Back to Gatefold#6 by D. Golightly
May 2017 |
"Worlds Apart"
The Archive
A government repository of all mutant files
Operating headquarters of the Mutant Response Team
“Help me to understand what’s going on here,” Cypher said.
His head was swirling with confusion. Upon arriving at what looked like Ground Zero of a severe shelling, he had seen the unmasked Xorn being attended to by both Daken and Morph. Xorn had apparently just atomized an insanely powerful mutant that was guarding a shipment of cryogenically frozen people on its way to Russia, and she looked like hell.* Despite her charred outfit and unconsciousness, Xorn was apparently doing just fine.
* [Last issue!]
Only she wasn’t Xorn. She was Lorna Dane, better known as Polaris.
Back at the Archive, after being given a thorough examination by a medical team that Havok had called in, she was moved into the conference room. She sat upright and appeared to be okay, except that she looked tired, as if she hadn’t slept in a week. A new Xorn helmet was sitting on the table beside her, and she kept glancing at it like she was desperate to put it back on, but regretting it at the same time.
Cypher stood in front of the closed door, blocking her or Havok’s exit. He knew that Havok had more information on his teammates then he was letting on, and it time to get it all out. At least where Xorn/Polaris was concerned.
“Look,” Havok replied. “I get it. You’re upset.”
“No so much upset as royally pissed,” Cypher shot back. “Why are you being so secretive?”
“Does my real identity endanger anyone on the team?” Lorna quickly added. Despite her grogginess, she was still fairy alert.
“Yes,” Havok said to her before turning back to face Cypher. “Doug, you have to understand that keeping her presence unknown is a priority for the team.”
“We’re not witness protection,” Cypher said, but then he hesitated. “Wait, are we? I mean, our charter is a little ill-defined. We’re government sanctioned, but disavowed. I was under the impression that the Mutant Response Team was acting in the country’s best interests.”
“It is,” Havok stated.
“Then why are we harboring…I don’t even know what she is. A fugitive? Is that why she’s hiding her identity? If I’m going to effectively manage this team in the field I need to know everything about them.” He pointed at Lorna. “Starting with her. Right now.”
Havok sighed. Given Doug’s abilities, he knew that it would be impossible to mislead him any longer. Now that he knew there were lies in his rhetoric he could detect them, and if necessary, start controlling the conversation like he did with the Brood Queen.*
* [X-Factor #4]
He nodded to Lorna. “Tell him,” he said.
Lorna looked up at Havok, back at her helmet on the table, and the finally at Cypher. She also took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Fine,” she finally said. “The first thing you need to know about me is that my name isn’t Lorna Dane. It’s Lorna Summers. And I’m not from your world.”
# # # # # # # # # #
Genosha
A mutant warzone
Home dimension of Lorna Summers
18 months ago
What had once been a gorgeous vacation destination, filled with lush foliage and tourist traps was now nothing more than a barren landscape of rubble and blackened husks. Insipid demands for visitors to bargain for merchandise had been replaced by cries for help and mercy.
“Run!” a man shouted.
He was desperate, utterly desperate. From the crumbled entrance of what had once been a hotel he emerged, scurrying for his life. He paused in what was left of the doorway to spin around and unleash a torrent of plasma from his fist. The rings of his energetic power rippled back into the building, demolishing the floating robot that had been chasing him.
He hated them, hated what they had caused him to become. He had been a peaceful man, following in his brother’s footsteps to work with the United Nation’s many outreach programs. But during a trip to Mumbai he had been outed as a mutant and forever marked, now on the run and fighting for his life.
For Alex Summers, life was a daily struggle.
“C’mon!” he called back into the building. For all of his struggles, and all of the horrible things he had done in the name of liberating mutants from Trask and his Sentinel army, at the very least he could claim one thing: if not for the Dream he would never have met her.
Lorna’s emerald hair was the first thing he saw coming out of the shadows of the wrecked entrance. He breathed a sigh of relief as she ran to him, taking care to step over the Sentinel debris.
“I have it!” she cried out. “Move, move, move!”
Under one arm she carried a fireproof safe, no larger than a briefcase really, but it was heavy and awkward to carry. It was the kind of item insightful parents would buy to keep their kids’ birth certificates in, just in case the house ever caught fire.
