Charles Xavier watched as Kent collapsed himself into the dream laboratory's bed. Outside the moon and stars speckled a clear night sky, while inside the Mansion the Professor was joined by the young but brilliant Henry McCoy in this converted suite. Xavier was pleased that Kent followed through, remembering his instructions; a steady and slow breath, to unwind the muscles, and relax.

Xavier guided his wheel chair into the adjoining room, where Hank monitored his new friend's vitals. Sensors had been attached to the Kent boys' temple and chest, and in the other room the school's newest student, at last had allowed himself, after so many days and nights of wakefulness, to sleep.

In the darkness bright Computer displays tracked his pulse, and brain activity. A video feed tracked Kent's face. Together with his young student Xavier waited for the dream sleep cycle to begin. As Kent's eye-lids began to flicker indicating REM sleep the Professor closed his own eyes and held his body still. Xavier withdrew from the outside world into an extended mental landscape. In this self-generated meditative trance the experienced telepath could step through the physical confines of his own mind and immerse himself into the consciousness of another living being, creating a Psychic bridge.

In this case an alien boy child.

There were differences between their species; differences were expected, just as there were between humans and mutants. Still this meant the Professor had to work harder to create a connection. With Kent, Xavier had to start again from the beginning, as if he were a novice, and he sought to find a mutual center, a point of agreement, where common experiences could bring their minds together. Charles remembered his childhood self; a boy called by another name. He revisited in his own memories the moment when that boy had first created a psychic bridge, a link between his consciousness and someone else. This experience had proven transformative.

Alexander Charles Xavier Luthor had been a troubled child, brilliant but socially inept, so much so that his father had first thought he was retarded. Red headed Lex had been late to speak, to walk, barely intelligible as child in kindergarten, ostracized from his classmates. Only his mother could reach him. She had given the name Charles after her late father, and only her touch gave Lex a sense of security and belonging, of love. In time Lex had started to communicate, only to discover that other children couldn't understand a word he was saying, they hadn't his grasp of math's and science, they weren't interested in nuclear power, genetics, and socio-political economic theory. His father took an interest in his 'backward' son, realizing the opposite was the case, and now he bullied him too, in a different way. Lex Luthor was placed several years – several grades ahead of his biological age; separated from his doting mother for months at a time – secured in a boarding school for high achievers, while she suffered and died from her terminal cancer. He was alone, whether there or with Lionel. The older man now boasted he had a savant genius for a child. Bullied mercilessly, both at home and at school as the richer kid among the rich kids, the slight red headed boy he grew to hate these older so called brighter children, to loathe their lack of imagination and intellect. Then at his lowest point in his life, shortly after his mother's untimely death, his mutation asserted itself.

In a single moment, as he lay on the floor of the changing room feeling the bite of wrapped wet towels into 'rats tails' whipping his naked skin as his bullies chanted "no hair" and laughed at his pre-pubescence. Lex Luthor saw himself through the eyes of his tormentors, for a brief moment- but one that for him seemed to last an eternity. He stood in their shoes, he became them, he experienced their hopes and fears, appreciated the passions and terrors that drove them. He saw himself as they saw him. He realized they were already afraid of him, and until that moment, all Lex wanted and wished was to make them -and the whole damn world, fear him. In that moment Lex realised that it was already true. Fear didn't stop them bullying him, it drove them to it. Fear wasn't the answer, it was the problem.

Charles sometimes wondered what might have happened to the boy he had been – to Lex, had he not been born a mutant telepathy. He guessed at a dark path, one where his loathing for Lionel would have driven him to hate, perhaps grappling for power – seeking to prove himself to Lionel by usurping him, making Lionel and the world fear him. However he was changed by his insight into human nature, altered by his burgeoning psychic abilities. In time he chose to embrace the memory of his late mother. He had left Lex Luthor behind and now used only the names she had given him, and here at his mother's family home he strove to live up to her ideals.

In this moment the Professor felt affinity for the Kent boy, he found the connection he was looking for. He too had suffered great loss; death and separation, and the responsible party was his father, Lionel.

