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#2 by D. Golightly
February 2016 |
"The Collection - Part 2 of 2"
The feral mind of Daken was fighting for control of itself. His eyes were glazed over, lost to the internal struggle he underwent, yet somehow fixated on the man that caused his agony.
Dressed in a gaudy, green and purple-accented costume sat the pseudo-monarch of this ragtag group of lost souls. Mesmero was what he had called himself, but Daken hadn’t recognized the moniker. Not that it mattered. As soon as he could break away from the man’s mind control he would impale him through the throat and the matter would be but a memory.
He had been ravaged by mentalists before. Part of his upbringing had required him to undergo forced learning through hypno-therapy and other psychic intrusions. As a result he was all too familiar with the tactics and the pain associated with a psychic assault.
“Strong wills in this group,” Mesmero commented from his makeshift throne. “But they’ll succumb. Just like the rest of my little collection here.”
“Ain’t you going to punish them?” one of the mongrels asked of its master. “”You saw what she did to me!”
Memsero turned to face the slim teenager, but his face juxtaposed his sentiment. “Yes, Lightswitch. I saw that she easily ripped through your light-field. I trust you are well now?”
Lightswitch scoffed and cracked his knuckles, staring daggers are the four captured mutants.
“I thought as much,” Mesmero continued. “More damage to the ego than the body, yes? Mm-hmm. While I allow some such as yourself to serve me willingly, Lightswitch, never forget that I can change that arrangement at any moment should I so desire. Punish them I shall, but not before I learn more about them. This fierce-looking one with the claws, for example. There is more to his mind then I had first assumed. Even while his compatriots are entranced he resists me!”
They had been moved to a chamber beneath the streets of New York City, deep within the forgotten tunnels that many homeless denizens have retreated into at one time or another. Amongst mutant communities, the Morlocks were the most infamous for seeking refuge here, although their numbers had since been culled.
They had obviously been ill prepared for this assignment. Daken could only blame himself for not gathering sufficient intelligence prior to going underground. The entire area was nothing but a killing floor; that was obvious to him now. He had been stupid, even lazy.
The dank tunnels were a maze of brick, mortar, and darkness. Mesmero’s throne chamber was lined with stolen tapestries, with bunk beds stacked along the walls. The chamber itself appeared to be part of a spillway, where water would collect and build up until the floodgates could be opened to siphon off the excess.
All of Daken’s concentration was put toward safeguarding his psyche and he couldn’t spare the necessary neurons to command his neck to turn enough to see the others. Even if he could, the chains around his neck, wrists, and ankles would keep him bound. They all appeared to be completely overtaken by Mesmero’s mental abilities; Cypher, Morph, and the woman called Xorn.
Morph had returned to his original state, or what seemed normal for him at least. Cypher blankly stared at the floor. Xorn was unreadable beneath the helmet, but she hadn’t moved a muscle since Mesmero had made himself known.
Like most of his life, Daken was on his own.
Sweat had formed on his forehead as he fought against the engulfing control pressed upon his mind. Every part of his body was flexed and strained, but to no avail. All he seemed able to do was retain his wits, so for the moment that would need to be enough. Once he broke free of Mesmero’s control he would dislodge the chains holding him physically in place, and then his would-be jailer would die amongst his own entrails.
A scantily clad woman slipped into position beside Mesmero, kneeling before him and holding out a tray of bite-sized food. Mesmero plucked something from the proffered tray and let his gaze linger on the woman, a smile forming on his face. As he chewed, he reached out and cupped her chin, bringing her face closer to his own.
“You see?” he said, turning his attention back to Daken. “I could have you serving me lunch if I so wished, or provide other…services.” His smile grew as he looked back into the slave woman’s eyes. Her spirit was broken behind her pupils.
With a wink, he released her and stood. “Why do you struggle? I can feel your mind battling against my control. You must have had extensive training to resist me this long. But I can feel the walls breaking down! I am beginning to pierce that veil and I wonder if I will enjoy what I find there. I find that the hardest shells to crack are often hiding the most succulent fruit.”
Several dozen people were spread throughout the chamber, most of them with the same dazed expression on their faces, but more than a few that seemed to be here willingly. Havok had sent the team here after linking reports of missing low-level mutants. If the only factor playing into their success on this mission was finding the vanished mutants, they were winners already.
Mesmero stood and with a dramatic gesture made a show of his audience. “You see how they obey me?” he said. “They are the scraps of your culture! The remnants cast aside. No one cared about them until they weren’t there any longer, like a child refusing to share toys. And even then it was months before anyone even thought to look for them.”
He placed his arms behind his back and paced away from Daken and the others, looking through his collection of slaves and servants. “Their powers are parlor tricks at best, but combined they become more than the sum of their parts. It is why some are here because they choose to be. It is why they are now your betters.”
He paused in his rant in front of a young boy, no older than ten. His skin was tinted orange, with a few fragmented scales beneath his droopy eyelids. Mesmero smiled down at the lad, running a hand over his dirty hair.
“I have provided them with a home,” Mesmero continued. “I have provided them with guidance. Your mutant community tossed them aside, but we have created our own community, a superior community. All I ask in return is their loyalty, and sans that, their forced cooperation in my endeavors.”
Stalking behind his makeshift throne and appearing to face the captured mutants again, Mesmero broadened his smile and clapped his hands in front of his chest. “Now! With the addition of you four, no doubt affiliates of Summers or Xavier or some such enterprise, my plans to push upward can continue. With my empire established down here, I’ll meet with little resistance up there.”
