Hey there, X-Fans! Thank you for waiting out my minor plague --to make up for the impromptu gap, I've returned with a Double Release Weekend!!
Enjoy Parts Five and Six right here --back-to-back!
Then look forward to Part Seven, set to arrive on schedule Friday the 10th!
=========
Back in the Medical Bay
"Ah just don't get whah Cyclops would do this."
Jubilee: "I guess he could've done a lot worse. Like maybe he thought it would just be like a 'ping' and didn't expect you to go down so hard?" she turns from Rogue to Angel.
Iceman: "I don't see what else he would've expected to happen, catching Angel off guard like that."
"Then maybe he didn't see straight."
"Cyclops?"
Rogue: "Besides, Jubilee, we saw his reaction on the monitors. Or lack of one."
"But then why?" She looks like she would've preferred to have some excuse, even a weak one, to grasp onto.
Iceman: "There's something going on with him."
Rogue: "Yeah, but then not all the tahm. Lahk he hasn't been short tempered teaching or anything."
Jubilee: "It's just as if he suddenly decided to put the 'Danger' in 'Danger Room' himself."
Angel: "Listen, kids," he shifts to the result of a sharp intake of breath, "I want to work out what Scott's thinking as much as any of you," -grunt- "but maybe you could confer about it some place else and tell me what you land on?" He makes another, careful shift of position.
Iceman: "Oh, yeah. Sorry, Angel."
Rogue: "Yeah, we'll let you rest."
Jubilee: "You want anything? I could raid the kitchen."
Angel manages a smile. "Thanks. I just want to close my eyes for a while." And pretend this didn't happen those eyes seem to say.
The trio take off.
But Angel doesn't close his eyes, at least not for more than a moment.
Instead, he stares off with a pained, yet deliberating look.
Later, Jean stands in Xavier's office, arms folded with each hand wrapped around the opposite upper arm; internally disturbed, externally serious and this time, irritated with herself.
"I never thought of what might happen. We didn't have this degree of psychic link prior to the Reset Procedure.*"
*Issue #0! ~Keeping-your-facts-straight Tra.
Jean (CONT'D): "What if because of it, my leaving is somehow causing Scott's mind to fracture?"
Xavier gives this due consideration before responding: "Perhaps if this thought is introduced to him, he'll allow us in to see."
"He's actively opposed to me trying. . . .he's feeling this more than I thought," she admits almost inaudibly.
"Myself, then." He wheels out from behind his desk. "First I'll see where he's -ah, I believe he's just returned."
Jean realizes this, too.
Together they meet Scott in the foyer. His visor once again* in hand.
*Scott, having just swapped to his glasses, was supposed to
still have his visor in his hand when Jean talked with him,
accidentally taking it with him when he left the Mansion.
~Corrections Department, Tra
He and Jean "meet" each other's eyes, but then Scott shifts attention: "Professor, a word if you please?"
Somewhat disappointed, Jean excuses herself.
For all it appears, Scott keeps his gaze trained on Xavier.
However, unseen behind his glasses, his eyes could be following Jean as she goes.
Xavier: "My office, then."
"Well actually. . ."
So we join them in Cerebro. . . .
Xavier (at the console): "So you would like me to search for the presence of Emma Frost?"
Scott stands just behind him. "Jean's concerned someone may be planning to manipulate her at the time of ascent. . .I think they might be trying something on me. My actions. . .my emotions haven't felt like my own. . .Emma's not at her practice*."
*In this iteration, Emma Frost is a psychologist who uses her emotional manipulating powers regularly in her work. As if you forgot! ~Tra
"It's a sound thought. You were crucial to getting Jean back, then." He pauses in placing the device on his head to look back at Scott. "Though I thought it had been surmised Emma couldn't, or wouldn't, use her powers on you?"
"Then what else could account for it?"
"Jean wonders if you may be experiencing some kind of mental break from your heightened psychic link, now that she'll be leaving. That she may be tearing a part of your mind away with her as the time nears."
