Post by Dave Mc on Sept 19, 2006 14:52:22 GMT -5
Finally I get the complete version of this issue written. Sorry about the delay and stuff but here it is. Read the rest of it and let me know what you think.
X West #1 Forsaken Past
Neal Sharra walked down Pacific Avenue and took the turn off, onto Poplar Street. He looked up from watching his feet, counting the steps. From here he could see his new home, Chesterfield Manor. Even looking at it from this distance made him feel ashamed. And it was all thanks to Callisto. If only she had just, … no. There was no point in thinking like that, nothing could be done to change the past. This was the way it was now, and he was going to have to get used to it. No matter how much he hated it.
They had left under a dark cloud, leaving the mansion at Westchester after one of the biggest blow-outs in X-Men history. Never before had the group of mutants had such in-fighting and leadership difficulties. And it had all come to a head when, … stop it Neal, he chided himself. They had left and that was it. He had helped Callisto set up this headquarters for her followers shortly after she had decided to take a substantial portion of the active X-Men to the west coast of America. Now they were living in San Francisco.
He had contacted his parents in India. He had not spoken to them in a long time. Not since he had walked out on them. Not since he had met Karima. And then there had been Betsy and then Heather. He had been too busy, enjoying his life as an X-Man too much to make amends with them. And then he had had to call them up and debase himself by asking for money. He would never have done it, never have stained himself with the shame, if Callisto had not asked him. Of all the ones who left only he had significant access to funds. He burned with shame over the conversation he had had with his father. His company had bought him the manor house, they all currently resided in, and the house beside it. They had furnished it and supplied them with the basics, then the worst part came.
His father offered him his share of the company. He had explained to Neal that he was liquidating it. All assets would be sold. He said it was because he had no heir, after what he and his brother had done. He would never pass it on out of the family, and so it was gone. Neal was rich and his family’s legacy was gone, all that remained was that which his father had retained and this crumbling old house, a relict of some Californian ‘old money’.
As he mulled this over, brooding to himself, he approached the front gates. They were rust coated and one looked near to falling off it’s hinges. He walked through them and up the driveway. There was a circular patch of lawn outside the front entry, browned from the heat and lack of a gardener. He walked over it rather than follow the driveway around it. Approaching the door he stopped and looked at the lion’s head knocker. Pushing it open he stepped through, into the entrance hall.
Neal wandered up the stairs, wondering where everyone was. Usually the place was ringing with the sound of arguments. They may have left for the same reasons but that did not mean they necessarily got along. He decided to try and find someone. Even an argument would be better than this dark depression he seemed to have descended into. He walked down the corridor and as he passed one of the bedroom doors he thought he heard voices. But they were subdued, quiet, almost whispers. That was weird. Intrigued Neal stepped closer to the door. He normally wouldn’t eavesdrop but he wanted someone to talk to and he was not about to walk in on someone else’s conversation.
The whispering was still going on. Neal waited a bit more. He could hear at least two different voices. One had a soft, sibilant quality to it. He was not familiar with it. The other voice was clear spoken, and for a second Neal thought it sounded afraid. Screw this he thought and he pushed open the door.
For a second there seemed to be a flurry of shadows that dazzled Neal’s eyes. In the few seconds it took for his vision to right itself the room seemed normal. There sitting on a bed near the window was his fellow X-Man in exile, Nils Styger. Nils had a strange look on his face, a cross between suspicion and fear.
“Are you ok Nils?” asked Neal. He was not that close to the young man. The split within the X-Men had been particularly hard on him, he knew that at least. Nils had only joined the X-Men at first in an effort to better know his half-bother Kurt Wagner, the X-Man known as Nightcrawler. After a while he had enjoyed the time he spent there, working on various projects with Hank McCoy and his research team.
“Nils is everything alright?” he repeated.
“Uh … fine, everything is fine” he said, getting up. He edged his way around Neal towards the door. Eyeing Neal nervously he dashed outside.
What on Earth is up with him thought Neal. He watched as Nils ran out the door and into the corridor. Just in time to crash into another resident of the manor. This is going to be ugly thought Neal.
“Merde!” he heard a French accented voice exclaim out in the hallway. He ran out the door and saw Nils sprawled on the bare wooden floor at the feet of Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, the French-Canadian woman known as Aurora. She was leaning against the wall, having staggered backward from colliding with Nils. She was glaring down at him, despise burning in her eyes.
