Previously In:
X-Men: Twisted Beauty
-Gifted a small sample of flesh from the King of the Monsters, Godzilla, Professor Henry McCoy a.k.a. Beast of the X-Men has inadvertently given life to a chimera of monster, plant, and woman. Before anyone can understand what's going on, an emergent consciousness of fractured genesis arises in Westchester, possessing not only the fury of a kaiju, but an unrefined psychic capacity.
-Meanwhile, an extremist group of Islamic supremacists known as 'The Purifiers' have exploited the devastation in the wake of the Kaiju invasion to strike against the Charles Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. After an indirect fire attack on the mansion leaves craters and terror, Wolverine, Cyclops, and Psylock are in pursuit of the perpetrators. The Purifiers, led by a man known as Al-Rahim, the Mudaris plots the next step in their plans.
-After having made psychic contact with Godzilla during her cross to the other side, an impression of the atomic titan's memory lingers deep in the mind of Jean Grey that Xavier intends to exorcise…
Down In The Facilities Of The X-Men's Mansion
"Charles!" Beast rushed around Jean's bedside and laid a hand on Xavier's shoulder, scrutinizing him for any sign of what could be wrong. Nightcrawler tensed, unsure of how to help and reaching out with a hesitant hand. Suddenly Charles had begun to choke, breath becoming strained as he maintained the connection to her psyche.
"There's… a memory." The professor managed to grunt with a pained grimace. "An artifact of… Godzilla's!"
"Godzilla?" Henry muttered, baffled. "But how-" Then the recollection struck him, the moment at Tokyo Bay when she had reached out to touch the monster's mind. Jean had fainted, unable to withstand the sheer force of will unleashed upon breaching the psychic barrier.
"Can you remove it?" An anxious Kurt Wagner asked.
"I'm not sure." Charles' face pinched. "Without understanding how it became attached, I could risk wounding her mind."
The longer Professor X maintained the connection, the stronger his own defenses could be raised to push back against the malignant memory. The grip on his neck loosened and the image of the assailant receded, allowing Xavier to abstract himself and disentangle from the thought. He watched the figure fade into an opaque mist, a few details standing out, however. The terrible yellow eyes, glowering with a foreboding menace, the outline of a wide, jagged face, and a horn that blazed with the same golden energy.
Jean's body in the interim had relaxed, her neural activity steadying to a normal unconscious rhythm.
"I can try to quarantine it." Xavier suggested. In the mindscape, he summoned an aura of polychromatic energy around the iceberg memory, something he'd invented to isolate certain memories and ward them from being evoked. A shimmering nimbus developed into a chrysalis and sealed the memory off from the rest of Jean's subconscious.
"That should keep it contained for now." Retracting himself fully into his own mind, the Professor massaged the midpoint of his brow. "But I don't believe it was an example of an errant bleeding over, Henry."
"What then?" Beast was settling Grey back into a comfortable position, Nightcrawler fixing the sheet around her.
"It's difficult to say what circumstances might prove powerful enough to imprint themselves on a creature like Godzilla." Charles said, steepling his fingers and bringing his thumbs to his chin. "But my intuition tells me this was a death memory. Godzilla died."
"Died?" McCoy asked, trying to coax Charles to elaborate.
"There was… another creature." Xavier's face twitched. "The impression is so strong, Henry."
"A trauma." Beast muttered, and he tried to think back to the files he'd read on Godzilla back when Reed Richards had assembled his team to make the journey over to the other universe. Those people had tried so many times to destroy the monster, find some way overcome the seemingly indestructible. But it always found a way to survive, by one way or another.
"What did it look like?" Henry pressed.
"The memory is mostly emotion, it's not clear, ill-defined. But…" Trying to chisel a coherent image from the memory was more difficult that Charles anticipated, formed in the inhuman mind of the god-like kaiju. "I saw… yellow eyes, horrible. A wide face, a looming presence, and some cranial appendage."
Nightcrawler used a side monitor to inspect his reflection. "Horrible yellow eyes?" He said, wondering how his own mutant visage might be seen by others.
"Sorry, Kurt." Xavier apologized, realizing the commonality. "As I said, it's more of an impression than a description."
"I understand." Giving his mentor a small smile, Wagner turned to see Jean's sleeping face at peace. "She's gone through so much zis veek. Do you think she'll be alright, Professor?"
"The true extent of Jean's capabilities is still unknown." Charles reached out and laid his hand on hers. "But she's incredibly resilient; we just have to manage what we can and hope she can withstand this ordeal."
Beast let out a long sigh, "Her life-signs are stable, but Kurt's right, she's undergone a phenomenal amount of stress in a relatively short time. It's exhausting."
"We'll let her rest for now." Moving his hover-chair back a pace, Charles now began shifting his mental energy towards other pressing matters. "I've got to check in with Logan and Scott to see what progress they've made with the Purifiers."
Nightcrawler looked over to McCoy with a curious pitch of the eyebrows. "Und vhat about… Biollante?"
Beast's attention remained on the monitors, adjusting the glasses on his nose. "That's a whole different enigma entirely, my friend."
SHIELD Sub-Station,
"The hell am I looking at?"
Agent Grant Ward tilted his head as he stood before the satellite feed in the operations room of the station. Behind him, two rows of computer stations were occupied by agents tapping away at their work monitors. On the screen before him, was an image taken from one of their satellites in geo-synchronous orbit over North America, an object that had not been there the previous day. The enhancements to the shot, while clarifying, did not help him to understand what he was seeing.
There, likewise, locked in orbit above the earth, was the head of a rose in bloom.
As the staff in the office went about their business, the female agent manning the screen control shrugged and isolated the bud from the rest of the image.
"It appeared shortly after the incident at the X-Men's property; it's hanging right above them." She said, and the display shifted to exhibit the curve of the Earth and a red line calculating the distance to the atmospheric flora. The designator window labeled it as a U.O.O., an 'Unknown Orbital Object'.
"They called it 'Biollante'." Ward told her, crossing his arms. "Use that."
"Yes, Sir."
Grant huffed and decided there was nothing more to learn for the moment and left the room. "Let me know if it shits out a seed or something."
