File 02: Meet the Neighbors

Authour notes:

Well, it certainly took long enough; I went and got distracted by several other things including but not limited to: devising potential future plot threads; Ace Combat 4; Everything or Nothing; and Ace Combat 5... which means that the upcoming releases of Ace Combat Zero, Gun, and From Russia with Love will in all likelihood bode ill for quick updates.

Were one to ask Scott Summers at that moment why he was in a good mood, he would be able to present more than one answer. For one, it was shaping up to be a fine summer day, with a comfortable breeze and only a few high clouds. Second was the simple fact of nothing going on: no Apocalypse making a very premature and unwelcome return; no Magneto making his next obvious move in his agenda of mutantkind under his leadership; and not a sign of the Hellfire Club doing... whatever it was they were up to.

Third, and perhaps most important to the X-Men's field leader, was that the Avengers, as well as both 'official' Misfit teams, were all supposedly on assignment. These assignments' nature interested Scott only insofar as they were far away from Bayville.

Yes, he thought, nodding in agreement with the weather forecast being read over the radio. It's definitely going to be a good day. On the heels of that thought came another, that they should bring some refreshments to poolside; in fact, he was about to ask Jean if she had any preferences in that department when...

"Finally...!" There was no mistaking that voice. "The Thunderbolt... has come back... to Bayville!"

And that quickly, Scott's predicted good day curled into a whimpering fetal ball, seeking mercy from the assault which was the arrival of the West Coast Misfits. "Here we go..." he muttered. Louder: "I thought you guys were on the clock."

Ace Starr fielded that question ("That's the East Coast crew, dude.") before a squealing Paige attached herself to him. Scott just shook his head, thankful for the small mercy of it not being Paul Starr, Whose presence would have had a much more... widespread... impact on the Institute's female residents, a fact which irked Scott (and, indeed, most of the Institute's men) no end.

"So why are you here...?" Jean wanted to know.

"As Lance said to ye once, our happy little family has grown..."

- shouts echoed from the house just then ("Get outta' th' kitchen!" "Chill out Sheila, I'm hungry!"), confirming that one Tommy 'Chilljaw' Sharpe had indeed found his way to the refreshments -

"...an' we thought we'd be good neighbors and make the introductions."

"Yeah." Kyle again. "The Thunderbolt thought we should show the new guy the jabronis we have to work with sometimes."

"Kyle, I think that's en-" Scott got no further with either the sentence or his attempt to get off the chair: both were brought to a quick halt by the Bostonian electrokinetic's getting in his face.

"It doesn't matter what you think!"

So this is the famous Xavier Institute, was his first thought.

His second was that Rahne had not been exaggerating in her description of how the two teams tended to get along; this opinion Chance shared with the bubblegum-chewing blonde who walked by at just that moment.

"Got that right," Tabitha said once she'd recovered from her surprise. "Kyle's about this close to smacking the taste out of ol' Scooter's... hey, who are you?"

"You could say I'm why those two are at it again. And why Tommy's had occasion to pillage your kitchen; as well as the reason Sam is doubtless looking for a place to hide." A large cardboard box with the letter 'A' stenciled on one side shuffled by.

"Um-hm." Tabitha blew a small bubble. "A regular chaos magnet."

"Apparently, Tabitha. Chance Sergeyvich Chekov; nice to meet you."

"How'd you know my name?"

"Rahne proved quite informative." A shrug. "Given how things are going, it's fortunate she insisted on sharing everything she thought I'd need to know about you folks."

"New guy, huh?"

"Got it in one."

"So what do you do?"

"Well..."

Just then, Scott and Kyle's verbal exchanges came to a quick end with the older boy having his head smacked by a lounge chair, followed by getting a knee to a very sensitive spot. Whimpering, he collapsed and tried to squirm away, hands covering certain injured anatomy. "Know your role and shut your mouth!" Kyle crowed.

"Tabby," Jean called, "could you get Scott to the infirmary? 'Blunderbolt' here needs a good spanking."

"You can try, Red!" crowed Kyle. "Just bring it!"

Among the many things he'd learned was that a unit could be greatly affected by the mental state of its leader. While he was not a trained psychologist (a trade which he'd heard one of the East Coast crew was teaching himself), the various anecdotes making the rounds about Scott Summers gave Chance cause to worry (briefly) about the state of the X-Men. Granted, Lance, Kyle, and so on weren't exactly being any great help in that department, but still...

What the hell were he and Kyle arguing about anyway? "Is this sort of thing normal?" he asked the blonde as they rounded the last corner.

"Yep. You guys seem to have a knack for driving 'im loopy." Tabitha shrugged - at least, insofar as it was possible to do while helping carry a whimpering Scott. "Well, aside from you, anyway... hey, I still wanna know, what do you do?"