“You stupid, disgusting, poor excuse for homo superior, how dare you touch me” she shrieked.
“Jeanne calm down” Neal tried to interrupt.
“Shut up Neal, let the wretch speak for himself” she said, glaring in turn at him. “Well?” she demanded of Nils, prodding the cowering mutant with her foot, “What do you say gene joke?”.
“I … I…” stammered Nils.
“That’s enough” said Neal with more force in his voice.
Jeanne-Marie rolled her eyes upward and shot one more nasty look at Nils. “You’re pathetic” she spat at him. She stepped out of his way and he jumped up and ran off down the corridor.
“Nils wait!” Neal shouted after him, but the young man didn’t stop and he disappeared around a corner. He rounded on Jeanne and caught the smirk on her face. “What the hell was that all about?” he yelled at her, “That was totally uncalled for”.
“Do not raise your voice to me Neal. I shall speak to him however I please” she replied.
“Who put the fright on Nils?” said another voice, just as Neal was about to berate Jeanne more. Neal turned and was greeted with a slap on the back by another member of the team, the man called Sabre.
“She did” Neal said, pointing to Aurora.
“You serious, how could someone as deliciously good looking as Jeany here frighten even a mouse?” said Sabre. Neal rolled his eyes, turned and walked away. Sabre strolled up to Jeanne-Marie, a smirk on his face. Time for his favourite past-time he thought. He stood in front of Jeanne and put his arm up on the wall to one side of her. Looking her straight in her gorgeous eyes he said “Hey babe”.
“You moron” was all Jeanne said as she yanked his arm down and stalked off.
“Damn!” Sabre exclaimed as he watched her walk away. He liked a woman who played hard to get. He enjoyed flirting, or trying to flirt, with Aurora. She made the game fun. Of course back at the mansion there were a few more hotties to work on but … well that was over. Shrugging his shoulders he decided to go and check on Ever, he hadn’t seen that guy in ages.
Sabre walked down the bare wooden floored hallway. He reached the end of it and stood looking at a panelled door. The entrance to the basement he thought. “Ever, you can be one creepy son of a bitch sometimes you know” he muttered to himself. He knocked the door three times. The noise seemed harsh and too loud in the silence of the corridor. A shiver ran down Sabre’s spine.
He knocked again, the vibrations echoing down the corridor. He listened. Silence, nothing. Sabre shrugged, “Whatever”, and walked off in search of something more fun to do.
He listened as the footsteps receded down the hallway. He waiting till they faded to nothing. Ever let out a sigh. He walked away from the steps leading to the basement door and sat down at his work table. He hadn’t left this place in a week, and nobody had disturbed him. He had shut everyone out this past while, trying to get the piece of mind he needed for his experiments.
“Hah!” he said to himself, piece of mind indeed. He lifted a scalpel from the workbench. Dipping it in ethanol, he passed it through the flame of a nearby, lit Bunsen burner. As the ethanol burnt off, he raised his other arm. Gingerly he used the cleansed scalpel to remove a piece of flesh from his forearm. He gritted the teeth with the pain. He used forceps to pick up the piece of flesh he had removed and placed it in a nearby Petri dish. Picking up a notebook and a pencil he scratched ‘experiment no. 13’. He sat back in his chair and started to wrap the weeping wound he had just created.
It was very run down. Neal stood at the centre of what had been the old manor’s gymnasium. Currently the rag tag bunch of ex-X-Men were using it to blow off steam until they figured out exactly what they were going to do here in San Francisco. If there was something Neal needed to do right now it was blow off steam. Even if he had agreed to do some training with Aurora and Sabre. He raised himself a few feet into the air by producing explosive thrust from his legs. Altering the direction, he span around in a circle and surveyed the layout. In one corner lay the rusted remains of what was once, he assumed, a set of weights. The ceiling, once glass was now open to the cooling breezes of the night air. He flew up through the rusted framework and stared out at the sunset. It looked beautiful but it still failed to move the depression Neal had felt settle over him today.
“Yo, flyboy, we doing this or what?” Sabre’s voice drifted up to him. Neal glanced down and saw the pony-tailed figure of his fellow exile staring up at him. Despite himself he found a smile creeping across his face. Sabre always seemed to be cheerful, he was nearly impossible to get down. He was just one of the guys, and with little choice in his options he had decided that Neal was also one of the guys. To Sabre it was simple, Neal was young and single, hence he must want to go to bars and hit on chicks. Sabre liked to simplify things so that they fit in his happy go lucky world. Hell he even treated combat situations with a certain amount of flippancy. Neal descended back into the gymnasium.