He exited the office, went down a short corridor, and made a right before going through a stairwell door. Ward paused on the landing, checking to see if anybody was within earshot. He removed a phone from the inside of his jacket and punched in a three-digit sequence.
"Yeah…" He said upon hearing the line pick up. "The situation is ongoing and… bewildering. Keep your eyes to the sky."
Grant shut the phone off, rechecked his surroundings, and made his way down the stairs.
"How go your Westchester buddies?" Maria Hill asked as he exited the stairwell into the parking garage. She was leaning against a support column with her arms crossed and fixed him with a prying scrutiny. "They rack up any more Purifier bodies today?"
Ward exhaled with a set jaw and measured what he wanted to say. "You know I'm starting to think we should just give 'em badges if they're gonna do all this field work for us."
"They're walking a fine line." Hill came away from the pillar and lowered her face into something more serious. "We give Xavier and his squad a lot of latitude when it comes to dealing with mutant situations, the trade-off they get for not revamping the MRD's. But domestic terrorism like the Purifiers is outside their scope; that's Homeland, SHIELD, FBI."
"What are you buggin' me about this for, Hill?" Ward asked, pulling car keys out of his pocket and walking towards a black SUV with tinted windows. "So we let Wolverine and Cyclops go carousing some terrorists, then when they kick-up a nest we sweep in and make all the collars."
Maria's eye twitched. "The X-Men aren't your hunting dogs, Ward. At best they're socially conscious vigilantes who don't have a whole lotta scruples about trashing a city block or two." She followed him. "If this gets messy, it's gonna be your ass that gets put on the fire."
He opened the car door and was about to step in when she blocked him. "Grant, I suggest you tighten the leash on your hounds before they make a mistake you can't shuffle away in the paperwork."
"Listen, Maria," Maneuvering himself back into the open swing of the door, Ward gave her a reassuring smirk. "Even if Logan does get a little frisky with his claws, I doubt anybody's gonna get too busted-up about having a few less suicide bombers to worry about."
She shook her head. "You are un-goddamn-believable, you know that?"
Grant merely raised his eyebrows sardonically.
As he lifted a leg to get into the driver's seat, Maria lashed out with her right hand and smacked Ward on the butt-cheek.
He paused in place a moment, taken by surprise as she walked off.
"Just a friendly bit of advice, Ward." She called back over her shoulder.
The door slammed shut and he looked down into the side mirror to watch her leave, at first with a sly curl of the mouth. Then it shifted into something serious as he switched to the rear-view mirror, adjusting it and making sure she was out of sight before he keyed the ignition
ATTLEBORO, MASSACHUSETTS
The end of the cigar burned bright red as Logan took a long drag from it, sitting in the driver's seat of the black Mustang. He exhaled the smoke with a satisfied gasp as he spied the comings and goings of the six-story apartment complex two blocks away. A pair of swarthy men in normal clothes hung out on the rough stone flight of stars at the entrance: ostensibly just enjoying the afternoon. But to Wolverine's experienced hunting instincts they were sentries, casting suspicious gazes at anyone in eyeshot.
Parked next to the corner convenience store however, Logan elicited no more attention than anyone else making a brief stop for a pack of smokes or bottle of vodka. Psylocke opened the passenger side door and slid in, tossing a small brown paper bag into his lap.
"Sorry, they didn't have any 'Canadian Mist'." She said with a bit of mirth. "Had to settle for real whiskey."
"Yeah, you're a freakin' riot." Logan took the bottle and unscrewed the cap, downing a swig of the Scottish demon.
"Anything interesting yet?" Betsy Braddock asked.
He snarled. "Just a bunch 'ah beady-eyed creeps playing look-out. Clocked a few peeking out the windows every couple floors, group of kids that keep runnin' around the block every 10 minutes."
"Yes, they've got quite the nice community compound here, hidden in plain sight." Psylocke took her own estimation of the situation, while she plucked a few tiny bottles from a second bag. She knocked back a nip of gin with a restrained grimace and tossed the empty behind her seat.
"Remind me to never let you bring food in my car." He grumbled.
"You don't have a car, Logan."
"I got plenty of cars, you just don't know about 'em."
Braddock rolled her eyes, leaned back, setting her foot against the dash and checked her watch. "Scott should be ready by now."
Logan sucked in another long drag and exhaled a relaxed river of smoke.
It was at that moment, an explosion of red energy rocked the northeast corner of the 5th floor, sending dust and debris flying in a terrible eruption.
"Well, I'll get the front." Wolverine said, pinching the stogie in his teeth.
Upstairs, Scott Summers came up from behind the heavy wooden table he'd used to take cover, blown on its side with a small forest of shrapnel embedded in the underbelly. In the rest of the room that was now exposed to the open air via the missing section of wall, was strewn the obliterated remains of the occupants and what they did in here. Though spared the worst of the blast, he still wore a degree of singes and scorches on his hair and casual clothes.
A trickle of loose rubble fell from the ceiling.
"Good thing they didn't put their IED* (Improvised Explosive Device) lab on the first floor." He said before a cough forced itself through.
Unfortunately, aside from losing the ability to question the men who worked here, they being dispersed into several million particulates, much of the material intelligence he might've collected was also virtually destroyed.
With a huff he limped over to where some paperwork had somewhat survived, feeling the effects of throwing himself over the table at the last second before the rounds of a sub-machine gun ripped into his chest. Most of the half-burned sheets were diagrams on how to construct various implements of destruction, chemical formulas. Others were filled on both sides with Arabic writings that he couldn't read. Arranging the papers on the floor, he used his phone to begin taking pictures.
The door to the room swung open suddenly, men shouting in Arabic forcing their way in despite the objects blocking it. Cyclops snapped to the imminent intrusion and thought quickly about what to do.
{Translated}
"Push it! Hurry up!" The men worked in tandem with their shoulders born into the door and driving with their legs, and eventually managed to open it wide enough to press their bodies through. The first one stopped a few paces in, gun stuck in his waistband, taken aback by the scope of the damage. His partner bee-lined to the paperwork, scooping it up as hurriedly as he could.
