Chapter 8 Gen X Reunited

Paige Guthrie walked into her room at the Xavier Institute and noticed her cellular phone was blinking indicating that she had a call that had been missed. She picked up the cell phone and dialed up her voice messaging to see if there was a message. Sure enough, she heard a familiar voice on the other end.

"Paige, its Monet. X-Corp is allowing me to come to the states for a while, was wondering if you wanted some company. Give me a call back. You know the number here. Oh, and don't tell Jubilee I'm going to be there. Maybe she'll go on vacation before I get there." She laughed as she disconnected the phone.

Paige erased the message and immediately called Monet back. She was already in the air on X-Corp's luxury jet, on her way back to the states for the first time since they had all joined X-Corp after Gen X had disbanded.

"Hey there, Hay Seed." Monet said. "How are things?"

"They are pretty sporadic. Although I must admit, with people like Wolverine and Juggernaut around, things stay interesting."

"First off, before we go any further, I wanted to say I'm sorry for not being there for Angelo's funeral proceedings." Monet said, and she was as sympathetic as Paige had ever heard her be. "We both wanted to be there, but matters kept us here."

Of course she was talking about Sean Cassidy, their former headmaster and leader of the Paris Branch of X-Corp where they had worked. The matters that kept her there, Paige also knew about. Sean's X-Corp had been infiltrated by the mutant Assassin Mystique and Sean had been a casualty of the outcome. Mystique had slit his throat rendering him not only powerless, but also with lack of speech. With that attack, all of the former Gen-X students had left X-Corp and Jubilee and Paige had gone back to the states. Monet had elected to stay behind and take care of their former headmaster, teaching him sign-language so that he could communicate without means of pen and paper with at least her.

Upon returning to the States, the X-Men had been viciously attacked. While Paige had elected to return to the institute to pursue her career as an X-man, Jubilee had left to go to L.A. and spend time with Angelo, and pursue a career as an actress in Hollywood. That had fallen through and Angelo had left to go to New York to borrow money from Jono and Paige to get Jubilee out there with him, where they were both going to join the ranks of the X-Men. Before the attack on the institute, several mutants had been captured and mutilated and left for dead hung up on crosses in front of the Xavier Institute. Among these mutants that were tortured were former New Mutant Magma, and Angelo Espinosa. Jubilee got word that Angelo had been targeted and with money that was sent by Emma Frost, she hopped the first flight back to New York. She arrived too late, however, as Angelo was presumed dead when she got there. She, Paige, Emma, and Jono had been speakers at Angelo's cremating service. And the entire institute had attended. The only people that had been missing were Sean, Monet and Everett. Jubilee had even touched on the fact that she would always have her two angel's watching over her from above. Referring of course to Everett and Angelo.

And now for the first time since the break up of Gen X. All of the remaining members were going to be reunited.

"Don't worry about the funeral." Paige told her. "You and Sean were there in spirit. Everyone knew the situation."

"Ok, it's going to be good to see everyone again. How are Emma and Jono?"

"Jono is a little, well, how do you put this." She tried to find the words. "Even more detached than ever before." She sighed. "As for Emma, well, her and Jean aren't exactly getting along too well at the moment. In fact they have been at each other's throats over Jean's husband, Scott."

"Really? Girl, you have got to fill me in on these details once I land."

Monet told her what time the flight landed and Paige promised she'd be there to pick her up. After she hung up the phone, she went to go find Emma. She found Emma lounging in the living room with a couple of the other residents. Kurt Wagner was hanging from the chandelier, laughing hysterically as Bobby was jumping up and trying to grab him. Jubilation was sitting on the couch with her head tilted back watching the two guys playing around, while blowing bubbles with her gum. Emma was seated at the desk, turned away from a stack of papers. She seemed to be the only one of the four that noticed Paige walked into the room. Paige tapped her skull as her eyes met Emma's.

"Yes, dear?" Emma asked telepathically.

"Monet is coming to the states, and more specifically, she's coming here." Paige saw Emma's face light up with joy. Quickly, Paige added: "Keep it down; she didn't want Jubilee to know. I guess they still hate each other over the Everett situation."