“Hey bro, anyone else joining us?” asked Sabre as Neal touched down.
“Somehow I think the answer will please you” said Neal as he gestured to where the third person of their session had walked in. Sabre turned around to look and a smile stretched across his face from ear to ear.
“Well hello, hot stuff!” he exclaimed as Jeanne-Marie Beaubier walked into the run down gymnasium.
“Shut up you degenerate” she said as she brushed past him and walked over toward where Neal was standing. “So, what are we doing here?”.
“I’m thinking tag” replied Neal.
“Tag!” exclaimed Aurora, “how juvenile”, and she walked over to lean against the far wall, shooting dagger like looks at Sabre as she did so.
“Well you’re still going to play” replied Neal, refusing to rise to Jeanne’s crap. When they were finished here he was going to have words with Callisto about her behaviour. “The aim of the game is to tag the other person, now you two” he said pointing at Aurora and Sabre with each hand “are both speedsters so it should make this a little more interesting”.
“And what about you?” came the dry voice of Aurora, “Correct me if I’m wrong but you don’t exactly move at any spectacular rate.”
“Yeah” said Neal, a smirk on his face, “but you might find me a little to hot to touch”. As he said that Neal activated his powers. He generated a bulk of solar plasma and using his unique ability, began to shape it. He eventually had covered his whole body in a layer of roiling solar plasma generated quite a bit of heat.
“That’s cheating!” said Sabre.
“Funny” said Thunderbird “I don’t remember saying there were any rules”, with that he took off into the air.
“Well sexy” he said turning to look at Jeanne, “looks like its just you and me”. Jeanne wasn’t there. Sabre quickly moved, narrowly dodging a slap to the head from the Canadian mutant. “Babe, I like it when you play rough” he taunted.
The blur that was Aurora stopped and focused into the woman, standing with her hands on her hips, obviously annoyed that she had missed. “Shut up little man and start running” she said.
Neal looked down and was barely able to keep up with the other two as they zipped around the gymnasium floor. Sabre was a blur, but he knew for a fact that Aurora was faster. Then why was she holding back. He watched as Sabre stopped and began just narrowly dodging any effort Aurora made to touch him. He sighed and decided that until she was finished with her grudge with Sabre Aurora would not be bothering with him.
“Come on baby, you can do better than that, I’ve seen you dying to get your hands on me. All you have to do is move baby” grinned Sabre as he ducked and weaved at high speeds avoiding all attempts of Aurora’s hands to tag him. He could see Aurora was loosing her cool. As he thought, she was getting frustrated that she had not got him yet and he was taunting her into loosing it. He knew she was faster but he also knew she wouldn’t lower herself to using her full power on him. Her vanity would be his key to winning this exercise. “You know its kinda ironic, any other day I’d love to have your hands all over me” he laughed dodging another of Aurora’s attempts.
“That’s it!” screamed Jeanne as she lost her temper. With speed defying comprehension she reached out and grabbed Sabre’s head, a hand on either side. A surprised look crossed his face as he realised he had lost. But Aurora wasn’t finished. “ You want me to rock your world? Well here you go gene trash”. She started vibrating her hands at high speeds, shaking Sabre’s head as she did so. Blood began streaming out of his nose as blood vessels disintegrated.
Neal didn’t see how it had happened but Aurora had managed to grab Sabre. He knew she would have done so eventually but he didn’t know why she had waited so long. Now she wasn’t letting go. Then he heard the scream coming from Sabre. He raced down and saw blood pouring down Sabre’s face. He reshaped his plasma and fired it as a blast that sent the two mutants flying apart. Aurora stopped mid air and flew to the ground. Sabre slammed into the gymnasium wall. He staggered to his feet. “Damn bitch tried to kill me!” he yelled wiping blood from his nose. Neal flew over.
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah, girl tried to shake my head apart, healing is kicking in though” he said. He was right there was no longer any fresh blood coming from his nose.
Jeanne appeared beside them. Neal spun to her and glared. Quietly he asked “What on Earth was that, you were only supposed to tag him, not give him a haemorrhage”.