“Have we heard enough?” Xorn suddenly inquired.
Shocked, Daken tried to twist his head but found himself unable to do so. He had assumed that Xorn was down, enthralled under Mesmero’s power. He mentally chided himself for such an assumption, but before he could think more on the matter, another voice disrupted his concentration.
“I’m disappointed in the lameness of his master plan,” Morph responded from the opposing side of Daken, “but yeah. I’ve heard enough from this green windbag.”
“Good,” Xorn said. “I tire of this charade.”
The chains around Cypher, Morph, Xorn, and Daken burst apart mid-link thanks to a dull, blue snap of electromagnetic energy, freeing their wrists, necks, and ankles. Xorn immediately hovered a few inches off the ground and moved away from the wall, her arms tense at her side. The same blue glow erupted from the eye sockets of her helmet.
“Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last!” Morph shouted as he reformed his body to increase his mass, the bones and muscle shifting like liquid beneath the changing contours of his body.
Gone was the chalk-white face, replaced by an elongated snout, horns, and scales. A tail lashed out behind him as his spine deepened its curve. Wings sprouted from his shoulder blades, quickly spreading twice the height of his now hunched over form. What had once been a blank mutant template was now a ferocious and very angry dragon.
“Sure, the sentiment behind Martin Luther King, Jr’s most famous line is a little out of place here,” Morph continued through a garbled mouth full of fangs, “but it’s the context that counts.”
“Quit bantering,” Xorn scolded. “Daken and Cypher weren’t able to resist Mesmero like the both of us; we have to move quickly.”
“Right, boss lady!”
Mesmero, astounded and confused by their sudden outburst, backpedaled behind his throne once more. “Stop them!” he shouted, and a burst of renewed vigor rushed through his thralls.
A dozen mutants stepped forward but were just as quickly thrown back by an electromagnetic shove from Xorn. The spark of blue light died as quickly as it had came, but the effects were no less dazzling.
A middle-aged female mutant, called Droplet by the others, cupped her hands around each other and began drawing them apart. Between her palms was a translucent bubble, growing larger by the second. With a push, Droplet expelled the growing bubble toward Xorn, who sliced at it with an electromagnetically-charged hand.
Her hand bent the surface of the bubble, but only managed to bring it closer to her, her hand now stuck inside the watery bead. Within moments her other hand was caught as well, trapped by another bubble from Droplet.
Looking side to side between her two immobile hands, Xorn arched her back and mindlessly gazed at the ceiling, summoning her incredible power. With a cry of guttural expression, the eye sockets of her helmet flared and the bubbles filled with brimming blue power.
In an instant they snapped, the fragile surfaces of the bubbles unable to contain the brutal fury of her power. Xorn descended on Droplet, but another mutant came between them.
A pint-sized man, completely naked and devoid of any hair or genitalia, stretched out his arms to ward off Xorn. His eyes possessed the same entranced look as Droplet’s and a dozen other nearby mutants that were surrounding Xorn. His skin darkened, turning a shade of gray, and then seemingly sliding off of his body.
The folds of skin left behind a metallic body, a framework of sorts, which stood still. The skin wrapped itself around Xorn’s hovering legs, locking her into position.
“That’s it, Dermaton!” shouted a voice that Xorn recognized as belonging to Lightswitch. “Keep that bitch in place for me!”
“Now, now,” Morph said, his own voice chewed up by the fangs now lacing his gums. “I’ll have to rinse your mouth out with soap!”
Morph’s dragon-body tumbled into Dermaton, entangling scaled limbs with metallic ones. As soon as Morph connected with the mutant the skin wrapped around Xorn’s legs slid to the grimy floor in a heap, freeing her.
The pair rolled end over end until Morph’s freshly made wings planted themselves on the ground, allowing him to launch the other mutant across the room with a powerful two-legged kick from beneath. Dermaton’s skin slid along the floor after him while Droplet tried to escape into the shadows.
Xorn whirled on Lightswitch just as the latter was bringing to bare her all-encompassing light powers. Without hesitation, Xorn shut down Lightswitch’s abilities just as she had before, locking them inside the mutant’s body. Lightswitch double-over in pain as a result, her face contorting in agony.
Morph’s body shifted once again, the dragon scales and wings retracting into him and reforming into his chalk-white state, which he called his template form. He rushed to Xorn’s side, placing a cautious hand on her arm.
“Don’t hurt any of them,” he said quietly. “Most of them aren’t here because they want to be, remember?”
For a moment Xorn maintained her grip over Lightswitch’s abilities, but then she tilted her chin down and allowed the power to dissipate. “Fine,” she replied. “But we have to get Mesmero into—”
A foot wedged itself perfectly between Xorn’s ribs, wrecking her concentration and knocking her to the floor. With smooth precision, the assailant followed through with his forward momentum, spinning around and driving a fist into Morph’s temple, effectively disrupting the liquid in his inner ear. The shape-shifter fell just as hard as Xorn, but the elastic nature of his body allowed him to counter the effects quickly and he was up again within seconds.
What he saw was alarming.
Cypher withdrew one of his burka knives from the small of his back, gripping it upside down, and spun to face the downed Xorn. The curve of the blade was angled away from his wrist and plunging it into his target would do irreparable harm.
Morph elongated an arm, stretching it to three times its normal length, and wrapped it around Cypher’s cocked back forearm. He pulled back, but as he did so, Cypher turned on him again and back-flipped over the stretched arm, bending the now putty-like appendage and releasing the torque that Morph was applying.
