Am writing this from the back of an SUV in Chicago traffic two hours into the start of a LONG car trip (therefore I'm bored and TICKED that I'm wasting a lovely, no-school Friday in a car!)

Yes, yes, I know. Stop grousing and start typing the story…god knows I've got time to do it…hey, looky, I can see the Sears Tower from here! And I will for another two hours…

ANSWERS TO READERS' QUESTIONS:

How the arm got lodged in an undersea crevice:
(Freud: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.")
"
Artistic license?" Okay, I was not paying attention to the episode where Mystique shattered. I saw it from the corner of my eye and did a double take. IN MY MIND'S EYE, the X-Mansion grounds include a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean (Bayville). The gazebo Rogue pushes Mystique off of is on that cliff. The statue shattered on the rocks below where the waves crash in, and some pieces fell into the sea. (Conceivably, the force of a wave could then have lodged a piece in the cliff face.) That is how my brain remembers it happening, and that's the story I'm sticking to. If it makes people feel better, I'll write the scene and stick it in somewhere.

Why the Arm grabbed Rogue: (BWB: "…but the rest of the time, it's referring to a man's pants!")
Mystique was alive when the statue shattered. Frozen in stone like that, she didn't have time to "die," so the arm was still alive when turned back into flesh.
I will let the reader decide if Mystique's arm was trying to attack or comfort her… or if it was merely a dying appendage reacting to stimuli.


XXX

Cloning Evolution

Step 4: Consider the Ethics

XXX

Risty had fallen asleep in the passenger seat, reverting to her natural shape. Though her pants now came to her knees and her tiny shirt bared her entire midriff, her long limbs fit through the child's clothes with room to spare. It struck home how thin she was. Rogue glanced at her from occasionally, visions of the girl scoffing down entire veggie pizzas. Other times, she just looked, taking in Risty's smooth, blue features. She had baby skin, unmarked by age or worry. No wrinkles. No fingerprints. Cradling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in her arms like a baby, she almost resembled a statue of the Virgin.

Rogue tried not to think of statues, but it was the only way to describe Risty. She was like polished stone, carved by master's hands but still lacking the complexities of human flesh. Her skin also had the look of rock that had been worn smooth by water, though her months submerged in a glorified fish tank may have had something to do with that.

Unlike a statue, though, Risty's smoothness meant she was an unfinished work. As her powers were developed, she would become a more complex being. But what exactly would she be carved into, and by whom? The Beauty or the Beast?

Rogue sighed, knowing she would be plagued by such thoughts straight over three state lines. She was right.

There wasn't anything she could do about it, either. She was as much a passenger on this trip as Risty. The only difference was, she couldn't afford to fall asleep. If she did, a crash into a telephone pole was imminent. Or the mind occupying her thoughts would break through the mental barriers and grasp her body's controls. She would prefer to crash.

So she followed the mind's driving directions—south—and had absolutely no trouble staying awake.

Thinking about her destination was enough to keep her awake for days.

XXX

The old traveling circuses had wintered in the Deep South, particularly in Florida and Georgia, where the semi-tropical climate agreed with the exotic animals. The Gladring Circus had been one of the few that survived long enough to witness the rebirth of the Big Tops as an American pastime. Only, in their reincarnation they had been renamed Freak Shows. Proudly.

Gladring had been the proudest.

Now its wintering grounds were too much oversized litter disgracing several acres of backwater, southern Georgia. Rogue left the car on the dirt road within an overgrown patch of autumn shade and let the unwelcome memories guide her. Steps light, she wandered through the undergrowth into a gray, immolated clearing. Her feet stopped abruptly, and her hand lashed out to grasp whatever support it could find.

The mind inside hers was reeling as the bright memory of organ music and laughter was replaced with one of rusted shrapnel and ashen earth. It always happened. Memory was the only thing the homeless minds inside her had to hold on to. They needed it to prove that they were real and the prison inside her head was only their fleeting nightmare. So when one of their memories was overlaid by one of hers, they bitched like all Hell.