Scott doesn't make much of an outward reaction; similarly to Jean, his level of disturbance is kept more inside.
"I can take a look into your mind for any evidence of this, afterward. First I will see about Emma." He sets the apparatus on his head and soon the room fades away, replaced with the images of mutant minds.
". . . I'm not detecting her presence anywhere near the Mansion, nor in the city, for that matter."
She couldn't have gotten away that fast if she had been in proximity to Cyclops to manipulate him in the Danger Room.
"Maybe you're just missing her."
"Pardon?"
Scott's disposition has changed; darkened. "Like you missed finding Leech in time to save Alex."
Xavier is unsettled by this accusation "I am very sorry for that, Scott. . ." he tries not to let on as he turns his cerebral attention onto Scott himself. . . . "There are some things even I cannot readily perceive. . ."
From behind him, Cyclops looks to be on the cusp of acting out again.
When Xavier mentally shuts him down.
Removing Cerebro, Xavier turns to his grown pupil's now unconscious form on the walkway. "Now let's get you somewhere more comfortable so I may search your mind with an appropriate level of power."
He wheels down the hall for Beast's assistance.
Beast, meanwhile, being in the Med Bay with Angel.
"It's simply unfathomable of our stalwart leader."
"The kids didn't see it, but when he just stood there watching after the sim stopped, there was something hesitant in his expression. Like he wanted to see what damage he'd-" pained groan, "-done, but was afraid to get close."
"You're saying he couldn't trust himself? As though the prior action was perhaps made by something other than personal choice?" A furry hand rises to ponderously stroke his likewise furred chin. "Mind control?"
"I was going with that, except what psychic could be on the premises without Charles or Jean getting a whiff, or strong enough to control Scott without being close by?"
"Hmmm....astute queries. Then, what else?" He asks himself as much as Angel.
"The only shapeshifter we know is Mystique, and her game is to seamlessly blend in." Angel's pain shifts his mind: "Unless Scott's only in conflict with himself and a part of him did want to shoot me."
"And why would he want that?"
"We thought he was in our boat, the temporarily displaced. But you still have your lab work, I have options. He's jealous."
"I'm not so sure I'd equate his destroying of the latest fruits of my talents as jealousy. Admittedly, the points he brought up were sound."
"Fine. You put those talents to figuring him out, then." Another pained breath. "I'm no good for further conversation right now."
The sound of the door. Xavier: "Something beyond personal feeling is affecting Scott."
They turn to find him wheeling in. "We've just had an incident in Cerebro. Hank, if you could go collect Scott and bring him here. I need to look into things furth--"
CRRRASSSSSHHHH!!!!
SCREERMMBLLLE!!!!
Beast: "Dear heavens!"
Angel grinds his teeth as the startle caused him to shift in a bad way "-What in this world was -?!-"
VIZHOOOMGHHHH!!
He looks as Xavier and Beast rush out of medical, glimpsing down the hall, where debris and dust rain down from the ceiling of Cerebro.
Coming up to the threshold, Beast and Xavier look through the settling cloud to behold a gaping hole in the roof of Cerebro and the earth above; a blasted shaft rising up, revealing the sky.
Xavier is beside himself: "He should not have been able to wake so quickly!"
Beast considers the skyward hole. Then, making use of the busted and curled portions of the damaged walls, he adeptly climbs up towards the light.
Arriving on the Grounds, he scans the area but can't see Cyclops. He looks up towards a side of the Mansion a short distance away, where multiple students stand at the windows; some interested, some afraid; all confused.
He turns his attention to the corner, clearly figuring Cyclops must've proceeded around it.
Xavier's voice enters his mind: 'Leave him, Hank.'
Beast stares down into the hole: "Are you quite sure, Charles? Scott would seem to have turned into a menace."
"I am sure. We must figure this out before confronting him again."
So Beast sensibly climbs back down, while Xavier sends out a telepathic command to the rest of the X-Men to join them in the Ready Room.
Wolverine: "Look, you guys can brief if you have to, I'll be out there tracking him."
