Logs:Deliver me from my enemies, O my God; protect me from those who rise up against me.
| Deliver me from my enemies, O my God; protect me from those who rise up against me. | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae
Cerebro, Scott, Halim, Heather, Isra, Mystique, Kurt, Kitty, Leo, Regan | |
| In Absentia
|
2024-04-21 "We may want to regroup." (followed by Regrouping.) |
| Location
Westchester / DC | |
<XAV> Scott's Office - Xs First Floor There are relatively few personal effects in the Residential Dean's (actual) office, save for a few framed photos and a diecast model of a sleek black muscle car in the hutch of Scott's L-shaped computer desk. The rest of his space has been devoted to printouts and papers -- stacked in manila folders in plastic trays, leafed into neatly labeled three-ring binders on his shelves, and probably filling up the wall of sleek black filing cabinets that extends from behind him out to the opposite corner. There is room for four comfortable-ish chairs opposite the desk for guests, but three of those chairs have been lined up by the wall next to the door to create more maneuverable floor space. It's been a quiet day at Xavier's so far; the door of Scott's office is open, signalling that it's okay to come in, but Scott is alone in here, dressed casually in jeans and a navy blue tee, his window cracked to let in some fresh air, his blinds fluttering clack-clack-clack with the light breeze. Scott probably came here to get some work done; on one of his monitors, the template for a Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters administrative form is still in-progress, a new edge case he's trying to set a precedent for, but Scott has nowhere to be today, so he's taking his time. Chilling, even. Checking his email. Several messages ping Scott's phone so rapidly that each notification sound is cut off by the next and sounds like a stutter of a single text chime.
The phone rings immediately after the last notification, then answers itself the moment Scott picks it up -- as though it were an old-fashioned hook switch telephone. For all that he's clearly treating this as urgent, Cerebro's voice on the other end of the metaphorical line sounds more annoyed than frantic. "The Brotherhood found Halim, I have no idea how they did it so quickly, but what's happening is --" --- <DC> Hains Point The weather is gorgeous, and there are still plenty of straggling cherry blossoms mixed in with the new green shoots on the trees, but -- weirdly, just at the moment, none of the Sunday afternoon crowd is enjoying the pleasant riverview or pretty spring growth in this lovely little park on the Potomac. What blossoms have remained on this tree in particular are fluttering down heavily as one of many Sentinels thunks hard into the tree trunk and then quickly skitters back into the fracas. What had been a pleasant afternoon for picnicking is now getting swarmed with the bots, and most of the humans who'd come to enjoy the park have gotten themselves Gone with a quickness. Halim, previously unobtrusive in his jeans and plain blue tee, is sitting on a picnic bench looking for all outward appearances fully unconcerned by the chaos around him. He's not even watching the Sentinels, really -- just looking at the shower of petals raining down with a faint, small frown. "You. Should go." For awhile, Heather's tireless efforts at whack-a-mole, introducing a baseball bat with sharp pieces of machinery jutting out of it to her targets, seemed to at least be enough to keep things standing still. But as more Sentinels have introduced themselves, even her blur of movement is providing little barrier. There is the twitch of a frown on her lips as she looks towards Halim, before her recorded voice opines: "This sucks." Above the earthbound fray, Isra had looked like she was holding her own when she smacked the first Sentinel out of the sky with a swing of her heavy tail and tore a second one apart with her talons. But now there are three of them--no, make that five--harrying her, and however agile she is on the wing, they are outmaneuvering her handily. When their darts do not avail them they just start grappling her. Where she tears one off another takes its place until one manages to foul the stroke of her wing and she stalls, crashing down and leaving a long furrow in the soft earth. At least she crushes one of them in the process. Somehow she does not look triumphant--or, probably does not, under the dogpile of Sentinels. The lean blue woman rounding out this strike team does not look innately like she should be able to stand her ground against these machines, but somewhere between the uncanny agility and the extra limbs she has been growing and ungrowing as it suits, she's -- well. Not really held her own, but she's still standing. Kind of standing. At the moment she's tucking and rolling away from an oncoming Sentinel, using a torn-off leg of