"Hello?"
The young girl was standing in the middle of a vast field of grass that came up to her knees, dotted here and there with brilliant white lilies. She had no idea how she had gotten there.
"Is anyone there?"
Her voice only echoed across the field. She began to whimper. She was lost, and she had no idea where home was.
"Now, now, little one, don't cry. There is nothing to fear."
With a gasp the girl turned around. Before her was a man in a red cloak with curled auburn hair. He smiled at the blonde child warmly.
"Who… who are you?"
"I could ask you the same thing! We don't get visitors in my kingdom very often."
"Your kingdom?" The girl's eyes lit up. "So are you a prince? Like the ones in the fairytales?"
He crouched down to meet her eye level. "That's exactly right! Will you accompany me back to the castle?"
She shuffled her feet. "Well, I really should wait for my friends to come find me. I'm not really supposed to talk to strangers."
He blinked imperceptibly. "That's very smart thinking. But there's nobody out here for miles. If you come with me I'm sure we can reach your friends. Not to mention, you must be famished!"
She was starting to get hungry, now that she thought about it. "Okay," she said shyly.
The prince slapped his forehead. "How silly of me! I almost forgot! The little girl deserves a welcoming gift for coming all this way."
He held out his hand and a stone about the size of a pea appeared out of thin air. It hovered around two inches above his hand, perfectly spherical and crystal clear. She reached out to take it, then suddenly recoiled in pain with a yelp.
The prince smiled again, though the kindness the grin carried was no longer there. All around them the pastoral scene transformed. The lilies wilted and died, the grass turned brown and then crumbled to ash. The blue sky became stained with angry scarlet clouds, and great pillars of rock dropped down from the ceiling of the unseen cave. Smoke billowed from faraway fissures as more stone objects rose from the ground. They were roofs and steeples of ragged black buildings.
The little girl cowered as the world twisted around her.
"What's the matter, little one?"
The prince had begun to change as well. The collar of his cloak extended past his ears in harsh peaks. His skin grew a pinkish pallor as his eyes turned amber. Two small bone white horns protruded from his forehead. Near the hem of his cloak the tip of a tail flickered across his ankles. He licked his teeth with a pointed tongue. "We must return to my palace at once!"
In a great eruption of violet fire the ramparts of a terrible castle pierced the infernal landscape. The girl wanted to run somewhere, anywhere. But her legs refused to obey. She felt a numbing heat in the back of her head.
As the "prince" advanced on her a flash of light appeared between them in the field. From it appeared three figures. A woman with dark skin and shocking white hair. A tall man covered in shaggy blue hair. A wide-shouldered boy clad entirely in metal. The girl felt a pang of hope when she saw him.
"Give us the girl, demon," the woman said commandingly.
"Ah, the famed X-Men," the dark figure bowed. "Welcome to Hell."
"Please, Belasco. I've been to Hell," came an older voice as a fourth figure emerged from the light. "Yours doesn't impress me."
His face was obscured by a red and purple helmet, and he wore a purple cape. He floated a few inches off the ground, regarding the false prince coldly.
"You're too late," Belasco sneered. "She is already mine."
The woman's hands crackled with lightning.
"We shall see about that."
|X-Men: Limbo|
Boston, 16 Years Later
Cecily stood stock still in front of the door.
"You can do this," Laura put her hand on the younger girl's shoulder.
"It's been so many months now," Cecily sighed at the dark haired girl, "Is it even okay that I'm here?"
"You had to do this sooner or later. Either they'll understand, or they won't."
Cecily swallowed and rang the doorbell. A woman with streaks of grey in her red hair opened the door. Her hand shot to her mouth when she saw Cecily standing there.
"Ell! Get out here!"
A few minutes later Laura, Cecily, and Ellis and Jill Kincaid were sitting in their living room. Her father was just staring back and forth between the two girls. Finally he said something.
"It's been what, six months? At least that. Since that woman from the school told us where you went. And we never heard from you since then. Not a call, not a text."
"I didn't know what to do," Cecily looked down. "You were both so upset."
"How were we supposed to feel?" Her father said sharply. "How were we supposed to let you go out there, looking like that?"
Her mother gestured at Laura.
"Your friend is a mutant, isn't she? And she doesn't look any different from anyone else. Neither did your teacher. It's just doesn't seem fair to me. Why couldn't you have had one of those mutations?"
Laura stiffened. She excused herself from the room.
"No two mutations are exactly alike," Cecily held up her shimmering metallic arm. "Some of us look normal, others look different, like me. At the school they have these watches that some of us can use to… blend in."
She activated the device, and - to the shock of her parents - returned to the way she had looked the year prior.
"You mean you could use that all along?" Her father didn't seem to understand anymore than he had. Ellis' face was as hard as it had ever been.
