. He had only missed her quiet statement earlier due to the fatigue, but now she had his full attention. "Wait, Inez. I remember seeing those bracelets on the ground after the riot. Haven folks were there, weren't they?"

Blue eyes dropped down to the bracelet as Sue's brow furrowed for a moment, raising a single finger for a moment to draw attention. "You're right...I saw them in the evidence bags that...fell into our hands thanks to a mysterious benefactor..." A small smile before she glanced back at the bracelet in front of them, "I'm pretty sure there were a bunch in the evidence room and we might have a few in the lab too. That can't be a coincidence."

"Why would they . . . shit." Quentin eyed the bracelet on Inez's wrist. "Those things are Haven's calling cards, like fucking hippie flower crowns. If they were at the rally" — and he put a heavy emphasis on the if, though a hundred possible scenarios played through his head — "And Radha never told me they'd be there, then they'd only have left these for a reason. Arthur, try that. Inez's first, then one Sue procured. And I want to see, too. All of us should." If the hidden truth was as shocking as the smoke bomb's, then best they share that burden as a team and not pile it all on the psychometrist's shoulders.

"Wait, let me vet it first." This was an unusually cautionary level of warning from Arthur, but his tone was set. "I feel everything," Arthur placed special emphasis on that last word, "And Inez's business is her own."

He reached forward for the proffered bracelet with his hand that was still gloved. He winked at Inez. "Don't worry."

And, then.

Confusion, joy, love, hope. All emotions keyed to what Arthur already knew about Inez — like seeing a flower bloom for the first time, like sharing. More.

But... he squinted hard in concentration, willing his vision to peer back further toward any emotion that was not the cheerful, clever vision of Inez that had imprinted so readily onto the leather cords and beads.

Arthur gasped as he found it. His eyes were decidedly colder than normal as he nodded and tapped a temple with a single finger. "Q, time to share."

The team unified in a psychic singularity. They shared Arthur’s burden, bolstering each other so no one was crushed under the weight of the memory. Sweet, kind Josie, inoculating the bracelet with a deadly agent targeted at mutants. And behind her, benevolent, magnanimous Radha Dastoor, urging her on.

"She clearly holds great influence with her followers and they seem very devoted to her." Hope slowly spoke as she digested the vision. "That matches with what the cult expert said about her characteristics. It is not only her we have to worry about."

Quentin's stomach heaved as he gently disentangled his mind from the others. Not from the psychic backlash or the surge of foreign emotion but from the scene itself. "The mutant plague. It's all fake. Fuck. This is very bad. If this gets out . . ." Mutants were already being blamed for their lack of control that had killed or injured dozens of humans. If the world knew this was all the fault of a pair of mutants, it would be over for all of them.

Arthur sat still entranced, his eyes clouded with memories despite the termination of the psi-link.

"Sadly the potency remains a problem," he sighed with a clinical distaste completely divorced from his usual upbeat self. "My brilliant spores have a half life of less than a week after they're triggered the first time. Truly unfortunate."

"At least we know the same applies to these," a single fingernail tapped the desk before Sue gestured to the bracelet, "It looks like an organic spore there too so they're going to have a short half-life as well. We're probably safe now, but if it had been a chemical drug we'd be in even bigger trouble. I've got enough bracelets that I could take some apart, see if I can find enough spores to reconstruct them, see what we're dealing with. I don't know if we could synthesize an antidote, at least not in a hurry, but at least we'd know what we're dealing with."

Inez fidgeted with the bracelet still on her wrist, glad to hear that it was inert but still tempted to rip it off and to tear it into shreds. Either that or the person who gave it to her, which would be far cathartic she grimly realized.

"If y'want mine, feel free," she muttered, breaking out of those darker thoughts. "'Specially if it could do some good after all the harm it's done... oh god, I hope my stupidity in takin' it didn't get anyone else infected," she said with a sudden, sad realization.

"No one else at the mansion was sick as far as I know, and if they were, it wouldn't have been your fault." Reassurance was a foreign language to Quentin but he tried it out all the same. "I need to talk to Abhay about this. There's no way he . . ." He fell silent mid-sentence as realization kicked in. Abhay, who could turn a sunny autumn day into a torrential storm with a thought. Abhay, who had been "traveling" when Quentin was last visiting Radha, just as Hurricane Valentin smashed into the East Coast and laid lower Manhattan to waste. Abhay Dastoor, Radha's devoted brother.

"Goddamn fucking shitfuck."

Arthur, meanwhile, was recovering slowly. He worked his jaw back and forth slowly, feeling like he had cotton in his mouth. "So," he hazarded experimentally. Good. That was his voice. "Just to recap: three rotten at the top. Josie uses her powers to cause a plague, Theo goes unabomber, and Radha uses her powers to heal anyone stuck in the middle. Sounds like they decided to DIY their own apocalypse. Or is it the entire commune?"

Quentin telekinetically passed Arthur a bottle of water as he gulped down the remainder of his spiked coffee. The alcohol and caffeine combination would keep his mind sharp. "All the destructive unseasonal storms across the country are their faults, too, probably. Abhay controls the weather with his mutant power." He groaned and slumped back in his seat. "You know, I really thought Radha had made something good that I could make great. But it's rotten to the core. We have to stop her before she becomes a blight to mutantkind."

"Are we talking about my mother? Because let me assure you, she's already a blight on muntantkind....humanity really," Warren mused as he walked into the office.

The room was full of somber looking faces and Warren wondered briefly if he'd missed some kind of memo.

"The fact that everyone is serious right now is disturbing. Did Q's nudes get leaked again? That would turn anyone's stomach."