X-Men: Evolution

Blood Magics

28. Dire Circumstances

"I had thought that leaving that alert at my last base would be a good idea, but never did I imagine it would bring me so many wonderful new subjects. I certainly had planned to see about taking a few more students out of that school, but having so many of you come to find me… simply wonderful. I suppose introductions would be proper… I am Mr. Sinister. You seem to already know my previous subject. I'm quite please with how well things have been turning out with him, so far. I suffered quite a few setbacks with him, at first… my first attempt at claiming him and his mother for my use failed rather unfortunately when I was caught using another person's laboratory for it, and that person interfered. I'm quite fascinated with those who have physical mutations, you know. I have been able to give myself the mutant power of anyone I am able to collect a DNA sample from, except for those with obvious and significant physical mutations. When I injected my control serum into the placenta inside this one's mother," he gestured at Kurt, "while she carried him, it should have been able to spread through both their bloodstreams to put them under my control, but the man whose lab I was using managed to reverse its effect for them both just moments before the woman went into labour. At that time I was unfortunately much less equipped than I am now; I had no choice but to retreat, and then I lost track of both of my subjects. I had wanted them so badly. I am sure, with further study, I can determine why it is that I'm unable to replicate their powers for myself, and find ways around the problem. I haven't yet had enough time to study that as much as I would like, but that's alright. I have plenty of time, now. After a long time and a few setbacks that forced me to set up my lab over and over while I worked on it, I was finally ready, and tracked down one of those who got away that night. The mutant you know as Kurt now belongs to me. As will the rest of you. As far as introductions, that is all you need to know of me for now. You need not give me your names. It won't matter once you enter my experiments."

"Like hell we'll let you do whatever you want!" Rogue spat at him. Sinister smiled ever- larger.

"Charming. You won't have a choice, my dear. And with your particular power… yes, I read up on you. I can't yet say I've decided what to do with each of you, yet, but you, I'll be keeping around. That power of yours is quite fascinating. Easier even than my own for taking others powers, though yours appears to only be temporary. I should be able to fix that."

"Too bad you can't fix your head! You're going to be sorry for all of this!"

Sinister gave a single laugh. "The blue one said that too, before I started. The second part, at least. Did you know, word on the unsavory side of the street says that the blue one's mother is still after you? Curiously, not after her own son, but after you, girl, and that power of yours? She's still looking for a way to bring you to her side, for her bidding. Oh, it will be such an amusement when she finds out that I have won that little contest. I shall have to be around when she finds out."

"Like hell either one of you are gettin' anyone here!" Wolverine roared. He slammed his fists on the cage, and they rattled, but nothing more.

"What is it that you mean to accomplish, here?" Xavier asked sharply. He'd pushed himself up with his arms as high as he could, but it didn't seem that Sinister had thought it important to bring his wheelchair at all; Rogue's rage, already boiling, grew even hotter at the reminder that Professor X was left lying on the floor, immobile. He could sit up, but nothing more.

"Y'all just wait until we bring this creepy little dungeon down around your head!" Rogue added.

"If you let all of us go, we might go easy on you." Cyclops added coldly.

Sinister finally broke his eyes away from Rogue to look at Cyclops. "Amusing thought. But I don't think so. No, I am going to get things set up for more tests. My research into why I can't take the powers of those with physical mutations can wait a little longer. There are a few other things I'd like to look into. Oh, and I'm sure you've figured it out already, but I have a device that completely shuts down any and all active mutations over a ten- kilometer radius. The only people able to use their powers are those whom I have written in an exception, which of course are myself and my subject, here." The man stopped and actually patted Kurt's shoulder in the way someone might pat a dog's head. "Do inform me if they get up to any trouble. Otherwise, let them talk all they want. It won't make a difference." He told Kurt, and then walked from the room.

Wolverine snarled out a number of curses that would normally have Storm admonishing him heavily, but this time, the weather witch remained silent.

When Sinister was gone, silence fell. Beast was the first to break it when he murmured,

"So, then… I suppose we'd best determine what we do now."

Kitty reached a hand through the bars- they were more than wide enough for that, but certainly not for an entire person to fit through- towards Kurt, who stood as if frozen.

"Kurt! Kurt, come on! You have to break out of it!"

The voice that spoke then surprised them all; it was vaguely familiar, but only barely, as if Rogue had heard it once ages ago.

"I don't know if he can even hear you."

Rogue heard Kitty gasp, and her cellmate wasn't the only one to do so. All eyes turned towards the large, shadowy mass inside the tank, where the voice had come from. The one who spoke first was Kitty.

"T… Tristan!?"

Kitty's jaw gaped, and as far as she could tell, even Rogue and Wolverine had their simmering fury interrupted by their surprise when the shadowy mass spoke, and though it had taken her a moment to place it, she was more than a little shocked when she'd realized that the shadowy mass was, indeed, Tristan.

