HP/X-men crossover

Infinity

Ororo Munro was relaxing over the technology at her fingertips, not really worried as she performed the routine task of monitoring the machines that were made to monitor mutant activity all over the world.

The machines had nothing on their own Professor Xavier, nor some of the other mutants that had the ability to gauge almost exact levels of power that each separate mutant displayed, but it worked as a blanket monitoring device that was able to be constantly active without the drawbacks that affected those who needed to sleep to regain energy.

Of course, it also helped warn them of emerging talents, letting them get the general area that they needed to look for in order to help the teenagers with newly activated and unstable abilities.

The machines hummed softly, a bizarrely soothing sound as she leant back in her chair and flipped through a report from one of the latest x-men missions.

And then, as all things inevitably do, the peace ended. Rather violently, too.

It started as a whining – just beyond audible, but quickly raising, reaching a crescendo that had Storm clapping her hands over her ears and wincing, eardrums pounding and flinching away from the noise.

She stumbled towards the device, looking for a way to shut off or fix whatever was causing the machine to so suddenly malfunction so spectacularly, but when she reached the electronic map of crisscrossing sensors, all thoughts of perhaps shutting off all electricity in the room fled her thoughts.

Ororo hardly noticed others bursting into the room, looking around wildly for the source of such commotion – she hardly noticed that the ear-shattering noise had suddenly stopped – her gaze was fixed on the locator screen.

It was acting as it never had before. Before, you could see brief flares at random times, never showing up as more than a dot, perhaps the largest the size of the tip of her pinkie finger – it was a large world, after all.

But what was building on the map had been anything but regular, or normal, or anything else analogous to routine.

Oh, she could guess that it had – what had started as a dot had grown, blowing quickly out of proportion and seemingly flaring out, growing outwards in a display that reminded her of a cyclone; showing up as a brilliant red on the scanners.

It had started somewhere in Europe – she had been quick enough to see that – but the power was growing outwards, reaching, washing over everything.

She did not feel the others looking over her shoulder, wide-eyed as they too observed the flaring and impossible power that was quickly consuming and blanketing the electronic map.

They didn't even have the time to worry as the power reached out to America, moving and writhing as it crept further and further out from its origin.

As the flaring power reached their location, all those in the room – and, unknown to them, the school and further – shuddered as an alien presence was felt to seemingly glance, and then pass on, as if doing a cursory check.

They could still feel the power, even as they watched the screen show that the power was now, impossibly, covering the whole world.

And then, mere seconds after the whirling vortex of power had erupted, the screen mapping it out went back to normal as the flaring power suddenly disappeared. There was nothing left, and only mere seconds had passed as that sheer presence had touched them. The air around them seemed heavy; heavy with the silence of the absence of the… well, whatever it was.

And then the feeling was gone; as suddenly as it had came and crashed through, it left and everything was normal.

Storm immediately noticed that there were other people in the room, and she glanced around to see reflections of what she imagined herself to look like at that moment – a strange mix of shock, awe, and something else unexplainable.

It was Logan that summed up their thoughts, a strange expression on his features; "Well shit."

»•ΰ•«

At that moment of time, there was someone who really had no idea of the outright panic and shock that they had caused; and had they known, probably wouldn't have given a damn either.

A woman, appearing to be in her early twenties, was grumbling under her breath as she pulled herself up from the ground, brushing dirt off the seat of her pants as she did so.

Her nose crinkled as she smelled a mix of urine, puke and garbage around her, and she cast a glance around to see that this unhappy smell was because she had managed to land in an alleyway behind a group of shops that would definitely be called shady by regular citizens.

The woman scowled and grumbled, not hesitating to pick a direction that she hoped was the exit and walk in that way, mentally congratulating herself as she appeared on a street that didn't smell bad. She immediately stepped out into the crowds of people, blending into the general chaos so as to not garner a second glance and walking confidently, as if she had not just popped out of thin air and walked out of a disgusting smelling alleyway.

Her clothing didn't draw much attention – she wore jeans, slightly old with a few fashionable rips in them, although they hadn't been there when she purchased them, as well as a well-loved leather jacket coupled with a t-shirt underneath – certainly not what anyone would call the height of fashion.

But this woman had long since abandoned bothering about such petty things as appearance, social standing; hell, even self-consciousness and others perceptions of her. Really, you live long enough and you come to forget to care about that kind of shit, so no worries there.

Hell, spend a few years as an oracle in which you have to wear lofty robes and float about, proclaiming which peoples were going to win and having people wait on you every day; commonly emulating what you remember of the unique Luna Lovegood just to screw with them and get your kicks, and silly things like 'shame' goes out the window. Of course, in this case 'a few years' is relative – it must have been close to an even two hundred, or something – they just kinda flow together after all she's been through.

But that was what she did – ever since it became apparent that she wouldn't die, she joined a very restricted club called Dimension Hoppers Anonymous (DHA) that was restricted in that as far as she knew, she was the only member. Well, there were other versions of herself involved – sometimes they crossed wires and ended up in the same world, and proceeded to join different sides of whatever conflict that world was involved in just for kicks and the excitement of not knowing if your side was gonna win or not, which was good after all these years.

How could this happen? Any normal person would ask. Another logical question would be just how old the woman striding down the street actually was. Well, the first was that her animagus was a phoenix, and apparently there was more to the phoenix's immortality than first meets the eye. They die, they are reborn. It's as simple as that. But when the world they are on dies, they skip on over to the next one.