"You came to our front door like that, when this whole time you had a way to disguise your… mutation?"
"I'm okay with the way I look," Cecily was now getting frustrated. "I wasn't at first, but I've made some good friends who don't care about stuff like that. They make me stronger."
"Stronger eh? Yeah, you're so strong, Cecily. Strong enough to run away, live on your own with a bunch of other -"
"El," Jill interjected.
"Other people. Strangers," he grumbled.
"So what do you want, exactly? For us to say sorry, to just put this all behind us?"
"No." Cecily said quietly.
"No?" Ellis snorted.
"I didn't come to get an apology. I came to say goodbye."
"Status report, Armor?"
Hisako hefted a piece of flaming rafter out of the way. "The building could be less - hrrng!- on fire, Mr. Wagner."
The X-Men were responding to a hit Cerebro picked up in downtown Boston. A mutant was somewhere in this building, and judging by the fact that it was now on fire, there must have been a complication when their powers manifested.
"I count three left on our floor, including the mutant," Rachel chimed in.
Chistopher Muse, the X-Men's resident healer, was assisting some people trapped on the floor below, instructing them how to put on respirator masks and keep low to avoid smoke. A pair of Boston firefighters were hacking down doors to clear their way out.
"The firemen are saying the blaze is getting into the fourth floor," Chris reported. "We're running out of building. Armor, watch what you move."
"Copy. No bringing the building down on our heads. That would be embarrassing."
Kurt was circling the city in the Blackbird, keeping tabs of the operation. It was supposed to be a lot simpler than this. But now the X-Men were stretched between collecting the mutant and rescuing the people trapped inside.
Sorry Cecily, he thought. I know you needed some family time. But we can't save this mutant shorthanded.
Laura reappeared in the doorway. She would have taken any excuse to leave the house, but she was saved by a phone call from Nightcrawler.
"Cecily, that was Mr. Wagner. It's all hands on deck, now."
"Oh," Cecily nodded. She looked at her parents. "Maybe we weren't ready for this yet. But I have to go save another mutant. Because that's what my friends and I do. So… goodbye."
She hurried out the door before she could change her mind. Laura followed behind her. They both were silent for a while as they started the car.
"Nightcrawler's picking us up about 4 miles from here. I thought the plan was to invite them to the open house next month?"
Cecily's face drooped a bit.
"It will be easier for everyone if they weren't invited. They'd probably send the police before they came themselves."
"Hn," Laura grunted.
"You were quiet in there," Cecily added. "I thought you'd have more to say."
"I had plenty to say. But sometimes," Laura held up her fist to imply the claws stored within.
"There are some subjects where I know I won't stop at talking. Besides, I was just there for moral support. It's your family, and your fight."
"Don't we do enough fighting already?" Cecily groaned. She pointed out the passenger side window.
"Oh! Speaking of which, there's our ride."
The Blackbird decloaked from above the car and pulled it up and in with the special rig Kurt and Kitty had devised. The girls went back to get changed into their mission uniforms once the doors had closed. When they finished, they met with Kurt and Lockheed on the bridge. Lockheed was a small purple dragon. He didn't speak English, but he made up for it with several unique talents. Like flying aircraft.
Laura looked at the camera feed of the burning building.
"Dios. You weren't kidding Mr. Wagner."
"How are we going to find anyone in that?" Cecily asked.
"I'm open to suggestions. Hold on tight, girls. Lockheed, you're in charge."
In a puff of smoke, they were on the ground. A throng of people cordoned off from the blaze pointed and reacted with surprise at the appearance of the strange newcomers. The firefighters let them pass. They had already met the first three mutants on their way into the building, and at this point their captain wasn't saying no to extra hands. Has he not been managing three squads of firefighters he might have had more questions for the strangely polite blue guy with the tail.
Triage was leading his group of evacuees out of the building when the three mutants reached the entrance.
"Keeping cool, Muse?" Laura pulled down her mask. "Where's our soon-to-be new friend?"
"Second floor doctor's office," Chris said. "Phoenix is almost there, Armor is on her way out. The Fire Chief says there's a couple of his crew cut off on the third floor."
"I'll port up to Rachel's location," Kurt cracked his four knuckles. "Wolverine and Mercury, you locate the firefighters above!"
Nightcrawler disappeared in another puff of smoke, leaving Mercury and Wolverine to enter the building the old fashioned way. At length they arrived on the third floor.
"There's a scent leading down there," Wolverine pointed down a hallway glowing bright with flames running down the walls.
"It's faint and hard to keep track of with all the smoke, but it's there. We need a plan if we're getting down there, though."
Mercury melded her arm into a silver umbrella to block the embers raining down.
"Can't you heal through it?"
"I wouldn't be in good shape by the time I got to the other side. And they'd probably run in the other direction if they saw me coming."
