A/N: haha now that everyone claims to be confused (as was my evil plan), here's another chapter which will either further confuse you or clear some stuff up. And on a personal note: I became a freshman on the 8th so I wrote this to celebrate since there was no homework. : ) By the way, there will be no more updates until the eighteenth at the earliest; I'm writing for a challenge that I have no chance of winning, ant it's due on the sixteenth. So, on that note, sorry this chapter's a bit short, but please enjoy and I'd be happy with some reviews :)

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The laptop screen flashed green and purple light as soon as she opened it; raised the lid and signed in her name. As soon as she did that, it glowed and the words appeared clear as day, black on neon green.

YOU HAVE 17 MESSAGES

Kitty blinked against the sudden brightness and shifted her legs before the bottom of the device pulsed too much meat onto her thighs. Twenty two e-mails was strangely many when the only messages she ever received were either from her parents, a school friend or two, and various companies that had her on their spam list. Kitty slid her hand over the smooth square dent that was a mousepad, and pressed down two quick taps in succession, clicking the little blue INBOX button. The page loaded... loaded... and materialized.

'What the hell...?'

Seventeen e-mails, as promised, were in a neat stack on the screen. But that was not all. They were all from one source, and had no subject on any of them. Blue eyes did a quick scan over the send times, revealing averagely fifteen minute intervals between each message, hours between the first and last. Which was strange considering they were all from one source, an unknown: . Kitty clicked the first one. The first part of the e-mail was the copy/pasted version of a newspaper article, with seemingly random sections of text highlighted in nauseatingly bright yellow for reasons unknown to her. Kitty leafed through the article and immediately pursed her lips in sceptical disapproval. It was a story about a girl, told from a reporter's viewpoint, a girl who'd sold her soul to a friend for twenty dollars using a contract the two made on a piece of notebook paper and signed with blood. The reporter goes on to quote the girl, who told of how she'd endured several strange happenings that followed the signing of that paper. These occurrences ranged from ones as mundane as never not being cold, not even in steaming, bubbling Jacuzzi water, and constantly being hungry no matter how much she ate, to utterly chilling ones; not having the ability to laugh or a reflection in the mirror.

It goes on to say how the mortified girl (whom Kitty strongly disliked from this article) eventually bought it back from her friend, and all but the hunger disappeared, and that that too abated when she ate the paper itself. Below that was a link to the actual online article, and then what appeared to be a small series of bible quotes, that too, were sickeningly yellow. Kitty moved her hand.

MESSAGE DELETED

Next was a slightly different story (again sectionals highlighted, with a link and quotations below) under the same general theme. Only this time, it was of a boy who'd claimed 'the lord above' had made him invisible to a burglar's eyes when the man, having four prior murder convictions under his file, broke into his home. The boy said the man had climbed in through his window with a knife in hand, looked directly past him, and then gone downstairs, leaving him unscathed.

MASSAGE DELETED

And then 14 more were all swiftly sent to a cybernetic graveyard. Something instinctual or maybe curiosity made her keep the last one and made her read it, made her wonder who was, though she knew she should have figured it out by now and though she had a thought in the back of her mind that was clawing its way to the front. This one was different than the others and she knew it was because before the article, kw had written PLEASE READ in big letters which looked like pleading wide eyes. Kitty began to read, taking a breath. It was considerably shorter than the other one and read simply this:

In 1993, in St. Clemen's hospital, Boston, a boy was born to Nicki and Paul Aronsroet

at 7:34pm. The boy was named Tyler Andrew Aronsroet on sight and the delivery went

smoothly; without any complications. Tyler was wrapped in a soft blanket

and handed over to his mother like any other baby boy, but when Nicki

Aronsroet pulled it back to look at her son, both she and papa Paul burst into tears. Tyler

Aronsroet, beneath the sheets, was horribly disfigured. Tests were conducted immediately,

but they all revealed him to be human, making the blow that much harder for Nicki and

Paul. Tyler was born with one leg half the length of the other, and the bones of both were

twisted, crooked, and constantly sore, confining the boy to severe leg braces. His back was hunched

over and the bones of the spine were abnormally dense, making it very difficult to bend.

The boy's entire skin was thick and hard, and his face was contorted in a way that

rendered him unable to smile. He could barely move and the conditions were inoperable.

This condition, though no one has been afflicted with it since, was

later called 'The T.A. Aronsroet Deformity' by Doctor Lorelai Ryu.

At the age of six, Tyler was watching with his father, and saw a woman

diver dive into a pool, doing a triple aerial that amazed the boy. That same day,

he attempted to simply dive, without the flips, into his own pool and nearly drowned.

When his mother asked him why he jumped, Tyler responded simply: "It was what I was meant to

do." By age nine, he had memorized every diving trick possible, learned the aerodynamics of

them all, and knew the best divers in the business by name and face.