Normally she would have used her magnetic powers, her total mastery over that special invisible force that could move mountains, to haul her load. But she was inhibited, her powers held at bay by the collar around her neck.
The pair of them, husband and wife, ran across the pockmarked parking lot and away from the remainder of the Sentinels they knew to be inside looking for them. With Alex’s outburst at the entrance, they would now know that the pair had slipped out from under them and they would give pursuit soon enough.
At the far end of the lot was another man whose skin shimmered white and blue. The sun reflected off of him like he was made of a mirror, his features rigid and angular. Lorna and Alex, while running for their very survival, couldn’t help but smile at his presence.
“Bobby!” Lorna called as she ran.
Robert Drake, the quintessential man of ice, smiled back, but only for a brief moment before having to shout for his friends to get down. As a mutant fugitive from Trask’s army of hostility, Bobby had become just as well-versed at using his powers offensively as the rest. So, when another floating orb painted silver and purple shot off of the hotel’s roof and made a beeline for them, he leapt into action.
He took a knee to brace himself and raised his fists toward the Sentinel. The temperature around him suddenly dropped and moisture condensed in the air closest to his ice-covered skin. With a roar, the Omega-level mutant let loose a beam of frozen discharge, which smashed into the flying robot, knocking it out of the air. When it landed it was covered in thick chunks of ice, now inert.
Alex looked over his shoulder just long enough to see the Sentinel hit the ground and stay there, before he grabbed Lorna by the elbow to help her along. “Thanks!” he shouted. “She got it! We have to get out of here, now!”
Bobby nodded to Alex and winked at Lorna, ever the playful tease. Despite the fact that Trask’s legislation had not only alienated all mutants, but made them outlaws at birth, he had always kept good spirits. He was really the core of the Dream these days, ever since Xavier had been executed on national television ten years ago.
A jeep rolled up and came to an abrupt stop just in front of them, and the door swung open. At the steering wheel was a man with a mop of blonde hair on his head and a toothpick in his mouth. He took one look at the case Lorna was carrying and smiled. “Good work,” St. John Allerdyce said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Lorna, Alex, and Bobby piled into the back of the exposed jeep, which was the only transport they could manage these days. With the Trask-enforced embargo against Genosha, their resources were very limited. Despite the hardship, however, coming for the case was worth it.
“Buckle up, kiddies,” Allerdyce said, his Australian accent heavily pushing through the syllables, and he smashed down the accelerator.
“Can you open it?” Lorna asked, handing the case to Alex.
He fiddled with it for a moment before shaking his head. “The lock is too small,” he said. “If I try to bust it open with my powers I could end up shattering what’s inside. I’m not good for finesse work.”
“Yeah, you’re a regular havoc to be around,” Bobby said as he grabbed the case. “There’s an easier way to do this without risking what we came here to collect.”
He placed his palms on either side of the hefty case and concentrated for a moment. Frost started to spread out from his fingertips and cover the case completely, including the hinge. After a few seconds he lifted the case and then smashed it down onto the side of the jeep, cracking the hinge apart on the metal doorframe. It fell away and the case split into two pieces.
Bobby handed it back to Lorna, saying, “You do the honors.”
She smiled and extracted their prize out from between the two halves of the case: a USB thumb-drive with a small key welded to the side. Her eyes went wide and she fiddled with the thumb-drive for a moment before slipping the key side of it into the collar around her neck.
Bobby and Alex watched anxiously. A little LED light on the drive turned red and they held their breath. The encrypted key had belonged to Bolivar Trask himself, and their successful intelligence gathering of his organization had led them here, to Genosha. They hoped to reverse engineer the key and hopefully the collar technology to free their fellow mutants, who were quickly becoming part of a growing underground movement.
The light held red and they all jostled in the back of the vehicle as Allerdyce did his best to keep them on a straight path through the rubble. She knew it was just her imagination, but Lorna couldn’t help but feel like the collar was getting even tighter around her neck.
Then, finally, the light went green and she felt her world open up again. Her powers suddenly kicked back on in high gear and she felt like a weight had been lifted off her soul.
“Incoming!” Allerdyce shouted.