"You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Me the knight, you the shining armor?"
Cecily twisted into a fully liquid state and wound herself around Laura's body. The trick had won the day during the X-Men's first trip in the field, and they had been working on its practical applications ever since.
"I conduct heat pretty well, so don't take too long if you don't want a very awkward sunburn," she said, forming her head opposite Laura's.
"Just watch my back, I'll take care of the rest."
"Thank you for the assist, Rachel."
Nightcrawler could usually only teleport within his line of sight, or to places he had been before. Trying to eyeball it was an invitation to get stuck in a wall. But if someone with psychic powers like Rachel Grey leant him their eyes, he could go just about anywhere in range.
"Of course, Mr. Wagner. It's just this way."
Using her telekinesis, Rachel pushed open the door to the doctor's office. They were in a waiting room, the melted remains of a puzzle table and a charred bookshelf denoted it was some sort of pediatric practice. And huddled in the corner were two children, a boy and girl.
The purple psionic glow faded from Phoenix's eyes as she approached the children.
"It's okay, we're here to help. Do you know where the other kid is?"
The girl pointed, but didn't say anything. They both looked terrified. Kurt, thinking ahead, had activated his watch before entering. He now approached the children as a lanky young man with high cheekbones instead of as an - admittedly less inviting - blue mutant.
"I mean you no harm. Just close your eyes and count to three, and we'll get you out of here. Ready?"
The children huddled close and closed their eyes.
"One… two…"
BAMF
"Three!"
The boy and girl opened their eyes and found themselves on the ground outside the building. A team of paramedics rushed over to tend to them. Kurt flashed then a quick smile and teleported back upstairs.
"In here, Nightcrawler," Phoenix' voice drew him back further into the collapsing building. Lying in the middle of the receptionist's office - curled into a ball - was the shape of a girl covered in bright red cracks like a volcano. A white hot discharge poured from the openings. Heat radiated it out of her and all across the room. Kurt felt his fur start to singe.
"We can't get in there," he called over the road of the blaze.
"Not physically," Rachel agreed, a series of glowing lines appearing on her face.
"There's… a lot… of fear in her mind…" Phoenix winced through the strain required to telepathically communicate with the mutant.
"Steady Rachel, I can't have you lose control here."
"I'm… I'm in. She… can't stop the fire. I'm going to bring her down into unconsciousness. Then you port us out.'
The girl let out a shuddering breath, and the worst of the heat dissipated. The cracks faded to reveal a fair skinned girl with strawberry blonde hair. The fire still raged on though, and they had little time to celebrate their victory.
"Damn thing," the firefighter grumbled, pressing the button on his radio one more futile time.
"They know we're up here, it's only a matter of time before they find us," his partner tried to reason with him.
The first firefighter grabbed his axe.
"This building's getting worse by the minute. We're gonna have to rescue ourselves."
At that moment, a bizarre metal shape crashed through the wall of the room they were pinned in. The figure's head receded to reveal the face of a dark haired girl.
"You still aiming to rescue yourselves, or are you coming with us?"
The firemen looked at one another. They shrugged and went over to the newcomer.
About an hour later, the fire had been mostly contained.
Chris saw the two children Nightcrawler evacuated from the building sitting on the tailgate of an ambulance in shock blankets. Both of them looked frozen, with dead, frightened eyes. He walked over.
"Anyone hurt? I can look at cuts and burns."
The girl looked up and, after a delayed reaction, said "Um, I cut my knee."
"Ah, let me see. You know her?" Chris jerked his head back towards the mutant girl Armor and Rachel were carrying into the Blackbird.
The boy shook his head.
"You're scared," Chris said to the children. It wasn't a question. "That kid started this huge fire, and you barely made it out alive. But as scared as you are, imagine how scared she must be. Try to remember that, if you ever run into her again. It will mean more than you know."
Chris took a look a look at the girl's knee.
"What's gonna happen to her?" She worked up the nerve to ask.
"Is she gonna go to jail?" The boy added.
"No, no. We're going to take her back to our home, and we're gonna teach her how to control her ability. She'll meet a lot of other people like her, get the help she needs."
"That sounds cool," the boy said.
"It is pretty cool, yeah," Chris nodded. The last six months of his life had certainly been the most interesting. He had nearly died once or twice, gone to exotic places, met some cool people - and a dragon.
"Do you make fire too?" The girl asked. They were both a bit more energetic now.
"Nope. I do this!" Chris's hands emitted a soft glow, and when he lifted it, the cut had healed.
"Woah," the boy whispered.
"There's lots of people like us, and everyone does something different. A lot of them don't even know it yet. But if they need help, we'll find them."
"That's nice," the girl said.
"It's kind of a shame about the building though," the boy looked at the burnt out structure.
"Yeah," Chris said thoughtfully.
