If your house is on fire, and maybe it's just starting to ignite, there's certainly smoke strangling itself on the ceiling and flickers of hungry red snapping from crevices and shadows, but there are windows and the possibility of forcing a door or two, or if it's really bad, you can rip off some half-rotted pipe hanging from the wall and make potholes in the plaster until something gives.

Or, if you were Kurt, you could teleport out of the flames before you broke anything more than a sweat.

The Brotherhood house was not on fire.  Neither was Kurt, exactly -- he tried to keep matches away from his clothes if at all possible.  He had re-awoken.  The seering skin-pain-tingle had been subsiding pore by pore as blue fur crept over his limbs and face and whatever else and quenched it entirely.  A pale snake of a thing coiled up on the other end of the bed was gradually becoming less pale.  Kurt suspected he'd be terribly sick of blue before long, but since blue = cold = numb, so it was.

"Oh heck," Kurt spat, kicking his tail off the bed with an over large foot.  "Heck, heck, heck, heck."  There are better demi-curses and "heck" has such a funny sound to it that Kurt was giggling by the end of his one word rant.  That really didn't make him feel any better.

He had a sudden, stupid impulse to bite the end of that stupid tail and compensated by dragging a pillow over his head and screaming (again).

That didn't help either.

He threw the pillow at the ceiling, where it promptly hit a light fixture and plummeted right back on his face.

Oh well.

He could take inventory.  Four fingers, two thumbs, four toes, two funky heel extensions, two ears, two eyes, one tail, nose . . .

What a great idea.  So . . .

There was a knock at the door.  Kurt remained on the bed, pillow-blind, and didn't say anything.  The door creaked open.  Kurt stayed on the bed.  Lance ripped the pillow off his face and battered his chest with it, howling epithets, while Kurt made a point at staring off into space, just for spite.   Finally, Lance resorted to stomping on the pointy part of his tail and Kurt jerked stock-upright, screaming (euphamistic) epithets right back at Lance until they bother realized that they hadn't a clue what was going on.

Kurt petered out first.  "Geh . . . vhaddya vant?"  He'd pulled his tail around his ankles to protect it.

"I was just checkin' on ya, but you looked all suffocated and dead and stuff and you weren't moving.  You could, you know, acknowledge a person . . . "

"I don't feel very social," Kurt growled, draping a long arm around a bed post and using the leverage to examine his fingers.  "Hmmm."

"There's a difference between bein' unsocial and fakin' a coma."

"Tired of all this crazy excuse for sympathy, look.  I'm some crazy uber mutating demon-whatnot and I'm a little tiny bit depressed, so maybe we should let me mope for an epoch, if we wouldn't mind and . . . "  Oh yes, but it felt good to blather in German every once in a while.

"What?"

"I'm hungry," Kurt finished tersely (in English).

"Now?"

"Morphing into a . . ."  He gave up and continued in German.  "Crazy denizen of the place of flames and apparently reptiles, judging from those crazy hallucinations . . . "  And English " . . . takes eet out of you."

"Well, uh . . . I guess maybe Freddy hasn't eaten everything left in the refrigerator . . . "

"Vhatever.  Eet's not urgent."

Lance hitched his shoulder and scuffled back out the door.  Kurt abruptly (and possibly rudely, as Lance was going to come back and find the room all deserted) wanted to be out.  It seemed to be a day of odd impulses and physical shifts and junk.  Kurt whipped his tail straight, which smacked loudly against the wall and dropped to the bed, twitching.

"Vimp," he said, shaking his head.  He noticed, with a vicious scowl, that he was still wearing one of them flaccid blue hospital gowns.  And, wonder of wonders, there was a pair of pants half tucked under the bed.  Mmmm.  Kurt quickly snatched them up with a ravenous gesture and pulled them over his legs, up to his waist, and they were entirely too big.  Probably not Toad's then, weird.  Maybe Lance's.  Pants were pants, though.  He struggled out of the hospital gown and dropped it haphazardly on the floor. 

The band of the jeans kept trying to slip off his waist, but he had a hard time caring.

Before he knew why, he was on the bed again.  He splayed out too-long limbs to the four corners of the sheets, taking handfulls (and, er, footfulls?) of the fabric with a sort of baseless curiousity before teleporting . . . and ending up on the roof, hopelessly tangled in afore-mentioned sheets.