Scott moved deftly to avoid being heard, slipping behind the still shocked man and wrapped an arm around his neck. While most people might not understand the difference in techniques between choking off the air supply or the blood flow, Summers was well practiced. Applying his bicep and forearm to either side of the neck, he compressed the arteries ferrying oxygenated blood to the brain, rendering the apex organ unconscious within a few moments.
But the process still took a few seconds, and in that time there was a scuffling of feet and hapless grunts.
The man who had been gathering the evidence spun around to see his companion go limp and slump to the floor. He yelped in surprise, dropping the papers as he stood and grasping a pistol from the back of his pants.
Cyclops covered the distance while the man fumbled with the weapon, pushing it aside to take himself out of the line of fire and driving his hand into the man's throat. Exploiting the moment, Scott twisted the gun out of his grip and flung it away, sliding his body into position and pulling him into a koshi-guruma judo throw.
Outside, Wolverine stood a few feet away from the stairs and watched who came running out. Mostly women and children so far, but he noted their eyes and reactions as they parted around him in their flight.
Then came one guy, skinny, patchy facial hair who nearly toppled down the steps as he skid to a halt upon seeing the X-Man waiting on the sidewalk. His jaw quivered and he glanced fretfully to either side. Logan met is gaze and gave him a wink.
Skinny bolted over the side of the stairs, shoving a woman back as he did, and vaulted to the ground. Like a wolf after a deer, Logan was in the chase. Having to carry around a metal skeleton for as many years meant that the musculature of the surly mutant had a long time to accommodate the weight. When skinny was tackled by Wolverine at full sprint it was like being hit by a car at thirty miles an hour. Only this car pinned him down by a shoulder and pressed a fist to his throat, two Adamantium knives stabbing to the ground on either side.
Around the back of the building, those fleeing through the rear entrance ran past Psylocke as she stepped into the 1st floor hall, they each passed into and out of a telepathic field. Like an email being processed by an algorithm for key-phrases, she scanned their minds for certain thoughts and images related to the Purifiers. For Elizabeth, they seemed to go by in slow motion in a pervasive thrum akin to being underwater as waves pass overhead. Most thoughts were in the moment, about family members, if someone they knew was hurt, if they would be put out of their homes.
As Braddock reached an intersection, a woman came out of her apartment in full niqab and went straight to the stairwell, pausing at the bottom to crane her neck up the flight.
Visions of men in masks working at a large table entered Psylocke's mind, men setting wires in place and soldering components under a magnifying glass.
Psylocke reached out her hand, and the woman was frozen in place. Walking up behind her, she placed her hands on either side of the hooded head and delved a little deeper.
More images flashed:
Ball bearings…
Bricks of grey putty…
A man standing in front of a mannequin in a fishing vest…
Dear God…
Cyclops finished securing the zip ties to the leg of the table, binding the wrists of the men together into an awkward position that would prevent them from easily freeing themselves. Emergency sirens were already getting close, and he knew his time frame to gather evidence was rapidly shrinking. A new idea occurred to him, and he rushed over to the strewn-about papers, looking them up and down very deliberately.
Betsy will just have to dig these out of my memory later. He concluded.
Leaving both the evidence and the suspects for the authorities to find, he said a quiet thanks for the foresight to wear gloves and slipped out the door.
Braddock was still combing through the woman's mind when Scott came hurrying down the stairs two at a time.
"Let's go," he told her in stride. "Police are almost here."
"I've got what I need." She said, putting the woman into a slumber and letting her collapse clunkily.
Cyclops stopped despite himself, noting the lack of regard for the stranger's welfare with some confusion.
But Psylocke pushed him on, "Don't waste your concern on her."
Logan was already waiting for them at the car when Scott and Betsy got back, leaning against the driver's side door.
"Let me go in, Scott says." He began with a slight mumble due to the cigar. "I'll be more discreet, Scott says."
"Go f*** yourself, Logan." Cyclops shot back, opening one of the doors. "At least we got something."
Pointing a thumb towards the trunk, Wolverine smirked. "So do I."
"You're just full of subtle surprises, aren't you?" Betsy teased.
By now, a considerable amount of people were rushing towards the disaster scene, an easy opportunity for one unassuming man to move among them without much notice.
"So what the hell happened up there?" Logan asked, dropping behind the steering wheel.
"Guy pulled a gun on me." Scott huffed, hitting his sleeve to beat off the dust. "I fired back, hit something explosive. Goddamn IED lab."
Psylocke nodded once back in her seat. "That tracks with what I saw. This was an important hub; the Purifiers will be up in arms about this one."
He'd never seen them in person before, but he recognized the X-Men not only from television and magazines, but also the intelligence briefings he'd sat through. He never really imagined he'd be this close to them, in fact he hoped he wouldn't. But here he was in this strange turn of fate, hands shaking and heart pounding. He gulped nervously.
Cyclops reached forward and put a hand on Psylocke's shoulder, "Betsy, I'm gonna need you to pull some memories out of my head later. There was some paperwork in there I didn't have the time to take pictures of, and maybe you'll catch something I missed."
"And what of your efforts?" She asked, turning to Wolverine.
"Caught a fella who got real nervous to see me, tried to take off."
"I assume he's still alive?" She pressed.
"Enough."
Starting the ignition, Logan checked his mirror to make sure he was clear to pull out. Scott looked himself over to assess just how much damage had been done to his clothes. Braddock grabbed her paper bag and dug out another nip bottle.
It was then, as Wolverine was watching the flow of traffic for an opening, that he felt a tingling on the back of his neck, the hairs standing on end. Instinctively he sniffed, and despite the cacophony of scents in the air, he did detect an odd mixture. He spun in his seat and saw the torso of someone in a big jacket walking to a stop beside their car.
Psylock glanced up from her gin and raised an eyebrow.
"Allahu Akbar." The final syllable hung on his lip as the man stood there on the curb, the mutant's car only an arm's reach away. But he did nothing more.
"His thumb is on a trigger. "Betsy said, still hunched over her drink with eyes narrowed in concentration. "If he takes it off, the bomb explodes."
Cyclops balked to see the figure just on the other side of the window, speechless to find himself so close to such a sudden and conclusive end. He did indeed see the man's left hand partially out of the jacket pocket, his quivering grip on a device wrapped in black tape with a red button.