The shape-shifter tried to close the distance between them and fling a kick into Cypher’s crotch, but Douglas Ramsey interpreted Morph’s body language, plasmatic as it was, and read the telegraphed movements before they occurred.
With his free hand, Cypher blocked the feeble kick, slid his hand underneath the heel, and upended Morph. Cypher retrieved his other burka and drove it into Morph’s stretched arm. With a howl, Morph unwrapped him appendage from Cypher and pulled it back.
Morph was immediately ensnared by several entranced mutants, held at bay by whipping tendrils, translucent bubbles, and various other abilities. He tried to shift, but one ghostly mutant plunged her hand into his chest from behind and squeezed his heart in her grip, paralyzing him.
“Beautiful!” Mesmero shouted. “While I can sense low-level telepathic abilities in this one, it would seem that he’s just as susceptible to me as these commoners. Kill them! Kill your teammates and then grovel at my throne!”
Daken could only watch, locked in place as he fought against Mesmero’s ever-present control. He saw Xorn try to slide away from the stalking Cypher. She was gripping her side where Cypher had struck her and he knew that several of her ribs were likely broken. The pain would wreck her concentration, which was now also compounded by fear. He could smell it on her.
All around them stood Mesmero’s army, watching and waiting. Those he controlled looked like they might even begin drooling, so out of touch with their own faculties as they were. The ones that willingly succumbed to his leadership looked apprehensive, as if they weren’t sure that what they had signed up for should include these events, but they were just as trapped at this point.
Internally he roared. He hated the handicap of incapacitation. It was a relatively new sensation for him. While he had been controlled most of his life, he had agreed to the training and the experimentation. He had been turned into this killing machine voluntarily, and he felt no remorse for his decisions.
“And when you finish with her,” Mesmero said casually as he looked on at Daken, “kill the dog you brought with you, too.”
The mental pain of pushing against Mesmero’s control was almost too intense. He felt like his brain would be damaged if he continued fighting so aggressively. That must be one of the fundamental aspects of his abilities; control over the mind through negative reinforcement.
Daken doubled his mental efforts, and then doubled them again. His training for detecting, isolating, and resisting mental probes was the only thing he focused on. He centered his willpower on pushing back, on bucking against the intrusion.
Cypher gripped both burkas and raised them over his head.
Sweat beaded down Daken’s face, every muscle in his body taut.
And then the effort of fighting against Mesmero took its toll and his mind folded in on itself. His brain now damaged, Daken went limp, no longer able to fight because there was no longer a mind to urge the skirmish.
Feeling the sudden release of tension that he occupied some small corner of Mesmero’s consciousness, he raised a hand toward Cypher and said, “Hold.”
Cypher paused, the blades already brought halfway down toward Xorn. Cypher’s expression was blank, devoid of any emotion or awareness. Xorn shuffled further away, unable to focus her own abilities to defend herself. A spot of red had formed on the front of her uniform where Cypher had struck her. It was all she could do to remain awake at this point.
Mesmero came closer to Daken, walking directly between the frozen Cypher and the wounded Xorn. “Interesting,” he said. “The blonde one with the blades resisted, but ultimately it was a futile effort. The changeling’s mind must be as in flux as his body, so it stands to reason that he was able to fake being under my control. I can only assume that the woman’s helmet protected her from my mental probe, something I should have anticipated.
“You, however,” he said when he was mere inches from Daken’s now inert face, “are a mystery. I have felt a mind like yours before…yes. And your appearance is so like him as well! The animal aggression. The claws. I wonder. But I was able to control him for a time. You are different somehow. You actually damaged your own brain trying to fight me off. Unique!”
Mesmero turned to face his entourage. “Let this be a lesson you!” he shouted with raised arms. “The only escape from Mesmero…is death!”
SNKT!
Three points suddenly burst through Mesmero’s green face. Three jagged, yet razor sharp, points that were actually shards of bone. Two through the forehead; one through the nose.
Daken leaned forward, whispering into Mesmero’s ear. “I’m not him,” Daken said. “I’m something new.”
With a wet pop, Daken retracted the three claws back into his arm; two through the back of his hand and the third back into the underside of his wrist. Mesmero slumped to the floor, dead and motionless.
Instantly it was total chaos throughout the chamber. Those that had been enthralled by Mesmero were either shrieking or sobbing, scared or abhorred by the things he had made them do. The others, those who looked to Mesmero as some kind of mutant savior, or at the very least, a father-figure, began to disperse into the tunnels.
Cypher blinked and then took in his surroundings, finally focusing on Xorn. He knelt beside her and tried to help her up, but she pushed him back with the arm that wasn’t holding her ribs together.
“Let me,” Morph said. Now free, he also rushed to Xorn’s side kneeled. He flatted his arms and slid them effortlessly underneath her, disturbing her as little as possible. Cypher stepped back and watched one of Morph’s arms wrap around her torso like bandages, compressing the ribs and staunching the blood flow.
“What the hell happened to us?” Cypher asked rhetorically.
Daken flipped his head to the side and then the other, cracking his neck. “I’d say mission accomplished, boss man,” he replied.
# # # # #
24 Hours Later
The Archive
A government repository of all mutant files
Operating headquarters of the Mutant Response Team
“He gave himself brain damage…and then fixed it?”
Havok nodded. “Daken’s healing factor is unique,” the leader of the X-Men said. “I don’t totally understand it myself, Doug. I knew that Daken could shrug off bullet wounds and stabbing…but this…well, I just don’t know what to think. His MRI doesn’t even show any scarring.”