Xavier: "I know where he's gone, Logan, and it's fine. I believe Scott chose such a dramatic form of exit so as not to risk further contact with myself, Hank or Warren. And possibly anyone else. That means he's fighting this."
"And what exactly is 'this'?"
Jean: "We think Scott's mind might be. . .fracturing," she eyes everyone, uncomfortable admitting this, "from the greater connection we established which presumably will be severed."
Xavier: "Actually, Jean, I no longer believe that is the case."
She looks at him.
"I was just beginning to distinguish somethin foreign in his mind when I had to shut him down. Foreign, yet not originating outside his mind."
Logan: "Then I've got your answer. Scott absorbed more than just his own blast power when he took on that Sinister Ray."
Iceman: "Hey maybe that was the plan all along."
Jean: "Scott's only been acting strange recently. I'm sure I would've picked up on something..." yet her eyes shift with uncertainty. She hadn't picked up on what Xavier's talking about. Is it something only Cerebro could perceive, or. . ?
Xavier: "This signature didn't feel like Sinister's." He shifts as though he has the beginnings of a thought, but not all the information needed to posit it. Thus, he turns to: "Jean. As you sit before us, the woman that we know, where is the entity you became?"
Jean clearly wasn't expecting this line of inquiry, but answers readily: "Some part of it, some...connective tissue, has always been inside me. The rest of the Phoenix exists across the universe. It's no place specific until certain circumstances compel it to come."
"Such as your decisive self sacrifice four years ago."
Jean nods.
"And are you aware of any other such entities? Ones worse."
Kitty: "What could be worse than an entity described as destruction?"
Xavier: "We have known it to be destructive, yes, but an entity of rebirth as well," at this his eyes flick back to Jean. If Phoenix were wholly destructive, she certainly wouldn't be here.
Hank: "Indeed. The Phoenix is destruction with a purpose, akin to a controlled burn in a forest. Worse, then, would be arson."
Something looks to have clicked in Jean: "I've had it wrong."
The revelation sits more uncomfortably than the unknown.
They all look to her.
She meets their eyes: "I've been feeling what I took to be Phoenix's return for me. It's not. What I've thought was the Phoenix energy building inside me--" she throws her hand down towards the table top as though this should've been clear to her before, "it's been in Scott!"
Xavier reacts like this was the missing piece of the puzzle he needed: "Perceived, no doubt, through your psychic link, it was taken as your own."
Regrettably, Jean nods.
Logan looks concernedly from Jean to question Xavier: "So why do you think this is a different one and not just Jean's Phoenix?"
Xavier: "Because what I felt in Scott was malicious."
Jean: "After he hurt Logan, Scott said he didn't know 'what came over him'. . .I should've understood what he was saying..."
"I wouldn't feel too responsible. Whatever this is has enfolded itself so much in Scott's mind, if I hadn't been in Cerebro at the very moment it exerted itself on him again, I may've continued to miss it myself."
Rogue: "But what you're thinking is there are two Phoenix?"
Beast: "Of course! The conflict between good and evil is part of the fabric of existence. Perhaps the world cannot hold without the counterbalance -if we take Jean's Phoenix to be an entity ultimately for life, for good, it only stands there would be another for ill."
Xavier: "Now we must strategize how to exorcise it from Scott. . .lest we have to bring him down. . .Scott was key to restoring calm when Jean was consumed by Phoenix. Jean, I would like you alone to approach him, again. If you cannot get through, the rest of you will be read--"
rrrrRRRRUMMBLLLE!!!!
CRRRASSSSSHHGHHGH!!!!
The X-Men brace themselves as something has rocked the building up above.
Suddenly Xavier's eyes widen -Jean senses it, too- "Ororo!"
Part Six
While the X-Men have been having their discussion, Cyclops' thoughts seem to be in line with Logan's, as the place he's gone is the scene of the Sinister Ray; some distance out on Mansion grounds.
He's knelt down in the mini-crater -the exact spot where he took the blast; tense with the inner conflict he doesn't understand.
