"We beat them!" Jacques said exuberantly as they reappeared in their headquarters.
"Don't be stupid." Vlad snapped irritably. "We got lucky. They didn't know who we were, how many of us there are, or what our powers were. And lest you forget…" he growled. "That the Scarlet Witch single handedly drove us off!" He glared at the Frenchman. "Did you not get the memo? It was fairly short, 'Do not piss off the Scarlet Witch!' Not that hard to remember was it?" Vladimir snarled. Jacques wilted.
"Relax." Amira told him. "You getting worked up. We did very well for our first skirmish with the Misfits."
"We gave away too much." Vlad muttered. "They'll be on their guard next time. We won't have that kind of luck again."
"Geez you're getting upset that we did so well? Would you rather that we lost?" Semira asked.
"Yes!" Vladimir snapped. "I'd rather have them underestimating us than anything else!" He sighed. "Look, we took them down before it became a real fight. They were taken by surprise because they didn't realize right away that we were mutants."
"That reminds me…why are we wearing these stupid things?" Takashi asked looking at the Cobra uniform he was in. "Shouldn't we have uniforms of our own?"
"I'm working on it, I'm working on it!" Vlad snapped. "I didn't think our wardrobe was our top priority!"
"At any rate we were supposed to simply destroy the hangar and keep the Misfits engaged long enough for Phelan to retrieve the files I asked him to get." Vladimir sighed. "The fight was not supposed to get that heated. We ended up revealing too much of what we were capable of."
"You were going pretty all out there yourself." Semira noted. Vlad shrugged.
"Adrenaline I guess." He thought, wrongly. There was a certain…battle fury that he felt as he started firing away at that Joe mutant. He never felt so invigorated, so powerful, so…alive. He was barely even aware what he was doing. It was almost as if…a sudden headache convinced him not to dwell on it any further.
"Like I said before, we all showed too much of what we were capable of." He repeated.
"In other words, we're all out of tricks." Phelan summarized.
"Right. We won because we had tricks they didn't know about. That they couldn't know about since they didn't know what we were capable of. Now they do."
"So what now fearless leader?" Amira asked.
"We train." The others groaned. Vlad ignored them. "We come up with new tricks for the next time we meet with the Misfits."
"So we aren't going to be fighting the Misfits again sometime soon?" Rodriguez asked. Vladimir shook his head.
"No. In fact the point of today's exercise was to buy us time until we could meet them again later on equal footing."
"Okay, you lost me." Semira admitted.
"Do you really think that a few weeks training would be enough against army trained mutants? Their evil, but not weak." Vladimir reasoned. "They're better fighters and brawlers. We just happened to have an edge in tricks today."
"What about today?" Takashi challenged. "We handled them well enough."
"Like I said. We got lucky. They were fighting as individuals and we managed to pick them off one at a time. At least until somebody had to go anger the most powerful mutant on the team!" Vlad shot another glare at Jacques.
"So, you're saying that we overplayed our hand." Amira concluded. "Fair enough. But why did you have us fight them then? What was so important that we had to keep them busy? Even if it meant using up our bag of tricks?"
"This!" Phelan said as he dropped the files he took from the Joes onto the table.
"And those are…?" Semira wondered.
"The blueprints for The Pit." Vladimir grinned. "As well as a few…other things valuable to us. That's why I didn't have Phelan come with us. He was sneaking into Hawk's office when everyone else ran off to meet us or Cobra."
"And the cameras didn't see him?" Takashi asked. Phelan smiled.
"Wouldn't you know? One of the things that Cobra fired was an EMP. Electromagnetic Pulse bomb. Knocked out all the electrical monitoring devices."
"Que lastima." Rodriguez smiled. "What a pity."
"And they won't miss the files?" Jacques asked.
"Why would they? They never left the office." Phelan grinned. "Watch." Picking up a cup that had been left lying on the table, Phelan created a clone of himself. Both of them were holding a cup in their hands.