Cypher crossed his arms and looked down at the conference table he sat at in the center of the room. Havok leaned against the far wall, dressed in his black and silver uniform, which meant he must have come straight from the field himself. He sipped a steaming cup of what Cypher assumed was coffee.
Spread across the conference table were the dossiers he had been provided prior to meeting the other three members of his team. He was beginning to realize that they were not only incomplete, but that they were alarmingly misleading.
“Any other secrets I should know about?” Cypher finally said. “Knowing Xorn’s identity might be nice right about now.”
Havok shook his head. “Can’t do that. Sorry. I placed her on the team to keep an eye on her. If I had my way she would be with Moira getting a better handle on her powers. She wants to be out there, though. Making a difference. It’s just part of her nature, and honestly, I’d rather not piss her off.”
Cypher let out a sigh. “Great. So I have a killer that doesn’t even recognize the lines he could cross, a mystery woman that I should try real hard not to upset, and…and…honestly, I don’t know what the hell to make of Morph.”
“I’ve worked with worse,” Havok replied with a smile.
“And Mesmero?”
Havok straightened up. “His body is with the feds. I’ll have the autopsy results in the morning, but it seems a little pointless. You did good; putting him out of commission.”
“I didn’t do anything. I was a pawn. I was useless. It was the psycho that put him down. All I did was break three of my own teammate’s ribs, rupture her spleen, and cause massive internal bleeding. Oh, and don’t forget that I severed several tendons in my other teammate’s wrist.”
“Morph will get over it,” Havok shot back, “just like you should. You have no idea what that guy has already been through. Trust me, he’s had way worse done to him. As for Xorn…well, trust me when I say that she knows the risks of being an operative for the government. She’s been out of surgery for hours now and she’s already asking about getting back here.”
“What about Mesmero’s people? The ones he abducted.”
“After you called it in we rounded up some of them. The ones that he had been controlling anyway. The others are in the wind. Those tunnels go on for miles. The survivors are headed to Xavier’s for counseling.”
Cypher leaned forward and placed his head in his hands. “Jesus, Alex. I’m really not sure if I’m cut out for this. How am I supposed to build trust with this team and make us affective? Our first time out I nearly killed two of them and the third sort of committed suicide. Oh, and he killed our target.”
“We got the result we needed.”
Cypher scoffed. “Oh, I’m sure that’s government-speak for looking other way, right? Alex, how can you sleep at night with this kind of stuff going on?”
“I sleep just fine.” Havok moved toward the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down across from Cypher. “Doug, you have to understand something. It’s a lesson that you might not have gotten to when you were still with the X-Men. Before you…well—”
“Died and then came back to life?”
“…right. Before that. Anyway, being an X-Man isn’t about good versus evil, or us versus them, or even you versus anybody. Those are all outmoded concepts. People think that because you’re a mutant that you’re automatically categorized into being against someone. Like, you’re always a protagonist in a never-ending conflict. But the secret here, what Xavier tried to teach more than anything else, was equality.”
“Sure.” Cypher sat up in his chair and stared at Havok. “We fight so that mutants can be thought of as equals. Mutant rights. All of that stuff.”
Havok shook his head. “See, you just did it again. It’s not about fighting for equality. It’s about being accepted as already being equal. You were born equal, Doug. You don’t have to fight for it. Others just need to accept it.”
“So, you’re saying it’s not me versus somebody. It’s just me.”
“A little existential,” Havok replied, “but yeah.”
“So, what’s this little lesson have to do with us functioning as a team?”
“Xavier’s dream was about the rest of the world waking up and realizing that mutants are people, too. A lot of people have already come around to the idea. Your team’s job is to respond to mutant threats and contain the situation. The X-Men are essentially soldiers. You and your team have to be more…tactical. The dream has evolved, Doug.”
Cypher shook his head. “I’m not sure I get it.”
Havok sipped at his coffee. “You will. And so will they.”
# # # # #
Egypt
A bunker three miles below the surface of the Earth
Clad in silver armor from head to toe, a man couldn’t help but smile at what he was witnessing. His minions had been searching thoroughly for one specific person, perhaps the only one in the world, that could do what he needed. After more than a year of searching, he appeared that he had finally found that person.
This ancient cavity in the world had once been a secret fall-back of someone that had commanded entire nations. His legacy lived on, in a manner of speaking, even though he had actually departed this plane of existence.
The stone framework was reminiscent of the tombs of the pharaohs, and while the original creator of this bunker had known many of their kind, none of them had ever ruled over him. He was beyond such mortals.
The man in the silver armor admired that. It was something he took pride in himself and he was not ashamed to admit that he aspired to such an outlook.
“My lord,” a voice said from within the alcove. “Do you have orders for us?”
“Yes, Neophyte,” the man said. “Bring their headquarters to ruin and bring her to me.”
As the lackey slipped back into the shadows of the pseudo-tomb, the man turned his attention back to the holographic display arranged in front of him. A captured closed-circuit feed from beneath the streets of New York City was being processed through the advanced computers that had been installed to the underground installation, converting the black and white feed into a three-dimensional display.
It showed a woman in a helmet using her mastery over electromagnetic energy to shun the white-washing effects of a low-level mutant. The image jumped ahead, showing her burst apart a pair of translucent bubbles with a push of power. It leapt a third time, showing her retreating for her very life, grasping at her side where a teammate had struck her.
“Soon,” he said, and then he watched it again.