The Professor began to move through Kent's memories, watching and waiting for the dreams to begin. In the child's mind Xavier saw how the dark of night was something Kent only remembered. Darkness was a fleeting shadow in Kent's farthermost recollections. This child saw as clearly at night as he did during the day, albeit in different less vivid shades of colour. The Professor descended deeper into the boy's mind searching for answers, Kent's first clear memories were of the farm, his Ma and Pa, alongside the crackle of the fireplace, the wonder of Christmas revealed through the landing rails as he peered at the presents scattered under the tree in the living room below.

But these happy memories didn't colour Kent's recent dreams. Since Jonathan Kent's murder, sleep had meant night terrors. Today, like yesterday, and tomorrow Reilly Kent grieved for his Pa, while his new outward persona, Kent Logan bottled it all up inside, but at the same time Charles Xavier also felt there was more to this grief, something greater still than the death of Jonathan Kent.

The Professor reflected like many of his kind, this alien child had been forced to grow up very quickly indeed.

The dream grew dark, Xavier saw the brute Sabre Tooth's bloodied claws, fire ripping through Kent's childhood home; these nightmares began with these horrors, only to become more terrifying still.

"A dark sky littered by stars, the landscape is washed out greys. Whites made silver under the moon, broken jagged by black indistinct trees and their shadows." Xavier dictated, a Dictaphone was built into his chair, it recorded his observations. "Like a black and white film, as if from another time and place." The Professor pushed against these memories, intending to create a mental wall between them and the Kent boy. "In this peculiar nightmare he feels weak and ailing." Xavier added all the time willing the child to settle into a peaceful sleep.

The Professor found himself struggling to succeed.

"Observation; these comparable memories of sickness and pain connect Kent's recent trauma to this older dark horror, and to another as yet an undefined then.

"In the dream darkness Kent experiences an incapacitating nausea." Xavier dictated. "This is the same sensation he remembers during Victor Creed's attack on his parents Farm."

The Professor noted the memory now replayed in the child's dreams. "Creed used an unidentified luminescent green stone against the Kent boy; it functioned almost like some evil magic totem. Now the same agony was here filling his dark nightmare.

"There isn't only pain, there is a sense of great loss too, and something else – another indistinct memory, I see something large, hungry and bestial." Xavier stopped dictating, he felt the bleed of emotion across the psychic link – this was something far more terrible even than Victor Creed.

"I am forging a memory anchor in his current dream-scape." Xavier noted. "I shall attempt to follow the emotional bleed back deeper into the child's subconscious to determine a remedial action."

Xavier recognized the signs, he'd seen many times how the mind buried unpleasant memories, locked them down, bolted them fast, and hid them from conscious recollection.

There was a barrier. The Professor perceived it visually, imagined against the mental landscape of Kent's subconscious. The barrier took the form of a wall of ice crystal, diamond pure, appearing miles high, miles thick. A boundary between the boy's life with the Kent's, and whatever had come before. Xavier mentally tugged on his psychic anchor to the present, reassuring himself that he was still connected and in conscious control of this dream journey, before drifting deeper into the child's repressed memories.

There was no posted sign, written plain, it wasn't necessary, Xavier knew intuitively what this great wall meant, what lay beyond it, his lips breathless mouthed the words. "Here be Monsters."

What Xavier could not see, his eyes closed and attention turned inward, was the expression on Henry McCoy's face.

Hank stared at Professor, his young students face was wrinkled with worry.

And Hank knew two certain things:

Xavier could not see what he saw, the Professor wasn't in the room so to speak, and so he couldn't see the wild spikes on the display measuring Kent's brain activity, or see the video feed of the sleeping boy moving erratically in his dreams in the next room.

The second certainty was the Professor's standing instructions.

There were clear rules that were to be followed always when Xavier journeyed deep into the consciousness of another person. The Professor was not to be interrupted.

Hank agonised over what he should do next. He could see this wasn't a normal situation.