"I've paralyzed him for the moment," Psylocke swallowed a lump. "But we should deal with him quickly."
The three took a calming breath. Then her expression twisted in confusion.
"Wait…"
The explosion that went off in the next moment engulfed the car, its apex as high as the fourth story of the adjacent building. The man and half-a-dozen others in proximity were obliterated in a blink.
Sitting in a chair by the window, another man reclined, putting his own trigger mechanism on the table beside. His job had been to ensure the success of the trap they'd laid for the mutants, holding the 'chicken-switch' for the vest in case the martyr had lost his courage or been disabled.
"Allahu Akbar." He muttered.
XAVIER ESTATE
Beast walked among the destruction of the greenhouse, giving his dejected appraisal of the ruination of Ororo's project. He touched a large fern leaf, lifting it gently before it came apart from its stem.
"And it only just got rebuilt." Henry sighed. The authorities had relinquished their hold on the property as a crime scene, leaving the X-Men to clean up the aftermath of the mortar attack. He'd brought along a snow shovel and a large plastic barrel, so that he might wallow in self-reflection over his decisions as he worked. And while he certainly didn't blame himself for the mortar attack, the calamity afterwards however…
Beast arrived at the spot where the planter had been, and pushing aside some rubble, found the berth of the hole where Biollante had burrowed into the ground before re-emerging in the pond. He stared down into it like the last man on earth standing on the rocky coastline of a wind-tossed ocean, nothing existing but the two entities opposite one another. With a sigh he knelt down and found the length of vine the had tried to seize hold of him.
Why had it done that? He wondered, recalling how it had subsequently treated him last night; first winding around him before attempting another pull.
"It didn't seem to intend to harm me…" Mulling the thoughts, he turned the fragment over in his hand to examine the startling fusion of plant fiber and muscle tissue. A beautiful expression of the jam-packed cell he observed under the microscope.
"And what of its antipathy towards Jean? It must have something to do with their shared DNA."
An audible BAMF! With a puff of smoke behind Beast, gave him a moment's notice of Nightcrawler's arrival. He wasn't alone, with Dani Moonstar and Kitty Pryde on either side.
"Use a hand, Professor?" Dani asked.
"Ve thought you looked lonely out here by yourself," Kurt patted McCoy's shoulder.
Beast couldn't suppress a small smile, "Well, I suppose it is just pretentious to indulge in my misery."
Pryde threw her arms around her mentor's broad back and pressed herself into a hug. "We're the X-Men, Professor. We're here for each other."
"Thank you, kids." Returning the gesture with a soft palm on top of hers, Henry took the opportunity to exchange the melancholy moping for a more positive outlook on the situation. "I do tend to lose myself at times."
Dani knelt beside the senior mutant and hovered her hand over the groove in the floor where Biollante's tendrils had come squirming out. Like before when she recreated the imagery of the attacker's vehicle, an outline of pinkish light manifested in the shape of the destroyed potter and the oversized flower with its vines. The construct continued down into the hollow, disappearing beyond visibility.
Beast stood and was eye-level with the bloom. "I wish I could have had some more time with it." He reached out with both hands and cupped the lower petals, caressing it thoughtfully. "To understand it."
"There was a lot of pain here." Moonstar said, her eyes closed. "Pain and… longing."
"It reached out for you, Professor." Kitty reminded him. "In here and out by the pond. Why do you think that is?"
"Hard to say, dear." McCoy adjusted the glasses on his nose, giving the mirage a harder look. "Biollante is a fractured creature… evidently with a capacity for attachment."
"Ororo used to tell me," Dani began. "That some people talk to their plants, sing to them, play music. That it helps them grow."
"Think that's it?" Matching his gaze upon the hologram, Kitty tilted her head. "You ever talk to the rose?"
"Quite often actually." He said with a fond remembrance. "I even recited Frost to it."
"It knows you, Professor." Dani turned to him with a tender expression. "Like a baby in the womb hearing the voice of its mother."
At this Henry raised a stunned eyebrow.
"The impression is strong." Running her hand over the mirage of a vine on the floor, the apprentice X-Man concentrated on intuiting the residual emotional impressions, nodding her head affirmatively. "It has a deep bond with you; might even call it an affection."
"Well," Beast swallowed a lump. "It's nice to know someone was listening all that time."
Elsewhere on the estate…
Charles Xavier reached into the desk drawer to his lower left and drew out the small rattling bottle. When a telepath as strong as he suffered from a headache, the job required more than the standard over-the-counter Aspirin. Prepared by Beast especially for the X-Men with a psychic capacity, the homebrewed pharmaceutical was designed to placate the areas of the brain controlling the sixth-senses.
Swallowing a pair of capsules and restoring the bottle cap, he sunk into his chair and closed his eyes. But it wasn't just a migraine he wanted to ward off, it was the memories he wanted to explore. Letting his consciousness project into the recesses of his mind, he began to concentrate on the extraordinary contacts he'd made recently.
The first had been the entity in the asteroid, an entity he now understood to be called King Ghidorah. Touching that consciousness had been like bobbing for apples in a vat of boiling acid; completely alien, vast beyond anything he'd ever encountered, and consumed with the urge to destroy. Fortunately that experience had been momentary, and its mass was small enough to deposit in a deep place without any real fear of repression disorder. Holding a silver orb in his hands, Charles let it drop into the abyss of the abandoned subconscious.
The second had been the SpaceGodzilla, the malevolent sibling of the King of the Monsters. That had been a deliberate evil, acting with malice aforethought, seeking power and domination. Through the inadvertent connection they'd shared, he was able to see a glimpse of the creature's life as an interstellar tyrant and its callous disdain for lives it considered lesser than itself. Xavier and the SpaceGodzilla had battled in the mindscape and was rescued only by the timely intervention of Jean and her suppressed powers.
While formidable, Charles considered his tangles with Magneto to be more traumatic by comparison. The silver orb of this memory was allowed to drift among the constellation of others that emerged into view, passing like a river overhead. Upon release, the pain that had been plaguing him since the appearance of the kaiju finally abated, bringing a shiver of easement to the professor.
Then the phone rang.