A split second after the light turned green and Lorna Summers had her life handed back to her, a 50mm shell from a sky bound Sentinel dropped onto the front of the jeep. The metal casing tore through the jeep’s frame and engine like it was butter. The front of the vehicle punched down from the force and the rear lifted up, and then the resulting explosion kicked all of the passengers upward.
Lorna’s body felt like it was being used as a pinball. Instinctively she had erected a magnetic force bubble around her, but the key was still lodged into her collar. The collar short-circuited and her brain was suddenly on fire.
As her friends were vaporized she rose up into the air, watching helplessly as they died. Alex reached for her just as his body turned to dust, a result of her own power growing increasingly out of control. Allerdyce was covered in flame as he disintegrated and Bobby seemed to melt halfway before turned into vapor.
She felt her power growing increasingly destructive. Whereas before she could manipulate magnetic forces and even generate magnetic waves from her hands, now she was linked to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. She could see the energy trails from the approaching Sentinels coming for her.
It was their fault. Trask’s wretched technology had made her into this uncontrollable monster, had made her unwittingly kill her friends. The power, her power, enhanced by whatever brain scrambling the collar had done, couldn’t be shut off.
A wave of oncoming Sentinels were crushed with a flick of her wrist. She smashed the single ball of metal that had once been twelve individual Sentinels down into the asphalt again and again. She only grew more angry.
With this incredible power now at her command, Lorna felt unleashed. She could do anything. She could even kill Trask and end this nightmare. So, she did.
The army of metal soldiers, the Sentinels that had given Trask so much of his political leverage and physical threat, were nullified just by her presence. She had gone straight to the White House and wiped out his forces within seconds. She had ripped the roof off of the Oval Office, plucked Trask out, and rocketed him into the stratosphere. When she stopped his heartbeat with an electromagnetic pulse she watched him die, sure that this would calm her spirit.
But it didn’t. She still felt hollow. Alex was still dead. She was still a monster. So she shocked him back to life and killed him again. And again. Miles above the Earth’s surface she killed Trask a dozen times, but she couldn’t find the piece she sought.
She released his corpse, which would burn up on re-entry eventually. She wished that the sight of his lifeless face would make her feel better, but it didn’t.
The world was in chaos. Her actions made people more fearful of mutants than ever before, and as wretched as Trask was, most of the economy was based on his success. The United States became an even worse place, a demilitarized zone of sorts. Class warfare only heightened, with Lorna now seen as Public Enemy #1.
She eventually figured out that her unique power range made her easy to track. Those loyal to Trask, now a martyr of unheard of legend, came for her day and night. She tried to dampen her energy signature with the use of the helmet, but even that was short term. They would come for her; they always did.
It wasn’t just the humans that wanted her, either. Powerful mutant leaders that wished to wipe away humanity in its entirely wanted to use her incredible power to their own ends. She would be a tool of destruction, something she feared almost as much as anything else.
She would have to flee. Through what was left of the mutant underground, a group calling themselves the Mutant Liberation Front, she was connected with the aboriginal mutant named Gateway. However, even the MLF wouldn’t give her sanctuary. Her existence was a threat to everyone else they kept safe. But with Gateway’s help, she could escape to somewhere that Trask’s legacy couldn’t find her.
She could flee to another dimension.
With the help of other power-enhancing mutants, Gateway opened a tear in reality, a door to another dimension. Lorna fled from those that wanted to use her as a weapon, or see her destroyed. She left her life behind and hid behind her helmet, forever sealed away.
# # # # # # # # # #
The Archive
The Present
“You see,” Lorna continued, “in my world, there are no X-Men. Mutants were always feared, hated, and hunted. When I escaped to your world, I thought that there was…some hope.”
She began to tear up. Just thinking about all that she had lost was like reliving it all over again. Alex placed a hand on her shoulder, and while he wasn’t her Alex, it still helped.
As insane as it all sounded – other dimensions, Sentinels openly killing mutants, Xavier killed in front of a watching world – Cypher could tell that she was telling the truth. Or, at the very least, she believed she was telling the truth. His powers enabled him to pick up on meta-messages, body language, syntax, and other nonverbal cues that alluded to whether or not she was telling the truth, and right now his powers were only confirming her story.
“So,” Cypher finally said after a long pause. “What, you went straight to Alex? When you first came here, what happened?”