"Zat vas pretty dang incredibly smart."  His attempts at extracting himself only made the tangle a little more complicated -- his borrowed jeans got knotted into the sheets and the framework of thick and badly enmeshed cloth got wrapped around his tail and he was stuck sans pants in the proper sense, instead tressed up in denim and bedding like a particularly stupid version of the wolf in that Peter opera/symphony whatever.

It looked like time to try out those canines he'd magically aquired earlier.  He was actually quite good with them -- they made great scissors . . . well, maybe pen knives was a more accurate description, but within a matter of minutes (and with some attention to denim versus sheets), he'd transformed captivity into useful little strips of frayed color.  You could use them for tourniquets.

O-or, a belt!  Kurt hastily put the pants back on, strung a strip of sheet through the belt holes, and tightened it until he could tie a knot (clumsily, because his fingers were huge) and have some hope of his pants staying up from now on.  He then made a makeshift scrap-shirt from the rest, which had a lot of gaps in it and looked somewhat less stylish than the gear of all those semi-nude rock stars, but, if the scraps had been black instead of Salvation Army paisley, it would have been nearly cool.

Having thus utilized all his ruined sheet material, Kurt crept to the point of the roof closest to the old TV antenna and poised like a gargoyle.  Standing like a person was supposed to was becoming more difficult by the moment.  Slouching was acceptable, running around on all fours was not.  Yet, Kurt had this gradual fancy about running on all fours and eating pizza.  Oh right, he was hungry. 

He leaned over, peering at the blades of grass shimmering in the half light, and dove right off the roof.

In a normal person, this would have either been a suicidal plunge or a really stupid attempt at flight and while he fell, Kurt wasn't quite sure whether he wasn't doing either/or/and.  But his body was smarter than he was.  A second before he would have smashed his brains on the concrete, his arms pulled his legs up to his chest in a cannonball spin and he teleported . . .

. . . a good ten feet higher and several hundred feet in any direction from the House.  He came out of his barrel roll with his limbs spread out wide, and grinning madly.   It was no longer early and the streets were not bare of all onlookers.  Surely someone saw him falling none-too-slowly and cackling like being a demon was some kind of game (these punk kids now-a-days), but he couldn't care.  He teleported again and again and his half-fall, half-flight across Bayville became more gradual and stately as the speed of his initial plunge wore away and he finally landed on a roof without much fear of breaking a leg on impact.

Not that he landed well.  He kind of cartwheeled across that roof until he slammed against a railing and fell over with a splat, but he didn't break anything.

"All tings considered," he gasped, when his lungs worked again.  "Zat vas not so bad."

The body image, he'd have to work on.  Definitely dye the scraps black, for one.  Perhaps his fur black, too.  Why the heck not?  He figured, while he was lying there, flicking at a bit of bird scat with a massive yellow fingernail, whatever had happened to him was probably not liable to go away.  Unless he was a were-demon or something.  But somehow, morphing painfully into a tailed menace in mid-morning just didn't have the right dramatic factor.  No, it was probably permenant.

And it might have something to do with those pills he stopped taking. 

Normally, Kurt was fairly conscientious about pills.  It was how he'd been raised.  He'd been taking those pills for as long as he'd remembered.  It didn't rank with brushing his teeth -- it ranked with going to sleep and eating at least one meal a day, it had become so unconscious.  He didn't even know what they were for.  He just knew his parents got them in the mail very regularly.

About, two, three months ago, Kurt had suddenly lost all interest in taking medication.  Maybe it was a belated and weak form of teenage rebellion, he didn't know.  Anyway, his parents certainly trusted him to take them on his own, since he'd done it forever, and he'd taken some steps to look like he was taking them, surruptiously slipping them into the trash or the sink instead.  He'd felt he had some right to eschew the pills at the time.  After all, he'd never known what they were for, despite all his curious inquiries as he grew out of taking everything his parents said for granted.  They didn't seem to know either and there was something funky about feeding your kid something that could be doing anything to his body.  It was the equivelant of picking heroin needles off Danish beaches and sticking them in your skin just because they were there and convenient.

