Chapter 8 The Master Plan

Disclaimer: It all belongs to Marvel, except for my original characters, of course. But if Marvel wants to use them, they can. Feel free to post this, or any other Glaivester fic, anywhere, but please notify me so I can brag about it.

"Sorry, Kurt. But I need to do this. You're lucky I was told to capture you and not to kill you."

Kurt harrumphed. He had been drugged so that he was mostly paralyzed, but he could breath and talk, although not teleport. "I am not certain what they want with you," Graydon continued. "I think that something big is going down. In any case, you, Pietro, and some other mutant - a teleporter like you, I believe - are going to New York."

"What do you want?"

"I don't know what is going to happen. I was just told to bring you to New York."

Meanwhile, the X-Men and the Brotherhood were trying to follow in the X-Van, and various other vehicles, but Graydon had gotten too far away.

Back at the X-Mansion, Wanda was comforting Talia. "Daddy will be all right. Don't worry," cooed Wanda. Talia was, however, inconsolable, sobbing as she held on to Wanda so hard that it hurt.

"Mommy," asked Talia suddenly. "I... I know where Daddy is."

"What?"

"I can sense him, Mommy."

Wanda was impressed. So Talia was beginning to be able to control and use her telepathy. It was apparently quite weak, but she seemed to have a special connection with her parents.

Wanda thought a second and made a decision. "Come on. We're going after him. And this time, we're going to kill anyone who tries to hurt Kurt."

Samuel Sterns looked at the young man in his charge. "Hello, Calvin, wakey-wakey."

Calvin Rankin got up from the table. "What's happening, Mr. Sterns?"

Mr. Sterns raised an eyebrow. "Reach out to me with your mind." He began thinking very hard.

Calvin discovered a mild sort of telepathic connection to the green man. Concentrating on it, he suddenly became very... lustful for something. Lust was the only word he could use, but it wasn't lust for sex. It was lust for information.

Mr. Sterns handed Calvin a book. "Read this."

Calvin began reading, and as he did so, his forehead grew slightly and his skin gained a trace of green. He scanned the pages very quickly, and Sterns calculated that he was reading about a page every fifteen seconds. It usually took Mr. Sterns seven or eight seconds.

"We are bringing in someone else." Suddenly, in walked Warren Worthington III. "So what was I called in for?" he asked cheerfully. "My father told me that our defensive industries needed my assistance on something.

"Please use your wings."

Warren nodded and took off his jacket, revealing his wings and flying a short distance in the surprisingly large and tall room.

"Concentrate on him," directed Mr. Sterns.

Calvin did, and suddenly wings sprouted out of his back.

"Excellent."

When everyone who had gone out was back at the mansion, Logan noticed the note stuck to the door. "I'm going after him. Talia is coming with me. We're no safer here than out there, so don't worry about us going out." Reading this, Logan snarled.

"What's wrong?" asked Storm.

"The Witch has taken the Elfling. They're trying to find Elf."

"How?" asked Scott.

"I don't know - perhaps it has to do with Talia's telepathy," remarked the Professor. "Remember, her telepathy played a role in her finding Kurt in Switzerland. Perhaps the relative weakness of her telepathy is compensated for by its precision in locating people."

Talia was riding on the sidecar of one of the motorcycles, which Wanda was driving.

Wanda was getting very worried about not only Kurt's current predicament but also over the question of how to break the story of Talia's origin to her. Now that she was asking questions about male/female relationships, it would only be a matter of time before she questioned her parents about the circumstances of her own birth. As Wanda recalled, realizing that your parents produced you through sex was a very jolting thought the first time you realized it, even though in her case her mother had been dead long before she thought about such things, and so she had been able to look at that half of the equation more objectively. The idea, however, of Magneto - helping to make babies - it just seemed wrong to her, although it looked like it was going to happen a second time with Rogue. Great, now Wanda would have a stepsister or stepbrother, who was also Kurt's stepniece or stepnephew.