She briefly locked eyes with Alex before looking back at Cypher and replying. “Not at first. I kind of wandered for a little bit. I saw some reports about the X-Men, a few headlines here and there, but I didn’t want to bring my troubles to people who were essentially strangers to me. It wasn’t until someone from my world crossed over to find me that I went looking for help.”
“Hank McCoy and I picked her up on Cerebro,” Alex stated. “But we didn’t approach her right away. She came to us before we could start scouting for her anyway. She told us everything and after thoroughly vetting her story through genetic testing and vibrational assessment - something to do with dimensional frequencies - we decided she was genuine. We picked up someone else on her heels, too. A very powerful psychic force was popping up in places where she had spent some time in hiding, and it was getting closer.”
“Who is it?” Cypher asked.
Alex shrugged. “Don’t know yet. We helmet is shielding her for now. We think.”
Cypher glanced at the table. “But she’s not wearing it anymore.”
“We’re shielded here,” Alex responded, motioning broadly to the Archine itself. “But with what recently happened, Lorna’s energy signature is all over the map and was likely picked up by various agencies around the world.”
“Plus whoever is tracking you from your own world,” Cypher stated.
Lorna nodded, but just looked down instead of continuing the conversation. Cypher could tell that she was exhausted, but wasn’t sure if it was due to her recent exploits or the burden of reliving her past.
“So,” Havok said after a moment, “for the time being, she’ll stay with us, where she has people she can count on surrounding her. If this mystery person comes knocking, we’ll answer on her behalf. In the meantime, we have some other priorities to discuss.”
“TransGenics,” Cypher offered.
“Bingo. Specifically, what the hell are they doing shipping augmented mutants to Russia?”
As if on cue, the triangle-shaped conference phone at the center of the table chirped. Cypher leaned forward and pressed the intercom button, saying, “Yeah?”
“Visitors,” the electronically-filtered voice of Daken replied. “The official kind.”
Cypher raised an eye toward Havok, who was the government liaison for the team and would likely know what was going on. “Friends of yours?” he asked.
“Your’s, too. Let’s go.”
Lorna slipped her helmet back into place and Cypher heard the snap and hiss of it sealing around the base of her skull. Immediately her posture changed. He had seen masked heroes alter their body language before, but with her it was like she was compartmentalizing her personality. Maybe it was how she coped with being in an alien land surrounded by familiar faces that were still foreign to her.
When they entered the main entrance foyer, they saw Morph and Daken waiting for them, flanked by three other people. One was a man in a black suit and tie; the typical non-descript government agent, who nodded at Havok as they approached.
The other two, both women, were much more profound in their appearance: one with lavish green hair even brighter than Lorna’s that made her white skin look pale, and the other with close-cropped blonde hair spilling over dark skin and a tattoo over her one eye. Cypher didn’t recognize them, but Havok obviously did. He shook hands with the suit, who turned and left, as if he had done his job by depositing the two women.
“I hear you got yourself into some trouble, Alex,” the green-haired woman said. “Need us to bail you out?”
“Not quite,” he replied, “but we appreciate the help. The Mutant Response Team is not officially operating under the purview of the United States Government. With what we’ve uncovered an international incident may be on the horizon.”
“Mutant trafficking into Russia,” the blonde stated.
“Right. So, in the interest of not breaking any international laws, we’re calling in the XSE to lend a hand and give our team some authoritative weight.”
“The XSE?” Morph commented, who then threw up his hands. “There goes the neighborhood.”
Cypher said, “And they would be…”
“Government stooges,” Daken spat out. He sized up the two women and abruptly turned to leave, stomping out of the foyer and disappearing into the stacks of the Archive.
Havok eyed him, but let him go. “TransGenics is now a bigger threat than we can handle on our own. The X-Factor Sanction Enforcement, a sister branch of SHIELD that focuses on mutant issues that affect international security, is a useful resource to us. Team…meet Abigail Brand and Shard of the XSE.”
The blonde, Shard, merely nodded and picked up a duffel bag and walked by them. Abigail Brand removed her green shades that matched her flagrant hair, shot a smile that could melt ice cream, and said, “When do we start?”
Next issue: International mutant madness as the team heads to Russia, hot on the trail of TransGenics’ criminal activity! With the added boost of two of the XSE’s finest, will they be able to stop what’s coming next?