The suddenness of the chime caused him to jolt forward in his chair with a snort of breath, he blinked several times to reorientate himself to the present.
"Yes?" He said into the receiver of his desk phone.
"Chuck… slight problem."
The ragged voice of Wolverine on the other end was immediately disconcerting.
"Logan? What's happened?"
As he listened, Xavier's face first scrunched inward, then expanded with a gasp.
"Oh thank God…" He put a hand to his face and leaned on his elbow. "And Elizabeth?"
…..
"Well, make sure she gets some time to recuperate and doesn't stress herself for a few days.."
…
"Just try not to- Logan?" Charles glanced at the handset, the dial tone audible even removed from the ear.
"I suppose he's got greater worries right now."
Putting aside the phone, he touched two fingers to his right temple and concentrated.
Beast, Beast can you hear me?
I hear you, Charles. Came a voice in his mind. What is it?
There's been another attack.
Upstate New York,
Evening
Warm brown eyes watched the crowd enter the mosque with silent pleasure. The visitors gave him heartfelt greetings as they passed, and he returned each with a hand over his heart and a modest bow. His face was square-ish, close-cropped sideburns that grew into a well-maintained beard.
They greeted him, as Mudaris, a word meaning 'teacher' or 'master'. In this way he welcomed many into this house of worship, as was his happy custom. Eventually one man approached who he had been anticipating seeing.
"As-salamu alaikum, Shaqiq." He said in humble attire, referring to him as 'brother'.
"Wa 'alaykum s-salam, Mudaris." In traditional worshipful attire, the follower embraced the master and the two exchanged kisses on either cheek.
"All transpired as you said it would." Shaqiq said softly when their faces were beside one another. "The mutants were taken up in the explosion, alive, but not without injury."
"And another blessed martyr is now in paradise." The Mudaris assured. "With all those before him who gave the greatest sacrifice for the glory of God."
Shaqiq nodded with a tight smile, meeting an equally devoted gaze from the mentor.
The men came apart, allowing the Mudaris to greet another couple walking by. "And the other thing?" He asked.
"Proceeding as scheduled. InshAllah, we awake to a better world tomorrow."
"InshAllah, Shaqiq."
Al-Rahim considered himself a man of the people. Despite his moniker as the Mudaris, to him, this was merely a descriptive term, a role to execute for the benefit of his brothers and sisters of the faith. Throughout the service he worshipped alongside the others, bending and bowing and reciting in unison. He listened attentively as the Imam gave his lecture; a very enjoyable historical piece on the great Sultan, Salah ad-D in, a favorite figure of his. An inspiration, a man who preferred peace but still led a conquering army.
"Do you believe in peace? Brothers and Sisters?"
After the regular service had concluded a dozen or so men and women remained behind, gathered around Al-Rahim in a circle in a separate room from those for worship. His Arabic was spoken in a gentle, paternal tone, the question left to dangle for any to answer. When none did, he continued.
"I do… insomuch as we can achieve it in this fallen world." He let his head hang as if in reflection. "And peace we are promised in the end."
"The mutants… Some of them want peace, or they proclaim as much. Others cry out for war against the children of God, saying they are the next leap forward in evolution, the 'Superior Man'."
The Mudaris shook a finger. "But God does not grant such gifts to the non-believers, he does not put these powers in the hands of atheists, pagans, and other heretics."
At this the assembled nodded with subtle murmurs.
"He certainly does not transform them into monsters and abominations. No my brothers and sisters, that is the hand of Shaytan and his many ways he tries to corrupt the image of God."
"Magneto makes his intent clear: subjugate humanity to their mutant overlords. We know where the Brotherhood stands. The X-Men however…"
Al-Rahim stood, face still cast downwards in contemplation. "The X-Men however spread this lie that mutants and humans can live together when we know that they will never allow that to happen. The mutants will never see themselves as our brothers and sisters, both sides declare themselves as separate from the rest of us, a different breed."
"And they will continue to believe this, so long as they believe that their powers prevent them from being held accountable by non-mutants."
The audience was grim as they listened, his tone becoming more serious.
"Those with such power are not given to lower themselves to the level of those without out of a sense of benevolence, to humble themselves. But Allah humbles the prideful, Allah fills our hearts with the courage to carry out his will."
His words were affirmed among the acolytes, some closing their eyes and uttering genuflections.
"Our faith arms us with resolution, our righteousness…" Mudaris pointed upwards. "His divine order."
The crowd then recited in unison: "By Allah's will, we purify.
"The mutants must be humbled."
"By Allah's will, we purify."
"And we are chosen to enact his will."
"By Allah's will, we purify."
Al-Rahim bowed his head and held his palms to the sky, once more speaking softly. "Allahu Akbar."
The others who had been sitting, touched their foreheads and palms to the floor, parroting the exclamation.
And there he held them.
MOTEL ROOM
"I keep telling you, I'm fine."
Psylocke grit her teeth as Cyclops attempted to hold her eye open to examine her pupil. She sat on one of the twin beds, stripped to her pants and sports-bra, Scott bent in front of her holding a lamp close to their faces.
"You were out for a good while," he told her. "Traumatic brain injury isn't always apparent at first."
She knew he was right; Braddock was just frustrated. "If I had another second, Scott, I could have made him lay on the ground." Her mouth scowled and her brow twitched under his inspection. "I just caught a glimpse in his mind, about the chicken switch."
"You did what you could with only a second." Satisfied that she betrayed no signs of neural trauma, Scott pulled back and instead put a hand on her shoulder. "You sure as hell saved my ass, throwing up a telekinetic shield around us."
"Yeah, musta been nice!" Wolverine called from the bathroom.
"I knew you could take it, Logan." Betsy defended. "Scott and myself aren't so resistant to shrapnel and organ-crushing explosions without your healing factor."
"Yeah, that's what everybody says."
Standing shirtless in front of the wide mirror, Logan set the bottle of cheap vodka down on the bathroom counter and went over his body to make sure he'd located all the points of perforation. He'd been the first to recover from the explosion, much to his discomfort. Psylocke had done the right thing, using her energy to protect herself and Scott from the force of the blast. If it had been any thinner to encompass him as well, they might have been blown apart. Still, pulling bits of metal out of your face while recovering from a concussion that would have killed a less resilient man sucked. It really sucked.