one of the bots to beat back another, but when she gets nimbly back to her feet it is to declare to her Brothers: "We may want to regroup." --- <DC> Hains Point Given the urgency with which the X-Men arrived and the purpose with which Cyclops is striding across the manicured lawn now, this is a sedate and quiet little stretch of DC Metro parkland. Straggling cherry blossoms, a light spring breeze, patches of singed and uprooted grass, sprays of dirt and mud on the paths. Is there a mechanical buzzing in the air? Is there a restlessness across the river, a rustle in the distant greenery? Scott tromps through the grass and stops, his head tilted; there might be an expression of perplexment on his face, under the hood and visor that cover most of his face. He's flexing his hands at his side, but not with a nervous air -- merely a thoughtful, bemused one. "Huh," he says. "Well, I guess we were bound to get lucky eventually." “You, mein freund, have an interesting definition of luck,” Nightcrawler remarks, keeping pace with his teammates. Teleporting them down one at a time was preferable, and getting the scope of the battlefield gave them a better advantage rather than just barging in. It’s much like riding a bicycle, returning to fight. Uniform on, his mind already in fight-mode, Nightcrawler studies the burnt marks in the mud and cocks his head to the side to catch the whine above them. “How many do think, Shadowcat?” "How many what?" Kitty is staying on Scott's right and within arm's reach, slowly rotating her right arm from the elbow more than is altogether necessary for the Absolutely Nothing waiting for the X-Men right here. She's looking at a long scrape across the greenery with a frown, apparent even from under her black gaiter mask. Shadowcat is not reaching for the titanium kali sticks strapped to the back of her armoured jacket back. Yet. "I don't see anyone, I thought that -- ohwait is that him?" There is a hopeful uptick in her voice as she points out the lone cherry blossom observer. Halim is looking quite serene, where he sits, leaning back against a picnic table and looking up into the trees. His eyes tic -- brief -- to the arriving X-Men, and then back to the trees. Past the soothing background ripple of the river flowing by, the telltale humming is very abruptly growing -- closer and more intense. As the first skittering waves of his robotic bodyguards begin swarming back in, he's just grimacing, and diverting one of the swarm away to kind of gently pull a half-broken bough of a cherry tree more into place and secure it with a small squirt of adhesive. Halim sits up a little straighter on his picnic bench, but his voice is blandly dispassionate. "Eventually." --- <DC> A Corner Starbucks - SW Waterfront Mystique does not look like Mystique anymore, for all the obscurity it will win with the firefight they just fled -- but at least at the moment there are no Sentinels looming in sight. She's leaning up against the patio rail, glaring with prosaically brown eyes out across the river towards the nearby island and its deceptively peaceful park. "-- clearly underestimated his resources. We won't make much headway if we --" Here she's trailing off, though. Narrowing her eyes at the familiar sounds -- shouting? Shooting? coming from -- oh, that's not a peaceful park. She's watching the abrupt re-mobilization of the bot swarm across the water with a sudden curiosity. Her forefinger taps lightly against the side of her unnecessarily froofy coffee drink. "Hm." Isra's double-shot red-eye (or whatever they call that at Starbucks) has smoothed over her wounded dignity, at least, if not her actual wounds. She does not look very concerned about those, nor about being a very wanted gargoyle out on this very public patio. "We ought to have brought B." She's speaking deliberately, and quiet enough that the low soft rumble of her other voice is more apparent than usual, a sustained growl under her words. Her ears perk at the commotion and she rises up to her full and somewhat unnerving (to most) height, tail swishing slow with interest. "X-Men," she offers, even softer than before. She doesn't stop growling, though. The venti mocha double with whipped cream and chocolate sauce that Heather ordered now stands empty, though she has checked a few times by tilting the cup back and forth to check if there is any little bit remaining. "X-Men?" repeats her recorded voice, and she looks off towards the park as well. "Is this a turn-based campaign?" she wonders as she reaches back down under her chair for her bat, though only to prop it up for easier access. The crackle of energy that deposits Regan with the others is only there an instant and then gone. The illusionist is not looking out towards the river but to her assembled Sisters, a quick-sharp smile cutting quick across her face. "So. Small change of plans." --- <DC> Hains Point It is no longer quiet and sedate