A government repository of all mutant files
Operating headquarters of the Mutant Response Team
“Help me to understand what’s going on here,” Cypher said.
His head was swirling with confusion. Upon arriving at what looked like Ground Zero of a severe shelling, he had seen the unmasked Xorn being attended to by both Daken and Morph. Xorn had apparently just atomized an insanely powerful mutant that was guarding a shipment of cryogenically frozen people on its way to Russia, and she looked like hell.* Despite her charred outfit and unconsciousness, Xorn was apparently doing just fine.
* [Last issue!]
Only she wasn’t Xorn. She was Lorna Dane, better known as Polaris.
Back at the Archive, after being given a thorough examination by a medical team that Havok had called in, she was moved into the conference room. She sat upright and appeared to be okay, except that she looked tired, as if she hadn’t slept in a week. A new Xorn helmet was sitting on the table beside her, and she kept glancing at it like she was desperate to put it back on, but regretting it at the same time.
Cypher stood in front of the closed door, blocking her or Havok’s exit. He knew that Havok had more information on his teammates then he was letting on, and it time to get it all out. At least where Xorn/Polaris was concerned.
“Look,” Havok replied. “I get it. You’re upset.”
“No so much upset as royally pissed,” Cypher shot back. “Why are you being so secretive?”
“Does my real identity endanger anyone on the team?” Lorna quickly added. Despite her grogginess, she was still fairy alert.
“Yes,” Havok said to her before turning back to face Cypher. “Doug, you have to understand that keeping her presence unknown is a priority for the team.”
“We’re not witness protection,” Cypher said, but then he hesitated. “Wait, are we? I mean, our charter is a little ill-defined. We’re government sanctioned, but disavowed. I was under the impression that the Mutant Response Team was acting in the country’s best interests.”
“It is,” Havok stated.
“Then why are we harboring…I don’t even know what she is. A fugitive? Is that why she’s hiding her identity? If I’m going to effectively manage this team in the field I need to know everything about them.” He pointed at Lorna. “Starting with her. Right now.”
Havok sighed. Given Doug’s abilities, he knew that it would be impossible to mislead him any longer. Now that he knew there were lies in his rhetoric he could detect them, and if necessary, start controlling the conversation like he did with the Brood Queen.*
* [X-Factor #4]
He nodded to Lorna. “Tell him,” he said.
Lorna looked up at Havok, back at her helmet on the table, and the finally at Cypher. She also took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Fine,” she finally said. “The first thing you need to know about me is that my name isn’t Lorna Dane. It’s Lorna Summers. And I’m not from your world.”
# # # # # # # # # #
Genosha
A mutant warzone
Home dimension of Lorna Summers
18 months ago
What had once been a gorgeous vacation destination, filled with lush foliage and tourist traps was now nothing more than a barren landscape of rubble and blackened husks. Insipid demands for visitors to bargain for merchandise had been replaced by cries for help and mercy.
“Run!” a man shouted.
He was desperate, utterly desperate. From the crumbled entrance of what had once been a hotel he emerged, scurrying for his life. He paused in what was left of the doorway to spin around and unleash a torrent of plasma from his fist. The rings of his energetic power rippled back into the building, demolishing the floating robot that had been chasing him.
He hated them, hated what they had caused him to become. He had been a peaceful man, following in his brother’s footsteps to work with the United Nation’s many outreach programs. But during a trip to Mumbai he had been outed as a mutant and forever marked, now on the run and fighting for his life.
For Alex Summers, life was a daily struggle.
“C’mon!” he called back into the building. For all of his struggles, and all of the horrible things he had done in the name of liberating mutants from Trask and his Sentinel army, at the very least he could claim one thing: if not for the Dream he would never have met her.
Lorna’s emerald hair was the first thing he saw coming out of the shadows of the wrecked entrance. He breathed a sigh of relief as she ran to him, taking care to step over the Sentinel debris.
“I have it!” she cried out. “Move, move, move!”
Under one arm she carried a fireproof safe, no larger than a briefcase really, but it was heavy and awkward to carry. It was the kind of item insightful parents would buy to keep their kids’ birth certificates in, just in case the house ever caught fire.