"We should be getting answers right now, instead he gets turned to goddamn hamburger."
"Funny that." Elizabeth mulled, laying herself along the bed. "How convenient it was that they just-so-happen to have a suicide bomber on stand-by."
Scott sat on the opposite bed, fixing her with a curious look. "You think they knew we were coming?"
"It's not like we were being subtle in our approach." She said wryly. "Purifiers just waited until we showed up."
"We'll have to be a lot more careful going forward. We managed to avoid catastrophe this time, but we can't bank on being that lucky again."
Cyclops likewise laid himself back on the bed and measured his thoughts. "We need to identify the Purifiers leadership before they commit another attack."
"Oh yeah, why don't we just do that?" Striding back into the room, Logan downed a sip of vodka before dropping himself into a corner chair. "Instead of wasting our time with these assholes."
Betsy held out a hand with grasping fingers and Logan tossed her the capped bottle.
Summers observed as she took a hearty swig. "Do you always drink this often on the job?"
Wincing as the shot made its way down, Psylocke pursed her lips and resecured the cap. "It helps with the headaches. Having to parse though the minds of these troglodytes gives me a migraine. They're absolutely drenched in that psychotic philosophy."
Wolverine struck a match, lighting the cigarette in his mouth. "How the hell else are you supposed to get a guy to strap a bomb to himself and press his own detonator?"
"And they think we're the dangerous ones." Scott mused.
"We are." Braddock smirked, casting an eye at Logan. "Some of us anyway."
The only return was a wink.
She briefly turned her attention back to Cyclops but saw that his focus was elsewhere as he stared up at the ceiling. Knowing the man, it didn't necessarily take a psychic to decipher his thoughts' preoccupation with a redhead back home. But being a psychic, Betsy could all but hear his worry over her condition, and something about a strange creature. She raised an eyebrow at the curious notion but kept it to herself.
"So Logan," She began. "How was your sabbatical northward?"
"Eh, cold." He grumbled, receding into his seat to stew. "Thought I picked up her trail in east Alberta. Musta' let myself get upwind somehow, and she gave me the slip again."
"You know I could put some of my own feelers out." She offered. "Maybe get Alpha Flight involved?"
"Nah." Shaking his head, Logan let his gaze drift to an unoccupied corner of the room. "She's smart, she'll see you coming and make herself even harder to find."
"Wonder where she gets that from…" Psylocke let the suggestion linger but Logan didn't pluck it, choosing instead to chew the inside of his cheek and silently mull his thoughts.
"Well I can see I'm on my own tonight." She said with a bit of a scowl. Pulling the side of the blanket over with a roll, Braddock contented herself to snuggle into its warmth and close her eyes.
As each diverged into their own ponderances, Scott Summers hoped that someone out there could hear his.
XAVIER ESTATE
Jean Grey awoke with a gasp, a hand instinctively moving to her neck.
"Are you alright?" Beast asked, sitting at a small desk against the wall of the room. Having moved Jean from the exam table to her own quarters, McCoy had decided to sit vigil in case she came back to consciousness. He'd been reading a volume on medieval Japanese poetry to take his mind off things.
"Did you have a nightmare?"
"Yellow eyes, Henry." She said with a gulp. "These horrible yellow eyes."
"Charles said much the same thing." He closed his book and removed the pince-nez from the bridge of his nose. "In much the same words."
"It's really the only way to describe it." Jean shuddered and flung the blanket aside. "That and the… choking feeling."
"You shouldn't-" Beast raised a hand to forestall her as she climbed out of bed, but she waved him off.
"Henry, I really have to pee."
"Oh."
When Jean returned, she seemed to move with a reservoir of energy accumulated during her unconsciousness, going to her mirror and taking a brush to her hair.
"I had another episode, didn't I?" She asked.
"You don't remember?"
Grey examined her reflection, "I remember fighting off Biollante by the pond, and then…" She paused to think, her eyes staring back into her. "And then I was having this dream or…"
"A residual memory." Beast finished. "Charles believes that you parted from your psychic encounter with Godzilla bearing some impression of a memory. One potent enough to lodge itself in your subconscious."
"A repression." The realization came to her with a stark clarity.
McCoy raised an intrigued eyebrow. "Interesting." Pushing himself out of the seat, he collected his things and headed towards the door.
"You must be hungry, dear. Let me make you something to eat."
Jean gripped onto his forearm with a gentle hand, "I would love an omelet."
"And an omelet you shall have." He smiled.
"Any news on Scott and Logan?" She asked abruptly as he was crossing the threshold. "They any closer to finding the men who attacked us?"
"They ran into a bit of an obstacle today…" Beast began carefully, "Itself, evidence of their progress."
Jean felt the hesitancy radiate from him, a signal of something bad. But without probing his mind for the details, she'd have to settle for his assurance.
"Everybody okay?"
"A little bruised but otherwise intact, from what I understand." With a comforting nod, he left her alone.
Putting her brush down and digging the small bits of crud from the corners of her eyes, she suddenly felt a tingle on the back of her neck. Her hand went to cover it before she even thought to do so, a sensation of attention pricking at her mind, as if someone were calling out her name.
Jean rubbed her nape and turning towards the room's singular window, let out a long breath, searching for something that might answer her mystery. In the center of the room she halted, closing her eyes to concentrate on the feeling, removing the impediments to her powers of perception. With a crinkled brow she snapped her face to the right…
"Scott…"
Outside…
"Turn them on."
Activating a device on their belts with the press of a button, several figures in black clothes and tactical-style vests assembled. Down the length of their sleeves in white Arabic markings was the only outward display the Purifiers made of their association. A technological wreath about their heads featured a similar blue illumination in the center of the forehead. They bore firearms just as dark, spare magazines tucked into pouches around their waist.
Confident in the significance of the blue light on their gear protecting them, they began scaling the perimeter wall.
"Feel anything here?" Bobby Drake asked. At the shore of the pond he, Kitty, Nightcrawler, and Moonstar sat and watched the gentle laps of water in the cool night breeze.