“He was being annoying” she replied rather coolly, “besides he is fine” she said gesturing to the slowly recovering Sabre. Neal was seething with fury. She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Oh and by the way …. tag!”. She disappeared from the gymnasium in the next second.
“More wine Eve?” asked Callisto as she raised the bottle of red toward her drinking companion sitting across from her in the Manor’s sitting room.
“Please” replied the pale skinned woman known to the residents of he manor as Electric Eve. She held out her mug as Callisto used one of her tentacles to pour her some of the wine. They were on their second bottle. Eve felt comfortable around Callisto. Like her she had spent a lot of time on the run, hiding in the dark sewers afraid to walk with normal people. She and a group of mutants had dwelled in the Chicago sewers until events had forced them to flee the very city.
After that she had lost contact with her fellow refugees. She had found her way to New York and after a misunderstanding, had been brought to the attention of the X-Men. There she had met Callisto. The two had clicked instantly, and when Callisto decided to leave she hadn’t thought twice about following her. Besides she wasn’t wholly comfortable with the way things were going back at the mansion. Anyway she decided she wasn’t going to dwell on that now. Also Callisto got very angry when that whole subject was brought up.
Her thoughts were interrupted as Callisto raised her own mug. Eve made a mental note to go out and buy some wine glasses. Provided she could get money for them from Neal. It was weird how you got used to having money and nice things. Well she had done it once she could do it again.
“To a fresh start” chimed Callisto, the wine making her act a little more lucid than she normally would. Eve raised her glass and clinked it off Callisto’s. The tiny sound rang around the spartan room echoing off the bare walls. It was quickly replaced by the doorbell.
“I’ll get it” said Eve as she stood up out of her chair. “it’s probably just Sabre coming back drunk again after losing his keys”.
She walked out the sitting room door and into the large airy, cold foyer of the manor building. The doorbell rang again. “Ok, ok I’m coming. She reached the front door and opened it. She then took two steps backward her hands flying to her mouth as she gasped in recognition. A man in beggars clothes was standing on the doorstep. A man she knew very well.
“Is that you?” she asked, “Postman?”.
X West #1 Forsaken Past
------------ The Corner of Pacific and Poplar -------------
Neal Sharra walked down Pacific Avenue and took the turn off, onto Poplar Street. He looked up from watching his feet, counting the steps. From here he could see his new home, Chesterfield Manor. Even looking at it from this distance made him feel ashamed. And it was all thanks to Callisto. If only she had just, … no. There was no point in thinking like that, nothing could be done to change the past. This was the way it was now, and he was going to have to get used to it. No matter how much he hated it.
They had left under a dark cloud, leaving the mansion at Westchester after one of the biggest blow-outs in X-Men history. Never before had the group of mutants had such in-fighting and leadership difficulties. And it had all come to a head when, … stop it Neal, he chided himself. They had left and that was it. He had helped Callisto set up this headquarters for her followers shortly after she had decided to take a substantial portion of the active X-Men to the west coast of America. Now they were living in San Francisco.
He had contacted his parents in India. He had not spoken to them in a long time. Not since he had walked out on them. Not since he had met Karima. And then there had been Betsy and then Heather. He had been too busy, enjoying his life as an X-Man too much to make amends with them. And then he had had to call them up and debase himself by asking for money. He would never have done it, never have stained himself with the shame, if Callisto had not asked him. Of all the ones who left only he had significant access to funds. He burned with shame over the conversation he had had with his father. His company had bought him the manor house, they all currently resided in, and the house beside it. They had furnished it and supplied them with the basics, then the worst part came.
His father offered him his share of the company. He had explained to Neal that he was liquidating it. All assets would be sold. He said it was because he had no heir, after what he and his brother had done. He would never pass it on out of the family, and so it was gone. Neal was rich and his family’s legacy was gone, all that remained was that which his father had retained and this crumbling old house, a relict of some Californian ‘old money’.
As he mulled this over, brooding to himself, he approached the front gates. They were rust coated and one looked near to falling off it’s hinges. He walked through them and up the driveway. There was a circular patch of lawn outside the front entry, browned from the heat and lack of a gardener. He walked over it rather than follow the driveway around it. Approaching the door he stopped and looked at the lion’s head knocker. Pushing it open he stepped through, into the entrance hall.