Normally she would have used her magnetic powers, her total mastery over that special invisible force that could move mountains, to haul her load. But she was inhibited, her powers held at bay by the collar around her neck.
The pair of them, husband and wife, ran across the pockmarked parking lot and away from the remainder of the Sentinels they knew to be inside looking for them. With Alex’s outburst at the entrance, they would now know that the pair had slipped out from under them and they would give pursuit soon enough.
At the far end of the lot was another man whose skin shimmered white and blue. The sun reflected off of him like he was made of a mirror, his features rigid and angular. Lorna and Alex, while running for their very survival, couldn’t help but smile at his presence.
“Bobby!” Lorna called as she ran.
Robert Drake, the quintessential man of ice, smiled back, but only for a brief moment before having to shout for his friends to get down. As a mutant fugitive from Trask’s army of hostility, Bobby had become just as well-versed at using his powers offensively as the rest. So, when another floating orb painted silver and purple shot off of the hotel’s roof and made a beeline for them, he leapt into action.
He took a knee to brace himself and raised his fists toward the Sentinel. The temperature around him suddenly dropped and moisture condensed in the air closest to his ice-covered skin. With a roar, the Omega-level mutant let loose a beam of frozen discharge, which smashed into the flying robot, knocking it out of the air. When it landed it was covered in thick chunks of ice, now inert.
Alex looked over his shoulder just long enough to see the Sentinel hit the ground and stay there, before he grabbed Lorna by the elbow to help her along. “Thanks!” he shouted. “She got it! We have to get out of here, now!”
Bobby nodded to Alex and winked at Lorna, ever the playful tease. Despite the fact that Trask’s legislation had not only alienated all mutants, but made them outlaws at birth, he had always kept good spirits. He was really the core of the Dream these days, ever since Xavier had been executed on national television ten years ago.
A jeep rolled up and came to an abrupt stop just in front of them, and the door swung open. At the steering wheel was a man with a mop of blonde hair on his head and a toothpick in his mouth. He took one look at the case Lorna was carrying and smiled. “Good work,” St. John Allerdyce said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Lorna, Alex, and Bobby piled into the back of the exposed jeep, which was the only transport they could manage these days. With the Trask-enforced embargo against Genosha, their resources were very limited. Despite the hardship, however, coming for the case was worth it.
“Buckle up, kiddies,” Allerdyce said, his Australian accent heavily pushing through the syllables, and he smashed down the accelerator.
“Can you open it?” Lorna asked, handing the case to Alex.
He fiddled with it for a moment before shaking his head. “The lock is too small,” he said. “If I try to bust it open with my powers I could end up shattering what’s inside. I’m not good for finesse work.”
“Yeah, you’re a regular havoc to be around,” Bobby said as he grabbed the case. “There’s an easier way to do this without risking what we came here to collect.”
He placed his palms on either side of the hefty case and concentrated for a moment. Frost started to spread out from his fingertips and cover the case completely, including the hinge. After a few seconds he lifted the case and then smashed it down onto the side of the jeep, cracking the hinge apart on the metal doorframe. It fell away and the case split into two pieces.
Bobby handed it back to Lorna, saying, “You do the honors.”
She smiled and extracted their prize out from between the two halves of the case: a USB thumb-drive with a small key welded to the side. Her eyes went wide and she fiddled with the thumb-drive for a moment before slipping the key side of it into the collar around her neck.
Bobby and Alex watched anxiously. A little LED light on the drive turned red and they held their breath. The encrypted key had belonged to Bolivar Trask himself, and their successful intelligence gathering of his organization had led them here, to Genosha. They hoped to reverse engineer the key and hopefully the collar technology to free their fellow mutants, who were quickly becoming part of a growing underground movement.
The light held red and they all jostled in the back of the vehicle as Allerdyce did his best to keep them on a straight path through the rubble. She knew it was just her imagination, but Lorna couldn’t help but feel like the collar was getting even tighter around her neck.
Then, finally, the light went green and she felt her world open up again. Her powers suddenly kicked back on in high gear and she felt like a weight had been lifted off her soul.
“Incoming!” Allerdyce shouted.