As the Blackbird flew off, the crowd of bystanders and reporters dispersed.
"The mysterious new guys again, eh?"
One of the reporters was discussing the events of the morning with their cameraman.
"Suppose we should reach out to the State Department, see if they have a statement. They must be hot about these guys sidestepping the Accords."
The cameraman was focusing on his recording while he listened. "I'm sure it will be the same old 'no comment.' Bah. This ain't gonna win us a Pulitzer, that's for sure."
"Did you not get the shot?"
"I got the shot, but I didn't get them. Their faces are all blurry, not a single one in focus."
"Why didn't you… zoom in, or something?"
"You don't get it. Here, look. Everything else is in focus, it's just them. Damn superpowers."
And all across town people were realizing that their photos and videos didn't come out either. Where the faces of the X-Men should have been in full view, there was only fuzz. It was one of Kurt's favorite toys.
Kitty Pryde hurried downstairs when she heard the Blackbird descending. Kurt, Laura, Rachel, and Cecily were deplaning when she got to the hangar.
Kurt gave her a wave.
"Are we late?"
"It's possible that you're late," Kitty rolled her eyes and hugged Kurt.
"Armor and Triage are taking the new mutant to the infirmary," Kurt reported. "Chris will do the brunt of the healing, then let her rest until after the orientation."
Lockheed flew over to Kitty and perched on her shoulder. The little dragon was Kitty's friend and partner. They had lived together for most of the time the school had been closed.
"Hi, you. Did you keep these guys in line? You smell like a campfire."
"I suppose that makes us the s'mores," Chris said, wiping his goggles once more to clear some of the soot from the rims. He and Armor rejoined the group. "New mutant is a pyrokine. Said her name is Amara. Made a bit of a mess."
"Well, unfortunately we don't have time to change," Rachel was looking steadily upwards. "Miss Frost's aura is becoming more impatient as she goes."
The X-Men were all gathered in the sublevels of the Xavier Mansion, where for years the mutant team had made their home.
"No worries," Kitty smiled. "I know a shortcut."
"Which is why it is imperative that we remain vigilant as our kind reemerges in the world."
Several stories above Kitty's head, a large gathering was seated in the mansion's sun-filled event hall. It was Orientation Day. The day all their hard work (and much of Emma's money) paid off. The day the Xavier School for Higher Learning opened its doors to a new class of mutants.
The students, many accompanied by their parents, sat before Emma Frost, who was currently winding down her welcoming address. If only the address had been at all welcoming. Emma had chosen to emphasize her newfound commitment to protecting mutantkind by bolstering her speech with all sorts of fearsome rhetoric of the kind that the mothers in the audience wouldn't have wished to hear before leaving their children to stay on their own for the summer.
Scott Summers, Emma's boyfriend - though they had both agreed that they probably ought to find a different term for it - was slouched in his seat trying not to look as uncomfortable being up there as he was.
Wrap it up, Emma, he thought to himself. You're losing the room.
I've also lost our dear headmistress, in case you couldn't tell, Emma paused in her speech long enough to blast into his mind. Idle thoughts were difficult to keep to yourself around telepaths.
I don't know, make something up?
Damnit Scott, I've got enough going on up here as it is-
Emma stuttered at her podium.
"Ahem. Apologies, I seem to have lost my place. At this point I would pass the microphone to our headmistress, Katherine Pryde. But she had to step out a moment ago-"
"Here I am," Kitty announced, her upper body phasing through the back wall of the stage. The audience was awash in gasps and laughter. Emma was less impressed.
She stepped through the wall, hand in hand with the other X-Men behind her.
"I wanted to make sure that you met the most important part of our operation here at the Institute: the X-Men. As you all know, humankind has forgotten about their mutant neighbors. But young people are still discovering their mutations every day, and many of them find themselves in need of help. That's what the X-Men are for. The X-Men find endangered mutants all over the world and bring them back here to learn and acclimate themselves to their new abilities."
She reached the podium now, and rolled into the main part of her speech. She had never been in front of so many people.
"Some of you have been affiliated with the school in the past. I want to offer particular thanks to our new staff, many of whom are alumni."
There was a patter of applause directed at the front row, where the teachers sat. Recognizable to Kitty's students was Alison Blaire, the FBI agent who had helped them defeat Mister Sinister months prior. There was also a young woman with deep green hair, a powerfully built man with hair down to his shoulders, and a man with shining good skin.
"...But others here today were approached in secret. We appreciate your discretion as we figure out how best to reintroduce ourselves to the world. Charles Xavier believed coexistence was possible, and I believe it too. That's why I hope that very soon we won't have to have meetings like this in the shadows, and that one day this will be a school for everyone."
The crowd clapped for Kitty. She gave a sheepish grin.
"But for now, let's focus on the present. Welcome to the first official term of the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning!"