# # # # #
Next issue: The team is dragged into an altercation before they can even be given their next assignment. Get ready for a little space-hopping action, a familiar intergalactic pirate with ties to the X-Men, and the Brood!
Dressed in a gaudy, green and purple-accented costume sat the pseudo-monarch of this ragtag group of lost souls. Mesmero was what he had called himself, but Daken hadn’t recognized the moniker. Not that it mattered. As soon as he could break away from the man’s mind control he would impale him through the throat and the matter would be but a memory.
He had been ravaged by mentalists before. Part of his upbringing had required him to undergo forced learning through hypno-therapy and other psychic intrusions. As a result he was all too familiar with the tactics and the pain associated with a psychic assault.
“Strong wills in this group,” Mesmero commented from his makeshift throne. “But they’ll succumb. Just like the rest of my little collection here.”
“Ain’t you going to punish them?” one of the mongrels asked of its master. “”You saw what she did to me!”
Memsero turned to face the slim teenager, but his face juxtaposed his sentiment. “Yes, Lightswitch. I saw that she easily ripped through your light-field. I trust you are well now?”
Lightswitch scoffed and cracked his knuckles, staring daggers are the four captured mutants.
“I thought as much,” Mesmero continued. “More damage to the ego than the body, yes? Mm-hmm. While I allow some such as yourself to serve me willingly, Lightswitch, never forget that I can change that arrangement at any moment should I so desire. Punish them I shall, but not before I learn more about them. This fierce-looking one with the claws, for example. There is more to his mind then I had first assumed. Even while his compatriots are entranced he resists me!”
They had been moved to a chamber beneath the streets of New York City, deep within the forgotten tunnels that many homeless denizens have retreated into at one time or another. Amongst mutant communities, the Morlocks were the most infamous for seeking refuge here, although their numbers had since been culled.
They had obviously been ill prepared for this assignment. Daken could only blame himself for not gathering sufficient intelligence prior to going underground. The entire area was nothing but a killing floor; that was obvious to him now. He had been stupid, even lazy.
The dank tunnels were a maze of brick, mortar, and darkness. Mesmero’s throne chamber was lined with stolen tapestries, with bunk beds stacked along the walls. The chamber itself appeared to be part of a spillway, where water would collect and build up until the floodgates could be opened to siphon off the excess.
All of Daken’s concentration was put toward safeguarding his psyche and he couldn’t spare the necessary neurons to command his neck to turn enough to see the others. Even if he could, the chains around his neck, wrists, and ankles would keep him bound. They all appeared to be completely overtaken by Mesmero’s mental abilities; Cypher, Morph, and the woman called Xorn.
Morph had returned to his original state, or what seemed normal for him at least. Cypher blankly stared at the floor. Xorn was unreadable beneath the helmet, but she hadn’t moved a muscle since Mesmero had made himself known.
Like most of his life, Daken was on his own.
Sweat had formed on his forehead as he fought against the engulfing control pressed upon his mind. Every part of his body was flexed and strained, but to no avail. All he seemed able to do was retain his wits, so for the moment that would need to be enough. Once he broke free of Mesmero’s control he would dislodge the chains holding him physically in place, and then his would-be jailer would die amongst his own entrails.
A scantily clad woman slipped into position beside Mesmero, kneeling before him and holding out a tray of bite-sized food. Mesmero plucked something from the proffered tray and let his gaze linger on the woman, a smile forming on his face. As he chewed, he reached out and cupped her chin, bringing her face closer to his own.
“You see?” he said, turning his attention back to Daken. “I could have you serving me lunch if I so wished, or provide other…services.” His smile grew as he looked back into the slave woman’s eyes. Her spirit was broken behind her pupils.
With a wink, he released her and stood. “Why do you struggle? I can feel your mind battling against my control. You must have had extensive training to resist me this long. But I can feel the walls breaking down! I am beginning to pierce that veil and I wonder if I will enjoy what I find there. I find that the hardest shells to crack are often hiding the most succulent fruit.”
Several dozen people were spread throughout the chamber, most of them with the same dazed expression on their faces, but more than a few that seemed to be here willingly. Havok had sent the team here after linking reports of missing low-level mutants. If the only factor playing into their success on this mission was finding the vanished mutants, they were winners already.
Mesmero stood and with a dramatic gesture made a show of his audience. “You see how they obey me?” he said. “They are the scraps of your culture! The remnants cast aside. No one cared about them until they weren’t there any longer, like a child refusing to share toys. And even then it was months before anyone even thought to look for them.”
He placed his arms behind his back and paced away from Daken and the others, looking through his collection of slaves and servants. “Their powers are parlor tricks at best, but combined they become more than the sum of their parts. It is why some are here because they choose to be. It is why they are now your betters.”
He paused in his rant in front of a young boy, no older than ten. His skin was tinted orange, with a few fragmented scales beneath his droopy eyelids. Mesmero smiled down at the lad, running a hand over his dirty hair.
“I have provided them with a home,” Mesmero continued. “I have provided them with guidance. Your mutant community tossed them aside, but we have created our own community, a superior community. All I ask in return is their loyalty, and sans that, their forced cooperation in my endeavors.”
Stalking behind his makeshift throne and appearing to face the captured mutants again, Mesmero broadened his smile and clapped his hands in front of his chest. “Now! With the addition of you four, no doubt affiliates of Summers or Xavier or some such enterprise, my plans to push upward can continue. With my empire established down here, I’ll meet with little resistance up there.”
“Have we heard enough?” Xorn suddenly inquired.
