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ax_mainThe rescue is coming!
TJ's week had not exactly been going well, but it was looking up. She'd been having a nice time in the city yesterday... until she'd gotten jumped by footmen she easily recognized, and wished she hadn't. She'd managed to grab an odd-looking, banged up device from them as they ran away from a bigger fish than they had been ready to fry, but it had been a closer call than she liked. And knowing that Mojo had tried to grab her again...
She still owed him for her dreadlocks, and for the general torture he'd put her through. But dammit, she'd liked her locks.
Her mood only darkened further when it turned out quite a few students had been successfully grabbed. Fortunately, the geniuses remaining at Xavier's got to work fixing the device until it was travel ready - turned out it could rip holes through time and space, and it was tuned in to Mojoworld.
And now she was getting ready to head back there. She'd briefed the team on everything she knew about Mojo and his goons, and it was time to go. She fingered the collar of her X uniform and idly wished Morph was here with her. She'd welcome one of his stupid jokes right now.
"Any last minute questions?" she asked, looking over her teammates. Clarice, Pete and Kurt. A good, solid strike team, and they would hopefully have the element of surprise.
Clarice remained quiet, worrying her lower lip with her teeth. This was hardly her first outing, but it was much further from home than she usually ventured--and, for her, that was saying quite a lot. A whole, different dimension! And one apparently ruled by an insane, bloated TV producer. It was a lot to process; luckily, spending time with TJ had mostly inured her to the kind of talk she would have considered crazy not all that long ago. Meant she could focus on the main issue at hand--getting their friends and teammates back--and not spend so much time agonizing over the ramifications of Basic Cable Universe.
"We gon' try do it the sneaky way?" she offered. "Or is this more like a smash-and-grab kinda vibe?"
Sensing that the tense air was in desperate need of some lightening before it crushed them all, Kurt raised a hand. “And just how many television-related puns are we allowed?”
"I figure we sneak right up until all the puns lead them straight to us, and then we grab and get the hell out," Pete provided helpfully. He looked over at TJ, who seemed like she knew what she was about. "Ready with that thing?"
"Sneak, smash, grab," TJ confirmed, and gave Kurt a grin. "All puns welcome. Let's do this." She clicked the switch she'd been shown, pushed the appropriate button, and blue energy swelled around them.
Hopping realities again. That was something.
Not really knowing what to expect, Clarice set her posture in a ready position and braced herself. The experience was definitely not like moving through one of her blink portals; the color was all wrong, for one thing. For another, she felt suddenly as if she'd been wrenched forcefully to one side, and had to fight down a momentary surge of nausea as her stomach caught up with the rest of her. Once that was under control, she took in their new surroundings, luminous eyes wide.
"This is e'en worse than I figured it'd be," she muttered to nobody in particular while trying to look in every direction at once. "Somehow."
"Looks like the bloody BBC exploded or some shite," Pete groused as he looked around, hot flames burning at his finger tips. The room was covered in wall to wall televisions, each showing its own program. At a glance, he immediately recognized several of his fellow students on individual screens, but before he could bring them to anyone's attention, a young woman dressed in what looked like a red and gold usher's outfit entered, her jaw dropping open when she caught sight of them.
"You can't be here!" she cried, throwing her hands to her head and smacking herself with the clipboard she'd been carrying in one of them. "No one's allowed in the viewing room except Mojo! We still have to do editing, and voice overs, and put in the laugh tracks and choose just the right poses for the action figures and the shots for the promos and the trading cards and -" Smoke, quite literally, started puffing out of her ears and she collapsed to the ground, looking like a marionette whose strings had just broken.
"Right then," Pete said, pulling his eyes away from the trainwreck and shaking his head, trying to figure out what that had all been about. "Think she set off some kind of alarm when she short circuited?"
"Hopefully not," TJ stated, nudging the robot with her bare foot before turning back to the screens. That had been unexpectedly easy, and now she could feel the old, familiar anger bubbling up inside her, just watching their fellow students having to go through the motions of Mojo's sick entertainment programming. "But let's not stick around to find out."
"Most sensible words I e'er heard," Clarice agreed, studying the wall of monitors through narrowed green eyes, and sorting the familiar faces from the random, senses-shocking alien programming. Her lavender cheeks darkened slightly as she realized belatedly this universe's version of the FCC must employ much laxer standards than she was used to, given the gratuity of some of the content. But she quickly refocused on the task at hand.