here, and though Scott is surrounded by a handful of Sentinel parts, cleaved heatlessly from their bodies, there are still plenty more buzzing around him, scrabbling underfoot, clinging to his foot, so on; the bursts of ruby-red light from this corner of the battlefield are impeccably aimed but he can only turn his head in one direction at once. One arm of his X-Jacket is peppered with darts that haven't yet made it to Scott, and though he's still somewhat patiently knocking Sentinels away from him there is a sense of huffiness in the way he detaches one of these darts and just flings it back at a Sentinel (it sticks in the joint attaching one spidery leg and trips it up.) "Come on," is loud but not a yell, directed past the Sentinels to their technopath overlord. "We're trying to help you -- just -- before the Brotherhood get back, can we -- talk, at least?" “A moment, bitte,” Nightcrawler adds as politely as he can to Cyclops’s request as he does his best to avoid being hit or harmed by the Sentinel swarm. It almost makes one miss when foes were giant and merely one or two in number. He teleports away while holding part of a leg, only to appear a few yards away near the trunk of the cherry blossom tree. He throws the leg back at the same Sentinel, like a game of lawn darts (only with both hands and a considerable amount of force) to try and knock it into its comrades. “I’ve never thought I would miss Herr Blob more than I do now,” he sighs. "This is," Kitty is telling a Sentinel, irritably, right before walking through its spidery body, "really unnecessary." She bats her club at another Sentinel, fusing the titanium bar into its center. The Sentinel clinging to Scott's foot is latching its oddly jointed legs around one ankle -- and then the other, like some weirdly spidery set of manacles. The Sentinel that Kurt throws the leg at does skid back, though probably not as much as would be hoped. Parts of it are rearranging around the detached leg and before long it has assimilated it back. Plenty of its compatriots are more opportunist -- if they lose a limb they might well take a different one from their brethren just as well, though plenty seem to reconfigure themselves just fine to make do with fewer. As the X-Men attack they are learning -- the Sentinel Kitty phases through has sputtered and gone still, but immediately other who had been closing in choose instead to give her considerable berth while they adjust their strategy. Halim, though, is still sitting, kind of outwardly unfussed -- legs crossed, fingers steepled below his chin. There are several Sentinels sticking guardedly close by him, but though they're keeping a watchful eye on the X-Men the technopath himself is just watching the water. "Do you think I need help." For a strange and surreal moment, the ~~battlefield~~ park is quite suddenly full of Mystique -- a Mystique appearing for every Sentinel, two for each X-Man. There's a small and wicked smile on each Mystique's slightly-curved lips and they are each of them striking with an uncanny immediacy in the same moment they are appearing. A strong kick aimed (distressingly and inexplicably solid even with the phasing) at Kitty's midsection, at Cyclops's face, solidly at Kurt's throat. To the Sentinel's eyes, at least, only one Mystique has appeared. This one is right behind Cyclops, the heel of her hand striking towards his head in attempt to dislodge that visor. Beside Halim, another Mystique, eyes narrowed. Her deep multitone voice sounds kind of amused. "You do now." A blur weaves past the Mystiques until it resolves itself into Heather's form. Her worn shoes are even more certainly ruined to the point of uselessness after her approach towards Kurt. Her recorded voice sounds, "Your hair blob will not aid you," as she swings her hand in a devastating slap at Nightcrawler's cheek. Isra's shadow on the ground appears only a split second before she does, but it is an alarmingly large and pointy shadow, for anyone who manages to see it. She drops down almost on top of Kitty right after "Mystique's" "kick" and gives a wordless roar, the eerily doubled noise made all the more deafening by the amplification of her mantled wings. 