Shocked, Daken tried to twist his head but found himself unable to do so. He had assumed that Xorn was down, enthralled under Mesmero’s power. He mentally chided himself for such an assumption, but before he could think more on the matter, another voice disrupted his concentration.
“I’m disappointed in the lameness of his master plan,” Morph responded from the opposing side of Daken, “but yeah. I’ve heard enough from this green windbag.”
“Good,” Xorn said. “I tire of this charade.”
The chains around Cypher, Morph, Xorn, and Daken burst apart mid-link thanks to a dull, blue snap of electromagnetic energy, freeing their wrists, necks, and ankles. Xorn immediately hovered a few inches off the ground and moved away from the wall, her arms tense at her side. The same blue glow erupted from the eye sockets of her helmet.
“Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last!” Morph shouted as he reformed his body to increase his mass, the bones and muscle shifting like liquid beneath the changing contours of his body.
Gone was the chalk-white face, replaced by an elongated snout, horns, and scales. A tail lashed out behind him as his spine deepened its curve. Wings sprouted from his shoulder blades, quickly spreading twice the height of his now hunched over form. What had once been a blank mutant template was now a ferocious and very angry dragon.
“Sure, the sentiment behind Martin Luther King, Jr’s most famous line is a little out of place here,” Morph continued through a garbled mouth full of fangs, “but it’s the context that counts.”
“Quit bantering,” Xorn scolded. “Daken and Cypher weren’t able to resist Mesmero like the both of us; we have to move quickly.”
“Right, boss lady!”
Mesmero, astounded and confused by their sudden outburst, backpedaled behind his throne once more. “Stop them!” he shouted, and a burst of renewed vigor rushed through his thralls.
A dozen mutants stepped forward but were just as quickly thrown back by an electromagnetic shove from Xorn. The spark of blue light died as quickly as it had came, but the effects were no less dazzling.
A middle-aged female mutant, called Droplet by the others, cupped her hands around each other and began drawing them apart. Between her palms was a translucent bubble, growing larger by the second. With a push, Droplet expelled the growing bubble toward Xorn, who sliced at it with an electromagnetically-charged hand.
Her hand bent the surface of the bubble, but only managed to bring it closer to her, her hand now stuck inside the watery bead. Within moments her other hand was caught as well, trapped by another bubble from Droplet.
Looking side to side between her two immobile hands, Xorn arched her back and mindlessly gazed at the ceiling, summoning her incredible power. With a cry of guttural expression, the eye sockets of her helmet flared and the bubbles filled with brimming blue power.
In an instant they snapped, the fragile surfaces of the bubbles unable to contain the brutal fury of her power. Xorn descended on Droplet, but another mutant came between them.
A pint-sized man, completely naked and devoid of any hair or genitalia, stretched out his arms to ward off Xorn. His eyes possessed the same entranced look as Droplet’s and a dozen other nearby mutants that were surrounding Xorn. His skin darkened, turning a shade of gray, and then seemingly sliding off of his body.
The folds of skin left behind a metallic body, a framework of sorts, which stood still. The skin wrapped itself around Xorn’s hovering legs, locking her into position.
“That’s it, Dermaton!” shouted a voice that Xorn recognized as belonging to Lightswitch. “Keep that bitch in place for me!”
“Now, now,” Morph said, his own voice chewed up by the fangs now lacing his gums. “I’ll have to rinse your mouth out with soap!”
Morph’s dragon-body tumbled into Dermaton, entangling scaled limbs with metallic ones. As soon as Morph connected with the mutant the skin wrapped around Xorn’s legs slid to the grimy floor in a heap, freeing her.
The pair rolled end over end until Morph’s freshly made wings planted themselves on the ground, allowing him to launch the other mutant across the room with a powerful two-legged kick from beneath. Dermaton’s skin slid along the floor after him while Droplet tried to escape into the shadows.
Xorn whirled on Lightswitch just as the latter was bringing to bare her all-encompassing light powers. Without hesitation, Xorn shut down Lightswitch’s abilities just as she had before, locking them inside the mutant’s body. Lightswitch double-over in pain as a result, her face contorting in agony.
Morph’s body shifted once again, the dragon scales and wings retracting into him and reforming into his chalk-white state, which he called his template form. He rushed to Xorn’s side, placing a cautious hand on her arm.
“Don’t hurt any of them,” he said quietly. “Most of them aren’t here because they want to be, remember?”
For a moment Xorn maintained her grip over Lightswitch’s abilities, but then she tilted her chin down and allowed the power to dissipate. “Fine,” she replied. “But we have to get Mesmero into—”
A foot wedged itself perfectly between Xorn’s ribs, wrecking her concentration and knocking her to the floor. With smooth precision, the assailant followed through with his forward momentum, spinning around and driving a fist into Morph’s temple, effectively disrupting the liquid in his inner ear. The shape-shifter fell just as hard as Xorn, but the elastic nature of his body allowed him to counter the effects quickly and he was up again within seconds.
What he saw was alarming.
Cypher withdrew one of his burka knives from the small of his back, gripping it upside down, and spun to face the downed Xorn. The curve of the blade was angled away from his wrist and plunging it into his target would do irreparable harm.
Morph elongated an arm, stretching it to three times its normal length, and wrapped it around Cypher’s cocked back forearm. He pulled back, but as he did so, Cypher turned on him again and back-flipped over the stretched arm, bending the now putty-like appendage and releasing the torque that Morph was applying.
The shape-shifter tried to close the distance between them and fling a kick into Cypher’s crotch, but Douglas Ramsey interpreted Morph’s body language, plasmatic as it was, and read the telegraphed movements before they occurred.