Xavier was usually the personification of calm, especially when he was telepathically engaged. Yet right now the older man was showing signs of distress, and exertion. Beads of perspiration clung to his brow and bald pate, his stern face was crossed with tension. The Professor's hands gripped the arms of his chair tightly.

Racked by indecision Hank finally dialed an internal line raising Raven Darkholme from her bed.

Raven arrived quickly, she wore her hair red, and her suit was jet black, she was as ever immaculately dressed, even now, Hank on the other hand looked as crumpled and disheveled as ever, and worse, unslept.

Raven lent in close staring at the professors skin, she felt his pulse. "You did the right thing Hank." She said drawing back, and pulling up a chair."

"What can we do?"

"We stick to the Professor's protocols." Raven replied reaffirming what Hank already knew. She stood watching the movements of the Kent boy in the other room on the monitor. "And we wait." She added looking at the Professor.

Hours past as they watched the Xavier's quiet battle. Raven said little, Hank didn't try to change that.

For their mentor this was an inward struggle, and one conveyed by the smallest of movements, a twitch of the Professor's hand and or his face. Other times their mentor was motionless, but still locked into his trance like state. In the other room Kent moved too, there was communality, a shared rhythm between them. Hank had no idea what was happening -what the Professor was seeing, but he believed it was terrible.

The dog growled. It wasn't aggressive, not in the least, it was playful, friendly even, but revealing teeth that seemed to belong to another time and place, like sabres they glinted with unnatural clarity. Xavier observed the moment through the incredible lucidity of the alien child's eidetic memory.

This was the world behind the barrier. Finding the crack meant swimming against the bleed of memories that were trickling through into the present, the source of the maddening night terrors. Passing through the imagined ice-crystal wall had been confusing, disorientating, as if thousands upon thousands upon thousands of voices had been calling out to him at once, bombarding Xavier with information he could not begin to process. Only his mental shields honed by hours upon hours of meditative practice had prevented the Professor's consciousness being overwhelmed by the torrent of information. Emerging exhausted on the other side, he had wanted to join Kal in sleep.

Kal! Xavier thought excited and with this realisation he pushed onward. He now knew the boy's birth name, and the Professor fought his own exhaustion excited by curiosity. Kal was super baby in human terms, remembering so much more, and with so much clarity, and this world the child recalled was not Earth, its norms were not human ones. Instead the colours reverberated like noise, the experience was synesthetic, and the air was thick almost like water, lending a surreal quality as if seeing an animated oil painting. The surrounding landscape, the gardens of a palatial residence that rose defiantly tall from the surrounding vegetation, characterized by stout stems, trees of sorts, with rainbow leaves were as broad as they were tall. Insects of a sought swam through the air, even more alien than those on Earth. Seen against a strange backdrop of pink craggy canyon, then Xavier saw this was nothing of the sort, instead Kal was looking at the insects as they flew over the surface of his own hand, these flyspeck things magnified as if through a microscope. Here was a baby with vision so acute it could fix on the infinitesimal tiny, and distant. Yet at the same time Xavier felt Kal struggling against a great weight, the gravity of the world pulled at his bones, and the babe grunted as he struggled to move towards... Krypto. The dog was as alien as the insects, the closer Kal looked, the more detail was added to the memory. The Professor recognised the canine-like animal was really an example of convergent evolution, its massive bones carried equally massive muscle, as the white furred beast moved through the heavy air, each hair sparkled like a fibre optic cable, diffusing a rainbow spectrum. Above them a huge red star dominated the day, an enormous ruby immersed in oil, covering half the sky, pulsing radiation into the viscous atmosphere. Xavier knew this, he knew Rao shone down on Krypton. The Professor realised some of the information frozen into the mental construct he had perceived as a vast crystal ice wall had seeped through into his own consciousness, enough that he could understand what he saw through the baby's memories.