'Go! He doesn't want or deserve your help,' she signs, rapid and agitated, then sweeps her powerful tail around low, aimed at Kitty's shins The last of their group isn't here at all. At least, not to the eyes of any of the other people there. The Sentinels can certainly see Regan's casual saunter nearer, hanging considerably back from the fracas just right now and still sipping her latte. Cyclops manages somehow to keep his balance as his ankles are pulled together, bending his knees in a sort of demi-plie and bowing his head to aim a laser-cutter-precision beam of force down at the Sentinel at his feet, ignoring for the moment the other Sentinels swarming around him and even the myriad Mystiques. The real Mystique's blow to the back of his head does not, alas, dislodge his visor, which is strapped firmly to his face, but it does jar him -- the laser-cutter beam blasts wildly out of control -- fshoom!! -- in a dramatic flash of red and a spray of dirt and grass and Sentinel pieces and... well, it's a good thing Scott is immune to his own eyes. The Sentinel, alas, has no such luck; by the time the red light shuts off, it's lying squashed at the bottom of a compressed-dirt crater as wide across as Cyclops's shoulders, and Cyclops is whirling, forgoing the visor for now to simply swing, blindly, on Mystique. The Sentinels probably shouldn't be fooled by Mystique's Surprise Replication trick, but -- oddly, many of them are adjusting for the Mystque Swarm. They're far more clumsy about their adjustments to all the Mystiques than they are to the actual people around. Halim is blinking, looking away from the trees as if only now this deep into the chaos is it worth his notice to pay attention to the teams duking it out over him. The heel of his hand presses to his eyes and when it drops he -- does not seem any less confused. He is shifting a little uncomfortably and grumbling: "Don't you all. Have real terror. To do." "No! Because you ruined it," Heather answers Halim almost immediately, though it does not cause her motions to otherwise pause. "You are a ruiner." Nightcrawler grunts, trying to dodge the kick to his throat and managing only to shift himself away so the kick lands at his chest instead. He might have teleported away from the slap all together but between the Sentinels, and the two front attacks, there’s no way he’s evading this. His jaw clenches through the hit and he’s betting money that the pop he felt from Mystique’s kick isn’t great news. Still, he’s not out yet. Whipping his tail, he tried to grab at Mystique’s waist, aiming at throwing her (or her copy? There are so many copies of now that he can only imagine what else is in store) as far as he can while grabbing at Heather’s forearms. “How forward! I usually wait until the second dance for the slapping to begin, Schatz,” he rasps, teleporting. If he’s managed it, Heather is going in quite the ride with him. Mystique -- or the copy of Mystique, anyway, simply disintegrates in the clutch of Kurt's tail. All around them, one by one, the Mystique flashmob is evanescing into nothingness. The ground under Scott's feet is rumbling and shaking very unevenly, now, and as he turns to swing on the sole remaining Mystique -- does he lose his footing as the ground grows large rocks and cracks open? Does he not? Who's to say, but a narrow crevasse is opening up before him and from it, a snaking tentacle that whips up and seemingly, roughly, snatches away his visor. Hope he doesn't think he needs that. In the distance, Regan just sips again at her coffee. The kick (distressingly and inexplicably to Kitty, who was so sure she was phased until this moment) knocks her backwards, winded even before Isra's appearance widens her eyes, her friend's roar fills her ears. She's trying to sign back 'You don't know everything, wait --' when Isra's tail sweeps into her (upsettingly still solid) legs and knocks her into the ground. Kitty doesn't get up -- as the Mystique that winded her disappears, so does Shadowcat, falling away into the ground. As all the other Mystiques fade, one remains. She's catching Scott's blind swing against one blocking arm and was bringing the heel of her other hand up toward his chin when she actually spots Nightcrawler, stark and blue once all the myriad Other Blue has vanished. Her movement hitches. For just a second her eyes have gone wider, and rather than driving her assault forward she's just briefly frozen in place, gaze transfixed on Kurt. The CLAMP of a Sentinel's spindly legs around her ankle snaps her out of this, and with a wordless frustrated cry she's sweeping her leg -- attached spiderbot and all -- low towards Scott's ankle. "Has your mother not warned you of the perils of fast women?" Heather replies to Kurt's quip. He does indeed manage to get his hand on Heather's forearm, though her other hand snaps out to grab his arm as well, as if to truly turn this into a dance of nerves. "You are ruining my park." Halim closes his eyes again, experimentally. Then opens them. He's frowning over toward the underworldly tentacle, and several of the nearer Sentinels pivot towards it. One of them is addressing Scott, now, though in Halm's voice (it's honestly not much of a change, just a slightly different register of robotic monotone): "How is this helping?" As soon as his first punch is blocked, Cyclops swings his other fist, also going for an uppercut. Whatever ungainly collision this might have resulted in, he pulls back sharply as his once-solid crater starts to ripple underfoot, his gait suddenly stumbling and unsure, his mouth pulling into an irritable grimace. He sucks in one short, annoyed breath, but