"Familiar with Splinter Cell?"

Tabitha nodded. "I think so... saw a couple of the TV commercials."

"If you believe Ace, I'm supposed to be the next Sam Fisher... ah, here we are."

The door opened almost immediately after being knocked upon, which was not that much of a surprise; the loud bagpipe playing which stopped when they entered, however, was.

Hank McCoy was momentarily surprised to see Tabitha and someone he didn't recognize carrying Scott into his infirmary. "What happened?"

"Kyle," was Tabitha's one-word response.

"Okay, lass," the blue-furred, kilt-wearing mutant said. "Ah, who's the lad with ye?" he asked next, after Scott had been laid on a bed.

"I'm Chance."

"Ah'm Scottish an' drunk; nice t'meet ye."

To which Chance simply nodded as he and Tabitha took their leave. Back in the hall, he wondered, "Is he always drunk?"

"No, not always. Looks like he's gotten into the Scottish whiskey again."

"So that would explain the bagpipes, kilt, and accent."

"Sure does. Last week, he had some sake, and was running around the mansion in full samurai armor. Day before yesterday, Logan and Warren bought some English beer..."

"Let me guess: Dr. McCoy, soccer hooligan."

"Close; English punker."

And I'd believed the good doctor's flights of fancy mere exaggeration, he thought as Tabitha shifted gears to share her take on how the X-Men got along with the 'original' Misfits, selected points of which led him to wonder if this... concentrated eccentricity, for lack of a better phrase, was an inevitable collateral effect of an active X-gene. Probably not - such a trait was most rare among the Joes, and were their hijinks (or at least rumors thereof) not instutional legend among America's armed forces?

"Hey." Tabitha had stopped in the middle of explaining how one Webber Torque had become a Msifit, because it reminded her of a question she'd been close to asking earlier. "How'd you end up with these guys anyway?"

"A friend of the family happened to share Ace's opinion..." - said feral ambled by just then, trying to disentangle himself from an estatic Paige - "...and I thought his recommendation was a good idea, so I volunteered." Exactly what business this individual was in was something Chance saw little sense in bringing up just now.

"You haven't met the others yet, have you?"

"No, not really..."

"C'mon, I'll introduce you." A flight of stairs and some turns brought them to a room full of computers and occupied by a quintet of the X-Men. "Hey guys!" The 'guys' - Remy, Piotr, Ray, Kurt, and Fox - looked up from whatever they were doing. "This is Chance; he's with the West Coast Misfits."

"What's with the hair?" demanded Fox. That question was ignored.

After the introductions and 'nice to meet you's, Kurt asked aloud, "We need another player for Halo; wanna join?"

Shrugging, Chance took a seat at a nearby terminal. "Surely." Only Remy saw the brief grin - so similar to his own when he was about to join a game he was at home in - and was at once certain that some egos would not take subsequent events well.

"Where did Chance wander off to?" Toshiro wanted to know a short time later, back at poolside.

"He met Ray and the others." Tabitha helped herself to another lemonade. "I think they're playing Halo..." Terrell and Rictor started laughing just then. "What's so funny?"

"Halo?"

"Uh-huh." That elicited a hummed rendition of a funeral march from the sonic generator and the speedster. "What?"

"I hope they handle losing well." Athena snickered.

Tommy finished off a hamburger. "Trust us, Sheila. They won't know what hit 'em. Kyle sure didn't."

"Hey!"

The sides were evenly matched in terms of numbers and quality... until now, anyway. Chance's arrival to fill out the red team had removed the need for rotating sit-outs. And proceeded to rain on the blue team's parade.

"Damn!" spat Ray, watching the camera view pan around his virtual corpse, the countdown-to-respawn timer beeping tauntingly at him. When it had been just him and Fox (or, alternately, Kurt) playing against Remy and Piotr, the flow had been more back and forth; now, though... now, the red team had taken a solid lead. And Chance had the infuriating tendency of escaping notice - the only time they'd have an idea of where he might be was when one of them had their head taken apart by a sniper round. Or was smeared all over their surroundings by a plasma grenade that'd been stuck on their back. Or took a melee attack to the back of the head. Or...

Fox muttered, "What kinda nick is 'Temnota', anyway?"

"A Russian one." Piotr tried (unsuccessfully) to stifle a chuckle. "It means 'darkness' or 'oblivion'. Quite fitting, no?"

Whatever the Detroit native was going to say by way of rejoinder was preempted by the arrival of a pair of Joes: both blonde, one with semi-long hair and a green headband, the other wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt.

"Chuckles, Hi-Tech." Chance left his terminal to shake their hands. "I assume everything is in readiness."

"Absoloutely, Temnota. We're good to go."

Turning to face his new acquaintances - all of whose expressions save Remy's betrayed various degrees of bemused surprise - Chance said one last thing to them before walking out of the room with the Joes:

"It's been interesting; see you around."