------------------ Inside Chesterfield Manor -----------------
Neal wandered up the stairs, wondering where everyone was. Usually the place was ringing with the sound of arguments. They may have left for the same reasons but that did not mean they necessarily got along. He decided to try and find someone. Even an argument would be better than this dark depression he seemed to have descended into. He walked down the corridor and as he passed one of the bedroom doors he thought he heard voices. But they were subdued, quiet, almost whispers. That was weird. Intrigued Neal stepped closer to the door. He normally wouldn’t eavesdrop but he wanted someone to talk to and he was not about to walk in on someone else’s conversation.
The whispering was still going on. Neal waited a bit more. He could hear at least two different voices. One had a soft, sibilant quality to it. He was not familiar with it. The other voice was clear spoken, and for a second Neal thought it sounded afraid. Screw this he thought and he pushed open the door.
For a second there seemed to be a flurry of shadows that dazzled Neal’s eyes. In the few seconds it took for his vision to right itself the room seemed normal. There sitting on a bed near the window was his fellow X-Man in exile, Nils Styger. Nils had a strange look on his face, a cross between suspicion and fear.
“Are you ok Nils?” asked Neal. He was not that close to the young man. The split within the X-Men had been particularly hard on him, he knew that at least. Nils had only joined the X-Men at first in an effort to better know his half-bother Kurt Wagner, the X-Man known as Nightcrawler. After a while he had enjoyed the time he spent there, working on various projects with Hank McCoy and his research team.
“Nils is everything alright?” he repeated.
“Uh … fine, everything is fine” he said, getting up. He edged his way around Neal towards the door. Eyeing Neal nervously he dashed outside.
What on Earth is up with him thought Neal. He watched as Nils ran out the door and into the corridor. Just in time to crash into another resident of the manor. This is going to be ugly thought Neal.
“Merde!” he heard a French accented voice exclaim out in the hallway. He ran out the door and saw Nils sprawled on the bare wooden floor at the feet of Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, the French-Canadian woman known as Aurora. She was leaning against the wall, having staggered backward from colliding with Nils. She was glaring down at him, despise burning in her eyes.
“You stupid, disgusting, poor excuse for homo superior, how dare you touch me” she shrieked.
“Jeanne calm down” Neal tried to interrupt.
“Shut up Neal, let the wretch speak for himself” she said, glaring in turn at him. “Well?” she demanded of Nils, prodding the cowering mutant with her foot, “What do you say gene joke?”.
“I … I…” stammered Nils.
“That’s enough” said Neal with more force in his voice.
Jeanne-Marie rolled her eyes upward and shot one more nasty look at Nils. “You’re pathetic” she spat at him. She stepped out of his way and he jumped up and ran off down the corridor.
“Nils wait!” Neal shouted after him, but the young man didn’t stop and he disappeared around a corner. He rounded on Jeanne and caught the smirk on her face. “What the hell was that all about?” he yelled at her, “That was totally uncalled for”.
“Do not raise your voice to me Neal. I shall speak to him however I please” she replied.
“Who put the fright on Nils?” said another voice, just as Neal was about to berate Jeanne more. Neal turned and was greeted with a slap on the back by another member of the team, the man called Sabre.
“She did” Neal said, pointing to Aurora.
“You serious, how could someone as deliciously good looking as Jeany here frighten even a mouse?” said Sabre. Neal rolled his eyes, turned and walked away. Sabre strolled up to Jeanne-Marie, a smirk on his face. Time for his favourite past-time he thought. He stood in front of Jeanne and put his arm up on the wall to one side of her. Looking her straight in her gorgeous eyes he said “Hey babe”.
“You moron” was all Jeanne said as she yanked his arm down and stalked off.
“Damn!” Sabre exclaimed as he watched her walk away. He liked a woman who played hard to get. He enjoyed flirting, or trying to flirt, with Aurora. She made the game fun. Of course back at the mansion there were a few more hotties to work on but … well that was over. Shrugging his shoulders he decided to go and check on Ever, he hadn’t seen that guy in ages.
--------------- The Basement of Chesterfield Manor ---------------
Sabre walked down the bare wooden floored hallway. He reached the end of it and stood looking at a panelled door. The entrance to the basement he thought. “Ever, you can be one creepy son of a bitch sometimes you know” he muttered to himself. He knocked the door three times. The noise seemed harsh and too loud in the silence of the corridor. A shiver ran down Sabre’s spine.