he was prepared for this; he has another visor in his jacket he's retrieving, one-handed, and trying to press onto his face, over the visor that is still already there; for some reason a clean suction seal does not form, and the backup visor falls to his feet, perhaps into the crevice now occupied by the Cthulhu creature. Scott perhaps does not realize this -- he's already smoothly paired his X-suit's controls to the other visor as he hits the ground with a thud; Mystique's Sentinel is gleefully trying to grab his ankle too, like it wants them to do a three-legged race. Only now does Cyclops open his eyes. Perhaps he did not mean to blast out this directionless punch-blare of crimson -- zark! -- for he quickly grabs for the manual control at the side of his (first) visor, his other hand clenching into a fist, and shuts it off to take stock. (At his feet, the backup visor is whirring imperceptibly as he fusses with the controls.) He sucks in another short, annoyed breath and looses an eye-punch from the ground up at Mystique as he's struggling to get back up, yanking a bot off his leg and bowling it at the waving tentacle. Then, to the Sentinel that's just addressed him, he says, "These people want you dead -- we can protect you." From the crevasse in the ground there are bodies crawling -- painful, slow; some look bloated with waterlog and some have been mangled horribly, but they are recognizable as they grasp and straggle, with difficulty, towards Cyclops. A few former Xavier's students who were not quite sold on the dream of assimilation who found painful ends at Ascension Island. "Do you know who you're protecting?" rasps one of the ex-X-Kids, and another: "He'd see you dead, too, and all your kids with you." Mystique's leg briefly seems to ooze, disconcertingly jelly-like as it wiggles boneless and tentacly itself out of the Sentinel's grip. It's resolidified again, hefty and distressingly more solid than it should be as she swings her -- heel? It's more like a wide club, at the moment -- towards Scott's side. It doesn't quite connect though when the eyepunch hits her, and she's knocked back, club-foot digging Yet Another skid in the park's once-lovely grass as she rights herself. "Why protect this traitor." “On the contrary,” Kurt says, immediately letting go of the disintegrating Mystique clone— he’d ask later but this was combat and apparently she was no longer going to be an issue (???) for the time being. Instead he wraps and his tail around Heather’s waist (they are locked arm to arm but he has at least one ore appendage) and teleporting them both off to several tree tops in succession. “She encouraged it!” BAMF At each successive jump, Heather kicks off of the treetops they port to, sending the pair airborne. "You could poof--" Another tree, another kick. "--right to him--" Her head whips back as she tries to orient herself. "--he killed my friends--" And then back to Kurt's face, the reflection of her goggles diminished at this proximity, so her eyes are visible. "--my Family." Her fingers dig into his forearm as she keeps grip. "He will again." "I will again," Halim echoes, kind of flat -- he probably can't hear Heather from his distance, but then, plenty of the hovering Sentinels likely can. He's once more closing his eyes. Doesn't reopen them again, and now -- finally -- several of the bots are veering in towards Regan, rudely ignoring her coffee-drinking as they attempt to shackle her. Back down on the ground, Cyclops stumbles getting up, mouth opening in slack horror at the bodies clawing out of the ground, before he finds his feet again. He turns his head very deliberately away from the faces of his former students; his fists clench again at his sides, but this time there's no punch, no whir from his fallen visor. For now Scott is gamely ignoring the Sentinels at his feet, swarming around him, to address Mystique: "So vengeance will heal your losses? Vengeance will protect your people? The people who made a traitor out of Halim will lose no sleep over his death, and you will have killed someone who could still have been saved." Isra whips around for a moment, clearly expecting Kitty to emerge from the ground again from a more advantageous position. When it's clear that advantageous position isn't here, she leaps into the air and veers out over the water to gain altitude before banking sharply to dive toward Halim--and very nearly collides with Kurt and Heather's aerial ~~dance~~ fight. She rolls deftly out of the way, only to collide instead with two Sentinels that were presumably on a more controlled path to intercept her but also did not anticipate the intervening tangle of speedster and teleporter. One of them blunders into her wing on a forceful downstroke and is summarily (if only temporarily) knocked out of the sky, but the other successfully turns accident into opportunity and gloms onto her torso. It stretches two legs out