With his free hand, Cypher blocked the feeble kick, slid his hand underneath the heel, and upended Morph. Cypher retrieved his other burka and drove it into Morph’s stretched arm. With a howl, Morph unwrapped him appendage from Cypher and pulled it back.
Morph was immediately ensnared by several entranced mutants, held at bay by whipping tendrils, translucent bubbles, and various other abilities. He tried to shift, but one ghostly mutant plunged her hand into his chest from behind and squeezed his heart in her grip, paralyzing him.
“Beautiful!” Mesmero shouted. “While I can sense low-level telepathic abilities in this one, it would seem that he’s just as susceptible to me as these commoners. Kill them! Kill your teammates and then grovel at my throne!”
Daken could only watch, locked in place as he fought against Mesmero’s ever-present control. He saw Xorn try to slide away from the stalking Cypher. She was gripping her side where Cypher had struck her and he knew that several of her ribs were likely broken. The pain would wreck her concentration, which was now also compounded by fear. He could smell it on her.
All around them stood Mesmero’s army, watching and waiting. Those he controlled looked like they might even begin drooling, so out of touch with their own faculties as they were. The ones that willingly succumbed to his leadership looked apprehensive, as if they weren’t sure that what they had signed up for should include these events, but they were just as trapped at this point.
Internally he roared. He hated the handicap of incapacitation. It was a relatively new sensation for him. While he had been controlled most of his life, he had agreed to the training and the experimentation. He had been turned into this killing machine voluntarily, and he felt no remorse for his decisions.
“And when you finish with her,” Mesmero said casually as he looked on at Daken, “kill the dog you brought with you, too.”
The mental pain of pushing against Mesmero’s control was almost too intense. He felt like his brain would be damaged if he continued fighting so aggressively. That must be one of the fundamental aspects of his abilities; control over the mind through negative reinforcement.
Daken doubled his mental efforts, and then doubled them again. His training for detecting, isolating, and resisting mental probes was the only thing he focused on. He centered his willpower on pushing back, on bucking against the intrusion.
Cypher gripped both burkas and raised them over his head.
Sweat beaded down Daken’s face, every muscle in his body taut.
And then the effort of fighting against Mesmero took its toll and his mind folded in on itself. His brain now damaged, Daken went limp, no longer able to fight because there was no longer a mind to urge the skirmish.
Feeling the sudden release of tension that he occupied some small corner of Mesmero’s consciousness, he raised a hand toward Cypher and said, “Hold.”
Cypher paused, the blades already brought halfway down toward Xorn. Cypher’s expression was blank, devoid of any emotion or awareness. Xorn shuffled further away, unable to focus her own abilities to defend herself. A spot of red had formed on the front of her uniform where Cypher had struck her. It was all she could do to remain awake at this point.
Mesmero came closer to Daken, walking directly between the frozen Cypher and the wounded Xorn. “Interesting,” he said. “The blonde one with the blades resisted, but ultimately it was a futile effort. The changeling’s mind must be as in flux as his body, so it stands to reason that he was able to fake being under my control. I can only assume that the woman’s helmet protected her from my mental probe, something I should have anticipated.
“You, however,” he said when he was mere inches from Daken’s now inert face, “are a mystery. I have felt a mind like yours before…yes. And your appearance is so like him as well! The animal aggression. The claws. I wonder. But I was able to control him for a time. You are different somehow. You actually damaged your own brain trying to fight me off. Unique!”
Mesmero turned to face his entourage. “Let this be a lesson you!” he shouted with raised arms. “The only escape from Mesmero…is death!”
SNKT!
Three points suddenly burst through Mesmero’s green face. Three jagged, yet razor sharp, points that were actually shards of bone. Two through the forehead; one through the nose.
Daken leaned forward, whispering into Mesmero’s ear. “I’m not him,” Daken said. “I’m something new.”
With a wet pop, Daken retracted the three claws back into his arm; two through the back of his hand and the third back into the underside of his wrist. Mesmero slumped to the floor, dead and motionless.
Instantly it was total chaos throughout the chamber. Those that had been enthralled by Mesmero were either shrieking or sobbing, scared or abhorred by the things he had made them do. The others, those who looked to Mesmero as some kind of mutant savior, or at the very least, a father-figure, began to disperse into the tunnels.
Cypher blinked and then took in his surroundings, finally focusing on Xorn. He knelt beside her and tried to help her up, but she pushed him back with the arm that wasn’t holding her ribs together.
“Let me,” Morph said. Now free, he also rushed to Xorn’s side kneeled. He flatted his arms and slid them effortlessly underneath her, disturbing her as little as possible. Cypher stepped back and watched one of Morph’s arms wrap around her torso like bandages, compressing the ribs and staunching the blood flow.
“What the hell happened to us?” Cypher asked rhetorically.
Daken flipped his head to the side and then the other, cracking his neck. “I’d say mission accomplished, boss man,” he replied.
# # # # #
24 Hours Later
The Archive
A government repository of all mutant files
Operating headquarters of the Mutant Response Team
“He gave himself brain damage…and then fixed it?”
Havok nodded. “Daken’s healing factor is unique,” the leader of the X-Men said. “I don’t totally understand it myself, Doug. I knew that Daken could shrug off bullet wounds and stabbing…but this…well, I just don’t know what to think. His MRI doesn’t even show any scarring.”