Kal struggled, his pudgy hand pushing toward the shaggy mutt's face, grabbing at last a handful of the white fur. The beast woofed after a fashion, a sound so deep, so bass as to make little Kal shake, but there was nothing but love in the huge canine's manner. Kal giggled, his naked skin soaking in the ambient radiation of the great red star. Could this be possible he mused, could millions of years of evolution create a human being indistinguishable from an Earthling, yet one able to process solar energy. Strengthened by the old sun's punishing radiation, Kal drags his torso upright using Krypto for leverage, and then falling forward into a crawl; he resists the incredible pull of the super-massive and super-dense world that is Krypton to make a halfway successful attempt at locomotion.

Xavier felt Kal lifted into another arms, a face, beautiful and filled with love, his Mother, Lara. The emotional feedback coupled with the data bleeding through from the hidden repository in Kal's mind was too much, forcing the Professor to pull back. Xavier retreated behind his defenses like a turtle would its shell. It was clear to the Professor that the alien child's nightmares were as a result of the fracture in the mental wall, the barrier between these repressed memories of his home-world and his mind, but nothing could prepare the Professor for the scene that these buried memories now revealed.

There were monsters and they were terrible.

"Jor-El!" Lara called out as she ran into the room from the outside. The door closed automatically behind her, a transparent barrier. Lara's long hair was disheveled, and dust rose from her cloak. Around her the mote filled air exploded like fireworks.

A calm disembodied voice announced. "Contaminant neutralisation program complete.

"Madam Lara you are not wearing your Com-Net headband, would you like me to print you a new one?"

"No." Lara shouted, and then she continued after catching her breath. "Jor, the infected K-Rell ectobots have begun metabolising matter, they are sending hard constructs against fortified buildings – I saw them attacking Fort Kryptonopolis."

"It was inevitable once the contagion began to spread." Jor-El replied. "The Protocol was designed to target the greatest threat to its purpose, in this case our defence network and work backwards. The infection is spreading through the trans-human neural network at an exponential rate; leveraging each infected Kryptonian to pull more power from the core to power the K-Rell constructs." He touched a golden coloured metal head band. "I'm still trying to run counter measures but the virus is evolving faster than I can develop my algorithm."

"It's too late." Lara stated. "Jor, you must sever your connection to the Com-Net, the contagion it's almost here – people, our neighbours are already falling victim, please Jor, I can't lose you, not now, not yet."

The Professor's psychic perspective was skewed as it must be, the observer; Kal was a child seated on the floor and beside the ever vigilant alien canine, looking up at his parents, fascinated by their passionate exchange.

Kal looked around the shape of the alien dog like animal Krypto, and past his mother, beyond to the outside. Kal's memories of this moment included images of the wider community, as seen through the room's floor to ceiling glass walls. The street for want of a better description was a wide avenue, which more like a park than a thoroughfare, impressive houses rose from the wide squat vegetation in defiance of Krypton's crushing gravity. The child was able to see clearly at great distances even through the thick atmosphere of this alien world. Xavier saw men and women, aliens, but human-like, falling to the ground, some clutched at their head bands, but all seemed to be caught up in some kind of neurological fit.

He could hear Lara's voice. "I couldn't reach my post. The Defence Station was locked down and under attack."

Jor responded. "You had to try, it was your duty my Warrior Princess."

Kal was watching fascinated as outside the window, in the avenue, dust had risen from the ground, as if driven by a whirl wind, taking the form of pulsating twisters a few feet in size, dancing violently around the fallen Kryptonians.

"Jor!" Lara screamed his father's name.

Kal turned away, drawn to his mother's voice. Seeing his Father's agonised face, Kal felt fear, confusion, he let out a cry of distress. Krypo licked Kal's face almost immediately, almost obscuring events in the room. Xavier caught sight of Jor, the scientist tore a thin metal headband from his temple, it sparked brightly as if objecting to a connection being broken between it and the wearer.

At the same time Jor-El's green suit reacted to this assault, by changing colour, but not the dark hue of his cloak, that remained the same deep red. The suit Kal's father wore had the appearance of armour, that is to say it seemed to be made of individual pieces joined together, but unlike metal it was flexible as cloth, one that shifted colour to a deep blue before the child's eyes. The alien crest that took pride of place also changed from a flaming image of Rao to another, a crest in red and gold which looked like a stylised serpent or perhaps the letter S.

