Hybrid knew she could teleport, but not across dimensions, or he just assumed that it was impossible to get out of Rom's Limbo
/
The students at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters were finally getting back into a normal routine of doing schoolwork. At least the girls were. The boys, never to be bothered with studying (at least at my school) were on their way back from a baseball game.
In the room they shared Illyana and Kitty were preparing for an exam, which made Illyana somewhat suspicious. "Kitty, I know that your spot on the X-Men is contingent on your keeping good grades, but you know this stuff cold. So why are you here and not with the X-Men wherever they've gone to?"
Kitty closed her textbook. "The prof' asked me to try to talk you into joining the New Mutants."
"Again?" Illyana moaned. "How many times do I have to tell him 'no?'"
Kitty shrugged. "He thinks it would be good for you, and I do see where he's coming from. The X-Men are almost always in danger. If something were to happen to me you wouldn't have any friends at all. If you hung out with the X-babies (Kitty's favorite name for the New Mutants) more maybe you'd become friends."
"Yeah right." Illyana scoffed. "They're all way too scared of me to give me a chance. Rahne is always going to hate my guts no matter what I do, Roberto pisses himself every time he looks at me, Amara compared me to Selene before finding out I was a sorceress, and Sam tried to kill me. I'm sure we'll make the best of friends."
"It's the prof's idea, not mine." Kitty said. "By the way, when are you going to tell Peter about your powers."
"I know, but I'm scared. Piotr's already suspicious of me and doesn't fully trust me. What if he reacts the same way the New Mutants did?"
"You'd better tell him soon, before one of the X-babies slips up and blurts it out to him first."
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Sam and Roberto were almost back from Yankee Stadium when they noticed a shooting star overhead. As they watched it grew bigger, and bigger, until they finally realized that it was heading right at them. The meteor flew about forty feet over them and crashed several hundred yards behind.
They walked over to them small crater it had formed and saw the round object lying in the center. Roberto entered the crater and used his strength to lift it up. He carried it into the mansion and to the basement lab. As they went towards their wing of the mansion Roberto joked to Sam about the professor having "a new toy to play with."
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In the lab the meteor did not sit still. It sprouted a tentacle, then another, then a head, and finally it looked semi-humanoid.
'Processing.' it thought. 'Condition: energy levels, dangerously low. Ample supplies of energy detected in immediate environment.'
It got up and left the lab, entering the X-Men's wing of the mansion.
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Kitty and Illyana's conversation was interrupted by a squeal from Lockheed, Kitty's pet dragon. "What's the matter, Lock?" Kitty asked. "You smell something?"
The dragon flew out of the room and into the hall, where it found the creature that Roberto had brought to the lab. The creature analyzed Lockheed, and judged that he was a good energy source. It reached for Lockheed, who avoided its grasp.
Illyana and Kitty came out of their room to see what had upset Lockheed, and were quite surprised to find what they thought was a demon trying to grab the small dragon. Illyana summoned her soulsword and swung it through the creature, but it was not magical and was unaffected.
The creature responded by hitting Illyana and knocking her into the wall, which cracked from the impact. She was saved from injury when the armor that had first appeared during the fight against the demon bear manifested itself upon impact, covering her torso, one of her arms, and one of her legs.
The creature grabbed at Illyana, and she avoided it. It did manage to graze the hand which was unarmored, which suddenly became overlaid with circuitry. Kitty and Illyana watched in horror as the circuitry began to spread up Illyana arm.
Illyana then yelled at Kitty. "get out of here and warn the others! Tell them not to touch this thing!" She summoned a light disk and disappeared into it, but not before Lockheed flew into it after her.
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A loud crash brought the New Mutants out of their rooms, where they saw Kitty running away from the creature. Amara and Roberto transformed, Amara firing lava blasts at it.
When the lava blasts proved ineffective Roberto grabbed one of the creature's tentacles. "Careful!" Kitty yelled. "Its touch is deadly."
"So is mine." Roberto replied, ripping the tentacle in two. The creature screamed and threw Roberto across the hall. Like Illyana, Roberto hit the wall, leaving it cracked.
As the creature advanced on Roberto, Dani, still in a wheelchair from the injuries she suffered against the demon bear, used her power to create an image of what the creature feared most. What appeared was what seemed to be an even larger image of the creature. It panicked and ran away.
"What the heck was that?" Sam asked Kitty.
"I don't know. Lockheed smelled it and attacked it. Illyana drove it off of him but it turned her hand into a robotic thing. She teleported away and it chased me here."
"Well," Dani said, "it has something that it fears, so it must be sentient." (I have no idea why. Animals feel fear, but that's what they said in the comics.) "Maybe we can communicate with it. Get Doug Ramsey over here and we'll use Rahne's sense of smell to track it."
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They found the creature back in the lab. It had been low on energy before arriving and Roberto's attack had hurt it. It was lying on the floor, and had lost its humanoid shape. Kitty and the New Mutants, minus Sam, watched it from outside the door (which had a window on it) as it tried and failed to put itself together again. The creature did not look for the creature then, but instead looked quite pathetic. They also noticed for the first time that it was made of circuitry.
Sam arrived with Doug Ramsey, who was upset and confused. One of his friends came into his home, woke him up, told him that he was a mutant with the ability to translate and understand any language, and then flew him over to the mansion, all the while talking about how they needed him to communicate with something that Sam had no idea what it was.
Doug looked into the lab, and was shocked to see the creature inside. "You really weren't kidding." He opened the door and went inside. "Hello," he said to the creature. "My name's Doug. What's yours?"
The creature tried to pull itself together to answer, but still couldn't. Instead it flashed lights in a pattern, first very bright but gradually growing dimmer. Somehow Doug knew that the creature was telling him that it was low on energy and that it was on the brink of death. He walked over to an electrical outlet and said "You'll find all the power you need in here."
The creature reached into the outlet, and suddenly it glowed with the surge in power. It then reformed into its humanoid shape and spoke for the first time. "Self thanks…self-friend?"
"Sure," Doug answered, 'why can't we be friends?" He then beckoned the New Mutants to come in. "Its okay. He just needed some food. He's actually only a baby."
"And I suppose he told you that when he was flashing lights?" Kitty asked.
"As a matter of fact he did."
/
I am not happy with how this chapter went, but I wanted to get it done quickly because I am really anxious to get the next one up. And what is it with ff that keeps on underlining or italisizing or just messing up the documents after I upload them? It underlined the whole document! Oh, and I'm going to tell the story of what Illyana was up to during this time in a later chapter, just like they did in the comics.