He knocked again, the vibrations echoing down the corridor. He listened. Silence, nothing. Sabre shrugged, “Whatever”, and walked off in search of something more fun to do.
--------------- Inside the Basement ---------------
He listened as the footsteps receded down the hallway. He waiting till they faded to nothing. Ever let out a sigh. He walked away from the steps leading to the basement door and sat down at his work table. He hadn’t left this place in a week, and nobody had disturbed him. He had shut everyone out this past while, trying to get the piece of mind he needed for his experiments.
“Hah!” he said to himself, piece of mind indeed. He lifted a scalpel from the workbench. Dipping it in ethanol, he passed it through the flame of a nearby, lit Bunsen burner. As the ethanol burnt off, he raised his other arm. Gingerly he used the cleansed scalpel to remove a piece of flesh from his forearm. He gritted the teeth with the pain. He used forceps to pick up the piece of flesh he had removed and placed it in a nearby Petri dish. Picking up a notebook and a pencil he scratched ‘experiment no. 13’. He sat back in his chair and started to wrap the weeping wound he had just created.
--------------- The Old Gymnasium ---------------
It was very run down. Neal stood at the centre of what had been the old manor’s gymnasium. Currently the rag tag bunch of ex-X-Men were using it to blow off steam until they figured out exactly what they were going to do here in San Francisco. If there was something Neal needed to do right now it was blow off steam. Even if he had agreed to do some training with Aurora and Sabre. He raised himself a few feet into the air by producing explosive thrust from his legs. Altering the direction, he span around in a circle and surveyed the layout. In one corner lay the rusted remains of what was once, he assumed, a set of weights. The ceiling, once glass was now open to the cooling breezes of the night air. He flew up through the rusted framework and stared out at the sunset. It looked beautiful but it still failed to move the depression Neal had felt settle over him today.
“Yo, flyboy, we doing this or what?” Sabre’s voice drifted up to him. Neal glanced down and saw the pony-tailed figure of his fellow exile staring up at him. Despite himself he found a smile creeping across his face. Sabre always seemed to be cheerful, he was nearly impossible to get down. He was just one of the guys, and with little choice in his options he had decided that Neal was also one of the guys. To Sabre it was simple, Neal was young and single, hence he must want to go to bars and hit on chicks. Sabre liked to simplify things so that they fit in his happy go lucky world. Hell he even treated combat situations with a certain amount of flippancy. Neal descended back into the gymnasium.
“Hey bro, anyone else joining us?” asked Sabre as Neal touched down.
“Somehow I think the answer will please you” said Neal as he gestured to where the third person of their session had walked in. Sabre turned around to look and a smile stretched across his face from ear to ear.
“Well hello, hot stuff!” he exclaimed as Jeanne-Marie Beaubier walked into the run down gymnasium.
“Shut up you degenerate” she said as she brushed past him and walked over toward where Neal was standing. “So, what are we doing here?”.
“I’m thinking tag” replied Neal.
“Tag!” exclaimed Aurora, “how juvenile”, and she walked over to lean against the far wall, shooting dagger like looks at Sabre as she did so.
“Well you’re still going to play” replied Neal, refusing to rise to Jeanne’s crap. When they were finished here he was going to have words with Callisto about her behaviour. “The aim of the game is to tag the other person, now you two” he said pointing at Aurora and Sabre with each hand “are both speedsters so it should make this a little more interesting”.
“And what about you?” came the dry voice of Aurora, “Correct me if I’m wrong but you don’t exactly move at any spectacular rate.”
“Yeah” said Neal, a smirk on his face, “but you might find me a little to hot to touch”. As he said that Neal activated his powers. He generated a bulk of solar plasma and using his unique ability, began to shape it. He eventually had covered his whole body in a layer of roiling solar plasma generated quite a bit of heat.
“That’s cheating!” said Sabre.
“Funny” said Thunderbird “I don’t remember saying there were any rules”, with that he took off into the air.
“Well sexy” he said turning to look at Jeanne, “looks like its just you and me”. Jeanne wasn’t there. Sabre quickly moved, narrowly dodging a slap to the head from the Canadian mutant. “Babe, I like it when you play rough” he taunted.
The blur that was Aurora stopped and focused into the woman, standing with her hands on her hips, obviously annoyed that she had missed. “Shut up little man and start running” she said.