Cypher crossed his arms and looked down at the conference table he sat at in the center of the room. Havok leaned against the far wall, dressed in his black and silver uniform, which meant he must have come straight from the field himself. He sipped a steaming cup of what Cypher assumed was coffee.
Spread across the conference table were the dossiers he had been provided prior to meeting the other three members of his team. He was beginning to realize that they were not only incomplete, but that they were alarmingly misleading.
“Any other secrets I should know about?” Cypher finally said. “Knowing Xorn’s identity might be nice right about now.”
Havok shook his head. “Can’t do that. Sorry. I placed her on the team to keep an eye on her. If I had my way she would be with Moira getting a better handle on her powers. She wants to be out there, though. Making a difference. It’s just part of her nature, and honestly, I’d rather not piss her off.”
Cypher let out a sigh. “Great. So I have a killer that doesn’t even recognize the lines he could cross, a mystery woman that I should try real hard not to upset, and…and…honestly, I don’t know what the hell to make of Morph.”
“I’ve worked with worse,” Havok replied with a smile.
“And Mesmero?”
Havok straightened up. “His body is with the feds. I’ll have the autopsy results in the morning, but it seems a little pointless. You did good; putting him out of commission.”
“I didn’t do anything. I was a pawn. I was useless. It was the psycho that put him down. All I did was break three of my own teammate’s ribs, rupture her spleen, and cause massive internal bleeding. Oh, and don’t forget that I severed several tendons in my other teammate’s wrist.”
“Morph will get over it,” Havok shot back, “just like you should. You have no idea what that guy has already been through. Trust me, he’s had way worse done to him. As for Xorn…well, trust me when I say that she knows the risks of being an operative for the government. She’s been out of surgery for hours now and she’s already asking about getting back here.”
“What about Mesmero’s people? The ones he abducted.”
“After you called it in we rounded up some of them. The ones that he had been controlling anyway. The others are in the wind. Those tunnels go on for miles. The survivors are headed to Xavier’s for counseling.”
Cypher leaned forward and placed his head in his hands. “Jesus, Alex. I’m really not sure if I’m cut out for this. How am I supposed to build trust with this team and make us affective? Our first time out I nearly killed two of them and the third sort of committed suicide. Oh, and he killed our target.”
“We got the result we needed.”
Cypher scoffed. “Oh, I’m sure that’s government-speak for looking other way, right? Alex, how can you sleep at night with this kind of stuff going on?”
“I sleep just fine.” Havok moved toward the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down across from Cypher. “Doug, you have to understand something. It’s a lesson that you might not have gotten to when you were still with the X-Men. Before you…well—”
“Died and then came back to life?”
“…right. Before that. Anyway, being an X-Man isn’t about good versus evil, or us versus them, or even you versus anybody. Those are all outmoded concepts. People think that because you’re a mutant that you’re automatically categorized into being against someone. Like, you’re always a protagonist in a never-ending conflict. But the secret here, what Xavier tried to teach more than anything else, was equality.”
“Sure.” Cypher sat up in his chair and stared at Havok. “We fight so that mutants can be thought of as equals. Mutant rights. All of that stuff.”
Havok shook his head. “See, you just did it again. It’s not about fighting for equality. It’s about being accepted as already being equal. You were born equal, Doug. You don’t have to fight for it. Others just need to accept it.”
“So, you’re saying it’s not me versus somebody. It’s just me.”
“A little existential,” Havok replied, “but yeah.”
“So, what’s this little lesson have to do with us functioning as a team?”
“Xavier’s dream was about the rest of the world waking up and realizing that mutants are people, too. A lot of people have already come around to the idea. Your team’s job is to respond to mutant threats and contain the situation. The X-Men are essentially soldiers. You and your team have to be more…tactical. The dream has evolved, Doug.”
Cypher shook his head. “I’m not sure I get it.”
Havok sipped at his coffee. “You will. And so will they.”
# # # # #
Egypt
A bunker three miles below the surface of the Earth
Clad in silver armor from head to toe, a man couldn’t help but smile at what he was witnessing. His minions had been searching thoroughly for one specific person, perhaps the only one in the world, that could do what he needed. After more than a year of searching, he appeared that he had finally found that person.
This ancient cavity in the world had once been a secret fall-back of someone that had commanded entire nations. His legacy lived on, in a manner of speaking, even though he had actually departed this plane of existence.
The stone framework was reminiscent of the tombs of the pharaohs, and while the original creator of this bunker had known many of their kind, none of them had ever ruled over him. He was beyond such mortals.
The man in the silver armor admired that. It was something he took pride in himself and he was not ashamed to admit that he aspired to such an outlook.
“My lord,” a voice said from within the alcove. “Do you have orders for us?”
“Yes, Neophyte,” the man said. “Bring their headquarters to ruin and bring her to me.”
As the lackey slipped back into the shadows of the pseudo-tomb, the man turned his attention back to the holographic display arranged in front of him. A captured closed-circuit feed from beneath the streets of New York City was being processed through the advanced computers that had been installed to the underground installation, converting the black and white feed into a three-dimensional display.
It showed a woman in a helmet using her mastery over electromagnetic energy to shun the white-washing effects of a low-level mutant. The image jumped ahead, showing her burst apart a pair of translucent bubbles with a push of power. It leapt a third time, showing her retreating for her very life, grasping at her side where a teammate had struck her.
“Soon,” he said, and then he watched it again.
# # # # #
Next issue: The team is dragged into an altercation before they can even be given their next assignment. Get ready for a little space-hopping action, a familiar intergalactic pirate with ties to the X-Men, and the Brood!