At age fourteen, Tyler became an assistant coach at his high school's diving team, and

the school's rankings improved dramatically. The coaches themselves placed him on their wall of

fame; he was so well respected there. One day, a few months later, when the Aronstroets

went to church, Tyler asked his mother if he could join the team himself.

"He told me that he had 'A diver's soul trapped inside his reject's body.'" Says Nicki Aronstroet,

in tears. His father, Paul had this to say:

"[Tyler] started saying it more and more in his sophomore year. Soul meant to dive.

And he was serious about it too. I thought it was good for [Tyler] to have some faith, you know?

The lord in his life. We both did." Everyone who knew him had said, in more or less

the same phrasing that when he spoke about diving, it would have been one of the few times

where he would have surely been smiling had he the ability. No one knows, to this day

what triggered it, but one day, at age sixteen, Tyler hung a cross around his neck, and stood on

the family roof, leg and back braces off for the first time in his life. The pool

had been merely a few feet away from being directly

underneath the roof. The note left on his kitchen table had said it all. Two words that would haunt

Nicki and Paul to this day: Triple aerial. And when

the Aronstroet family had found Tyler, lying dead and broken on the bloodstained

grass, the doctors couldn't explain it, but he had been grinning like a fool.

Something made Kitty choose to keep this message, and then she read what had been below it, below the link.

You said I could try

~Fuzzy elf.

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Bobby was currently watching Kurt swinging back and forth with a kind of shocked curiosity. He was watching the boy, sixteen tomorrow, swinging steadily back and forth. On a chandelier.

Upside down.

By his tail.

While reading a book. It was making Bobby nauseous. Because it was late, the only light was from the light near Bobby's chair that he had turned on so he could read a book before he went to bed and he could only tell where Kurt was by the slow creaking sound of the chandelier, the vague silhouette, and the moving lights of his eyes as they went back and forth. Abruptly, Bobby stood up, turned out the light, and went to bed. "Don't get it..." he muttered. "Reading in the car makes me throw up..." and he left, and Kurt was happily reading alone in the night, the sounds of clinking swords and pirate banter imagined in his head.

Kitty came through the ceiling then and spied the devil pendulum that was Nightcrawler, letting out a quiet breath before the gold lights turned to her. She froze for the slightest moment under their scrutiny... those golden eyes like cleansing fire...

Kitty cleared her throat.

"Kurt?"

"Ja?"

"Did you, like, spam my inbox with a bunch of articles?" Fangs glistened in the night.

"Ja..." She turned on the light. Her eyes barely caught the series of inhumanly agile moves he made to come down from the chandelier.

"Why?" and then she interrupted him, knowing full well that was a stupid question. "When did you even have time to?"

"Ve came home from zhe picnic, and I vent onto Scott's computer."

"And you've been doing that till, like, now?" He nodded, hair falling around his face.

"Well then, why did it take you so long to write each message?" The smile fell a little, and was replaced with an expression akin to condescending. Playfully condescending, but somehow dark in its own way. He held up his hands, three thick fingers waggling in her face. Huh?

"Zhree fingers. Make it..." he turned his hands around both ways like he was looking them over."a little harder to type, ja?"

Oh. "I... see." She said, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. A beat passed as he brought his fingers back down and put them behind his back. "Are you going to send me more spam?" she asked suddenly and his mouth trembled upwards and she was reminded suddenly of those cartoon characters whose mouths would turn into a wavy line before they bust out into cartoon laughter. So Kurt. She was tempted to smile herself at the thought, but refrained.

"Zhat depends." Kitty rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.

"On what?"

"Did you delete zhe ones I sent you?" Kitty thought back to the article of the diver boy, stowed away in her inbox like a dirty little secret and for some reason felt it must stay one.

"Yes." And then the wavy line of his blue lips transformed into another oddly dark expression, this one a grin. She stared at those lips and then realized she was doing it, before meeting his eyes again.

"Zhen yes." And BAMF.

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The girl had done what she imagined was one of the stupidest, poorly thought out plans ever. When the night was almost over, and she felt the impending sunrise through her jetlagged state of mind and with it the thought that she would have to bear another whole day, she had pulled over to the side of the highway, stepped out of the car, bashed in the door with a bat she carried in her trunk, gotten back in, and fallen asleep.

[There's no harm]. She thought. [If I get woken up, I'll say I was in an accident and was knocked out sand that's why I'm asleep in the side of the highway.] She saw it then: [No, of course I'm not a stupid tourist who didn't sleep or drink any coffee and got lost and decided to fall asleep on the side of the road. Only a total idiotwould do that.]

