Did somebody say cliffhanger?

Beta'd by… just me, this time.

Kitty Pryde was more than a little over this week.

Sentinels were one thing, and even if this Nimrod was a little bit more advanced than she was used to, even with Rachel sharing the occasional memory from her time's murderous robots, but he was nothing they couldn't handle.

The Hellfire Club, too, was something that they had experience with, albeit not as much, and she was well acquainted with Sebastian Shaw and his particular brand of… tomfoolery.

No, it was what had happened to Rachel- and what she had done- that was really getting to her.

She wasn't as close to Rachel as she was to Piotr or Ororo, or Rachel had been to Scott, but… well, hearing from Logan that he'd as good as killed her, even if it was on her request according to both him and Betsy, when she'd delved into his mind at his own request, that was just too much.

If there was any consolation, it was the fact that the Phoenix hadn't interceded and proceeded to recreate what she'd done after Jean Grey had left the Hellfire Club's "service". She'd only heard stories, but… well, those stories painted a grim picture. Even so, what she'd seen for herself, following in Rachel's wake, and heard from Rogue, who had borrowed the memories of the various pawns of the Hellfire Club to better understand the sequence of events that had happened while they were out of commission, as it were, was more than a little disconcerting, even setting aside the historical problems that Rachel had had with Selene.

Then again, it wasn't like this was the first problem that Xavier's school had been having of late.

Scott had been… well, of late, he'd been acting oddly. He was still, technically, the leader of the X-men, but his keen tactical and strategic mind had seemingly lost its edge, to the point where Ororo and Logan had been co-opting his plans to handle circumstances that, in the past, he'd taken into account almost out of habit. Between that and Betsy's ability to keep them coordinated in the field, they were more or less as effective as they had been before Scott's turn, for what that was worth.

On top of that, even just around the house, he seemed erratic, flinching at the sight of seemingly random items around the mansion and becoming more curt with Rachel. Hell, she'd even heard him mumbling something about having to get to Alaska in order to see… somebody, which was okay if that had been his newly-reconnected grandparents, but some part of her was absolutely certain that that wasn't the case, and the fact that Ororo and Betsy had gone out to Anchorage in response to a massive alert from Cerebro (that Scott had only missed because he was literally asleep at the console), only to return empty-handed, just raised more questions.

Kitty and Illyana had tried to reach out to Rachel, but the temporally displaced young woman hadn't taken the seeming rejection from her father well, and had all but retreated into herself.

On top of that, Jean Grey's retrieval by the Avengers and Fantastic Four had further complicated the situation. Scott had all but withdrawn into the room that Jean was convalescing in, to the point where Kitty hadn't been able to identify a single person who he'd allowed into the room alone, not even Rachel. She seemed to have taken this hard, and had withdrawn even further, and between that and the fact that they hadn't taken a single mission since her return… well, the atmosphere in the mansion was rather tense.

In short, the entire school was one massive powder keg, just waiting for the spark- a spark Selene had delivered.

She wasn't actually sure if Scott knew what had transpired with Rachel, what with how hard he'd been focusing on Jean's recovery of late, and even if he had been told, it was a toss-up whether he'd actually react instead of remaining locked up with Jean.

The only good thing about today, she thought, sitting down at the dining table and resting her head on its surface, was that she and Piotr had managed to rescue Kurt without too much trouble.

Slurrrrrp.

The look that Kitty managed to muster up for Illyana and her soup-slurping ways, albeit after a moment, was more tired than angry, but on a day like this she'd call it a glare.

"Mm? Do you want some, Katya?" the shorter (only by an inch, but that was close enough as far as she was concerned, to Illyana's occasional chagrin) girl asked, summoning another spoon in a flash of brimstone.

Kitty maintained the glare for another moment before, with a sigh, getting up and walking through the table over to her occasional roommate, taking the outstretched spoon. "Yeah, if it's on offer," she grumbled, albeit mostly out of a sense that she should still be frustrated than out of actual frustration.