Once she was relatively sure she could blink her way onto the sets where their friends and classmates were being held, she turned back to TJ--she had prior experience with Mojo's bizarre take on reality, and her mind that made the other girl the natural leader of this expedition. "Do you wan' me 'port us where we's need go one program at a time?" she asked, then raised an eyebrow at Kurt. "Or we could maybe split up to cover more ground, if the Elf is feelin' ambitious today." Clarice wasn't sure where, exactly, she'd overheard that nickname. It definitely--if weirdly--fit, though.
TJ smiled briefly at the nickname and turned to Kurt. "What do you say?"
Kurt, who had been watching the television screens and the familiar faces on them with a frown, looked at TJ. “Split-up? Teams of two? They are going to catch on to what we are up to pretty quick, so the more people we can break free before they do, the better.”
"Let's make this our meet-up point, in case our comms go down," TJ agreed with a nod. "Take Wisdom, I'll go with Bl-"
But before she could finish her sentence, the doors burst open.
"Bugger," Pete muttered as he summoned up a handful of hot knives in the hopes of slowing them down, aiming them at the floor in front of the incoming goons. Who were, predictably enough, labelled such, wearing matching jumpers blazing with the letters GOON as if they'd come straight from some bad 1960's TV comedy. "Odds that these things are robots like short-circuit girl there?" he barked at TJ.
"Slim to none!" TJ shouted back, even as she launched into the air and landed on one of the guards' shoulders. "Artificially created, but not robotic!" She yanked the guard's helmet off and knocked him out with it, jumping off of him through the door to escape whatever energy was shooting out of their guns. Probably nothing lethal, knowing Mojo and his love for entertaining mutants, but that didn't mean she wanted to risk it, whatever it did.
She liked her hair.
A shard of pink teleportation energy cut through the air, teleporting one of the conveniently-labeled goons' weapon out of his hands and into Clarice's. She disappeared through the floor with a blink, dropping through the air to her feet behind another of the still-armed, human-seeming aliens. The back of his head was quickly introduced to the butt of his friend's rifle with as much force as she could muster, really twisting her hips into the blow the way she'd been trained. That one crumpled, and she bisected the stolen ray gun with a quick slash of pink. Clarice 'ported through the door after TJ, but was careful not to get too far ahead, in the event Kurt or Wisdom ended up having more difficulty with the remaining guards.
Kurt ran toward the closest goon and leapt into a flying kick. He disappeared in a flash of sulfurous smoke, then reappeared in another flash of the same swirling darkness behind the man. Momentum still carried Kurt forward and his foot connected square in the man’s back, sending him flying to the ground.
Grinning, Kurt landed lightly on the now unconscious man’s back and patted his head consolingly. “Take Five, buddy.” He jumped off and took off after the next closest goon, running on all fours.
The purple girl had the right idea, Pete decided, aiming his hot knives at the goons' hands and making their weapons, which looked like something straight out of classic Doctor Who, too hot to handle. The closest dropped his, but barreled forward anyway, hit shoulder connecting with Pete's chest and knocking him backwards. Pete felt himself falling and let training take over, controlling his descent so that he landed faster than the wanker'd anticipated and following it up with a two-legged kick that sent his opponent flying over him. Hand to hand wasn't his best skill, no, but STRIKE had managed to pound the basics into his head, at least.
Between hot knives, teleportation javelins, hex bolts, and Kurt's acrobatics-teleportation-fu, it took under a minute to put the guards out of commission.
"More will be coming!" TJ called out as she straightened up, taking in the room she was in for the first time. More controls, fewer television screens - and the few showed security feeds rather than television programs. "This has gotta be a control room! Let's see how much we can screw up his operation." Chaos would be their friend. "Blink, watch the door."
With a little salute, Clarice blinked back to the door, pressing her back to the wall closest to the opening and cautiously tilting her head to keep eyes on the previous room. She muttered a few profanities under her breath, and several telltale blinks went off in rapid succession. "Feel free to start screwin' things up anytime now," she suggested, brow furrowing with concentration. "My tank ain' nearly empty yet, but e'en I can' keep this up all day."
Kurt teleported over to lend TJ a hand. “So, what—schiess.” The bank of computers was a sea of buttons, toggles, and switches. He looked over them searchingly, and was wondering just how bad hitting a bunch of them at once would be when his gaze landed on a big red button. It was labeled, of all things, The Big Red Button. ...There was no way it was that easy. He looked over at TJ.
TJ spotted the button, then looked back up at Kurt, eyebrows raised. "Don't look at me, I have no idea. For all I know it could be a kill switch."
"Or it could shut down the whole bloody mess," Pete tossed in, watching the monitors, some of which showed students he recognized in situations that could best be described as fucked up. "Which would the giant blob be more likely to make a button for?"