"A lot of confusion and lot of pain." Dani explained, digging her fingers into the soil as the ambient emotions of the scene filtered through her senses.
"And a much greater awareness of self." She said with a crinkled brow.
Kitty nodded, "Like Biollante was evolving." The progression of the plant-hybrid made sense from what she'd seen, from the potted version to the towering growth in the pond. "But into what?"
"Maybe a giant Brussel sprout!" Kurt suggested with a chuckle. "Or something like Audrey zwei from 'Little Shop of Horrors'."
"Well... it did try to eat someone." Grimaced Drake. "I think we got lucky and nipped this one, in the bud."
The gurls turned on him with pained expressions for the pun, but Bobby shrugged defensively. "Sorry, I thought it seemed appropriate."
It was a lot to weigh on one mind, even that of Charles Xavier. The chaos of the SpaceGodzilla's destruction, the creation of Biollante and its hostility, and the Purifiers attack all within such a short time. And even with the specter of Magneto freed from prison, his mind haunted on matters closer to home.
Since Beast's files on the Kaiju from the other side were in the household network, it was easy for Charles to peruse the data himself to try and gleam some insight from one of Biollante's progenitors.
"The child of mutant and monster," Charles sighed, looking over the information at his desk's computer. "How fitting to birth into the world here."
Earth Defense Force records on Godzilla's behavior was surprisingly thorough; several decades of observation providing ample continuity between the three generations of the creature. While the exact relationship between them was questionable, behavior constants did run through.
Territorial? Xavier considered, Godzilla's penchant for imposing his dominance the scene of many a flattened landscape.
But why Jean particularly? What piece of the picture was he missing?
A rival… Godzilla was known to navigate the globe to confront an enemy, but he hardly troubled himself every time another kaiju poked its head out.
Only those who pose a threat… "Not just Godzilla but part Jean as well…"
A union out of the chaos. "That's why it attacked her… it thinks Jean is competition."
Stalking through the trees, the Purifier squad stooped to examine a periscope-like camera hidden amidst a bush, glances between them interested in the effectiveness of their devices. So far it seemed the X-Men's security system had failed to detect them. At least one of their ploys was proving to be worth the money.
One tapped another on the arm and gestured across the sparkling black pool to where a group of the young mutants were sitting by the water's edge. Gripping the weapons in their hands, they narrowed their focus.
A shiver down Beast's spine caused him to turn around from his work at the griddle, like a finger across his fur. Nobody was behind him, nor was there even the familiar echo of a telepathic connection. For a moment he thought he might've glimpsed a bead of light in the corner of his vision, but it was gone in the next instant.
"Huh." He rolled his shoulder and flexed the muscle, content to pass it off as the occasional phantom sensation incumbent with being covered in hair.
"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door, some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door. That it is and nothing more."
Returning to the food, McCoy poured a small bowl of chopped ingredients over the egg. "Don't get many chances to pull out some Poe."
While he sat and ruminated, something caused Charles Xavier to glance towards the window of his of office. There was nothing of particular note for him to catch outside, at least not through the obscurity of the curtain. Fireflies were a common nightly occurrence, so when he saw the dancing motes of light playing over the grass he thought nothing of it. Something nagged at him however, something he couldn't quite crystallize. Like humidity, the feeling just hung in the air, saturating, palpable.
He touched his finger to his temple, Jean, do feel this?
She was still trying to reach back out to Cyclops when a clouding presence began to dim her psychic signals. A low fog descended over the house to dampen her range and block any inkling of her lover's mind.
Then she heard the Professor call out to her.
I do, Professor. What is it?
Grant Ward was driving when the phone in his pocket rang.
"Hello?"
…
His face twisted. "It what?"
…
"Where?'
…
"Get a team on the road."
He ended the call and tossed the phone into the passenger seat. Diverting into the parking lot of a bank, the tires of the SUV screeched as he spun around and headed back in the direction he had come.
"That's weird…" Moonstar gazed up at the night sky and noticed the roiling clouds above, churning like a cauldron's brew.
The faces of the others followed, craning to see the odd meteorological phenomena.
"Forecast didn't say anything about a storm tonight." Bobby said, holding up his hand. "Doesn't feel like there's much moisture in the air."
Kitty tilted her head, "No, I've read about some weird-looking cloud types. Nimbo…stratus or something like that?"
"Maybe it's caught in a wind vortex?" Kurt suggested. "High altitude!"
But Dani shook her head. "No… it's something else."
They had not come with your average firearms. The strange men who had provided the black-clad team with these weapons promised they were especially engineered with the X-Men in mind. Behind their thin visors they explained that while they held no personal interest in the Purifier's holy mission, they did seek the opportunity to have the weapons tested under combat conditions.
The young X-Men were out in the open, with no cover or concealment closer than forty yards. So they crawled on their bellies and took prone positions as best they could in the brush. The optical sights mounted to the top of their weapons illuminated the mutants in thermal visuals, three warm bodies and one very cold.
As one of them adjusted their position for comfort, the corner of his vision picked up a tiny bauble of light drifting down from the canopy before fading into the ground. Then came another not far behind. Though there was no discernable substance to the ethereal mote, it fell as if in accord with gravity.
"Look!" Pointing to the center of the atmospheric anomaly, Kurt noticed a burgeoning glow within the formation. "Lightning!"
Iceman raised a wary brow. "Maybe we should get inside?"
Bobby hardly noticed anything amiss until Nightcrawler grunted and staggered back into him. The girls gasped in surprise to hear the pained expression, surprise that quickly turned to fear when they saw the small spatter of blood on his chest.
"Whoa!" Drake cradled his friend in both arms as Wagner's legs gave out under him. Yellow eyes rolled back in their sockets and his breathing shallowed.
"Kurt!" Kitty and Moonstar laid hands on him with stark terror.
"Something shot him!" Dani cried.
Xavier's contemplation was suddenly rocked by the fearful minds of his students, shouting all at once about something terrible happening to Nightcrawler. In the next heartbeat he was reaching out to scan their thoughts to discover the cause. In the next, he was reaching out to everyone in the house.
Thinking quickly, Kitty phased her hand into Kurt's chest and felt for what she presumed would be a bullet. It was during this moment of intangibility that another shot passed through her torso and bit into the trunk of a tree several meters past her.