Yeah, not many people know that little nugget of information, probably because not many people think of the apocalypse as anything more than an abstract theory, and even then they never think that they'd actually be alive and have to bother about their imminent doom.

And really, she was one of them, once upon a time.

She'd waited around on her original world, watching through the ages as things rose and fell, her own time becoming a legend and myth, waiting for the ever-more-likely moment that the world would go boom as it started to show its age and deterioration from its former glory. Well, that day had come; there had been a dull red sun and suddenly they had found the Earth superheating. She'd smiled that day – after so many years of staying the same as everything around her evolved, and retaining so precious few things as constants in her life, she was looking forward to dying.

Well, whatever 'higher beings' had started life, had fucked up that plan. Her powers had gone mad without her permission, and spiralled out of control. She had flashed off that world, and ended up in some kind of 'inter dimensional locker room' with a few versions of herself lounging around. They'd given her a short explanation that amounted to 'you can't die, enjoy fucking with whatever dimension you want to, but don't piss off anybody more powerful than you are – that can be troublesome.'

Well, at least they had held her own view on unnecessary words.

Next thing she knew, she'd been dumped on a world that was primarily occupied by house elves and had to figure out just what the hell she was doing.

Yeah, that was definitely one of the weirdest worlds she'd found – especially when she met the Voldemort version of house elves, threatening to leave mess everywhere.

After that, she'd blackmailed one of the others into teaching her how to pick worlds that were more aligned with her original.

Since then, she'd inhabited many different worlds, of so many different cultures and backgrounds that her head spun whenever she took the time to fix up the catacombs of her mind.

But at least she never got bored – none of them did, what with all the messes that they got themselves involved with – they met many different people, of many different temperaments and many different backgrounds, and they pretended to be many different people with many different temperaments. That was how they added spice to life – in one world, you be the evil bitch, in another you're the epitome of intelligence and fairness, and in the one after that you're the craziest person they'll ever meet.

She'd had many names, many more occupations and learnt many more trades and knowledge – magics, electronics, mechanics, woodwork, crafting, weapons, combat, cooking, healing, languages… the list went on and on. There really was a limitless potential for learning to pass the time.

The name that she'd chosen for this world was Raven Bennett – she'd used it in a few worlds, and combinations of it, so she was as happy with this as any other. This contrived name was more her name than her first – they all kept their first names to themselves, never re-using them after that first life.

Her first name, the name that she was born with all those lives and years ago, was kind of fuzzy, even if she had cemented and made sure that she would never lose her own origins, her first life. That name was Aiden Potter, daughter of Lily and James Potter, saviour and darling of the Wizarding World. But that was just logistics; all those who she had known were long and dead, their dust spread to the winds and their world collapsed.

It was interesting that she would run into people all the time that would remind her of those first friends, but then she had quickly realised that events and situations liked to repeat themselves on the different worlds.

But then, she would have been more concerned if she hadn't spotted resemblances from her past – she'd about seen and done it all.

And when she'd aimed for this dimension, it was because of the interesting situation developing on it. Or at least the capacity for there to be such a situation.

She liked to go in blind, so to speak, and just out of habit landed somewhere near England, which she had quickly found that it was actually named England – good, last time it had been a smoking crater when she'd shown up, and she'd accidentally blasted this person whose laugh was grating her headache, which had somehow ended up as her being worshipped as a Goddess by the people left over, because apparently this person had just managed world domination or something and she'd been unfortunate enough to blow him up without feeling out the local happenings.

An accident that had led to her going bat-shit crazy and wiping out the lot of them, then giving the planet to the centaurs cos they were the least annoying at the time.

Yes, she'd done a lot of crazy shit.

And stumbled across a lot of crazy shit.

But she was more than used to that, so she was using this world that she could tell was at least close to her first (enough for the mundanes to call London London, at least) to chill out. She could also tell that there were no pesky 'all-powerful' higher beings on this planet. Good. The last time that happened, she'd made them cry.

It was an inconvenience that whenever she slipped into a new dimension, her magic automatically spread out around it to check out the locals, so to speak, and she hoped that they didn't have any way of tracking that little power surge – it could be annoying. She knew all about people who would be pretentious enough to see that and come running, probably with the motive of locking her up and experimenting on her, or getting her to join their evil cult for 'glory and honour' or some other shit. Heh, a few times she'd taken up the baddies, only to be bored out of her mind sitting around and listing to some megalomaniac ranting about their own awesomeness and eternal power – in the long run, she'd seen they all got bored if they managed it for longer than how long it took for people to cut them down.

Haunting green eyes gazed at the street sign to Charing Cross road, and she ambled her way into the station. She rested her hand on the wall between platform 9 and 10, and although she wasn't really expecting anything, sighed as she confirmed that there was nothing strange about it. After all, she knew already that this world didn't have the same brand of magic that was on her first world.

Raven shrugged and took a moment to locate the highest concentration of magic. Hmm, it was across the pond in America – all the better. A simple eye-averting spell later, and she silently disappeared from the station.

Raven landed in the middle of New York City – if you were going somewhere, it may as well be big. She didn't look out of place even here, and slipped into the night-time crowds, heading towards a place where she could crash.

»•ΰ•«

"Does anyone have any idea just what that was?" It was a valid question, one that had sparked the argument that had degraded an adult 'very fast' conversation.