Though he's about to. . .
'It was an awe-some light to behold.'
Scott's jaw drops at the voice that just rang through his head.
'Reaching to the cosmos from this very earth. I knew from whom it came must be someone of great potential. . .Yet I found only you.'
Despite the disturbance, Scott can't help reacting from a vulnerable place; even to this voice, he's. . .But then his brows crease; who is this voice to judge?
'I wasn't far mislead. That power is not in you still, but what is is sizeable enough. And what else is inside. . .'
Cyclops isn't liking this.
'. . .You deserve what you desire. . .You can have so much more. . .Yet you fear the destructive force within you, and within a certain someone above all else. . .Why? Destruction is only domination.'
'I don't want to dominate.'
'No, you just want your place. . .So put them in theirs, so yours cannot be denied. . .Begin with her.'
At first Scott is confused, but then something directs his attention skyward, and he notices a certain X-Man returning from her errand.
Storm alights on a balcony.
She hangs out there for a few minutes until she spies Cyclops down below, making his way over. His attention clearly on her, she flies down to meet him.
Cyclops: "Accomplish what you needed to?"
"Absolutely." She takes in his expression, and the fact he's wearing his visor. "You look task-focused yourself. What is it?"
"What you were saying the other day. . .about the X-Men? I disagree."
"Do you?"
"I think the team needs a singular vision."
Storm frowns. "I get the impression you're meaning yourself."
"I mean let's see."
Storm's eyebrows raise, then a little smile crosses her face. "That seems fair."
She rises again with the air currents; confidence exuding: "I think you will find this contest will be decided far sooner than you anticipate."
An uncharacteristic smirk crosses Cyclops' face.
And the "spar" gets underway. . . .
Storm has clouded the grounds in a thick fog, and while she circles in the air unseen by her ally-turned-rival, she makes not a sound besides the air she stirs.
Cyclops: "The lack of sight goes both ways." While he doesn't know where to aim, he does know not to stay standing where she last saw him.
Storm: "Correct as that may be...."
Suddenly the wind picks up, dismissing the fog, and with that--
KCRKRRR!!!
"Aaghh!" A flash of lightning makes contact. With his light particle absorption the bolt doesn't inflict the kind of damage it would on most any other, though it's rough on his system and damages still.
And, it serves to make Storm's point.
"...the element of surprise belongs to me!" The fog returns.
Before Cyclops is completely enshrouded again, we see another uncharacteristic look; a darker one. Then--
VZHOOOOM!!!
"Aahh!" A direct hit, then another --somehow he's sniping her perfectly through the fog, and true to form flawlessly anticipating her rate of motion and shooting enough ahead not to miss.
His blast hasn't been dialed that high, however; making his own point.
Storm lowers the pretense of the fog.
"You'll have to explain how you managed that, later."
She's reasonably impressed,
he's unusually smug.
Storm makes note of this, but responds to his skill, with her own.
Conjuring storm clouds, she soaks the earth, making it slick and tricky to move on, and that's on its own ~~she adds intense winds.
Cyclops slips to his hands and knees.
We hear Storm's thoughts:
'Too little power behind my lightning, and he will manage to turn it around to his advantage. Too much and I will stop his heart.' She draws an in-command breath. 'Control.'
Even though he hasn't been able to keep his eyes on her -his attention on stability; the pelting rain and whooshing wind- hasn't seen her readying herself, somehow he knows, as if his body felt the atmosphere heat up ahead of the crack ~-the lighting crashing into a well-placed optic blast.
He keeps going, dialing up.
Storm is holding her own -~like a game of tug-o-war with the marker being the point of contact between optic blast and lightning bolt~- but with a shift of her hands she makes her lightning veer, taking his aim with it.
She escapes the deadlock.
And goes for a less direct approach by making use of the conductive properties of water; striking at the ground beneath him just as he's tracked her and about to fire another shot.
"Aaaghh!"
