Dear Reader, I own nothing of this, as I am too young to have pioneered the comic scene. Plus, all this belongs to someone else. Please don't sue me as Jennifer wouldn't like that. Please don't make her angry, You wouldn't like her when she's angry, but she stays that way anyways.
Anonymous Refusal
I don't know why I kept this terrible contraption, I know why I made it, I made it because at the time, I had a young, frightened girl, with a skunk stripe in her hair, that couldn't control her powers on my hands. She was deemed a danger, so I was commissioned to make a weapon against her. This gun of mine, the Neutralizing Ray, was never used for a benevolent purpose, instead it was first used against the love of my life, a stunningly beautiful woman by the name of Orroro Munroe, and now, some villain by the name Anon has stolen it from under lock and key. He or she, it's so hard to tell with this one, has something close to my abilities. Anon can take an existing thing, and reform it, make it bigger, make it smaller, make it better, and this time the ray's been made capable of neutralizing most of the Americas. Anon set off beams in New York, Georgia, Oregon, Kansas and Arizona, with threats of more to come. There were flairs in northern Mexico too, Every mutant for thousands of miles, except extreme northern Canada and Alaska, is normal.
I see I forgot to introduce myself, My name is Forge, I made things, that was my mutant ability, I know it sounds unimpressive, but if you take into consideration I can make a cannon from a lawn chair, that sounds a little better. I say "made" and "Was" because thanks to my own invention, I am human. I always was "human" in the fundamental sense, but I was a different kind of human. Now, I'm a washed up war veteran with a prosthetic leg. I can only hope that the effects aren't permanent, as they were when the gun was made and tested.
The X-Men, some of them are reviling in this chance to be normal. Marie and Remy are planning a quick wedding, Scott is enjoying not having telepaths roaming about his head, and Emma's enjoying not having stray thoughts enter hers. Others aren't so happy. Storm cries for her connection to the Earth and winds above, Beast cannot get used to not being able to bound and leap the way he did, and has already broken a leg trying, not to mention, he has to get used to clothing. All of them however, are expecting something ill on the horizon. Out of all the X-Men, X-Factor and everything else X, only Lorna and Alex, Jean and Logan, Cable and Jubilee and all aboard Avalon, still function as mutant. Not even the Fantastic Four were immune to the blast.
Alex and Lorna were in Hawaii, Alex wanted to go home and visit his adoptive parents. Jean was in space, helping to repair a hole in Avalon, Logan was racing the Iditarod, at current he has made it to Shaktoolik. Cable was aboard Corsair's ship, sort of a family thing, and Jubilee was learning the ways of China. They've all been warned not to come back yet, as we may need them.
I am on my way to New York. I have to see Storm, I have to be there for her as my heart won't let me do otherwise.
At Salem New York.
"Hello, Scott. How is she doing?" I ask out of concern. Storm, Orroro, has lain claim to what's left of me from the day I met her.
"She's still depressed." Scott replies. He looks good, though. He looks like he's gotten a lot of sleep these past few days. "She's up in her apartment. I think seeing you might do some good."
He barely lets me in when a sonic boom hits the school and a blood curdling scream echoes through the Halls. Scott goes running as the sound is from his and Emma's quarters.
"Emma! Emma!" He screams as he searches the rubble of the collapsed roof. He finds her near what was the bed. "Emma, speak to me!"
She's just barely coherent as she whispers out a name. "Anon… failed Hellion…I failed…hnnnn." She bleeds out her last breath.
Scott holds his wife and wails as I try to free her from the beam across her legs. He's useless when it comes to women. I wonder what she meant by "failed Hellion". She had led a group of mutants named "Hellion", but I thought they were all dead. She had almost died that time too. Sentinels had been running amuck all over Manhattan, She wasn't there to protect the children under her care and she's always beat herself up over that, not that it matters now, but who else blames her? I wonder if Scott would have any ideas, but he's a little occupied. Storm has arrived and helps me free Emma's limp, bloodless body as we slip in the sludge of spent fluids and wood splinters. We take him down to the medical quarters of the mansion, but Beast, after a half hour of trying to revive Emma, takes her to the morgue.
"What do you think this Anon person is?" I ask Beast.
"I don't know, but I'm willing to bet He, She or it is immune to technology but not to psionic attack." He replies offhandedly as he shuts the freezer door.
"Why do you say that?" I ask completely puzzled.
"Because Anon got through your security and could still use it's mutantagenic abilities to get past ours, But Emma had to be neutralized else Anon's presence would have been made known, and thus, no revenge." Beast dummies it down for me. "Besides, the name means "Soon", "Rapidly" or "Before long".
"And the other cities?" I'm intrigued at Beast, he's always thinking, always evolving that thinking. These are things I would have taken weeks to ponder out.
"Anon could not risk another telepath warning Emma, or perhaps a diversion? Perhaps just to see what it could do." Beast theorized.
"Where do you think It will head next? Perhaps Shaw?" I'm trying to understand this things mind, with no luck. I'm dumbfounded as to why someone would plan so elaborately to kill another person, especially one so tortured.
"Fritzroy. He was tied intimately there. I have work to do here, however, we can discuss this upstairs in the war room. That should be a more appropriate setting."
He's right, I tell myself. We need a team of thinkers on this because of the only two people who know who Anon is, one is dead.