"Not to worry, May made enough chili to spare." She gestured, and the bowl seemed to almost unfold itself out to double the diameter, remaining equally full of reddish liquid. "And, since I don't think you have quite the spice tolerance that some of us do…" Another gesture materialized a plate with a pile of tortillas on top, still steaming gently as if freshly warmed, as Kitty sat down, resisting the urge to rest her head against Illyana's but not the urge to bump shoulders with her.

"Who's May?" Kitty asked, eyeing the chili dubiously.

"A human… wizard, I think the English term is? Баба is what we normally use in Russian for that kind of thing, but the word is just grandmother, and you do not have the same tradition here, but she is skilled in the creation of magic artifacts, and she recently came into property in Limbo, so… wizard it is," she said, somehow managing to fit three bites of chili between words. "Do not worry, she's completely trustworthy. Her daughter, she is an old friend of Rachel's, and they even had the both of us over for dinner last night!"

Kitty froze, spoon halfway to her mouth. "Say that again, that last sentence."

"Her daughter, Morgan, she is an old friend of Rachel's… you know, from before the whole-" Illyana waved her hand vaguely- "-time travel thing, and they were kind enough to host both myself and Rachel for dinner last night."

She managed, somehow, to avoid facepalming, which was good because she still had the spoon in her hand. "Yeah, okay, hang on, we're going to go see Ororo." She set the spoon back in the bowl with a clunk.

Illyana frowned. "Why, is there a problem about me being invited over for dinner?"

"No, it's just…" Kitty gave in to the urge to run her hand through her hair, thankfully without getting it full of chili. "We've been looking for Rachel all day, and I feel like we should probably get the search called off now that we know she's… relatively safe, depending on what's going on with this May person." She gave the blonde a side-eye. "Which I'm not sure about, since I know that the most famous Baba is Baba Yaga, and that's who you made the comparison to."

Illyana sighed. "I do not have enough cultural context to properly make comparisons. She is more like Lady in Lake, ah… Nimue, I think, than Baba Yaga, but neither is really close." Despite that, she stood with Kitty, vanishing both bowl and spoons with a wave of her hand to summon a stepping-disk before looking around for a moment and, seizing Kitty's hand, dragged her off through the house.

Kitty, being used to this treatment, went along with it with a bemused smile on her face, making judicious use of her phasing ability to avoid getting bumped around by her roommate's enthusiasm as she tore through the house.

"Ororo," Illyana said, about half a second before bursting through the doors to Cerebro's control room. "I have good news! There is no need to continue the search for Rachel, I know who she is with and she is… well, not fine, but she is reasonably intact and has a defensible place to stay, at least for now!"

"Ah," said Betsy, who was the one behind the console, with Ororo and Piotr looking deep in thought at her shoulders. "That's… fortuitous timing, I suppose, since Rogue's explanation of the situation was interrupted."

"Ah, good, she's met May! Yes, she is-" The ringing of the phone interrupted Illyana, who frowned, releasing Kitty's arm. "Wait, something is…" Her eyes went distant, glowing slightly with reddish light.

"Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, you're on speaker," said Betsy, flipping a handful of switches to answer the call.

"Betsy, something's wrong here," Rogue said, more worry than Kitty would have expected in her voice seeing as how she'd just found Rachel. "There's a guy here, in the tunnels under New York, and he's saying he wants to kill the Morlocks… how fast can y'all get over here?"

Illyana hissed out something in Russian that, just by context, Kitty was fairly sure was a curse. Then, her right hand snapped out, Soulsword shimmering into view, and her left latched onto Kitty's arm again. "Hold on to hat, Katya," she said, accent thicker than normal, and before Kitty could respond, the world vanished in a flash of violet light, before Illyana's stepping disk deposited them in an underground tunnel of some sort.