The one in the mental limelight had been a quick rising officer in the F.O.H. ranks towards the end of the war. He was actually the last person she'd sucked for information. Magneto had taken over the day after in the sort of fell swoop that only fictional criminal masterminds monologued about pulling off—right before they were thwarted by the valiant heroes. Only in this story, the plan went off without a hitch, and the heroes were faced with the ultimatum of join him or die. Rogue had opted for option C, disappearing into the night with nothing but the clothes on her back, a faked death, and an F.O.H. officer screaming in her head for the Devil (her) to release him from Hell (also her).

He was right about the Hell part, anyway. To explain, her more recent absorptions were always more to the front of her mind, and staying off-radar required a no-absorption policy on her part. In short, Officer Rosenheimer had enjoyed being the second-in-command of her head for nearly a decade. He used the position to make her life Hell whenever possible. Payback, he called it. To him, she was a demon come to torment his soul.

She was a mutant to boot, so he felt no remorse in trying to beat her to death in her own mind when he found his fond memory of the Gladring Freak Show replaced with a burnt shell.

Rogue shoved Officer "Rose"—her personal thorn-in-side—back into his cell and stepped into the remains of the dead circus. Her hand slipped from the singed sign she had been supporting herself with. The blue and black paint on the large wooden board was faded, but the pointed eared demon wreathed in a cloud of smoke was still visible. He snarled at onlookers, held back from throttling them only by a technological collar and chains.

In cheery gold letters it read 'Welcome to Gladring Freak Show.'

Mr. Rose fought with her as she entered the fairgrounds, trying to make her see his memory instead of reality. Milling people and food stands flickered in and out of view. A half-naked, orange-scaled woman performed a spectacular twenty-foot acrobatic twist, only to vanish before she touched ground. The man was most stubborn about the Big top, but occasionally the illusion would break.

The enormous tent had been torn asunder. The vertical support poles still towered into the air, blue canvas bound to each top. The ragged cloth hung, creating a dagger-like point from each pole with curved, downward arches in between. From a distance, the broken tent seemed a gaping circular mouth with blue razor-sharp teeth rising from the earth to swallow everything good in the world.

In the next instant, it turned back into a brilliant blue pagoda of good, clean fun with golden flags billowing smartly in the gentle breeze.

XXX

As she meandered, turning slowly, trying to find her bearings, she found her feet had carried her into ruins of the big top. Or rather, Officer Rose had. She stood on the slightly warped, metal bleachers circling the ring. Again Rose seized her attention. She dropped into the rusted seat, suddenly remembering a past she had never experienced.

The jeers and booing roared into her ears. Her own throat felt raw from it. The spotlights came on, and a shout of anticipation rose through the crowd as hundreds of necked craned upward. Pinned under the lights, a small, cubic cage gleamed and dangled from just below the tent's zenith. A shape huddled within the bars. Nothing happened. The shouts grew insistent as a man in a blue top hat milked the crowd. He was a master. At his direction, the audience booed and laughed derisively, and then fell silent with a single gesture from his gloved hand. There wasn't a drum roll, not even an expectant breath as the seconds ticked by.

Only one sound was heard in the immense area. An accented, baritone voice filtered down from above, pleading softly in a tongue few in the audience knew. As the moment stretched, the same foreign words repeated again, then again. The beginning, almost staccato in desperation seemed to pierce her ear drums every time. "Mutter Goddess—"

The cage fell to pieces in an instant. He plummeted. Rogue's heart slammed against her ribcage even as a whoop issued from Rose's throat. Tumbling forever with no safety net below, the man clutched at air with scarred, three-fingered limbs, the flash of silver around his neck. The ringleader was heard to chuckle as a taunt tightrope came up with a snap. The flailing victim of gravity latched on with no little relief and swung around in a graceful arc until he came to stand upon the narrow wire.

