Chapter Two: Jubilee's Adventure

Jubilee woke as she always did, thrilled to be an X-man, "Although" she would often think "X-Person is a better description."

It was a golden age for X-Men in her dimension. Sure Sentinels attack mall rats for no reason and most everyone dresses in brightly colored spandex, but what is life without it's surprises? After all, Rogue and Gambit seem to have found true love. Scott and Jean will probably be married in a year or less, and Beast didn't seem to mind at all when he was put on trial for his part in destroying the records at the bureau for mutant affairs. And Wolvie would be back today!

Jubilee strut proudly down the hall, wrapped in a bathrobe, and directly in to the bathroom. The door locked with a definite 'click'.

Gambit sat bolt upright in bed. "Damn." he thought "Petite beat me to it." He beat his pillow twice with his fist and settled down to try and sleep. It would now be a good forty minutes until he could use the bathroom just down the hall. "Need to gets that girl her own place." He thought as he began to drift off again.

Suddenly there was a crash from the bathroom that sent Gambit flying out of his bed and toward the hall. He threw open the door as he tried to call out "Pet..." but that was all the further he managed to get before he was met with the business end of an XSE issue side arm.

"Die traitor." The man said, his dark eyes flashing and his nostrils flaring. He pulled the trigger.

The orange flash was rimmed in purple. It flared each of the three times Bishop pulled the trigger. The first blew Gambit back in to his room but not off his feet. The second went strait through his heart. He reached out desperately for something to touch, to charge, to fight back with, but nothing came to his aid. The third shot struck with the hollow sounding sizzle that let Bishop know that Remy LeBeau, traitor of the x-men, was dead.

Bishop could feel the force of minds searching for his. So many telepaths, searching for answers. But he shut them out. A man holding his glasses blitzed out of a side room. Cyclops Bishop realized. But he was too late. Bishop keyed a sequence of his temporal displacement bracelet and vanished before his eyes.

"Gambit! Gambit!" He called, sprinting down the hall, he caught himself and stopped short. There was no point in hurrying for Remy any more.

The house was off and odd that day. And it wasn't until the next day that people began comparing notes and looking for Jubilee.

Bishop however knew immediately. As soon as he keyed in the sequence and was teleported back to the future. The lab had changed.

People were present, but not the XSE patriots he expected, instead they were incomplete, and mentally lacking. They moved with great precision and ease. They lined up along either side of him, as if directing or shepherding him toward the door.

No longer did the lab open in to a small cramped hallway. Instead it opened on to a metal walkway that hung over a three story marble room adorned with a central throne. Blue and Gold banners hang alternated with black and red draperies along the walls. And there upon the throne sat Professor Xavier, or his living corpse anyway.

Twisted and deflated, undernourished and dying, the form of Professor Xavier sat like a discarded puppet on a toy throne.

"Xavier" Bishop said aloud, the whisper filling the great room as though it had never known sound.

Suddenly a door opened and a line of robed men and women filtered in to the room. Their eyes glazed and empty, they stopped in unison and opened their mouths. No one spoke. A resonance sounded deep inside their bodies and the sound formed words as it continued.

"Bishop the Anomaly, you are hereby found guilty of non-inclusion with the great and holy lord Onslaught. The sentence is death."

And Bishop was suddenly assaulted with a devastating telekinetic wave. It tore him apart.

Jubilee woke up. She woke up as she did every morning of the six years she had been missing from the mansion. She woke up running for her life. Her once latent telepathic skills are not quite developed and offensive. People believe what she wants them to. Act as she wants them too, but it only goes so far.

Because behind every mind on the planet is the Mind of Onslaught. Born of Magneto's rage and Xavier's power, the Onslaught hit the world unaware and went about collapsing under the strain. Until in a last ditch effort, the Onslaught consciousness bonded with that of the Prime Sentinel. Now this techno-mutation keeps the people of this world subservient to the needs of the great master Onslaught who needs nothing but the most basic of care.

When Jubilee was temporally displaced by Bishops time jump she arrived almost six years prior to Bishop's departure. The lab was there and run by XSE people who welcomed a woman of legend. They called her an omen of good will in the battle against the sentinels. She was caught eventually and tattooed over her left eye. And while in prison time began to rewrite around her. No one else noticed when people began to disappear, when buildings changed location and configuration, and when lastly, there was no one left who was not 'zombified'.

No one except Jubilee, who grew more and more powerful as the mutant population of the world began to dwindle. It was as though all the mutant potential of her world was trying to focus itself through the few remaining potential canidates.

It both disturbed and delighted her.

Finally Jubilee had grown in to the kind of woman she had idolized in her past. She could fill out a costume like she remembered Jean and Rogue doing. And she bit back the tears that there was no one left to see it. Her mind recoiled from the thoughts that wished to come. She wanted to think of Wolverine, of Cyclops, or of Trevor of the XSE. The men of her past and her imagination.

The fantasy threatened again; access to a time machine. Surely, after all she's been through, she could have any of them at all if only she could reach them, explain herself.

And she banished the thoughts from her mind. She wondered how normal it was to think about the past like this, then she winced. There was no such thing as normal. Not anymore.

The morning had been unusually quiet. The distant automated factories were producing far less billowing gas today as well. The normal patrols of robed half human husks that walked these roads without fail every morning rain or shine, were also, absent.

Jubilee crept along the road searching, cautiously, for any sign of the beast known as Onslaught.

Two hours later Jubilee had given up on any attempts to conceal herself. She walked boldly and daringly towards the hives of technozombies that now occupied her world. It wasn't long before she found the disciples of Onslaught. Most were already dead. A few others comatose and unfathomable.

By that night she had patrolled the entire complex that was once the base of operations for a tyrant who held the world at bay. It was now a kingdom of corpses.

In one room she found an ancient and decrepit skeleton that reminded her of Professor Xavier. "Couldn't be." she thought "He wouldn't have allowed this."

And there before the corpse on the throne she found the bloody remnants of a man, swatted like a gnat. A man who wore the mark of the XSE.

There was no way for her to know that Onslaught had been dying. That he had been turning over more and more control to the prime sentinel. No way of knowing that Onslaught had assumed Jubilee long dead. That it assumed as it faced Bishop that he was the last bit of resistance it need ever face.

She, and Onslaught, had no way of knowing that once the threat was eliminated the prime sentinel would shut down the entire extermination program. A last line of code from the ancient and bigoted humans who built the machine. No way to know that it would consider the people it possessed as expendable and unreliable parts of a mechanism that had outlived it's usefulness.

And so with Bishops Death, Jubilation Lee was finally and truly, alone.