Joey Jenkins hadn't really expected working with the Maggia to be so… ordinary.

I mean, sure, intellectually he understood that, on the large scale, the Maggia was just a big business, and one that was less concerned with the law than every other business he'd ever heard of, but on the other hand, he'd grown up on stories about bootleggers and moonshiners during the Roaring 20s, and that kind of dramatic storytelling had left the young Joey with a somewhat larger-than-life picture of organized crime in his head.

As such, it had taken him a while to get used to what was, essentially, a middle manager's job as a made man.

It was, more or less, a lateral move, a jump from being some Joe Shmoe in a bank to being some Joe Shmoe in the Maggia, but he had something at least resembling a chance at advancement in the Nefaria family, small as it might be. On top of that, he was all but expected to carry his piece on him when he was on the clock, as opposed to his gig at the bank- he'd been robbed by normies three times, and every time the fact that he was expected not to show the dumb motherfucker who did it some good old-fashioned American spirit gnawed away at him something fierce.

The costumed freaks, those he didn't mind knuckling under to, what with how hard he'd seen Rhino punch through a wall without even running up to it, but every time one of them showed up, he got a little bit more resentful of their strength. What point was it to come into normie turf and try to shove people around? They had their own posturing to do with the heroes, no point in lording it over everyone else!

But then again, that was half of what had gotten him into the Maggia in the first place, the other half being the money he could earn under Count Nefaria. The ability to be… more than he had been was, apparently, one of the more common motivators among the Nefaria family, right next to their experimentation with… more advanced weaponry.

But that was for more trusted men than him, at least for now, and if he wanted a shot at the rayguns the eggheads were cooking up, he had to keep running his little news-sifting squad at the top of their game.

"Yo, boss, I think I got something worth seeing." Joey looked up from his spreadsheet to meet Finnegan Foley's eyes, and a nod got the squirrely little blond to scurry closer to him, newspaper in hands.

On the front of the paper was a remarkably clear picture under some tabloid or other's title, a brunette and two redheads, the shorter redhead and the brunette clearly in the process of getting the taller redhead over their shoulders.

Joey frowned, leaning in closer to the paper and scrutinizing the faces. The girl in the middle was just some random girl, but the two on the outside, the hispanic ones… they looked familiar, even though he couldn't quite put his finger on what about them was setting his brain off. "What do you got for me, Finn?"

"Yeah, so, uh, when the X-freaks were fighting that big fuckin' Sentinel yesterday, someone found these three out right on the edge of Central Park. The two on the outside came from the subway, apparently, and the one in the middle came outta the park. They did… some sort of magic mumbo jumbo," he said, turning the page to a sketch of a vaguely flamelike symbol that looked like someone had tried to draw an arrow on fire but given up and scribbled all over the paper, "then they just fuckin' vanished. I was thinking they might be some street-level wizards, new blood that we might be able to snag?"

Joey sat back in his chair, taking in Foley's hopeful air, before it clicked. "Shit, Finn, this is over both'a our heads. We might get a finder's fee for this, but otherwise we ain't going anywhere near them. Leave me the paper, then take fifteen, go grab a donut from that place down the block."

Foley clearly had no idea why he was getting these directions, but he was sharp enough to know that now wasn't the time to question them. "Yeah, sure, boss," he said, giving him a side-eye as he walked out of the room.

Once he was sure Foley was gone, Joey got up and closed the door, then picked up the phone and dialed a number he hadn't really expected to need to call.

"Yeah, boss, it's Joey with the Newspaper Crew. Yeah, I know what time it is, but I think I mighta found a lead to what happened to the Trujillo kid. Yeah, I'll hold."

There was a click before some gentle muzak came on, but it was only a couple of minutes before the hold music turned off and he heard one of the most intense voices he'd ever heard in his life, and that included most of the costumed clowns that had decided to take a crack at his bank.

"What has become of my son?"

And that's that!

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