A split second after the light turned green and Lorna Summers had her life handed back to her, a 50mm shell from a sky bound Sentinel dropped onto the front of the jeep. The metal casing tore through the jeep’s frame and engine like it was butter. The front of the vehicle punched down from the force and the rear lifted up, and then the resulting explosion kicked all of the passengers upward.
Lorna’s body felt like it was being used as a pinball. Instinctively she had erected a magnetic force bubble around her, but the key was still lodged into her collar. The collar short-circuited and her brain was suddenly on fire.
As her friends were vaporized she rose up into the air, watching helplessly as they died. Alex reached for her just as his body turned to dust, a result of her own power growing increasingly out of control. Allerdyce was covered in flame as he disintegrated and Bobby seemed to melt halfway before turned into vapor.
She felt her power growing increasingly destructive. Whereas before she could manipulate magnetic forces and even generate magnetic waves from her hands, now she was linked to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. She could see the energy trails from the approaching Sentinels coming for her.
It was their fault. Trask’s wretched technology had made her into this uncontrollable monster, had made her unwittingly kill her friends. The power, her power, enhanced by whatever brain scrambling the collar had done, couldn’t be shut off.
A wave of oncoming Sentinels were crushed with a flick of her wrist. She smashed the single ball of metal that had once been twelve individual Sentinels down into the asphalt again and again. She only grew more angry.
With this incredible power now at her command, Lorna felt unleashed. She could do anything. She could even kill Trask and end this nightmare. So, she did.
The army of metal soldiers, the Sentinels that had given Trask so much of his political leverage and physical threat, were nullified just by her presence. She had gone straight to the White House and wiped out his forces within seconds. She had ripped the roof off of the Oval Office, plucked Trask out, and rocketed him into the stratosphere. When she stopped his heartbeat with an electromagnetic pulse she watched him die, sure that this would calm her spirit.
But it didn’t. She still felt hollow. Alex was still dead. She was still a monster. So she shocked him back to life and killed him again. And again. Miles above the Earth’s surface she killed Trask a dozen times, but she couldn’t find the piece she sought.
She released his corpse, which would burn up on re-entry eventually. She wished that the sight of his lifeless face would make her feel better, but it didn’t.
The world was in chaos. Her actions made people more fearful of mutants than ever before, and as wretched as Trask was, most of the economy was based on his success. The United States became an even worse place, a demilitarized zone of sorts. Class warfare only heightened, with Lorna now seen as Public Enemy #1.
She eventually figured out that her unique power range made her easy to track. Those loyal to Trask, now a martyr of unheard of legend, came for her day and night. She tried to dampen her energy signature with the use of the helmet, but even that was short term. They would come for her; they always did.
It wasn’t just the humans that wanted her, either. Powerful mutant leaders that wished to wipe away humanity in its entirely wanted to use her incredible power to their own ends. She would be a tool of destruction, something she feared almost as much as anything else.
She would have to flee. Through what was left of the mutant underground, a group calling themselves the Mutant Liberation Front, she was connected with the aboriginal mutant named Gateway. However, even the MLF wouldn’t give her sanctuary. Her existence was a threat to everyone else they kept safe. But with Gateway’s help, she could escape to somewhere that Trask’s legacy couldn’t find her.
She could flee to another dimension.
With the help of other power-enhancing mutants, Gateway opened a tear in reality, a door to another dimension. Lorna fled from those that wanted to use her as a weapon, or see her destroyed. She left her life behind and hid behind her helmet, forever sealed away.
# # # # # # # # # #
The Archive
The Present
“You see,” Lorna continued, “in my world, there are no X-Men. Mutants were always feared, hated, and hunted. When I escaped to your world, I thought that there was…some hope.”
She began to tear up. Just thinking about all that she had lost was like reliving it all over again. Alex placed a hand on her shoulder, and while he wasn’t her Alex, it still helped.
As insane as it all sounded – other dimensions, Sentinels openly killing mutants, Xavier killed in front of a watching world – Cypher could tell that she was telling the truth. Or, at the very least, she believed she was telling the truth. His powers enabled him to pick up on meta-messages, body language, syntax, and other nonverbal cues that alluded to whether or not she was telling the truth, and right now his powers were only confirming her story.
“So,” Cypher finally said after a long pause. “What, you went straight to Alex? When you first came here, what happened?”