"I don't think he'd actually kill them," TJ said after a second. "Knock them out, worst case scenario. He won't wanna lose his talent." She walked over, glanced at Kurt, then stared back at the button. It wasn't like she could ask him to do it, in case her logic was wrong. "Here goes nothing." She pressed the Big Red Button.
On the monitors surveilling the sets of their schoolmates, nothing much happened. But on others... doors were sliding open, and people were walking out of their cells. Including... "Longshot!" She grinned, and pointed at the young blond man on one of the screens. "Not what we were hoping for, but he'll keep Mojo busy while we figure out how to get everybody back."
Just then, a tiny spray of sparks that faintly resembled glitter cascaded from somewhere near the ceiling. "Look out below!" called a cheerful, resonant voice that echoed beautifully through the large, round air vent which had until recently delivered cool, fresh air to the control room. The vent itself swung open, and what appeared to be a rope ladder intricately braided out of copper wires, pipes, joints, and joists tumbled from the opened vent to the floor. It was a thing of beauty, flexible as it unfurled itself, steady and strong once it reached the ground. A moment later, Gilmore slid down his handcrafted-neo-steampunk conveyance creation, and turned to grin beatifically at the other assembled rescuers.
Only a couple of locks in Shaun Gilmore's glorious black mane were out of place, and a quick toss of his head set his hair back to perfection once again.
"All clear, sexy," he called back up the ladder toward the vent. With a wink at TJ, he added, "We're just gonna join X-Force for a sec. What d'you think?"
Nolan's own descent lacked his boyfriend's panache, and he only gave the assembled X-Force members a quick nod in greeting (and a faint smile at Clarice) as he reached the ground. "Good to see you all." He undoubtedly would have seemed more surprised than warm-dry if they hadn't heard them all talking before making their way down. Nolan touched his hand to Shaun's elbow as he brushed past him towards one of the computers. "Let's get everybody back to their real selves, hmm? Make sure none of them will resist their rescue."
He slid into a chair and started typing.
"...I guess that's the plan now," TJ agreed, and clapped her hand on Gilmore's shoulder with a grin. "Good job, boss-man. Blink, get ready to start rounding people up. It's time to play 'spot our friends on the video feeds', guys."
TJ's week had not exactly been going well, but it was looking up. She'd been having a nice time in the city yesterday... until she'd gotten jumped by footmen she easily recognized, and wished she hadn't. She'd managed to grab an odd-looking, banged up device from them as they ran away from a bigger fish than they had been ready to fry, but it had been a closer call than she liked. And knowing that Mojo had tried to grab her again...
She still owed him for her dreadlocks, and for the general torture he'd put her through. But dammit, she'd liked her locks.
Her mood only darkened further when it turned out quite a few students had been successfully grabbed. Fortunately, the geniuses remaining at Xavier's got to work fixing the device until it was travel ready - turned out it could rip holes through time and space, and it was tuned in to Mojoworld.
And now she was getting ready to head back there. She'd briefed the team on everything she knew about Mojo and his goons, and it was time to go. She fingered the collar of her X uniform and idly wished Morph was here with her. She'd welcome one of his stupid jokes right now.
"Any last minute questions?" she asked, looking over her teammates. Clarice, Pete and Kurt. A good, solid strike team, and they would hopefully have the element of surprise.
Clarice remained quiet, worrying her lower lip with her teeth. This was hardly her first outing, but it was much further from home than she usually ventured--and, for her, that was saying quite a lot. A whole, different dimension! And one apparently ruled by an insane, bloated TV producer. It was a lot to process; luckily, spending time with TJ had mostly inured her to the kind of talk she would have considered crazy not all that long ago. Meant she could focus on the main issue at hand--getting their friends and teammates back--and not spend so much time agonizing over the ramifications of Basic Cable Universe.
"We gon' try do it the sneaky way?" she offered. "Or is this more like a smash-and-grab kinda vibe?"
Sensing that the tense air was in desperate need of some lightening before it crushed them all, Kurt raised a hand. “And just how many television-related puns are we allowed?”
"I figure we sneak right up until all the puns lead them straight to us, and then we grab and get the hell out," Pete provided helpfully. He looked over at TJ, who seemed like she knew what she was about. "Ready with that thing?"
"Sneak, smash, grab," TJ confirmed, and gave Kurt a grin. "All puns welcome. Let's do this." She clicked the switch she'd been shown, pushed the appropriate button, and blue energy swelled around them.
Hopping realities again. That was something.