to scrabble at her wing, trying to restrain it. Isra is not having any of this, but is also not having an easy time dislodging the robot, and her flight grows erratic with her attempts. It might not actually be entirely intentional that she's spun and dipped somewhat closer to their target in snarling and slashing at the tenacious bot that simply keeps reattaching the limbs she rips off. Isra was right -- one hand punches up sharply from the ground in front of Halim. Kitty rises up, eeriely smooth, from the ground, pushing a Sentinel off the end of her kali stick to clatter to the bench. "Sorry about all this," she says, extending her free hand out to Halim (though it's not quite an invitation as she reaches towards his shoulder). "We really did just want to talk." Maybe Halim is also intangible, because there's no shoulder there when Kitty reaches out. Oh, no, wait, he's not intangible, he's just -- gone. There's a hiccup that's running through many of the Sentinels on the field, hitching them almost too briefly to catch before they get back to their regularly scheduled Menacing. And -- someone entirely different deposited at the far side of the Sentinel Horde, as if the battle field is a cash register take-a-mutant leave-a-mutant dish. The Sentinels' eyes don't all start glowing red when Halim is disappeared from the field. Maybe it would be a boon, though, if they had, because where the swarm of spiders had been making an extreme but overall non-lethal nuisance of themselves, now there's very little warning when they swing jarringly, suddenly, hostile. The next shots that rings out are not darts but actual bullets, firing first toward Kitty, toward Isra, toward Mystique. A large number of the bots are forming a perimeter, large but skittering rapidly tighter, around the mutants still on the ground. Mystique's teeth bare as the first bullet hits her shoulder. She's whirling out of the way -- kind of incidentally putting Scott beyond her in the line of fire of one of the Sentinel that was shooting at her -- and scooping a tree branch off the ground to whack it down hard at the bot. "Vengeance won't make us whole, but it will ensure that he --" But then she's looking, yellow eyes narrowing balefully at -- the empty place where Halim was -- before, bullets notwithstanding, a slim smile curves her lips. It’s an oddly acrobatic battle between Heather and Nightcrawler, ricocheting from tree trunk to tree trunk before Nightcrawler attempts to slow their descent by wrapping his tail around a particularly thick tree branch that juts out low to the ground. Annoyance arches his voice— did no one communicate anymore? “We did not come to save him; we came to speak to him.” And then attacks and trading blows happened. Well, to be fair to everyone involved, none of the X-Men knew if Halim had been brainwashed or not. That was always the tricky part about these things. “I’m sorry for your loss.” The Sentinels are unleashing a rain of violence -- but not for very long. At one side of the park they are starting to go quiet. The humming that has been thrumming strong in the air is beginning to taper as the spiders stutter, hitch, go dark; they're crumpling to the ground or falling unceremoniously straight out of the air. First one and then three and then ten and -- As the spiderblight ripples through the Sentinels all around it leaves an almost eerie quiet in its wake. Somewhere at the epicenter of this -- carnage? Averted carnage? Leo is looking approximately as unassuming as he ever does, picking his way delicately over a slew of fallen jointed legs and strange round bodies. He's stopped nearby Regan, and looks just about to say something when he catches sight of Kitty over by the picnic table. His eyes go just a little wider -- and then lower to the ground. He nudges at a Sentinel gone limp on the ground where a moment ago it had been out for blood. Very quiet: "We should go." Regan has only recently returned to visibility, her concentration momentarily distracted by the incoming Sentinel Assault. The ground has closed back up, the tentacles dissolved, and she is with a faintly exasperated look shaking spilled coffee from her hand. << We have the technopath. Let's go. >> comes silent to her teammates. She looks down at the bots dead at her feet, and it's a long and tense moment, lips compressing hard, before she looks back up at Leo. "Handy." Kitty’s frozen, staring right back at the Brothers across the field of fallen robots for a long, agonizing moment. Her face is ash white — maybe because it’s Leo in the centre of the dead robots where she can’t stop staring, but probably the slow trickle of blood coming from the grazing bullet wound on her still-raised left arm is not helping. Somewhere across the ravaged park Cyclops is calling the retreat. Her hand falls away from where Halim’s shoulder was, slow and heavy, before Shadowcat turns and follows her team away. | |