She briefly locked eyes with Alex before looking back at Cypher and replying. “Not at first. I kind of wandered for a little bit. I saw some reports about the X-Men, a few headlines here and there, but I didn’t want to bring my troubles to people who were essentially strangers to me. It wasn’t until someone from my world crossed over to find me that I went looking for help.”
“Hank McCoy and I picked her up on Cerebro,” Alex stated. “But we didn’t approach her right away. She came to us before we could start scouting for her anyway. She told us everything and after thoroughly vetting her story through genetic testing and vibrational assessment - something to do with dimensional frequencies - we decided she was genuine. We picked up someone else on her heels, too. A very powerful psychic force was popping up in places where she had spent some time in hiding, and it was getting closer.”
“Who is it?” Cypher asked.
Alex shrugged. “Don’t know yet. We helmet is shielding her for now. We think.”
Cypher glanced at the table. “But she’s not wearing it anymore.”
“We’re shielded here,” Alex responded, motioning broadly to the Archine itself. “But with what recently happened, Lorna’s energy signature is all over the map and was likely picked up by various agencies around the world.”
“Plus whoever is tracking you from your own world,” Cypher stated.
Lorna nodded, but just looked down instead of continuing the conversation. Cypher could tell that she was exhausted, but wasn’t sure if it was due to her recent exploits or the burden of reliving her past.
“So,” Havok said after a moment, “for the time being, she’ll stay with us, where she has people she can count on surrounding her. If this mystery person comes knocking, we’ll answer on her behalf. In the meantime, we have some other priorities to discuss.”
“TransGenics,” Cypher offered.
“Bingo. Specifically, what the hell are they doing shipping augmented mutants to Russia?”
As if on cue, the triangle-shaped conference phone at the center of the table chirped. Cypher leaned forward and pressed the intercom button, saying, “Yeah?”
“Visitors,” the electronically-filtered voice of Daken replied. “The official kind.”
Cypher raised an eye toward Havok, who was the government liaison for the team and would likely know what was going on. “Friends of yours?” he asked.
“Your’s, too. Let’s go.”
Lorna slipped her helmet back into place and Cypher heard the snap and hiss of it sealing around the base of her skull. Immediately her posture changed. He had seen masked heroes alter their body language before, but with her it was like she was compartmentalizing her personality. Maybe it was how she coped with being in an alien land surrounded by familiar faces that were still foreign to her.
When they entered the main entrance foyer, they saw Morph and Daken waiting for them, flanked by three other people. One was a man in a black suit and tie; the typical non-descript government agent, who nodded at Havok as they approached.
The other two, both women, were much more profound in their appearance: one with lavish green hair even brighter than Lorna’s that made her white skin look pale, and the other with close-cropped blonde hair spilling over dark skin and a tattoo over her one eye. Cypher didn’t recognize them, but Havok obviously did. He shook hands with the suit, who turned and left, as if he had done his job by depositing the two women.
“I hear you got yourself into some trouble, Alex,” the green-haired woman said. “Need us to bail you out?”
“Not quite,” he replied, “but we appreciate the help. The Mutant Response Team is not officially operating under the purview of the United States Government. With what we’ve uncovered an international incident may be on the horizon.”
“Mutant trafficking into Russia,” the blonde stated.
“Right. So, in the interest of not breaking any international laws, we’re calling in the XSE to lend a hand and give our team some authoritative weight.”
“The XSE?” Morph commented, who then threw up his hands. “There goes the neighborhood.”
Cypher said, “And they would be…”
“Government stooges,” Daken spat out. He sized up the two women and abruptly turned to leave, stomping out of the foyer and disappearing into the stacks of the Archive.
Havok eyed him, but let him go. “TransGenics is now a bigger threat than we can handle on our own. The X-Factor Sanction Enforcement, a sister branch of SHIELD that focuses on mutant issues that affect international security, is a useful resource to us. Team…meet Abigail Brand and Shard of the XSE.”
The blonde, Shard, merely nodded and picked up a duffel bag and walked by them. Abigail Brand removed her green shades that matched her flagrant hair, shot a smile that could melt ice cream, and said, “When do we start?”
Next issue: International mutant madness as the team heads to Russia, hot on the trail of TransGenics’ criminal activity! With the added boost of two of the XSE’s finest, will they be able to stop what’s coming next?