So, yes, now that he thought about it, Kurt was perfectly justified in liberating himself from those mysterious pills.  In a matter of two-days-missed, he was already out of the habit and releashing the two extra seconds it gave him every morning and evening to himself.  Hah hah, no pills to look in on your esophag--was it esophagus?  Yes, esophagus.  Not trachea, esophagus.  Anyway, it was nice, until, about four days into pure freedom, the whites of his eyes started to turn yellow.

His parents pronounced jaundice and the doctor pronounced, not likely, has no other symptoms, wait a week.  And the yellow grew until it was all his eyes were and Kurt took to wearing sunglasses and avoiding his parents to the best of his ability, as they always nagged him about "checking his progress" and he knew that if they actually saw that progress, they'd freak.

About a week and a half into freedom, Kurt felt this odd tingling sensation in his gut.  This was at the dinner table, which he hadn't been able to avoid this certain day, and Mom was saying to please honey, take off the glasses, it's dinner family time and we'd like to see your eyes every once in a while and dear me whatever is that stench?

Kurt couldn't smell it himself, but Mom's nose was wrinking and Dad's nose was wrinkling and they were both staring firmly at him.

"What?" he'd asked.  And then.  "No-o, I didn't do that --"

And then the tingling had become unbearable and he'd teleported across the room, right next to the door, and about three feet from the ground.  He'd smashed into said door and accidentally teleported again and it was about two days before he was on the train to the Netherlands and on the first step to the Brotherhood.

Kurt was never sure how all the stuff in between had happened (he wasn't sure about the first parts either), but Mom had said something about that nice person from America who sent the pills . . .

Oh yes, it had to do with the pills.  No doubt.  Kurt had even popped a couple after his eyes went weird to see if they'd regress, but he hadn't held out any hope and, if the person from America had called, (s)he apparently didn't either.

This was just part of it, then, and Kurt would just have to ride it out.  Besides, teleporting had apparently gotten a lot easier since the fur and tail had burst out of him.

The bird scat was really very cemented onto the roof.  Kurt scowled at it, but his thumbnail was sore, so he decided to leave it alone. 

He crawled over to the railing and hauled himself up along it, peering over the side into the alleyways below, cluttered with trash and the occasional cigarette smoking punk.  There had been a lot of cigarette smoking punks, lately.  Kurt was surprised there hadn't been a city meeting about it yet.

A pigeon swooped and muttered overhead and Kurt looked up automatically.  There were quite a lot of pigeons as well, but that wasn't so unusual.  Kurt thought he remembered Toad occasionally snacking on one or two when they came down too low.  What was a little unusual, maybe, was the massive raptor-bird hovering above the pigeons, wheeling in concentric circles over Kurt's roof.  The head was lighter than the rest of the dark body and Kurt wasn't sure, but it resembled a picture in his biology book, ecosystems' chapter.  Food chain.  As he remembered, it was plants at the bottom, then bunnies, than big massive bird, what was it?  Oh yes, an eagle.  Fancy, an eagle in Bayville.  Hadn't the chart in his book been a mountain ecosystem?

Oh well.  Kurt felt like teleporting again.  He directed his attention back in front of him, not up or down, his elbows hooked loosely over the railing.  Not too far distance, probably in 'port range, was a massive house.  Ah yes, the Gifted Institute, hoity-toity.  It was largely alone and only one road went by it -- certainly no lower subdivision structures cramped its living spaces.

Kurt was suddenly and irrationally angry that the house, the mansion, existed at all.  What right did it have to exist, really?  What were Gifted kids anyway?

He actually had to strain to remember who lived there -- it shouldn't have been too hard, the other Brotherhood members didn't like them much and kept talking about them, although usually when they thought Kurt wasn't listening.  Erm.  Scott Summers.  He kinda remembered him.  Straight-backed chap, sunglasses.  Right, that was why he was interesting.  Sunglasses.

There'd been other kids, like, a red-head girl and . . . some blond dude and . . . no, pretty much escaped him at the moment.  They all lived at this Institute that the Brotherhood chuckled at and probably envied, there was always a sort of restrained holiness to their jibes, and it sat alone and unchallenged in its little grove of trees.

Of course, Kurt knew where he was going to teleport next.

He wasn't sure what he was going to do once he emerged.  Or rather, he had some ideas, and not a one of them was proper.  The one at the forefront of his mind involved doing a little urine damage to the bushes from the viewpoint of the roof and he squeamishly dismissed it only for the idea to rise again and again, insistently and wickedly, all in the period of time it took for him to travel from one roof-top to another.  His landing was comparitively graceful this time -- his splat resulted from a slight fall of half a foot.