Explaining anything to Talia about her origins, of course, would have the added difficulty of the fact that Kurt and Wanda had not chosen deliberately to conceive a child, nor to have sex, for that matter had really considered being in any sort of relationship at all, even friendship. It was hard enough to explain the birds and the bees in a normal situation. But Wanda would also have to decide whether or not to explain the bird-and-beekeeper to Talia as well. Instead of, "Mommy and Daddy loved each other very much," she would have to say "A man named Nathaniel Essex liked your father and mother's DNA very much, and so he drugged them and had them..." She wondered if it would be better to simply pretend that she and Kurt were lovers and that Talia was the result of one of their encounters. In a few more weeks or months, the first part of this characterization might well become true.

For her part, Talia had forgotten all of her questions about Rogue and about the people on the soap opera. She had different concerns right now. She didn't know what was happening to her, but since her distress at her father's kidnapping by Graydon she had developed a headache. Having considered herself to be a "little trooper" for most of her short life, she didn't want to say anything, but she was in great distress. And not only her head. The rest of her body felt all tingly, and she felt as if there was some sort of psionic energy bursting inside of her. Whenever she used telepathy, she felt this strange sort of connection to whomever was nearest her. Not like the way she felt connected to her father, an awareness of where he was, but rather some sort of awareness of their body, what it actually felt like to be them.

What no one realized is that someone else was following Kurt. Someone who had tapped into the phone line, and found out about Murphy's Dock and who had driven her car immediately there.

"Ahh..." thought Laura. "What a good thing that I slept with that weird nerdy kid. Arcane of something like that. I never knew there was a way to tap into phone lines so that you could listen in with your cell phone."

Peter Parker meanwhile was trying to track Jameson's location from home using a spidey-tracer he had managed to put on the man when he had been carted off by the FOH goon squad to be... whatever they did to traitors. Parker had quickly gone back to home [A/N in my story, Peter Parker is a freshman in college and is still living with Aunt May] after the incident to see where they were taking him. Unfortunately, it appeared that the tracer had been discovered and removed, as his computer had recorded that the signal had died soon after Jameson had left Polotown.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door. When Peter answered it, he saw a beautiful blonde with a silver ring around her right eye.

"Hello, Mr. Parker. A friend and I have been watching you. I don't think that you believe that FOH crap, and I want to know if you can help us to fight the organization from within - if that's not what you are doing already."

"Who are you?"

"The name is Tandy. Tandy Bowen."

Meanwhile Murdock and Farmer were discussing with Carlton the plans for the following Monday.

"So let me get this straight," asked Murdock. "We get Jameson into work and have go to the top of the building, ostensibly because someone called him up there. Then this speedy kid confronts him and taunts him with anti-wild-type [A/N in case you've forgotten, wild-type means non-mutant] slogans. Then Miss Ferguson teleports in and grabs him, and gets into a fight. He gets close to winning, but in the end she uses her powers to teleport him a few feet off the building. He falls to his death, and then she teleports to the ground, and the demon-guy teleports in, too."

"Yes," replied Carlton, "They will attack carefully placed FOH members - only no one will know that they are FOH members. Then a few of our other agents will suddenly appear out of the crowd and shoot the two mutants to death. We'll capture the speedy kid and he will confess that he and a bunch of other mutants are all trying to start a war to wipe out us normals. Then we will get a lot more acceptance and the mutants will get a lot less."

Farmer nodded. "It's a pity, really, that unless we force the issue, the mutant's real agenda will never come out. It's a shame we have to lie a little, but the larger point is true, after all, so it evens out in the end."

Carlton nodded. "Sometimes you need to make things worse to make them better."

"How are we going to get them to do what we want?" asked Farmer.

Carlton smiled. "We will fill them with a murderous desire to kill Jameson and the selected 'targets' we plant in the crowd. You see, we have captured another mutant recently, and unless he does what we ask, we will torture him to death. We have him hooked up to a machine that will tell us if he tries to deceive us. He will fill these other mutants with a murderous rage in order to save his own life."

"Who is he?" asked Murdock.

"His name is Wyngarde. Jason Wyngarde. He calls himself Mastermind."