Not really knowing what to expect, Clarice set her posture in a ready position and braced herself. The experience was definitely not like moving through one of her blink portals; the color was all wrong, for one thing. For another, she felt suddenly as if she'd been wrenched forcefully to one side, and had to fight down a momentary surge of nausea as her stomach caught up with the rest of her. Once that was under control, she took in their new surroundings, luminous eyes wide.
"This is e'en worse than I figured it'd be," she muttered to nobody in particular while trying to look in every direction at once. "Somehow."
"Looks like the bloody BBC exploded or some shite," Pete groused as he looked around, hot flames burning at his finger tips. The room was covered in wall to wall televisions, each showing its own program. At a glance, he immediately recognized several of his fellow students on individual screens, but before he could bring them to anyone's attention, a young woman dressed in what looked like a red and gold usher's outfit entered, her jaw dropping open when she caught sight of them.
"You can't be here!" she cried, throwing her hands to her head and smacking herself with the clipboard she'd been carrying in one of them. "No one's allowed in the viewing room except Mojo! We still have to do editing, and voice overs, and put in the laugh tracks and choose just the right poses for the action figures and the shots for the promos and the trading cards and -" Smoke, quite literally, started puffing out of her ears and she collapsed to the ground, looking like a marionette whose strings had just broken.
"Right then," Pete said, pulling his eyes away from the trainwreck and shaking his head, trying to figure out what that had all been about. "Think she set off some kind of alarm when she short circuited?"
"Hopefully not," TJ stated, nudging the robot with her bare foot before turning back to the screens. That had been unexpectedly easy, and now she could feel the old, familiar anger bubbling up inside her, just watching their fellow students having to go through the motions of Mojo's sick entertainment programming. "But let's not stick around to find out."
"Most sensible words I e'er heard," Clarice agreed, studying the wall of monitors through narrowed green eyes, and sorting the familiar faces from the random, senses-shocking alien programming. Her lavender cheeks darkened slightly as she realized belatedly this universe's version of the FCC must employ much laxer standards than she was used to, given the gratuity of some of the content. But she quickly refocused on the task at hand.
Once she was relatively sure she could blink her way onto the sets where their friends and classmates were being held, she turned back to TJ--she had prior experience with Mojo's bizarre take on reality, and her mind that made the other girl the natural leader of this expedition. "Do you wan' me 'port us where we's need go one program at a time?" she asked, then raised an eyebrow at Kurt. "Or we could maybe split up to cover more ground, if the Elf is feelin' ambitious today." Clarice wasn't sure where, exactly, she'd overheard that nickname. It definitely--if weirdly--fit, though.
TJ smiled briefly at the nickname and turned to Kurt. "What do you say?"
Kurt, who had been watching the television screens and the familiar faces on them with a frown, looked at TJ. “Split-up? Teams of two? They are going to catch on to what we are up to pretty quick, so the more people we can break free before they do, the better.”
"Let's make this our meet-up point, in case our comms go down," TJ agreed with a nod. "Take Wisdom, I'll go with Bl-"
But before she could finish her sentence, the doors burst open.
"Bugger," Pete muttered as he summoned up a handful of hot knives in the hopes of slowing them down, aiming them at the floor in front of the incoming goons. Who were, predictably enough, labelled such, wearing matching jumpers blazing with the letters GOON as if they'd come straight from some bad 1960's TV comedy. "Odds that these things are robots like short-circuit girl there?" he barked at TJ.
"Slim to none!" TJ shouted back, even as she launched into the air and landed on one of the guards' shoulders. "Artificially created, but not robotic!" She yanked the guard's helmet off and knocked him out with it, jumping off of him through the door to escape whatever energy was shooting out of their guns. Probably nothing lethal, knowing Mojo and his love for entertaining mutants, but that didn't mean she wanted to risk it, whatever it did.
She liked her hair.
A shard of pink teleportation energy cut through the air, teleporting one of the conveniently-labeled goons' weapon out of his hands and into Clarice's. She disappeared through the floor with a blink, dropping through the air to her feet behind another of the still-armed, human-seeming aliens. The back of his head was quickly introduced to the butt of his friend's rifle with as much force as she could muster, really twisting her hips into the blow the way she'd been trained. That one crumpled, and she bisected the stolen ray gun with a quick slash of pink. Clarice 'ported through the door after TJ, but was careful not to get too far ahead, in the event Kurt or Wisdom ended up having more difficulty with the remaining guards.