The ringleader's hand slid towards a switch on his belt, and the man quickly took a bow amid a chorus of boos as the spotlights swung to illuminate him. His body and dark leather pants bore the signs of heaving whipping. His one article of clothing was in tatters, and the scars lacerating his body had lightened or completely stripped his midnight blue fur in jagged, crisscrossed stripes. A dark tangle of curls obscured his face as he stood above the crowd, the picture of grace and defiance.

But anyone who had lived with him for any time knew his back never arched straight like that. He should have been taunting childishly. Instead he stood, dead silent, in that calculated pose. His gaze fixated on the ringleader as a few lucky members of the audience were allowed to take up pellet guts and open fire. He whirled into action as the rat-a-tat-tat began. He dodged the streams of stinging shot with graceful ease—too easily, it seemed, because the ringleader's hand strayed yet again to his belt.

The tormented acrobat threw himself unhesitatingly into one of the lines of fire.

He buckled, issued a small scream that didn't need to be faked, and clung desperately to the wire with all four limbs. His fur along his left side was now riddled with a yellow powder. The crowd cheered for the first time, and the little girl shooting yellow was awarded a prize.

Meanwhile, a clown act began on the ring floor with a few prat falls and fake blows. The children were amused, but the crowd only really got into it when the tightrope went slack and the furred acrobat allowed himself to fall down into the eager arms of the jokers with brawler's fists. For the rest of the act, the hits were real, and the audience went hysteric with laughter at the Amazing Nightcrawler's expense.

XXX

Rogue staggered from the stands, suddenly remembering herself. She murdered the laughter in her throat, making it die, and glared at the spot where the ringleader had stood. It was her fervent wish for him to still be alive, because she wanted so badly to kill him herself.

She looked up and sighed. No tent top, no cage, just an innocent, blue sky.

She shoved Rose into the deepest recess of her mind and stalked from the area. Broken amusement park rides flew past, and she tried to ignore the old circus train cars scattered throughout the grounds. Mutants had obviously been forced to live in them. The Nightcrawler had never been in one. He had been the star attraction. People came to gawk at him, and they wouldn't buy the Big Top show ticket if they could torment him from a tiny, painted cage.

Rose's memories showed her the back of the fairgrounds, and she slipped through the now obsolete security gate. The switch to an indoor setting was chilling. Rose's fragile grip on Rogue's reality slipped as she entered an area he had never seen. The faint memories of fun at the circus vanished. There was no glossing over this new place with a positive image. It was a prison.

There was the number of reasons why she knew the sixth cell was the one she had come for. It was the furthest away from the rest of the circus—furthest out of earshot. As per clichéd usual, some idiot had decided to write in another two 6s after the first number painted on the metal door. 666, brilliant.

Idiots.

The main reason she grasped the heavy steel door and wrenched it off its hinges was because of the view she got looking through the sliding, eyelevel slot. Someone was dead in there.

The corpse hung, held aloft by rusting chains. That was the censored way to explain it. A truer version involved the rotted remains of tendons and flesh loosely knitting the bones together so the body wouldn't fall apart in a heap on the floor.

The wrists were shackled, pulling his arms apart into a spread-eagled position. The silver collar had been attached to a length of chain so the head was never really allowed to fall. The skinless kneecaps hung a scant few inches above the stained concrete floor. Remains of the feet were tethered to the ground. A silt top hat lay nearby.

Judging by the shredded clothes on the back, the body had been whipped severely. Whether the beating was the actual cause of death, she didn't know. The glint of metal caught her eye, and she knelt to study the shiny tips of a many-tailed whip lying abandoned in the dust.

Metal.

Her mood soured. Taking a breath and holding it, she stepped forward to study the corpses' wrists. The steel bindings wound around the rotted flesh seamlessly without a hinge lock in sight. The metal was smooth in the way metal could only be when it had been manipulated like putty. The collar had been sealed in the same way.

She picked up the old top hat from the floor and began to crumple it as a voice inside of her reminded her that she had wanted to kill Nightcrawler's tormentor anyway. What did it matter if he had done it for her?