One he regained what little bearings he had, he made an awkward attempt to balance on his too-large feet, which seemed to want to be bent practically in two, with all the weight on the front squishy part below his toes.  When he jerked his back out of its monkey-slouch, it only sent spikes of pain up and down his spine in protest, until he was forced into the comfortable and disturbingly inhuman position again. 

He waddled over to the railing a little slowly, his gait still unfamiliar.  The nasty prank kept chewing at his frontal lobe, demanding to be used, and Kurt feared if he didn't do it, it'd latch onto his dreams and haunt him for at least the rest of his life.  The problem was it was a stupid idea and the Institute kids were unlikely to notice it and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't secretly praise him for his ingenuinity and punky brilliance.  They'd write him off, quite understandibly, as a dirty, uncreative vandal and maybe press charges.  In his current state, charges were the last thing he needed pressed.

His mind was trying to turn that last sentence into a pun when he reached the railing and looked down . . . and someone was coming up.  Yes, coming up and not in some expensive, useless stained glass elevator, no, coming up without aid of wires or platforms or anything.  It was a black woman with long, flowing white hair and a blue cape Kurt couldn't fathom the use of, her white-gloved hands outstretched and she was looking directly at him and flying closer by the second.

Kurt backed hastily away from the railing, but two steps later, she was already hovering over the roof, she'd be facing him directly if she wasn't floating, and her eyes were cold.

"I believe you are trespassing."

She was right, but Kurt hadn't expected the denizens of the Institute to be able to fly.  "Ach, I vas just leavink, I am sorry."

If the woman had been about to answer, she was interrupted by a cacophonous burst of noise from behind Kurt, who whirled around, half panicked.  There was an elevator landing mid-roof and it was opening, pouring out quite a few kids in gaudy uniform, well, three, maybe.  One with a visor, a red-head, and a surly looking girl with pale skin.  A bald man in a wheelchair creaked out behind them.

Kurt felt surrounded and more than a little threatened.  Naturally, he didn't have any weapons or advantageous talents to deal with any of it, so he poised to teleport . . . and found that he couldn't.  The tingle was there, but so muted and worn that he'd apparently used his juice up for the moment.  Therefore, his only option was to stall for time.

Considering how everyone was staring at him, he possibly had some routes in that direction.

"Stay back!" he warned, flailing a thick finger at visor-boy, red-head, and black woman in turn.  "I am Balreialr-ting, the demon auf . . . eccoseeestem and ze first vun to moof vrong vill turn eento . . . alga--"

The bald man sighed.  "Your name is Kurt Wagner and you've suffered an acceleration of mutation.  You are not a demon."

Kurt blinked and grasped for the broken fragments of drama.  "Nein, I am a demon auf third order.  Ja, third order.  You aunly tink of me as mutant because demons are beyond your comprehension!  Ja, I sold my soul for zhis pover and --"

"You are also Catholic."

"I sold my soul very recently . . . "  Kurt gave up.  "Who aure you?"

"We're the X-Men," the visored-kid offered.   "Mutants.  You know us, sort of.  The Professor alerted us when you went jumping all over town, but you'd have seen us in street clothes.  I'm Scott Summers."

"Eet rings a bell.  A leetle bell, but a bell."  The red-head looked about to introduce herself too, but Kurt felt the spark of his power renewing itself and, wow, look at the time.  "Ach, I apologize again for intrudink, auf veidersein!"

He crouched into 'port position and . . . nothing happened.  A flash of very strong annoyance crossed his face.

"I vould like to leaf, if you don't mind," he accused, looking directly at the bald man because bald men are always behind these kind of things.  Everyone knows bald men are psychic, because all that thought energy kills hair.

"Kurt, the . . . emergence of your power has caused some strange occurances.  We need you here a little longer."

Kurt said something he was not normally accustomed to saying and lunged at the red-head out of simple frustration, but with a little . . . persuasion from the cold, ungloved fingers of the sullen goth girl, he became quite lax and, if not willing to descend to the X-Men's secret chambers, too unconscious to care anyway.

Besides, it was a good day to be unconscious.