The jolt is enough for her to get in close--
--but again, somehow, he's ready. Like he can read her mind.
He grabs and throws.
"Aahh!" Storm flips and skids on the drenched ground.
She jolts him again and moves in; we see both their skill at hand-to-hand, but Storm is craftier --she nearly gets his visor but he just manages to hold her off and - -VIZZZ!!
Storm is hit back, yet with less power than Cyclops used in his last blast.
She hadn't seen him work the dial, hadn't seen him touch the button, yet being he's not wearing his combat gloves he had to have. . .
While Storm is considering the oddities of this fight in one part of her mind, she's planning her next action in another; taking to the skies again and dialing up the wind around her to create a water spout.
Cyclops blasts straight into it, but she's not there.
She commands more to swirl around him.
The battlefield is hers,
so he decides to change it.
Looking down, Cyclops makes use of the technique he showed in his training with Angel --rocketing himself up and away from the weather, which we see has only been concentrated in a certain radius around them. The rest of the grounds, and the Mansion itself, in a much calmer environment.
"Remarkable!"
Cyclops has aimed his propulsion well enough -even taking the slickness of the ground into account, and alights on the roof of the Mansion.
"Your reconditioning has surpassed the place you were before in just this short time."
But Cyclops seems to care little for her praise and only for the battle, which Storm again takes note of, as he brings his hand back up to the side of his visor.
But then he does an odd thing. . . .and looks away.
And blasts the Mansion- VZHOOOOM!! GHGHCKLE!!! -a hole is blown clear through part of Storm's attic greenhouse.
"Scott!!"
He was trying to incite her.
"You've been holding back."
"Of course I am! This is a professional spar! We are not enemies."
He speaks coldly: "If you want to lead the X-Men you shouldn't make costly assumptions."
". . .what?"
He leaps off the roof and turns-
VZHOOOOM!!!!
A whip of optic blast indiscriminately pounds through a portion of the Mansion, destabilizing that section.
GHGHCKLECKLE!!!!
We see the impact inside --students narrowly missed by the blast having a collapsing ceiling and successive debris to deal with as they fall with the collapsing floor --others, further away, fall from the shockwave.
Cyclops continues to turn in mid-air, away from the destruction he seems not to care a jot about, and manages a controlled landing while debris too minor to bother him sprays past.
And uncharacteristic of Cyclops' blasts -though this one was enough with its purple hue-
heat seems to have been carried as fires crop up in the damaged Mansion.
Storm: "Scott!! What has this become?! Where is your sense of control!"
As she says this, she aims her rain to reduce the fires to smolders.
"What do you mean?" Cyclops asks in a dark voice. "I'm the one who's in control."
VZHOOOM!!
Storm just manages to meet his optic blast with a lightning bolt from one hand ~~quickly making it two as he dials up ~-a spar this is not, he's in this for something else.
And Ororo isn't sure he's even the one in it.
"I don't know what's happened, but this is not you! Fight whatever it is!"
She manages to keep channeling as powerful a bolt through only one hand, while with her other, she concentrates the forces of the wind around him ~~succeeding in funneling him away.
"And now, whatever this is, ends." With a narrower, even more concentrated stream, Storm blows off his visor.
It has the intended affect --after a wild blast into the trees, he ceases --eyes shutting. No matter what his bent is, Storm still trusts he wouldn't go so far as to continue this fight raw; he's been bragging and exemplifying his control -or twisted interpretation of it- and she's just removed it all.
Except--
He's suddenly staring straight at her -his optic blasts contained within his eyes, settling back until we see Scott's irises glowing a fiery, purple-blue.
Storm's eyes widen.
It's at this point the X-Men have come up from the basement.
Wolverine: "I'm gonna' kill 'im!"
Xavier: "The plan stays! Assess the damages and any injuries but do not engage! Jean-"
Jean moves with purpose: "-I know where he is."
Back out on the grounds, we see Cyclops reach down to where his visor lays. He swishes the mud off it in a puddle. The next moment we see him propel himself away.
We don't see Storm.