Kurt ran toward the closest goon and leapt into a flying kick. He disappeared in a flash of sulfurous smoke, then reappeared in another flash of the same swirling darkness behind the man. Momentum still carried Kurt forward and his foot connected square in the man’s back, sending him flying to the ground.
Grinning, Kurt landed lightly on the now unconscious man’s back and patted his head consolingly. “Take Five, buddy.” He jumped off and took off after the next closest goon, running on all fours.
The purple girl had the right idea, Pete decided, aiming his hot knives at the goons' hands and making their weapons, which looked like something straight out of classic Doctor Who, too hot to handle. The closest dropped his, but barreled forward anyway, hit shoulder connecting with Pete's chest and knocking him backwards. Pete felt himself falling and let training take over, controlling his descent so that he landed faster than the wanker'd anticipated and following it up with a two-legged kick that sent his opponent flying over him. Hand to hand wasn't his best skill, no, but STRIKE had managed to pound the basics into his head, at least.
Between hot knives, teleportation javelins, hex bolts, and Kurt's acrobatics-teleportation-fu, it took under a minute to put the guards out of commission.
"More will be coming!" TJ called out as she straightened up, taking in the room she was in for the first time. More controls, fewer television screens - and the few showed security feeds rather than television programs. "This has gotta be a control room! Let's see how much we can screw up his operation." Chaos would be their friend. "Blink, watch the door."
With a little salute, Clarice blinked back to the door, pressing her back to the wall closest to the opening and cautiously tilting her head to keep eyes on the previous room. She muttered a few profanities under her breath, and several telltale blinks went off in rapid succession. "Feel free to start screwin' things up anytime now," she suggested, brow furrowing with concentration. "My tank ain' nearly empty yet, but e'en I can' keep this up all day."
Kurt teleported over to lend TJ a hand. “So, what—schiess.” The bank of computers was a sea of buttons, toggles, and switches. He looked over them searchingly, and was wondering just how bad hitting a bunch of them at once would be when his gaze landed on a big red button. It was labeled, of all things, The Big Red Button. ...There was no way it was that easy. He looked over at TJ.
TJ spotted the button, then looked back up at Kurt, eyebrows raised. "Don't look at me, I have no idea. For all I know it could be a kill switch."
"Or it could shut down the whole bloody mess," Pete tossed in, watching the monitors, some of which showed students he recognized in situations that could best be described as fucked up. "Which would the giant blob be more likely to make a button for?"
"I don't think he'd actually kill them," TJ said after a second. "Knock them out, worst case scenario. He won't wanna lose his talent." She walked over, glanced at Kurt, then stared back at the button. It wasn't like she could ask him to do it, in case her logic was wrong. "Here goes nothing." She pressed the Big Red Button.
On the monitors surveilling the sets of their schoolmates, nothing much happened. But on others... doors were sliding open, and people were walking out of their cells. Including... "Longshot!" She grinned, and pointed at the young blond man on one of the screens. "Not what we were hoping for, but he'll keep Mojo busy while we figure out how to get everybody back."
Just then, a tiny spray of sparks that faintly resembled glitter cascaded from somewhere near the ceiling. "Look out below!" called a cheerful, resonant voice that echoed beautifully through the large, round air vent which had until recently delivered cool, fresh air to the control room. The vent itself swung open, and what appeared to be a rope ladder intricately braided out of copper wires, pipes, joints, and joists tumbled from the opened vent to the floor. It was a thing of beauty, flexible as it unfurled itself, steady and strong once it reached the ground. A moment later, Gilmore slid down his handcrafted-neo-steampunk conveyance creation, and turned to grin beatifically at the other assembled rescuers.
Only a couple of locks in Shaun Gilmore's glorious black mane were out of place, and a quick toss of his head set his hair back to perfection once again.
"All clear, sexy," he called back up the ladder toward the vent. With a wink at TJ, he added, "We're just gonna join X-Force for a sec. What d'you think?"
Nolan's own descent lacked his boyfriend's panache, and he only gave the assembled X-Force members a quick nod in greeting (and a faint smile at Clarice) as he reached the ground. "Good to see you all." He undoubtedly would have seemed more surprised than warm-dry if they hadn't heard them all talking before making their way down. Nolan touched his hand to Shaun's elbow as he brushed past him towards one of the computers. "Let's get everybody back to their real selves, hmm? Make sure none of them will resist their rescue."
He slid into a chair and started typing.
"...I guess that's the plan now," TJ agreed, and clapped her hand on Gilmore's shoulder with a grin. "Good job, boss-man. Blink, get ready to start rounding people up. It's time to play 'spot our friends on the video feeds', guys."