The shadow confirmed it.

"Yeah, it's me. He doesn't like getting rid of experiments as long as he thinks they might still be useful at some point."

"Wha…" Kitty trailed off, not even sure what she'd been going to ask in the first place. As the shock faded, she looked again at Kurt. His eyes scanned the cages, monitoring them.

She regained her question. "What do you mean, you don't think he can hear me?"

"Well, I don't really know for sure." The shadow admitted. "It's impossible to tell. But after he got Sinister's control serum, he stopped doing anything other than what Sinister tells him. He literally stands there like a statue until given an order. I've tried talking to him myself. No response. But he'll follow any order Sinister gives him at all. Once, when he was in the way of this big experiment Sinister was setting up, he told Kurt to curl up in a corner and sleep until Sinister woke him. Kurt did exactly that even though it was almost a full day before Sinister told him to wake up. The degree of control Sinister has over his body is terrifying. I'm lucky that it's not possible for that stuff to be put in a shadow. I have no idea if Kurt can hear you, but I think you should assume that he can't, because he doesn't react at all."

Kitty felt her eyes burn and her chest squeeze.

"You've been here a while, then, I take it?" Cyclops called.

"Oh, I've been here since Sinister's control on me failed thanks to the little shadow- user you have back at the mansion. He dragged me back here with what little grasp he had left and put me in here. And if there's one thing that guy likes, it's to talk. I think even if I wasn't here, he'd babble to hear his own voice. He's got no worries at all about talking about his experiments and such."

"If that's true, could you tell us exactly what was done to Kurt?" Rogue asked him.

The shadowy mass undulated a bit before replying. "Well… I could, sure, but there's not really a lot that he left out. He had his eye on Kurt's mother, but lost track of them when he was chased out. He worked on setting up his own lab for a while after that… I think about four years ago, he suffered a setback with his first lab, a bunch of stuff got destroyed in a fight, and he had to move because the person he fought with got away. He took what he could from his old lab back here in terms of, you know, data he'd collected, but it took him another four years or whatever it was to set up this lab. That's when he went back to hunting down Kurt, once he was finally ready again. He found out about the incident at the Munich Circus, and managed to figure out from there what had happened, then tracked him down at your mansion. Then he sent me.

"His control over me was kind of… weird. He had to use his own power, and while he can control people to a certain extent with his own mind- he's got some telepathy- everything he worked out to gain control over me was a bit incomplete. I couldn't disobey, nor was I able to tell you anything about anything until his hold on me was broken, but I… I lingered as long as I could. I tried hard not to hurt anyone badly. He couldn't really see or tell exactly what I was doing, so as long as I was doing some kind of fighting, I was able to… we'll say hesitate on bringing Kurt back to him. He started getting angrier the longer the fight went, so I wasn't able to help getting a little more violent as it went on, but… that tiny mutant, the little dragon one, she broke the hold. Once she did, he dragged me back here. He was furious, but other than keep me confined in this tank, there's not much he can do to me- I'm dead. I'm not even sure how he raised my spirit out of hell. He hasn't gone babbling about that particular accomplishment of his so I have no idea. But for Kurt, he waited for a while, trying to figure out something that would drop your guard. He wanted to do it himself this time, but he wanted it done quietly. He didn't know how his control on me was broken; like I said, he couldn't really see what I was doing. I never told him what happened, by the way. And Kurt didn't tell him anything, either, before he was given the control serum, and he hasn't spoken a word after he got it, so I don't think people who are injected with it are able to speak.

"Anyway, then he came up with a plan; he hijacked a few drones from a military unit that was working on ways to monitor mutants anyway, and then found several mutant- hating people in the town you live in and began to rile them up. Once an opportunity came, and a handful of your people were out somewhere else, he exerted as much control as he could over the people he'd riled up and had them all gang up and start a fight."

"The café brawl." Kitty realized, understanding dawning. "Those people claiming on the news that something was controlling them and forcing them into attacking weren't lying after all!"

"Not completely, at least." Rogue muttered. "Though surely, with that many people, if they really hadn't wanted the fight they would have been able to stop themselves."