"Well," Remy said after the door closed, "Remy glad he's with th' Misfits."

"What!" Ray again.

"Jus' a hunch, mind you." The Cajun leaned back in his chair. "Whithalf may seem a li'l touched in the head, but y' don't get those stars by bein' a fool where it matters."

"So it is not a question of if he made the cut, but of why."

"Yes Piotr, that's it. That's it exactly. An' perhaps we already have a clue."

Kurt finished off the donut he really shouldn't have brought into the room. "I think Tabitha might know. She brought him." Which was considered a sensible line of reasoning.

"Ah can see how he got to 'kill' Kyle over here, but not how he got past all of ya - twice." Rogue shook her head in disbelief at the recounting of it. "'Specially when three of ya got senses like Wolverine's. How'd Chance do it? Can he turn invisible, like Fox or somethin'?"

"Pretty well, I've been told."

It took most of the Southern girl's self-control not to scream as she turned, utter surprise evident in her expression, to get her first look at the subject of conversation. On whom, it occured to her, the ash-grey jeans and matching denim jacket seemed to look more like a uniform than the casual wear they were supposed to be.

And even as that thought formed, the answer to her other question reached Rogue's ears: "And... 'or something'."

Both answers just raised more questions, and hearing Tabitha (among others) snickering was not helping. "Ya knew he was back there, right?" she asked them.

"You should've seen the look on your face, Roguey." So Ace wasn't kidding.

"Aye," Rahne chimed in, "'twas priceless."

"We'd wanted to do that to Scott." Athena speared an apple with a claw, took a bite out of it. "Kyle got to him first, though."

"Theresa," Chance said just then, dispelling Rogue's mental image of Scott taking that surprise worse than she had, "the... project I was working on has been green-lighted."

Which the Irishwoman had suspected, having just noticed the pair of Joes waiting near the mansion. "Good luck to ye, then, and godspeed."

"Thank you. Rogue, Tabitha, nice to meet you both." And with that, Chance left as quietly as he had arrived.

"Is he always that quiet?" Rogue asked next; that earned her an amused smile from Rictor. One did not hear Chance, the Hispanic reassured her, unless he so wished.

Kyle snorted. "The Thunderbolt wishes he'd stop doing that." And with that, he got up and headed into the mansion.

"So where...?"

"Does he come from?" Theresa finished, glad that their new teammate had made a good impression on some of the X-Men at least. "One of General Whithalf's acquaintances referred him, but..."

"You mean the devil," snapped Ray, who had arrived with some of the others in time to hear the question. "Tabby, you knew he'd...?"

"How bad was it?" Tabitha couldn't help but chuckle; behind her Terrell snickered, and Rictor high-fived him.

Remy just shook his head. "Brutal."

"Let me guess, never saw it coming."

"Bingo," deadpanned Kurt.

"Consider yourselves fortunate." Athena took another bite from her apple. "It was just a video game."

Remy was quick to draw a conclusion from that statement: "You mean he can do that for real?"

"Yeah, Swamp Rat, he does it pretty well."

"So Remy was right: Whithalf brought 'im on for de black work."

"Like Spetsnaz, da?" Piotr speculated, snickering.

Just as Ororo had her greenhouse, Forge had his own 'territory': one of the subterranean laborotories, not too far from the infirmary wherein Scott was convalescing. This was where Kyle found the Native American inventor.

"Hey, Forge."

"Be with you in a bit."

"Just gotta quick question: is it true one of your gizmos turned Shipwreck and Storm into kids?"

Forge tapped away at his laptop. "It was supposed to induce controlled cellular regeneration; there're still a few bugs to work out..."

Hmmm... Kyle looked around the room. Here was what looked like an ambulatory cherry bomb; there, a chemistry experiment of some kind; and... "Is this it?" he wondered, hefting a largish pistol-like device.

"Yeah... just, be careful what you touch in here, all right?"

Because Forge had turned his attention back to his journal, both Kyle's nod and grin escaped his notice; he did, however, hear the younger Wildfire reassure him that yes, he'd be very careful what he touched. And after somewhat more than a minute's worth of relative silence he concluded that Kyle had simply walked off; reassured of that fact by a quick look around the lab, he once more buried himself in his writing.

After-action notes:

And the game is on, more or less. This file was added as an attempt to head off at the pass concerns about the overall flow of the early storyline, as well as get in some first impressions before the evolution takes off in earnest. My apologies for the delay, but - aside from the partial list of reasons cited above - I wanted to get this right.

Coming in File 03: 'Arc Dream'...

The Massachusetts Academy is introduced to Chance and his mysterious project... pity they won't be immediately aware of that fact. And exactly why is Kyle interested in that more infamous of Forge's inventions, anyway?