Only everything. She looked at the dead ringleader. Instead of his family coming to save him from the man, Nightcrawler had been snatched from one monster into the jaws of another.

She turned away. Setting her jaw, she started to hunt through the cell for her quarry.

XXX

It wasn't there. Not in the cell, not in Mr. Gladring's personal office. Not anyplace. She growled as she reentered the fairgrounds. Her eyes roamed, searching for a place she hadn't looked. Thankfully, Rose had stopped trying to hide reality with his memory, and she was able to study her surroundings without the distraction of a ghost circus. In fact, he was being unnaturally quiet.

It made her suspicious.

Without warning, she threw Rose into the deepest recesses of her mind and spun around in a tight circle. She was rewarded with the sight of the remains a small, ornate building popping into existence before her eyes. The bastard, he had been hiding it from her.

As her mental self beat the teeth out of his, she stalked to the ruins and began throwing aside broken lumber. As she worked, she unearthed several objects. Shattered glass teardrops, large scraps of snakeskin that had been peeled off a human's hide—the normal mutant-themed souvenirs. And then there was the trapdoor.

Rose screamed with rage. She took that to mean she had found what she was looking for.

She had to wrench it out of the frame to open it. At least that meant no one had been down there in a decade. The steps she saw as she peered in looked about as safe as cannonballing into a live volcano. She floated down into the underground, not willing to put her weight on them. The first sight that greeted her was the pickled cat's-eyes of a mutant resting on a shelf. The pupils, the liquid they were submerged in, and the glass of their jar all gleamed in the light that streamed in from the open trapdoor.

If the place had ever had electricity, the chance to use it was ten years gone. Rogue slowly drifted into the horrid little freak museum, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the dim. She wanted nothing more than to avert her gaze from the various body parts drifting in the large jars, but necessity—and horrified fascination—made her study the contents of each.

A brutal raping of Rose's memories revealed he had visited the place with a fellow officer. His friend had been interested in purchasing a souvenir. She grimaced as she started to notice numbers and dollar signs scrawled onto many of the jars. The back shelf didn't come with price tags. Whether that meant they weren't for sale or there wasn't enough room on the jar to write all the zeroes, she wasn't sure.

The head of a humanoid lizard on the shelf. The whole section seemed decapitation-happy. Only one item wasn't a severed head.

Curling in the jar, the blue tail with the spaded tip looked more like a snake.

XXX

Hundreds of miles to the north, a figure clutched a rosary and began, "Mutter Goddess…


My take on Kurt in the Circus…yep, not fun. Could've gone on, but I figured I'd stop with the tail. Yes, my evilness knows no bounds. Poor blue baby…

Here's the READER RESPONSES:

Wild Card Reaf: Good Jesus! And I thought I wrote long reviews. …Are you sure I can't convince you to marry me? It's legal in Spain. (I'm kidding, of course. But, seriously, you are the BEST!) …and you realize I MUST do the potty-training chapter now.

Anna Marie Raven: The STATS feature is a BLESSING to FicWriter-Kind. Basically, it's on the column of options when you sign on to your account. You click it, and it pulls up all the statistics on your stories and yourself. For example, by clicking on the "Hits" hyperlink for this story, I can see…the page for my Ch. 3 was "hit" 52 times (as of now). Theoretically, that means 52 people are reading this story.
Of course, that makes me wonder why less than 1 in 10 of my readers choose to review…

Rogue14: You may think Risty calling Rogue "Mom" is cute, but think about what that makes McCoy… Call the Child Protection Services!

GothikStrawberry: My old readers are coming back to me! Yay! (You're right. That argument will be far from over.)

Velvet Shadow: And readers are checking out more than one of my fics! This calls for a deliriously happy moment.


TELL ME IF I MADE ANY MISTAKES! IT'S 2 A.M. IN AN OUTTA STATE HOTEL ROOM. ...please?