"That many people, yeah." Tristan agreed. "I mean, he was working for a few weeks to get them riled up enough to begin with, so that they wouldn't fight him too much. Get a mob of people in the right mood, and they'll do something they know is wrong because they feel justified in doing it. So Sinister had them start the fight, trying to get some of you injured enough that it would provide a distraction and people wouldn't be paying as much attention. From what I can tell, he succeeded, and then was able to watch you guys with the drones until Kurt was alone. He used a shadow power he was able to get a few decades ago to sneak in and out of the mansion and grab Kurt. Sounds like getting him here was a pain, he had to keep knocking him out, but once he was close enough for his machine that stops powers to start working, there wasn't as much of a problem. His biggest concern up to that point was him teleporting away. Once he had him here, he put him in the chains right away… did some sort of scan on him. I don't know what, exactly. I'm not familiar with the machine he used. He took some blood. Then he gave Kurt the control serum. Turned Kurt into what he is now. Then he ran a few more experiments, injected some things… I couldn't tell you what, exactly, but I think he was trying to expand Kurt's range of his teleportation power. When that didn't work, he was able to make a device instead. You can see it, there, strapped on Kurt's back… that grey metal box. Size of your average dictionary. Long as that's strapped on him, Kurt can teleport anywhere in the world he wants. Sinister made sure to make adjustments to his power- stopping device, too, so that it stopped affecting Kurt once Kurt was under his control. That's mostly it, at this point. He had Kurt bring him a few things from here and there once he had that box on him. He's been studying Kurt's DNA insanely close. Sinister really wants to figure out why he can't copy the powers held by those with extreme physical mutations for himself. Although, you should know, when he wasn't doing that he was obsessing over you, girl with the white stripes in your hair."

"Me?" Rogue took a step back, disgust written on her face. Kitty heard Wolverine snarl.

"Yeah. He can copy other people's powers permanently, but it takes him weeks of intensive study on their X- gene first before he can determine how to incorporate their power into his own. He was excited to see someone who can do it in seconds with a single touch. He figures that as long as he can make your power take others' permanently, then replicate that into himself, then he'll easily be able to take any power he wants."

"But why does he even want all that?" Kitty questioned.

"I dunno? To become the most powerful mutant ever would be my guess. That seems like a typical supervillain thing to me. But he's never told me if he has any ulterior motives. He likes to babble about what he's done and what he's doing and what he's going to do, but the how and the why are usually left out of his chatter. Gotta tell ya, I get sick of listening to him sometimes." The shadowy mass made a sighing sound. "One thing I can tell you for sure is that he's completely insane. I mean, he's brilliant, probably knows more about the X- gene than anyone else alive by this point, but he's utterly, absolutely, certifiably bonkers."

"No doubt he got the knowledge he has with his experiments that no person with any sense of moral decency would ever perform." Beast sighed. "At any rate, it sounds like there is one silver lining- Kurt has not come to too much harm. While we don't know what it was that he gave Kurt in his experiments, Kurt is, at least, standing in front of us completely uninjured. If we can get him back to the mansion, we have an antidote for the control serum."

"You do?" Hope shot through Kitty's chest; every time she looked at Kurt, right now, she felt cold as his emotionless and abnormally green eyes stared emptily back. If they had an antidote, that meant Kurt could be returned to normal.

"How did you get that?" Wolverine sounded both confused and suspicious, but Kitty didn't care how they'd gotten it as long as it worked.

"I made arrangements with an old friend."

Wolverine snarled. "I thought I smelled Magneto and his goons on ya. Charles, whatever you did-"

"Was necessary." Professor Xavier interrupted. "I had to take a calculated risk because the benefit far outweighed the danger. If we get Kurt home, we can reverse what's happened to him. And how to get him and the rest of us back home is what we should be discussing right now. If you're angry about my discussion with Magneto, it can wait. Tristan, you said Sinister had a device that prevented our powers from working?"

"All active mutations, yeah. Doesn't do anything against appearances and stuff."

"Do you know which device it is?"

"No, not at all. Trust me, I wish I did. But I don't know what a fraction of these computers and scanner- y looking things are for."

"I see. Do you happen to know where we are at all?"

"Uh… exact location, no. I only know that he picked out this lab to be really far away from any cities, towns, you know… those kinds of places with people. He didn't want this lab to just have people walking by. You want my guess at it? His machine has a ten- kilometer radius for killing off active mutations. I would think that means civilization as we would call it are at least ten kilometers away or more."

"That seems like a fairly reasonable assumption." Beast murmured. Kitty glanced over to see him nodding. "And if that's true, then we're not likely to be all that close to his first lab."

"Which means the others have no way of finding us." Storm murmured. "We had better determine a way out if we can, the sooner the better."

"Indeed. It does intrigue me, however, that Sinister was able to make his power- negating device both cover far more ground than any I've seen before, and he is able to program it to allow certain signatures to still work. Intrigue, and worry me." Professor Xavier commented. "If all this is true, and we've certainly seen evidence to support at least the second part, then that means that Sinister's technology is more advanced than ours as well as his understanding of the X- gene. I knew that he was going to be a serious threat. If he's as brilliant as all of this indicates, then the situation with him is even worse than I thought."

A/N: And so they meet another old friend... and they all talk a lot. Not too much else they can do at the present second. They'll have to start working on an escape plan somehow, since no one at the mansion knows where they are...