Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters, except for those I invent. I invented a character named Marie. I realize that is the real name of Rogue, but I will always refer to Rogue/Marie as Rogue, and Marie/Marie as Marie. No infringement is intended.
For details on Marie and her friend Jean-Pierre, please read "An American Ka-Boom! in Paris." chapter one through eight.
D.C. is also a character I invented. For details, see "D.C. and the CN Tower." chapters one through five.
"Whoa! Oh! Ah! Yikes! Watch out! Look out! Do you speak English?"
DC was having a hard time fighting. Sheila kept getting cornered by soldiers, and DC had had to rescue her five times already. There was a woman who kept charging and screaming in Spanish at the soldiers, with flames appearing in her hands. She looked like some sort of a dragon lady, and most of the soldiers that saw her turned and ran for their lives. But not all of them did, and so DC had to save her several times as well. When DC asked her what her name was very slowly, she said, "Meg ferozdama," then sped off at the soldiers again.
Explosions were everywhere. Dirt and debris was flying. DC, who could defy gravity, flew around unleashing blasts that knocked planes out of the sky, turned over tanks, and sent soldiers flying several feet. He always paused, just to make sure everyone was all right.
Sheila revealed how smart she was just then. By running in circles around a unit she got a small tornado going. Storm noticed this. She flew over and whispered in Sheila's ear. Nodding, they both disappeared from view.
Cyclops kept aiming for the control building, and he was doing damage, but he kept getting sidetracked.
The ground was shaking thanks to Jean-Pierre. Marie was hurling tanks fifty feet. Whenever soldiers charged a thick sheet of ice suddenly appeared and all went down. Multicolored sparks were flying like mad from Jubilee's hands, sending soldiers out for the count. Gambit had incredible aim with his cards. Almost every time he threw them the cards became lodged in the main guns of tanks and rifles alike. A few seconds later, and soldiers were running away from their disabled tanks or carrying their dismembered guns as they ran.
A mutant that looked like Hank except with no fur and with a tail kept appearing and disappearing in front of soldiers. He stole a great number of weapons, which made about half the army defenseless. Many were running away as they realized their guns and rocket launchers were missing.
A great pinnacle of smoke was rising from the battlefield, the result of several of several explosion caused somewhat by the military and a few mutants, but mostly by DC. For the first hour it just drifted about lazily, as if watching the battle far below. Suddenly, it shaped itself into a giant anvil shaped thunderhead. DC noticed Sheila doing something funny. She started to run in a circle about three hundred feet in diameter in an area free of mutants and soldiers. As she ran faster and faster, dust rising from behind started to form a small tornado. Suddenly the column of dust flew upward into the base of the thunderhead. Sheila broke away from it then, and fell to the ground, exhausted. DC flew to her side and tried to make her stand up, but when he saw what was happening to the small tornado he stopped trying and watched, openmouthed. The tornado's winds picked up speed, and it suddenly split apart. A dozen tornadoes branched off from it. DC realized Sheila had helped Storm make the tornado so that Storm wouldn't have to expend as much energy. The tornadoes swept over the battlefield, sucking up tanks, airplanes, and soldiers, but leaving mutants unharmed. Between the tornadoes a terrible wind blew. It twisted around the funnels, battered this way and that like a ball in a pinball machine. DC had an idea on how to make the twisters more powerful and terrifying. He made sure nobody was in any of the funnels, then he started an explosion in the base of each one.
Flames curled and rose. The funnels turned from dark brown to bright yellow. Swirling up into the base of the cloud, twelve tornadoes made entirely of yellow flame moved toward the rest of the army.
Panicky yells rose up, screams were heard, then a stampede of troops was pouring toward, around, and away from the control building, running for their lives.
Inside the building, it was chaos. Officers and privates, doctors and nurses, guards and janitors ran around. Paper and overturned furniture were scattered all over. Alarms were screaming, lights were flashing, and right in the middle of all, the general was screaming his head off, trying to be heard in the utter pandemonium.
"Doctor, where are you? Somebody switch off the alarm! Tell unit G to circle around the mutants! Where the hell is troop 261? What is that?!?"
He looked out the windows facing the entrance to the mutant prison. Except he couldn't see the entrance because an explosion or something had completely covered it! And it was coming this way!
He grabbed a microphone lying on the ground, clicked it on, and yelled into it.
"THIS IS THE GENERAL! EVACUATE THE BUILDING, I REPEAT, EVACUATE THE BUILDING, NOW! THIS IS A CODE 10 EVACUATION! DROP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND RUN!"