"I am fine." Jor-El gasped. "The inoculation program held. The virus won't feed from my nightmares."

"Your armour" She said "You've take the House's Battle Colours." Lara stepped closer to her husband, her long red cloak moved slowly in the heavy air, revealing a similar garb. "Frankly I'm glad to see the back of that Science Counsel Uniform. Damn them."

Her husband turned to Kal's mother his face stern with worry his eyes brimmed with emotion. "Yes darling, we're both warriors today." He said.

"So it's really happening – just as you predicted." Lara said gravely.

Jor-El nodded. "Only more quickly" Self-recrimination echoed heavy in his tone.

"If only the Science Council had listened to you" Lara countered "You warned them Jor. You told them that they couldn't be certain of their predictive model, that the core had been irreparably changed. You told them what would happen to Krypton if our core's instability triggered the Planet Killer's offensive programming." Lara struck the console with her gloved fist. "Trying to stabilise the ageing core with of all things - the ultimate destroyer of worlds..."

"...was considered to be the safer option than attempting mass evacuation." Jor-El interrupted.

He sighed and said. "The strain the infected minds are placing on Krypton's ailing core is rising exponentially; it is hastening the inevitable death of our world."

"How long do we have?"

"Not long, a few hours at best." Shaking his head Jor said with anger. "If only I'd had more time I could have fire-walled the space port installations – perhaps some of us could have made it to the shuttles, got off world." Lara reached for him, her hand to his arm, she pressed against his back.

"I can still manage your escape from here." He said. "In case I couldn't defend our regional node from the contagion I isolated the house's backup system. The house is now independent of Krypton's Com-Net. Were locked in, and the virus is locked out."

Lara frowned. "But that means doing everything manually from here?" Kal's mother said her voice hesitant.

"Yes." Jor stated. His face lost in thought. "Damn touch interface is so slow." He spat, as his hands danced in the air, moving through three dimensional holographic projections, the symbols looked related to the sigil he and his wife wore; an alien alphabet.

"I won't leave you." Lara said.

Jor sighed. "Yes you can, and you must, for Kal's sake.

Lara released him shaking her head. Tears fell from her eyes.

"I am certain that Zor-El received my message." Jor-El said, his voice full of hope. Kal's father gestured to a holographic image of Krypton, the globe turned in the air beside him becoming a flattened map of this world. Across this the distribution of the contagion was mapped out in real time. The virus was spreading from apparently random points on the world, a red stain it bled across the regions. As Jor-El moved his fingers the image focused in, so that Xavier was able to determine that the virus was leaping from city to city across a spider's web of interconnections. "Argo City is relatively speaking the most isolated node of our planet wide Com-Net, I'm positive this gave Zor time to act on my warning."

"What did your brother say?" Lara asked.

"He didn't, but Argo city has gone dark.

"He raised the city new defences? It is the only logical explanation. His hard shield was designed to prevent what happened to Kandor repeating itself. Nothing will get through. Not even the Doomsday Protocol."

Krypto growled.

Kal turned away from his parents, Xavier seeing this world, these memoires through the babes eyes saw what had caused the hound's hackles to rise.

Outside the dust was coalescing into shapes, muddy coloured golem like creatures emerged from the the thick dusty whirls, built it seemed from the very substance of Krypton. Hulking beasts with stone like jagged projections, horn like from their joints, from knuckles, wrist, elbow, shoulders and knees.

The calm automated voice rang out once more. "Threat detected. Raising shielding."

As the beasts charged the shutters snapped upwards at lightning speed, closing off the outside world. The interior lights shifted up a gear to compensate.

"Will the shutters hold?" Lara asked.

"They were designed to resist multiple atomic explosions, so given the K-Rell constructs, not for very long." Jor replied. "But long enough." He added.

Outside Kal could hear the sound of the pounding, the noise was the strongest memory, the bleed into his consciousness, and the monsters were coming.