"You made a clone of yourself and made a copy of the files." Semira mused. "So the Joes don't even know we took anything…" Vlad smiled.
"Exactly." He turned to Semira. "You can open your portals anywhere, right?"
"I can open them anywhere I've been before. Sometimes I can get to a place by looking at a picture of it, but it's better if I actually visit it before hand. Why?"
"I'll tell you later." Vladimir said smugly.
"So what next? Besides training?" Takashi asked.
"More training." Vladimir said promptly.
"Hard ass." Amira muttered at Vlad's back.
"Were you looking?" Phelan snickered, then gagged as Amira started choking him.
"Oh brother." Vladimir groaned. "Fine, everybody take five. We'll start training more tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm going to go over the blueprints for The Pit and…Amira, let Phelan go! He's turning blue!"
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"What happened?" General Hawk asked sometime later. The Misfits managed to flee the hangar before it completely collapsed. There weren't any fatalities among either the Misfits or the Joes, but the damage to the base and their equipment had been extensive. Many Joes were in the infirmary and the Misfits—after being mostly healed by Low Light—were resting up in their own wing of the infirmary.
"New mutants that were working for Cobra." Lance said, relatively unscathed but still exhausted. "We had no idea who they are or what they could do, so we ended up getting blindsided. It won't happen again." He added with a growl.
"I'm more worried about who they were." Hawk sighed. "They didn't say anything that could've given us a hint?"
"They denied that they worked for Magneto, if that means anything." Wanda said.
"Hmmm, they could be lying. But usually these guys tend to boast of who they are and who they're working for." Hawk reasoned. "But why weren't the Triplets and Spyder with you? Or Arcade? They could've made a big difference in the fight."
"Ummmm, well they wanted to go out and get some more fireworks for tonight so…" Wanda started.
"Never mind. Just please tell me that they had nothing to do with that fire over at the Xavier Institute!"
"They had nothing to with the fire at the Xavier Institute." Wanda said. Hawk blinked.
"Really?"
"No. You just asked me not to tell you."
"Thanks." Hawk groaned. "Really appreciate it."
"How's Shipwreck?" Wanda asked after a moment's pause.
"Lifeline will have him all patched up in no time." Hawk assured her. "You did good today. Drove those mutants off…whoever they were." Althea groaned from her bed.
"You all right?" Wanda asked, concerned,
"I feel like an idiot for getting taken out like that." Althea winced. "I just went in expecting either some Cobra soldier or some cocky idiot working for Magneto or the Hellfire Club." She sighed, "I got careless."
"Happens to the best of us." Hawk said. "Trust me. From what I've heard, there was no way to know that they had a mutant with electrical powers."
"So there are seven of them." Wanda mused. "The six we fought plus the one that showed up late. Wonder what he does."
"We'll probably find out soon enough." Hawk said. "I'm already requisitioning supplies and new equipment…lousy paperwork…so we should be up and running at full strength soon."
"Next time we'll get those evil creeps." Althea swore. "We won't lose again."
"Anything can go wrong once." Hawk said. "Heck, even Cobra gets lucky once in a while!"
"Unlike Pietro." Fred snickered from where he was sitting. Despite being tossed about, his invulnerable skin kept him relatively unharmed.
"Shut up!" Pietro muttered from his bed, the worst of his injuries already healed. "At least I've actually been on a date! Unlike Wanda…"
"DIE!" Wanda yelled as she started smothering Pietro with a pillow.
"Oh brother, I think we really need to work on our teamwork." Althea groaned.
"Do you think we'll see those bozos again soon?" Todd asked from his bed.
"Definitely. Nobody likes unfinished business." Althea said. "Especially me. The next time we see those clowns we're gonna kick their sorry butts!" She looked towards Wanda and Pietro. "If we still have a team by that point! Wanda, stop smothering Pietro, he's turning blue!"