So she pulled the coat she'd used as a blanket off of her, and was grateful there were still no cars on the road and that no one had stopped to wake her though she wondered if that was a good thing; supposing she had been really hurt? But she pushed the thought aside and stretched, gazing over her map again. Her eyes lit up as she folded it back into a tiny square. She had been closer than she thought. Only a few more hours, and the sun wasn't even up yet. She could still make it in time. Coming out of the car, she bent down in a crouch and examined the dent she'd left in her sleeplessly warped logic. She cringed; it was bigger than she thought. Driving in this state, she would be sure to get some strange looks from the locals. And she needed good relations with the locals; they had directions they could give her. And she was on a limit. Taking a deep breath, she remembered the warning words she'd been given before coming.

'[Don't do it. Don't even think it. They're idiots; they'll think you are a mutant, and you won't be able to protect yourself if they do. You're not good enough for that yet.]' And she'd agreed. But no one would see, and she could probably do it, just this once, if she concentrated. Her head turned rapidly to the left, and then the right and the empty expanse of concrete proved to be free of possible threats.

She got to her knees in front of the car, and said a quick prayer. She looked over the dent, deep in the metal of the car, and pressed her hands lightly to it. She closed her eyes, breathing steadily and deeply, and blocked out all the sounds around her.

At her touch, the metal scraped and began to move back into form...

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"You've told the children about Scott's message?"

"Yes, Ororo, I was sure to."

"Do we have the results yet?"

"No, Logan. Just a little longer."

"I don't understand, why do they need Scott?"

"Assuming, 'Ro, that they kidnapped him."

"Right."

"Well, I don't know, Ororo. Information, maybe."

"What does Scott know?"

"Ha ha. Very funny, and so appropriate, Logan."

"Sorry."

"He knows a lot, really, blueprints, passwords, everything we all know. It's really not a bad plan, if they did kidnap him."

"They are just trying to get whatever information they can?"

"Yep."

"A little simple, no? Charles?"

"Not really. They tried to kidnap Kitty a few days back, remember?"

"So why did they go for Cyke next? They coulda gotten whatever they needed outta Kitty."

"What does Kitty know?"

"Oooh, very mature, `Ro."

"He was the easiest target at the moment, I suppose."

"Hm..."

...

"...Are the results ready yet?"

"Just a little longer."

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"Kurt? Kurt, where the hell are you?" Evan scoured the halls and tried with futile effort to search in every shadow he saw. There was a mild shuffling sound in one of the rooms and Evan groped the walls blindly before he found the doorway. He peeked inside to see Kurt perched on a computer chair, looking every inch as if he would fall off. The white light of the screen shone eerily on fur.

"Kurt!" he hissed. Kurt turned his head slowly towards the boy and Evan was unnerved by the unnatural movement, resisting the slight urge to retreat. He acknowledged Evan's presence and turned back to the white screen.

"Was, Evan?" He looked utterly focused on slowly pressing his fingers down on the keyboard, so carefully, even his tail was making slow, calculated movements to aid in his concentration. The keys made slow clacking noises that rhythmically broke the night silence. "Vhy aren't you asleep?" click, clack, clack, clickety clack.

The boy stammered, too many possible retaliations clogging up his throat and only hoarse and airy croaks coming out of his mouth.

"Why aren't I asleep? Me? Why aren't you? It's really late." He walked over to the screen, just as Kurt clicked a button with utmost precision. "What are you doing, anyways, at this unholy hour?"

YOUR MESSAGE HAS BEEN SENT

Kurt turned to him with a smile.

"Spamming. Go to sleep, I zhink I'll be up for a vhile." The statement was undermined when his words went slurred and airy in a contradictory yawn.

"What? No. Come on, go to sleep."

"Nein, I'm not tired." He lied. Evan scoffed.

"Yeah, I can see that. Why aren't you going to sleep?" Kurt's eyes glazed over, and he turned off the computer.

"I turn sechzehn—um, sixteen tomorrow, and I'm too excited."

"... Don't want to fall asleep?" he asked, testing dangerous waters. Kurt could see him and he couldn't see Kurt and that made it somehow easier to ask.

"Ov course not. Vhat are you talking about?" His voice flustered, horrible at lying.

"So let's go then." Evan called his bluff. The eyes, the only thing he could see in the dark, seemed to flash with something akin to fear, and then hardened.

"Fine." And they both went up to sleep.

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Henry McCoy rushed in with thundering footsteps, a sheet of paper clutched in his hand tightly and crumpled.

"The results!" he called and rushed into the room and six eyes turned to him with expectation. "We have to help Scott."

"Logan," Ororo commanded, "go wake Bobby, Kitty, and Rogue. I'll get Kurt, Evan and Jean."

"No!" he cried, and she turned to him with confusion in her eyes. "I mean... let's switch. I'll get the elf... and Jean."

"Why?" the professor asked. "Is something wrong with one of them? Kurt?" Logan paused and instinctively pulled up his mental shields. He'd made a promise earlier to him...

"No. Nothing's wrong, let's go." He ran to the door, and then turned back.

"By the way, Hank. Who's print was it?"

"There were two." He said, and showed the piece of paper. "Pietro... and Mystique."