"Bobby! Wall!"
Not a second after Drake cast his hand out to create a shield of ice between them and the direction of the shots, did a barrage of ammunition begin striking it.
The moment she felt the foreign object in her touch, she extracted it.
"Dani, help me get him inside! Bobby, cover us!"
The girls took him up as Bobby moved to rearguard their retreat, expanding his barrier as they went.
Beast came barreling through the hallway with such velocity he ricocheted off the walls as he took a corner, a course of emergency surgery unfolding itself in his mind.
Jean and Professor X met each other in the 2nd floor hall as they rushed out, their faces drawn and pale with fright. Without asking permission, she grasped his chair in her telekinetic grip and took them both over the railing and down to the ground floor.
"They're running!" A Purifier called out to the others as he dashed to his feet. "Hurry! Before they shield themselves in!"
Now that the cat was out of the bag, the Purifiers sprinted from their cover across the open distance in pursuit.
Far above their heads, like rain breaking from a stormcloud, a mass of golden particles descended from the formation in a cascade.
The younger students were already fleeing to their rooms when the downstairs lounge became scene to an emergency room. A step behind the girls, Drake threw up an icewall over the door and windows.
"Dear God!" Beast cried as Kitty and Dani ferried the unconscious Nightcrawler to the center of the room. For a moment his mind refused to think, looking down and seeing his friend with a bloody wound in his chest. But with a sharp breath his reason kicked back into gear and began building a mental picture of the damage inflicted to the body. He reached out and gripped one hand to Kurt's neck to check for a pulse. It was faint, but there.
Seconds later Jean and Xavier arrived as Beast was pressing his other hand over the entry wound.
"Get him downstairs!" McCoy ordered over his shoulder towards Grey, referring to the medical center they were all quite familiar with. "And keep him from bleeding out!"
Without a word, Jean took her friend up with an invisible hold, levitating him with her right hand and applying pressure to the open wound with her left. It was precision technique that Cyclops had made sure she trained for. She and Beast ran off.
Charles turned his focus to the other teens: "What did you see? Is someone out there?"
"We didn't see it but-!" Kitty began, glancing down at the crimson on her hands and chest.
"It's gotta be a whole squad!" Bobby finished for her. "Coming from the back of the property!"
His face tensing, Xavier touched his head and extended his telepathic sonar. When nothing registered, he frowned in confusion.
"I don't feel anyone…"
Some of the Purifiers scrambled to the left of the building, the rest to the right. One remained behind, pulling the retaining pin from a grenade before hucking it at the blocked rear entrance. It exploded against the ice, but the frozen barrier managed to withstand the force of the detonation. Uttering a curse in Arabic, the man hesitated where he stood to consider another method to breach the house.
Behind him, a river of sod was pushed up by some force underneath, streaking towards him like a torpedo.
He plucked another fragmentary grenade from his gear and was preparing to unleash it when the earth around him erupted. There was only a fraction of a heartbeat for him to try and understand before his chest was parsed by a green spear with a spray of gore. In the process his arms were forced apart, separating the explosive from its retaining pin.
It was fortunate that Drake had reenforced the wall when the second explosion went off, ere their shield might have fallen.
"Why can't I sense them?" Xavier asked out loud, genuine fear building in his breast as he shifted his chair's position to concentrate on a different area.
Moonstar pinched her eyes shut, "I can't either, it's like they're not even there."
"They had enough forethought to defeat our security system, they had enough to account for Jean and myself." Still trying to comprehend the situation, Charles was suddenly forced to grip the handrests of his chair when an ear-splitting wail cut through all the chaos of the moment and rang loud throughout the grounds of the Xavier estate.
Dani as well buckled where she stood, supporting herself on the back of a sofa with one hand, while cupping the other to her head.
"It's back!" She cried, clenching her teeth. "Biollante!"
Putting up a mental defense, Charles struck upon another realization: Aggressors to its territory…
Its actions during the previous attack now made more sense, trying to protect Scott. Now this group had come with hostile intent, provoking the creature's ire.
The mansion began to rumble, as if the ground on which it stood were revolting against its position in the strata.
The butt-end of a weapon was smashed against a window's glass, the masked assailant grunting with every thundering attempt to smash through it. He was not aware that the translucent pane had been designed to withstand forces well above his capabilities. It was the lack of this knowledge that would cost him his life.
The earth at his feet fell away, and it its place arose a sinewy tendril, knocking him to the ground. A maw filled with crocodilian teeth howled and flailed as the man looked on in terror. From the gullet of the thing was vomited a gout of green slime that drenched him from head to toe. An acidic hiss and caustic odor began to eat through the man's shape, body armor, skin, and all.
Another intruder on the opposite side managed to locate an open point, climbing in through a window and finding himself in a long hallway. He whipped around to the sound of scuffling feet behind him, advancing with his weapon tucked into the shoulder. Perhaps one of the younger mutant children had been brazen enough not to flee at the alarm, he hoped.
But any hopes he entertained were dashed apart when the floorboards shattered in an instant, a boneless muscle seizing him by the leg and yanking him to the floor with such force, his body was broken before it disappeared into a well of darkness.
Jean and Beast were almost to the medical center when she was brought to a knee under the strain of some invisible burden. Fortunately, McCoy caught Nightcrawler before he could slam into the concrete tiles. Though the sound was muffled here, Beast's inhuman hearing did perceive the familiar cry of the chimera echoing through the air.
"You're back…" He whispered under his breath, the fur on the back of his neck tingling.
A thunderous blow struck the floor from underneath, enough to crack and spiderweb the concrete. Jean staggered and pressed herself to the wall but did not move away. Several vines as thick as a man's torso finally broke through, snaking and writhing with disjointed animation. Beast maneuvered his body to protect Kurt, but a wild tendril cost him his footing.
That was when a new scream was heard, not the mournful wailing or piercing shriek, but something birthed from a much more human throat. As Jean watched on, an arm appeared from below, clawing up the length of a vine.
Beast gasped, "Oh my stars and garters…"
A fusion of woman, plant, and kaiju, Biollante emerged into view.
/