Neal looked down and was barely able to keep up with the other two as they zipped around the gymnasium floor. Sabre was a blur, but he knew for a fact that Aurora was faster. Then why was she holding back. He watched as Sabre stopped and began just narrowly dodging any effort Aurora made to touch him. He sighed and decided that until she was finished with her grudge with Sabre Aurora would not be bothering with him.
“Come on baby, you can do better than that, I’ve seen you dying to get your hands on me. All you have to do is move baby” grinned Sabre as he ducked and weaved at high speeds avoiding all attempts of Aurora’s hands to tag him. He could see Aurora was loosing her cool. As he thought, she was getting frustrated that she had not got him yet and he was taunting her into loosing it. He knew she was faster but he also knew she wouldn’t lower herself to using her full power on him. Her vanity would be his key to winning this exercise. “You know its kinda ironic, any other day I’d love to have your hands all over me” he laughed dodging another of Aurora’s attempts.
“That’s it!” screamed Jeanne as she lost her temper. With speed defying comprehension she reached out and grabbed Sabre’s head, a hand on either side. A surprised look crossed his face as he realised he had lost. But Aurora wasn’t finished. “ You want me to rock your world? Well here you go gene trash”. She started vibrating her hands at high speeds, shaking Sabre’s head as she did so. Blood began streaming out of his nose as blood vessels disintegrated.
Neal didn’t see how it had happened but Aurora had managed to grab Sabre. He knew she would have done so eventually but he didn’t know why she had waited so long. Now she wasn’t letting go. Then he heard the scream coming from Sabre. He raced down and saw blood pouring down Sabre’s face. He reshaped his plasma and fired it as a blast that sent the two mutants flying apart. Aurora stopped mid air and flew to the ground. Sabre slammed into the gymnasium wall. He staggered to his feet. “Damn bitch tried to kill me!” he yelled wiping blood from his nose. Neal flew over.
“Are you ok?”
“Yeah, girl tried to shake my head apart, healing is kicking in though” he said. He was right there was no longer any fresh blood coming from his nose.
Jeanne appeared beside them. Neal spun to her and glared. Quietly he asked “What on Earth was that, you were only supposed to tag him, not give him a haemorrhage”.
“He was being annoying” she replied rather coolly, “besides he is fine” she said gesturing to the slowly recovering Sabre. Neal was seething with fury. She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Oh and by the way …. tag!”. She disappeared from the gymnasium in the next second.
--------------- The Manor ---------------
“More wine Eve?” asked Callisto as she raised the bottle of red toward her drinking companion sitting across from her in the Manor’s sitting room.
“Please” replied the pale skinned woman known to the residents of he manor as Electric Eve. She held out her mug as Callisto used one of her tentacles to pour her some of the wine. They were on their second bottle. Eve felt comfortable around Callisto. Like her she had spent a lot of time on the run, hiding in the dark sewers afraid to walk with normal people. She and a group of mutants had dwelled in the Chicago sewers until events had forced them to flee the very city.
After that she had lost contact with her fellow refugees. She had found her way to New York and after a misunderstanding, had been brought to the attention of the X-Men. There she had met Callisto. The two had clicked instantly, and when Callisto decided to leave she hadn’t thought twice about following her. Besides she wasn’t wholly comfortable with the way things were going back at the mansion. Anyway she decided she wasn’t going to dwell on that now. Also Callisto got very angry when that whole subject was brought up.
Her thoughts were interrupted as Callisto raised her own mug. Eve made a mental note to go out and buy some wine glasses. Provided she could get money for them from Neal. It was weird how you got used to having money and nice things. Well she had done it once she could do it again.
“To a fresh start” chimed Callisto, the wine making her act a little more lucid than she normally would. Eve raised her glass and clinked it off Callisto’s. The tiny sound rang around the spartan room echoing off the bare walls. It was quickly replaced by the doorbell.
“I’ll get it” said Eve as she stood up out of her chair. “it’s probably just Sabre coming back drunk again after losing his keys”.
She walked out the sitting room door and into the large airy, cold foyer of the manor building. The doorbell rang again. “Ok, ok I’m coming. She reached the front door and opened it. She then took two steps backward her hands flying to her mouth as she gasped in recognition. A man in beggars clothes was standing on the doorstep. A man she knew very well.
“Is that you?” she asked, “Postman?”.