They continued to "talk" a little bit more as Paige filled Emma in on all the details. Emma was ecstatic to have Monet back with the group. When they were in Gen X, Emma had looked at all the students as family, but she had been especially close to Monet St. Croix, growing as close to her as she would a sister.

As their conversation ended, Bobby had managed to get a hold of Kurt's tail and was holding him from getting any higher on the chandelier.

"Alright, Kurt, get down here!" Bobby was saying.
"No way!" Kurt said and with the traditional BAMF, he disappeared. Bobby suddenly fell on his butt, since the item he was tugging on disappeared along with Kurt.

"Are you two done?" Emma asked Bobby. "I've got paper work I need to get done."

"Well, if you could make Kurt give me back my."

"Bobby, really, you are plenty old enough to solve your own problems. Just please do it in the other room." And with that Emma Frost turned back to her desk to dive back into her papers. She was worth billions of dollars, since she was the CEO of Frost Enterprises, and she had recently made the mistake of firing her accountant after she found out that he was leaking confidential information to the stock market. The mistake was that she had fired him before hiring a replacement. Now she was stuck doing all the financial book work herself, and she really hated doing anything she could hire someone to do for her.

Paige for her part decided to go outside and enjoy the nice weather. She went back up to her room to change into some sweatpants and sweatshirt, which is what she typically wore out to go running in during the morning. She turned to leave her room and saw Jubilee standing in the doorway.

"So what's the big news?" She said around a bubble.

"What are you talking about?"

"I saw you and Emma eye-locked" She said with a quizzical look on her face. "I also saw you tap your head, which means you two were talking to each other where the rest of us couldn't hear. So what gives?"

Paige sighed. She hated that the girl was so perceptive and active all the time. She didn't feel there was much reason to not tell her about Monet. Paige knew she wasn't going on vacation anytime soon, so she was going to find out sooner or later.

"Monet is coming home for a while."

"Oh, is that all? Geez, Paige, I thought you had some kind of Juicy Gossip. I knew about that last week."

Paige just looked at her with a wide-eyed surprised look on her face.

Jubilee explained: "You do realize that Sean can still type on a computer, right? He told me a week ago Monet was coming down here."

Paige wondered why Sean had said nothing to her in her e-mails about it, but decided against pursuing the matter any further. Sean probably thought that since Monet and Paige were still on talking terms, that Monet had probably told Paige about it already. He probably e-mailed Jubilee because he knew Monet wouldn't tell her.

"And don't worry, Paige, I'm not going to want to go with you to pick her up, so you don't have to worry about anything. There won't be a scene between me and Monet the whole time she's here." Jubilee looked away from Paige and added, "Besides, the more I think about it, the more I miss her."

"I've got an idea. Why don't you go get your roller-blades and go running with me? Well, I'll run you roll." Paige suggested. Jubilee smiled and went to go get her blades and met Paige at the bottom of the stairs. The two of them headed for the door, when Paige opened up the door to go outside, her cell-phone rang again. She looked at the number expecting it to be Monet, but instead got a confused look on her face.

"It's an unknown number." Paige said.

"I wouldn't answer it. Probably a wrong number and will just waste your minutes." Jubilee said as she was pulling her roller blades on.

Paige waited until the call got forwarded to her mailbox and clipped the phone back onto her waist. No sooner had she done that, the phone started chirping indicating she had a message. She looked at Jubilee. "So much for it being a wrong number." She said as she pulled the phone back out and accessed her voice messages.

Jubilee watched as Paige's face went from confused to troubled. When she finally hung up the phone, she was staring at Jubilee, looking right through her.

"Who was it?" Jubilee asked curiously.

"It was Espeth. She's in trouble and she's at the Massachusetts Academy. You go get Emma, and I'll go get Chamber. Meet us at the Blackbird."

Without another word, Jubilee sprinted back into the house to go find their mentor, and Paige took off to the one place she knew Jono would be: The Danger Room.