Hearing the warning, everyone turned as one and ran like hell. The building was three stories tall, so everybody on the second and third story broke the windows and jumped. From outside the explosion could be discerned as a tornado but nobody cared because now they could see eleven more coming right after it.
All were F-5 tornadoes, which means flame was rotating at over 300 miles per hour. Each of the bases was over 200 meters wide and they suddenly merged into one giant super tornado. Now the base was contracting, shrinking from a mile wide to about twice the width of the control building. As the base shrank the wind speed increased. 350…400…500…600…700…1000…1500…2000…3000…4000…5000…6000…7000…7600 mph!!!
Now, a twister composed entirely of fire, with a wind velocity of ten times the speed of sound, was moving towards the control building. Needless to say, that is a very scary sight.
It was almost on top of the building now. The control building itself was an old abandoned wooden saloon. On the outside it looked like a rotting collapsing rat hole, but the military had fixed it to look that way so that nobody would guess that supercomputers and monitoring systems were concealed inside. Now the few shingles still clinging to the roof were being ripped off along with roof panels. When the fire twister was less then five feet from the building, both objects seemed to flicker for a second or two. Then they looked exactly the same as before, except for the fact that the building was being ripped apart.
The rotting strips of wood on the side facing the tornado were pried off by the ultrasonic wind and sucked into the funnel. This revealed the inside of the building. Desks, chairs, computers, insulation, TVs, cameras, vending machines and high tech gadgets flew through the holes in the walls and were consumed in the flames. The rest of the roof was torn off, and it orbited around the funnel a few times before entering the funnel several hundred feet above the building itself. Windows shattered, and the funnel finally touched the building.
Inside, a fierce wind was blowing through the broken windows, overturning furniture, and making makeshift wind tunnels in the halls. This caused a vacuum which sucked out doors, exposing rooms without windows to the winds. Even the carpet was pried up and torn off, joining the rest of the loose objects flying through the halls towards the funnel. As the vending machines tipped over, rolled, and collided with other objects, the glass fronts broke and added their contents to the melee. When the funnel touched the building, the flames expanded into it. A shock wave went before it, so the objects tumbling down the halls changed direction briefly before they were consumed.
In a room opposite the funnel, it was almost normal. The shutters had been closed over the windows, and the door was holding its own against the vacuum in the hall. This room contained two desks, which were orderly and not the slightest bit messy. Not even the wastepaper baskets had been over turned, and the only thing wrong was the awful roaring and bumps and thumps coming from the hall.
Suddenly, a computer monitor came flying through the wall, followed by a small couch. Then, expanding flames came bursting into the room, blowing the rest of the wall out. The computer and couch went careening out the windows, and the two desks would have joined them if they hadn't been burned to a crisp.
The flame tornado had covered nearly the whole structure, except the wall facing away from the prison entrance. Most of the outside paneling had been stripped away, revealing smoking insulation and solid flames consuming almost all of the rooms behind the walls. Several pieces of furniture had pierced the wall and were sent flying one hundred meters or more.
Now it was only the basic framework that was left. The new support system the military had built into the building to keep it from collapsing was brand new steel, and it was what was left of the building. The personal running away and looking back could discern it only because it glowed red against the yellow flame of the twister. Suddenly, when a screech and a groan heard even above the roar of the tornado, the steel framework tore from its foundation and tumbled out of the funnel. It rolled and tumbled around the funnel a few times like a hyperactive toddler around his mother. Then it slowly lifted off the ground and still rolling in midair, was sucked into the funnel.
The military personal meanwhile were making for the mining town about ¼ of a mile from the control building. Almost all of them had reached it, jumped into military caravans there, and high tailed it out of there, heading for Westchester. The last caravan waited for ten more stragglers. When they were loaded up, the driver happened to look into the review mirror, and nearly wet himself. The fire tornado had followed them to the old town, and was presently bearing down on the first structure, a broken down outhouse.
A man with his pants around his ankles suddenly burst from the door, and ran as fast as he could for the truck, a very difficult thing to do in the middle of doing your business.
As soon as he had jumped into the back, the driver put the petal to the metal and drove down the dust road. A stinky odor reached his nostrils, but he was too busy looking behind him to care. To his immense relief, the twister suddenly dissipated into a column of black smoke, which rose slowly into the sky, disappearing into the jet black cloud that hovered above the area.
Back at the mine entrance, DC looked at control building, sitting completely unharmed in its proper position. Storm was standing next to him. He turned to her and said, "Isn't it amazing how real holograms look?"
THE STORY IS NOT OVER YET! DID YOU REALLY THINK YOUR SUFFERING WAS OVER?!?